My Young Life

by Frederic Tuten

  “Goitia is always there,” a Mexican fellow student told me. “He is famous for never going anywhere and seeing no one.” Goitia had no phone, so I took my chances.

  I rode out of the city until finally the trolley was clacking through cornfields. The driver called out my stop; there was nothing but tall cornfields on either side. I asked him about Goitia, and he said “el loco” was over there, pointing to someplace in the distance. I saw a little footpath and took it, wondering if I could find my way back and when the next trolley would come to return me to the city. I came to a wooden shack; chickens were running wild. I called out but there was no answer.

  “He’s sick,” an old woman in a nearby shack told me, surprised that I had come to see him. “He’s in the hospital.”

  I waited a long time for the trolley to return. I studied the surrounding cornfield and the cobalt sky, and listened to the chickens cackling away. I was so far from the Bronx, but I had never felt so close to home.

  • • •

  My friend Danny at the bohemian table at City College had written to his father about me and he took me under his wing a week after I had arrived in Mexico City. He introduced me to the artists who had formed the Taller de Gráfica Popular, a collective devoted to lithography with a social bent. The TGP had the same aim as the muralists whose art I’d been busing around Mexico to study, but they worked on a small scale, making prints easily reproducible and affordable to the poorest: art for everyone.

  I liked their art and I liked them: they were warm to me and to each other. I was invited to little gatherings at their modest apartments with plants in the windows and prints by fellow artists on the walls, and I learned how to drink tequila the Mexican way, with salt I licked from the hollow near my thumb, followed by a bite of lime. I was proud to be accepted; I was the gringo mascot who loved Mexican art.

  I had a crush on Mariana Yampolsky, a thirtyish American artist and photographer who lived in Mexico and eventually became a Mexican citizen. She had an affectionate way with me that made me feel loved. I envied that she had changed her life so completely, living independently as an artist among artists. Her example further convinced me that I had to be free, but what did that mean? I seldom thought of Paris now: la vie bohème seemed so anemic and narrow and precious, so much a part of my childish escapist self, a dream of a pure world and a pure art high in the pure clouds. There was no ivory tower in Mexico.

  “You should see more of Mexico,” Mariana said. “Then you should come live here.”

  “With you,” I said.

  “You’re very quick, compañero.” She touched my cheek. “Not that I mind it.”

  My friendships were not always so easy. I clashed once with Dosamantes when he assured me that Mexico would have another great revolution, a socialist one this time.

  Bullfight in Mexico City, 1956. I went there to see what Hemingway had seen and returned having seen it.

  “The United States will stop it,” I said. “They will send in the troops like they did in 1914, except that this time it will be with whole armies.”

  “The Soviet Union would go to war if the USA did that,” Dosamantes said.

  I laughed. “Go to war?”

  Another time he explained to me that Abstract Expressionism was being taught by American artists in Mexican art schools as part of a CIA plot to undermine the politically driven Mexican art. I laughed at that, too, only to be amazed to learn years later that he had been right.

  Even with these little parties and gatherings, and the classes I was attending, there was much room for me to wander the city, even at night, alone, in the darkest streets. I was naïve and fearless about going to new places, especially dangerous ones like the Barba Azul, a bar on the dark Plaza Garibaldi, a place, had I known, I should not have ventured into even with a heavy tank. Barba Azul had a long wooden bar and booths with hard benches, but after a few shots of tequila the benches went soft. Mariachi bands, playing for tips, strolled in and made the place bounce, and everyone sang along—me, too: “Ayee, Jalisco no te rajes.” I felt very Mexican.

  Everything about the Barba Azul was exciting to me, even the toilet stalls that were kept packed with ice and quartered limes to deodorize the urine, and the tile floors paved with sawdust that were continuously swept and refreshed with more sawdust.

  One night three very elegant young Mexican couples in their twenties came in, slumming, like me. They took a booth and soon went into an uproar of drink and fun. I wished I were among them, so filled with life, so sexy. But after a while one of them slapped his girlfriend, accusing her of flirting with one of his friends; the friend immediately got into the act and called the man a coward for slapping a woman. Tears, cries, shouts. The two men went out into the dark street, followed by the whole bar and the bartender, who was holding a bat. More name-calling between the two, then fists, then one drew a knife and stabbed the other. I stood there entranced by the drama, thrilled. Passion, honor, death. This was the very real stuff of life that writers were born to experience!

  But then someone took me by the sleeve and said in English, “Get out of here right away.” Everyone else was running away, including the two who had been fighting, although the one who had been stabbed and was bleeding through his shirt did not run so fast. He held his hand over his bleeding chest and was carried along by his slapped girlfriend. I ran, finding a taxi meandering in a dark side street. I arrived home and didn’t even argue with the driver when he invented a new surcharge to the meter. I didn’t care whatever the price was; I was so grateful to have found him in that empty side street and so grateful to be home.

  You like it raw until it gets too real, I said to myself as I turned off the light. You’re just a bourgeois jerk, I added. Good night, jerk.

