Gringa Page 4

  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.

  Adele had lived for years with two gay men who worked in television, and Abilene looked forward to seeing them again, too. One was a very good cook, and the other told funny stories that made Abilene cry with laughter. But Adele said that the cook was killed in a freak accident. He was running across a busy street and he ran up to a car whose aerial was sticking out sideways; he didn’t see it, and it went through one eye and into his brain. After that, his lover went to France and from there to Senegal. Adele had stayed on in their apartment, with her daughter Pola, until a few months ago. Then she had married the publisher of a small weekly newspaper. His name was Daniel Moya. Adele said she was very much in love. “I’ve been alone ten years,” she said. “I wouldn’t go with a man who didn’t have integrity, and who didn’t respect me, and my work.” She was a photographer.

  She scolded Abilene for staying away and for not writing. “Was there nothing to tell me?” Abilene shrugged. “In the country, everything stays the same,” she said. She had never talked to Adele about Sage.

  Adele showed her the apartment. It was large and airy, in a decent building, but they had spent almost nothing on furnishing it. In a back room Adele had a closet darkroom, and a makeshift drafting table where she was laying out the pages of a fotonovela. “You see how it goes,” she said, pointing to the photographs that would make up the comic book format of a romantic story. Such books were cheap and popular. “I’m working with some women from several of the districts where conditions are very bad, where everyone is very poor. It was the idea of a Maryknoll nun, a friend of Daniel’s. Of course there are a thousand districts, maybe ten thousand. We only have a little money. But we tell the women, ‘Pass it on.’ How else can anything ever change?”

  “What is the book about?” Abilene was peering at the pictures.

  “First aid! You see, the young wife Rosa learns it at neighborhood meetings. For going, her husband beats her, and her mother-in-law calls her a whore. But then one day her husband comes home with a bad wound in his arm, from the factory. They did nothing for him at work but give him a sling, and the wound will fester, he will probably lose his arm. All this is taken for granted; it happens all the time. But our little Rosa—she knows what to do, and she cleans and cares for her husband’s arm, and saves it.”

  Abilene sees that in the last photograph Rosa and her husband embrace. “And after that he never beats her again.”

  “You tease me, Abilene. We do what we can. Come on to the other part of the apartment.”

  “Don’t misunderstand! I think it’s fascinating. I didn’t know you were doing anything like this.”

  “Of course you didn’t. It is recent, and I never see you. But here you are now! You look very sweet and young with your pink raw face, Abby. It is good to see you! Come, we’ll make lunch, and you can meet Daniel then. Pola is at school this morning, and she has plans with a friend through the afternoon. But now you will come every day! Wait until you see how she has grown, my little Pola.”

  The lunch talk was about the murder of a young American woman in the colonia—near where they lived, in fact. She had been found in the street, bludgeoned. The police had no leads. She carried no identification, or at least there was none left in her purse. Daniel was explaining.

  “But now I hear from a hotel proprietor that he has an American guest who is missing. His hotel is in the neighborhood. He calls me first, and we go to the police and to the morgue together. Sometimes American girls disappear off the streets of the city and are never heard from again. Where do they go? Young girls, mostly, who’ve gone out to buy candy while their parents are at siesta. A few years ago workers for the government, excavating a site on a ranch not far north of the city, found graves of young girls. There has been a rumor for a long time that if you have enough money and know the right people, there is a place where you can have a gringa whore. I wrote about it once. Word got out before the story was printed, and on the day it came out, federal agents bought all the copies of the paper at all the stands. In an hour there wasn’t a single copy of The Voice on sale.”

  “What a scandal!” Abilene said, and added, “I’ve heard about the ranch with young girls, too, from my friend Antonio Velez. He says it is true, though he never saw for himself.” Ardently, she hoped he had not lied about that.

  Daniel went on. “The hotel owner has a son who talked too much and got into trouble. He was sent to Lecumberri. I helped get the boy out—a little money, a little pressure. I told the father I couldn’t help if they didn’t already want to let the boy go. But his father is grateful. He tells me what he hears.

  “So this morning the two of us go to the morgue and look at the body. My friend says yes, it’s the girl from his hotel. He is sure, though her face—” Daniel stopped and drank his broth.

  Abilene groped for words. “The newspaper business—you hear so many things—”

  Adele pointed toward the main room where shelves were stacked with black notebooks, and the corners of the room were crowded with boxes of papers and folders. “This is Daniel’s work, to know these things. To know about crimes that mean nothing to the law, and crimes that the law itself perpetrates.”

