‘It is in the nature of a test,’ he ventured finally.
‘A test?’
‘Of character. That’s what my father told me.’
He was waiting for her to speak, but she chose not to.
‘A glamorous posting on the mainland,’ and he drew down the corners of his mouth and shook his head, ‘there would have been no challenge. This town may be remote but it is still, after all, a command. But you,’ and he brought his dark eyes up to hers, ‘why did you come?’
‘I wanted to be with my husband.’
‘And now?’
She gave him a steady look. ‘You’re insolent, Captain. I expect that’s why they sent you here. It was your insolence.’
‘Perhaps you’re right,’ he said.
Though her rebuke had been seriously intended, he had chosen to treat it as a joke. His voice remained light and mischievous, admitting no remorse, no guilt. She felt cheated. He had taken the confidence that she had given him, and used it against her.
She moved past him, towards the door. Somehow she felt that she had been robbed of the initiative, and that her departure from the room could be seen as a retreat. She heard him follow her, his spurs chinking every time a heel struck the floor. The sound was like a few coins in a pocket, a handful of loose change. It seemed to mock her. Was that all she was worth?
‘It is almost seven o’clock. You should go, or people might begin to worry.’ He was still behind her, speaking into her back. His words were ambiguous. They contained equal measures of menace and concern.
The carriage was waiting outside. Night had already fallen. To the north the furnaces had thrown an amber light into the sky, as if that part of town had been left out in the rain and then rusted. It was the only light there was.
‘It’s so dark,’ she said. ‘How will he find the way?’
‘He knows the road.’
As she stepped up into the carriage, Montoya took her by the arm, asking her to wait, and before she could ascertain the reason he had turned and hastened back into the house. He emerged a moment later with a lit candle inside a dome of glass. She took the lantern, asking him what it was for. His smile was crooked in the tilting flame, unstable. It was so he could watch her, he said, as she travelled back across the town.
Chapter 6
Wilson was woken by Indians shouting in the room below. They had arrived three days before, from the mainland. They were a tribe that he did not recognise, short querulous men with barrel chests and hair that hung in greased strands to their shoulders. Wilson had seen them through the gap in the floor. Sitting cross-legged, they scrawled sets of circles on the bare boards with a piece of charred wood. Then they tipped pebbles out of leather pouches. They would be up for hours, drinking and gambling, cackling, spitting. Their little stones would rattle through his dreams.
He lay down and tried to sleep, but his foot was troubling him and he was up again as the sun poured its light across the waters of the gulf. He watched the miners shuffling out on to the street. They could not have slept for more than an hour or two; it was no wonder they could scarcely lift their feet. And now they would be working underground, in temperatures of forty degrees, pitting their strength against the stubborn local clay. But that was how the Indians lived. They thought no further than the day or night that surrounded them. They always looked forward to the ripening of the pitahaya, but when the time came they never harvested or stored the fruit. They ate as much as they could on the first day. Towards sunset they could be seen sprawling on the ground, speechless, bloated, green in the face. He had once heard of an Indian who had received six pounds of sugar as payment of a debt. The Indian sat down in the dirt and ate his way through the sugar, every ounce of it, and died. Wilson did not doubt but that story was true. They did not think ahead. There were those who said they did not think at all.
He rolled a cigarette and took it out on to the balcony. He sat on his weak chair, smoking peacefully. The ridge to the north-west had caught the sun. The rock glowed orange. The land that lay below still stood in shadow, the colour your fingers go when you gather wild berries. He could see a long line of men moving on the path that climbed up from the town. They would be heading for the Arroyo del Purgatorio, where a new bed of copper had been discovered. He still could not get used to the sight of so many Indians collected in one place. On his expeditions inland, his many fruitless searchings for the riches he believed were buried there, he had become acquainted with their customs. They were a nomadic folk, with no attachments to the land and few belongings. They travelled in small groups to where the food and water was, seldom sleeping on the same ground twice. They were simple, hopeful — credulous. In their daily lives they would walk for twenty hours without fatigue, but give them a vision of doom, a man painted half in red and half in black, and the light emptied from their eyes and their muscles cramped. It took something supernatural to happen before they believed their grievances were real. Their progress up the wall of rock seemed laboured now. He could not help wondering how it would end.
His gaze dropped down into the town. In the square outside his window men were already at work on the church. He had grown used to the ringing of hammers; if he closed his eyes he saw a score of blacksmiths making shoes for horses. Almost a month had elapsed since the tramp steamer had docked; four metal arches now stood on the ground, four hoops lined up in a row and linked by horizontal rods, like a wagon with the canvas off. He could see Monsieur Valence, seated on a packing-case in his black frock-coat, mopping the sweat from his forehead. The pale face seemed turned for a moment in Wilson’s direction, and Wilson raised a hand in greeting. The Frenchman did the same. But that was the limit of their acquaintance. No word had yet passed between them.
He took up his guitar and ran his thumb across the strings. One jangled chord lifted into the air. In his enforced idleness, he had decided to write a song. It was about gold, of course, but it was also, in a curious way, about Suzanne as well. The words would have a kind of double meaning, if he could just get them right. He only had one line so far, which had come from the dream he had woken with on the morning she arrived: ‘Gold fever, running in my veins …’ That was it. He had already decided to dedicate the song to her and, when it was finished, he would play it for her, one quiet afternoon, in the shade of a veranda.
His eyes blurred, took on distance.
A morning in the hills west of Salinas. A morning that had stayed with him. The sun slanting on yellow grass. Pale-green moss hung from the trees like the matted strands of fleece that sheep leave on fences. A cool morning, early fall.
They had stolen two horses the day before, in Greenfield. A good horse was better than money, his father always said. It might last fifteen years, which was more than money ever did. Money had this way of spilling through your fingers, even if you closed a fist round it. Money always found the one hole in your pocket. Money ran out on you every chance it got; it was even worse than women. These were lessons he had learned from his father, though as a teacher his father often contradicted himself. He taught out of bitterness instead of knowledge, that was the trouble. Take women, for example. It was not women who had run out on his father — if anything, it was the other way round — but it was not the son’s place to point out inconsistencies; it was the son’s place to listen. He owed obedience, still being only twelve years old, not yet a man. And that obedience, that listening, could pass for love. Were parts of love. When his father told him they would have to steal a horse or two to get through the winter, he went along with it. But the horses that they stole that day, a chestnut and a roan, from the back of the Staging Post Hotel, belonged to a marshal who happened to be visiting the town. They were fortunate to escape arrest, hitching a ride on a melon cart, switching two hours later to a doctor’s wagon that was travelling in the opposite direction, then walking half the night. That was the nature of his father’s luck: two-sided, like a coin.