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‘Oh. Yes.’ He fell silent for a moment and then sighed. ‘Well. Never mind the gas. Is there a bus out of here for the Capital soon?’
‘All will be attended to, in time,’ said the Manager nervously. ‘This way.’
As they were climbing the stairs they heard a noise. Looking out they saw their car riding around and around the plaza, eight times, loaded with men who were shouting and singing and hanging on to the front fenders, laughing. Children and dogs ran after the car.
‘I would like to own a car like that,’ said Señor Esposa.
He poured a little cool wine for the three of them, standing in the room on the third floor of the Esposa Hotel.
‘To “change”,’ said Señor Esposa.
‘I’ll drink to that.’
They drank. señor Esposa licked his lips and wiped them on his coat sleeve. ‘We are always surprised and saddened to see the world change. It is insane, they have run out on us, you say. It is unbelievable. And now, well – You are safe for the night. Shower and have a good supper. I won’t be able to keep you more than one night, to repay you for your kindness to me five years ago.’
‘And tomorrow?’
‘Tomorrow? Do not take any bus to the Capital, please. There are riots in the streets there. A few people from the North have been killed. It is nothing. It will pass in a few days. But you must be careful until those few days pass and the blood cools. There are many wicked people taking advantage of this day, señor. For forty-eight hours anyway, under the guise of a great resurgence of nationalism, these people will try to gain power. Selfishness and patriotism, señor; today I cannot tell one from the other. So – you must hide. That is a problem. The town will know you are here in another few hours. This might be dangerous to my hotel. I cannot say.’
‘We understand. It’s good of you to help this much.’
‘If you need any thing, call me.’ Señor Esposa drank the rest of die wine in his glass. ‘Finish the bottle,’ he said.
The fireworks began at nine that evening. First one skyrocket then another soared into the dark sky and burst out upon the winds, building architectures of flame. Each skyrocket, at the top of its ride, cracked open and let out a formation of streamers in red and white flame that made something like the dome of a beautiful cathedral.
Leonora and John Webb stood by the open window in their unlit room, watching and listening. As the hour latened, more people streamed into town from every road and path and began to roam, arm in arm, around the plaza, singing, barking like dogs, crowing like roosters, and then falling down on the tile sidewalks, sitting there, laughing, their heads thrown back, while the skyrockets burst explosive colours on the tilted faces. A brass band began to thump and wheeze.
‘So here we are,’ said John Webb, ‘after a few hundred years of living high. So this is what’s left of our white supremacy – you and I in a dark room in a hotel three hundred miles inside a celebrating country.’
‘You’ve got to see their side of it.’
‘Oh, I’ve seen it ever since I was that high. In a way, I’m glad they’re happy. God knows they’ve waited long enough to be. But I wonder how long that happiness will last. Now that the scapegoat is gone, who will they blame for oppression, who will be handy and as obvious and as guilty as you and I and the man who lived in this room before us?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘We were so convenient. The man who rented this room last month, he was convenient, he stood out. He made loud jokes about the natives’ siestas. He refused to learn even a smattering of Spanish. Let them learn English, by God, and speak like men, he said. And he drank too much and whored too much with this country’s women.’ He broke off and moved back from the window. He stared at the room.
The furniture, he thought. Where he put his dirty shoes upon the sofa, where he burnt holes in the carpet with cigarettes; the wet spot on the wall near the bed, God knows what or how he did that. The chairs scarred and kicked. It wasn’t his hotel or his room; it was borrowed, it meant nothing. So this son-of-a-bitch went around the country for the past one hundred years, a travelling commercial, a Chamber of Commerce, and now here we are, enough like him to be his brother and sister, and there they are down there on the night of the Butler’s Ball. They don’t know, or if they know they won’t think of it, that tomorrow they’ll be just as poor, just as oppressed as ever, that the whole machine will have shifted only into another gear.
Now the band had stopped playing below; a man had leaped up, shouting, on the bandstand. There was a flash of machetes in the air and the brown gleam of half-naked bodies.
The man on the bandstand faced the hotel and looked up at the dark room where John and Leonora Webb now stood back out of the intermittent flares.
The man shouted.
‘What does he say?’ asked Leonora.
John Webb translated: ‘“It is now a free world,” he says.’
The man yelled.
John Webb translated again. ‘He says, “We are free!”’
The man lifted himself on his toes and made a motion of breaking manacles. ‘He says, “No one owns us, no one in all the world.”’
The crowd roared and the band began to play, and while it was playing, the man on the bandstand stood glaring up at the room window, with all of the hatred of the universe in his eyes.
During the night there were fights and pummellings and voices lifted, arguments and shots fired. John Webb lay awake and heard the voice of Señor Esposa below, reasoning, talking quietly, firmly. And then the fading away of the tumult, the last rockets in the sky, the last breakings of bottles on the cobbles.
