10

He was beginning to feel the alcohol, but he met her at the platform of the car and offered her his arm like a gentleman of the old school, all his conflicts resolved into this reality: a young and beautiful woman in a pleasant social situation far removed from any decisions; life, after all …

She accepted a small glass of tequila.

“So!” Harriet Winslow sighed, playing the role of a North American woman with the prospect of a comforting glass at dusk with a fellow American. “It isn’t easy, you know, to leave New York behind. Washington really isn’t a city, it’s a place of passage. The principal actors change so often.” She laughed quietly, and the old man had to wonder whether this conversation was taking place at nightfall in a savage Mexican desert.

“Why did you leave New York?” he asked.

“Why did New York leave us?” Her quiet laughter expressed her pleasure, and the old man told himself that Harriet’s drink must be taking effect more quickly than his, with a more dizzying result. All he wanted to ask, yet again, was: As you entered the ballroom, did you look at yourself in the mirrors?

But with a swift glance at the woman who only a few moments earlier had in effect been in the arms of a young foreigner, he realized that she would prefer not to talk about that; neither, however, did she want to appear gauche and ask him about his own life. That morning she had seen the old man’s open suitcase, two books in English, both by the same author, and a copy of the Quixote; and now, beside his glass, she saw some pages of manuscript and a stubby pencil. It was easier for both of them to talk about her, about her past. The old man had fought today; he could have died. She sipped her drink and said to him, wordlessly, I know you fought today, the excitement is in your face; I would not deny you a little candor, even a little warmth. That’s why she chose to speak about herself and answer the old man’s insistent question obliquely: “So many things were left unanswered when my father went to Cuba. I was sixteen, and he never returned.”

She told him that her family history was bizarre, you would think she had invented it, especially “when I tell it to you here.” In the 1840s, her great-uncle had been one of the richest men in New York. He had a son of whom he was very proud, and he sent him off to Europe to become a man. In addition, as a sign of fatherly confidence, he charged him with buying some Old Masters. Instead, “my marvelous Uncle Lewis” had bought paintings no one appreciated then: Giottos, and primitive masters. “You know what? My Great-uncle Halston disinherited him! He thought his son had made a fool of him by buying such horrible and crude paintings, totally unsuitable to be shown to ladies and gentlemen in the drawing room of a mansion on the shores of Long Island Sound.

“He left all his money to his two daughters, and as a kind of joke, he left Lewis the paintings, which he considered worthless. Uncle Lewis kept the pictures and died in poverty. A maiden aunt kept them in her attic, and when my own grandmother inherited them, she gave them to somebody. When they were finally auctioned twenty years ago, they brought five million dollars. Uncle Lewis had paid five thousand. But for us, it was too late.”

She raised her glass and said to the old gringo: Can you imagine? And he said yes, he could imagine a young girl’s dreams of being wealthy in New York at the beginning of the century, when life was sweet there; instead, “having to wait, as her mother had also had to wait, it wasn’t easy, no, it wasn’t easy,” because they weren’t accustomed to accepting charity, in whatever form; suitors did not flock around a girl without a dowry, the daughter of a minor officer fallen in the Cuban campaign, the daughter of a widow of an army captain, studying at a normal school in Washington, D.C., to be near God knows what and …

“Well, then … What about you? That’s the end of my story.”

“Imagine…”

“Yes,” she said, “yes,” and again she glanced at the scribbled sheets of paper, the stubby pencil. “We studied literature in school, you know, sir. It is admirable that you brought Cervantes’s book to Mexico.”

“I’ve never read it,” said the old gringo. “I thought here…”

“It is never too late to read the classics.” This time Harriet held out her glass and the gringo filled it before serving himself his fourth, his fifth … “Or our contemporaries. I see also that you brought two books by a living American author…”

“Don’t read them,” said the old man, wiping the sting of the tequila from his mustache. “They are very bitter books, the devil’s dictionaries…”

“And you?” she insisted, as he had insisted: Had she seen herself in the mirrors when she entered the ballroom? What story did the mirrors tell her?

He? Did she think he was going to tell her everything he was feeling? I came here to die, I am a writer, I want to be a good-looking corpse, I cannot bear to cut myself when I am shaving, I live in terror that a rabid dog will bite me and I will die disfigured, I am not afraid of bullets, I want to read Don Quixote before I die, to be a gringo in Mexico is one way of dying, I am …

“A bitter old man. Pay no attention to me. Coincidence brought us together. If I hadn’t met you, Miss Harriet, I’m sure I would have come across one of the American newspapermen trailing along after Villa. I wouldn’t have to tell him my story. He would know it.”

