Gringa (23 page)

In this way I passed the time, waiting for him.

He came too fast and stopped too short. His wheels dug into the gravel and spewed grit all over me. “Come on! Get in!” he called from the cab of the truck. I clambered in and reached for his arm. He moved it away to change gears. He drove a few miles from the hotel and found an off-road, and parked. I turned to him again, expecting his embrace, and he hit me with his fist. I do see stars! I thought. He punched at me viciously, while I screamed for him to stop. His blows caught my ear, my arms, my back, and once I'd turned, my head and neck.

“Oh why oh why?” I cried when he stopped.

He said he had gonorrhea and had given it to his wife. It took me a moment to realize what he was saying. I knew very little about such things, only what I had learned from gossip in school. Then I realized he was blaming me. My hands slid up the door and hung on the open window's pane. I lay slumped away from him, disbelieving. He had fucked maids and whores, yet he blamed me! I said this, now bitter and fully aware. “Not like that, I didn't get it like that,” he said. “It was you and your French fag. Something he ground out of some boy's ass. Fag clap. That's what you brought to me.” He hit me again and I tried to open the door. He had taken the handle off the inside and I couldn't get out. I crouched toward the floor while he poured blows on my head and shoulders; at least they were now open blows, from palms, not fists. He stopped as suddenly as he had begun, got out and opened the door. With a yank, he pulled me onto the ground. “How could you!” he said.

“I didn't, you idiot!” I shouted. Why hadn't he just asked me? I could have made a joke of it. Me and Claude! Claude a fag. Why hadn't I thought that.

“I know you did,” he screamed, “because I asked him.”

He backed out and I breathed the dust he made. I had to stumble and half-crawl the two miles back to the hotel. A car passed and I lay flat beside the road to keep its lights off me. I stumbled around the back of the hotel and up to Claude's hut. His light was on. When he opened the door, it struck me that he showed no surprise. “Please,” I begged.

I knew he was cold and superior, that he would not have bothered to deny Sage's accusations. But he would see what he had done. He would take care of me, though I was an American girl, though he had never liked me.

By the time Tonio returned, there was only a pale bruise on my cheek below the eye. I told him I had slipped coming in from the pool because I didn't take the time to dry. He touched the spot with his fingertips. I knew it would be yellow for a few days, and then gone.

The fault that had opened with his going had closed again. Whatever had dropped in was lost, and lost, was forgotten.

In June, Bruni bought a trailer in Brownsville and married the laundry maid Octavia. He had acquired a virgin ranch and set about clearing it, as Antonio had done, with AID funds. The land was in the state of Veracruz, where savannah ran to lowland forest, and the trailer was as venerated as a pyramid by the Indians there. Four months later, Bruni's daughter was born. They named her Enriqueta, in memory of Octavia's irascible brother, who had hung himself at sixteen after losing a minor altercation with a friend. He was Huastecan, and this had once been their way.

In Portugal, Tacho disappeared. Tonio had left him to train and fight and to take the alternativa in Spain when he could. He went away with a band of Romanian gypsies, leaving his suit of lights boxed, his swords safely sheathed, on the ranch of Tonio's friend Don Amparo. He wrote his patróns Don Amparo and the matador Antonio Velez identical letters, from France, saying he had fallen into a madness wrought by the minor keys.

Estaban, Tone's other banderillero, and no longer young, married in San Marta and began working with the breeding of brave bulls on the Tecoluca. Though Tonio planned to fight many more years, he took on no more banderilleros, preferring to hire them without attachment. In a Tijuana corrida, Tonio was gored (his seventh injury) and then, for the sake of healing, circumcised. He brought to the ranch a Portuguese novice, Clemente Cortazar, at the request of Don Amparo. Clemente fought on foot and not in the Portuguese way. He had a haughty expression in the ring, which hid quite nicely his bad teeth. He taught Antonio's young gringa to make the veronica, and he played the bull for her, though it was hard not to laugh. He could have had her in his bed but he was old-fashioned and believed spilled seed was courage lost.

