Fiesta of Smoke

Praise for Suzan Still’s Commune of Women:

"Commune of Women is a riveting read. The characters are diverse and their stories will find a place in your heart. From Betty’s fascination with fake flowers to Pearl’s horrifying and tragic life, there is something uplifting in how each found the strength to carry on. In a nightmare situation…the women came out stronger than when it began, with compassion and the will to survive. Commune of Women is a captivating read that I highly recommend!"

– Minding Spot

I very highly recommend this book. The writing is outstanding and the story is compelling, with characters that are real and easy to relate to…It’s entertaining, touching, and inspirational. It is full of drama, suspense, mystery, and even romance. This was the first book I have read by Suzan Still and I am definitely a fan!

– Life in Review

"Commune of Women is one book you do not want to miss…It is an incredible tale that will stay with you long after you read the last word. Pick up Commune of Women and be prepared to laugh, cry and gasp."

– Single Titles

"Wonderfully written…All in all, Commune of Women was extremely satisfying to read and I am honored to have been able to review this book."

– Simply Stacie

Praise for Suzan Still’s Fiesta of Smoke:

"Suzan Still’s Fiesta of Smoke is an extraordinary book, encompassing a vast time frame yet bringing the possibility of a contemporary Mexican revolution to vivid life through its beautifully tuned, disparate voices. With a tonality that at times echoes the quiet grace of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera, matched by passages that have the psychotic edginess of Breaking Bad, Fiesta of Smoke is a book that will both compel and seduce you to read it to its haunting conclusion."

– Alexander Stuart, author of The War Zone and Life On Mars

"As with the brush of a muralist, Suzan Still has captured 50 years of the history of Mexico in vivid color. This passionate, non-linear novel explores the lives of three very different people involved in decades of political upheaval, and sounds the depth of injustices done for centuries there. Gripping in its detail, and daring in its reach, Fiesta of Smoke is a moving portrayal of the disparate cultures and complexity of a turbulent, beautiful country."

– M. E. Hirsh, author of Kabul and Dreaming Back

"Break out the Margaritas, chips and salsa, Suzan Still’s new novel, Fiesta of Smoke, is reason to celebrate! The great mythical sweep of the book, its stunning descriptions of Chiapas, and the human dramas that unfold will waft you away as you read. The book embodies Still’s love of the country and her profound grasp of people, their strengths and foibles. Add some guacamole and settle back for a great read!"

– Hope Werness, author of The Continuum Encyclopedias of Native Art and Animal Symbolism in Art

"Fiesta of Smoke chronicles the empowerment of women and indigenous peoples in Mexico. Powerful, poetic writing brings alive vivid characters who stride through one of the great dramas of the twentieth century. . . . The women of Fiesta of Smoke have known terrible hardship and loss, yet, through courage and a united front, they rise above these to prevail. Fiesta of Smoke honours love on many levels, not the least of which is the love of freedom."

– Gillian P. Herbert, author of Spare Scenes

"Suzan Still’s Fiesta of Smoke is a literary tour de force that explores how long-suppressed and marginalized people are rising phoenix-like from the ashes of their sacrificial fires. The smoky wings of these transfigured beings are gallantly abroad in the pages of this book. Feminine energy especially is emerging as a force to be reckoned with in every aspect of global life. Fiesta Of Smoke is an exquisitely written and powerfully rendered chronicle of divine feminine resurrection."

– Julie Loar, multiple award-winning author of Goddesses For Every Day

"Still’s writing smolders with volatility, authenticity, and intelligent femininity. Set in Mexico, Fiesta of Smoke skillfully captures with layered nuance the importance of women healers, of traditional medicinal methods, and sensitive portrayals of Mexico’s landscape and the dynamics shaping it today."

– Tammy Horn, author of Bees in America: How the Honey Bee Shaped a Nation and Beeconomy: What Women and Bees teach us about Local Trade and Global Markets

"In Fiesta of Smoke, Suzan Still has composed an epic tale unlike anything I’ve ever read. While the overarching love story, which is entangled in Mexican history and politics, is deliciously compelling, Still’s brilliance shines when she drops her story back in time and place into a sequence of nesting tales, one inside another like Russian dolls. These beautifully crafted segments deposit the struggle of Mexico—and the lovers themselves—into the context of a far-reaching historical conflict. Fiesta of Smoke is a book that moves, instructs, and enriches; it is at once intellectually challenging and sweetly vibrant."

– Patricia Harrelson, author of Between Two Women and The Right Sisters

"Novelist and storyteller, Suzan Still, delivers a love story that is an intense, fast-paced journey as she carries her readers through five decades of Mexico’s building revolutionary fervor. Her multilayered characterizations, poignant and explosive, keep her fans intrigued as the force of the story continues to build. Not since Gone with the Wind have readers been treated to such a star-crossed and passionate love as that between Javier Carteña and Calypso Searcy. Fans of Ms. Still will remain on the edge of their seats with the addictive power of Fiesta of Smoke."

– L. L. Nielsen, author of Lasso the Stars

"Fiesta of Smoke investigates the profound secrets of Mexican history and probes the mysteries of life with a keen and humanistic eye. The choreography of the three protagonists of Suzan Still’s second masterful work is an epic calligraphy: the brush is singing and the ink is dancing. Full of sudden rebounds and surprises, the rhythm of her writing explodes on the page. Like a samouraï, she enters the depth of wounds and love with a passionate elegance, not afraid to reveal the unknown, to interrogate and distill life’s essence."

