Blue Eyes (12 page)

“Kids from the American colony,” Chino said.

“Can't they bend? Don't they have a waist?”

“Ah, don't worry for them. They're out of it. The gringo babies. They live off the covers of the record albums. They take technicolor shits. They drink with a straw. Like Jerónimo. They're worse than the pigeaters. At least Mordeckay sits at home.” Then he softened to them. “Polish, it's not their fault. They didn't send their papas into Mexico. How you think I looked when my papa brought me to New York? I wore earlaps summer and winter. I put sugar on the corned beef. I lost my hat in the toilet bowl. Don't sit on my hand, Polish. Come on. The cholos might not like the time we picked to steal their little gringa.”

He led Coen up Mississippi Street and across the three tiers of Melchor Ocampo to an apartment house in pink stucco on Darwin Street off Shakespeare. It was hard for Coen to associate grubby hoods and a shanghaied girl with the striped awnings over the windows and the gold knockers on the main door. They rode a tiny elevator with an inlaid ceiling and hammered walls up to the fifth floor. Coen kept scratching his knuckles but the Chinaman didn't fidget once. He lifted the tails of his jacket to air his pistol butts. He stepped onto the landing, opened a door, and walked in without announcing himself. There were four Mexicans in the sitting room. All of them had on ties and laundered white shirts. They wouldn't budge for the Chinaman. Coen figured they were brothers because they each had a chubby face with an irregular eyeline that gave them a permanent scowl; only one of them wore a moustache. They cursed the Chinaman, using his pet name. They also mentioned the Guzmanns and Zorro. They sneered at the Chinaman's automatics and they showed him some kind of receipt.

The Chinaman turned to Coen, who was still in the doorway. “Polish, they say the little gringa's their wife. And they have papers to prove it. Imagine, a legal shack job, split four ways.” He shoved Coen into the sitting room. The Mexicans backed off. “El Polonés,” they whispered, pointing to Coen. They looked away from his eyes. “El Polonés.” They grabbed their belongings and flitted past Coen, crowding into the fancy elevator.

“What the fuck?” Coen said.

“Polish, you made your rep. Mexico's yours. They won't be home for a week.” He cracked a sour ball and stuck the pieces under his tongue.

Coen began to fume. “You scumbag Chinaman, did you run around the city in the afternoon planting stories about me? Have you been dropping kites all over the place? Am I supposed to be Zorro's new pistol? A special hand at strangle jobs. Do I blow people's mouths away?”

A girl came out of the bedroom in a prim olive robe. She had crust in her eyes from sleeping too hard. “Where's Miguel? Were's Jacobo the Red?”

The Chinaman shrugged off the names. “Can't tell you, sweetheart. They left in a big hurry. Jacobo, he said, ‘take care of my wife.'”

Still drowsy, the girl stubbed her toes against the Mexicans' fat-legged couch. She hopped near the Chinaman, holding one foot, trying not to fall on Coen. The hopping must have ended her sleepiness. She hissed for a while when she discovered a badge on Coen. “You're the dude who works for my father. Odette warned me about you. The Yid cop who goes down for millionaires.” Then she inspected the badge and saw Coen was wearing an Acapulco fireman's star. She ignored him and laughed in the Chinaman's face. She had to sit on the floor to control the heaves in her belly. The Chinaman enjoyed how her calves could swell.

Coen squatted over her, hands on his kneecaps. “Carrie,” he said. “Caroline. Please get up.” The Chinaman thought Coen shouldn't placate her so much. He would have taken her by the hair and shown her his worth. He didn't value rich little gringas, the ones that spit at you and ran behind their papa's knees. But he had to mind himself. He couldn't offend Señor Blue-eyes.

“Don't be fooled by the star on his shirt, Miss Child. He's the legitimate article. Detective Coen. Me and him, we can't stand to see you living with cholos.”

Caroline took off her four wedding bands and hurled two at the Chinaman and two at Coen. “I'm not going anywhere with you. Where's Miguel?”

Careful of Coen, he lifted her by the elbows and walked her toward the bedroom. She was crying now. “Where's Miguel?”

“Chino,” Coen said. “What are you doing?”

“Let me talk to her, Polish. In there. I'll convince her. Soft, soft.”

Coen listened through the bedroom door. He heard her say, “Daddy has all the clunks.” She came out with Chino in a simple cotton dress, a seventeen-year-old with plain hands and a bony face, no more the mistress-wife of Darwin Street. Coen pitied her and loathed his own part in playing the shepherd for her father. The Chinaman tried to amuse him. “Polish, she didn't change clothes before I shut my eyes.” He held her arms for Coen. “Look at those marks. The cholos put her on horse.”

