Gringa (12 page)

Simon pulled Elena to her feet and tried to dance with her. They touched each other lightly, like blind people, and then suddenly clasped and began dancing without moving their feet. It was quite a display. Gilberto, the professor from the university, rose and gathered glasses off the floor. “It's past midnight,” he said in Spanish. “I've got classes in the morning.”

Hallie whirled toward him. “Oh, God, me too!” she said. “Art History at ten. Do you have a car?”

They consulted. Gilberto lived in an old section not too far from the university. Hallie was boarding with a family in the elegant Pedregal colonia, built on a lava bed, a little beyond. Gilberto said he would take her home.

Hallie wanted to make a date with Abilene for the next day.

“I don't know what I'll feel like,” Abilene said weakly. Hallie ignored her. “Museum of Anthro, the fountain, two p.m.,” she said. “We'll eat something, and I'll take you to meet some of my friends. It'll be fun.” She looked at the others. “It is all very exciting, you know, the consciousness of the students.” No one laughed; in fact they looked solemn and approving. Simon said, “Gilberto is an economist.” Hallie took Gilberto's arm as they left.

As soon as the door shut after them, Simon said, “Think what she would be like in harness, or in bed.” Abilene was a bit shocked. The actress snickered. Adele said, “Really, Simon, even from you.” He defended himself ardently. “I only meant her energy! Her youth and vigor! Really, Adele. Is it only pain that provokes you? Only tired old Indian eyes?”

Adele, surprisingly, smiled. “Actually it's enthusiasm that wears me down. When I'm not working, I fidget. When I do work, I'm tense. It's all very tedious.”

“Certainly you can't suggest that Adele's sensitivity is over-focused, rolled too tight?” Daniel said. He too was annoyed with Simon. Simon put his hands up to stave off more comment, but Daniel said, “How could that be true, when she's an artist? An artist with ties to the real world, as you must surely know?”

Abilene thought someone hateful could say a lot about that. What was real about high fashion?

“Everyone can't use art for political purposes,” Simon yawned. “How boring to always think about what's right.”

“Theatre has its own rules, nothing to do with politics,” Elena said. “It has only to do with truth and art.” She looked smugly toward Simon, who laughed.

Daniel laughed too. “And that's how we sound! Like a cocktail party on stage. In one of Simon's plays we would be undressed, or dead by now. Go home, the lot of you—”

What had seemed a coming quarrel dissolved in embraces and promises for a quick reunion. As Abilene reached for her things, Adele caught her elbow. “But not you, please! Wait.” She locked the door and leaned against it. Daniel kissed her forehead and said goodnight.

When he was out of the room, Adele asked, “Are you too exhausted to talk? Really talk, I mean?”

“I'm tired. The evening took—a lot of energy, I guess.”

“Oh, them. You're not used to it. It doesn't amount to all that much. That's the way Mexican intellectuals are. Blah blah. They're close to Daniel, you see. They're important to him. We see them all several times a week, it's more like family. Listen, if you can stay a while, you can sleep here. There are cushions and quilts in Pola's room.”

“It doesn't matter much where I sleep,” Abilene said.

They huddled over cups of cocoa Adele had made them in a bowl in the Mexican way, whipping the chocolate to a froth. Adele kept chewing at her thumbnail.

Abilene asked, “What did you think of Hallie? I only just met her today, you know. It's not like she's a friend—”

“Oh, she's okay. She's probably good for you, all that verve. There are lots of girls like her in Mexico. They say the whole Department of English is made up of fluffy rich girls who like to spend time in the U.S. But these girls—they can work very hard. They have to have something to believe in, just like anyone else.”

“Is that what you want to talk about?” Abilene knew she couldn't hold up her own end in a conversation about meaning. She'd been long enough away from the Tecoluca, it was like she didn't have a life at all. Like a battery running down. And if she didn't go back to Tonio—Oh, she wished Adele would tell her what she would do instead! Wasn't that why she'd looked up her old friend, and not just to pass time? It was like the time she raced around Lubbock with her sister-in-law, looking for her dead father's mistress: she'd gotten caught up in the rushing, she'd had a reason for the next hour—

“—Daniel thinks what's going on will be very important.” Abilene realized she hadn't heard what Adele was saying. “But that's not what I've got on my mind, not right now. I've been thinking of that American girl, Sylvia Britton—the one who was murdered.”

