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She rode handsomely and she rode well, and in her, like a stone in a peach, was a peacefulness. She called to her husband as they slowed on a rise, "Berty!"
"Yes?"
"Can we..." she asked.
"Can we what?" he said, not hearing the first time.
"Can we come here again sometime?" she asked, nodding back toward the powerhouse. "Once in a while? Some Sunday?"
He looked at her and nodded slowly. "I reckon. Yes. Sure. I reckon so."
And as they rode on into town she was humming, humming a strange soft tune, and he glanced over and listened to it, and it was the sound you would expect to hear from sun-warmed railroad ties on a hot summer day when the air rises in a shimmer, flurried and whorling; a sound in one key, one pitch, rising a little, falling a little, humming, humming, but constant, peaceful, and wondrous to hear.
16
EN LA NOCHE
Copyright, 1952, by Fawcett Publications, Inc.
All night Mrs. Navarrez moaned, and these moans
filled the tenement like a fight turned on in every room so no one could sleep. All night she gnashed her white pillow and wrung her thin hands and cried, "My Joe!" The tenement people, at 3 A.M., finally discouraged that she would never shut her painted red mouth, arose, feeling warm and gritty, and dressed to take the trolley downtown to an all-night movie. There Roy Rogers chased bad men through veils of stale smoke and spoke dialogue above the soft snorings in the dark night theater.
By dawn Mrs. Navarrez was still sobbing and screaming.
During the day it was not so bad. Then the massed choir of babies crying here or there in the house added the saving grace of what was almost a harmony. There was also the chugging thunder of the washing machines on the tenement porch, and chenille-robed women standing on the flooded, soggy boards of the porch, talking their Mexican gossip rapidly. But now and again, above the shrill talk, the washing, the babies, one could hear Mrs. Navarrez like a radio tuned high. "My Joe, oh, my poor Joe!" she screamed.
Now, at twilight, the men arrived with the sweat of their work under their arms. Lolling in cool bathtubs all through the cooking tenement, they cursed and held their hands to their ears.
"Is she still at it!" they raged helplessly. One man even kicked her door. "Shut up, woman!" But this only made Mrs. Navarrez shriek louder. "Oh, ah! Joe, Joe!"
"Tonight we eat out!" said the men to their wives. All through the house, kitchen utensils were shelved and doors locked as men hurried their perfumed wives down the halls by their pale elbows.
Mr. Villanazul, unlocking his ancient, flaking door at midnight, closed his brown eyes and stood for a moment, swaying. His wife Tina stood beside him with their three sons and two daughters, one in arms.
"Oh God," whispered Mr. Villanazul. "Sweet Jesus, come down off the cross and silence that woman." They entered their dim little room and looked at the blue candlelight flickering under a lonely crucifix. Mr. Villanazul shook his head philosophically. "He is still on the cross."
They lay in their beds like burning barbecues, the summer night basting them with their own liquors. The house flamed with that ill woman's cry.
"I am stifled!" Mr. Villanazul fled through the tenement, downstairs to the front porch with his wife, leaving the children, who had the great and miraculous talent of sleeping through all things.
Dim figures occupied the front porch, a dozen quiet men crouched with cigarettes fuming and glowing in their brown fingers, women in chenille wrappers taking what there was of the summer-night wind. They moved like dream figures, like clothes dummies worked stiffly on wires and rollers. Their eyes were puffed and their tongues thick.
"Let us go to her room and strangle her," said one of the men.
"No, that would not be right," said a woman. "Let us throw her from the window."
Everyone laughed tiredly.
Mr. Villanazul stood blinking bewilderedly at all the people. His wife moved sluggishly beside him.
"You would think Joe was the only man in the world to join the Army," someone said irritably. "Mrs. Navarrez, pah! This Joe-husband of hers will peel potatoes; the safest man in the infantry!"
"Something must be done." Mr. Villanazul had spoken. He was startled at the hard firmness of his own voice. Everyone glanced at him.
"We can't go on another night," Mr. Villanazul continued bluntly.
"The more we pound her door, the more she cries," explained Mr. Gomez.