Mr. Mac the Scot-Canadian died a gentle death on his disheveled bed in the corner of the generator shed. At his request the cacique curandero crossed the river in the night. The shaman massaged the old man's legs and fumigated his sleeping area with a torch of pine. Mr. Mac was buried on a knoll above the new practice ring, after his feet had been carefully washed.

With Bruni gone, Sofia's job took on new importance. She bought a refrigerator and a bed with a mattress made in a factory. Not long after she was seen in San Luis Potosí by a cousin of Tonio's head carpenter; she was looking at Volkswagens in a used car lot.

While excavating for a new bullring (to test the yearlings and brave cows), workers discovered a mass of artifacts, as thickly clustered as grapes. Federal archeologists came to the ranch for half a year. The site was claimed by the government (as are all prizes underground) and fenced as out of bounds. Construction of a ring was completed a quarter of a mile farther on. Esteban was promoted to foreman when the old one slipped a disc and was pensioned.

Tonio tore down the aviary and had a tennis court built. Three dependable hands went to Monterrey to learn to mind the nets. Sometimes Tonio and Abilene volleyed balls back and forth, but neither had the knack and they lost interest. The second year, vines broke through the surface, and in no time it was ruined.

The hermit botanist Harrison was murdered by Mexican squatters who thought he had found gold beneath his orchids. A small Texas college made his Ranch of the Sky a field station, and birders pressed to include the site in the annual Christmas count.

Mickey, thoroughly desperate, jumped in a second-class bullring with a bright red rag and had his pants ripped off. Not long after, Tacho came home from Portugal and the other countries where he had been.

Calves were bought, grazed, and then transported away to slaughter in San Marta. More than half their meat was bound for export from a country where one man in ten eats beef some of the time.

Tonio fell giddily in love with a Mexican starlet, Pilar Acosta, and took her with him to Kenya and Mozambique. Their safaris were given much play in the actress' publicity, but were in truth the last events of their affair. Tonio brought home to Abilene a bracelet made of elephant hair, though he had already given her one before, made of gold. Later, photographs arrived from Mexico City. There was one of a Kikuyu with a penis fifteen inches long, hung in a loop along his thigh. Then came shields and spears, masks and drums. Later still the trophies came: the hides of wildebeests and zebras, a rhino's head, a lion golden as a field of grain. Tonio said Pilar made him silly; as he said it, his upper lip tucked down as over a smothered grin. Abilene thought he pined. She didn't pay much attention.

Thinking that Tonio must someday marry, Abilene did consider sadly the attributes the woman would have to have: fair hair and beauty, equestrian skill, and languages, a privileged family, and youth. Such girls did not come by by chance. Those men who did come were adventurers, like the spelunkers who talked of the Pit of Swallows and its unmeasured depths; wastrels like the Houston oilman whose girlfriend shot a steer in error, and Mickey with his sighs. A girl did not appear until a festive tienta, held one April. She was accompanied by her mother and courted, in his way, by Tonio, in front of sixteen guests.

The American rancher Sage observed Antonio taking the diplomat's daughter by the hand and helping her into the jeep to drive up to the ring. Now divorced, Sage was touched by this affection and it gave him some ideas. He dawdled after breakfast to stay with Abilene, while the other late-risers smoked Acapulco gold. He did not approve of Abilene's getting high, but he knew it would prove advantageous to his suit. Dreamy, lank and moist, Abilene yielded to his plaintive regrets for old mistakes, and granted him a tender try at recompense. So pleased was he (how perfectly life sorts itself out!), he fell asleep, and missed the spectacle of her as espontánea, caping a mooing cow.

Now that I look back I see myself a student again, passed from tutor to tutor. Tonio taught me about dope and sex, about patience and emptiness, days and days of emptiness; taught me about the lining inside me, where I am dry. Taught me that there is freedom in yielding. Under his tutelage I learned to be evasive, to use words as masks, to distrust.

Martin, my archeologist friend, taught me about looking back from far away, creating a perspective so vast that I see I am nothing in it; or in another glance, am everything. He taught me about superstition, and about faith, about holding on merely because others have managed before you. He taught me that life is, when immediacy is gone, only an accumulation of tools and vessels, only something to be eaten and drunk and left for the sand to cover, or vines, or stone or water.

