Black Alibi (7 page)

“I was just wondering, that is all. Why this sudden intense fervor, this devotional passion, this
locura
almost.” The fan closed, pointed upward, descended again, reopened, went on fluttering. “I don’t like it. It isn’t good at your age. It isn’t natural. It is not that your papa passed from us yesterday. It is five years ago, now, may he rest in peace. You were thirteen then. You loved him, you were desolated.
Bueno
. Then it passed, as it should with the young. You were like other girls your age, you enjoyed the
cine
on a Sunday afternoon, having an
helado
in a sweetshop now and then, those things. Now all at once this frenzy of tragic grief descends on you, excluding every other interest. It is almost feverish, I have seen you brooding by the hour. You cannot go often enough, nor remain long enough, at All Saints Cemetery. You are unable to eat or sleep, unable to think of anything but the departed. It’s morbid, it’s melancholy.”

The fan never stopped a moment. The monologue ran on, with a sort of velvety firmness that didn’t raise its voice, threaten, command. That just stated facts. “It is to stop now. No more of these visits to a burial ground. They’re not normal. I don’t understand them. At your age one shouldn’t think of the other world so constantly.”

The girl gave her a look of almost tearful supplication. “Just one more time,
madrecita
. Just today, and then I won’t go any more—if you say so.”

“Very well, one more time. Tomorrow. Tomorrow I will feel better, I will take you myself, if you insist on going.”

The girl looked harassed, almost terrified at the alternative. “But today’s his saint day! Just this once. Look, I’m all ready to leave. It’s after halfpast four already. I can be there and back before you know it. Just this once more—”

The Senora Viuda wagged her head darkly, in accompaniment to her fanning. “Always there is one time too many, daughter of my blood. Who knows, this may be it? Don’t go; listen to your mother. I had a dream I didn’t like when I was napping just now.”

The girl showed a momentary interest. “About me? What was it about?”

“Only that I could hear your voice calling to me from some dark place, and I could not reach you.”

The girl chuckled indulgently. “Is that all? In school the sisters used to tell us we mustn’t believe in anything like that.”

The Senora Viuda, who was anything but irreligious, muttered something that sounded suspiciously like, “Are the sisters mothers?”

She fanned awhile longer, still withholding consent. “Stay here,” she urged. “Here, within the walls of your home, where you should be. Read, sew at something, sit by the bars of the window, looking out, dreaming the dreams a young girl does. Or go into the patio at the back, bask there in the late sun, looking at yourself in the water, doing your hair some foolish new way. What is the worst that can happen to you here? Only that time may drag a little. Better that time should pass too slowly than too quick. Tomorrow we will go Out, buy you something at one of the stores, have a
refresco
, take in the crowd at the tables around us—”

She sighed. She could see it was no use, even before the answer came. “Go then, if you must,” she gave in grudgingly. “But today is the last time.” Then as the girl half started up from her chair in unleashed alacrity, a gesture of the fan stopped her short. “And I want one thing understood. You are not to go there accompanied by Rosita any more.”

The girl looked stricken. “But I can’t go by myself! Who else is—?”

“I don’t trust her. She’s giddy and only a few months older than yourself, no fit companion! I should have put a stop to it long ago. I don’t know what I’ve been thinking of until now. It will be old Marta who will take you, if you go at all.”

A look of unadulterated horror passed over the girl’s face at this. Before she could answer, a telephone had pealed distantly, in some remote room.

“Rosita!” the mistress of the house called.

There was a wait that somehow suggested more a stage wait than an actual approach from a distance, and then a comely young girl-of-all-work, with a shawl already coifed around her head, materialized in the doorway, without any preliminary tread along the hall having been audible.

“Si, senora?”

“Was that the telephone just now?”

“The operator must have made a mistake. Nobody answered when I got to it, there wasn’t anybody on it.”

The Senora Viuda’s horizontal brow line arched slightly, then evened out again. “Every now and then that seems to happen in this house. You can take off your shawl, Rosita,” she added with an indifferent drawl, “you will not be going out.”

