He nodded. They stood blinking at the great dust cloud filtering down like yellow pollen upon their heads and arms. He saw a few bright splashes flick from her eyelids when she blinked.
‘Don’t,’ he said. ‘After all, it was only a machine.’
‘I loved it.’
‘We’re always loving everything too much.’
Walking, they passed a shattered wine bottle which steamed freshly as they stepped over it.
They were not far from the town walking single file, the wife ahead, the husband following, looking at their feet as they walked, when a sound of tin and steam and bubbling water made them turn and look at the road behind them. An old man in a 1929 Ford drove along the road at a moderate speed. The car’s fenders were gone, and the sun had flaked and burnt the paint badly, but he rode in the seat with a great deal of quiet dignity, his face a thoughtful darkness under a dirty Panama hat, and when he saw the two people he drew the car up, steaming, the engine joggling under the hood and opened the squealing door as he said, ‘This is no day for walking.’
‘Thank you,’ they said.
‘It is nothing.’ The old man wore an ancient yellowed white summer suit, with a rather greasy tie knotted loosely at his wrinkled throat. He helped the lady into the rear seat with a gracious bow of his head. ‘Let us men sit up front,’ he suggested, and the husband sat up front and the car moved off in trembling vapours.
‘Well. My name is García.’
There were introductions and noddings.
‘Your car broke down? You are on your way for help?’ said Señor García.
‘Yes.’
‘Then let me drive you and a mechanic back out,’ offered the old man.
They thanked him and kindly turned the offer aside and he made it once again, but upon finding that his interest and concern caused them embarrassment, he very politely turned to another subject.
He touched a small stack of folded newspapers on his lap.
‘Do you read the papers? Of course, you do. But do you read them as I read them? I rather doubt that you have come upon my system. No, it was not exactly myself that came upon it; the system was forced upon me. But now I know what a clever thing it has turned out to be. I always get the newspapers a week late. All of us, those who are interested, get the papers a week late, from the Capital. And this circumstance makes for a man being a clear-thinking man. You are very careful with your thinking when you pick up a week-old paper.’
The husband and wife asked him to continue.
‘Well,’ said the old man, ‘I remember once, when I lived in the Capital for a month and bought the paper fresh each day, I went wild with love, anger, irritation, frustration; all of the passions boiled in me. I was young. I exploded at everything I saw. But then I saw what I was doing, I was believing what I read. Have you noticed? You believe a paper printed on the very day you buy it? This has happened but only an hour ago, you think! It must be true.’ He shook his head. ‘So I learned to stand back away and let the paper age and mellow. Back here, in Colonia, I saw the headlines diminish to nothing. The week-old paper – why you can spit on it if you wish. It is like a woman you once loved, but you now see, a few days later, she is not quite what you thought. She has rather a plain face. She is no deeper than a cup of water.’
He steered the car gently, his hands upon the wheel as upon the heads of his good children, with care and affection. ‘So here I am, returning to my home to read my weekly papers, to peek sideways at them, to toy with them.’ He spread one on his knee, glancing down to it on occasion as he drove. ‘How white this paper is, like the mind of a child that is an idiot, poor thing, all blank. You can put anything into an empty place like that. Here, do you see? This paper speaks and says that the light-skinned people of the world are dead. Now that is a very silly thing to say. At this very moment, there are probably millions upon millions of white men and women eating their noon meals or their suppers. The earth trembles, a town collapses, people run from the town, screaming, All is lost!’ In the next village, the population wonders what all of the shouting is about, since they have had a most splendid night’s repose. Ah, ah, what a sly world it is. People do not see how sly it is. It is either night or day to them. Rumour flies. This very afternoon all of the little villages upon this highway, behind us and ahead of us, are in carnival. The white man is dead, the rumours say, and yet here I come into the town with two very lively ones. I hope you don’t mind my speaking this way? If I do not talk to you I would then be talking to this engine up in the front, which makes a great noise speaking back.’
