Nothing That Meets the Eye (13 page)

While preparations for the American tour went on, Alejandro indulged himself in sprees around the village. He bought drinks for whole cantinas, bought gifts of silver and leather for Mexican girlfriends and many new American girls. How much easier it was to get an American girl now that his tailor-made clothes proclaimed from across the plaza that he was rich! There was really no limit to the money he could spend now. He gazed with a dreamy smile at the five-figured numbers in the señora's account books, at her stock reports, the Mexican bank account that was in his name as well as hers. And he owned the house, too, one of the biggest in the village. At seventeen!

The night before their departure for the honeymoon, Alejandro decided to visit Cesar's for a final tequila with his old cronies. He heard the jukebox from the cantina as he turned up the lane from the plaza. It played a gay ranchero song that he loved, and he sang with it:

Quien dijo miedo, muchachos?
Si, para morir nacimo-o-os!
Traigo mi cuarenta y cinco
Con sus cuatro cargadores!

He stood for a moment on the threshold of the cantina, smiling on everyone. Drunken shouts greeted him, many stood up and opened their arms, because even if he were not everyone's personal friend, he had money and would buy rounds of drinks. As the jukebox stopped, a mariachi in the corner began a fast rollicking song on his guitar.

Then Alejandro saw his brother Antonio sitting at one of the little tables. His was the only unfriendly face. Antonio was drunk, and Pancho was beside him, his solemn face frowning and worried. There was something so unfitting in Antonio's being here, something so frightening in Antonio's being drunk, that Alejandro hesitated to go in.

Then Pancho stood up and, with his hands in his pockets, still frowning, strolled forward, veered toward the jukebox just to the right of Alejandro, then furtively motioned for Alejandro to step back from the door. Alejandro stepped back into the alley.

“Go home!” Pancho whispered. “To the house of your parents! By way of the barranca!”

Alejandro smiled, but Pancho had turned away and was already strolling back to Antonio.

“Alejandro! Coming in?” someone yelled.

Still smiling, Alejandro waved a hand in a general good-bye, and walked back down the alley. Go home to the house of his parents, indeed, and by the back way? Not on the night before the great trip. He didn't care to get into a fight with Antonio, so he'd give up Cesar's tonight, but back to that mud hovel his parents lived in?

It happened at the foot of the steep lane that led to his big house. Two figures stepped out of the shadows only inches away from his shoulders, and simultaneously they struck at his back. The impact nearly pitched him forward on his face, and when he staggered upright again, he felt he was going to faint.

“
'
Ey!” he called, but they had already disappeared, on the run.

Then the cobblestones came up and hit him in the face. He crawled around, trying to rise, murmuring for help, for someone, anyone. Then, after a long time, two men came and with loud voices lifted him up and asked him questions.

“To the house of my parents,” Alejandro said in a voice as weak as a whisper. He waved a hand in a certain direction, and he spoke in Spanish. He was dying. No doubt of it. Dying, and there would be no more honeymoon, no more pesos to spend, no more American girls. As the men bore him away, he thought of Antonio sitting at the very table in Cesar's where he and la contesa . . .

His mother, who undressed him in the hut, found the wounds in his back. Then she called to her husband, who had been standing outside while she did the work of undressing and washing the body. When her husband opened the door, the music of an American dance tune came louder from the hotel on the hill. She pointed to the two tiny spots of blood on either side of Alejandro's spine. He had been killed by the daggers with square, notched blades that close up the flesh when they are withdrawn, so there is almost no bleeding. In between her sobs, the American dance music came. Finally, the man went to the window and closed the shutter against it, but still the music came.

A few minutes later, they heard a hesitant knock at the door. Alejandro's mother opened the door cautiously, a candle in her hand. She saw an American woman, a very ugly American woman of about fifty years.

“What do you wish?” she asked politely.

“Is Alejandro here?” the woman asked in heavily accented Spanish.

