Air and Fire (42 page)

Wilson stared at the doctor's empty hands. He could not speak.

‘She left this morning,' the doctor said, ‘with her husband. I advised against it. In my opinion, she was not well enough to travel. She needed rest, as you do. But he would not listen.' Stepping forwards, the doctor adjusted the metal apparatus that stood beside the bed. ‘The sooner she returns to France, the better. That is what he said.'

Wilson suddenly noticed the bottle of clear fluid above his bed and how it fed down a tube into his arm. ‘What are you doing to me?'

‘Salt solution. To replace what you lost. You will be a new man.'

Wilson doubted that. His mind would still be old. His mind and what was in it.

He lay still, watched the fan revolve. Then he closed his eyes. The air beat softly at his eyelids.

Not dead, but gone.

The knowledge floated down. Was there a difference – for him? He was not sure. He felt the knowledge settle in his head. He had never imagined that grief could weigh so little, or desolation be so gentle. It was like being covered in the finest gold leaf.

‘You're something of a hero, you know,' he heard the doctor say. ‘It's not every man who would have risked his life like that.'

‘If you don't mind,' Wilson said, ‘I'd like to sleep now.'

When he woke the next day, there was a huge area of blue at the edge of his vision. He altered the position of his head on the pillow. Monsieur de Romblay was sitting on a chair beside his bed. It was the frock-coat that was blue, with a loop of gold, the Director's watch-chain, slung like some elaborate vein between his heart and his liver. A white lace neckcloth billowed at his throat. He was muttering to himself under his breath. From time to time he would fall silent, lifting his eyes to the ceiling. Then he would smile and his chin would tumble downwards; he would continue with his muttering.

At last he noticed that Wilson's eyes were open. His smile puckered, the corners of his mouth tucking into his cheeks. His feet shifted on the floor.

‘I was just working on a speech. We're expecting the Mexican Foreign Minister here tomorrow.' He grasped Wilson's hand. ‘It's good to see you looking so well, Monsieur Pharaoh.'

‘Good of you to come, sir.'

‘How are you feeling?'

‘Much improved.'

The Director nodded. ‘I assume that you've heard about our,' and he paused, ‘our difficulties?'

‘They'd already started when I left.'

‘Of course.' The Director adjusted his lace neckcloth. ‘I have never known such carnage,' he said, ‘not since my days as an engineer with the Army.'

Everyone who appeared at Wilson's bedside seemed eager to furnish him with their own version of the events and each version differed. With Monsieur de Romblay, there was no sartorial angle, of course. Instead he talked at great length of his diplomatic initiatives and how, given their failure, he felt that he should shoulder some of the responsibility for what had followed. He had been left with no option but to declare a state of emergency, he said. Nonetheless, many heinous crimes were committed, many barbarities. None more disturbing, perhaps, than the lynching of Captain Montoya.

‘They killed him?'

‘Oh yes.' The Director grimaced. ‘But the word “kill” does not adequately describe what they did to that unfortunate young man.'

Wilson did not need to be told. He was familiar with the way in which Indians exacted vengeance; he knew that it would have been brutal and humiliating beyond his imagination.

Happily, the Director continued, when he saw that he would be hard pressed to sway Montoya, he had cabled the authorities at Guaymas, requesting urgent reinforcements. The response had been most impressive. Once order was restored, he had announced a substantial increase in the miners' basic wage, then he had introduced a raft of new safety regulations. The miners were due to go back to work any day now. He had kept the soldiers on, billeted in Montoya's house, in case of further trouble. But he felt confident that the episode was over. There had been numerous letters of apology from the Mexican Government, even one inviting him to Mexico City to discuss the crisis, signed by Don Porfirio himself.

‘As I said, the Foreign Minister is due tomorrow,' Monsieur de Romblay concluded. ‘He's profoundly embarrassed. Hence the speech.'

‘I can think of nobody better qualified to reassure him, sir. Everyone remarks on the high quality of your public speaking.'

