If Enrique didn’t love her, she now announced in the carriage, it was not her fault. She didn’t see how God was going to help any of this. Enrique’s mother didn’t approve of a divorcée, so that was one person to blame. And the servants, who did everything wrong. She would like to blame Leandro but couldn’t. The white-flour dough he made for the pastries was perfect, as silky as Salomé’s white dress that could be poured out of a pitcher, in which she still hoped to be married one more time.
The problem must be this long-legged son, bouncing with the bumps in the road, brushing hair out of his eyes, staring off at the ocean. No place on the top of the wedding cake for a boy already as tall as the president, who was not, himself, elected.
To get to the oil fields in the Huasteca, Enrique had to take the ferry to shore, then the panga to Veracruz, then the train. If he had to be gone one day, he’d be gone a week, or better yet a month. Salomé wanted to go with him to Veracruz, but he said she would only want to buy things. Instead, he allowed them to come in the carriage to the pier in town, to watch him leave on the ferry. In the flattering morning light she waved her handkerchief from the dock, elbowing the son to wave as well. They both had roles in the play called Enrique Makes Up His Mind. “Pretty soon he’ll say the word, and then we can let our hair down, kiddo. Then we’ll think what to do about you.” Enrique had mentioned a boarding school in the Distrito Federal.
The pasteboard notebook was running out of pages, the book called What Happened to Us in Mexico. He asked to purchase a new one at the tobacco stand. But Salomé said, “First we’ll have to see if there’s more to the story.”
When the ferry was gone, they ate lunch on the malecón across from the shrimp jetty, watching seabirds wheel in circles trying to steal food. Out on the water, men in small wooden boats pulled in their nets, crumpling up mounds of gray netting that rose like storm clouds from each hull. By late morning the trawlers were already docked with their rusted hulls all listing the same direction along the dock, double masts leaning like married couples, equally drunken. The air smelled of fish and salt. The palm trees waved their arms wildly in the sea wind, a gesture of desperation ignored by all. The boy said, “There is always more to the story. This lunch will be the next part.” But Salomé said what she always said now: You need to stop doing that, put the book away. It makes me nervous.
On the way home she directed the driver to stop at a little village near the lagoon. “Drop us off here and come back at six, never mind for what,” she said. The horse knew how to go everywhere, and it was a good thing, because old Natividad was nearly blind. That was a good thing also, as far as Salomé was concerned. She wanted no witnesses.
The village was too small even to have a market, only an immense stone head in the town square, left over from a century when the Indians had huge ambitions. Salomé stepped down from the coach and strode past the great head with the beard of grass under its chin. At the end of the lane she said, “It’s this way, come on,” and turned up a path into the forest, walking fast in her sling-back shoes, her lips pursed, chin tilted down so the marcel wave hung forward like a closed curtain. They came to a plank footbridge suspended on ropes over a ravine. Slipping off the pointed white shoes and dangling them from a hooked finger, she stepped out in her stockings onto the bridge over crashing water, then paused to look back. “Don’t come,” she said. “You should wait here.”
She was gone hours. He sat at the end of the plank bridge with his notebook on his lap. An enormous spider with a fire-red belly came along lifting one foot at a time, slowly pulling its entire body into a tiny hole in one of the planks. What a terrible thing to know: every small hole could have something like that inside. A flock of parrots shuffled in the leaves. A toucan looked down its long nose, shrieking: a mi, a mi! Squatting by the chasm, he believed again in the tree-devils. And so at dusk, howling, they arrived.
When Salomé returned, she took off her shoes again to cross the bridge, put them back on, and strode toward the village. Natividad was already waiting, a stone head himself, letting the horse graze. She climbed in the carriage and never spoke at all.
It was a form of revenge to steal the pocket watch. Something he could keep from his mother, for refusing to tell why she’d gone into the jungle. He did it on the day the tailor rode out from town, eager for Salomé’s opinion about fabrics for Enrique’s new suit. Enrique was away. It was only good manners for the tailor to take a glass of chinguirito with Salomé, and then another one. There was plenty of time for a boy to creep into her room to look at the Father Box. It was covered with dust, shoved underneath the cabinet where she kept her toilet pot. She hated the man that much.
No use crying over a spilt father, she always said. Only once had she let him look at the things in this box: a photograph of a man who had been his father somehow. A bunch of old coins, fobs, jeweled cuff links, and the pocket watch. He craved the watch. That first time, when she’d let him sit on the floor and touch everything in the box while she lay on her bed, propped on one elbow watching him, he’d dangled it on its chain in front of her eyes, making it swing, like a hypnotist: You are getting very sleepy.
She said, “El tiempo cura y nos mata.” Time cures you first, and then it kills you.
Strictly speaking, these things are yours, she’d told him. But strictly speaking they were not even hers, she’d scooped them up in a hurry without asking, when she left and ran off to Mexico. “In case we needed something to sell later on, if we fell on hard times.” If they fell on something harder than Enrique, she must have meant.
Now the watch she’d stolen was stolen again: a double-cross. He’d crept in her room and taken it while she was in the parlor laughing at the tailor’s jokes, lolling her head back on the silk sofa. Among all the treasures in the box, he’d only needed that one. The time that cures you first, and later stops everything that’s happening in your heart.
The blue fog of Tuxtlan cigars came out of the library and filled the whole house. Two Americans had come back with Enrique this time, to fumigate the southern shores of Mexico with their smoke and endless talk: the election campaign, Ortíz Rubio, that disaster Vasconcelos. Gringos always made Enrique nervous, and Salomé excited. She poured cognac in their glasses and let them see her chest when she leaned over. One looked, the other never did. Both were said to have wives. At midnight they went out for a walk on the beach, in their fedoras and leather shoes. Salomé collapsed in a chair, all the flapper draining out of her.