Diamond Dust (18 page)

Still bemused by Don Beto's—the unworldly, retiring, scholarly Don Beto—actually having suggested he go in for journalism instead of poetry, and all in the name of opposing a golf club, Louis wandered down to the zocalo in the sun-struck heat of the afternoon, wondering if he would find anyone there at all.

In spite of Dona Celia's complaints, he found the town exactly as he remembered it. Visitors from Cuernavaca and Mexico City were still pouring in for the Sunday market as they had always done, in their holiday clothes, to fill the restaurants from which music loudly rollicked. In the zocalo, he was sure the old couple selling pottery, their own faces as brown and seamed and cracked as if fashioned from clay, were the same he had always seen seated on a mat under the rubber tree; there were the same elderly people eagerly buying herbs and roots and seeds from the herbalist to cure them of gout, insomnia, obesity and fits, impotence and urinary problems; chillies hung in dark, leathery bunches that still set him sneezing; the florist continued to decorate his potted cacti with tiny paper flowers, and in the food stalls pans sizzled and steamed and large curs prowled around the customers' feet in the hope of scraps.

Louis remembered all that but somehow, after his visit to Don Beto, he was not content simply to plunge back into it and wallow in nostalgia. Instead, he drifted towards the big marquee of blue plastic that had been set up in between the town hall and the bandstand, the recording and amplifying systems that were being unloaded and attached, and the crowds gathering around it, some chewing on corn cobs and others licking helados. On the steps of the post office he could see some of the young men he had known. Arturo was there, in the same striped T-shirt he had worn in the morning but with the addition of a baseball cap. Reluctant to go up to him, Louis lingered to read the legends on the banners flying everywhere—Puebla contra Fascism! Tierra del Morte!—and study the lurid murals that had been painted on the town hall walls: a rubicund golfer with a tail protruding from his golf pants and hooves in place of shoes, his caddy a grinning imp with pointed ears and a forked tail, together facing a group of peasants huddled in blankets, dark, weary and watchful. In another, over the shoe stall with its rows of huaraches, rufescent golfers sported golf clubs and grinningly molested frightened young women whose blouses had been torn off their breasts. Every one of the rubber and laurel trees in the little park around the bandstand, and every pillar of the post office, had smaller, printed posters pasted on them. Several depicted frogs, squirrels, butterflies and birds, each saying 'No' to the golf club in a different language: Niet! Nein! Na! Non!

Now the first strains of an amplified guitar rang out. People dropped the huaraches and sombreros they were examining, got up from around the roasted corn cob stalls, came out of the ice-cream parlours and cafés, and began to gather under the marquee. Louis strolled across as casually as he could, but when he saw who was playing the guitar and teaching the audience the lines he had composed 'for Tepoztlan', his assumed composure fell apart: it was Alejandro, who had been in school with him and Arturo, and had been known for his passion for fireworks, whose ambition it had been to launch a fire balloon which, once aloft, would release a burst of rockets. Now he was standing in front of a microphone in jeans and a black tank shirt, his head shaved on all sides, leaving one cornrow to grow along the centre where it stood in jagged peaks, dyed a fiery red. When he called out a line:

'Leave me my streams, leave me my hills,'

the crowd echoed him:

'Leave me my streams, leave me my hills,'

and then joined him in the refrain:

'Leave me my paradise, Tepoztlan.'

Louis fell back, allowing a party of curious tourists to edge up in front of him, in the hope they would conceal him from Alejandro. But of course Alejandro was not looking at him—he was plucking his guitar with his eyes closed and his head thrown back as he sang:

'Who dares to come and steal
My paradise, Tepoztlan?'

Someone was going around selling tapes of, presumably, Alejandro's songs. A young woman in a flowered skirt circled the crowds with a straw hat outstretched, collecting donations. She smiled into Louis' face: hers was like a ripe peach, so round and sweet. He dug into his pockets and brought out a crumpled note for her.

Now Alejandro was waving at the crowd and turning to run back up the post office steps and vanish among his friends there while another figure leapt into their midst: a lithe young man dressed entirely in black but with his pants cut off at the knees and his shirt open on his chest. In his hands he held an empty rum bottle and with it he performed a dance of a kind Louis had never seen in the clubs and parties to which he had been. He could hardly maintain his compoure as he watched the man crouch, roll on the ground, leap, fall, clutch the bottle and fling it away, all with such abandon and fury that it had Louis flinching.