The Director's hand fluttered among the folds of his lace neckcloth. Then, in an attempt to conceal his pleasure, he rose to his feet and turned away.

After a moment's silence, Wilson spoke again.

‘I have a question.'

Monsieur de Romblay's face loomed over the bed once more, all benevolent attention.

‘The church,' Wilson said. ‘Was it destroyed entirely?'

‘Not entirely. But it's badly burned.'

The Director explained that scaffolding materials had been piled against an inside wall, chairs too, fence-posts – anything combustible. Then somebody had set the lot on fire.

He sighed. ‘It will be built again, of course. Perhaps next year, perhaps the year after. When things are less sensitive.' He turned to Wilson and his face brightened. ‘But I did not come here to burden you with all this unpleasantness. I'm here to express the gratitude, not only of Monsieur and Madame Valence, but of the whole community.' He leaned forwards. ‘I would like to know,' he said, ‘how we can repay you for what you did.'

‘There's no need. Madame Valence was a friend.'

‘All the same, Monsieur. It was a heroic act. We feel that it should be recognised.'

Wilson stared up at the ceiling fan. It revolved at a speed that allowed him to distinguish the individual blades. The air dropped on to his face in soothing layers.

‘What can we offer you,' and the Director's voice had softened, ‘as a token of our indebtness?'

Wilson brought his eyes down from the ceiling. ‘I'd like some wood.'

‘Wood?' The distance between Monsieur de Romblay's features seemed to expand.

‘Oak, if you have it,' Wilson said, ‘though I guess pine would do.'

The green light of evening.

Across the lawn the palms showed black and spare against the sky. There were no waves in the Bahía de Limón tonight – just a slight swell, a restlessness, as if the water were a single, gleaming sheet and some creature stirred beneath.

It would rain before long.

Angling her chair so that the light fell across her writing paper, Suzanne dipped her pen into the inkwell and began.

Hotel Washington, Colón, Panama

19th July, 189 –

My dearest Wilson,

I do not know whether this letter will ever reach you. I have to believe that it will. Still, writing gives me a disturbing feeling, as if I were speaking to an empty room –

She paused, looked up. Imagined him.

His flat-crowned hat, its curling brim. His shocked blue eyes beneath. Eyes that looked as if they had witnessed atrocities, or miracles. At times they had seemed to distance him, to place him at one remove from reality. Then she could see why some might think of him as a simpleton, a dreamer – a laughing-stock …

Yet he had saved her life.

The thought opened a space inside her head. A landscape that was featureless, where nothing could find purchase.

She tried to imagine thanking him and saw his boots begin to shuffle
in the dust. She watched one hand wander from his pocket, touch his hat.

She lifted her eyes to the window. Beyond the palm trees, on the horizon, black clouds heaped above a narrow blade of land. That would be the coastline, stretching north. Bahía de las Minas. Cristóbal.

The sky had darkened. Green light seeped through one last gap.

We arrived in Panama after nine days. I did not see much of the city, though we did take a drive along the Avenue Balboa and spend a few moments on the seafront, looking out towards Taboga and the islands beyond. There were many white pelicans floating on the water. To the south the mountains were covered in a light cloud. It was very beautiful. And it seemed quite natural to be sitting there, just looking, saying nothing, perhaps because it was the kind of thing we used to do –

A knocking at the door interrupted her. She looked round.

‘Yes?'

When there was no response, she laid down her pen and rose to her feet. She opened the door. Two hurricane lamps, already lit, stood at her feet.

She peered down the corridor. It was tall and narrow; the walls, panelled in cheap wood, had been treated with a dark varnish. She caught a glimpse of a boy in a white shirt, close to the top of the stairs.

‘Thank you,' she called out. ‘
Gracias
.'

Back in her room, she placed one of the lamps beside her on the writing desk and then sat down again.

Wilson, it was so strange for me to find myself in a country where there are trees and flowers, where there is life. In fact, it has been a strange journey altogether, undertaken in a kind of trance. I am suffering from headaches; it is possible that I am still feeling the effects of our ordeal in the desert, though it could be a change of climate, I suppose, since Théo has been ill as well –

A kind of trance.

