Trouble (17 page)

“All of these drawings? We’re right here,” said Raquel. “The Zócalo was built on the ruins of the city of Tenochtitlán. The cathedral was built right on top of the Templo Mayor, where human sacrifices took place. The Aztecs used to rip out their hearts and throw them onto the steps of the temple. And the Palacio, this building, used to be Moctezuma’s castle. We’re basically standing on heaps of buried skulls. Ghosts are everywhere.”

Then, inevitably, in ensuing panels, Cortés and his men came, and everything went to hell as those ransacking, heedless, cruel, barbaric Hun-like creatures raped the women and brutalized the men like animals and burned the towns, wrecked the buildings, took over the land. In one of the murals, a dog barked at a tied-up dumb sheep angrily, as if to say, Look at you, all trussed up like a retard!

“The Aztecs ate dogs,” said Raquel when I pointed to the dog. “So he got his, in the end, just as much as the sheep.”

In another mural, an Indian woman carried a blue-eyed baby in a sling. I was totally enthralled with all of it. Raquel had to nudge me along a couple of times; otherwise, I might have stood for half an hour in front of each panel. It was like watching a silent movie unfolding.

By the time we got outside again, we were both hungry. Raquel led me along the Zócalo, where I noticed that there was no sign of David yet, to Avenida Cinco de Mayo, then hustled me several blocks to a plain-looking restaurant. We went in and sat at a table near the front plate-glass window so we could watch everyone walking by.

“At least I can eat,” said Raquel when the dishes had been cleared. “So maybe I won’t die of heartbreak and shame.”

I laughed. “Are you feeling better today?” I asked her.

“I guess,” she said. “I wish my father had brought me down here more when I was a kid. I’ve been here only a few times before; I don’t really know the city that well.”

“You do so.”

“I don’t! I speak Spanish like a Chilanga because I learned it from my father, so I can pass as a native. But really I’m faking it, just showing off the few tourist attractions I know.” She inhaled sharply, suddenly serious, as if gearing up for battle. “Let’s go,” she said. “Let’s check the Internet before our siesta.”

We trundled along the high, narrow sidewalk of Avenida Isabel la Católica, back to the hotel. In the lobby, we sprawled in the big comfortable leather chairs, waiting for one of the two computers to become available. Drowsily, I watched the big fish drifting around their tank. Raquel tapped her teeth with a fingernail. I thought about calling Wendy again but then figured maybe sending an E-mail was a better way to communicate with her. She had screened me twice in the past couple of days when I’d tried to reach her cell, so obviously she was doing just fine without me, which surprised me. Recalling my idea to go over and cook for them every night, I realized that they might not, in the end, want me to. I felt a chill of impending loneliness and pushed it away. No way was I going to prove Indrani right.

“Here,” said Raquel, handing me a ten-peso coin. “Go, go; it’s free now.”

I slid the coin into the slot. First, I checked my E-mail, and found three: one from Wendy, assuring me that no one missed me at all; one from Anthony, which I didn’t open; and one from my younger sister, Juliet, who had, true to hypochondriacal form, forwarded me a link to a breast cancer Web site, which I didn’t open. I typed quickly to Wendy: “I miss you and love you so much. There’s a freak cold snap down here—I think it might be even colder than it is up there. Can you believe it? Love from Mom (and Raquel).”

“Come on,” Raquel urged from her chair behind me, “get it over with.”

I made a face at her over my shoulder, but when I saw the naked dread on her face, the tension, I turned back around and typed “
minaboriqua.com
” into the box on the search engine. Within seconds, I was reading the words “Rock-Hell is in Mexico City!” There was that same unbelievably unflattering photo of Raquel, with white stuff coming out of her nose this time, and, beneath it, the story that sources had tipped off Mina Boriqua that “Rock-Hell” had been seen in Mexico City, giving a surprise performance at “a music club” the night before.

“They know you’re here,” I said to Raquel. I turned around to look at her. She was curled in her chair like a larva. “Not the Isabel,” I added quickly. “But Mexico City. Someone told them after your performance.”

Her pupils dilated and she flinched, but she waved this news away as if she didn’t care. “It’s a big city,” she said. “They don’t know where I’m staying. They don’t know how to find me; I registered under another name.”

