out there today?’
‘I’ll try to think of something.’
‘Long ago I stopped trying. Señor, we have always been a minority, we white people. I am Spanish, but I was born here. They tolerate me.’
‘We have never let ourselves think about our being a minority,’ said Webb, ‘and now it’s hard to get used to the fact.’
‘You have behaved beautifully.’
‘Is that a virtue?’
‘In the bull ring, yes; in war, yes; in anything like this, most assuredly yes. You do not complain, you do not make excuses. You do not run and make a spectacle of yourself. I think you are both very brave.’
The hotel manager sat down, slowly, helplessly.
‘I’ve come to offer you the chance to settle down,’ he said.
‘We wanted to move on, if possible.’
The manager shrugged. ‘Your car is stolen, I can do nothing to get it back. You cannot leave town. Remain then and accept my offer of a position in my hotel.’
‘You don’t think there is any way for us to travel?’
‘It might be twenty days, señor, or twenty years. You cannot exist without money, food, lodging. Consider my hotel and the work I can give you.’
The manager arose and walked unhappily to the door and stood by the chair, touching Webb’s coat, which was draped over it.
‘What’s the job?’ asked Webb.
‘In the kitchen,’ said the manager, and looked away.
John Webb sat on the bed and said nothing. His wife did not move.
Señor Esposa said, ‘It is the best I can do. What more can you ask of me? Last night, those others down in the plaza wanted both of you. Did you see the machetes? I bargained with them. You were lucky. I told them you would be employed in my hotel for the next twenty years, that you were my employees and deserve my protection!’
‘You said that!’
‘Señor, señor, be thankful! Consider! Where will you go? The jungle? You will be dead in two hours from the snakes. Then can you walk five hundred miles to a capital which will not welcome you? No – you must face the reality.’ Señor Esposa opened the door. ‘I offer you an honest job and you will be paid the standard wages of two pesos a day, plus meals. Would you rather be with me, or out in the plaza at noon with our friends? Consider.’
The door was shut. Señor Esposa was gone.
Webb stood looking at the door for a long while.
Then he walked to the chair and fumbled with the holster under the draped white shirt. The holster was empty. He held it in his hands and blinked at its emptiness and looked again at the door through which Señor Esposa had just passed. He went over and sat down on the bed beside his wife. He stretched out beside her and took her in his arms and kissed her, and they lay there, watching the room get brighter with the new day.
At eleven o’clock in the morning, with the great doors on the windows of their room flung back, they began to dress. There were soap, towels, shaving equipment, even perfume in the bathroom, provided by Mr Esposa.
John Webb shaved and dressed carefully.
At eleven-thirty he turned on the small radio near their bed. You could usually get New York or Cleveland or Houston on such a radio. But the air was silent. John Webb turned the radio off.
‘There’s nothing to go back to – nothing to go back for – nothing.’
His wife sat on a chair near the door, looking at the wall.
‘We could stay here and work,’ he said.
She stirred at last. ‘No. We couldn’t do that, not really. Could we?’
‘No, I guess not.’
‘There’s no way we could do that. We’re being consistent, anyway; spoiled, but consistent.’
He thought a moment. ‘We could make for the jungle.’
‘I don’t think we can move from the hotel without being seen. We don’t want to try to escape and be caught. It would be far worse that way.’
He nodded.
They both sat a moment.
‘It might not be too bad, working here,’ he said.
‘What would we be living for? Everyone’s dead – your father, mine, your mother, mine, your brothers, mine, all our friends, everything gone, everything we understood.’
He nodded.
‘Or if we took the job, one day soon one of the men would touch me and you’d go after him, you know you would. Or someone would do something to you, and I’d do something.’
He nodded again.
They sat for fifteen minutes, talking quietly. Then, at last, he picked up the telephone and ticked the cradle with his finger.
‘Bueno,’ said a voice on the other end.
‘Señor Esposa?’
‘Sí.’
‘Señor Esposa,’ he paused and licked his lips, ‘tell your friends we will be leaving the hotel at noon.’
The phone did not immediately reply. Then with a sigh Señor Esposa said, ‘As you wish. You are sure—?’
The phone was silent for a full minute. Then it was picked up again and the manager said quietly, ‘My friends say they will be waiting for you on the far side of the plaza.’
‘We will meet them there,’ said John Webb.
‘And señor—’
‘Yes.’
‘Do not hate me, do not hate us.’
‘I don’t hate anybody.’
‘It is a bad world, señor. None of us know how we got here or what we are doing. These men don’t know what they are mad at, except they are mad. Forgive them and do not hate them.’
‘I don’t hate them or you.’
‘Thank you, thank you.’ Perhaps the man on the far end of the telephone wire was crying. There was no way to tell. There were great lapses in his talking, in his breathing. After a while he said, ‘We don’t know why we do anything. Men hit each other for no reason except they are unhappy. Remember that. I am your friend. I would help you if I could. But I cannot. It would be me against the town. Good-bye, señor.’ He hung up.
John
