SIlverland II

Peter was reading, or something. He’d muttered something about “re-evaluating some maps” while they were still lying in bed, about half an hour ago. Sara had let him go, but not very willingly. She wanted to calm him down, partly because if he was calm, so might she be. She wanted an afternoon like the ones they were used to, lying idly, talking about nothing or things that seemed thoroughly excluded by the rickety walls of Peter's hut.
But today she could only watch the bones of his shoulders and his spine through the green of his T-shirt as he flipped through books and sheets of paper. He was swearing in English and then in Spanish and thinking she couldn’t hear because his ruffled head was turned away.
Her father had made him swear and that was bad – a loved one swearing because of a loved one. She wasn’t used to swearing in any case – her father never approved of it. She wandered restlessly around the rooms trying to recapture the feeling she always felt she’d worked for. But today she could smell the mustiness, the corners where things had been spilled in the past, before Peter moved in. Stains made the dark wood still darker and she even caught herself wondering of the whole place was rotting. No, rationally speaking it wasn’t, but even so…
She was naked still, and every so often she would wander into his line of sight and catch his eye. He’d smile, as he always did, but he was packed up in his sandy jeans and scruffy top, and it seemed as though his smile was over the sharp edge of a knife blade. He didn't stand up to be nearer to her.
She poured water out of their Thermos and handed him the hot maté gourd. He looked up at her over his sharp shoulder.
“Thanks.”
“How’s it going?”
“It’s all right, I suppose. It just occurred to me that I hadn’t thought out the relationship between the pukara and the settlement patterns up in this end of the valley properly. Not that there’s much evidence to go on, but it matters if you want to understand how the anti-Spanish defence was conducted.”
He was looking away and there was an undertone of irritation in his voice. She rubbed the sides of his neck with gentle fingers but he didn't relax.
She took the gourd from his desk, pressing her body against his back, and drank a few sips. “I’ll leave you alone, shall I?”
“Don’t go too far.” His hand squeezed her knee convulsively for a second and then returned to the papers. He still wasn't going to come back to the bedroom.
“I won’t.” Her own grin was strained now, though he couldn’t see it. She went back into the bedroom, where she had left a magazine she meant to read.
On the bed, she flipped through the pages with the same frustration as Peter. The coarse feel of the elderly sheet against her skin felt more real than the semi-serious investigations on the magazine pages. Even though she laughed at Anna for her dislike of the porteños, it was true that Buenos Aires was a long way away from Cafayate. Apparently it was the same in England – Londoners were a different species from everyone else, with lots of stupid ideas about how the world was. Peter was very sure of this, but she didn’t quite believe him. She’d seen maps of Britain, and it was tiny. How much different could one city be when they were all crowded in on each other?
In Argentina there was desert and so much empty space where the land changed, no one place could share its identity with all the rest. In Buenos Aires cars, buildings and people rode along on top of each other, each so common that they barely noticed the others. Cafayate was different.
She threw the magazine on the floor among the others that she and Peter had never got around to clearing up and went to the window. The shutters had been blown half-to by an unexpectedly strong wind. She pushed them open and stared out as she had done so many times. This time she did it to prove herself right about her home. The sky was clear and the hillsides bare. There was space here. She nodded to herself, and then froze.
Back behind the sparse branches of the bush, John felt a droplet of sweat run down the side of his face. He didn’t move but all his body was jumping with pleasurable fear. Had she seen him? He hoped not. He wanted her to stay right there with the light on her until he dared to look again, and to look properly this time. Oh, this was good. Dirty old man or not, he sure as hell wanted her to stay there. But if she didn’t, he’d have to be ready – still, no, he’d look again. As if she might be able to feel his weight, he rested his fingertips on the ground as lightly as possible and craned his neck, not flinching when a thorn jabbed him and scored a line across his throat.
A good girl would have hidden herself. In her mind, her father pursed his lips in disapproval but she was not inclined to listen to him. The spy already seen, hadn’t he? And there he was again. It was the other Englishman, she guessed, by his shaved head and the scorching on his white skin. Ah, looking again, as she’d expected. He started as she caught his eye and he ducked back again. She could see the rough shape of him through the thin leaves of the bush. Silly man, to believe he could hide in her desert. Still, she wasn’t going to gratify him any more. She pulled the shutters to with a bang. In the dark she caught her toe on the spine of the magazine, but pulled on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt without stopping. She resented the feel of the cloth against her skin. Another interference in her afternoon.
Peter turned as she went quickly into the study room and his face fell as he took in the off-white and crumpled blue on her.
“Why’ve you got dressed?”
“Your English friend had come to pay you a visit.”
It took a couple of seconds for everything to sink in. He went pink and stood up shakily, his hand knocking aside a confused heap of papers. “Oh God, he’s not out there wanking in the cacti is he?”
“What’s wanking?”
“I’m sure you can guess,” he said in Spanish.
The breaking of the rule she had made, that they should only speak English together, set fire to her mood. “It’s not my fault! Go and talk to him. You’ve both got a lot more to share now!”
He hesitated. He made uncertain gestures with his bony arms. She could see him regretting his look and the first words he’d said when she came in. this only irritated her more. Then John intervened, his fleshy fist battering on the outside door and bending it against its fastenings in the tiny entranceway. “Any-body ho-ome?”
“Bastard.” Sara stared at her lover. Thoughts visibly crossed his face. Over the next round of knocking she heard him say: “My God, he’s come for the silver!”
“Just answer the door!” Anger was like molten metal in her mouth. “Get rid of him!”
Sara went into the dark bedroom and jammed a chair under the doorhandle. She could wait before meeting John Wilson where she could touch him. The pair of them had already exchanged enough knowledge about each other.
How was he going to speak when they let him in? His mouth was dried out, what with the heat and the excitement. Sara Bolivar’s breasts and belly were continually being sketched on the grey-brown wood a few inches from his nose.he was breathless too, but it didn’t matter. Peter wouldn’t need much talking to this time. John just had to be here and that would be enough. Laughter seemed to want to come out of his nose like lager and his penis twitched again and again as he reconstructed for himself the exact shade of her nipples and of her skin.
At last, here was Peter pulling the door against something it was stuck on. Poor bugger, doesn’t look like he’s slept, and he’s been carrying something heavy – look at those hunched-up shoulders!
“Hiya! Can I come in?”
She could hear them talking as they moved around in the room next door. He was pretending he’s seen nothing, but she didn’t want to protest that he was a liar, didn't turn her head to the faint lines that marked the frame of the door. She just carried on staring at the golden sunshine that stretched from the top of the shutters, up across the brown plasterboard and then across the uneven slats that made up the underside of the roof. After a while her eyes grew blurred and the creases in her clothes became irritants on her shoulders and back. But she didn’t move, she didn’t stretch an arm across the bed for a pillow.
The light on the ceiling was a trackway to the silver. Outside, it would merge with the same-colour dust and the loose stones that tried to roll away from under your feet – and no one would see you follow its path.
Peter had told her all about the silver. In the early days, when he stumbled over calling her by name and sat hunched at the hotel’s plastic breakfast table, he’d wanted to tell her.
She would come in through the big double doors each morning, hot from the long drive into town, with her hair slicked round her neck like a fraying rope. He'd be there, sitting. At first she believed him when his body language claimed he was working on the papers in front of him. Who knows, it might have been true at the very beginning – he was sat between the tourists trailing out and the hidden staff coming in with their buckets and aprons and gloves. It showed he wasn't one of either. But his pretence certainly wasn’t true by the time she knew enough to be interested in him.
He was always gone when she came back down from cleaining upstairs. Sometimes Luisa would be wiping the table where he’d been instead of flirting idly with Julio at the reception desk. It was only on those days, the days that were different, that she caught herself thinking about him as she put the juddering engine into gear and roared across the square amongst all the other cars’ dust. There’d been a lot to think about apart from him. The university work had been flowing freely down from Chicago and her father had asked her to rewrite most of her essays.
It was never really clear to her how Peter had gone from being a wide-eyed thin face in a dark corner of her town to a man looking hungrily across at her in the shadow of a dune.