  Abilene didn’t know what that meant, and said so. Daniel waved Adele’s explanation away with his hand. “I’ve got to go,” he said. “But first I want to tell you what else my old friend said. The police went back with him and searched the room. They found clothes, shampoo, shoes, and nothing else. ‘Did you ever see her passport, a visa?’ they asked. But such things are not required of Americans. He had already taken the papers out of the room. They went away. What do they care? They have to bury her. They’ll take her fingerprints and her photograph and wait for someone to file a missing report. They will probably never know who she is.”

  “The papers he held—what are they?” Adele asked.

  “Won’t he get in trouble?” Abilene asked.

  Daniel smiled at Abilene. “This is not
an important crime, little friend. This is just a dead whore as far as the police are concerned. There’s no identification in the papers. She gave the name Sylvia Britton. The police have given that name to the other precincts and to the embassy. They have nothing to learn from a dead girl’s notes. But he wants us to look at them. I think he wants us to take them. I told him I would send you, Adele, this afternoon.”

  “But what does it matter?” Abilene asked. “You don’t even know who she is!”

  “That’s exactly why it matters,” Daniel said sadly. “Who will remember her otherwise?”

  Adele tried to explain Daniel to Abilene.

  “Daniel documents. Besides the paper, I mean. He says it is his function to record. He reduces grief and terror to lists. The imprisoned. The assassinated. The disappeared. Sometimes he travels to Oaxaca, Chihuahua. You are surprised to see how many? These notebooks, with their lists? This is not a nation of general repression, not Uruguay, Hungary, Nazi Germany—In the country, one village may know nothing of the next. In the city, each block is a nation. It would be so easy, Daniel says, for the numbers to be lost, the impact of the sums. Oh, Daniel must tell you himself! He speaks with such goodness and passion. Didn’t I fall in love with him?”

  “Tell me about meeting him.” Abilene had her doubts.

  “The meeting was nothing special. We met at friends of Jay’s—he is in Senegal now. We were drawn together, can that be explained? I suppose it was a physical thing, the same as with any man and woman. I had been alone so long. In his bed I told him about Yannis, Pola’s father. I told him about the trip we took to Central America in 1955. In Nicaragua they were so poor I saw children scraping with their teeth the banana peels off the streets. We were both taking photographs like mad. I was only nineteen. I didn’t know I was pregnant with Pola. In Guatemala we wanted to visit the Indians in the mountains. They are beautiful people, their lives are very simple and very old, and of course I was so romantic then. The women dressed in wonderful bright colors. One day we were having a beer in a cafe, and we heard there had been a killing in the next village. Men had come into the village and had murdered a dozen men. We raced to our jeep and sped to the village to see for ourselves. We arrived to find the dead laid out in the square. Their wounds had stained their white pajamas black. However each had been killed, he had also been shot in the face. My husband was so excited. ‘In an hour we would have missed it,’ he said to me.

  “He used to hit me, never very hard, and I wasn’t afraid of him. But on that day, when I saw the look on his face in front of those corpses, I was terrified. After, when I learned I was pregnant, I was afraid for the baby, too. I knew I didn’t want to live with him anymore.”

  “What an awful story. You hadn’t told me.” In Zihuatenejo, Adele had told Abilene about her second lover. He had beat her too, and he had been hard to leave. The two stories together told quite a lot more than either alone. Had she told Daniel both?

  “This will sound strange, Abilene, but I think until I lay in Daniel’s bed that night—I felt so safe, you see—I had forgotten about it, pushed it way down inside me. Daniel spent a lot of time in Guatemala. Since the U.S. helped to overthrow the government fifteen years ago, things have been very bad for the Indians. When he talked about it, I felt his pain and sorrow so much! He learned something very important there. When there were some executions, years ago, there was quite a stir in the country and in the international press. After that, the executions took place in the mountains or by rivers. Though many are murdered in Guatemala, many more disappear, to rot in dumps and rivers. That’s what he fears here. He fears it in every poor nation!”

  “And because you both were in Guatemala—”

  “Oh yes! He was there at the very time I was. And so now we fall in love. It’s as crazy as that. Listen, Abby, don’t you see it? Here is a man who expects the best of me. That’s what we all want, especially women with bad pasts.”

  “And this poor American girl—” Abilene felt cold and angry, remembering her. “It sounds like no one ever came along like that.”

  On the street Adele said something in a very intense whisper. “Why is it that, knowing nothing at all about this girl, we know so much?”

