Dr. Brinkley's Tower (11 page)

— Ay sí, said the molinero. — But you know what they say about angels. They always have at least a little devil lurking deep inside.

Both men chuckled at the molinero's witticism. Later, when they had finished smoking, they both rose to their feet, a laborious production given the molinero's age and the mayor's bad foot, the latter acquired during one of the more disturbed phases of the revolution. Predictably, the mayor limped off to the cantina. The molinero, meanwhile, shuffled back to his home. Inside, he found Laura packing up.

— Do you like what I've done? she asked.

He looked around his little cottage. She had collected all the laundry, dirty dishes, and old newspapers, and then swept the space she'd created. The room looked bigger, it smelled of flowers, and the sun coming in through his window wasn't thick with dust motes. It was no longer, he realized with a start, the home of an old man.

— Sí, mucho. Gracias.

— I'll return tomorrow. I didn't have time for the kitchen.

— No, por favor, you don't have to.

— I know that, Señor Pántelas.

Laura Velasquez shyly grinned.

— But I want to.

The next day, as promised, Laura again came with her cleaning utensils and her bashful, tight-lipped grin. This time, however, the molinero had awoken earlier, giving himself time to bathe and shave his grizzled features, his eyes sufficiently dim that he failed to notice the halo of fine cuts and gouges he'd distributed over his jawline. When he opened the door and presented himself, Laura smiled so freely that he saw, for just a moment, the tips of her broken, misshapen teeth.

As the molinero sat in the plaza, smoking once again with Miguel Orozco, Laura finished the job she had started the day before, chiselling away at years of grease and smoke and the resin produced by cooking over smouldering green branches. When the molinero returned, he stood gaping, his eyes welling with the sort of tears caused by fond memories: he was remembering his own mother, in this very kitchen, cooking stews made from vaca tail and nopales. As he looked around, he had the hopeful thought that maybe, just maybe, this kitchen might play host to the creation of pleasing memories once more.

She was at his door at eleven o'clock the very next day, wearing the same skirt and white cotton shirt that, the molinero was starting to notice, had a tendency to tighten against her body whenever she reached for something, revealing a feminine litheness that the old man had not previously associated with Laura Velasquez. This time she was carrying a large, round wicker basket. After nodding hello and refusing an offer of coffee, she headed towards the bureau in the corner, where she had stuffed all the clothing she had picked up
over the past two days. When she opened the top drawer, her nose wrinkled slightly at the odour that puffed, cloud-like, into the room. This embarrassed the molinero, who turned to leave.

— No, she called brightly. — You don't have to leave. Not unless you want to.

A minute later she left the molinero, her basket filled with every stitch of clothing he owned, save for the shirt and dungarees he was wearing. He spent a quiet morning reading his newspaper with a magnifying glass and mulling over the strange, ancient sensation that was building inside him — a sensation that made the area behind his knees feel vaguely weakened and that left his thoughts a miasmic swirl.
Jesús
, he thought with a grin.
I'm as badly off as that poor cabrón Francisco Ramirez.

She came back late in the afternoon and left her basket in the middle of his table: in it were his trousers, shirts, socks, and underwear, all of which had been beaten against the rocky bank of the Río Grande, rinsed in water scented with clematis, and left to bleach in the relentless Coahuilan sunshine. His socks, he noticed, had been mended, and the more shredded denizens of his underwear drawer had been scissored into neat, square handkerchiefs.

— Do you like? she asked, her grin revealing a smile that, to the molinero, was both tragic and sublime.

— Laura … Tomorrow, I don't want you to clean or work or help me with anything. Instead, I'd like you to come have tea with an old man who, for some reason, no longer feels quite so old.

A moment passed.

— Está bien, she said.

Thus came the day that, given the profusion of curious eyes and ears in Corazón de la Fuente, would pass into local history as the one in which a twenty-one-year-old girl fell in love with a stooped and rickety senior citizen who, it was true, knew women as intimately as a chef knows his knives. With a pot of jicama tea steeping in his outdoor kitchen, the molinero opened the door. He was wearing pressed trousers, a chambray shirt, a gabardine donkey jacket, and a homburg. His facial cuts from the previous day's shave had healed considerably, such that they now looked no worse than a sprinkling of paprika. He had trimmed the few hairs still clinging to his speckled, leathery scalp, and he had splashed himself with a cologne that wasn't nearly as pungent or vinegary as it could have been, given its vintage. He smiled. He watched as her eyes brightened. They stepped towards each other, and, as will happen with two people who were together in a past life, flowed into each other's arms, all skin and muscle and bone disappearing, leaving only a shimmer of blissful, radiant energy.

A few days later, Roberto Pántelas and Laura Velasquez were walking together around the plaza. Far above the town, Kickapoo Indians were helping to place the tower's antenna with the aid of a crane so vertiginously high it defied imagination; naturally, a crowd had gathered to watch, and to toast the completion of the tower with glasses filled with everything from iced tea to mescal. And yet, as the two walked by, the crowd collectively turned and took in Corazón's latest, and unlikeliest, couple.

— Everyone knows, said Laura.

— Claro, said the molinero. — They are happy for us. As you know, this is a town of good people.

After that, the molinero and his much younger sweetheart walked hand in hand when out together, and it was said that whenever Laura Velasquez left the old man's house, her cheeks shone with a redness caused by one thing and one thing only. Meanwhile, even the poorest ejido dwellers had stopped using the services of a molinero; they had money now, and they preferred to buy their cocoa and corn preground in the store of Fajardo Jimenez. The molinero didn't care — a bit of lost revenue mattered little when compared to the smiles of his fellow citizens. Besides, he had worked hard all his life, and he deserved to dedicate as many hours as possible to his new-found happiness.