– Sylvie Carnot, Château de La Rochepot, a Medieval Revival (Les Editions du Palais, Paris)

FIESTA OF SMOKE

Suzan Still

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of either the author or the publisher.

Studio Digital CT, LLC

P.O. Box 4331

Stamford, CT 06907

Copyright © 2013 by Suzan Still

Cover design by Barbara Aronica Buck

Cover art by José Luis Hernandez, Jr.

Story Plant paperback ISBN: 978-1-61188-112-7

Fiction Studio Books e-book ISBN: 978-1-943486-49-6

Visit our website at www.TheStoryPlant.com

All rights reserved, which includes the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever except as provided by U.S. Copyright Law.

For information, address Studio Digital CT

First Fiction Studio Printing: March 2013

First Story Plant Printing: September 2013

Printed in the United States of America

*

For Javier Aguirre

En las profundidades del mar

Detrás de sus pestillos calcificados

Las conchas susurran sus misterios, sus secretos

Para los cuales en el mundo humano

No hay palabras.

And to the cultural autonomy and freedom from injustice of indigenous peoples everywhere.

*

*

I am not I.

I am this one

walking beside me whom I do not see,

whom at times I manage to visit,

and whom at other times I forget;

the one who remains silent while I talk,

the one who forgives, sweet, when I hate,

the one who takes a walk when I am indoors,

the one who will remain standing when I die.

– Juan Ramón Jiménez

Y Tú, la excelsa, la de la luz vestida,

Alza, oh Madre de Dios, alza triunfante

La causa de los libres, tan querida.

– Guillermo Prieto

*

Prologue

The story I am about to tell you is true, as I myself was a participant. Some parts come from the accounts of my contemporaries, as alive and vivid as a basket of eels. The rest, rising from the dust of centuries, is open to conjecture only to those who lack a certain kind of faith that we, who made this story by our doing, held as our deepest fiber. To participate with us, you must consider that illusion is the veriest truth and reality can play you false in a heartbeat. There is nothing more you need to know, except that in matters of this world – and no doubt the next – the only real thing is love.

*

Sierra Madre Occidental, Chihuahua, Mexico

In a house ringed with guns, the couple is dancing. Courtyard walls condense fragrances flying on night wind sighing down the Sierra. Nectar and smoke lace with the smell of tortillas on the comal. From the open kitchen door a trapezoid of yellow light illumines, on a tilted chair, a blind guitarist whose gypsy rumba entwines the soft splatter of the fountain. White moths circle the musician’s head like spirits of inspired music.

The dancers scarcely move. He holds her close, his forearm across her back, her hand curled into his crooked wrist, the other warm on the back of his neck. He scoops her into himself, their hips pressing, slowly rotating to rhythm as one. He submerges himself in her hair, its scent of apples and sandalwood, brushes his cheek against its softness, and gazes into the darkness, alert for signs.

She rubs her cheek against the rough hand-woven cloth of his white shirt, breathes his essence – rich as newly-churned butter, sweet as vanilla, feral as a jaguar. It rises into her brain like a drug. Her head against his chest, she feels his heart pulsing powerfully, tuned like a guitar string to its own primal note. His whole being vibrates with what he senses: the closeness and surrender of her body, the sultry beat of the music, the luscious fragrances of the night, the invisible ambling of the guards on the walls, the inevitable approach of ruin.

Chapter 1

Calypso: Paris, 1992

Concentration kept down the fear. She focused on the tattoo of her orange snakeskin pumps, the heel striking minutely before the tap of the sole, a rhythm difficult to maintain on the uneven cobbles of the quai. The full skirt of her yellow dress wrapped into her legs and flowed out behind her as she faced into the afternoon river wind. Walking quickly and confidently, it was her intention to look both purposeful and carefree.

She turned away from the bustle of rue Jacob into the tiny alleyway that cut through toward the Seine. It was her habit when leaving the library at the Sorbonne to pass that way, coming out near Pont Neuf. She enjoyed standing in one of the rounded bays, mid-span, leaning on the ornate railing after so many hours of reading, seeing nothing but the glossy water flowing silently down toward the sea.

She became aware of the follower when she hesitated, half-turned, before a shop window: dark hair, features hidden under a fedora, medium build, nondescript gray suit. Because of him she had deviated from her accustomed route. She turned instead onto Quai des Augustins, with the Île de la Cité across the river channel, where there were always police around the Palais de Justice, even this late in the day. She could cross by Pont St.-Michel . . . but she did not. Instead, she continued down the river quays hyperalert to the presence behind her but wearing an instinctive veneer of calm. Her yellow skirt billowing around her calves in the autumnal wind, she arrived at Pont Saint-Louis having formulated a plan.

She remembered the story of a friend on safari in Africa who was charged by a rhinoceros while taking the morning air. It is impossible to outrun a galloping rhino, and lacking either a gun or nearby cover, he defended himself with the unexpected: he bent at the waist and observed his careening challenger through his knees, his posture so confusing the beast that it stopped short and bolted away. It was so improbable that she thought it must be true, and therefore adaptable.

