Black Alibi (8 page)

Somehow she got it inside the lining of her glove, refolded, by thumb motion alone. Then she dipped her face to the violets once more. As the Senora Viuda had said, one couldn’t change the world.

They came out of the older part of town with its tortuous, cobbled streets, where respectable, conservative families like hers lived, into one of the new semi-suburban sections, favored by foreigners and the more flashily prosperous who copied their ways—even to letting their daughters run around without an older woman in attendance. They traversed this along a straight, broad asphalted driveway, and beyond emerged into open country for awhile. Then in the distance ahead a symmetrical line of dark-green poplars began to peer over an intervening rise of the ground and, when they had topped it, suddenly seemed to spring forward to join the road, behind a stone wall that ran back as far as the eye could reach.

It turned and followed the roadside for a while. All Saints Cemetery was known as the largest in the city, if not anywhere in the world. It was said of it that it was big enough to accommodate all the world’s dead at one time.

On the opposite side of the road, buildings had sprung up once more, called into being to accommodate the living who on Sundays and certain religious holidays came out here in such shoals to pay their respects to the dead. A headstone carver’s shop and workyard, littered with ornamental urns, cherubs, mourning angels, and crosses, a refreshment and eating pavilion, and others such. They were intermittent, with large gaps between, and the whole atmosphere was one of abandoned desolation rather than life-quickened activity, somehow.

The carriage drew up at the main entrance, marked by a pair of massive bronze doors set within a stone arch, and they got out. “Come back for us within a half-hour, no more,” Marta instructed the driver.

The carriage ambled aimlessly off on some mission best known to its driver—perhaps the nearest cantina at the next crossroads ahead. As it left them, Conchita held back in seeming irresolution a minute.

“Marta, before we go in, can’t we go over to that place across the way and sit down for a minute? I’m so thirsty.”

Marta objected querulously, flattening the sheaf of flowers so that she could look at her clearly over their tops, “No,
nina
. How can we? Your mother told me to bring you right back. Look, the sun’s already far down. Night will be upon us before we can get back to the house.”

“How long will it take?” the girl coaxed.

“But did we come out here to visit your father’s grave or did we come out here to have
refrescos?
” the old woman said with peevish stubbornness.

“Just a cup of mint tea. You know how you love your mint ‘tea. You always take it at this hour at home.”

The chaperon wavered, obviously tempted. She cast a look across the road, as though judging how long it would detain them to go over and back. “But isn’t it better to go in first and pay our respects, and then have it when we come out? The place may close.”

“I’m faint, Martita. Why do you refuse me?”

Her companion was at once all whimpering solicitude. “Oh my light, why didn’t you tell me sooner? What am I thinking of, standing here wrangling? Come, my heart, take me by the arm, we’ll go right over.”

They inched across the road, held to a painfully reduced gait more by the stout figure’s slowness of limb than by the slender one’s weakness, if the truth had been known. The devoted Marta even had to caution her charge, “Not so fast,
linda
. You may get dizzy.”

The establishment was bare of customers at this hour. A waiter with a tray tucked under his arm came attentively to the door, waiting to see where they would decide to sit before moving any further. There was a terrace strip of terra-cotta mosaic tiling laid out in front of the place, holding a row of reedy, forlorn-looking, wafer-sized iron tables, each one with more wire-legged chairs wedged around it than it could accommodate.

“Let’s go inside out of the glare,” Conchita suggested demurely.

They continued on into an interior of cavelike dimness, after the outer brightness, in which a sea of other equally reedy, equally untenanted iron tables could be made out. A loosely strung pasteboard sign proclaiming ASK FOR EL SOL BEER brushed against Marta’s head as she passed below it. She swept it indignantly aside.

They seated themselves opposite one another in a small booth against the wall, duenna and massed flowers on one side of the table, young mourner on the other. The waiter approached. “
Buenos dias
.”

“
Buenos dias
,” Marta grunted, with the curtness one employee often has for another.

