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  Her eyes remained down, on the skin, as if she did not hear him. But Mota knew something in her was curious. Otherwise she would have fled before he appeared, as she had done when he and the others had first ridden down toward her rock.

  “Or poems—I have pamphlets left with me by one of my men. Winners from the city’s last competition and other such things.”

  She hesitated in her scraping, then picked up the skin and, without meeting Mota’s eyes, retreated beyond the pine tree and into a clump of others. Mota’s leg ached from standing, and so with an unanswered farewell he pivoted on his good leg and swung himself back toward the cabin.

  THE NEXT MORNING he went looking for Beatriz, but she did not allow herself to be found. The curiosity he had detected had been pure illusion, he decided, the sad imagining of a withered heart. But in the night that followed he was woken by breath on his face, an elbow sharply pinching his chest. His eyes opened to darkness, and in that first terror he flung out a hand. It struck a shoulder, ribs, the curve of a back. Beneath his palm flesh stretched against bone, surprisingly smooth. Fingers wrestled with his trousers and he helped, pushed the trousers down. The night phantom was astride him now, and, his leg stiff and awkward in its splint, the creaking bed’s maize leaves poking his back, they coupled, the woman’s grunting nothing like María Isabel’s dutiful cries. She held him at the shoulders, either to anchor herself or keep him pinned, and he bit his lips shut for fear of frightening her away. She groaned when he loosed himself, then waited for him to lengthen again.

  The next morning Beatriz was still there, asleep and curled against him. With care he negotiated his way over her and out of the bed, then went to the door and cleared his bladder. When he turned around she was sitting up, yawning with arms stretched, and he tried to decide if she was beautiful. “Read me some of those things you brought from the city,” she said when she finished her yawn. He grabbed the satchel of books and went to the bed. Whenever he stopped, pausing after a mascarada song or an account of a sea battle with the English—all the stuff and trash of life for which he had no taste—she said, More, more. She dug herself into him with her backside, pulled his arm over her, and he indulged a fantasy of taking her back to Mexico, presenting her to the viceroy as a marvel, a wild woman tamed. He would live with her in a fine palace bought with his earnings from the mine; though dressed in silk, she would keep her wildness and bear him a string of cubs. Others would speak of him as the man who had found Tayopa in the wastes, who had rescued a near savage from the lands beyond the frontier, and he would be changed—no longer the man who had let ten years silt away into nothing, the man who had buried himself in a lead coffin and joined himself with the dead. His mouth tired of so much reading and he begged a respite. Beatriz said she would allow it, and as he lay back she told him scraps of her life: that her mother sold her for a year’s worth of meat, that she had begged her husband not to take her from their village outside Querétaro, that he had beaten her when the midwife pulled a daughter, stillborn, from her. They had been lured here by the Jesuits, she said, who had told them they were supplying missions in the far north and forbade them to leave their ranch. She had hidden in her cave when the Yaquis had come, had refused to weep when she found her husband and the other ranchers slaughtered. As she spoke she shifted at random to whispers, covered her eyes, made crosses on Mota’s arm—traces of the small but important something in her that had long been rattled loose. After, she fed him a mash of corn and dried meat. When he mentioned the city to her, said he wanted to take her there, she answered that she wanted to go.

  Two days later, they heard the shuffling hoofbeats of a horse in trot. Mota was in the bed, resting his leg, and Beatriz was lying beside him. She startled, and he held her. The hoofbeats drew closer, and soon after they stopped Fernando appeared in the doorway and looked down at them. “We’ve found it,” he said.

  FERNANDO HAD GRINNED AT THE WOMAN, and at Mota’s insistence they bring her with them. Such a demand, Mota knew, was much unlike the self he had long presented his fellows. But Fernando quickly swept the grin away and said, “Of course.” When they left, Mota and Beatriz sat atop Fernando’s horse while Fernando walked it and told Mota of the mine. It was a three days’ ride away, he said, and they hadn’t actually seen it—as soon as Father Pascual identified the canyon they’d turned around, believing Mota, as inspector, should be with them. But the ex-Jesuit assured him there could be no doubt. He’d recognized the country, and the horn’s echo was unmistakable.