“True,” I said, still watching her.

“Oh my God,” she said, looking wild-eyed and haunted.

“I know,” I said. “But they won’t find you. They may not even really be looking for you.”

“Oh my God,” she repeated. “Those Japanese girls, yesterday.”

“That doesn’t mean they’re going to send E-mails to the gossip blogs.”

“They’re Japanese. They’re all obsessed with the Internet.”

“Don’t assume that.”

“I should never have gotten up on that stage. If it had been anyone but Chuy …”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said, trying not to think about the fact that I had told Wendy where I was going. Despite her promise to keep her trap shut, I knew she might not have the fortitude to keep it to herself. “You can’t hide forever. You have to go home at some point, first of all. And second, frankly, you’re famous. Someone will always recognize you. That’s what being famous means. Does it really matter if they find you?”

“They find everyone,” she said. “They hunt all over the world; they track us. It’s a human game.”

“That is so creepy,” I said.

“Let’s go upstairs,” she said, looking around the lobby as if she had just realized that someone might be listening.

In our room, Raquel turned on the shower and waited for the water to get hot. She stayed in the shower for a long time. She came out fully dressed again, her hair in a turban made of one of the stiff, thin hotel towels. I was sitting in bed with the blankets over my legs, reading the novel I had brought,
A Passage to India
. Raquel sat on the edge of my bed and tucked her knees under her chin.

“The thing is,” she said, “I hate to seem like I’m being hysterical or overreacting. But you have to understand. I don’t have a lot of time left in my career. In rock years, I’m geriatric. This is my one last shot, this new album, or so it feels to me now. It might be different if I were a man, but not necessarily. This isn’t victimization; it’s the truth.”

“I wasn’t arguing with you.”

“I know.”

“One of the reasons this bites me in the ass so hard is that all I want is respect. I want attention, but not like this. I’m thin-skinned, I know, but most of the other performers I know are just as hypersensitive and overly vulnerable as I am. People with leather hides don’t tend to go into this line of work.”

We looked at each other in silence for a moment. I put my book facedown on the bed next to me. Raquel’s eyes looked very hollow and dark. Her face was pale and bare from the shower. She scooched her butt around so she was sitting next to me in my bed, with her legs under my covers.

“Seriously, this is my worst nightmare,” she said, leaning her head on my shoulder. “I need a nap.”

We lay down back to front, spooning the way we had the night before. I stroked her hair while she cried hard but silently for a while, and then we must have fallen asleep.

I awoke to darkness and lamplight. I had a slight headache and a sense of dread I couldn’t understand until I realized that it was purely physiological: My stomach hurt. “I think I’m sick,” I groaned.

Raquel was sitting in her own bed, reading. “You’re not sick,” she said. “You’re just getting used to the altitude and the strange bacteria in the food. You might feel like shit, but that’s because it’s your third day. You’ll be fine if you keep your alcohol level good and high all night, and eat plenty of fat.”

“Is there an alternative?” I asked.

“By tomorrow, the altitude sickness will be gone and your own bacteria will have adapted to these foreign ones and they’ll coexist in peace and happiness. Here, have a cigarette, and drink a lot of water. That’ll help both your head and your stomach. Then we’ll go down to the Isabel bar for a quick tequila, and then we’ll take a taxi to the gallery.”

I sat up and smoked a cigarette and read my E. M. Forster novel while I drank most of the liter bottle of water I had bought at the stand outside the hotel.

The Isabel bar was empty. We sat at the bar and sipped a shot each of Tres Generaciones tequila; the sangrita in this place was the same too-sweet cough syrup-like stuff they served at the cantina with the dime-a-dance women. I saw the bartender pouring it out of a big industrial plastic jug and decided I wasn’t going to drink any more of that fake stuff, ever, as long as I lived, so I drank the tequila without a back.

“Your taxi is here,” said the bartender, waving to someone just outside the door to the bar: our driver, come in search of us. We paid and left the bar and climbed into a minivan, whose driver was a very young, very dark-skinned boy with a shock of black coarse hair standing straight up.

