Gringa (2 page)

He didn't have to be there at all.

The bedroom was filled almost to the walls by a king-sized bed covered with a beautiful down comforter of gray cotton and several pillows. At the foot of the bed, on a stand, there was a television, and beside that, ice buckets, glasses, and sterling silver stirrers. So. That was what the apartment was about. A trysting place. Felix's home away from Mama.

Abilene wondered about the women Felix brought here. Stewardesses from Dallas and L.A. Tonio's ex-mistresses. Maybe a high-class Mexican girl, though probably not. Virginity, or at least exquisite discretion, still belonged in the dowry.

Constanzia sat at the table reading a magazine she had brought with her. The fancy lamp gave off a poor light. “I'll need things to read,” Abilene said. Constanzia, without looking up, said, “Oh yes.”

“Where will you go?” Abilene asked.

“To Sanborn's, for magazines and the little American books. I'll go tomorrow.”

“In English,” Abilene said.

The girl smiled a quirky smile. “I said I'd get American books,” she said. Abilene saw that her makeup was smeared. The dark shadows under her eyes looked like the pouches of an old woman. A Halloween face. A Day of the Dead face.

“Go away,” Abilene said. “There's no reason for you to stay here.” She wanted to be alone. Reyles said it would take three weeks to heal. She would stay inside, except when she went to see him.

She felt a wave of panic.

“Go on!” she said. “Go back to work!”

“The señor says to stay.” Constanzia turned a page.

Abilene took her handbag into the bathroom and put her things away noisily. She carried a little paper sack of grass into the bedroom and put it under the mattress. There should have been another bag already here, brought over from Tonio's, with her nightclothes, robe, cardigan, a raincoat and rain hat. Her summer city clothes. And a bottle of brandy.

Without the bag, she had only her jeans and shirt. In the bedroom she found a shirt she supposed belonged to Felix. It was salmon-colored, with shiny silver threads running up and down it. She could sleep in it for the night. She called out to Constanzia, “I want my bag brought from Tonio's!” She wished she had called him el señor, or patrón. She detested the sense of familiarity she felt with the girl. She wondered if Tonio sometimes took her into his inner office. He would have her on her knees; there was no couch.

She had never considered, not for an instant, having a baby. She had not even thought of being pregnant in that way. It was like a toothache; you went to the dentist. She only minded that other people knew, and that she had been a problem for Tonio. She had lived for so long now in such a delicate state, asking for nothing, being there when he wanted her, staying an American girl, a Texan, but not being silly, not asking stupid questions or getting in the way.

She sat on the bed and ran her hand over the silky Chinese cotton and wondered how much she would bleed.

At seven the girl went out for food. She returned in an hour trailed by a waiter in a formal coat carrying a tray laden with platters. The girl had paid. The waiter, a handsome boy with limp hair and the puffed-out chest of a vain bird, acknowledged Abilene with exaggerated deference. He was Indian, but a light, yellowish color. His hair fell low on his forehead. He bulged against his shiny tight black pants. She wished for a moment she could send Constanzia away, that she could find a night's comfort with this boy whose name she didn't want to know. She knew he could see it: his black eyes gleamed. She had never been with an Indian boy. But he was a waiter in a good restaurant. He risked nothing. He laid out the food and heavy white napkins on the table. There was barely enough room. Once he was satisfied that the platters were settled, he made a sweeping gesture with the tray and tucked it under his arm. At the door he smiled and said to Constanzia, “Till tomorrow, then,” playing with the soft /n/'s of mañana, his tongue in his teeth, his freshly licked lips shimmering as he spoke. “He will come for the dishes,” Constanzia explained casually as she bolted the door. “I will have things to do here. He might as well come then.” Abilene would be in the hospital. They would do the abortion in the afternoon, and if there were no complications, the dermabrasion the following morning. Abilene was not amused at Constanzia's plotting.

“I don't want anyone here when I'm not,” she said.

“Oh, just to bring your magazines.”

Abilene saw that at some time on her outing the girl had put on a vivid scarlet lipstick. It streaked the napkin like blood.

They both gave their attention to the food. “It's really good,” Abilene conceded. She hadn't realized how hungry she was. She ate slowly, thinking of Jello and broths in the hospital. Her steak ran bloody on the platter. She felt suddenly that the girl had done her a good turn; she might have brought her something with tortillas, or awful hamburgers from Sanborn's. The girl finished eating quickly and then closed the drapes and began to stack dishes carelessly, so that she made a lot of noise. Abilene's friendly feelings evaporated. A ridge of lard had congealed along the potato. She pushed her plate to the center of the table.

