Gringa (13 page)

“Anger sweeps you clean,” Hallie said.

Abilene thought maybe Hallie would take her on as a project. People were always doing that.

Hallie asked, “Your Tonio. Is he like other rich men—cold and powerful?”

“He's a sultan and a magician and a shark. He would really love you.”

“Oh, I didn't mean that!”

Abilene knew Hallie did mean that. Somehow that helped.

They rode a bus out to University City. On the way Hallie told Abilene about her boyfriend Refugio, son of a baker. She said, “He's sweet and good, and he kisses me with his mouth closed.” This made Abilene smile. “Are you hoping for more?” she asked.

“Oh no. Refugio is icing. The cake is what he's part of—the movement here. You'll see. And maybe you will meet someone—yes, of course, you must meet Gato. He's older, mysterious. He would challenge you! He would keep you on your toes!”

“Another student radical? What would we have in common?”

“He's the real thing, Abby.”

“What's that?”

“I don't know a word for it. He's not a kid. He's not confused about what he believes. He's so sure. He can be ruthless, you can tell. And he has this quality—charisma! The students really listen to him. He tells them to study ideology and strategy, and wait for the right moment.” She seemed very pleased with herself to have remembered all that about Gato.

Abilene asked if he was sexy.

Hallie liked this. “Oh yes, he is! And he doesn't have any special girl as far as I know. He's always in groups, like a pied piper. Actually, I don't think he'd be any good at all at sex. He probably couldn't maintain attention. He has his mind on other things.” She paused to search for a word. “He is a visionary.”

“What does he see?” Abilene knew what the answer would be.

“Revolution, of course.”

To Abilene's dismay, the word stirred her.

“Oh damn!” Abilene said as they went into a building. “I've laid my old shoes down somewhere and lost them.” Her new sandals were rubbing blisters. They tried to think back to when she had last had the shoes. She was sure she hadn't left them in the cafe; she thought she remembered them bouncing against her leg on the bus.

“Come on, come on,” Refugio said to Abilene and Hallie. “We're starting.” He led them down a hallway to a classroom where students were crowded in and everyone was talking. In a moment someone whistled and the room quieted down. “Don't speak,” Refugio whispered. “And stay near the door.” He left them and went into the crowd.

A man spoke in a soft, compelling voice. He was wearing jeans and a corduroy jacket, a tie loosened at his neck. Abilene noticed immediately the lack of intensification, of embellishment, in his speech. It was like he was saying, this is too important to exaggerate. He was talking about change and about how he had been waiting for it.

“When I was your age,” he said, “I dreamed about a true revolution. Now I see you hope and dream this same dream. That dream is the heart of the movement. It will beat so loud and strong in the plazas and streets, in the hearts of our people.”

A young man stood up and asked, “So you are joining us?”

“I don't have to join! I'm from Poli. I'm from a worker's family. I was born into the movement.”

“What do we do?” students shouted.

“Meet with your friends, and then meet with your rivals. Forget your petty differences of ideology, and unite in a common purpose. Vallejo is still in prison. Repression lies like a fog over us. Remember the strength is in solidarity. You must learn to talk to workers and peasants. The movement belongs to us all.”

“To Puebla and Juarez!”

“To Cuba and Vietnam!”

“Teachers!”

“Students!”

“Workers!”

“Che! Che!”

The teacher had begun to cry. Tears made his long lashes shiny. He put his hands up and pointed his fingers toward his temples like pistols. “They cannot silence me with fear! I will not let my gray hairs make me weak!”

The shouts began. The true revolution is still to come! The government is run by mummies!

The speaker waited for them to die down and then he spoke at last in the full fervor of a Mexican in love with a cause. “I will never stand apart from students. This is my fight and yours, my wife's fight, and my children's. It is the people's fight!”

Cheers went up in the room. A dark boy with Indian features stood and spoke with the piping voice of a child. “It's time to listen to the voices of the peasants,” he said loudly. He raised his arm and saluted with his fist.

“He's just a baby!” Abilene whispered to Hallie.