She’d lain there while the sun plunged below the suddenly soft-edged mountains. It dragged down all the snakes of light it had spawned and sent uncoiling across the sky. It took the heat as well and as her body cooled she saw the faint prickling of goosepimples all over his skin. The frantic rush of sex had smoothed into lethargy and Peter struggled back into his clothes saying he was cold.
He sat in the truck with his legs hanging not far from her head. He cleared his throat a few times and his swinging feet clicked and clicked against blade of the needle grass that tried to hide the colour of the sand. Other than that, the sky, the road and the curves of the earth were ecstatically silent. She stretched and moved to impress the shape of her body into the ground.
“Do you… do you want to go and see something?" Peter eventually asked. "I’ll show you something.”
“Oh! You surprised me!”
“It’s pretty quiet out here isn’t it? I’d have thought you’d be used to it.”
“What, this? Lying here naked?”
“Oh no, no, I didn’t mean that – I mean… you’re just joking aren’t you?”
When she got up and walked over to him, swinging her clothes in her hand, she could see that he wasn’t sure. But he didn’t dare ask again. Instead, he moved his legs across the seat and under the steering wheel. “Come on, I want to show you something exciting.”
“It had better be.” She already knew that it pleased him when she tried out her English on him. She spread her arms to take in everything his eyes would have taken in if he’d looked away from the dashboard properly.
She closed the truck door behind her and fiddled with the neck of her shirt. He carefully bounced the truck over the sand and onto the road.
“So what is it?”
“If I tell you before you see it, it won’t be half as interesting.” He was grinning and biting his lip. Now he dared to look at her in between watching the turns of the road. This was before he moved into this hut, and so they drove past the wooden shack without a glance. The few maps that marked the cave at the end of their journey didn’t acknowledge the track in the headlights that they swayed behind.
Sara’s face was set in an expectant grin. Peter always watched her face to see what she was thinking – he had done so since she had first spoken to him, offering him a cup of coffee. He wasn’t aware of doing it though, being too excited by what he was going to show her.
“Go on, have a look.” He straightened up, just missing his head on the overhanging rock.
She hesitated. In the flashlight beam he was mostly shadow. She calculated how much she could trust him. “You don’t have to if you don’t want to.”
His voice had grown a sad tinge. She watched him for a second longer, trying to recapture the reckless enjoyment she had rolled along with all day. Forget the rules! she decided in English, and stepped forward to take the torch.
“Bring some up,” he said softly as she followed the light into the cleft. The air inside was still, enclosed in its own chill. A few wispy plants hung listlessly from the roof. Below her, something glistened. “If you rest on your stomach it’s quite easy to reach.”
She reached down and ran her hand over the mass of plastic so that it crackled. “What is it?”
“Have a look! Have a look!”
Her hand travelled over the shapes again. She plucked in one place at random. They were separate bags. It took her a little time to moved it so that she could put her hand in it. The torch beam jiggled crazily on the creviced wall opposite.
The contents were so cold she thought at first they were wet. She scrabbled and they knocked against each other as though annoyed by the intrusion. At last she had hold of some. Coins. Heavy precious coins.
“Bring some out.”

“I’m coming.”
With that, Sara pulled the chair out from under the doorhandle and let them in. Now, as at the silver cave, Peter was staring at her. She didn’t smile at him this time.
“Did you go to sleep?”
“No. You must be John Wilson.”
“I am. Sorry to barge in on you like this. Peter’s never invited me, but I thought I’d pop round.”
“Very rude.”
The two men almost looked at each other to see who was the target of the words. Sara stepped forward. Peter immediately lurched back out of her way. John Wilson’s big chest did not and she almost found herself pressed up against it. As he gave way at last, she could see his eyes trying to latch onto hers. She already knew that his were blue. Instead of meeting his gaze, she glanced at the round bulge of his cheek and noted the frond of whiskers he had missed with that plastic razor of his.
The hallway was oppressive with three people in it. She didn’t linger. “I suppose you’ll both want some coffee.”
The words floated over her shoulder as she passed through the door to the hot open space of the valley. Peter tried to catch at them. “I’ve still got some maté.”
But the door banged shut and there was no reply.
“The kitchen’s really a sort of outhouse. It’s round the back.”
“What luxuries. She's a nice catch though.” Peter knew that his disgust would be visible on his face so he turned away and pretended to struggle with the shutter latch above the left side of his desk.
“Here, let me.”
An idea of an arm like an express train of flesh flashed by Peter’s face. He blinked, and as he blinked he heard the latch snap open.
“Nice to have some light in here. How can you work? It’s bloody dark even with that open. And I bet you haven’t got light switches.”
“I try to work in the afternoons.”
“Meaning, Piss off, Wilson.”
“Whatever you like.” John had got Peter angry again, this flickering his eyes, looking up to the ceiling, sharp stabbing and sullenness swamping his throat and mouth. And John knew it, the bastard, standing there with his hands on his hips like a builder inventing an estimate.
“I can’t go because I haven’t got what I came for. Do you know what that is?”
“Tell me then.”
“Ah, you do know.”
A thousand answers crossed under Peter's sweating scalp. But there was only one he was ever going to give. Until he opened his mouth. “You want to know if I’m coming home because the Dean really wants to know.”
“Dead right!” Fist smacked into palm. John's whole round head was laughing at Peter the coward. “You never answered the question the other night – I didn’t want to raise the topic on our little trip out, but I really do need to know.”
Another imitation, this time of a little inoffensive English Lit tutor. Peter had last seen her being bullied into swapping rooms with a certain overweight member of the Languages faculty. He stared dully at the base of John’s neck where a few dark hairs nosed up over his T-shirt.
“You’ve been getting pretty busy here. Lot of maps around the place. I know that one.” He jabbed a finger at a plan of the pukara that was pinned tightly over the desk. Then he pointed to the one next to it. “Where’s that one from? Is it of here?”
“Yes. Further up though. The bit we’re in isn’t on it.”
John’s hand was flat over the contours. He was clearly uninterested in them now he knew what they showed. “Lot of Indians up here then?”
“Some. Sometimes.”
“Why haven't you got a map pinned up with your – house – on it?” That light tone again. Peter eyed the other man like a rabbit waiting for the pounce.
“I did have, when I was concentrating on this area. I’m not doing that now.”
“And what do you concentrate on now?”
“Why don’t you read the book when it comes out?”
“Don’t snap at me mate, I’m only showing a friendly interest.” John came closer and Peter could see the mass of his body crowding him into the corner. He felt the squared edge of the desk dig hard into the flesh around his kidney. “Anyway, why’re you getting your back up all of a sudden? Not giving you any, is she?”
Peter could see his thumbs digging into that flesh that shook with laughter, pressing in above the larynx, pressing in so deep – would the skin break? Then there’d be blood running down, over his wrists. John would die with his eyes bulging.
Typical of the silly sod to put a lid on his anger, John thought. Still, he’s as scared of her as he is of me. Wasting her time, she is. I’ll give her a free ticket. Crush your spirit, though, would hanging around in this little box. And it smells.
John turned his head at the sound of steps. With Peter pinned back so well, he’d forgotten that Sara Bolivar would return. He took the thick-glazed mug instinctively, feeling his eyes trapped by her again. Her hair hung across the skin of her cheek like thick silk. She met his eyes this time, challenging him as she had when he had caught her at the window. Even now it was hidden, her body captivated him as it moved smoothly against her clothes. He caught his breath at the shape of her nipples under the green T-shirt.
“Don’t forget how much work you’ve got to do this afternoon, Peter.” Her Spanish was quick and hard. That sentence was directed at him, John knew. She wasn’t as eager to see under his T-shirt.
“Er, yes, yes. I’m pretty busy today. You never did tell me what it was you wanted, John.”
Peter’s lip curled. John could barely suppress a grin.
“OK, OK. Apart from the pure pleasure of coming to visit you, I wanted to ask you about something that came up while I was having a chat with your mate José.”
“I’ll wait outside.”
“Wait – hang on, Sara! Oh, well… what?”
“Speaks English too does she? Good looking and clever. Very nice, mate, well done.”
“I can’t think what José would’ve sent you to me for. He’s been studying this area for years… I think he could probably recite the last twenty-five kings of the Quilmes without a second’s thought – no, no I don’t think I could tell you anything more than he can about it.”
