A boy appeared at the table, grime around his mouth and one ear torn. ‘Anything else?’
‘What else is there?’ the priest asked.
‘There’s coffee.’
‘Coffee.’ The priest snorted in contempt. ‘Bring me another bottle.’
The boy took his plate away, scraping the bones on to the ground outside the door. There was a flurry of cats.
The priest turned to Wilson. ‘Do you have another smoke by any chance?’
‘I’ve got a butt, that’s all.’
‘I’d appreciate it.’
Wilson reached into his waistcoat pocket and produced an inch and a half of two-week-old cigar. It was his last smoke, but he did not begrudge it to the priest. He held it out across the table. The priest stuck it in his mouth and leaned into the flame that Wilson struck for him. He took a deep draught down into his lungs.
The boy with the torn ear stood another bottle and two glasses on the table. The priest uncorked the bottle, poured two drinks. He pushed one in Wilson’s direction.
‘On me,’ he said.
He sucked down another lungful of smoke. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘let’s hear it.’
Wilson told the story of Suzanne Valence from beginning to end. His first sight of her, their first meeting. He talked of his infatuation, then his love. Her trust in him. His hypocrisy, his lust. He took the knife of his desire and turned it on himself. He twisted it deep. Revealed the vision of her ring slipping from her finger. Her clothes slipping from her body. The vision of her naked between the sheets that smelt like hot, sweet grass. Naked on sharp fields of lava. Naked under the bright-orange branches of the elephant tree. He did not spare the details. Nor did he spare himself. He wanted everything out in the open, known.
By the time he had finished, the sun had altered its position in the sky. The priest was staring at him, a curved fold at the corner of his mouth, one eye slightly narrowed. It was the closest he had come to smiling.
‘I don’t understand,’ he said.
Wilson stared back across the table. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I don’t understand what happened.’
‘I told you what happened.’
‘Everything?’
‘Yes.’
‘In that case I don’t understand what you’re confessing.’
The boy stood another bottle on the table. The priest poured himself a drink. He drank it off and placed his empty glass next to the bottle.
‘Have you slept with this woman?’
‘Of course not.’
‘So what is it that you’re confessing? A conscience? The unique ability to resist temptation?’ The priest cackled again. ‘Abstinence?’
Wilson did not like the sarcastic tone. ‘I’m confessing sins committed in my head.’ He picked his drink up, drank it down.
‘In your head?’ The priest ran a hand through his hair, then reached for the bottle. ‘In your head,’ he repeated. Still holding the bottle, he gave Wilson a look that seemed to come at him from around a bend. It was as if the priest’s eyes had to turn a corner just to see him. ‘If you’re a sinner, then you’re the purest sinner I’ve ever come across,’ he said. ‘By Christ, if you’re not the purest.’
‘I want absolution.’
‘You don’t need absolution. You just need to forget.’
Wilson fixed the priest with a steady look.
‘What the hell.’ The priest put the bottle down and began to make signs in the air, but as his hand dropped from his head towards his heart he toppled sideways off his chair. He lay in the dust, among the fish-bones. He did not move.
Wilson knelt beside the priest and seized his shoulders. Shook him. The priest’s head lolled on his neck. His eyes fell shut like a doll’s. But a pulse was beating in his wrist. He was still alive.
The boy with the torn ear pointed at the three empty bottles lined up inside the door. ‘He drank them for breakfast. It’s a wonder he could speak to you at all.’
Wilson hauled the priest into a sitting position, propping him against the wall. Then he walked over to his mule. There was nothing more that he could do in this place. He untied the reins and mounted up.
The boy came and stood below him. ‘He won’t remember you. When he wakes up, you’ll be nothing but a dream to him.’ He grinned up at Wilson, one eye closed against the glare.
Wilson turned his mule round and rode out of the village. He wanted it behind him, lost in memory.
He headed inland, towards Comondú, which lay some thirty miles to the west. If he did not stop to sleep he would be there by daybreak.
The drinks that the priest had forced on him blazed steadily behind his eyes. The boy’s words stayed with him. The hours he had spent in their company had given him the curious feeling that he had been alive once, and had then passed on, and that all this had happened long ago. He was not sure that he could have offered proof of his existence, if he had been asked for it. He had been well and truly undermined by the encounter, and the width and harshness of the landscape that now surrounded him did nothing to restore the balance.
Chapter 4
Towards evening, when the sun had dropped behind the ridge and the Mesa de Francia lay in cool, mauve shadow, Suzanne picked up her fan and her parasol, and left the house. There had been no word from Wilson Pharaoh, and she began to doubt whether her message had ever been delivered; she did not trust that gloating Mexican, with his thick lips folded back upon his face and his pockets stuffed with cakes. She could not now be sure whether Wilson was in the town at all. But, thinking of his promise to ride with her to San Ignacio, she found it hard to believe that he would have gone without her.
She had followed the dirt-track that the miners used, high into the stony pastures behind the Hôtel de Paris. Away to her right she could see a railway line climbing in lazy curves towards the mine entrance. The landscape was barren, industrial, unfinished. Work had been suspended on the church that day, owing to an Indian festival, but Théo had still contrived to spend the entire morning at the site. Since four o’clock he had been confined to his study. He was conducting some research into stress factors; he wanted to impress Monsieur Eiffel with his zeal on their return. When she asked if he would like to take a walk with her, he looked at her with incredulity. It seemed he no longer understood even the simplest and least threatening of her desires. Which made her wonder whether, in fact, he ever had. In Paris, with its wealth of distractions, she had never noticed. But the harshness of the light in this new place had revealed differences between them, and had thrown those differences into sharp relief.
Before leaving for Mexico she had bought a sketchbook from the artist’s shop behind the Rue Fontaine and, during the voyage, she sat on deck and recorded her impressions in water-colour. She captured the conical green hills of the Azores at sunset, Tierra del Fuego’s celebrated glaciers, ports like Panama and Buenos Aires, Santiago with its almond trees in bloom. But there was one page, in her opinion, at least, that stood out from the rest; she had painted it during their passage through the South Atlantic.
She had been thrilled when Théo and the Captain took the decision to sail round Cape Horn. She knew of its reputation, and it had not disappointed her. She remembered the first storm descending, the moment it began — a black cloud moving up from the south and swallowing the sky. Suddenly they could not hear each other speak.
She did not know how long it had lasted; time soon lost all meaning in the constant darkness. One morning, her mind almost visionary with lack of sleep, she ventured up on to the bridge. It was then, in that dim light, that she saw a sight that she would never forget. They were about fifteen nautical miles north-east of the Cape, and it was beginning to exert its influence. The ship would disappear in front of her and it would seem as if they must be sinking, but the bows would heave and lift, and they would scale a wall of water that was higher than a house, and then, when they reached the summit, there would be a hush, a kind of stillness, and she would catch a glimpse, under the boiling sky, of waves in their thousands, each one a mountain capped with snow, then down they plunged, the body of the ship protesting, down into the depths once more.