16

You know why I came back? he asked Harriet Winslow, then did not ask but stated: You know why I came back. Your eyes are running away from you, gringuita, you must be fleeing from something if you want so much to return to it: look, you saw yourself in the mirror, you think I don’t know? I saw myself in the mirrors, too, when I was a little boy; but my men had never seen their full bodies: I had to give them that big gift, that fiesta, to say to them: Now, see yourselves, move, raise an arm, dance a polka, make up for all the years you lived blindly with your own bodies, groping in the dark for a body—your own—as strange and silent and distant as all the other bodies that you were not allowed to touch. Or that were not allowed to touch you. They moved in front of a mirror and broke my spell, my enchantment, gringuita. You know, there is a children’s game here. It is called “the enchanted.” Anyone who touches you enchants you. You must remain frozen until someone else comes to touch you. Then you can move again. Who can say how long it will be before someone else enchants you once more? It is a dangerous word. You are bedazzled. But you do not own yourself anymore. You belong to someone else who can be good or bad to you, who knows? Listen, gringuita: I have been enchanted by this house since I was born here, not in my father’s plush canopied bed, but on a straw petate in the servants’ quarters. The hacienda and I have faced one another for thirty years, as you faced a a mirror, as my men saw themselves reflected. I was paralyzed by stone and adobe and tile and glass and porcelain and wood. A house is all that, but much more than that, too. Did you have a house you could call your own when you were a girl, gringuita? Or did you also look at a house that could have been yours, that somehow was yours, you know?, but was more distant than a palace in a fairy tale. Some things are both yours and not yours; they are painfully yours because they are not yours. You understand? You see another house, perhaps you understand that house: you see the lights go on and scurry from window to window, then you see them flicker out at night, and you are inside the house but also outside the house, angry because you are excluded but grateful that you can see the house, while they, the others, the rest, the many, many, are inside, captive, and cannot see. Then they become the excluded, and you exult, gringuita, you are happy and there is a fiesta in your heart: you have two houses and they have only one.

Arroyo let out a ghastly sigh, more like the groan of someone kicked in the groin, and concealed his involuntary expulsion of inner passions with a clearing of the throat, a rough spitting of thick phlegm into a cup of mescal. It was an ugly sight and Harriet hid from it, but he grabbed her chin firmly.

“Look at me,” said Arroyo, naked in front of Harriet, kneeling naked with his brown hard chest and deep navel and uneasy sex, never restful, she found out, always half full, like the bottle of mescal he always left sitting around anyplace he was, as if the hard long testicles like a pair of furry avocados swinging but hard as stones between his slim, sleek, hairless Indian thighs were constantly in the act of refilling that fat, heaving penis, sleek again, crowned by an aureola of the blackest hair she had ever seen (and she laughed, thinking of Delaney’s scraggly, reddish, sparse pubic hair, which she had seen only once, through a half-opened fly, like some dismal dwarf in a laundry shop, but felt so many times, when he asked her, Be my woman, Harriet, prove your love to me, do what I like, you know, no danger for you, sweetheart, only your soft little hand, Harriet: and his jerky, cold little pleasures). Arroyo was like an even, fluid stream of sex: that is what his name meant, Brook, Stream, Creek: Tom Creek, Tom Brook, what a good English name for a man who looked like Tomás Arroyo! She laughed with him kneeling there in front of her, not flaunting his perpetual semi-erection, which she saw and touched wistfully, understanding that there was nothing to be understood in it, that Arroyo, her Tom Brook, was the quintessentially uncomplicated stud: she had heard it said that men such as cattle drivers, sheep shearers, construction workers, always had a hard-on handy, they were not complicated by thoughts about sex, they used it as normally as they walked, sneezed, slept, or ate—was Arroyo like this? She thought so for a moment, then hated herself for patronizing him once more. How much better to think that Arroyo’s cock was always ready, or half ready, really, thanks to a complicated imagination that she had no way of truly fathoming: perhaps he was like this only with her, not with other women?

“Harriet Winslow,” she silently remonstrated with herself. “Pride is a sin. Don’t you become a silly infatuated lass at this late hour. You are not driving anyone wild, in Mexico or in Washington. Hush, baby, hush, Miss Harriet, steady now.”

She was not talking to herself then; her own imagination had taken her into the arms of her father’s lover, the damp black woman in the damp hushed mansion where the lights moved up and down the stairs.

