“Mlle. Duhamel, would you consider being my friend?” Lucien asked, more seriously, he realized abashedly, than most men ask women to be their wives. “Would you consider friendship with a man who is sincere only at the core of his ambiguous heart and in the way he wishes to be a friend to you? A man whose very right hand is false?”
Mlle. Duhamel murmured adoringly, “I was just thinking that I held a hero’s hand.”
Lucien sat up a little. The words had taken him completely by surprise. “A hero’s hand,” he said sarcastically, but not without contentment.
THE CAR
“I had Carlos wash the car today,” Nicky said as he sat down at the table.“I saw it. It looks beautiful.” Covertly, she removed a bewildered ant from the tablecloth. “It was sweet of you to remember.”
“Oh, you’ll find I have a very good memory.”
They smiled at each other, a little shyly, and with the intent concern of newlyweds. Actually, they had been married a year, but they thought of these last two weeks as their real honeymoon. In the last year, their marriage had been a matter of his flying up to San Francisco on rare weekends to see her, and of her going down to Mexico for the summer to see him. But now Florence had given up her teaching job and had come to live with him in San Vicente.
“It’s nice I can see the car from the porch,” Florence remarked, as she did almost every evening.
She gazed below her, half across the town, at the parking lot behind the Hotel Estrella del Sud. The Estrella del Sud, the best hotel in town, was where she had been staying when she met Nicky a year and a half ago on her summer vacation. The farthest car of the three in the lot, the big aquamarine Pontiac, was hers. It was the first car she had ever owned. She had bought it with her own money, saved over a period of years. The car was more than a year old, but still looked brand-new, because she was meticulous about its weekly washing and she had never gotten a scratch on it.
“I wish you could drive it, too, Nicky.”
“Oh, I don’t mind. I’ll enjoy it enough.” He could not drive because of his weak eyes.
“Have more soup, Nicky.”
“No, thanks, I couldn’t. It’s awfully good, though.”
She went into the kitchen and came back with a platter on which sat a well-browned roast surrounded by braised potatoes, carrots, and peas. She set it down modestly.
“Boy!” Nicky exclaimed, though he took little interest in food. “You’re feeding me much too well, Florence.”
“I got the roast yesterday in Mexico City. I wanted to surprise you.”
“You certainly did.” He began carving.
“The meat markets in this town are a sight, Nicky. They’re so smelly, I can’t even get through the door. I’ve decided once a week I’ll drive to Mexico City for fresh butter and meat.”
“The meat’s not as bad as it looks, you know.” He smiled at her as he sat down. “The natives look pretty healthy, don’t they?”
Florence nodded agreeably. It was what he always said whenever she questioned the cleanliness of anything in Mexico. She gave a start, and under the table drew up one foot and pinched at her ankle. There was a flea inside her sock, but it was foolish to try to kill it by pinching, she knew, because only a pair of thumbnails were of any use. She could tell a flea easily from an ant now. Fleas moved in stealthy jerks, while ants went steadily in one direction, even if it was a wrong one. Compared to fleas, ants were innocent, friendly little creatures.
She helped Nicky to more and more food, despite his protestations, but otherwise they said little to each other. She listened to the tinkling music of the cantinas’ jukeboxes that were starting up here and there with the fall of night. From the hill where they lived, they had a splendid view of pink-roofed houses spilling one atop the other down a hillside, of a small, bushy valley just below where pigs and chickens wandered, of the dark green treetops in front of the cathedral’s yellow towers, and finally of the mountains that lay in no range but loomed up everywhere, around the full circle of the horizon. She felt very happy here with Nicky.
“Would you like some more tea?” she asked when they were starting on the chocolate layer cake she had baked. Nicky did not drink coffee except in the mornings, and she had adjusted her habits to suit his.
“I would if it’s convenient.”