The girl put her hands to it, but left it in place, as if hoping the order might yet be countermanded. “But the Senorita Conchita wanted me to accompany her to—” she said with an odd sort of breathlessness.

“Call Dona Marta, she is to go with her instead.”

The girl’s black-pitted eyes were fixed on her mistress’ face with a sort of tremulous fixity that somehow suggested they wanted to direct themselves at somebody else in the room, but were being restrained. She gave a little knee dip, “Si, senora,” vanished from the doorway.

The Senora Viuda turned back to her daughter. The latter was sitting almost in the attitude of a penitent by now, her second ankle had retreated far under the chair to join the first, and she was busily engaged with both hands in pleating and smoothing out again a small section of dress over one kneecap. She could feel her mother’s gaze on her, looked up through her long lashes to confirm the impression, looked down again when she had.

Senora Contreras said, with an odd sort of kindliness seeping through her mien of authority, “Come here a minute, my child.” Conchita got up, moved to the side of the chaise longue, crouched down to the level of her mother’s face. The fan had finally stopped, for the balance of the interview; was laid aside. The Senora reached out, tipped up her hand to her daughter’s chin, held it under it in a sort of static caress. She looked questioningly into her eyes.

The girl’s eyes never wavered, they were crystalline innocence itself.

“I did not come into this world a middle-aged woman, a widowed mother, as you see me now, you know. I was a young girl myself once, and not so many years ago. Always remember,
hijita de mi alma
, anything you think, your mother thought before you. Anything you do, your mother did before you. And her mother before her. There isn’t anything new in women.
I
know,
I
know.”

“Know what,
madrecita?
” the girl breathed so low it could scarcely be heard.

The Senora Viuda kissed her with classic benevolence on the forehead, then more fondly on the lips. “You are a sweet little thing. You are the morning sunlight in my dreary afternoon sky. It is not that you would do anything so unforgivable. It is just that there is a way of doing things that is right and a way that is wrong. You are young, and the world is old. When you are a few years older, I don’t want you to have to look back on anything lacking in dignity, in which you cut a ridiculous figure. Anyone who may become interested in you should come here to our house, as the established custom is with us; should be introduced to you by myself, or Uncle Felipe, or some other older relative.”

“
Mamacita
, I don’t know what you mean—”

The Senora gestured leniently. “I haven’t said anything. It is just my heart talking to your heart. Now go there if you insist, with Marta, and come right back. The sun will soon be down, so don’t linger—”

Without actually springing up, the girl was suddenly all the way across at the open doorway, like something from which a leash has just been detached.

At the threshold she turned for a minute. “What,
madre mia?
”

“Nothing. Run along.” What the Senora Viuda had just said, half to herself, with a sigh of resignation, was: “It will do no good. It never has from the beginning, it never will to the end of time. One can’t change the world.”

In the passageway outside, Conchita crossed paths with Rosita. They brushed by one another like two people unaware of one another’s presence, or at least trying to give that impression. The daughter of the house whispered, “She’s sending Marta with me, what am I going to do?”

The serving girl reached out backhand and clasped hands with her in passing, as if to lend moral support.

Conchita looked down at something. “What’s that?”

“Don’t be afraid, it’ll just make her drowsy.”

“Me? I can’t!”

The other fanned both hands at her in a violent affirmative.

“It won’t hurt her, will it?” Conchita breathed anxiously.

“It’s nothing, just an herb from the mountains. I got it from an Indian down at the market. I’ve tried it on myself. All it does is— Sh! Here she comes.” They resumed their interrupted transits.

An old woman of about sixty, shawled for the street, was coming down the passageway. “Are you ready, my flower? Have you said good-by to your mother?” And to Rosita, in angry authority, “Go in there and stay with the Senora, useless one! She may need you for something.”

Conchita brushed past. “Wait for me at the door. I’m just going back to my room a second.”

She stopped before the mirror in there, scanned herself anxiously as though to make sure she was looking her best for the sake of the dead in the cemetery. She threw open a drawer, unearthed a lipstick from some secret hiding place at the back of it, hastily touched it to her lips. Then she lowered the dimming veil over her face, obliterating the improvement she had just made, and hurried demurely back along the passageway to rejoin her companion.