“But I don’t,” said Harriet Winslow. “And I have been candid with you. A bitter old man, you say?”

“Old Bitters. A contemptible, muckraking reporter at the service of a baron of the press as corrupt as any I denounced in his name. But I was pure, Miss Harriet, do you believe me? Pure, but bitter. I attacked the honor and dishonor of all men, without distinction. In my time, I was feared and hated. Here, have another, and don’t look at me like that. You asked me to be frank. I am going to be. Being frank is what I do best.”

“I’m not sure, truthfully, that…”

“No, no, no!” the old gringo said, dogmatically. “You know why you have to listen to me today.”

“Tomorrow … I know your name.”

The old man grimaced ironically. “My name was synonymous with coldness, with anti-sentimentality. I was the devil’s disciple, except that I wouldn’t have accepted even the devil as master. Much less God, whom I defamed with something worse than blasphemy: a curse on everything He had wrought.”

She attempted a graceful diversion: she was a Methodist, he was dreaming, give her a minute, she wanted to imagine it; but he would brook no trick, no distraction. He had invented a new decalogue, the old man said abruptly: “Adore no images save those the coinage of the country shows; Kill not, for death liberates your foe from persecution’s constant woe; To steal were folly, for ’tis plain, in cheating there is greater gain; Honor thy parents, and perchance their wills thy fortune may advance.”

“So I invented myself a new family, the family of my imagination, through my Club of Parenticides, the target of destruction. Good God. Why, I detected signs of cannibalism even at my mother’s breast, and I urged lovers to bite one another when they kissed, yes, nip, bite, animals, devour another, bite and … ha!”

He leaped from his chair, scattering the pencil and papers precariously balanced on the armrest of the chair where he had been sitting; from the platform they saw the desert night renewing its kinship with the vanished sea. In the distance, the bald harsh mountains were the color of the pyramids. Birds flew by, trailing the sound of dry, rustling grass.

“Oh, I had my moment of glory,” the old man said, laughing sarcastically; on his knees, picking up the scattered writing utensils. “I became so much a nemesis for California’s great corruptor and defaulter that finally he invited me to visit him in his office, and tried to bribe me. ‘Oh, no,’ I said, ‘you can’t corrupt me.’ He laughed, Miss Winslow, as I am laughing now, and said, ‘Every man has his price.’ I answered, ‘You’re right. Write me a check for seventy-five million dollars.’ ‘In your name or made out to the bearer?’ asked Leland Stanford, checkbook open and pen in hand, mocking me with something worse than mockery, the complicity in his mouse-gray eyes. ‘No,’ I said, ‘in the name of the Treasury of the United States, and for the exact amount of the public lands you stole!’ Miss Winslow, you never saw a face like Stanford’s when I told him that. Ha!”

The old man enjoyed his audacity more now than when he had been in Stanford’s office. Then, he’d had to keep a wooden face, and now he could enjoy it; the memory was better than the fact; oh, could he laugh now! So tomorrow he would die? It’s true, you know, he said, drying tears of laughter with the skirt of a tasseled red tablecloth; a muckraking reporter needs a robber baron as God needs Satan or a flower needs manure; without the low, what can you compare glory to?

He did not speak for a moment, and she shared the silence. He was remembering his ride through the mountains several days before, and even now recalled the powerful breath of creation that blows across the Sierra Madre.

“I should have accepted Stanford’s offer and thrown Hearst’s job in his face, instead of going on scrimping, denying comfort to my wife and children, and then compounding my guilt by squandering what little I’d saved in those damned bars in San Francisco where all good Californians got together to stare off into the sea, so we could tell ourselves: The frontier’s gone, boys; the continent’s dead; Manifest Destiny’s gone to hell in a hand basket; so where are we to find adventure? In a desert mirage?”

And after another drink: “No more West, boys, except in the blurry frontier of an empty whiskey glass.”

Harriet took the old man’s shaking hand and asked him whether he was sure he wanted to go on, wasn’t what he’d already said defeat enough, and an atonement in memory? But he said no, it wasn’t an atonement because he’d kept trying to justify himself; he wasn’t responsible.

