She nodded as if she understood, and perhaps she did. “Your first name is French.”
“My mother,” he said, packing into those words a transplanted Parisian yearning all her life for the boulevards. “Yours is … theological.”
“Classical. My father was a schoolteacher. And a soccer coach.”
“Ah … and do you follow our national sport?”
“My husband does.”
They had seen the same recent movie, on which they disagreed. But they shared admiration for Borges, for Dufy. They smiled tolerantly at saint worship and all that. Dea was sure that death was soon followed by rebirth. “We travel through lifetime after lifetime,” she told Alain.
A conductor appeared at their door, speaking not only to them but to the whole car, speaking as if through a megaphone. “A wall has crumbled,” he shouted. A little girl ran up to him and pulled at his jacket. “The train—”
“Come back, Ella,” called a man’s voice.
“—stopped just in time,” the conductor went on. “No one has been hurt, a few of our men bruised. But the train cannot proceed, and we must walk backwards through the tunnel.”
“Walk backwards!” the child laughed. “Not me!”
“Well, walk forwards, but in the direction from which we came.”
“I want to walk backwards,” said the contrary child.
“Ella!” the man called again.
There was an orderly scramble from the train. A wheelchair and its feeble old occupant took some time to disembark. “My suitcase,” fretted a woman. “Carry the thing yourself,” snapped a man. “This way,” called a voice from the rear.
Seventy-five passengers edged past the stalled train. They were beamed on by the workmen’s batteried torchlights. Only the figures were illuminated; the walls of the tunnel, the floor of the tunnel, even the air in the tunnel, was black. The little girl so eager to walk backward rode on her father’s shoulders. A large fellow in a leather jacket carried the crippled old man in his arms; another carried the wheelchair, folded, above his head; a calm attendant in a flowered turban followed the threesome. Behind the last car the crowd reassembled, along with engineer and brakeman and conductors and firemen. The old man got resettled in his unfolded chair. Now they were addressed by the chief conductor, who wore epaulets.
“Ladies and gentlemen, we must return to Muñez. We will walk eastwards through the tunnel.”
“… an important appointment!” shouted a man.
“We regret the inconvenience. Tonight the transportation department will provide lodging in Muñez hotels. Tomorrow we will board buses to the capital.”
“Buses go around the mountain, for God’s sake,” said the man with the important appointment. “They take eight hours.”
“Alas … Railway personnel are ready to escort us now. Only a few miles. A small commuter train will be waiting at the mouth of the tunnel.”
“The evening express will smash us to pieces … oh!” A trio of old women.
The chief conductor permitted himself a sigh. “All trains have been cancelled,” he assured the crowd.
Alain planned the days ahead: no trains at all during the repairs, then one track opened, a small army of men deployed to direct operations first in one direction and then the other. There’d be television inaccuracies to correct, newspaper editorials to counter, extra buses to commandeer for that lengthy mountainside road. Private planes would rent themselves out to fly from the capital to Muñez and back again until one crashed into the mountain — no safe air route had yet been discovered.
The procession was led by the chief conductor. The other train workers distributed themselves among the passengers, their torch-lights supplementing the tunnel’s flicker.
Alain and Dea were near the end of the line. He carried his briefcase in his outer hand. In hers she carried a rattan sack containing samples of other rattan. Their inner hands were free. Occasionally their knuckles brushed. The man with the important appointment, who had broad but somewhat hunched shoulders, complained at length to a fellow traveler, apparently a stranger, who murmured with idle sympathy and occasionally turned his head as if searching for someone to take his place.
In half an hour the light from the torches melded with another light, a gray evening light. They breathed fresher air. The tunnel was behind them now; they stepped into knee-high grasses. An old wooden train waited. It had only three cars, and most passengers had to remain on their feet during the ride to Muñez. The man in the wheelchair and his attendant were stowed like baggage in one corner. The little girl Ella insisted on curling up in an overhead rack. Dea stood in the aisle, alongside the hunched man, who was still muttering. Alain stood beside Dea.
At the empty station — how many hours earlier had he boarded that fateful express train, right here? — the mayor was waiting under a grand nineteenth-century arch. He looked like the last soldier in a defeated army. He distributed hotel vouchers. Then he and Alain walked together to his office, past stone mansions with delicate balconies: mansions sacrificed to governmental need. Hibiscuses flourished everywhere: the national tree, beautiful but easily bruised. At the mayor’s desk, from the mayor’s chair, Alain spoke briefly on the telephone to the president, and briefly also to Isabella, who thanked God and cried a little, then at great length to the minister of transportation, and at medium length to his own second in command. By the end of the final conversation it was midnight.
“Minister — you are welcome to spend the night at my house.”
“It’s the oddest thing — I travel so much that now I can sleep only in hotels. But I thank you.”
The mayor seemed relieved. Alain looked at his voucher, recognized the address, and set off along the main avenue. A late tram moved behind him like a bodyguard. Ahead the hotel was dimly lit. Alone, in its lobby, sat the woman. He had forgotten her name — Lea? — but he had not forgotten her. From the moment the train thudded to a halt, sharply braked by the quick-witted engineer—“I saw the side of the tunnel crack, half a mile ahead,” the man would say on television. “I saw rocks appear in the crack; I knew what was happening; I prayed that the engine would stop clean and the cars behind not pile up, derail …”—from that moment of death averted, of survival ensured, Alain and the woman had been twisted together like cars in the wreck that hadn’t happened. He approached her chair and held out his hand. She took it.
ALAIN REMAINED IN MUÑEZ another several days. There were officials to speak to before he returned to the capital to meet with another shaken bunch. For the next several months the unfortunate occurrence in the tunnel would call on his patience and his willingness to let somebody else end a conversation. By some miracle no plane crashed into the mountain.
The rest of the survivors rode to the capital the next day on the extra buses that had been pressed into service. Dea arrived home at five in the afternoon. Luc’s pharmacy occupied the front of their house, and when she entered he was waiting on a customer, explaining the possible side effects of a medication. Seeing Dea, he interrupted his own speech, though without moving from behind the counter. He looked at his wife with his usual kindly upward stare — he was a short man — and his already pale skin paled further with relief renewed, gratitude renewed — they had spoken on the telephone the evening before, he knew she was safe, but still. From an expertly penned-in corner their two-year-old sent up a howl of welcome.
Dea did not work the next day. Instead she took her beloved son to the park, and they watched the puppet show, and listened to the band, and shared a giant dish of ice cream. But the following morning she returned to her trestle table in the back room of their house, a windowed studio looking out on a small garden fringed with hibiscus. The child played at her feet with tongue depressor soldiers and a castle made of empty pill vials.