Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [164]
A little later they stepped out onto the balcony and looked over the silent city. Two street lamps, lemon yellow, pooled their light and shadow on the rough stones of the street. Across dark trees there was a ghostly intimation of bell towers. From one of them a great bell spoke once, a sound as single and heavy as the sound of a drop falling from an overburdened leaf. It gathered itself and spoke again, gathered again and spoke a third time.
Shivering, Susan crawled in under Oliver’s arm. “Oh!” she said. “I have never been anywhere till now!”
2
In her dream she moved with some great procession bearing banners and saints’ images through streets that hummed with the bronze of bells, and woke, and felt the last vibrations from the church tower in the Plaza of the Martyrs quiver through the room and break in soft shock waves against the inner court of the Casa Walkenhorst. As if summoned, the two young bloodhounds chained in the court woke and bayed, a sound that went down her spine. Instantly, harsh and challenging, Don Gustavo’s gamecocks crowed from their gallery above the rear court, and when they left off she heard the voices of doves, soft and heavy as droppings, falling from the high window ledges. On the other side, through the shutters, the growing, shut-out, disregarded sounds of day were beginning out in the square.
Beside her, Oliver slept with his face deep in the coarse linen of the pillowcase. She slipped out of bed and put on her dressing gown and carefully, not to creak the hinges, went out into the corredor to watch the Casa Walkenhorst come awake.
The corredor was an open arcade that went around all four sides of the court, one story up. Twenty rooms opened off it, but of all those doors only hers was open. Through vine-wreathed arches she looked down into the court pillared like a church crypt, clean and empty in the gray light except for the hounds that surged against their chains in frenzied greeting of something underneath Susan, where the stables were. The gateway into the rear court framed the corner of a sunny corral, a stone watertank, bamboos from whose arrowy leaves shadows shook across the pavement. The sun intruded in a sharp, early triangle four or five feet into the main court.
Now Ysabel, the coachman, came into view below her, leading a string of two white mules and three horses. Their shoes clashed on the paving stones, the hounds stood up on their hind legs and leaned choking against their collars. Their ears hung down beside their sad faces, their tails went wild. Ysabel led his string past them through the gate and into the sharp new sunshine, and they crowded to dip their noses and suck up water from the tank. While they drank, Ysabel came back and released the dogs, which went around with their noses to the ground and now and then anointed a pillar or corner. Then Ysabel sat down on the coping of the tank and smoked a cigarette with the shadows of bamboo leaves flickering over him, but by the time she thought of her sketch pad he had risen and was leading the horses and mules back through the court and under her, out of sight.
Then the air was full of wings, the doves came down out of the sunny blue like angels in a painting, and she saw old Ascenci6n, in black trousers and white jacket and scarlet sash, scattering grain down in the kitchen corner of the court. He left the doves pecking and labored up the stairs with a heavy water jar on his shoulder; and, sandals shuffling, went along the corredor tilting a quart or two of water into each flower pot. When he came to the corner opposite Susan he lifted the hood off the parrot’s cage, and the parrot, as if being electrocuted, shrieked, “Enrique, mi alma! Enrique, mi alma!” Ascención watered the last pot, set down his jar, picked up from the corner a short broom like a bundle of twigs, and backed away down the opposite corredor, sweeping.
Down in the court a white poodle had joined the bloodhounds. A maid, Soledad, came out of the kitchen and sloshed water around on the stones. The dogs