“He's crazy,” Caroline said. “They're allergy shots. Miguel paid for them. My nose would run without injections.”

“Horse,” the Chinaman said.

They sneaked her past the concierge at the hotel. Coen paced the bathroom. “How do we get her out? She needs a tourist card, something to prove she's a citizen.”

The Chinaman smiled. “Don't worry. Zorro fixed it.” He removed wrinkled papers from his wallet, tourist card and birth certificate in the name of Inez Silverstein, Mordeckay's North American niece.

Caroline slept on Coen's bed. Coen sat beside her. “Carrie,” he whispered, “who brought you to Darwin Street?”

The Chinaman scolded him. “Jesus, you'll wake her.” He prepared bunks for him and Coen under the footboards of the two beds. Coen undressed in the bathroom. The Chinaman mumbled “Noches” and immediately began to snore. Coen went to bed in his underpants.

Caroline preferred the Chinaman's even snores to Coen's thick breathing. She wished she could be with Jacobo the Red. Jacobo wouldn't hide under a hotel mattress with his toes sticking out. If she had the choice, she would have taken the Chinaman into her bed. Coen's ears were too sharp. They had the fix of a bloodhound. And she disliked cops in pointy shoes. The Chinaman had cuter eyes; he didn't represent her father, like Coen. She owed a certain allegiance to the Chinaman; he brought her into Mexico, together with that gray-haired boy, an imbecile who had erections on the plane. The Chinaman introduced her to Jacobo, Chepe, Dieguito, and Miguel, borrowed the wedding bands off an old Jew in another barrio, a certain Mordeckay, and now he was conspiring to take her back. This cop had some power over him, probably.

Caroline wasn't a spoiled girl. The Carbonderry School hadn't made her cross, like Odile. She held few illusions about her worth as a seductress. Jacobo had gotten her for free; in deference to his cousins, he was sharing her. This arrangement satisfied Caroline. She hated her father's devotion to high art, his smug promoter's life, his superiority to anything natively American, his Pinter festivals, his Beckett weeks, his Artaud happenings (little events where benches would be destroyed, girls in the audience would lose pieces of blouse, though never Caroline), his English teas, his croissants, the rococo games in his ping-pong room, none of which Caroline was permitted to join. Bereft of her father's pleasures, Caroline paid cousin Odile three hundred dollars, saved from an allowance of thirty a month, to smuggle her out of the country. She might yet have stuck with her daddy if he had been able to look her in the face. Vander was a collector of beauties; he surrounded himself with Odile and the hypersensitive creatures of his Bernard Shaw revivals (girls with flawed noses and fabulous chins). Recognizing her own plainness, Caroline had to show daddy Vander that a man could desire her, even if it was only Jacobo the Red.

She kept her eye on the Chinaman now. She wanted more of him than the whistles coming up the side of her bed. So she reached a leg down and scratched him on the arm with a painted toe. The Chinaman woke stiff as a knife. He acknowledged the foot hovering over him.

“Missy, get them toes back upstairs and keep them there.”

“No,” she said, trying hard to whisper. “Chino, are you sleepy? If you can't come up, I'll come down to you.”

“Are you crazy?” he said. “What about the Polish boy under the other bed? That cop, he's a scrupulous man. Don't kid yourself. He'd know if we used the same toothbrush.”

Caroline began to pout; the nightshirt Chino had given her to wear halted at her kneecaps, and she couldn't get the hem to rise. “Oh, bother with him! He's just a silly cop. I don't care.”

“Missy, I do.” The Chinaman crept way under the bed; he had Odile to reckon with; that girl had made him wet his own pocket. He should have followed César's maxims; never fall for a
prostituta.
But his fingers itched from having climbed up the leg of somebody's ski pants to touch silky hairs on a scarred knee. And with Caroline jostling over him, putting crinks in the mattress, the Chinaman was afraid he would be denied all the benefits of a snore.

The
chueta
, Mordeckay Crisóbal da Silva Gabirol, had come to Mexico from Peru. His forebears were mostly Portuguese. Crypto-Jews who converted to Catholicism to preserve the wholeness of their skin, they became priests, sailors, and ministers to the kings of Portugal until the Inquisition struck and pushed them into Holland and the Americas. The da Silvas underwent five smaller Inquisitions before landing in Peru. Having already been reduced to penniless scratchers, they attended church (which they called El Synagoga), and mumbled secret prayers at home, cooking vast amounts of pork outside their doors to mislead their Christian neighbors and protect themselves from future Inquisitions. Thus Mordeckay inherited his role as a cooker and eater of pork. There was no longer an external need to fool the Christians (no da Silva had burned since 1721), but the
chuetas
couldn't give up their secretiveness. Like his fathers, Mordeckay had a predisposition toward gloom. Never venturing outside his own
colonia
(or district), he knew nothing of Mexico City. He lived between walls, accepting the conduits and
galerías
inside Belisario Dominquez, and hating the noise and brutal light of the street.

