Strange, lying here in her bedroom, strange to be alive, strange that Caterina is dead ... stranger still is Angelina's coldness, her sorrow, her introversion ... what is it we say to one another, or don't say? What is it that heals us? Something for one, something else for another. She wouldn't like to care for me but she would like to look after a child. Strange sound the sea makes, strange what life is.
In a few days I'll be back at Petaca. I'll see her and she'll ask about my shoulder and I'll ask about the earthquake. There must be a way to change ourselves. Lucienne says there is no God. How does she know? Has she searched? She spends her time with her plants and her friends. Gabriel has said "God is." For him it's as simple as that. And I must talk to him, to change myself. Caterina didn't live for nothing. Her faith was real to her....
Lying alone in Lucienne's tiny servant's room (a room that had no furniture), Manuel saw his soul sitting in front of him, about three feet high, made of clay. He had often seen it. It had a bulging forehead, close cropped hair and scraggly beard. It spoke in an African tongue, faintly. He listened and tried to understand. Wasn't it repeating the same things? The voice rose. The soul seemed to grapple with something; it snuffed the air ... Manuel, breathing hard, turned restlessly on a dusty straw mat, woke and gazed about at the tiny room.
Up long before dawn, he washed in the sea, ate, talked with Lucienne about Raul's condition and then saddled his horse for Petaca.
Flashes of lightning streaked the gray sky and before he had ridden far it began to rain. He welcomed it, glad the stink of smoke and ash would vanish. A borrowed poncho wrapped around him, he felt warm and comfortable; he was sure none of Pedro's men would be out in the downpour. Passing a stone roadside cross, he thought of Ortiz and Gonzalez, dead in Lucienne's chapel. A man's luck gave out at the strangest moments. Raul's luck had died out yesterday. He would have to fight back....
Slashes of rain struck across the road and men on burros appeared out of the rain, the riders crouched under raincoats of palm, fibrous, soppy masses. Each man bore a hoe. The burros trotted wearily, heads down.
An embankment, gutted by years of erosion, led onto a bridge of sixteenth century red masonry, crumbling and narrow. In the center, on a limestone panel, a Humboldt had had a sonnet carved, before his sugar plantation had collapsed or before his mine had petered out in Jalisco. Empire builders, those Humboldts. Beyond the bridge, sweeping over fields, the rain rippled over sugar cane, breast high. Above, on a rocky hill, was the stone fence line of the Medina property, a great crooked L.
For Manuel, the green sweep of cane held a promise: he hoped for a few acres and felt that Raul would let him have them soon. Many men hoped for acres of their own. Pedro had promised land, if men sided with him, land he had never owned.
Ping of a muzzle-loader stirred a flock of duck from a Medina pond and a scrawny, lame man popped out of bushes and hailed Manuel, a duck slapping his leg.
"Cubo," said Manuel.