While she was in the kitchen, Nicky stood up and strolled to the balustrade of the porch. He was a slightly built man of about forty, hardly taller than Florence, of Belgian birth and Swiss and German descent. Usually his face had an expression of impersonal amiability, an expression sometimes seen on the faces of people whose business it is to be pleasant to everyone. He was manager of the second-best hotel in the town.
He put his lean hands on the porch rail and tested its steadiness. He had built the porch himself the week before Florence arrived. The two-room house he had rented would have been nothing without the porch. They were saving all the money they could to buy a house on the other side of the cathedral. The new house cost twelve thousand pesos in down payment, but they had forty-five thousand now, counting the four thousand dollars Florence was going to draw from her bank in the States. Nicky wanted very much to own a house, because he felt that no one was anything in San Vicente unless one did. He was looking forward to spending the rest of his life in a comfortable house with a comfortable wife.
“Nicky, what’s the matter with the water?” Florence called to him. “It won’t run.”
Nicky came into the little galley of a kitchen. A thin trickle of water wheezed into the dishpan Florence held.
“I’ve been waiting a long time. It’s on full force.”
“Couldn’t be the drought already,” Nicky said, half to himself. “I guess it is the drought starting, all right. It’s early yet—but we’d feel it first up here on the hill.”
After a few days, the water stopped running in the daytime, but came on mysteriously for a few minutes around ten in the evening. Hearing it belch through the taps they had left open, Nicky and Florence would hurry and fill all the buckets and pans in the house. A week later, there was no more water at any time, and they were forced to haul it, pairs of buckets by pairs of buckets, from the nearest fountain, which was at the foot of the hill. The distance down to the fountain was only a few hundred yards, but the climb back made the chore exhausting and even dangerous. The cobblestone lane was steep, and it was a common thing to see people slip and take bad falls.
Since Nicky had little time to wait in line at the public fountain and Florence was rather weakened by diarrhea, they hired a woman to work half days for them. It was an extra expense, but under the circumstances a necessary one. Nicky knew they would have no water until June when the rains came, and this was only the middle of March.
In saddle oxfords and socks, a blouse and tweed skirt, Florence walked self-consciously past Pepe’s Bar into the shade of the plaza’s trees. She looked up at the open balcony of Pepe’s, where the usual six o’clock crowd jammed the little tables. The balcony was bright with sports clothes, and through the brassy din of the four-piece Mexican band, she could catch American phrases.
“Oh, Freddie, you didn’t!”
“I did! Lord knows what was in it, but I ate it!”
A shriek of laughter that could only be American laughter.
She longed to be up there with them, and yet she wondered if she would be happy even then. Nicky had taken her up to the balcony one evening, but he hadn’t known anyone. “Oh, these are mostly new tourists,” he had said. And all of them had been so much better dressed than they that Florence had felt subdued and uncomfortable. Besides, she didn’t like to drink, not even beer.
She bought some peanuts in a newspaper cornucopia for fifty centavos, and took them to a bench. She broke the shells slowly, eating the nuts one at a time, watching the balcony with the wistful expression of a child
who is there and yet not there, listening at the same time for the car that would come up the narrow street at the corner of the plaza. Nicky had taken the car yesterday with his friend Mr. Sigismundo to drive to Mexico City, as they both had business to do for the hotel. It was the first night she had spent alone in Mexico, and now she was eager for Nicky’s return. The peanuts were nearly gone when she heard the familiar motor, and the change to first gear for the climb to the plaza’s level.
“Nicky!” She stepped into the road and waved as the car crept toward her. Here was one thing she needn’t feel ashamed of before the people on the balcony. Not many of them had a car as beautiful as hers.
“Hi, Florence!”
Florence started to open the door on Nicky’s side, when she saw that the backseat was full of Mexicans. They were not Mexicans like Mr. Sigismundo, but Mexicans in sombreros and dirty shirts, four or five of them.
“It’s all right. Get in.” Nicky made room for her in front.
