The Crossing(146)

Y entonces qué? said Billy.

He shook his head. As if the recollection of these things were a trial to him. Ultimately they had climbed out of the gorge and made their way out of the mountains as far as Sahuaripa and there they had waited until at last a truck came droning down the all but impassable road from Divisaderos and they rode in the bed of this truck for four days, sitting with shovels across their knees, shapeless with mud, climbing down times uncounted to dig and pitch in the muck like convicts while the driver shouted at them from the cab and then groaning on again. To Bacanora. To Tonichi. North again out of Nuri to San Nicolás and Yécora and on through the mountains to Temosachic and Madera where the man with whom they had first contracted would demand the return of the monies advanced them.

The gypsy pitched the stub of his cigarette into the fire and crossed his boots before him and drew them to him in his hands and sat leaning forward studying the flames. Billy asked him if the airplane had ever been found and he said that it had not for indeed there was nothing to find. Billy then asked him why they had returned to Madera at all and the man weighed this question. Finally he said that he did not believe that it was by chance that he had first met this man and been hired to go into the mountains nor was it chance that sent the rains and flooded the Papigochic. They sat. The tender of the pail rose a third time and stirred it and set it by to cool. Billy looked at the solemn faces about the fire. The bones beneath the olive skin. World wanderers. They squatted lightly there in that ring in the wood, at once vigilant and unconstrained. They stood in no proprietary relationship to anything, scarcely even to the space they occupied. Out of their anterior lives they had arrived at the same understanding as their fathers before them. That movement itself is a form of property. He looked at them and he said that the airplane they now freighted north along the road was then some other airplane.

The black eyes all shifted to the leader of their small clan. He sat for a long time. It was very quiet. Out on the road one of the oxen began to piss loudly. Finally he shaped his mouth and said that he believed that fate had intervened in the matter for its own good reasons. He said that fate might enter into the affairs of men in order to contravene them or set them at naught but to say that fate could deny the true and uphold the false would seem to be a contradictory view of things. To speak of a will in the world that ran counter to one’s own was one thing. To speak of such a will that ran counter to the truth was quite another, for then all was rendered senseless. Billy then asked him if it was his notion that the false plane had been swept away by God in order to single out the true and the gypsy said that it was not. When Billy said that he had understood him to say that it was God who had ultimately made the decision concerning the two planes the gypsy said that he believed that to be so but he did not believe that by this act God had spoken to anyone. He said that he was not a superstitious man. The gypsies heard this out and then turned to Billy to see how he would respond. Billy said that it seemed to him that the freighters did not hold the identity of the airplane to be of any great consequence but the guano only turned and studied him with those dark and troubled eyes. He said that it was indeed of consequence and that it was in fact the whole burden of their inquiry. From a certain perspective one might even hazard to say that the great trouble with the world was that that which survived was held in hard evidence as to past events. A false authority clung to what persisted, as if those artifacts of the past which had endured had done so by some act of their own will. Yet the witness could not survive the witnessing. In the world that came to be that which prevailed could never speak for that which perished but could only parade its own arrogance. It pretended symbol and summation of the vanished world but was neither. He said that in any case the past was little more than a dream and its force in the world greatly exaggerated. For the world was made new each day and it was only men’s clinging to its vanished husks that could make of that world one husk more.

La cáscara no es la cosa, he said. It looked the same. But it was not.

Y la tercera historic? said Billy.

La tercera historic, said the gypsy, es ésta. É1 existe en la historic de las historian. Es que ultimadamente la verdad no puede quedar en ningún otro lugar sino en el habla. He held his hands before him and looked at his palms. As if they may have been at some work not of his own doing. The past, he said, is always this argument between counterclaimants. Memories dim with age. There is no repository for our images. The loved ones who visit us in dreams are strangers. To even see aright is effort. We seek some witness but the world will not provide one. This is the third history. It is the history that each man makes alone out of what is left to him. Bits of wreckage. Some bones. The words of the dead. How make a world of this? How live in that world once made?