“Walk to the village. Skirt instead of shorts, I’d say. Flat heels.”
By the time we reached the public square, we had adjusted to the rich odors of the town. The brown kids had flocked around us, demanding pesos, dollars, dimes, two beets, neekles, and in the face of smiling, polite refusal, had accepted the rejection cheerfully enough, somehow passed the word to other hopefuls, and let us go our way. The slightest unbending, the smallest gift, would have made any future trip to the village one vast annoyance.
We wandered, looked at the stalls, then sat on a bench in the square, where the inevitable pigeons pecked at the walks and the scrub grass. There were beads of perspiration on Nora’s upper lip. We watched the people. Aside from the very few bureaucratic types in the ubiquitous dark suits, the men wore khaki and twill and denim, clean, faded with many washings. The women, the older ones, wore either skirts and white blouses, or shapeless cotton dresses. The young girls wore the bastard American clothes of the catalogue houses, the pastel pants to mid calf, brief tops and halters. They moved in flocks, chittering, slanting their dark glances. I had located the post office, the police station, the public market. These were handsome people, trim and muscular, with the broad faces, dusty black hair, liquid tilting eyes of the Indio blood. Not too many hundreds of years ago they had roamed these coasts in their dugout canoes, leaving mounds of shells at their camping places, weaving complex fish traps of tough reeds.
I thought of using the post office as a possible approach. Looking for an old friend. Yes indeed. Good old Sam Taggart. He still around here? But it seemed clumsy.
A young priest walked by us and glanced over and said, “Good morning!”
“Good morning, Father,” Nora said meekly. I recognized him as the same one who had been on the Tres Estrellas flight. I watched him head toward the church on the other side of the square and disappear into the dark interior. And I had a little idea worth developing.
“Are you Catholic?” I asked Nora.
“If I’m anything. Yes. I don’t work at it. But it sort of builds up… and then I go to mass. Twice a year, maybe. I had an awful lot of it when I was a kid. When I was sixteen I had a brother who died, terribly. Some kind of cancer. Big horrible lumps all over his body. He got immune to the drugs. Way down the street they could hear him screaming when he had to be moved, for dressings and keeping him clean. I wore my knees out and my beads out, praying for God to take him to end that agony. He was a sweet boy. He was the best of us, really. But he lasted and lasted and lasted, until you wouldn’t think he had the strength to scream like that. But he did. Almost to the end. Why should a kid endure such torture? By the time he died, my religion was dead too. I had terrible fights with my family about it. But I wouldn’t pray to anything my brother’s death had proved didn’t exist. Are you religious at all, Trav?”
“I think there is some kind of divine order in the universe. Every leaf on every tree in the world is unique. As far as we can see, there are other galaxies, all slowly spinning, numerous as the leaves in the forest. In an infinite number of planets, there has to be an infinite number with life forms on them. Maybe this planet is one of the discarded mistakes. Maybe it’s one of the victories. We’ll never know. I think the closest we can get to awareness is when we see one man, under stress, react in… in a noble way, a selfless way. But to me, organized religion, the formalities and routines, it’s like being marched in formation to look at a sunset. I don’t knock it for other people. Maybe they need routines, rules, examples, taboos, object lessons, sermonizing. I don’t.”
“By the time I was twenty I saw that it was kind of shallow to blame God for what happened to my brother. I didn’t go back to the church. The hold was broken by then. I go sometimes. It’s kind of sweet. Nostalgic. There’s a girl there I used to be, now it’s the only way I ever find her again.” She sighed. “How did we get onto this?”
“Check me on the routine. Any talk you have with a priest is privileged information, isn’t it?”
“Up to a point. I mean if a person confessed a murder, the priest would have to tell the police. What are you getting at?”
“That priest might know some things that would help us.”
She looked startled, and then she comprehended. “But… how could I go about…”
“Ask for his help in a confidential matter. Wouldn’t that keep him quiet?”
“I suppose it would.”
“‘Tell him you were in love with the man, that you lived in sin with him and he left you and you have been searching for him for three years. I have the idea these village priests know everything that goes on. And he speaks English.”
“It would feel so strange… to lie to a priest.”
“I hear it’s done frequently.”
“But not this way” She looked in her purse. “I have nothing to cover my head.”
We went to one of the sidewalk stalls. She picked a cotton scarf. It was ten pesos, then five, then four, and finally three pesos fifty centavos, sold with smiles, with pleasure at the bargaining.
She gave me a tight-lipped and nervous look, and went off toward the church. I watched her go. Blue and white blouse in a diamond pattern, narrow white skirt, with a slit at the side to make walking easier, blue sandals. I saw her go up the worn steps, stop and tie the dark blue kerchief around her head, then disappear into the interior, through the pointed arch of the doorway.
I went back to the bench. The broad leaves of a dusty tree shaded me. Lizards flicked across the fitted stones of the pathways. A strolling dog eyed me in unfriendly inquiry. Two small boys wanted to shine my shoes. Two black and white goats stopped and snuffled among wind-blown debris. A fat brown man with one milky eye came smiling over and, with fragmentary English, tried to sell me a fire opal, then an elaborately worked silver crucifix, then a hand tooled wallet, then a small obscene wood carving, and then, in a coarse whisper, a date with a “friendly womans, nice, fat.” He sighed and plodded away. I had the feeling I was the object of intense scrutiny, of dozens of people wondering how best to pry some of the Yankee dollars out of my pocket.
I knew it would not have been that way before the hotel was built. But now the village had begun the slow transformation to the eventual mercilessness of Taxco, Cuernavaca, Acapulco. Too many Americans had shown them how easy it could be. Greed was replacing their inborn courtesy, pesos corrupting their morals. The village cop, agleam with whistles, bullets and buckles, strolled by, whapping himself on the calf with a riding crop.
Nora was gone a long time. A very long time. Though I was watching the church, I did not see her until she was about twenty feet from me. Her color looked bad, her mouth pinched.
“Let’s walk,” she said.
I got up and went with her. “Bad?”
“He’s a good man. It got to me a little. Let me just unwind a little bit.” She gave me a wry glance. “Mother Church. You think you’ve torn loose, but… I don’t know. I lit candles for him, Trav. I prayed for his soul. What would he think of that?”
“Probably he would like it.”
We. headed back out of town, toward La Casa Encantada. After we passed the last of the houses, there was a path worn through grass down toward the beach. She hesitated, and I nodded, and we went down the path. The beach was the village dump, cans and broken bottles and unidentifiable metal parts of things. There was some coarse brown-black sand, and outcroppings of shale, and tumbles of old seaworn rock. We went down where the tide kept it clean, and after a hundred yards or so, came to an old piece of grey timber. She sat there and leaned on her knees and looked out. The big protective islands looked to be about eight miles offshore. An old fish boat was beating toward town, with a lug-rigged sail tan as lizard hide.