A Dove of the East (8 page)

It was already five-thirty. He could smell roasting chestnuts. He was in his light gray and blue suit, and he carried the leather briefcase under his arm. It was filled with musical manuscripts he had written since his return from Greece. He was steady, slept soundly, spoke softly, and smiled more. He was older, and felt like his father, enjoying little things. His desk looked more chestnut-colored, and the bright lights of autumn were sharper than they had ever been. He knew now who was good, and he knew he was good. Massive clouds made the dark come early. Cold lightnings could be seen far north of Paris. High in the air birds rode thermals, tiny white flecks against the gray clouds. He loved the cool air, and looked up and down the paths, but they were emptying and the leaves just rustled on the floor of the Tuileries as if they were a German forest. That night he would sit under his lamp and pen the blinding white sheets; every day he felt himself rising a little higher, quietly, powerfully He jumped off the railing and walked toward the Champs Elysees. He was due at dinner with a friend whose sister was to be there. He was in the Ministry of Finance and she was a model who had appeared on the covers of
Match, Jours de France,
and
Elle.
One evening Harry had been in a restaurant alone and had stared at her picture, feeling himself fall into a trance somehow allied to the sweet darkness outside. My God, he said, as his heart opened to her image. The serenity was numbing. He found himself walking with quick step as a winter wind came down the Champs Elysees.

He passed a tall girl with a beret. That bittersweet frame and the cold rushing air, the leaves like percussion, made him shudder. His friend's sister had deep blue eyes and on the cover of
Elle
she had been wearing a blue velvet gown. He knew he would be loving her soon, in the quiet of autumn, smooth, silent, and blue.

A
FASHION
in New Mexico was mountain dancing, which was called that because it started in small villages in the North up high in the mountains. Rarely were there clouds in Truchas. Farther on toward Truchas Peak were thick forests with clear steady streams. Perpetually terrified of bears, cattle roamed the mountains, meek beasts who looked with fear even at one another and at birds, and who at the slightest noise would crash through the thick brush and run until they dropped—because like young children in the dark they feared their own sounds.

Mountain dancing was not a
form
of dancing but rather just dancing on a Friday night. Couples would come, and if not couples then people alone. And they often brought their children. Josie brought her children because they were little enough to fear the moon and the night silence over the desolate black and white hillsides. They played in the corner with several other little children, some of whom were in bathrobes. All moved much faster because of the music, although they did not themselves know it.

Josie was tall and brown. Around her wrists were bracelets of dull silver studded with blue stones. This work of the Southwest was nothing when compared to her eyes; her eyes, black and Persian against the red clay and outstanding clear green of the trees. When she held her hand, fingers spread, over her breast so that the tips of her nails reached nearly to her neck, it was possible to see her eyes reflected in her bracelets, and the silver and turquoise were also to be seen in the wet blue-black of her eyes, although not as well.

She danced the best of all the women in Truchas, and better than the unattached girls. Dancing was a matter of pride and slow movements, of watching a wall or window while in the mind there was soaring and flying over silver mountain ranges, standing up rigid with the wind and rain rushing by as if around an upright Christ. The more ecstasy, the more stillness. That is why they started with much movement and the pine floor rocked, resinous, yellow, and dusty. At evenings end very little was left of motion, for everything was contained, and the wind whistling over the roof made the women shudder with love. But Josie was alone, for her husband had died in the army. She had considered other men even before the time of mourning had passed, because she had loved him so much, and chose to start when she wished since she would never allow herself to be a horse breaking at the bit, and her legitimate pride made her seek others as an exercise in grief.

He had been in the First Cavalry. He was Spanish, from Truchas for many generations, mixed with the dying Indians. He had the same dark eyes, and he had killed many men before he himself was killed in a helicopter crash.

She did love him, more so when he was dead, and she had loved him in that cold way which is the great love of one who is hurt. But then, there were wonderful clear moments, all lightness and gaiety, such as one time when they walked for miles down the road in the moonlight just laughing and relieved that they had nowhere to go and were completely alone.

When he died she learned much and she became more protective of her children. She became then not a girl but a woman. There are ways in which a woman becomes a woman; they often take her by great surprise, and this was one. It seemed to her that she valued her own life a little less, and life itself much more. She became devoted to her children and would have made sacrifices for them of which a year or even a few months before she would not have dreamed. She felt old, but very strong, and when old people went by in the street she understood them more, and was proud of them.

One Friday night in the summer there was mountain dancing. Josie was there. She and her children had been escorted by the man who guided hunters from the East, and spent much time alone in the mountains. People were somewhat afraid of him because he was so strong and was seldom in the village, but at the same time they were happy to have him because they guessed that he would fight hard for them if for any reason they had to fight. Josie was enlivened by his company because he was so much older. It seemed to her girlfriends, whom she had already outdistanced, that he was frightening and somehow beyond understanding. It was an important time for her. She was learning to change her sadness into a tenderness which made itself manifest on nights just like these. The pain had withered to a point of beauty, and she was receptive and full of love.

When things began to go and she stared no longer at the black glass through which were tinted stars and shapes of peaks, when in fact she was eating a lemon ice and talking convivially with her friends and a young boy who had come up from Santa Fe to work for the summer on his cousins farm, two men came in, two strangers. They smiled occasionally but seemed not to have come for the dance.

Josie began dancing with the hunter, who was a good dancer. A time passed while she danced and was very happy. Then, when the musicians rested, the two men went to the middle of the floor and asked for attention. In Truchas no one had to
ask
for attention. If he wanted to speak to the people all at once, he spoke. These young men were from California, their Spanish was not the same, and they said they were revolutionaries. One spoke, and then the other said that what he said was true. They talked of fighting, and guns, and violence. And they mentioned many times “the people.” They talked for half an hour, and when they finished there was silence in the room. The hunter was unimpressed, and smiled at them as if they were children who knew very little. What did they know of the mountains, of the peaks? They were from the flat land and not accustomed to the thin air. The other people were puzzled, and did not understand fully what they had said or why.

