Air and Fire (34 page)

When they reached the hospital, the doctor bounded up the stairs and then spun round, addressing Wilson from the veranda. ‘And your foot, Monsieur. How does it feel?'

Wilson smiled. One broken foot after all this talk of legs and ribs and anarchy. It hardly seemed worth mentioning.

‘It's fine,' he said. ‘Just fine.'

A momentary gloom descended on the doctor. ‘Well,' he said, ‘that's something.'

Seventeen dead. That was what the Indians were saying. They had gathered in the Hotel La Playa, shouting and spitting, clutching at the air, their faces brassy against the pale-green walls. The lobby bubbled like a cauldron with their voices. They did not pay Wilson much attention as he climbed the stairs to bed.

When he reached the top, he noticed a strip of light beneath his door. It was wavering – bright and steady one moment, almost invisible the next. Somebody had lit a candle in his room.

The door was ajar. He could hear voices coming from inside. A woman's, then a man's. He moved closer, testing each floorboard for creaks before he took a step. Then shoved the door open and stood in the gap.

It was the men he noticed first. He thought he had seen the tall one before. On the waterfront, maybe, or in the bar. A jaw like a horseshoe, hard and curved. Bloodshot eyes. The other one, a foot shorter and dressed in miner's rags, did not register.

‘Welcome home, American.'

In the corner of the room, half shielded by the door, stood La Huesuda, bony as ever. She had a snapped-off chair-leg in one hand. Her mouth tipped sharply upwards at the edges and her thin nose glistened. Far from showing any signs of guilt, she seemed to have found some benefit in his appearance, seemed to be relishing the fact that he had caught them in the act.

‘You've just been on a trip,' she said, ‘haven't you?'

Wilson did not deny it.

‘Find anything?'

‘Not really.'

She stepped forwards. ‘No gold?'

‘No.'

The taller of the two men came and stood next to her. His only weapons were his height and the bunched fists that swung like lead weights on the end of his arms. He was looking at Wilson, but he spoke to La Huesuda.

‘You believe him?'

Her mouth turned upside-down.

‘Who are these men?' Wilson asked her.

‘My brothers.'

Wilson looked at each of them in turn. ‘Are they descended from Amazons as well?'

He saw the tall man's fist loop towards him. The room burned yellow for a moment. Then he found that he was sitting on the floor, the tall man standing over him.

‘Actually, they're half-brothers,' La Huesuda said.

The short man began to rummage in the knapsack that hung on the wall. His hand emerged with a wedge of onyx.

His face twisted in a triumphant sneer. ‘Thought you said you didn't find anything.'

Wilson climbed to his feet. The inside of his head shimmered and hissed. ‘I was looking for gold,' he said, ‘not onyx.'

‘Onyx?' the tall man said. ‘I never heard of that.' He was studying the knuckles of his right hand.

‘Still, it must be worth something,' the short man said.

‘Is there anything else?' La Huesuda stepped over to the wall. She had wrapped her small head in a scarlet shawl. Her nose protruded from her face like a knife stuck in a door.

Snatching the knapsack off the wall, she turned it over on the bed. A collection of lesser minerals, the fruit of his two weeks in the desert, spilled across the mattress. There was jasper and chalcedony, some crystals of cumengeite, and the onyx. They looked prettier and more valuable than they might otherwise have done. He had been working long hours on the stones, drawing the colours and markings out through polishing. It had been one of his methods for trying to remove Suzanne from his memory. It had not worked. He had ended up meditating on their beauty and then, by association, on hers.

‘This is robbery,' he said.

La Huesuda turned to him, the black shapes of her two half-brothers lurching in the room behind her. ‘Yeah, well,' she said, ‘I had some personal misfortune recently.'

‘What happened?'

‘Someone destroyed my balcony.' She smiled to herself, teeth touching the wet curve of her bottom lip. ‘It was a foreigner, I think. An American, if I remember right.'

Wilson said nothing.

‘I'm asking for contributions,' she went on, cackling now. ‘Just so happens I thought I'd start with you.'

