Air and Fire (4 page)

‘It's a difficult business.' The doctor was bending over Wilson's foot, binding the ankle in tight bands of gauze. ‘The soil in this region is a soft, wet clay. Very unstable. Even with heavy timbering it can collapse.' He began to apply plaster of Paris to the gauze. ‘But you, as a prospector, would have a better understanding than most of the perils involved.'

‘I do most of my work on the surface,' Wilson said. ‘I have come to mistrust tunnels.'

‘Even so, I'm sure that you have witnessed many accidents.'

Though Wilson had not, in fact, witnessed even a single accident, it seemed ungrateful, in the circumstances, to deny it. Accordingly, he recalled an incident where a man had fallen thirteen hundred feet to his death after being overpowered by a noxious gas. It had happened in Nevada.

‘There,' the doctor said. ‘You see?'

Wilson lay motionless, content with the silence and the soothing coolness of the marble against his forearms and the back of his head. It did not seem to him that he had lied. He could still remember reading the article in the
Illustrated News.
The accident had been described in such a vivid and realistic style that he did honestly feel as if he had been there.

While the plaster dried, the doctor left the room, returning some minutes later with a pair of wooden crutches.

‘These will help you to move about,' he said, ‘though I suspect you'll find small spaces difficult.'

‘Small spaces?' Wilson peered at the doctor over his chest.

‘Balconies, for example,' the doctor said. He handed the crutches to Wilson, his lips tightening into a furtive smile.

The hospital clock was striking midday when the two men left the building. They stood on the south veranda looking at the town below. The houses had roofs made from sheets of shining tin. The streets looked swept. But mesquite and ocotillo were beginning to disrupt the symmetry, and away to the east, where the mountains lifted steeply against the sky, Wilson could see a number of shanty dwellings pieced together out of driftwood, scrap metal, wild flag.

His eyes shifted east, towards the waterfront. The ship that he had noticed earlier was now docking in the harbour. It was a freighter, out of Le Havre. You saw ships like it in every port from Seattle to New Orleans, carrying timber, grain or fruit. Three masts, a funnel that could use some paint, engines of low power. An ocean tramp.

He watched the hawsers fly from the deck to the quay, where they were deftly looped through heavy iron rings. Coal barges were already nudging against the starboard bow. It did not look as if the ship would be in Santa Sofía for long.

‘Do you know, Monsieur,' the doctor said, ‘what is the cargo of that vessel?'

Wilson did not.

‘It's a church.'

‘A church?'

The doctor's smile broadened, but he chose not to elaborate. He too, it seemed, would have his mysteries.

‘I'm afraid I must leave you,' he said, checking his watch. ‘I have other patients to attend to.'

‘You've been very kind,' Wilson said. ‘What do I owe you?'

The doctor raised his hand in front of him, palms outwards, and turned his head away.

‘When you find your gold,' he said, ‘then perhaps one small, how do you say,' and he rolled his forefinger against the inside of his thumb and held it up.

Wilson could just see the sky through the gap. ‘Nugget?'

‘Yes.' The doctor beamed. ‘Nugget.'

‘You've got yourself a deal,' Wilson said.

He had reached town a month before, stone-broke and weak as a deadwood fence, his face buried in his mule's coarse mane, and all his tools hanging off her flanks and chinking like a kitchen in an earthquake. The sun stamped on the back of his neck, his shoulderblades, his hat. When he raised his head he saw two brown trains on the beach, waves rustling against their wheels, and thought he must be tumbling into madness. Then buildings appeared. Workshops, furnaces. A railway line. Smoke climbed from a tall brick chimney. Sawblades poured gold on to a soil floor. He pinched his eyes. A woman was standing on the road, her feet spread wide in the dust, as if she were about to draw a gun on him. That was all he needed.

‘Who are you?' he asked.

Her name was Mama Vum Buá.

She stared at him. ‘You want breakfast?'

What he wanted was water.

‘No water,' she said. ‘We got coffee.'

He took the coffee. You did not argue with Mama Vum Buá.

