Cities of the Plain

  THE LAST TIME he was to see her was in the same corner room on the second floor of the Dos Mundos. He watched from the window and saw her pay the driver and he went to the door so that he could watch her come up the stairs. He held her hands while she sat half breathless on the edge of the bed.

  Estas bien? he said.

  Si, she said. Creo que si.

  He asked was she sure she had not changed her mind.

  No, she said. Y tu?

  Nunca.

  Me quieres?

  Para siempre. Y tu?

  Hasta el fin de mi vida.

  Pues eso es todo.

  She said that she had tried to pray for them but that she could not.

  Porque no?

  No se. Crei que Dios no me oiria.

  El oira. Reza el domingo. Dile que es importante.

  They made love and lay with her curled against him and not moving but breathing very quietly against his side. He did not know if she was awake but he told her the things about his life that he had not told her. He told her about working for the hacendado at Cuatro Cienegas and about the man's daughter and the last time he saw her and about being in the prison in Saltillo and about the scar on his face that he had promised to tell her about and never had. He told her about seeing his mother on stage at the Majestic Theatre in San Antonio Texas and about the times that he and his father used to ride in the hills north of San Angelo and about his grandfather and the ranch and the Comanche trail that ran through the western sections and how he would ride that trail in the moonlight in the fall of the year when he was a boy and the ghosts of the Comanches would pass all about him on their way to the other world again and again for a thing once set in motion has no ending in this world until the last witness has passed.

  The shadows were long in the room before they left. He told her that the driver Gutierrez would pick her up at the cafe in la Calle de Noche Triste and take her to the other side. He would have with him the documents necessary for her to cross.

  Todo esta arreglado, he said.

  She held his hands more tightly. Her dark eyes studied him. He told her that there was nothing to fear. He said that Ramon was their friend and that the papers were arranged and that no harm would come to her.

  El te recogera a las siete por la manana. Tienes que estar alli en punto.

  Estare alli.

  Quedate adentro hasta que el llegue.

  Si, si.

  No le digas nada a nadie.

  No. Nadie.

  No puedes traer nada contigo.

  Nada?

  Nada.

  Tengo miedo, she said.

  He held her. Dont be afraid, he said.

  They sat very quietly. Down in the street the vendors had begun to call. She pressed her face against his shoulder.

  Hablan los sacerdotes espanol? she said.

  Si. Ellos hablan espanol.

  Quiero saber, she said, si crees hay perdon de pecados.

  He opened his mouth to speak but she put her hand to his lips. Lo que crees en tu corazon, she said.

  He stared past her dark and shining hair toward the deepening dusk in the streets of the city. He thought about what he believed and what he did not believe. After a while he said that he believed in God even if he was doubtful of men's claims to know God's mind. But that a God unable to forgive was no God at all.

  Cualquier pecado?

  Cualquier. Si.

  Sin excepcion de nada? She pushed her hand against his lips a second time. He kissed her fingers and took her hand away.

  Con la excepcion de desesperacion, he said. Para eso no hay remedio.

  Lastly she asked if he would love her all his life and she'd have touched her fingers to his mouth but he held her hand. No tengo que pensarlo, he said. Si. Para todo mi vida.

  She took his face in her hands and kissed him. Te amo, she said. Y sere tu esposa.

  She rose and turned and held his hands. Debo irme, she said. He stood and put his arms around her and kissed her there in the darkening room. He would have walked her down the hallway to the head of the stairs but she stopped him at the door and kissed him and said goodbye. He listened to her steps in the stairwell. He went to the window to watch for her but she must have gone along the street beneath him because he could not see her. He sat on the bed in the empty room and listened to the sounds of all that alien commerce in the world outside. He sat a long time and he thought about his life and how little of it he could ever have foreseen and he wondered for all his will and all his intent how much of it was his own doing. The room was dark and the neon hotel sign had come on outside and after a while he rose and took his hat from the chair by the bed and put it on and went out and down the stairs.

  AT THE INTERSECTION the cab stopped. A small man with a black crape armband stepped into the street and raised his hand and the cabdriver took off his hat and set it on the dashboard. The girl leaned forward to see. She could hear trumpets muted in the street, the clop of hooves.