  Dosamantes later explained to me that if you are a witness to an accident or a crime in Mexico, the police have a right to keep you in the country until all the legal proceedings are over—which might mean years. This frightened me more than the fight in the plaza, so I stayed clear of the Barba Azul after that and kept to the tamer streets and bars without fire, although I missed the wildness. I thought: Would I ever have experienced this excitement in a café in Paris?

  Ice Cubes and Caviar

  Sanborn, the Reforma, 1956

  For all my adventures, I still thought about Diana. I thought about her in class, during the lectures on Mexican mural painting. Slides of Rivera’s workers and peasants marching with scythes and rifles and led by a mustachioed man in a huge sombrero and riding a white horse merged with Diana’s face and shoulders and breasts and creamy flat belly. In my battle between ideas and sex, sex always wins. In a choice between anything and sex, sex always wins. Reveries of sex will be my companion on my deathbed.

  Diana followed me most of the day and in my sleep. I did not have her phone number and I thought it not polite to ring her doorbell cold, so I squeezed a note into her mailbox—a note I had written many times over, trying to find a tone at once friendly but not from just a friend; casual, but suggestively at the edge of erotic familiarity.

  I finally hit upon: It was wonderful meeting you. May I invite you to dinner, at your convenience?

  No word from her in the following days, and there was no response note in my mailbox or under my door. All the same, my roommate was a bit in awe of me, having seen her, the divinity. He said, “You lucky bastard. How did you get so lucky?”

  I was not in love with Diana, but I wanted to be in her sophisticated aura and all the sex that went along with it—imagined, because I had no memory of sex with her the first drunken night I slept in her bed.

  A week or two passed since I dropped off my dinner invitation and there was still no word from Diana. I started to think that I did not miss her.

  But then, at three or four or five in the morning, there was a ringing, then a pounding at my door. I knew who it was. As much as I wanted to go to the door, I was crushed with sleep. More pounding. “Open the door, you little Bolshevik, I know
you’re in there!”

  I was worried that Diana would keep pounding until the neighbors went wild and started their own shouting, to be followed up later by complaints to the building’s manager. I finally opened the door, pretending I had heard her knocking only a moment earlier. I yawned twice and blinked my eyes.

  “Come up for a drink,” she said, more of a command than an invitation. Her lipstick was smeared. She was swaying.

  “I have an early class,” I said, which was true. But she slowly came into erotic focus and the classroom melted away.

  She was carrying an armful of bags filled to the brim.

  “Aren’t you going to give me a hand?”

  My roommate called out from his room, “Hey! Bring her in.”

  She did not want to come in. She ordered me to take the bags and follow her in my pajamas and bare feet up to her apartment. All the lights were blazing; they were always on when she left the house, she said, day and night, so she did not have to worry about coming home in the dark. We emptied the bags on the kitchen table: three tins of Iranian caviar, still cold; four bottles of vintage French champagne, lukewarm; and a silver pail of maybe a hundred chocolates in cellophane wrappings. And there were more little precious-looking items I could not identify.

  “Santa came early this year,” she said when I asked where it all had come from.

  She started drinking the champagne with a single ice cube in a water glass—her favorite glass, it seemed, for any beverage, even water. “You know, Freddy, people put an emphasis on the right glass for the right drink. But I think that’s all bull to make everything seem fancy.”

  “Simplify, simplify,” I said, telling her, in a puffed-up way, that it was a quote from Thoreau.

  She made an innocent face. “Gee, you mean Emerson’s boyfriend?”

  I was embarrassed for being such a snob and she saw it, saying, “I’m just kidding you. But don’t you think I’ve ever read a book?”

  I wanted to say, “I have never seen you read even a magazine,” but of course I didn’t.

  She spooned me the caviar directly from the tin. I had never eaten caviar before, but I didn’t tell her that. It was unpleasant, slimy and salty. Who eats this stuff? I wondered. And it was supposed to be very expensive! However, I dug in and soon liked it better, and after the third heaping spoonful I couldn’t stop.

  By the time we were on the second tin, Diana said: “Oh, shit,” and turned over the bags still on the table. “I forgot the toasts.”

  There were none, but we polished off the second tin without them, and the champagne, too, and a half glass of cold Russian vodka for her, followed by a fat joint that gave me a contact high and the feeling that very soon I would be sick.

  She was smiling in a woozy way. “I’ve saved the best part for last,” she said, rising and taking me by the hand to bed.

  I was half-drunk and excited to see her strip down to her black bra and black panties, black garter belt and black stockings—like a girl in a black-and-white stag movie or the one with Belinda that looped forever in my mind. She staggered into the bed, where I was nervously waiting, naked.

  “You have a funny body,” she said. “Flat, like an Etruscan’s.”

  “You’re so beautiful,” I managed to come up with, not knowing the words to say how amazed I was by her body, so golden and with such wonderful curves.

  “You don’t have to do anything,” she said, going down on me. I came fast; she swallowed and licked the little bit of sperm that clung to the edge of her lower lip. “Good night, my little commie,” she said, giving me a kiss on my forehead.

  She was soon in dreamland and I thought I had better leave before I missed another class. I slid to the edge of the bed, but with her eyes still closed she took me by the hand and in a little girl’s voice said, “Don’t leave yet. Don’t leave me.”

