Weep for Me (23 page)

“Sleep, señor,” she whispered.

I closed my eyes. Her hands were firm, yet gentle. She hummed a quiet melody, deep, throbbing in her throat. When I woke up, much later, there was no soreness in the burn. She was gone. And so was a lot of the day. I wondered if it could be my last day. Again I tried to taste fear and this time a little came, metallic in my throat, a cold hollowness in my belly.

A sound began to intrude. I could barely hear it. A thin mewling, like the sound a kitten makes. It seemed to come from the direction of the door. I walked to the door and listened. It came from right outside the door. I pulled the door open. Adela sat on her heels, her hands covering her face. The sound came from her.

“What is it?”

She glanced up at me through stained eyes. “Ai,” she said softly. “Ai.” It was the cry of pain and grief too great to be born.

“Come in here.”

She came obediently. I closed the door. “Now tell me.”

Her face became an Indio mask. She shook her head.

“No good to tell you, señor.”

“Maybe I can help you. I’d like to help you.”

Her eyes went naked for a moment and then filled with tears again. “Not me. It is you to be helped.”

“Why? How?”

She took my hand and pulled me over toward a chair.
“Sit.” I sat and she knelt beside the chair, still holding my hand. “In the kitchen, cook told me you are going. Tonight. I do not know where. I am wishing to know. I do not know why. You are not like anybody I know. So I say I will find out.” She pointed. “A boat is out there to take you. I know that. A captain is here. A bad man. And a man of my people who works for him. His name is Joaquín. A silly man. A stupid man.” Her voice was growing more tense and her two hands were tight on mine. “I find Joaquín and I make the eyes. I tease him. I tell him he is strong and I am a poor stupid village girl. All to find out where you go tonight. Because I think maybe I go there too, one day. He laughs. I let him kiss me, a little, and he smells of the fish. I tell him he is wise. Then he tells me he comes back. He says an anchor makes him rich, maybe as much as a thousand pesos. He blinks his eyes and rolls them. I do not understand. And then he takes me to a quiet place. He whispers that tonight they teach a fool
norteamericano
to swim. And the
norteamericano
swims with an anchor tied to his feet, and when he does not come up, too bad, they must keep his money. Ah, señor, it is you for this teaching to swim.”

It was too vivid. The fear came strong. It made me want to cry out. I fought it and it slowly receded.

“Don’t cry,” I said.

“They kill you. I made him say. They kill you!”

“It doesn’t matter.”

She looked up at me with streaming eyes.

“
No importa?
But you die!”

I gently released my hand. “I have been dying for three months.”

“
Enfermo?
Sick?”

“Sickness of the soul. Do you know that word?”

“Soul? Like heart, I think.
Corazón
.”

“That’s right.”

“That is why you have no fat and your eyes are tired.”

“Yes.”

“Can you tell me of this sickness, señor, Sometimes it is good to tell a thing.”

“There was a girl, with hair like sunlight. A small girl, and very happy. We were to be married. I worked in a bank. At times I thought I did not like the bank and did not like the thought of being married. Do you understand?”

“Men of my village also, when the days begin to grow more hot.”

“And then came the dark girl, the one señor, Flores now has.”

“Ah, the evil one! Clearly, she is evil.”

“I wanted her. She wanted money. I had none. So I took money from the bank, where I was trusted, and I came to your country with her.”

“It was a spell, a magic she put on you.”

“No. I am also an evil one.”

“Foolish. Not evil.”

“That is why dying does not seem important. I have nothing left. No pride. I am a criminal and I am ashamed.”

She was kneeling by the chair and she sat back on her heels. She had ceased crying. Again the obsidian Indio blankness had taken over her face, and looking into her eyes was like looking into the black shadow of an Azteca pyramid.

She stood up and walked to the door, shot the bolt, turned and leaned against the door, holding herself so that the pale blue uniform was taut across her body.

“The señor, has fear, no?”

“The señor, has fear, yes,” I said with a grimace, not quite achieving a smile.

“You cannot get out of this place. You will die, señor.”

“Why do you say that?”

