Stones for Ibarra Read online

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  STONES FOR IBARRA

  Harriet Doerr (1910–2002) was born in Pasadena, California, and attended Smith College in 1927, but received her B.A. in 1977 from Stanford University, where she was accepted into the Creative Writing Program. She was a Stegner Fellow, and received the Transatlantic Review Henfield Foundation Award and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Doerr’s first novel, Stones for Ibarra, won the 1984 National Book Award for First Work of Fiction, the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award, the Godal Medal of the Commonwealth Club of California, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Harold D. Vursell Award. Her second novel, Consider This, Señora, was a national bestseller. Doerr’s third and final book, The Tiger in the Grass, was a collection of stories and anecdotal pieces.

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  First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin Inc. 1984

  Published in Penguin Books 1985

  Copyright © 1978, 1981, 1983, 1984 by Harriet Doerr

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  The author gratefully acknowledges the support of the Wallace Stegner Fellowship, the Henfield Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts, which made possible the writing of this book.

  “The Evertons Out of Their Minds,” “A Clear Understanding,” “The Inheritance,” “The Red Taxi,” “Christmas Messages,” and “The Doctor of the Moon” appeared originally in The Ark River Review; “The Night of September Fifteenth” in The Southern Review; and “The Life Sentence of José Reyes” (under the title “The Retreat and Final Surrender of José Reyes”) in Quarterly West.

  ISBN 9780140075625 (pbk.)

  Ebook ISBN 9781101666852

  Version_1

  For

  A. E. D.

  Por el cariño que él mismo sentía al lugar

  CONTENTS

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  1

  THE EVERTONS OUT OF THEIR MINDS

  2

  A CLEAR UNDERSTANDING

  3

  THE LIFE SENTENCE OF JOSÉ REYES

  4

  KID MUÑOZ

  5

  THE INHERITANCE

  6

  PRAY FOR US, FATHERS

  7

  THE RED TAXI

  8

  PARTS OF SPEECH

  9

  THE THORN ON THE BLOWN-GLASS LAMP

  10

  THE NIGHT OF SEPTEMBER FIFTEENTH

  11

  CHRISTMAS MESSAGES

  12

  LUNCH WITH THE BISHOP

  13

  CALLING FROM LORETO

  14

  THE PRIESTS’ PICNIC

  15

  THE BAPTISTS

  16

  THE DOCTOR OF THE MOON

  17

  IMMENSE DISTANCES, EXTRAORDINARY EVENTS

  18

  BRING STONES

  1

  THE EVERTONS OUT OF THEIR MINDS

  Here they are, two North Americans, a man and a woman just over and just under forty, come to spend their lives in Mexico and already lost as they travel cross-country over the central plateau. The driver of the station wagon is Richard Everton, a blue-eyed, black-haired stubborn man who will die thirty years sooner than he now imagines. On the seat beside him is his wife, Sara, who imagines neither his death nor her own, imminent or remote as they may be. Instead she sees, in one of its previous incarnations, the adobe house where they intend to sleep tonight. It is a mile and a half high on the outskirts of Ibarra, a declining village of one thousand souls. Tunneled into the mountain whose shadow falls on the house an hour before sunset is the copper mine Richard’s grandfather abandoned fifty years ago during the Revolution of 1910.

  Dark is coming on among the high hills and, unless they find a road, night will trap at this desolate spot both the future operator of the Malagueña mine and the fair-haired, unsuspecting future mistress of the adobe house. Sara Everton is anticipating their arrival at a place curtained and warm, though she knows the house has neither electricity nor furniture and, least of all, kindling beside the hearth. There is some doubt about running water in the pipes. The Malagueña mine, on the other hand, is flooded up to the second level.

  Richard and Sara Everton will be the only foreigners in the village and they will depart in order, first Richard, then his wife. When Sara drives away for the last time, taking a studded leather chest, a painted religious figure, and a few flower pots, there will be no North American left in Ibarra.

  • • •

  For an hour the Evertons have followed footpaths and wagon trails that begin with no purpose and end with no destination. Although they can see their goal, a steep range of mountains lifting abruptly from the plain, they have found no direct way to approach it. The distant slopes rise first on their right, then on their left, and occasionally behind them.

  “Let’s stop and ask the way,” says Sara, “while there is still daylight.” And, as they take a diagonal course across a cleared space of land, she and her husband notice how the flat, pale rays from the west have lengthened the shadows of a row of tattered cornstalks, stunned survivors of the autumn harvest.

  But the owner of this field, the crooked fig tree, and the bent plowshare dulled by weeds and weather is nowhere in sight.

  Richard points to a drifting haze. “There’s some smoke from a cooking fire.” But it turns out to be only a spiral of dust whirling behind an empty dam.

  “We won’t get to Ibarra before dark,” says Sara. “Do you think we’ll recognize the house?”