“I saw myself as a kind of avenging angel, you see. I was the bitter and sardonic disciple of the devil because I was trying to be as sanctimonious as the people I scorned. You surely understand, you a Methodist, I a Calvinist; each of us trying to be more virtuous than the next, to win the race to see who is the most puritanical, but, in the process, offending whoever is closest to us—for you will see, Miss Harriet, that in fact the only power I had was over my wife and children, not my readers, they were as smug as I, or Hearst; they were every one firmly on the side of morality and rectitude and indignation; each of them said: I’m not the person you’re denouncing, no, that’s my despicable brother, that other reader. No, I had no power over the targets of my journalistic rage and even less over the men who manipulated my humor and my anger to their own ends. Long live democracy!”

She did not release his hand. (She sits alone and remembers.) Why, she wondered, should she have to choose between those here who sought the curse of death but nevertheless lived their final moments seeking understanding and those who conceived of death as a gift of life, but turned away from the gift, refusing to accept it. She stroked the old man’s rough hand with its heavy wedding band. All she could say, with an awakening of affection, was: “Then how is it you know what it means to be defeated?” She spoke in English, but with an imperceptible change of tone, a movement toward the affectionate familiarity expressed in the Spanish “tú.” The old man was too wrapped up in himself, in his memory, to notice, murmuring that one day the bitter old cynic discovered he was as sentimental as the people he had scorned: an old man drowning in nostalgia and memories of love and laughter.

“I couldn’t bear the pain of those I loved. And I couldn’t bear myself for being a sentimental fool when misfortune tapped my shoulder.”

He pressed Harriet Winslow’s hands as the passing clouds of night vainly sought their mirror in the desert and continued on their errant destiny. He wasn’t, he swore to Miss Harriet, asking her to share his misfortune; it was just that tomorrow, maybe … She understood; she was the only one who could understand, and they both felt a little happiness.

“But I have no misfortune to share.” Miss Winslow spoke abruptly, coldly. “I have suffered only humiliation, and I scorn gossip.”

He was not really listening now, nor was he able to measure the many shadings of her moods, capricious, willful, dignified, weak. But he continued to hold her hands in his.

“I only wanted to tell you that you must understand the defeat of a man who believed he was master of his fate, who even believed he could shape the destinies of others through a journalism of accusation and satire, I, who stoutly insisted I was the friend of Truth, not of Plato, while my lord and master of the press cannibalized my anger for the greater glory of his political interests and his massive circulation and his massive bank accounts. Oh, what a fool I was, Miss Harriet! But that’s what they paid me for, for being the idiot, the buffoon, in the pay of my lord and master on this earth.”

He lightly embraced Harriet, burying his face in that hair that was the living answer to the desert, thinking only that it was the stirring of physical love that moved him to go on living, the nearness of another body, not the hated sentiment and compassion, hoping that she would understand or accept such a distinction, accept in her father’s name the old gringo she wanted to see and listen to, not as a journalist, but as a military man lost in action, lost in the desert with no comfort but hers, his compatriot imbued with notions of military honor and of the succor due compatriots in a foreign land. My own son died twice, he told her, first as an alcoholic and then as a suicide, after reading me and telling me, Old man, you have written the blueprint for my death, oh, beloved old man.

“One afflicted with a painful or loathsome disease, one who is a heavy burden to those he cares for, one threatened with insanity, one without property, employment, or hope, one who has disgraced himself, one irreclaimably addicted to drunkenness! Why honor a valiant soldier or fireman and not the dutiful suicide?

“You see, Harriet,” he said to her, as if he were speaking to the dead stars, not into the warm, moist ear so close to his lips, as if the woman’s arms were not pressing him to her breast, “they weren’t really against me, they were against the life I lived. The man who was my older son decided to die in the horrible world I had written for him. And the man who was my younger son decided to die by proving to me he had the courage to die for courage.”

He laughed aloud. “I think my sons killed themselves so I wouldn’t ridicule them in the newspapers of my boss William Randolph Hearst.”

“And your wife?”

The old gringo’s eyes followed the line of salt cedars bordering the meager river. Those thirsty, luxuriant shrubs hoarded the scarce water only to turn it bitter, salty, useless for any purpose. She died lonely and filled with bitterness; she died of a deep and consuming illness, the feeling that she had wasted a lifetime in the thousand sad recriminations of two people who go for days without speaking, without even looking at one another; the unsufferable encounters of two blinded animals in a black cave.

