Dr. Brinkley's Tower (8 page)

— Before we go, I just wanted to thank the owner of this establishment for all his kind hospitality.

He then poured the contents of the tequila bottle over the aging wooden table and lit it with a match. As the men
walked laughing from the cantina, Carlos rushed to his bedroom and grabbed the embroidered bedspread given to him by his in-laws on his wedding day. He used this to beat back the flames. When he was finished, he sat alone in his smoke-filled bar and shivered. He could not control it. His teeth shook and his nose ran and his heart fluttered and his fingers would not stop trembling. It was if he were sitting in the coldest place on earth, not a bar in the middle of a small Coahuilan border town.

A week passed. A week in which he felt ashamed to look his wife in her lovely blue-black eyes. On the night that his problem first presented itself, the cantina owner had been tired, and he concluded later that this was likely the problem. He retired to his bed, where Margarita was waiting with open arms and a suggestive, mirthful smirk. He kissed her, and when it came to the point at which man and woman melt together like heated wax, he suddenly found himself assaulted by a vivid memory of that Villista capitano, all bad teeth and halitosis, firing away at the floorboards, wood chips leaping into the air, the other rebels shrieking with laughter.

He squeezed his eyes shut and tried to think only of Margarita's comely tetas and the lovely curve of her fleshy coffee-toned thighs. When this didn't work, he thought of the curve of her ballooning hips, and when this didn't work, he pictured the hunger that radiated at such moments from her luscious red-painted lips. He felt nothing but the re-ignition of his shame.

— Not tonight, he told her. — I'm tired.

— Ay, pobrecito, she responded with an understanding smile. — You work too hard.

The following night he was interrupted once more by the memory of his humiliating encounter. Margarita, naturally, pretended it didn't bother her: to do so would have been an insult to her husband's machismo. This did not help. With time, Margarita stopped dabbing the hollows of her neck with agua de rosa and took pains to be asleep by the time her husband came to bed. The cantina owner, for his part, perpetuated the charade by retiring later, and by no longer coming up behind her when she was bent over their sink doing dishes, which he had once done so often, and with such giggling abandon. He spent more and more time in the cantina, sitting alone and smoking. She, in turn, repressed her affections towards her once manly husband and redirected them towards a private relationship with Jesús. She turned pious, and dour. Their marriage, once a torrent of colour, turned into something chilly and grey.

The cantina owner tried everything. He drank a little tequila before congress, thinking this might relax him, and when that didn't work, he tried giving up beer and liquor altogether, in case they might have been dimming his energies. Thinking his blood might be a little thin, he switched to a diet consisting solely of beef necks and goat's milk; this played havoc with his digestive system and caused him to smell like an abattoir. He went on long walks to energize his system with fresh air and exercise. He forced himself to fantasize all day about the pleasures of the flesh, which in the end only served to frustrate him. In his dirt-floored cellar he secretly prayed before a statuette of San Judas Tadeo, the patron saint of lost causes, and received only sore knees in return. He even thought about visiting Madam Félix's House of Gentlemanly
Pleasures, thinking that the Marias might know of some wicked measure to restart his motor. There was only one problem: the Marias functioned within the gringo economy, and like all residents of Corazón de la Fuente (with the possible exception of the hacendero), he couldn't afford even Maria de los Sueños, a pudgy Chiapan girl who, it was rumoured, wore a halo of furry moles on her left buttock.

The night came in which the cantina owner, feeling as desperate as it is possible to feel, lay in bed waiting, his eyes cast upwards at the dark ceramic ceiling. At around two in the morning he rose. He slipped out the kitchen door and made his way along a dark mud alley behind his neighbours' houses. Creeping from shadow to shadow, he reached the southwest tip of the pueblo, at which point he more or less broke into a jog: the moon was a blaze of illuminating silver, and he worried that someone out for a late walk might see him. As he trotted, he heard crickets and wind and the soprano howl of coydogs.

Panting, he knocked at the door of Azula Mampajo, the town's curandera. It opened. She peered up at him, her head turned slightly to favour the less milky of her eyes.

