Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [157]
If they eyed the ladies, so did one lady eye them. She saw everything and drew much of it; her sketchbooks, if they had been preserved, are something I would have cherished. All I know of them is that Thomas Hudson thought them superb and that Winslow Horner and Joseph Pennell both praised them. Even the two dozen woodcuts that were developed from the sketchbooks have great variety and spirit: Toluca with its sixteenth-century profile of bell towers, terraced roofs, tiled domes, and cypresses; Indian huts where women set out on cloths weighted with stones the pulque, tortillas, and fruit of roadside refreshment ; packmules and burros, old subjects from New Almaden; bullock carts with solid wooden wheels; sandaled Indians bent under hundred-pound bundles of camotes, or towers of pottery woven together with cords, or bales of matting; swineherds driving herds of black pigs and wearing capes made of dry corn leaves so that they looked and sounded like walking corn shocks. Somehow, staggering after dark to one of the bare rooms that inns provided, she managed to pause long enough to get sketches of arcades and courtyards. Rising at three, in total darkness, she stood in the corredor long enough to catch the scene below, where men brought out and harnessed the mules by torches of agave rope. dipped in pitch.
She had a heart as well as an eye, and they were sometimes at war. Patient Indian women with their babies slung in rebozos, men bowed under their burdens, looked to her like people waiting for their souls. A cathedral rising out of a huddle of huts, a ranch whose stone water-works seemed to her to rival those of Seville, made her ashamed of the delight she took in a picturesqueness created out of so much driven human labor. She saw a bullfight in Maravatio and was sickened by it, but got her sketches just the same.
At two o’clock in the morning, after twenty-three hours on the road, they crashed through the silent streets of Morelia, past what her fellow passengers murmured was San Pedro Park, and into the courtyard of the Hotel Michoacán. A sleepy mozo came out and took the mules, a sleepy maid smiled at them from the doorway, a tall man dressed in American business clothes met them in the lobby and presented his card: Don Gustavo Walkenhorst. Speaking English with a German accent and Spanish turns of phrase, and with a look in his pale pop eyes that asked them to observe how well he played the role of international grandee, at home anywhere and with anyone, he said that he had waited only to welcome them, not to dismay them with his company when they were–especially the señora–so tired. He had taken the liberty of ordering beds for them, and a light supper. Tomorrow, when they were rested, he begged permission to call on them. He and his dear dead wife’s sister, who kept his house, would be honored if Señor and Señora Ward would be their guests at Casa Walkenhorst during their stay. And now, with permission, he would take his leave. Until tomorrow. Sleep well. He hoped the room would be satisfactory. He had particularly specified that they were to have this poor hotel’s best.
He put his hat on his pomatumed hair and left them. The maid led them, Susan reeling and lightheaded with fatigue, to a vast room with a tile floor and a four-poster bed carved like an altar piece. The mozo brought their bags, the maid brought Don Gustavo’s light supper, which proved to contain cold chicken, cold ham, bread, cheese, strawberries, tacos filled with guacamole, oranges, tiny bananas, Puebla beer, and a bottle of cold white Graves. They sat and ate hungrily, smiling foolishly into each other’s faces as they gobbled, craning their necks to search the corners of their great room. Night blew in on them in soft gusts from the balcony’s open french doors.
“Well, Señora Ward,” Oliver said. “You look just a leetle done in.”
“I’m dead.” She had taken off her shoes, and her stockinged feet slid voluptuously on the cool tiles. The room, the food, the secret soft air from the balcony, were so coolly opulent after the wracking, jolting, dusty, baking diligence that she felt tearfully happy. One glass of wine had gone to her head. Half undressed, she lay down on the bed, propped with bolster and pillow, and let Oliver peel her an orange and fill her glass. The stem in her fingers was as fragile as a straw; the candles winked in the wine.