“Only death can compensate for so much vindictive bile, the demands for silence, genius at work, and then, where is the proof of the much-vaunted talent?” the old man asked, returning to reality, aware of the pain in his head, moving away from Harriet Winslow as the sinner moves from the confessional and looks for a floor where he may kneel to carry out his penance. The old gringo tried to pierce the desert’s inky blackness, to imagine the creosote bushes that grow there, maintaining their distance from other plants because their poisonous roots kill anything that grows near them. So he moved away from Harriet Winslow.

“And your daughter?” she asked in a voice that trembled for the first time, and immediately cursed that betrayal of feeling.

“My daughter swore never to see me again,” he replied, struggling to compose himself, his nervous hands vainly searching for a glass or a piece of paper. “She told me: I shall die without ever seeing you again, and I hope you die before you learn how much you will miss me. But I doubt that, Miss Harriet, I doubt it because in her eyes I saw the burning hope that I would remember all the little things that, in spite of everything, held us together so many years. Was it like that with the three of you, Miss Harriet, you and your father and mother?”

She didn’t answer. She wanted to hear the end. She didn’t want the old man to gaze sightlessly again into the desert night, looking for impossible analogies. (She still sits and remembers. She wanted the old man to finish, so she would never have to begin.) She knew that the tragicomic story of her Great-uncle Halston and the Italian paintings was not enough to pay for the gift her old compatriot the writer had given her in the story of his life.

“And your daughter?”

“Do you remember the many little pleasures shared between a father and a daughter, and then the enormous grief of understanding that all that is gone forever?”

“And your daughter?” Harriet Winslow almost screamed, but with a stubborn, controlled coldness.

“She told me she would never forgive the mortal pain she suffered before the bodies of her two brothers. You killed them both, she told me, both of them.”

“And your country?” Harriet rose now with anger, disguising her fear of not continuing alone, I must answer the old man, and your country? And he fell into the trap. I mocked that, too, of course; did she want to know that he had also scoffed at the meaning of national honor, of patriotic duty, of loyalty to the flag? Why, yes, even that, that is why his family feared him, he had mocked God, his Homeland, Money; for God’s sake, then: when would it be their turn? They must have asked themselves that, when will it be our turn? when will our accursed father turn against us, judging us, telling us you’re no exception, you prove the rule, and you, too, wife, and you, my beautiful daughter, and you, my sons, you are all a part of the ludicrous filth, the farts of God, we call humanity.

“I shall destroy you all with my ridicule. I shall bury you all beneath my poisonous laughter. I shall laugh at you as I laugh at the United States, at its ridiculous army and flag,” the old man said breathlessly, choking with asthma.

My country ’tis of thee,

Sweet land of felony …

Harriet made no move to help him. She merely watched him choking, bent over like a folded shaving knife in the little wicker chair on the platform of the railroad car.

“I tell you, I respect the army.” Harriet spoke as neutrally as she could, trying not to sound argumentative, because at least the old man had not lied to her.

“Because the army intervened between you and the poorhouse?” The old man wheezed, his eyes shining with tears, but determined to die on the bitter edge of mockery, choked by his own laughter. “Then it was the poorhouse. I’m sorry.”

“I am not ashamed of our nation or our forefathers. I told you, my father died in Cuba, missing in action…”

“I’m sorry.” The old man coughed, who minutes before had stroked the hands and buried his face in the auburn hair of a beautiful woman. “Open your eyes, Miss Harriet, and remember how we killed our Redskins and never had the courage to fornicate with the squaws and at least create a half-breed nation. We are caught in the business of forever killing people whose skin is of a different color. Mexico is the proof of what we could have been, so keep your eyes wide open.”

“I see now. You are ashamed that you were open and human with me. You cannot bear the pain of those you loved.”

The old gringo had written at length about his father. He had been a soldier, he had fought against naked savages and followed the flag of his country into the capital of a civilized race to the far south. But he didn’t say that to her now; he didn’t want to share anything more with her, or let her believe she was right about anything. He wondered whether this was all they had in common, war between brothers, wars against the “savages,” wars against the weak and the foreign. He said nothing because he wanted to hope that something more, someone else, could still unite them, without her having to depend on him to be able to understand anything here. He would not soon forget the smell of her hair, the softness of her skin, her desirable hands. Maybe it was already too late: she had disappeared and he was alone facing the desert. Maybe he could visit her dreams. Maybe the woman who entered the ballroom the previous evening had not looked at herself, but had dreamed herself.

“They live a life we don’t understand,” said Inocencio Mansalvo. “Do they want to know more about our lives? Well, they will have to make them up, because we’re still nothing and nobody.”