— Señora, he said. — Please, I …

— I know what is wrong. I can see it on your face, you poor bastard. Come in. I will help you.

The cantina owner left her fetid home with a paste consisting of mashed huizache leaves, dried piglet bladders, and water blessed by an epileptic seer who lived in the desert near Acuña. For the next fourteen days he mixed a few spoonfuls with simmering water and then swallowed it under the light of the desert moon. On the fifteenth night he returned to his
wife's open arms and found that his marital life was in no way revived, their lovemaking still akin to jimmying a padlock with an oyster. And so he gave up. It was easier, in a way, to just accept his new reality. He spent more time in the cantina, and he depended on his closest male friends to satisfy the need for human companionship. In this way he settled into a life of silent, barely tolerable angst, his only consolation being that many people had similarly flavoured lives in the sad, bereaved years of the revolution.

But
now
, every time he passed the tower, he was reminded that there was something else he could try, some new and expensive mortification he could subject himself to. Having worked so hard to accept his post-concupiscent life, he resented that he was being asked to rattle the very principles of his insufficiency. By the same token, there was also a part of him, however repressed, that still remembered what it was like to lie beside his wife with more than a tormented, paper-thin sleep to look forward to. There was a part of him that still remembered what his lips felt like when pressed against hers, and there was yet another part of him that remembered, with an almost painful clarity, how it felt to tear open the blouse of a woman whose sultry, black-eyed gaze was encouraging of a beast-like comportment.

One evening around dusk, he stood on the stoop of his saloon and gazed at the nearly completed tower. All around him was activity: school had finished for the year, and the streets ran with children, all excited to be free of spelling primers, chalkboards, and the regular experience of having their knuckles rapped with a wooden ruler. A fury grew within the cantina owner. He couldn't stand it that, for the rest of the
town, this phallic monstrosity symbolized good fortune and promise, while for him it mocked his most shameful of inadequacies. He seethed. He brooded. He fantasized about what he might have done had he been carrying a pistol the night those Villistas set his saloon on fire.

It was at this moment — staring up at the tower, hands clenching at his sides, frustration welling inside him — that he suddenly turned. He stormed through his place of business and marched through the room where he slept with Margarita. A few seconds later he was in the desert, striding towards a substantial mound of scrub. On the other side of the mound was a large stand of mesquite trees. Beyond that, entirely hidden from view, he began digging beneath the large, flat leaves of a prickly pear. Every few seconds he paused and looked in every direction, ensuring that he wasn't being watched. After a few minutes he uncovered a plain metal box, in which he kept the money he was accumulating from the increased business that had come to his saloon. Huddled over, he began to count. Through a series of stealthily placed inquiries, he had learned that Brinkley's goat-gland treatment cost two hundred gringo dollars, an amount significantly higher than the average Mexicano's yearly salary. A curious chill rose from a subterranean pocket of cold, sifted up through the desert floor, and entered the very core of his being. Though the day was broiling hot, he felt a shiver run through him.

Though he didn't yet have the money, he would, soon enough.

AS FRANCISCO RAMIREZ RODE ATOP THE HACENDERO'S
old grullo, the sounds of the village faded into the background. After another twenty minutes, rider and horse reached the main roadway running along México's northern border, the sun beating down on Francisco's head and shoulders. He looked up, and for the next minute he rode with spheres of red flaming against the packed-earth roadway. They were heading west. Every few minutes a truck filled with building equipment filched from the construction site in Corazón raised dust into Francisco's throat and eyes as it headed towards the interior. When they were farther away from the town, there came a silence so profound that banks of sound created by Francisco's excited mind spilled over the plains, turning the desert into a place where thoughts were louder than the rustling of wind, the call of hawks, or the clopping of an old nag's hooves.

An hour passed, and then another. Stretching before him in all directions were cholla and brambles and pale earth and
prickly pear and huizache and blossoming mesquite trees. Beneath him was a scramble of scorpions and small lizards. The sky was a blue bleached pale by the brutalizing sun. Far away, at the very edge of his vision, the desert turned into a series of undulating ridges, an illusion created by the heat. Above him vultures flew in lazy, ominous circles.