The mother hesitated. “He is here. Who are you, if I may ask you?”

She knew how to say it. She remembered it from the day of the wedding. “I am his wife,” she said.

Then Alejandro's mother slowly raised her hands, the candle dropped, and she let out a wailing, insane scream that reached all the way to the village, and echoed and reechoed across the black hills.

THE HOLLOW ORACLE

T
he black mass of the house sprang out of the darkness, and he tripped on the wooden step. He knocked on the screen-door frame, seized the knob and wrenched it back and forth as though he must be let in before a pursuer overtook him. Like a murderer he held the powerful clawhammer straight down at his side, in a grip that made the hammer a part of his arm, welded in the ache of his muscles. He shook the door until the sound grew crazy in the silence, and he stopped, losing then the momentum that had carried him the two miles down the road, the murderer's momentum that had started twenty minutes before, like the beginning of the act itself. In the stillness there was time to hear his own gasping breath, to feel the eyes in the dark behind him. He pressed close to the house, making no sound.

The door pushed against him. He stepped back, his arm shooting up at an awkward angle, like a girl's arm about to throw a stone. But it was several seconds before he could distinguish her figure on the threshold, and her head was inches higher than his hand. His arm dropped slowly, indecisively.

Then the woman said, “Arthur? . . . It's you, Arthur! Come in!” Her voice was hollow in the house, coming from nowhere.

He hesitated, almost turned and fled, but now he feared the night through which he had just come even more than the house. He came in quickly, and in the movement lost her figure in the porch. The stale, yellowish smell of the house invaded him, lifeless, insidious, forcing upon his mind a thousand visits with her. He crouched, breathing shallowly, watching for the woman, who could see him well in the dark.

“I guess it's been all of three weeks since you've come to see me, Arthur.”

He said nothing. It had been four months. Almost exactly four months. He cursed himself for remembering now. By now it should have been done! But how could he see her without some light? It would be horrible to miss with the hammer. And yet he wished it might be done without seeing her.

“Come into the kitchen and I'll fix some tea.” She glided away from him, and he heard her long cotton skirt rustling faintly over the bare floor.

He came after her, avoiding by old knowledge the porch furniture. “Before the lamp is lit!” he swore. “Before I can really see her!” But he had sworn to the night air, swinging his hammer like Thor in the unresisting air, that he would strike her before she could recognize him, and he had failed. He felt like a diver who has looked too long at the water to make the leap.

The kitchen was large, and he did not find her until the lamp waxed suddenly and filled the place with golden light.

He saw it then. He stared long seconds at the distortion of her figure, stared with his myopic eyes wide in their dark sockets, his thin lips parted in an expression that was strange to his tense face. He watched her until he grew conscious of a kind of hypnosis over himself, a feeling of giddiness and exhaustion. He hid the hammer behind his trouser leg and backed against the sideboard.

Emma did not once look at him. She filled the kettle, struck a match to the gas burner. She moved gracefully, weightlessly, in spite of the bulk of her body. A few gray hairs, escaped from the mottle-brown comb, caught the lamplight like a halo about her smallish head. Her hands, for all their activity, made gentle, uncertain movements. But there was, even in the placing of the lid on the teakettle, an expression of a generous and indiscriminating love.

The man watching her grew afraid. It was the child he was afraid of, not of Emma. It had invested her with a reality that bewildered him and stupefied him. He began to feel that his inertia was willed by Emma, and by the subtle aroma of the house. To strengthen himself he whispered, “It is inevitable! . . . Inevitable!”

As though the words had reminded her he stood there, she turned to him and said, “You must have a great deal to tell me, Arthur, after three weeks.”

The trite, courteous words embarrassed him. She was not herself, he thought. But what was herself? Her rapt attention when they read together? The fascination when he talked about the creations of his brain? The intent of his paintings that he could never put on canvas? He cleared his throat. “No, I . . .”

