I waited, but he still ignored me, so I put in all the wood from the scuttle. The stove was by a window that turned the corner of the room. One side faced the town and its lights, the other towards the forest, along the treeline. It was black except for a faint glow somewhere inside that was the same colour as the lamps’ pollen. The new wood sent out a fresh wave of heat and I almost thought about taking off my coat. Raphael was sitting in his shirtsleeves. In all the time I’d been pottering, he hadn’t turned the page. I sank down in the other chair to look at the light on the table. The pollen floated and furled, brightest at the edges of a set of tiny sails stitched on to the clock hand. It was hypnotic. My fingertips itched to open up the bulb and see what the pollen did if it was allowed to float free, but I didn’t want Raphael to punch me in the face so I sat without touching it, my hands trapped between my knees.
It was a little while before I realised he hadn’t moved at all, although he was still holding the tweezers and the clockwork. I’d assumed he was only thinking, but it was perfect motionlessness.
‘Everything all right?’ I said.
He seemed not to hear. Slowly, I stretched forward and waved my hand under his eyes. Nothing happened. I was starting to feel uneasy when I remembered it had happened before. He had ignored us on the jetty earlier, sitting as still as this, when I’d thought he was going to kill something. I caught his wrist and lifted it gently. It wasn’t difficult to move him, but when I let him go, his arm didn’t thunk back down again. It fell at nothing more than the speed of relaxing tendons until his knuckles brushed the table edge and rested there.
He looked up suddenly. I’d never known anyone to be frightened to see me before, but he was then. I sat back slowly to put some more space between us. He had clenched his fists. ‘Is everything you needed there?’ I asked.
His eyes slipped down to the clockwork again as though it might have moved since he last saw it, then nodded. He got up and drained the quinoa into the sink. When he came back to the table to serve it, he rested the edge of the hot pan against his hand. I waited for him to realise and snatch it away, the muscles in the back of my neck tightening more and more the longer he didn’t, until I had to put my hand out to touch the pan rim. It burned even in a split second.
‘Christ, put that down. Can’t you feel that?’
He put the pan down to examine his hand. There was a red mark but the burn hadn’t broken the skin. ‘No.’ He looked nearly worried when I reached out to stop him lifting it again. ‘What?’
‘Don’t.’ I took it off him and touched the handle experimentally, then had to pull my sleeve over my hand. He sat down to get out of the way. ‘Were you born like this?’
‘It’s nothing.’
‘Analgesia isn’t nothing. Nor is catalepsy. Have you been to a doctor?’
He gave me another brief glassen stare, more like himself again. ‘The doctor here is an empiric with some army ants and a hacksaw. What do you think?’
I sighed. ‘That the Quechua medical profession is not all it could be.’
He tipped his fork at me by way of agreeing.
‘Did you say empiric?’ I said after a second.
‘Is that wrong?’
‘No, I just haven’t heard anyone say that since I was small.’
‘What do you say now?’
‘Quack,’ I said, interested. He must have learned English from passing expeditionaries when he was young, although it was such an ancient slang word that it must have been an old man who’d taught him even then.
He let his eyes drop and I felt awkward. I hadn’t meant to tip him into language fatigue but he didn’t say anything after that. It was clicking silence, because he was putting the clockwork back together again inside another glass fishing float he must have had ready and waiting. It was split in half neatly and when he had finished, it fitted together around a tiny hole, for the piece of string on which he had suspended the clock mechanism. There was no pollen inside yet and he wound the string round the ball and left it in a bowl between us filled otherwise with lemons and differently coloured maracuya, which must have had an English name, but I didn’t know it. He saw me looking at the latter and cut one in half to show me. You had to eat it with a spoon, which made it seem more like a purple egg cup of rice pudding than fruit, though it was much better than rice pudding. We saved some food for Clem, but he was so deeply asleep that he didn’t even stir when I shook his shoulder.
Just as I came back, a singing bell rang from beyond the closed door to the nave. I thought at first that it was something I’d made up, but after a little lag, I heard it again, a sparkling noise that carried clear over the wind. Raphael was looking at the door too. After the second pause, it sounded once more, much longer.
‘Has someone been in there all this time?’ I said.
‘No. They wait in the woods until they see lights in here.’ He sat still, looking exhausted, but he never lost the rigidity down his spine. I had never seen him slouch, not even sitting on the floor at the miserable little inn in Crucero.
‘Who?’ I asked.
‘The . . . I’m not saying Chuncho any more, that just means wildman. The people who live in there. The ones who keep the border.’ When the bell stopped, he stood up. ‘Come with me,’ he said. ‘Bring the lamp.’
TWELVE
The door that led into the nave was frozen closed and Raphael had to push his shoulder into it. Ice cracked on the other side. When I went through after him, up a steep step and down again into a blast of cold air, I saw why. The main church was open like a cloister on all sides except ours, held up by pillars mostly invisible under the vines, which were red and dying. The normal order of things was inverted; we didn’t come out behind the altar but by a font. The altar was at the other end, at the base of the cross shape the church made. There were three candles on it, inside glass jars, and a bundle of blankets. Beyond was the open air and the looming blackness of the forest. Snow had blown crosswise across the nave, enough for us to make footprints.
The bundle was a baby, wrapped up against the cold and tucked close to a rag doll. She was asleep. From behind the altar a beautiful marble statue stood watching and shielding it from the wind. The statue was holding a bell. Raphael lifted the baby up. It yawned and woke but didn’t seem to mind.
‘What?’ I said, bewildered. ‘Where did she come from?’
‘Look over there. Put your hand over the light.’
I wrapped my hands around the pollen lamp so that it looked like I had a star between them, the light seeping out from between my fingers. He blew out the candles. For a few seconds all I could see were dim yellow bursts where the light had been, but then there was a glow somewhere under the trees. It flared and then faded, slowly, easily the size of a person. It startled some birds and suddenly a whole flock of them took off through the branches. Each one left a swooping trail of light. Nearer the ground, there was a soft haze of more muted light. They were vines, like Chinese lanterns, fragile and translucent and twined around the roots of the trees, which were as tall as me. They were dying now and hardly more than botanical skeletons, but inside they glowed, just. It was too soft a light to have seen from the well-lit church. The bright wake shone again, further away. There was a brilliant puff as whoever it was walked through a patch of the vines.
‘It’s the – pollen,’ I said, staring. ‘There was someone there. Just now.’
‘They leave crippled children here. I can’t see what’s wrong with her but there’ll be something. Where are you going?’