“Death to the government liars!” someone shouted.

A tall young man called out, “We cannot kill the government! We must free it from the bankers' prison, from the barbed fences of imperialist North America, from the false god of capitalism. We are not granaderos, to come in the night with pistols and clubs. We are not corrupt or frightened. We are the true patriots!”

A girl jumped onto a chair. “We won't make revolution in this room, talking about it!” she shouted. “We won't make revolution by fearing blood! We will make revolution in the streets, where the people are.” Her long black hair hung in two fat braids over her shoulders. “We must organize for battle. We must form brigades.”

“Organize!” someone challenged. “Tell us about it! Will we become our own government, another university? Organization is the blood line of lies and bribes.”

“Each of us is no better than a rock thrown at a window!” the young woman retorted. “One by one they are taking us off the streets. They can gag us and bind us and rape us. They can lock us away in prison. And, one by one, the people will not know! But together—” She paused dramatically. All the others had been silenced by the power of her speech. “Together we are too strong. Together, in brigades, we are soldiers in a fight for liberation!”

Hallie whispered to Abilene. “I see her everywhere. Her name is Carolina. She lives far away, near Teotihuacan. Refugio says she leaves home before dawn, carrying tortillas for her breakfast. She was studying to become an engineer, but now all her work is for the movement.”

Carolina stepped off her chair and the other students gathered around her and embraced her.

Refugio called out from the front of the room. “Watch the boards for notices! Talk to your friends!”

Carolina called out: “Be brave and tireless.”

“Isn't she—neat!” Hallie said.

Suddenly everyone was talking at once. Hallie nudged Abilene, and together they went outside and leaned against the building. They were breathing deeply, like two runners. Abilene felt blood at her temples. Her heart raced, and lower, she felt a dampness, an impatience. She felt longing.

To Adele, later, she said, “It really is exciting, isn't it? Not that I understand it, of course.”

Adele's face was drawn and pale. “Oh no, it's not exciting. It's frightening. Last night Daniel sat up in the middle of the night, sat up in bed like his name had been called. ‘What is it?' I asked. I thought he was ill. ‘I've got to start a second copy,' he said, and lay back down. I tell you, something is swelling beyond all space. The other day I came around the corner and there were small boys scuffling. One of them was knocked down and I heard him say, ‘I'll call the army, you bastard! I'll tell them you are dirty Fish like Paco's father! I'll see you in prison, you black dirty Communist.' I ask you, Abilene, if it is so big and getting bigger—can we stay out of the way?”

ABILENE DREAMED of the murdered Sylvia Britton. She knew how it might have happened: the woman taunting a Mexican youth, to turn his insults back on him; his sudden violent anger; a blow, to stifle the humiliation.

Tacho had warned her: You American girls. You shouldn't play games with us. Not with Mexican men. Don't think we are stupid because we are not your kind.

Abilene woke, drank a little gin and water, and after, slept without dreams.

She went to see Adele in the morning. “You and Daniel are professionals,” she argued. “Don't you want to know what happened?”

Adele said they would ask the hotelkeeper, Javier Piñeda, to call if anyone came looking for Sylvia Britton. She acted to help Abilene, but she was philosophical and distant. “All around me I see violence and death. It makes it harder if you give a victim a name.”

Adele asked after the hotelkeeper's son Nando, whom Daniel had once befriended. Piñeda said his son had not learned his lesson well enough; Nando had his head in the clouds.

Adele shook Piñeda's hand. “You will call?” she asked again.

Piñeda regarded the two women with exasperation and wonder. “She was killed by the night, Señora. She is one of many.”

There were more dreams. Abilene told Adele, “A woman comes out of the dark, under a street lamp. A taxi approaches, and she waves for it to stop. The driver gives her the finger and calls out, ‘Hey, gringa whore!'”

Adele laughed. “There's nothing frightful about that, Abby. When did it ever kill you to be called a gringa whore?”

Abilene looked away. “Doesn't it bother you?” she asked softly.

