The Astronomer's Tower
Javier leaned heavily on the wheel and squinted into the dark. The lights of his pickup bobbed across banana and coffee plants, agave and aloe vera. I wobbled in the passenger seat, clinging to the door, while my rucksack rolled in the back.
“How can you find your way around these roads?” I said, as we turned at another unmarked dirt junction.
He shrugged. “It’s my back yard,” he said. “I’ve lived round here all my life, except when I went to study in the capital. My ancestors built these roads, so I guess the routemap is in my blood.”
We passed another shrine at the edge of a precipice. Javier stopped suddenly and turned the engine off.
“Come on,” he said, “I want to show you something.”
We got out of the pickup and walked a short distance through a cutting in the thorn bushes. I had my head down, watching my step, when we came to a natural lookout point. The air was thick and hot, full of the sounds of cicadas, frogs, buzzing insects, clicking bats and rustlings in the undergrowth. Below us the mountain tumbled away and every branch of every bush was full of fireflies pulsing orange red. In the distance I could see less natural lights, settlements of a few houses, maybe, or a big city far away; it was hard to tell.
The mountains were silhouetted against the brightest night sky I had ever seen, and a great band of light spilled above us, millions of tiny points, blinking.
“Fucking hell,” I said. I had always been a city boy. In the city we rarely look up because there’s little point. I had never seen anything like this. “I mean it’s amazing, that's what I meant to say.”
Javier patted me on the back. “I understood ‘fucking hell’,” he said. “Come on, we still have a way to go.”
We left the dirt and hit the cement roads of Tequis about two hours' winding climb later. It looked empty and dark, except for the odd bulb hanging from a rafter, but that might have been because the road was more like a gulley, with pavements at least five feet high on either side and occasionally a set of stone steps climbing up to them.
“It rains hard here,” said Javier. “So we build the sidewalks high. When it rains, it can come down for weeks or more, and all the water channels into the town. We dig the roads deep and build the buildings high to let it pass through.”
“So the road becomes a river,” I said.
"Yes." He yawned, and we rolled on through streets that seemed dead, but when we turned a corner onto the central square, the place burst into life like an elaborate surprise party. The expanse in front of the small but pristine church was teeming with people; kids playing football; groups of girls and boys clustered at a safe distance from each other, giggling and scowling respectively; men throwing their customary ten-gallon hats aside to take hold of ropes and heave a massive arch made of what looked like corn husks into the air; another group of men and women dancing some kind of quadrille, while musicians kept rhythm by smacking tambors and others made violins and whistles shriek.
"Wow," I said. "Where did all these people come from?"
“The mountains,” said Javier. "Someone once said that they drip out of the forest like dew from a morning flower, I think of them more like cockroaches. Sometimes even I don't know where they come from."
I noticed a group of older people sitting around the bandstand at the centre of the square; they were watching us pass by, their faces like stones.
"Why are they out so late?" I said, because it must have been past midnight, though I never carried a watch.
"Fiesta," said Javier. He stopped the car by a group of women who had set out stalls selling steaming tamales, quesadillas and coffee.
"You hungry?" he said. I nodded; we'd not touched anything since we'd left my home, Maria and Agustin waving at me from the gate to the ramshackle group of buildings where we lived.
Javier wound the window down and barked some words I didn't understand. Within moments food and drink was being passed in through the window, money passed back. The blue corn tortillas of the quesadillas were earthy, gritty almost, and the spicy paste of the tamales sucked the moisture out of my mouth, so that I was glad to drink the sweet, cinnamon-infused coffee.
I watched a woman pushing green tomatoes, onion and garlic round a dry griddle, roasting ready for the pestle and mortar.
"This place is fantastic," I said. "Can we look around?"
I had the door half open before Javier leaned across me and slammed it shut, pushing down the lock.
"Not tonight, güero."
As we pulled away I saw two young men by the roadside, machetes hanging by their sides, and I could sense they were watching us, though their faces were shadowed by their hats.
At the far side of the town, if it could be called that, the road gradually petered out and gave way to forest. There on the limits of civilisation was the front of a house, or at least a long wooden wall, with a door, no windows, and a veranda dripping with bougainvillea.
To either side of the front of the house there was nothing but forest.
"There is only one way in to this town," said Javier, "on the road we came in, and only one entrance to this house. You would not survive a moment in the forest alone. Remember that."