  The hotel proprietor was very cordial. His wife made coffee while the women looked at the jumbled papers he gave them. They seemed to be notes from a diary, but they had been torn from a common spiral notebook. There were details of dances, days on the beach somewhere, foods eaten. The papers were very dirty and wrinkled. Nothing was dated. There was a list of men’s names: Jorge, Arturo, Paco, and half a dozen others, only their first names. There was a code of some sort after each name. “I think she’s grading them,” Abilene said. She felt hot. “This isn’t good, Adele.”

  “I know.” Adele’s face had gone white.

  “I would like to be rid of them,” the hotel proprietor said. “I will destroy them, or you may take them. But if there is something the police should have, you must let me ‘find’ it and take it myself. The rest—what do they need to know?”

  Adele looked sadly. “I have found something, Javier. I want my friend to read it, and then I think you should take it to the precinct station. There’s an address in the corner, don’t you see? She was writing a letter to a friend and she scribbled the address. Maybe she was going to get an envelope while she was out.”

  Abilene read:

  So, dear Katherine, you think I grovel and debase myself and ought to come home and go to work again at something ‘useful.’ You don’t understand why I look for the cockiest of the boys. Stop explicating text. I am not a scholarly pursuit. I will explain it to you. Sex is as simple a thing as your name. Say it and it is yours. I am looking for ecstasy. And I think fear is the way to it. The exhilaration! The game—the stakes—One of these days I will sweep through the fear, and past it, free and clear. Ecstasy is freedom. The ultimate is the end.

  They walked back to Adele’s slowly. They passed a bench at the edge of a patch of grass, and Adele motioned for them to sit down. “Do you know who I thought it might be?” she asked.

  “You thought you knew her?”

  “It’s mad! But I thought it was the girl from Zihuatenejo, the one Pola was so crazy about. She called herself Lotus, do you remember her?”

  “Oh yes. But what reason did you have—?”

  “No reason at all. I wanted it to be her. Think what she was like. I could never forget her. She was on her way to something terrible, I could see it on her face—” Adele stopped and stared at Abilene a moment. Abilene shifted uneasily on the bench. “I worried about you, too, you know—” Adele said. Abilene looked away. “I wanted it to be Lotus so that there was only one of them. I didn’t want there to be another girl who went the same way—”

  “Killed?”

  “Looking for it. Isn’t that what they say about women? When I read the letter—well, it isn’t that girl, I’m sure of it, it was too great a coincidence—but I thought for a moment, for just a fraction of a moment: She got what she wanted.”

  “What she deserved. That’s what you really mean.”

  Adele’s face was streaked with tears. She wiped her cheeks with the back of her hand. “Yes.”

  “Then why be so upset!”

  “Oh Abby, nobody deserves what happens to them, not that. Destruction comes looking for you.”

  “Adele! That’s what the Indians believe! That old fatalism. Aren’t you the one who told me—do you remember, in Zihuatenejo, we talked about fate—’You make your own life, from one day to the next. You don’t let the past make it for you. You decide to be happy.’ You told me that.”

  “And I do believe it! Only I have to wonder, does everyone have the power to choose? Daniel’s lists—did those people choose their deaths? They were like objects in a high wind, tossed here and there. They came back down so hard.”

  “Who did decide, then?�
�� Abilene thought the answer had something to do with Mexico. You could talk about fate, and about Mexico, and it was the same thing.

  They began to walk again. At the door of her apartment, Adele kissed Abilene goodbye. She said, “I don’t believe all those things I said. I was upset. I only meant that sometimes things happen to people and it’s too painful to think about. We say, ‘What was she doing there, anyway? Why were they up to that?’ We say, ‘Thank goodness that can’t happen to me.’ And I don’t want—it would be so terrible, Abilene—I don’t want to blame the victims. So I say it was fate, or bad luck, or the evil of other people falling down on them. And I still want to say—how can you go on if you don’t believe this—I want to say, you can decide to be who you are. You can decide who that is.”

  Abilene wanted to get away. “Then I hope you’re right,” she said, because she didn’t think she had made that decision yet herself.

  Part II

  Chapter 3

  I WAS TEN when I realized families weren’t all the same. We were living in Hadicol Camp, in the blankest part of West Texas, and there was nothing to do but stare at the landscape and try to imagine cities and oceans and mountains and trees. I watched tumbleweeds come out of nowhere—I’d see them coming when they looked the size of a tennis ball—and I’d watch while they were tossed out of sight, or hung up on a fence until the wind shifted and tore them loose again. I knew to cover my face in a dust flurry, to speak cautiously to my mother and to teachers, not to expect anything out of each day. I didn’t know then that what seems true can be all a lie.