Puzzle for Pilgrims (10 page)

On the toppling descent past the dark, secondary church, past the unlit houses where begonias gleamed white on high balconies, Iris kept as far from me as possible, avoiding a chance physical contact from a stumble on the cobblestones. Her wary silence became unendurable, particularly now when the first confusions were gone and I had started to realize to the full the huge change Sally’s death would make for all of us.

We took a twist in the road, past a pig grunting in its sleep by a heap of straw. The colored lights and the glossy-leaved trees of the Zocalo shone below us like a stomacher.

“Martin won’t need a divorce now,” I said.

“No.”

“And you’ll marry him?”

She whispered, “Yes, I’ll marry him.”

“We’d better call him in Acapulco. Let him know.”

Iris pulled the coat around her as if she was cold. “Yes, we’d better call him.”

“He doesn’t know you’re here, does he?”

“No,” she said stiffly, making it clear she had nothing more to say to me.

We dropped into a narrow street like a funnel and suddenly we were in the plaza. It was a change as violent as stepping from midnight into high noon. The little park inside the frame of dark trees was ablaze with color, stalls bright with candied fruit and trashy toys, a rickety bingo stand, a pink children’s swing, and the carrousel with golden horses, sad and peeling. Indians swarmed everywhere; so did dogs and pigs and turkeys. Children stared longing-eyed at posts decorated with flambeaux of spun-sugar candy. And the cathedral, gray-pink behind its frivolous strings of lights, seemed to be dancing in the air.

The hurdy-gurdy music made the square shrill. It mingled with the human noises, the laughter, the shouts, the squabbles. This near, the roar of the revolving carrousel was like the stampede of an army in flight.

I said, “We’ve got to find Marietta. You don’t know her, do you?”

“No.”

“She’s probably in a bar, Jake said. We’d better go to Paco’s. It’s up there on the balcony across from the cathedral. I remember. That’s where most foreigners go.”

Now that Iris had shut me out, I was thinking of Marietta with a kind of excited anxiety. Marietta belonged with fiesta, with colored lights and the pink children’s swing. Marietta would have bought a stick of pink foamy candy and eaten it with the grave relish of an Indian child. Marietta would have ridden on the carrousel, unsmiling, remote, lost in a dream, but part of the carnival.

Marietta who had come to me last night, whose cool kiss had asked me to forget Iris. Marietta, haunted by furies, who had made Jake drive her to Taxco to see Sally.

Why?

I took Iris’s arm and guided her past the carrousel in the direction of Paco’s. She seemed as remote to me now, with my thoughts of Marietta, as I had been to her. I almost resented her for monopolizing all my emotion when Marietta too might be caught in the invisible web that had been spun at the Casa Haven.

The organ sobbed into “Begin the Beguine’, which, here south of the border, sounded Manhattan as the Stork Club. The carrousel lumbered around and around. Two little girls were crouched together on a somber gold horse, their faces white with ecstasy, their pig-tails streaming behind them. A very thin old Indian with a scarlet serape lumbered around straight as an angry cat’s tail. A girl giggled by, waving to a couple of youths in slick, American suits. Then I stopped dead, staring.

I had seen him first as a gleam of yellow coming around on the carrousel, a gleam of yellow hair startlingly out of place behind the glossy black hair of the Mexican riding the horse in front of him. He swung round into full view. He was riding the gold horse lightly as if it were a hunter. He looked about eighteen. His skin was golden from the sun, darker than his hair. A yellow balloon bobbed on a string from his left hand. He was grave, absorbed with the infantile pleasure of circular motion—just as Marietta would have been.

Iris had stopped dead too.

“Martin.”

I turned to her and her face was so stripped that I looked away.

The carrousel started to slow down, losing its synchronization with “Begin the Beguine’. The two little girls, tittering daringly, leaped off their horses while it was still in motion, landing in a tumbled, delirious heap on the confetti-strewed grass. The other customers were clambering down now. Martin was the last to leave. He waited for complete absence of motion, as if to move earlier would be an impoliteness. Then he dismounted solemnly and came straight toward us, the balloon still clutched in his hand.

He didn’t see us at first. And then his gaze fixed on Iris and his face shone with the joy of seeing her.

He ran to us. He took both of Iris’s hands. He twisted the string of the yellow balloon around her finger, making it her balloon.