I said nothing as we got out of the car and I retrieved my rucksack from the back. He was making me uneasy. Back home he'd said he had a job for me; a job that would be well paid and that would keep me out of town and out of danger for a while.
I'd laughed at that, but the others hadn't, and before long I'd been convinced that Javier was my guardian angel; now I wasn't so sure.
He lit a storm lamp that was hanging by the doorway and opened the door, which I expected to creak, but did not. Behind the door a long corridor stretched off into darkness, with steps leading up every ten yards or so and rooms set on either side. The place was old, weary, and I'm not sure that it was plumbed or had ever been wired.
“It’s built on stilts,” said Javier. “Because of the rains, you know. My grandfather built it. Took him years, apparently, wouldn’t let anyone help. He had the wood brought up to the front, and the nails and tools and the like, but that was as far as anyone went. Every evening he would sit on the veranda and take care of business. The folks would queue up to talk with him about some grievance or request, a loan, something like that. They would lean on the veranda, and some would be offered a seat, but nobody went inside, even the priest was kept out.
“One day he went away without a word, came back a few months later with a horse and cart and a woman in the back — my grandmother. Those that saw her said she was a beautiful white woman, but there weren’t many that saw her. She was the one person who came into the house, and she didn’t come out again for five years, and then it was in a box.”
“No shit,” I said.
“None at all, güero. So, my father was a small boy by then, and he grew up in these rooms, and wandering around the mountains, playing with the local boys, messing with the local girls. And I suppose I did the same as a boy. You don't care who you play with when you're a boy.
"I remember my grandfather vaguely; he beat me sometimes, but not often. Anyway, he built the house on stilts and it's probably because of that that it hasn't washed away. Over the years, others have tried to build on this hill, but the rains come and I open my door in the morning to find nothing but a scar in the forest and some squatters picking up their belongings.”
It was dark and cold, and the house may have withstood the rains, but the forest wasn't giving up. As we walked along the corridor and poked our heads into some of the rooms, Javier was constantly stooping down or reaching up to pull or cut a tendril of some plant. Many of the rooms had windows, but they were blocked by creepers, lined with webs, and some seemed full of leafless pale green arms dripping from the walls and ceilings. The place made me shiver.
“I’ve never been underneath,” said Javier. “But I wouldn’t be surprised to find that the stilts are gone, rotted away, and the whole building is sitting on a tangle of vines. I hope to move out soon, build somewhere a little more manageable. Here we are.”
We had reached a wall of unhewn stone that sparkled in the light of his lamp.
“Have you ever touched a mountain?” he said.
I reached out and placed a palm on the rock. Javier laughed. “It’s just stone,” he said. “It’s not magic. Let me show you the magic.”
To the right of what looked like a dead end was an elaborate screen, decorated with fantastical birds and insects and orchid-like plants, though these birds, insects and plants were being eaten by mould. Javier wrestled the screen aside.
“You know, my father died three years ago,” he said, “and I finally moved in here properly. But it took me three years to find this. He never mentioned it; I don’t think he even knew about it.”
It just looked like more rock to me. “About what?” I said.
Javier smiled. “Follow me.”
The first step was high, so high as to be unnatural, and he had to grab the mountain and heave himself up, but within moments he had vanished.
“You coming then?” he called back at me.
I followed. It was a bit of a struggle; my leg ached from running with the bull, and the way was tight and steep, the rocks slippery with moss, but I chased Javier’s heels, climbing, sometimes clambering, breathless, I’m not sure how far up, I would never know.
“So,” he said at last. “Here we are.”
He was lighting another paraffin lamp on a desk, a desk in a room lined with wood, with maps and books scattered everywhere, but the maps were of skies, and the books old. A spiral staircase rose into the roof.
“Much like you, Peter, faced with something new, I swore when I found it," said Javier as I crawled into the room, righting myself, standing. "I was drunk, of course. Why else would you climb up that way? I think there must have been a ladder at some point.”
There were frames on the walls, though whatever they had once depicted was now hidden by mildew, and books that had been left on the floor or propped up against the desk, left by a distracted reader, had crumbled. On the shelves they had fared a little better; I pulled out a heavy volume, some kind of text book filled with diagrams and equations that meant nothing to me, so I slipped it back onto the shelf, releasing a puff of spores. The floor had been carpeted, which is unusual in those parts, and impractical — it was mostly string now.
