18

The moon-faced woman wound the phonograph player and stealthily put the needle on the twirling record. Out of the loudspeaker, shaped like a ribbed beige cornucopia (thought Harriet) and adorned with the figure of a little black-and-white dog listening to His Master’s Voice, came the soothing yet jarring sound of Nora Bayes singing “By the light of the silvery moon.”

By the light light light of the …

Harriet thought of the Wabash and the other languorous rivers of North America, then refused to look out through the windows of the stalled train at the Mexican desert.

The woman did not say it, but her hushed voice let her understand that the scratchy music was meant to muffle her words: this was a woman perpetually fearful of being overheard by men, Harriet thought with a certain scorn.

The tinny church bell of the hacienda rang out.

The woman called La Luna said it was strange to hear a bell and not recognize the reason for its sound. That’s how she knew the Revolution had arrived at her small provincial town in Durango: the bells started ringing at a time no one could call vespers or matins or anything else. It was like a new time, she said, a time we could not imagine, and then she thought of the regularity of our time, generation after generation abiding by the traditional seasons, the traditional hours, even the traditional minutes; she had been brought up that way, decent, not too wealthy but with enough to be well-off, her father a grain merchant, her husband a moneylender in that same little town where, child or woman, you got up at five, so you could dress while it was still dark (that was extremely important, not to see your own body ever), then be at church at six in the morning and walk back hungry even if you had swallowed the body of Christ (the mystery that enlivened her memories, the mystery that teased her imagination: a body in a piece of bread, the body of a man born from a woman who had never known man’s flesh, you know, Miss Winslow, we speak in terrible circumlocutions here, we were taught as girls never to say legs, but that’s what I walk on, never buttocks, but that’s what I sit on—she laughed softly, almost sighing; the body of a man who was God, the body of a man who shared his Godliness with two other men; she imagined them as men: a second bearded man, old and mighty, sitting on a throne, who was at the same time the young man nailed to the cross; and a third, spectral, ageless man, a magician who called himself a Ghost, and Holy at that, and who was surely responsible in her childish imagination for all the other transformations: one into three, three into one, one into the virgin, then out of the same virgin, then dead, then resurrected and presumably back into three without ceasing to be one and then three-into-one into wafer, many, many millions of tiny pieces of bread all containing Him, and the Magician working away, the Ghost of a Spectral World). The church thus became a specter, as did my own home, as did my destiny; we were all specters wandering around in shifts—breakfast, then lessons, in what was known as home economy, then lunch, then cake making, then prayers, then dinner, then a little piano, then to undress in the dark and go to bed: like a child, and you’ll say it wasn’t bad. But when the life of a man was yoked unto the life of a child bride, Miss Harriet, then that life became dark, repetitive, as things are when they come to a standstill and do not blossom forth from what they were before, before the man, the father, the husband, was there to see to it that you remained a child bride, that marriage was a ceremony of fear: fear that you might be punished for not being a little girl anymore; yet this man takes you, señorita, and punishes you with his sex for not being a little girl anymore, for betraying him with your sexual blood and your sexual hair, and I who soon proved barren was for that reason worse—there was no justification for my ugly hairy mound, my fierce hairy armpits, my abundant, sewer-like menstruations, my irritated, inflated, blooming but milkless nipples. He draped me in long coarse thick nightgowns with a slit in front of my cunt and the Sacred Heart of Jesus embroidered there in thick, red, silvery thread, a frozen emblem of my dirty womanhood, holy now in this blind encounter with his own untouchable sex: a quick thrust, a heavy sigh, a few seconds; I knew that he masturbated many times so as to avoid me, and when his imagination dried up or he needed me to prove his manliness to himself, even then he would play with himself first, so as to be instantly ready to thrust it in, let it come and swiftly withdraw it. I was not to have any pleasure, and I refused to, with him or without him; I betrayed all my teachings and saw myself a few times in front of a mirror, but then did not do it anymore, not because I was tempted to let my fingers wander down from my flourishing nipples to my heavy dark crotch, but because I started seeing myself in that mirror as an ancient child, a silly crone muttering childish babble, a ruined doll singing obscene nursery rhymes and sticking the imaginary dicks of stuffed animals into my withered, prune-like vagina—bells, matins, vespers, confessions, communions, Hail Marys, mea culpas, Credos, thick holy smoke in church and out of it, homilies, fear of Hell, love of Jesus, love of Jesus the man, love of the naked man Jesus on His cross, in His bier, the lovely child Jesus with His tiny fat penis playing on His mother’s trembling knees. Life had stood still and my husband, every Saturday afternoon, had his accountants receive the workers in the town, the tradesmen and the artisans with their brown felt hats and striped collarless shirts and waistcoats, as well as the poorer street hawkers, candle sellers, candy sellers, broom sellers, and a few women wrapped in shawls who hid their faces, and ever-longer lines of field hands who were not attached to any hacienda and who all owed my husband money: a long line of men and women winding down a flat, dusty, hot Saturday street of low, shuttered houses, houses chained in on themselves, the padlocks girdling every big porte cochere like chastity belts, señorita, houses jailed in on themselves, the low-slung grillwork balconies like cages on the faces of the houses—like dogs’ muzzles, señorita, amiga, friend, may I call you that?

