17

The old man is plodding along in a straight line, muttering to himself stories he had once written, cruel stories of the American Civil War in which men succumb and survive because they have been granted a fragmented consciousness: because a man can be at once dying—hanging from a bridge with a rope around his neck—and watching his death from the far side of the creek: because a man can dream of a horseman and kill his own father, all in the same instant.

The roving, ranging consciousness disperses itself like pollen on a spring day; the same thing that shatters it also saves it. But along with this splintered consciousness of the universe, one question travels with us through life, asking: What is the strongest pretext for loving?

Although Harriet was walking beside the old gringo he continued muttering, not caring whether she heard or understood him. If it is necessary, our atomized consciousness invents love, imagines it or feigns it, but does not live without it, since in the midst of infinite dispersion, love, even if as a pretext, gives us the measure of our loss.

The time comes to renounce even the pretext; he had written: “The time to quit is when you have lost a big stake, your fool hope of eventual success, your fortitude, and your love of the game.”

He looked at her, walking beside him now, matching him stride for stride, capable of keeping step with the gringo, a long, silent step unlike the quick, staccato, clicking heels of the children of the Spanish world. He looked at her, this agile, sure, elegant thirty-one-year-old woman who reminded him of his daughter, and his wife when she was young. She was following him closely so they could both watch Arroyo, energetic and active on the distant, dusty plain, haranguing, perhaps destroying what Harriet Winslow had so delicately constructed. She was following him closely and finally understood his words: he had you as if you were an object; you let yourself be violated by the animal appetite of that man; he took you to satisfy his arrogance and his vanity, nothing more.

“No. He didn’t have me. I had him.”

The old gringo stopped and for the first time looked at her with real fury. His bitter blue eyes seemed as sad as his words, but his eyes belied the words: they were truly violent. “Then, Harriet, it was you who was lonely and hungry.”

He meant: you didn’t need to be alone, because ever since I met you, you’ve been living a second life, you have been loved without knowing it, in the thousand fragments of my feelings and my dreams. Even in the mirrors of the ballroom, which you entered without vanity as if into a forgotten dream, even there, without knowing, you were living and being loved.

“No,” Harriet replied. “I didn’t take him for the reason you think, because I know I could have found consolation elsewhere.”

He didn’t blink. She hadn’t heard his thoughts. The bitter blue gaze didn’t flinch.

“Then why, for God’s sake, why?”

“He said he was going to kill you. I told him he could have me if that would save your life.”

The old man did not react immediately; it took him several minutes to absorb her words before bursting into laughter, bellowing laughter with tears running down his face, doubled over as if bowed by the alkaline wind that robbed him of breath. She stood watching, uncomprehending, filling the space of his laughter with more justifications, a spate of words: Arroyo said he could have killed you that night, when you disobeyed him and refused to kill the Colonel; he said that was reason enough; you rebelled against him, your superior; you asked to join Arroyo’s troops, he didn’t invite you; he thought you were trying to win his confidence and couldn’t understand why you would rather prove it by tossing a silver peso in the air than by killing a Federal colonel. I said to him: “You say the Colonel died like a brave man. Wouldn’t that have been enough?” “No,” he told me. “I could also have told you the old man died like a coward.” “Why, why did you have to tell me this?”

“Because I saw him kiss you the other night. I saw him. I saw him with you in your bedroom, and another time, and another. It is not very nice, I’m sorry. I learned to spy as a child. My father was a rich landowner. I spied on him as he was drinking and fornicating, not knowing his son was watching him, waiting for the moment to kill him. But I didn’t kill him. My father got away. And now the defiant gringo is getting away because we both know you would never make love to a murderer.”

“I swear I made my decision to come to Mexico before they jailed Mr. Delaney for federal fr—”

“A check for seventy-five million dollars, made out to the Treasury of the United States, Mr. Stan—”

“I don’t want President Díaz touched with so much as a rose petal; our boss, Mr. Hearst, has too many interests in Mex—”

“‘Was there anybody on the horse?’ ‘Yes, my father.’ ‘Good God!’”

“He never returned from Cuba. Missing in action. An empty grave. Good God!”

“I spied on him drinking and fornicating. He got away from me. Good God!”

The old gringo stopped laughing and began to cough, a deep, racking cough.

“You have been deceived from the beginning,” he said, with difficulty, wondering whether they, the two gringos, could at last bring their true emotions into the light without killing them the way flowers wilt at the touch of sun and air when they are removed from the shaded nooks where they grow. “First, the Mirandas brought you here to help them avoid suspicion and escape more easily. The Capetians of France might have saved their skins if they’d thought to engage a teacher the very night of their flight. But this isn’t Varennes, Harriet. And now you’ve been convinced that by giving your body to the General you would save my life.”