“I married Isis on the fifth day of May”
Raquel sang with a nasal twang.

I leaned against her while the taxi jounced its way toward wherever we were going.

“Another thing that kills me,” she said with deceptive calmness, looking out the window at the reflections of car headlights flashing in plate-glass store windows, briefly illuminating a flock of mannequins tarted up in what looked like prom dresses, “is that I was the first woman he ever fell in love with, or so he said. He was an emotional virgin. He didn’t realize what he had, because he’d never lost anything before. He threw me away because he didn’t know any better.”

“He’ll get his someday,” I said.

“Maybe not,” she said. “Some people don’t, ever.”

“That’s true,” I said. “Some people just sail right through the whole thing.”

“Not us,” she said.

“Not us.”

 
hings started to move very fast when we got to the gallery, and I was separated from Raquel for a long time. The gallery was in a row of seventeenth-century houses in a little gated mews just off a wide boulevard. Going through a pair of French doors off the mews, we came into two open, large, well-lit rooms filled with people. Felipe was right there as I entered, as if he had been waiting for me. He immediately kissed me warmly on both cheeks, took my arm, and led me through the crowd to the makeshift bar at the back of the second room and procured me a tequila in a plastic cup. Then he led me around, introducing me to his friends proprietarily, proudly, as if I were his girlfriend. I found this pleasantly surreal, and I didn’t mind, but I wondered what had become of Raquel and hoped she didn’t think I had abandoned her. For a while, Felipe and I stood sipping our tequila in a little clump of people that included a pink-cheeked, mad-eyed Polish sculptor who talked at length about the mirrored crosses he was making, which sounded a little pretentious and silly, but what did I know; and Elfriede, a sweet, ox-faced young German ceramicist who was in Mexico to study pottery making in a village near Oaxaca and was just passing through; and Miguel, who didn’t seem to remember ever having met me before, but of course, we had all been shit-faced the previous night.

After a while, I disengaged from the group and from Felipe and went off in search of
el baño
, which I found near the bar. I had myself a nice pee, successfully remembering to put my toilet paper into the trash basket and not the toilet, washed my hands right outside the bathroom at a long troughlike sink littered with scraps of pink soap, and then reemerged into the gallery and got another cup of tequila. Raquel had been right: The liquor seemed to be helping my stomachache and headache. I plunged into the crowd and skirted the gallery walls, examining Alfredo and Eugenia’s work. They seemed to be a husband-and-wife artist team, since both of their names were on all the little white cards. Evidently together, they made masklike, dense, enormous, flat, colorful animal faces, rough and strange and beautiful, out of bits and scraps of things they might have picked up off the street. I especially liked a blue wolverinelike face with rakish bat ears and flickering, intelligent eyes made out of beads and bits of reflective paper. I checked the price, five thousand pesos, about five hundred dollars, which seemed totally arbitrary, like all prices for art. I wanted to buy it but wondered how I would get it home. Was it sturdy enough to ship? Probably not, but I liked the idea of hanging it on the bare white walls of my stark, empty new apartment, which I had managed to avoid thinking about since I’d arrived in Mexico City. Anthony had always curled his lip if I tried to brighten our apartment with anything too colorful or, as he had contemptuously dubbed the embroidered pillows and wall hangings I liked, “folksy.”

I banished all thoughts of Anthony and looked into the thick blur of moving, talking, expression-filled, unfamiliar faces for Raquel.

“There you are,” said Felipe. Suddenly, we were kissing very lightly and slowly, holding back like racehorses in the gate, mouths open, tongues barely touching, staring into each other’s eyes as if to say, Later. He felt young and alive and electric with muscular heat. I was trying not to picture him naked, over me, inside me, because the jolt of lust I got from these images made me feel faint with urgency. I could not wait to fuck him. I had rarely felt this way about sex when I was younger; there had always been an element of self-consciousness and fear in my lust before now, but something had shifted as I got older, and now I felt a pure carnal craving, exactly like what I imagined men must feel for women, straightforward, uncluttered by any worries about whether or not we were compatible in the long run. I wasn’t looking for a husband, and as far as I knew, Felipe wasn’t looking for a wife; we didn’t have to think about each other in any sort of scary, long-term, pragmatic, socially relevant ways. We were in total alignment here about what we both wanted.

