Against the Day (194 page)

Melpomene
told him how the Indian women of Palenque captured the beetles and tamed them,
giving them names which they
learned to answer to,
putting them into
little cages to carry like lamps at night, or wearing them in their hair
beneath transparent veils. Nights were populated by lightbearing women, who
found their way through the forest as if it were day.

   
“Do
all these critters here have names?”

“Most
of them,” giving him a look of warning not to make fun of this. “Even one named
after you, if you’d like to meet him. Pancho!”

One
of the fragments of light detached itself from the tree and flew down and
landed on the girl’s wrist, like a falcon. When the tree went dark, so did
Pancho.
“
Bueno,
“she
whispered to it, “pay no attention to the others. I want you to light up only
when I tell you. Now.” The bug, obligingly, lit up.
“
Ahora, apágate,
”
and again Pancho complied.

Frank
looked at Pancho. Pancho looked back at Frank, though what he was seeing was
anybody’s guess.

He
couldn’t say when exactly, but at some point Frank came to understand that this
bearer of light was his soul, and that all the fireflies in the tree were the
souls of everyone who had ever passed through his life, even at a distance,
even for a heartbeat and a half, that there existed such a tree for each person
in Chiapas, and though this suggested that the same soul must live on a number
of trees, they all went to make up a single soul, really, in the same way that
light was indivisible. “In the same way,” amplified Günther, “that our Savior could
inform his disciples with a straight face that bread and wine were

indistinguishable from his body and blood. Light, in any
case, among these Indians of Chiapas, occupies an analogous position to flesh
among Christian peoples. It is
living tissue.
As the brain is the
outward and visible expression of the Mind.”

   
“Too
German for me,” Frank mumbled.

   
“Consider—how
is it that they all go off and on at once?”

   
“Good
eyesight, fast reflexes?”

“Always possible. But recall that
there are also tribes up in these mountains who are known to send messages
routinely across hundreds of miles,
instantaneously.
Not at the finite
speed of light, you understand, but with a time interval
of
zero.
”

“Thought that was impossible,” said
Frank. “Even wireless telegraph takes a little time.”

“Special Relativity has little
meaning in Chiapas. Perhaps after all telepathy exists.”

Perhaps after all. Frank meant to
bring it up with Melpomene next time he was in the Quetzal Dormido, but she
beat him to it.

   
“There’ll
be a little disturbance tonight,” she said.

   
“
Caray,
your
novio
’s
back in town!”

She flicked cigar ashes at him. “It’s
those Mazatecos again. A gang of them are getting together right now to march
over here. They should arrive a little after midnight.”

“Mazatán, that’s fifteen miles away.
How do you know what’s going on there ‘right now’?”

   
She
smiled and tapped herself lightly on the center of her forehead.

Around midnight there was some
hollering and explosions and a number of gunshots, moving into town from the
west.
“
¿Qué
el
fuck?” Frank, a little sleepy by now,
inquired—“Oh, beg pardon,
querida,
meant
¿Qué el chingar?
of
course.”

Melpomene
shrugged. Frank looked out the window. Mazatecos without a doubt, disposed to
mischief.

Political
experts tended to label the resentments expressed regularly by Mazatán against
Tapachula as another “Vazquista” rebellion, though people down here understood
it more as one of those townagainsttown exercises that had been simmering in
Chiapas since long before the Spaniards showed up. Lately, perhaps further
aroused by the climate of national rebellion, elements in Mazatán had clearly
been spending idle days and nights preoccupied with plans to attack Tapachula,
clean out the contents of both banks in town, and kill the local
jefe.
But
their planning somehow always failed to in

clude Tapachula’s volunteer selfdefense force, who were there
waiting for them every time, now and then chasing them all the way back down to
Mazatán, and occupying the town to add to the humiliation. “Almost as if they
knew in advance,” Frank puzzled. “But who warns them? you? Who tells you?”

Which
got him an enigmatic smile and little more. But Günther had been giving it all
some thought.

“It
is like the telephone exchange,” he declared. “Not even ‘like’—it
is
the
telephone exchange. A network of Indians in telepathic communication. It does
not seem to be sensitive to distance. No matter how far any of them may wander,
the single greater organism remains intact, coherent, connected.”

Winter
arrived on the calendar, though not in the
tierra caliente.
But
something like a shortening of days, a defection of sunlight, was occurring in
the spirits of everybody at the
cafetal.
Something was on the way.
Indians began casting strange looks at one another and avoiding everybody
else’s eyes.

One evening Frank was sitting near
Melpomene’s fig tree, watching the
cucuji
put on their show, and at some
point, the way you drift into sleep, he fell into a trance and without
hikuli
this time he found himself back again in the same version of ancient
Tenochtitlán that El Espinero’s cactus had once taken him to.

His
mission was a matter of life and death, but its details were somehow withheld
from him. He did know that he must find his way to a part of the city hidden
from most of its inhabitants. The first step was to pass beneath a ceremonial
arch—which he understood would one day be obliterated, as the Spaniards
had once obliterated all the Aztec structures of Tenochtitlán. The Arch was of
pale limestone, with a triumphal sculpture on top, a sinister figure, all
curves, tresses, wings, drapery, standing in a chariot. He recognized the gold
face of the Angel of the Fourth Glorieta on Reforma, but understood this was a
different Angel. As a gateway the structure seemed to define two different
parts of the City as incommensurate as life and death. As “Frank” passed
beneath it, it was seen to take on a ghostly light and to grow taller and more
substantial.

