To See You Again (30 page)

Teresa at that time was excessively shy, perhaps partly because nothing that she saw of her own face pleased her, in the broken mirror beside the crucifix in her mother’s hut. (Her father had left for somewhere, Guerrero, maybe, after the birth of her youngest brother.) She saw no reason why anyone should stare, least of all Ernesto Fuentes, who, although rather small, was straight-backed and almost handsome, very serious, with thunderous dark eyes and a curious sun-bleached streak in his heavy dark hair.

Teresa was an inward, thoughtful girl; she thought much more than she spoke: about Ernesto, of course, and about the coconut plantations where Ernesto and most of the men and boys of the village worked. She thought about Señor Krupp, the blond, mustached plantation owner, who drank beer or tequila all day and who was rumored to have an evil temper. And she thought about Ixtapanejo, and the incomprehensible tourists who came there, pale Northern people who tried to blacken their bodies on the beach. (She did not think about Acapulco, having never been there and having heard very little about it.) And, what must have also contributed to her shyness, she found much in her surroundings to fear: the staring men, and Señor Krupp, and even the Ixtapanejo tourists, who spoke so loudly in their own tongues and even more loudly and incorrectly in Spanish.

The person of whom Teresa was least afraid, with whom she talked as easily as she did with anyone, was Aurelia, an older cousin of hers. Aurelia was already married, to Francisco, a bad man who beat her when he drank and who did not work, but Aurelia had no fear of Francisco nor of anyone. She had established a thatched-roof restaurant in Ixtapanejo,
on the beach, where she served the tourists fresh oysters and clams, and red snapper that she cooked in a special way, and quantities of beer. She did not even own the land where her restaurant squatted, there on the beach overlooking the green-glass sea, but Aurelia had explained to Teresa that what she did was not truly illegal; there was something in the laws of Mexico that favored the rights of Indian-blooded people. “And anyone can see that we have much Indian blood,” said Aurelia, with one of her big laughs.

Aurelia very much liked her tourists, especially the North Americans; and she liked Teresa, often worrying about her shyness, and her fears. She had tried to persuade Teresa to come to work at the restaurant, speaking of large gratuities and sometimes presents. But Teresa could not bring herself even to think of taking orders and remembering and counting beers and asking for money and making the change correctly. Once, on an errand, she had gone to the restaurant, and the very look and the sound and the oil-sweet smell of those people had weakened her legs and tightened her breath, so that she was barely able to speak to Aurelia.

The town where Teresa lived at that time was so small that there was not a proper cantina, just a hut like the others in which beer was sold, and ice-cream bars. But there was a large, bright-colored machine for playing records, North American music, mostly: fast hard band music for dancing, and some slower Spanish songs. The boys of the village often gathered there at night, some of them buying beer, and on many nights several girls, in small groups, would walk past, in a slow, indifferent way. Two boys, or more, might saunter toward the girls, and invite them to dance, and maybe the
girls would say yes. The ground around the hut was as hard and smooth and bare as any floor, and most of the boys and many of the girls danced barefoot, in the light warm breeze from the sea, in the flowery darkness.

On a certain night, one especially hot November, the season of rains, Aurelia, visiting from Ixtapanejo, persuaded Teresa to take a walk past the dancing place. Normally, Teresa stayed at home with the younger children; she would work on some small jars that the village potter had commissioned her to paint, to be sold in Ixtapanejo. Her shyness kept her at home, and a feeling that she was too clumsy for dancing. But Aurelia was very persuasive; with her, Teresa would be absolutely safe, she reasoned. No one would ask a married woman to dance, and thus it would be impolite for anyone to invite Teresa.

Fat and bright-eyed, darker even than Teresa, Aurelia was in an especially good mood that night. She was rich, she said; some North Americans who were returning that day to New York had given her a great many pesos. She bought them both ice-cream bars, as the music machine played Beatles songs. Teresa saw Ernesto standing outside with a group of boys, their white shirts silver in the dark, but she did not look at him, not really.

Aurelia and Teresa were on the point of unwrapping their ice cream, standing inside the hut, when they heard a thundering commotion. Teresa thought, An earthquake! Many years ago she had felt such a thing and had been told what it was, that trembling of the world beneath her feet, and naturally she had not forgotten. But this shaking was not an earthquake; it came from huge horses, a group of them just arrived, galloping up outside, and some shouting men.

