The Stories of Paul Bowles (26 page)

He got up. Again he spent a quarter of an hour or so searching the room, scuffing piles of refuse under the tables, kicking the furniture over to examine the under part, emptying drawers of their dust and litter. He lit a small cigar and returned to the bed. His oblique eyes looked almost closed in the light of the candle.

“Where is it?” he said.

“There is none. But I have something more precious.”

“What?” He looked at her with scornful disbelief. What could be more precious than money?

“Untie my hands.”

He gave her the use of one hand, holding the other arm firmly while she fumbled in her clothing. In a moment she drew forth a small parcel done up in newspaper, and handed it to him. He placed it on the bed and bound her hands together. Then in a gingerly fashion he lifted the parcel and smelled of it. It was soft, and slightly wet.

“What is it?”

“Open it,
hombre.
Eat it. You know what it is.”

Suspiciously he removed the outer layer of paper and held the contents close to the candle.

“What is this?” he cried.

“Ya sabes, hombre,”
she said calmly.
“Cómelo.”

“What is it?” he said again, trying to sound stern; but there was fear in his voice.

“Eat it, son. You don’t have the chance every day.”

“Where did you get it?”

“Ah!” Doña Faustina looked mysterious and wise, and gave no further answer.

“What do I want of it?” said the young man presently, looking down at the little object in his hand.

“Eat it! Eat it and have the power of two,” she said cajolingly.

“Brujerías!”
he exclaimed, still without putting the thing down.

A moment later he added, speaking slowly: “I don’t like witchcraft. I don’t like it.”

“Bah!” Doña Faustina snorted. “Don’t be stupid, son. Don’t ask questions. Eat it, and go on your way with the force of two. Who will ever know? Tell me that! Who?”

This argument appeared to weigh with the young man. Suddenly he lifted the thing to his mouth and bit into it as if it had been a plum. While he ate he looked once at Doña Faustina darkly. When he had finished, he walked around the room tentatively for a moment, his head slightly on one side. Doña Faustina watched him closely.

“How do you feel?” she inquired.

“Bien,”
he said.

“Two,” she reminded him. “Now you have the power of two.”

As if inspired by the fortifying suggestion, he walked to the bed, threw himself down on it and lay with her again briefly. This time she kissed his forehead. When it was over he rose, and without undoing the rope that bound her hands, without saying a word, he went out of the door and down the stairs. A minute or so later she heard the front door close. At the same time the candle, which had burned down to its base, began to flicker wildly, and soon the room was in darkness.

ALL NIGHT DOÑA FAUSTINA LAY
perfectly still on her bed, sleeping now and then, and during the periods of wakefulness listening to the slow dripping of the mist outside her windows. In the morning Carlota, still fearful, opened her door a crack, and apparently finding everything in the corridors in a normal state went to Doña Faustina’s room.

“Ay, Dios!”
she cried when she saw Doña Faustina lying with her clothing partially ripped away and her hands lashed together. “Oh, God! Oh, God!”

But Doña Faustina was calm. As Carlota undid the rope, she said: “He did no harm. But I had to give him the heart.”

Carlota looked at her sister with horror.

“You’re mad?” she cried. “The police will be here any minute.”

“No, no,” Doña Faustina reassured her, and she was right: no police arrived to search the house again. Nothing happened. At the end of two weeks they made another trip, and a little while later still another. Two days after they had returned from this one, Doña Faustina called Carlota into her room and said to her: “There will be a child.”

Carlota sat down slowly on the bed.

“How terrible!”

Doña Faustina smiled. “No, no. It’s perfect. Think. It will have the power of thirty-seven.”

But Carlota did not seem convinced. “We don’t know about those things,” she said. “It may be a vengeance.”

“No, no, no,” said Doña Faustina, shaking her head. “But now we must be more careful than ever.”

“No more trips?” said Carlota hopefully.

“I shall think about it.”

A few days later they were both in the rose garden sitting on a bench.

“I have thought,” said Doña Faustina. “And there will be no more trips.”

“Good,” replied Carlota.