I pulled away, finally, and said, laughing, “I need some air.”

“Come outside,” he said.

We went out into the courtyard of the mews and stood in the light of the lamplit windows in the old stone row houses and the glimmering air of the city overhead. It was even colder than it had been the night before. The tips of my ears began to burn with cold. Felipe handed me his cup of tequila to take a sip of; mine was finished. I was happily buzzed, happily aroused, but my fingertips were going numb, and I was hungry.

“I love their work,” I said. “Those masks. I’m thinking about buying one if I can figure out how to ship it home.”

“They can ship it for you,” he said. “You should buy one! It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”

It was then that I caught a glimpse of Raquel. She was standing by the entrance to the mews, the two huge wrought-iron gates, talking to someone quietly and intently. I squinted to see whom she was talking to, and almost, but not quite, identified David. Then they slipped through the gates and disappeared, leaving me wondering whether that woman had really been Raquel at all.

“You think they really can?”

“Yes,” he said. “I think so. I will ask. Wait here, unless you are too cold?”

“I’ll wait right here,” I said.

I stood alone in the mews, hugging my arms to my body. A few people drifted out to smoke. I watched them talking in clicking, velvety Spanish, observing their faces. They were very vehement and sure of themselves. Their words came out without hesitation. There seemed to be an argument afoot about something—I couldn’t understand what, but I assumed it was about personal gossip, art, or politics, like most social arguments. The group consisted of three men and one woman. It was the woman who fascinated me most. She was small, with abundant glossy black hair and a lot of very red lipstick on an ugly-sexy mouth like Luz’s, with a full, twisty lower lip and an overbite. She wore a fur coat, and I could smell her spicy, fresh perfume through the cigarette smoke. She spoke softly and clearly, looking directly at whomever she was talking to. She held herself erect so that even though she was shorter than the three men, she seemed of equal stature. I breathed quietly, in and out, feeling invisible and rapt. She reminded me of female Italian movie stars from the 1950s, feminine, confident, alluring, but very tough. She was probably about twenty-six; at that age, I had been a neurotic, self-conscious mess, simultaneously arrogant and shy, full of myself and racked by self-loathing. This woman seemed wholly integrated, fully herself. A wedding ring flashed on her hand; one of these men was probably her husband. She probably already had a couple of kids, asleep at home, watched over by some loyal old
abuela
. I pictured a stucco villa, a leafy, serene courtyard with a splashing fountain, a full staff, and loud, cozy, extended-family dinners at a long candlelit table in the courtyard with platters of fish and meat, like a magazine ad for wine or pasta. As I watched her listen to one of the men, holding her face perfectly still, seeming to focus her entire attention on what he was saying, I tried to imagine the inside of her heart and mind, her private pains and unresolved conflicts. I could only imagine that she lived her life in comfortable, secure public display, with very few internal struggles, but of course I had no clue what really went on behind such a smooth and glossy facade. Maybe her psyche was a seething lava bed.

Then Felipe was back. “It’s no problem,” he said, pronouncing it
prahleen
. “They can ship it; they do it all the time. Come on, let’s talk to him about which one you want.”

Inside, the air was warm and smelled of people’s breath and skin and clothes and perfumes and that harsh disinfectant I smelled everywhere in Mexico. We found Alfredo near the bar, in the back. With Felipe translating, he and I agreed that I would buy the blue wolverine from the gallery, pay a premium for shipping and leave my address, and it would arrive in New York City before too long.

“I don’t have enough cash with me,” I told Felipe.

“It’s no prahleen,” he said. “You can give a credit card.”

I laughed; why had I thought the gallery would be too primitive to accept plastic? How provincial of me. “Who’s the person to give it to?” I asked.

