And he was taking your success away from you, your single purpose, or he thought he was, anyway. But strangely enough, though she had never told him, she didn’t care about forfeiting the money.
If it made peace, if it made him happy, if it made him think he was causing her to suffer, that was all right. He had exaggerated ideas as to the value of money; it hurt him to lose it or spend it, therefore he thought it would hurt her as much. But I’m feeling no pain, she thought, I’d like to give him all of the money, for that’s not why I write at all, I write to say what I have to say, and he doesn’t understand that.
He was quieted. ‘You’ll pay?’
‘Yes.’ She was dressing quickly now, in slacks and jacket. ‘In fact, I’ve been meaning to bring this up for some time. I’m giving all the money to you from now on. There’s no need of my keeping my profits separate from yours, as it has been. I’ll turn it over to you tomorrow.’
‘I don’t ask that,’ he said, quickly.
‘I insist. It all goes to you.’
What I’m doing, of course, is unloading your gun, she thought. Taking your weapon away from you. Now you won’t be able to extract the money from me, piece by piece, bit by painful bit. You’ll have to find another way to bother me.
‘I—’ he said.
‘No, let’s not talk about it. It’s yours.’
‘It’s only to teach you a lesson. You’ve a bad temper,’ he said. ‘I thought you’d control it if you had to forfeit something.’
‘Oh, I just live for money,’ she said.
‘I don’t want all of it.’
‘Come on now.’ She was weary. She opened the door and listened. The neighbors hadn’t heard, or if they had, they paid no attention. The lights of the waiting taxi illuminated the front patio.
They walked out through the cool moonlit night. She walked ahead of him for the first time in years.
Parícutin was a river of gold that night. A distant murmuring river of molten ore going down to some dead lava sea, to some volcanic black shore.
Time and again if you held your breath, stilled your heart within you, you could hear the lava pushing rocks down the mountain in tumblings and roarings, faintly, faintly. Above the crater were red vapors and red light.
Gentle brown and gray clouds arose suddenly as coronets or halos or puffs from the interior, their undersides washed in pink, their tops dark and ominous, without a sound.
The husband and the wife stood on the opposite mountain, in the sharp cold, the horses behind them. In a wooden hut nearby, the scientific observers were lighting oil lamps, cooking their evening meal, boiling rich coffee, talking in whispers because of the clear, night-explosive air. It was very far away from everything else in the world.
On the way up the mountain, after the long taxi drive from Uruapan, over moon-dreaming hills of ashen snow, through dry stick villages, under the cold clear stars, jounced in the taxi like dice in a gambling-tumbler, both of them had tried to make a better thing of it.
They had arrived at a campfire on a sort of sea bottom. About the campfire were solemn men and small dark boys, and a company of seven other Americans, all men, in riding breeches, talking in loud voices under the soundless sky.
The horses were brought forth and mounted. They proceeded across the lava river. She talked to the other Yankees and they responded. They joked together. After a while of this, the husband rode on ahead.
Now, they stood together, watching the lava wash down the dark cone summit.
He wouldn’t speak.
‘What’s wrong now?’ she asked.
He looked straight ahead, the lava glow reflected in his eyes. ‘You could have ridden with me. I thought we came to Mexico to see things together. And now you talk to those damned Texans.’
‘I felt lonely. We haven’t seen any people from the States for eight weeks. I like the days in Mexico, but I don’t like the nights. I just wanted someone to talk to.’
‘You wanted to tell them you’re a writer.’
‘That’s unfair.’
‘You’re always telling people you’re a writer, and how good you are, and you’ve just sold a story to a large-circulation magazine and that’s how you got the money to come here to Mexico.’
‘One of them asked me what I did, and I told him. Damn right I’m proud of my work. I’ve waited ten years to sell some damn thing.’
He studied her in the light from the fire mountain and at last he said, ‘You know, before coming up here tonight. I thought about that damned typewriter of yours and almost tossed it into the river.’
‘You didn’t!’
‘No, but I locked it in the car. I’m tired of it and the way you’ve ruined the whole trip. You’re not with me, you’re with yourself, you’re the one who counts, you and that damned machine, you and Mexico, you and your reactions, you and your inspiration, you and your nervous sensitivity, and you and your aloneness.
I knew you’d act this way tonight, just as sure as there was a First Coming! I’m tired of your running back from every excursion we make to sit at that machine and bang away at all hours. This is a vacation.’
‘I haven’t touched the typewriter in a week, because it bothered you.’
‘Well, don’t touch it for another week or a month, don’t touch it until we get home. Your damned inspiration can wait!’
I should never have said I’d give him all the money, she thought. I should never have taken that weapon from him, it kept him away from my real life, the writing and the machine. And now I’ve thrown off the protective cloak of money and he’s searched for a new weapon and he’s gotten to the true thing—to the machine! Oh Christ!
Suddenly, without thinking, with the rage in her again, she pushed him ahead of her. She didn’t do it violently. She just gave him a push. Once, twice, three times. She didn’t hurt him. It was just a gesture of pushing away.
She wanted to strike him, throw him off a cliff, perhaps, but instead she gave these three pushes, to indicate her hostility and the end of talking. Then they stood separately, while behind them the horses moved their hoofs softly, and the night air grew colder and their breath hissed in white plumes on the air, and in the scientists’ cabin the coffee bubbled on the blue gas jet and the rich fumes permeated the moonlit heights.
After an hour, as the first dim furnacings of the sun came in the cold East, they mounted their horses for the trip down through growing light, toward the buried city and the buried church under the lava flow. Crossing the flow, she thought, Why doesn’t his horse fall, why isn’t he thrown onto those jagged lava rocks, why? But nothing happened. They rode on. The sun rose red.
They slept until one in the afternoon. She was dressed and sitting on the bed waiting for him to waken for half an hour before he stirred and rolled over, needing a shave, very pale with tiredness.
‘I’ve got a sore throat,’ was the first thing he said.
She didn’t speak.
‘You shouldn’t have thrown water on me,’ he said.
She got up and walked to the door and put her hand on the knob.
‘I want you to stay here,’ he said. ‘We’re going to stay here in Uruapan three or four more days.’
At last she said. ‘I thought we were going on to Guadalajara.’
‘Don’t be a tourist. You ruined that trip to the volcano for us. I want to go back up tomorrow or the next day. Go look at the sky.’
She went out to look at the sky. It was clear and blue. She reported this. ‘The volcano dies down, sometimes for a week. We can’t afford to wait a week for it to boom again.’
‘Yes, we can. We will. And you’ll pay for the taxi to take us up there and do the trip over and do it right and enjoy it.’
‘Do you think we can ever enjoy it now?’ she asked.
‘If it’s the last thing we do, we’ll enjoy it.’
‘You insist, do you?’
‘We’ll wait until the sky is full of smoke and go back up.’
‘I’m going out to buy a paper.’ She shut the door and walked into the town.
She walked down the fresh-washed streets and looked in the shining windows and smelled that amazingly clear air and felt very good, except for the tremoring, the continual tremoring in her stomach. At last, with a hollowness roaring in her chest, she went to a man standing beside a taxi.
‘Señor,’ she said.
‘Yes?’ said the man.
She felt her heart stop beating. Then it began to thump again and she went on: ‘How much would you charge to drive me to Morelia?’
‘Ninety pesos, señora.’
‘And I can get the train in Morelia?’
‘There is a train here, señora.’
‘Yes, but there are reasons why I don’t want to wait for it here.’
‘I will drive you, then, to Morelia.’
‘Come along, there are a few things I must do.’
The
