Burning Your Boats: The Collected Short Stories (59 page)

In the afternoon, the slack time, Roxana and her sister sit in Roxana’s boudoir with the shades down against the glaring sun, rocking on cane rocking-chairs, smoking cigars together and gently tippling tequila. Maria Mendoza is a roaring, mannish, booted and spurred bandit herself; savage, illiterate, mother of one daughter only, the beautiful Teresa. “We finally fixed it, Roxana; signed, sealed and almost delivered … See, here’s the picture of Teresa’s fiance … isn’t he a handsome man? Eh? Eh?”

Roxana looks at the cherished photograph dubiously. Another bandit, even if a more powerful one than Mendoza himself! At least she, Roxana, has managed to get herself a man who doesn’t wear spurs to bed. And Teresa hasn’t even met her intended … “No, no!” cries Maria. “That’s not necessary. Love will come, as soon as they’re married, once he gets his leg over her … and the babies, my Teresa’s babies, my grandchildren, growing up in his enormous house, surrounded by servants bowing and scraping.” But Roxana is less certain and shakes her head doubtfully. “Anyway, there’s nothing Teresa can do about it,” says her mother firmly; “it’s all been fixed up by Mendoza, she’ll be the bandit queen of the entire border. That’s a lot better than living like a pig in this hole.”

The Mendozas do indeed live like pigs, behind a stockade, in a filthy, gypsy-like encampment of followers and hangers-on in the grounds of what was once, before the Mendozas took it over, a rather magnificent Spanish colonial hacienda. Now Mendoza himself, Teresa’s hulking brute of a father, gallops his horse down the corridors, shoots out the windowpanes in his drunkenness. Teresa, the spoiled only daughter, screams at him in fury: “We live like pigs! Like pigs!”

Problems in the brothel! The pianist has run off with the prettiest of all the girls; they’re heading south to start up their own place, she reckons her husband won’t chase her down as far as Acapulco. They wait for the stagecoach to take them away, sitting on barrels in the general store with their bags piled around them; the coach drops one passenger, the driver goes off to water the horses. Any work here for a piano-player? Why, what a coincidence!

He’s from the north, a gringo. And a city boy, too, in a velvet coat, with such long, white fingers! He winces when he hears gunfire—a Mendoza employee boisterously shooting at chickens in the gutter. How pale he is …a handsome boy, nice, refined, educated voice. Is there even the trace of a foreign accent?

Like the Count, he is startlingly alien in this primitive, semi-desert environment.

Roxana melts maternally at the sight of him; he delights the Count by playing a little Brahms on the out-of-tune, honky-tonk piano. The Count’s eyes mist over; he remembers … The conservatoire at Vienna? Can it be possible? How extraordinary … so you were studying at the conservatoire at Vienna? Although Roxana’s delighted with her new employee, her lip curls, she is a natural sceptic. But he’s the best piano-player she’s ever heard.

And, anyway, nobody really asks questions in this town, or believes any answers, for that matter. He must have his reasons for holing up in this godforsaken place. The job’s yours, Johnny; you get a little room over the porch to sleep in, with a lock on it to keep the girls out. They get bored … don’t let them bother you.

But Johnny is in the grip of a singular passion; he is a grim and dedicated being. He ignores the girls completely.

In his bedroom, Johnny places photographs of a man and a woman—his parents—on the splintered pine dressing-table; pins up a poster for the San Francisco Opera House on the wall,
Der Freischütz.
He addresses the photographs. “I’ve found out where they live, I’ve tracked them to their lair. It won’t be long now, Mother and Father. Not long.”

Hoofbeats outside. Maria Mendoza is coming to visit her sister, riding astride, like a man, while her daughter rides side-saddle like a lady, even if her hair is an uncombed haystack. She looks the wild bandit-child she is. But—now she’s an engaged woman, her father forbids her to visit the brothel, even to pay a formal call on her good aunt! Ride back home, Teresa!

Sullen, she turns her horse round. Looking back at the brothel as she trots away, she sees Johnny gazing at her from his window; their eyes meet, Johnny’s briefly veil.

Teresa is momentarily confused; then spurs her horse cruelly, gallops off, like a wild thing.

In the small hours, when the brothel has finally closed down for the night, Johnny plays Chopin for the Count. Tears of sentimental nostalgia roll down the old man’s cheeks. And Vienna … is it still the same? Try not to remember … he pours himself another whisky. Then Johnny asks him softly, is it true what he’s heard … stories circulating in the faraway Austro-Hungarian Empire; the Count starts.

