11

A Dearth of Earthenware

Rico was grateful Grace seemed unaware that people of his family’s station considered it highly unseemly for a man and woman to touch unless they were married. Their prudery had always struck Rico as old-fashioned and silly, but now he understood it. The sun’s tug on the planets, the earth’s magnetic field, or a dozen strong men pulling on a stout rope couldn’t compare with the irrational forces at work in Rico.

Grace sat sideways on the saddle in front of him. Rico’s arms ached from trying to avoid contact with her, when what he wanted to do was encircle her waist with his hands, to see if it was really as small as it looked. He didn’t know how he was going to make it to San Miguel without brushing away the tendrils of her dark red-gold hair and kissing the curve of her neck.

She also must have felt the tension because she kept up a steady flow of questions.

“Captain, why does your friend Juan call you Diez y siete? Doesn’t that mean ‘seventeen’?”

“It’s nothing. A joke.”

Then Rico thought of all the things Grace might assume it to mean. The number of women he had bedded. The number of illegitimate children he had fathered. The number of freckles on his backside. With Juan calling him that, seventeen could mean the number of venereal diseases Rico had contracted.

“Seventeen families own one-fourth of all the land in the state of Morelos.”

“And your family is one of them?”

“Yes. Their original deed goes back to an encomienda, a grant from Hernán Cortés.”

“And yet you joined Francisco Madero’s army to fight for the rights of the poor.”

“It is possible to have money in the bank and a conscience, too.” He paused. “As for me, I keep my conscience safely locked in the bank’s vault.”

When Grace laughed she threw her head back and her hair tickled his nose. Her laughter was so carefree that it chased away his own cares.

“And yet your family had so much to lose with a change of government.”

“As it turned out,” Rico said, “they lost nothing.” And that, oddly enough, was one of his cares. The cause for which he had fought seemed to have been forgotten once Francisco Madero became president.

“What do you think of Mr. Zapata?” Grace asked.

“He’s an idealist, and you know what they say about those.”

“What do they say?”

“An idealist observes that an orchid smells better than a potato, so he concludes that it will make a more savory stew.”

“President Madero is an idealist and yet he governs.”

Rico wanted to tell her that Francisco Madero had proven to be an educated fool, a coward, and a hypocrite. Instead he said, “President Madero is a logical man trying to run an illogical country.”

“If the world were a logical place, Captain, men would ride sidesaddle, now wouldn’t they?”

Rico laughed so hard he almost lost his balance, and the tension vanished. What had started as a strategy for seduction had become an outing with a friend, a beautiful, complex, desirable friend, but a friend nonetheless. He lowered his arms to a more natural position and he felt Grace’s spine lose some of its starch.

As the horse struggled to find footing on the rocky trail, Grace asked, “Is this the only road?”

“The only one I know of.”

“Then the villagers have to transport all their pottery on burros.”

“Or on their backs. When the indios laid the railroad tracks they took the wheels off the barrows, loaded the sand and rocks into them, and carried all of it.”

“You jest with me, Captain.”

“I swear I do not. The Aztecs were clever people, but they left the invention of the wheel to the Europeans. Their descendants still regard it with suspicion.”

“I trust someone in San Miguel will be able to speak English.”

“Other than your acquaintance, José Perez, we’ll be lucky to find someone who speaks Spanish.”

“What if he’s not there?”

“I can speak Nahuatl.”

Grace turned to look at him, realized how little space separated them, and quickly faced forward. “When did you learn Nahuatl?”

“My grandmother was pura india and so was my nurse. I didn’t speak much Spanish until I went to school. The teachers hit us with sticks if we answered in Mexican.”

“Mexican?”

“We refer to Nahuatl as Mexican.”

“Where did you learn French, Italian, German, and English?”

“Here and there.”

“Your ‘here and there’ must encompass more of the world than most people’s.”

“I’ve traveled some and I tested the patience of the professors at Harvard for a time.”

“Did you major in poker and pranks?”

“Those were electives.”

“What was your course of study?”

“My family assumed I was studying law. They were displeased to discover I had enrolled in medicine.”

“Why didn’t you want to study the law? The search for justice is a noble profession.”

“Not in this country. To succeed here a young lawyer must give up any principles and ideals he might have.”

Rico realized that something was happening here subtler than he had experienced before. Grace Knight now knew a lot about him and he had learned almost nothing about her. Rico’s conquests had always been younger women only too willing to tell him the mundane details of their lives whether he wanted to hear them or not. Was Mrs. Knight reticent because she was older and wiser or because she was British? Or did secrets lurk in the shadows of her past?

“Is the village much farther?” she asked.

Rico pointed ahead and up. “There.”

“Where?”

“The houses follow the rim of the barranca.”

“They look like a continuation of the cliff face.”

“After a thousand years a village begins to resemble its surroundings. This one may be named in honor of Saint Michael, but don’t be fooled. It was here long before Cortés came. It’s divided into neighborhoods based on the Aztec kinship system. Each barrio has its ancient name, like ayotl, azcatl, cueyatl.”

“What do they mean?”

“Ayotl, means turtle. Azcatl, ant. Cueyatl, frog. They must sound silly to you.”

“Those can’t compare with names of English towns. Have you ever visited Slack Bottom or Bachelor’s Bump?”