She had woken in a small white room, not knowing where she was. Her bones lay buried deep below her skin; they felt as if they had been down there for centuries. Her mouth hurt when she tried to speak.

There was a constant humming in her ears which she found comforting somehow. She did not need to have the sound identified.
It was days before she learned that it was engines. That she was on a ship.

As her strength returned she left the cabin, but the voyage south made almost no impression on her. She slept much of the time, in a striped canvas chair. When she was not asleep, she watched blocks of shadow edge across the bleached boards of the deck. The second officer would bring her iced water in a jug.

In Panama City Théo heard that a steamer was sailing from the port of Colón on the east coast the following afternoon. Hoping to escape the heat, they took the night train. A journey of fifty kilometres lasted almost seven hours. She remembered the day breaking, darkness lifting from the jungle. Light that was pale and tropical, like oysters or muslin. Massed trees, sticky with mist. A river sliding past huge knotted roots, its surface solid, seamless; it could have been a length of polished wood. She saw a bush adorned with white flowers of such a size that she could only stare. One blast from the train's whistle and the flowers rose into the sky.

Herons.

As the mist began to burn off, Théo woke from a nap and looked at her, his eyes dark in his exhausted face.

‘I've been dreaming.'

But he did not elaborate.

Instead he turned to face the window where broad trenches were now visible, gouged through the terrain. The soil was the colour of tea.

‘The canal,' he murmured.

Suzanne gazed out.

This was all that now remained of de Lesseps' attempt to build a waterway through Panama. It had taken him eight years to admit his mistake; by then the scandal had muddied even Monsieur Eiffel's name. Yet the cleared areas were already growing back; banana leaves and lilies draped pieces of abandoned machinery. The shame of the French was being covered over, as if the land itself were embarrassed on their behalf.

Théo contemplated the scene with a kind of morbid relish.

‘They say that twenty thousand men died out here.'

The landscape offered him no solace, no evidence of mercy or redemption. He could see only disaster, and it was everywhere he looked. It was as if his failure had taken its rightful place in a whole hierarchy of failures.

And one failure, it seemed, could breed another. In the shipping office in Colón, they were told that there was no boat. Not for another week. When Théo tried to argue, the man just shrugged his shoulders, a slow, watery gesture that seemed to render them powerless, that was like being drowned. They had no choice but to book into the Hotel Washington, and wait.

On their first evening, Suzanne took a seat on the veranda. As the sun began to set over the Caribbean, Théo joined her. A march by Sousa blared and crackled from the graphophone in the dining-room. She wondered whether she ought not to be talking to Théo. Instead she listened to a French anthropologist tell a story about some trees that he had discovered in the province of Chiriqui. ‘They were extraordinary,' he said. ‘Quite square.' She presumed he meant the trunks. When he had finished his story about the trees, he launched into another. This time it was frogs. Golden frogs. He was a thin man, tubercular, with earnest lines between his eyebrows and the distinctly irritating habit of constantly swirling his drink around inside his glass. She found that his stories did not surprise her. In fact, she was not sure that she was capable of feeling anything as abrupt as surprise. Certainly it would take more than a few square trees.

When she retired to bed that night she glanced across at Théo. They had scarcely exchanged a word all day. She wondered if the anthropologist had noticed. Weren't anthropologists in the business of noticing such things?

The lamp at her elbow began to smoke; she had to adjust the flame. Then she dipped her pen into the inkwell and continued.

From Panama we took the railroad (built by Americans, apparently!) to Colón on the Atlantic coast, which is where we are now. There is little to do here but rest; the good doctor would approve, no doubt. We leave tomorrow, on a steamship bound for New York – an eight-day voyage, if everything goes well –

The door opened and Théo entered. He hung up his hat, leaned his cane against a chair, then glanced across the room at her.

‘A letter?'

She nodded.

‘Who are you writing to?'

‘Monsieur Pharaoh.'