Gringa (19 page)

There weren't many tourists then in Zi, mostly kids who slept in tiny rented rooms and spent their days by the water. Age was a natural barrier between them and the two women on the hill. Adele and Abilene and Pola often ate along the beach, where there were cafes set up under thatched roofs with tables set in the sand. They ate grilled snapper, and salt water crayfish. Sometimes they all went to the little hotel at the other end of the beach where they drank watery drinks at its “disco” (a bar with one big blue light) and danced with one another, singing along to the records. The American kids paid them no attention. Sometimes young studs from Acapulco came on holiday and stood around and watched, but there was no apparent way to break in on two women dancing! It was Pola who heard they were witches.

It was Pola, too, who brought some Americans to the house. She met Lotus at the boats where they had gone to buy off the morning catch. Lotus—more likely Sally, Jane, or Joan—looked no older than eighteen, and sick. She was too thin, her color was bad. An older girl said they had driven down from Guadalajara. She was carrying a woven bag from Mykonos, Greece, and in it she had peyote buttons that she offered to share. The boys were long haired, skinny, nut brown. They all hovered and took any food that was offered, but said almost nothing in the women's presence. Abilene noticed that one of the boys had a hard-eyed look; she thought he was older than the others, maybe in his late twenties. When she pointed this out to Adele, Adele became nervous and told Pola not to go off with them. She gave a cautionary speech to the youth, assembled on her porch. “This is Guerrero, and the hills are full of guerillas and dope growers, either of which type can kill you if you are in the wrong place.” She pointed out how casual they had been with their dope. “This is a country, with laws and jails, and you kids can get locked up even if you don't believe it.”

They bore her lecture with stony patience and said they weren't “into hiding.” Pola sat on Abilene's lap while the kids traipsed off downhill and became absolutely swollen with impatience. “You can go down for two hours,” Adele said, broken by Pola's silence and pouting. Pola followed the others. In a while she returned, pale and shaken. “They're cutting up a turtle on the path,” she said. The three of them rushed down to see. It was the landlord's son and his friend, twelve or so in age, with long sharp knives, hacking at what had once been some creature's living flesh. The thing between the boys was large and bloody and still jerking. Their little local hustler grinned at them and offered them some of the meat for soup; at this they scattered. Pola whined to Adele that if the boy had brought the turtle wrapped in paper they would have bought it. She was angry at her mother for the slaughter, or perhaps for keeping slaughter secret until then.

The older boy was named Paul. He disappeared for a couple of days and no one in his entourage seemed to know where. Privately, Adele said she had seen him in a jeep with a big Mexican. She had seen sun strike something on the seat, a knife or a gun. Many of the locals carried machetes. The import of this mystery soon faded, however, for they all saw a woman drown fifty feet from her breakfast table, in the surf. They were on the porch above the bay and Abilene noticed a commotion below. A big woman in a bathing suit was waving her arms frantically, while people lined up on the beach to watch. “My God I think she's drowning!” Abilene cried, and ran down the path, the others following. It took nearly ten hard minutes to reach the beach. By then the woman was dead. Still, Adele pushed through the men, a tigress slashing at their hovering; she breathed into the poor woman's mouth and pounded on her chest, then rolled her over, sprawled on her side like an abandoned puppet. Pola buried her face in Abilene's chest and wailed.

Abilene screamed, without thinking, “What did any of you do, assholes?” The Mexicans shrugged and looked at one another for an answer none could give. Finally the cafe cook said the woman had eaten an omelet and then had gone in too soon; he seemed to think the eggs had sunk her. None of the Mexicans knew how to swim. Only the American women were mystified that a woman drowned in water to her chest in full view of a crowd. The Mexicans took it as fate, unhappy as it was. The woman's husband materialized from some errand he had been running and howled with grief and rage. He had gone to get tickets back to Acapulco, where boys dove from cliffs and there were places to dance until dawn. They had been bored with Zihuatenejo, old as they were. The cook told the man about the eggs his wife had eaten; his face fell like something melted.