“I’m not interested in the Indians, you bloody idiot.”
Peter stared up at him, veins bulging out on his neck. For a second it was as if there was only John in the world – the room behind him had been replaced by blackness. No escape that way –
Then it all rushed back and he was able to shake and sweat and loathe his very first rush of enthusiasm in that library in Buenos Aires and the stupid e-mail he sent. “Well, what are you interested in then?”
The pressure of those blue eyes drove him further and harder against the wood of the desk. “It’s all right to say, mate. She might be able to understand you, but she sure won’t be able to hear.” John jerked his head. A truck motor was muttering away and there were the faint strains of some music.
A sudden image shot through Peter’s mind. Sara lying back behind the steering wheel with her eyes shielded from the glare of the sun. Something similar had occurred to John as well. The two men’s eyes met and held. “That was just a theory,” Peter hazarded. “I just typed it in on the spur of the moment because I was so excited by it. Then I just sent the e-mail without thinking.”
“You haven’t typed much since then, spur of the moment or otherwise.” Stupid bugger, why even try to lie? But who could tell what was going on in the head of someone like him? “When I arrived here I thought it was quite interesting that you hadn’t moved on from Cafayate since all that time ago.”
Peter grimaced up into John's grin. “Isn’t Sara reason enough?” He made an irritable gesture at the wall through which the sound of the engine was coming.
“For me, maybe, and for most blokes. But not you, mate. I never saw you have a flicker of hormonal activity all the time you were in Oxford.”
How reasonable Wilson made himself! “Just because I didn’t go around trying to stick my dick in everything that passed my window-“
“Oh, now, Mr Atkins, that’s hardly fair is it?”
“And stop putting on voices! It’s not fucking funny!”
“Don’t lose your rag mate, I was only-“
“I know what you were ‘only’ doing, you cheap cunt!”
Peter couldn’t breathe. His lungs had crumpled with pain, his knees met the wood of the floor lurching up, his head was spattered with lights and stabbing. He lay choking, tasting vile fluids jolted up from his stomach. When he opened his eyes, John was still there, looking down at him through hundreds of metres. The towering man raised a foot over his head. “There’s plenty more of that if you want it, mate. And for her."
Peter waited until the gurgling in his throat had stopped. “She can look after herself.”
“That’s as may be. Just tell me where to look and I won’t give it a try.”
“Go out – turn left – a kilometre further on.”
“What’s a kilometre?”
“Ten – minutes’ walk.”
“And I can’t miss it?”
“You can’t miss it.”
The pale yellow of the trainer sole went away from his eyes. Now here was John’s hand, broad and heavy, offering to help him up. That was the one that had driven all the air out of him. He ignored it and climbed up the side of the chair and the desk before leaning on them. His face was cold where his eyes and nose had run.
“That’s a nasty bruise, mate. Best get it seen to.”
Peter stared at him. John cast one more look around the studious clutter on the walls and on the floor.
“I’d better be going then. I’ll be seeing José fairly soon, but if you talk to him first, thank him for me.” A mocking false sad smile. “I’ll let myself out.”

There she was, leaning on the truck’s wheel, staring, waiting for him. As John walked towards her, she blew out a plume of cigarette smoke that recoiled from the windscreen and framed her in its dirty whiteness. She turned the music off, and then the engine, but did not open the door.
“Where’s this track go to?”
“Nowhere.”
“In England, you know, you get a dozen protestors for every metre of road you build. But here you just build roads to nowhere.”
“You don’t have enough space,” she said indifferently. Her face was firmly fixed. She blew out more smoke.
“And you do, of course. Still, I know that well enough. Now I’ve got to cover some of it on the way back to town.”
“You hired a bike.”
“Course I did. My little guide book tells me it’s the best way to travel around here. You act as though you’re surprised.”
“No I don’t. How’s Pedro?”
“Peter’s fine. He’ll be wanting to know where you’ve gone.”
John watched her for another few seconds. She went on smoking and he admired the solidity of the way her slender hand moved to and from her mouth. Then he turned his back, not wanting to be tempted into trying more talk. He was sure she could see him, was watching intently even when a turn in the track had taken him out of her sight. He picked up the heavy frame of his hired “touristic” bike and wheeled it back onto the smoother surface of the road. He began his journey back into Cafayate with a broad smile despite the slow burning from the sun on the back of his neck.
Sara looked away from the road John hadn’t taken as Peter lurched out of the hut door. She leaped out of the truck and threw her cigarette into the sand as she ran to steady him.
“Did he go there? Did he?”
“What did he do to you?”
“He hit me – I caught my head on the chair when I fell – but is he going for the silver?”
“Go back inside. Your head’s bleeding. Go in and lie down.”
“He’s gone for the silver. Oh God oh God oh God.”
She dragged him into the hut, feeling his heart beat against the hard frame of his ribs. He knocked the walls and the bedroom door with his shoulder, but she was stronger than he was and he fell back onto the bed with a low sigh.
“He’s not gone for the silver. He went back towards town. Relax now, don’t try to sit up. Let me get something for your head.”
Only in the kitchen outhouse, as she filled a bowl with water from the plastic tank and soaked a cloth in it did she realise that she’d been on the verge of panic. The sunlight here was filtered by the roughly-laid board but it wasn't much cooler than in the sun. She ran her hand over her face and breathed shallowly, then more deeply, calming herself the way her father had trained her.
Now she could assess the situation more clearly. A doctor was needed. Peter might be concussed. It could be a fracture. She had to get him to lie still until she could get back from Cafayate. She was already calculating the time she’d need on the road. In little crowded England this would not have happened.
Peter was lying still, as she’d told him to. She pressed gently around the bloodstained bulging bruise. He trembled uncontrollably. He didn’t dare speak until she’d finished her examination.
“I’m sorry,” he gasped as she opened one shutter slightly for more light.
“Just lie still.” He didn’t seem able to focus on her raised finger and his eyes closed dully the moment she lowered it. The pulse in her neck quickened again. “Don't worry. Lie still. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
He didn’t protest and she saw his muscles stop clenching as he submitted to her ministrations. She breathed more easily and bent to kiss his hot face. “I’ll bring a doctor.”
Who would pay the doctor, she had no idea, but he would be fetched. She was certain of that. She closed the shutter again and went to the door. Peter was so thin and still on the bed she nearly rushed back to him.
But then he croaked. “He’ll be thanking José, the bastard.”
“Thanking José?”
“That’s what he said.”
Sara tensed. She had to get into town right now.
“Lie still.” She forced a hard edge into her voice, but could only spare a second to see if he’d obeyed. The truck’s engine was running and in gear before she had another thought.

It was the last house on the Avenida Jujuy, at the far end of the town from the river valley. John freewheeled down most of the way, occasionally swerving to avoid dogs, potholes and piles of debris. There was no traffic here, though cars and trucks lined the right-hand side in front of the long brick and stone walls of homes on the other streets. John shot through the intersections without looking either way. He also ignored overhanging from people’s yards that gave him instants of welcome shade.
The journey felt longer than he’d expected, but he was there in good time. It wasn’t so far ro Peter’s after all. Hernan’s house was set apart from the others. It was a square block, faced with concrete that had once been painted a pale shade of yellow. A tiny metal plate like a policeman’s badge on the wall gave the number. The door was set right up against the road.
John looked left and right now, over the wire-fenced enclosure on the left, over the waste ground toward the vineyards on the right. Unless someone was hiding in the filth-streaked bins that stood in Hernan’s “garden”, it was all clear. The nearest neighbour’s house didn’t even have any windows on this side – just a blank breeze-block wall and another staked-out fence. The smell of the bins was a dull sensation in the air. John felt vaguely reassured through his excitement. The bin smell was the sort of thing he’d have expected of Hernan, not the air of respectability in crisis the house gave off.
He raised his hand to the sun-heated paint on the door and knocked three times. He concentrated the knuckle of his middle finger on one of the smooth paint bubbles that had swollen up in the years since the homeowners had done any DIY. The bubble burst and splintered against his skin. Childish mischievous energy was still creasing his face when the bright sun-reflections were whisked away and a blast of cooler air struck him.