“I have not.”

“My favorite place-name is Cockup. Big Cockup and Little Cockup, actually. In England’s north country.”

“What does ‘cock up’ mean?”

“A mess. A total disaster.”

Rico could see where that would be a useful phrase to describe Mexico these days. They rode in a comfortable silence for a while. Comfortable silences were also something Rico had not experienced with women.

He had never been to San Miguel. He was surprised to find that it could be reached by a narrow concrete bridge across a river hustling along over rocks. Birds sang in the huge cedar trees whose drooping branches brushed the surface of the water.

Halfway across the bridge, Grace asked him to stop. On the downstream side of the bridge the shallow, boulder-strewn riverbed dropped away suddenly, sending a torrent of crystal clear water in a headlong plunge over a precipice.

“Just when I think I have seen all the beauty your country holds, Captain, it astonishes me again.”

Beyond the bridge they had to dismount and lead Grullo up the steep climb to the aerie called San Miguel. Rico held Grace’s hand to help her along. Grace was panting when she reached the top, but the village was worth the effort. Mango trees shaded the dusty main street. Drifts of purple, red, and orange bougainvillea flowers covered windowless houses made of the local volcanic rock. Many of the thatched roofs had been patched with flattened oil cans.

Visible through the open doorways were dirt floors, dented cooking pots, and the ever-present sleeping mats made of the reeds called tule. Set out to dry on boards in front of a few houses were examples of the earthenware that had brought Grace here.

“I expected to find more pottery,” she said.

“Maybe they sold it all in the market yesterday.”

The children wore rags or nothing, and they stopped their games to watch Rico and Grace ride past. Ladder-ribbed dogs barked or skulked away. The scrawny pigs and mangy chickens ignored them. Men sent oblique looks from under their sombreros. The women glanced up, but didn’t break the cadence of patting out tortillas and grinding corn.

“The children are so thin,” Grace murmured. “I didn’t realize the village was this poor. At the market they all look so…” she searched for a word “…so spruce.”

“They put on their Sunday best for market day. And San Miguel is better off than many.” Rico called to one of the children, “¿Mi hijo, donde vive José Perez?” When he received a blank look, he repeated the question in Nahuatl.

The boy started off at a trot and Rico reined the horse around to follow.

Word traveled faster than they did. José was waiting for them at the gate of the adobe wall in front of his house. His stiff thatch of black hair was indented in a circle around his head, the impression left by the straw hat he held in his hand. Here in his home territory he looked very much the solid citizen.

He invited them to sit on a bench in the courtyard where laundry hung on a bamboo pole laid between the crotches of two papaya trees. Flowers rioted all around and heaps of drying cocoa beans made the air heavy with their aroma. José’s wife, Serafina, and his beautiful daughter, Socorro, brought out small porcelain cups of hot chocolate. The cups were obviously prized possessions.

“Captain, please tell the Perez family how pleased I am to be able to visit them here in their home. And could you explain that I have business to discuss with Maestro Perez?”

Rico had assumed that Grace intended to negotiate a monopoly on the villagers’ pottery output. He was surprised to learn that she had something else in mind. She went with José to inspect an open-sided, thatched shelter that might do for a factory.

Rico translated as Grace and José discussed quotas, delivery schedules, records-keeping systems, and the cost per pot. They estimated the price of ovens and drying racks, and even straw and rope for packing. Grace said she would like the Colonial to have priority as an outlet for their wares, but she also offered to speak to the owner of Luz del Día, the largest store in Cuernavaca. Perhaps he too would carry the pottery.

At the end of their discussion Grace asked José if he would accept the position of foreman, jefe, for a small monthly salary. She trusted him, she said, to choose not only the best potters but the ones most in need. He accepted. They shook hands.

When Rico and Grace rode out of San Miguel they left it a happier place than when they rode in. This enterprise was obviously about more than turning a profit in the Colonial’s gift shop. In fact, Rico didn’t see how Grace planned to make any profit at all after she bankrolled an entire village.

“You made a wise choice in José,” he said. “He’s the mayordomo of San Miguel.”

“Like the village mayor?”

“More than that. The mayordomo is an Aztec tradition. José collects funds to maintain the chapel. That means people trust him with money. He organizes the annual fiestas for their patron saint. Also, every village has communal work days called cuatequitl. José tells people when their turn has come.”

They reached Cuernavaca at sunset, with the sky pulsing as brilliant as fiesta fireworks over the mountains. A fiery, opalescent mist wrapped around the snowcaps on the two volcanoes. Rico dismounted at the Colonial’s front gate. When he lifted Grace down from the horse his hands did indeed almost span her waist, even with her coat on. For a few moments they saw their reflections in each other’s eyes.

Grace had eyes like cenotes, the pools of water trapped in limestone and as blue as the sky above them. Cenotes were also much, much deeper than they looked.

Grace thanked him, told him when dinner would be served, and hurried inside. She seemed all business again, but she began singing as she crossed the courtyard. Gilbert and Sullivan operas had been popular at Harvard, and Rico recognized “Bunthorne’s Bride.”

Maybe she would consent to harmonize with him on it sometime. In any case, he had to think of a way to hold her in his arms again because, as of today, he had become addicted to it.

He had known for several weeks that he loved her, but the situation had become much more serious. Now he liked her.