The gallery person was, conveniently, standing right near us. He was a dapper, slight man about my age in a down vest, blue work shirt, and painter’s pants. He had a rock star-like swoopy coif and a handlebar mustache that he somehow managed to sport, amazingly, without being comical. I handed over my MasterCard and pointed to the blue wolverine, wrote my address on a gallery card, and signed the slip he brought back to me after about five minutes. Apparently, I had officially bought some art, and now it was time to toast my purchase. Alfredo and Felipe and the gallery guy and I clinked our plastic glasses together and simultaneously drank. This was so exciting, to be able to buy something without imagining Anthony’s disparaging complaints once it arrived. He would hate this wolverine, would think it was crude and childish, and that was part of the reason I was so happy to own it: He would never have to look at it; it was all mine.

But just underneath my happiness was a sense of something gone awry. At some point since I had said I wanted to buy the mask, I had felt a wall come up between Felipe and me. He had stopped touching me, and the heat between us had noticeably ebbed. I turned to tell him about how glad I was to have the wolverine and to thank him for helping me buy it. As I spoke, I saw a smiling, pleasant, distant stranger’s face.

“You seem very excited about it,” he said.

“I am,” I said.

He shook his head at me, smiling oddly, as if he were put off, or disapproving, or puzzled. So he felt this wall between us, too. I could see in his face the same retreating confusion I felt in myself, as if we would have both vastly preferred to feel the way we had just moments ago, but a gulf had opened, and we couldn’t cross it. I had felt until then that we were playmates in a verdant garden of sex, the membrane between us open and slippery with frankly easy desire. But now, suddenly, it seemed immensely clear that Felipe was a struggling young Third World artist and I was a tourist, a patron, a middle-aged New Yorker with a disposable income. Guiltily and possibly irrationally, I wondered whether it had been the way I had whipped out my credit card. Maybe I should have taken it out less avidly, without such nakedly acquisitive excitement.

But that was absurd. Why shouldn’t I be excited to buy it? Why should I have to pretend? Felipe had encouraged me to buy it, had practically engineered the whole thing. It made no sense why he should then withdraw from me, but maybe he didn’t know why it had happened, either. He probably hadn’t anticipated this fallout any more than I had.

I drifted away without a word, escaped to the bathroom again, and went into a stall and just sat there for a while, staring at the closed door a foot from my face.

Maybe he was jealous; the night before, looking at his work, I had been too attracted to him to see it and take it in, but I had loved it. Had I seemed lukewarm, and was his pride injured? I had absolutely no idea.

When I emerged, I saw Felipe across the gallery, laughing and talking animatedly to Alfredo and the gallery guy. Paranoidly, I wondered whether they were making fun of me, but I immediately recognized this kind of thinking as the irrational fear of a stranger in a strange land. More than anything, I wanted to find Raquel, my link to the familiar. The tequila seemed to be turning on me; I was suddenly so hungry, my stomach felt awash in hot acids, as if it were gnawingly digesting itself.

I wandered through the gallery, staring into faces. No one seemed to notice me; I felt invisible. In my shaky, hungry, half-tipsy state, people’s faces seemed to take on some of the impersonal cruelty and rough beauty of the masks on the walls. There was something very dark going on here in Mexico, some ghostly but ever-present residue of the history of the place that lay underneath the communally fatalistic, laughing, egoless equanimity of the national character. The human-sacrifice tools in the anthropological museum were beautiful things, carefully crafted, professional almost, as precise in their intent as surgical instruments; the Aztecs had absolutely believed that the sun, in order to rise, required a live heart to be ripped from a live human and thrown before the gods. Heaped for sale on the Zócalo were ceramic skulls of every size; death was everywhere here, human death, not hidden away like it was up north, but on display, held close, a talismanic presence, stripped of some of its terrifying mystery through everyday use. The Catholic churches here likewise had a pagan, humble, homespun feeling; even the grandeur of the cathedral was tempered, rendered folksy and informal by the unmitigated humanity of its icons. The saints were luridly painted, not muted or romanticized, but frankly celebrated for their weirdness, the kind of obsessive self-mutilation and self-abnegation that, later on, caused people to be locked up in asylums and, these days, got them put on heavy medication. All the images of Jesus here were not saintly, not beatific, but desperately human, showing him in harrowing pain, grimacing and lamenting. Women cried and wailed openly sometimes during Mass; almost no one cried during Mass in the States unless it was for a funeral. There was no tasteful distance from darkness here: It was as common and ubiquitous as food, as light.