Rennert sat for a long time, staring at the silenced radio. He was trying to sort into orderly arrangement the strands that lay tangled at his fingertips. His mind, however, kept grasping stubbornly at some illusive memory that dangled just out of its reach.
It had been the mention of a doctor that had brought it so tantalizingly near. A tiresome discursive little American doctor with whom he had traveled one day, years before, out of the hot brooding land about Vera Cruz, where the sun and the air and the hostile tropical soil take toll of human life. The doctor, relieving his loneliness with talk while Rennert sat in drowsy inattention, had mentioned (he was positive of it) the word “yellow.”.…
He turned around at a light footfall on the tiles.
Esteban Flores was crossing the room.
“I beg your pardon, Mr. Rennert. I came to get the magazine that I was reading before dinner.”
He picked it up and began to crease the paper with long dexterous fingers.
“Mr. Falter,” he asked softly, “how is he?”
“I haven’t any medical knowledge but he seems to be in a very serious condition.”
The Mexican lowered himself onto the arm of a chair, carefully adjusting the knife-edge crease of his trouser legs.
“They tell me that old Miguel Montemayor is sick, too.”
“Yes, also seriously.”
The young man’s face was polished granite in the weak glow of the light.
“Do you know what the trouble is?”
“No, I’m sorry to say.”
“Mr. Falter’s words about the yellow light bulb—what did he mean?”
“I wondered myself. Did it suggest anything to you?”
Flores shook his head slowly.
“Nothing. I thought at first that he was joking—How do you say?—kidding Miss Fahn because she was praying so long. Now, I do not know.”
“You know this hacienda and its history. Have you ever heard of any sickness about here that had any connection with the color yellow?” (That memory, that association with the doctor’s conversation—what was it?)
“No. Down along the coast, about Tampico, there is much yellow fever.”
“No, that won’t do. Whatever this is, it gives its victims the strange illusion that objects they see are yellow.”
The young man’s face was grim and his laugh sounded hollow.
“Mr. Rennert, we of this hacienda have known little of sickness. The bullet and the machete have been our surgeons. They operate only once. Their patients are never troubled again—with anything.”
“Your family has lived here for a long time, has it not?”
Flores stirred on the chair-arm and laid one leg over the other. His hands held the magazine motionless and the signet ring caught and reflected the light. He fixed Rennert with the steady scrutiny of his eyes.
“One of my ancestors came here with Francisco de Urdiñola in the sixteenth century. We have been here ever since. This house was built by my grandfather, Toledano Flores.” Something stirred in his eyes—something (Rennert would have sworn) calculating, as if he were measuring an adversary. “You have heard of my grandfather?”
“Yes, a brave man, I understand.”
“A very brave man, Mr. Rennert.” There was a pause and he said, his lips forming the words very carefully: “I am looking for his body, Mr. Rennert.”
“Strange that it was never found.”
“Yes. Shall I tell you the story, Mr. Rennert?”
“If you wish. I thought the subject might be unpleasant for you.”
“Unpleasant? No, it does not pain us to speak of him. We are proud that he died rather than leave his property to bandits. I shall tell you.” There was a persistence about his manner that rather puzzled Rennert. “They stole—the bandits—all that they could lay their hands on. Miguel and Maria they locked in a hut that used to stand on the hill, where the powerhouse is now. They threatened to set fire to it, if they interfered. They tortured my grandfather to make him tell where the family plate and jewels were hidden. My father and mother had taken them to the United States but they would not believe this. They thought they were hidden somewhere in the mountains. They staked him to the walls, with bayonets through his shoulders, and tortured him. The little Montemayor watched and told afterwards how the old man laughed at them and cursed them.”
“The little Montemayor—Miguel and Maria’s son?”
“Yes, I forgot that you did not know. He died this spring with a trouble of the intestines—helminthiasis. The little fellow ran away and hid in the hills until the bandits had gone. When he came back and let his father and mother out there was no trace of my grandfather. Miguel thought that he had been killed and buried somewhere near but could find no trace of the body. Maria was very ill afterwards. She had known of the torture, you see.”
“Her mind was affected, they say.”
Flores shrugged.
“So they say, Mr. Rennert. She became very gentle and sad, like a little child. Since her own son died she spends all her time with her flowers. I think,” he hesitated, “that she feels that he is living again in them.”
“Living again?”
“Yes. You see, Mr. Rennert, they buried her son under the flowers in the inner patio. But I was telling you of my grandfather. After the Revolution my father came back and searched for the body but could find nothing. There was a story among the peons that the old man had lost his mind during the torture and had run away into the mountains. Some of them even said that they had seen him at the mouth of a cave. My father went and looked. Someone had been living there recently, yes, but there was no trace of my grandfather.”
“You think there is still hope in looking?”
“My father has heard a story—from a man in Mexico City—about another man who died there not long ago. This man had been a peon of my grandfather’s but joined the bandits. He said that they had killed my grandfather but had not bothered to bury him. This man stayed after they left and buried him on the hillside behind this house. He put a large rock over the grave so that the coyotes would not dig into it. He was ashamed, you see, of what had been done.
“Of course,” Flores’ eyes were fixed with a peculiar intentness on Rennert’s face, “it may be nothing but a story. One hears so many of them in Mexico. But since I am here on the hacienda I am searching. It may take a long time but,” he shrugged, “this company—Falter, Solier, and Stahl—got this land so cheap that they can afford to entertain me a few weeks without charge.”
Rennert thought: Mexicans are poor actors. He had some purpose in telling me of his grandfather and of the torture. I wonder what it was. He said: “I understood the company paid your father a good price for the property.”
“A mere ten thousand pesos, Mr. Rennert. Do you call that a good price? Less than three thousand dollars.”
“Not exactly.”
“That is what they paid. My father took it because he was in need of money at the time and because under this government it is impossible for an hacendado to live.”
Rennert had gotten up and strolled to the door, where he stood gazing out over the flowers. The shade that had fallen upon them seemed to have metamorphosed them strangely. The shade, deepening their hues, or an odd chiaroscuro effect of the light that shimmered over the upper surfaces of their petals. A hummingbird poised over a scarlet “rain of fire” with a whirr of wings like breath on paper. Tiny twilight insects darted about in swift sibilant confusion, creating by their invisibility the illusion that the flowers themselves were stirring and gasping in the humid still air.
A sea-green worm crept from between two of the paving-stones and moved with awkward contortions of its swollen body toward the shelter of the yellow marigolds and their green leaves.
… a wor.… the yellow of the marigold.… gree.…
Memory stirred at last.…
Behind him the static tore at the entrails of the radio, disrupting thought, and out of the torture of metal an announcer’s voice was saying, just coherent:
“Communication with Tampico has not yet been established so that we are unable to give our listeners any account of the damage done there by the tropical hurricane which struck the city late this afternoon. The hurricane is reported to have continued its way inland in a general southwest-northeast direction at a velocity…”
Static drowned the rest.