Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [172]
This afternoon I shall know more about the possibilities. Emelita tells me of the house of the town advocate–I believe there is only one–who is in Germany seeking relief for his gout. It is a small house, only twelve rooms! She will have Ysabel drive us past when we take our airing.
I can’t tell you whether I hope it will suit or not, whether I want to stay or not. But I believe I do. I miss my little Ollie, of whom we have not heard since we sailed. I know he is safer with Mother and Bessie than he would be with me, but I wish we had him here just the same. After all that sickness in Leadville, and all the moving he has done in his short life, he deserves a safe home.
More later. I hear Ysabel bringing out the mules.
Next day. I have seen the house–white stucco around a central patio, with a white wall around it all, and a bougainvillea swarming over the wall. Very definitely it will do. The rooms are good, and the arrangement of square within square, a wall around the house and the house around a court, will let us live as we please. It is very near the park, so that the three of us could ride there together, assuming that I can ride without shocking the citizens. Oliver will not mind, I know. He has a way of walking through conventions of that kind as if they did not exist, and being so much himself that pretty soon people begin adapting themselves to him.
Even when he is at the mine, which he will surely have to be half the time, Ollie and I might ride, accompanied by some Rubio or Bonifacio, once we had accustomed people to our irregularities. It gives me a delightful sense of wickedness to contemplate it, though I wouldn’t think of being so cavalier with the proprieties at home.
I think it will do, I honestly think it will. You and Thomas can visit us here, instead of at that lighthouse on the Pacific to which I once confidently invited you. Morelia isn’t Paris, but it is gorgeously picturesque. Much of it is made of a soft pink stone that in certain lights, or when wetted by a shower, glows almost rose. I think you would find subjects for your brush, as I find them for my pencil, on every corner.
Today, as we were returning from looking at the house, we passed the market, which I had never seen. It was thronging with Indians, the men in white pyjamas, the women with their heads and infants wrapped in rebozos, the children often in nothing at all except a little shirt. And the things spread out there on the ground, under the matting roofs! Oranges, lemons, watermelons, little baby bananas, camotes (sweet potatoes), ears of their funny particolored corn, strange fruits, strange vegetables, chickens hanging by the legs like so many bouquets of Everlasting drying in an attic. Turkeys, pigs, beans, onions, vast fields of pottery and baskets, booths where were sold tortillas and pulque and mysterious sweets and coarse sugar like cracked corn. Such a colorful jumble, such a hum of life, such bright hand-woven cottons and embroidered chemises! Over one side soared the arches of the aqueduct, and in the center was a fountain from which girls were drawing water, gathered around its bright splashing as bright as flowers. (In this place, the poor look like flowers, the rich like mourners–at least the women.)
I cried out at once that I must come and draw it in the morning, when the sun would be on the other side of the aqueduct and would throw its looped shadow across the market, and give me a chance to hold down the boil of all that human activity with some architectural weight. I asked Emelita if I could be spared Soledad or Concepción, to accompany me for a couple of hours. She never quivered. Of course. ¿Como no?