So Walker asked the man to return before sundown and the man smiled and drove away. Walker suspected they would never see him again.
Lu Anne walked across the road to the foot of the path.
“Hey, bo,” she said. “Don’t you know we’re going up?”
Walker knew. He fell into step with her.
“The next hill,” he said to her when they had gone a way, “that never was a thing that troubled me.”
“No,” Lu Anne said.
“I was always hot for the next hill. Next horizon. Whatever there was. That’s why I came along now.”
He paused, looked around and took a pinch. It was very wasteful. When he had satisfied himself, he took a drink of bottled water. Lu Anne took some cocaine from him.
“Yes,” she said. “You’re Walker.”
“They don’t call me Walker for nothing,” Walker said. “It’s a specialty.”
“Of what does it consist?” Lu Anne said.
“Well,” he said, “there’s the road. And there’s one.”
“And how does one approach the road?”
“One steps off confidently. One in front of the other. Hay foot, straw foot. Briskly.”
“Oh,” Lu Anne said, “that’s you, Gordon. That’s your style all right.” She linked arms with him. “Tell us more.”
“Well,” he said, “there are things to know.”
“I knew there would be. Tell.”
“There’s to and fro. There’s back and forth. There’s up. Likewise down. There’s taking care of your feet.”
“And the small rain,” Lu Anne said.
“And mud. And gravel and sand. And shit. And wet rot and dry rot. And going over fences.”
“Can you look back?”
“Never back. You can look down. You have to see where you’re going.”
“But is there a place for art?” Lu Anne asked with a troubled frown. “It’s all so functional.”
“There’s whistling. That’s the principal art. The right tunes in the right places. Whatever gets you through the afternoon.”
“How sad,” Lu Anne said. They walked on, winding upward along the hillside. “How sublime.”
“The road is never sublime,” Walker told her. “The road is pedestrian.”
When they had walked for half an hour, they could see both valleys — the plains to the east and the forested barranca through which they had come.
They stopped to drink the rest of their water and take more of the drug. The road over which they had driven ran close to the summit; the top of Monte Carmel was only a quarter mile or so above them.
“Your road is mine, Walker,” she told him.
“Right,” he said. He glanced at her; she was clutching the collar of the army shirt she had thrown on after the party. Her eyes were bright with pain.
“It was always me for you.”
“I knew that,” he said. He was thinking that, of course, they would never have lasted three months together by the day. Arrivals, departures, fond absences and dying falls were all there had ever been to it. Bird songs and word games, highs and high romance. “We weren’t free.”
“Oh, baby,” she said, “there ain’t no free.”
“Only,” Walker said, “the comforts of philosophy.”
“Which in your case,” Lu Anne said, “is me.”
Walker laughed and so did she.
“Likewise the consolations of religion,” Lu Anne said, “which is why we are out here …”
“Under the great vault of heaven,” Walker suggested.
“Under the great vault,” she repeated, “of heaven.” She stopped and began to cry. She knelt in the dust, her eyes upturned in absurd rapture, doing the virgin’s prayer. Walker was appalled. He bent to her.
“Can’t you help me?” she asked.
“I would die for you,” he said. It was true, he thought, but not really helpful. He was the kind of lover that Edna Pontellier was a mother. At the same moment he realized that his life was in danger and that he might well, as he had earlier suspected, have come to Mexico to die. His heart beat fearfully. His sides ached.
“I don’t require dying for,” Lu Anne said. He considered that she deceived herself. Weeping, she looked childlike and stricken, but even in his recollection she had never been more beautiful. She had grown so thin in the course of the film that her face had contracted to its essential lines, which were strong and noble, lit by her eyes with intelligence and generosity and madness. The philosophy whose comforts she represented was Juggernaut.
He knelt breathless beside her and realized that he was happy. That was why he had come, to be with her in harm’s way and be happy.
She looked into his face and touched his hair. “Poor fish,” she said. “I was always there for you.”
“Well,” Walker said, “here I am.”
“Too late.”
She raised her eyes again.
“And nothing up there, eh? No succor? No bananas?”
He helped her to her feet.
“Who knows?” Walker said. “Maybe.”
“Maybe, eh?”
She stayed where she was; Walker was above her on the trail, which grew steeper as it ascended.
“Do you know why I was an actress?” she asked him.
“Why?”
A sudden luminous smile crossed her face. He could not imagine what force could drive such a smile through tears and regret.
“You’ll see,” she said, and took him by the hand. She climbed with strong sure steps. Just short of the crest, she released his hand and fell to her knees.
“This is the way we go up,” she said. He watched her struggle up the last rise, one knee before the other. When he tried to help her, she thrust his hand away.
“This is how the Bretons pray,” she told him. “The Bretons pray like anything.”
So it was on her knees that she mounted the top of the hill. Walker went on before her, to find a featureless building of the local stone with a thatched roof. Over the door, a wooden sign rattled on the unimpeded wind of the mountaintop, lettered to read Seguridad Nacional. There was a noxious smell in the thin air.
He stood panting before the building, and he realized at once when he had seen it last and why the landscape to the east had seemed so familiar. Ten or perhaps twelve years before, he had come down from Guadalajara by limousine to visit her on the set of a Traven remake. The unit had been based on the Constancia Hot Springs in the cultivated valley to the east. He had worked many Mexican locations and sometimes confused them in memory, but he remembered it quite well now, seeing the homely building with its sign. The unit’s laborers had thrown it up in a day or two.
Lu Anne crawled over the coarse yellow grass of the hilltop on her knees. A long slow roll of thunder echoed along the mountain range. An enormous bank of storm clouds was drifting toward them from the coast.
“This is a holy place,” Lu Anne said. “Sacred to me.”
“This is the police post from that Traven picture,” Walker told her. “It isn’t anything or anywhere. It’s fake.”
“It’s holy ground,” she told him. “The earth is bleeding here.”
Walker went around behind the building; the ground there was muddy and stinking. He found an empty wooden trough with a litter of corncobs around it. There was a barred window through which he could see stacked ears of maize and heaped grain sacks.
He went back to where Lu Anne was kneeling.
“For God’s sake, Lu Anne! It’s a fucking corncrib on a pig farm.”
Lu Anne leaned forward in her kneeling posture and pressed her forehead into the dirt.
Walker laughed.
“Oh wow,” he cried. “I mean, remember the ceremony they had? The governor of the state came out? They were going to make it a film museum.” He stalked about in manic high spirits. “It was going to be a showplace of cinema, right? For the whole hemisphere, as I recall. Second only to Paris, a rival collection. Oh Christ, that’s rich.”