Puzzle for Pilgrims (3 page)

“Peter…”

“And if the wife makes trouble, shoot her over to me.” I felt taut and hard, but the way ice is taut and hard over water. “I’ll help you get your man if he’s too feeble to help himself. God knows, I hope it’s heartbreaking when you get him. But if she acts up, I’ll fix Sally Haven for you. And I’m not being noble. It’s just plain, ornery vindictiveness.”

That was too much for her. She stood in front of me, quite still, crying. Large, bright tears wet her lashes and slid down her cheeks.

The futile unhappiness of it all—for me, for her—moved me. I put my arm around her and stroked her hair. I felt then that maybe I was the one with the strength, after all.

“Don’t worry, baby,” I said softly. “It’ll all pan out. And, believe it or not, I’ll probably live.”

Martin left Sally. She let him go with a quietness which should have aroused their suspicions. Iris left too. I helped her pack and drove her to the airport. When she boarded it, she asked me in a tight voice not to start divorce proceedings until she gave me the word. We didn’t kiss. We shook hands stiffly. I caught a glimpse of her white, obsessed face in the window as the plane roared away.

After that, life had been smooth for them for a few days in Acapulco. That, of course, was just because Sally had been preparing her attack. Then the attack came. I heard about it from Iris. One evening her voice came through thinly on the long-distance wire from the coast.

“Peter, please don’t be angry. I’ve got to talk. There’s nobody but you.”

Sally had arrived that afternoon and thrown a scene. First she had attacked Iris, calling her every gutter name outside of the dictionary. Then she had turned on Martin. She told Iris that he was wanted by the English police for embezzlement and could never go back there. She said he had consorted with the lowest types in Taxco and that he was a drunk. But those had only been preliminaries, getting her tongue in. She came to the point in her own good time. She was never going to give a divorce; she would die before she gave him a divorce. And not only that. For the three years of the marriage, Martin had been penniless; she had given him large sums of money and on each occasion she had made him sign an IOU. If he didn’t go back to her, she would sue him for the return of every cent.

“She means it, Peter. It’s all lies about Martin. I know. But she can twist things.” Iris added forlornly, “Peter, what are we going to do?”

That was what showed me the real extent of my defeat. The thing between us was so dead for her that she was asking my advice as if I were a godfather or an old friend of the family. I wasn’t comforting. I growled something about her taking the rough with the smooth and hung up.

Then I went out and got drunk. That’s really all Mexico City had to offer me. I couldn’t leave, because I had to wait for word from Iris to start divorce proceedings. I had nothing to do. Occasionally, I’d make a halfhearted tourist trip, but Aztec pyramids and Catholic churches aren’t much balm. Mostly I hung around bars—not the chromium bars where American businessmen borrow Mexican hats from the orchestra while their wives kick their shoes off under the bars and let their make-up run, but Mexican bars where they play dominoes and shoot dice and sometimes, because it’s sissy not to, hit their best friends in the face.

Two weeks before the bullfight I was in a bar, a few days after Iris called, when I met Marietta Haven. In New York it would have been a wild coincidence, my meeting Martin’s sister, but in Mexico everyone runs into everyone sooner or later. She was sitting at the bar of La Cucaracha in front of a Martini. We started to talk, not knowing each other. I thought she was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen.

Even now, when I know her as well as the lines on my own palm, I find it difficult to describe Marietta. She was tall and dark as her brother was slight and fair. She was slender, too, like a spray of pussy willow, and there was a quality of spring about her, fresh, with clean, dark hair and the sort of flawless country skin which made the French pedant write that God, when he created the perfect woman, gave her an English complexion. But that wasn’t the essence of Marietta Haven. The real Marietta was always elusive. If she was spring, it was spring with a late frost and a sad backward glance at winter. You felt that, deep inside her, something secret was locked. There’s a street in Mexico City called the street of the Niños Perdidos—the lost children. Sometimes I thought of Marietta like that—a lost child. And sometimes, when her cool green eyes forgot me for her own incalculable reflections, I thought of her as Ixtacihuatl, the Sleeping Woman, the snowbound, brooding volcano that watches over Mexico City.

