Air and Fire (38 page)

Still she did not move. Her hands were almost touching the sides of her dress. He could see the air between her fingers.

‘You'll have to show me the way,' he said.

Then he lay down on his bed and slept.

It was long ago, somewhere in Paris. There were chestnut trees, their branches weighed down with pale blooms. She noticed the fragrance pausing at their table, then its absence as the wind blew. She watched her two hands taking one of his. His hand that could lift her trembling to the surface of her skin, then sink her deeper than she had ever been. And she could hear her voice.

‘I love you, Théo. I really do.'

‘Yes, yes.' His hand withdrew.

The strength of what she felt embarrassed him.

A gust of wind; the fragrance of the blossom gone.

There had only been a few who had not been impelled by her into some needless hostility or withdrawal, and she had thought him one of them – but he was not. There was Monsieur Épaules, if that was truly his name. She was always returning to him, perhaps because she had never been able to. That sense of life falling short, an incompleteness that would last for ever. She could see him climbing the stairs with his burden of water. Tilting in the silver pails, solid and opaque, like ancient coins or medals. And his secret vial on a cord inside his shirt. That bitter taste. That promise of a future.

But this was not a good time to be thinking of him.

‘No,' she murmured, ‘it is not a good time for that.'

She looked around. Orange boulders littered the ground. The air stood tall and still. She had no hat, no parasol. She had no water.

She pulled on the reins; the hoofs stopped. Flies settled on her face, the backs of her hands. She tore a square piece out of her skirt. Placing it over her head, she tied the two ends beneath her chin. A simple headscarf. It would afford her some relief. She had to keep going, though. Inland, always inland. Sooner or later she would reach the mission at San Ignacio. Sooner or later she would drink from the cool green waters of Kadakaamana. Two days' ride, she remembered. But
how long had she been riding for already? She could not recall how many times the darkness had come down, or even if it had at all. She laid her hand against the horse's neck.

‘I'm sorry, Normandy,' she whispered.

She shook the reins and they moved on. Through fields of boulders and cactus. Past trees with pale-green trunks and spindly branches of grey and amber. Towards the volcano. Its flanks of charcoal and violet, moulded like the muscles on the haunches of a lion. This was where the makings of her nerve remedy were gathered. Under whose influence her dream had been delivered in its entirety. Not what she would have called a peaceful night. No source of peace to her at all. Though still some distance off, the mountain rose so high, it made her feel giddy. She had to look away.

There came a time when she could only think of things that made her weep. Monsieur Épaules, alone in the darkness of the stairwell, his silver buckets empty. Théo with his back turned late at night. Wilson Pharaoh playing the piano in the rain, his fingers slipping on the keys. And her own two children, who had never even drawn a breath. Her first child, burned in a ragman's brazier at a crossroads in Les Halles. Her second, two inches long and lying on her palm. That seedling eye, those streaks of redness. No he, no she. Just something that had failed.

Her tears scalded her face.

And the brown pelican which flew so close to the water that its shadow almost touched its belly.

Her tears.

That barrenness inside had led her to believe that nothing could be changed, inside or out. His love was weak and hers would never be enough. Nothing between them could be sustained. Everything between them died.

Yet there was still the memory of setting sail from Le Havre. That crisp December morning, ice and sunlight gilding the handrail as she climbed aboard. It was her first time on a steamboat, unless you counted that trip down the river the summer before, when they had moored at the Pont du Jour and dined on fried gudgeon and the sour green wine of Surèsnes. The open sea delighted her. She had looked back on her life – the dances, the opera, the races – and wondered how it had been possible to breathe at all. She remembered taking Théo's arm. They stood on deck and watched the spray rise off the waves.

‘So,' he said. ‘You're happy now.'

She had laughed. The word did not do justice to her feelings. ‘You were so selfish,' she said, ‘to try and keep me from all this.'

It was not a reprimand, of course, but an expression of her elation and he had taken it as such, smiling down at her, moving his hand to cover hers, then lifting his eyes to the horizon and filling his lungs with clean, cold air.

