Diamond Dust (16 page)

Whereas Nadyn appeared stunned by the sudden appearance of a young man out of the dusk, and stepped back almost in fright, Dona Celia recognised him without a moment's hesitation. 'Ah, Teresa's son, eh? Louis, eh?'

Of course they were expecting him—his mother had telephoned, he too had spoken to them on the phone, all the while imagining it ringing through the empty house and the fluster it would cause in those silent rooms—but he was late, very late.

Dona Celia reminded him of this immediately. 'You are late,' she accused him. 'We have waited all day. What kept you, eh?'

He tried to explain, laughing falsely: he had hoped to get his father's car and drive up; he had waited, it hadn't turned up; he had made his way to the bus terminal but met friends on the way who insisted he stop, who delayed him. It was true, he admitted, taking off his hat and wiping his face, true that he had only managed to get away and catch a bus hours after he had said he would. That was how it was, he laughed.

Dona Celia's long face swung in the dark like a cow's. She shifted on her chair, wrapping her shawl about her throat—a shawl, on such a still, warm evening indoors; that too he remembered. All her movements expressed her displeasure. 'Well, we have eaten. Finally, we ate, Nedy and I. But Nedy will show you to the kitchen and you can help yourself before you go to bed.'

'Oh, is it bedtime?' he blinked. Already?

This was taken as an impertinence. She was not going to reply. A young nephew to speak to his aunt so, and tell her what should and should not be the hour for bed? Her face set into its deeply cut folds. Louis could hardly believe this sour old lady could be the sister of his laughing, plump, brightly dressed mother. A much older sister, it was true, and the daughter of their father's first marriage, more like a mother to her younger sister by a second marriage, but still, there was not the faintest resemblance. Perhaps it was the difference between the old family home in Tepoztlan which the old lady had never left, her own husband having entered it when they married, and left her there when he died, while Louis's mother had married into a family that lived in Mexico City.

Following Nadyn into the kitchen for a bowl of sopa tortilla she said she had kept warm for him, he sighed. Yes, Mexico City was very far, in a sense, not geographical, from Tepoztlan.

The bowl of soup Nadyn promised him turned out to be only one course of a succession of dishes she kept placing on the table and watching him eat his way through out of politeness, not hunger. She placed her elbows on the table, her chin on her cupped hands, and let her eyes wander. Why did she not put the light on? he thought querulously, peering into the dishes in the gloom, not even certain what he was eating although Nadyn assured him each time 'Your favourite.' 'It is?' he asked doubtfully, lifting a spoon and stirring. 'Of
course
,' she replied,
'we
remember.'

What else do you remember? And what do you do besides remember? he wanted to ask her, bad-temperedly and unfairly, since she was telling him, in some detail, all the events of their lives in the time he had been away in the USA, quite as if she were sure he had heard nothing about them, living as he did in exile. As she mentioned this uncle, that cousin, or the other nephew or niece, he drooped over his plate gloomily, wondering if he dared light a cigarette and indicate he would not eat any more.

But now she was bringing out the pièce de résistance of the meal, carefully preserved in an ancient icebox that stood grumbling in its corner, and even in the gloom the colour of the jelly that wobbled in its dish was such that it made him cringe. 'Your favourite,' she challenged him as she set it, trembling, before him. How could he tell her that he had long since outgrown green and red jelly puddings?

'Only if you share it with me,' he said, inspiration having suddenly struck. By the brevity of her hesitation, and the eagerness with which she brought across a glass dish for herself, he remembered how Nadyn had always been the one with the sweet tooth.

'So, Nedy,' he decided to tease her, passing over all but one spoonful of the jelly to her, 'que hubo? Pedro—is he still around?'

She collapsed against the table, as if she had been struck. He had been unfair: he should have let her finish her jelly before bringing up the matter which he knew to be unpleasant, had a long history of being unpleasant. Now she would not be able to enjoy her pudding.