She was a Yaqui Indian, from the province of Sonora on the mainland, but sometime during the previous century the pure blood of her family had been corrupted by a renegade Jesuit priest. Her eyes were not brown, as you might have expected. They were a startling cobalt-blue. She was ashamed of the colour – it set her apart from her people, whom she loved
– and she found her contempt for anything foreign almost impossible to conceal, especially if it involved religion too. There was an old withered quince tree in the yard behind her restaurant. ‘It was planted by some missionary,' she would hiss. ‘No wonder it didn't bear no goddam fruit.'

Like many Indians in Santa Sofia, she wore copper rings on her fingers and her thumbs: twelve of them – one for every child she had conceived, living and dead. She had strung a handful of bronze Mulege pearls on a length of catgut and fastened it around her neck. She arranged her hair in the traditional Yaqui style, three braids coiled on her head, and she always appeared in the same dress, yellow with red flowers, though it had been washed in salt water so many times that the colours had faded to cream and pink. She chewed quids of some fiery local root that stained her gums and palate red, and when she smiled, which was not often, she always smiled out of the right side of her mouth. Wilson had taken to her instantly, her belligerent manner, the hiss and rumble of her speech. No morning was complete until he had breakfasted at Mama Vum Buá's place.

It was almost one by the time he limped into her yard. He laid his crutches on the ground and sat himself down at his usual table in the shade. Three Indians in cloaks stared blankly at his foot. A few minutes passed. At last the Señora emerged from the darkness of her kitchen. She stood in the sunlight, blinking, fists on her hips. When she saw Wilson, she hawked and spat. A rope of red liquid looped through the air towards him, landing in the dust close by.

‘You're late this morning.'

‘I had an accident – '

‘You fell off a balcony. I know.'

‘It just collapsed. I didn't – '

‘In your underwear. You want eggs?'

Smiling, he lit the butt of a cigar and aimed the glowing tip at the harbour. ‘They say there's a church on that ship.'

She tilted her head sideways, as if listening for hymns or prayers or something that might give the church away – but there was only the clank of the conveyor belt and the dull whining of flies in the midday heat. She let her breath out fast and spat into the dust so hard it bounced.

‘You want tortillas?'

He nodded.

‘Coffee?'

‘Yes.'

Wilson heard voices chattering behind him. He looked round. Six of
the Vum Buá girls were waiting by the date palm, two of them naked but for twenty-pound flour-sacks with holes for arms. One was swamped by a grown woman's dress; it wrapped around her twice and trailed in the dirt. Another held a dead fish by the tail.

Mama Vum Buá had eight daughters, none of whom had yet reached womanhood. They had dark eyes and funny, jagged teeth, and their black hair was tied back with dried kelp or fishing twine or bits of frayed rope. They had Indian names that were so long and unpronounceable that he had christened them First, Second, Third, etc., according to their height. Every time he sat down to his breakfast, they would sidle up and twist themselves around the nearest trees or chairs like ribbons, their eyes all wide and shiny. Sometimes he would entertain them with coin tricks he had picked up from a retired gunslinger in El Paso. Other times he would bring his guitar along. While he waited for his coffee to cool he would sing them songs in his tuneless voice, songs about broken hearts and America and fields of gold. Since they could not understand the words, it did not matter what he sang about, though he would never sing anything that contained obscenities. This morning he planned to tell them about a man who was so dumb that he tried to leave the second floor of a house without using the stairs. He could already hear their ancient, cracked laughter as he traced his descent in the air with his hand.

He was still wondering how to begin the story without mentioning vice of any kind when he noticed a small crowd gathering on the quay. He recognised Monsieur de Romblay, the Director of the mining company. He could also see a group of Indians, dressed in white shirts and clean breeches. They were clutching a variety of pipes and drums and whistles. It looked as if Monsieur de Romblay had come down to the waterfront, along with certain other select members of the French community, to meet the boat that had docked that morning. It was a welcoming party, and there would be music.

‘Tell us about your foot, mister.'

Wilson turned to the girls. ‘What?'

‘Tell us what happened to your foot.'