But Josie tightened her lips and tensed herself to stop the shaking. She was furious, and looked at the children in the corner and gathered her own with her eyes. With her head held high and the tendons in her long slim arms raised, she stepped out a pace and challenged the two young men. She threw back her black hair.

What did they know, she said, about Truchas, about mountain country. A few years ago a man from the army had come and convinced her husband to fight, making him believe that he would be fighting for himself and for his children. “These are his children,” she said, sweeping her arm toward the now still babies stacked in the arms of older women who had taken them up. “They are there and quite alive and do not need to be fought for. Their father is dead because of men like you. You are not revolutionaries. There is nothing new about you. You are the leaders of men and the slaughterers of men. I myself have seen you pass through this village before, and I will not be fooled a second time.”

The hunter stepped forward, but Josie waved him back. With the eyes of a lioness she looked at the two men and she was full of rage. On this the night when she began to learn how to make life whole again, they had come to tear it apart. She would not let these men take her children as they had taken her husband. She would fight all right, she would fight for herself, she said, because
she was the people.
“And it is time,” she said, “that all the people learn to fight just for themselves, and not for anyone but themselves. Truchas remains here, and you will leave. Pass on. Leave us.” The young men began to argue, saying first that they understood her feelings...

“You do
not
understand,” she said. The Mayor, a little old man with a pink face and only one good eye, said politely that Friday night was for mountain dancing, and that if the two young men wished they could come to the same place on any first day of the month and air their views at the town meeting. He asked them very cordially if they would like to dance, at which the previously silent hall exploded with laughter, and all the people of Truchas laughed for a long time. And then they ate, and when the musicians started to play they danced, and that night many would make love and some only dream of it, and on the morrow herd cattle and chop wood, and the hunter would again disappear into the mountains.

Josie danced with tears in her eyes. Her bracelets jangled and she was happy and full of love. The two young men started the long walk down to Santa Fe.

“I
HAVE
never been as calm in my life,” said Father Trelew. “No, not ever.” He was speaking to Helen, his housekeeper, but she was not much in his mind, even though she had been with him for several years—he could not remember exactly how many. He looked at the sky. “Soon I will be on the plane to New York, and then to Rome.”

“Have you been to Rome before, Father?”

“Yes, I have, in 1925 when Mussolini was in power. You know what I think of him, don't you, don't you, Helen.”

“I most certainly do.”

It was hot where they stood, but his clothes were clean and white and his thick hair was white, so he had no discomfort. There was a black spot of oil on the drive. A shimmering desert stretched beyond—his parish. He could smell the hot sand and see waves of heat rising from it, distorting the mountains.

The driver put the bags in the car, and after bidding good-bye to Helen and shaking her hand Father Trelew got in the back and clicked the door shut. The car was air-conditioned. It was taking him to Phoenix for the plane. He was going to Vatican II.

It was years since he had left his parish. In New York before his parents died, they had called him sometimes “The Indian Priest,” but he never heard them, they thought. They were ashamed of him. They wanted him to be an archbishop. Instead he spoke to deep-brown faces in a dark church with no lighting, while the sand blew outside. He could see it through the window sometimes—perfectly white against the blue sky and billowing like foam on the ocean, and yet it was cool and dry. His mother and father thought he would come back from Arizona as if from some foreign campaign, distinguished and likely to advance. The bishops would appreciate his sacrifice. He knew he was not coming back, but he never told his parents. They died in the Depression, sure that at the end of the Depression he would be called back from Arizona.

If he thought about being an archbishop, he clenched his fist and banged it on the table. When he had too much to drink, he thought wild thoughts about seeing God, about golden staircases and whitened plumes rising from the wide floor of Heaven, about places where it was so bright you couldn't see anything at all. He had such prideful dreams only after wine or whiskey, so he drank rarely.

He arrived in Rome early in the morning. He felt young, for he had slept on the plane and Rome seemed to him not to have changed since 1925, when he was thirty and had been there for two months as a student. Now there were few carriages, but the streets were the same. In Piazza Navona, the old colors still stood; the fountains had been going for almost forty years since he first saw them. He wondered if they ever stopped, for even a moment. Perhaps each time the city died—after the March, or when the Germans were there—the fountains stopped. He thought to ask an old man, but realized that no one man would have watched constantly, and besides, he thought, I am an old man and could tell no one if ever in Arizona the mountains turned pure white or the sky the color of gold, because I have not watched them the whole time. At least, the fountains appear never to stop; at least, I have seen them while they were going.

His budget for this trip was delightfully large. The Vatican paid much of it, his diocese another great part, and his savings the rest. He thought he would live for this short time in a fashion unlike that of his small frame house on the reservation. There the wind came in a steady stream through an unputtied crack of the window. In the morning gold light glinted off his porcelain shaving basin. At these times there was only silence and cold. After he shaved, he opened the window, and after he opened the window he dressed and prayed—but not in Rome. He would pray, yes, but in Rome he would pray in his own good time. There would be no kneeling on hard wooden floors, no fasting, and no cold.

He checked in at the Grand Hotel, which was full of priests and extremely elegant—marble, rich Oriental rugs, chandeliers, and in his room French doors with a view of a piazza and its enormous fountain shooting a hundred feet upward. As the weeks passed, he habitually ate his breakfast on the balcony. With high winds, he felt slight droplets of spray from the fountain. His bed was large, with a satin quilt. As always when he stayed in hotels—even in Phoenix—he wondered what people had made love in the bed, and then laughed good-naturedly at himself. He had learned to live with
that
a long time ago.