“It is something you must know and understand. Does the señor have sons?” Her expression was unreadable.

“I have no children. Why?”

“In my village a certain thing is known. It is hard to die. It is harder to die without sons. It is
triste.
How do you say? A sadness. An emptiness. If there is a son, then a man does not die altogether.”

“Why are you saying this?”

The Indio look faded away, leaving her face soft and vulnerable. She held out her hands. “Strong hands, señor. For work. A son would be cared for. He would have the health. You could make a son in me, señor. His life would be good. I promise that. And knowing a son is made, it is not so hard to die, no?”

The corners of my eyes began to sting. I looked away from her. “I told you of dying for many months, Adela. It did something to me. Now I am no good. No good with a woman. That is how señor Flores took the girl with the dark hair.”

Her mouth twisted with contempt. “Love with that one would be like death. To make a son is like life. It is easy to see.”

I looked at her and glanced away. Something compulsive about her eyes brought my glance back to her.

“It would be no good,” I said.

She unfastened the coronet braids. With nimble fingers she unbraided the waxed cedar hair, then combed the strands with her fingers. She never took her eyes from me. The hair fell in soft dark waves to her shoulders. She unbuttoned her pale blue uniform from throat to hem. She slipped it from her shoulders and tossed it carelessly toward the serape. She wore nothing under the uniform. Her breasts were firm and heavy, warmly brown. In the uniform she had looked stocky, heavy-hipped. Naked she was Eve, Juno, a brown Diana.

As she took her first slow step toward me, her cheeks glowing red under the dark skin, the sun, slanting in from the white beach through a slit of the blinds, turned her flank to purest gold.

As she walked toward me, she said, as though reassuring a child, “It is no harm to try, Kyle.”

W
hen dusk was in the room, like gray-blue smoke, and the sea had become muted, she braced herself on one elbow beside me, smiling down into my face.

She pressed her right hand firmly against her abdomen. “It is a funny thing, how certain I am. I know in my heart. I know a child is made. I know it is a son. In love I could feel that a child is made. How do I know that?”

“I felt the same.”

“There is promises to make, Señor Kyle. But first, why did you weep during love?”

I couldn’t tell her why. Maybe some of them were the tears that could not be shed during the past months. I said, “A person weeps when a thing is beautiful. A scene, a poem. I don’t know.”

“Your tears fell on my cheeks. Like a burning rain. Or like wax from a candle. I must promise.”

“Promise what?”

A fierce and savage determination changed her face. “I will leave this place. He will be born in a village. I will care for him until he needs me no longer. He will go to school and he will speak this English and write it, also. There will never be shame in him.”

“What will you tell him about me?”

“His father was a man who died bravely. That is enough, no?”

“Perhaps I won’t die bravely, Adela.”

“Ai, you will. It is a thing I know.” Her eyes glowed.

I knew that were she permitted to watch, I would die bravely enough. I reached out and traced the line of her breast with my fingertips. She slid down beside me, her face against the side of my throat, one arm across my chest, one brown warm thigh across mine. She snuggled closer and gave a contented sigh.

I said, “I must give you some of the money. It is under the bed. It will help you.”

“No,” she said in a sleepy voice.

“Why not?”

“I cannot use it. It is not of Mexico. They will say I am a thief, surely.”

“You will take my pesos, though. There is not much.”

“If you wish, señor Kyle.”

“There are only about twelve or thirteen hundred pesos.”

She sat up abruptly. “It is a great fortune! He gives me sixty pesos each month. It is almost two years of pay.”

“It is of no use to me, Adela.”

“Thank you,” she said, and slid back into her former position. Soon the very last of the daylight would be gone. The last daylight. She murmured in her own tongue, reached across me, and tugged until I turned toward her. I was held, then, in a great warm vise, taken into the life beat that pulsed at the heart of it, taken and submerged in that life pulse, drawn into a slow beating like that of the sea, imbedded deep and slow, deep and slow, into an aching primitive sweetness, into a deep honeyed promise of new life, from twoness into oneness, from lazy hunger into rocking warmth, held close and carried, along with the sea sound, up, and slowly up, to a thing that caught us for a time, and twisted us, then let us slowly down into a softness, into a shudder, into a long sigh, shared, that mingled our warm breathing.