  The others were waiting for Mota at a camp not far from the canyon. They betrayed the same muted astonishment at the woman’s presence as Fernando had, but otherwise kept their distance from her and avoided her gaze, as if fearing she might be ill luck. Once Mota was helped off the horse Baltazar poked his fingers inside the splint. “Better,” he pronounced. “But it’ll need at least six more weeks.” Meanwhile, El Sepo launched into his own version of how they found the mine, telling how he had danced a quick jig and Father Pascual had refused to smile. Mota seemed to miss every other word. Night had fallen, and on the far side of the fire, where its light bled into darkness, Beatriz was bedding down, away from them. The distance ached. When El Sepo finished his story, Baltazar leaned over to Mota and said, “I bet she was hungry for it, she ride you cross-eyed?”

  TWO DAYS LATER they came to a shelf of rock beneath which the country flattened. Mota and Beatriz had shared a mule, she mounted in front of him as he kept his hands on the reins, his arms around her. The country from atop the shelf of rock looked no different from anywhere else they’d ridden through, but here they stopped and Father Pascual took his horn from his pack and blew. The first echo was faint, but the second came back louder than the original blast.

  “Tayopa,” Father Pascual said, pointing to a break in the valley’s far side. The last echo had come from there.

  They crossed the valley, halting at a stream that purled out of the break, which, Mota saw now, was the mouth of a narrow barranca. Alongside the stream led a trail covered with broken shale, disappearing as it bent. A breeze coursed out of the barranca’s mouth, fluttered over Mota’s face. In front of him Beatriz shifted as she cursed the mule’s backbone. They rode in.

  After forty varas a red shoulder of rock forced path and stream into a tight embrace, and once they eased around the shoulder they came to a round, two-story building.

  “The first guardhouse,” Father Pascual said.

  Past the guardhouse the trail and the stream twisted north. The walls of rock began to widen, and the bunchgrass and the madroños, which had granted the narrow path a dappled green light, started to thin, giving way to ropy thornbushes. Then the trail swiftly mounted several layers of rock, and Mota and the others found themselves in the wide, barren bowl of a box canyon—Tayopa. In the middle of the bowl, attached to the roofless skeleton of a church, stood a bell tower, its sides licked with soot. Machinery from a smelting works lay broken and half-buried, and patterns of mud and stone rubble were scattered between the bell tower and a circle of kilns. Beyond loomed the dark piles of slag, and all around, in the basin’s walls, watched the black, hollowed eyes that were the entrances to the mines.

  Mota tightened his grip on Beatriz—she had shuddered, at what he wasn’t sure—and took in the brown and red slope of the far ridge. The air smelled of dried, flaking dirt, and the wind coming over the ridge carried an empty sound. Mota closed his ears to it, buried his nose in Beatriz’s matted hair, erected once more in his mind the vision of their return. But this did nothing to still the shadow that had stirred once more in his heart.

  With the aid of his crutch, he slipped down from the mule. They would be weeks, assaying samples from the mines and the slag heaps, logging troves, scouting new routes from the mine. The sooner they started, the sooner they could leave.

  AMY

  I HAD BEEN IN WIESBADEN FOR TWO WEEKS. This was in October 2009. The German semester hadn’t started y
et, and so neither had my job, and after a first week surrendered to various bureaucracies I was spending a chain of sunny days exploring. On the third such day, after taking the little yellow funicular up the Neroberg and hiking down, I was walking in the pedestrian-zoned city center and had paused to look through the window of the gummy candy store. Thoughts of a present shipped home to my nephews took breath then perished (the postage, the hassle) before somebody behind me said, “Holy shit,” and grabbed me by the arm.

  The words with their three flat American syllables leapt at me from the German public’s constant guttural hum. I turned and a short, nicely thick-bodied woman with light green eyes and rusted blond hair was looking up at me, mouth hanging open in a display of shock. My memory fumbled, then immediately I had a flash of her at fifteen: studded leather choker around her neck, bottle of cherry soda constantly stowed in her backpack, Mod Podged collages of ads from Spin magazine covering her folders. Amy Heathcock. She’d been two years behind me in high school, and we’d been members of separate outcast cliques that shared the hallway outside the band room for standing around in the mornings before class. Once we’d gone on a date, and later, when I was home from college, I ran into her at the Corny Dog in the Longview Mall, where she dipped hot dogs in batter. But by the time she clutched my arm in Langgasse I’d forgotten she existed.