Adele didn't enforce her sanctions against the American kids, but she began to fret about their influence on Pola. She thought Lotus was pumping Pola full of something secretive and maybe malicious. Abilene said she thought Adele had every right to tell her nine-year-old daughter what to do, and Adele said, “Thank you very much!” as though insulted. She told Pola she could not stay in the village past dusk. So one afternoon when Pola did not return in time, Adele went off to find her and brought her back, herded in front like a balky goat. The child looked puffed up with anger. The women skipped supper and sat on the porch drinking beer. Now and then Pola's long cries split the cool evening calm. Adele ignored the piteous wails though she couldn't relax until they stopped. She talked for hours.

“I've always had some reason to worry about Pola. She was born with no opening in her vagina. It's called an imperforate vagina. A couple of years ago it had to be slit open, and last year they excised her hymen.”

“How strange!” Abilene said. She observed that it didn't seem to matter to Pola. Abilene thought the strangeness of this nine-year-old girl could be easily attributed to the lifestyle her mother lived. Why wasn't she in school?

“Well, it bothers me! It's like she grew up overnight. They made her a woman, with a sharp knife. I can't stand to have her out of my sight.” Adele had a tutor for Pola, the wife of a clerk in the French embassy. Adele rocked forward and back like a person grieving. “I take her everywhere I go. She has a bomb in her, I hear it ticking when she's asleep. It's something she got from her father. Someday I'll have to let her go. How I dread it. It's Pola who's the witch.”

“My God, Adele, she isn't ten years old yet!”

“Going on thirty,” Adele said. She felt better in the morning.

Paul, who had gone off with the man in the jeep, did not come back. The police came at five one morning and seized his van. They let its occupants scatter. Adele pitched in, helping them all make arrangements to get out of Zi. Lotus made frantic calls to Oregon and let the others go off on the bus without her. Adele sorted out the calls, made a reservation for Lotus from Acapulco home. Pola broke out in shingles, an unbelievable misery like nothing Abilene had ever seen. A doctor met them all in Acapulco and gave Pola a shot before they flew on to Mexico. While they waited, Abilene escorted Lotus to another flight where a ticket was waiting. When she rejoined Adele Pola was weeping; she had thought Lotus was coming with them.

On the plane, in a moment's silence, Adele sighed loudly. She said, “I thought a child would give my life a center.” Abilene couldn't know what was the right thing to say.

“Don't lose touch,” Adele said in Mexico. She took Pola off in a taxicab without asking what Abilene was going to do. Abilene felt abandoned and insulted; she realized she felt like Adele's other child, left for Pola's more urgent needs. She wrote Adele from the ranch when Tonio got back, and invited her and Pola to visit. Adele called to say she was getting some work and putting Pola in school. Later she wrote and said she was spooked by the tropics. “In Mexico, I'm above that labyrinth of muggy malevolent sluggish life. Up here the air is clear. You come sometime.”

They met again, in the city, but it was never the same. Abilene realized that Adele had drawn into another space, away from the self she had been in Zihuatenejo. She asked about Abilene's life without any genuine interest. Abilene didn't know why she bothered to see her at all, except where else would she ever get any good advice? Who else did she know who understood how hard it is to get away?

I WAS IN Acapulco the next winter to see Tonio fight. He was spending an evening with people I couldn't stand, and I asked Tacho if he would take me dancing. We went to a fancy club called the Orpheus, where neither of us felt comfortable; there was too much obvious money in the room. We went down to the red light district, to a place called the Cave. On the way I had an idea.

I paid my own way and ignored the scornful doorman's suggestion that I sit along one wall. I stood right beside the dance floor. Tacho went to the bar. The dance hall was a pavilion open on two sides to the night.

A bold young boy approached me and asked me, in good English, to dance. When I saw that Tacho was watching, I said I would, and I danced with the music in my guts, though I held back, too. Part of the pleasure was in holding something back.

