The first guard stepped up to John Webb and his face was now not relaxed or easy; it was like brown stone.
“Yes,” he said. “They always have money. I know. They come here and they think money will do everything. But what is money? It is only a promise, señor. This I know from books. And when somebody no longer likes your promise, what then?”
“I will give you anything you ask.”
“Will you?” The guard turned to his friends. “He will give me anything I ask.” To Webb: “It was a joke. We were always a joke to you, weren’t we?”
“No.”
“Mañana, you laughed at us; mañana, you laughed at our siestas and our mañanas, didn’t you?”
“Not me. Someone else.”
“Yes, you.”
“I’ve never been to this particular station before.”
“I know you, anyway. Run here, do this, do that. Oh, here’s a peso, buy yourself a house. Run over there, do this, do that.”
“It wasn’t me.”
“He looked like you, anyway.”
They stood in the sun with their shadows dark under them, and the perspiration coloring their armpits. The soldier moved closer to John Webb. “I don’t have to do anything for you anymore.”
“You never had to before. I never asked it.”
“You’re trembling, señor.”
“I’m all right. It’s the sun.”
“How much money have you got?” asked the guard.
“A thousand pesos to let us through, and a thousand for the other man over there.”
The guard turned again. “Will a thousand pesos be enough?”
“No,” said the other guard. “Tell him to report us!”
“Yes,” said the guard, back to Webb again. “Report me. Get me fired. I was fired once, years ago, by you.”
“It was someone else.”
“Take my name. It is Carlos Rodriguez Ysotl. Go on now.”
“I see.”
“No, you don’t see,” said Carlos Rodriguez Ysotl. “Now give me two thousand pesos.”
John Webb took out his wallet and handed over the money. Carlos Rodriguez Ysotl licked his thumb and counted the money slowly under the blue glazed sky of his country as noon deepened and sweat arose from hidden sources and people breathed and panted above their shadows.
“Two thousand pesos.” He folded it and put it in his pocket quietly. “Now turn your car around and head for another border.”
“Hold on now, damn it!”
The guard looked at him. “Turn your car.”
They stood a long time that way, with the sun blazing on the rifle in the guard’s hands, not speaking. And then John Webb turned and walked slowly, one hand to his face, back to the car and slid into the front seat.
“What’re we going to do?” said Leonora.
“Rot. Or try to reach Porto Bello.”
“But we need gas and our spare fixed. And going back over those highways . . . This time they might drop logs, and—”
“I know, I know.” He rubbed his eyes and sat for a moment with his head in his hands. “We’re alone, my God, we’re alone. Remember how safe we used to feel? How safe? We registered in all the big towns with the American Consuls. Remember how the joke went? ‘Everywhere you go you can hear the rustle of the eagle’s wings!’ Or was it the sound of paper money? I forget. Jesus, Jesus, the world got empty awfully quick. Who do I call on now?”
She waited a moment and then said, “I guess just me. That’s not much.”
He put his arm around her. “You’ve been swell. No hysterics, nothing.”
“Tonight maybe I’ll be screaming, when we’re in bed, if we ever find a bed again. It’s been a million miles since breakfast.”
He kissed her, twice, on her dry mouth. Then he sat slowly back. “First thing is to try to find gas. If we can get that, we’re ready to head for Porto Bello.”
The three soldiers were talking and joking as they drove away.
After they had been driving a minute, he began to laugh quietly.
“What were you thinking?” asked his wife.
“I remember an old spiritual. It goes like this:
“‘I went to the Rock to hide my face
And the Rock cried out, “No Hiding Place,
There’s no Hiding Place down here.”’”
“I remember that,” she said.
“It’s an appropriate song right now,” he said. “I’d sing the whole thing for you if I could remember it all. And if I felt like singing.”
He put his foot harder to the accelerator.
They stopped at a gas station and after a minute, when the attendant did not appear, John Webb honked the horn. Then, appalled, he snapped his hand away from the horn-ring, looking at it as if it were the hand of a leper.
“I shouldn’t have done that.”
The attendant appeared in the shadowy doorway of the gas station. Two other men appeared behind him.
The three men came out and walked around the car, looking at it, touching it, feeling it.
Their faces were like burned copper in the daylight. They touched the resilient tires, they sniffed the rich new smell of the metal and upholstery.
“Señor,” said the gas attendant at last.
“We’d like to buy some gas, please.”
“We are all out of gas, señor.”
“But your tank reads full. I see the gas in the glass container up there.”
“We are all out of gas,” said the man.
“I’ll give you ten pesos a gallon!”
“Gracias, no.”
“We haven’t enough gas to get anywhere from here.” Webb checked the gauge. “Not even a quarter gallon left. We’d better leave the car here and go into town and see what we can do there.”
“I’ll watch the car for you, señor,” said the station attendant. “If you leave the keys.”
“We can’t do that!” said Leonora. “Can we?”
“I don’t see what choice we have. We can stall it on the road and leave it to anyone who comes along, or leave it with this man.”
“That’s better,” said the man.
They climbed out of the car and stood looking at it.
“It was a beautiful car,” said John Webb.