Moving his hand to cover hers.

The sun stared into her eyes. The horizon duplicated itself in the heat like a stack of plates. From a distance the orange boulders looked as if they might all be the same size, but up close every single one was different.

‘How can you bear it?' she had asked him recently, in the calmest voice that she could muster.

Théo glanced up from a list of the church's components. ‘Bear what, my dear?'

‘The fact that all the parts are the same. All perfectly identical. Every section the same length, every hole drilled to within a millimetre. Every time.'

He was smiling. Though she was attacking him she could see that he was flattered by her familiarity with his work.

‘You're talking about perfection,' he said. ‘If it's attained, it should be celebrated, admired. It's not something that you have to bear.' And he looked at her in that quizzical way he had, as if he suspected that she might be teasing him.

She raised her eyes from the coarse hairs of the horse's mane. The sky was one exhausting wash of light. She had tried thinking a woman's thoughts, which were always, it seemed to her, excuses or apologies: he has his work; he is making discoveries; he needs my understanding. But a cry had always risen up in her: Discover
me.
Perhaps she should have made small parcels of her love, been miserly with it. Perhaps she should only have offered it when it was wanted. Begged for. Earned. But how could she, with her feelings for him so generous inside her? You might as well tell trees not to blossom in the spring, a river not to flood its banks. You're talking about perfection, he had said. Was her love so imperfect, then?

There was a ridge ahead of her. She could not tell how far away it was, but it seemed to her that beyond it she would find the mission. She would pause on the crest of the ridge, her face bathed in the last soft light, and she would look down and there it would be. One hundred thousand
palm trees. The cool green waters. Kadakaamana. There, as promised. What relief there would be in that still moment. What peace.

The horse stumbled, dropped its head. She could feel its bones stagger in its skin. She shook the reins with the little strength that she had left. She touched its flanks with the heels of her boots. She could hardly speak because her lips had turned to stone.

‘Normandy,' she whispered. ‘We're almost there.'

The party that had gathered outside the main office of the mining company to wish Wilson Pharaoh well was necessarily small, owing to the lateness of the hour and the pressure of events. Of the four people present, only Monsieur Castagnet appeared calm. Monsieur Valence paced up and down, the cinders crackling beneath his polished shoes. Madame Bardou stood close by, her face so drained of colour that her lips looked as dark as an invalid's. It was not just Suzanne's disappearance that had upset her. Late that afternoon the Bardous' house had been broken into, and more than a dozen of the doctor's waistcoats had gone missing. Clinging to Madame Bardou's arm, and flushed with the drama of the situation, was Madame de Romblay. As Wilson mounted the mule that Valence had commandeered, she spoke to him, her eyes dilated, almost gloating.

‘I hear you were attacked.'

Wilson smiled grimly. ‘They thought I was French.'

‘My God,' she said, ‘what will become of us?'

Madame Bardou's hand had risen to her throat. ‘You're not hurt, I hope?'

‘No, ma'am, not a scratch. But thank you for asking.'

Wilson leaned down to adjust a stirrup strap. It had been impossible to keep track of what was happening; reports varied wildly. He had been woken from his nap by the sound of hammering – not the church this time but Mexicans, nailing bits of wood over their windows. Towards midnight, as he crossed town to meet with Monsieur Valence, he ran into Pablo. Pablo was in his element, meddling with fact and fabricating rumour.

‘The fat man,' he said, his eyebrows lifting high on to his forehead. ‘The Director. Have you heard?'

‘What about him?' Wilson said.

According to Pablo, Monsieur de Romblay had been taken ill as
he left the Plaza Constitución that evening, and had been rushed to hospital. Then, as the doctor reached for his scalpel, Monsieur de Romblay exploded. Right there, on the operating table. A nurse was killed by flying organs. The doctor only survived because he was wearing a magic waistcoat, the one made out of sunlight and diamonds. There had been some trouble on the waterfront as well. The customs house had been looted, and someone had uncovered Ramon's secret stockpile. Not just ordinary goods like sugar and flour. Luxuries too, which must originally have been intended for the French. Silk pyjamas, for example. Goose-liver pâté. Armagnac. And then, less than an hour ago, two of the five dead miners had come back to life. They had been seen on Avenida Aljez, leaning casually against a tree, their hands and faces lit by soft green flames. What else? Oh yes –

‘Don't tell me,' Wilson said. ‘The Amazons are coming.'

