Rennert walked along a narrow path between scarlet carnations and red and yellow columbines, their colors deepened by the shade.
The rim of the sun was touching the ocherous red tiles of the roof. It had, Rennert thought, an oddly suffused glow, as if he were looking at it through cellophane. The atmosphere seemed heavier, laden with odors of the parched earth and of the many flowers. Not a breath of air stirred the little sea of petals and leaves.
He came to the open door of the Montemayor quarters.
Upon a cot at the opposite side of the room lay an elderly Mexican, his lined face impassive. Rennert thought at first that he was staring at the ceiling but saw in a moment that his eyes were closed. The only movement visible was in his hands, like brown talons, that kept twisting as if in pain at the bedclothes.
On a low table beside him stood a brown pottery bowl filled with red hibiscus flowers.
Deep in an alcove cut in the wall at the head of the bed rested a small wax image of the Virgin of Guadalupe, the hem of her skirt and her feet hidden behind a banked mass of white floripondio blossoms. In front of them a candle burned with a steady flame.
Maria Montemayor was kneeling upon the floor, her gaze fixed upon the wax figure. For at least three minutes, as Rennert stood upon the threshold, there was no movement at all discernible in her body.
He waited—not without a feeling of self-reproach at his intrusion.
She rose finally, her fingers going nimbly through the movements of the cross, and turned. As she saw him her face froze into immobility and a thinly veiled look of hostility sprang into her eyes.
She moved toward him quickly and stood barring the doorway.
“What is it, señor?” Emotion ruffled the flat monotonous surface of her speech.
“Is it permitted to see Miguel?”
She shook her head and threw her shoulders back defensively.
“No, señor, you can do nothing for him.”
“You wanted someone to tell him that those flowers were red, not yellow. I thought I would do so.”
With one hand she reached backward and closed the door. A vague smile touched her lips without altering the stonelike quality of her face.
“There is no need now, señor. He knows that they are not yellow.”
“And the claveles? He saw them again?”
“Yes, he saw that they were white.”
“He has fear of death no more then?”
“No more, señor.”
“He is still suffering?”
She hesitated and the smile died slowly on her lips.
“Yes, señor, he is suffering, but it will pass. It will pass,” she repeated with a note of passionate emphasis. “La Guadalupana will aid him. She will drive out—” She stopped and something seemed to close behind her eyes, leaving them as lifeless as obsidian flakes.
“Los aires?” Rennert finished for her.
The fingers of one hand plucked at the fringe of the rebozo.
“Yes, señor.” It was almost inaudible. She half-turned and fumbled for the knob.
“But where did they strike Miguel?” Rennert asked quickly, before the moment of confidence should be gone. “There is little water here.”
Her face was averted so that he had to lean forward to catch her words: “I do not know, señor, I do not know.”
Before he could continue she was gone and he faced a blank weathered door.
He lit a cigarette and strolled back through the flowers. He knew now that he had interpreted rightly the woman’s suppressed fear of that afternoon, her wary glance at the jug of water. Los aires, “the airs,” are tiny little people, malignant and mischievous, who dwell about water, diving and swimming or merely lying on banks. One must take care to wear amulets of round stones and petrified deer-eyes or they will strike his body, causing illness. One must not mention them by name, either, or they will become angered. The white man accounts for the Empress Carlotta’s madness by saying that it was occasioned by grief and anxiety for her husband beleaguered in Querétaro. In Mexico they know better—but say nothing.
He stopped under the archway, staring out over the patio. He was glad that he had no confidant for his thoughts then, for he was fighting off a feeling of un easiness, of vague, undefined foreboding in the face of some dimly sensed danger. In this damned country (he cursed it often yet knew that this feeling of disquiet which it inspired was, perversely, for him an invariable lodestone) one never felt stability. There was always a faint tremor under one’s feet, in the air one breathed. As if the volcanoes far to the south were stirring ominously in their sleep.
He was puzzled by the whole affair, by the inexplicable manner in which the mention of yellowness was tingeing with the bizarre the lives of these commonplace people. That there was some link between Stahl’s death and Miguel’s illness he felt certain. For a moment his mind played with the idea of apparitions, staged by naturalistic means, for the benefit of the susceptible. He could conceive of a man being frightened to death, granted a weak heart and an active imagination. But the physical pain that accompanied this malady—and its prolongation. No, it wouldn’t do.
The cigarette was a solace. The weather, he told himself, was doubtless responsible for his feeling. This dead utter stillness that had settled upon everythin.…
He started at a faint insect-like touch upon the back of his neck, turned and saw a tendril, like a blind green worm, swaying toward him in the still air. Behind it, on the vine that coiled over the adobe, an orchid opened a swollen rust-brown mouth.
Good God, he thought, I’ll be gibbering next!
He stepped into the patio.
A woman—tall, thin, impeccable in black bombazine—stood by the frangipani tree, pulling one of the lower branches toward her. As he watched she detached with deft fingers one of the white flowers, stared at it a moment through gold spectacles, buried her long straight nose in its softness. There was an odd flushed look on her face when she withdrew it that could be (Rennert thought, regarding her through the gathering dimness of evening) nothing but sensuality.
She raised a hand, awkwardly, and fixed the flower in the steel-gray hair over her right ear with the determined movement of a woman thrusting in a hatpin.
Rennert stepped forward.
“Miss Fahn, I believe?”