After a long time she dressed in darkness, came back to the bed, printed her lips on mine in farewell, and said, “It is much to remember,
querido
.”

I pressed the pesos into her hand and she went silently into the night. The bolt clicked, the door opened and shut, and I was alone with fear.

I turned the lights on, showered, dressed very carefully. I had a strong consciousness of my body, of legs and arms and chest and belly, of skin over the pulsing blood, of white nerve fibers imbedded in the tissues, of teeth and nails and hair.

It is a sad thing to die when you finally find a reason for living. Jo Anne would have been like that. I knew it. And I knew what I had given up, for the sake of a dark-eyed
woman with a body that was a whip with which to punish me.

I looked at my eyes in the mirror. Behind my eyes I saw the placid cattle of Chicago mooing their way into the mechanized death that ended when the inspector stamped the grade on the flayed flesh.

Before Adela, I would have submitted myself just as peacefully.

Now there was pride. A new sort of pride. Your father died bravely. Did bravery consist of holding out your ankles so they could get the anchor knot tied properly and with the least amount of trouble?

Every man an Errol Flynn. Grin like Flynn. I showed my teeth. I succeeded only in looking a bit silly.

I took my shoes off, turned off the lights, and slipped out of the room. I half expected that a guard would have been posted. There was none. I went down to the corner and went down to the door where I had stood and heard the rawness of Emily’s voice in pain.

I tried the door. It was locked. I listened, heard Flores say something in a completely casual voice. Emily answered in a very low tone.

I tapped lightly at the door.

“Quien es?”
called Flores.

I mumbled something without words. I heard his light step, the clack of the lock. I drew my right fist back.

As the door swung open. I struck at his face as hard as I could. I was still operating in a Flynn fashion. The sound was just as satisfying as the crack on a movie sound track, and he went reeling backward, fighting for balance, just as do Flynn’s opponents. The only flaw was that my right fist felt as though it had been cracked between sledge and anvil. The pain drew my lips back and I went in, kicking the door shut behind me.

Emily stood by a big canopied bed. She was looking at me. Her eyes were wide, startled. The light was behind her. She wore a nightgown that was high at the throat, that reached to the floor, wide and full.

After one quick glance at her, I looked back at Flores just in time to see the backs of his legs hit a small table,
see him go down with a crash of broken glasses and pitcher, a heavy thud of strong shoulders and back against the tiles.

He bounded up like a great cat, blood on his mouth. He spat on the tiles, kicked the table out of the way, and came toward me. That was in the Flynn script too. Now I should hit him and knock him down again. And then again, until he pleaded for mercy.

I threw my sore right hand at his face. It missed him and I slipped and nearly fell. He began putting his hands on me. He found a nerve center under my collarbone and drove me down onto my knees. I cried out with the wicked pain of it. As I lifted my arm, he drove his fingertips into my armpit. I tried to scramble back away from those big, white, well-kept hands. Something was going wrong with the script. He dived toward me, scrambled along the floor onto me, thumbed the back of my elbow, and sent a lance of pain down my arm that numbed my fingers.

A shadow moved across the light. I was on my back, writhing, shutting my teeth against the pain. He had hold of my left arm. He looked dignified, remote, amused.

He glanced up into Emily’s face from his sitting position and said, “You see, my dear, application of pain can bring a—”

Her white arm moved like the flick of a lizard’s tongue. It darted out and back and then she moved back, step after step, until her back was against the wall by the door. The pressure on my arm was gone. He was still holding it, but gently. I yanked it out of his grasp and spun onto my knees. He sat there, his eyes bulging, terrible. At first I couldn’t understand what the object was that I saw. It protruded from the hollow at the base of his throat. And then I saw that it was the silver handle of an ordinary table fork. The tines were in a horizontal line, buried as deeply as they would go, buried in the hollow of his throat, just above where the strong black hair curled crisply from the open throat of his sports shirt.