He
found himself in a part of the City where savagery prevailed and mercy was unknown.
Robed figures passing by stared at him with a searching sort of hatred.
Artillery fire and gunshots were audible, both close and more distant. Blood
was splashed against the walls. There was a smell in the air of corpses and
gasoline and burning flesh. He desperately wanted a cigarette but was out of
smokes. He looked behind him for the gateway, but it had vanished. Now and then
a pedestrian would look fearfully at the sky, cry out or run for cover, but
when Frank looked up, he could see nothing beyond a shadow which

approached from the north, like a
storm, covering more and more of the field of stars. He knew what it was but
could not find its name in his memory.

He
arrived at the edge of a great plaza, which stretched away into the lightless
midwatch, all but empty of pedestrian life, lying between two official but
unnamed structures, faced with local volcanic
tezontle,
and
tepetate
—both
these monuments, despite modest height and emotional illegibility, as
intimidating, perhaps as cruelly intended, as more ancient pyramids of this
valley. There was gunfire now, more or less unremitting, and Frank could not
see how to proceed. Neither of the two enigmatic structures provided any
safety. He saw before him the mortal expanse of dark hours he must pass here,
until the roosters started in and the sky slowly retained more and more light,
perhaps revealing in silhouette, on the jagged rooftops, human figures who
might have been there all along, attending to the hostilities.

When
Frank returned to the indicative world, there was Melpomene with news from the
Capital of the Huerta coup, and it slowly became clear to him that the two
mysterious buildings in his vision had been the Presidential Palace, where
Madero had taken refuge among forces loyal to him, and the arsenal known as the
Ciudadela, a mile and a half to the west, where rebels headed by Félix Díaz,
the nephew of Porfirio Díaz, were dug in. Between was the center of the
Capital, a place of warfare and thousands dead left where they fell, under the open
sky, which would go on for ten days that February and become known as the
Decena Trágica. The shadow overhead, all these centuries in pursuit of the
Aztecs and their generations, southward in their long flight, came at last to
hang in the sky over the Valley of Mexico, over the Capital, moving eastward
from the Zócalo to gather itself above the penitentiary called
“
el palacio blanco,
”
and
condense at last one by one into the .38caliber rounds that killed Madero and
Pino Suárez and put Huerta into power, and despite the long and terrible
struggle, and the people’s faith so misplaced, had after all allowed the
serpent to prevail.

Deciding
not to stick around to see what kind of a price if any the new regime might
have put on his head, Frank left Mexico aboard a coffee boat out of Vera Cruz,
concealed in the hold beneath several sacks of cargo. By the time he got to
Corpus Christi, he was so cranked up from breathing coffee dust that he was
ready to run all the way to Denver on foot. “Stay in Texas,” pleaded a fandango
girl named Chiquita as he was speeding through San Antonio.

“Darlin
ordinarily I’d love nothin better on account of how Mexico once my other land
mi
otra tierra
as we say down there has made me more than usually aware of San
Antonio home of the Alamo cradle of Texas independence and so forth without
getting into the details of who stole what from who

I’m sure you can understand that
sooner or later somebody in some saloon’ll bring the matter up maybe no more’n
a slide of the eyeballs in the mirror back there yet a promise of business to
be transacted in the near future that could range anywhere from the price of a
beer to one of us’s life you see . . .” by which time in any case he was out
the door again and halfway to San Angelo.

Soon
as he got to Denver, he went to the bank to see if any of the money he’d been
sending back had actually made it out of Mexico, and to his amazement found a
nice piece of change in the account. Besides the salary from Günther and one or
two heavymachinery commissions, there was the ten dollars a day in gold that
Madero’s people had been paying him back in 1911 in Chihuahua, which seemed to
include a fallingoffyourhorse bonus added in there as well. It was the first
time he was aware of getting paid for being stupid. Could there be a future in
this?

Frank was in a
bar
on Seventeenth
Street one night when who should he run into but Dr. Willis Turnstone, onetime
disappointed beau of Frank’s sister Lake, just off his night shift at the
hospital nearby.

   
“Notice
you’re favoring that leg, there,” the Doc said after a while.

   
Frank
told him the tale. “Somethin you can do for that?”

“If I can’t, my partner sure can.
Chinese fellow, cures everything by sticking you full of gold needles. Lay
there looking like a porcupine, next thing you’re up doing the fox trot all
night long.”

   
“Needles.
Have to give that some thought.”

“Here’s our card. I’m just around the
corner, come on by sometime and we’ll have a look.”

After
a few sociable rounds, the Doc said, “You notice I didn’t once ask about your
sister.”

   
“Appreciate
that. Guess you’re over it. Wish I could say I was.”

“Over it and how. I am engaged to
marry the most perfect of angels. I can’t begin to describe her. Oh Frank she
is adorable in every way. Mother, muse, and mistress, all in one, can you
imagine? Of course you can’t. Say, you seem a little peaked, all of a sudden.”

   
“Lookin
for a spittoon to throw up in?”

   
“Can’t
here, there’s a house rule.”

Doc Turnstone’s
office
was a block and a
half from Mercy Hospital,

and three flights up. “Weeds out the malingerers!” chuckled
his partner Dr.

Zhao. “Let’s see your tongue. Aha.” He took both Frank’s
wrists and attended for a while to various pulses. “How long have you been
pregnant?”

   
“How’s
that?”

   
“Making
jokes!”

The door opened, and a young woman in
one of those dark velvet chapeaux that were showing up all over town put her
head in. “Hi Honey, are you— Aaahh! You!”