Alejandro was too optimistic to fear that Antonio would hear of the evening through Señor Martinez, but he spent over a thousand pesos bribing the staff. For a few days, Alejandro felt nervous and resentful. He was a little afraid of his brother, though when he watched him in the plaza from time to time, he could see no change in him. And when the idea occurred to him that Antonio might take action, he dismissed it as he dismissed his family—he had lived at the hotel since his return from Acapulco—because Antonio was essentially as stupid and ineffectual as his parents. Meanwhile, Alejandro had moved in with an emotionally starved American woman resident of the village, whose young Mexican husband had just abandoned her. He had often called on her before, and now she welcomed him for as long as he cared to stay.
Not long after his discharge from the hotel, on one of the afternoons he was idling about the village, too proud, still too well off to worry about earning more money so soon, he wandered into a bookshop off the plaza and saw Mrs. Kootz. Mrs. Chester Kootz came every summer to the village and stayed three or four months. Though she was a millionairess and a widow, Alejandro had never considered her because she was so ugly. She wore her hair in a gray bun that could hardly be seen under the strands that escaped it and that hung down like gray rags. Her dresses were uniformly gray, too, and so shapeless they might have been slept in. The joke was, she had been cited year after year as one of the ten wealthiest women of America, and that if she did not look it, then she must be all the wealthier for not spending money on adornment.
In a bitter mood, Alejandro flirted brazenly with Mrs. Kootz in the bookshop. Mrs. Kootz glanced at him, dragged on her cigarette, and chose a book. She had known Alejandro by sight since he had been a little centavo-beggar at the bus stop. Alejandro smiled cockily to himself and strolled out of the bookshop in the tracks of Mrs. Kootz’s run-over oxfords. She started up the lane that led to the big house she always rented. But the way was so steep, Alejandro lazily turned back, slouched onto a bench in the shade of the plaza’s trees, locked his fingers over his flat waist, and dozed for a while, lulled by the hum of Spanish voices around him, by the squeals of children at play.
The idea took form in the middle of a little dream: he was enjoying some delicious pleasure because he was married to Mrs. Kootz and had money. The dream fell away, but the idea remained. He would court Mrs. Kootz and try to marry her. It made him snicker now to think about it. But would the Countess laugh? Alejandro quit the shade of the plane tree as Gautama had quit his Bodhi Tree, with a purpose.
At about six that evening, Alejandro glanced up at the balcony of a bar in the plaza and saw Mrs. Kootz at a table alone, drinking one of her brandies. Alejandro went up the stairs without even raking a comb through his hair or pulling his thumbs down the sides of his collar, his habit before going into action. He walked directly to her table, and asked if he might join her.
She drew on her cigarette, squinted up at him, then gestured to the opposite chair.
Alejandro changed his tactics from those of the afternoon. Now he was the gentleman the Countess would have advised him to be. He behaved as if the sleek Countess had been sitting opposite him instead of dowdy Mrs. Kootz. He asked if she was enjoying her stay, and she replied not particularly, that she came every year because of her asthma. She spoke briefly of her ailment and with an unfeminine frankness. She was interested in buying a house in the village but couldn’t because she was not a citizen or a permanent resident. This gave an opening for the remark that if she married a Mexican, she could buy it in his name, but even he felt it so pointed he could not say it.
“Do you know the Countess Lomolkov?”
Mrs. Kootz shook her head. “Who’s she?”
“A lady who was here in the spring. From New York, too. We spent a month together in Acapulco.”
Mrs. Kootz said nothing.
Alejandro talked pleasantly for nearly an hour, but nothing of his charm seemed to penetrate. Mrs. Kootz only drank brandy after brandy, sipping from a glass of Carta Blanca as a chaser. Then she said something about the fleas in her leather chair eating her alive and that she wanted to go. He accompanied her to her house, lending her an arm over the rough spots. He lingered at her door, waiting to be asked in to dinner.
“Good night,” she said, without glancing over her shoulder.
Alejandro turned away cheerfully, remembering the hundred-peso bill she had taken out to pay the check, one of many others in her big worn alligator wallet. He had insisted on paying the check, of course. Appraisingly he looked at her dark green convertible parked in the alley, flecked with Mexican mud, but still showing its thirty-five-thousand-peso lines.
In the plaza he saw Antonio and Pancho. Antonio came toward him with one hand outstretched.
“Is from your mother,” Antonio muttered in Spanish as he passed him at arm’s length, as if he did not want to befoul himself with touching him. Even Pancho had barely greeted him with a nod.
Alejandro looked at what had been dropped into his hand. It was a rosary with a small silver cross he had seen before. He had not been home in over two months, and evidently his mother was concerned for his soul.
With a big bouquet of red frangipani, Alejandro called on Mrs. Kootz the next morning at eleven. A Mexican girl opened the gate, then went to see if Mrs. Kootz would admit him. Finally Mrs. Kootz herself came slowly down the flagstone walk, frowning against the sun and the smoke from her cigarette, wearing the same dress she had worn yesterday. Her forefinger was in the pages of Guizot’s History of France.
“What’s up?” she asked hoarsely.