She slowed her stride as she stepped onto Pont Saint-Louis, that homely old pedestrian bridge so startlingly banal in the luscious heart of Paris, and strolled out to mid-span. Casually, she lowered her bag onto the pavement by the railing, slipped off her fox jacket, its pelts afire in the late afternoon sun, and dropped it onto her bag. Then, with studied calm and elegance born of many hours at the ballet barre, she turned to the railing and performed a perfect developpé. Raising her arm in a port au bras, she proceeded with the familiar routine of ballet stretches, humming a Bach cantata for rhythm. Behind her, a tattered stream of weary tourists straggled by, and a gray figure melted into the deepening shadows of the Left Bank dusk.

*

Hill: Paris, 1992

Culturally, so much depends on the placement of the body in space. For the French, there are three reasons why one might sit alone at a café table: one is waiting for a friend, or one is an intellectual, solitary and brooding, or one is a tourist. Of them, the first is most acceptable, the second, merely suspect, and the last, contemptible.

Perhaps his patina of world-weariness led the woman who served Hill his café au lait, carottes râspées and hard, butterless bread to believe he was the suspect of the three. In a neat dark skirt and white apron, she whisked to his table on the basic black de rigueur pumps of the Parisian working woman and deposited his food without the familiar buoyancy offered natives, but also minus the blank reserve that walled out the taint of the étranger. He was a creature apart, her actions told him. Having been so on every continent for the last thirty years, he accepted her appraisal without surprise or resistance. He was in fact vaguely pleased to find his psychological camouflage intact.

This café on Île St.-Louis was a favorite of his, although the prices were high and the food poor, fit only for the clientele of footsore tourists who managed to limp over that plainest, most utilitarian of Parisian bridges, Pont St.-Louis. The problem lay less in their feet, he always suspected, than in the daunting effect of that first tour of Notre Dame.

From his vantage on Quai d’Orleans, the cathedral rose majestically across the intervening channel of the Seine, dominating the tail of the Île de la Cité, startling and grand as a newly-erupted volcano. He watched the intermittent stream on the bridge: solid German matrons in square wool suits and flat, thick-soled walking shoes; scruffy kids of indeterminant nationality in battered tennies and baggy pants, lugging backpacks; a flotilla of Japanese, all grinning, like a cloning experiment rejoicing in its escape from the laboratory.

They came to sit over their coffees with the stunned look of survivors of cataclysm. Perhaps the fifth whirlwind day since Brussels had undone them. More likely, Hill suspected, it was the ecstasy of the thirteenth-century cathedral. Notre Dame smells of mold and smoke, but steps like a stone foot on contemporary notions of aesthetics.

Fluctuat nec mergitur is the city’s proud motto: She is tossed but does not sink. The cathedral was the giant poop deck of the boat-shaped Île de la Cité. Other cathedrals rose to greater heights, had vaster expanses of colored glass, better acoustics, embodied more purely the Gothic conception. But for Hill, this edifice, this spot of land, not Rome, was the beating heart of the Church. If one could not smell the odor of sanctity here, one would never do so. It so saturated the ground that even walking in the Bois or shopping on rue de Rivoli, the cathedral, hidden from sight, still vibrated in the mind.

Paris always puts Hill in this mood. Bangkok, Tokyo, Montreal, D.C., Santiago, Baghdad – they had their charms, of course, but he could remain detached, do his job. But Paris! He approached her like a lover. Thirty years as a foreign correspondent dropped away and he was a besotted adolescent, or mendicant monk, finally come home to the City of Light.

He patted the gold watchcase in his inner pocket through the tweed of his suit, as he did habitually several times a day. It contained a tiny basaltic chip of the Elura Shiva, from Mt. Kailasa, a small gold nugget given to him in Denver by his paternal grandfather when he was ten, and a gelatin capsule that once held crystalline ascorbic acid but now contained a minute rag of cloth, stained brown. This last, a ripped-out portion of an Egyptian cotton handkerchief, had absorbed into its closely-beaten warp and weft, like a dead bird still kept in a cage, a speck of Sadat’s blood, spattered on Hill’s hand that fateful day in Cairo, in 1981.

So Hill, twentieth-century man, for a lifetime fingering the fevered pulse of events that anticipated the twenty-first, was yet susceptible to the old gods and the blood of martyrs, and Paris was the reliquary where he kept all his atavistic tendencies.

He ordered another café au lait and sank his upper lip into its bitter foam. Across the river, the brilliant November light picked out the cathedral’s bones, and the great arching buttresses seemed to exist simply to exhort its immense walls upward. White flecks of pigeons sailed through the stone lacework of arcs and spires like liberated souls. It was this back view, with all her props and braces, that Hill loved. The facade always seemed too austere, too foursquare, with its truncated spires. No, Notre Dame revealed her true grandeur to those who flanked her from the Quai aux Fleurs and came with amazement on those arcing arrows of stone.

He liked to think that these frazzled tourists around him had been struck by those arrows; that born into a time when art is preciously self-conscious, they still could be smitten by Our Lady’s mathematical formulations that expressed profound intuitions about the nature of God. The more abstract the truth one wishes to teach, the more it is necessary to beguile the senses with it.

Here he was, like an old lech, slobbering in his coffee over the Virgin again. Time for a good war somewhere before his brain rotted out completely. He fished some ten-franc pieces from his pocket and began to push back his chair when his eye lit again on Pont St.-Louis. A woman stood there, mid-span, facing the cathedral. She was wearing a yellow dress and the afternoon sun slanting through it gave hints of a long and lithe body. But more remarkably, she had one leg stretched out on the railing and was rhythmically lowering and raising her torso to her extended knee, in long, balletic stretches. Intrigued, Hill left a five-franc tip to propitiate the gods and threaded out through the metal chairs.