Constanzia put a set of keys down beside Abilene's plate and looked at her watch. “I'll go now,” she announced. At the door she paused to say good luck. Abilene said nothing. The heavy door made a thudding sound as it closed. She thought of prisons, crazy houses. She shivered again; this time she knew it was the cold. She found a thermostat, but nothing happened when she jiggled the mechanism. “Shit!” she said aloud. The sound of her voice was startling in the emptiness of the room. She listened to the evening roar of the city, the incessant honking of horns.

She crawled under the bedcovers in her clothes and shook with chill. I'm afraid, she thought. She wasn't afraid that she would die. She was afraid that everything would change.

She lay still and tried to single out the sounds of the city, the cars and jackhammers (even at night!), the cries and laughter of people, instead of the sounds of peacocks and dogs and rustling palms. She missed the Huasteca night. She drifted away from the city, into reverie:

The little cow speaks to her. It says, I'm going to hurt you. But why? she asks, though she knows. Because you are there. Because you are weak, says the cow. She sees the hair on the ridge of the cow's back when she passes it. She sees the place where its horns have broken the skin. The cow knows what to do and cannot help itself, nor can Abilene; she lets the cape drop. The cow, the girl: each waits.

She decided to take one of the sleeping pills from the doctor's office. She undressed to her panties and shirt and drank water from her hand, under the tap. If it made her sick—what would they do at the hospital? Can you have an abortion if you are already sick with the turista?

The buzzer made her jump. It was Tacho. His voice over the intercom was thinned and peppered with static. She rang the buzzer to let him in from the street and then made him wait in the hall while she dressed. She took her time, pulled on shoes, brushed her hair, while he banged on the door with his fist and cursed her.

When she let him in, he said, “Tonio says to stay.” He was burly and disheveled. He had been back from Portugal a year, and in that time he had gotten fleshy, his face jowly and slack. He needed to shave, and his hair had been badly cut. His sour mood was chronic.

“I don't need a babysitter,” she said in English. He made an ugly gesture with his hand. “Bird-talk!” he said, angry because, despite all the Americans who had been around him for years, he had learned almost no English. She told him again in Spanish, except that she called him a watchdog. He shrugged. “There's a dinner party at the apartment,” he said. “With caterers.” So he would stay with Abilene, he said. He was to accompany her to the hospital in the morning.

There was no place for him to sleep. When she said so, he laughed and pulled a bottle of brandy out of her bag. He sat at the table with his legs open wide, one on each side of the chair, and he drank her brandy. She watched him, thinking of the people who would be at Tonio's, high-ranking people from the government, and actors and businessmen and bullfighters.

Suddenly she was flooded with nostalgia for the ranch, the Tecoluca, as if it was a place she had known long ago. She thought of a time when she drove with the archeologist Martin miles out from the airstrip, and she showed him a place where a wildcat had killed a steer, and a little farther on, the pond where she had fished (with Tacho) for flat bony fish of splendid flavor. She thought of herself with Tonio in the arbor between the gate and the house as people came up from the ferry for a holiday. “This is my Abby,” he had said of her, over and over, all through that first year.

He had not called her that in a long time.

She thought of him on his bed in late afternoon, the hair on his chest spare and golden, his hips gilded by the sun coming in under bamboo shutters.

“My Tonio.” Would any woman ever say that, except in self-mockery?

“I'm going to bed!” she shouted. Tacho grunted and then laughed out loud. His voice was still ringing in her ears as she plummeted into sleep.

Some time in the night he came to her bed. She struggled up from her drugged sleep to the smell of him before she felt his hands on her. She had been dreaming of him, dreaming of a time before he went to Portugal and threw away the golden ring, before he started passing on the kicks he thought the world had given him. Everyone around Tonio wanted to be more than they were, but nothing Tonio gave would be enough to change them. If they could be with Abilene at least they took a little more from the patrón. And there was pleasure in risk.

Tonio had sent Tacho to Portugal to fight, and Tacho had run away from it, to go with the gypsies. He had travelled with them across the borders of four countries. He had learned their songs. He had come home bitter, and he had looked at Abilene with loathing. He had never forgiven her for being there when he came skulking home.

“Why do they blame me, when it is Tonio they hate?” she once asked a friend, Isabel Ruiz. Isabel knew. “You are nobody, and a woman. What a perfect victim you are!”

Tacho smelled of brandy and smoke and rutting. She was weakened by the sedative, but she managed to give him a hard shove with her feet that sent him rolling onto the floor. He groaned and she held her breath. If he rose and came at her, she would have no more strength to fight him. He was too big, and he could hurt her.