  I stayed beside her trying to sleep but it was not until broad daylight that I did.

  The maid came in and repeated the breakfast of my first stay. She was even friendlier this time and said to Diana, “Muy guapo,” and “Si joven.”

  It was noon when we were finally out of bed. She invited me to shower with her. I did, the first time with anyone, the first time I saw in her soapy wet body how beautiful it was to be alive in the morning with a woman who excited you.

  I didn’t know what to do for the rest of the day. She looked about as if she was wondering the same until she said, “Let’s go to Sanborns and get some lunch, my treat.”

  I had never been there, having heard it was a place for tourists and Texans. Of course, I was neither.

  “It’s the only place to go where you can eat the salad—not that I eat salad,” Diana said.

  I knew what she meant, having gone through a bout of dysentery the first days I had arrived in Mexico and making it worse by drinking tequila, which I thought would kill the bad bacteria in my intestines.

  Diana called for a car and soon we were down the Reforma and in Sanborns and at the counter, where all that was missing for the idyllic Norman Rockwell magazine cover was the strawberry ice cream float for us to share, one straw for each.

  She looked over the bilingual menu for what seemed an hour before saying, “I’m not really hungry.”

  She ordered a Coke without ice. I followed her lead.

  “Don’t drink stuff with ice in it,” she said. “Even here in Sanborns, you never know if the water is healthy.”

  She sipped her Coke and studied the glass a few times as if to see how much of it was left. She smiled and it made me happy to be there with her in the friendly bustle of the restaurant among American voices.

  Then her mood swung and her good cheer vanished; she turned and said, “Why did we come to this dump anyway? Vamanos.”

  There was a cab line right outside. Diana did not say a word all along the way and stayed fixed in a faraway stare. I wondered if I had done something wrong and, fearful of making it worse, remained silent, too.

  Then she turned and very loudly said: “You know, it’s not just Sanborns; it’s Mexico City and its whole world of low-class ignorant idiots with money.”

  “There are rich idiots everywhere.”

  “Yes, but in Paris they dress better.”

  “What’s wrong, Diana? Did I do something to upset you?”

  She smiled. “Don’t be so nice to me. I can’t stand it. But don’t change, either, or I’ll hate you.”

  I wondered if she ever wanted to see me again. But then a week passed and we spent four nights in a row together. I was prepared and even had a toothbrush at the ready. I was missing classes but I didn’t care. But I did care, worried the university would drop me: “Good-bye, foolish gringo!” Hadn’t I learned my lesson from being expelled from City College?

  Then Diana vanished and it was two weeks before I saw her again, late in the afternoon, when she showed up at my place, sober and somber in a nervous way. She was wearing a scarf over her head and the huge sunglasses when we first met by the mailbox. We sat in my living room, which was no better furnished than when we first met.

  “Didn’t Theresa bring you a pair of chairs and a coffee table?”

  “Not that I know of,” I said.

  “Don’t you like me anymore?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “Then why haven’t I seen you?”

  “You’ve been away, I suppose.”

  “Why haven’t you called?”

  “I have: I got some answering service.”

  “They never gave me the message. Why didn’t you just come up?”

  “You told me never to.”

  “I haven’t been there anyway. Do you want to come up now?”

  “More than anything.”

  We were soon up in her living room; the windows were shut and the room felt dusty and hot, as if they had been shut for weeks. But then again, I was sure she lived only in her bedroom. She took off her scarf and sunglasses; she was bruised about the left eye. She caught my look.


  “Some guys just like slapping you around.”

  “What guys?”

  “Use your imagination,” she said.

  She disappeared and returned with an unopened bottle of vodka and a single glass and poured herself a tall one.

  “I don’t think you should drink in the afternoon. It starts a bad habit,” she said.

  I felt a great tenderness for her, as if I were the adult and she the child. “Diana, do you want to go for a walk in the park, get some fresh air and a little sun?”

  “Come over here, you little jerk,” she said with a great, happy laugh. We were sitting on the spotless white sofa and began necking like kids in the back of a movie house. I put my hand on her breast and squeezed.

  “You don’t have much experience with girls, do you?”

  “Not in a big way.”

  She spread her legs and guided my head downward, where it had never been. “Lesson one, my little student,” she said.

  After the rest of the day had vanished and night had vanished, there was breakfast and sex and another midday followed by a long nap. Diana was gone when I woke. Theresa brought me coffee and, on the tray beside it, a blue envelope with a handwritten note. Be away for a while, it said. Here’s something to keep you company when I’m gone. There were two five-hundred-peso notes inside the envelope, about eighty dollars, a fortune.

  I did not see or hear from her for a week, and I mustered up the courage to go up to her apartment and found Theresa, who assured me that la señora was on vacation, maybe Acapulco, or just somewhere, quien sabe?

  Somehow I was relieved. I needed a rest from Diana and even from her exciting lessons, which had sometimes left me feeling exhausted and longing to hibernate.

  Adios, Muchachos y Compañeras de Mi Vida

  Mexico City DF, Pedregal, 1956

  A few days before I was to return to New York, Theresa came to the door as I was packing and said that Diana was in the hospital and wished I would visit her.