They were at the edge of town.
‘Please,’ said John Webb, ‘it wouldn’t be wise for you to be seen with us today. We’ll get out here.’
The old man stopped his car reluctantly and said, ‘You are most kind and thoughtful of me.’ He turned to look at the lovely wife.
‘When I was a young man I was very full of wildness and ideas. I read all of the books from France by a man named Jules Verne. I see you know his name. But at night I many times thought I must be an inventor. That is all gone by; I never did what I thought I might do. But I remember clearly that one of the machines I wished to put together was a machine that would help every man, for an hour, to be like any other man. The machine was full of colours and smells and it had film in it, like a theatre, and the machine was like a coffin. You lay in it. And you touched a button. And for an hour you could be one of those Eskimos in the cold wind up there, or you could be an Arab gentleman on a horse. Everything a New York man felt, you could feel. Everything a man from Sweden smelled, you could smell. Everything a man from China tasted, your tongue knew. The machine was like another man-do you see what I was after? And by touching many of the buttons, each time you got into my machine, you could be a white man or a yellow man or a Negrito. You could be a child or a woman, even, if you wished to be very funny.’
The husband and wife climbed from the car.
‘Did you ever try to invent that machine?’
‘It was so very long ago. I had forgotten until today. And today I was thinking, we could make use of it, we are in need of it. What a shame I never tried to put it all together. Some day some other man will do it.’
‘Some day,’ said John Webb.
‘It has been a pleasure talking with you,’ said the old man. ‘God go with you.’
‘Adiós, señor García,’ they said.
The car drove slowly away, steaming. They stood watching it go, for a full minute. Then, without speaking, the husband reached over and took his wife’s hand.
They entered the small town of Colonia on foot. They walked past the little shops, the butcher shop, the photographer’s. People stopped and looked at them as they went by and did not stop looking at them as long as they were in sight. Every few seconds, as he walked, Webb put up his hand to touch the holster hidden under his coat, secretly, tentatively, like someone feeling for a tiny boil that is growing and growing every hour and every hour …
The patio of the Hotel Esposa was cool as a grotto under a blue waterfall. In it birds sang, caged, and footsteps echoed like small rifle shots, clear and smooth.
‘Remember? We stopped here years ago,’ said Webb, helping his wife up the steps. They stood in the cool grotto, glad of the blue shade.
‘señor Esposa,’ said John Webb, when a fat man came forward from the desk, squinting at them. ‘Do you remember me – John Webb? Five years ago – we played cards one night.’
‘Of course, of course.’ señor Esposa bowed to the wife and shook hands briefly. There was an uncomfortable silence.
Webb cleared his throat. ‘We’ve had a bit of trouble, señor. Could we have a room for tonight only?’
‘Your money is always good here.’
‘You mean you’ll actually give us a room? We’ll be glad to pay in advance. Lord, we need the rest. But, more than that, we need gas.’
Leonora picked at her husband’s arm. ‘Remember? We haven’t a car any more.??
?
‘Oh. Yes.’ He fell silent for a moment and then sighed. ‘Well. Never mind the gas. Is there a bus out of here for the Capital soon?’
‘All will be attended to, in time,’ said the Manager nervously. ‘This way.’
As they were climbing the stairs they heard a noise. Looking out they saw their car riding around and around the plaza, eight times, loaded with men who were shouting and singing and hanging on to the front fenders, laughing. Children and dogs ran after the car.
‘I would like to own a car like that,’ said Señor Esposa.
He poured a little cool wine for the three of them, standing in the room on the third floor of the Esposa Hotel.
‘To “change”,’ said Señor Esposa.
‘I’ll drink to that.’
They drank. señor Esposa licked his lips and wiped them on his coat sleeve. ‘We are always surprised and saddened to see the world change. It is insane, they have run out on us, you say. It is unbelievable. And now, well – You are safe for the night. Shower and have a good supper. I won’t be able to keep you more than one night, to repay you for your kindness to me five years ago.’