It comes to this! she thought. But he lay still, his buttocks catching the barest strip of moonlight through the window blinds. She burrowed in the covers like an animal in a nest. Some time in the night Tacho woke her again, crying out. She thought he had said, “I am torero!” and then, “I am animal.” Such mournful cries. To think she had once giggled against his shoulder; she had ridden the bus sixteen hours to be with him, when she had a plane ticket in her pocket all the time. She could not blame only him that it came to this. She hadn't thought of his heart. She had thought of him as an animal composite: fine-muscled like a horse, a curious sniffer like a boar, a silly threat like a goose, and sadly, dumbly noble, like the brave bulls at play in Tonio's greenest pasture. She had done what tourists do all the time, she had thought of him as a peasant. But she had thought he looked like Marcello Mastroianni. She had called him Marcello and he loved it.

She started to cry. Then, abruptly, she sat up in bed and wiped her cheeks with the sheet. Outside her a city was alive. She wanted nothing of remorse—not Tacho's, not her own. In the Huasteca she could pass days and nights and never think about guilt or pity or shame.

She had dreamed his cries, as once she had dreamed his affection. She had invented lovers, because she could not invent Tonio.

She wanted no more lies. No more dreams. She wanted the blackness of sleep, a night without stars. Tomorrow the life in her would be sucked out, and she could not know what would be left instead.

TONIO'S COUSIN Mickey was her first visitor, the week after she was back in the apartment. “You look just like a green lizard,” he teased. Abilene was glad to see him. She was half-mad in the solitude of Felix's apartment.

“Every afternoon I go to Dr. Reyles' office, and he picks at my scab and clucks and paints it green. He says underneath I am pink and new again, like a baby's butt.” Dr. Reyles was gentle and solicitous, and told her jokes too. It would be easy to fall in love with so nice a man, even if it was only bedside manner. “I've been coming and going in cabs. Yesterday a driver asked me if I had cancer. I told him to worry about his mother's lovers.”

“A good Mexican answer!” Mickey approved.

“He looked at me in the rearview mirror with his stupid macho grin and said, ‘I'll fuck you, lady. I don't fucky the face.'”

“What a limp chile!” Mickey said. “Nobody can care that your face is a green scab. Don't you see newsboys with smallpox scars, blind beggars, syphilitics, idiots? Everywhere you look, mutilation? Mexico is sinking into the ground it is built on. What we're counting on is all those woeful pobres as landfill. A whole city walking around on its dead, waiting for the earth to open up and swallow them.”

Mickey brought news of Tonio. What he really came for was to tell Abilene his worries. She had a good idea what he wanted, but he never got to ask. She dealt hands for gin rummy. “You look glum,” she warned Mickey, “and I will beat you if you don't pay attention.” She thought: If he wants to set up stakes, something for me against his goal to crawl in my bed, I'll do it just to liven up the game. She had forgotten for a moment how bad she looked with her old face ground away. Mickey didn't mention stakes at all. They played three hands before he began to unravel.

“So nice to have company,” she said wryly. He sat at the table too disconsolate to bother looking at her. He wanted someone to take it all in—his bad luck, his decline, his lost opportunities. Anyone would do. That would have been insulting if she hadn't known him so well. He was full of pain because he had lost his new girlfriend, the one he was so proud to have. The one who was to give him reason to begin Life For Real At Last. The girl he had kidded himself about. The one he had lost to Tonio.

Well, she wasn't going to sympathize with him over that! He had been kidding himself all along. He met the girl at a concert in the spring. Of course the first thing he would have told her was that his cousin was the rejoneador Antonio Velez. And he hadn't figured that out! “I'll get you invited to Antonio's tienta, it's a fabulous bash. Paco Rivera might come, and Rafael Lara. You can come, and bring your mother.” What a fool he was! It was just what he had done with her in Austin. “I have a cousin who fights bulls,” he had bragged. They had gone down on the bus. Abilene never went back.

Abilene got them beers and drank hers standing up, leaning against the wall. Mickey might have been sleeping for all the signs of life in him. When would he grow up? Two years out of graduate school, shouldn't an American-trained geologist be able to work? Shouldn't he be able to make enough money for a nice apartment and maybe a car? For a girlfriend, even a wife? He lived in a maid's room on the top of a four-story concrete building in an old section of the city. He had a single faucet for water, a brazier for a stove. At least he had a toilet. She had been there and said, “Oh Mickey, this is terrible poverty!” He had told her that poverty was fifty families on a faucet, and shit running down the street. She had felt reprimanded and resentful.