The boy offered to get me something to drink, but I walked away from him without answering. Another young man asked me to dance, and I liked him better. I didn't let on that I spoke Spanish, and his English was terrible. He combed his hair before we went out onto the floor. While he danced—he was easy and unaffected in his dancing—he gave me long burning suggestive looks. It was hard not to smile.

Coming off the floor I bumped into Tacho. He grabbed my arm and pulled me back onto the floor. “Now dance with me,” he growled. I pretended to want to wrench away. He pushed me over to the open side of the hall. “I can dance when I want,” I told him. “With any of the boys.”

His hand dug into my arm. “That's too much!” I told him. He mocked me.

“You think this is your game, don't you?” He kissed me roughly. He was right, I had meant to play a game. To act out a safe fantasy, to use him—Suddenly I knew I had set up something dangerous, and I was thrilled and scared. Tacho had always been around, like the cook or the foreman. Changing that was risky.

“I don't want to dance now,” I told him. “Let's go to your hotel.” I was seeing him for the first time, a man in his own right, and not Tonio's peon.

“I want to dance! And if you are not a good dancer, I will leave you here!”

I had wanted Tacho to pretend to pick me up, that was all. I hadn't meant to poke at his damned machismo. “I don't want to dance,” I said. “I think I should go back to my own hotel—”

He grasped my buttocks and squeezed hard. I danced. When one dance was done, there were only a few seconds before the next one started. The band was playing brassy cantina music, and I didn't think it was fun anymore.

Finally Tacho said gruffly, “Now we'll go.” He pushed me into the street and hailed a taxi, pushed me inside, and as soon as he had given the driver his address, began to kiss me and thrust his hand between my legs. I was very excited, but also terrified at the possible consequences of my foolhardiness.

When we got to Tacho's hotel he slammed the door and pushed me against it, whispering my name. “Abelita,” he called me. Weakly, I said, “You're forgetting the game. You don't know me. I haven't told you my name.” I did want him, but when we were done, I wanted him to forget what had happened.

“I know who you are,” he murmured hoarsely. “Whore. Antonio Velez' whore.” I didn't care. He said, “Now you're mine.” He had never intended a game.

Tonio had had his own evening. When I saw him in the morning he didn't even ask about mine. There was an American girl, he wanted to take her back to the ranch in his plane for a few days. Did I mind to wait a day and go on a commercial flight? He was boyish and silly about it.

That was how I ended up on a bus with Tacho. All the way to San Marta we talked and joked and got to be friends. In the middle of the night we stopped for a snack at a tiny cafe in the mountains. I was stunned to find myself at the top of the world. Stars swirled around me like snow. I had never seen anything so beautiful, and Tacho had given it to me. Back on the bus we argued about whether you could take Hemingway seriously. Tacho said you could. He said all the young bullfighters read Hemingway.

We had to be very very discreet, we knew that. Conspiracy was a large part of the pleasure. I wasn't bored again for months.

Tonio was gone most of the winter. He was building a packing plant in the city and setting up his distribution, negotiating with the unions—becoming a big businessman. Tacho and I spent long days together. He taught me to curse and sing bawdy songs, to play pool, and to cape a cow. He took me to Tampico to see the Huastecan museum, and then to visit a Russian freighter docked there. He made me wear a scarf around my hair and keep my eyes cast down; he told the Russians I was his ignorant wife. We were so giddy and smug, going through that boat. Afterwards we ate fish at a cafe by the pier, piling bones on the tablecloth and fiddling with them, drinking pitchers of beer. We stayed in the city for the night and made love, though we were too drunk to make a good job of it. I woke in the night sweating. It was a cheap hotel, and I thought I had heard something in the walls. I stared at the door in the dark until I realized I was waiting for a vengeful Tonio to pass through it.

Tonio was in Mexico City, playing around with some actress.