There was, of course, another reason why he didn't care. For about a year, the molinero had been growing a lump, right in the middle of his sternum. Recently it had begun to issue a pain through the bones and muscles surrounding it. With a certainty possessed only by the aged, he knew that this protuberance would prove to be his end. Again, he didn't care, or at least he didn't care greatly. Few grew to be a man of his age, particularly in such tumultuous times, and his life had been rich with joyfulness and romance. In fact, he grew dizzy with gratitude every time he thought of the sweet, soft-voiced gift that the Lord had sent him in his waning years.

Now that his final days were upon him, he experienced an intensity of emotion that, while wonderful, would have been impossible to live with had he known it throughout the whole of his life. Every time he saw a buzzard circling in the cloudless white sky, he would stop and watch it, his neck crooked with awe. Whenever he spotted a child, he was overcome with a tearful desire to rush over and pick the little creature up, the
absence of children in his life being his one true regret. Every time he placed a forkful of fajita meat in his mouth, it was as though the Creator himself were strumming what was left of his taste buds. Each time he passed Dr. Brinkley's tower, he felt as though the town was being rewarded for having displayed such resilience during the revolution. While walking he would suddenly feel amazed that his feet, which had grown so leathery and sparrow-sized with age, had carried him without complaint for the better part of a century. For all of these gifts he felt grateful and humbled.

One day Laura visited with a lunch of tortilla, avocado, and grilled tripe. As she sat slowly eating, each bite causing her upper and lower teeth to uncomfortably collide, the molinero could only stare at her, beaming, his food untouched. Slowly she grew self-conscious. Her hand lifted to her mouth, reflexively hiding the source of her homeliness.

— Roberto, she finally peeped. — Qué pasa?

He swallowed and continued beaming at her. He couldn't say it. To do so would be an end to the anticipation incurred by this moment, and he was enjoying this more than he'd ever enjoyed anything.

— Laura, he finally said. — You have given an old man a final taste of life. For this, I adore you with the entirety of my soul.

He paused to breathe. — And I want to give you a present.

— A present?

— Sí, preciosa. A testament to my undying love.

She looked at him, blinking.

— Laurita, he said, savouring the moment, — I am going to have your teeth fixed.

VIOLETA CRUZ WAS IN HER TINY HOUSE, LYING IN
the hammock her mother ordinarily used, which was suspended between a pair of roughly hewn mesquite poles that offered the added benefit of preventing the roof from caving in. As she brooded, she gnawed at the tiny sliver of nail still existing on the ring finger of her left hand. She proceeded to gnash it into a mushy non-existence, at which point she began gnawing on the cherry-pink cuticle that resided underneath.

Francisco.
He
was the problem. Before he entered her life, her attitude towards the young men of Corazón de la Fuente had been simple, liberating, and so easy to maintain. It had all started around the age of twelve, when members of the opposite sex had begun sniffing around her like ants to a spilling of sugar. Their demands were relentless — to go for walks, to have some ice cream, to attend a fiesta. Her response, meanwhile, was always swift and unambivalent:
No, I can't, I have schoolwork to do.
It finally reached the point where the male youths of the town, their egos collectively bruised, decided
that Violeta either had to be a nun in training or a woman in name only, and not worthy of their virile attention.

It was the way the local men dressed, with those skintight dungarees and denim shirts stretching at the buttons. She hated the way they hung around in semi-feral clumps, hissing
Mamacita!
at every señorita who happened to walk by, as if this single word were clever enough to win a young woman's attention. She hated the way they continually cut classes — she would never do that, education being a means to a future — and she detested that they seemed to have no goals other than playing football in the scrubby fields surrounding the mission. Even more so, she hated the way they obviously spent a significant portion of their morning before their own reflections, combing their pomaded hair into stiff, sheeny concoctions.

And then, one month ago, Francisco Ramirez knocked on her door and respectfully asked to accompany her to the Reyes brothers' lucha night, a courtesy so lacking in precedent she became flustered and, after a moment of awkwardness, assented. Since that night, she'd brooded continually over whether she'd made a mistake or opened an interesting new door in her life. Yes, he was a handsome young man, his misaligned nose only adding to his appeal. Yet it was equally true that he was the sort of muchacho whose appearance seemed beside the point, his real attributes residing in a place not reflected by a mirror. Apparently he did well enough in school, spoke a fair bit of English, and was an intimidating presence on the football pitch, achievements you would never have heard about from Francisco himself. Unlike the boastful young men in town, Francisco was an hombre of few words,
with most of his thoughts being communicated by the limpid clarity of his light brown eyes. It was this quality of his — this air of sad, contemplative knowing — that had crept up on her that night, igniting the first, hesitant sparks of interest.

But if Violeta became seriously attached to him — and she was at an age when the other chicas in town were taking husbands and starting families — her future would be clear. She would quite likely stay rooted in Corazón, an eventuality she would not permit for herself. Since she was a young girl, she had dreamt of a man who could take her and her mother away from the insecurities of México, with its constant threat of violence and deprivation, and she worried that Francisco, who had no professional ambitions that she was aware of, would not be that man. For as long as she could remember, she had pictured herself marrying a man who might furnish her with some of the better things in life — a decent house, perhaps, and a good education for her children — and she believed that Francisco would never be able to do this for her. Since she was a niña in ribbons and a pinafore, she had imagined herself with a man of privilege, and she knew that
privilege
was a word she would never associate with the family Ramirez. And yet … 
Ay, ay, Francisco, how is it that when I am near you, my heart beats erratically and I have to fight the impulse to giggle like an amused child? How is it that my stomach feels light, and the area behind my kneecaps uncomfortable? How dare you do that to me, Francisco Ramirez? How dare you complicate things so?