Conchita waited until he had gone away again, then tipped the veil from her face with an air of angelic primness.

The visibility lightened up a little around them as their eyes grew accustomed to the place, though not much beyond the blue-green transparency of a submarine deep from first to last. Then too, the daylight outside was fast toning down, losing its contrasting vividness.

They sat for a moment or two. “We’ll be locked out,” Marta mourned. “We’ll have had the whole trip out for nothing.” She shifted her head and shoulders outward along her seat to scan the seemingly lifeless rear of the establishment. She shattered the silence with an explosive double smack of her cupped hands. “
Muchacho!
We’re in a hurry!” she called imperatively.

The waiter returned at a trudging walk, his excuse for not hurrying any faster the brimming cup of strongly aromatic tea and glass of lemonade he bore on the tray.

Marta ducked her chin to the cup, smacked her lips expressively as she raised it again. Conchita, who was sitting facing the thoroughfare outside, kept scanning it, more as though she were on the lookout for something to come along and catch her eye than because something had. Suddenly she gave a little sob of suppressed laughter, flexed one finger toward the outer panorama.

“You should have seen that! The funniest-looking man just went by. I wonder what he was.”

Marta, who was sitting back to the road, laboriously swiveled herself around and tried to peer out past the edge of the booth partition behind her.

She turned back in a moment, shrugged. “I don’t see anyone.”

A little ripple was going around in her cup.

“You missed him. He’s gone past now.”

Marta said, “You do look pale,
nina
.”

Conchita did look pale. She wasn’t used to acts of overt treachery against members of her own household. Against anyone, for that matter.

Another minute or two went by. Marta put down her drained cup.

“Come
pequena
, we must go.”

“Just let’s sit a minute longer. It’s so nice here. I haven’t quite finished my lemonade yet.”

“The sun is almost all gone. It’ll be dark before we know it. We can’t go in there in the dark—”

“You look tired, Marta.”

As though she had only realized it now that the thought had been suggested to her, Marta admitted: “I am tired. I went ‘to six-o’clock Mass this morning.” She sighed self-indulgently. “When one gets to be my age—”

“Put your head back a minute against the leather padding,” the girl suggested.

“It wouldn’t look right, out in public like this.”

“There’s no one but us here to see.”

The old woman’s head went back almost of its own accord, she closed her eyes gratefully, and gave a deep sigh of relaxation. Her head stayed straight for a minute, erect on her shoulders. Then it slanted over until it had found the angle between the two walls of the compartment, remained leaning against it, supported by one of them. Her breathing started to become more gritty. Her lips parted company slightly, just in the middle.

The girl sat quietly on opposite her a moment longer. Then she shifted outward along the seat until the impediment of the table had ended, stood up, never taking her eyes off her deputy guardian’s face. The heavy jowls were shaking a little now, with each breath.

She reached cautiously downward for the mass of flowers beside Marta, scooped them up in the crook of one arm, careful to keep them from rustling too flagrantly. She got them all but one, a long-stemmed white rose which escaped her. She let that remain where it was. To have tried to retrieve it might have cost her all the others.

She picked her way through the shoal of spool-topped tables, moving like a black-garbed wraith against the dying brightness of the day outside. When she had gained the lateral aisle of clearance that led to the front and out, she motioned the waiter toward her before proceeding along it, at the same time cautioning him with finger to lips.

“Si, senorita?”

“My
nodriza’s
very tired,
pobrecita
. I’m going to leave her here for a few minutes. Don’t wake her up, please, until I get back. I’m just going across the street. I’ll be back for her in a quarter of an hour.”

“Just as the senorita orders it,” he murmured respectfully. A refined young girl in mourning from head to foot, an armful of flowers obviously destined for a grave—who could think anything amiss?