Then one of the Mexicans opened a rear door, and there was a squawk of chickens. One by one they got out, two with chickens’ legs in each hand, one with a tiny white goat in his arms, and with bowing and tipping of hats they bade their adieus to Nicky and Alfredo.
“Adíos, señor! Muchas gracias!”
“Por nada! Adíos!—Adíos, señor!” Nicky smiled and nodded to each in turn.
“Who are they?” Florence asked.
“Oh, we picked them up this side of Puebla,” Nicky replied. “How’ve you been?”
“All right.” Florence twisted around, and inspected the back of the car. There was a swipe of mud on the edge of the seat, marks of dusty feet on the floor, a blob from a chicken. “Nicky, why’d you let them bring a goat in here?”
Nicky gave the backseat a glance. “Oh, I’ll clean that, Florence.”
“Did they mess it?” Alfredo Sigismundo asked. He pulled into the parking lot and stopped.
“Not much,” Nicky said. “Buena noche, Carlos!” he called to the caretaker.
Florence didn’t trust herself to speak until Alfredo left them. Then she said, “Nicky, promise me you’ll never pick up people like that in my car again.”
Nicky smiled. “Why, Florence, they were stuck on the road with a broken cart axle. You couldn’t just pass them by.”
Florence sat tensely in the leather chair, her Spanish lesson book open on her lap, watching Maria, the cleaning woman, moving about on the porch. In a minute, Florence thought, Maria would come to the threshold and jabber something about going home, and at that instant something inside her was going to burst in a million pieces.
The woman moved more and more slowly, idly readjusted a plate, whisked an ant off the tablecloth, because everything was ready and had been for nearly an hour. But Nicky had not arrived. Florence knew he was in one of the cantinas, drinking beer, talking on and on with Mr. Sigismundo and a lot of other Mexicans. It was the fifth time he had been very late. The third time, she remembered, she had gone down to get him, but it had been an embarrassing experience. Women were not supposed to set foot in the ordinary cantinas, so she had stood in the street in front of the open door until Mr. Sigismundo had seen her and poked Nicky. Then she had moved into the shadow by the wall and waited until Nicky had come out. Nicky was never really drunk but he could get tipsy enough not to realize or care that he kept her waiting. What annoyed her most was that when he came home on such evenings, he would invite Maria and her dirty little daughter, if they were around, to have dinner with them. Imagine! Mexican help eating their good food at their own table!
She watched Maria seat herself on the porch rail and run her fingers through her long, loose hair. Florence would gladly have dismissed her for the day, but she was not sure of the Spanish, and besides, the woman’s presence in the house somehow paralyzed her. Florence hated her. She had haggled forty-five pesos out of Nicky for half-time work, when fifty a month was standard for full-time, she ate their food behind their backs and moreover was lazy and deliberately neglectful of the main thing she had been hired for—to see that there were always three or four buckets of water in the house. And when Florence could get Nicky to speak to her, she would say she hadn’t been able to understand a thing that the señora told her to do. Just let a servant behave like that in the States and see what would happen!
Florence’s face took on a childlike expression of affront as she gazed at Maria. Her face was round, good-natured, and naive. When she was pleased, it broke out in a small, upcurving, wooden-angel smile, and when she was surprised or hurt, these emotions were recorded, not promptly but accurately, in her face and even in her body. Now there was hardly a trace of lipstick on her thin, soft lips, and the powder she had put on an hour before had vanished. Her nose shone as it generally did with a kind of dead whiteness between splotched pink and white cheeks. She had gained weight from lack of exercise (in California she had played a lot of tennis), and there had grown about her an air of no longer caring, of having been defeated, as anyone might have been, by privation and primitive living. She looked older than thirty-one, and even by San Vicente’s informal standards she was dowdy.