“Look at me,” Arroyo repeated, look at me facing you (this is what he wanted to say, anyway, she thought; now she sits alone and remembers), unable to move while I face you, because you are beautiful, perhaps, but beauty is not the only reason to remain like this, transfixed in front of someone or something: a snake—she grinned—for example, or a mirage in the desert; or a nightmare from which you cannot escape, falling forever into the shaft of sleep, running forever out of your own sleep; no, said Arroyo, you think sad and ugly things, gringa, I mean beauty, or love, or because I suddenly remember who you are or you make me remember who I am, or maybe we remember somebody each on his own but are grateful to the person we are face to face with for bringing that sweet memory back to us; yes—she held up the palm of her hand—I can imagine many things that never were here tonight, or desire that we never had, said Arroyo, placing his palm against hers: she cold and dry, he hot and dry too, both kneeling, their knees churning up a froth of sheets, the bed like a still surf which would come to life as soon as the train moved once more, hurried on to its next encounter, the battle, the campaign, whatever came next in Arroyo’s life. Then the bed of the Mirandas where they were kneeling together in love would heave on its own, unmindful of the bodies that now gave it its only rhythm: a sea of slow cool tides and sudden flashes of heat from the unsuspected depths where an octopus could move in senseless fear and clouds of black sand would funnel upward, warming the waters with the suddenly revealed fever of the unmoving, breaking the mirrors of the cool sea, splintering the surface of reality.

Each closed his fists over the other’s.

He said that he had been as if mesmerized for nearly thirty years, as a child, and a boy, and a young man of the hacienda. Then there had been this stirring. He had not started it. He had simply joined it. He did understand that it was his, as if he had fathered the Revolution, in the loins of the desert of Chihuahua, yes, gringuita, just like that. But that was not the important thing. The thing was that he had moved, at last, he and all of them, stirring, heaving, rising as if from a drugged sleep—slow, brown, parched, and wounded animals, rising from the bed of the desert, the hollow of the mountain, the naked feet of the little flea-bitten villages, had she talked to La Luna, the moon-faced woman, who had come from a little town in northern Mexico, did she know? Well, he had thrilled to that movement, and now, and now—he struck down her hand in his and held it over his uneasy cock—and now he would only say it to her, he would never tell La Luna, she would understand but feel betrayed because they were both Mexicans, now he would tell the gringa, because he could tell it only to someone from a land as far away and strange as the United States, the Other World, the world that is not Mexico, the foreign and distant and curious, eccentric, marginal world of the Yankees who did not enjoy good food or violent revolution or women in bondage, or beautiful churches, and broke with all tradition just for the sake of it, as if there were good things only in the future and in novelty; he was able to tell the gringa this not only because she was different but because now they, the Mexicans, were, for an instant only, perhaps like her, like the old gringo, like all of them, restless, moving, forgetting their ancient fealty to one place and one landscape and one graveyard.

This he would tell her: “Gringa, I am locked in again.”

“What do you mean?” she asked, startled once more by this man whose words were her surprise.

“I mean this. Understand me. Try. I was paralyzed when facing the hacienda, as if it was my own ghost. Then I broke out and moved. Now I am paralyzed again.”

“Because you came back here?” She tried to be kind.

“No, no, no.” He shook his head vigorously. “More than that. I am once more a prisoner of what I am doing. As if I weren’t moving at all again.”

He was locked into the destiny of the Revolution, where she had surprised him, he wanted to say. No, it was more than coming back to the hacienda. Much more than that—he let his head fall on Harriet’s naked thighs: We all have dreams, but when our dreams become our fate, should we be happy that they’ve come true?

He didn’t know. Neither did she. But Harriet did start to think then that perhaps this man had been able to do what no one was supposed to: he had come home again, he was trying to relive one of the oldest myths of mankind, the return to the lar, the earth, the warm home of our origins.

That cannot be done, she told herself, and not only because very likely the place won’t be there anymore. Even if it were, though, nothing could ever be the same: people age, things break down, feelings change. You can never go home again, even to the same place and the same people, if by chance both have remained, not the same, but simply there, in their essence. She realized that the English language could only conjugate one kind of being—to be. Home is a memory. The only true memory: for memory is our home. And thus the only true desire of our hearts: the burning quest for our tiny, insecure paradises, buried deep within our hearts, impervious to poverty or wealth, kindness or cruelty. A glowing nugget of self-awareness which will only shine for the child? she asked.