‘And tomorrow?’
‘Tomorrow? Do not take any bus to the Capital, please. There are riots in the streets there. A few people from the North have been killed. It is nothing. It will pass in a few days. But you must be careful until those few days pass and the blood cools. There are many wicked people taking advantage of this day, señor. For forty-eight hours anyway, under the guise of a great resurgence of nationalism, these people will try to gain power. Selfishness and patriotism, señor; today I cannot tell one from the other. So – you must hide. That is a problem. The town will know you are here in another few hours. This might be dangerous to my hotel. I cannot say.’
‘We understand. It’s good of you to help this much.’
‘If you need any thing, call me.’ Señor Esposa drank the rest of die wine in his glass. ‘Finish the bottle,’ he said.
The fireworks began at nine that evening. First one skyrocket then another soared into the dark sky and burst out upon the winds, building architectures of flame. Each skyrocket, at the top of its ride, cracked open and let out a formation of streamers in red and white flame that made something like the dome of a beautiful cathedral.
Leonora and John Webb stood by the open window in their unlit room, watching and listening. As the hour latened, more people streamed into town from every road and path and began to roam, arm in arm, around the plaza, singing, barking like dogs, crowing like roosters, and then falling down on the tile sidewalks, sitting there, laughing, their heads thrown back, while the skyrockets burst explosive colours on the tilted faces. A brass band began to thump and wheeze.
‘So here we are,’ said John Webb, ‘after a few hundred years of living high. So this is what’s left of our white supremacy – you and I in a dark room in a hotel three hundred miles inside a celebrating country.’
‘You’ve got to see their side of it.’
‘Oh, I’ve seen it ever since I was that high. In a way, I’m glad they’re happy. God knows they’ve waited long enough to be. But I wonder how long that happiness will last. Now that the scapegoat is gone, who will they blame for oppression, who will be handy and as obvious and as guilty as you and I and the man who lived in this room before us?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘We were so convenient. The man who rented this room last month, he was convenient, he stood out. He made loud jokes about the natives’ siestas. He refused to learn even a smattering of Spanish. Let them learn English, by God, and speak like men, he said. And he drank too much and whored too much with this country’s women.’ He broke off and moved back from the window. He stared at the room.
The furniture, he thought. Where he put his dirty shoes upon the sofa, where he burnt holes in the carpet with cigarettes; the wet spot on the wall near the bed, God knows what or how he did that. The chairs scarred and kicked. It wasn’t his hotel or his room; it was borrowed, it meant nothing. So this son-of-a-bitch went around the country for the past one hundred years, a travelling commercial, a Chamber of Commerce, and now here we are, enough like him to be his brother and sister, and there they are down there on the night of the Butler’s Ball. They don’t know, or if they know they won’t think of it, that tomorrow they’ll be just as poor, just as oppressed as ever, that the whole machine will have shifted only into another gear.
Now the band had stopped playing below; a man had leaped up, shouting, on the bandstand. There was a flash of machetes in the air and the brown gleam of half-naked bodies.
The man on the bandstand faced the hotel and looked up at the dark room where John and Leonora Webb now stood back out of the intermittent flares.
The man shouted.
‘What does he say?’ asked Leonora.
John Webb translated: ‘“It is now a free world,” he says.’
The man yelled.
John Webb translated again. ‘He says, “We are free!”’
The man lifted himself on his toes and made a motion of breaking manacles. ‘He says, “No one owns us, no one in all the world.”’
The crowd roared and the band began to play, and while it was playing, the man on the bandstand stood glaring up at the room window, with all of the hatred of the universe in his eyes.
During the night there were fights and pummellings and voices lifted, arguments and shots fired. John Webb lay awake and heard the voice of Señor Esposa below, reasoning, talking quietly, firmly. And then the fading away of the tumult, the last rockets in the sky, the last breakings of bottles on the cobbles.
At five in the morning the air was warming into a new day. There was the softest of taps on the bedroom door.
