The flatness had become a dream verging on nightmare. No one lived here. That there were flat places in the world she’d known, but the enormity of it scared her even more than crossing the mountains. She’d been afraid all the way from Culiacán. The first couple of days she kept thinking she’d get off at the next stop and go back home. She thought she’d be discovered. They’d be attacked by bandits, robbed. Killed. Two more weeks, slogging higher and higher into her mother’s mountains in a smelly wagon she couldn’t even get out of to stretch her legs, not till everyone else was asleep, and then only for a brief interlude of wide cool darkness, a quick look up at the frosty stars. The driver and all the passengers thought she was a young girl travelling alone to meet her guardian, veiled because of a vow she’d made to Our Lady. Respecting her silence, they left her alone and were kind and helpful whenever they made a stop. Up the mountains, down the mountains, going mad with boredom, sleeping and drifting, jerking awake a hundred times, and with every mile that jolted by feeling more and more unreal, losing all sense of distance, the world a giant carpet unfolding endlessly.
In the morning they pulled into a depot. She was up and dressed and veiled, sitting by one of the small windows. The porter came with bread and coffee. New Orleans was no more than a couple of hours away, he said. The coffee was appalling. She was sick to death of this veil. She’d never had to wear it so much at home. It didn’t matter. All these new people she’d have to meet, she’d be famous, Rates said. She would perform. They’d flock in their millions. And they’d pay. After New Orleans, New York. Let them goggle. You show them, you show them what you can do, how proud you are, you go out there and let them see you. Can’t do it, she thought. Scared. Scared. Have to. Come this far. Who is this Rates anyway? Mama, I’m lost. She sipped the bitter muck. He could be a crook or a madman for all she knew. All she remembered was a suave podgy little man, well-spoken. In New Orleans, Mr Rates said, there’d be a big rehearsal room where she could practise on a real stage. What if he wasn’t there? Alone in New Orleans. Never get back home.
The conductor was calling all aboard. The place filled up. She watched the country roll by again, flat as ever still, but broken up now with vast stretches of water and acres of sugar cane, and people sprinkled out like black corn, working the flatness. The long car was packed, boys passed up and down the aisle selling candy and papers, and the heat was terrible. Off in the distance from time to time a cluster of slave cabins would appear, and sometimes a great white house. The windows didn’t open. The air was ripe with sweaty people. A stove at one end leaked smoke.
At the station she stood with her grip on the ground beside her. The place swarmed, the same as all the other waystations they’d stopped at along the road, only bigger and noisier. She didn’t see Mr Rates and didn’t know what to do, where to wait. Everyone was shouting, shunting luggage around, She tried to get out of the way, close to tears. And then he loomed in front of her, the portly man from the night of Marta’s wedding, with his thin-lipped smile and small pale eyes. At the wedding he’d been dressed like a gentleman, but here he wore a loud check jacket and carried a black cane with a silver tip.
‘My dear Miss Julia,’ he said in an oily way.
‘Mr Rates,’ she said, ‘I was just wondering what to do if you hadn’t been here.’
‘Of course I’m here.’
A thin pock-marked boy whose nose turned up extremely appeared at Mr Rates’s side. He looked straight at her veiled face then away.
‘And on time, you see,’ Rates said. ‘Is this all you have?’
She looked down. Her stuff looked paltry. ‘This is all,’ she said.
‘Excellent. Michael!’
The boy picked up her grip and her guitar and set off briskly, weaving through the crowd. Mr Rates offered Julia his arm and led her after. ‘You must be tired,’ he said. ‘Terrible journey, terrible, I’ve done it myself. All went well, I take it?’
‘Yes.’
‘Excellent.’
Outside, the horses hung down their long brown heads, nostrils steaming. Their carriage smelled of dung and lemons. All the books she’d read in Don Pedro’s house had not prepared her for the excitement of New Orleans. ‘But it’s too big!’ she said with a nervous laugh. ‘It goes on and on.’ It was a city of long streets and tall terraces, big houses with gardens, Spanish courtyards that put her in mind of Culiacán, and everywhere people teeming, loitering, meeting and parting, more people than she’d ever seen. Music flashed by, the high whistling peal of a street organ. Trying to see, she carefully lifted her veil, and was aware of a tightening in Rates’s attention. But she held it slantwise, cleverly, so that it was like looking out of a tunnel. No one could see her.
‘Careful,’ Rates said very softly by her ear.
She had never felt so buried yet so alive, and she dropped the veil.
‘I’m scared about meeting all the new people,’ she said too quickly.
Rates leaned back. ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘it’s only natural. But there’s nothing to be afraid of.’ He smiled, and putting on his grand stage voice declaimed, ‘You were born to entertain!’
‘I’m sick, sick of this veil!’
‘Not long now,’ he said. ‘You can take it off soon,’ patting her gloved hand and leaning close so that she could smell a slight odour from his breath. ‘You’re not shy, Julia,’ he said. ‘It’s what I noticed first about you. How calmly you faced the world with that stupendous, utterly unnatural face of yours, and of course – you know the spirit in which I say that, it’s merely a stated fact – I knew then you were a natural. No no, there’s no doubt in my mind, no doubt at all, but that you’ll thrive.’
The carriage swerved to get by a crowd spilling into the road.
‘Tell her about the Saint Charles Theatre, Mikey,’ he said.
‘It’s grand,’ Michael said, bored, looking out of the window on the other side, where a horse pulling a big dray was blocked by a lop-sided cart. The man driving the dray started shouting in an accent she couldn’t make out.
‘Wait until you see New York,’ said Rates.
‘I can’t believe I will.’
‘Oh, you will,’ he said, ‘you will.’
‘Wish I could go to New York,’ said Michael grumpily.
‘It’s not as pretty as New Orleans,’ said Rates, and the boy gave a crude snort as if prettiness was over-rated. ‘It’s like an old whore,’ he said, ‘all paint and dirty underneath.’
Mr Rates’s sister-in-law ran a rooming place in one of the faubourgs, an area where shuttered cottages mingled with low terraces and overhanging roofs. On shady wrought iron balconies, on steps, porches, people, people everywhere, all kinds, Spanish, black, white, every mixture. They pulled up beside a high fence in a busy street, not far from a corner where women hovered seriously over baskets of fruit outside an oddly shaped store. A tall middle-aged woman in a dark blue dress opened the gate immediately as if she’d been watching for them, and peered into the carriage eagerly before they’d even had a chance to get out. ‘Well, the new girl,’ she said and giggled like a giddy girl. Her face, vivacious and fleshily wrinkled, was heavily powdered white and wafted a scent of flowers into the airless carriage. ‘Can’t wait to see what you got under there,’ she said cheerfully.
‘Julia,