No, he answered intuitively, a child is but a witness. I was the witness of the hacienda. Because I was the bastard in the servants’ quarters, I was forced to imagine what they took for granted. I grew up smelling, breathing, hearing every single room, every single corner of this house. I could know without moving, without opening my eyes, you see, gringuita? I could breathe with the place and see what each one was doing in his own bedroom, in his bathroom, in the dining room, there was nothing either secret or public for me the little witness, Harriet, I who saw them all, heard them all, imagined and smelled them all by simply breathing with the rhythm they didn’t possess because they didn’t need it, they took it all for granted, I had to breathe in the hacienda, fill my lungs with its smallest flake of paint, and be the absent witness to every single copulation, hurried or languorous, imaginative or boring, whining or proud, tender or cold, to every single defecation, thick or watery, green or red, smooth or caked with undigested corn, I heard every fart, do you hear, every belch, every spit fall, every pee run, and I saw the scrawny turkeys having their necks twisted, the oxen emasculated, the goats eviscerated and put on the spit, I saw the bottles being corked full of the uneasy wine of the Coahuila valleys, so near to the desert that they taste like cactus wine, then the medicine bottles being uncorked for the castor-oil purges, and the fevers running high in death and childbirth and children’s diseases, I could touch the red velvets and creamy organdies and green taffetas of the hoopskirts and bonnets of the ladies, their long lace nightgowns with the Sacred Heart of Jesus embroidered in front of their cunts: the quivering, humble devotion to the votive lamps quietly sweating away their orange-colored wax as if caught up in a perpetual holy orgasm; contrasting, gringa, with the chandeliers of the vast mansion of stylish, expensive wooden floors and heavy draperies and golden tassels and grandfather clocks and wingtip chairs and rickety dining-room chairs bathed in golden paint—I saw it all, and then one day my old friend, the most ancient man in the hacienda, a man maybe as old as the hacienda itself, a man who had never worn shoes and did not make noise (Graciano his name was, now I recall it), dressed in white peasant shirt and pants, a piece of rawhide that man, wearing clothes that had been patched over and over again till it was impossible to distinguish between the patches on his clothes and the wrinkles on his skin, as if the body also had been patched over a thousand times: Graciano with his white stubble on head and chin was the old man charged with winding the clocks every evening, and one night he took me with him.

I did not ask him. He just took me by the hand and when we reached the clock in the sitting room where they were all having coffee and brandy after dinner, Graciano gave me the keys to the house. He was the only man in the servants’ quarters who was entrusted with them. And he gave them to me that night to hold as he wound the big grandfather clock in the vestibule to the sitting room.

Gringa: I held these keys in my hand for one instant. They were hot and cold, as if the keys, too, spoke of the life and death of the rooms they opened.

I tried to imagine the rooms the hot keys would open; and which, the cold keys.

It was just an instant.

I clutched the keys as though clutching the whole house. The house was in my power during that instant. They were all in my power. They must have sensed it, because (I am sure) for the first time in anyone’s life they stopped their chatter and their drinking and smoking and looked toward the old man winding the clock, and a beautiful lady in green saw me and came up to me, knelt in front of me, and said: “How cute!”

The young lady’s appreciation of my nine-year-old cuteness was not shared by the rest of the company. I saw huddled movements, heard low voices, then an embarrassed silence as the young lady looked back as if to share her delight with them, but only met icy stares, then asked in silence, “What have I done now?” She was the young bride of the eldest son of my father. She was the mother of the children, my nephews, that you came to teach English to, gringa. She had yet, twenty years ago, to understand the ways of the Mirandas. I stared, clutching the keys to the house.

Then the man who was my father barked: “Graciano, take those keys from the brat.”

The old man held out his hand, asking for his gift back.

I understood don Graciano. I gave him the keys, letting him know that now that I had had them in my hands, now I understood that he had made me this wonderful gift for some reason unknown. When I gave back the keys, they were hot, but my hand was cold.

Then don Graciano took me with him to his bunk in the servants’ quarters and he just sat there with a distant look that I have later come to recognize in the eyes of those who are about to depart but do not know it yet. Sometimes when we see them, we know before they do who is going, and when. There is distance in the eyes, an inward gaze says: “Look at me. I’m going. I don’t know it yet. But that is because I’m looking at myself within myself, and not outside myself. You who see me from the outside, tell me if I’m not right, and look here, fellow, don’t let me die all alone.”