When he reached the bridge, she had taken her leg from the railing and was doing a dainty little series of steps – a pas de bourrée? – her hands resting on the rail for support, apparently absorbed in the wonder of Our Lady’s derrière.

Hill was now close enough to ascertain three things: her dress was of a light-weight, open-weave wool of the most sumptuous Naples yellow; a red fox coat, heaped on a big oxblood-colored leather bag, glowed like a fire at her feet; and she was humming the strains of Zum reinen Wasser: "Where streams of living water flow, He to green meadows leadeth. And where the pastures verdant grow with food celestial feedeth."

Leaning casually against the railing about four feet away, a distance he deemed friendly but not overpowering, Hill ventured: I love Bach, myself.

She stopped humming but was slow to tear her eyes from the view. When she did, it was not to face him but only with a slight turn of the head, the eyes sliding into the corners, regarding him warily, the color suddenly blanched from her cheeks.

After a moment, the tension left her shoulders and her eyes crinkled wryly. Truly, she said. It was not a question and it rolled between them like a ball of butter spiked with carpet tacks. The accent was American, like his own. Thirty years of savoir-faire melted and Hill was a fuzz-faced lout from Denver again, all elbows and size-16 shoes.

One of his loveliest . . . he managed to stammer, his finest cantatas. I heard it performed there, he nodded across the water to the cathedral, the second Sunday after Easter. Two years ago.

Such a memory! She wasn’t going to give him an inch. A cold wind came up-river, wrapping her skirt around her calves. She had beautiful ankles above a pair of expensive-looking pumpkin-colored snakeskin heels. He raised his eyes and found her grinning.

Well? Do you have me all sorted out yet? she asked pleasantly.

Time for pure out-West charm – ingenuous, all-man, no horseshit.

Listen, he said, I know just from looking that you and I are as different as hogwire and harpstring. But if you’re not otherwise engaged, I’d be honored to take you to an early supper.

Her eyes took on a vague, unreadable look. She gazed searchingly over his shoulder toward the Left Bank. Then, to his amazement, they lit with a friendly twinkle. She grinned again and said, Okay! As long as we eat here, nodding behind her toward Île Saint-Louis.

Dear lady . . . whatever your heart desires! Stooping, he retrieved her coat and gallantly held it open for her.

*

Hill took her to Au Chariot de L’Isle, a cave close by. His choice was motivated not by gastronomic considerations, but by the fear that if he took time to call a taxi, she would change her mind and vanish like a swallowtail on a March wind. She settled right in, however, as if it were the perfect choice, and even made murmurs over the truly ordinaire wine. Kooky she might be, but a lady, too, through and through.

Allow me to introduce myself, Hill began, as soon as the waiter had taken their orders. My name’s Hill. I used to be an international man for the Associated Press, but now I freelance. More freedom that way.

She rested her elbow on the table, her chin on her hand, and gazed at him with complete attention, making him feel like the most fascinating thing since the invention of the cotton gin. He needed to watch himself or he’d be babbling like a fool. She was the kind of woman who made a man need to remind himself of that – a real geisha, born to make a man feel twelve feet tall and virile as a three-peckered billy goat.

Just Hill? Is that given or sur-?

Sur. I never divulge the other. Never. Classified information.

"Oh, come on. It can’t be that bad. Let me guess . . . is it Elmer?"

"Good God, no! My mother wasn’t that cruel!"

Then it must be Walter. She was looking deep into his eyes, reading something from them.

Gooseflesh crept down his arms. How did you know that? How could you possibly know? he whispered.

They were sitting inside the silence of his surprise when their soup arrived. She smiled as she surveyed the oily broth. Just a lucky guess. Her lashes cast long, blue, serrated shadows across her cheeks in the candlelight.

Hill examined her minutely as she sipped from her spoon. Her dark hair was swept into a chignon at the neck, the silky wings riffled slightly by a natural wave, like wind over night water. The face, while not fine-boned, had an indefinable delicacy – a refinement of expression, perhaps, or a factor of coloring? Her skin was the palest apricot washed with rose, the complexion of a reposeful child.

Most extraordinary, however, were her eyes. At first, he’d been taken by a wry, dancing twinkle that hinted at humor. But now he saw that they were jade green, ringed with deepest cobalt. And beyond that . . . what? That last glance, that penetration of his interior . . .

He realized he didn’t even know her name.

Calypso Searcy, she said, buttering a dab of bread. And no comments, please. I’ve heard every imaginable joke on the subject already. I consider it an act of irremediable cruelty on the part of my parents.

"Well! I certainly wouldn’t have guessed that!"

It’s not so easy as Walter.

Calypso . . . Calypso . . .

She was in love with Ulysses.

Oh yes. The Queen of Someplace. She kept him seven years and promised him immortality if he would stay.

Correct. And was inconsolable when he left.

"Why did your parents name you that?"

As far as I can tell, they thought it was quite literary. They had aspirations.

And the last name – is it spelled the same as . . .?

"No. No, quite differently. But the sound is there, the intention . . ."

You’ll have to remind me about her.

Circe is the one who turned Scylla into a sea monster and Ulysses’ crew into swine.