Again the old man exploded into bitter laughter. “Rich or poor, the Mexicans always get the best of us. They hate us. We’re the gringos. Their eternal enemies.”

“I don’t understand,” said Harriet, confused and unbelieving. “He was really going to kill you.”

“Did he say why?”

“Because a man who has no fear is a danger to his comrades and to his enemies. I think that’s what he said. Because sometimes there is a courage worse than fear.”

“No. The real reason.”

He meant to say, her reason, her own reason, imagining her captive and liberated by her own past, the dreamed past, the humid tidewater summers, the light in the old house, her father, the black woman, the lamp on her mother’s table, the solitude and happiness when her father went away and never returned, a forty-two-year-old beau who asked, Aren’t you happy? You are my ideal woman.

“You’re right. He also said he was jealous.”

The old man had begun walking again, mulling over the events of the hour, but when Harriet said this, he paused, then gathered her into his arms and pressed her head to his breast.

“Oh, child, my poor, beautiful child,” said the old gringo, fighting the emotion he had felt ever since she told him Arroyo had wanted to kill him and she had given herself to save him. “Oh, my beautiful little girl. You haven’t saved me from anything.”

Then the roving consciousness that was the seal and fascination of his imagination, if not his genius, asked the old gringo: Did you know she has been creating you just as you were creating her? Did you know, old man, that she had created a plan for living for you? Did you know we are all the object of another’s imagination?

“Don’t you understand? I want to die. That’s why I came here. To be killed.”

Huddled against the old man’s breast, Harriet smelled the fresh lotion on his shirt; she lifted a loving hand and stroked the old man’s lean, clean-shaven cheeks, free for once of the customary white stubble. He was a handsome old man. It frightened her, suddenly, to realize he was clean, shaved, perfumed, as if in preparation for some great ceremony. But she was unexpectedly distracted by the distant commotion in the village. Arroyo was speaking to the people, moving rapidly and with authority among them. The gringos were watching from a distance, but they saw him in close detail: cruel and tender, just and unjust, vigilant and lax, resentful and self-confident, active and lazy, modest and arrogant: the quintessential Latin Indian. They watched him as they stood in an embrace, immersed in odors and deceits, silhouetted against the setting sun, far from their own cities and rivers, subjugated by the feeling of revelation that “like the face of God in the desert” comes but once or twice in a lifetime.

The old man whispered quickly in her ear: “I will never kill myself, because that is how my son died and I don’t want to duplicate his pain.”

He told her he had no right to complain, much less to seek compassion now that misfortune had come to him. He had no right because he had mocked the unhappiness of others; he had spent his life accusing people of being unhappy. He had surrounded his family with a hatred alien to them.

“Maybe my children are the proof that I didn’t hate the whole universe. But they hated me, anyway.”

She listened to him, but said only that life was worth living and that she would prove it to him; there was a child in the village, a two-year-old baby girl … But the old gringo was holding her away, saying that he already knew, that as soon as he entered Mexico his senses had been awakened. Crossing the mountains and the desert, he felt that he could hear and smell and taste and see as never before, as if he were young again, better than young again—he smiled—when lack of experience had prevented comparisons, and now he felt liberated from the filthy editorial rooms and the yellow lamplighted parlors, and the stinking barrooms where his son had died and his life had stagnated while all the dead of California lifted their whiskey glasses in a toast to the imminent earthquake and the imminent disappearance of El Dorado into the sea, forever, and to the good fortune of humankind: liberated from Hearst, liberated from the young parenticides who circle around a famous writer like the ubiquitous buzzards of Mexico, and leaving those who admired him not the memory of a decrepit old man but the suspicion of a horseman in the sky.

“I want to be a good-looking corpse.” The blue eyes sparked.

“To be a gringo in Mexico … ah, that is euthanasia.”

Here, now, amid the copper-colored mountains and the shimmering, translucent evening and the odors of tortillas and chilis, and the distant guitars, as Arroyo was swallowed up in the cage of mirrors of the ballroom he had saved from destruction, he could listen and taste and smell almost supernaturally, like the man hanged from Owl Creek Bridge, who at the instant of his death could see the veining of each leaf; more: the very insects upon them; more: the prismatic colors in all the dewdrops upon a million blades of grass.

His ranging consciousness, close to final unity, told him that this was the great compensation for the loves he had lost because he deserved to lose them. Mexico had, instead, compensated him with a life: the life of his senses, awakened from lethargy by his proximity to death, the dignity of nature as the last joy of his life: would she corrupt all this by offering him the body that last night had belonged to Arroyo?

