Her eyes were fixed limpidly on him, wide with helpless inability to succor him. “I can’t tell you any more than I’ve already told you. I don’t know. Larry, I don’t know.”
“But why don’t you look at the sea? There is a sort of fascination in the sea, I could understand that. But why always in there, inland, to the back country? What is there about that? Can’t you put it into words for me? Don’t you love me enough to put it into words for me? I don’t care what words, but just words — to take away this creepy nothingness!”
“I don’t know.” She always came back to the same thing again.
“I don’t know my face is turning that way, until suddenly I find that it already has. I don’t know my eyes are seeking it, until suddenly I find that they’re already on it.”
He straightened up, raised her to her feet. He had to draw her away after him with both arms. “Come inside, Mitty. Don’t stay out here any more.” He led her back into the darkness of their room. Then he stepped over to one side of the window. “Here, let me lower these blinds,” he said tight-lipped.
“We won’t get any air.”
“I don’t care. I don’t want you to see that damned thing any more.”
And as the blinds came rustling down, dismembering the night sky into parallel slivers, he did a strange thing there behind her back. A strange thing for a young husband to do. He shook his fist. Not at another man, trying to take his wife away from him, but at a mountain, crouching out there at the foot of the far-off horizon.
Chapter Nine
Again a startled awakening. Again the receding tide of fear, the casting aside of the encumbering net. Again the velvet pall of the room. Everything the same, except that this was another night.
His eyes, piercing the gloom, sought her first on the balcony, in remembrance of the time before. She wasn’t out there. The spidery little wrought-iron chair she had sat on stood empty. This time she was gone completely.
He crossed to the rail of the balcony and looked down. There was nothing there below, no one. Dark lanes running through a patchwork of tiled roofs interspersed with patio foliage; an entombed light or two here and there, standing guard in the silent watches of the night.
She couldn’t possibly be down there. What would she do down there at this Godforsaken hour? But then, there were no other places for her to be but up here or down there. And up here she wasn’t.
Turning from the rail, he trod on something soft and white he had not noticed lying there before. Her handkerchief, dropped on the balcony. So she had stood there by the rail a little earlier, as he was doing now.
He plunged back into the room, found the cumbrous light switch, and the uncertain electricity went on. Her nightdress clung to the rim of the bed, dripping down toward the floor, as though thrown from a distance and in a hurry. One slab of the ponderous wardrobe teetered open, and her dress was gone, the only one she had, the one she’d happened to have on that unlucky day she’d stepped off the boat.
The light only confirmed what the darkness had already told him. She’d gone out of this room. She’d dressed and gone out of here, into the night-bound town, while he lay asleep.
In a moment he had his trousers on, was out in the silent, shadowed hall, and then down the stairs to the ground floor. He knew the answer and he was afraid to admit it to himself. The mountain.
He punched the bell on the untended desk with the whole side of his tightly fisted hand, and it exploded with a jangle in the stillness. A chair scraped somewhere out of sight, and the clerk came waveringly sleepily forward.
“Did my wife go by here? Mi señora?” He swept his hand along.
The clerk nodded. “Sí, señor. I saw her go by a little while ago.”
“Did she speak to you? Say anything?”
“No, señor. I bowed; she didn’t seem to see me. I said something to her; she didn’t seem to hear me. She was just looking out that way intently.” He shrugged expressively. “Salió.”
Jones floundered out into the darkness of the street. He looked up and down it. He didn’t even know which way to go. He chose a direction at random, and jogged along on the double. There was no one in sight around him. There was no sound but the scuff his own hurrying footfalls made. Then a low-hanging palm frond drooping over a wall got in his way, and he sliced it aside. It gave a venomous reptilian hiss, as though a raging boa constrictor had been looped over his head. He shivered and went on.
Something kept swelling inside his breast, and it had nothing to do with shortness of breath or the exertion of his run. Some sort of fright. Fear in the night. Fear of the night. Fear of strangeness. Fear of things that are not to be named.
After the first couple of blocks he couldn’t hold it in any more. It burst from him between cupped hands, a hoarse cry of sheer, undiluted terror: “Mitty!” and went reverberating down the street, shocking the somnolent night.
That was no way for a grown man to call anyone, he knew; berserk, half crazed like that. He tried not to do it again.
It came again before he could stop himself.
“Mitty!”
He flung up his forearm, and that stifled it the third time.
A figure materialized from some doorway, approached, raising hand to headgear. This man wasn’t like the police up north, snarling a challenge to noisemakers. He was deferent to the light-skinned outlander.
Jones veered and hurried to meet him, almost slobbering in his gratitude.
“A woman. An American woman. Have you seen her? Did she come this way?”
“Sí, señor. A woman by herself. She passed by here a little while ago. I stood and looked after her a long time. It was the first time I ever saw anything like that. I knew she must be an americana, for our women do not walk alone at night like that.”
“Help me try to find her. I don’t know my way around here.”
“Servicio, señor.” He touched his cap again, and they started out together.
Sweat that wasn’t just the sweat of hurrying or of heat was all over Jorges’s face, like pearls of agony.
He knew that it wasn’t the mere fear of something happening to her, some bodily harm befalling her, that was wrenching at his vitals so. It was the strangeness of her doing it that had him so short-breathedly terrified.
They wavered there for a moment, in uncertainty.
“Where does this go? How far does it go?”
“Nowhere, señor. It just keeps going, out toward the mountains.”
“Mitty!” was jarred from him again, as though his chest had been dynamited.
They went on again.
The town began to crumble to pieces around them, the bare earth to show through. A dog barked, off across a small patch of cultivated ground, roused by their distant passage, then subsided again.
The policeman touched him on the arm; his darker eyes had pierced farther ahead. “There she is, señor. Sitting on that tumbled wall, resting. See, straight before us?”
Jones came to a dead halt. “Go back now. I’ll go the rest of the way alone. Here.” He took out his wallet.
“No, señor. I haven’t done anything.”
“Here, please.”
He went on toward her. She was like a part of the wall, she was so still. She was sitting there sidesaddle, one leg higher than the other. Always, sitting, walking, resting, she seemed to be looking that way, toward that. Never any other way but that.