Trouble (16 page)

Maybe it was the mescal, maybe it was David’s clear, impassioned way of talking, maybe it was the Don Quixote-like image of a farmer tilting on such a steep hillside with his oxen, and maybe it was Felipe’s hand insinuating itself under the waistband of my jeans, at the very top of my butt crack, but I found David’s eager and unapologetic earnestness appealing. Up in New York, whenever someone got political or impassioned at a party filled with people of my generation, those of us who’d been born in the early 1960s, I frequently felt a kind of mass withdrawal from whoever was going out on the limb, a backing up and moving away psychologically, not out of cynicism, but out of a realistic unwillingness to think that way, having seen where all that had ended up when we were impressionable kids. We weren’t going to stick our necks out the way our elders had. We knew better.

“Our government, they’re all on the take; they’re all corrupt,” David was saying. Finally, his impassiveness had cracked. When he talked, he gestured with his one arm. I could feel his phantom arm, could almost see its ghostly outline making parallel gestures. I stared at where he’d pinned the empty shirtsleeve to itself, sensing those defunct nerve endings in his shoulder still sparking away. His dark angular face looked intent and alight under the harsh overhead bulb. Behind him on the counter was a litter of fish heads and scales and tails on a big piece of brown paper that was stained wet and pink with fish blood. On the stove was a big pot of rice. On the opposite counter were a pineapple, some avocados, and some sort of squash I didn’t recognize, cut in half, its seeds and innards spilling out onto the Formica. Next to the still life of produce was an ashtray crammed full of cigarette butts.

“They want Mexico to be exactly like the United States,” David was saying. “They want the corporations to come in and take over and get fat off our land, and make them rich, and screw all the people. We can barely afford our own mescal now. Even tortillas are getting expensive. Can’t stay here. Can’t leave. They don’t want us to do anything but drink their Coke and get fat and watch our kids die of diarrhea. Up in the States, they’re all watching TV, eating Burger King, and sitting on the computer all day. Mexico won’t go that way.”

“No,” said Eugenia. She was tall and skinny, with very blue eyes, a long face, and a diffident, polite manner. Her soft brown hair was cut in a kind of pageboy; I hadn’t seen one of those in a while. “In Mexico, we fight it.”

“Of course Mexico will go that way,” said Chuy. “Everyone wants TVs and computers and McDonald’s; they’re going right down the same tubes. Have you ever seen a country reject an advance of technology? Have you? No, and it’s because everyone wants what the multinationals are selling. If those peasants in Chiapas were offered tractors and TV sets in exchange for their forests, you think they’d turn them down?”

“They would,” said David. “They would turn them down. They’re the people who beat the shit out of you for taking pictures of the inside of their church, don’t forget. They just want to be left alone to live the way they’ve always lived, eat their traditional food and do their ancient ways of farming and the old handcrafts and dress in their traditional clothes. You go there. You’ll see what I mean.”

“They sound like the Amish,” I said.

“Maybe,” said David. “The point is that they need those forests. That’s their firewood and cooking fuel. For thousands of years, they’ve managed the wood supply, and now these logging companies are just taking it away. And believe me, these people in Chiapas don’t want to turn into
norteamericanos
. To them, that would be a nightmare.”

“What about your father?” Raquel asked. “Was it a nightmare for him to go up there and get an education for his kids and escape that kind of poverty?”

David shot her a hard, careful look. “My father had certain ideas for what he wanted for his kids,” he said. “But never did he let us forget who we were. We were Mexicans every minute of our lives, although we lived up there, learned English, could get around. We still ate the same food and spoke Tzotzil and Spanish at home, so we would know both. The idea was to take what we got up there and bring it back here. That’s what he taught us to do. He was a great man, in his way. He had a vision, and he lived according to it.”

“So how many of you moved back down here?” I asked.

“My brother Carlos is down in Chiapas. Maria and I are here. Everyone else is still up there. But three out of eight isn’t so bad.”

Raquel lit a cigarette. “So you’re doing good things for them all,” she said. “Helping them. So that’s great, good for you.”

“David is our superhero,” said Miguel, clapping him on the shoulder.

“The one-armed bandit of the Zócalo,” said Felipe, laughing also. “Us, we’re just painters. We don’t know anything; we just make pretty pictures.”