There was a comic interlude to follow: a fool-faced vendor of eggs strolled through the audience and tried to sell them, a clown-faced policeman accosted him with a rubber truncheon and dragged him off to a frowning judge with a cotton-wool beard who made a fool of himself by asking the vendor totally absurd and irrelevant questions till the egg vendor, exasperated, seized the policeman's truncheon and brought it down on the judge's head. The crowd roared. Louis felt he should now edge away and disappear. There was no need to be an onlooker at a market sideshow along with vegetable sellers and tortilla eaters.

But the dancer had returned to the ring and Louis, looking back, saw his feline body stalk across the space with the kind of authority that rivets an onlooker. Besides, Louis caught sight of another figure strutting across the ring from the other direction, towards him and past him—a girl in blue jeans and a white T-shirt, ordinary laced black shoes, her hair cut short to her shoulders, no make-up or costume, but with a dancer's controlled grace and carefully considered movements that invested the faintest turn of her head or twist of the wrist with significance. Louis was held by that grace and authority, and as he stared it dawned on him who she was: Arturo's kid sister, one of the two little girls who had smiled at him when he visited, sometimes played basketball in the garden with the boys, and for whom he had developed boyishly sentimental feelings he never confessed to anyone, scarcely even to himself. Ester and Isabel—he remembered their names now: which one was she? He glanced across at Arturo who was standing at the top of the stairs, watching, his arms folded about him, and his expression—watchful, proprietorial, concerned—confirmed his impression: this was Isabel, or perhaps Ester, grown into this astonishing young sylph, dancing with the man in black as he had never seen anyone dance in the city, at clubs or parties. Where had she learned to dance like that—in that man's embrace, or rejected by him and on her own, then with a second dancer who entered the arena and prowled around, waiting for his chance and taking it? Here was Ester—or Isabel—and now she was grown-up, and dancing, amongst grown-ups, performing, acting out those rites of attraction, infatuation, rejection and recovery that Louis had not only not experienced yet but not witnessed anyone in his circle of family and friends experience with such ardour, abandon and intensity.

The trio met in the centre of the ring and performed their dance together, then parted, stalking off in different directions, and Alejandro was returning, holding his guitar above his head, when Louis broke away and pushed his way out past the onlookers.

He hurried past the lurid murals, the huarache sellers and the comic-book stalls under the trees by the bandstand and out onto Avenida de Revolution 1910 without thinking. It was the wrong direction, he realised, and he would have to walk down its length before he could take the turn that led him back to Matamoros—Matamoros where Dona Celia kept the old house as it had always been, and the world at bay.

The entire street was jammed with the gaieties of the Sunday market, shoppers strolling in the sun, picking through stalls of silver trinkets, scarves and blouses, paper flowers and painted mirrors. The ice cream and sorbet stall, festooned with pink and blue pompoms, was so busy it was hard to get past it. The middle of the street was taken up by the young, sipping margaritas from clay mugs, or large families enjoying helados. The women wore high heels and low-cut blouses, dark glasses and jewellery, the young girls had tinted hair, painted nails and laughing mouths and young men pressed against them, admiring.

These were the people from Cuernavaca and Mexico City to whose parties Louis went when he was at home; these were the girls with whom he danced, the young men with whom he played tennis. If there were a golf club here, then these were the people who would play on its course. His family would urge him to join them: he belonged, they belonged, to the same society. He did not belong to the people under the marquee—they would have been strangers to his family, and they would have looked upon him as an onlooker, and an outsider.

Then what made him push his way out of their company and stumble through the gate to the convento and seek out its calm, cool cloisters? He had always liked to come here, for its quiet and shade and vast views of the mountains and valleys from its deep windows. It had always been an oasis to which he could withdraw, for contemplation.

In the court, the sun stone, immobile;
above, the sun of fire and of time turns;
movement is sun and the sun is stone.