  The musicians who appeared were old men in suits of dusty black. Behind them came the pallbearers carrying upon their shoulders a flowerstrewn pallet. Wreathed among those flowers the pale face of a young man newly dead. His hands lay at his sides and he jostled woodenly on his coolingboard there astride the shoulders of his bearers and the wild notes from the dented gypsy horns carried back from the glass of the storefronts they passed and back from the old mud or stuccoed facades and a clutch of women in black rebozos passed weeping and children and men in black or with black armbands and among them led by the girl the blind maestro shuffling with his small steps and look of pained wonder. Behind them came two mismatched horses drawing to a weathered wooden cart and in the bed of it unswept of its straw and chaff a wooden coffinbox of handplaned boards pinned with wooden trunnels and no nails to it like some sephardic box of old and the wood blacked by scorching it and the blacking sealed with beeswax and lamp-oil so that save for the faint wood grain of it it looked a thing of burnished iron. Behind the cart came a man bearing the coffinlid and he carried it upon his back like death's penitent and his clothes and he were blackened with it wax or no. The cabdriver crossed himself silently. The girl crossed herself and kissed the tips of her fingers. The cart rattled past and the spoked wheels diced slowly the farther streetside and the solemn watchers there, a cardfan of sorted faces under the shopfronts and the long skeins of light in the street broken in the turning spokes and the shadows of the horses tramping upright and oblique before the oblong shadows of the wheels shaping over the stones and turning and turning.

  She put up her hands and pressed her face into the musty back of the cabseat. She sat back, one hand over her eyes and her face averted into her shoulder. Then she sat bolt upright with her arms beside her and cried out and the driver wrenched himself around in the seat. Senorita? he said. Senorita?

  THE CEILING of the room was of concrete and bore the impression of the boards used to form it, the concrete knots and nailheads and the fossil arc of the circlesaw's blade from some mountain sawmill. There was a single sooty bulb that burned there with a grudging orange light and a millermoth that patrolled it in random clockwise orbits.

  She lay strapped to a steel table. The steel was cold against her back through the short white shift she wore. She looked at the light. She turned her head and looked at the room. After a while a nurse came in through the gray metal door and she turned her stained and dirty face toward her. Por favor, she whispered. Por favor.

  The nurse loosed the straps and smoothed her hair back from her face and said she would return with something for her to drink, but when the door closed she sat upright on the table and climbed down. She looked for some place where they might have put her clothes but save for a second steel table against the far wall the room was empty. The door when she opened it led to a long green corridor dimly lit and stretching away to a closed door at the end. She went down the corridor and tried the door. It opened onto a flight of concrete steps, a rail of metal pipe. She descended t
hree flights and exited into the darkened street.

  She did not know where she was. At the corner she asked a man for directions to el centro and he stared at her breasts and continued to do so even as he spoke. She set out along the broken sidewalk. She watched the paving for glass or stones. The carlights that passed fetched her slight figure up onto the walls in enormous dark transparency with the shift burned away and the bones all but showing and then passing cast her reeling backwards to vanish once more into the dark. A man pulled up in a car and drove beside her and talked to her in low obscenities. He pulled ahead and waited. She turned into a dirt alley between two buildings and crouched shivering behind some battered steel oildrums. She waited a long time. It was very cold. When she went out again the car was gone and she went on. She passed a lot where a dog lunged at her silently along a fence and then stood in the fencecorner shrouded in its own breath silently watching her go. She passed a darkened house and a yard where an old man also in nightclothes stood urinating against a mud wall and these two nodded silently to each other across the darkened space like figures met in a dream. The sidewalk gave out and she walked on in the cold sand along the roadside and stopped from time to time to stand tottering while she picked the little goathead burrs from the soles of her bleeding feet. She kept the haze of light from the city before her and she walked a long time. When she crossed the Boulevard 16 de Septiembre she kept her arms folded tightly at her bosom and her eyes lowered in the glare of the headlights, crossing half naked in a hooting of carhorns like some tattered phantom routed out of the ordinal dark and hounded briefly through the visible world to vanish again into the history of men's dreams.

  She went on through the barrios north of the city, along the old mud walls and the tin sides of warehouses where the sand streets were lit only by the stars. Someone was singing on the road a song from her own childhood and she soon passed a woman walking toward the city. They spoke good evening each to each and passed on but the woman stopped and turned and called after her.

  Adonde va? she called.

  A mi casa.

  The woman stood quietly. The girl asked do I know you but the woman said that she did not. She asked the girl if this were her barrio and the girl said that it was and the woman then asked her how it could be that she did not know her. When she did not answer the woman came slowly back down the road toward her.

  Que paso? she said.

  Nada.

  Nada, the woman said. She walked in a half circle around her where she stood shivering with her arms crossed over her breasts. As if to find some favored inclination in the blue light of the desert stars by which she would stand revealed for who she truly was.

  Eres del White Lake, she said.

  The girl nodded.

  Y regresas?

  Si.

  Por que?

  No se.

  No sabes.

  No.