Michael Sage taught me that there was a laughter inside me, free of spite or self-derision, undefensive and happy. He taught me to want fiercely, without calculation; and then he taught me there is no vulnerability like that which comes of love. He took the love away, and taught me my place.

Tonio knew me best. Knew who I was all along. When I came to him, I had everything to learn, and he already knew it all.

TUESDAY, AUGUST 27. A quarter of a million people march from the Museum of Anthropology to the Zócalo.

They are a block away when they see the lights. Hallie leads the way, half-fairy in her excitement, jumping and leaping to let the energy out. Behind her Abilene and Pola walk arm in arm. They have walked more than a mile, with Simon and Elena falling behind as the crowd joined the procession. Hallie turns and walks backwards, waving over heads into hundreds of men and women, some with banners they have stopped to unroll.

“I can't see Simon!” Hallie says. She stumbles into someone in front of her. She laughs and apologizes. The woman she bumped says, “Bless you children, you good boys and girls! You children know the truth!”

Everyone is smiling.

There is the festive spirit of a street fair. Girls dance along the walks with sweaters tied at their waists, the arms hanging below the hems of their short skirts. Boys call out to them and run alongside. “You came!” they say, as though it was for them.

The Plaza de la Constitution is ablaze with lights. Thousands and thousands of candles flicker. Blankets of flowers line the plaza. Banners and flags ripple and slap above the heads of their bearers. Everywhere the faces of the young are radiant. The bells of the cathedral ring once, twice, and yet again, fabulous long peals that are met by deafening applause, a sound like thunder that spreads out into the side streets and then comes back like an echo, back into the Zócalo, the heart of this magnificent city. A chant goes up: “ME XI CO LI BER TAD. ME XI CO LI BER TAD.”

Hallie finds the core of the demonstration. She finds Refugio and other mates from Poli, professors and parents and friends. There are so many friends.

A girl cries out, “Oh look! Everyone I love is here!”

Someone speaks from a platform, but Abilene cannot hear. Elsewhere songs are being sung. The candles blur into a cover of light. It is the sky fallen to earth. A night of stars.

Abilene turns to Pola. By a trick of light, one of Pola's eyes is flickering while the other is black. She is laughing. Abilene wonders what Pola thinks of all this, what it is that moves her so. She doesn't care; it's good to see a child laugh from joy. For her, Abilene, the pleasure is in the phenomenon of a great space filled with people, without trouble. It is the effect of ten thousand candles on the night.

Pola reaches for Abilene's hand. “It's so beautiful!” she says, and when Abilene turns, smiling, to speak to her, Pola kisses her on the mouth and throws her arms around her. Abilene can feel Pola's heart. “Beautiful!” Pola says again. Then, “Where do you think Mother is?”

Adele has gone ahead of them, to find a place to photograph. Abilene points to the rows and rows of windows and balconies above them. “Adele could be anywhere,” she says. From those windows a thousand bulbs could flash. A thousand guns could fire.

Abilene shivers, to free herself from such a thought. There have been no incidents tonight, though someone said he saw army trucks as they left the Santo Tomas campus earlier in the evening. The windows give nothing away. The buildings appear empty.

They wait in the center of the plaza as the people turn the other way and begin to pour out into the adjoining streets. The boys and girls, some of them still singing, put away their banners and placards and candles, and make plans to eat or dance, make love, or plan another day.

Pola, Abilene and Elena head home together, back to Obregon Street. Simon has already slipped away, and Hallie has gone with Refugio.

Pola cries out suddenly, “Oh look!” as all the street lights go out. They huddle close and pause to get their bearing. They walk along the Reforma in darkness, their way lit by the lights of cars. As they turn a corner and plunge into the black maw of a side street, they can still hear the sounds of hundreds of youngsters yelling: “Did you see! Did you hear!”

The laughter and jokes. The great joy.

Abilene feels cold in the sudden blackness; she has been sucked into a vacuum, the light now far away.

She doesn't know what it is she fears. All her troubles are of her own making. How foolish she feels all of a sudden, to march with these people in this place. To pretend to be a part of something so important.

Pola takes her hand. “What a trip, huh?” she says, smug with her good English.