“Hello, Iris.” He turned to me with his grave prefect’s courtesy. “Hello, Peter.”

I was amazed at his insensitivity. He was holding Iris’s hands and yet he did not seem to notice that anything was wrong.

I said, “I thought you were in Acapulco, Martin.”

“I was.” He pushed back the unmanageable lock of hair. “I just drove up to—”

“… to come to the fiesta,” broke in Iris. “You love the fiesta, don’t you, Martin? Every year you come to the Santa Prisca fiesta.” It was pitiful, her attempt to warn him.

He blinked and said confusedly,” Yes, the fiesta.” And then, uncertainly,” What are you doing here, Iris?”

“She came to see Sally,” I said.

“Oh, Sally.” He seemed to lose interest. He stared down at his bronzed hands. I looked at them too. I noticed a white patch on the second finger of his right hand, where the sun had not touched the skin. It was pathetically obvious now.

I brought out of my pocket the ring that had dropped from Iris’s finger in Sally’s house.

“Your ring, Martin?”

He looked mildly puzzled. “Where on earth did you find it?”

I was going to answer, but Iris swung round on me, the yellow balloon bobbing on its string. Her eyes were blazing with hatred.

“A filthy, low-down trick.”

Martin said, “What’s the matter, Iris?”

“He’s tricked you. The ring was at Sally’s. I—I didn’t know he’d got it. He’s tricked you into admitting you were at Sally’s. And Sally’s dead.”

In spite of the shock of knowing my wife could hate me, I felt a sense of relief. Was this then all it had been, the terror in Iris that had made her faint? Had it just been that she had found Martin’s ring there and was terrified of what
he
might have done to Sally? Just Martin now? Not Iris?

I watched Martin’s face absorbing what Iris had said. The change was a complex of so many emotions that it almost gave the impression of stupidity.

“Dead? Sally dead?”

“Yes, yes.” Iris turned on me again. “Go away, Peter. Leave us alone.”

“But—”

“Leave us alone. Can’t you leave us alone?”

The steam organ was playing again, a sweet, halting tango. Iris’s eyes bored into me, willing me out of existence, willing the destruction of everything except Martin.

I felt beaten, whipped. I said, “I’ll go to Paco’s. Look for Marietta. Join me later.”

I left them. I didn’t look back, but I could see them in my mind, standing there close together, oblivious to the thronging merrymakers, Martin slight, golden, to be protected, always to be protected, and Iris…

As I pushed my way through clusters of children, women with babies slung in shawls at their breasts, and soft-stepping Indians, a wave of excitement swept over the square. People at the far end, near the cathedral, started shouting and then a man darted into the Zocalo from a dark side street. On his shoulders he carried a big, brashly colored effigy of a bull, bedecked with a scaffolding of fireworks. Already the fuse was sputtering gold in the darkness. I remembered that the fiesta of Santa Prisca always climaxed with a fireworks bull, and some of the mass excitement infected me.

The man was alone now in the center of a jostling circle. With a quick flare, the first layer of fireworks ignited. Squibs banged. Red, blue, and yellow stars soared into the air and with them a rain of silver. Wildly bucking like a mock bull, the man charged the crowd, which scattered before him, shouting, screaming, laughing. The stars, the hissing, snapping squibs, exploded around them.

In the weird multicolored light, the red cardboard bull on the man’s shoulders reminded me of the bullfight, of Sally’s jumping up, clapping her little hands, staring bright-eyed.

Blood and the ballet, Peter. Dressed up for death. That’s the only thing that excites them, isn’t it? Death.

The second layer of fireworks blazed with an even greater sparkle and hubbub. The square was afire with the thrill of it. And I thought,
This isn’t death. Sally was death with her deep, dead malice, Iris is death with her love like a disease. And Marietta?

I wanted to see Marietta. I hurried into a side street, past the dimly glowing door of a pulque dive, headed toward the entrance to Paco’s.

You have to go upstairs to Paco’s. Drinks are served on a balcony looking down on the Zocalo. It has a certain shabby pretense to elegance. That’s why the tourists go there. I climbed to the tiny hallway. Crowded in the entrance, a marimba and two violins were playing loudly, competing with the organ below. The noise was deafening.