But somehow she managed to combine two emotions and two activities—and he watched with fascination as the woman with the long grey face and the two pigtails who sat across from him in her grey dress managed to spoon the sweet into her mouth avidly, relishing each chill, slippery mouthful as an armadillo might enjoy slipping slugs down its throat, and at the same time emitting an endless flow of complaint and grumbling, all bitter as ash, raw as salt. There was such a long, long history, after all, of Dona Celia's opposition to Pedro as a suitor, and her objections: that he was muy sucio, dirty, not fit to enter their house, and just because he ran a business in town. A business? queried Louis, was it not a truck? Oh yes, a truck was a part of it, how else was Pedro to deliver those bombas de gaz if not by truck, but did Louis know how the people of Tepoztlan now relied on those bombas for heating and cooking, how good, how thriving a business it was? It was not that Pedro was not doing well, or that he did not work hard. Then what was it? Louis enquired. Here she threw up her hands, then clutched her head, then clasped her arms about her, and went off on another tack: that of Dona Celia's stubborness, her adamant attitude, her rejection of Pedro's family—for how could she object to Pedro? No one could object to Pedro, it was his
family
—and here Nadyn became dejected, her mouth and shoulders and hands all drooped. She tinkled a spoon in the empty glass dish, making a forlorn sound: even Nadyn could not speak for Pedro's family. She had visited it, after all, and had to admit—and had told Pedro, too—that it was not the kind of home
she
had grown up in,
that
anyone could see. Pedro's home and Pedro's family could not be described as anything but sucio, not even by Nadyn. And she had not been given such a welcome by them either: they were not used to cultivated and aristocratic women such as the women of their own family, said Nadyn with a shrug, and their way of living—well, it was little better than pigs'. After all they had only recently made the move to Tepoztlan from the hills where they
had
raised pigs, turkeys, and scratched maize from the fields, but how could Pedro help that? He had worked hard to rise above that himself: only Mama would not see that, being of the old school—old-fashioned and stubborn.

Louis felt his eyelids weighted as if by lead with the repetitiveness of Nadyn's complaints. He could postpone the cigarette no longer. 'One day she will,' he sighed, without the least conviction, knowing as well as Nadyn that only over Dona Celia's dead body would Pedro cross the threshold of their home. His eyelids twitched with a sudden spasm of sympathy. People like Dona Celia took a long, long time to die—he did not need to tell Nadyn that: she knew.

He took his cigarette out into the courtyard to smoke. This was only partly in order not to offend his aunt's and his cousin's nostrils—they were used to the heavy coils of smoke of Raidolito and of incense but not of tobacco—but also because he could not help feeling absurdly hurt that Nadyn had not asked him a single question. Instead she had taken for granted that he would want to hear
her
news,
their
news, without the faintest suspicion that he might have some of his own. It made him feel ridiculously childish—no one ever imagines a child could have anything of interest to say. So it was with a somewhat sulky air that he strolled out into the dense jungle of the courtyard, thinking to sit down on a bench beside the water trough in the ferny centre and brood silently upon his own affairs before going in to bed. For a while it was as he remembered: the scents, the sound of water dripping, the howling of dogs in the lanes of Tepoztlan in voices more human than canine, so full of despair, desire and woe, and in the distance the wail of similar human laments on a radio, broken into by the raucous gaiety of a mariachi band playing on another, and overhead the night sky so deep and so dark that it was like being upside down and peering into a well. But very soon not only did the cigarette dwindle to its end and the bench grow distinctly cold under him, but what he remembered and what he reaffirmed began to have a profoundly depressing effect on his spirits. He saw the light go off inside the house, only the red glow around the Virgin of Guadalupe left throbbing, and then it became too much for him and he got to his feet and withdrew as if afraid this might be the stage, the setting for his life as well.

When he woke, much too late—the sun was already smashing in through the windows he had left unshuttered—it was to find the mood of Dona Celia's house unchanged. The courtyard was still uninhabited, there was no longer a team of maids and manservants to labour there, and although someone had drawn the covers off the cages, a number of them did turn out to be empty while the few that were inhabited contained only very aged, disgruntled birds that glared at him out of a single eye as he made his way past them to the main wing of the house for his breakfast, and did not bother to squawk a greeting or whistle back. In the house things were as usual. Nadyn appeared to have her arms deep in tubs or basins or buckets of housework, and Dona Celia, whom he went to greet, was seated as always upon her comfortless throne and, even if it was a summer's day and the sun beating up from the white dust in the street outside, she was wrapped in her shawl, holding it about her throat as if to keep every sort of danger at bay—draughts, chills, unsuitable suitors for her daughter's hand, whatever. Kissing her cheek, Louis actually found it chill to his lips—chill and mouldy, as if disintegrating.

