Gringa (24 page)

They say we are spoiled. They don't want to take us seriously, they want to make us feel little. But we can feel the people rising up with us. All we want is what the Revolution promised—a chance for all to have a decent life. Those of us who are students, we've had better luck than the peasants. It's up to us to speak up, no matter how hard they try to make us quit. I might end up in prison, and I don't want to, but that isn't enough to make me afraid. Even dying wouldn't be enough. If I die my life will go on in the sky like a star. When there are enough of us, the sky will be lit so bright everyone will see. That's what this is about. It's about our rights, the rights of everyone.

Rosa: a student's mother, a resident of the Tlatelolco housing units, with a son in Lecumberri and a daughter active in the Movement:

All night I boiled water to pour on their shitty army heads. In my apartment we had a mound of stones and jars, all that we could find that would hurt when we threw them from above. There was tear gas and shots fired, but we didn't give up. Even little kids were on the roofs and on the balconies, shouting and throwing stones. Dozens of people were wounded by their bullets, but in the end the granaderos went away with their tails between their legs. They saw who they were dealing with! Not just students, but their families and neighbors. The whole neighborhood!

One day Elena had shown up and said she had something she wanted Adele to have for her records. She was very different without Simon, quieter and more thoughtful, with a softer expression.

The granaderos came to the Belles Artes Institute with police dogs and took away directors, dancers, even scene painters! I hadn't realized—oh, I had been to a public meeting on the esplanade. I might have gone to their big demonstration. But now I'm really with them. Remember when we went on tour, and in Montevideo we heard about the Indian troupes in the hills, where they don't even have radios? That's how they got the news, from actors who showed them what was going on. Now we've formed brigades, like the Indians, to go out and show what's happening. We go to all the markets and the squares. They should have left us to our rehearsals, who did they think we were? But I thank them for waking me up! I thought this all had to do with students, but it's my business too. I'll fight with the students until their petition is granted. I'll fight until wrongs are righted. Otherwise, what good are Lorca and Shakespeare?

Abilene laid the file down and asked Adele if they could go somewhere for lunch. “My treat,” Abilene said.

Adele, without looking up, said, “Couldn't you make something for us here? Pola will be home in a while, and I have so much to do.”

“I know you're busy, Adele, but I'm at loose ends. The summer is over. Pola's going to be going to school all day. She's a kid, Adele! Tonio is losing patience with me. Claude will want his apartment soon for his own time in the city.”

“You mean you aren't going back to the ranch?” Adele said, as though she hadn't tried to talk Abilene out of that very action years before. “I assumed you were waiting out the rainy season.”

“Maybe,” Abilene said weakly. She didn't think she could feel worse, but in the next moment she did.

“Look, I can't be your mother right now!” Adele said. There was a terrible moment between them, Adele with her mouth still partly open, Abilene unable to move. Then Adele threw her head back and sighed loudly. “I can't even mother Pola.”

“I don't know why I'm here,” Abilene said in a small voice. She felt such a fool.

“I really am sorry,” Adele said. The hurt hung between them. “I could use Yannis right now, to help me sort all this out. Sentiment, truth, danger, hysteria. He always knew what to make of God and large emotions.”

Abilene went down onto the street and began walking toward the avenue, where she could get a taxi. As she turned a corner, she saw an army truck coming up the street toward her. She stepped away from the curb. Bits of paper skittered across the walk in a light gust of wind. As the truck passed she saw there were young soldiers in the back, carrying guns. The truck moved so slowly, Abilene met the eyes of a young man leaning out toward her. Their gazes seemed fixed for a moment. He had a full mouth, parted, as though to say something. He might have been asking Abilene along, it was that sweet a look on his face. He didn't belong in a truck with soldiers. He would rather have been with her.

Daniel came with news that the police had found the murderer of the American woman. Her name was Sylvia Barton, not Britton. They had found her passport by chance; that was how the murder was solved.

This is what the murderer said:

Yes, all right, I killed the American woman. She was a slut, she asked for it. Any man with balls would have done the same thing.

I'm a pre-med student. All I've ever wanted was to be a doctor. I grew up in the slums. I had six baby brothers and sisters die in the years I was growing up. My father has always thrown himself around like he's a big shot, but he's never been able to get what we needed to live. Now I know it's not his fault.

I get up at five in the morning and ride buses into the city to attend classes at the university. Then I go to the hospital where I work in the morgue. I clean off the blood and guts from the dumb jerks who have got themselves knifed in fights out there, sometimes they've shit all over themselves, too. I work until midnight and then I try to get some sleep and start all over again. I catch naps at work, but I never get enough sleep.

