Frank was working at the gate, having no luck, and I saw Gino head around the fence, the others following. Then Frank followed, and in moments they were standing shoulder to shoulder pressed against the fence and looking under the lighthouse, pointing and gesturing, and I could see their steamy breath on the night air.
I heard the sound of a motor, and when I looked up the road to where the houses were the police car was coming. It flashed to its high beams, and the men in their coats and woolen hats and bare ankles below pajama legs were caught in the bright light. Then the car stopped and the men turned and the officer climbed out of the door and strolled along the blacktop toward them, leaving footprints in the silver frost behind.
At times I can hold a tissue, still as a piece of heavily starched fabric, in the breeze in the hallway between the open doors, one looking out along the crest to sky and sea, the other down into the meadow and up to the Manor on the hill, and I leave the windows open in most weather, at least a crack in winter, to get some of the outside in, because I can’t go there, but for Arthur and the dark car he calls his limousine.
Last night John was sleeping in his bed early on in my shift, and when I passed the foot of the bed I heard him call out softly, “Chepa” in some dream, as if he were speaking to me. It was later that he told his story, and after I’d sucked the men on the ward, I’d gone behind the screen in the solarium to tend the one I’ve come to have feelings about. His face is oddly beautiful in its repose in his coma, and when I dab the sweat from his brow and cheeks I usually linger over him. His eyelids are utterly unwrinkled, long curling lashes, and he responds to my touch sometimes, coming up to a shallowness in delirium, and I feel I can almost reach him.
And I was tending him and John was telling his story, and though the circumstance of the story was beyond my experience in time and intention, I was provoked at his mention of that square in Tampico, the place I’ve come to call my agora, and the old images came up to me again, the man leaving me to sit on a bench there, buildings pressing down over me, and the yellow chihuahua that came up to my knee and sniffed it.
I felt my stomach turning and I stepped out from behind the screen into the early stages of the story, interrupting it for a brief moment only, and went to the instrument room to clean the tubes and cannulas, to get my hands into alcohol and sputum and my mind free of memory.
My mother died in Tampico. I was eighteen years old and a licensed practical nurse and my father had died, and we went to Tampico to see his family and to give them money. My father was a fisherman, like his father before him a Mexican who had married an Indian woman, who was herself the product of a marriage between a Spaniard and an Indian before the turn of the century. My father left the fishing village of Chorreras when he was twenty-seven and had come up to the northeast without English to make his fortune. It wasn’t much of a fortune when he died at sixty-seven, but there was the house and boat and money in the bank, and he’d set aside money that my mother didn’t know of until the will was read, a few thousand dollars for his sister and brothers, those Mexicans that neither my mother nor I knew existed. He’d left money for air fare and hotels and a codicil that would tie the rest up if my mother didn’t go there.
It was a bus that killed her. It was full of chickens, and the chickens flapped at the windows and flew from the doors with the people when the bus slid to a stop in the muddy street over her.
I was helpless before it, hugging my raincoat in the rain, my umbrella skidding away, and it was only the old man’s arm around me that steadied me as he turned me away from the sight and led me through the doorway of a bakery at the corner.
His name was Joaquín Sánchez, a businessman of some kind just passing by, and he made arrangements with the coroner and for shipping the body back. Then he took me to dinner, spoke to me like a grandfather, and in two days came to get me at the hotel. I stood in shade under the awning while he spoke to the driver who would take my suitcases and my mother’s suitcases out to the airport and put them in a locker, then return and leave the key at the desk. I had a book and my toothbrush and some underwear in a bag over my shoulder. He said I shouldn’t be carrying anything heavy, not right then, and he walked close to me as we headed up the street and into the square, where he sat me on a bench and went into one of the public buildings to finish up the paperwork.
It was early afternoon and the square was crowded with people. Vendors were busy at their carts, and I watched men passing in business suits, women strolling together, hand in hand, carrying shopping bags and large purses. The doors of the public buildings were heavy and windowless, and when people entered in through the dark spaces at their openings, they were closed tight again and looked like smoky paintings on the façades in which they were set. The places where the edges of buildings met at right angles, forming the square’s corners, were, I imagined, narrow passages, streets winding in from the serious industrial back streets of the city, transformed into shopping and business avenues as they spilled into the square, but I couldn’t see their mouths, and the buildings seemed butted together at their edges there, as if there were no entrances at all. There was only the street we’d walked down from the hotel. It entered at the side of the square, and I could see into it for a good distance to where it turned, shops and offices, people crossing in traffic and exhaust smoke, and could imagine the hotel beyond the turn and on the second floor my room there, and my mother’s full suitcases and my own, standing in a bulky gathering on the carpet beside the bed. Then I remembered the driver and thought the room would surely be empty now.
I felt something, a light pressure and a wetness, and I looked away from the street and down into the shadows the leaning buildings cast over me and saw the yellow Chihuahua, her paws on my leg, snout reaching up and touching the edge of my hand where it rested on my knee. I jerked my hand away, a little shocked by her presence and her color, and she looked up at me curiously, then kicked from my knee, turning before her feet hit the ground, and trotted off across the square. Beyond her and above her I could see a fire escape, no more than a steep vertical ladder climbing up the edge of a building’s front, and I found myself thinking of it as a way out of the square, but then I looked to the building’s base and saw that its first rung was too far up to be reached. The dog disappeared into a crowd. There seemed to be more people in the square now, and I looked quickly to the place where Señor Sánchez had entered, but the door was closed tight and I couldn’t see a handle, and I felt my stomach tightening, a rush of blood at my temples. I reached for my wrist and found my pulse. It was racing, and when I looked down at my hands, the one holding the wrist of the other, it was as if they were someone else’s hands, there in my lap.
And I was hearing things, a motor and laughter, a flapping in the breeze, and when I looked to the one remaining exit from the square I could see it was closing, a truck was turning, edging ahead, then back, coming horizontal at the mouth, blocking the street off.
And people were climbing up on the truck’s long bed, and I saw that many were skeletons. Some wore sombreros, serapes draped over their bones, some were in business suits, their skulls chalk white under fedoras, derbies, and cowboy hats. And there were women too, in loose flowered dresses and blond wigs, and I thought I could hear their joints grinding and clacking as they reached their skeleton arms and hands down, their teeth grinning under the dark holes of their noses, and lifted up streamers, piñata pigs and skeleton horses and instruments. Then the skeleton band was playing, under the flowered archway they’d constructed on the truck’s bed, and the women and the small skeleton children were dancing, and streamers stood horizontal in the breeze above them, elevated on the pitchforks of horned devils.