I never knew why she talked to me that first night, or why, having come into my life, she stayed. But then I never could tell what she was thinking or feeling or even if she was thinking or feeling anything. She hardly ever talked about Martin, Iris, or Sally, either—only an occasional phrase that dropped into the conversation when it was least expected.

We saw each other every day, but there had never been talk of a romance or even of an affair between us. And yet she must have known dozens of other men in Mexico City, although she never spoke of them and I never saw them. Sometimes I wondered if she was a very good person who knew what a raw deal her brother had given me and was trying to make compensation. Sometimes I wondered if she was just a bum after free drinks—because I always paid.

She went everywhere with me, except to the bullfights. She didn’t like the bulls. That’s why I’d been alone that afternoon when I met Sally.

The drive home from the bull ring ended in the quiet, tree-lined block of the Calle Londres where my apartment was. I left the car on the street and walked to the door leading to my patio. Someone had left a large, shiny rooster, with its feet tied together, pegged into the brown strip of grass outside the door. It watched me with a baleful eye.

Near it, but detached from it, an Indian squatted on the sidewalk behind a cloth on which lay a dozen tiny mounds of peanuts and a plate of cucumbers, fancily cut into slices. He was there all day every day. I had never seen him sell anything.

I ducked under the bougainvillea vine and went up the steps to my apartment, which had its own outside entrance on the second floor. I let myself in, thinking how I was going to dislike the emptiness inside.

But the living room wasn’t empty. Marietta was sitting in a cream brocade chair by the window, drinking tequila. She sat cross-kneed, showing long, thoroughbred legs. She never wore a hat, and her dark hair gleamed in the late sunshine, brown with a touch of gold and seemingly in motion like the gold-splashed water of a trout stream. She was elegant and cool, as always, the way you expected English women to look in
The Tatler
when you hadn’t actually seen
The Tatler
for a long time.

She got up and came to me.

“The
velador
let me in, Peter. He’s used to me now. He probably thinks I’m the Mexican equivalent of your little piece of fluff.”

She had an unopened envelope in her hand. She held it out to me. She wasn’t smiling and something was wrong for her. I could tell that at once.

“Here’s a letter from your wife,” she said. “It’s just come special delivery. You’d better read it. I have a feeling something nasty is brewing.”

I opened the thin air-mail envelope.

Peter:
I’m frightened for Martin. Sally was here yesterday. She threatened him again. And this time it’s real. She says she knows something. I don’t know what it is but something he’s done here, and she says she has proof. She says if he doesn’t go back to her, she’s going to the police. Why are people like that allowed to live? I hate her. I could kill her. Peter, do you remember that you offered to help me with her? I never dreamed I’d take you up on it. But pride doesn’t seem important any more. Martin will never leave me—whatever she does. I know that. Peter, please, someone’s got to stop her. I can’t. There isn’t anyone but you. You might be able to do something. Go to her, talk to her, try and make her see it can’t help her to destroy Martin. God, hasn’t this made me a monster? Peter, I’m so sorry.

Iris

I handed the letter to Martin’s sister. She was so much a part of my life now that it seemed the natural thing to do.

“I saw Sally at the bullfight,” I said. “She came and sat with me.”

“Sally at the bullfight. How repulsive.” Marietta read the letter and handed it back to me without comment. “I saw her too.”

“Where?”

“She came to my house this morning.”

“What did she say?”

“A lot of unpleasant things.”

“What unpleasant things?”

“The sort of unpleasant things she’s so good at saying.”

“You think it’s serious? This threat against Martin?”

Marietta’s eyes were green, but so dark a green that sometimes they looked black. She said, “I can’t think about Sally on an empty stomach. Let’s eat.”

We went downstairs, past the rooster and the Indian with his heaped peanuts. I was still sucker enough to feel Iris’s unhappiness almost as if it were my own. I thought of Sally with her small head, her heavy hair, her eyes bright with passion while the bull jabbed the horse. She was dangerous, all right. Maybe I should have stayed, tried to do something.