“Good morning.” He smiled, twiddling the bouquet. “I beg to see you a moment. Inside?”
She looked at him. “Come on in.”
He followed her up the steps to the front hall and into a large sunny room with a tile floor and scatter rugs, with comfortable-looking corners that held books and reading lamps and Mexican leather easy chairs. Mrs. Kootz went toward one corner where a laden ashtray and an open bottle of brandy showed she had been sitting.
“Drink?” she asked, refilling her glass.
Alejandro shook his head. “These are for you.” He advanced with the bouquet and bowed as he presented it.
She took the flowers as if she had not noticed them before. “Thanks,” she said in a tone of surprise. “Juana?” When the girl appeared, she gave her the flowers and made gestures at a nearby vase. “Aq-wah.”
The girl started to remove the tamarind pods from the vase she had indicated.
“No, not that one,” Mrs. Kootz said impatiently. “Find an empty one.”
The girl looked blank.
Alejandro rapped out a sentence or two in Spanish and Juana left the room promptly.
Mrs. Kootz stared after the girl, said “Damn,” and tossed off the brandy. She put another cigarette in her mouth, but before Alejandro could get her a light, she had struck on her thumbnail one of the American wooden matches she always carried about her.
“Do you like Wagner?” Alejandro asked, fingering a biography of Wagner that lay on a table.
“Some. His art songs.” She sat down heavily in her chair.
“He is too noisy for me,” Alejandro said prissily.
Mrs. Kootz looked at him as she had looked at the flowers. “Say, what’s your name?”
“Alejandro. Alejandro Palma, at your service.” He bowed again, then seated himself gently on the arm of a divan. “Do you know why I came to see you, Mrs. Kootz?”
“Why?”
He stood up. An amused smile had forced itself to his lips and he lowered his head. “Because I am in love with you.” He had decided the simple, direct approach was best. “I admire your mind, your . . .” But what could he say about her? The hag!
Mrs. Kootz got up, too, started to pour another brandy, then strolled out onto the side porch, the only move inspi
red by self-consciousness she could recall ever making.
Alejandro was beside her, insinuating his slight body into her arms. He kissed her before she could recover from her surprise to thrust him away, kissed her again.
A few yards below and in front of them, a girl named Hermalinda Herrera glanced up from her own roofless terrace, where she sat chewing gum and reading the latest issue of Hoy, and saw an unbelievable sight: the “bad boy” Alejandro kissing Señora Kootz muy caliente and the señora liking it, too! That afternoon, the whole village learned of it.
No one would have believed it, if Alejandro and the señora had not been seen together so often thereafter. Could they be thinking of getting married? Alejandro’s Mexican girlfriends twitted him, and he told them frankly that he was going to marry the señora and for her millions of pesos. He told the guides in the plaza and his friends in Cesar’s Cantina. Whether it got back to Mrs. Kootz before he clinched the marriage was no worry to him. It would sound like typical gossip, might even be good propaganda: he was having trouble convincing Mrs. Kootz that their getting married was at all possible, that someone could love her and want to make her his wife. Mrs. Kootz had somehow forgotten she was a human being, but he was teaching her to remember. But the bridge between the two languages did not seem likely to be crossed. Only the Mexicans seemed to talk, and Mrs. Kootz had no Mexican friends and only a nodding acquaintance with a few Americans.
They were married in a little chapel of the village with the traditional ceremony of two rings and thirteen pieces of silver money, symbolic of the union of their worldly estates. Antonio would not even look at Alejandro now when they met, and Concha only stole sidelong glances at him. All his Mexican friends were in awe of him, and he could make them comfortable with him only by getting them drunk.
Immediately, Señora Palma bought in the name of Alejandro Palma the house she had rented for so many years from Ysidro Barrera, a gift shop owner in the village. Interior decorators came from New York and Mexico City and argued with one another over the deployment of mountains of furniture and drapes Señora Palma had ordered, and when they at last went to work, each seemed bent on making his or her contribution as hideous as possible in order to blame the others. The house became a famous atrocity of the town, and Señora Palma allowed groups of gaping tourists to shuffle through it twice a day, conducted by guides who told them it was an example of the “luxuriant embellishment” of the Americans who had made the village their permanent home, which it was, and told them it was exquisite, which most of them believed. Señora Palma was flattered, as she had been flattered by Alejandro’s attentions. She had grown less introverted, and for a while Gibbon, Toynbee, Guizot, and Prescott were forgotten in the planning of her house and the honeymoon trip she and Alejandro would make in the fall. After the house was running smoothly under the care of three maids who would be paid two hundred pesos each per month, she and Alejandro were going to drive in the green convertible to Mexico City, New Orleans, Charleston, New York, the American West, San Francisco, and home again, enjoying themselves where they found things to enjoy, spending money as they pleased. She had never known what pleasure it was to have money until Alejandro showed her how to spend it. She had never known what pleasure companionship was, or what it was to be loved. And she was proud of him: he was handsome, and his grooming inspired a kind of terror and reverence in her. Most of all, and with her self-analyzing temperament she realized it and admitted it, the novelty of him pleased her, the fact that he was a Mexican, that he was so young, that despite all the odds he had come so far with his ludicrous ambitions, his veneer of cosmopolitan gentleman. And his crumbs of information on the Negro problem, Wagnerian music, and Russian history! In another environment such determination might have made a Napoleon of him, or a Henry Ford. As a historian, she respected his intensity.