‘But I told you. They're not worth anything.'

‘So what are you worried about?' She snapped her fingers in the air beneath his nose. He could smell raw onions, bacon fat, the genitals of sailors.

He sighed. ‘I collected them. It was a lot of work.'

‘As I said. A contribution.'

But he did not want to lose the crystals. Lifting the idea from his dream, he had decided to make a present of the best ones to Suzanne when they were finished. They would be souvenirs for her to take back to France with her. His only way of remaining in her memory. Touchstones. In his frustration, he had stepped forwards.

The taller of the two men stood in front of him again, his bottom teeth overlapping like a hand of cards, his bunched fists dangling against his thighs. There was a foot of stale breath between them.

The corner of the room exploded as the short man broke a bottle.

Wilson appealed to La Huesuda. ‘I told you that I'd mend your balcony,' he said. ‘Don't you trust me?'

‘Trust you?' La Huesuda said.

The room was filled with mocking laughter.

Wilson looked from one face to another. All the mouths the same shape, all the laughter identical. Here was the family resemblance that he had been unable to see earlier on.

Suzanne could see the house, high on the cemetery ridge. She saw the long white wall ribboning across the land, and soldiers lying among the rocks, asleep or dead. Beyond the house, below it, lay the sea, an aching shade of violet. It was dusk.

A crowd moved up the hill towards her. There must have been at least five hundred people. The dirt-track could not hold so many. They spilled out across the slope, scrambling over rough terrain. An urgency, as if they were late for something.

She thought of hiding, but there was nowhere. Only stones the size of heads or fists, and the house in the distance, standing out against the sky, the graves like bruises on the ground. Only the dead, it seemed, could hide.

But they did not see her.

She stood on a bank above the track while they moved past. Women took the lead, their heads wrapped in black scarves, all softness gone. Silent the women were, with tight mouths, and the silence was more frightening than sound. Some had pickaxes in their hands. Others had spades. Sticks. Chains. Kitchen things.

The men followed, in workshirts streaked with clay and stiff wool trousers. She could smell them as they passed. Their clothes were company-issue, worn for weeks on end. Sweat, oil, urine, garlic, sperm. At dances you could smell it too. When you sat on a hard wooden chair against the wall and the couples went whirling past your face. It was always the men that you could smell. She stepped backwards, covering her mouth and nose. Still they did not see her. Their eyes all pointed different ways. Their fists beat at the air, as if the air were a door and they were trying to get in.

Then she was standing in the house.

She knew this part. No lamps lit in the hallway, only moonlight falling through a high window. A shine on anything that was smooth: the tiled
floor, the curve of a banister –

The stairs.

They brought him down feet first. Hoisted on their hands, he seemed to undulate, a cloth stretched over poles, a snake on stony ground. She could not look into his face.

He was wearing the scarlet jacket with the silver epaulettes – his own pride, other people's mockery. His feet were naked, though. His boots were now the property of two different men. They wore one each. Later they would fight to make it a pair. Down the stairs they carried him. Along the hall. Out into the night.

It would happen in the cemetery.

She watched the crowd swarm along the ridge. Something else was being carried. The long oak table from the dining-room. She asked what it was for. One Indian shrugged. Another chuckled, but would not say.

Clothes were lifting into the air, short flights against a sky that ached. Tunic, breeches, undershirt. They were stripping him bare. She saw a silver epaulette spin through the darkness, vanish into someone's outstretched hand. Sometimes, through the crowd, she caught glimpses of the body he had wanted to show her. Pale as a peeled fruit. She had to look away. But, whichever way she turned, it was still there, in front of her.

There were knives now. Sticks too. Kitchen things.

All along the ridge the miners had lit bonfires so she could see the colour of his agony.

Up the table came, propped against a cairn of stones. And he was pinned to the dark wood, with nails through his wrists and ankles. The crowd had learned their Christianity too well. His belly had been opened lengthways, ribs to groin, and his guts tumbled downwards, over his genitals, in one bright coiled pulp. Served up on his own table like a feast.

