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and as guilty as you and I and the man who lived in this room before us?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘We were so convenient. The man who rented this room last month, he was convenient, he stood out. He made loud jokes about the natives’ siestas. He refused to learn even a smattering of Spanish. Let them learn English, by God, and speak like men, he said. And he drank too much and whored too much with this country’s women.’ He broke off and moved back from the window. He stared at the room.
The furniture, he thought. Where he put his dirty shoes upon the sofa, where he burned holes in the carpet with cigarettes; the wet spot on the wall near the bed, God knows what or how he did that. The chairs scarred and kicked. It wasn’t his hotel or his room; it was borrowed, it meant nothing. So this son-of-a-bitch went around the country for the past one hundred years, a traveling commercial, a Chamber of Commerce, and now here we are, enough like him to be his brother and sister, and there they are down there on the night of the Butlers’ Ball. They don’t know, or if they know they won’t think of it, that tomorrow they’ll be just as poor, just as oppressed as ever, that the whole machine will only have shifted into another gear.
Now the band had stopped playing below; a man had leaped up, shouting, on the bandstand. There was a flash of machetes in the air and the brown gleam of half-naked bodies.
The man on the bandstand faced the hotel and looked up at the dark room where John and Leonora Webb now stood back out of the intermittent flares.
The man shouted.
‘What does he say?’ asked Leonora.
John Webb translated: ‘“It is now a free world,” he says.’
The man yelled.
John Webb translated again. ‘He says, “We are free!”’
The man lifted himself on his toes and made a motion of breaking manacles. ‘He says, “No one owns us, no one in all the world.”’
The crowd roared and the band began to play, and while it was playing, the man on the grandstand stood glaring up at the room window, with all of the hatred of the universe in his eyes.
During the night there were fights and pummelings and voices lifted, arguments and shots fired. John Webb lay awake and heard the voice of Señor Esposa below, reasoning, talking quietly, firmly. And then the fading away of the tumult, the last rockets in the sky, the last breakings of bottles on the cobbles.
At five in the morning the air was warming into a new day. There was the softest of taps on the bedroom door.
‘It is me, it is Esposa,’ said a voice.
John Webb hesitated, half-dressed, numbed on his feet from lack of sleep, then opened the door.
‘What a night, what a night!’ said Señor Esposa, coming in, shaking his head, laughing gently. ‘Did you hear that noise? Yes? They tried to come up here to your room. I prevented this.’
‘Thank you’ said Leonora, still in bed, turned to the wall.
‘They were all old friends. I made an agreement with them, anyway. They were drunk enough and happy enough so they agreed to wait. I am to make a proposition to you two.’ Suddenly he seemed embarrassed. He moved to the window. ‘Everyone is sleeping late. A few are up. A few men. See them there on the far side of the plaza?’
John Webb looked out at the plaza. He saw the brown men talking quietly there about the weather, the world, the sun, this town, and perhaps the wine.
‘Señor, have you ever been hungry in your life?’
‘For a day, once.’
‘Only for a day. Have you always had a house to live in and a car to drive?’
‘Until yesterday.’
‘Were you ever without a job?’
‘Never.’
‘Did all of your brothers and sisters live to be twenty-one years old?’
‘All of them.’
‘Even I,’ said Señor Esposa, ‘even I hate you a little bit now. For I have been without a home. I have been hungry. I have three brothers and one sister buried in that graveyard on the hill beyond the town, all dead of tuberculosis before they were nine years old.’
Señor Esposa glanced at the men in the plaza. ‘Now, I am no longer hungry or poor, I have a car, I am alive. But I am one in a thousand. What can you say to them 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,