“About what you've been painting, and thinking and reading, about the walks in the woods, and the long nights walking,” Emma went on. She stood now in the center of the kitchen, facing him, pale and calm. Her eyes, clear as a young girl's, played without direction about his face like blue mists.

“I haven't painted at all,” he said. He noticed a kind of satisfaction in her, a childlike pride, and he wondered if she were waiting for him to mention the child. The thought disgusted him.

“It is not fit for you to create while the child is being created,” Emma said.

A sickening thrill went through him.

She came straight toward him, and he slipped aside. She took down the white china cups and saucers from the cabinet over the sideboard. “The air is filled with creation,” she remarked.

He recognized with sudden shame that the words were precisely his, that he had said them one night as they stood by the well in the garden. To what exultation had he given voice that night?

“I have told the people again and again that my child is God-given, and how few will believe,” she continued, without passion, with only a conviction that flowed like a thin, buried stream in her. “So it has been since the days of Sarah.”

He gripped the hammer, but his energy was from shame, wasting itself in the trembling of his fingers. Now he was far from striking her, so far that he did not think to ask himself why he delayed. Her voice like the wind, void and capricious, rose and fell, parroting the words, enchanting him.
Sarah
. . .
and the creation of the world
. . .
and the days of Sarah
. . .

Still she stood, holding the cups and saucers in her long hands upturned before her. “You have always understood such things, Arthur. . . . You can understand why it is my duty to speak God's word on the streets.”

He said nothing. He drew his upper lip between his teeth, seeking among many remembered conversations the pieces that had built the precarious structure of her belief.

“You yourself have told me that those of God's inspiration should proclaim themselves. I shall tell every living soul unto my last breath and they will believe finally.”

“Oh, hush! Hush!” He stepped forward, but he could not have brought himself to touch her. He glanced behind him at the window, but the squares reflected only the scene in the kitchen, the man and the woman with the golden lamp between them. He looked at it for several seconds, wondering at the strange sensation he had of not participating in the action in the room.

“They do believe,” Emma continued quietly. “Some have come to me and bowed down and said they believe . . . and the others . . . they believe, too. That's why they want me to go away. . . . They would make my child of mortal man. Their hearts are closed to the spirit and their eyes bent down to the earth!”

His words! His words, all of them, come back to fill him with shame. His lean face, sloping back from the finlike nose, thrust forward, parting the mystic veils around her.

“They were here today. . . . What did they say?” And at the same time, he was thinking, what did it matter what they said? Or what did it matter if they knew, since he had come to kill her?

Emma turned her face to the ceiling, closed her eyes. “They said we are mortal men, and we proclaim our blindness. We proclaim our need to be saved.”

“I mean Roy . . . Roy's men, Emma. The men from the courthouse. What did they say?”

“The twelve men did come and they said we are humble men before you and there is a beam in our eye!”

He seized her arm and a cup fell at their feet, breaking like an eggshell. Emma started. “No! What did they say, Emma! What!” he whispered as desperately as though the answer would free him.

She frowned, looked down on the shards at her feet, confused at the disorder. “They said I must leave the town unless I tell who the man was,” she sighed.

He took his hand away. Her words were so clear, he felt suddenly she had been pretending the rest. “But you know there was no man,” he said, and the sentence was supplied from some part of his brain that wanted him to live and be saved.

“I said, ‘Ask for him and no man will show himself, for there was none.'”

His shoulders relaxed. How sweet would it be to believe! To sit and talk and drink tea and to go home believing, and thinking happily as he walked home of all the multitude of things in the world that he loved and which gave him pleasure.

“They have asked,” he whispered, “and you are right, there was no one.”

“Oh, no.” Emma smiled. “Yes, it is divine. It will be a divine child.”

She turned her face toward him, waiting for more beautiful words from his lips, trusting him, and tasting joy in each syllable. But he could not open his mouth. He could think of no beautiful words. “What else did they say, Emma? Do you remember?”