“I had a final vanity,” said the old gringo, smiling. “I wanted to be killed by Pancho Villa himself. This is what I meant when I wrote a farewell note to a dear friend, a woman poet, saying: You won’t see me again; you may hear of me being stood up against a Mexican stone wall and shot to rags. It beats falling down the cellar stairs.”

He stood looking into Harriet’s gray eyes. He let the minute expand in silence, gravely, so they could feel it to the fullest.

“I am afraid of falling in love with you,” he told her, as if these were the first words he had ever spoken. She had been the final answer to the mad dream of the artist with a split consciousness. She had seen the books in his open suitcase. She knew that he had brought the Quixote but not that he wanted to read it before he died. She saw the scribbled papers and stubby pencils. Maybe she knew that nothing is seen until the writer names it. Language permits us to see. Without the word, we are all blind. He kissed her, he kissed her like a lover, like a man, not with Arroyo’s sensuality, but with a shared covetousness.

“Don’t you know I wanted to save you in order to save my own father from a second death?” she asked, with an urgency punctuated by her new awareness. “Don’t you know that with Arroyo I could be like my father, free, and sensual, but that in you I have a father. Don’t you know that?”

“Yes!” he said. “Yes!” as she had said to Arroyo when Arroyo had made her feel like a whore and she had reveled in being what she despised. He tried to hold her apart, only to assure himself that there were tears in those beautiful eyes, but quickly pressed her to his breast again, blinding her, so he could say what he had to say now that he thought he knew everything, and knowing everything was to know there was something still to know. She had changed forever, her embrace told him that, her warmth, the nearness of this beautiful woman who could be his wife or his daughter but was neither, only herself, at last. He had been the privileged witness to the moment when a person, man or woman, changes forever, clings fatefully to the instant for which he or she was born and then lets it go, without yearning but with sadness. She had changed forever; his daughter changed in the arms and between the legs of his son, and nothing he could invent, no mockery, no accusation, no devil’s dictionary, could prevent it. All that was left was to accept the change Harriet had undergone in Arroyo’s violent love, and demand something of her in the name of the love that could not be, the love between the old man readying himself for death and the young girl who had come alive: “Now, tell me the truth, by whatever is holy to you; don’t let me leave without hearing your secret.”

(She sits alone, and remembers. My lover. My daughter.)

“All right. My father did not die in combat. He was bored with us and stayed in Cuba to live with a Negress. But we told everyone he was dead and we collected the pension in order to live. He wrote me in secret, asking me to understand. What could I understand, when I didn’t know how to feel? He didn’t say it, but we killed him, my mother and I, in order to live. The worst was that I never knew whether she knew what I knew or whether she cashed the monthly check in good faith. I tell you, I didn’t want to understand; I wanted to feel…”

To bring skin and sensation and movement to life, to make them one. No one understood her. Did he understand her? The old man nodded. She swore that although she knew who he was, she would never tell anyone. That would be her way of loving him from now on.

“I shall forget your real name.”

“Thank you,” the old gringo said simply, and added that he regretted she had come to offer life and instead must stay to witness death.

“You mean, although I came to teach, I am the one who is being taught,” she said, wiping her eyes and nose on her full sleeve, following the old gringo now, faithful, from this moment his vestal virgin, sanctifying those minutes when they succeeded in uniting—each in the other’s—their split consciousness, before the final dispersion they sensed was near: time, Mexico, war, memory, flesh itself, had given them more time than most men and women are allowed.

“Maybe,” the old man said. “We all try to be virtuous. It’s our national pastime.”

“You want me to tell you I didn’t go to bed with Arroyo to save your life and to feel virtuous, but because I wanted his body, and that I enjoyed it.”

“Yes, I would like that. Even though our other national pastime is to tell the truth, we can’t keep a secret. That, too, to feel virtuous, of course. Washington, as a boy, could not deny he had chopped down the cherry tree. I think young Juárez was able to hide that he had designs on his master’s precious daughter.”

“I liked it,” Harriet said, oblivious to what he was saying.

She said she liked the way he loved (he heard it and attributed her pleasure to himself, to his old body); she wanted him to know. “I also want you to know that Tomás Arroyo had no right to my body and that I will make him pay for it.”

Harriet looked at the old gringo exactly as he wanted to be looked at before he died. He felt that her gaze completed the fragmented sequence of his imagination of Harriet Winslow that had begun in the reflections of the mirrors in the ballroom that was but a threshold of the road to dream, atomized into a thousand oneiric instants and now joined again in the words that told the old gringo that Harriet would not allow a living testimony to her sensuality, that she was giving the old man the right to dream about her, but not Arroyo.