Mexico was to blame for his life, he said. None of his misfortunes came from his own doing. Like the matter of a job. Mickey referred to jobs as “positions.” The good “positions” were given as favors, controlled by the government. Mickey's father, who worked for a bank, wasn't in the PRI—the official party of the Revolution, of the country. Mickey didn't go to the national university, so he never had a chance to join the student group that was an arm of the national party. (As though going to school in the states was another piece of bad luck!) He swore he wouldn't have joined the bastards anyway. “The fucking PRI!” he often shouted. “It's supposed to be a people's party! A workers' party! It's a giant piñata of a party! It's Pan Bimbo, white bread.” The workers and the bureaucrats connived to stay on top; the capitalists worked below the desk, with vast sums of money changing hands. Besides—and here Mickey's tone shifted, he could not forget his ambition, his avarice—he was no worker. He said these things to stress his lack of connections. (The underlying accusation was understood, that Tonio would not help his own kin.) The real power was in the chambers of business and commerce. Tonio sometimes dined with cabinet members! He had the ear of the President himself, his best protection against seizure of his land. Hadn't he lent Ordaz his own plane in the last campaign? A campaign like every one since the Revolution, a sham. The signs and festivals, the flyers and bands and hoopla were to let the country know who its father would be for six years. Choice had nothing to do with it.

Mickey looked up from his misery long enough to say, “Half my students are missing every class. Even these young kids! It's like a rot, something eating at the floorboards.” He had a low-paying part-time job as an instructor in one of the polytechnical schools. “They go to political meetings, they tell me. Politics!”

“Are they wrong?” Abilene asked.

“Are students ever wrong to question? Isn't that what education is supposed to be about?”

What Abilene wanted was for Mickey to engage her for another hour. All day she had only the racket of the streets. Sometimes she got high and sat by the window. She could hear ice in drinks at the cafe a block away. She could hear the conversations of passersby. “Spare me,” she said. “I thought university was where girls went to find husbands. What do I know?” She poured more beer into her glass and licked foam with her fingers. She grimaced and felt the scab give across her cheeks.

Mickey amazed her. He went on, as though he were talking to her on the phone. “They quote and misquote Marx and they chant slogans from Cuba. But they haven't read Hegel or Kierkegaard. They know nothing of dialectics.”

“You're forgetting I had half a term of college. Talk English.” She tried to smile; the effort pushed the cracks of her scab toward her ears.

“I am.”

“I'm dumb and you know it. Stop showing off for me.”

“You wouldn't say that if you thought it. I've been thinking lately how smart you've become. How sophisticated.”

“Never mind the sarcasm.”

“Well, these students. They are very poor. Everywhere they look what do they see? Poor and rich. It is difficult to synthesize that contradiction. They sell Chiclets on the streets as Mercedes cruise by.”

“But you're speaking of students! If they're smart won't they go to the university?”

“Oh sure. The university. If they're very smart and very very lucky. If there's a way for them to get fed, buy books. It's easier if you are in the party.”

“The PRI.”

“There are no other parties! The others are mosquitoes! The PRI pays their campaign costs and laughs at them, even the Communists! They can buzz, but they cannot bite. I don't think this crop of kids understands this. They make me nervous with their talk, and if I am nervous, what is the head of the police?”

“So the poor are angry. They seem classic.”

“The poor are hungry! It is the young who are angry.” Mickey had rolled his right hand into a fist. Now and then he tapped the table with the fist, like a carpenter taking aim. “They have learned words like ‘democracy' and ‘prosperity,' and they are very ignorant. They are ambitious in a way different from their parents, different even from my generation. Oh I have friends who despise the system and lament the loss of the true revolution. But what do they do about it? They drink rum and talk all night, and go to sleep in one another's beds. Once a year the old radicals dig out their pens and scribble something for the anniversary of the Revolution, or maybe for the anniversary of the Cuban independence. There's even a joke about it, that there is a rhyming dictionary with a hundred words to rhyme with Che. One of our circle did something, a year or so ago. He tried to organize his neighborhood to demand electricity and water for the poor who had made shanty houses on vacant lots. He said the Communists would help them get what they needed. They burned effigies. One day he was there, and the next he had disappeared. Now we talk to one another. We say, ‘Maybe he went to the country with a lover.' Such talk!”

