39
As he had grown used to for this last year, Don Celestino woke up alone the next morning. It took him a few seconds to recall that he hadn’t gone to bed alone, though. The lights were still off, but he could make out the shape of his pants on the chair. At first he thought she might be in the bathroom; the door was half shut. It was possible that she’d gotten up to relieve herself and figured it wasn’t worth closing the door the whole way. But she was also modest when it came to her body, preferring the room as dark as possible when they were intimate or, if it was during the day, as it usually was at his house, for them to stay under the covers. At least if there were some sound, any little bit, coming from that part of the room. How many minutes had gone by now? Five? Ten? These last few mornings he’d been the one to wake up first, much earlier and more alert. It was still dark outside. The hotel didn’t have a restaurant and the lights were off in the lobby. She wouldn’t have thought to go out for a walk at this early hour. He had a feeling he should get up to see where she was, but he also sensed that he might be alone for more obvious reasons.
“Socorro,” he called out finally.
He did it again a few seconds later, but still with no response. In the harsh light of the bathroom, he found that she had taken her brush and a few toiletries and had left the clutter that was on his side of the bathroom vanity. The area was wiped clean, with no sign that she had ever actually been there. The handwritten note attached to the mirror was all that she had left behind:
Maybe I should have stayed and not come — only you know what you want.
And that was all. No name at the top, no signature at the bottom. As if the last guest in this room had left the message for the next traveler. He tried to remember their last conversation, if it could actually be called a conversation, with only one of them eager to talk and the other ready for sleep. If this was about meeting her brother, then fine, he would meet him, shake his hand, talk to him for a while, whatever made her happy. Because he didn’t want to jump on a bus in the middle of the night was no reason to leave this way.
He dressed and washed his face, barely taking his usual time before the mirror, and then hurried next door to grab the bag with his brother’s medicines. Outside the hotel the dim streetlights guided him along the sidewalk that led past the municipal building and to the taxi stand. Two cars were parked, one behind the other, and he found Isidro sleeping soundly in the driver’s seat of the first one. The windows were rolled up, with only a tiny crack at the top.
The other driver stepped out of his car with a cigarette in his hand. “Taxi?”
“I arranged yesterday for him to take me,” Don Celestino said. He tapped on the window, but the sleeping man only scrunched his nose as if a fly were trying to disturb his sleep.
“With this one, you might be here all day,” the young man said. “Let me take you where you need to go.”
“Do you know how to get to a ranchito they call De La Paz?”
The driver blew out a trail of smoke. “How hard can it be?”
“We took a long time to find it yesterday.”
“Only because you went with Isidro. He can get lost going from the front to the backseat.”
Don Celestino glanced at the sleeping man. “I set everything up with him.”
“I can make you a special price,” the young man said. “The half of whatever my friend said he would charge you.”
“That would be good, but he already knows the way.”
The driver didn’t respond at first, then said, “However you want it.”
“Thank you,” Don Celestino said, “but I should go with him.”
“That’s fine.” The young man stamped out what was left of his cigarette. “I was only trying to help.”
“Yes, but thank you for offering.”
The driver nodded as he looked over at the other taxi. Then he reached into his own car and laid on the horn until Isidro jolted up. “Now you can thank me,” he said.
The sun had risen by the time they reached the outskirts of town. From there they retraced many of the same dirt roads from the last two days, passing this windmill or crossing that ironwork bridge. At one point the same old man and his grandson in the mule-driven cart waved to them the same way they had when they first arrived in Linares. A short while later Isidro stopped and doubled back, shaking his head as if overnight someone had changed the roads on him. Before they could turn left off the main highway he had to wait for a bus passing in the opposite direction. Don Celestino craned his neck in time to see the blackened and soot-covered back windows as the bus headed eastbound, in the direction of Ciudad Victoria. He turned around to the front before this image had completely faded, then a second later twisted around again, but by now it was gone.
“You would be more lost if you had gone with another driver, believe me.”
“No, I wanted to wait for you,” Don Celestino said. “This will only take a few minutes for me to get my brother. And from there you can take us to the bus station.”
“And your wife?”
For a second he considered ignoring the question altogether. And then he wondered what Socorro might say if she were the one sitting back here.
“Really, we’re only friends.”
“Friends?” he said, as if he had heard the word before but not used in this particular context.
“She had to leave early,” Don Celestino said, “so she could see her family.”
“To tell you the truth, in my mind I had the two of you married.”
“Maybe one of these days.”
Don Celestino brought his other arm down from the seat back. They were passing the first set of groves, and the workers were only beginning to pull their ladders from the trucks. He blamed himself for not making more of an effort to stay awake. It was one thing for him to accidentally fall asleep and another to will himself to fall asleep so he wouldn’t have to talk. But even if he had stayed awake, he wasn’t sure he had the words to make her understand his hesitation. Less than a year ago he had promised himself not to remarry, and not because of some loyalty to his deceased wife but simply so he wouldn’t have to go through the experience of losing someone again. If the right words had come to him last night, he might have told her that he had resisted getting closer for fear of putting her through the same. Because to meet her family was to get closer to her, and to tell his family was to say that he was serious about this young woman he had met, otherwise why risk telling them something that might hurt them? And to be more serious was to get married and to know that this marriage, as wonderful as it might end up being for both of them, would inevitably end someday. All of this he had done for her.
His logic made less and less sense to him the longer they took to arrive. Did he think he was the only one who understood what was happening? Wasn’t this the same woman who had seen them loading him into an ambulance with his eyes glazed over and the oxygen mask covering most of his face? And still she had come to visit him in the hospital later that day. She had met his brother and seen what their future together might look like if she chose to stay with him, which apparently hadn’t been much of a choice until earlier this morning. So what exactly was he protecting her from? And what exactly had he convinced himself she was too young to comprehend? And then he realized that she had already been alone herself, and for much longer than he probably ever would.
They crossed the iron bridge from yesterday and near the next grove Isidro pulled alongside a truck and waved to a teenage boy hanging on to the wooden slats that rose from the bed. A second later the boy tossed an orange down and the driver caught it, then tapped his horn as he drove off. Farther along the road he handed the orange back to his passenger. “For when you see your lady friend again, a little souvenir from Linares,” he said. “Maybe it will help her to make up her mind about you.”