On the desk there was a photograph, the image of a young woman still visible.
“My grandmother, I suppose,” said Javier.
“She was pretty,” I said.
“But this is not all,” he said, climbing up the spiral staircase, throwing back another hatch, and vanishing once again. I followed. We’d brought no light, and so my eyes had to adjust again, but I could see we were in a dome, a telescope at its centre, a stool and a small table next to the scope. Javier wound a handle and the night sky opened up, the Milky Way even clearer here.
“I knew my grandfather was a strange old man, a bit of a hermit,” said Javier. “But to have built this, never to have told anybody, what was the purpose of that?”
I had no idea so I said nothing, and instead tried to look through the scope, but I couldn't see a thing.
"So, there must have been some purpose in this place," said Javier. "That's why you're here. Come.”
He climbed back down and I followed. He was standing at the desk, flicking through some leatherbound books.
“They’re ledgers,” he said. “I can understand most of it because it’s just names and numbers, amounts owed to him, interest, payments, but then there are places written in English, and in two different hands. Look.” He turned one of the books round so that I could read it. There was a distinct change in the writing; to start it was neat, small and measured, each line straight as a die, then the following paragraph would be scrawled, erratic, often scraping off the edge of the page.
“It looks like a dialogue,” said Javier. “Like he’s talking with someone.”
“His wife,” I said. “Your grandmother.”
He nodded. “Except this conversation continued thirty years after her death," he said, throwing one of the books onto the desk, a little dramatically, I thought.
“So what are they talking about?” I said.
“You tell me, güero, that’s why you’re here,” he said.
“You want me to translate them?” I said. “I could have done that in town, or you could have sent them anywhere. Why take me away from the shop, from Maria and Agustin and the kids?”
Javier shook his head. “No, they belong here,” he said. “I want to know what they said, every word. It's all I have now, my last hope. So give me every word."
It might have sounded like the speech of a desperate man, but he didn't look so desperate as he glared at me.
“OK, I'll start now.”
I began to pick the books up, but he stopped me.
“No, güero,” he said. “They stay here. You stay here, in the Astronomer’s Tower. I will bring you food, and you can use that hole for your toilet. I think that's what it is for.”
He pointed at a corner of the room. When I walked across to look at it, the room creaked and tilted slightly. I peered down into the small dark hole.
“Anyway, it's safer for you here,” said Javier, climbing back down the entrance and slamming the hatch shut. Despite the shakiness of the tower, I ran to the hatch and pulled on it with all my might, but it wouldn't budge. Clambering back up to the observatory, standing on the stool and then teetering on the table, I could see a few lights in the town, far below, but nothing else apart from the cloudless, shimmering sky. I had no exit except a small hole that led to darkness or a sky I couldn't reach.
There was paper and pen ready on the desk, and I drew the first of the journals toward me.
“Darling,” she began; she always began with darling. “Darling, I have not complained before of the way you treat me. But last night I asked if you would let me go about town sometime, perhaps to buy some vegetables or trinkets from the Indians, for much as I love this home you have built for me, and though, as you say, I could sleep each night in a different room, would that there were a cot or some such on which to sleep, and I would not have to visit the same room twice in one month, I do feel confined and wish to take the air a little. I understand when you say that a white woman like myself, being that I do not speak the language, not even Spanish let alone this native tongue, might not be safe among these people, who, as you say, still sacrifice God’s creatures at their altar, but I would wish for you to accompany me, and do not, as you say, wish to ‘flaunt my beauty and inflame the men’, this being the last thing on my mind…”
It went on like that for ages, and before I’d finished the first paragraph I was already tired. But when I picked up her photo, I could see the attraction, physically at least; her figure was curvy, with hips you would want to hold on to, breasts whose shape could not be hidden; she had poise, leaning slightly so that I imagined beneath those skirts the thighs slightly parted, one hip raised higher, one knee relaxed, and as she rested her hand on the back of a chair she stood by, she wore a small smile on her open, bright face, eyebrows raised a little, as though inviting the viewer to come sit down, let her run her fingers through his hair.
I placed the photo close to hand and continued to translate, more sympathetically perhaps, shallow as that may now seem, but I was missing home, had been for a long time, and she reminded me of someone I'd once known.