  “What are you doing here?” she said. She smiled and freed her other hand from a stroller to pull me into a hug.

  “I’m teaching,” I said, neglecting to mention I was also fleeing a failing marriage—arguably the truer answer. “What about you?”

  “I’m staying with a friend,” she said. The friend’s husband was army, she explained, stationed at the airfield outside town, and they lived in one of the blocks of married housing on the other side of the train station. I nodded. The day before I’d taken a bus in that direction and seen a Popeye’s and a Taco Bell locked behind a tall, guarded fence. “This is my Macy,” Amy added, looking down at the two-year-old who lay in the stroller’s seat, passed out. “She likes it when I push her through here. Sometimes it’s all I can do to get her to sleep.” Amy looked up again. In that moment she seemed barely changed in the decade-plus from the girl I remembered. The same freckled nose with its mousy tip, the same sly light in her eyes, the same thin T-shirt fabric pulling across the same soft pouch of belly. She said we should hang out and I agreed.

  WE WENT TO THE CAFÉ MALDANER, just around the corner, where we picked slices of cake from a glass case and sat in the high-ceilinged, wood-paneled tearoom. I’d wanted to go inside the Maldaner since I first saw it. According to the gold lettering on the window, it dated to 1859, and I imagined Dostoevsky, who’d lived here in the 1860s, drinking coffee inside as he fretted about the previous evening’s losses at the gaming tables.

  As we sat Amy tended to her daughter. She had woken, and, after staring silently at me for three minutes (“Macy, this is one of Mommy’s friends,” Amy had said), she started throwing her toys at a mink-coated frau whose spun-sugar sphere of white hair made an irresistible target. The toys kept landing short, and I would pick them up and give them to Amy, who would give them back to the crying Macy, who would throw them again. I wondered if this was all that would happen and if it was for the best. But after Macy’s fit, as Amy asked me about high school—who I still saw, if I remembered this or that drama—she took my hand, and once we finished our cake I walked her to my apartment. There we parked Macy in front of the TV, which I turned to KiKA, the children’s channel, and we went into the bedroom. As we stood together, Amy’s back pressed against me, I lifted her skirt and bit her neck. She squealed—I remembered that squeal, heard sometimes in the hallway before class whenever another sex-deprived, aching boy poked or tickled her generous flesh. Then she told me to hurry. We only had until the cartoon ended.

  AFTER WE FINISHED she wheeled Macy out of my apartment, and I sat down to work on my syllabi. I’d given Amy my phone number and my e-mail address, but as I looked at my laptop’s screen I hoped that was it, that she would step back into her life and I into mine. The last thing I wanted was a new entanglement.

  So when she called me a few days later, asking if I’d like to meet her, I was worried.

  “Just for an hour,” she said.

  “My wife,” I said.

  “You said you haven’t talked to her in a month.”

  “Macy.”

  “I’ll leave her with Beth.”

  She waited while I said nothing. I found myself thinking of the large, milk-white breasts that I’d admired at sixteen and that, as we’d stood in my bedroom, had remained bound behind her bra, unexplored.

  “I’m not sure,” I said.

  “Think of it this way. We’re friends. What’s wrong with being friends?”

  But we’d never been friends. She was just a girl I’d happened to know years ago. Still, it was enough. Two hours later I was waiting for her outside the Karstadt, one of the massive, glass-walled shopping centers downtown. She showed wearing jeans and hoop earrings, and I felt twelve years younger, the entirety of my life spread before me, unmade.

  MY WIFE SAT enshrined chief among the mistakes and disappointments I’d come to Germany to escape. I met her in my third year at Michigan, when she was a first-year fresh from a small liberal arts college in Maine. Clara came from an old-money family of Chicago lawyers, bred for summers at Saugatuck and seats on museum boards, and attended our graduate seminars in peasant dresses no peasant could afford and high leather boots that pressed smoothly against her calves. At parties she would stand in the corner telling practiced stories to a small, rapt circle of fellow students clutching bottles of Oberon or Winter White. About the night the president (before he was president) came for cocktails: “He had really hairy ears. You think someone would tell him.” About the year after her parents’ divorce: “I met my dad each week at this Chinese place. I always ordered the Happy Family.” A pause, then a half smile. “He never got the joke.”