I came out from work that night thinking I needed a drink. Usually I don't spend my money that way. What I really wanted was to get high. I was thinking this, coming around a corner, walking the long way to the bus line, looking for a pulqueria open at that hour, and I saw this girl leaning against an abandoned shanty house in a side street. I knew by the way she was standing that she was smoking grass. I went up to her and I said, “I could use a drag of that awfully bad. I work in the hospital morgue and it was a bad night, you see.”

She was pretty, but she had this hard mouth, like an old whore. She laughed at me but she gave me a long drag. She said it was the last of her dope. She asked me about my work and let me finish off the joint. I made it sound like maybe I was an intern, I said I was studying to be a doctor and I had a bad turn at the things they make you do. She gave an ugly laugh. “You, a doctor!” she said. She ran her hand down my shirt. All right, I was dressed cheaply, how would you dress to go to work in the morgue? What kind of clothes would you wear if you were feeding your family and going to school? But she made me feel real bad. Ugly, you know. She made me feel I wasn't sexy, like nobody would want me. She was letting me know I wasn't good enough for her gringa taste.

I moved closer to her and put my testicles up against her crotch. She leaned back against the wall of this little shack and the whole thing shuddered. A piece of scrap wood, this big board, fell off right beside us on the ground. She said, “Maybe I'll fuck you, but I won't kiss you. I don't think you brush your teeth, they're all yellow—” I put my hand over her mouth and told her to shut up. Now I wanted to fuck her real bad, I was big and hard and I could tell she wanted me to, but she wanted me to make her. Gringas, you know? Not that I had any experience. I'd never had a gringa, but I'd heard. They come down here because they want us to treat them bad. They want to laugh at us for doing it. They want you to promise them everything and tell them you love them. They want you to make them pretend they don't want it. They want you not to love them, they want to hate you.

She pulled her dress up; she didn't have anything on under it. This shocked me and I must have pulled away. She thought I was really funny, she was laughing and choking and sputtering. I told her to stop it. She was laughing so hard she had to sit down on the ground. Now what was I going to do? I got down beside her and tried to talk to her sweetly. “I know you want to do it,” I said. “Let's go inside the shack.”

She grinned big so that her big gringa teeth all shone white in the street light, and she said to me, “You smell like sour beans. All you chavos stink.”

The board was right beside my hand. I didn't even think before I picked it up. Before I knew what I was doing I had whacked her across the face with it. She never made a sound. I hit her again as hard as I could, and then I went into her purse and took everything out: some money, her passport. She had a little empty bag where she had had her dope. I'd heard somewhere you could sell a gringo passport. But I never knew where to take it. I never knew what to do with it and I didn't throw it away. I would have, later, but I was waiting, I think, until I could look at it. I wanted to take a good look at her picture before I threw it away.

The real joke in this is that nobody would ever have found out if it hadn't been for the movement. I lived in a slum and killed myself getting to school on time and work on time and staying awake day and night, and all the time these fucking students are getting my classes shut down so that I won't get my semester's credits. I didn't even know what they wanted. I figured I had enough to do and they didn't.

One of the big-shot students lived in the same slum as me. Everybody called him Figaro because he could sing. Some nice mornings he'd get out of his bed and go down on the street and just sing, like that. So everybody knew Figaro.

They were looking for him when they came to our apartment. They thought I knew him. They went through my stuff looking for movement literature. They sure had the wrong man for that shit. They tore the place apart completely, and when this one granadero finds the passport, he lets out a shout: “Well, fuck your mother.” He was grinning ear to ear. “Didn't we find ourselves a smart thief?” He made me take all my clothes off in front of my mother so he could search me. He let me get dressed to go, though. I've met prisoners who came to jail stark naked.

They didn't find Figaro so they took his little brother. Twelve, thirteen maybe. They threw us in the same paddy wagon. This kid was scared to death but cocky. They had grabbed him by the hair and chopped it off at the top. He looked like a sick cock.

Now I'll never be anything, all because of that American puta. My life is over, because she couldn't keep her mouth shut. They shouldn't let American women into Mexico alone. They don't belong here. They ought to keep them out.

“What a sad story this turns out to be,” Daniel said. “I feel sorrier for him than her.”

Adele watched Abilene read the transcript. It made Abilene's stomach turn over.