My kinda gal!

She favored him with a wan smile.

The conversation turned to more general topics. Hill ordered îles flottantes for dessert and watched with amusement as she doctored her coffee with outlandish amounts of sugar and cream. Years in the business had made him adept at sizing people up quickly, but Calypso was an enigma. She carried herself like a much older woman, self-possessed and confident. Yet, with the possible exception of the backs of her hands, powdered with a faint freckling of brown spots, she appeared no older than thirty-five.

Forty-two, she said unexpectedly, laying her spoon neatly on the saucer and flipping her eyes up to his in annoyance.

Hill was caught off guard. Sorry! he muttered, thrusting his lip into his coffee for a long, steadying sip. Forty-two! You don’t look it.

This, as they say, is how forty-two looks.

Yes, but I mean, so many women approach it differently.

Oh, I know. They start smearing shellac on their faces. Or whatever it is that makes them look stretched too tight.

I guess most women . . .

It’s a matter of genes, I’m sure, she cut in on his banal generality-in-the-making. And my expectation, deeply held, that I will never grow old. Like Calypso.

Feeling that the conversation had given him unspoken license, Hill sat back and studied her openly. So he was alarmed when she suddenly snapped at him, anger flaring her nostrils, her mouth grim: Age! Age! This fascination of the male with age! Is she too old? Has she begun to wrinkle? Do her breasts sag? You create narcissists and neurotics in your women, draining off all their energies in the minute scrutiny of this fabric, this organ . . . She pinched up the skin on her arm. It disgusts me!

She snatched up her bag and began to push back her chair. Hill had to stand, reaching across the table to lay a restraining hand on her arm.

Please! Please! Forgive me. Please sit down again. I am a fool. Please. Please forgive my rudeness.

She wavered, body half-bent over the table, eyes seeking the door. Hill could imagine her flight: the river wind of early evening would catch her skirt as she emerged from the restaurant. It would flare about her like yellow wings, and in a few quick strides she would be to the corner, melting into the shadows . . . gone! Obviously, there was no indemnity against the foolishness of falling instantly in love with her. He never had been a gambler, yet . . .

He felt the pull of her arm, leaning out toward the coming night. Please. You must forgive me. You’re right: I’ve been concentrating on the most minor of your attributes, your beauty, although it is indeed glorious, but only because I suspect it is the veil of deeper worth.

Her eyes flicked toward him, her face now watchful.

Only because I have to satisfy myself with acquaintance with the outer woman, until the inner opens to me.

She smiled, the weary, wry smile he was already coming to anticipate.

Well done, Hill.

She pulled her arm quickly upward, breaking his grasp, and – his breath stopped while she hung poised – slowly settled into her seat again.

"Just so we’re perfectly clear: I am not an object!" The face she bent to her coffee was still tight with anger.

*

After dinner Hill took her to a quai-side café on the Left Bank, across from the cathedral. Floodlights threw the flying buttresses and sculpture on the side of Notre Dame into high relief. Calypso had a profile, he mused, watching her watch the cathedral, such as one sometimes sees incused on ancient coins. To fain disinterest at this point would be sheer nonsense. He felt ingenuous as a deer, gazing with the innocent brown eyes of surrender, capitulating without a shot having been fired.

They had been skirting around topics of a purely personal nature. After three full hours of acquaintance, this surprised him. He was accustomed to eliciting information like a cannery putting up peas: mechanically, at high speed, with precision, neatly packaged. He had learned that Calypso was a writer. This much she had confided and not much more. She seemed more comfortable listening than talking, and when she did speak, it was more in the nature of general observations.

As if to emphasize this perception, she turned to him, saying, Those great swags of ivy hanging down the quai almost to the water always seem to me to have a valedictory air, as if some occasion of tremendous importance were about to transpire, or had just taken place – the death of a king, possibly. Something grand and tragic.

She ran her eyes over Hill, who hunched on the tiny metal café chair like a bear on a beach ball, his suit rumpled, his tie askew. An unlikely companion. She wondered, as she turned back to her contemplation of Notre Dame, what had induced her to take up with him, besides his obvious protection from the watcher. Perhaps there was something to the notion of the attraction of opposites. The man must be half a foot over six feet, with hands like baseball mitts and a paunch like a wine cask. He was everything Calypso avoided in herself: heavy-set, poorly-tailored, badly shorn and noisy. Still, there was something boyishly appealing about him that simply might be a startlingly brilliant mind.

So what kind of writing do you do? Hill asked, leaning across the little metal table. Don’t say you’re a correspondent. Your face isn’t tough enough.

She smiled. No. Nothing so hard-edged as that. There’s a juncture in my brain where facts and the joy of writing diverge, I’m afraid. I’m a novelist.

I don’t think I’ve read any of your books. I’m sorry . . .

"Oh, I don’t use my own name. People assume it’s a nom de plume, anyway. I write under David Rockland."

"David Rockland! No kidding! You were on the Times Best Sellers list most of last year!"

Ummm hummmm.

But I’ve still never read any of your books, he admitted.

Think nothing of it. I got tired of writing excellent, obscure novels and living in poverty, so I wrote a blockbuster. It’s full of screeching Masarati tires, clashing gears and square chins with clefts. The men are all dangerous and virile and the women are beautiful and intelligent but vulnerable. Pap for the masses. The only thing I’m proud of concerning it is my bank account.