While preparations for the American tour went on, Alejandro indulged himself in sprees around the village. He bought drinks for whole cantinas, bought gifts of silver and leather for Mexican girlfriends and many new American girls. How much easier it was to get an American girl now that his tailor-made clothes proclaimed from across the plaza that he was rich! There was really no limit to the money he could spend now. He gazed with a dreamy smile at the five-figured numbers in the señora’s account books, at her stock reports, the Mexican bank account that was in his name as well as hers. And he owned the house, too, one of the biggest in the village. At seventeen!
The night before their departure for the honeymoon, Alejandro decided to visit Cesar’s for a final tequila with his old cronies. He heard the jukebox from the cantina as he turned up the lane from the plaza. It played a gay ranchero song that he loved, and he sang with it:
Quien dijo miedo, muchachos?
Si, para morir nacimo-o-os!
Traigo mi cuarenta y cinco
Con sus cuatro cargadores!
He stood for a moment on the threshold of the cantina, smiling on everyone. Drunken shouts greeted him, many stood up and opened their arms, because even if he were not everyone’s personal friend, he had money and would buy rounds of drinks. As the jukebox stopped, a mariachi in the corner began a fast rollicking song on his guitar.
Then Alejandro saw his brother Antonio sitting at one of the little tables. His was the only unfriendly face. Antonio was drunk, and Pancho was beside him, his solemn face frowning and worried. There was something so unfitting in Antonio’s being here, something so frightening in Antonio’s being drunk, that Alejandro hesitated to go in.
Then Pancho stood up and, with his hands in his pockets, still frowning, strolled forward, veered toward the jukebox just to the right of Alejandro, then furtively motioned for Alejandro to step back from the door. Alejandro stepped back into the alley.
“Go home!” Pancho whispered. “To the house of your parents! By way of the barranca!”
Alejandro smiled, but Pancho had turned away and was already strolling back to Antonio.
“Alejandro! Coming in?” someone yelled.
Still smiling, Alejandro waved a hand in a general good-bye, and walked back down the alley. Go home to the house of his parents, indeed, and by the back way? Not on the night before the great trip. He didn’t care to get into a fight with Antonio, so he’d give up Cesar’s tonight, but back to that mud hovel his parents lived in?
It happened at the foot of the steep lane that led to his big house. Two figures stepped out of the shadows only inches away from his shoulders, and simultaneously they struck at his back. The impact nearly pitched him forward on his face, and when he staggered upright again, he felt he was going to faint.
“’Ey!” he called, but they had already disappeared, on the run.
Then the cobblestones came up and hit him in the face. He crawled around, trying to rise, murmuring for help, for someone, anyone. Then, after a long time, two men came and with loud voices lifted him up and asked him questions.
“To the house of my parents,” Alejandro said in a voice as weak as a whisper. He waved a hand in a certain direction, and he spoke in Spanish. He was dying. No doubt of it. Dying, and there would be no more honeymoon, no more pesos to spend, no more American girls. As the men bore him away, he thought of Antonio sitting at the very table in Cesar’s where he and la contesa . . .
His mother, who undressed him in the hut, found the wounds in his back. Then she called to her husband, who had been standing outside while she did the work of undressing and washing the body. When her husband opened the door, the music of an American dance tune came louder from the hotel on the hill. She pointed to the two tiny spots of blood on either side of Alejandro’s spine. He had been killed by the daggers with square, notched blades that close up the flesh when they are withdrawn, so there is almost no bleeding. In between her sobs, the American dance music came. Finally, the man went to the window and closed the shutter against it, but still the music came.
A few minut
es later, they heard a hesitant knock at the door. Alejandro’s mother opened the door cautiously, a candle in her hand. She saw an American woman, a very ugly American woman of about fifty years.
“What do you wish?” she asked politely.
“Is Alejandro here?” the woman asked in heavily accented Spanish.
The mother hesitated. “He is here. Who are you, if I may ask you?”
She knew how to say it. She remembered it from the day of the wedding. “I am his wife,” she said.
Then Alejandro’s mother slowly raised her hands, the candle dropped, and she let out a wailing, insane scream that reached all the way to the village, and echoed and reechoed across the black hills.
THE HOLLOW ORACLE
The black mass of the house sprang out of the darkness, and he tripped on the wooden step. He knocked on the screen-door frame, seized the knob and wrenched it back and forth as though he must be let in before a pursuer overtook him. Like a murderer he held the powerful clawhammer straight down at his side, in a grip that made the hammer a part of his arm, welded in the ache of his muscles. He shook the door until the sound grew crazy in the silence, and he stopped, losing then the momentum that had carried him the two miles down the road, the murderer’s momentum that had started twenty minutes before, like the beginning of the act itself. In the stillness there was time to hear his own gasping breath, to feel the eyes in the dark behind him. He pressed close to the house, making no sound.