  “Yes,” he says, and without speaking they separately recall a faded photograph of a wide, low structure with a long veranda in front. On the veranda is a hammock woven of white string, and in the hammock is Richard’s grandmother, dressed in eyelet embroidery and holding a fluted fan. Beyond is a tennis court and a rose garden.

  • • •

  Five days ago the Evertons left San Francisco and their house with a narrow view of the bay in order to extend the family’s Mexican history and patch the present onto the past. To find out if there was still copper underground and how much of the rest of it was true, the width of sky, the depth of stars, the air like new wine, the harsh noons and long, slow dusks. To weave chance and hope into a fabric that would clothe them as long as they lived.

  Even their closest friends have failed to understand. “Call us when you get there,” they said. “Send a telegram.” But Ibarra lacks these services. “How close is the airport?” and to avoid having to answer, the Evertons promised to send maps. “What will you do for light?” they were asked. And, “How long since someone lived in the house?” But this question collapsed of its own weight before a reply could be composed.

  Every day for a month Richard has reminded Sara, “We mustn’t expect too much.” And each time his wife has answered, “No.” But the Evertons expect too much. They have experienced the terrible persuasion of a great-aunt’s recollections and adopted th
em as their own. They have not considered that memories are like corks left out of bottles. They swell. They no longer fit.

  • • •

  Now here, lost in the Mexican interior under a January sun withering toward the horizon, Richard and Sara remember the photographs that turned first yellow, then sepia, in family albums. They remember the packets of letters marked MEXICO and divided into years by dry rubber bands. They remember the rock pick Richard’s grandfather gave him when he was six. His grandfather had used the pick himself to chip away copper ore from extrusions that coursed like exposed arteries down the slope of one mountain and webbed out into smaller veins up the slope of the next.

  Richard, without stopping the car, gropes under the seat for the rock pick, touches it, then heads across a field of stubble toward a few stripped trees in the west.

  Halfway to the trees, behind a clump of mesquite, a posted sign confronts the Evertons. According to the federal power commission, the community of El Portal is about to be electrified. A moment later, beyond a broken arch, they come to El Portal, a cluster of nine adobe houses and a colonial chapel so small, perfectly proportioned, and vividly domed that it might have been designed to be attached to the nursery of a princess in Córdoba or Seville.

  “Only a very short priest could enter to say mass and only children worship there,” says Sara. As if summoned, a boy and a girl with the half-formed bones and oversized front teeth of seven-year-olds materialize, staring, in a doorway.

  Richard lowers the window. “Which is the way to Ibarra?” he asks, and the children, unable to reconcile the Spanish words with the aspect of the stranger, turn rigid as stone.

  “Ibarra,” the American says again. “In those mountains.” And he points in the direction of three peaks, skirted all around by a somber border of foothills. “Where the mines are,” he says.

  • • •

  “What does he know about mining?” Richard’s friends have asked one another. “What does she know about gasoline stoves and charcoal irons? In case of burns, where will they find a doctor?” The friends learn that the Evertons are taking a first aid manual, antibiotics for dysentery, and a snakebite kit. There are other questions, relating to symphony season tickets, Christmas, golf, sailing. To these, the answers are evasive.

  Heedless of criticism and disbelief, the Evertons have gone ahead, mortgaged their house, borrowed on their insurance, applied for bank loans against dwindling collateral, and invested the total proceeds in rusty machinery apparently racked beyond repair.

  “It’s supposed to be a concentrating mill,” one of the friends told the others. “Who’s going to assemble it?”

  But the Evertons neither notice the rust nor seem concerned about finding mechanical engineers in a village where only the youngest generation has graduated from the fifth grade. They indeed propose to operate the family mine and occupy the family house, and they see no reason why their project should not succeed.

  • • •

  The two seven-year-olds in the doorway, as if they had never heard of mines, remain fixed and speechless in their places. Suddenly a farmer, leading a lame burro, approaches the car from behind.

  He regards the two Americans. “You are not on the road to Ibarra,” he says. “Permit me a moment.” And he gazes first at his feet, then at the mountains, then at their luggage. “You must drive north on that dry arroyo for two kilometers and turn left when you reach a road. You will recognize it by the tire tracks of the morning bus unless there have been too many goats. Or unless rain has fallen. But this is the dry season.”

  He does not ask why the Americans are going to Ibarra, where they are sure to be conspicuous because of their car, their textbook Spanish, and their four suitcases, which he imagines to be full of woolens, silks, and lace.

  He merely points and says, “The arroyo is beyond that tree.” Together they look at the six remaining top branches of a leafless cottonwood whose destiny it has become to cook the beans and toast the tortillas of the nine families of El Portal until it is reduced to a stump. Then that other cottonwood, farther down the arroyo, will in its turn perish gradually by the ax.

  Before going on, the Evertons look around them at El Portal.

  “You have a beautiful chapel,” they say.

