Diamond Dust (17 page)

He thought of rising from the table on the pretext of going and examining this den, this pit, this abomination, for himself but the two women were already onto the next disclosure of iniquity. Could Louis imagine such a thing: the garbage collector's wife, she put a table outside their door,
their front door
, every evening, and thereon boiled a tubful of corncobs and stood there, impudently as you please, slathering them with mayonnaise and chillies, selling them to passersby, as if Dona Celia were growing maize in her garden and posting her maid out there to sell it!

'I am sure that has not occurred to anyone who knows you, Aunt,' Louis said kindly, seeing her distress and beginning to feel a little amused in spite of himself.

'Yes, and what of all those who do
not
know me? Do you think Tepoztlan is the place it once was? Haven't you seen how it has been overtaken by hordes of newcomers, from Cuernavaca, from Mexico City, from God knows where...?'

'It's now got a good road and good transport—it's more lively now,' Louis reminded them, although it was clear liveliness was not to them a quality: they would have preferred it a morgue.

'Yes, yes, lively—we all know about lively. Men come to our street corner to drink. All afternoon you hear them drink and gamble there under the bamboos, and by evening you may see them lying stretched out in the road, dead drunk—
so
lively has it grown,' Dona Celia said, bitterly.

'Why, is there a bar now at the corner?' Louis asked with interest.

'A bar! I should think not! I am sure it is that vile woman—that pigsty owner's wife—who supplies them with liquor. Home-brewed. Oh, we would go to the police, inform them—but do you know what we can expect of the police of Tepoztlan? If people go to them with an honest complaint, and ask for justice, they are first asked "And how much will you pay us?" Do you think Nedy and I should submit to—'

Louis could not help laughing at the idea of his aunt and cousin visiting that most disreputable department in the town hall by the zocalo where policemen sat playing cards in the sun and their families cooked meals over open fires. 'No, of course not, Aunt—but perhaps Cousin Heriberto could go along—'

'Heriberto!' Dona Celia threw up her hands. 'That one! If you only knew—'

'I thought I'd go and visit him.' Louis scrambled quickly to his feet. 'Is he still at the old place?'

'His
old place? You don't
know
what he did with it?'

Louis began to back out of the room. 'And—and Don Beto—I need to see him—about my thesis—ask his advice—'

The two women, still seated at the table, still seething and quite capable of continuing through the afternoon, found their audience disappearing at such speed that they were cut short in midstream. 'Thesis!' Dona Celia snapped as he turned and ran. 'I should like to know what thesis! Does he think he can deceive
us
as he does his parents!' And Nadyn shook her head exactly as her mother did, at the foolishness of such a notion.

Making his way out of the house, Louis ran into Teresa returning from the mercado, her market bag bulging with the produce for the day's cooking. 'Ah, eh,' she greeted him delightedly—how was it that his aunt and cousin could not muster such a display? he wondered—and showed him the vegetables she had bought to prepare for him, and the corn to make the pozole, his favourite, she knew, then gestured at the lane outside, making a face and warning him, 'Basura, basura everywhere.'

It was as she said—the basura collector's truck was parked outside the door, and bits of plastic bolsas and newspaper and vegetable peel blew off it and littered the cobblestones. He carefully stepped over them and, at the corner, where the great clump of bamboos leaned over Dona Celia's garden wall, there were the men she'd spoken of, leaning against the adobe, their sombreros pulled low over their foreheads, and every one with a beer bottle in his hand while empties littered the earth around them. Louis could not help feeling amused to find the town had crept up this far and was even daring to assail his aunt's fortress. Perhaps one day she would be brought face to face with the modern world. The confrontation would be worth witnessing.

He rounded the corner and crossed Avenida Galeana, then started to climb the humps and hillocks of Calle de Cima towards Barrio Santa Cruz, keeping his eyes on the ground and picking his way from one cobblestone to another, avoiding the trickles and runnels of drainwater in between. The sun struck at the back of his neck and he wished he had bought a hat from the woman with a stall at the corner on Avenida de Tepoztlan, but it was too late to go back for it now.