“Now I'm dreaming about her,” Adele said. “Last night. I thought I heard her say, ‘What should I do?' I thought I heard her weeping. I went looking for her in my dream. It was dark. I was going to take her in my arms. I was going to save her. I looked and looked for her in my dream, until I woke up. In my dream, I never remembered that she was dead.”

Abilene didn't think Adele heard herself talking. “What should I do?” Abilene had asked, and Adele didn't have time to talk about it. Now she wanted to save a dead woman in her dreams.

“I just couldn't remember she was dead,” Adele said again.

“She is,” Abilene said. “Tell Pola I'll be by some time.”

That night, Abilene went to the cantina where she had been with Angel, but the doorman wouldn't let her in alone. When she turned to leave, young men yelled after her, and one followed her onto the street. “You come in with me?” he said. He had a scar on his cheek. He was ugly, and she was tired.

“When the Revolution is finally made,” she said. It cheered her up, that she'd thought of that.

ABILENE MET the famous Gato one afternoon. She was coming out of the university library with Hallie and Refugio. She had heard his name dozens of times; he was what they called an acelerado. An agitator. He was too old to be a student.

If she had passed him on the street she wouldn't have given him a second look. He was dark and thin, his chest sagged in, his hair was too frizzy to hang right. A real pachuco. And smug.

Refugio introduced them. Refugio, son of a baker, who still kissed Hallie with his mouth closed tight. Gato said, “Another gringa?” Abilene said, “Another chavo?”

He had a smirky smile. Abilene knew immediately that Hallie had been wrong; that he would know just what to do in bed. Sarcasm, subtlety, a sense of superiority and a taste for conflict—she saw it all in his smirky smile.

She saw that trouble lay around him, waiting for a nudge to get it tumbling. He was the kind of danger Tonio had warned her about. And he despised her on first glance. It showed in his eyes: Gringa. What could be so low?

She knew something else, something she had learned from some of the best teachers. A man who wants to put you in your place wants you on your back. He never knows you want it too. You never tell.

Still, she went to hear him speak when she had a chance. The sloganeering and rhetoric were everywhere. The whole city was like something on fire. It had started with a clash between two groups of kids, some nonsense, probably an insult or a dare. It was just what the granaderos had been waiting for; they had been tethered only by lack of incident. How could the anti-riot squad work if no one rioted? They saw to it that a minor street fight qualified. Students, passersby, janitors all fell beneath the blows of billy clubs. A woman with a bag of fruit from the market ended up in a paddy wagon on her way to Women's Detention. Another, shaking a dirty mop out a window, ended up in Military Camp.

Sure, there was a lot of talk now. Mostly it was wild and unreasonable: kids were going to change the world. They demanded open dialogue with the government, when the authorities wanted nothing so much as to paddle them on their collective butts.

The students listened to Gato; rumor had it he had been in Colombia when thirty thousand students struck. Now he talked about rights.

“Peasants were promised redistribution of their lands, and what do they get? Land without water, rocks, the bleaching sun.”

The students said, “The fat cats get all the rewards.” They called them that—fat cats—in English.

“They invest, their risk absorbed by the government, and they take the profits. Is that economic development?”

They liked to cry out. “The Revolution was a lie!”

The speeches were like favorite poems; everyone knew the verses and followed along. Gato cautioned them. “A strike is effective only if there is an immediate cause, an incident; only if there is a broad base of support. You can't mobilize a city, let alone a nation, on a base of rabble-rousing.” They listened, but they knew something was going on. Mobs appeared at every public meeting. He kept a grim view. “You have to read more.” He wanted them to talk ideology and strategy. He said they had too short a vision.

He advised a long look.

Hallie arrived one day with two men in tow. One was Gato; the other, disheveled and tired, was an older man named Alfonso. They were looking for a place to spend the night.

“I haven't the bedding,” Abilene said. She knew bedding wasn't the issue. They stared at her until she said, “Is it so urgent?”

“It's better if you don't know, señorita,” the older man said. He looked ready to drop. “The floor, please?” It was so little to ask.

Some days later Gato came again with a duffel bag. “For a few days,” he announced, no interrogative in his voice. Abilene pointed to a corner of the living room. “Down here,” she said. “This is not by invitation. It's only because I'm friends with Hallie.” And she has a damned crush on all of you! she thought.

He gave her that same smile.

She thought: The last thing I need is another lover.

Hallie started bringing her other friends. They needed a place to meet. Whole groups of kids came, arguing and yelling at one another, talking all at once, terribly young and sincere and excited. They drank cheap wine and touched one another, arms across one another's shoulders, hands clasped as they talked. Young men got up on chairs to speak, a position that became riskier as the evening progressed.