A scattering of people stood at the inside bar. A few American women in the wrong clothes, schoolteachers probably, were giggling through their idea of the rumba with venal Mexican boys. Other people, Mexican and tourist, were strewed around at tables. French windows stood open, leading to the balcony. I looked around for Marietta’s dark, secret head.

She wasn’t there. I went to the French windows and stepped out onto the terrace. Down in the square, the bull was still on the rampage. The squeals and cries and the organ drowned out the marimba. Sparks and tinsel streamers of light flared up to me.

I saw Marietta at once. She was at a corner table, alone, a tequila in front of her. Her face quivered in and out of brightness as the strange red, yellow, green lights of the fireworks followed each other. She wasn’t looking down into the square. She was in profile to me, gazing out across the red-tiled roofs.

“Marietta.”

She moved her head. The dark hair fell loosely around her face. She wore a green blouse with a white skirt, elegant with a touch of faded glamour, like something from Antibes in the twenties. The green blouse made the dark, unfathomable eyes green as laurel leaves. She looked up at me, calm, abstracted, not smiling and yet intimate.

“Hello, Peter,” she said. “I hope you’ve got a cigarette. I’m too lazy to go to the bar for some.”

I sat down next to her, facing the glow and dazzle of the Zocalo. I handed a cigarette to her and lit a match as her dark head came toward me. My hand was unsteady. I felt like a kid with his first love. But it was fear really, fear for what she might have done or what she might be accused of having done.

I said, “Why on earth did you come here, Marietta?”

She glanced up over the thin trickle of smoke from the cigarette. “I came to see Sally.”

“I know. But why? What did you think you could do? Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I thought it’d be better coming without you. I made Jake drive me down.”

“Jake,” I said. “Jake who you came screaming from last night.”

The vague eyes watched me. “He has a car. I didn’t want to come by bus. I didn’t take him to Sally’s. I left him here. I don’t know what’s happened to him.”

Was that how she thought of me. I wondered? Jake who has a car. Peter who has a couch to sleep on.

Keeping my hands quiet on the table, I said, “And Sally? How was she?”

“Sally?” She shrugged. “The same.”

“She didn’t say anything?”

“Of course she said things. Sally always says things. She had a fine time.”

“Doing what?”

“Oh, a spite fest. Little nasty threats and hints. Enjoying having me in her power. She’s that unbelievable a woman, Peter. She talks about having people in her power. Like the pictures.”

I saw the scene so clearly. Sally taunting Marietta with the hold she had over her, relishing it, not letting her know that she wasn’t going to the police after all.
Making her squirm.

“I shouldn’t have gone,” she was saying. “I only made things worse.” Her eyes met mine again, perfectly at ease. I tried to penetrate their impenetrability. Could anyone put on so good an act, if…?

I said, “And you left her? Sally?”

“What do you think I did—move in with her?”

“I mean, she was all right when you left her?”

“Of course.” She picked up her tequila. “Why?”

“Because now,” I said, “she’s dead.”

Marietta dropped her tequila. The little glass clattered across the table, coming to rest on its side against the central vase of magenta stock. I’d never seen her face like that before. The green eyes came alive with a leaping emotion that had fear in it and a strange, meaningless exaltation too. It was the least expected reaction.

Then I realized that she wasn’t looking at me. She was staring at something over my shoulder. And I knew then that the glow, the new, half-fearful warmth that had thawed her, had nothing to do with what I had said. I doubt if she had even heard me. I turned to follow the direction of her rapt eyes.

Martin had come onto the terrace with Iris at his side.

They joined us at the table. Iris looked white and spent. Martin had her arm tucked into his. In his other hand he held the balloon.

I don’t think he had noticed Marietta. She was just a girl sitting with me. He pulled two chairs together and sat down, still holding Iris’s arm. Once again I was amazed by his absence of sensitivity. The tension in Marietta was so strong I could feel it like the throb of dance music very far away.

And then I remembered that they had quarreled. Sally had deviously engineered a break. They hadn’t seen each other or spoken to each other for years. Maybe he was deliberately ignoring her.

But I was wrong about that too. For he looked away from Iris across the table and saw Marietta. She was in control again. They looked at each other, grave, polite, as if they were people who had met once a long time ago at a house party. Friendly but completely casual. It was such an English meeting that it scarcely seemed real to me. Two people from another planet meeting the way people don’t meet on earth.