“Will they show?” I said again to Isabel.
“I don’t know. I doubt it. They were just sitting there, holding hands.”
“What were they saying?”
“Betty was talking, not Javier. She was telling him that it didn’t matter. That life had to go on.”
The girl called White Rabbit withdrew her foot from mine and looked at me with amusement and scorn. Very slowly she kissed Jakob.
I stroked Isabel’s hair. “If we leave right away, we can be in Veracruz by dawn.”
“No. I don’t want to see the sea now.”
“Would you rather go back to Mexico City?”
“Yes.” She stood up and opened her purse and looked for her comb, her lipstick, her mirror. “Yes. There’s nothing left to do here. Let’s go back. I’m exhausted.”
And the faces of the six Monks observed us with mockery. The black-skinned face. The face veiled by the straw-colored hair of the youth wearing pink pants. The Gothic face, erect over the sharpness of the cheekbones, of the girl in black sweater, black pants, black boots, black everything. Jakob Werner’s half-closed eyes. The divine pallid face without eyebrows and with orange lips, the face of young Elizabeth of the eternally intolerable life that nevertheless is eternally worth being lived. The blond and bearded face of all agonies. They looked at me as I stood beside Isabel. The dark-skinned women with swollen bellies and bare feet looked, and the slobbering drowsy dogs, the sardonic-eyed soldiers.
“Yes, let’s go back. I’m exhausted, too.”
They all looked, smiled, crossed their arms. Ya no vivan tan engreídos con este mundo traidor. I picked up a fistful of peanuts and tossed them at the face of one of the musicians.
“Hey, you! Take it easy there.”
He put down his guitar. A man with thick mustaches. He stepped over his guitar and with the movement of a black panther advanced toward our table.
“Knock it off, drunk. Knock it off fast. Show some respect for…”
I threw another handful of peanuts at his face and the soldiers leaning against the columns of the arcade straightened and put their hands to the butts of their pistols and the big-bellied women covered their children’s heads with their shawls and stepped out of the way as the dogs ran off limping, one foot lifted, hanging in the air, or perhaps only the stump where a foot had been, their bare hides splotched with dry stains, and the soldiers took out their pistols and ran toward us along the arcade where the four musicians were preparing to jump us, beat the hell out of us.
Jakob stood up quickly and quietly and calmly removed a bloody knife from his portfolio.
* * *
Δ You told me all this that afternoon, Dragoness, when they let you visit me.
These places are always far from the usual human walks, from towns and cities. They have to be far, otherwise they would lose their meaning. I don’t know what you had to pay before they would let you in, what you had to do; I don’t want to try to guess. But you had always said, Some day I’ll tell you everything, and I had no reason to doubt your word.
Of course, they made you stay outside my door. Even there you were running risk enough. Your voice reached me very feebly, very low, but then the walls of my room caught it and amplified it. That was why I didn’t move nearer you. I stood facing the part of the wall that pretends to be a window and I caught your voice before it fled from everything, before it died.
You have to do much before you can understand what they say. This tightrope walking is my daily bread, which I eat to understand. As they have never lived, any life that can be called living, they know nothing, not even the secrets of this their place. They have created isolation and believe that four walls can contain it. But nothing is utterly isolated. Nothing, Dragoness.
They would be surprised if they lived here with me and discovered that the absolute silence of the first days is merely the announcement of a universe of sounds which at first are heard one by one, then fused into a pattern, an order. When one of us to his shame tells them, they laugh and say it is all imagination. Be it known it is eviclass="underline" to live imprisoned. But gradually, almost imperceptibly, the screws tighten. They themselves begin to imagine what we imagine and then we are no longer alone: they also are living imprisoned. They know it and they know that it is contrary to the principle of authority that they themselves attempt to impose. And then they stop your food, Dragoness, so that you won’t have pangs of indigestion. Or they stuff a viscous pap into you because they believe that your imagination is the result of your hunger, which sharpens it. Or they cover the floor with cotton mattresses to shut the sounds away.
So I tell them nothing. I play the mute idiot and keep all I hear to myself. All the voices that come through the stone. The panting of love-making, the shouts of a quarrel. The snapped commands, the fall of clods of earth. The volleys of rifle shots, the crack of a rubber-hose lash. The whining of animals and the crying of children. The night music of an eternal repose and the million footsteps that drag past. The moaning I hear every night when I put my ear to the floor to communicate somehow with someone who must be buried beneath the soles of my feet.
It makes me happy that you have come to see me. You are going to tell me that you and Javier came out of the pyramid dragging the body behind you. The first thing you saw was the parked Lincoln. You left the body lying across the iron rails and took advantage of the sad Cholula night, as silent as falling dust, so dark there at the foot of the pyramid and the church, near the insane asylum, in order to get rid of your burden. You opened the trunk of the Lincoln and he dragged the body up. But inside the trunk you found something you couldn’t have expected. It was something alive, wrapped up like a mummy, a little bundle that stirred and whimpered. You felt afraid. Behind those bandage-like wrappings there was life, perhaps there was even more than one life. Javier was also afraid but with him fear showed itself as action. He went back and got the body and dragged it to the car through the sad silent darkness, the darkness as secret as the deepest recesses of the earth. He took the body by the armpits and made you take it by the feet and between you, with difficulty, you raised it and dropped it into the trunk. Javier wanted to put down the lid at once. You hesitated. When the body of the dead man had fallen, you had heard a soft cry, one that for a moment you let yourself pretend you couldn’t identify, it might have been the cry of a nun in the church on top of the hill pyramid, it might have been the cry of a patient in the nearby insane asylum, it might even have been only the cry of a cricket. But you knew all the time that the cry had come from within the trunk of the car. You reached beneath the dead body and took out the small living bundle and held it in your arms without knowing what it was. Javier wanted you to leave it there. He told you that it wasn’t yours, that it wasn’t any of your business, that he had better put the lid of the trunk down and both of you get the hell out. But you cradled the bundle in your arms and accepted it, accepted everything, knowing that whatever was within those tight wrappings was both yours and not yours, and that the world has many riddles and enigmas that must not be too closely looked into except at the risk of catastrophic destruction. And whom could you ask about it, anyhow? You began to run, Dragoness, not sure where you were going. You could have gone up the steep road to the church, or down the street into Cholula. Or around the pyramid to the asylum. You chose the last, knowing that there would be doctors and nurses at the asylum. You ran to the wide gate of its spacious grounds and put down the bundle where it would be found. Then you went back to your husband, Dragoness, as you always go back to him, to Javier waiting beside the closed trunk inside which lay a new skin to rot in the stead of the skin you had saved from rotting. You will always know whom you have to care for and protect, Dragoness. And let no one say anything about fear.