When he got thirsty, he drank. When he got hungry, he pulled the knapsack off his shoulders and helped himself to a chew of deer jerky. Every time he reached a fork in the road, he selected the one heading more or less in the direction of Piedras Negras. As the day wore on, all motion that he had previously detected in the desert — snakes, scuffling voles, the drifting of sand — ceased, and suddenly Francisco felt completely alone. He looked in all directions and could see only scrub and the dwindling, needle-thin roadway — even the huizache and mesquite trees had abandoned him. The vultures, which had been drifting above him all morning, so high they looked like winged black insects, had gone somewhere as well. Without their presence to add perspective, the sky was rendered limitless and, oddly enough, suffocating.

He made a calculation. It was noon, and he hadn't yet reached the tiny outpost called Rosita, which was more or less halfway to Piedras. This concerned him; with each passing hour it seemed that Estrella's gait was becoming more lumbering and rheumatic. At this rate it would be a full day before they reached their first destination, and Fajardo Jimenez had packed only enough provisions to see him to mid-afternoon at best.

Just then Francisco heard a protracted, distressed whinny coming from Estrella. He dismounted and looked into the
horse's dull eyes. Patting Estrella's muzzle, he tried to soothe her with words softly spoken. Still, her breathing sounded laboured, as though her old lungs contained liquid.

— What is it? Is my pretty horse thirsty?

Again Francisco looked around, and as he did he struggled to banish any thoughts of his predicament from his mind. His only choice was to walk her through the brambles separating the roadway from the banks of the Río Grande.

— Come on, Estrella, he said, taking her lead.

He stepped into the desert and pulled her along slowly, giving her plenty of time to step her old feet around stones and small rocks and animal burrows. After a hundred metres or so, he heard a sneeze.

— What is it? he asked her in a voice intended to calm. — You managed to catch a cold in this heat?

The horse shuddered, and that's when Francisco saw the projection of blood, looking like paint shot from a rifle, on the desert floor.

— Oh, Estrella, he said, again struggling against the panic welling inside him. He took one or two more steps towards the river and heard a strangulated whinny come from the hacendero's old horse. Francisco took a deep breath and stepped back towards her. Patting the softness between the horse's sad eyes, he kept saying
Oh, I know, señorita, we're in a bit of a jam, it's true, good thing we're both young and strong.
It was in the middle of this attempt at consolation that Estrella trembled and then slowly lowered herself to the desert floor, her legs folding beneath her like a day-old fawn's.

Francisco did the only thing he could do: he walked to the roadway and waited, hoping that some form of help might
come by. As the heat rose wavering and light blue from the highway, he found his thoughts turning to places he had never seen and things he had never done. After ten minutes or so, he walked back to the tawny mound that was Estrella, only to find that she had lowered her head, apparently unbothered by the intense heat transmitting from the sand. He stroked the fringe of dusty hair hanging over her eyes and said
If you could just hang on a little longer, mi bonita
, at which point he trudged back to the roadway, where he again waited, his eyes reddening from both strong emotion and the reflection of sun off chipped asphalt. When he went back the third time, there was a murky foam on the hot sand in front of Estrella, her eyes motionless against a buzzing of flies.

Francisco sat on the earth and stroked the poor animal and told her she had done well, that it was his fault for expecting so much from her, and he hoped she could find it in her heart to forgive him. As he spoke, he noticed something so odd as to be impossible: despite the horse's weight, she barely made an impression in the earth.
Estrella
, thought Francisco,
without the heaviness of our souls we'd all be able to take flight, am I right?
He choked, a rise of emotion that he would not permit; later, when he'd figured a way out of this mess, there would be time for regret and feelings of loss. Instead he hardened himself, unbuckled the straps of the saddle, and pulled it away from the horse's weathered midsection. He then carried it back to the roadway and put it down and sat on it and waited with a heaviness of heart compounded with feelings of intense worry.