Gringa (3 page)

Why should I care what Tonio does? I wouldn't want him to see me like this. I don't care about Anne Lise. She's one of those girls who grew up without ever hearing a four-letter word, and he thinks it is fun to play games with her. He wants to break her down. Sorority girls take longer. If I let that bother me, where would I ever be? Who would ever have me?

I miss the ranch as much as Tonio. Before I left I saw how dark it is, the dark places I never looked at before. The thicket with its path grown over. The vines in the tennis court. And the birds.

Tonio said that some men went down in the pit of swallows. How would that be, to fall and fall? At the bottom, is it dark and wet? Would you sink and disappear? I know you would die, but would you disappear?

Would you?

“Cheer up,” Isabel said. “Soon Reyles will peel your scab and I will take you out. I promised my sister Ceci and her friends we'd go dancing.”

“I dreamed I was on a train. I looked up and my mother was on a seat facing me, two or three rows ahead. She was in her waitress uniform, with her legs stuck straight out in front of her like a dead chicken's. She was sleeping. I tried to talk to her, but she wouldn't open her eyes.”

“Bah.” Isabel would have none of it. “I don't know about dreams. If I wake up feeling bad, I smoke a little, or drink a bit of vodka or rum, and then I go back to sleep. I don't know about the past either. What did I do as a child? Who did what to me? I don't remember, I tell you! My mother remembers everything. She told me just yesterday at dinner. There was a woman who lived in a house on her street when she was a child. The woman grew an avocado plant so tall and strong it went to the ceiling and broke the skylight. My mother tells me this very solemnly; it has meaning for her, you see. But not for me! I collect my money from the vendors, I go to parties and am a good sport so they will all ask me back. I look for Ceci, because my parents can't see to the other side of the windows on the street. Who has time for the past? For dreams?”

The table was strewn with the remains of lunch. Isabel had brought roast chicken, mangoes and lime, flowery Guerrero grass.

“Michael Sage says he's in love with me.” Abilene belched softly.

“So he's the one!”

Abilene nodded.

“Tonio can't have liked that!”

“He doesn't know. Or doesn't say.”

Isabel rolled a neat joint and they passed it back and forth. “You can bet he knows,” she said. “He knows everything. And Sage! Tonio hates him.”

“Tonio leases to him.”

“He's a good rancher. But such a big man!” Isabel giggled. “Tonio minds his size, don't you see?”

Suddenly it was terribly funny. Abilene nearly choked telling Isabel about Sage at the tienta. “We made love while Tonio was down at the ring.”

“He knows.”

“I don't think so. Wouldn't he say?”

“Not until he wants to. Then you'll see.”

“Oh what, Isabel? Tell me what he'll do!”

Isabel had known Tonio a long time, ten years or so. Felix, too. She met them at a party where all the men wore togas, and wreaths on their heads. “It'll be Sage he'll get,” she said. Abilene was shivering. “Tonio can do terrible things,” Isabel went on. “Once he hung a trespasser and got away with it.”

“I know all those stories. So what? He can't hang Sage!” Abilene felt her stomach rumble. “Anyway I'm too stoned to worry. I'm glad you came.”

“If I was you, girl, I'd be thinking what next.”

“Don't, Isabel. It's been awful, all these days in Felix's apartment.”

“Maybe Tonio forgives you, because you caped that little cow. I thought she was going to gore you, for sure.”

“But Tonio stepped in and saved me! He caped the little cow away. So see?”

Isabel was quite merry. “You had one leg propped up on the other, like a stork. What would it have looked like if he'd let you get hurt, in front of all those people? Oh, you'll hear more about your rancher lover, chiquita. Tonio will pick his time.”

“Don't frighten me!”

“I've got to go.”

“No. Oh, but it's time to go to Reyles'.”

“I'll drop you. Then you can come and smoke a little more and sleep like a baby.” Isabel touched Abilene's face. “Don't you wonder,” she said very softly, “what it looks like inside, after what they did?”

Abilene burst into tears.

