Clash of Star-Kings Read Online Free PDF

Pit of Purgatory instead of rather like an Andean village shoved north by a glacial drift. Finding Señora Mariana’s back patio house had been, they were not long in realizing, a stroke of luck, for Los Remedios was not much designed for accommodating foreigners.
    Another thing they soon picked up was that living there was not going to cost them anything as low as $100 a month, either. Curiosity mingling with annoyance, Sarah said, “Mac, how do you manage to live here on only $50 a month?”
    “I sleep with my landlady,” he said, very simply.
    “Oh. You didn’t tell us that.”
    “If I had, you wouldn’t have come, and I wanted some people I could speak English with.”
    Their expenses ran them something close to $200 a month, but this was still about $400 cheaper than life in Mrs. Moomaw’s semi-renovated barn, plus the fact that Señora Mariana would as soon have entered a brothel as a court of law. Besides her truly benevolent assistances, they had six rooms for $20, including a large studio with a skylight where Jacob Clay, a thin, frenetic man enraged by the difference between what he was writing and what he knew he was in theory capable of writing, typed and cursed and periodically poked his head out to see if the mail had come with assignments or checks. At least once a day they went over to Macauley’s house and at least once a day he came over to theirs. Another approximately $20 went to Lupita, but by now Lupita had managed to extinguish any guilt feelings either of them had had for paying such wages.
    So now, at the moment, while Jacob crouched at his typewriter like an outraged toad, and Sarah sulked her way through the dishes — only not very far through them: the water was
cold
— Macauley sat on the coping of a dry fountain in the patio and talked. He talked of his stories, for one thing, and his fears (in which Jacob, who mildly admired the stories, concurred) that despite their merits they were far too far out of current literary fashion to achieve any notable success. “So I decided to take time off — from the one about the childless aunt who schemes to replace her sister-in-law as Foremost Female Figure in the children’s lives … by the way, a standard plot item in Mexican soap opera … nobody cares about a philandering husband that much — and repair Lenita’s kitchen ceiling. I’d like to put in a fireplace but she wouldn’t know what to do with one. The Mexicans have never discovered the chimney, they ‘re moving right from the charcoal brazier to the atomic pile; meanwhile, let the smoke find its way out — that’s their attitude. It took me only about half the time that it would have taken a carpenter, but it would have driven a carpenter crazy to watch me!” he said, with cheerful pride. “Carpenters are always driven mad to see the way that miners work because we always do everything ass-backwards … according to them … but we get it done better and quicker. Any miner can handle wood, but did you ever see a carpenter who could handle explosives?”
    “No,” said Sarah, rubbing her rapidly chapping hands. “I didn’t know you used to be a miner …”
    “Once a miner, always a miner…. Say, don’t forget the procession tonight. You won’t want to miss that. It’s quite a thing.”
    She felt that she would gladly agree to miss every procession that ever was or would be, even if led by Jesus of Nazareth riding a zebra, in exchange for getting the dishes done. But of course nobody would take her up on it. She noticed that young Mexican who spoke the strained English come into the patio. Mac spoke to him in rapid Spanish, the boy asked something about Jacob, and Mac gestured to the study door. Sarah felt too subdued to warn him off, and besides, if Jacob shouted at the boy he might work off all his hostilities and be in a good and sympathetic mood towards her. She sighed heavily and looked glumly at the dishes.
    “Tell me about the procession,” she said,