One night someone suggested a stroll. The rain hadn't been heavy in the afternoon, and it was warm. They went down the avenue toward the Zócalo, five across, dipping their heads and calling out greetings to tourists and gawking boys, to scowly scratchy-faced men, and a saucy girl with beehive hair. They piled into two booths in Denny's and spent a long time reading the menu before they ordered three cheeseburgers, to divide ten ways.

Gato stayed behind.

Later he said, “They're naive. Babies, all of them.”

“They know what they want,” Abilene countered. “A just world.”

“Political prisoners freed. Indemnities. Electricity in shanty houses. New paint for their classrooms. Real jeans. They don't know what matters and what does not. They're too young.”

“I can sympathize,” Abilene said, to provoke him. She was warming up to this. She had felt so bad for so long. She had even thought of looking up Angel again.

“They wouldn't know a good life if they had it.”

“Why don't you like them?” Why are you here? that was the question. She knew why he could make trouble. He made your skin prickle. He dared you.

“If they turned out of the prison all those who are not criminals, if they abolished the rightist groups on campus, what would be different? It would take a week to see that everything is exactly the same. What the students ask for is impossible to achieve under this government, and it wouldn't help anyway. They might as well ask for dialogue with the devil. They're like peasants in a jungle; they believe in witches, magic. Bah! The university is the wrong place to start a revolution.”

Abilene remembered Hallie's talk. “What about Paris? The students nearly shut it down.” She regretted what she said as soon as she said it. She had no idea what was going on in Paris now! Gato didn't care, though.

“The students are bait,” he said. “They make incipient repression more visible. It's a good thing for the federales to yank bankers' children. They're little seeds. The real roots are in the country.” He stared at her coldly. “It's all nothing to you. American. Not your matter.”

“I'm curious, though.” Her remark, oddly enough, seemed to please him. He leaned forward, his hands on the floor in front of his knees. He was like any other man, zealot or not; he needed release. Let him think it was all his idea.

She thought him least attractive when he was most didactic. Why did all men like to lecture! She thought she would divert him with sex, but he had a schedule for it, just before he slept. Once she succumbed, she relished the way he took her attention. Adele was all caught up in a new role she had made for herself as social historian. Pola was starting back to school. Hallie and Ceci and their friends were always going at full speed, as if every day had to mean something. There was so much to accomplish. Abilene liked thinking about Gato. He was fine and lean, his belly inconspicuous, and he was nimble, not so much like a dancer as a burglar. He moved with intention, but it couldn't be apprised until it was accomplished. His very gait was full of secrets, he defied scrutiny. His ordinary Mexican-ness made him almost invisible on the streets, good for rabble-rousing. Abilene had an idea that beneath his sheen-less hair his ears were blocked off, and so he had a way of looking around jerkily, a way of bringing his nose up sharply at some sudden scent. His eyes were narrow and slanted, the bones under his eyes took too much room; he had an altogether sly look.

She tried to think of what Tonio would say. (She didn't know why she hadn't heard from him. She had thought he would send someone for her: Constanzia, Bruni, Felix, maybe even Tacho. To tell her to get to the ranch or else. What she wanted to know was or else what?)

She thought of Tonio and her skin was cold. She was afraid. She was lying in bed beside Gato, who stared at the ceiling and thought great thoughts.

“If you had a lot of money what would you do?” she asked.

“Such a stupid question!” he said. “I'd buy guns, of course.”

Though he hadn't asked, she said, “I'd go to the south of France and try to learn French.” She had read somewhere that the beaches of France were pebbles, but she didn't care.

“You're a dumb bitch,” he said. She caught her breath, afraid he would get up and get dressed and leave, when what she needed from him was something to do.

He turned on her with gruff insolence and made love harshly, short of pain or insult, but pushing past detachment for the first time, straight to the quick, where the body is carried away; and in one moment, one evasive, tricky, deceiving, compromising moment, she felt free.

She forgot Tonio. At least there was that.

He took her out to Netzahualcoyotl. She could not believe the insects! Half a million people lived in seventy square kilometers. One-room dwellings of metal sheeting, beaten from cans and drums, of cardboard and wood scraps. They walked across a street in which garbage glided along on a film of putrid water. There was an elderly woman on a pallet in a dark smelly room. Gato squatted by the woman, speaking rapidly, and he gave her something from his pocket—money, Abilene decided. Outside the shack he said to Abilene, “She is from my village in Guerrero. She's not much older than you. Her children are away, in the streets, stealing.” Abilene was gagged by the smells and sounds and colors. Gato took her arm, steered her back to the avenue and the bus. On the way she began to call out, wildly, the names of things she saw: the paint of buildings, an old woman with a basket of clothes on her head, little girls in white socks swinging on a metal bar. Gato's face grew dark, full of contempt. “Damn you!” she shouted. “What do you want me to say?”

