Passage I

PROSE FICTION: This passage is adapted from the novel Stones for Ibarra by Harriet Doerr (@1984 by Harriet Doerr).

Here they are, two North Americans, a man and a woman just over and just under forty, come to spend their lives in Mexico and already lost as they travel cross-country over the central plateau. The driver of the station wagon is Richard Everton, a blue-eyed, black-haired stubborn man. On the seat beside him is his wife, Sara. She pictures the adobe house where they intend to sleep tonight. It is a mile and a half high on the out skirts of Ibarra, a declining village of one thousand souls. Tunneled into the mountain is the copper mine Richard’s grandfather abandoned fifty years ago during the Revolution of 1910.

Dark is coming on and, unless they find a road, night will trap at this desolate spot both the future operator of the Malaguena mine and the fair-haired unsuspecting future mistress of the adobe house. Sara Everton is anticipating their arrival at a place curtained and warm, though she knows the house has neither electricity nor furniture and, least of all, kindling beside the hearth. There is some doubt about running water in the pipes. The Malaguena mine, on the other hand, is flooded up to the second level.

“Let’s stop and ask the way,” says Sara. And they take a diagonal course across a cleared space of land. But the owner of this field is nowhere in sight.

“We won’t get to Ibarra before dark,” says Sara. “Do you think we’ll recognize the house?”

“Yes,” he says, and without speaking they separately recall a faded photograph of a wide, low structure with a long veranda in front. On the veranda is a hammock, and in the hammock is Richard’s grandmother, dressed in eyelet embroidery and holding a fluted fan.

Five days ago the Evertons left San Francisco in order to extend the family’s Mexican history and patch the present onto the past. To find out if there was still copper underground and how much of the rest of it was true, the width of the sky, the depth of the stars, the air like new wine. To weave chance and hope into a fabric that would clothe them as long as they lived.

Even their closest friends have failed to understand. “Call us when you get there,” they said. “Send a telegram.” But Ibarra lacks these services. “What will you do for light?” they were asked. And, “How long since someone lived in the house?” But this question collapsed of its own weight before a reply could be composed.

Every day for a month Richard has reminded Sara, “We mustn’t expect too much.” And each time his wife answered, “no.” But the Evertons expect too much. They have experienced the terrible persuasion of a great-aunt’s recollections and adopted them as their own. They have not considered that memories are like corks left out of bottles. They swell. They no longer fit.

Now here, lost in the Mexican interior, Richard and Sara remember the rock pick Richard’s grandfather gave him when he was six. His grandfather had used the pick himself to chip away copper ore from extrusions that coursed like exposed arteries down the slopes of the mountains.

“What does he know about mining?” Richard’s friends have asked one another. “What does she know about gasoline stoves? In case of burns, where will they find a doctor?” The friends learn that the Evertons are taking a first aid manual, antibiotics for dysentery, and a snakebite kit. There are other questions relating to symphony season tickets, Christmas, golf, sailing. To these, the answers are evasive.

A farmer, leading a burro, approaches the car from behind. He regards the two Americans. “You are not on the road to Ibarra,” he says. “Permit me a moment,” And he gazes first at his feet, then at the mountains, then at their luggage. “You must drive north on that dry arroyo for two kilometers and turn left when you reach a road. You will recognize it by the tire tracks of the morning bus unless rain has fallen. But this is the dry season.”

“Without a tail wind we won’t be bothered by the dust.” says Richard, and turns north.

He is mistaken. The arroyo is smooth and soft with dust that, even in still air, spins from the car’s wheels and sifts through sealed surfaces, the flooring, the dashboard, the factory-tested weather stripping. It etches black lines on their palms, sands their skin, powders their lashes, and deposits a bitter taste on their tongues.

“This must be the wrong way,” says Sara, from under the sweater she has pulled over her head.

Richard says nothing. He knows it is the right way, as right as a way to Ibarra can be, as right as his decision to reopen an idle mine and bring his wife to a house built half of nostalgia and half of clay.