PeRdido
PeRdido
Rick Collignon
This is a work of fi ction. The names, characters, places andincidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or areused fi ctitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead,business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Unbridled Books
Copyright © 1997 by Rick Collignon
Originally published in hardcover by MacMurrary & Beck, Inc.
First Unbridled Books trade paperback edition, 2010
Unbridled Books trade paperback ISBN 978-1-60953-028-0
All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may notbe reproduced in any form without permission.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataCollignon, Rick, 1948–
Perdido : a novel / Rick Collignon.
p. cm.
ISBN 1-878448-76-5
I. Title.
PS3553.0474675P4 1997
813'.54—dc21
96-53857
CIP
Printed in the United States of America
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
To Octaviana Esquibel
Prologue
“THE NIGGER CAME TO Guadalupe in the summer of the year 1946,” Telesfor Ruiz said. It was hot and dry, and the rains that came each summer to Guadalupe and moved black with speed over the valley had not yet arrived. The fields were wet only with water from the ditches, which ran full from the heavy snows the winter before.
He came to Guadalupe from the south. The road was not paved then, and in the spring, when the ground thawed, it was not a road at all but only mud. On that day in July, with no rain, the man walked loosely on the hard-packed adobe, as though that were all he had ever done. He was tall and thin and carried a worn canvas bag over his shoulder. His dark clothes were baggy on his frame and too heavy for the season. The face shadowed beneath his cap was weathered and thick featured. He stared at the ground as he walked, as if he thought it might have something to say, although he was no longer interested in what that might be. At times, he would swing the bag off his shoulder and carry it in his right hand, as he was doing when the first person in Guadalupe saw him—a young boy named Gilfredo Vigil, who was in a field throwing rocks at his grandfather’s cows. Gilfredo could see that this man’s right arm hung four inches longer than his left and that the skin of his face and hands was black.
Telesfor Ruiz told Will that he remembered the year the nigger came because it was also the year Eduardo Muñoz froze to death near the church and wasn’t found until the snow melted in the spring. Eduardo, an old man whose mind had always been like that of a child, lived with his sister. Each morning, Eduardo would walk the long distance from his sister’s house to Felix’s Café. There, he would sit, drinking coffee by himself, talking to no one, and look out the window at the village. After three cups of coffee, he would rise hurriedly from the table, as though he had heard a voice, and return home. Sometimes, if the café was quiet, Felix García would watch the old man walk down the hill into the valley. Eduardo would walk with his head bent, his arms stiff at his sides, but for an old man, he walked quickly with a purpose no one understood.
On the day Eduardo froze to death, the wind blew harshly from the north. Eduardo stood at the window in his sister’s house dressed in rubber boots, watching the January wind blow the snow sideways. He could feel it touch the back of his hand as it came through the cracks around the frame of the glass. When his sister, Lucinda, came from bed an hour later, she found her house empty. By then, her older brother was already dead.
When Eduardo reached the church, only a few hundred yards from Felix’s Café, his face was burnt red from the wind and his ears were the color of chalk. Although Eduardo’s feet still moved, he was walking in place. The wind inside his clothes pressed on his chest, and his body felt as though it had been taken with fever. He took off his coat and shirt, pulled off his boots, and sat down in the snow. Before him, he could see hundreds of small birds the color of the snow. Each one made a noise just louder than the wind. Eduardo watched them as they hopped onto his legs and sat on his bare feet and crowded together in his lap. After a while, he lay gently on his side, careful not to crush them. He closed his eyes and thought that the sound of these birds was something he had heard before.
Eduardo lay lost in the snow for almost two months. One night in early March, when the weather that winter had finally broken, Father Jerome was returning to the church after visiting Guadalupita García. Guadalupita had been near death for three years and had spent that time praying incessantly in a language not even she knew and summoning the priest to her home. There, Father Jerome would sit by her bed, staring at the white adobe wall and wondering when this old woman, who spoke such strange words, would die and leave him in peace. As he neared the church, he stumbled off the path and into the snow. When he looked up, he saw in the moonlight the half-naked body of Eduardo Munoz, curled about itself. The old man’s eyes were closed, and on his face was a smile.
It was the summer of that year, Telesfor Ruiz told Will, that the nigger came to Guadalupe.
He stayed in Guadalupe for seven years. On the day he arrived, he walked through the village without a glance about him, and just past Felix’s Café he suddenly cut off the road, through the fields to a house near the base of the foothills that had sat empty for more than twenty years. Gilfredo Vigil, distracted from throwing stones at his grandfather’s cows, had followed the stranger through the village, trailing far behind as if this man were an animal that he had never seen before and he were unsure whether it could be trusted. Gilfredo stood in the sagebrush and watched the man push open the door of the house and then lower his head and walk inside. Soon after, Gilfredo saw smoke coming from the stovepipe. Only eleven years old and living with too many older sisters, he thought that this village, which had always been the same to him, had changed in a moment.
The nigger’s name was Madewell Brown, and he moved into the house that had once belonged to Antonio Montoya, who had long ago left the village. No one in Guadalupe knew how Madewell had come to choose this house, and since he kept to himself and also because most people were uneasy in his presence, this was a question never asked. He lived there as though it were his.
Horacio Medina, who owned many head of cattle and much of the better pasture land in Guadalupe, was the only person to try to start trouble with Madewell Brown. He went to Tito’s bar one night in August and bought whiskey for everyone, a thing he was never known to do. Then he said that this village was not a place for someone, especially a nigger, who had appeared from nowhere and moved into the Montoya house as if he owned it, which he didn’t. Horacio bought some more whiskey and said that what they should do was walk to Madewell Brown’s house and show him what was what.
Alfonso Vigil, who had been in the bar since the day before celebrating the birth of his fourteenth granddaughter, raised his head and in a voice like gravel and with eyes that had turned bleary and red said that if anyone’s house should be burned, it should be Horacio Medina’s, as it was he who had cheated the people of Guadalupe whenever given the opportunity. And besides, Alfonso went on, it was too late in the evening to go to the nigger’s house; they would only disturb him.
In the years that Madewell Brown lived in Guadalupe, the only person to come to know him at all was Felix García. On the first of every month, before dawn, Madewell would walk to the back door of the café and Felix would sell him beans and flour and meat. As Felix too was a man who kept to himself, much of their dealings were done in silence. But on days when the weather was poor, Made-well would duck his head and step inside. Felix would look at this man and wonder how someone like him had come to this place.
Madewell