It was dark on Avenida Manganeso. The only light came from the pool-hall, which was used for cock-fights and illegal lotteries. He stopped in the entrance. Three smoking oil-lamps lit the room. A man was sleeping on a table, with an empty bottle for a pillow. There was a smell of warm urine. Wilson moved on, his arms aching from the crutches. Stars massed in such numbers above his head that it looked as if somebody had spilled chalk-dust across the sky. As he passed along the north side of the municipal square he heard a baby crying, and then silence. At last he pushed through the door of the Bar El Fandango.
The first person he saw, leaning against the zinc counter, was La Huesuda. He could tell from the angle of her head on her neck that she already had a few drinks under her skin. He began to ease backwards through the crowd, but she noticed him. Downing a shot of clear liquor, she swilled it round her mouth, spat it on the floor, then elbowed her way across the room towards him.
‘So,’ she said, ‘American.’
He touched the brim of his hat.
‘Where have you been hiding?’
‘Nowhere special,’ he said.
‘You’ve been lying low, haven’t you. Avoiding me.’
He glanced down at his foot. ‘I’ve been resting. The doctor told me to rest.’
Her eyes followed his.
‘That’s a pretty flower,’ she said. Her voice had sharpened at the edges.
‘It’s not bad.’
‘Who painted that on there?’
‘A friend.’
‘More than a friend, I’d say. That’s a woman, did that.’ Her thin face scraped the air. ‘Am I right, American?’
He nodded.
‘Mother of Christ.’ Her eyes were knocking around in their sockets like two drunks in a cell. She was muttering some language that he did not understand. All teeth and saliva.
‘Pearl,’ he said, taking hold of her wrist, ‘what’s wrong with you?’
She twisted away from him. ‘Get lost.’
‘Pearl,’ he said.
‘Go fuck a goat,’ she said, and slammed out of the bar.
One of the miners turned to him, ‘Jesus,’ he said. ‘What did you do to her?’
Wilson did not answer. He was remembering the afternoon he had spent with Suzanne and how, after saying no to all the flowers he could think of, and all the animals, after saying no to lumps of gold — they would look, she said, like potatoes — she had decided on a rose. He had not been able to dissuade her. In truth, he had not tried too hard. Deep down he had thought that it might represent the love he felt for her and could not name, though he suspected that she was thinking of his heart and how he had lost it to a girl with bright-red hair. And now the Bony One, with the prickly insight that whores seemed to possess, had seen right through the veils and disguises to that secret truth.
‘Nobody wants to fuck her anyway,’ Pablo was saying. ‘She’s too skinny for fucking.’
‘I had her once,’ the miner said. ‘It was like what you leave on your plate after you ate a chicken.’
Wilson sighed. ‘I don’t feel good about it. When my foot’s mended, I’m going to build her a whole new set of stairs.’
Pablo’s lip curled.
‘I’m going to paint them some colour that’s real nice for a whore,’ Wilson said. ‘Like pink, maybe. Maybe put in a few electric lights as well.’
‘Sure you are,’ Pablo said.
‘I am,’ said Wilson.
But somehow it was Suzanne that he could see, standing at the top of the steps in a white silk dress. And, as he watched, he saw the French gold wedding-ring slide off her finger. It slid right off her finger and dropped, spinning, through the air. It landed on a stair and bounced, missed the next two stairs, then bounced again, jumped over his boot and lay down in the dust like it was dead.
He drank quietly for a while, and the blood ran with smooth purpose in his veins, and he dreamed of setting his foot, his mended foot, on that first step, and of her smile as he looked up for reassurance. Clutched in his fist would be a lump of gold. Enough for ten thousand wedding-rings.
Raised voices brought him out of his reverie, and one voice louder than the rest. It was an Indian, his neck and forearms streaked with clay. A miner. He stood shouting in a circle of men. His hands shook as if he were carrying a fever, and his eyes were fastened on the ceiling, though there was nothing there but sheets of tin and smoke from cheap cigars. His words forced themselves out of his mouth; it almost seemed as if he was retching — a flood of words, a pause, another flood. His hair was spiked with sweat.
Wilson asked Pablo what was being said.
‘He has seen a painted man.’ Both Pablo’s eyebrows lifted.
‘A painted man?’
‘The man was seven feet tall and he was naked,’ Pablo said. ‘He was standing at the entrance to one of the mines. He was painted half in red and half in black.’
‘Who was he?’
‘He is a warning.’
Wilson watched the Indians close in around the shouting man. They were pulling at his shirt and talking into his face, but he paid them no attention. He seemed to be receiving a voice from beyond the roof, and repeating what he heard.
‘The painted man is an ancestor, and they must listen to him.’ Pablo was still translating. ‘He is angry with his people. They are betraying their heritage. They must return whence they came. This town should never have come into being. It is a place of blood and ashes. It is an abomination.’ Pablo reached for a piece of rag and began nonchalantly to wipe the bar.
The miner uttered a single high-pitched shriek and dropped to the floor. His body thrashed like a hooked fish in the bottom of a boat. His eyes rolled back into his skull; his throat began to rattle.
Pablo looked up. ‘He’s an epileptic.’
‘He’s swallowed his tongue,’ Wilson said. ‘He’s choking.’
He pushed through the crowd and, bending down, reached into the man’s throat and pulled his tongue loose. Then he turned the man on to his stomach. The fit was over. Yellow vomit trickled from between the man’s lips.
‘Don’t move him,’ Wilson told the miners. ‘Leave him be.’
He found some water in a bucket behind the bar and washed the bile off his hands.
‘You saved him,’ Pablo said.
Wilson shrugged. ‘Maybe.’
The Indians had ordered more drinks. They were talking among themselves in rapid broken Spanish. Their prophet lay forgotten on the floor.
‘This town isn’t so bad,’ one said.
‘At least we’re getting paid,’ said another.
‘If you can call five pesos a day getting paid.’ This man had a short, twisted body and he wore a deerskin beret.
‘It’s five pesos more than you get scratching around in the dirt,’ the first man said.
‘Right,’ said the second. ‘And they build us houses.’
The man in the beret spat on the floor. The spit lay next to the epileptic’s hand, like a coin tossed to a beggar.
‘We’re cheap labour is what we are,’ he said. ‘They’re using us for work they wouldn’t do themselves.’
Some of the miners were beginning to see with his eyes. And maybe they had a point, Wilson thought. He could still remember how many patients there had been in the hospital, and that sudden shift in the doctor’s tone of voice.
‘They don’t care about us,’ said the man in the beret, one arm thrown up in front of his face and curved like a bow. A space had cleared in front of him so he could express himself. ‘They’re only interested in feathering their own nests,’ he said. ‘They build themselves fine houses up there on the Mesa del Norte. They’re even building themselves a church now — ’