We went to a little Mexican restaurant. Marietta liked Mexican food hot enough to take the plating off the cutlery. English palates seem to go that way in foreign countries. She sat across from me at the rickety table behind a vase of skimpy white daisies, eating the blazing food and looking as cool as her native Thames. In spite of her outer placidity, I could still feel the change in her. She didn’t say much, but it wasn’t that, because she never said much. It was something more subtle. I wondered if it had to do with Sally’s visit to her. Sally hated her, I knew. Marietta had tried to prevent the marriage. There had been a terrific clash.

I could never anticipate Marietta’s moods. Because I had no active desire to do anything myself, I found her incalculability refreshing. Sometimes she wanted to go to the most expensive night club in town and dance, gravely and well, all night. Other times she dragged me to the lowest Mexican dives where she drank tequila straight for hours without the faintest change in her appearance or her behavior.

That evening, after I had paid the check, she said, “Do you mind if we go to the Delta?”

“It stinks.”

“I know it stinks.” She gave me that blinding smile of hers which was mocking either me or herself. “We need bad smells. Bad smells and Sally go together.”

That was unusual too. That she should mention Sally of her own accord.

As soon as we pushed through the swing doors of the Cantina Delta, the smell came. I had never tried to define it. The ingredients, I felt, were better left unanalyzed. A few men lounged at a drab bar to the right. On the left were booths, most of which were filled with boys and men in shirt sleeves, tightly wedged together and jabbering. Unpainted stairs loomed in the center, leading to a second floor.

Marietta always liked being upstairs. With her proud walk and her black suit, perfectly tailored at the shoulders and the narrow hips, she was preposterously out of place. But hardly an eye was raised to watch her. She was too familiar a sight by now. We went up the stairs. We took one of the tables by the grimy windows that looked down onto the activity of the Calle 16 de Septiembre. That was my doing. With the window tilted open, the smell was less marked.

The waiter brought tequila without our asking. He brought salt and cut limes too. Marietta sprinkled salt on the base of her thumb in the Mexican fashion, sipped the tequila, and nibbled on a slice of lime. She watched me from the clear, unrevealing eyes.

“Worried?” she asked suddenly.

“What about?”

“About Iris.”

“You know me by now. That’s my theme song.”

She put the lime down neatly on the plate with one of her fastidious hands. “Doesn’t it ever strike you as idiotic to go on being in love with her?”

“Sure it strikes me as idiotic. So what?”

She looked down through the window at the narrow, cluttered sidewalk below. Her head in profile on the long, white neck reminded me of a tulip. It was absurd, of course. People’s heads don’t look like tulips.

I said, “Is it serious? This threat Iris talked about?”

Marietta lit one of her own cigarettes. She wouldn’t smoke my respectable Belmonts, only the cheapest, strongest Mexican tobacco. She looked up at me over the burning wax match. “Of course.”

“Sally has something on Martin?”

She shrugged.

“Something that could get him into trouble with the police?”

“If you like.”

“What is it?”

Almost angrily, she said, “Do you have to be told everything?”

“Of course not. But she could send Martin to jail?”

“Martin? Me? One of us. Both of us.”

“You too?”

She didn’t answer. She stubbed her cigarette into the grimy ash tray as neatly as she had put down the squeezed slice of lime.

“But she has proof of this thing?” I insisted.

“Enough. She can twist things. If you’ve got money, you can twist anything with the police.”

“And she’ll go through with it?”

“She’ll go to the police in Taxco tomorrow if Martin doesn’t go back to her. She told me so. I believe her.”

“Then Martin goes to jail or goes back to her?”

“I suppose so.”

“Then he’ll go back to her.”

She shook her dark head. “He won’t go back. And Sally knows it.”

“Why not? Because he loves Iris so much?”

She shook her head again. She was looking beyond me at the Mexican hair, shiny with oil, that showed above the booth behind me.

“No,” she said. “Not because he loves Iris.”

“Then why?”

Someone at one of the other grimy tables had a guitar. He started to strum softly, flat, monotonous chords.

Marietta was still looking beyond me. She said slowly,” When we were children, we used to live in Hertfordshire.” She laughed. “That sounds like Noel Coward, doesn’t it?”