“What is it you want?” Sage had asked in April. They were lying in her bed while down in the bar and along the trellised walkway, Tonio's tienta guests drank rum punch and made jokes about the bulls. Some of the women would be at the ring, watching Tonio ride.

She answered easily, without thinking first. “To change what happened between us.”

“You know I'm sorry.”

“Not just that. Not that you beat me like a thief.” He shifted away from her on the bed. He was sober, almost grim; she was drowsy and happy, in her way. She was glad to have a chance to tell him how much he hurt her, but she knew it was mean. In two years, she had forgotten. Why remember things that make you unhappy?

“I'd change all of it,” she said. “I'd pick it up and put it down someplace else. Away from the hotel, away from Tonio's land. I'd put it someplace where you would be serious—”

“If I hadn't been serious I would never have been so angry—”

She sat up and hugged her knees and stared at the funny print on the wall: Christ at the Last Supper, forever gazing down on women coming undone in bed. She didn't know how to make Sage understand that what she really wanted was to start her own life over, to be a teenager again, to understand that she could say yes, she could say no. She could choose her life instead of letting it happen to her.

She didn't see how she could do that anymore. How she could start so late. “I'm going to go out in the morning and cape one of the brave calves,” she said. The business of the tienta was over; now the guests could have a good time playing torero. Every tienta someone had his pants torn. It was never very serious; Tonio only let the bad calves in with the amateurs.

“You're crazy. Tonio won't let you.”

“You don't know him! He'll love it. He'll think I'm being ballsy. He'll like watching to see if I get hurt, playing around, he'll like waiting to decide when to step in.”

“You could get hurt!”

“Don't I know that!”

“What about us, Abby?”

“There's no such thing.” Yet an hour ago she had let him sigh and weep over her, and bring his contrition to climax. He thought that was the same as being forgiven.

“I love you. I've thought about it for nearly two years, Abby. We're two of a kind. I don't think we're such great people, but we're of a kind. I'd be better with you. And you don't belong with Tonio. He can't ever know you.”

“He doesn't have to.” She went into the shower. “He doesn't have to!” she shouted from under the water. “He owns me,” she said, but only to herself. “The way he owns everything.”

Like Sage's leased land. His leased life. What a fool she would have to be to think it could be that easy! To start over with a man who hated Tonio? And even if Tonio loved someone else, he wouldn't let her go. Not to Sage.

They would have to start over on the moon.

She walked home from Reyles' office soaked to the skin. She liked the awfulness of the rain, the stripping to the skin inside the apartment, her hair clinging to her neck and face. The rain was so hard it washed her fears out of her, they ran down the streets.

The rain had been hard but warm. There was no reason for her to be cold, but her teeth were chattering. She put on layers of clothes and made tea. She cradled the cup in her hands and took it to bed.

Warm again, she told herself that she was only now reacting to what had happened to her. To be sick in a foreign city, not just sick, but stripped, emptied, swollen, marked? She had been foolish not to see how hard it would be to convalesce. But when had she ever looked ahead at anything? When she tried to do that, it was like her dream, she was on that train, and everything outside was speeding by. She could never see anything until it was past. If she tried to look, the past became sharp. She saw the sun like a white ball of heat over the sandhills. Shabby trailers circled like a wagon train. Her brother with rabbits he'd shot, one in each hand, dripping blood.

She got back up and turned on all the lights and sat at the table to write letters. The cold goaded her. First she wrote her sister-in-law in Austin.

It was great to hear from you and get the picture of the new baby. I suppose you get teased now about having the perfect family, a boy and a girl, but I'm glad about the girl because maybe she'll be someone you can feel really close to. And Kermit finished school! Now he's a pharmacist! I hope that means you can stay home with the baby. Is your mother there? Has my mother come? She hasn't written me in a long time. I don't worry. I know you'd tell me if anything was wrong. I'm sorry I took so long to answer.