She twisted around to see the clock, but it was already too dark in the room. The chair creaked loudly as she moved. It was a sprawling, uncomfortable chair that Nicky had inherited from the hotel where he worked. Florence suspected they had got rid of it because it was full of fleas. The back and seat were made of one piece of leather, and though shaped invitingly, it was hard as a rock to sit on. A month ago, she had torn her last pair of silk stockings from the States on the rough edge of the leather. On that day, too, she remembered, she had waited for Nicky to come home to dinner, an especially good dinner, and he had not come until nearly midnight. She swallowed, as though to thrust back the memory of the miserable evening lest she start weeping and the woman see her. The woman was coming.
“All right, all right!” Florence interrupted.
The torrent of shrill, complaining words stopped abruptly.
Then, because her voice had been harsh, Florence said very courteously, with a smile and gestures toward the door, “Sta beeyen, señora, sta mooey beeyen.”
With a final shrug and an amused little smile that Florence knew was at her bad accent, the woman ambled off.
She felt better as soon as the woman was gone. The house was all hers again. She no longer wanted to fling herself across the bed and weep, and she almost decided not to scold Nicky. She really hated arguments, and she had held her tongue many times so Nicky might not think he had married a nagger. She slanted her Spanish book toward the light and stared at a declension chart of irregular verbs.
“Concha!—Concha!”
It was Maria, calling her daughter in the street. Tomorrow she would tell Nicky she had stayed long overtime, and Nicky would pay her extra, though he would tell Florence that he hadn’t. She had once thought Nicky economical, even a little stingy, but these two months had changed her mind. He spent at least seventy pesos a week on beer alone, and as far as she could see let himself be cheated by every tradesman in town.
The cathedral chimes struck, and she got up restlessly. She stood on one foot, debating whether to turn the light on, scratching flea bites on her calf with the laces of her shoe. She listened for Nicky’s step, but all she heard were the street sounds that came with startling clarity from just behind the wall, the clatter of a burro’s tiny hooves, Mexican men’s voices drifting past in pairs and the slap of their sandals on the stones, the whack and slide of the boards the children rode like sleds down the hill, making the cobbles as slick as glass.
The lane beside the house was another thing wrong! It was not only the noisiest, busiest lane in town, but the steepest. She fell on it about twice a week, fell on her face or sat down hard, always amid giggles of children. In the dark, it was risking life and limb to use it unless one went backward on all fours. After dusk,
she felt imprisoned in the house. Why they didn’t put steps in, she couldn’t see. There was enough picturesque about San Vicente without having lanes that broke people’s necks.
Every direction her thoughts took led to the same impasses of discomfort. Nicky did not seem to realize how hard it was for her, how lonely it was without her friends, how much more confining it was in a Latin country for a woman than for a man. She had thought he would have a few American friends in the town, but all his friends seemed to be Mexicans. The time he had taken her to the Barreras’ had been awful. They had tried to be nice, but neither the husband nor the wife had known any English, and she had sat through the whole evening not understanding a word, keeping a pleasant expression on her face until she felt like a ninny.
She walked slowly through the foyer and onto the porch. The light from the Estrella del Sud’s dining room fell on the parking lot behind it. She stared at her car and felt better, though the tears rose in her eyes until the twinkles of the rear bumper looked like stars with long points. Often when she was lonely or depressed, she would look at her car for long moments, while all sorts of things ran in her mind, thoughts of home, the voices of her mother and her brother and sisters saying things she had heard them say and had not known she remembered. She would think of the places she had been to in the car last summer with her sister Clara. Yellowstone Park and the geysers. The Black Hills of South Dakota. The roadstands where they had stopped for hamburgers and Cokes. Good American hamburgers, served in clean paper napkins fastened with a toothpick. . . .
There was a thump on the door, followed by three facetious little raps, and she wiped her eyes and mechanically pushed her hair into place before she went to the door and opened it.
“Hello. I forgot my keys,” Nicky said, smiling as he came in. His small blue eyes blinked affably, but the lids were pink and swollen as they always were after he had been drinking. “Sorry I’m late.”