‘I’m glad you’re here,’ she said, following him into the living room, which had undergone a cleaning. ‘I haven’t been able to sleep.’
She dropped onto the sofa, fumbled about on the end table, picked up a cigar, then set it down; she looked up at him expectantly.
‘Well, have a seat.’
He did as instructed, taking his perch again on the easy chair. ‘I was hoping you wouldn’t mind answering a few more questions.’
‘Questions . . . you want . . . oh, all right. Questions.’ She gave a fey laugh and picked nervously at the fringe on the arm of the sofa. ‘Ask away.’
‘I’ve heard,’ he said, ‘that Mardo had in mind for you to take over the leadership of the temple in case of his death. Is that correct?’
She nodded, kept nodding, too forcefully for mere affirmation, as if trying to clear some painful entanglement from her head.
‘Yes, indeed,’ she said. ‘That’s what he had in mind.’
‘Were there papers drawn up to this effect?’
‘No . . . yes, maybe . . . I don’t know. He talked about doing it, but I never saw them.’ She rocked back and forth on the edge of the sofa, her hands plucking at ridges of its old embroidered pattern. ‘It doesn’t matter now.’
‘Why . . . why doesn’t it matter?’
‘There is no temple.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘There is no temple! Simple as that. No more adherents, no more ceremonies. Just empty buildings.’
‘What happened?’
‘I don’t want to talk about it.’
‘But . . .’
She jumped to her feet, paced toward the back of the room; then she spun about to face him, brushing hair back from her cheek. ‘I don’t want to talk about it! I don’t want to talk at all . . . not about . . . not about anything important.’ She put a hand to her brow as if testing for a fever. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’
‘What’s the matter?’ he asked.
‘Oh, nothing,’ she said. ‘My life’s a shambles, my lover’s dead, and my father goes on trial for his murder tomorrow morning. Everything’s fine.’
‘I don’t know why your father’s plight should disturb you. I thought you hated him.’
‘He’s still my father. I have feelings that hate won’t dissolve. Reflex feelings, you understand. But they have their pull.’ She came back to the sofa and sat down; once again she began picking at the embroidered pattern. ‘Look, I can’t help you. I don’t know anything that can help you with the trial. Not a thing. If I did I think I’d tell you . . . that’s how I feel now, anyway. But there’s nothing, nothing at all.’
He sensed that the crack in her callous veneer ran deeper than she cared to admit, and, too, he thought that her anxiety might be due to the fact that she did know something helpful and was holding it back; but he decided not to push the matter.
‘Very well,’ he said. ‘What would you like to talk about?’
She glanced around the room, as if searching for something that would support a conversation.
He noticed that her eye lingered on the framed sketch of the woman and baby. ‘Is that your mother?’ he asked, pointing to it.
That appeared to unsettle her. ‘Yes,’ she murmured, looking quickly away from the sketch.
‘She’s very much like you. Her name was Patricia, wasn’t it?’
Mirielle nodded.
‘It’s a terrible thing,’ he said, ‘for a woman so lovely to be taken before her time. How did she drown?’
‘Don’t you know how to talk without interrogating people?’ she asked angrily.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, wondering at the vehemence of her reaction. ‘I just . . .’
‘My mother’s dead,’ she said. ‘Let that be enough for you.’
‘I was only making conversation. You choose the subject, all right?’
‘All right,’ she said after a moment. ‘Let’s talk about you.’
‘There’s not much to tell.’
‘There never is with people, but that’s all right. I won’t be bored, I promise.’
He began, reluctantly at first, to talk about his life, his childhood, the tiny farm in the hills above the city, with its banana grove, its corral and three cows – Rose, Alvina, and Esmeralda – and as he spoke, that old innocent life seemed to be resurrected, to be breathing just beyond the apartment walls. He told her how he used to sit on a hilltop and look down at the city and dream of owning one of the fine houses.
‘And now you do,’ she said.
‘No, I don’t. There’s a law against it. The fine houses belong to those with status, with history on their side. There are laws against people like me, laws that keep us in our place.’
‘Of course,’ she said. ‘I know that.’
He told her about his first interest in the law, how it had seemed in its logical construction and order to be a lever with which one could move any obstruction, but how he had discovered that there were so many levers and obstructions, when you moved one, another would drop down to crush you, and the trick was to keep in constant motion, to be moving things constantly and dancing out of the way.
‘Did you always want to be a lawyer?’
He laughed. ‘No, my first ambition was to be the man who slew the dragon Griaule, to claim the reward offered in Teocinte, to buy my mother silver bowls and my father a new guitar.’