I was woken by the birds in the forest and the musty smell of the journal in my nostrils. Pissing into the small hatch, which was no less dark than at night, but through which I thought I could hear faint movements, I thought clearly about Alice for the first time in ages, though she was always there somewhere; if she had lived, would I have ended here, imprisoned in an Astronomer's Tower? Somehow I doubted it; somehow, I thought, I would have been behind a desk in a stifling office, staring at the wall for lack of window, gradually rotting inside, like this tower, this dead thing within a living forest.
Javier appeared, dragging a hamper up into the tower.
“I brought you some supplies,” he said, pulling the hamper to the middle of the room. It was full to the brim of hams and other meats, cheeses, olives and chillies in jars, packets of tortillas, fresh fruit, two bottles of dark rum and a bottle of tequila, some soft drinks, beer, all packed in ice.
“If you leave the lid on, the ice will keep a couple of days,” he said, taking the rum and tequila out of the hamper, and offering me two cartons of cigarettes.
“I gave up,” I said.
“Oh, never mind. Does that hurt?”
I touched the bandage on my cheek where I'd been cut. "No, not really," I said. "The stitches will come out in a few days."
"By themselves?"
I shrugged. "I suppose."
He looked at me doubtfully, so I rummaged through the hamper and made myself a sandwich while he sat at the desk and started to read what I’d translated.
“It’s mostly arguments,” I said. “She complains about being cooped up, and he goes on about her being an ungrateful bitch, and then they make up. She says 'darling you are to me brighter than the sun at its zenith, and I could no more live without you than the crops in the field could grow without that sun’s rays'.”
“Nice,” said Javier.
“He's not so romantic though," I said. "Look how he answers her: ‘Isabel, come now to my bed and I will plough that field and seed that crop!'”
"Not so nice."
“No,” I said. “He adds a little detail sometimes, like here.”
I pointed lower down the page and Javier recoiled slightly. “I see, well, keep going güero, there's something in there I need.”
“Maybe you could tell me what it is,” I said. “Then I could just read through it and tell you when I come across what you’re wanting.”
Javier stood. “No güero, you might miss something that I would see, or you might deceive me and try to hide the evidence. Then I would have to kill you, and that would get me into trouble."
He watched me for a moment, and then laughed. "Just my little joke," he said. "But seriously, get on with it.”
"What if I say no," I said. "What if I say fuck you I will not do it; open that door and let me out?"
He sighed. "Then I would reluctantly have to give you to that woman who's so keen to find you, güero. They talk about her in the village, you know. She has a fearsome reputation that's come here from as far as the coast. I don't know how you got messed up with her, but believe me, you are safest in this tower."
I worked hard, desperate that day to get at least one of those journals behind me, thinking that if I could, then within two weeks I would be on my way back down the mountain. But by the afternoon, having completed only about a quarter of the first journal, I was exhausted, and I was stiff from sitting at the desk all day. The sun was still high, and so I went up to the observatory, stripped off and lay on the table, and I thought about Isabel, and what life must have been like for her, for them both, with nothing but each other to feed from, and I imagined them feeding.
I woke feeling even stiffer. The sun was down but it had done its job of drying me out. Cold beer seemed to be the best remedy, and so I gingerly put my clothes back on and inched down to the tower to get some. Beer was followed by rum with cola, which was delicious and numbing, especially the second when I mixed the two about half and half. I don’t much remember the taste of the third, but it was around then that I spotted the cigarettes that Javier had left on the desk. One wouldn’t hurt, I thought, and it didn’t, but it did pick the room up and spin it on its axis so that I crashed heavily onto the floor, banging my head sharply and setting up a ringing in my ears. Even then the room wouldn't rest, like it was rolling silently down the mountain and I had to hang on to the floor. Maybe if there had been some dramatic crashing noises, something to make sense of the movement, it would have been better, less nauseating.
I managed to drag myself to the hole in the corner and let my head fall over the edge, so that most of the vomit spilled into the darkness, and after a small delay splashed on something below. I blinked at the void, sniffed the fetid air, and with a distinct wish in my head that I had someone around to stop me making these stupid mistakes, passed out.
The next morning, crouching over the same hatch, I realised that I had no paper. A few minutes later Javier arrived carrying two large bottles of water. He frowned at me.
"What happened to you?" he said.
"I caught the sun," I said. "And I fell over."
“But what happened to your shirt sleeve?”