She hated what she had written. She wondered if Sherry ever thought of that day they raced around Lubbock, looking for her father's girlfriend. Had Sherry felt like Abilene did about it, like they'd been friends that day? They had been on the edge of discovering something nobody else knew.

She sat for a long time, and smoked a little of the grass Isabel had brought, and tried to think of what to write to Sage. The corners of the room were moving toward her, into the light; she realized it was almost dawn.

I told you I would write you when I had thought about what you said at the tienta. I've thought about it every day since. But I was sick and I've been in Mexico almost a month. Can you understand how hard it is to think of there when I am here? To think of you at all? I mean, in any real way. I know what you say. You did say that. That we both love the Huasteca. You're right about that, but why is it we never have talked about it? Do we love the same things? Is it the beauty of the land, where it is beautiful, or the dry hard spaces where it isn't? Is it the isolation? Or the cat in the brush? Is it that neither of us could get along someplace else? A long time after Tonio came back from Europe that spring, I realized that you and I had never gone the quarter mile from your house to the beautiful grotto where the river is born. I went there with tourists from the hotel, but never with you. Where did you take me? To a cave filled with vampire bats!

Do we have enough to give one another? I don't know if there's very much inside me. Maybe Tonio suits me because he wants so little from me. And which of us would tell him? What would he say? What would he do? He could hurt you!

Maybe Tonio will marry the diplomat's daughter and I will come to you because I have no other place to go except the real world. Would you settle for that? Would it be enough? For how long?

I don't know what to do. I feel like I'm outside a cave in the heart of the city. A city built on an ancient lake-bed. Who knows? Maybe the cave will fall in around me. Maybe the city will fall in. All the rich people and the bureaucrats, right along with the desperate peasants from the country, and me.

Something might happen to all of us, and it wouldn't matter who I loved.

She read the letter carefully. The next day she mailed it to Sage, in care of the Arcadia Hotel.

A few days later she received a letter from Claude, the Arcadia manager. When she saw his name at the return address, she was shocked. Had he written because of Sage's letter? Had he read it? Oh, he would dare to do something like that, for all his talk about discretion! He had tried to make her read Camus and Rousseau and Sartre; he thought Sage was ignorant, like her. She clutched the letter in a moment of panic, and then she relaxed. There hadn't been enough time for her letter to reach the hotel. The letters had crossed in the mail. Claude had written her at Tonio's office.

He had sent her a key to his apartment in the city. It was out of the tourist zone, across the avenue beyond the angel. “It is sunny and large, and empty now. It will be much better for you while you are getting well. There are stores nearby.” It was even near the doctor's, though that wasn't very important anymore.

“I'll be damned,” she said when she showed Isabel the letter. “He wants to manage my life from way out there, imagine that.” She wondered who had told him she was in the city, and if he knew the reasons.

“Maybe he has a heart,” Isabel said. “What are you going to do?”

“Oh, I'll move, alright. I'm sick enough of this place!”

“Maybe you should just go to Tonio's. Then you might see him when he's in town.”

“What do you mean? Is he there? Have you seen him!”

“I'm not in his circles anymore, chiquita. Only at the ranch, where I round out a party.” Isabel could laugh at herself.

“He never asked me to stay there,” Abilene said in a moment. “How would I look among his beautiful things?”

Isabel helped her take her things out of Felix's apartment. The sunlight on her face was hot; Reyles said she would be tender for a year. She ducked her head for a moment and let the sun fall on her like a cloak.

The concierge at Claude's building was expecting her. She led Abilene and Isabel up a flight to the apartment and gave Abilene the key. White, airy, splashed with the colors of bright dhurris on the walls, the apartment might have been Moroccan, she remembered that he had once lived there. No, he had lived in Tangier; she couldn't remember what country that was.

Adele was the only friend Abilene had who was in no way tied to Tonio. She had never even met Tonio, since she refused to come to the Tecoluca. “I'm not a country girl,” she said when Abilene asked her to visit, more than once. So Abilene saw Adele in the city when she came in, a few times a year. They had once spent part of a winter together.