Ah, I know the type. The men wear aviator glasses. They’re tanned and suave and move within an aura of menace.

Yes, indeed. And the only one to whom they show their essential vulnerability is the woman they love.

That’s a switch. The vulnerable man, I mean. Of course, in real life you wind up with someone like me. Hill gestured grandly across his chest. "I’m a real man, with the body of a water buffalo and the soul of a turnip. Tell me you’re in love with me!"

In laughter, all the planes of her face fractured. She was transformed from a serene and regal presence to an imp. It was a face that could find humor in anything, including herself. Hill was duly captivated.

She laughs. She laughs. Why do they always laugh? He shrugged, his palms raised heavenward, a gesture so French that it gave Calypso instant insight into Hill’s long familiarity with Paris.

Tell me you love me, he insisted again.

I’m saving myself for someone tall, dark and handsome.

They don’t make them that way anymore. The dark ones are all squat. The tall ones are Aryan types with crazy blue eyes. And I’ve cornered the market on handsome. The man of your dreams doesn’t exist.

Her face became very earnest. Her eyes circled his face but seemed to be seeing something else. Oh yes, Hill, but he does, she said softly. He most certainly does.

Complete with sunglasses? Hill was alarmed by her sudden seriousness.

Mirrored, she affirmed.

And a dark aura of danger? he gasped in mock incredulity.

Ominous, definitely.

If you tell me he drives a Masarati, I’ll tell you you’re a fool for some no-good playboy.

She granted him a thin smile. I have no idea what kind of car he drives.

Ah ha! So you admit you scarcely know the man. He may be married – as if that mattered nowadays. Or a neo-Nazi. Or a homosexual. This man is a figment of an over-active imagination. I knew it. Why bother finding out how vacuous or insane or thoroughly nasty he is, when you can have me, right here, right now, in the too, too solid flesh?

She smiled her wry smile and intended to say, Hill, you’re too much, but what came out, with a little shake of the head, was, I feel like I’ve known you forever.

Oh, but you have. We were lovers in Egypt under Akhenaten, remember? It was fantastic. We bound our wrists together and promised to reincarnate together again and again to appease our unappeasable lust for one another. Surely you haven’t forgotten?

No. I haven’t forgotten. I’ve just changed my mind. It’s tall, dark and handsome this time around, Hill. Accept it.

The waiter, in cut-away coat and long white apron, brought them more drinks and added the saucers to the growing stack. Calypso pulled her fox coat more tightly around her shoulders.

This is the last one.

Good. Then I’ll take you for a little late night snack.

Calypso laughed. "Is this how you woo women, by over-feeding them like geese destined for foie gras?"

I don’t woo women.

Meaning?

Meaning I’ve never been married and I’ve never had a really serious relationship. Not since I was a young man, anyway.

You obviously expect me to believe that. Perhaps I can con you into believing I’m a virgin.

Hill cupped his big hands around his glass and frowned down into it, his lower lip curled toward his chin.

Okay. Alright. I believe you: I am the first true love of your life. Her tone was cajoling, humorous.

Damned if it doesn’t look like it.

Oh Walter, you’re being silly. We’ve just met!

"Don’t call me that!"

If you love me, you’ll let me call you Walter, Walter, she cooed.

Hill rubbed his chest, feeling for the watch case. What was he babbling? Had he lost his mind? He shook his head wearily. I feel that I am destined to love you. He said it with a sigh and a resignation that flustered her.

You’re serious, then?

Dead.

She sat back and gazed at him in astonishment.

But Walter, I can’t love you. I’m in love with someone else.

It amazed her to have a serious conversation over the possibility of a love affair with this huge, dissheveled man whom she had known for an evening. Yet it all seemed quite natural, really. She felt as comfortable with Walter Hill as if she had known him for an eternity.

Walter, I think we’re both a little drunk, she said reasonably. Let’s try this conversation again another day and see if we don’t feel like complete fools.

No, Hill said firmly. No. I want you to tell me about him.

About whom?

Him. My rival.

"Your rival? Hill, that’s positively medieval."

Nevertheless. . .

I don’t want to discuss it.

But you must!

Look, Hill. I know this is all great fun for you, but I really don’t feel like dragging him out like a plaything for you.

"It is not fun. It’s awful. I feel like a fool. I’m smitten and I haven’t any idea what to do about it. Forgive me if I’m making a fool of myself. I’m an amateur."

Calypso planted her elbows on the table, ran her fingers up along her temples and buried them deep into her hair, staring at Hill. "I admit that I do feel a strange attachment to you, as if we’d been friends forever. But love, Hill? It’s preposterous."

Not if you remember Egypt, where we were lovers.

Brother and sister, more likely. That I might admit to.

Even as your brother I lusted after you.

Hmmm . . . thirty-five hundred years of unrequited incestuous adolescent horniness. Maybe it’s time to grow up.

I’m thirty-five hundred years older now, and that’s led to a maturity and savoire faire that may have been lacking, previously. Tell me about him.

I don’t want to.

Please.

You’ll think I’m crazy.

Any crazier than you must think me?

He doesn’t love me, really. I think.

Then he’s the crazy one!

He’s married and has three children.

Worse and worse. Why are you doing this to yourself?

I wish I knew. And lastly, he’s Mexican.