Pablo held his hand out in the air. Wilson had to shake it.

‘But seriously, Pablo.'

‘Well,' Pablo said, ‘there has been some rioting on Calle 14.'

This Wilson could believe. The Mexicans would not be boarding up their windows for nothing. If the French had any sense, they would do the same, despite the heat.

It was from Castagnet that Wilson learned of recent developments on the Mesa del Norte. In the wake of his abortive speech, Monsieur de Romblay (shaken, but in perfect health) had been trying to resolve all disputes in private conference. At one point during the proceedings Montoya had pulled his pistol from its holster and fired a bullet into the Director's dining-room ceiling. The bullet had passed through an electric wire and fused every light in the house. The three Indian spokesmen who were waiting in the hallway – they would not sit down at the same table as the Mexican – were plunged into darkness. One Indian claimed to have heard thunder. Another talked of an eclipse. Offerings of amaranth and crushed obsidian would have to be made at once, they said. To Coatlicué, to Humming-Bird-on-the-Left – and to Jesus Christ as well: in circumstances as mysterious as these, it was best to leave nobody out. De Romblay and Montoya had repaired to Castagnet's house and were believed to be close to reaching some kind of understanding. In the hospital across the road the doctor was performing surgery on an injured miner; amputation of the leg seemed likely. Of resurrected Indians and revelations at the customs house, Castagnet knew nothing. There was a sense in which Suzanne's disappearance
could be seen as conforming to a pattern. It could have been truth or rumour. It was yet another symptom of the town's delirium.

Monsieur Valence coughed into his fist. ‘You're quite sure that you will go alone?' he asked.

Wilson nodded. ‘It's what I'm used to.'

Monsieur Castagnet stepped forwards, one hand on the reins. He stroked the mule's nose. ‘Do you have everything you need?'

‘Compared to what she has – ' Wilson did not finish the sentence.

‘True,' Castagnet murmured.

‘What I still cannot understand,' Madame de Romblay said, ‘is why she stole my husband's horse in the first place. That horse is valuable. He paid more than a thousand francs for it.' She was looking at Monsieur Valence, as if she expected an explanation.

But Valence, deep in a turmoil of his own, had not noticed. ‘I don't know how I'll sleep tonight,' he said.

Wilson smiled bleakly. Sleep did not seem a possibility for anyone.

Madame Bardou offered him her face once more. Her hair was curling in the humid air.

‘Which direction will you take, Monsieur?'

He had given no thought to this at all and yet he found that he already knew the answer.

‘I'll be heading inland,' he said. ‘West.'

Five hours of darkness remained when he set off along the cinder track that led out past the lumber yard and the smelting plant. When he had passed the two brown trains he glanced behind him. The French were still standing outside the gates, four figures dwarfed by buildings and machinery. They looked like a fragile race, a race in danger of extinction. He found himself feeling a kind of pity for them as he rode on.

It was a moonless night, not at all the kind of night that he would have chosen for a journey through the awkward country of Cabo Vírgenes. In some places the coastal plain that divided the mountains from the sea was no wider than the track itself. To the left you passed canyon after canyon, reaching down from the mesa, high and waterless, behind. The land was only fertile in one respect: minerals had been found in such abundance that names could not be made up fast enough. It was here that the company had established many of its mines. To the right lay a gravel beach and waves that always sounded tired:
flop
-flop
flop
-flop
flop
-flop. An hour went by before he saw the turning that he had been
looking for; it wound its way up into a district known as Soledad, and then climbed higher still, towards the pass that cut through the Peninsula Range. He breathed a sigh of relief. It was a narrow path and he might easily have missed it in the dark.