Suddenly it was the other girl, the girl with the calm, lying face and the fake blonde hair, who became real to him. Against his will, she leaped into his thoughts. He could reconstruct her presence close to him on the couch of the hotel suite; he could see every detail of the slightly roughened hand, lying inches from his own, which he could have touched and hadn’t. The emotion she evoked was anger. But it was a flesh-and-blood anger. Ellie had become as abstract as the solution to an algebra problem.
Outside the car window, narrow, cluttered streets hemmed them in. Apathetic burros, loaded with wood, baskets of fruit or sacks of charcoal, blocked their way. The frenzied buying and selling of trivial objects was still in full spate, and still, inevitably, a cacophony of music from street orchestras, jukeboxes, marimbas, blared through the night. The taxi nosed into a large, tree-shaded plaza in front of a huge stone church, and here the crowds and confusion were twice as chaotic as any he had yet seen.
‘Navedad.’
The driver grinned at him over his shoulder.
‘Una fiesta grande.
Many people.’
Colored electric lights nestled like tiny balloons in the trees. There was yet another carrousel and tents and stalls — all the carnival squalor which had haunted his day. A group of Indians with fantastic feather head-dresses and skirts were dancing fervently beside a frozen-custard stand. Tall iron railings guarded the church from this seething mass of merrymakers or worshippers or whatever they were. And, above the church, on top of an eccentric hill like a brandished thumb, stood a small chamber-like building which was probably the shrine itself.
The taxi crawled through one block of chaos and then turned again into winding narrow streets. The houses on each side were hidden behind high stuccoed walls and barred windows. An occasional light hinted at life within, but it was obviously a humble, Mexican life, fantastically inappropriate for Ellie.
‘Bonaventure 20.’
They stopped in front of one of the blank walls no different from the dozens of others in the street. Mark stood in front of the closed, rickety wooden door, wondering why he had come. The house was situated at the foot of the thumb-like hill which led to the shrine above; a narrow, dusty alley wound upwards past its side wall. Music and clamor roared from the plaza, hidden by masonry only a few hundred feet away.
Peering in the dim light, he could make out a chipped tin plaque saying: 20, which had been nailed above the door frame. A faint radiance at one of the barred windows indicated that someone was at home. With no hope at all, he beat on the wooden panels.
The thumping echoed unexpectedly loud above the obbligato of music from the plaza. Instantly it was challenged by the shrill, neurotic barking of a dog inside. He knocked again. The barking sprang nearer. With it sounded the click of footsteps on stone or tile. He had no feeling of danger. He felt only lassitude. This wasn’t a trap. It was a mare’s nest.
A woman’s voice scolded sharply and the dog stopped barking and started to whimper. The footsteps paused with just the thickness of the door between them and him, and then, slowly, the door opened a crack. A woman’s face showed in the opening. It was a young, anonymous Mexican face framed by a dark rebozo. A dog’s snout appeared lower down, sniffing suspiciously.
The woman said nothing. In the obscure illumination her face seemed as expressionless as a face at prayer.
‘I am looking for my wife,’ said Mark slowly. ‘My wife. An American woman.’
The dog, unable to control its outraged feelings any longer, gave a falsetto yelp. The woman bent swiftly and slapped it. She looked at Mark impassively again.
‘No entiendo, Saar.’
‘An American woman.
Una Americana.’
She gazed at him with the stupid look of someone who had given up all effort to understand.
‘Oscar,’ he tried. ‘Oscar sent me. Oscar.’
Her voice came suddenly, echoing the name. ‘Oscar.’
‘Oscar from the Hotel Granada.’
‘Momento.’
The woman’s face disappeared; the door slammed shut; the footsteps clicked away inside. It hadn’t been a rejection. She had obviously gone to consult some higher authority.
Above the vulgar street music the solemn boom of a bell sounded from the cathedral. The footsteps began to click again inside. This time they were confused, multiple. Once again the door opened a crack. Framed in the crack was a different face, a tiny, wrinkled, old woman’s face, sharp as a half moon. Behind it, Mark caught a glimpse of the first woman.
The half moon gazed at him. ‘¿Q
ue quiere, Senor?’
‘Oscar sent me. Oscar from the Hotel Granada.’