Up at the top, he paused by the church with the faded, mottled pink stucco walls and tower that looked like something made by a potter, then left out for decades in the rain and damp. He had arrived at Calle Sor Juna Inez de la Cruz. He stood there catching his breath and remembered the times he had run up so lightly and eagerly, on his way to converse with the one man he held in esteem, the man whom he thought of as his mentor, and who had persuaded him to postpone entering his father's firm and go to university instead. He hesitated now because he was not sure if Don Beto would admire the way he was proceeding—Louis knew there was little cause for admiration—or even if he was still interested. It was such a long time since Louis had gone away to university in the States, and it was true he had been neglectful of writing letters to the old man or visiting him but, at the same time, if Don Beto were as he remembered him, then seeing him would surely give his work the impetus it required: lately it had foundered and stalled, leaving him wondering if he was really made for an academic career, if he hadn't better give up and enter Papa's firm. After all, his entire circle of friends appeared to have done just that, falling out of university one after the other, disappearing, then re-emerging as elegant young dandies, owners of sleek cars. Their social lives revolved on a higher plane to which Louis was invited whenever he visited from Texas but on which he felt like an interloper. It was one such invitation that had driven him back to Tepoztlan and to Don Beto: Marisol dressed in skin-tight pink silk and black lace, giggling, 'Paz? Octavio Paz and Hin-doo philosophy? Oh, Eduardo, you didn't tell me your friend is a Hin-doo!' and making enormous eyes, while Eduardo called loudly from the bar, 'Louis? He was always a philosopher! Better give up trying to lure him, Marisol.'

He was resting in the shade of the church wall and thinking of that evening when he heard his name called and looked up to see "his childhood friend Arturo parting the vines of a flowering squash plant on the hillside and peering at him. 'Louis, ola! Ola, Louis! What are you doing here? Thought you were in Houston or somewhere.'

Louis blinked up at him and answered as lightly as he could: he was not at all certain he liked encountering this apparition from a past life—schooldays, days when his family had all lived together here in the old house, before his father had taken them away to Mexico City. He and Arturo had played basketball together after school, in the court on Avenida Tepoztlan, looking out over the valley. Arturo had sisters he had been fond of, quite sentimentally, taking care never to betray those feelings when they were together. They had given him a present when he left, declaring he was sure to forget them otherwise. Actually, he'd lost it even before he got to Texas. He had not forgotten them, however, even if he had not particularly remembered. Now he shaded his eyes from the sun, chatting with Arturo, trying to say as little as possible about the university or Texas: it did not seem right when Arturo had gone nowhere, was probably helping his mama run the little abarrote down the street—what else was a young man with little school learning to do in Tepoztlan? But Arturo seemed not to share his embarassment at all; standing there on the hillside with his hands on his hips, he called down to Louis, 'You chose a good day to visit. Come along to the zocalo this afternoon—you'll see some fun.'

'What kind of fun?' Louis asked warily. His family had never approved of the fun boys could be expected to think up in Tepoztlan.

'Ah, it's a show we've put together, to show those bandits from the city what we think of them and their plan for a golf club—'

'A golf club?' It was the last thing Louis expected to hear. 'A club golfo, here in Tepoztlan?'

'That's right. It's a pretty place, no? Green hills, streams, nature—so why not come and spoil it all, make a playground for the rich so they can come up on weekends to play, and who cares if the green hills and the pure streams all vanish? Plenty of boys doing nothing who could caddy for them, too. But we're going to teach them a thing or two—we're putting up a real fight. Come along for the show—you'll meet the old gang.'

Louis wondered who the others were who had stayed back and were now members of this curious group he had never heard of, and even Dona Celia had not mentioned in her zeal to bring him up to date. He raised his hand in a wave, promising to come along 'after I've been to see Don Beto. He still lives up this way, doesn't he?'

Arturo beamed down at him. 'Oh yes, where would he go? He'll die here under Tepozteco—he's willing to die for the movement, you know. Just ask him about it.'

It was not at all what Louis expected to talk about to the old scholar, but the conversation with Arturo left him uncertain of what he might and might not find. Don Beto's house was exactly as he remembered it, built into the hillside under the forests and crags on which the small pyramid of the Aztec god Tepoztecatl stood perched, and invisible from the road and the wrought-iron gate. The rusty, cracked bell still hung from the branch of a mango tree, its rope draped casually over the gate for visitors to pull. Beyond, he could see the ruins of the former house, the one Don Beto had grown up in, at the back of the grassed-over cobbles of the courtyard, only one step and a broken arch left standing with a ruined wall for a backdrop. A canvas hung on that wall, incongruously—a painting of underwater blues and greens with piscine shapes faint in its wash. A piece of clay moulded into a curious shell shape lay on the step.

