"Here I see no killings. It's quiet. I can rest. The Sisters are nice to me."
One hand shaking, she reached out and seemed to pat something. Then, with a sharp cry, she got up, swayed, and fled into the hospital, her yellow skirt fluttering.
20
Back in Colima, Raul and Lucienne took Vicente to his school, where his friends swarmed about him, asking him if it was really true that the revolutionists had taken pot shots at his train as he came from Guadalajara. How he enjoyed being back, gabbling! Raul and Lucienne watched him for a while from the school gate, then walked away.
The sun made a tropical wad of itself and Lucienne and Raul kept on the shady side of the street, where breadfruit and coco palms made walking comfortable. A water cart rocked slowly by, pulled by a donkey.... The sloshing water added to the coolness of the shade. A pleasant street, it curved in a long curve toward the center of town, little homes on both sides with a tree now and then, like a jack-in-the-box, popping out of some patio or garden.
Lucienne wore freshly starched white, loose at the waist and shoulders, and carried a pink, blue-lined parasol. She was bareheaded and he was bareheaded. His white clothes had been made by a poor hacienda tailor, and had had the freshness taken out of them, but he, too, looked comfortable, part of the tropical town.
At La Lonja they decided to have something cool to drink and went inside, through a low, arched doorway. La Lonja had been the seventeenth century home of a French merchant. In the center of the grassy patio stood an ugly statue of a sans-culotte woman, chipped and beaten, discolored by bird droppings, yet wonderfully alive, rising up valiantly out of a huddle of bougainvillaea and honeysuckle.
There were quite a number of Colimans at the tile-topped tables, in the shade of a high wall. Someone greeted Raul, as he and Lucienne walked to the back, away from everyone, and farther from the biting sun.
Raul wiped his forehead.