His eyes drifted back towards the quayside. Two figures had just appeared on deck. A man and a woman, her arm linked through his. The band struck up a tune that Wilson did not recognise, and the two figures began to move down the gangway. The man wore a Panama hat and a black frock-coat. The woman wore a yellow dress that belled out into the air below her waist, and her parasol balanced at a jaunty angle
on her shoulder. He wondered who they could be. Were they someone's relations? Could they be royalty? He leaned back in his chair. One thing, at least, was clear: they were French.

‘Come on, mister. Tell us what happened.'

His foot ached inside the plaster cast. His shoulder ached too. He did not feel well. But he could not take his eyes off the scene that was unfolding on the quay. The man and woman had climbed into an open carriage, with Monsieur de Romblay in attendance. A whip arched and snapped. The carriage sprang forwards. Wilson suddenly saw that it would have to pass within a few feet of the table where he was sitting.

As the carriage approached, he straightened in his chair and, taking hold of his hat by the crown, lifted it into the air. The woman's head turned at that moment and she saw him. Her eyes were green, the shape of leaves. They seemed to be resting on her face; if the wind came, they might blow away and then she would be blind. She smiled, as if to reassure him, and vanished behind the wall of the Señora's restaurant. He did not see the carriage again until, pale-pink dust blossoming around its wheels, it took the bend that led up the hill to the Mesa del Norte.

The world bent at the edges and a fringe of sweat broke out on his forehead. Slowly he returned the hat to his head, slowly he lowered himself down into his chair. He sat without moving for some time, his hands clasped in his lap, his thoughts becalmed. The sight of that woman had run into him like something molten, had run into every part of him, and would set.

When he looked up again, the Vum Buá girls had gone. He could hardly blame them; he had not provided much in the way of entertainment. Only one of them remained, squatting in the dirt, oblivious to everything. She was carefully crushing ants with the tip of one finger. He lifted his cup and blew across the rim.

Mama Vum Buá put a basket of tortillas on the table, then she stood beside him, shielding her eyes, and peered out towards the boat.

‘Any sign of that church yet?'

But Wilson had seen something far more unusual, far more sacred, than a church, and could not answer.

Towards dusk on the first day Suzanne left the Hôtel de Paris and walked south, along the Calle Francesa. She was wearing a white dress, a simple dress, fastened at the throat with an ivory cameo that had belonged to her mother. The sun had already fallen behind the wall of mountains to the west, and a fan of mauve and crimson rays had opened in the upper sky. She felt as if she were giving off light as she walked; she could have been a piece of the moon. Her new town, her new street. This new earth beneath her shoes.

Of course every place had its share of spells. Even the city she had left behind held many secrets underneath its skin. Only last year, while digging foundations for the Opéra, they had uncovered some ancient oyster beds, thousands upon thousands of shells, and several labourers had died of mysterious and disfiguring diseases. But there was nothing to compare with a new land, about which little was known, in which all the secrets lay waiting. The sailor's words came back to her.
You are entering a land where legends are born.
Her hopes rose; a smile reached her lips. Perhaps there was even a child in this town, a child who expected her.

She was passing houses where the other French people lived. The lit rooms seemed to crouch down, then leap up again as the kerosene lamps flickered. Screens had been fastened to the windows, and moths whirled against the fine wire-mesh. She walked within a few feet of a veranda that had been shielded by columns of jasmine and bougainvillaea. She could hear voices murmuring behind the leaves.

After the stealth of sailing up into the gulf, after all the tensions and conspiracies, she had not been prepared for the effect the town would have on her. By the time she stepped out on to the deck that morning, a crowd had gathered on the quay below, hundreds of faces gazing upwards – native women selling copper jewellery, soldiers in grey uniforms, boys with shaved heads and voices like ravens. Not since Santiago had she seen people in such numbers. There was even a band
of musicians, Indians dressed in white shirts and moleskin breeches. Their faces were serious, though it was not, she thought, the seriousness of concentration. It was more as if their minds were somewhere else. And their version of ‘La Marseillaise' reflected this: it was shrill, chaotic, disembodied.