Mexican! I knew it! You’ve fallen for some Latin Romeo. Or Romero, as the case may be, Hill groaned. Don’t tell me any more. I’ll tell you. He looks at you with inscrutable black eyes and tells you hair-raising stories about narrow escapes he’s had. He wears skin-tight sharkskin pants tailored in Tijuana and a vest, with his shirt unbuttoned to the navel. His nose, in profile, is like the beak of a hawk and he pronounces your name ‘Caleepso’. How’m I doing?

A couple of direct hits.

Hill spat out a vague monosyllable. "Psuuhhh! It’s the description of every gigolo in Acapulco. Maybe you are crazy. Or naive."

You’re not being fair. This is different. Her eyes filled with tears and she seemed genuinely distressed, but Hill was remorseless.

"That’s what they all say: it was different with me. It’s me he really loves. You’re too old to fall for that crap."

Calypso gave a little shriek of pure rage and stood so quickly that her chair toppled backward. "Are you doing a parody of yourself, Walter, or are you really this obnoxious? You know nothing of the circumstances! You are insufferable, Mr. Hill! Good night." Snatching up her bag, she spun to her right and strode away.

Hill sat momentarily stupefied by this appalling turn of events. When he leapt up and began to run after her, however, the waiter came after him, shouting for his money. Hill ripped his wallet from his pocket, and pulling out an unknown quantity of franc notes, threw them over his shoulder and kept running under a hail of French explicatives. His brief hesitation had given her a head start, and she was already far down the quai. He could hear the rattle of her feet and was amazed at her ability to sprint in high heels. He lumbered after her in desperation and only caught up with her as she was hailing a cab at the entrance to Pont Neuf.

He threw himself into the cab behind her and slammed the door, shouting to the driver before she could object, To the Ritz! At the same instant, he caught sight of a man, running, his pale face momentarily flooded by a streetlight as the cab lurched forward.

Who was that?

Who was who? she asked sullenly, sliding to the far end of the seat.

Looked like someone who wanted to get your attention.

Calypso didn’t answer, but Hill could feel the recoil slam through her body. As the cab sped toward Place Vendôme, he reached over and touched her arm gently.

"Somehow I’m going to make up for my appalling rudeness. I’m not sure how, but I’m going to start at the bar at the Ritz. I’m going to listen and I’m not going to say another asinine thing.

Go to hell, Walter.

And as a token of my good faith, I give you freedom to walk out on me at any time, without trying to stop you again.

You’re giving me my freedom?

After you tell your story.

And I thought I already had my freedom. How careless of me.

*

The cab slid past the giant column honoring Napoleon I that, centered in the lights of Place Vendôme, cast shadows in all directions around its base like spokes. Calypso and Hill emerged from the cab and ascend the stairs in the misty yellow glow of the trident-shaped street lamps. Hill was expecting to endure a banal storiette bracketed on one side by a naive and fascinated woman and on the other by a cold and elusive man. Certainly he was not expecting that her story would become his life’s obsession. And neither was he aware of the arrival of a cab that pulled in as their’s departed, or of its occupant, who watched with grave interest as they disappeared through the heavy glass doors of Hotel Ritz.

*

Hill lay in the three a.m. doldrums, listening to late traffic along rue de Rivoli. The cobbled courtyard and stone walls of his apartment house collected and intensified the sound, even these two blocks back on rue de Sevigné. Periodically, tremors from the passing mètro, deep in its wormhole, shook the eighteenth-century foundations. The wine they had drunk at dinner and the liqueur at the Ritz had left him narcotized but strangely restless. His body pressed heavily into the smooth cotton sheets, while his mind raced.

For all the variety of his work and the ceaseless travel to the world’s hot spots, there was still a sad monotony to it all. It came, he realized, from his awareness of the unending striving of mankind for a freedom so dear that they were willing to kill for it. From Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, the same story: liberators became despots with dismal regularity.

From the first glimpse of Calypso with her leg stretched on the bridge railing, Hill had known she represented the absolutely antithetical in his life: freedom that took nothing from anyone and gave abundantly. The very sight of her lifted his heart the way a fleeting semaphore of birds across barred sky would exult a prisoner.

Not that there had not been women, and that some of them had not been loved. Elegant women, some of them, like the petite blonde who kept the family chateau down in the Loire Valley and was the cousin of the Countess of Something-or-Other. All bird bones, big eyes and four-inch heels, even with her jeans. Or the ravishing, sloe-eyed wife of the Cairo bureau chief, who came to him wordlessly, exuding sandalwood and sexual starvation. But each woman was only a fragment, and the loves had been half infatuation, half playacting veneering disappointment. Still, unlike so many men of his generation, Hill never had been inoculated against the potency of Woman. She was a mystery infinitely deeper than the paltry machinations behind world events.

No, Calypso, with her yellow dress and fox coat heaped beside her on the pavement, her clear soprano warbling Bach, was the genuine article. From twenty feet away he could see it. There was no begging in her, no need. Nor was she that most morbid of the incarnations of Woman, the martyr, on temporary respite from bleeding her life away for another.

He searched the hand-hewn beams above him, dented and napped in the halogen light seeping in from the courtyard, thinking they were probably full of dry rot, just like his brain. Men his age didn’t fall in love. After a number of inappropriate trysts with witless younger women, they declined respectably into late middle age and death without a whimper, mute, manly and unfulfilled.