‘It is me, it is Esposa,’ said a voice.
John Webb hesitated, half-dressed, numb on his feet from lack of sleep, then opened the door.
‘What a night, what a night!’ said Señor Esposa, coming in, shaking his head, laughing gently. ‘Did you hear that noise? Yes? They tried to come up here to your room. I prevented this.’
‘Thank you,’ said Leonora, still in bed, turned to the wall.
‘They were all old friends. I made an agreement with them, anyway. They were drunk enough and happy enough so they agreed to wait. I am to make a proposition to you two.’ Suddenly he seemed embarrassed. He moved to the window. ‘Everyone is sleeping late. A few are up. A few men. See them there on the far side of the plaza?’
John Webb looked out at the plaza. He saw the brown men talking quietly there about the weather, the world, the sun, this town, and perhaps the wine.
‘Señor, have you ever been hungry in your life?’
‘For a day, once.’
‘Only for a day. Have you always had a house to live in and a car to drive?’
‘Until yesterday.’
‘Were you ever without a job?’
‘Never.’
‘Did all of your brothers and sisters live to be twenty-one years old?’
‘All of them.’
‘Even I,’ said señor Esposa, ‘even I hate you a little bit now. For I have been without a home. I have been hungry. I have three brothers and one sister buried in that graveyard on the hill beyond the town, all dead of tuberculosis before they were nine years old.’
señor Esposa glanced at the men in the plaza. ‘Now, I am no longer hungry or poor, I have a car, I am alive. But I am one in a thousand. What can you say to them out there today?’
‘I’ll try to think of something.’
‘Long ago I stopped trying. señor, we have always been a minority, we white people. I am Spanish, but I was born here. They tolerate me.’
‘We have never let ourselves think about our being a minority/ said Webb, ‘and now it’s hard to get used to the fact.’
‘You have behaved beautifully.’
‘Is that a virtue?’
‘In the bull-ring, yes, in war, yes, in anything like this, most assuredly y
es. You do not complain, you do not make excuses. You do not run and make a spectacle of yourself. I think you are both very brave.’
The hotel manager sat down, slowly, helplessly.
‘I’ve come to offer you the chance to settle down,’ he said.
‘We wanted to move on, if possible.’
The Manager shrugged. ‘Your car is stolen, I can do nothing to get it back. You cannot leave town. Remain then and accept my offer of a position in my hotel.’
‘You don’t think there is any way for us to travel?’
‘It might be twenty days, señor, or twenty years. You cannot exist without money, food, lodging. Consider my hotel and the work I can give you.’
The Manager arose and walked unhappily to the door and stood by the chair, touching Webb’s coat which was draped over it.
‘What’s the job?’ asked Webb.
‘In the kitchen,’ said the Manager, and looked away.
John Webb sat on the bed and said nothing. His wife did not move.
Señor Esposa said. ‘It is the best I can do. What more can you ask of me? Last night, those others down in the plaza wanted both of you. Did you see the machetes? I bargained with them. You were lucky. I told them you would be employed in my hotel for the next twenty years, that you were my employees and deserve my protection!’
‘You said that !’
‘Señor, señor, be thankful! Consider! Where will you go? The jungle? You will be dead in two hours from the snakes. Then can you walk five hundred miles to a capital which will not welcome you? No – you must face the reality.’ señor Esposa opened the door. ‘I offer you an honest job and you will be paid the standard wages of two pesos a day, plus meals. Would you rather be with me, or out in the plaza at noon with our friends? Consider.’
The door was shut. señor Esposa was gone.
Webb stood looking at the door for a long while.
Then he walked to the chair and fumbled with the holster under the draped white shirt. The holster was empty. He held it in his hands and blinked at its emptiness and looked again at the door through which Señor Esposa had just passed. He went over and sat down on the bed beside his wife. He stretched out beside her and took her in his arms and kissed her, and they lay there, watching the room get brighter with the new day.