Every Sunday Enrique brought out the skeleton key, unlocked the case, and took out four books exactly, which he left in a pile on the table without discussion. Invariably historical, stinking of mold, these were to be a boy’s education. A few were all right, Zozobra, and also Romancero Gitano, poems by a young man who loved gypsies. Cervantes held promise, but had to be puzzled out in some ancient kind of Spanish. One week only with Don Quixote, before turning him in to be locked up again and exchanged for a new week’s pile, had felt like a peek through a keyhole.
And anyhow not a single one of those books could hold eight minutes to Agatha Christie or the others he’d brought from before, when they came here on the train. His mother had let him carry two valises: one for books, one for clothes. The clothes were a waste, outgrown instantly. He should have filled both with books. The Mysterious Affair at Styles, The Count of Monte Cristo, Around the World in Eighty Days, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, books in English that didn’t stink of mold. He’d already read most of them now, more than once. The Three Musketeers still called out to him, waving their swords, but he always shoved them back in the valise. Because what would be left, when all these books were in the past? He lay awake nights dreading it.
The program of a real school was vague in Salomé’s convictions, and frankly in his own: dank memories of wool coats and rough boys, and sport, a terrible thing, daily enforced. One lady in a brown sweater used to give him books to keep, that was the best thing he recalled from home. But that is not what we call home now, Salomé said, “We’re here and there isn’t a school so you’ll just have to read every book in that damned library, if we’re allowed to stay.” If not, her program became less certain.
The library often stank, from the oil men in there smoking Tuxtlan cigars all night. Salomé hated all of it: cigars, men talking. Also locked-up books, or any other kind it seemed, and flutie boys who read them too much. But even so, she bought him a notebook from the shop by the ferry docks, on the day they’d tried to run away from Enrique and cried because of having absolutely nowhere to go. She sat limp on the iron bench in her silk-crepe dress, shoulders shaking, for such a long time he’d had to wander over to the window of the tobacco stand and leaf through magazines. There he’d found the pasteboard notebook: the most beautiful book ever, it could become anything.
She came up behind him while he was looking at it. Set her chin on top of his shoulder, wiped her cheek with the back of a hand, and said, “We’ll take it, then.” The man wrapped it carefully in brown paper, tied with a string.
That was the story she had wanted him to begin, to tell what happened in Mexico before the howlers swallowed them down without a trace. Later on, many times, she would change her mind and tell him to stop writing. It made her nervous.
At the end of that day, after running away, buying a notebook, and eating boiled shrimps from a paper cone while standing on the pier watching ferries leave, they’d gone back to Enrique, of course. They were prisoners on an island, like the Count of Monte Cristo. The hacienda had heavy doors and thick walls that stayed cool all day, and windows that let in the sound of the sea all night: hush, hush, like a heartbeat. He would grow thin as bones here, and when the books were all finished, he would starve.
But no, now he would not. The notebook from the tobacco stand was the beginning of hope: a prisoner’s plan for escape. Its empty pages would be the book of everything, miraculous and unending like the sea at night, a heartbeat that never stops.
Salomé for her part was not worried about running out of books, only of having her clothes go out of fashion. You can’t buy a thing on this island. Unless he wants me to be a she-goat, wear skirts down to the ground. A trunk with her nicest things had been mailed overland from Washington, D.C., last year, according to the lawyer who was supposed to be taking care of these matters. But both the trunk and the divorce seemed to have lost their way. Enrique said they might see that trunk one day, ojalá, if the Lord is willing. Meaning if the Lord is not, the Zapatistas held up the train and took everything. The boy cried, “Oh yes, imagine it! The Zapatistas in their gun belts, reading Miss Agatha Christie by the campfire. Eating off Mother’s Limoges and wearing her dressing gowns.”
Enrique pinched his moustache and said, “Imagine it! Too bad you can’t sell daydreams like that for money.”
“Revolution in Mexico is a fashion,” he announced to the oil men at supper on their last night. “Like the silly hats worn by our wives. I don’t care what they told you in Washington, this country will work hard for the foreign dollar.” He raised his glass. “The heart of Mexico is like that of a loyal woman, married forever to Porfirio Díaz.”
The deal was made, the oil men went away. The next morning Enrique let Salomé sit on his lap at breakfast and give him a kiss like a trumpet player. A sign of progress, she declared, after he’d gone out to inspect a new packing house. “Did you hear him say that, hats worn by our wives?” Her first project now was to get herself moved back into his bedroom. Her second one was to fire his maid.
The boy’s best plan on any day was to make himself scarce. Walk out the back through the kitchen, down a long lane of mulata trees with red skin peeling away from their trunks, exposing smooth black skin underneath. Cut across the sand trail through the pineapple field, over the low rock wall out to the sea, carrying a rucksack with a book and a packet of tortillas for lunch, the diving goggle and a bathing costume. No one would see but Leandro, whose eyes following him down the sand trail could make him feel naked when he was not. Leandro, who came barefoot up the lane every morning carrying the smoky smell of breakfast fires from his village, but wearing a clean shirt laundered by his wife. Salomé said Leandro already had a wife, a child, and a baby. As young as he is, she clucked, happy that someone had wrecked his life even faster than she had wrecked hers. If Leandro was already in the Second Portion of Life (the part with children), it was going to be short.
Out on the reef, the fish came every day for the scraps of tortilla the boy brought from the kitchen and tore into pieces, casting his bread upon the waters. One fish had a mouth like a parrot’s beak and a fire-red belly, and was always the first in line to come banging up for the day’s handout. So really it wasn’t a friend. It was like the men who came to visit for the free eats and their eyes full of Salomé in a V-neck satin dress.