I looked at my bare arm, as though I needed to remind myself. “I had no toilet paper,” I said.
Javier’s frown deepened. “You have a room full of old books,” he said. “Why tear up your clothes?”
I said nothing, just glugged at the water, and Javier sighed, sat down at the desk, and read my previous day’s work.
It was pretty much the same stuff — they argued, they had sex, he said a few words about what they'd been up to. She complained that after "taking his pleasure" he would climb up to his lair and "stare into the heavens"; he replied that "at least there is some peace in the firmament from your prattling".
Big mistake, she went on for ages about what a bastard he was, how "brutish and ignorant", and there wasn't much he could dispute, but he had a go anyway. Eventually, I suppose as these things do with people who love each other, it settled down and, from what I could gather, they spent a night together in the tower, staring at the stars between bouts of lovemaking. He ended with an unusually neat paragraph, describing her naked beauty, and how, when he caressed her "in certain places" her flesh was "softer to the touch than the dying petals of the marigold on the altars of the dead".
"Do you have a wife?" said Javier, sitting back in his chair with the look of a man ready to smoke a cigarette.
"No," I said. "There's Maria, but she's not my wife."
"But you… you know."
"Not really," I said.
He looked at me for a while, like he was trying to figure me out, and I felt a little embarrassed.
"Come, sit down," he said. "I'll take your stitches out."
I sat in the chair, gripping the arms, while he pulled up a stool, and sat down beside me. He took a small medical kit out of his pocket, removed my bandage and cleaned the wound with oxygenated water.
"Why do you think she did this?" he said, as he cut what was left of the stitches and drew them out with tweezers.
"I don't know," I said. "She doesn't like me for some reason."
"You must have done something to upset her," he said. "Taken something she cherished, rejected her."
"I suppose I didn't care," I said. "About her, I mean, or myself. It was the same if she was there, or she wasn't. I just didn't realise it at the time."
"That'll be it then," said Javier, dabbing at my cheek with cotton wool.
"There you go," he said. "Got to keep you healthy."
I felt my cheek. It was pretty smooth, despite the stubble, and there was no bleeding. "Thanks mate," I said.
Javier tilted his head to one side and looked at me with a twist of the mouth. He poured himself a glass of rum and picked up the photo of his grandmother, turning it toward the light of the lamp.
"It gets lonely up here," he said. "I'm not surprised my grandfather went off to find a wife. I think I'll do the same once this is resolved. Find someone and move out of this godforsaken place."
"I suppose this is your home, though," I said. "Something ties you here."
Javier sighed and downed his rum. "I'll tell you something sad, güero. I have been waiting up here, in this town, for nearly fifty years, so that I could inherit the wealth my father hoarded, or so I thought. As it turns out there was no wealth, just a small amount in the bank that keeps me barely alive, and this place and some deeds. I'm not equipped to do anything else except live off other people. So you see there's not much chance of me attracting someone with that kind of dowry."
"There seem to be plenty of women round here," I said. "You could work the land or something."
"Do I look like I know how to work the land?" he said. "Anyway, our family never mixed well with the locals. We own things, while they think they should."
"We?" I said.
"Well, me," he said. "I have the deeds, I have the land. But these bastards don't seem to care. They live on it anyway, they raise their offspring and grow their corn and chillies on it and don't pay me rent, and I don't have the money to drive them off. I need the money, güero. I need a stake to take back what belongs to me. Get back to work."
That day I stayed off the drink. The beer was warm anyway as the ice, left uncovered, had melted, and the smell of rum or tequila made my head spin. Instead of sleeping on the cot Javier had made up in the tower, I made a bed in the observatory, more like a nest, out of some of the softer looking books from the shelves, but with no alcohol in me I slept badly, flipping myself over constantly in the hope of getting comfortable, slipping in and out of dreams of forest creatures and bursting galaxies.
When I saw that the translation would take me more than a few days, I settled unhappily into a routine. Each morning I would wake, squat over the small hole, wash as best I could, and then sit down at the desk with whatever breakfast I had, chewing over the next passage.
Javier would visit, read what I had done, and give me my rations. Sometimes he stayed a while to talk, just everyday things, gossip from the town, things he would hear from a widow he would visit. She was a bit of an outsider herself, a mestizo, but she was close enough to the community to tell him how matters were being settled by the council, who was visiting the town, when meetings were going to be held and what was discussed.
"Is she your lover?" I said once, and he laughed.
"Oh no, güero," he said. "Not my type."
Mostly I didn't say anything and barely listened, impatient to be getting on with my task. After he'd gone, I would sit at the desk translating as long as my eyes could cope, then would climb up into the observatory with a bottle of spirits and some cigarettes. I would sit long into the night, carefully taking apart the telescope with some screwdrivers and wrenches I'd found in the desk drawers, working by the light of the paraffin lamp, dismantling, cleaning, examining in silence but for the forest chorus and random thoughts, until the telescope lay in bits on the floor of the observatory.
The main lens was the trickiest; it was pitted, green with mould where moisture had settled, and the axles and joints of the frame were stiff with rust. I ripped off my second sleeve and tore it into thin shreds that I dipped into the paraffin of the lamp, using the damp cloth to gradually wear away at the decay until every part shone in the light of the moon; because the moon was full now, and I'd lost count of the days.
When the time came I would straighten up, stretch my back, turn off the lamp and look up at the sky; it was the moon, the milky way and me, the red-orange glow of my cigarette bobbing awkwardly in the dark, the rum warming my throat.
Sometimes I would put the stool onto the table and climb up, holding my hands out for balance, in an attempt to see some form of civilization, some other life. I would even shout out, scream maybe, scream at the top of my voice though I'm not sure to where, but the forest does not echo, there were no answers, just the same few lights, mostly dark vegetation, mostly silence.
I had started to rebuild the telescope when Javier's grandmother died.
There was no warning. They were in the middle of an argument about disciplining their son when suddenly the argument stopped. On the next day's ledger there was an entry for funeral costs, and that was it.
"So she's dead," said Javier.
"Yes," I said. "I'm sorry. I was beginning to like her. I had a feeling that they were coming close to understanding each other, that it was more than just the sex that held them together, though the sex was getting inventive."
"You're here to translate, güero," he said. "Not to speculate on my grandparents' love life."
"There are no more entries for years," I said. "Then it's him writing for page after page."
A deep rumble rolled across the skies, and we both looked up, though there was nothing but ceiling to look up at.
"You'd better work quickly, güero, if you don't want to be stuck here until autumn."
There were no forest sounds that night, or all the next day, just a steady, low roar of rain on the observatory roof, a thick veil through the forest, up and down the mountain and across the town, drowning out all thought and all other sounds but for the dripping of water behind the walls and over the books and shelves.
I brought the telescope down to the relative dry of the tower, and settled in to the voice of Diego (I decided to call him that, though it was more likely to be Javier also) as he began to write about fifteen years after his wife's death.
For page after page, he spoke at first to himself and then to Isabel, remembered her physically inch by inch, with many scratchings out, many corrections as he attempted to tie her to the page, every curve, each toe and finger, down to the nail, the different textures of different parts of her body, each likened to the feel of some plant or other, crushed between finger and thumb. He filled almost a page attempting to describe her voice alone, used many adjectives and erased them all with angry strokes, then on a fresh page, all alone, wrote simply "Your Voice".
He began to recall the things that they had done together, horse rides in the great parks of Mexico City, travels along the coast and dining among the great and the good, their first kiss, their first frantic fumblings, and the later intimacies of their often violent sex life, everything in detail. He skirted around the arguments, the imprisonment in this house, and ended this long passage that must have taken me more than a week to translate with: "When you left, you took my life also."
There was silence for weeks, only the totting up of numbers, until I came across a page that was blank but for the words: "Talk to me".
Several more weeks, and again: "Talk to me".
And she did.
I was expecting it, of course, but when I turned the page and saw that cramped, straight style, I shivered and reached for the rum.
"Darling," she began, "I have missed you so long; you have been so far away from me. It fills me with joy to hear your voice."
And so their conversation began again. She said she couldn't describe where she was, but it was good; she asked him to talk about his own life, and he wrote down the details of his days; it was tedious stuff. The boy, Javier's father, was grown now and being educated in the city (soon he would return with a motherless child). Diego talked to no one except the men he interviewed on his veranda, loaning and collecting money. He complained about the local men, their moaning, their pleas for release from debt, how they claimed their children went hungry because of the interest he charged.
"I accumulate," he said. "But it does me no good; it obscures even my view of the stars."
"Aha!" said Javier. "You see, güero? He accumulates — it must be somewhere."
Javier had been away for two days and had come back carrying a pistol. He also had a bloodied bandage on his arm and seemed feverish. I was about to ask him about this, thought for a moment that I should clean his wound as he had mine, but then it occurred to me that he had no more right to this money than I did. If he had it, it would be used against these people, to drive them from the land and into deeper poverty. If I had it, though, it could take me home, let me start over, find what I'd been missing.
"Sit down," he said. "Continue."
"I'm tired," I said. "Let me have a rest. Let me go into the town and eat a hot meal or something."
"There'll be no hot meals, güero," he said.
Sometimes as Diego wrote, the page was smudged with soot, and always his writing became more erratic as the paragraphs wore on, as though he was tiring, or becoming drunk.
But her pages were never smudged, and her writing was always neat.
"We live in different worlds," she said. "I in the waking light of morning, you in the confusion of night, and yet our love spans the two, our souls bridge the gulf between us."
Javier read these passages coldly, frowning at the page.
"You old fool," he said.
As the years passed, they had less to say to each other, all shared experiences were raked over time and again, and there was nothing new in his life or her death that they could discuss. They began to play with fantasies, places they could go, pleasures they could share, but even for a man as delusional as him, it was hard to sustain.
"What do I gain from these dreams," he scrawled, "when each night to the end of my days I will sleep and wake without you?"
There was silence for some time after that, as though she was hurt, and he stubbornly waiting for some answer, until she said: "Come to me then."
"It is not my time."
"Your time is when you wish it to be."
"I have duties here," he said. "Our son has a child of his own now, they need me."
"Let the living feed themselves. They will have plenty to keep them."
The paper was soft, quite easy to tear out of the journal and leave no trace. I folded the page and stuffed it into my shirt, along with the photograph of Javier's grandmother. My head was buzzing with the possibilities. I could set up my own business, or do nothing at all; travel the world, get far away from Dolores and her knives, go back to the rain-filled streets of my home town, though right now more rain was not so appealing.
But most importantly, no one would ever know.
Javier sat at the desk, his head heavy in one hand, squinting at his grandfather's last words.
"All these years I have spoken for you," Diego said finally. "Imagined what you would say. Now the time has come to meet my maker and be at your side once more, but I am greatly troubled that I believe in neither thing."
The roar of the rain was softer on the roof now, but outside I could hear a river, a river that was tugging at the foundations of the building, making it creak and moan. Tears dripped from Javier's face onto the page.
"What a life wasted," he said. "Now there is nothing left at all."
I thought about running then; I could be down the hatch and out before he would even notice, he wouldn't be able to shoot because his hand was black and swollen, useless, the gun tucked into his left pocket, he was so weak.
"Do you know, Peter, I have never loved. I have slept with women. I have made and lost friends, but I have never loved."
Before he could even pull that gun out, I would be gone. It might be hard going, especially getting across the new river, but I would manage, soon heading toward the church.
"Only once, one night, when I was in college, I came close, but then I lost his friendship too."
"There's time," I said, while I should have been running. Javier's head rocked awkwardly in his hand.
"Not now. Your woman has killed me."
"She did the same to me," I said. "But I was cured. I was helped."
"There is no one to help me."
"I'll help you, look," I said, when I should have already been at the church, looking for the priest, someone duty bound to help me, instead of taking that page out, unfolding it in front of him.
"It's too late, Peter," he said. "Too late for me at least. But you must get out of here, get someone to take you through the forests, because she'll come looking for you, as soon as the roads are clear. She found me, but not this tower. Take the money and go." He looked up at me, his face puffed up and sweaty.
I shook my head. "I can't take it," I said. "I was tempted. But it's not mine."
"I mean what's in the telescope," he said. "That is your pay. The rest belongs to neither of us, I know now."
So he knew all along that the telescope was stuffed with banknotes. The notes were decades old, probably worthless, but I'd kept that from him too, kept everything from him in spite and greed, and now he was dead.
I dragged the telescope down, began to drop it down the hatch. Probably I should have done something with his body, but I don't know what, and in any case, the next thing I knew, he, I, and the Astronomer's Tower, were all tumbling down the mountain, a mad confusion of limbs and memories spinning, and the cherished image of a long dead, newly loved woman spinning in my mind.
Ray Hoskins
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