He performed a few specific services for his cousins from North America in the Bronx, for which he was adequately paid. He sought no other employments, spending his hours praying over his pots of boiling pork. Mordeckay had prayers for the da Silvas, living and dead, for his Bronx cousins and
chuetas
everywhere, for El Dia del Pardon (the Day of Atonement), for the pigs that were slaughtered so that the da Silvas could survive, for the darkness that protected the
chuetas
, for the Portuguese language that had succored them, for the Spanish they spoke in America, and for his own apostasy, his forced departure from the laws of Moses. He worshiped Crisóbal Colón (Christopher Columbus), whom he considered a
chueta
out of Portugal, and Queen Esther, who married a Persian king to save the Jews, becoming the first Marrano in history. The
chuetas
had holy obligations to Santa Esther; on her feast day they were forbidden to spit, urinate, or consume pork. Mordeckay would only eat spinach for Esther's day. And no matter how hard his kidneys throbbed, he wouldn't pass water until sundown.

Mordeckay was uncircumcised. Centuries ago the
chuetas
couldn't afford to have their glans removed for fear of the Inquisitors, who would have spotted them instantly as Jews; the current
chuetas
persisted in this habit with these old Inquisitors in mind. They couldn't break a five-century bond. So they kept their foreskins and prayed to El Señor Adonai for forgiveness, crossing themselves and spitting in the direction of the devil. “Forgive me, Adonai,” Mordeckay would recite every morning in modern Portuguese, “forgive me for trampling on your laws, for ignoring the mandate of circumcision. I am unclean, Father Adonai. I am made of pestilence, and I have unpure seed. For this reason, Adonai, I have chosen never to marry. Last year, Adonai, a rabbi came from North America with a special man to circumcise the conversos of my district. I refused, Lord. I could not betray the trust of my family. At thirteen, Adonai, our fathers revealed to us the truth of our heritage, and swore that any one of us who submitted to the ritual wound could not remain a da Silva. So I closed my legs to the rabbi's knife. What I did, Adonai, my ancestors have done. I could not exist otherwise. Forgive me, Adonai, and send me books about your laws in Spanish or Portuguese. It is my hope and prayer that the spies of the afternoon will not discover where I live, and that only your angels, Lord, the angels of Adonai, follow me into the safe, dark porches of my home.”

As part of his obligations to the Bronx, Mordeckay inherited Jerónimo. Meeting the baby at the airport (for the Guzmanns, and the Guzmanns alone, would Mordeckay leave his
colonia
, and only in a chauffeured car with shades on the windows), Mordeckay brought him to Belisario Dominquez. But the baby couldn't sit still. So Mordeckay had to accompany him to the edges of the Zócalo and the clutch of
librerías
(bookshops) on the near side of the Alameda park. He couldn't keep up with Jerónimo's terrific pace, and he would be forced to occupy a bench in the Alameda and suck air between his ribs if he wanted to arrive at his
piso
(flat) with a workable lung. Still, Mordeckay maintained a closemouthed loyalness and a delicacy of feeling that were rare even for a
chueta.
He never asked his cousins why they had saddled him with a
subnormal
who couldn't survive without a lump of caramel in his mouth. It didn't matter that he also loved the boy. He would have surrounded him with an equally fierce devotion whether or not he despised those sticky caramel cheeks.

Only once had he mixed into the affairs of his Marrano cousins. This was eighteen years ago, on a visit to the Bronx at Moisés Guzmann's request. Mordeckay went by ship. His freighter took him through the Tropic of Cancer in the Gulf of Mexico, around the Florida Keys, up the bumpy Atlantic into the Port of New York. The Guzmanns greeted him at dockside in sweaters and earmuffs, icicles forming on their syrup-stained trousers. Mordeckay was wearing a madras shirt, appropriate for the Mexican winter. They bundled him in sweaters and earmuffs, and escorted him out of Manhattan, with a neighbor, Mr. Boris Telfin, at the wheel of the family car, a '49 Chrysler sedan (no Guzmann would ever learn to drive). Mordeckay admired the roominess of this vehicle.