“Wait. I’ll fetch him.” He had barely a glance at the woman's sullen face before she closed the door again. A wife or a daughter? He didn’t speculate because the thought of Sara Bolivar swung back at him with all its force.
John thought about her until the door opened again. Hernan was in a stained vest that struggled against his belly. John could see sweat-licked hair creeping out from under his arms. The man reeked of cigarettes – unlike Sara, who seemed to give off a more delicate hint of them– and his beard hung loosely on his leathery face.
“I want you to go out there and watch them. Until it gets dark at least. Here’s fifty dollars. Another fifty for every day I want you to watch.”
“But Señor I-“
“What else have you got to do? You can drink at night when you've finished watching. I thought you said your family was hungry.”
Hernan’s scowl had altered now he realised he wasn’t going to be allowed to speak. John flexed the hand that had grabbed the man's neck the night before. He saw with satisfaction how Hernan watched his fingers’ every movement.
“I don’t have to pay you if I don’t want to. You know what you’ll get if you refuse.
“Well? Do you understand?” he demanded, exaggerating what little he’d learned of the local accent.
“Yes, Señor. But how will I get there? I have to take something to eat-“
“Take this bike. Return it to the hardware store on Avenida Quatre Mayo when you’re done. You know the way there don’t you, don’t you?”
“Yes Señor. But – perhaps – a little more money to buy my food –“
“Shut up! Go back inside your house. Go back in!”
He scuttled in and John kicked aside the door so that it crashed against the inner wall. Inside, an ancient television fizzed away with the effort of displaying football.
“Listen to me, you lardy shit! Fifty dollars. Watch that house. Come and find me at eight o’clock in the place that does the two-peso menu on the square. You’ll tell me all you see. If not, I’ll slit your stomach and use it as a circus tent! Do – you – un – der – stand?”
“Yes Señor.”
In a second he was out of the door again, glad to have the stale polish smell of the room out of his nostrils. He could hear an old woman’s voice raised waspishly, but the words were inaudible. He paced down the road in hot anger, kicking stones up and dust that covered his shoes.
Hernan scurried out as he had scurried in. Only when he’d taken up the bike’s hot handlebars and edged the dirty seat of his trousers onto the saddle did he look up at John’s flushed face.
“You know where it is, don’t you? The thing you want to take?” he whispered hoarsely.
“Sure I do. They told me. But I don’t trust them, which is why you’re going to watch them. Now damn well get a move on – and make sure you’re not seen.”
Hernan recoiled as from a snake, turned the bike and pedalled off. John turned his back on the man and the house without even waiting for a glance at the young woman who'd opened the door. Anger made him pick up his heels and run to José’s shop.
Now he was on Belgrano, but something was wrong. It was in him, but it affected the houses either side of him and the cars on the road. Every one of them was staring, daring him even though they were clouded and blurred when he tried to focus. He stopped and remembered that he had been running.
Something was going to happen. There was nothing holding him back; his anger was a monster. It filled him with savage life. He hadn’t felt like this for years. He couldn’t remember where the anger came from. It was just there, throbbing away in his groin. He would have what he wanted. He would have it.
After a moment or two it seemed to have peaked. He became aware of himself again, and aware of why he had come to Belgrano. He walked on, keeping his hands in his pockets so that no one could see his fists until he wanted them to. Though it had peaked, the anger had not ebbed much. Atkins' weakness and the desire sparked by Sara Bolivar’s body mingled and became indistinguishable. His fists were great tight masses at the ends of his arms. Each step along Belgrano was accompanied by the deeper penetration of his nails into his palms.

“You can’t see my husband, he’s – he’s not available.”
There was a frightening light in his eyes. It was as though devils were dancing in them. She dabbed at the corners of her mouth with ragged tissue. Eyes like that meant a dangerous man. The soldiers had looked at her in the same way.
Juan turned away and paced from the shelves on the left of the counter to the shelves on the right. The frowning folds on his skin were deep and seemed to get deeper as he moved away from the light from the door. Anna thought of running to get José, to protect herself rather than to grant Juan’s demand. But she remembered how pale he’d looked, sitting in their dark room. He looked so ill she'd not gone to afternoon mass so she could watch the shop while he rested.
“Now listen to me, Señora Achua.” He jabbed a finger to within inches of the skin under her nose. “I just want to thank José for all the help he’s given me. And now you’re saying he’s not available.”
“I can tell him for you.” José help him – indeed!
“I won’t leave a message!” Like a poor child he is, waving his arms – well, children must learn. And patience is a virtue. Anna’s lips moved instinctively, framing the phrase. “What are you muttering to yourself, you mad witch?”
“I’m no witch, Señor. May the Lord forgive you –“
Her hand was halfway through the motions of crossing herself when she saw the devil’s flames in the man’s eyes take hold of the whole of him. She stepped back against the shelves behind the counter so that more than the wood of the counter separated him from her. Possessed, surely! Who would have thought of such a thing nowadays – and she’d only missed afternoon mass this once. Her mind was out of control, but whatever was in Juan was keen to get its claws into her. “When do you think he’ll be ‘available’?”
“He won’t be. He wants nothing more to do with you.” Heaven preserve her!
At every crash made by his hands on the wood she flinched and shrank further back, knocking cigarettes, sweets and razors onto the floor. “He’ll be missing out on something very important if what you say is true.”
“I’ve told you –“
“Very important in terms of money. Very important for Cafayate. I thought your husband was a historian, Anna.”
Where had he learned her name? Surely not from José? She’d missed mass so that he could rest and now this creature had her name on his lips! “My husband doesn’t want to see you. I’ll tell him what you say. Perhaps he can contact you later.”
He was trembling. His hands were flickering, gesturing. Fleetingly, Anna remembered the soldiers’ faces as they’d dragged her towards the gleaming metal of the Ford Falcon. Free of their grip on her arms, she ran through the door into the narrow space of the corridor, knocking boxes down behind her. This time she had a chance to run, but he caught her all the same. She fell with only one hand free to break her fall, catching her hip on a rough wooden corner, cracking her knees on the floor. He was on top of her, pressing her into the brown tiles that ran the length of her body and all the way to where José slept.
All the wrestling of her shoulders could not throw him off, and he still had hold of her arm, pulling at it while crushing her calves with the cutting weight of his feet.
“Come here, you bitch, come over.” She was so scared that she couldn’t even begin to scream, in despair because, having escaped this kind of attack once before, she would not have a second time.
He yanked her roughly round so that her back and head crashed again onto the tiles. Pain flooded through her, peaking where she could feel blood – in her nose and on her hip. She braced herself for more blows, because that was what the soldiers liked.
But none came. Despite herself, her eyes opened. When she focused she could see him crouching – that was the warmth across her thighs. The worn knees of his trousers were thrust up close against her face, the shadowed curve of his behind hovering over the crumples in her dress. Her dress was what was occupying his hands. He was picking away at a tear on her hip, holding it fastidiously away from the blood. For an instant she began to breathe again, believing that the fit had passed. But his fingers grew white on the cloth, then tore it, up and across her hip and stomach, then up more directly, finishing just above her right breast.
Frantically she tried to catch at his hands, stop his works of destruction. Now she found her voice, shouted for José, José, anyone, but he carried on. He tore down now, hauling the floral designs off her legs, exposing all she had below.
She was an old woman – how depraved must he be? The more she fought, the calmer he seemed, ignoring the blows of her fists on his arms. He pulled experimentally at her underwear, then sat back on his haunches, trapping her legs under his feet. His hands went to the fastenings on his trousers. Within seconds his penis was visible. Sickness rose up in her throat. She flailed at him but heard him laugh. He started to pull at her underclothes in earnest. She screamed until it seemed that that had never been any other sound or any other feelings than the fear that bit her joints at every move and crippled the breath in her throat.
Dear God! Dear God! Have mercy on a sinner. Spare me this, Lord! Juan laid a cold hand on the slippery curve of her belly. Her body tensed again, ready to try to the last to keep his filth out of her.
Then there was no more struggle, no more Juan. Then shouting – words in English – sounds of feet knocking against and crushing boxes, sound of a body falling hard against the wall and down against the boxes again.