  Quieres ir conmigo?

  No puedo.

  Porque no?

  She didnt know. The woman asked her again. She said that she could come with her and live in her house where she lived with her children.

  The girl whispered that she did not know her.

  Te gusta tu vida por alla? the woman said.

  No.

  Ven conmigo.

  She stood shivering. She shook her head no. The sun was coming soon. In the dark above them a star fell and in the cold wind before the dawn papers loped and clutched and rattled briefly in the spines of the roadside growth and loped on again. The woman looked toward the desert sky to the east. She looked at the girl. She asked the girl if she was cold and she said that she was. She asked her again: Quieres ir conmigo?

  She said that she could not. She said that in three days' time the boy she loved would come to marry her. She thanked her for her kindness.

  The woman raised the girl's face in her hand and looked at her. The girl waited for her to speak but she only looked into her face as if to remember her. Perhaps to read at second hand the shapes of the roads that had led her to this place. What was lost or what was ruined. Whom bereft. Or what remained.

  Como se llama? the girl said, but the woman did not answer. She touched the girl's face and took away her hand and turned and went on along the dark of the road out of the darkened barrio and did not look back.

  Eduardo's car was gone. She crept shivering along the alley under the warehouse wall and tried the door but it was locked. She tapped and waited and tapped again. She waited a long time. After a while she went back out to the street. Her breath pluming in the light along the corrugated wall. She looked back down the alley again and then went around to the front of the building and through the gate and up the walkway.

  The portress with her painted face seemed unsurprised to see her standing there clutching herself in the stenciled shift. She stepped back and held the door and the girl entered and thanked her and went on through the salon. Two men standing at the bar turned to watch her. Pale and dirty waif drifted by mischance in from the outer cold to cross the room with eyes cast down and arms crossed at her breasts. Leaving bloody footprints in the carpet as if a penitent had passed.

  HE SEEMED to have dressed with care for the occasion although it may have been that he had business elsewhere in the city. He slid back the goldlinked cuff of his shirt to consult his watch. His suit was of light gray silk shantung and he wore a silk tie of the same color. His shirt was a pale lemon yellow and he wore a yellow silk handkerchief in the breastpocket of the suit and the lowcut black boots with the zippers up the inner sides were freshly polished for he left his shoes outside his door several pair at a time as if the whorehouse hallway were a pullman car.

  She sat in the saffroncolored robe he'd given her. Upon the antique bed where her feet did not quite reach the floor. She sat with her head bowed so that her hair cascaded over her thighs and she sat with her hands placed on the bed at either side of her as if she might be afraid of falling.

  He spoke in reasoned tones the words of a reasonable man. The more reasonably he spoke the colder the wind in the hollow of her heart. At each juncture in her case he paused to give her space in which to speak but she did not speak and her silence only led inexorably to the next succeeding charge until that structure which was composed of nothing but the spoken word and which should have passed on in its very utterance and left no trace or residue or shadow in the living world, that bodiless structure stood in the room a ponderable being and within its phantom corpus was contained her life.

  When he was done he stood watching her. He asked her what she had to say. She shook her head.

  Nada? he said.

  No, she said. Nada.

  Que crees que eres?

  Nada.

  Nada. Si. Pero piensas que has traido una dispensa especial a esta casa? Que Dios te ha escogido?

  Nunca crei tal cosa.

  He turned and stood looking out the small barred window. Along the limits of the city where the roads died in the desert in sand washes and garbage dumps, out to the white perimeters at midday where smoke from the trashfires burned along the horizon like the signature of vandal hordes come in off the inscrutable wastes beyond. He spoke without turning. He said that she had been spoiled in this house. Because of her youth. He said that her illness was illness only and that she was a fool to believe in the superstitions of the women of the house. He said that she was twice a fool to trust them for they would eat her flesh if they thought it would protect them from disease or secure for them the affections of the lover of whom they dreamt or cleanse their souls in the sight of the bloody and barbarous god to whom they prayed. He said that her illness was illness only and that it would so prove itself when at last it killed her as it soon would do.

  He turned to study her. The slope of her shoulders and their movement with the rise and fall of her breath. The bloodbeat in the artery of her neck. When she looked up and saw his face she knew that he had seen into her heart. What was so and what was false. He smiled his hardlipped s
mile. Your lover does not know, he said. You have not told him.

  Mande?

  Tu amado no lo sabe.

  No, she whispered. El no lo sabe.

  HE SET OUT the pieces loosely on the board and swiveled it about. I'll go you one more, he said.

  Mac shook his head. He held the cigar and blew smoke slowly over the table and then picked up his cup and drained the last of his coffee.