“Barbara,” he said. Then again: “Barbara,” but this time the way an Anglo would say it — as if he were practicing.
He took the burlap bag from her and they embraced.
“Your mouth tastes of oranges,” he said.
“Never mind how my mouth tastes. The madrinas have come.”
He continued to hold her. But he didn’t look at her.
“Well, it was expected,” he said after a moment.
“Someone will talk. They’ll come here.”
“No one knows where I am.”
“This is Sonora — everyone knows and they whisper it everywhere. And when the time comes they’ll whisper it to them.”
He let go of her.
“Did you bring the Ford?”
“I couldn’t. They saw me. They knew who I was. I didn’t dare go near it.”
“It would have been a gamble anyway, that old car. Come, sit down. And if there’s bread and cheese in this bag we’ll make a modest meal.”
“How can you take this so calmly?”
“I’m filled with fear. Doesn’t it show? I don’t want to be the subject of one of their ballads. I don’t want them talking in the cantinas about how I fell on my knees when they came and begged for my life.”
“You’d never beg.”
“You don’t think so? But yes, I think so. It’s so painful, Barbara, to give up this life. But it won’t stop them. No, they pull the trigger all the faster if you beg. It encourages them.”
They were seated now on an old stone bench outside one of the ruined houses. He had a jug of water there and poured some into a tin cup for her.
She drank, tasting the tin and the cool of the water.
She said: “Is there no way you can square things with Jorge?”
“Ai — but we’ve talked about this before, Barbara. Jorge’s feet are no more solid than mine. In this business a man has a run of three, maybe five, good years, and Jorge’s had seven. He has to show the Big Pockets that he’s still a serious hombre, that he knows what to do about an underling who loses a shipment of the wonderful white powder the yanquis like to stick up their noses. Never mind that it was the police themselves that grabbed it and are now selling it on their own. And never mind either that I was outgunned and barely escaped with my life. When big money’s lost, somebody has to pay — that’s the rule. And who’s the peon around here?”
“We never should’ve got into this business,” she said sharply.
“What other way was there for us to make a few pesos? Maybe if my father had been a real father to me — but truly he was as worthless as the rest. And anyway, you’re not in this business, I am.”
“What happens to you happens to me.”
“I hope not. Because those madrinas are surely going to fill my belly with lead.”
“Don’t talk like this.”
“What other way should I talk? Here, eat something.”
“I can’t eat something. Not when you’re like this. Patricio, you were always so smart. Figure a way out of this.”
“How smart was it to get involved with Jorge? You know what his friends, the Big Pockets, say NAFTA stands for?”
“I don’t care what they say it stands for.”
“They say it means Narcotics Are Freely Transported Anywhere.” He paused and stared off at the horizon a moment. Then he spoke again. “They’ll come for Jorge one day, those madrinas. The Big Pockets will grow tired of him. Not that it’s any consolation.”
He ate some bread and cheese, washed it down with water from the jug. He still has an appetite, she thought. That’s something anyway. But he’d always been a good eater, a big fork man, and yet he remained slim and sinewy. “Like my father,” he’d told her. The Irishman who’d given him his blue eyes.
The night came down. He said: “Did you bring the matches?”
“Yes. Did you think I’d forget?”
“Come. I’ll show you what I need them for.”
There was a church at the other end of the village — little more than a chapel really, roofless and abandoned like everything else. He took her hand and led her to it through the darkness. It still had a wooden door, but one of the hinges had gone and it sat at an angle. He pushed it aside, then lit a match.
“It gets cold up here at night, Barbara, and I only had the one blanket. Then I found these in the basement — there must be a hundred of them down there — and figured a way to keep warm.”
He bent and applied the match and a candle came to life. Then he bent and lit another.
“The Zapatistas used the basement here to store weapons. Not these new Zapatistas with their Subcommander Marcos, but the original ones who followed Emilio in 1913. They’re the ones who must have left them here — a whole sackful of them.”
And all the time lighting new candles until the whole floor seemed covered with them — all but a blank space right in the middle.
“That’s where I sleep,” he told her. And she felt like screaming because he must look just like a corpse as he lay there — as if he were practicing the role for the madrinas.
“You’d be surprised how much heat these candles put out. But what’s wrong? You’ve gone white as a sheet.”
“Put them out!” she screamed. “Put them out! Don’t you see what you’ve been doing? You’ve been laying yourself out for a funeral!”
He grabbed her and held her while she shook in his arms.
“Put them out,” she whispered desperately into his shoulder.
He extinguished the candles and took her back to the place where the food was. Then he covered her with a blanket and lay down beside her and held her till she grew calm again.
“Those candles,” he began.
“I don’t want to hear about them,” she said sharply.
“But you’d better. But maybe later — hey?”
“Never.”
He continued to hold her. She was in one of those rare moods when she didn’t want to talk but she wanted him to talk just to hear the sound of his voice. Oh, how they knew each other and how to respond to each other. Since children almost — hating and loving and then only loving but fighting anyway because that was their temperament. Or maybe only her temperament though she’d never admit it.
So he talked about anything that came to his head, and she shook sometimes and was ashamed of it. Ashamed that she wasn’t strong when he needed her to be strong and not a burden. He pretended not to notice, but the way he held her, the way he caressed her, said that he was aware of every tremor.
There, under the open night sky, he began telling her about his father, the wild Irishman who’d sired him without bothering to marry his mother. A painter who’d sold what canvases he could to the turistas in the plaza, then, in drink or despair, slashed the rest with a palette knife. He’d heard them moaning sometimes in the other room, his mother and that man who never paid any attention to him, and wondered if that was how they’d sounded the night they made him. “He had one great friend — an old Hungarian who’d come here after World War Two for the sun and to forget the past. They drank as much as they could, whatever they could get their hands on — cheap wine, aguardiente, hard American liquor — and the more they drank the wilder my father got but the more calm the Hungarian became. So at the end of the night it was always he who brought my father home, like a kind uncle caring for a simpleminded nephew.
“Then one evening the police came and the Hungarian with them. They showed articles of clothing to my mother and asked her to identify them. They’d been found in a rocky place along the shore where the current was swift and the water deep, and there was some sort of drunken note with them that made no sense in either Spanish or English. This man has suicided himself, the old Hungarian said. There can be no doubt. But small as I was, I still saw that there were no shoes in that pile. And why would a man intent on drowning himself leave behind his pants and shirt and underwear but no shoes? The Hungarian sensed that I had seen something and got me outside and took me to a nearby store where he bribed me with sweets. And I thought: At last I got something from that bastard who sired me. I got these sweets.