Ensemble

from any port. From his own bed, the mayor could look down the hall toward this window, the hall light still on, and gaze through bleary, feverish eyes at this wonder he’d had sent from another land, across the ocean so far, far away. His wife had ordered it from a catalogue; it would remind her of the fishing town she came from. His wife–where was she, this late at night? Why wasn’t she home? She wouldn’t be safe maneuvering that mechanical beast, that smoking tin toy, up and down the hills in this dark. The mayor lay stretched out on his bed, fully clothed, the open letter in his hand. Or maybe it was another letter. Any letter. A letter from her, perhaps, written twenty years ago, still redolent of her toilet-water. It was hot in this room, or then again that could just be the fever. There was music, a murmur of music, in the breeze from the open windows, or maybe that was wagon wheels, creaking creaking creaking. The fan revolved, revolved, the rowboat circled in its whirlpool, the rowboat circled. He was sick. He was too sick even to call for help. But all he needed was a glass of water, a tall glass of water. He was so thirsty, he might be dying. But he wasn’t.

  The barber would start to think in that language he hadn’t spoken in thirty-five years when he was this tired and lights were out. The words of the language were little more than half-heard music now, but a wonderful music that would carry him back to that little country that no longer existed on any map. The words would drop in solid form, like rain, like snow, over that land, filling it up with light and movement. And happiness: The word for house. The word for father. For loved one, for one who loves you–mirror words. The word for mirror. The word for lost, as well. A thousand words combined to recreate that bygone kingdom, and as they combined and recombined in ten thousand ways to describe all he had touched, tasted, and seen as a young man, as a boy, an infant–so he fell to sleep.

  Just before midnight on the last day of June. Other musicians had joined the boy djinni– there were droning strings, hammered strings, reedy pipes, whistling pipes, little drums and cymbals and ankle bells, an asthmatic harmonium. The music whirled and sped, whirled and sped, ever quicker, ever louder. The schoolteacher had never heard or imagined such music. To call it beautiful would be wrong, but to call it anything else would not be enough. It filled his ears–it filled his skull. He never wanted the music or this scene to end. It seemed the librarian understood what he was thinking; she was tapping her fingers against the side of the wagon they sat besides; she was even stomping her foot now and then. He turned to look at her in the halflight. She was smiling, nodding her head, in a trance. She caught his eye, and before he paused to think what she might do if he did so, he kissed her. Maybe she was the type of girl who had been kissed before–maybe she had been kissed many times before–but she seemed to take this as her very first kiss, and the kiss she gave him in return seemed his first, as well. Part of him still thought like a dictionary or cyclopedia: of the magic word “thrall,” of “thralldom,” of “enthralled,” “enthralling,” of charmed adders and alchemical spells and midsummer metamorphoses. His mind raced as if he had imbibed strong spiced wine. This was an opiate’s dream, a lotus-eater’s fantasy, a divine madness. Dervishes must know this delirium; the saints, fakirs, shamans, bodhisattvas of cave and grotto and mosque and stylite must have sought such ecstasy. A bombard of words shot across his mind, like textbooks and primers set free of reason. But the music was so loud now he felt it resonating through his whole body, waves of music spreading from him to her, almost tangible, almost like liquid light. It mattered not what words poured through him and out of him; words meant nothing. He knew at this moment what he must do. What they must do.