The first man to enter the hut was tall and fat and blond, with a big yellow mustache; he looked like a North American
but he spoke in Spanish, and before anyone had said his name Teresa knew that he was Señor Krupp, Carlos Krupp, the owner of many plantations. Even in the heat he wore leather clothes, and his face was red, perspiring. Other big blond men, very likely his brothers, followed him in, and they all opened their cold dripping bottles of beer, and drank from them, with a noisy rude gulping.

Then suddenly, and with no warning—she had no idea that he had seen her—Señor Krupp turned on Teresa, and with his huge blond-haired hand he grasped her chin; she closed her eyes as she heard him say, “And this lovely young girl, whose is she?”

Almost fainting (although a part of her that she had not known existed wanted to spit in his hand), Teresa heard Aurelia begin to speak: “It’s Teresa, sir, my cousin—”

And then another voice, a young boy’s, but stern and confident: Ernesto, of course. “Teresa Valdez is my friend, sir.”

Startled, Teresa opened her eyes to see the look that then passed between the two men: Ernesto, at her side, and Señor Krupp, who was leaning sideways against the big music machine, which had unaccountably stopped playing. She saw that both men had forgotten her; in their look was violence, and murder, purely male and somehow familiar.

But nothing happened then. Perhaps Señor Krupp was too tired, or knew himself to be drunk, for he said, “Well, in that case my congratulations—Fuentes, I think your name is?” However, his eyes and his voice were stone cold, Northern, unforgetting and unforgiving.

Teresa and Aurelia, with Ernesto following, were able then to slip outside and into the clearing, where at one edge of the open space the great pawing, sweating horses were tied, and the other boys had gathered, staring at the horses. As Teresa and Aurelia moved away, toward the darkness that
hid the rest of the huts, Teresa turned back to Ernesto, and for an instant they smiled at each other. Of course she wanted to thank him, but she could not say it.

The following night it rained, and Teresa stayed at home. She was very nervous, agitated.

The night after that was miraculously clear, millions of stars in the vast black sky, above the darker sea. It seemed right, then, for Teresa to walk past the hut with some other girls, and to say yes to Ernesto, coming up to ask her to dance.

That was the beginning of an unusual time in Teresa’s life. Despite some trembling in her blood, and new bodily heats, she was unafraid; to be with Ernesto very soon seemed natural to her. She even found that she could dance with him. For the first time she felt herself to be a girl exactly as other girls; when she was not with Ernesto she spent time with girlfriends, laughing, discussing eye makeup. And when Ernesto drew her away from the clearing, into darkness, and then stopped and turned to her, holding their mouths together, that seemed natural too, nothing to fear. Even later when, farther away, in a hidden grove of vines, the heat of both their bodies forced them to lie down in the cool silver sand—even then, Teresa was not afraid; it did not seem a sin. She trusted Ernesto. She thought, but did not say, Love, you are my love.

After a few months spent in this way, months that included some long white beach afternoons with Ernesto, splashing at the edge of the waves, and a trip to Ixtapanejo, slowly some of Teresa’s fears and forebodings began to return, including, of course, a new one, that she should be with child. She was not, and then she began to fear that Ernesto would leave her, as her father had left her mother. They talked so little, Teresa and Ernesto, and she did not know what was in his mind.

“He will want to marry you, he is a very serious boy,” said Aurelia.

“That is possible,” Teresa agreed, although she blushed. And then she tried to tell her cousin, her friend, what was in her heart. “But when I think of the future, the years ahead of me, I see darkness, shadows. Sometimes something worse, some disaster, perhaps a giant earthquake. And when I see these things I think that I should not marry Ernesto.”

Aurelia frowned. “You are as superstitious as a grandmother. You should learn to read fortunes in the sand.”

However, Teresa could feel that Aurelia took her fears seriously; it was as though Aurelia was able to see Teresa’s visions of evil. And that was frightening to Teresa, a confirmation of her fears.

Still frowning slightly, Aurelia changed the direction of their talk. She said, “You really should come to work for me. Ernesto could find some work in Ixtapanejo.”

“No, I don’t think so,” said Teresa, vaguely.

It was that very night, however, that Ernesto told Teresa that he had almost finished building his own hut on the plantation, Señor Krupp’s plantation, where he worked. Where Señor Krupp permitted such building, for his workers. Then they should marry, Ernesto said. “You are so good, I want you always in my life.”