“Very beautiful,” said the man, his hand out for the keys. “I will take good care of it, señor.”
“But, Jack—”
She opened the back door and started to take out the luggage. Over her shoulder, he saw the bright travel stickers, the storm of color that had descended upon and covered the worn leather now after years of travel, after years of the best hotels in two dozen countries.
She tugged at the valises, perspiring, and he stopped her hands and they stood gasping there for a moment, in the open door of the car, looking at these fine rich suitcases, inside which were the beautiful tweeds and woolens and silks of their lives and living, the forty-dollar-an-ounce perfumes and the cool dark furs and the silvery golf shafts. Twenty years were packed into each of the cases; twenty years and four dozen parts they had played in Rio, in Paris, in Rome and Shanghai, but the part they played most frequently and best of all was the rich and buoyant, amazingly happy Webbs, the smiling people, the ones who could make that rarely balanced martini known as the Sahara.
“We can’t carry it all into town,” he said. “We’ll come back for it later. Later.”
“But . . .”
He silenced her by turning her away and starting her off down the road.
“But we can’t leave it there, we can’t leave all our luggage and we can’t leave our car! Oh look here now, I’ll roll up the windows and lock myself in the car, while you go for the gas, why not?” she said.
He stopped and glanced back at the three men standing by the car, which blazed in the yellow sun. Their eyes were shining and looking at the woman.
“There’s your answer,” he said. “Come on.”
“But you just don’t walk off and leave a four-tho
usand-dollar automobile!” she cried.
He moved her along, holding her elbow firmly and with quiet decision. “A car is to travel in. When it’s not traveling, it’s useless. Right now, we’ve got to travel; that’s everything. The car isn’t worth a dime without gas in it. A pair of good strong legs is worth a hundred cars, if you use the legs. We’ve just begun to toss things overboard. We’ll keep dropping ballast until there’s nothing left to heave but our hides.”
He let her go. She was walking steadily now, and she fell into step with him. “It’s so strange. So strange. I haven’t walked like this in years.” She watched the motion of her feet beneath her, she watched the road pass by, she watched the jungle moving to either side, she watched her husband striding quickly along, until she seemed hypnotized by the steady rhythm. “But I guess you can learn anything over again,” she said, at last.
The sun moved in the sky and they moved for a long while on the hot road. When he was quite ready, the husband began to think aloud. “You know, in a way, I think it’s good to be down to essentials. Now instead of worrying over a dozen damned things, it’s just two items—you and me.”
“Watch it, here comes a car—we’d better . . .”
They half turned, yelled, and jumped. They fell away from the highway and lay watching the automobile hurtle past at seventy miles an hour. Voices sang, men laughed, men shouted, waving. The car sped away into the dust and vanished around a curve, blaring its double horns again and again.
He helped her up and they stood in the quiet road.
“Did you see it?”
They watched the dust settle slowly.
“I hope they remember to change the oil and check the battery, at least. I hope they think to put water in the radiator,” she said, and paused. “They were singing, weren’t they?”
He nodded. They stood blinking at the great dust cloud filtering down like yellow pollen upon their heads and arms. He saw a few bright splashes flick from her eyelids when she blinked.
“Don’t,” he said. “After all, it was only a machine.”
“I loved it.”
“We’re always loving everything too much.”
Walking, they passed a shattered wine bottle which steamed freshly as they stepped over it.
They were not far from the town, walking single file, the wife ahead, the husband following, looking at their feet as they walked, when a sound of tin and steam and bubbling water made them turn and look at the road behind them. An old man in a 1929 Ford drove along the road at a moderate speed. The car’s fenders were gone, and the sun had flaked and burned the paint badly, but he rode in the seat with a great deal of quiet dignity, his face a thoughtful darkness under a dirty Panama hat, and when he saw the two people he drew the car up, steaming, the engine joggling under the hood, and opened the squealing door as he said, “This is no day for walking.”
“Thank you,” they said.
“It is nothing.” The old man wore an ancient yellowed white summer suit, with a rather greasy tie knotted loosely at his wrinkled throat. He helped the lady into the rear seat with a gracious bow of his head. “Let us men sit up front,” he suggested, and the husband sat up front and the car moved off in trembling vapors.
“Well. My name is Garcia.”
There were introductions and noddings.
“Your car broke down? You are on your way for help?” said Señor Garcia.
“Yes.”
“Then let me drive you and a mechanic back out,” offered the old man.
They thanked him and kindly turned the offer aside and he made it once again, but upon finding that his interest and concern caused them embarrassment, he very politely turned to another subject.
He touched a small stack of folded newspapers on his lap.
“Do you read the papers? Of course, you do. But do you read them as I read them? I rather doubt that you have come upon my system. No, it was not exactly myself that came upon it; the system was forced upon me. But now I know what a clever thing it has turned out to be. I always get the newspapers a week late. All of us, those who are interested, get the papers a week late, from the Capital. And this circumstance makes for a man being a clear-thinking man. You are very careful with your thinking when you pick up a week-old paper.”
The husband and wife asked him to continue.
