Harriet Doerr (8 page)

Carlos recognized her immediately through the downpour. “You are the señora’s daughter,” he said. “Good evening, señorita.”

“Hi,” said Stevie.

Carlos looked for luggage, found only a backpack, and led this Estefania to a chair in front of the fire. Then he took from her, as she removed them, garment by garment, a plastic poncho, a man’s red vest, two long scarves, and a pair of boots of the sort that soldiers wear. The girl leaned toward the flame in a torn black sweater as tight as skin and a green skirt so long it had trailed in gutters, wet and dry. Hair fell to her shoulders and covered half her face. This was not the light hair of the picture in the bedroom. This hair was the color of frying oil that had been used too many times. It was the eyes Carlos recognized, bright blue jewels.

“Permit me to call your
mamá,”
said the
mozo.

When Morgan came into the
sala,
she looked only into those eyes. The hair, the feet, the broken nails, the ragged sweater, the unhappy skirt—these things she ignored. She talked to her daughter in trial phrases, tentatively. Neither asked a question of the other. Morgan did not say, “Oh, Stevie, where have you been? Oh, Stevie.” Nor did the girl accuse her, saying, “What happened between you and Dad? Were there other women? Do you hate him now?”

“I’m taking the Saturday bus to Chiapas,” Stevie said. Morgan did not ask why Chiapas, a thousand miles south of here. Mother and daughter skirted the pertinent issues of the heart and spoke of peripheral things: Santa Felicia, the house, the other people on the hill, the lush countryside with its brimming lakes and ponds.

“I’m going to give you my room,” Morgan said. “It has a window that overlooks the town,” and she asked Carlos to take Stevie’s things to the large bedroom.

After dinner Stevie spoke again of Chiapas.

“I’m going there to see Greg.” There followed an extended pause. Then Stevie said, “He’s working in San Cristóbal.”

The relief Morgan felt at these words was like a soft south wind blowing across frozen steppes. So he was somewhere after all. She saw him in San Cristóbal, still freckled, still seventeen.

“He sits on the sidewalk in Indian clothes,” said Stevie, “and sells jewelry to tourists.”

This was something Morgan could easily imagine, Greg on a steep street of the old colonial town. She saw him in native dress, the loose white pants and shirts, the white
sarape
with the cerise border, the flat sombrero with the braided ribbon band. An unreasonable content filled her.

 

 

On the day of the party, Stevie instead of Morgan drove with the mozo to the market.

“Today you can take my place,” said Morgan, and stood at the gate to see them off. The car stopped almost as soon as it started, to pick up Lalia, who, singing, waited for the bus in front of the house next door. Then the three went on together, two who spoke only Spanish and one who spoke none.

That afternoon Stevie, dressed in a caftan of her mother’s, washed all her clothes and spread them on the terrace, where they dried flat like poorly cut dresses of a paper doll.

“Seven-thirty,” Morgan had reminded her daughter, but at eight o’clock, long after the six Americans and the two English, the Frenchman and the Danes, had gathered in the
sala,
Stevie was still upstairs. Morgan invented things to say to the guests. My daughter is ill, you are not the sort of people that interest her, she washed her clothes and they’re still wet. Instead, she asked Carlos to knock on Stevie’s door.

Five minutes later the girl appeared, and suddenly the lights in the room burned brighter of their own accord. The guests turned. Morgan turned. Stevie came toward them.

At first Morgan thought she was seeing an apparition, one who had braided blue ribbons into her cornsilk hair. Where had all this come from? The narrow white skirt that hung straight to white-sandaled feet, The fitted top, cut so low it barely contained Stevie’s high young breasts.

From the bedroom window of the house next door, Lalia reported the party to Fliss. The long windows of Morgan’s
sala
revealed the guests moving about, and all through the moonlit evening there was activity on the terrace. The gentlemen, one at a time, took Stevie outside and, each according to the degree of his longing, kissed her.

Lalia described all this to Fliss, who lay against three pillows on the bed.

“That is the dress from the shop at the market. Those are the ribbons we found. The eyes and the ribbons, the same blue. Now Estefania is outside with one of the American husbands,” Lalia went on. “Now with the English. She is back in the
sala
again, standing next to her mother. Two beautiful women, one old, one young. Carlos is passing wine and pastries on a tray. He is serving Estefania again and looking at her dress. The Danish gentleman has come up to lead her to the terrace. He is kissing her hands, her neck, her eyes. He loves her.”

“How do you know that?” said Fliss.

Lalia made a correction. “He tells her he loves her.”

“Go on,” said Fliss.

The party ended at midnight. Half an hour later Morgan and her daughter, with a wall between them, lay in their beds, ringed about outside by the rainbow of splintered glass.

In an unfamiliar room, on an unaccustomed bed, Morgan waited for sleep. For an hour she listened to the night. Wind on the magnolia leaves, an owl, a frog, and once, from the zoo, the distant protest of the lion. She was still awake when Carlos entered the house. She heard the watchman’s whistle and soon after that the mozo’s familiar footstep on the stairs. She held her breath in the silence that followed. Then the door of the large bedroom opened and closed. Morgan suffered a brief attack of lunacy. He has made a mistake, he has forgotten, he believes I am there in my bed.

Returned seconds later to sanity, she heard, in this order: Stevie’s light cry of surprise, the
mozo’s
reassurance, laughter, silence, a gasp, laughter again, a long silence. The bedsprings creaked. Stevie spoke. The carved mermaids knocked against the tapestried wall and knocked again.

Morgan covered her ears with pillows.

 

 

“How did you sleep?” they asked each other at breakfast.

“Perfectly,” they both said.

