I fell in love with a Mexican girl

The hill stood above the town beneath a sky already going dark, and below it I could see the little lamps kindling one by one along the street, each one wavering in the dust as though the town were full of candles set out for the dead. I knew the cantina before I could see it, knew the low roof and the rear door and the yellow square of its windows, and I knew that she was somewhere within that light because I had carried her there with me through seven years of desert and winter and cattle country and nameless towns where men drank without ever asking what another man had done before he came among them.

Seven years.

I had counted them at first, then stopped counting, because the years had ceased to be separate things and become instead one long night through which I rode with the sound of that pistol still somewhere behind me, and the face of the young man I had killed appearing whenever I closed my eyes, not accusing me, which would have been easier, but merely looking at me with the astonishment of a man who has discovered too late that another man’s jealousy could devour the whole of his remaining life.

I remember him as young because he was young, though perhaps he was no younger than I was, and perhaps it was only that the dead remain forever at the age in which we killed them. He came into Rosa’s laughing, with the dust of the trail upon his boots and the easy smile of a man who believed the world was still something that could be entered without permission. He drank with Felina. He put his hand upon the table beside hers. He spoke to her as though she belonged to him, though she belonged to nobody, and I knew that even then, if I had been wiser, I knew that she belonged to nobody, not to me and not to him and not to any man who might have wished to carry her away beneath the stars. But I was not wise. I was a young man who had mistaken wanting for righteousness, and when he laughed I heard an insult in it, and when he touched her hand I saw theft, and when he looked at me I saw a challenge though perhaps there had been none.

I remember standing. I remember the room growing strangely still. I remember my hand moving toward the pistol. Involuntarily, as if I had lost control of my very fingers. Yet sometimes, in the long watches of those years, I have remembered it differently: sometimes I am still sitting at the table and the stranger is laughing and Felina is turning toward me with those eyes of hers, blacker than night, and I know that if I remain seated the whole world will be spared what followed. Sometimes I sit there for hours. Sometimes for years. Sometimes I believe I am still sitting there now.

But I did not remain seated.

The guns came out almost together and there was a flash and a sound that seemed too small for what it had done. The young man fell backward and struck the floor, and I remember the way one of his boots turned inward beneath him, as though even in death he were trying to stand. Nobody moved. The music had stopped. I looked at him and then at the pistol in my hand and I understood, though not all at once, that there are acts from which a man does not walk away. I ran because I was afraid, but even then I think some part of me understood that I was not running away from the town. I was running away from the man who had stood in that room and drawn the gun.

I ran through the rear door, found a horse beneath the stars, and rode south until the town disappeared, and for a while I believed that if I could only put enough country between myself and that room the thing would become smaller. But the country only became larger. The desert has a way of making every man’s secret enormous.

For seven years I rode.

I rode beneath moons that seemed to follow me. I rode through rain that came suddenly and vanished before the earth could drink it. I worked cattle for men who knew me by another name. I slept beside fires with strangers whose faces I never learned. I saw men die, and I saw men kill, and I learned that there are a thousand reasons for killing and that none of them matter afterward. Yet always, when night came and the fire burned down, I saw Felina. Not as she had been when I left her, but as memory had remade her: sometimes younger than the girl I had loved, sometimes older than the woman she must have become, sometimes standing beneath the cantina lamp with her hands at her sides, waiting for me, though I knew she had no reason to wait. I would wake from these dreams with her name in my mouth and the stars above me, and there were nights when I hated her for surviving me and nights when I hated myself because I could not survive her.

One morning I saddled the horse and turned east. I told myself I was going home. But a man knows when he lies to himself. I was going back to the hill. I was going back to the cantina. I was going back to the room where the young man still stood laughing and where I still had the chance, perhaps, to keep my hand from the pistol. That is the strange thing about memory: it gives a man the power to return to the moment of his ruin without granting him the power to change it.

When I saw the town again I knew that I had already been there.

I saw the lights below.

I saw the cantina.

I saw myself riding down the hill.

Somewhere behind me there were riders. I heard the first rifle shot before I saw them, and then I was running, and the horse was running, and the road was beneath us, and the whole seven years had become one instant in which I was young and old and fleeing and returning all at once. Five mounted cowboys came over the ridge, then more behind them, and the rifles flashed in the dark. I remember thinking that they had come to kill me. I remember thinking that they had come to take me back. I remember thinking that they were not men at all but the years themselves, each one mounted and armed, driving me toward the place where I had begun.

The bullet struck my side. I felt the heat. Then I felt nothing. I rode on.

The horse fell before the cantina and I went down into the dust, and for a moment I lay there looking at the stars, understanding that I had been looking at them all my life and had mistaken their silence for indifference. I heard footsteps coming toward me. I thought they were the riders. I thought they were the dead. I thought they were only the years coming to collect what remained of me. The wind moved through the mesquite.

I heard her voice.

Sometimes she is young again and I am young with her, and the cantina door stands open behind us and the music is playing and there has been no pistol, no blood, no desert, no seven years. Sometimes she is old and I am old and she is holding a dying stranger whose name she barely remembers. Sometimes I am certain that she never came at all, that I died alone beneath the hill and invented her in the last instant because a man ought not to die without seeing once more the face for which he ruined his life.

The dawn was coming over the mountains. I could feel the cold leaving the earth. Somewhere behind us the horses were restless and the men had grown silent. Felina held me against her and I could hear her heart beating, slow and frightened, and I thought that this was the sound I had been riding toward all those years, not forgiveness and not salvation, because I had never believed myself worthy of either, but simply the sound of another living heart beside mine.

I closed my eyes. For one moment I was back in the cantina. The young man was laughing. Felina was turning toward me. My hand was moving toward the pistol. And I knew that if I could only stop it now, if I could hold my hand still for one second more, the road would open behind me and I could take another horse and ride another country and become another man.

The gun fired. And Felina was holding me.

And I was riding.

And I was falling.

And I was dying.

And all of it was the same night.