Tacho and I became reckless. He kissed me in the bunkhouse by the pool table. “Someone will see!” I said. He said everyone was a spy, he bared his teeth in a grin, a grimace, a dare. Behind his door nobody could see. I lay on his bed with a scratchy blanket twisted beneath my legs, raw as a fresh wound, and it dawned on me that this was some sort of suicide. I was putting my way of life down for a taste of sex with a stranger. Tacho was a coarse, rude man, used to laundry maids and whores, and I knew he had a chavo's view, the woman as chingada. I was a gringa, the ultimate whore. Beneath him, my fantasy evaporated in the heat of lust; I forgot Spanish as if I had had a stroke. I called out in English, “Stop! stop!” He was never tender, though he would sometimes say he loved me, the words bleating, lamenting, lost. One night he fell into a deep sleep and snored. My passion for him, once so quirky, now seemed gone. It was too much risk, for what? A moment's shudder.

I stopped going to him. I avoided looking at him. I clung to Tonio when he was there until he told me he was annoyed by it. Worry went off in me over and over like tiny firecrackers. I had acted out of impulse and perversity, I scolded myself, when what mattered was staying where I was. The idea of Tonio sending me back to Texas was horrifying. I wondered how I could kill myself if it came to that. I didn't want to do something that hurt.

Tacho came to me one more time. A tremendous rain and wind blew in from the gulf. The palms shook violently, and the bamboo lay down on the ground to wait out the wind. The hounds bayed. I lay in my bed in the middle of the night and thought: How odd it is, how odd I am, lying here in a house in a cleared-out jungle, alone with no future. How odd, I thought, because I knew damned well I was pleased with myself. I had to do no more than blink to see the alternatives: me behind a counter selling who-knows-what. My legs sprawled beneath dull ignorant men. The longest life in the world. I had escaped all that, for as long as I had, for as long as I could.

Out of nowhere—off the balcony—a drunk Tacho came in, shouting and sobbing. I couldn't get him out. Tonio was just across the hall, probably reading. Tacho crawled into my bed and then there was a tremendous clap of thunder, a great clatter as doors flew open. Tonio's hounds, a dozen of them, had come through the front doors into the house and were racing everywhere. Tacho jumped naked from the bed and ran through the house screaming at the dogs. The watchman from the little hut at the gate came, and someone from the servants' shed, and above them all I heard Tonio calling his dogs to heel. Frantic, I scooped up Tacho's clothes and threw them under the bed.

The dogs cleared out. Tonio looked in on me but didn't stay. I slept fitfully.

In the morning I took Tacho's clothes out like a rolled up wad of rags and went to look for him. He was gone. All of a sudden I felt safe again. Tonio and I had our routines: his ride in the afternoon while I watched, gin rummy before dinner, long evenings in the library. Sometimes while he read I smoked marijuana and floated around the room. If Tonio gave me dope, he was very indulgent about it. If I asked, though, he was always curt, he always said no.

One afternoon I was dispatched, with Tacho as driver, to a town some thirty miles away, on the other side of the village of San Marta. I had a bladder infection. I dreaded the ride, but I dared not argue with Tonio's churlish instructions. I slid onto the car seat not looking at Tacho or greeting him. He told me to get in the back seat. I said I wouldn't. He put his arms across his bull's chest and stared straight ahead. I screamed at him that I had an appointment, and he was my driver! He had instructions from the señor. He laughed in his cold barking manner and said something about women being driven—he said this as though it were something nasty—and he said that women belonged in the back, that was the way it was done in this country. Men sat in the front, and women were lucky to get a ride at all.

I saw myself as a cartoon. Gringa or not, I was, by virtue of sex, a secondary person. I might have argued class, but I didn't have the courage or the language for the argument. Who was I but the daughter of an oil-field roustabout? I had been raised in tin houses, and I was a cold man's whore. I felt myself crumple. All the times couples had come to the ranch and the wives would not speak to me. The times Tonio had patted my ass and sent me off to fetch something he wanted. The times I looked in the mirror and wondered my value. I had never felt this cheap! I had been angry and confused before, I had been lonely, but my bad feelings had always been moored in a kind of sublimity, as if I lived in a sauna and everything was heated out of me. But Tacho sucked from the marrow. Reduced me. When I collapsed the distance between us I made myself subject to his code, an amalgam of machismo, paternalism, and violence. I realized it was Tonio's code too; it was the central precept of the culture. The man (lover or father) has authority. Only marriage and children and age give women any weight.