Neither Daniel nor Adele come home for hours and hours. Abilene stays the night, sleeping in Pola's bed, her back warmed by the child's body. She dreams of the march, the lights, and then the dark. She dreams that in the blackness she runs away, runs for blocks and blocks. She runs, with no place to go, so that she cannot stop.

ABILENE WAS frequently with Hallie. She attended meetings in churches and school buildings, sometimes in cul de sacs off the main streets. In the evenings, though, Hallie and her friends seemed too young. Abilene felt out of place. Now and then she went to a movie with Isabel, or sat with her in Claude's apartment smoking dope or drinking quietly. Isabel had grown somber as the summer progressed. She told Abilene that she had stopped trying to look after Ceci's welfare. “Or yours,” she added. “But I have to say you're looking for trouble, Abelita. This business with the students is getting too big. The government won't let it be. You will get to see Mexico in a new light. You should take care not to be in the middle.”

It was easier to go to Daniel and Adele's apartment in the evenings, when Daniel's friends clustered for long hours of talk. They came to diffuse the energy they picked up from the city during the day. They talked in long rambling discourses about the meaning of the Revolution, and the callowness of youth. They cursed by name a hundred bureaucrats, governors, army officers and union leaders. They reviewed the old railroad strike and its imprisoned heroes. They discussed the psychological and philosophical impact of torture on the individual and his society.

They made everything abstract.

Simon drank too much and talked about ramming officials in the ass. He was directing a revival of a Ionesco play, and he ran around the room with his hands at his forehead, acting out the part of a rhinoceros.

Gilberto said sourly that they ought to burn down the National Palace. He had warned his friends, the other fish, he said. It was a pun, los peces, a play on the initials of the Communist Central Committee. “And apt!” Simon ranted. “Swimming aimlessly, little guppies, little minnows. Conceited, self-deceived, in their tiny little aquarium—”

“Be careful you don't talk about yourself,” Elena said. The others looked at her in surprise. In a while she left with Simon, following after him like one in court traipsing after a king.

“Now my friends are in prison,” Gilberto said. Headquarters had been sacked. Gilberto had been meeting classes at the university when the office on Merida was raided. When his friends went in to protest (and were arrested), he was lying down with a cold. “I'm a coward!” he cried.

The others rallied around him. “What good would you do in jail?” they said.

Arturo had the most weight and was forgiving. “I know about prison,” he told them. “Will hammered kidneys help the party?” They turned to Daniel, keeper of the data. Was it as bad as it seemed? It was possible to go about your business all day and not know anything was going on except preparations for the Olympics. Bright orange signs for the subway line that had opened. Freshly painted buildings. Olympic symbols everywhere. Then you could go around a corner and see army trucks, with men and carbines in the back. You could see soldiers with bayonets jeering at kids, and herding them into trucks.

Daniel said that Military Camp 1 was swollen with political prisoners, and they were clearing a wing at Lecumberri for more. Gilberto grieved more loudly. “I can't just stand on the side,” he said. “The professors have to join their students!” Everyone could see he didn't want to go along.

Adele, who had been busying herself with domestic details—rinsing glasses, putting out bowls of tortilla chips, wiping up a spill—sat down and said quietly, “The students say there will be strength in numbers. At every meeting, hundreds gather, just by word of mouth. There is talk of another demonstration in the Zócalo, this one bigger, bolder. Of course we all have to be with the students. They are speaking for what is right.”

Abilene could see that Daniel was surprised at Adele's passionate words. Adele had been spending a lot of time with Nando, the hotel keeper's son; they were often out, meeting with students, or holed up in the hotel, transcribing.

Daniel looked on the edge of a smile. He reached over to squeeze Adele's shoulder, a gesture Abilene took to be affection and praise. Adele looked tired, but pleased with Daniel's attention.

Pola lay on her bed in her room, reading The Stranger in French. She was trying to teach Abilene the language, to pass time.

Gilberto said, “We have met to draw up a statement—” He stopped in mid-sentence, as though he had swallowed something in a lump.

“Cat got your tongue?” Simon goaded. He had come back, entering a conversation that had gotten nowhere. He was alone. He glared at Gilberto. “Can't trust us?” he accused. “Afraid it's a nest of spies? Check the chairs for mikes!”