I sometimes saw them and tried to meet their eyes as I walked out to go to confession on Saturday afternoons, but one day I crossed sights with an impressive man. He was a humble peon dressed in white and with a sombrero held between powerful hands, but his face, I realized, was new; there was nothing humble about it: there was a fearful pride in it, he looked at me and held my eyes and told me right then with his gaze what I probably wanted to hear (La Luna went on: “I am poor and chained by debt. You are rich and chained by a lack of love. Let me love you one night”); such was the longing, proud fierceness of his eyes, the humorous, challenging grimace of his smiling white teeth, the rakishness of his big black mustache, the tousled, sleepless arrogance of his head. I could not help myself, señorita. Everything I had been taught told me not to do it. I should have bowed my head and gone on to church, telling the beads between my crossed hands. Instead, I stopped.

“What is your name?” was what I managed to ask that man whose head seemed too large for his short, powerful body.

The shutters of all the houses were suddenly open. The faces of all the houses were suddenly visible in the shadows of those interiors.

“Doroteo,” he answered, “Doroteo Arango.”

I nodded and walked on. I reached the church. I knelt in the confessional, modestly, like a woman, shielded by the grill partitions from the priest’s hands, though not from his breath. I confessed my usual list of venial sins. He shook his head. “You are forgetting something.”

“What, Padre?”

“You have stopped to talk to strange men on the street. Peons. Men who owe your husband money. What does this mean, my daughter? I am frightened for you!”

When I came back to my house, the line of people was gone, the shutters were closed.

Next day, in church, my confessor gave a sermon on charity. He quoted St. John on Christ chasing the moneylenders from the Temple. Yet he assured us that Christ’s holy fury was in defense of the Temple, not a lack of charity toward the merchants. These He had forgiven, for His voice was that of eternal charity for all.

That night at dinner I told my husband and his family, who always gathered with us, that I had thought about what the priest had said at Mass and wondered if charity did not also mean forgiving debts.

The word fell like a cracking sheet of ice on the table.

Debts, I repeated. Forgive the debts. Not only the sins.

I was ordered from the table without supper: I was always a little girl, you see, señorita, amiga, may I call you my friend?

When he came up to my room, I was not frightened, because I knew what to say.

I love you in my own fashion. Listen to me, I told him, for your own sake.

You are indecent, he interrupted me, you say indecent things at the table, you do indecent things in the street, you stop to talk to unknown men, low men, how dare you, you ridiculous little whore?

I looked straight at him, like the man named Doroteo looked at me, and I told him: You should be afraid. You should have looked at that man’s eyes the way I did. You should be afraid. These men are different. They’ve taken all they can take. Now they will look at you straight in the eye and then take your life. Watch out.

He struck me and told me he would send me into the cellar if I misbehaved again.

What was there in the cellar?

I had never been there.

But the next night, on Monday, the growls started coming at all hours from under the belly of the house, as if simply by mentioning that cellar where he threatened to send me as a punishment, he had peopled it with terrors, sounds, ghosts, beasts, humming voices, instruments—I pricked up my ears, I tried to distinguish the origins of sound, the birth of a harmony that perhaps reached my ears filtered through a thousand layers of brick and wood, adobe and wallpaper, nails and mortar, yes, and even more: the veils of all that we were in that house, I, my husband, the family, the men and women waiting outside on Saturday afternoons, their own silent rumblings and divinations: will I be lent some money, will I have to repay my debt, will there be grace, will there be grace, will there be grace?

Tell me, señorita, my friend (may I?), how was I to distinguish the real source of the sounds through so many layers of being and not being and rancor and hopelessness and fear of forgetting my childhood and fear of having nothing but my childhood, fear of never being a real woman, fear of dying, as I said, withered and humbled, spoilt to no avail, like a pear left to rot in a graveyard?

Were the rumblings from the cellar those of a piano softly playing my favorite waltz, Sobre las olas, over and over again?

No, shrieked my husband when the rumblings from the belly of the house were stifled by the rumblings from the streets, they are the screams of the prisoners, we are going to kill all the bastards who have risen up in arms, every single one of the dirty rats, but first I am going to bring them here to my cellar to skin them alive, rats, that is what they are, what they have always been, he said, his teacup rattling against the saucer; well, it won’t be only a manner of speaking now, they’re going to be skinned—he stamped the cedar floor with his tiny buttoned boots wrapped in fawn-colored spats—they shall be flayed, literally peeled like overripe bananas, like worm-infested apples, like rotting pears in a graveyard. Ha! he exclaimed, and the teacup fell on his spats and stained them—if they won’t line up each Saturday and pay their debts, they will line up every day of the week and be whipped to death; and those are the voices you’ll hear from the cellar, my dear, he said as he bent over to wipe his spats: Now you know.