They were married in January, just after the New Year—a day of the new moon, which Teresa had chosen, for luck. (The earthquake, years back, had taken place at a time of the full moon.)

And indeed, a long time of happiness and luck did succeed their marriage, so that Teresa became greatly less fearful, almost forgetting her former black forebodings.

In the month after the wedding she discovered that she was pregnant, and, unlike most of her cousins and friends,
she experienced at that time extraordinary good health, wellbeing. At first the pregnancy scarcely showed, but many people remarked on how pretty she had suddenly become. Even Ernesto, who was generally kind to her without many words, murmured that she was beautiful, and on the next market day, a Saturday, he bought her a necklace of bright black beads—like her eyes, he said.

Teresa decided that her old superstitiousness had been a part of her girlhood, now outgrown, along with certain pains, and bumps on her face. The important thing was the child she carried; from its movements she was sure that he was a boy, and that he would be remarkable.

Felipe, who was born on the night of the first new moon in September, was a strong handsome baby, but difficult from the start: always willful, never eating or sleeping at proper times but seemingly moved by some interior plan of his own. However, Teresa and Ernesto were vastly proud of this boy, this small strong dark child who had, already, his father’s thunderous dark eyes.

During her pregnancy and then in the early years of Felipe’s life, Teresa continued with the painting of the potter’s jars. It was fairly easy work for her to do, and she enjoyed it, and the potter said kind things about her efforts. He stopped telling her what he wanted in the way of decoration, so that Teresa could make her own patterns, trailing leaves, or sometimes bright bold stripes, in colors of her choosing.

Thus occupied with her baby and her pottery work, the cooking, and the cleaning of the hut, and all the laundry (to be washed in the plantation workers’ communal tub, then spread on rocks to dry), Teresa paid not much attention to her husband, to Ernesto. He left early in the mornings, while she and the baby still slept, and he came home late, silent and exhausted. Neither he nor Teresa had the habit of exchanging
changing words about their separate days, describing things to each other, perhaps because their activities were so divergent. Teresa could not, in her mind, see the smashing of coconut shells, the extraction of the meat. And often both she and Ernesto were too exhausted for speech. Sometimes in the night Teresa would wake, aware of the warm breathing body beside her, and then she would think how little she knew him, Ernesto, who had chosen her from among all the other girls. Who had given her their son Felipe. Who sometimes in the night made love to her, quickly and silently.

Within the next ten years Teresa had four more children, all girls, the last of whom died of a fever one week after her birth. Leaving Felipe, and his three younger sisters.

As Felipe approached his young manhood, at eleven, then twelve, thirteen, he was still quite small, with protuberant shoulder blades and eyes that seemed always full of thunder, like his father’s. And like Ernesto he stood very erect, straight-backed, his head proud; he seemed eager to have done with being a child, to become a man. Watching the two of them together, her husband and her son, Teresa sighed: how dark and mysterious they both were, and how distant from her. She felt closer to the little girls, all of whom were rather quiet children, and much easier to care for than Felipe had been.

On an afternoon in September—a day of the full moon, and shortly after the fifteenth birthday of Felipe—the little girls were out playing in the clearing, near the communal washing tub, and Teresa was inside the hut working on the decoration of two large matching jars. Felipe had gone off to
work with his father, as many of the boys of his age often did; the boys would watch the men, and sometimes they would help, pretending to be men themselves, although Señor Krupp and the overseers never offered to give them any money.

Suddenly, Teresa, sitting on the bare dirt floor of her hut, felt a terrific trembling beneath her, shaking her bones, and before she could stop them the two jars had crashed into each other, breaking open. An earthquake: Teresa ran outside screaming for her children, although the tremors had stopped almost as soon as they began. The little girls ran over to her instantly; they were perfectly unharmed, of course, and had not even noticed an unusual event—although, at the sight of the broken jars, and of their mother’s evident terror, they began to cry, and to cling to her. The four of them lay down together, Teresa and her small daughters, and they remained there for the whole afternoon. And, at the same time that she was attempting to soothe her children, Teresa experienced again the worst of her old visions. The earthquake was an omen, she knew, and worse, much worse, would follow. She could scarcely wait for the return of Ernesto and Felipe, so terrified was she that some disaster had befallen them.