She looked at him, with the suggestion of disappointment in the movement of the eyebrows that lay pale and fine below the handsome forehead. “They said people think it was the Negro Jim Crawford and they'd have to lynch him.”

The weight of his guilt lifted suddenly. His head was light. The waters flowed away, into this new channel, where he saw them swirling, catching up another creature. He did not participate. The maelstrom had passed over him. “Lynch him! . . . Will they lynch him? When will they lynch him!”

Emma went into the dining room and set the dishes down on the table, arranging them. “They didn't say.”

The flatness of her voice brought him back to his senses. They had told Emma they would lynch the Negro in order that she, in pity, might tell the truth. They didn't think the Negro guilty. Why should they suspect a man who was fifty years old? Who tended his farm by himself and went to church on Sundays? Emma did not realize what she was saying! She was repeating words!

She came back and turned off the gas, poured the water into the teapot, lifting the kettle with difficulty.

“Yes, they should lynch him,” he said, confusedly, “and get it off their minds.”

“It would be but one more sin to be redeemed,” she replied. Then, as if the words first took meaning for her, she shook her head. “Oh, no, Arthur. . . . Oh, no, I don't understand you tonight. I'm sure I don't.”

“I mean they will never understand such things as this. They must have blood revenge, and only then will they stop annoying you.” And he felt he was two people, one talking about the other, because certainly the blood revenge would be himself.

“They are only children, clamoring for the answer.” She took the potholder from the nail by the stove and set the white and gold teapot on it. She went into the dining room. “But they may well lynch him, in spite of all that I say to save him.”

“How do you know?”

“Does God save the innocent from their pain? The sins must mount up against the guilty. . . .”

“Did Roy Patterson say they'd definitely lynch him?”

“Oh, no.” Emma came back and hung up the potholder. “But Jim Crawford says it was you. He says he's seen you here so much at night.”

The blood drained from him, downward to his feet and away, leaving him empty and floating to nowhere. “When—when did he say that?”

“Today. He was here today with the others.” Emma got some tea buns from the larder and arranged them on a plate.

“But he only says that to save himself! Anyone can see that!”

“Yes,” Emma replied. “That's why I think they will kill him.”

“Who thinks it was I? Who!” He strode to her place at the table, where she sat calmly preparing her cup of tea, the gray head bent delicately, the hands busy.

“Come have your tea, Arthur, while it's hot.”

“But who? . . . Who believes?”

She did not even look at him. “Arthur, I don't understand you tonight.”

“How is it the Negro saw me come here?” he flung at her. “He spied on us! He spies on us!”

He laughed, but choked with fear. “Everybody knows I come here to see you,” he whispered. “It's no secret, is it? And nobody but Jim Crawford says it was I. . . . Isn't it so?”

Emma was silent. Then, “Oh, I don't understand you, Arthur!”

He seized her by the shoulders, turned her toward him. “You understand. Say it! . . . You know it wasn't I! . . . Say it, Emma!”

“What wasn't you?”

He relaxed. He wanted to laugh again, wildly to fall into tears, to throttle her, to embrace her. He stood straight and tense. “It wasn't! It wasn't!” he screamed. “No, it wasn't.” The hammer clattered to the floor.

Emma looked at him, uncomprehending.

The escape of the hammer from his hand sobered him all at once. Neither of them looked at it, lying on the floor at his feet. Emma had observed it. Her eyes were gentle. How delicate was the balance of her belief! he thought. He calmed himself deliberately. He must not touch those precariously balanced scales behind her eyes. . . . If the Negro were lynched, the town would stop its questionings, the alms of the town would still be given, the suspicions on himself would pass away. . . . Emma would have the child . . . but if the child were alive! How could Emma give birth to a live thing? . . . And suppose the strange processes in her mind one day reassembled the facts and she were to announce them in the church as she had announced her visitation from the angel of God!