“There has to be a reason to die like that,” Adele said. “Otherwise it could be you. I remember the girls in Vegas used to talk about their dreams all the time. They liked to say, your dream is telling you something. They dreamed about boats and trains and planes; everyone wanted to get away.

“What are you afraid of, Abby?”

Abilene began to cry. “I don't know any people on lists. But I know her.”

Tsk, tsk, went Adele's tongue. “Don't I know that?” she said. “Isn't that why the lists matter so much?”

“They're Daniel's lists, though, aren't they?” Abilene said. She thought Daniel must think her very trivial.

“Listen to me,” Adele said. She had made tea, and she leaned across the little kitchen table to pour it for Abilene in a white mug veined with cracks at the lip. “The names are just words on a page to me. I say that to you, and to nobody else. I can't live any other way.”

Abilene thought she understood, a little. Yannis had made violence so vivid. “But when you met Daniel, did you know he was so—”

“Good,” Adele said firmly.

“I was going to say obsessed.”

“I was afraid at first, alright. I thought, another well of despair and anger. I thought, by God I won't fall in love with a Marxist!” Adele's laugh was rich and happy and full, a truer laugh than Abilene could remember. “I needn't have worried. He was nothing so pat. He is a modest man. He writes down what people cannot write for themselves. A scribe. I suppose he liked me because I'm much the same, only with images.”

“Did he like your work?” Abilene asked. She remembered seeing photographs of peasants in their bright clothes, against a dry hillside.

“He saw more than I meant,” Adele said. “He thought I put the models next to the indios to make a statement. Does it matter where the impulse comes from? I work from intuition.”

Abilene asked to see some of Adele's work. “We've spent our time talking about things I don't know,” she said. “You took so many photographs of Pola when we were in Zi.”

Adele rose happily and led Abilene back to her studio. She drew out dozens of photographs from a box. There was Pola innocent, Pola seductive, Pola hurt, Pola sleepy. She went from small child at ten or eleven to budding woman at twelve and thirteen. She was immensely photogenic, with her lovely bones and eyes, her high brow and widow's peak, the long slender limbs, her patience and affection for the camera's eye.

“You're so lucky,” Abilene said in little more than a whisper. She could not imagine the connection of mother and child. She could not even wish for it; it was that remote.

“You see these—” Adele pulled out several pictures of Pola at her sweetest, her most childlike. “These are the photographs I sent Pola's father. I know I've caught only glimpses of Pola in my pictures. I know she holds things back. And Yannis writes back to me. ‘She is uncanny. Look how she shuts us out.' I hated him for saying that!”

Abilene helped Adele stack the photographs and put them away and then they sat, backs against the wall, on the floor.

“Maybe I know part of why you're here, in Mexico, I mean,” Adele said. “Because I feel it so much myself. I've always been a stranger, without understanding why. I've always loved places where no one bothers to ask if I belong: Las Vegas, L.A. Here most of all.”

“I wonder why the American woman came.”

“Like any of us, I suppose,” Adele said. “Because it isn't home, and you cannot be blamed for its terrors.” She turned to look at Abilene directly. “Daniel changes everything for me, though. He asks the best from me, without demanding anything. He talks about repression and cataclysm, provocation and terror, and I could listen all night. I'm lucky. I told him a long old story about visiting Guatemala with Yannis, and we fell in love! It's like I wanted it to be. People can come together because there is good in them.”

Abilene saw for the first time the distance opening up between her and this Adele, this Adele-with-Daniel. She said nothing. Something in Adele's eyes warned her to leave some things unspoken. They both understood the part luck plays in love. They both knew the important factor in the stories Adele and Daniel shared about that poor sad country Guatemala wasn't moral fervor at all, but coincidence.

The hotelkeeper's son Nando called a few days later. He was working the night shift and a man was there looking for the Britton woman.

There were people at the apartment. Daniel and Simon were arguing about a Fuentes novel. Arturo and Gilberto and another of Gilberto's Communist friends were producing a litany of complaints against Mexican artists who, they said, had been led around like dogs on ropes for years, putting the Revolution on the sides of buildings.