Now Tacho was getting even. He had picked this ridiculous moment—and how I smarted! how I itched and burned!—to face me down as if I were a mad cow and he, capeless, swordless, was prepared to let me hurt him knowing that it would all be reversed, the goring, the revenge. Tonio, embarrassed—the ultimate insult—would throw us both away like dead toads stinking in the sun.

Meekly, with no argument, I complied, and to compound my own indignity and his, I chose not to open the doors and go around, front to back, but to climb over the front seat, head first and rump in the air, and thence to settle in defeated silence for the long dusty bumpy ride to town. I was sure the groundsmen had seen it all. The peacocks had grown still. I slid down in the seat and shut my eyes.

Later, when I came out of the doctor's office, and remembered the strain of riding with Tacho, I thought, to hell with him. Let him play chauffeur. As I approached the car, though, I saw him at the wheel, his dark eyes shadowed by heavy brows, his glum mouth hanging slightly slack and dry on the lower lip. I recalled the cold condescension of Tonio at my “woman's problem,” and the stern coolness of the doctor. I felt, all at once, affection and pity for Tacho. I felt outrage for all the things that were outside and above us both, and I felt longing, gut-deep and burning, though I didn't know for what. I just wanted to have had a different chance at life, and I wanted Tacho to have had it too. And I saw humor in all this. Who did Tacho and I have better to hurt? Tacho turned, and caught me bemused, and I think he understood. We broke into witless laughter, shrieking and hooting and slapping one another on the arms. He bought us sour lime ices; the ice melted faster than we could eat it, so we tossed them into the billowing dust. All the way back to the Tecoluca, now sitting side by side, close together, in the front, we sang cantina songs and sealed not a truce but our conspiracy. Though we would never dare to wonder aloud at how we had betrayed Tonio, we gave ourselves glorious license to be friends, to place ourselves, despite the life that had been allotted us, in a kind of wonderland, where men and women sat where they wanted, at least between town and somebody else's house. I never went to Tacho again, but I liked seeing him. I liked it that he lived at the ranch, and I missed him when he was away.

Oh Tacho! There was never a chance in the world, but I swear I loved you. I wish you had been my brother. I wish Tonio had sent you away while you were young, so that you could have made your own life and not one in his shadow. I wish life were fair. I wish we had our rightful share of it.

Tonio no longer treated me like a lover. I would wake up to the sound of his plane leaving, and he would not have said a word. If I wondered where he had gone or how long it would be before he came back, I would have to ask Sofia, his hateful secretary, and sometimes, not often, I did. She always called him the señor, but her tone told me it was not out of respect for him, but disrespect for me. It was like she was saying: I am his trusted employee and he knows my worth. What can you say about yourself? Yet I wasn't afraid of being sent away. I knew by now how Tacho had come at fourteen or fifteen years old, hoping to be a bull-fighter, and had been taken on by the young matador and trained to be his dart-sticker. I knew that I used up nothing, and that Tonio liked my presence, as he liked the monkey's, the jaguarundi's, the Huastecan cook's.

When he said he was going away again, for a whole season in Europe, and taking Tacho and Esteban with him, my heart sank at the prospect of so much lonely time, but I heard the news and was immediately resigned. The surprise was that he had made some kind of plans for me. He wanted me to spend the time at his hotel, the Arcadia, which was only twenty miles away, where, he said, I would have some company and some occupation. Anything I needed I could have by asking Bruni. He, Tonio, would be gone, doing the things he did in Europe (fighting bulls, visiting ranches, consorting with the beautiful people, who really existed), and I, Abilene, would lie dormant like an insect to await his return. “My manager Girard is a pendajo and won't like it,” Tonio warned, “but you can ignore his Chinaman's queerness and make the best of it. After all, it is a resort.”