“But to disappear! In Mexico! Maybe he was robbed and killed by a street gang—”

Mickey sighed. “Oh yes, maybe,” he said sarcastically. “But these kids—they have so much spunk, and they have all our arrogance. They think they have invented idealism. They want to be the conscience of the country. They want to wake the rest of us up. They know nothing of history, of fate. I ask them: ‘So you throw out the best system in Latin America. Then what? What will you have?' I ask them that, and they smile at me as though it will all have to be explained to me one day. They want too much.”

“All the young are greedy.” Abilene was surprised to hear herself say that; where had she heard it; from someone else? “I'm surprised at your lack of sympathy, Mickey. You've always talked like a bitter man.”

“Bitter? Yes, I'm bitter. Did I say I didn't agree with my friends? I spend many nights with them, fighting new battles for independence, all with words. When none of us has a woman, we talk all night.” He winced at this admission. Abilene wondered how he could fail to see how fortunate he was, despite his concrete floor and cold water. He had mobility, access. He had an education, two languages. He even had his son now; his Texas wife had abandoned the child for a hippie commune. Mickey's parents kept the child. Tonio paid school tuition.

“It will blow over,” Mickey said, stretching and yawning. “If they talk too much they'll breathe too much dirty air and fall down sick.” He made a face. It was nothing to him. He saw the students as Tonio saw him: impertinent.

She asked him an easy question. “Are you hungry?” She knew he could go hungry for days before he would offer to get food. Two long jaunts with him had taught her his strategies. Kindly she considered: he puts away nuts for winter. He's a squirrel, like me. She touched the gold bracelet on her arm like a talisman. It had been a gift from Tonio.

She fried eggs and tortillas. Mickey stood in the doorway and watched her work. As she was turning the eggs, he said, “Tonio is seeing Anne Lise in Mexico.”

“I'm not surprised.” She handed Mickey his plate and followed him to the table. In truth she was shocked to the bones. It didn't help that she had seen it coming. She remembered how hangdog Mickey had been at the tienta, watching Tonio wipe the very cushion on which Anne Lise sat. Mickey had found no comfort in Abilene, who had gone numb, and then to Sage's bed. She remembered it as an old woman looking back on something very long ago. She hadn't expected Sage's ardor, or his contrition.

“She's beautiful,” she said coolly, using her fork to burst the yolks of her eggs. She didn't know if she could eat. “Like Tonio,” she said.

Mickey ate heartily, despite his proclamations of anguish. “She's not a movie star. Or a stewardess, or an American student on vacation. She's first class.”

How like a child Mickey was! He saw only himself, hurt because his plan to show off to Tonio had backfired. He hadn't even considered what it meant to Abilene. And what did it mean? Maybe it was the perfect thing to happen, to take choice out of the game, as always. Like the death of your parents, the loss of a lover was a catapult.

“Tonio is nearly forty years old,” she said. “He's tired of movie stars.”

“He's never gone with a girl like Anne Lise.”

“How is that?” Despite her intention to remain friendly—when Mickey left she would be alone again—she was rising to his insult. In his own way he was as rude as Tacho.

“She doesn't put out,” he said.

Her face burned at the edges, a ragged face torn from a picture. “How colloquial your English still is,” she said.

“Some do, some don't,” he persisted, but he blushed.

“Put the plates in the sink.” She pushed her plate across to Mickey. He was astonished. “Go on!” she snapped. He took the dishes but didn't rinse them. He knew a maid would come in the morning. Poor Mickey knew all about maids.

“Every year you get touchier,” he said when he sat back down. “I'd think you would treat me better, all things considered.”

She leaned under the light to glare at him. “Whatever you had coming to you, you've been paid twice over.” She knew what made him mad, what would make him mad forever, was that she had abandoned him twice in Acapulco. The second time she had walked out while he was in the shower. She had reached the bottom of the hill before he figured it out. She had heard him screaming from the walk outside their room, above her, stark naked, disbelieving.

“He's gone to Morelia to a house party,” he said casually. Cool, green, colonial Morelia. “Anne Lise and her mother will be in Morelia, too.”

“He told me he was going out of town,” she lied. “Did Anne Lise tell you her plans?”

“I read it in the paper. She's a diplomat's daughter. It's minor news but good gossip. She isn't Tonio's usual bitch.” He glared at her. One of these days, Abilene thought, he and I will have to punch it out with one another.

She stood. He stood, “I saw Isabel. She said she would come by,” he said, in a voice to soothe her. She went into the bedroom and slammed the door hard. Mickey jiggled the handle and called to her a few times. Then she heard him let himself out. She leaned against the door, facing the window, and through it, the blackness of a city night. She talked to herself in a small singsong voice. If she spoke aloud, she did not have to think too much.