‘Es amigo de Oscar,’
breathed the other woman in the shadowy background.
The bell was still tolling. Inside, the dog was whining again. The old woman studied Mark for a long moment in silence and then opened the door wide.
“Pase Vd, Senor.’
He stepped inside. The old woman closed the door behind him. They were in a dimly lit patio. Straggling vines in kerosene cans cast queer shadows on the broken-tiled floor. Dim arches hinted at rooms to left and right. From a blanketed birdcage hung on the wail came a sudden, startled chirp.
The little woman, frail and desiccated as a dead plant, stood in front of him. She was wearing black. The other, younger, woman hovered behind her. The dog, a scrawny yellow adolescent, wriggled to Mark in propitiation. The next move was obviously up to him.
He said again all he could say. ‘I want my wife. Oscar sent me for my wife.’
The women stood patiently and in silence. There was no sense of conspiracy, no feeling that they were keeping anything back from him. He seemed to be merely something incomprehensible that had happened, something that had arrived and would in time go away. The young woman suddenly and timidly asked:
‘¿No habla espanol, el Senor?’
He knew enough to understand that and said: ‘No, I don’t speak Spanish.’
‘Ah,’ said the old woman, nodding her head at something she could grasp.
‘El Senor no habla espanol.’
There were vague whisperings and movements in the shadows of the patio beyond. Cautiously a young girl emerged from the darkness. She was followed by another, and then another, and another, until there were four of them. They all! wore black. The family must be in mourning. They stood in a silent semi-circle around the two older women, watching Mark from black eyes bright with polite curiosity.
Mark said: ‘Doesn’t anybody speak English?’
The woman who had opened the door to him said again: ‘
Es amigo de Oscar.’
‘Oscar,’ rippled the four girls, glancing at each other and nodding. ‘Oscar.’
All six women stood watching Mark fixedly, waiting for a revelation. Because it was useless to talk any more, Mark gestured towards the interior of the patio indicating his desire to search there for his wife. The old woman seemed to understand. She said politely:
‘Si, si, Senor.’
She turned back into the shadows and started to guide Mark deeper into the house. The five other women followed. Only the oldest of the followers, the one with the shoes, made footsteps. The others glided silently as ghosts.
The old woman reached an open door, from which emanated a faint radiance. She stood by it, gesturing with her hand that Mark should enter. He stepped inside. He was in a bare floored square room lit by three candles stuck in empty liquor bottles, which stood on a wooden highboy. Two large iron
beds filled almost half the space. Four wooden chairs were
lined up stiffly along the wall. The highboy, gleamingly polished, obviously the pride and joy of the household, dominated the room. On it, between the candles, stood a photograph in a silver frame. Above it, on the grimy whitewashed wall, hung a large poster of the Holy Virgin of Guadalupe. The atmosphere was one of crushing poverty. In spite of its foreignness, it brought Mark memories of Providence.
The room was not empty. On one of the beds a little girl of about eight sat cross-legged. She too was wearing a frock of unrelieved black and was clutching the straw casing of a champagne bottle passionately and possessively as if it were a doll.
The old woman joined him. Now in the candlelight he could see that she was not really old. Although her face was immensely wrinkled and eroded, it was still a young face. She was probably no more than forty. She pulled one of the wooden chairs from the wall, placed it in front of the highboy and indicated that Mark should sit. He realized that she had mistaken his gesture in the patio. She had merely assumed that he was criticizing her hospitality, and wanted to be received in state. He sat down. The five other females collected in the room and stood in shy silence around him.
If they had been hostile, he could have ignored them, searched the house and gone away. But their exquisite politeness, their naive trust crippled him.
He said again, beginning to feel foolish: ‘Doesn’t anyone speak English?’
The little girl, clutching the champagne casing, leaned towards him from the bed, jet-eyed, fascinated. No one spoke. One of the candles above him gutted out. He glanced up instinctively and found himself looking straight at the photograph in the silver frame. It was a photograph of Oscar - Oscar in a formal dark suit, with his hair carefully brushed and gleaming, Oscar, smiling the supercilious, aristocratic smile of a Spanish grandee.
The old woman, seeing where he was looking, laughed suddenly and said:
‘Oscar.’