Adele went over and put her arm along Gilberto's back. The poor man was on the edge of a breakdown. “Don't mind Simon,” she soothed. “He's trying out lines for a new passion play. ‘The Temptation of the Intellectual.'” Simon gave her a dirty look and poured himself a drink.

The tension passed quickly. What these people had among them was stronger than Gilberto's fear or Simon's bitterness. Could it be friendship? Abilene thought. Daniel went back a long way with his friends. Daniel had been there the day Arturo was released from prison. The first thing Arturo said was, “You shaved your moustache.” Daniel had never had a moustache, but he didn't argue. He said Arturo looked okay. Arturo said everything had changed while he was away.

Pola said she hoped when she was grown up there would be something to do besides drink and quarrel and talk philosophy. Abilene said, “You have to pass the time some way.” She did not say that Daniel's friends provided a kind of cover for his activities. Nobody took anyone in this crowd seriously. For Daniel and now Adele, there was a reduction of significance by association. One did not look for heroes and villains in a crowd of clowns.

For Abilene, the truth was Pola was better company, but Abilene would have been embarrassed to ignore the gathering and spend her time with a child in her room. She liked Pola for the way she burst out with sudden thoughts, and then spent hours brooding before she said anything more. She liked her curiosity when they were out, the way Pola noticed color and expressions in other people. Pola saw the future as a vast canvas, an appealing thought, coming from her. One minute she was sure she would be a movie star. (Didn't she have a head start, being Yannis' daughter?) Another time she was going to study at the Sorbonne. She had many suggestions for Abilene's future, too, as though Abilene were another girl at the lycée. She thought Abilene could be an archeologist and go on digs in Greece and Egypt. She thought Abilene could learn about movies and work on Yannis' sets. She thought Abilene ought to fall in love and be swept away.

Abilene happened to have brought Hallie to Daniel's the night the army attacked the San Idelfonso Preparatory School in the middle of the night. The group was about to say its farewells, around midnight, when Nando came with news. A skirmish in the streets had the smell of real trouble. He came back later to say the army had splintered the beautiful old door of the school in order to rout out the students hiding there in the patios. The army had lined the students up, and beat them on the legs.

Nando had barely made it away.

They listened to the radio. Daniel went downtown to get press releases, and then to go to the paper. A little after three in the morning they heard the Secretary of the Department of Internal Affairs:

The upward course of the Mexican Revolution which so irritates
the naive militants is slowed down when there is unrest and
interferences with the rules of law and order.

“Here! Here!” Simon raved. “Let's hear it for law and order! Fuck the naive militants! Fuck their mothers!”

“That does it,” Elena wept. Abilene didn't know if she was commenting on the army actions, or on Simon's response.

Hallie started to cry. “This would never happen in the U.S.,” she said. Everyone looked at her coldly. “Maybe to Blacks,” she amended. “But not to students.” She cried harder. “I shouldn't even mention the U.S., should I?”

Adele had purplish bruised shadows under her eyes. She snapped at Hallie. “Don't play these troubles as your song.” Hallie left abruptly, pushing away Abilene's offer to go along. Abilene insisted, though. It was far too late, and maybe dangerous, to travel out to Fedregal.

Abilene took Hallie to Claude's apartment. They lay side by side on the bed, too tired for sleepiness. “Don't let Adele bother you,” Abilene said. “She is full of these stories she's been taping. She should have stuck to skinny women in expensive clothes. This trip has gotten too real.” She didn't try to explain what seemed so obvious, that being young was a lark, that Hallie was young. That Adele and Daniel and the others all knew that in Mexico youth could be punished. That there were young people with no route of escape, no fathers to call.

And then there was Abilene, no longer young, without connection, acting with all the meaning of a dog chasing a car.

She went to sleep thinking of the sounds of birds at the Tecoluca. She wondered if it had begun to rain there.

Abilene read the transcripts Adele showed her. The students had chosen names for themselves, and kept their real ones secret. They were eager to talk. They thought they were making history.

Quecha: A young sweet girl from one of the housing projects, a nursing student. Her father drove a cement truck: