When the Owl Cries Part 14

"I put it in there. She wanted to ... I had promised it to her." She did not care whether they understood her.

She wondered if anyone realized the courage it had taken to come here.

Was Angelina defiant? Was she terribly bitter? Her face, so forlorn, had filled her with compa.s.sion. She should never have come to Petaca ... her city friends meant so much to her.

Neither man spoke; it was not for them to comment. Manuel admired Lucienne for her love of Raul and her affection for Caterina, and he appreciated the hundreds of kindnesses she had shown him through the years. They had been friends since her girlhood. Her beauty filled him with pleasure. Noticing her black dress, he recalled her recent return from Europe, the hatboxes, suitcases full of gowns and high-heeled shoes ... things she had forgotten for her garden. Anyone who appreciated plants and flowers as much as she appreciated them had a place in his heart.

Raul found Lucienne by Caterina's grave, and her black clothes startled him. They shook hands, their eyes lowered; he could not bring himself to look at her; he had merely glimpsed her at the chapel service.

"I'm sorry you lost her, Raul," she said.

"A lovely girl," he said, as if he had memorized the words.

"Such a dear child. I loved her."

"She wants you to have Mona," he said.

"Mona, her little dog?" she asked, hoping that a few words, any words, might lessen his strain. Such a sad, dark face.

Palm fronds laddered the s.p.a.ce behind her.

"You taught her to collect plants and b.u.t.terflies."

"Did I?"

"Now G.o.d has taken her...."

"I wish I thought so, Raul."

"Don't say that," he objected.

"You know how I feel, you know what I believe. I can't lie, even at this time." The gentleness of her speech took away its offense. "I wish I could believe in immortality. It would be my comfort too, you know. I need that comfort."

Raul fingered his pipe in his pocket. It was not often he resented Lucienne's Teutonic independence, her foreignness, her atheism.

Glancing beyond her, he felt the sorrow of his friend Manuel, expressed in his face, stooped shoulders, and bowed head. He looked at the raw burial place, the palms with their tattered greens and browns, fronds over the headstones and markers in this family plot. A mound of vines hid his grandfather's stone, and the same vines in exuberance scrambled toward the newly upturned earth that would cover Caterina. Raul determined to have the cemetery cleaned and properly tended: by the end of the week the graves should be cleared and reornamented with sh.e.l.ls.

Men were approaching, carrying Don Fernando, who had refused to attend chapel service but who had demanded to be brought to the grave. The men stumbled over roots; Fernando cried out; lizards fled under vines; birds soared away.

The Radziwills and de Selvas walked together and Father Gabriel and Angelina followed; then the peasants, like white ants, sifted through the grove. Vicente, ashamed of himself, had hidden in the stable.

They were a courageous-looking lot. The sunburned _hacendados_ had the bodies of people who live outdoors, for even the asthmatic Count had been a stockman. The powdered women stood out among the peasants who needed only a feather or two to put them back a thousand years. Fine faces, buck faces, pretty girls, hags with tortilla cheeks, all gazed with sympathy at the grave of the child.

A bright cloud hung over the group, its shadow twisting toward the slope of the volcano. Shadows flecked the grove, the bent heads, the casket and its wilting flowers; other shadows fled across fields where oxen grazed. Gabriel said a few words and prayed and Angelina wept, clinging to Raul's arm, hating his black, hating Lucienne. She longed to return to her room and hide her grief, to be away from Lucienne's auburn hair, her placid face. Had she never known tragedy? Why had she come? Not out of respect! No, no ... to see Raul, to bribe him away, to laugh at her sorrow ... let me go, Raul. I'll go back alone!

Slowly, everyone began to leave the grove.

Raul thought himself the only one left, and then he saw his father in his chair among the trees. A great iguana peered at him from a palm immediately behind: its iridescent greenish head and dark eyes faced the ground, the tongue licked out. Click, click, ssh, ssh, said the blackbirds.

"Shall I call the men to carry you?" asked Raul.

"No," growled Fernando. "I told them to leave me here."

A flock of parrots fanned through the wood, loros, with red on their shoulders, yellow daubs on their beaks.

"My wife's gravestone is the parrots' roosting place," said Fernando.

"She gave up her fight too soon. They'll not dump their excrement on my grave any sooner than I can help it."

Raul kicked at a sc.r.a.p of palm and admired his courage.

"Death is for fools," the old man spluttered.

"Then we're all due to be fools," Raul said.

"Light a cigarette for me."

Raul's wax taper flared and dropped among the fronds and and gra.s.s.

"Caterina was no fool," Fernando retracted. "But you shouldn't have buried her in her scarlet dress."

"What would you have liked?"

"That doesn't matter."

"Your men have come to carry you."

"Let them wait. I came to sit and think. I'm old enough to sit and think. Over there is Pepe. He called himself 'The Tiger.' Under that crooked palm is Mama; I was glad to see her go because she never had a well day. There's Papa--the man I murdered. He'll be glad to see me go." The old man's voice was blown by the wind. "I counted them one day last year ... quite a lot of them buried there. The jungle has us under its vines and lianas and rot...."

"I'll have this place cleaned next week."

Fernando guffawed.

"You'll have it cleaned. What for? Can you keep back the jungle? Are you thinking of Caterina? The jungle has her already. This palmera stretches all the way to the Pacific. You can't stop it, boy....

Neither can you change the hacienda."

"I can try."

"I'll stop you whenever I can. I've decided to have a special chair constructed. In my chair I can look after the hacienda."

"No, Father. Your day is past. It's my job!"

Fernando spat. "You and your radical ways. G.o.d, you can't run this place!"

"Why not?"

"Everyone will laugh at you."

In the tree behind Fernando, the iguana decided to climb higher, its head waggling, tongue forking.

"That's the least of my worries. I'm thinking about the people and their chance to live as men ought to live."