The old legend, about the man who makes a pact with the devil to obtain a bullet that cannot miss its target …

An old legend, says the Count. In the superstitious villages, they believe such things still.

All kinds of shadows drift in through the open window.

The old legend, given a new lease of life by the exploits of a certain aristocrat, who vanished suddenly, left everything. And the Mendozas, here, the bandits—aren’t they all damned? Vicious, cruel … wouldn’t a man who’s sold his soul to the devil feel safest amongst the damned? Amongst whores and murderers?

The Count, shuddering, pours yet another whisky.

Is it true what they used to whisper, that the Count—this Count, you! old man—had a reputation as a marksman so extraordinary that everyone thought he had supernatural powers?

The Count, recovering himself, says: They said that of Paganini, that he must have learned how to play the fiddle from the devil. Since no human being could have played so well.”

“And perhaps he did,” says Johnny.

“You’re a musician, not a murderer, Johnny.”

“Stranglers and piano-players both need long fingers. But a bullet is more merciful,” suggests Johnny obliquely.

Out of some kind of dream into which he’s abruptly sunk, the Count says: “The seventh bullet belongs to the devil. That is how you pay—”

But tonight, he won’t, can’t say any more. He lurches off to bed, to Roxana, who’s waiting for him, as she always does. But why, oh why, is the old man crying? The whisky makes you into a baby … but Roxana takes care of you, she’s always taken care of you, ever since she found you.

Roxana mothers the newcomer, Johnny, too, but she also watches him, with troubled eyes. All he does is play the piano and brood obsessively over the Mendoza gunmen as they sport and play in the bar. Sometimes he inspects the Count’s old rifle, hung up on the wall, strokes the barrel, caresses the stock; but he knows nothing about the arts of death at all. Nothing! And he takes no interest in the girls, that’s unhealthy.

It seems to Roxana that there’s a likeness between her old man and the young one. That crazy, black-clad dignity. They always seem to be chatting to one another and sometimes they talk in German. Roxana hates that, it makes her feel shut out, excluded.

Can he be, can young Johnny be … some son the Count begot and then abandoned, a child he’d never known, come all this way to find him?

Could it be?

Old man and young one, with eyes the same shape, hands the same shape … could it be?

And if it is, why don’t they tell her, Roxana?

Secrets make her feel shut out, excluded. She sits in her room on the rocking-chair in the dusk, sipping tequila.

Voices below—in German. She goes to her window, watches the Count and the piano-player wander off together in the direction of the little scummy pond in front of the brothel, which is set back off the main street.

She crosses herself, goes on rocking.

“Speak English, we must leave the Old World and its mysteries behind us,” says the Count. “The old, weary, exhausted world. Leave it behind! This is a new country, full of hope …”

He is heavily ironic. The ancient rocks of the desert lour down in the sunset.

“But the landscape of this country is more ancient by far than we are, strange gods brood over it. I shall never be friends with it, never.”

Aliens, strangers, the Count and Johnny watch the Mendozas ride out on the rampage, led by Teresa’s father; a band of grizzled hooligans, firing off their guns, shouting.

Johnny, calm, quiet, tells the Count how the Mendozas killed his parents when they raided a train for the gold the train carried. His parents, both opera singers, on their way back across the continent from California, from a booking in San Francisco … and he far away, in Europe.

Mendoza himself tore the earrings from his mother’s ears. And raped her. And somebody shot his father when his father tried to stop the rape. And then they shot his mother because she was screaming so loudly.

Calm, quiet, Johnny recounts all.

“We all have our tragedies.”

“Some tragedies we can turn back on the perpetrators. I’ve planned my revenge. A suitably operatic revenge. I shall seduce the beautiful senorita and give her a baby. And if I can’t shoot her father and mother, I shall find some way of strangling them with my beautiful pianist’s hands.”

Quiet, assured, deadly—but incompetent. He doesn’t know one end of a gun from the other; never raised his hand in anger in his life.

But he’s been brooding on this revenge ever since the black-edged letter arrived at his lodgings in Vienna; in Vienna, where he heard how a nobleman made a pact with the devil, once, to ensure no bullet he ever fired would miss the mark …

“If you’ve planned it all so well, if you’re dedicated to your vengeance …”

Johnny nods. Quiet, assured, deadly.