And they had painted him. One half of his body red, smeared with his own blood. The other black, daubed with ashes from the fire. Flies were beginning to settle on his wounds. Her eyes jumped all round the sky. Would vultures soon be circling? She was not even sure that he was dead.

And in the house below, two women dancing, dancing –

She woke on her back, breathing fast. Perhaps she had run from the cemetery to where she lay. Perhaps she had run all the way. Her nightgown was drenched; she might have swum an ocean in her sleep.

Her gift had returned and it was stronger than ever. She could hardly bear the weight of it. They would kill Montoya. She knew that now. And knew it with absolute certainty. In one sense, it had happened already. She did not know what power she had to alter things. She only knew that she had been handed a responsiblity. She must go instantly, and warn him. The past had no place in her decision. She did not care for him, but still she could not let him die.

She reached for her clothes.

‘Where are you going?'

Théo had woken up.

But she did not stop dressing.

‘I have to warn him.'

‘Who?'

‘Montoya.' She spoke with some impatience. This was no time for words.

She had never told Théo about her dreams. They had vanished the moment that he made love to her and it would have been difficult to talk to him of something that was no longer there. It would have been like accusing him of theft. And besides, he was such a rational man. He was too rational, for instance, to believe in God. Such mysteries were for women; men had science. What point would there have been in telling him of premonitions? He would only have presented her with a series of facts and arguments to explain what she had experienced. It was too exhausting even to contemplate.

She was opening her wardrobe to choose a dress when Théo took her by the arm.

‘Just think,' he said. ‘Think for a moment.'

‘There's nothing to think about,' she said.

He was trying not to raise his voice. His seemingly bottomless patience had the look of weariness. ‘The town is not safe. There are people wandering the streets, looking for revenge.'

‘Exactly,' she said. ‘That's exactly why I have to go.'

As she lifted a dress from the wardrobe he reached round and snatched it from her hands.

‘You're not going anywhere, Suzanne.'

He stood in front of her with his head lowered, like a bull that might charge. She could not believe his stubbornness, his stupidity. He could not see for reasons. Facts had blinded him.

She threw herself at him, fighting to reclaim the dress. He held it away
from her, used his other hand to keep her at bay. He was too strong for her. She rushed towards the bedroom door instead. She would cross town in her lace petticoats if need be. But he seized her by the wrist as she ran past him and her arm almost leapt from its socket. She cried out in pain.

‘Be quiet,' he said. ‘Do you want everyone to hear?'

She twisted in his grasp. ‘Let me go.'

He pinned her to the bed, bruising her slender muscles along the inside of her arms. He placed a hand over her mouth.

‘You're hysterical.'

She tried to shake her head, deny it, but his hand was pressed so hard against her mouth that she could not use the lower half of her face at all.

‘You're making a fool of yourself. And of me.' The skin below his eyes had sagged. He was ageing. It no longer had the power to move her.

‘You're not going to see Montoya, or anyone else. You're staying here, in this house.' He shook her to make sure that she was listening. ‘You're not leaving. You're staying here. Do you understand?'

But he's in my dreams, she wanted to shout. He's dying in my dreams. She tried to force the words out through her eyes, but he only pressed down harder with his hand.

Mama Vum Buá cooked Wilson some breakfast as usual, but she would not speak to him. Her blue eyes seemed clouded and remote. He thought she must be in mourning for her people. They had died in a land that was foreign to them, a land with no rivers and no mercy: it had leaned on their spines until they snapped; it had climbed into their mouths and nostrils; it had killed them itself. He did not try to reach down into her grief. It was not his place. Besides, he had his own to deal with. Trivial beside hers, but there nonetheless. His crystals had been taken. They were gone, every one of them. He had nothing to give Suzanne. He ate his tortillas in the shade of the quince tree, content to be left alone.

It did not last long. The girls soon came clustering around his table. The Señora had warned them not to leave the property that day, and they were bored.