Of course, don Graciano did not speak of this, but rather of other things that night. He said, I remember (Arroyo remembered), that many times the owners wanted to pass their worn-out city clothes to him, thus honoring him and showing their esteem. He counseled me never to accept such hand-me-downs. He told me to wear my work clothes always. He said it that night. He spoke of charity and how much he hated it. He spoke of speaking, of talking like we talk, not parroting the speech of the owners. He said never to explain anything; better suffer lashes than complain or explain. If you had to survive, better do so without even saying “I didn’t mean to,” or “I don’t feel well.” He held me close to him and his heartbeat was fainter than that of the little desert lizards I sometimes caught fleeing a crumbling corner of the servants’ quarters.

Charity, he said, is the enemy of dignity—it’s not pride that’s a sin, he said, pride is simply dignity. Pride is not a right, he said, scratching under the rolled-up woolen jorongo that served for him to rest his head on, for pride is not a right. Dignity is. He produced a beautiful flat case of rosewood, gringa, hidden there in his artfully rolled-up jorongo, saying that dignity was a right, and the right was right here in this box: he had given me the keys but had to take them back or they would know that something was up. But what was inside this wooden box he could leave with me, since they did not know about it but I should, since I was the true heir to the Miranda estate.

I took the box, full of wonder, not truly understanding anything, just full of awe at what was happening to me this day, but assuring don Graciano that I would protect that little box as if it were my own life.

He nodded, smiling. “Our forebears will come to my burial and receive me because I have held the papers in trust.”

That is all he said. He said nothing more.

Then he heaved a big sigh and patted my head and told me to go to bed and come see him the next day.

I swear to you, Harriet, he did not say, We will talk tomorrow; he did not say, Be sure to come tomorrow so that we can talk some more. He certainly did not say, Listen, Tomasito, I’m going to die and I want you to be here with me, so don’t fail me tomorrow. No, gringa, he did not say, Listen, Tomás, stay with me, stay by my cot tonight and watch me die: I want you to see me die; you owe me that for taking you into the house and having you see them and having them see you, not the way they like, amid the huddled multitudes, you know, they are delighted not to acknowledge anyone, they look right over you as if you weren’t there, and I wanted to tell them: Here he is. You can’t see through Tomás Arroyo. He is not air, he is blood. He is flesh, not glass. He is not transparent. He is opaque, you damn bunch of prissy motherfuckers, he is as solid as the thickest wall of a prison you or I or he are ever likely to be in.

This was Graciano’s farewell to his years and years at the Miranda hacienda.

Next day, he was found dead on his cot. I saw him as they took him out to bury. “It is Graciano,” they said. “We wonder who is going to wind the clocks now.”

He was old too, Harriet, like your old gringo. He was buried here in the same desert that the Indiana General found when he came. But when he was buried, all our forefathers were at the gathering, you know, the Apaches and Tobosos and Laguneros who roamed the land when it had no owner, who hunted and killed there, and also the Spaniards, who came with a hunger for the golden cities of this desert, as they thought, and those who came with the cross after them, when they found there was no gold, and finally those who came to settle the land and drive claims into it with their silver spikes and their iron spurs, taking the land from the Indians, who came back shooting and raping and pounding the hoofs of their newfound stallions over the desert, and who were killed, or shipped off to prisons in the tropics where they would die of evil fevers, or went up the mountains, farther up each time, until they disappeared like the smoke you sometimes see on the very crown of the tallest peaks, as though this were their daily offering to the death we owe ourselves and others each day: a gray column of haze leaving this world, saying we are glad to part with something every day, even if it’s just a puff of cloudy sky, so that when we do go for good we will be used to it, we will recognize ourselves in our death that preceded us, gringuita, do you see my death as part of my life?

No, she said, life is one thing and death is another: they are opposites, enemies, and we should not combine them lest we cease to safeguard life, which is brittle and can cease to be at any moment. Ah, then it does contain its own death, pounced Arroyo. No, no—Harriet shook her loose tresses—life is surrounded by its enemy; we are besieged by what denies us: sin and death, the devil, the other. She dropped her gaze and added: But we can be saved by good works and personal decency, abstinences—she looked askance at the ubiquitous bottle of mescal, then chided herself for her lack of charity—and the Lord’s grace, which is ever-present, available to us because it is abundant and that is why He is the Lord. Arroyo looked hard at her because in her eyes a moment before she dropped them he could discover nothing that turned her words into truth: they were only convictions, and that is not the same, but should he respect them?

“You know what, gringuita? Don Graciano lived a very long time.”

“I hope the old American also lives out his allotted time.”