They passed butter and spoke of the fine day. Stevie spooned honey onto her toast. “My bus leaves at two,” she said.

“Carlos will drive you to meet it.”

Sun slanted the length of the table. Morgan saw everything turn gold: the tangerines in a bowl, the toast, the honey, her daughter’s hair and skin. Time telescoped. Stevie could have been eight years old, pristine, forgivable.

On the same wide panel of sunlight, Carlos entered the room from the terrace. His long shadow fell across the plates and cups as he greeted first mother, then daughter. The day was beginning without confusion, without tears, like any other.

“The señorita’s bus will leave at two,” Morgan told him.

Carlos immediately offered an invitation. “Then that will allow time for you to witness a mass in the most historic chapel of Santa Felicia. My family is sponsoring the service.”

Morgan’s silence extended so long he understood it to mean consent.

 

 

“In that case, señora, would you be kind enough to bring your camera? For a few pictures.”

So it came about that at twelve o’clock Carlos drove mother and daughter to his infant’s christening.

The chapel was pink and old and streaked by recent storms. Carlos led Morgan toward the small crowd gathered at its arched entrance. Stevie followed, saw Lalia, and waved. A woman, grown thick at the waist with bread and rice and pregnancies, stepped forward.

“My wife,” said Carlos. He pointed to three small boys at her side. “My sons.” They were grave replicas of Carlos, graduated in size.

Now here was Goya, wearing high-heeled pumps and a lace mantilla. A baby with skin the color of cambric tea was sucking its fist in the curve of her arm.

“Imagine it, señora,” said Carlos. “This baptism and my mother’s birthday all at one time.” He gazed into the worn face of his parent. “She has completed forty-two years today.”

My God, Morgan exclaimed in silence. That old woman and I are the same age.

After the mass, Morgan took pictures of mother and child, father and child, grandmother and child. Of the three sons and a street dog, which wandered into range by mistake.

“Now you,” everyone said to her, and Stevie caught her mother holding the baby, with Carlos at her side.

“One of us all together,” they finally demanded.

Morgan had to cross the street to include everyone. She focused her lens and waited while a hunchback begged from the christening party. Trucks and bicycles passed. As she lifted her camera, she was shoved from behind by a lottery ticket vendor. A sparrow of a child tugged at her skirt. Across the street, hands waved and faces smiled. Morgan believed she saw the lovely, hapless infant smile.

At the instant she pressed the shutter, a legless man seated on a child’s wagon propelled himself into the foreground and was included in the group. Then a military van stopped in front of her, and she took quick, repeated shots of its brown and battered side until the film ran out.

Stevie’s bus left three hours late. It was after five when Carlos drove Morgan up the hill. As they passed the zoo, she turned toward the cages. There was only time to see the aviary, where a few listless herons pecked at a water trough and molting macaws dropped their indigo and scarlet feathers on the dust.

But Carlos had news. “A new manager is coming to the zoological garden,” he said. “A person of experience. A Swiss.”

He turned to look at his employer, who only said, “Good,” and kept her eyes on the road.

As they climbed the hill, Morgan observed the cloudless sky and for the first time was conscious of Mexican evening light, the clarity of insect, leaf, and pebble.

Carlos noticed it too. From the top of the grade he pointed down to the plaza of Santa Felicia and advised Morgan to examine the panorama from her room.

“Consider this, señora,” he said. “On a day like today you can tell from here what kind of ice cream the vendor is selling. You can see the banker’s polished shoes and the blind man’s patch. From as far away as your house you can watch the big hand move on the cathedral clock. You can count the coins that drop into the beggar’s hand.”

Accordingly, Morgan went directly upstairs. She dropped her camera on the mermaid bed, glanced without mercy into the tin-framed mirror, and, as Carlos had suggested, crossed to the window to consider the view.

“It was God’s will,” said Trinidad. “Otherwise I might have taken the Wednesday train or the Friday train from Libertad to Obregón. But Thursday was market day in Obregón, when I could buy flannel, buttons, and yarn at less cost. Because I was sixteen and foolish, señora, I was not ready for the baby I had been carrying for almost seven months.”

Trinidad sat with Sara Everton under the widening shade of an ash tree, on a pine bench that was as upright as a church pew. The two women faced a walled garden, where limp vines and seared lilies drooped in the heat of the April afternoon. The uncompromising sun still paralyzed the air and baked the earth, although its rays slanted almost horizontally from the west.

Dust from the road had powdered Trinidad’s flat black slippers. She carried ten small eggs in a wire basket. When Sara asked the price, Trinidad said, “Whatever you wish to pay.”

Sara Everton realized that the eggs were the product of hens who scratched a living from straw, weeds, and piles of trash, and paid slightly more than the amount asked for a dozen large ones in the city supermarket.

From the bench the two women looked over the adobe wall, past the plowed field, the dry arroyo, and the village, with its three church towers and two domes, and across the broad empty plain to the mesas that closed the eastern horizon.

Sara inquired about Trinidad’s children.

“Señora, I have ten,” her guest told her. “Three dead and seven living.”

Unlike almost everyone else in Ibarra, Trinidad had not been born in this town. Only a year ago, she had come here to live with her sister. The two widows raised chickens and embroidered coarse cotton tablecloths in cross-stitch designs of harsh colors: heliotrope, hot pink, and saffron yellow. Trinidad’s hair, which showed no gray and was still as thick as ever, was pulled straight back into a knot, her skin was smooth over high flat cheekbones, her unwavering glance was directed from eyes where wisdom had been acquired without loss of innocence.

“Was the infant of whom you speak the first of your children?” Sara asked.

“Yes, señora, the first of them all, and a son, and the only one among them who was to be granted a miracle.”