His eyes slid to the long glass doors that gave onto a tiny balcony. Soft, cold rain had started to fall. Beyond one corner of the balcony he could see a small triangle of cobblestones below, black, rounded and glistening like caviar in rainy lamplight. He raised both leaden hands and rubbed his temples. He felt like a fool but his heart surged with joy. In a way he would never be able to express, even to himself, he had finally come home.

What created a woman like Calypso, other than a blinding flash of pure, creative exuberance on the part of God? Her manner was puzzling. While she revealed none of the details of her life, she leapt immediately into camaraderie with intimate assurance, as if they were childhood friends whose understanding represented an unspoken foundation of mutual trust.

He could not pin her down about her presence in Paris. Apparently, she was on an extended stay. Vaguely, she alluded to business contacts with gallery owners, but when he asked if she were an artist or collector, she had changed the subject. On the issue of her Mexican infatuation she was immovable. She pled exhaustion and intoxication and promised to explain at some future meeting. She could not be persuaded even to reveal his first name, although Hill, ever the investigative reporter, hungered for this one small detail. It was not, he felt, that she was being deliberately evasive. More, it was the reticence of a lady who did not consider her private affairs to be anyone’s business. A rare trait, in these self-disclosing days.

Getting her to agree to meet again, however, was simplicity itself. He had sat toying with his drink, considering possible approaches that would not drive her to a quick refusal. Finally, remembering that it was straight-out Colorado charm that had gotten her to come with him in the first place, he simply had asked her: May I see you again, soon? And she had smiled and said: Yes. That would be nice.

Just that simple.

Women, in Hill’s experience, were never that simple. They wanted to be cajoled or flattered or otherwise manipulated. He was confused by her reaction and what, if anything, lay behind it he could not guess.

And then, as she rose from the table, smiling, slightly tipsy, her grip on her handbag loosened and it dropped to the floor, upending, spilling a Dior compact, an alligator lipstick case, a soft red Moroccan leather folder embossed in gold, probably holding her passport and billfold, and a snub-nosed .38, lying on the plush carpeting of the Ritz bar as incongruously as a hand grenade in a dinner salad.

No explanation. Just a sweep of the hand that drove the scattered items back into containment. She refused to meet his eye. He did not inquire.

And, as he put her into a taxi on Place Vendôme, a fleeting shadow out of the corner of his eye: same size, same fidgety, evasive movement, then gone. Calypso, he concluded, his eyes drifting gradually toward the bridge of his nose, was the sort of woman you wrote novels about, if you were interested in writing novels. As if the truth wasn’t bizarre enough.

But a woman like Calypso bore examination. Her motivations could be probed, her history traced. It would be possible to build her, tessera by tessera, yielding a mosaic, complex, colorful, shining and shadowed. As his eyes closed at last, to the sound of plump drops striking the balcony doors, he saw her image against the bedroom wall, shimmering and mysterious as a Byzantine queen.

*

Javier: Northern California, 1992

Deep oak woods were wrapped in thick moss and rich in the umber scent of rotting leaves. An incandescent evening sky, apricot and electric blue, was snagged in a net of bare, black branches as Javier tramped, weighted by heavy clothes and muddy boots, his nose red and numb, his hands numb, too. His chest was tight: too cold for deep breathing, yet he was warmed down deep by some rising sense of transformation. Winter was in the land, but spring was rousing early in his heart. Fragile hopes flittered in the wintry dusk, sparks of summer glimmering on heavy, settled air. Winter was not death, as so many poets would have it. No, not death, but the tremblings of resurrection, rooted like the wildflowers already stirring beneath the snow, kicking at their seed hulls for liberation.

Liberation! Javier plotted as he trudged through crusted patches of snow, imagining the hungry fed, the homeless roofed-over, children reading and laughing. As the west gleamed like the Second Coming or the End of the World, ravens winged by, black silhouettes on the fiery sky.

OOSA. USA. So damn cold! Where is the sun of Chiapas and Yucatan that makes the humidity rise and vines bloom? Here in the north the sun burned through the black oak woods like the imperious eye of God, vermilion and gold, not caring if it warmed. And it had a message, as if it were written on a card and dangled on the thin, cold thread of the wind: It has to be done. It cannot be avoided. There is no turning back.

The sun was sinking fast, its curved bottom edge slicing into far indigo hills like a scimitar into flesh. The light was both more brilliant and more somber. The woods hunkered like a vast animal already camouflaged in night – not menacing but mysterious, all to themselves, not knowable, as was the way of all wild things; as was his own way.

He was divided between this awareness and other visions: Paris all aflame; London hanging the Lord Mayor; mobs in the streets of Santiago; American guerrillas lurking in the woods, awaiting the Red Coats.

Revolution. Others had done it. And now, Mexico. Again.

The land reforms of the past revolution were ineffective now. In Mexico City, the most populous, diseased, polluted place on the planet, people were packed like stockyard animals into dismal slums. Bad water, little food, violence, drugs, despair and death. Not the birthright Villa, Zapata and Cardenas envisioned back when the land was divided and the great estancias broken up into ejidos – community-held, farmable plots for the common man.

The sun cut deeper into the mountains’ flesh as his boot heels struck the frozen crust of snow with the report of small arms fire. In the woods, something big moved quickly and silently. A gato montés? A deer? His stomach felt empty and light; hungry, but also as if it would never accept food again.

This was the day, or never. This was the time and place, although it had always seemed to him a thing of the future. Now, the future had arrived and his life was