“Allotted time!” exclaimed Arroyo, and then laughed, laying his head on her mound. “Let him live just as much as he has lived up until now, let him double his life, gringuita, and you will see how he will hate it. He will hate us if we grant it to him. No, gringa, we die because our paths cross. The desert is big. Graciano, don Graciano, was buried in it. He always lived here. His forefathers came to see him being laid in the ground. The old gringo came here. No one asked him. He has no forebears here. It would be a lonely death. No one would visit his grave. It would have no name. Tell him to go away quick, gringa. He is not one of us. He does not believe in the Revolution. He believes in death. I fear him, gringa. He has no forebears in this desert.”

Tell me about yours, she pleaded, feeling that after the closeness of an instant, separation had crept in, and she wanted the closeness to last while it could; she was certain, if not of the fellowship or enmity of life and death, that, in life itself, being separated was the common lot, not being together; and being separate, she told Arroyo softly, that was death in life, didn’t he think so?

He answered by picking up his narrative, saying that the white men first, then the mestizos that soon populated the land, they too suffered like the Indians; they too lost their small holdings to the encroaching haciendas, the large properties financed from abroad or from Mexico City, making instant swells of all those who had the money to buy up the lands at auction when they were pried from the priests; and the small landholders, like his own people, again were left in the lurch of history. Take to the hills, little Arroyo, live with the Indians and become a puff of smoke, or crawl the desert during the day like a lizard, hiding in the shadows of the giant cacti, and strike at night like a wolf, running across the dry, orphaned ocean, or become a laborer here in the hacienda: maybe if you behave you will be given the keys again, you can wind the clocks in your old age, Tomás, preserve your dignity by refusing hand-me-down clothes. Pass me the beans, will you?

“I have come back to destroy that destiny, you understand?” He looked up at Harriet and their eyes met upside down, strange marine-life eyes accentuated by eyebrows like bags, mustaches, stray pubic jokes, yet his tone was so severe, so implacable, that she could not find anything funny in it: “I have come back so that no one ever again has the choice that was mine in Mexico.”

She thought how the old gringo would laugh at such an assertion, and why wasn’t she laughing, too, or wasn’t irritated anymore as she’d been at the start, when they met and she would not call him General? Why? Why? She searched her soul and found a searing heat there; but it was the heat of smoldering ashes, a dying fire, which is the hottest, most resilient fire of them all. Was it Arroyo’s fire, too, or was it—she now shut her eyes quickly so as not to see those two swimming porpoises that were Arroyo’s eyes—truly her own fire, saved for her own grace after Arroyo had kindled it, but not his, no, his only momentarily, he the instrument for reviving a fire that had always been there but that was hers, that belonged to the fall of the house of Halston, to summers never seen on the Sound and to her mother and her father and her father’s black woman, a fire that belonged to all of this, a fire which was hers and which he now wanted to attribute to himself, with macho petulance and unrelenting theatricality. She saw him now once more in his unlearned, spontaneous poses, a bullfighter in a vacant ring at night, surrounded by the dead smell of carcasses, an unsuspecting tenor in one of the Italian operas she had seen with her mother at the National Theater, but again, deprived of decor, costumes, heavy brocaded curtains: a naked singer, oh, a child almost, in his uneasy, rising, half-grown way. She did what she had never done in all her life, she swooped like a fragile but hungry bird down between his loins, she took that uneasy, rising, half-grown thing between her lips, she smelled at last the strange seed, she licked it off the arrow’s tip, she bit, she sucked, she swallowed what had been inside her, but now as though, by this act, she were inside him, as though, before, she had been possessed by him and now he were possessed by her: that was the difference, now she felt she could bite it off if she wished, and before he had been able to thrust like a sword and cut her in half, come out beyond her, piercing her like a butterfly; before, she could have been his victim, and now he could be hers; and so Arroyo now grew but refused to come, damn him, damn the brown fucker, damn the ugly greaser, he refused because he wanted to strangle her, suffocate her, pounding, heaving, thrusting, refusing to spill into her mouth, refusing to cry as he did with the moon-faced woman, damn him, refusing to shrink and be beaten, refusing to acknowledge that in her mouth he was her captive, but again making her feel that she would throttle first before he ever came and shrank and let her savor victory.

She rejected him with a savage, guttural sound, the worst sound that she had ever felt herself emit, as she spit out that hard rattlesnake which bit her lips and beat against her cheeks, flapping as she screamed what is it with you, what makes you what you are, you damned brown prick, what makes you refuse a woman a moment as free and powerful as the one you took before?

And, for this, Harriet Winslow never forgave him.