“It happened so close to your house. She was American. It seems natural enough to worry.”

“Doesn't it bother you?”

“Now that you ask, yes. It does.” Maybe there were things she could tell Adele, she thought. Adele would know what to do. Somebody had to know.

“Wouldn't you think someone would be looking for her? Wouldn't you think she would be missing?”

Abilene shrugged. Everyone doesn't have someone.

“Pola heard us talking about it, Daniel and me. She said, ‘Well, just because you don't know the story doesn't mean there's not a plot.' What kind of thing is that for a thirteen-year-old to say?”

“I don't know anything about kids.”

“She thinks everything is a script for a movie.”

“She has a filmmaker for a father.”

“Oh yes, her father.” The way Adele said this, Abilene thought: It has something to do with blood.

“This last film of his.” Adele had fallen back into her chair. “It was sordid. Pretentious and violent. The critics let him tell them what it was about: a parable about revolution. Greece, Cuba, Africa. See? Relevant! The film is about betrayal, he had said. You should see it! There's a girl in it, a young girl. She's kidnapped, raped and murdered. This is parable? Who can argue that the world isn't horrible? But why do they let him posture behind that? This was another romp with one of his child stars, violence reduced to teeny-bopper sexuality.” She took a long drink of water. “You don't read magazines, do you? You don't know about him. Child stars are his specialty. High school vamps. Child brides. Gangsters' daughters. He exposes them, like the flesh of guavas cut open for inspection. There are plenty of people who don't like it. Feminists. They picket his films and make him more famous. They give him weight. And they don't even get the point. The girls are incidental, thrown to the public to pant over; the movies are about basic human savagery. The girls are vulnerable and yet inaccessible; they get caught in crossfires. They're victims by chance; chance robs them of their meaning. Martyrs to no cause. It's sick.”

“You're bothered about the murdered girl because you don't know why it happened? Do I get it, Adele?” It surprised Abilene, how easily she understood Adele's worry, despite all the words. It surprised her more that Adele should care about such a thing, that anybody would care.

Adele nodded her head bitterly. “There has to be a reason.”

Abilene thought of bulls on their forelegs in the dust. Of thumb-sized babies in white enamel pans. Of love.

Adele said, “Yannis says there's meaning in violence. He says it counts for something.” Rancor was in her voice. “He ought to know. He has explored it in life as well as art. Come here.”

They went into the main room. Adele scrabbled in a box and came up with a file folder. “This has nothing to do with Yannis,” she said, “but it has everything to do with violence.” She threw the folder on the table. Pictures spilled out: photographs of corpses, some of them laid out with flowers on their chests, others contorted in their last gazes. Some were just kids. One was a woman late in pregnancy, her huge belly like a hill above her.

“We don't ask for these things. They come to us. Sometimes they come in the mail, or we find them outside our door. Sometimes they're left for Daniel at the paper. Braver donors wait in the hallway to shove them into Daniel's hands. These are always women. ‘Bless you for what you do,' they tell him. What good does it do? Yet they feel better. Is the meaning not in violence but in numbers? Is the meaning in the record itself? Have they given Daniel a share of the grief, or the guilt? I tell you, Abilene, I can't sleep, I lie awake and ask myself these things—”

“What does Daniel say?”

“I don't ask him.”

She tapped a photograph, this one of the pregnant woman. She pulled out another picture, of two young boys lying on the ground in front of a building—boys anywhere from twelve to sixteen years old. “They were students, full of enormous foolish confidence, taking part in a lark, while all the while it was—oh your friend Hallie knew the phrase—it was serious business. These pictures are from the provinces. Officials have told Daniel, these pictures have to do with drug wars. Are we supposed to believe that? Oh, here are students. You wait. You'll see them like this here, in the city.” She coughed hoarsely. “Lined up like tripe in a market stall, you'll see them.”

