She changed the subject by pointing out of the window. “The fig tree is over there by the cliff. You can see the top of it from here. It’s a very unusual specimen, the largest of its kind in this hemisphere, Jim says. He’s taken dozens of pictures of it.”
Pinata started the car, keeping down to the posted limit of ten miles an hour although he felt like speeding through the place and out again, and to hell with Daisy baby and her fig tree. The rolling lawns, the green and growing things, made too disquieting a contrast to the dead buried beneath them. A cemetery shouldn’t be like a park, he thought, but like a desert: all tans and grays, rock and sand, and cacti which looked alive briefly only once a year, at the time of the resurrection.
Most of the visitors had gone for the day. A young woman dressed in black was arranging a bouquet of gladioli above a bronze nameplate, while her two children, T-shirted and blue-jeaned, played hide-and-seek among the crypts and tombstones. A hundred yards farther on, four workmen in overalls were starting to fill in a freshly dug grave. The green cloth, intended to simulate grass, had been pulled away from the excavated mound of earth, and the workmen were stabbing at it listlessly with their shovels. An old man with white hair sat on a nearby bench and looked down at the falling earth, stupefied by grief.
“I’m glad you came along,” Daisy said suddenly. “I would have been frightened by myself or depressed.”
“Why? You’ve been here before.”
“It never affected me much. Whenever I came with Jim and my mother, it was more like taking part in a pageant, a ritual that meant nothing to me. How could it? I never even met Jim’s parents or my mother’s cousin. People can’t seem dead to you unless they were once alive. It wasn’t real, the flowers, the tears, the prayers.”
“Whose tears?”
“Mother cries easily.”
“Over a cousin so remote or so long dead that you hadn’t even met her?”
Daisy leaned forward in the seat with a sigh of impatience or anxiety. “They were brought up together as children in Denver. Besides, the tears weren’t really for her, I guess. They were for — oh, life in general. Lacrimae rerum.”
“Were you specifically invited to go on these excursions with your husband and mother?”
“Why? What’s that got to do with anything?”
“I just wondered.”
“I was invited. Jim thought it proper for me to go along, and Mother used me to lean on. It isn’t often she does. I suppose I... I rather enjoyed the feeling of being strong enough for anyone else to lean on, especially my mother.”
“Where are Jim’s parents buried?”
“The west end.”
“Anywhere near where we’re headed?”
“No.”
“You said your husband has taken many pictures of the fig tree?”
“Yes.”
“Were you with him on some of those occasions?”
“Yes.”
They were approaching the cliff, and the sound of breakers was like the roar of a great wind through a distant forest, rising and falling. As the roar increased, the fig tree came into full view: a huge green umbrella, twice as wide as it was tall. The glossy, leathery leaves showed cinnamon color on the undersides, as if they, too, like the lock and the iron door of the gatehouse, were rusting away in the sea air. The trunk and larger branches resembled gray marble shapes of subhuman figures entwined in static love. There were no graves directly under the tree because part of the vast root system grew above ground. The monuments began at the periphery — all shapes and sizes, angels, rectangles, crosses, columns, polished and unpolished, gray and white and black and pink — but only one of them exactly matched the description of the tombstone in Daisy’s dream.
Pinata saw it as soon as he got out of the car: a rough-hewn gray stone cross about five feet high.
Daisy saw it, too. She said, with a look of terrible surprise, “It’s there. It’s — real.”
He felt less surprise than she did. Everything in the dream was turning out to be real. He glanced toward the edge of the cliff as if he almost expected the dog Prince to come running up from the beach and start to howl.
Daisy had stepped out of the car and was leaning against the hood of the engine for support or warmth.
“I can’t see any name on it at this distance,” Pinata said. “Let’s go over and examine it.”
“I’m afraid.”
“There’s nothing to be afraid of, Mrs. Harker. What’s obviously happened is that you’ve seen this particular stone in this particular location on one of your visits here. For some reason it impressed and interested you, you remembered it, and it cropped up in your dreams.”
“Why should it have impressed me?”
“For one thing, it’s a handsome and expensive piece of work. Or it might have reminded you of the old rugged cross in the hymn. But instead of standing here theorizing, why don’t we go over and check the facts?”
“Facts?”
“Surely the important fact,” Pinata said dryly, “is whose name is on it.”
For a moment he thought she was going to turn and run for the exit gates. Instead, she straightened up, with a shake of her head, and stepped over the small lantana hedge onto the graveled path that wound around the periphery of the fig tree. She began walking toward the gray cross very quickly, as though she were putting her trust in momentum to keep her going if fear should try to stop her.
She had almost reached her destination when she stumbled and fell forward on her knees. He caught up with her and helped her to her feet. There were grass stains on the front of her skirt, and prickly little pellets of burr clover.
“It’s not mine,” she said in a whisper. “Thank God it’s not mine.”
A small rectangular area in the center of the cross had been cut and polished to hold the inscription:
Pinata was sure from her reaction that the name meant nothing to her beyond the fact that it was not her own. She was looking relieved and a little embarrassed, like a child who’s had the lights turned on and recognized the bogeyman for what it was, a discarded coat, a blowing curtain. Even with the lights on, there was one small bogeyman left that she apparently hadn’t noticed yet — the year of Camilla’s death. Perhaps from where she stood she couldn’t discern the numbers; he suspected from her actions in the newspaper library that she was nearsighted and either didn’t know it or didn’t want to admit it.
He stepped directly in front of the tombstone to hide the inscription in case she came any closer. It made him feel uneasy, standing on this stranger’s coffin, right where his face would be, or had been. Carlos Camilla. What kind of face had he once had? Dark, certainly. It was a Mexican name. Few Mexicans were buried in this cemetery, both because it was too expensive and because the ground was not consecrated by their church. Fewer still had such elaborate monuments.
“I feel guilty,” Daisy said, “at being so glad that it’s his and not mine. But I can’t help it.”
“No need to feel guilty.”
“It must have happened just as you said it did. I saw the tombstone, and for some reason it stuck in my memory — perhaps it was the name on it. Camilla, it’s a very pretty name. What does it mean, a camellia?”
“No, it means a stretcher, a little bed.”
“Oh. It doesn’t sound so pretty when you know what it means.”
“That’s true of a lot of things.”
Fog had started to drift in from the sea. It moved in aimless wisps across the lawns and hung like tatters of chiffon among the leather leaves of the fig tree. Pinata wondered how quietly Camilla was resting, with the roots of the vast tree growing inexorably toward his little bed.