“Mitty,” he said quietly from a few yards away.
She turned. Lack of recognition, as on the balcony.
“Mitty, don’t you know me?”
“Oh. Larry, where did you come from?”
“From the hotel. From our bedroom.”
She stayed there, draped on the wall. Then as his hand sought hers, “Why is your hand shaking so? Look, it dances in mine.”
He swallowed, unable to answer.
“Why are you looking at me like that, Larry? Your face is so white.”
He brought his face close to hers, pleadingly. “What is it, Mitty? Tell me, what is it?”
She just looked at him, like a wondering child.
“Mitty, this didn’t begin tonight. It’s been growing more noticeable all the time. I can’t talk like a book. I only know there’s a line dividing strangeness from what isn’t strange. I only know you’re on one side of that line now, and I’m on the other.”
He leaned his head against hers, in a sort of desolation. But the simile still held, for she was looking one way now, he another.
“Help me to help you, Mitty. I don’t care what it is, how strange, or how bad, or how anything it is. But put it into words. I won’t look into your face, if that’ll make it easier for you; I’ll keep my eyes like this, the other way. Talk to me as your husband. No secrets, no reservations, no separate identities between us. Just one of us, here on this wall in the moonlight. Don’t let me stay this way, Mitty. I’m scared now about things I didn’t even know existed before.”
Wonderment, still only wonderment on her face. The wonderment of a child who hears a grownup talking but doesn’t know what he means.
“What brought you out? Where were you going?”
“I don’t know. I just felt drawn. Like when water carries you along.”
“Didn’t you know that every step was taking you farther away from our room, from where I was, from where you belonged? Didn’t you know that shouldn’t be?”
“I... I didn’t think behind me. I only thought forward.”
“But when were you coming back?”
He saw her try desperately to give the answer, and saw that she couldn’t. That supplied it to him without her aid, and it was like a knife through him. She wasn’t. She wouldn’t have. Not if he hadn’t overtaken her.
A tortured cry broke from him. “Oh, why don’t they send that ship to take us out! There’s something around here that’s bad!”
He lifted her bodily in his arms, and turned away from the wall with her.
“I’m heavy, Larry. I can walk.”
“No, I want to make sure of getting you back with me.”
He started on the long return trip with her, walking slowly. The soft crunch of the powdered road dust under his feet was the only sound of their spellbound promenade. In the town ahead a church bell tolled the hour with infinite, age-old melancholy. As it must have tolled it two hundred years ago, on the same sort of night as this.
Down the rutted street he came, walking straight-legged with his burden, and he knew without looking at her that her head was turned, the whole way, to look back over his shoulder at the mountain.
As they passed the cantina its handful of inmates came out to the lighted doorway and stood there watching him go by. They stood there in a curious silence, without laughter or jeering remarks. And somehow he could sense what they were thinking, in a sudden spontaneous flare of kinship that flickered back and forth between him and them, overleaping the barriers of language and of race. Every man has his own penance to perform; this particular one’s was to carry his prowling wife home in his arms, save her from the evil mysteries of the night. He saw some make the sign of the cross, in pitying awe.
They were not wrong, they were not wrong.
And as he turned the last corner with her, he could feel, by the shift of her bodily balance, her neck elongate, to cling to the last lingering view of it, before the walls closed in behind them to shut it out.
Chapter Ten
The native doctor, a swarthy, oily-skinned man with close-cropped black hair, wore a crash linen suit and an apricot silk shirt, the latter darker in some places than in others from too close adherence to his body. In the background Jones strode feverishly back and forth while the stethoscope shifted here, there, the next place, like a little bug hopping about on her.
The chair scraped back, the doctor rose. He went over to Jones, satchel in hand. They turned and went out the door together and stood in the dim hall beyond.
The doctor put down his satchel first of all. He shrugged in complete frustration. “She has nothing, señor. Why did you send for me? What was it?”
Jones motioned. “She went out. Out into the street alone. About an hour ago, in the middle of the night.”
The doctor swept his hand put. “Nothing. Absolutely nothing.”
“But you don’t understand—”
He broke off short, staring across the doctor’s shoulder into the room they had just left. She’d quitted the bed, put on a thin wrapper, and gone out onto the balcony. It was growing lighter every minute. The sky was turning blue along the eastern horizon, where the mountain was, as though flickering gas flames had just been lit all along its contours.
He gripped the doctor’s arm. “Look, that’s it now. Always like that.”
“The air is fresher out on the balcony.”
“No. La Montaña. Always la montaña. Every night, see what I mean?”
The doctor smiled. “The mountain attracts her?”
“It pulls her. She wants to go to it all the time. Can’t you help me? Can’t you tell me what it is?”
“But this is nothing. This is no illness. Many young women are dreamy like this. They have the too strong imagination. It is no more than a form of poesy.”
“She wants to go to it. She wants me to take her to it.” He poked his finger repeatedly in that direction, to make him understand. “Before you came, she asked me to. She got down on her knees and pleaded with me. I have never seen her like that before.”
The doctor pondered, pursed his lips. “The climate down here on the seacoast is hard to bear. The change may do her good.”
“But what’s back there? I don’t know anyone. I don’t know where to go. It’s no place to take a woman, is it?”
The doctor motioned into the distance. “All the way back, no. On the other side of it is a tierra desconocida, an unknown land. No one goes there, not women nor men either. The government, even, does not know what lies there. But on this side, just a little way out, to where begins the rise, is all right. Would be cooler.”
He took out a card and began to write on the back of it.
“I have a friend has a coffee plantation out that way. One of your countrymen; American, like you. He comes down to coast sometimes on business. You go to him. He be glad to see you. He put you up.”
He handed Jones the card. It had a name on it, Mallory, and underneath, “Finca La Escondida.”
The doctor tapped his pocket. “You pay him a little something for your visit. He be glad to have you.” He picked up his bag and turned to go.
Then he halted once more, a scant step away, to repeat, “Not all the way out. Not beyond there. Just that far and then back again.” Cautioning with his finger, he pointed to the card. “You understand?”