She moved decorously enough until she had gained the terrace outside and the street beyond that. Then, because the cemetery entrance was some considerable distance down, not directly opposite, and because the sun was already expiring in a pool of blood in the western sky, and her precious store of stolen minutes was draining away through her fingers like sand, she began to hasten. Unnoticeably at first. In a moment more she was presenting the rather grotesque, not to say scandalous, spectacle of black-garbed mourner, flowers bobbing up and down in arms, veil ends and skirts streaming out behind her, rushing along full tilt toward a burial-ground entrance, as though the dead couldn’t wait, as though she couldn’t get in fast enough to offer them her homage. One or two heads turned to look incredulously after her as she whisked by.

She was out of breath as she rounded the ornamental entrance archway, black-silk-encased legs trip-hammering under her so fast they almost blurred. “I don’t want you to have anything undignified to have to look back on later.” Tell that to love!

Her sense of propriety returned to her just in time; she forced herself to slow to a more sedate though still rather rapid walk, as she passed between the ponderous, bronze gate flaps, outstretched like a pair of wings waiting to receive and fold upon her. The gift of some wealthy private donor, they were expensively worked in basrelief. On one was inscribed:
That which is so universal as death must be a blessing
. And on the opposite one:
And none may escape its benediction
.

She passed through them without a glance. The living have no time to look at death; they cannot see it even if they try.

A short distance within and beyond them was a little lodge, scarcely more than a stone sentry box, used by the gatekeeper during hours of admission. He was standing in the narrow doorway of it, looking out, as she Went by. He was a kindly, commonplace-looking old man, obviously nearsighted as she could tell by the way he squinted at her in peering uncertainty.

She stopped short, mbved a step or two over toward him. “Has a young man come in here within the past half-hour or so, have you noticed? Dark-haired and thin and, and by himself?”

“Sort of a good-looking young fellow?” he suggested.

“Oh, handsome!” she agreed fervently, casting a rapturous upward look at the sky.

The old man smiled a little with tolerant understanding. “Yes,
nina
, yes, I have seen someone like that. Three times within the past ten minutes he’s been out here to the entrance, looking for someone, getting more restless all the time, asking me if I’d seen—someone very beautiful, in black with jet-black hair, bringing a servant girl with her.”

She dropped her eyes, quickly raised them again.

“He’s still in there, though? He didn’t leave?” she said relievedly.

“He’s still in there as far as I know. I don’t remember seeing hini leave. Unless he left while I was making my last tour of inspection.”

“No,” she assured him, with a sort of charming inner conviction, “he didn’t, he’s still in there. Thank you.”

She turned and resumed her way down the long broad central avenue that led farther in before it began to unravel into numberless, winding, white-graveled paths, all looking pretty much alike and all already taking on a bluish cast as they filled up with the silt of night shadow.

“Don’t stay in too long, senorita,” the gatekeeper called after her in kindly warning. “When you hear my whistle blow that means we’re closing. You only have a minute or two left.”

She only half heard him. An invisible current that he couldn’t see had swept her up, was pulling her irresistibly forward. Whistles and gates and quotas of minutes couldn’t weaken or stop it or interfere. This was the time for love, treasured, hoarded, waited for, ever since the time before.

She walked rapidly down the somber avenue, through an eerie landscape fast dimming in the twilight. Eerie because it was neither natural nor human; it was that of the other world. There was a classical severity to it, a cold melancholy, that nature lacks. These cypresses, poplars, weeping willows, artfully disposed here and there, singly and in copses, they were rooted where dead human beings lay. They touched death, they sheltered it, they even lived and were nourished upon it. And scattered all about under them, through every opening in their low-hanging branches, in every space between their trunks, down every vista and at every turn, was a silent, soulless population, gleaming white in the wavering shadows. A population that seemed to be waiting some necromantic signal in the depths of oncoming night to come to swarming, malignant life. A population of angels, phoenixes, griffins. The very marble benches here and there along the paths, they seemed to be put there not for the living to rest upon during the course of their visits, but for the use of unguessed shrouded forms flitting along these thoroughfares and lanes in silent passage late at night.

And over it all hung a violet pall of expiring light, the
crepusculo
, whose very name was a little death in itself. The death of day.