“Whore!” someone yelled. A door slammed and there were more sounds of things being broken on the other side of it. Then stillness, and a cold shivering she could only control if she turned on her side and curled her legs up against herself.
“Has he gone?” They were the only words José could force out of his throat. He had reeled out of his room at the sound of shouting and seen, as his ancestors had, the white man holding his wife’s hands against the ground and crouching over her.
“Yes, I think so.”
“Are you all right?”
“It’s not me you have to worry about.” Sara was on her feet now. A thin line of blood brought out by the edge of one of the boxes showed up vertically on her face.
José had seen how Juan had looked at her when he had pushed her against the wall, and she still sounded shaky. But he went to his wife without another word and knelt beside her, his hand gently caressing her neck.
“It’s all right, it’s all right,” he repeated helplessly, looking up at his friend’s daughter imploringly.
She had one hand on each wall of the corridor and was leaning forward and shuddering in convulsive bursts, almost as though she was about to be sick across Anna’s legs. She controlled herself at last, but drew her arms over her body. José, still whispering his mantra of reassurance, thought she looked again like the little five-year-old Señor Bolivar had brought here after the Malvinas War. But her voice was that of a woman.
“Stay with her. Let her go at her own pace. I’ll close the shop up on my way out.”
“You’re going? But – but –“
“I have to. Look after Anna.”
“What about the police?” But he bit his lip as Anna jerked under his hands.
“Don’t call them,” Her voice seemed to have aged twenty years. “Don’t call the police.”
“But he’s dangerous. He’s wandering around out there.”
“Don’t think I don’t know that,” She began to croak out dry sobs. “But they won't keep it to themselves, they’ll all know, you can’t trust them.”
“I won’t call the police for Anna. But he hit Pedro as well. If they take him in for that, they won’t need to come here, and he’ll be safely away from you.”
Anna’s sobs stopped but she still shivered and curled herself tighter. She gave no other sign that she had heard. José redoubled his caresses, suddenly swamped by the enormity of it and desperate to restore what had been before. He remembered himself frozen in the bedroom doorway, just watching the violence. His throat stabbed with tears.
“Stop touching me. Please.” He dropped his hand from her skin, just stared down at her exposed body.
“What do you want me to do?” he whispered, not expecting to understand the answer. He stared hard at her, so hard that it felt like his eyes might melt and flow comfortingly over the skin over her shoulder, her belly, her thighs. If he could see into her he might know what to do because only she would know. But there was no insight. There was just her skin against the tiles and things done that meant that everything that had gone before was crushed and broken. If only Carmen was here, she would be able to stay and help. But his gut siezed at the thought of his daughter seeing this – or even worse. He reached for Anna again, but his hands stopped short, tingling with their uselessness.
“Anna, I have to go.” Sara waited a couple of seconds in case either of them wanted to reply. Neither even looked up, though it might have been that José’s head twitched. He remained kneeling though, hunched towards Anna’s head. Trying to stay silent, Sara stepped over the wreckage of the struggle and through the doorway.
For a second the idea of John lurking in the shop or just outside struck at her bowels, but then she remembered his face and the sounds of destruction. The man who had done this wasn’t capable of calculation or lying in wait at the moment. Sara, however, had to be. Peter had been left without attention for too long already. She picked her way over the sawdust and packages fallen from battered shelves. She shut the front door of the shop with a fast, controlled hand and strode off towards the Avenida Colon.

The valley was greens and yellows. Not the green of plants or the yellow of sunlit rocks, but fantastic shades that slipped in and out of each other and over the sky. Peter crouched beside his hut struggling with an urge to vomit. His head swayed from side to side and the pain, one step behind, followed. His bladder was bursting. He had to get to his feet, but his legs and arms were held down and there was a single burning spot in the middle of his back.
“I want to lie down,” he slurred.
He’d had horrors in that room but it was the only refuge even if John came back. Images fell over each other into his mind like superimposed film – first meeting with John, that cursory handshake, first sight of Sara with her swinging bucket. When would she be back? He tried to picture her return but only got a moment of her picking a strand of hair out of her mouth. Not now, not now. His nose swung out in front of him like a load on a crane.
He tried lifting his head but the pain cracked back at him and he caught an instant’s image of the valley’s unnatural shades and the size of the sky. Hand over hand, he crawled upright on the wall’s splintering boards. Now or never. He urinated away from the hut, watching the fluid discolour the sand. That was better. Despite himself, he felt he had achieved something. His struggle back into the dark was less laboured now and once there he lay, rather than fell, onto the bed.
Now he was lying down, he was hazy rather than groggy. An experimental raising of the hand was not such an effort. His arms had floated effortlessly, free of their load after he’d packed the last bags of silver in the cave.
Sara always seemed to be there when he thought about it. He had the distinct impression he’d asked her to carry some of the bags out of the hut and that she’d held the spade while he dug with his hands. She'd sat beside him in his truck, or something like that. The one part of him that felt unaffected by the pain tried to refute the theory, even claiming he’d made it up there and then to satisfy some other bizarre hypothesis. It wasn't possible. He hadn't even met her then. He couldn’t be sure; these things were all so hard to tell with your head in a great big balloon.
Sara couldn’t have been there because he’d driven up to Allemeinia within the first week of getting to Cafayate, and he’d barely even seen her at that point. He’d got out of his truck under a dozen incurious stares from the locals and made great play, he thought, of how he’d wanted to hike in the valley. The flat roofs of the houses didn’t seem to be laid out the way his map insisted they were, and none of the whitewashed walls had any doors. Still, there was that friendly middle-aged woman who’d rolled her eyes up to heaven at the incompetence of her menfolk. She pointed out to him the track he should take. She’d even led him back onto Route 68 and indicated a better way that didn’t take him through the wired-off enclosures of scrub and chickens each family protected, or past the excitable posse of dogs whose tongues lolled out between reddened teeth. Or was that the other villagers? They were all polite in the end. They were all polite in Argentina. He would give a mention in his book to the kindly woman with her blue dress stretched over her hips. She wouldn’t think of him as harmlessly mad when he made her famous for showing him the way to what he hardly believed was true.
He’d been on a wild goose chase, but she’d patted him on the back despite the others’ stares.
That was the start of him not keeping his promises to himself. He hadn’t looked at the shape of the valley or anything to do with its beauty that morning, just how easily he could hide himself. Of course, it was all just theory anyway. The letter to San Martín had a dubious provenance and wasn’t very exact. You could almost argue that it had nothing to do with what he’d come here for. Still – deduction and lucky guesses… you never heard of unlucky guesses. They didn't get turned into books or TV series. He’d made a few beforehand, and wandered around all sorts of peculiar places. Still, Sara, how lucky can you be?
This track the woman had pointed out was ideal. It ran along outside Allemeinia and he could certainly get a vehicle down the first part of it. Nicely off the road. The truck would look like a breakdown, or sightseers or something… something unsuspicious, at any rate.
There were pretty obvious reasons why the letter to San Martin in the National Library had been vague. I mean, if you were on a secret mission… How secret were secret missions in those days?
Sara pointed out the cleft in the rocks and helped him move aside the stones – no, not that one: “Under a mark like that of a horse’s shoe and within an afternoon’s [an hour’s?] walk of a stream.” No, no too far over. Oh this was silly, he hadn’t brought enough water, the stream had dried and there was no horseshoe. And Sara wasn't there.
Aha! But this was the one. He chalked rough X’s on the rocks, or Sara did – no, no. You would have thought he’d have got a tan after doing all this traipsing around in the sun.
His eyes opened and he jumped to find himself in the dark. A hairline of pain was insinuating its way round his head to clamp him in a metal band.
Something had happened – he wasn’t sure what – he swallowed but found his tongue immovable against the roof of his mouth. Oh bloody hell! Was he supposed to be lecturing today? And after that there’d be tutorials. Oh, the horror of holding his head together while the students trooped in two at a time and read out complex post-modern formulations. There were some good students, to be sure. But what had he taken? Too many of something of something powerful? Had he been drinking? He wasn't supposed to drink on his medication.
He lay for a while, unable to focus on anything illuminated by the light from the windows. All this seemed horribly familiar – but faked, as though it was some kind of TV reconstruction. There was no traffic noise, for a start.