All the girls tittered proudly and said: ‘Oscar’ too.
A mother and six sisters. He should have realized it earlier.
In some mood of perverse humor Oscar had sent him to his own home.
Mark’s first feeling was anger. Then he started to wonder. If Oscar had sent him on a wild-goose chase simply to cheat him out of two hundred and fifty pesos, would he have risked sending him to his own family? It seemed unlikely. Then what? Perhaps Mark’s original conjecture had been right. Perhaps Oscar was much more deeply involved in the conspiracy than his role as hotel clerk implied. Perhaps Ellie was housed or imprisoned here, and the desire for a two-hundred-and-fifty-peso topcoat had been alluring enough to make Oscar betray his allies.
It was just possible. And, if it were possible, these women were merely feigning stupidity. He looked from one face to the other. The proud giggling which had accompanied the mention of Oscar’s name had subsided. All six women looked back at him passively like gentle jungle animals. Only the little girl on the bed seemed excited. She had dropped her ‘doll’ and had squirmed closer to him until she was almost toppling off the bed. Her lips were half parted in a kind of ecstasy of wonder.
Mark got up from the chair. All the women shied as if they were going to scurry off into the patio, but they did not move.
Mark was angry again, not with the women, but with the day’s bitter frustration. They sensed his anger. He could tell that. Although they stood their ground, they were all tense. The music from the fiesta in the plaza pulsed faintly in the air, not like music but like distant pumping.
He asked harshly: ‘Where is my wife? The American woman?’
All of them stepped backwards as if he had struck them. But they did not answer. Perhaps it was only the product of his own suspicions, but they seemed suddenly knowing, guilty.
‘The American woman,’ he repeated.
From the bed a small but very clear voice said in English:
‘The American woman.’
He spun around. The little girl was smiling up at him with an expression of almost ludicrous pride on her face. One of the girls cried warningly: ‘Lupita.’ She ran to the bed and sat down next to the child, putting an arm around her. All the other women converged into a group.
Mark dropped to his knees and took both of the child’s tiny hands in his own. ‘You speak English?’
The girl on the bed dragged at the child and said again: ‘Lupita.’
But the child was still watching Mark enraptured. Very slowly she said: ‘I speak English in the school.’
‘Where’s the American woman?’ asked Mark. ‘Tell me. Where is the American woman?’
The mother almost shouted:
‘Callate, chiquita.’
But the child smiled at Mark a smile of ravishing sweetness. She tugged one hand out of his grip and, picking up the champagne casing, pointed with it across the patio.
‘The American woman is in the other room.’
The room was very still. Suddenly Mark heard a rustle behind him. He jumped up and turned. The mother and all the daughters were moving cautiously towards the door.
‘Hey,’ he called.
They all swung back to watch him, panic showing in their widened eyes and parted lips. Then, as he started forward, they scattered like hens stampeded in a chicken yard. He was caught up in their hysterical flight. The mother and two of the daughters reached the door before him. Another girl plunged into the frame at exactly the same instant as he and, for a moment, they were wedged there together. He could feel her soft warm flesh yielding to his elbow; her dusty-smelling rebozo flicked his cheek. The yellow dog, reappearing from nowhere, was flirting around them, jumping and yelping. An extra shove catapulted the girl and himself through the doorway into the patio. The girl staggered and clutched at his arm for support. Once she had steadied herself, she gave a thin scream and fled with the others. They all swooped away like large, shabby moths into the darkness.
He stood a moment, trying to get his bearings. The immense excitement of having at last found Ellie confused him. And this black, cluttered patio was a type of architecture to which he wasn’t accustomed. The other room? Where would the other room be? The women had not run to Ellie. He was sure of that. Their chaotic flight had been planless - nothing more than a primitive impulse to escape from danger.
He peered through the darkness. The dog was nipping playfully at his trouser leg and clinging with its teeth to the cloth. He shoved it with his foot. It whimpered with pleasure and bit into the trouser leg again, enjoying the game.
Ahead to his right he could make out a faint radiance - the light from a candle, perhaps, seeping through the cracks of a shuttered window. He started towards it. The dog was still mauling his trousers. He had to drag it with him.