“No one is stopping you from being a superhero,” said David without rancor. “All you need is a cape.”

“Well, making art is a little bit heroic in a way, isn’t it?” I said. “To put all that stuff out there, create something beautiful and interesting out of nothing. That’s something, I think.”

“Josie is a splayed-out romantic about artists,” said Raquel.

“Watch out.”

“Music, too,” I said.

“Yeah,” said Raquel, “we’re so generous and noble, right, Chuy?”

“Sure,” said Chuy. “I agree with Josie, I think it is a pretty good thing to perform or make something, whatever. You’re staying out of trouble, at the very least; you’re not adding to the bullshit in the world.”

“Not so sure about either of those things,” said Raquel.

“When I was younger,” said Chuy, “I was fucked-up and angry at the world, and I could have gotten into all kinds of bad shit.”

“So instead you wrote a bunch of pissed-off anthems,” said Raquel, laughing. “To spread the feeling.”

“For me,” said Miguel in careful English, “I first hear Chuy’s music when I am eighteen. I am very angry, and his angry music makes me feel better. So instead of blow shit up and make a lot of trouble for myself, I turn up this music so loud, my mother want to kill me. Much better to do that.”

“The fish is ready,” said Luz, looking into the oven.

“How do you all speak such good English?” I asked.

“I watch many American movies,” said Eugenia.

“You study at university,” said Miguel. “Like me.”

Eugenia answered him in Spanish, something that made everyone laugh. She found a small sharp knife in a drawer and began slicing the avocados. We ate dinner in candlelight at a long table in the next room. The table had been covered with an embroidered cloth and set with plates, forks, and knives. It was chilly in this house; the food warmed us up. There was some kind of firm-fleshed, mild-tasting fish baked in a green sauce, along with rice and squash and salad and tortillas. There were nine of us. I sat between Felipe and Miguel, Raquel sat across from me between Chuy and David, and Eugenia, Luz, and Alfredo sat at the other end of the table. We drank some not bad red wine out of juice glasses. It was after three o’clock in the morning by the time we finished all the food. We cleaned up and washed the dishes together. At almost four, we were back in the kitchen again, standing around, finishing the second bottle of mescal.

“Okay,” said Raquel, “I think it’s time to go back to our hotel and go to sleep.”

Felipe looked at me, asking me a question. I looked back at him.

“Where are you staying?” he asked me softly.

“The Isabel,” I told him.

“I’ll see you at the opening tomorrow night?”

“I think so,” I said. “Raquel is my master, so if she wants to go, we’ll go.”

“She wants to go,” said Raquel. A cigarette dangled from her mouth. She looked like a tiny female gangster in her child-size white wifebeater and black pants, her hair wild around her head. We took a cab back to the hotel; Miguel had called the cab company for us and had written down the taxi’s number before we drove off. The driver was evidently drunk off his ass. He talked into his cell phone, driving with a herky-jerky urgency through almost-empty streets.

“David is an interesting character,” I said. There. I had broached the topic of David. It hung there like a fragile butterfly I wanted to crush without knowing why.

Raquel seemed not to hear me. “So what’s this thing with Felipe?”

“We’re hot for each other for some reason,” I said. “I don’t know if it’s a ‘thing.’ I think the point is that it’s nothing. Why?”

She gave me a flash of a sideways smile. “It’s cute,” she said.

“Fuck you,” I said. Raquel pretended to be shocked at my unaccustomed profanity, and we laughed.

In our room at the Isabel, Raquel walked around in her black babydoll nightgown, pacing like a panicky insect. I settled into my bed and tried, without any luck, to find a soft spot on the mattress. The overhead light glared down at us.

“What’s going on with you?” I asked her. “Want an Ambien?”

“Josie,” she said. She perched on the end of my bed like a bird briefly alighting. “I’m not doing very well. I’m really fucked-up. Thank God you’re here and thank God for Chuy tonight. I can barely keep it together. My heart feels like it cracked in half, and it doesn’t help that he’s so unworthy. It makes it worse. But man, I am still in love with him. It’s not something I can turn off like a faucet. My body still wants him and my stupid heart is still sending out signals to him. I feel like he got ripped out of my arms at the height of passion. I know it sounds melodramatic, and it feels like cheesy Romeo and Juliet melodrama to me, too, but I feel like I’m going insane a little. Whatever he feels, I will never know, because I will never speak to him again.”