“Do you often find yourself disorientated? Is there any kind of particular experience that brings it on?”
“Often? I’m not sure. Perhaps so. I don’t think my friends or my mother like to mention it. Could be though. Perhaps a bit less often than once a week.”
“And what about what brings it on? The trigger, if you like. Can you remember anything like that?” It was a very gentle assessment. He’d expected them to be much more hurried, to bang him up as quick as they could. But that sort of thing never happened any more, they said.
“Maybe. It’s difficult to say. Obviously, I’ve got quite a history of these things…”
“What do you think caused them?”
“Genetics.” He gave a short, nervous laugh. The psychiatrist looked at him for a moment. Until she looked away, he was ready to tell her. This week, his problems dated from the dreams he had when he was twelve. He'd woken up shouting that he'd found his father dead in the bath. His mother hadn't found it funny. She took him to see her former husband two weeks later. He shook Peter's hand as though it was a dead cat.
But should he tell her all this? It seemed inappropriate when everything was being done so politely. He said nothing. The psychiatrist smiled and twiddled her pen between her fingers. She was quite adept at it and Peter realised he was being distracted by the reflecting light on its sides. She pushed her thick glasses higher up her narrow nose. “Please go on, Mr Atkins.”
A soothing voice was quite an asset in her job. It went well with her face, even the tiny glimpse of tooth that appeared periodically between her lipsticked lips.
“Well – there’s been a lot of pressure at work.”
“Personal pressure – or is it the work itself? You’re a lecturer I see.”
“And a tutor. No, I don’t think it’s that. More to do with professional relationships – you know the sort of thing.”
And so, he supposed, she set it all in motion, ultimately sent his off to write his magnum opus “At War with the Conquistadors”, of which he had written, well, seventy pages – but there were a lot more to come.
The headache was very like the one caused by lifting the bags of silver into the back of the truck. His fingers didn’t hurt as much though. It had been very hard to hold onto the truck's steering wheel after all that carrying, especially while he was reversing onto the road after dark. That had been the worst time. His mind had spent it praying that no helpful driver would stop and offer to direct him until he was back onto the tarmac, and amid the calls and gestures (which would bring the sleepless men down from Allemeinia), spot what was glinting through the plastic bags in the back of the truck.
No one came though, and he was able to pass anonymously along the road until his chosen turn-off. He’d made it all safe in the cave. No one would have been able to trace it. Unless they’d spent the night following him. He shifted uneasily in his amnesia. The silver was too exposed. Perhaps he should go up there, block up the new entranceway, make it doubly secure.
“Who the bloody hell are you?” He sat bolt upright in bed, absurdly feeling that spirals of cloth were unravelling off the top of his head.
The squat man stopped, uncertain, in the bedroom doorway. He looked over his shoulder and asked something that Peter’s throbbing head drowned out. Then he turned back with a more confident smile. He stepped into the room, then slightly to one side. Sara squeezed past him.
“It’s all right, Peter. It’s Doctor Rodriguez. He’s treated my father a few times.”
“Oh, er, right. He’s come to see me has he?”
“Of course he has. Now lie down again while he has a look at you. He doesn’t speak English though so you’ll have to answer him in Spanish. Can you do that?”
This was all at odds with what had been running through his brain. He wanted to protest and demand an explanation. But the pain in his head was strong and he lay down again.
“I’ll open the window for you,” said Sara.
“Please.” Doctor Rodriguez was sniffing the air suspiciously and approaching the bed with some circumspection as paper crunched under his feet.
Peter recoiled at the light and Sara caught her breath. The doctor was bending over him, holding up a finger, feeling carefully round the lump on his head, asking questions in a low voice. Peter replied in whispers. It was already superfluous. She knew what the diagnosis would be. But it was best, it was always best, to be safe, even at a cost. She supposed her father was sometimes right about that. She went over to the window while the doctor earned his money and gazed out at the familiar shapes and sand. It was better to be safe. She let out a long sigh and only half-looked away from the beginnings of the sunset. Then Doctor Rodriguez came over and addressed her in the same low voice he had used on the patient.
“He’s got concussion, Señorita.”
“I thought so,” she said. The doctor's head, which had been bowed, lifted suddenly.
“Do you know how to treat it?”
“He needs to rest and be watched in case it gets any worse.”
“I would have liked to send him to hospital, but I suppose there’s not much chance of that.”
“No. Not much chance. Don’t worry, if he does get any worse I’ll fetch you out and you can decide.”
“Of course. Is there anything I can do for you in town?”
Doctor Rodriguez was always circumspect about the question of bills. He never indulged in direct demands.
“Er, no. I will make all the arrangements as usual.”
“Oh good. Señorita, will you father be requiring me in the near future? I did suggest that his hip and his back needed constant attention.”
“My father is always very particular about his health. I’m sure he’ll be in touch with you soon. Do you want a drink before you go?”
“No thank you, Señorita. I’ll get straight back. Remember me to Señor Bolivar.”
She watched him pick his way to the door, then listened as he drove away. Señor Bolivar was so particular about his health that he had decided on a precise threshold of pain. That threshold had to be crossed before he would consider sending for a doctor. Before that he would never dream of expressing weakness. He’d told Doctor Rodriguez this many times.
It was only when the sound of the doctor’s engine had stopped echoing among the rocks that it occurred to Sara to wonder what the man must have thought of her. For all she knew, he still adhered to the strict morals he’d felt free to lecture her on when she was still young enough to be shorter than him. Not that she and Peter, strictly speaking, were living in sin –
She should have learned not to listen to that side of herself any more.
She turned back to the window. The sun had shifted lower in the sky and the hut’s shadow had colonised a few more centimetres of dry earth. Morally speaking – taking the doctor’s own words from him – she had only one course of action. Peter could not be left alone on the first night after his beating. She’d see how he was in the morning before she decided if she was going into work. But first there was the night to be dealt with, and she had to tell her father where she was and why.
Though he would probably guess where she was, he would not know the cause. She didn’t want him to think of as a whore – a night away was probably another one of the thresholds he kept laying down. But, all the same, driving to him and driving back again would mean leaving Peter alone again. For a moment she lingered at the window while her eyes mapped the intricate features of the rocks for the hundredth – five-hundredth time.
A memory of Anna’s voice as she lay on the cold tiles floated in from of Sara’s thoughts. The idea of it made her clench her arms to her sides. It was better to keep active, to stop these things getting through. But the memory wouldn’t go, though tears sprang up from the effort of thrusting it away. Would they – could they tell their daughter? Sara tried to imagine what she might have felt if Anna was her mother. No, it being Anna was enough to drag the last heat from the sun. Her own mother, dead beofre her daughter knew her, was too much like a saint, all pictures, prayers, icons and intercessions. Her arms would never have flailed like Anna’s. Sara closed her eyes at the thought, only to force them open again and make them see only the real and present mountains.
Peter groaned on the bed. She went to him quickly and turned the soggy cloth on his head. But as she stroked the sweat along his arms and wrists, her mind wandered again, skipped reluctantly round the Achuas’ shop and returned to her father. With a slow resigned gloom she remembered that he would be contemplating how fit Peter was to be trusted with his only daughter. Why would it have to be this evening? Her father had yet never stopped her doing as she pleased, so long as she didn't stray too far. But he'd never been so seriously involved in what she had decided, either. She imagined his face set firm as he drew his conclusions. Suddenly, even the space of the valley was too narrow for her future. The idea of being trapped, even here, frightened her.
She sat beside Peter’s still body as the light outside changed, faded and disappeared, worrying at each of her problems in turn. She couldn't prevent the reappearance of John Wilson, so she resolved to stop thinking about it. But his crazed face, with the fingermarks from her blows still imprinted on his cheeks, popped up in her head as often as her father’s did. And Anna was lying in her house, unable to resist José’s clumsy ministrations. Sara should be there to help her. If only Peter had a telephone!