“If you’re quite determined, then … you belong to the devil already. And a bullet is indeed more merciful than anger, if accurately fired.”

And the Count has always hated Mendoza’s contempt for himself and Roxana, who live on Mendoza’s charity.

But Johnny has never used a gun in his life. Old man, old man, what have you to lose? You’ve nothing, you’ve come to a dead end, kept by a whore in a flyblown town at the end of all the roads you ever took … give me a gun that will never miss a shot; that will fire by itself. I know you know how to get one. I know—

“I have nothing to lose,” says the Count inscrutably. “Except my sins, Johnny. Except my sins.”

Teresa, sixteen, sullen, pretty, dissatisfied, retreats into her bedroom, into the depths of an enormous, gilded, four-poster bed looted from a train especially for her, surrounded by a jackdaw’s nest of tawdry, looted glitter, gorges herself on chocolates, leafs through very very old fashion magazines. She hugs a scrawny kitten, her pet. Chickens roost on the canopy of her bed. Maa! maa! a goat pokes its head in through the open window. Teresa twitches with annoyance. You call this living?

Her door bursts open. An excited dog follows a flock of squawking chickens into the room; all the chickens roosting on the bed rise up, squawking. Chaos! The dog jumps on to the bed, begins to gnaw at the bloody something he carries in his mouth. Kitten rises on its hind legs to bat at the dog. Teresa hurls chocolates, magazines, screaming—insupportable! She storms out of the room.

In the courtyard, her mother is slaughtering a screaming pig. That’s the sort of thing the Mendoza women folk enjoy! Ugh. Teresa’s made for better things, she knows it.

She wanders disconsolately out into the dusty street. Empty. Like my life, like my life.

Willows bend over the scummy pool in front of Roxana’s brothel; it has a secluded air.

Teresa skulks beside the pool, sullenly throwing stones at her own reflection. Morning, slack time; in voluptuous déshabillé, the whores lean over the veranda: “Little Teresa! Little Teresa! Come in and see your auntie!” They laugh at her in her black stockings, her convent-girl dress, her rumpled hair.

Roxana’s doing the books, behind the bar, with a pair of wire-rimmed glasses propped on her nose. The Count pours himself elevenses—she looks up, is about to remonstrate with him, thinks better of it, returns to her sums. Morning sunshine; outside on the veranda, the whores giggle and wave at Teresa.

Johnny idly begins to play a Strauss waltz. Roxana’s foot taps a little.

The Count puts down his whisky. Smiles. He approaches Roxana, presents his arm. She’s startled—then blushes, beams like a young girl. Takes off her glasses, pats her hair, glances at herself in the mirror behind the bar, pleasantly flustered. Seeing her pleasure, the Count becomes more courtly still. Still quite a fine figure of a man! And she, when she smiles, you see what a pretty girl she must have been.

Johnny flourishes the keys; he’s touched. He begins to play a Strauss waltz in earnest.

Roxana takes the Count’s proffered arm; they dance.

“Look! Look! Roxana’s dancing!”

The whores flock back into the room, laughing, admiring. And begin to dance with one another, girl with girl, in their spoiled negligees, their unlaced corsets, petticoats, torn stockings.

Maddalena, partnerless, lingers on the veranda, teasing Teresa. Music spills out of the brothel.

“Teresa! Teresa! Come and dance with me!”

Slowly, slowly, Teresa arrives at the veranda, climbs the stairs, peers through a window as, flushed and breathless, the dancers collapse in a laughing heap.

She and Johnny exchange a flashing glance. But her aunt catches sight of her. “Teresa, Teresa, scram! This is no place for you!”

At the Mendozas’ dinner-table, her father sits picking his teeth with his knife.

“I want to learn the piano, papa.”

He continues to pick his teeth with his knife. She didn’t want to learn the piano at the damn convent; why does she want to learn it now? To be a lady, Papa; isn’t she going to have a grand wedding, marry a fine man? “Papa, I want to learn the piano.”

Teresa is spoiled, indulged in everything. But her father likes to tease her; he’ll drag out her pleading as long as he can. He doesn’t often have his daughter pleading with him. He cuts himself a chunk more meat, munches.

“And who will teach you piano in his hole, hm?”

“Johnny. Johnny at Aunt Roxana’s.”

He’s suddenly really angry. You see what an animal he can become.