“Adele—why are you so—so depressed?” She had forgotten her own agenda.

“Pola's father makes death beautiful. What happens to its horror when he does that? Who believes in death anymore? Maybe that's what the pictures are good for!” Adele was weeping now. “These damned kids. They don't know who they're dealing with. This isn't California. If things get hot, girls like Hallie fly home. If she gets picked up, her daddy will come and bribe her way out. Even you've got someplace to go. But these damned kids, don't they know what death looks like?” She gathered up the photographs and took them out of the room. When she returned she had wiped her face and composed herself.

Abilene had spent the moment wondering from what sorts of troubles Tonio would rescue her. It would be a very short list.

“I'm so worried about Pola,” Adele said. “She's at the lycée in the mornings, but I can't watch her all the rest of the time. She knows things are getting lively in the city, she hears rumors. She accuses me of not wanting her to have any fun!”

“Maybe I could spend some time with her.” Abilene hoped this was what Adele was wanting from her. It was easy enough; the girl intrigued her. “We could go to the movies now and then, a museum, that sort of thing.”

Adele seemed pleased. “Tomorrow Elena is taking her down to the theatre for a little tour. Another day, the movies with you—yes, that would help. Oh, I'm so glad you are in the city!” She was nodding, over and over.

“Don't worry, Adele. She just needs something to do. She's just a child.”

Adele looked sad and tired. “No one is a child like Pola.”

She picked up an allotment of money from Tonio the next morning. Constanzia smiled as if to show off her teeth. It was her way of pretending not to think she was superior.

In the elevator Abilene looked down at her feet and saw how old her heavy huaraches looked. She went into the first shoe store she came to and bought an expensive pair of Italian sandals. They took almost all her money. The clerk handed her her old shoes in a bright yellow plastic bag. All through the transaction he smiled at her. So too the clerk at the register, a skinny woman in a scarlet shift. Abilene left the store with their faces in her mind. She knew as soon as she was gone their faces turned cold until the next customer came along. She hated the falseness, the fawning, not because it was false, not because it masked contempt—which it surely did—but because she didn't know how to respond to it. Courtesy put her off guard. Most things did. She was twenty-five years old and she didn't know how to get along with anyone.

She and Hallie went from the museum down the street to a pleasant cafe. They drank Cinzanos and talked. Bits of information fell from Hallie like so much lint. She had travelled in Europe, Mexico, and South America. She spent her last year of high school in Argentina, where an aunt worked for the American embassy. She had a cousin trekking in Nepal. She studied art. She was thinking of joining SDS in Berkeley, or of going to Ohio to live with her grandmother. “They really need leadership there,” she said, as if Ohio were an undeveloped country.

“Do you have a boyfriend in Berkeley?” Abilene asked. It was the only reasonable question she could think of.

Hallie smiled. She had had lovers, she said, and, remembering them, she laughed at them and herself too. Going away to school had been like tumbling down a long slope of pillows. She loved school, she loved boys, and she loved the movement. Fortunately, she'd found they went together, so far.

She asked about Abilene, who told a little about Tonio: that he was a rancher and a businessman. That he was away for some of the summer. She was vague. “I'm just doing what I want—”

“Well yes! That's what you must do!” Hallie said; she seemed to think they were speaking of important things.

“You know, I'm not a student radical,” Abilene said pleasantly. “I'm not even a student!”

Hallie was being earnest again. “What hasn't hit you, Abby, is the anger. It's anger that sweeps you clean. I envy you, to come to the movement so fresh! It's virgin anger, it will wash over you, sudden, instead of seeping up, like it did for me.”

“What is the anger for?” Abilene asked, to humor her.

“Why, for the persecuted and the poor.”

“What about me? What if it's me I'm angry about? If I've had a bad time of it myself?” She wasn't certain why she was trying to provoke Hallie, but she wasn't going to base their friendship on something so false as shared dedication to good causes!