When they reached the hospital, the doctor bounded up the stairs and then spun round, addressing Wilson from the veranda. ‘And your foot, Monsieur. How does it feel?’
Wilson smiled. One broken foot after all this talk of legs and ribs and anarchy. It hardly seemed worth mentioning.
‘It’s fine,’ he said. ‘Just fine.’
A momentary gloom descended on the doctor. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘that’s something.’
Seventeen dead. That was what the Indians were saying. They had gathered in the Hotel La Playa, shouting and spitting, clutching at the air, their faces brassy against the pale-green walls. The lobby bubbled like a cauldron with their voices. They did not pay Wilson much attention as he climbed the stairs to bed.
When he reached the top, he noticed a strip of light beneath his door. It was wavering — bright and steady one moment, almost invisible the next. Somebody had lit a candle in his room.
The door was ajar. He could hear voices coming from inside. A woman’s, then a man’s. He moved closer, testing each floorboard for creaks before he took a step. Then shoved the door open and stood in the gap.
It was the men he noticed first. He thought he had seen the tall one before. On the waterfront, maybe, or in the bar. A jaw like a horseshoe, hard and curved. Bloodshot eyes. The other one, a foot shorter and dressed in miner’s rags, did not register.
‘Welcome home, American.’
In the corner of the room, half shielded by the door, stood La Huesuda, bony as ever. She had a snapped-off chair-leg in one hand. Her mouth tipped sharply upwards at the edges and her thin nose glistened. Far from showing any signs of guilt, she seemed to have found some benefit in his appearance, seemed to be relishing the fact that he had caught them in the act.
‘You’ve just been on a trip,’ she said, ‘haven’t you?’
Wilson did not deny it.
‘Find anything?’
‘Not really.’
She stepped forwards. ‘No gold?’
‘No.’
The taller of the two men came and stood next to her. His only weapons were his height and the bunched fists that swung like lead weights on the end of his arms. He was looking at Wilson, but he spoke to La Huesuda.
‘You believe him?’
Her mouth turned upside-down.
‘Who are these men?’ Wilson asked her.
‘My brothers.’
Wilson looked at each of them in turn. ‘Are they descended from Amazons as well?’
He saw the tall man’s fist loop towards him. The room burned yellow for a moment. Then he found that he was sitting on the floor, the tall man standing over him.
‘Actually, they’re half-brothers,’ La Huesuda said.
The short man began to rummage in the knapsack that hung on the wall. His hand emerged with a wedge of onyx.
His face twisted in a triumphant sneer. ‘Thought you said you didn’t find anything.’
Wilson climbed to his feet. The inside of his head shimmered and hissed. ‘I was looking for gold,’ he said, ‘not onyx.’
‘Onyx?’ the tall man said. ‘I never heard of that.’ He was studying the knuckles of his right hand.
‘Still, it must be worth something,’ the short man said.
‘Is there anything else?’ La Huesuda stepped over to the wall. She had wrapped her small head in a scarlet shawl. Her nose protruded from her face like a knife stuck in a door.
Snatching the knapsack off the wall, she turned it over on the bed. A collection of lesser minerals, the fruit of his two weeks in the desert, spilled across the mattress. There was jasper and chalcedony, some crystals of cumengeite, and the onyx. They looked prettier and more valuable than they might otherwise have done. He had been working long hours on the stones, drawing the colours and markings out through polishing. It had been one of his methods for trying to remove Suzanne from his memory. It had not worked. He had ended up meditating on their beauty and then, by association, on hers.
‘This is robbery,’ he said.
La Huesuda turned to him, the black shapes of her two half-brothers lurching in the room behind her. ‘Yeah, well,’ she said, ‘I had some personal misfortune recently.’
‘What happened?’
‘Someone destroyed my balcony.’ She smiled to herself, teeth touching the wet curve of her bottom lip. ‘It was a foreigner, I think. An American, if I remember right.’
Wilson said nothing.
‘I’m asking for contributions,’ she went on, cackling now. ‘Just so happens I thought I’d start with you.’
‘But I told you. They’re not worth anything.’
‘So what are you worried about?’ She snapped her fingers in the air beneath his nose. He could smell raw onions, bacon fat, the genitals of sailors.
He sighed. ‘I collected them. It was a lot of work.’
‘As I said. A contribution.’
But he did not want to lose the crystals. Lifting the idea from his dream, he had decided to make a present of the best ones to Suzanne when they were finished. They would be souvenirs for her to take back to France with her. His only way of remaining in her memory. Touchstones. In his frustration, he had stepped forwards.
The taller of the two men stood in front of him again, his bottom teeth overlapping like a hand of cards, his bunched fists dangling against his thighs. There was a foot of stale breath between them.
The corner of the room exploded as the short man broke a bottle.
Wilson appealed to La Huesuda. ‘I told you that I’d mend your balcony,’ he said. ‘Don’t you trust me?’
‘Trust you?’ La Huesuda said.
The room was filled with mocking laughter.
Wilson looked from one face to another. All the mouths the same shape, all the laughter identical. Here was the family resemblance that he had been unable to see earlier on.
Chapter 11
Suzanne could see the house, high on the cemetery ridge. She saw the long white wall ribboning across the land, and soldiers lying among the rocks, asleep or dead. Beyond the house, below it, lay the sea, an aching shade of violet. It was dusk.
A crowd moved up the hill towards her. There must have been at least five hundred people. The dirt-track could not hold so many. They spilled out across the slope, scrambling over rough terrain. An urgency, as if they were late for something.
She thought of hiding, but there was nowhere. Only stones the size of heads or fists, and the house in the distance, standing out against the sky, the graves like bruises on the ground. Only the dead, it seemed, could hide.
But they did not see her.
She stood on a bank above the track while they moved past. Women took the lead, their heads wrapped in black scarves, all softness gone. Silent the women were, with tight mouths, and the silence was more frightening than sound. Some had pickaxes in their hands. Others had spades. Sticks. Chains. Kitchen things.
The men followed, in workshirts streaked with clay and stiff wool trousers. She could smell them as they passed. Their clothes were company-issue, worn for weeks on end. Sweat, oil, urine, garlic, sperm. At dances you could smell it too. When you sat on a hard wooden chair against the wall and the couples went whirling past your face. It was always the men that you could smell. She stepped backwards, covering her mouth and nose. Still they did not see her. Their eyes all pointed different ways. Their fists beat at the air, as if the air were a door and they were trying to get in.
Then she was standing in the house.
She knew this part. No lamps lit in the hallway, only moonlight falling through a high window. A shine on anything that was smooth: the tiled floor, the curve of a banister –
The stairs.
They brought him down feet first. Hoisted on their hands, he seemed to undulate, a cloth stretched over poles, a snake on stony ground. She could not look into his face.