  Out into the midst of merrymakers the schoolteacher led his librarian, and the strand of gaily colored dancers broke apart only to link again with them. None of them seemed surprised, least of all the two young village people. Where was his new straw boater? Back in the pine grove. Where was her summer bonnet? Lost to the wind. No matter, no matter. Now part of this revolving human chain, they pounded the earth with primeval rhythm, swayed as one nearer and then farther and then nearer again to the mounting flames. They felt the heat; their skin shone, too, now that half their clothes were off, and it seemed thousands of bracelets and brass anklets and rattling beads and tiny ornamental bells were caught up in the same rhythm, too. The girl had let down her shining hair, the boy had long torn off his ridiculous collar and tie. He knew now he was no longer just an earnest young schoolteacher; neither was she just a naive village librarian. Even with their drab country ways they were of this tribe. They belonged to this new world which was more ancient than these mountains. And they would never be happy again back in that dust-blown, forgotten little village. They didn’t say this; they didn’t think this, but they would know it to be true. They danced and sang as the black coffin burst into flame, and the black bird flew toward the heavens . . . while the music quickened ever more and the valley echoed with bell-like laughter. The young men and women, all these exquisite young men and women around them in their fairytale costumes, laughed with them, clung to them, held tight to their hands and waists, swung them faster and faster around the bonfire. The schoolteacher kissed, was kissed in return, a thousand times, and seemed to feel himself rising like that black crow with the sweet smoke, into the clear night air, where there no words, no memories, and all his past dissolved without them.

  Dawn on the first day of July. Just a few rings of charred earth and stone where the camp had been, trampled ashes in curious rings, a bronze amulet or a broken bracelet or two, perhaps, among the embers. The painted wagons were already far up the road, high in the mountains, above the tree-line, where snow had fallen in the night and the world was ice-covered and still. They tread on crystal flowers, the old people and their old horses, and their breaths clouded the air like cotton wool. No birds sang here, and even the bells were frozen, mute. They were so high up anyone down below might have thought they were walking in the sky, stepping from bright morning star to bright morning star. In the valley far below, the barber was just rising, happiest as always in that first few minutes of the day before some part of himself reminded himself that he was old now, his own hair was now completely gone. Never mind, though, he was rich now, for a village barber, and today he could spend the daylight hours just whistling in the shade if he wanted to. The mayor had not risen with the rest of the village. The mayor still lay sleeping, snoring, dreaming he was drifting on a boat far beyond islands and all he had ever known, drifting farther, farther. . . . Elsewhere, the world was already moving forward as steadily as the clock-hands on the church steeple. Dairymen were done milking their cows; sheep roamed the hills, hounds stretched in the sun, crows laughed at the world, women sent their children scurrying out of kitchens. But today the village library would not open at nine, and the bachelor farmer would wonder why that young tenant in his attic was sleeping so late.

  Quintana Roo

  And What the Traveler Found There

  “The sleep of reason produces monsters.”

  —Spanish proverb

  Then the traveler awoke, sat upright in bed, lit a cigarette; in the lighter’s flash he caught sight of a glassy scorpion scurrying up the cracked adobe wall. An invisible fly hummed around his head, alighting now and then on the back of his neck. Impossible to see and slap. Outside the room’s parallel windows, the hotel’s neon sign blinked green and pink and green and pink: the only light in the world. The sky held no moon or stars; the streets below were unlit, the lamps out in every house. Was it midnight or an hour before dawn? No means to tell; his watch, he now saw, had stopped sometime while he slept—its luminous green hands had, anyway, faded into the night. He traced a wide circle in the air with the burning tip of his cigarette.

  The distant glow of what first looked like more cigarettes surfaced and sank out of sight again outside the window: a car or truck’s tail-lights far off in the hills beyond, leaving this world, heading for open desert, which peopl
e here called infierno, hell. If you want to cheat the devil, they were known to say, keep to the coast—it was a proverb; it rhymed somehow.

  (In the desert outside this world, at the edge of a village called Ozuama, he remembered seeing a man before a market stall, flaying a pig which hung by its hind hooves from a tree. With one casual stroke, the man had sliced open the pig’s belly. Glistening innards spilled out like a cache of jewels, an image from a dream... The thought had then come to him that this country’s sad history was nothing but the interpretation of dreams and the book, his book, would fail at even that—those dreams were much closer to nightmares. Upon leaving the village, he had seen the pig again, its naked, waxy body swaying in the hot wind. A swarming armor of flies covered half the pig’s body. He had had to press his hand to his mouth. It was true: that place belonged to nightmares, the domain of the devil.)

  The watch, when shook, ticked softly like an insect, but (holding it toward the tip of his cigarette so he could see better) there was no movement of