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‘They’re succeeding!’
I went for a walk around the block. It was a nice summer evening. Returning I glanced idly in their front door. The dark silence was there, and the heavy shapes, sitting, and the little blue light burning. I stood a long time, finishing my cigarette. It was only in turning to go that I saw him in the doorway, looking out with his bland, plump face. He didn’t move. He just stood there, watching me.
‘Evening,’ I said.
Silence. After a moment, he turned, moving away into the dark room.
In the morning, the little Mexican left the house at seven o’clock alone, hurrying down the alley, observing the same silence he kept in his rooms. She followed at eight o’clock, walking carefully, all lumpy under her dark coat, a black hat balanced on her frizzy, beauty parlour hair. They had gone to work this way, remote and silent, for yea
rs.
‘Where do they work?’ I asked, at breakfast.
‘He’s a blast furnaceman at U.S. Steel here. She sews in a dress loft somewhere.’
‘That’s hard work.’
I typed a few pages of my novel, read, idled, typed some more. At five in the afternoon I saw the little Mexican woman come home, unlock her door, hurry inside, hook the screen, and lock the door tight.
He arrived at six sharp, in a rush. Once on their back porch, however, he became infinitely patient. Quietly, raking his hand over the screen, lightly, like a fat mouse scrabbling, he waited. At last she let him in. I did not see their mouths move.
Not a sound during supper time. No frying. No rattle of dishes. Nothing.
I saw the small blue lamp go on.
‘That’s how he is,’ said my wife, ‘when he pays the rent. Raps so quietly I don’t hear. I just happen to glance out of the window and there he is. God knows how long he’s waited, standing, sort of “nibbling” at the door.’
Two nights later, on a beautiful July evening the little Mexican man came out on the back porch and looked at me, working in the garden and said, ‘You’re crazy!’ He turned to my wife. ‘You’re crazy, too!’ He waved his plump hand, quietly. ‘I don’t like you. Too much noise. I don’t like you. You’re crazy.’
He went back into his little house.
August, September, October, November. The ‘mice’, as we now referred to them, lay quietly in their dark nest. Once, my wife gave him some old magazines with his rent receipt. He accepted these politely, with a smile and a bow, but no word. An hour later she saw him put the magazines in the yard incinerator and strike a match.
The next day he paid the rent three months in advance, no doubt figuring that he would only have to see us up close once every twelve weeks. When I saw him on the street, he crossed quickly to the other side to greet an imaginary friend. She, similarly, ran by me, smiling wildly, bewildered, nodding. I never got nearer than twenty yards to her. If there was plumbing to be fixed in their house, they went silently forth on their own, not telling us, and brought back a plumber who worked, it seemed, with a flashlight.
‘God damnedest thing,’ he told me when I saw him in the alley. ‘Damn fool place there hasn’t got any light bulbs in the sockets. When I asked where they all were, damn it, they just smiled at me!’
I lay at night thinking about the little mice. Where were they from? Mexico, yes. What part? A farm, a small village, somewhere by a river? Certainly no city or town. But a place where there were stars and the normal lights and darknesses, the goings and comings of the moon and the sun they had known the better part of their lives. Yet here they were, far far away from home, in an impossible city, he sweating out the hell of blast furnaces all day, she bent to jittering needles in a sewing loft. They came home then to this block, through a loud city, avoided clanging street-cars and saloons that screamed like red parrots along their way. Through a million shriekings they ran back to their parlour, their blue light, their comfortable chairs, and their silence. I often thought of this. Late at night I felt if I put out my hand, in the dark of my own bedroom, I might feel adobe, and hear a cricket, and a river running by under the moon, and someone singing, softly, to a faint guitar.
Late one December evening the next door tenement burned. Flames roared at the sky, bricks fell in avalanches, and sparks littered the roof where the quiet mice lived.
I pounded their door.
‘Fire!’ I cried. ‘Fire!’
They sat motionless, in their blue-lighted room.
I pounded violently. ‘You hear? Fire!’
The fire engines arrived. They gushed water into the tenement. More bricks fell. Four of them smashed holes in the little house. I climbed to the roof, extinguished the small fires there and scrambled down, my face dirty and my hands cut. The door to the little house opened. The quiet little Mexican and his wife stood in the doorway, solid and unmoved.
‘Let me in!’ I cried. ‘There’s a hole in your roof; some sparks may have fallen in your bedroom!’
I pulled the door wide, pushed past them.
‘No!’ the little man grunted.
‘Ah!’ the little woman ran in a circle like a broken toy.