“You will be okay,” I said. “It’s only feelings!”

“I know,” she said with a flash of a weak smile. “But I can’t take it. It’s in too many pieces. God, I am freezing! It’s never this cold here.”

“I know,” I said. “I wonder if we have enough blankets. Raquel, you’re going to recover from this.”

“If I were young, I would believe you,” she said. “But keep telling me these things. I really need you to hold my hand.”

I reached over and took her hand.

“I didn’t mean literally,” she said, squeezing my hand, “but thanks.”

“So tell me about Jimmy Black,” I said.

“God, just hearing his name makes my heart hurt like you would not believe,” she said. She closed her eyes. Her face contracted slightly. “My heart literally hurts.”

“Oh Raquel,” I said.

She leapt up, took two cigarettes from the pack she’d left on the vanity, lit both, sat back down, and handed one to me. I had just brushed my teeth, but I took a drag anyway.

“We didn’t go to Mass today,” Raquel said on an exhale. “I need to go to Mass every day we’re here.”

“What’s this sudden Catholicism?” I asked, laughing.

“Maybe it’s just that I need all the help I can get,” she said. “It’s sort of like the NA meetings I went to when I was first getting clean. Everyone was so raw. It was comforting. Safety in numbers. All the cavemen huddled around the same fire.”

“That makes sense,” I said.

We smoked in silence. Raquel was shivering with cold. We snuffed the cigarette ends out in the ashtray on the nightstand and then Raquel climbed under the covers with me. “Pretend I’m Wendy,” she said. “It’s too cold to sleep over there.”

“Wendy would rather die of cold than sleep in the same bed with me,” I replied, spooning with her and resting my head against hers. She felt as tiny and fragile, but also as tough, as a wicker basket.

The next morning, Raquel and I dressed in our warmest clothes and our jackets and went out into the sunny, crisply cold morning and bought newspapers at Sanborn’s and sweet rolls and take-out cups of very strong
café con leche
from El Café Popular, and fresh pineapple juice at the place across Avenida Cinco de Mayo, then hauled our picnic breakfast to the Zócalo, where there was no sign of David or his umbrella. We sat on a low wall and read the papers and watched the skaters, laughing at how funny the Mexicans all seemed to find their own unaccustomed efforts to skate. When we’d finished our breakfast, we went into the cathedral. It was slightly warmer in there than it was outside. We squinted in the sudden darkness as we made our way to the small chapel in the middle of the cathedral, genuflected, and slid into a pew. We sat there in silence for a long, long time, with the soaring weight of belief all around us. Gradually, people gathered, filling the small chapel where we sat in the middle of the cathedral. A Mass began. We stayed for the whole thing, then afterward walked out into the cold sunshine of the cathedral’s fenced-in courtyard.

David still wasn’t at his post in the Zócalo, I noticed. Maybe we were looking for him, maybe not. Raquel led me across the square to the enormous building called the Palacio Nacional, which took up the entire east side of the Zócalo. We went in and showed our identification to the uniformed guards and were immediately admitted to a huge courtyard with a double staircase rising on either side of us. Raquel started up the stairs; I followed. There was a mural painted on the huge wall at the first twist in the staircase: armies and workers, animals and women.

“Diego Rivera?” I asked Raquel.

She rolled her eyes at me and said, “Duh.”

“What was he, a Commie or something?” I whispered, kidding. She rolled her eyes at me again.

The murals continued around the walls along the upper balcony. Slowly, like little kids looking at a picture book, we examined each one. One by one, going around the upper balcony, they depicted the history of Mexico from the height of Aztec culture to the conquistadores’ takeover of the pre-Hispanic civilizations, the story of an ancient, violent, mysterious, complex culture being brutally dismantled and enslaved by invading bearded blue-eyed devils with better weapons, who swashbuckled violently in and wrecked Mexico without a clue about what they were ruining. The early murals, gorgeously drawn and detailed, showed the Aztecs thriving in all their weird and fascinating glory of human sacrifice and strange customs and intriguing decorative self-mutilation. One panel showed a marketplace in the foreground, people bartering and selling heaps of grains and vegetables and handmade goods, and beyond, a farm set in verdant fields, a close-up view of brilliant farming and irrigation methods, and beyond that, the grand pyramids of the city.