Hot Night in the City

'I don't seem to have any appetite.' This was a lie; he was seething with appetite, but not for food.

'Well... if you're sure.' She took his creme brulee, and his heart was lifted by the symbolic significance of it all, as he watched her finish his last spoonful. Then they both spoke at once.

'By the way, what's—?'

'May I ask—?'

'I'm sorry, what were you—?'

'No, you first.'

'Well, I was just wondered what your name was.'

'I was going to ask you the same thing,' she said.

'Now, surely that's a coincidence.'

'Not at all.'

This tale borrows a narrative device from a story by Robert W. Chambers that appeared in the bound European version of New Harper's Monthly Magazine, August, 1903 (Volume CVII, no. DCXXXIX). I gratefully acknowledge my debt to Mr Chambers, and I should be delighted to hear from his descendants.

THE APPLE TREE

The Widow Etcheverrigaray took great comfort and pride from the splendid apple tree that grew on the boundary of her property, just beyond the plot of leeks that every year were the best in all the village; and her neighbor and lifelong rival, Madame Utuburu, drew no less gratification from the magnificent apple tree near the patch of piments that made her the envy of all growers of that sharp little green pepper. Unfortunately for the tranquillity of our village, we are not speaking of two trees here, but of one: a tree that grew exactly on the boundary between the two women's land and was, by both law and tradition, their shared property. It was inevitable that the apples from this tree should lead to dispute, for such has been the melancholy role of that disruptive fruit since the Garden of Eden.

As all the world knows, neither pettiness nor greed have any place in the Basque character, so one must look elsewhere for the cause of the Battle of the Apple Tree that became part of our village's folklore. The explanation lies in the bitter rivalry the two woman cultivated and nourished for most of their lives. When young, one of them had been accounted the most beautiful girl in our village, while the other was considered the most graceful and charming—although in later years no one could remember which had been which, and, sadly, no evidence of these qualities remained to prompt the memory. As mischievous Fate would have it, both the young women fancied that handsome rogue, Zabala, who was not yet called Zabala-One-Leg, for he was still to commit the unknown (but doubtless carnal) offence for which the righteous God the Father punished him by taking one of his legs in the Great War, while His benevolent Son, Jesus, revealed His mercy by leaving him the other to hobble along on. All the village knew that the young women admired Zabala because neither of them would deign to dance with him at fetes, and both would turn their faces away and sniff when the cheeky rascal addressed a word to them, or a wink. If further proof of their attraction were needed, both village belles were heard to vow upon their chastity that they would not marry that flirting, two-faced scamp of a Zabala if he were the last man in Xiberoa. They would become nuns first. They would become prostitutes first! They would become Protestants first! (Of course, nobody believed they would go so far as that.)

Now, being every bit as crafty as He is good, God knows how to punish us, not only by withholding our wishes, but by granting them. In this case, He chose to cut with the back of His blade. He willed that neither of the young women would have Zabala, for he went from the village to punish Kaiser William, who was at that time raping nuns and spitting Belgian babies on his bayonet, the enlistment posters informed us. Zabala returned three years later, without one leg, but with such worldly sophistication that he could no longer remember the Basque word for many things and used the French instead. He bragged about the wonderful places he had seen and the many sinful and delicious things he had done, but he was astonished to learn that in his absence both the women had married simple shepherds far beneath their expectations, that both their weddings had occurred within two months of the exciting and heady fete that marks the harvest of the hillside fern, and that both women had born babies after only seven months of gestation. Short first pregnancies do not occasion criticism in our valley, for it is widely known that the good Lord often makes first pregnancies mercifully brief as His reward to the girl for having preserved her chastity until marriage. Subsequent pregnancies, however, usually run their full terms, which only makes sense, as the very fact that they are not first pregnancies means that the mother was not chaste at the moment of conception. Is it not marvelous how one finds justice and balance in everything? Yet further proof of God's hand in our daily lives.

Over the years, the shepherd Etcheverrigaray slowly increased his flock until he was able to buy a small house on the edge of the village with an overgrown garden that his wife tamed and tended until it was the pride of the village and, it goes without saying, also the envy. But the husband fell into the habit of spending time he ought to have given to the care of his sheep in the cafe/bar of our mayor, squandering his money on so many small glasses of wine that, after he died suddenly of no disease other than God's will, his widow would have had a hard time making ends meet but for the productive garden she had enriched over the years with her sweat and her loving care.

As for Madame Utuburu's husband, he was plagued by something worse than drink: he was unlucky. And there is an old Basque saying that teaches us: Unlucky indeed is he who is burdened with bad luck. If there was a thunderstorm in the mountains, you could bet that some of Utuburu's sheep would be struck by lightening. If, upon rare occasions, his ewes had a fruitful season, the price of wool was sure to drop. Nor was the village very sympathetic with his misfortunes, for it is well known that bad luck is the lash with which the Lord chastises those who have sinned, however cleverly and clandestinely. And there was another thing: when the price of wool fell for Utuburu, it fell for everybody—even for us, the lucky and the innocent.

You can imagine how surprised we all were when we learned that Utuburu-the-Unlucky was to receive an unexpected inheritance from a distant uncle. But the Lord's subtle ways were revealed when, staggering home after celebrating the only bit of good fortune in his life, Utuburu fell into the river and drowned.

With what was left of the inheritance after grasping lawyers had gorged on it, Madame Utuburu bought the small house next to the Widow Etcheverrigaray's, and there she eked out a modest annuity by toiling morning and evening in her garden, which became either the best or the second-best garden in the village, depending on whether one measured a garden by the quality of its leeks or that of its piments.

Thus it was that ironic Fate brought the two rivals to live and grow old side by side on the edge of the village, each with no husband, and each with only one son to absorb her love and color her expectations.

The Widow Etcheverrigaray's son soon revealed himself to be a clever and hard-working scholar, first at the village infant school, then in middle school at Mauleon, later at the lycee at Bayonne, and finally at university in Paris. With every advance in his education, he moved farther and farther from his village, so in proportion as his mother had ever greater reason to be proud of him, she had ever fewer opportunities to show him off to her less fortunate neighbor. At first he wrote short letters that the village priest read to Widow Etcheverrigaray over and over until she had them by heart, then she would share them with the women beating their laundry clean at the village lavoir, her eyes scanning the paper back and forth as she recited from memory. And once her son sent a thick book full of tiny print with his name on the cover, which the priest told us was proof that he had written it: every word, from one end to the other. The book said such clever things about tropical agriculture that not even our priest could read it for long without nodding off. Eventually, the son gained a very important position in some Brazil or other, and the village never saw him again.

As for Madame Utuburu's boy, the best that can be said of his educational performance is that the damage he did to school property during his brief stay was not nearly so great as some have claimed. His native gifts lay in another direction: he developed into the most powerful and crafty jai-alai player our village ever produced—and this is saying something, for it was our village that gave the world the fabled Andoni Elissalde, he who crushed all comers from 1873 to 1881, when a blow of the ball to his head made him an Innocent: one so beloved of God that he was no longer tormented by doubts or led astray by curiosity. After young Utuburu made his reputation with our communal team, he went on to play for Bayonne, where he was selected for the team that toured Spain and South America, humbling all before them and making every cheek in Xiberoa glow with pride. Thus, as the lad became more and more famous in that noblest of sports, he played ever farther and farther away from our village and from