But, while he sat over his café con leche and his pan dulce, he learned about the changes that had occurred during his absence. The house was no longer the barricaded fortress, the safe retreat it had been for previous generations of Crazes: the fortress was threatened on every side. Dona Celia filled in the news into his left ear, Nadyn into the right, since he had noticed nothing for himself. In a way Dona Celia had herself brought it all about—and Nadyn was full of sharp little barbs to remind her—but having already sold off orchards and farmland lower down in the valley, she had finally resorted to disposing of bits and pieces of their own compound. Did Louis remember the row of sheds at the far end of the courtyard? Yes, he did and he also knew they had been bought up by an entrepreneur who had rented them to shopkeepers so that now there was an abarotte in one, a video parlour in another, a lavendaria in a third ... What was wrong with that? he asked, irritated. Not only was it old history but it brought in an income off which the two of them lived, so what was their complaint? First they brought change to Tepoztlan and then they complained of it. He pushed aside the basket of rolls Nadyn kept nudging towards him, and swept his hand over the dish of memelade about which a very large, fat fly hovered.

But now they were coming towards the true horror they had to face, its pit, its bottom: that end of the courtyard, round the corner from the row of rooms now kept shut, they had had a piece of land planted with avocados and lemons, did he remember? Well, they had sold it to a man who had come to them with cash in hand, and a suitably respectful manner of speech, telling them he wished to build a house for his family which had only recently moved to Tepoztlan. Being who they were—a shawl was fingered, a brooch nervously touched—they had not thought to question him regarding his profession or the size of his family. After all, if they had sold their land to him, they had no right to do so (and of course they couldn't wait to sell it and have the money in their pockets, Louis thought viciously; had they not always been money-grubbing, was not the whole family so?) and now they had for a neighbour a man who was a garbage collector by profession—

'What?
What
by profession?'

Louis' reaction satisfied them deeply: it set them off on an even higher pitch of complaint. The man owned a truck that he parked in front of
their
front door, often right under their windows so they could smell its contents, and even when the maid went out and persuaded him to move it down the street a bit, it left behind a trail of stray bits and leavings of garbage scattered all over
their
threshold. What was more, behind the high wall he had built around his piece of property before he had even erected a shack upon it, they suspected he stacked and sorted his garbage—

'What do you mean? He doesn't go and dispose of it, he
stores
it?'

'Yes, yes,' screamed Dona Celia and Nadyn together, in agitation: they were convinced, they had evidence, the maid had climbed up a ladder and peered over the wall and seen there all the empty bottles of agua purificada, the beer cans, the flattened cardboard cartons, that his family sat sorting into bundles for resale. And the family! By the rising crescendo of their voices, Louis knew he was in for a long saga. He began to squirm, to indicate that he was done with his breakfast, but they paid him no attention whatsoever, they were carried along by the tide of their indignation regarding the family because the man had not informed them that he had no fewer than seven children, boys and girls of all sizes, all in rags, and all day that was what they occupied themselves with, rag-picking, while their father drove around the town in his truck, loudly ringing a bell and collecting garbage to bring home to
their
doorstep. That was what the Avenida de Matamoros had come to, and there was no way of ignoring it: hot only did the most noxious smell rise from the foetid garbage pile that was his compound, but day and night the place rang with the abominable music from the radio and TV—had Louis not heard it last night?
They
had been kept awake, always were. The man had not yet got around to building his family a house—well, yes, he had built some walls and a roof, but not a door or a window, not fit for habitation, yet a radio and TV had been set up in it to entertain the family while it sat sorting garbage. All day that ungodly music thundered through their compound—Dona Celia drew her shawl about her and shivered with fury. But the shawl was worn thin, no one cared how she shivered, such was the sorry state of affairs that Louis could see for himself.