Now he walked down the shaded veranda under a ceiling painted with crimson roses not quite faded into the stone, and entered the courtyard where water dropped quietly from a fountain set amongst grass paths and potted bougainvillaea. But above it hung a strange, unfamiliar shape fashioned out of wicker and fastened by ropes to the belfry. What was it? He climbed the stairs to the upper galleries for a closer look at the wicker basket—or was it a trap?—and found the galleries hung with art exhibits and remembered that that was the use to which the convento was nowadays put. If this could be called an art exhibit: the exhibition clearly had to do with Tepoztlan's environment—the subject could not be avoided, it confronted him wherever he went. Here were photogaphs of its flowers and birds, here were installations of sand scattered with ugly litter—Coke cans, plastic bolsas—and paintings of devastated landscapes, pitted and marred by modern, urban blight, photographs of the aged, their weathered faces looking out of doorways and windows, watching.

Louis caught his breath. Was there no escape from Tepoztlan's issues and involvements, its demands and accusations? And whose side
was
he on? Everything, everyone he encountered seemed to ask him to decide, to declare.

It was late afternoon when he finally turned into Avenida Matamoros, and early clouds had begun to descend from the mountains. The bamboo grove threw long shadows across the white dust and in it sprawled men he'd seen earlier, heavily asleep. He had to avoid stumbling on their limp figures and empty bottles. He turned in at the gate and shut it quickly behind him.

In the shadowy drawing room Dona Celia was seated stiffly as an idol but on seeing him began at once to complain about how the town had gone to pieces and wanted to know if he had noticed the deterioration. Who, what is it that has deteriorated but you, you old ghost? he wanted to ask and to say that everyone else was moving on, on, but instead he muttered his impressions as noncomittally as possible. Nadyn, who was poking at a Raidolito with a hairpin and blinking against its fumes, interrupted to ask if he had met any of his old friends. What were they doing now? she wanted to know as if confident he would reply 'Nothing' at which she could pull a face, but he turned it into 'I don't know', disappointing her.

'There's nothing to know. The young today—pah!' snorted Dona Celia, drawing her shawl about her throat with a malevolent glare.

It was a relief when Teresa announced dinner and they rose to go and sit at a table where she had placed a pot of pozole and stood waiting for Louis to take his first spoonful. 'Good?' she queried. 'As good as before, eh?'

Nadyn looked up and frowned at her but Dona Celia herself was giving the soup her approval, slurping it up with indiscreet sounds that expressed relish—in spite of everything, expressed relish.

Louis had to wait till Teresa was gone before saying to his aunt, 'I will be leaving in the morning. Please don't let me disturb you—so early—I'll let myself out—'

What?
Dona Celia's expression managed to say, after another quick, delicious swallow. Slowly her look of pleasure was overtaken by the habitual displeasure. So soon? He, had only just come. 'And are you not staying for Cousin Heriberto's birthday celebration? It is to, be a very big celebration, you know. He is eighty years old this week.' All his children were coming, from Monterey, from Toluca—even Louis' parents had spoken of coming. Why then—

His thesis. His classes. The university—But not in the summer, surely? Research had to be continued, you see, no rest for the weary. He flushed as he stumbled over his excuses and Nadyn watched with a tightening of her lips—she of course saw through them instantly. Her pride at never having made them herself gave her mouth a bitter twist.

'We're too old for you, not up to date, eh?' she said. 'Ah, the gringo—'

He wanted to protest but the words disintegrated in his mouth, useless. He lowered his eyes to the bowl of soup, Teresa's excellent pozole. He felt ashamed of not doing it the honour it deserved.

P
AYING
off the autorickshaw driver, she stepped down cautiously, clutching her handbag to her. The colony was much further out than she had expected—they had travelled through bazaars and commerical centres and suburbs she had not known existed—but the name given on the gate matched the one in her purse. She went up to it and rattled the latch to announce her arrival. Immediately a dog began to yap and she could tell by its shrillness that it was one of those small dogs that readily sink their tiny teeth into one's ankle or rip through the edge of one's sari. There were also screams from several children. Yet no one came to open the gate for her and finally she let herself in, hoping the dog was chained or indoors. Certainly there was no one in the tiny garden which consisted of a patch of lawn and a tap in front of the yellow stucco villa. All the commotion appeared to be going on indoors and she walked up to the front door—actually at the side of the house—and rang the bell, clearing her throat like a saleswoman preparing to sell a line in knitting patterns or home-made jams.