“I don't want you to say anything. I want you to look.”

He took her out again, on a long jostling smelly series of rides on the cheapest buses. He took her to a municipal garbage dump, and before she knew where she was, she smelled its incredible stench. It was a lake of odor more than a quarter mile across, and as they approached it, coming up among low-lying bushes at its crest, she was met by the spectacle of acres of rubbish. In and among piles of refuse, she saw pigs, goats, dogs, chickens and children scrabbling and grunting. Adults with boxes and bags stooped into piles of trash.

“They're looking for salvage to buy a bowl of beans for their day's food,” Gato said. His voice was cold, unmoved. Abilene was clutched by nausea. She despised Gato for bringing her. She walked quickly away from the dump.

“They're not so bad off,” Gato droned behind her. “They have a water ration, better than hundreds of thousands in shanty towns. Every day they find a little salvage, enough for a peso or two. Not so bad, when you think of it.”

“Oh stop!” she said, as if he had been teasing her.

Stubbornly she made a beautiful soup for dinner, with a whole plump chicken and yellow squash, red tomatoes and rice. He ate with satisfaction. She watched him bitterly. Is it for them you eat my soup? she wanted to say. She banged dishes and pots, putting things away.

When she went into the room where he was sitting in the near dark, he made an ambiguous gesture to her, an invitation, she thought. She sat down beside him. Then he revealed to her how ignorant he was, how dismal was his knowledge of her country. He was a believer of myths. He said he wanted her to remember what she had seen, and to tell all her friends when they make their plans to grow brown on Mexican beaches. “You can make them a little less ignorant. Maybe it will mean something when they hear that poor people seek liberation in Latin America.”

He thought she was like all Americans, rich and vacuous.

“I don't have any friends,” she said icily.

He sighed. “Then what are you good for?” he said.

One night the students stayed late, folding their pamphlets and eating pots of rice. They set their bowls aside and found places and positions to relax. A girl lay with her head in another girl's lap; a boy leaned against the wall. Someone had brought down Abilene's pillows from off her bed.

“Talk to us, Gato,” they said.

“In the mountains, they are weary of waiting. They move against thievery and repression.” He went on, telling a long story about his father. Abilene sensed that the story was familiar to the students; their heads nodded expectantly, they sighed and murmured. There had been a fiesta. The governor's party paid for pulque and mariachis, for paper to hang on poles around the square. It was the time when the president-to-be was “campaigning” to gain popular support for his already certain election. The governor wanted to be “in touch” with his people as well. He wanted to hear his people's needs, he told them. The townspeople made a kind of throne for him under an awning. In the afternoon after the drunken dance, the people came from their huts, many walking miles into the village. They wanted to hear what the governor would do for them. First a bold boy of sixteen stepped forward. He played the guitar, but he couldn't afford new strings. “Music is in our soul!” cried the governor. He would buy the strings; he would buy more instruments to make more mariachi bands for the village. Then a shy nun came forward. She said she tried to teach the people to read, but she had no books. The governor said he would buy slates for her. Then she could teach them to write stories of the Revolution, and to read them. (This was the students' cue. ‘The Revolution!' they mocked.)

Next Gato's father, a communal landowner, came forward. He wasn't afraid to look the official in the eye. He was a brawny man, short but strong, like a brave bull. He said he and his fellow landowners had been given the wrong lands by mistake. “What mistake?” the governor said, biting the hook. “We've been given all the dry land,” said Gato's father. “There is only one area with water to irrigate for crops. It belongs to one man alone, and he lives most of the year in Acapulco.” Gato's father said he had submitted claims against this man's land; he had asked for wrong to be righted, according to the laws of Mexico. But in the city he learned that there were thousands of such claims, that they lay about in large rooms until they grew brittle, and cracked and fell to dust. A hush like hot cotton lay over the gathering. The governor glared. “I have no authority over these things!” he shouted. “You must follow the letter of the law and wait for wheels to turn. Are you more important than the man who waits before you?” Gato's father was bitter beyond caution. “Wait?” he cried. “In silence? Forever?”