Her father would have drawn made his decision by now, and written it faultlessly in the heavily-bound book he kept at the head of his bed under a photograph of her mother. It lay alongside his Bible, and he recorded everything in it like some dreadful angel. He’d recorded her mother's death; the election of Menem; the tenth anniversary of the invasion of the Malvinas. For the first time since she could remember, he would write in it without her there to see. Peter and Sara may marry, may go to England. Peter and Sara may not.
By his breathing, Peter was sleeping now. His body was hot and clammy and pressed against hers. She got up without disturbing him and went over to the window, ready to shut it. She never shut the windows in her own house – that was a duty her father had taken upon himself. He saw it as part of his role as her defender. To close the shutters here, for Peter, settled her love for him in her mind. She wondered whether this made her pleased or not. Her decision stretched out in front of her, measuring itself against the length of the valley.
The sight of the stars' frail scattered light on the rocks’ hard edges made her pause with her hands on the metal handles. The mountains were flat against the sky, and she almost believed she smelt their familiar dust. They were her real protectors. She pushed the thought away, not understanding why she did so.
The shutters were almost closed when she stopped again and reopened them a little way. Her ears were still sensitive to any would-be threats and that had sounded suspiciously like a bicycle chain clanking on the teeth of the drive-wheel. The noise was not repeated. She fastened the bolts with firm hands. One silence was replaced by another, more warm and enclosed. It was underlain by the sensation of Peter’s rhythmic breathing. He would be all right now.
She felt her way to the door, to the flashlight left within arm’s reach of the outside world. Its beam lit the tiny entranceway with white-hot light for a split second, then continuously as she pressed the switch down more firmly. She waved it around for a second while her eyes got used to the brightness. Then she went into Peter’s study to find the Thermos of water and read some of what he had written and never got round to showing her.

Where was the Englishman? Hernan tried to look at the broad clockface without turning his head or risk catching the eye of Señora Elena, who might ask him to buy another drink. Having failed, he pretended to sip at the coffee cup. He accidentally allowed some of the stale dregs to knock against his lips and moisten his moustache. He wiped at his mouth with an irritated hand. All day he had sat, knelt and even stood, when it felt safe, outside the other Englishman’s miserable little shack. He’d seen nothing all day except the doctor coming and the doctor going, this time without Sara Bolivar. She’d stayed inside ever since, which had disappointed him, until his imagination had got to work a little.
But even the interest from that disappeared when he started wondering why the doctor’d come. Every so often, no, every minute it felt like, he fingered the thirty dollars he’d hidden from the women in his house until the paper of the notes went snick-snack against the skin of his hand. Then there was checking the bike. He’d felt tied to it, unable to let it out of his sight in case he lost it or it was found. He couldn’t stop himself, being terrified of telling the Englishman he’d got something wrong. The idea of the doctor worried him. He’d had it on his mind for a few hours now and it had cost him a sticky ten minutes trying to decide if he should make sure he got to the café early, or whether he might run the risk of missing something. He couldn’t get away from the thought that somehow the Englishman would know if something had happened while Hernan was looking the other way. He might have set another man to watch Hernan, and another to watch him, and another and another all the way through the valley to Cafayate. Each of them would be sitting two hundred metres apart with bulging eyes, making sure they all reported the truth, sniffing at each other like some long line of stinky desert animals.
The more he waited for the Englishman, the more likely this felt. He pushed aside the coffee cup at last, feeling a great need for some beer in his mouth and throat. He’d thought he’d do better to stay off drinking, but he’d missed it while he was sitting out there. He could’ve made a little circle of beer bottles round himself and then he would’ve told the Englishman what to do with himself.
Yes… a beer. That’s get the dust out of him, settle his head down and get these stupid ideas out of his head. Isabella’d often told him he shouldn’t sit in the sun all day. He didn't usually listen, what with his mother rattling on all the time. It made him sick when they were right. Still, twenty dollars shut them up, though not for long if they then found out about how much the Englishman had really given him.
Where was he? Hernan crossed himself, a lazy habit he’d never taken the trouble to break since he left school. It was nothing but a sign to himself that he was ready to decide something. He looked determinedly at the clock. It was nearly fifteen minutes past. This wasn’t fair. The filthy shitbag had said eight. He’d looked at his watch.
Hernan had only a mirage-like conception of the fear he’d felt at the time. The sense of unfairness was much stronger. He’d sat in that desert for hours. His throat was full of dust, he’d had bugs and even lizards run over his hands when he wasn’t looking, and he’d missed his siesta to sit out in the full heat of the day watching some matchbox of a house where nothing happened! Even just thinking about the heat made him feel a little bit sick.
A beer then. He couldn’t help but smile as he touched the notes in his pocket and tried to work out how many of the big bottles he could get with them. The number was slightly disappointing, so he tried again before giving up.
Señora Elena had been watching him, he realised, so he flashed her a smile. She didn’t unfold her arms until he laid the ten-dollar note on the counter. Even then, and even after placing the bottle of Quilmes and a glass in front of him, she kept up a disapproving stare. Hernan pocketed his change quickly and gulped at his drink. She’d made him uneasy again and that soured the taste.
He filled the glass up to the top after she pushed her way through the bead curtain to fetch Eva. The young waitress was to serve the two men who’d come in talking loudly and sat down next to the television. They’d taken the table where the Englishman had been sitting the night he’d dragged Hernan out into the street.
Hernan contemplated his glass with gloomy eyes. He didn’t know that much about the Englishman, but he reckoned he knew enough to expect him to be on time. He must be missing something.
His elbows protested as he lifted them from the counter. He hadn’t really thought about what he was doing. He just remembered the way the Englishman had looked at him. No, there was no chance he was going to come in here now. But he wouldn't let Hernan get away without fulfilling his side of the bargain. The reluctant spy set his shoulders and went out into the streetlights’ miserable glow.
One or two men were sitting at the outside tables. They greeted Hernan. He nodded absently in return. Apart from them, the plaza was almost deserted. Hernan gazed morosely at the lines of still cars, the benches and grass littered with newspaper, San Martín’s gesturing arm. He really wanted to feel free to drink his beer. The centre of Cafayate seemed to crush him, but still he lingered, walking along the edge of the square and hitching up his trousers.
“Hernan!” The voice was hoarse and quiet but he recognised it. He froze and imagined his ears leaping along the fronts of the buildings behind him. “Hernan!”
He turned, as much to get his back away from the whispering as to see where the Englishman’s voice had sprung up from. He saw an arm pressed against the front of the bank, fingers grabbing into the stone. Then the Englishman’s face poked out from the thick brown shadow of the alley between the bank and the building next to it.
Hernan looked around exaggeratedly. No one was nearby. He sauntered over to the edge of the shadow with a confident smile and stood with his hands on his hips. He knew that this might not be wise, but the Englishman’s face was paler than it had been and his eyes were wide and frightened.
The Englishman’s eyes reflected little speckles of light out of the gloom. “I’ve been waiting more than twenty minutes for you to walk past. Are you really this late?”
There was fear in his voice too. Hernan yawned before replying, and scratched at the hair under his chin. He needn’t have worried. Sitting out in the sun just didn't help a man think clearly. “I was early. You should have been waiting before eight if you’d wanted to see me.”
The contemptuous laugh coming out of his mouth was stopped abruptly. His arms flew out behind him like streamers on a car ariel and he was sprawled in the shadow, curling as a foot buried itself twice in the flesh of his belly and struck once against his head.
When his vision cleared he could see the Englishman’s shape against the light from the square. He was leaning against the wall with his head bowed, as though he was praying.
“What was that for?” Hernan spluttered.
“Don’t give me any of that shit, you little bastard.” The Englishman had not moved, but Hernan lay back quickly on hearing his voice. “You can keep your money. That was all part of the deal. But you keep your side of it, too. What did you see?”
Hernan told him.
“And you weren’t seen?”
“No, Señor.”
“No one went along the track away from the road?”
“No Señor.”
The Englishman's shape moved at last, into the shadow. Hernan jumped when he heard his breathing next to him, but when the hand came it was just to pull him, by the front of his shirt, to his feet. “Go again tomorrow. You’ll get your money after you’ve done – so long as you go early and don’t leave early.”
“And I’ll meet you here at eight?”
“Yes – no, no, you will not.” The Englishman seemed confused, but Hernan knew better now than to laugh. “Eight still, but out of town. Where the road through the valley meets the other big one, you know. There’s vineyards up there. At the junction. This time, be there at eight. Don’t mess me around.”
Hernan staggered out into the light again. His beer was still waiting and he lurched towards it clutching his stomach and head. Despite the pain, despite the sickly feeling of being in the power of someone who couldn’t seem to think straight, even despite the nasty feeling of being watched, an encouraging idea had lodged itself in his brain. As he sat down to his beer again, ignoring the curious stares of people in the café, he began to admire himself for his potential cunning. The Englishman was afraid of something. Perhaps that something would pay good money without the beatings. Well, Hernan would find out.

It was obvious he would have left town, now Sara thought about it. Luisa had told her that the Englishman had left as she ran through the open doors of the hotel having forgotten almost everything except that she was late. She’d tried to respond to Luisa’s disappointment, but as her heart slowed down to its normal speed she began to think about the empty room. If she saw it, it would be true that he had gone away.
Where his clothes had lain in a crumpled mess, there was only floor. His rucksack, toothbrush, underpants, everything that had told her about him, had disappeared. A few fragments of his beard still lurked in the sink. There was still a faint tang of his deodorant in the air. That was all. She smiled broadly to see how little of him was left. Sara washed the severed bristles down the plughole and set about changing the scent in the air with her mop and soapy water.
She worked hard at it, trying to eradicate all trace of him. The sheets had already been taken away. Luisa must have seen the open door and cleared them away early in the morning. She wasn’t normally that enthusiastic, but John Wilson had caught her eye – or perhaps she was just being nosy.
It was such a relief to return to ordinary work after everything that had happened. Her bucket clanked and slopped cheerfully on the tiled floor, and though the room looked a bit forlorn, that was just its nature. Sara wouldn't be creeping along the corridor now. She could open the windows wide and let the air in. As she closed the door behind her, she looked round one last time, just to be sure. Yes, it was ready for the next guest – just a hotel room now. John Wilson was eradicated from it.
“Don’t lock it.”
“Luisa – you scared me. Why not?”
“Ferdinand is coming up to have a look – the Englishman stole all the sheets and the pillows and he took the key we gave him.”
Sara looked at her stupidly. She could only think of silly questions to ask. “Did he pay his bill?”
“He did. We were all wondering about it though – why would he pay his bill but steal everything else?”
“I don’t know,” Sara said without giving the words any thought. She pushed the door open again and started towards the next room along. She watched the strip of light under the door to see if the shadows of the people staying there were moving across it. No. She’d have to knock.
“We thought you might know where he’d gone or something.” The voice of the younger woman pursued her down the corridor. Sara could well imagine the question on Luisa’s face – she wouldn’t have decided yet whether to be vicious or just curious.
“Why would I know?” She turned back with her hand flat on the door. Luisa was leaning forward, her mouth a little open, one sprig of curly hair hanging down and disrupting the lines on her face.
“Well, you know the other Englishman – we thought you’d know –“
“I wasn’t chasing after this one was I?”
Sara rapped smartly on the door and went in without waiting. It was empty and she was relieved. The guests staying here were very tidy, so she could wait here idle for a while. After a few seconds she heard Luisa’s hard shoes on the floor in the corridor. Sara wondered if Ferdinand had told her to watch the room or whether she’d taken it on herself. Perhaps she was just pressing up close to one of her fantasies about being whisked away from Cafayate by a strong man in case it became real.
Once Sara was sure Luisa wasn’t following her, the tense bundle of worry in her mind began to loosen and unfold like dozens of carrier bags.
Today was the day she would resolve each of her problems, one after the other. Ay least, this was what she’d promised herself while she sat in the pitch darkness, saving the flashlight batteries and her eyes but unwilling to sleep. She sat on the edge of Peter’s bed near one of his outstretched hands. He brushed it against her as he moved. She wanted to lie down with him. But he had to be watched and she had to think.
She would have to go to work in the morning. Both Peter and her father needed the money she would be earning.
After work, she would go and see Anna and stay with her for a while.
After this, she would go to the police – though she wasn’t sure what it would achieve. Perhaps it was just for completeness.
Then she would go and see her father and explain it all to him.
In the darkness, this list had slipped, soaplike, from her grasp. By the time she the end of it the beginning was always forgotten. But she had to control it, despite her tired head and the night chill. She took to reeling it off, one hand counting each item on the fingers of the other. It went through her mind over and over again until order was imposed.
She was like a child by now, swinging her legs under the bed, counting off a little rhyme. She screwed her face up in the dark and ran through the list again. It had been almost dawn before she was satisfied and lay down to catch a few fitful hours with her face buried in Peter’s oblivious back.
But in the morning she spent too long feeding him, talking to him, asking him what he remembered from the day before. Some of her resolve died there, suddenly exposed to the real size and light of the world.
Now the rest of her night’s effort had shrivelled. The idea of John Wilson had seemed impermanent impermanent up to now – he was here, soon he would be gone. She had believed that he had gone. Nothing he did had a place in Cafayate. But now he’d stolen sheets and bedclothes. He was going to stay and remain hidden around them, like a spider in Peter’s silver cave.
His presence destroyed her ordinary life. Tomorrow, she would have gone to Salta to pick up the title of her next essay from her e-mail; her father would have sat alongside her for the whole journey there and back; she would have dropped him off with relief and gone to Peter and his homely, stale bedroom. She had performed the routine enough times for her to know and love the details.
That wouldn't happen. She had to find her new routine. The rest of her plan for today might be it. First of all, she had to get through her work. She brushed about the neat tiles in a cursory way, blanking all unwanted thoughts out of her head. This time the discipline seemed to work and she went out into the corridor again feeling efficient and full of potential. Her heart fell as a man spoke behind her.
“Hello Sara. What do you know about this thieving bastard Englishman? I can’t let this room now.” Ferdinand’s smart leather shoes tottered to and fro. The flagstaff body of the manager hovered and calculated.
The hotel was less than a third full, and he talks as though it was fiesta day, Sara complained to herself. The new beginning of her day meant that she had to grudge every second of the coming interrogation. Once Ferdinand got started on things concerning the hotel, it became the most important building in the world. “I don’t know. I did meet him once, but I don’t know what he’s like,” she muttered hurriedly. She thought of his head peering from the bushes and his back across Anna’s body, and shuddered.
“Was he like a thief? Why would he want our sheets and our key? Now we have to pay to replace it all and change the lock. I won’t be able to use the room for days.”
Like a thief? “I don’t know. He was just introduced to me.”
“Who introduced him? Was it Pedro, that Englishman of yours?”
“Yes.”
“Did he say he was a thief?”
Sara sighed exasperatedly and looked into Ferdinand’s eyes. “No he didn’t. They’re not particularly friends, so how would he know?”
“He always kept his room clean when he stayed here, that Pedro. I suppose you know all about his habits now. At least he paid his bill though, the thief Englishman. Mind you, we’d have caught him if he hadn’t.” Ferdinand scratched his sparkling shell of black hair.
From where Sara stood, Ferdinand seemed to scrape against the corridor ceiling. The hotel constricted around her, tying her hands to the mop and bucket. She needed to get away Everything left to do in the day was being pressed into an impossibly small amount of time.
Ferdinand abruptly started to twitch with discomfort. “I suppose we’ll have to tell the police. I don’t know if there’s any insurance, but they’ll want to know we have done if they exist.”
“I’ll go if you like.” The words jumped out of Sara's mouth but they fitted in perfectly with what she wanted.
“Oh, all right.” The tall man seemed to reel with surprise. “Have you finished cleaning?”
“Nearly. Just one more room to do.”
“Go on, then.” There was relief all over his shiny face.
She smiled at him, and then, less warmly, at Luisa, who had just emerged from John Wilson’s old hiding place. The girl stared back with envious eyes.
“You’ve checked all the drawers?” Sara heard Ferdinand ask as she escaped to the next room. It certainly wasn’t the last she was supposed to do, but one day’s dust on all the empty ones wouldn’t be noticed.
She was out of the hotel in minutes and hurrying across the square. Her skin tingled with the need for efficiency. The police could wait. First, she had to try and help Anna back to life life she had before.