It certainly seemed like a gateway to the past, and Louis gave the rope a tug. Immediately a dog sounded a warning howl but did not make an appearance. Eventually Don Beto's daughter, Marta, came hurrying down the path between the avocado and citrus trees that grew at the back. She did not recognise Louis at first, and pushed a strand of grey hair out of her eyes to peer at the figure on the other side of the gate, but when he greeted her she opened the gate, shook his hand, remembering, smiling. What did she remember of him, Louis wondered.

'You didn't recognise me,' he complained.

'Oh, we are growing old, old—our memories are going,' she laughed, making an excuse.

'But still painting,' he said, gesturing towards the canvas on the wall and the shell sculpture on the step as they passed around to the back of the ruin and faced the house that Don Beto had moved into after his wife's death, nothing more than a small cube of concrete, weathered and mildewed, but a veranda in front where flowers grew in rusty old jalapeno cans.

She preceded him into the house from which she fetched her father out onto the veranda. (Was this town peopled by ageing daughters taking care of their aged parents? Louis wondered.) Don Beto was more bent than before, like a woodland goblin, with a face like a knot in an ancient tree, and he had a stick like a twisted root to help him move. Both his daughter and Louis tried to help him settle into a chair but he waved them away and perched on a bench, insisting that Louis have the chair instead. This produced in Louis a discomfort that lasted throughout his visit. Don Beto, unlike everybody else he had met so far, questioned him closely on his life at the university in Houston, on how work was progressing on his thesis, showing the same intense interest in what Louis was doing as he had always had. Louis had corresponded with him over the years and Don Beto had recommended books and writers to him all along but, to Louis' disappointment, he appeared not to have any suggestions to make now. For such a young man to be paid such attention by an old scholar had been a heady experience and it had led Louis to believe he could and should go to university and pursue a scholarly life himself, but now he sensed a certain remoteness in Don Beto, as though this pursuit was not a joint one as Louis had fondly imagined. It made him feel the loneliness of academic labour, the hardness of such a pursuit.

Marta brought them té de manzanilla in pretty cups, and a plate of pastries. Then, as they sat crumbling the pastries with their fingers and watching out of the corners of their eyes a minute hummingbird hover over a plate-sized hibiscus in a pot, Don Beto changed the subject abruptly, and made a wholly unexpected suggestion: perhaps Louis should turn his mind, temporarily of course, to another kind of writing. Polemical. Why not use his pen and his gifts to address the matter that concerned all of them so urgently? And what was that matter? Ah, had he not heard of the club golfo that a consortium of wealthy developers wished to create here, having robbed the country of enough and now having to find ways to spend that wealth, here in this unlikely, unsuitable setting of Tepoztlan, drawn as everyone was to its mountains, its sweet water, its flora and fauna, its allure.... He gestured passionately; the hummingbird fled.

Stillness
not on the branch
in the air
Not in the air
in the moment
hummingbird

'Is this true?' asked Louis. 'I did hear—from Arturo—'

'You have heard? You
have
?' Don Beto questioned, and seemed astonished that Louis had heard and yet not spoken of it, or acted. 'Of this scandal? Then you must inform the world of it, you must turn your pen into a sword and fight....' The old man lifted his hand from the knob of his walking stick and held it up in the air, steady with command.

Louis left his crumbled pastry uneaten on his plate. Don Beto was filling his ears with facts and statistics now, his voice rising to a high pencil-squeak of indignation as he detailed the losses such a project would
create, the
losses to what made Tepoztlan such a treasure—no, not in the eyes of the world that saw it as poor and backward, a place that should think itself lucky to be chosen for 'development', with the money such a club would bring in—but to what those who lived here knew to be its wealth ... and as he spoke of the environment and its endangered condition, it was as if all the old interests they had shared had been swept aside tb make room for what was evidently now the old man's consuming passion. Once when Don Beto paused, Louis ventured to ask, 'And are you writing poetry, Don Beto? Have you written any verse recently?' only to see Don Beto set his mouth firmly and dismiss it with a wave. 'I write what my young friends need, in language that people can read and understand. Not poetry, no,' abandoning what he had spent a lifetime on, and towards which he had directed Louis.