Her chaperon already had a public carriage drawn up at the door and was sitting waiting in it. To go to the cemetery in a gasoline-powered vehicle was somehow improper, she seemed to feel. “To the flower market,” she ordered the driver, as the slim veiled figure climbed in next to her.

Ten minutes later, after driving through a number of narrow, elbow-jointed streets, they reached a small plaza fronting a rose-tan church of massive Spanish colonial architecture. What was remarkable about it was the broad expanse of worn stone steps leading up to it, spanning the entire foundation in width. They were invisible as steps save for a narrow lane of clearance left in the middle, running directly up to the entrance. All the rest had disappeared under what seemed to be a multicolored, unbroken flower bed, with patches of shelter over it here and there. It was only on closer inspection that this disintegrated into separate little zones of barter, each presided over by its individual vendor. Some had rigged up little portable stalls, poles supporting awnings, or straw mats to keep the sun off their perishable wares. Others, unable to afford this, simply squatted on the steps in hollow squares, their merchandise ranged around them in open sheaves or clusters thrust into clay water jars. The air was cloying with an indescribable odor of ferns, crushed leaves, bruised and trodden petals and stalks, and, above all else, the peculiar brackishness given off by age-old paving stones saturated repeatedly with water all day long without ever having time to dry off. It was an odor compounded in equal parts of verdant, blooming life and stagnant, mildewed decay. This was the flower market, held on this site for two hundred years past every day from sunrise until dusk.

Conchita’s chaperon got out of the carriage at the foot of the steps, turned to ask: “What kind shall I get?”

The girl descended right after her. “I’m coming, too. I want to pick them myself.”

Marta started to protest that it wasn’t necessary, she would do it for her, but Conchita had already taken the lead, was moving slowly up the main aisle of display, looking about her, assailed from either side by an advancing barrage of shrill, wheedling, poetic, and personally flattering cries that kept pace with her, to die out again forlornly behind her as she passed out of reach into the next vendor’s jurisdiction. Hands reached for her, tugged importunately at her clothing. Marta slapped them down again.

“Here,
nina
, roses crying for you!”

“Look,
chiquita
, carnations begging to be bought. Ten centavitos. Five. Any price you say. Only take them, take them!” It was late and the market was about to disband.

Marta halted. “Here are some. Will these do,
nina
?”

Conchita glanced around, but without halting her ascent. “No, up here at the top. I always buy from this one at the end.”

The stall she indicated, as a matter of fact, had a less sizable assortment to offer than many of those they had just passed. The vendor was an old woman with a face as finely lined as though mosquito netting had been drawn over it.

“Some of these.” Conchita picked up a single white rose and held it to her face outside the veil, causing a small indentation to appear with indrawn breath.

“Si, little, angel, si!” the vendor jabbered, bustling to collect them. “White roses, as beautiful, as young, as you are yourself.”

“And gardenias,” Conchita instructed.

Marta held out her arms for the unbound accumulation. “I’ll carry them, they may tear your clothes.” She handed the old woman a coin, turned to pick her way down the slippery steps.

The vendor, however, was not yet satisfied. “Look, a little cluster of white violets to go with them. The last one left.” She laid one finger craftily alongside her nose for a moment, glanced after the retreating chaperon. “I’ve been saving them for you all day. Free! I give them to you free!” She pulled twice at the girl’s skirt, almost as though it were a bell cord.

The girl took them, moved down the steps in the wake of her companion, holding them close to her face. They were platted together on a single, large leaf of some sort. She had extracted the thinly folded note twined around their stems even before she re-entered the carriage. She opened it with one hand, read it, holding it down out of sight on the side away from Marta, as they jounced back through the narrow, erratically turning streets on their way to the cemetery.

Just a few words. The oldest message in the world, that said nothing, that said everything. “Sweetness of my life. Will you go there again today? I will be waiting. I have counted the hours all week long, since the last time. Sweetness of my life, have mercy on me.”