“Well,” said the old man, “I remember once, when I lived in the Capital for a month and bought the paper fresh each day, I went wild with love, anger, irritation, frustration; all of the passions boiled in me. I was young. I exploded at everything I saw. But then I saw what I was doing: I was believing what I read. Have you noticed? You believe a paper printed on the very day you buy it? This has happened but only an hour ago, you think! It must be true.” He shook his head. “So I learned to stand back away and let the paper age and mellow. Back here, in Colonia, I saw the headlines diminish to nothing. The week-old paper—why, you can spit on it if you wish. It is like a woman you once loved, but you now see, a few days later, she is not quite what you thought. She has rather a plain face. She is no deeper than a cup of water.”
He steered the car gently, his hands upon the wheel as upon the heads of his good children, with care and affection. “So here I am, returning to my home to read my weekly papers, to peek sideways at them, to toy with them.” He spread one on his knee, glancing down to it on occasion as he drove. “How white this paper is, like the mind of a child that is an idiot, poor thing, all blank. You can put anything into an empty place like that. Here, do you see? This paper speaks and says that the light-skinned people of the world are dead. Now that is a very silly thing to say. At this very moment, there are probably millions upon millions of white men and women eating their noon meals or their suppers. The earth trembles, a town collapses, people run from the town, screaming, All is lost! In the next village, the population wonders what all of the shouting is about, since they have had a most splendid night’s repose. Ah, ah, what a sly world it is. People do not see how sly it is. It is either night or day to them. Rumor flies. This very afternoon all of the little villages upon this highway, behind us and ahead of us, are in carnival. The white man is dead, the rumors say, and yet here I come into the town with two very lively ones. I hope you don’t mind my speaking in this way? If I do not talk to you I would then be talking to this engine up in the front, which makes a great noise speaking back.”
They were at the edge of town.
“Please,” said John Webb, “it wouldn’t be wise for you to be seen with us today. We’ll get out here.”
The old man stopped his car reluctantly and said, “You are most kind and thoughtful of me.” He turned to look at the lovely wife.
“When I was a young man I was very full of wildness and ideas. I read all of the books from France by a man named Jules Verne. I see you know his name. But at night I many times thought I must be an inventor. That is all gone by; I never did what I thought I might do. But I remember clearly that one of the machines I wished to put together was a machine that would help every man, for an hour, to be like any other man. The machine was full of colors and smells and it had film in it, like a theater, and the machine was like a coffin. You lay in it. And you touched a button. And for an hour you could be one of those Eskimos in the cold wind up there, or you could be an Arab gentleman on a horse. Everything a New York man felt, you could feel. Everything a man from Sweden smelled, you could smell. Everything a man from China tasted, your tongue knew. The machine was like another man—do you see what I was after? And by touching many of the buttons, each time you got into my machine, you could be a white man or a yellow man or a Negrito. You could be a child or a woman, even, if you wished to be very funny.”
The husband and wife climbed from the car.
“Did you ever try to invent that machine?”
“It was so very long ago. I had forgotten until today. And today I was thinking, we could make use of it, we are in need of it. What a shame I never tried to put it all together. S
omeday some other man will do it.”
“Someday,” said John Webb.
“It has been a pleasure talking with you,” said the old man. “God go with you.”
“Adiós, Señor Garcia,” they said.
The car drove slowly away, steaming. They stood watching it go, for a full minute. Then, without speaking, the husband reached over and took his wife’s hand.
They entered the small town of Colonia on foot. They walked past the little shops—the butcher shop, the photographer’s. People stopped and looked at them as they went by and did not stop looking at them as long as they were in sight. Every few seconds, as he walked, Webb put up his hand to touch the holster hidden under his coat, secretly, tentatively, like someone feeling for a tiny boil that is growing and growing every hour and every hour . . .
The patio of the Hotel Esposa was cool as a grotto under a blue waterfall. In it caged birds sang, and footsteps echoed like small rifle shots, clear and smooth.
“Remember? We stopped here years ago,” said Webb, helping his wife up the steps. They stood in the cool grotto, glad of the blue shade.
“Señor Esposa,” said John Webb, when a fat man came forward from the desk, squinting at them. “Do you remember me—John Webb? Five years ago—we played cards one night.”
“Of course, of course.” Señor Esposa bowed to the wife and shook hands briefly. There was an uncomfortable silence.
Webb cleared his throat. “We’ve had a bit of trouble, señor. Could we have a room for tonight only?”
“Your money is always good here.”
“You mean you’ll actually give us a room? We’ll be glad to pay in advance. Lord, we need the rest. But, more than that, we need gas.”
Leonora picked at her husband’s arm. “Remember? We haven’t a car anymore.”
“Oh. Yes.” He fell silent for a moment and then sighed. “Well. Never mind the gas. Is there a bus out of here for the Capital soon?”
“All will be attended to, in time,” said the manager nervously. “This way.”
As they were climbing the stairs they heard a noise. Looking out they saw their car riding around and around the plaza, eight times, loaded with men who were shouting and singing and hanging on to the front fenders, laughing. Children and dogs ran after the car.