“But before?” I dared ask. “Before this, what were the rumblings down there?”

“How dare you question me!” he shouted, and got up, threatening me, and at that very instant, I swear to you, mi amiga, my friend, the bells started pealing for no reason at all, no matins, no vespers, no hour that I had known in time, and an explosion tore open our porte cochere and the men in the stained Stetsons and the barrel chests crossed with cartridge belts came in, crushing the fragile shell of the teacup, and one of them pointed out my husband—“That’s him, that’s the bloodsucker!”—and the man I had seen in line that Saturday long ago, the man with the fearful pride in his eyes, the man who had told me without words: “I am poor and chained by debt. You are rich and chained by a lack of love. Let me love you one night”—that man was now in my sitting room.

I knew him.

I had seen his face over and over again, in wanted posters stuck with pins to the notice board of the church, along with invitations to novenas for the souls in purgatory or reminders of the feast of St. Anthony: he was Doroteo Arango, the posters said, a cattle thief, and now he was in my parlor and he was not even looking at me but saying violently: “Take the bloodsucker back to the corral and shoot him quick. We don’t have time. The Federales are hard on our heels.”

Then the bells stopped ringing and the rifles cracked in the corral, ripping the afternoon as if it had been linen, and I was left alone in my parlor and swooned.

When I came to—my friend, Señorita Winslow, may I…?—no one was there. A terrible silence was all around me. They had left, and I did not want to go to the corral in back of the house and see what I knew was there.

Then the Federales came in and asked what had happened. I was numb. I didn’t know. Maybe my husband had been killed. Doroteo Arango …

“Pancho Villa,” they said, correcting me. I did not understand that name then.

“They are gone now,” I said simply.

“We are beating them, don’t worry,” they said.

“I am not worried.”

“You’re sure they all left?”

I nodded.

But that night, still refusing to go out to the corral and see what had to be there, I heard the rumblings from the cellar, but now they were different. I mean, the old noises were there, but now there was something more, a new humming that only I could hear, the music of a different breathing from the disconcerting panting my husband had offered up to my fear (his supreme gift to the fear he gave me in the name of marriage, as the equivalent of marriage: marriage was fear, this I had to learn and accept from him, or there was no reality to our bond, you see) : I did not go out and bury him. I didn’t know how many bodies there were lying around, the revolutionary dead—not victims, I refuse to call them that, just the dead, for when will we know, señorita, mi amiga, who was just and who was unjust? Not me. Not then. Not yet. And that new sound brought me a new fear: perhaps in the cellar of our house (I called it ours only now that my husband was surely dead) there was now something better, a treasure, yes (my childlike illusions, Señorita Harriet, coming to an end), but I knew I must keep it from following the path to death that had become my husband’s.

I did not know what to do the first night after all this happened.

I dreamed that my husband was not dead, only hiding among the chickens in the netted coop, and came back to me that night, opening the doors of the bedroom with his thrusting ugly penis as I shrieked in terror: he was alive, but he was caked in blood.

I then dreamed that whatever was hidden in the cellar would be taken from me by the Federales when they came back.

This, for some obscure reason, I could not bear.

Very early next morning, I went out to the corral.

I did not look down, but I heard the buzzing flies.

I tore the boards off the coop, piled them up, carried or pushed or dragged them as best I could to the top of the cellar stairs.

The unaccustomed labor tore my long black dress, my hands that had only baked cakes and fingered the rosary and touched the lonely nipple.

I was on my knees for something other than praying for the first time in my life.

I was sweating and soaked in essences that gave off a smell I had never known existed in me, Miss Winslow.

I was sore and bruised and wounded as the nails were driven into the boards covering up the entrance to the cellar.

I wanted to protect what was there.

Or perhaps I did what I would have had to do if I had decided to give my husband a Christian burial.

The acts were similar, but his body was not present.

I let my weary body rest on the planks and said to myself: “You are smelling another body. You are sharing another breath. Those are not monsters waiting for you down there. The cellar does not hide the terrors your husband said.”

Then what was down there?

I wanted to distinguish the things I came to desire during that long wake from those I came to hate. If my husband was not buried down there, then something that was his was certainly there, something stinking, putrid, gaseous, hairy, excremental, dripping and loathsome: I could smell it.

And I could smell something else, something I wanted.

Then the bells rang again and I knew the Federales had left and Villa’s men had retaken the town. But maybe I was wrong and the bells that meant nothing meant something else. The world was not altering its realities just for me.

My doubts were resolved by a loud pistol shot from the cellar, followed by a second one, and then silence.

This was the second time I had heard shots inside my house, but this time I was not afraid.

I tore at the boards with my hands, I knew I had to free the man who fired the shots. I knew I had to pry open the cellar doors and see the dogs lying dead there first: only dogs, nothing more.

And see him come out with his lips clean.

“They were only dogs.” Those were his first words to me, señorita, mi amiga, may I call you friend now? Do you understand, Miss Winslow?