‘Can I help you, Madame?’ He spoke French.
‘I’m looking for Monsieur Pharaoh,’ she told him.
‘The American?’
She nodded.
‘He’s not here.’
‘Do you know where I can find him?’
‘I’m afraid not, Madame.’ His mouth hung open. The gaps between his teeth were filled with the cake that he had just devoured.
‘If you see him,’ she said, ‘would you be so kind as to give him a message?’
‘But of course.’ He dusted his hands and, removing his blue spectacles, moved closer. ‘I would be delighted.’
She did not like this familiarity of his, but she had no other choice. ‘Tell him that Suzanne wants to speak to him. It’s urgent. Tell him,’ and she paused, trying to think of words that would be remembered, words that would bring him back, ‘tell him that I miss him.’
A smile spread over the man’s thick lips like butter. He talked past her shoulder to the other man, who was now peering through the hole in the wall. A few fast words of Spanish, followed by coarse laughter.
‘I beg your pardon?’ she said.
The man switched back to French. ‘I was just saying. Mr Pharaoh is a very lucky man.’
She chose not to dignify his impertinence with a reaction. Instead, she turned and walked calmly out of the hotel. As she crossed the street she could hear him laughing and calling after her in French, ‘I miss him, I miss him.’
Chapter 3
Wilson had no idea where he was going. One of his eyes had misted over. The other was closed and swollen; he must have struck some wall or door or table with his face. Every time the mule stumbled beneath him, his head pealed like a great cracked bell.
He had woken that morning sprawled on a bank of sandstone and pumice at the back of the Bar El Fandango. Daylight had come down like an axe and split his good eye apart with one clean stroke, as if it were a piece of wood to feed a fire. He did not want to think about why he had drunk with such seeming greed for his own annihilation or why, on waking, he had saddled up and ridden out of town in the direction that would present him with the greatest hardship, namely south-west, towards the desolate pastures of the Vizcaino. He did not want to think about reasons.
He must have dozed off as he rode, or else he took a wrong turn. As he came through a narrow pass, it was not desert that he saw but sea — one shot of pale liquor in a rough brown glass. He had found his way to San Bruno, that cluster of cactus-shacks and fishing-huts which clung to the sun-blasted shore some ten miles south of Santa Sofía.
That San Bruno should offer sanctuary was no small irony. In times past, men had been drawn to this stretch of coast by the promise of a night of love. The women of San Bruno were twice the size of other women, except in one miraculous respect, and they wore skirts of black pearls which, when unfastened, fell to the ground with a sensual, hypnotic click. There was no man alive who could resist the sound — though it was likely to be one of the last they heard. For it was here that men were captured for their seed and butchered afterwards. Their corpses were heaped into barges known as bone ships, along with any male offspring, then cast afloat on currents that would carry them southwards, to the ocean, to oblivion. This had always been a dangerous country for men. Just stories, of course, legends that had grown in the otherwise unfruitful soil; the only skeletons on the village shores these days were the skeletons of fish — but still. A man could not ride into a place like San Bruno without the vague feeling that he might be inviting his own extinction and that immortality was by no means guaranteed.
It was strange then that the first person he should see as he cleared a mesquite grove and rode up a track towards the village was a priest. The priest was sitting at a table made from bits of driftwood. The wall behind him, a kind of salmon colour, revealed the true state of his vestments. They were stained and faded, torn in places too, as if he had fought his way through cactus thorns on foot. At his right hand lay a pack of playing-cards, weighed down by stones in case the unthinkable happened and the wind blew. This priest no longer trusted anything at all; or maybe he had lost so much that he was taking no chances with the little he had left. A priest in San Bruno, Wilson thought, as he rode up to the cantina. It was a rare sight. The nearest mission was Mulege, some thirty miles to the south.
He looped the reins over his mule’s head and tied them to a post that held the roof up. He stood in the shade, one shoulder against the wall. He watched the priest picking at a plate of fish.
‘Morning,’ he said.
The priest grunted, but did not lift his head.
‘Are you a priest?’
‘What’s it to you?’
‘You look like a priest.’
The priest raised eyes that were the washed and naked blue of a sky after rain. ‘And you look like you lost a war.’
They had both lost wars. The priest’s hair was drained of colour and prickly as ice-plant. His blue eyes seemed related to the Señora’s. But that man would be dead by now, long dead. Another of the same breed, though. Priests who had turned religion on its head and cast the Lord out of the garden of their bodies.
Wilson knew the stage that the man had reached. He himself was somewhere similar. That moment when you let go of one thing and reach out for the next. You’re not sure where the next thing is or what it looks like; for all you know there might be nothing there at all. You wait. In the silence that follows there’s no expectation of what might happen, only abandonment of what came before. Halfway out, no going back. How that place could hurt, that halfway house. Its rooms were haunted, lonely; rain through the roof and voices on the stairs. Sleep would have been a blessing, but sleep was something that happened somewhere else. You lay awake. You hurt. And you couldn’t see how things would ever change.
He gestured at the only vacant chair. ‘Mind if I sit down?’
‘You got something to say, you can say it standing up.’ But the priest had wearied; his voice did not burn with the same fire as his words.
Wilson sat down, removed his hat. He sighed.
The priest stared at him a moment longer, as if considering an act of violence, then he bent over his fish again. He worked on the skeleton with the precision of a watchmaker. He did not seem to be eating the fish but, rather, mending it.
‘Maybe you could do something for me,’ Wilson said.
The priest won a piece of grey meat from the net of bones and poked it into his mouth. He studied Wilson as he chewed.
‘You could listen to my confession.’
The priest began to cackle. Bits off ish danced on his tongue.
Wilson leaned forwards, forearms on the table. ‘Father,’ he said, and he heard a threat buried in the calmness with which he was speaking now, ‘I need it done.’
He was too astonished at his own resolve to notice how the priest responded. This whole scene, in fact, was taking him by surprise.
‘Are you a Catholic?’ the priest asked him.
‘What difference does that make?’
Another cackle, but it faded fast. ‘I’d like to finish my lunch first. You got any objections?’
Wilson sat back. It seemed as if some fragment of his desperation had got through. He lit the butt of an old cigar and felt the smoke rake over the back of his throat. If he had judged this wrong he would have been dead by now.
He sat in the midday heat, and smoked.
It was a while before the priest pushed his plate away. Wilson could not be sure, but he suspected that the priest had used the time to gather himself. He was the challenge that the priest had been expecting, a moment of truth. But he was early. He felt rather guilty about arriving during the man’s lunch.