Toward the end of the year Doña Faustina was confined to bed, awaiting the birth of the child. She lay back comfortably in the crooked
old bed, and had Elena come and sweep out the room for the first time in many months. Even when the floor was clean, the room still reeked of the garbage that had lain there for so long. Carlota had bought a tiny crib in the town; the purchase had awakened interest in their activities on the part of the townspeople.

When the time arrived, Elena and Carlota were both in the room to assist at the birth. Doña Faustina did not scream once. The baby was washed and laid beside her in the bed.

“A boy,” said Elena, smiling down at her.

“Of course,” said Doña Faustina, beginning to nurse him.

Elena went down to the kitchen to tell José the good news. He shook his head gloomily.

“Something bad in all his,” he muttered.

“In all what?” said Elena sharply.

“Who is the father?” said José, looking up.

“That is Doña Faustina’s secret,” Elena replied smugly, rather as if it had been her own.

“Yes. I think so too,” said José meaningfully. ‘I think there is no father, if you want to know. I think she got the child from the Devil.”

Elena was scandalized. “Shameless!” she cried. “How can you say such a thing?”

“I have reasons,” said José darkly. And he would say no more.

Things went smoothly at the inn. Several months passed. The baby had been named Jesus Maria and was in perfect health—
“un torito,”
said Elena, “a real little bull.”

“Of course,” Doña Faustina had replied on that occasion. “He has the power of thirty-seven…” Exactly then Carlota had been taken with a violent fit of coughing which managed to cover the rest of the sentence. But Elena had noticed nothing.

The rainy season had finished again, and the bright days of sunlight and green leaves had come. José went in search of fruit once more, wandering down through the garden, crouching over most of the time to creep beneath the hanging walls of vines and tendrils. Again one day he cut his way to the tank, and stood on the edge of it looking toward the ramp, and this time he saw the monster just as it slid forward and disappeared beneath the surface of the water. His mouth dropped open. Only one word came out:
“Caimán!”

He stood still for several minutes looking down at the dark water. Then he edged along the side of the tank to the place where the path had been the year before. It had completely disappeared. No one had been to the tank in many months; there was no indication that such a corridor had ever existed there in the mass of vegetation. He returned the way he had come.

It was a scandal, thought José, that such a beast should be living on Doña Faustina’s property, and he determined to speak to her about it immediately. He found her in the kitchen talking with Elena. From his face she saw that something was wrong, and fearful perhaps that he was going to say just what he did say a moment later, she tried to get him out of the room.

“Come upstairs. I want you to do something for me,” she said, walking over to him and pulling him by the arm.

But José’s excitement was too great. He did not even notice that she was touching him. “Señora!” he cried. “There is a crocodile in the garden!”

Doña Faustina looked at him with black hatred. “What are you saying?” she said softly and with a certain concern in her voice, as if the old man needed to be treated with gentleness.

“An enormous
caimán!
I saw it!”

Elena looked at him apprehensively. “He’s ill,” she whispered to Doña Faustina. José heard her. “Ill!” he laughed scornfully. “Come with me and wait a little. I’ll show you who’s ill! Just come!”

“You say in the garden?” repeated Doña Faustina incredulously. “But where?”

“In the great tank, señora.”

“Tank? What tank?”

“The señora doesn’t know about the tank? There’s a tank down below in the orchard.
Sí, sí, sí,”
he insisted, seeing Elena’s face. “I’ve been there many times. It’s not far. Come.”

Inasmuch as Elena seemed to be on the point of removing her apron and, accepting his invitation, Doña Faustina changed her tactics. “Stop this nonsense!” she shouted. “If you’re ill, José, go to bed. Or are you drunk?” She stepped close to him and sniffed suspiciously. “No?
Bueno.
Elena, give him some hot coffee and let me know in an hour how he is.”

But in her room Doña Faustina began to worry.

THEY GOT OUT
just in time. Carlota was not sure they ought to leave. “Where shall we go?” she said plaintively.

“Don’t think about that,” said Doña Faustina. “Think about the police. We must go. I know. What good does it do me to have the power of thirty-seven if I pay no attention to what they tell me? They say we must leave. Today.”