  At these words, the man and the burro and the two children in the doorway turn their heads to regard the miniature structure with its carved stone lintel and filigree cross as if it had been built today, Saturday the twenty-seventh of January, between noon and four o’clock. But they don’t reply. They cannot decide so quickly if the chapel is beautiful.

  The Evertons drive toward the last of the houses, where a rooster stalks the flat roof, pecking angrily at crumbs of plaster.

  “Probably, in a high wind, comhusks fly up there, or acorns, or wild berries,” says Sara, imagining a meal for the rooster, who now leans in the attitude of a vulture from the roof’s edge and assesses them through hooded eyes. But there is not a gust of wind to carry husk or seed aloft.

  “Without a tail wind we won’t be bothered by the dust,” says Richard, and turns north.

  He is mistaken. The arroyo is smooth and soft with dust that, even in still air, spins from the car’s wheels and sifts through sealed surfaces, the flooring, the dashboard, the factory-tested weather stripping. It etches black lines on their palms, sands their skin, powders their lashes, and deposits a bitter taste on their tongues.

  “This must be the wrong way,” says Sara, from under the sweater she has pulled over her head.

  Richard says nothing. He knows it is the right way, as right as a way to Ibarra can be, as right as his decision to reopen an idle mine and bring his wife to a house built half of nostalgia and half of clay.

  When they have gone two kilometers, they stop and look for the road to Ibarra. But it is as the man in El Portal half suspected. There have been too many goats. While the Evertons search the trampled ground, they notice that all around them the winter afternoon is folding in on itself. Toward the west, in the direction they must turn, are only random boulders, nopal cactus, and the shadows strung out behind.

  But from the east, where a moment ago there was nothing, runs a boy, and, for the first time, the Evertons witness a recurring Mexican phenomenon: the abrupt appearance of human life in an empty landscape. Later it would become a commonplace experience. They had only to turn their backs momentarily on a deserted plain and a man on a mule would have ridden up behind them or a woman with a child settled on a nearby rock.

  Now, out of a vast unpopulated panorama, here, close at hand, is a boy with a satchel. He observes the two North Americans without astonishment through quick eyes that are wide apart and expectant. The Evertons realize immediately that he is a person wholly committed to what is going to happen next. Within a minute he has offered to show them the way to Ibarra. It is the village where he lives.

  “Then ride with us and be our guide,” says Richard, and the boy climbs into the rear and accommodates himself between the suitcases and cartons.

  “What is your name?” Sara asks in careful Spanish.

  “Domingo García,” says the boy. “At your orders.” He smiles with white, even teeth.

  “To the left of that big rock,” he tells Richard. “Between those two huisache trees. Across that bridge.”

  The bridge is two parallel planks set about five feet apart over a canyon, and Richard has trouble aligning his wheels with the boards. He walks to the bridge and notices the depth of the gorge.

  Domingo joins him and steps on a plank to try it. “You drive,” he says, “and I will show you.” Balanced on the brink, his back to the abyss, he extends his hands, palms facing. They move an inch to the right and half an inch to the left. When he is satisfied that the wheels are aimed at the boards, he runs back to insert himself again among the luggage.

  “Straight ahead,” says Domingo, and the Evert
ons are introduced to a second national peculiarity, one they will soon recognize on the streets of Ibarra and in towns and cities beyond. It is something they will see everywhere—a disregard for danger, a companionship with death. By the end of a year they will know it well: the antic bravado, the fatal games, the coffin shop beside the cantina, the sugar skulls on the frosted cake.

  There are two more bridges, but Richard refuses further help. Sara shuts her eyes and sits still as a stone image while they cross. When it is over, she turns to the passenger behind.

  “Did you walk far today?”

  Domingo says he missed the bus this morning, so he had to walk all the way from La Gloria. La Gloria is where he has been enrolled in preparatory school by his older brother, Basilio, who does not permit him to miss even one class. But, thanks to this ride, he will arrive in Ibarra in time for the fiesta tomorrow, on the saint’s day of the town. He asks if it is the annual visit of the bishop of the state or the carnival itself that is bringing the Americans to Ibarra. There is no hotel, he tells them, only Chayo Durán’s mesón, and the four rooms may already be occupied.

  “We are not visiting Ibarra. We are going to live there,” says Richard. “In the house my grandfather built.”

  Domingo, now in possession of a clue, falls silent.

  • • •

  In the last century Richard Everton’s grandfather built an adobe house in Ibarra for his wife. He took a stick and drew the shape of the house in the dirt while his mason observed the plan. First he drew a square around a patio, then one wing and then another, and then a veranda around it all.

  • • •

  The Evertons follow the invisible track pointed out by Domingo for half an hour until it abruptly mounts an embankment and they find themselves on a scraped dirt road.

  They have traveled smoothly along it for ten minutes and are already in the foothills when a careening carnival truck overtakes them. Behind the cab, the wooden legs and tails of horses and the wooden necks of swans protrude from the splitting canvas that secures them.