  That I made her love me, that I somehow entered her existence and found a place in it—the comfiest chair in the living room of her soul—I still count as the greatest accomplishment of my reinvention. I had been a sweaty, acned nobody from a small town in East Texas that most people had never heard of, then a scholarship student at the state university with no claim on anything higher than the dreary futures (pharmaceutical sales, a chain store’s management track) touted at the job fairs held each year in our basketball arena. But a marathon semester spent polishing an application essay ended with me in a grad program where my peers were people with the kinds of East Coast, private-school educations I had long envied. By the time I met Clara I had transformed myself, through the alchemy of a research assistantship with a famous theorist and a paper on Spinoza and Coleridge given at a major conference, into a promising scholar, a rising star of the department. I was climbing, never so sure of what I was climbing toward until I saw Clara standing in her circle—her hair loose over her temples, her upper lip pooched by the slightest of overbites—exuding class privilege like a musk.

  We married a year later. The ceremony was small, in the chapel of a large downtown Chicago church, St. James Episcopal. The other graduate students dubbed us the power couple, and we took an apartment in a house in the Old West Side with a porch we’d sit on when it was warm, drinking gin and tonics, and two spare rooms we used as offices. Clara dressed me in thrift store blazers, idly ran her fingers through my thinning hair while she read. In the summer we spent long weeks at her family’s place on Lake Michigan, swimming and working through stacks of books. Our happiness seemed unquestionable. But the following spring, after a semester spent trying to break ground on my dissertation—“Representations of Eastern Europeans in the Nineteenth-Century Novel,” chosen after a misleadingly exuberant seminar—I had a crisis. I saw all my future years spent waking to wrestle with murky thoughts, to put cold words on cold pages no one would ever read. It was a
rather mundane crisis, my adviser told me, but I didn’t get over it. Meanwhile, Clara had turned into a plodding worker, in her office every morning, and only now that we were married did I discover that what I’d thought was a quiet, aristocratic disdain was instead pure shyness, that her affected coolness shrouded a sentimental heart. I had expected the air in this new world to which I’d laid claim to be different, to ease me past imperfection and strife in a narcotic mist. But sealed together in that house, Clara and I began to fight. Usually I was the provoker, coming to Clara with some correction I thought she could make to her habits or person (the dissertation abandoned, I had little else to brood about). At first, whenever I caught the sound of her crying behind her office door, I’d go to her, apologize, but eventually I chose to leave her be and waited instead for her to come to dinner, amnesic smile pinned to her face. When, at the end of summer, I told her about the job in Germany, a one-year exchange appointment I’d begged from our grad director, she said she didn’t want me to go, but within a day she’d packed my things in a box.

  AMY AND I BEGAN MEETING on Mondays and Fridays. I taught the other days of the week at the university in Mainz, and the weekends, I told her, I needed for grading, though in fact I simply wanted to keep them to myself. Sometimes we took trips: In Bad Homburg we strolled through the Kurpark with its Thai temples and miniature Russian church, then toured the kaiser’s summer palace where the guide showed us first the kaiser’s telephone cabinet, with its private line to Berlin, then the kaiser’s flush toilet, with its view over the palace roof. In Höchst we wandered into the toll castle’s moat, a green, ivy-strewn park abandoned that day under a gray sky, and in Rüdesheim we sat on a rock in a muddy, bare vineyard, getting drunk on grape brandy while we watched the Rhine flow by, its long, thin cargo barges easing their way to Rotterdam. On our trips I found it difficult to contain myself. In the vineyard I brought her head to my lap and unzipped my jeans as hikers passed a hundred feet above us, and in the Höchst moat I’d leaned her into a corner and slipped my fingers inside her waistband before a man overhead whistled, his head poking out from the castle’s high tower, which cost a euro to climb.