As they sat in the train, ready to pull out of the station, surrounded by baskets, Doña Faustina held Jesus Maria up to the window and made his tiny arm wave good-by to the town. “The capital is a better place for him in any case,” she whispered.

They went to a small
fonda
in the capital, where the second day Doña Faustina conceived the idea of applying at the nearest
comisaría
for employment as police matron. Her physical build, plus the fact that, as she told the lieutenant, she was afraid of no human being, impressed those who interviewed her, and after various examinations, she was accepted into the force.

“You’ll see,” she said to Carlota when she returned that evening in high spirits. “From now on we have nothing to worry about. Nothing can harm us. We have new names. We are new people. Nothing matters but Jesus Maria.”

At that very moment the inn was swarming with police. The news of the
caimán,
which José in his obstinacy insisted was really there, first to Elena and then to others in the market, had reached them and awakened their curiosity once again. When it was found that there was not one, but a pair of the beasts, in the hidden tank, the police began to look more closely. No one really believed even now that it was Doña Faustina and her sister who were responsible for the disappearance of the dozens of infants who had vanished during the past two or three years, but it was felt that it would do no harm to investigate.

In a dark corner of the laundry, under one of the washtubs, they found a bundle of bloodstained rags which on closer inspection proved beyond a doubt to be the garments of an infant. Then they discovered other such rags stuffed in the windows to fill the spaces left by broken panes. “They must be Jesus Maria’s,” said the loyal Elena. “The señora will be back in a day or so, and she will tell you.” The police leered.

The
jefe
came and looked around the laundry. “She was not stupid,” he said admiringly. “She did the work here, and
they
”—he pointed out toward the orchard—“took care of the rest.”

Little by little all the stories from roundabout concurred to make one unified mass of evidence; there was no longer much doubt as to Doña Faustina’s guilt, but finding her was another matter. For a while the papers were full of the affair. Indignant articles were spread across the pages, and always there was the demand that the readers be on the lookout for the two monstrous women. But it turned out that no picture was available of either of them.

Doña Faustina saw the newspapers, read the articles, and shrugged her shoulders. “All that happened long ago,” she said. “It has no importance now. And even if it had, they could not catch me. I have too much power for them.” Soon the papers spoke of other things.

Fifteen years passed quietly. Jesus Maria, who was unusually bright and strong for his age, was offered a position as servant in the home of the Chief of Police. He had seen the boy about with his mother for several years, and liked him. This was a great triumph for Doña Faustina.

“I know you will be a great man,” she told Jesus Maria, “and will never bring dishonor upon us.”

But eventually he did, and Doña Faustina was inconsolable.

After three years he grew bored with his menial work, and went into the army, carrying with him a recommendation from his employer to a close friend, a certain colonel who saw to it that Jesus Maria was pleasantly treated in the barracks. Everything went well for him; he was constantly promoted, so that by the time he was twenty-five he had become a colonel himself. It may be observed that to be a colonel in the Mexican army is not so great an attainment, nor is it necessarily a sign of exceptional merit. However, there is little doubt that Jesus Maria’s military career would have continued its upward course, had he not happened to be in Zacatecas at the time of the raids on the villages thereabout by Fermin Figueroa and his band. As one more privilege in the endless chain of favors granted him by his superiors he was put in charge of the punitive expedition that was sent out in pursuit of Figueroa. Jesus Maria could not have been completely without ability, nonetheless, since on the third day out he succeeded in taking the leader prisoner along with thirty-six of his men.

No one ever really knew what happened in the small mountain village
where the capture took place, save that Figueroa and the bandits had all been tied up in a sheep corral, ready to be shot, and when a few hours later a corporal had arrived with six soldiers to carry out the execution, the corral was empty. And it was even said, after Jesus Maria had been stripped of his rank, that a sheepherder had seen him enter the corral in the bright afternoon sunlight when everyone else was asleep, loosen the ropes that bound Figueroa, and then hand him his knife, whereupon he turned his back and walked away. Few believed the sheepherder’s story: colonels do not do such things. Still, it was agreed that he had been inexcusably careless, and that it was entirely his fault that the thirty-seven bandits had escaped and thus lived to continue their depredations.