And as luck would have it, the luck of small-town life that the expats have created for themselves within Patzcuaro, her friend Jorge Servin is striding across the plaza just now. He spots Ariana and, as etiquette allows, settles down beside her for a smoke and idle chatter before going on about his day. Ariana is able to smile and say hello. Jorge is a talker, with enough at the tip of his tongue not to notice her reticence and distress. Witty, fun, Jorge is one of those sophisticated Mexicans that expats compete to befriend. His first exposure to New York was in his late teens, courtesy of an older man, a tourist passing through Patzcuaro who became utterly infatuated with the dark, delicate boy for whom New York was the Vatican, the spiritual center of his faith in a more glamorous future than Patzcuaro seemed likely to provide him.
He was soon bored by his mentor’s Upper Eastside world. Uprooted from his own, Jorge had managed to talk his way into a factotum’s job in the Manhattan offices of Televisa, the giant multi-media conglomerate owned by Mexico’s Azcárraga family. He had the guile and savvy to quickly outgrow gofer status, and soon enough was picking through the slush-pile in search of unsolicited ideas for one-off documentaries or episodes for Televisa’s ongoing and immensely lucrative soap operas — telenovelas. From unsolicited slush, he moved on to lunches with agents and their writers. He had started to make good money when the whole thing began to pall. His politics got in the way of easy corporate success. Plus, he missed Mexico. In semi-retirement since his early forties, Jorge has been able to live on the cheap in Patzcuaro doing whatever he wants — which has turned out to be agenting middle-brow books, some for publication in the States, some for the Latino market, never more than one or two in a year. Typically they advance an edgy, left-liberal agenda. Jorge is completely without pretensions, as far as Ariana can tell. Genre fiction can be put to his purposes, even celebrity journalism — which he will tell you in the next breath is the era’s defining cultural disgrace.
He has some news: A book he recently shepherded through to publication has been bought by, yes, his old pals at Televisa, for a documentary TV series: interviews with and about the fallen children of prominent blowhards. There is the drug-addled street-walker cast out of her family home by a Pentecostal evangelist from Oklahoma; the gay son of a homophobic diputado in the Mexican legislature; the zen pacifist sprung from the loins of a saber-rattling foreign policy apparatchik in the Bush family’s inner circle and, just to balance things out: the lavishly self-indulgent investment banker who was brought up on bean sprouts by Sixties hippies on a back-to-basics commune here in western Mexico.
Ariana compliments her friend on his success, managing to sound exuberant.
“What’s next?” she asks.
“Still waiting for your own contribution to the sum of human knowledge,” Jorge says, renewing his standing offer to rep a book about expats — “if you and Schuyler ever get off your asses and actually set to work!”
Jorge: “Stick with it, my pet. It could be kind of a marvelous coffee-table book: a history of the expat scene, Spratling, John Reed, Diego and Frida. William Burroughs? Trotsky, for god’s sake! The sicarios, the kidnappings?”
Ariana shudders inwardly.
“Christ, you could do the whole thing on kidnappings!
“No go? The expat idea is not resonating with you? (Like many people fluent in a second language, Jorge is always among the first to pick up on a linguistic fad — “resonating with you?” His delivery of it drips with irony.) Oh, you want to go high-brow? Liz and Dick’s Mexico, a memoir of Puerto Vallarta in the 1960s? No? OK then, this: You chronicle my search for the prettiest boy on earth, a book with no ending.”
Jorge winks and runs his fingers through his hair, still more ebony than gray. The skin on the back of his neck is sun-dried and intricately wrinkled, like the crackled glaze on the base of a porcelain table lamp. He pulls another Lucky Strike from the pack in his T-shirt pocket. He’s got one too many rings on his fingers and a couple of copper loops around his left wrist, but otherwise Jorge’s wardrobe avoids showy extravagance; it’s more a dandy’s riff on the boho style of the 1950s: jeans rolled up an inch or two at the cuff, low-cut white tennis sneakers by Jack Purcell. For comic effect, he sometimes carries his cigarette pack under the short sleeve of his T-shirt, like James Dean in … was it “Giant”? “East of Eden?”
In the late Forties, Jorge would have belonged in the back seat of the Hudson Hornet that Sal Paradise drove across the vastness of America, except that in the late Forties, Jorge was ten years short of being born.
As he talks there on the bench, Jorge fidgets quickly and restlessly, crossing and re-crossing his legs, dragging on that cigarette. Always a cigarette. He talks with his hands, but the gestures are concise, not florid. He sculpts the air. He adores Ariana, the diva in her, her good looks and sense of style, her ability in a single gesture to evoke the New York that had at first infatuated him. He does not put his fingers on Ariana’s forearm to show sympathy or sensitivity as he stresses a point he’s trying to make.
Now Jorge has wound down far enough to take note of Ariana’s silence. He knows she has her off days and opts to try cheering her out of this one. He leans back on the bench with his hands clasped behind his head. “Tell me something, Ariana. Is this not the loveliest place on earth?”
And even in her distress, Ariana can not deny the charm of the Plaza Grande. A passing stranger looks her full in the face, smiles and says, “Buenas tardes,” because it truly is, a good and glorious afternoon. One of the young men who has propped his girlfriend up on the fountain wall locks his arms around her waist. He kisses her again and again, playfully, until she laughs and pushes him away. Kid brothers pedal along the walkways that crisscross the plaza. They jerk the front axle of their bicycles up into the air and ride the rear tire like a unicycle. They spin around and somehow launch the whole bike a couple of feet off the ground, then land on two wheels and pedal away.
Jorge rises suddenly from the bench, takes a last drag on his cigarette and flicks the butt into the cut-stone pathway, leaving Ariana alone again to solo-surf her wave of anxiety. All the while they were talking, she was trying to summon the nerve to spill her secret, take a friend into her confidence. Now he is walking away.
Ariana stops for olive oil at the natural food store that opened last season at a corner of the Plaza Grande, then negotiates the steep stone staircase that leads to Calle Madrigal. Back at home, Ariana assesses her situation. She is running out of ways to look like everything is normal. This is insane, she tells herself. The isolation is excruciating, the ban on bringing anyone in on her pain and her fears. “I am in over my head,” she tells herself, speaking aloud in the empty house, pacing into the living room, into the study and back into the kitchen.
Something is awry — or is it: an envelope on the kitchen’s tiled island. The xeroxed copy of a recent American Express bill. She receives and pays the bills electronically, but prints them out to keep track of her spending. Another wave of paranoia: has someone been rifling through her desk? What possible reason was there for her to have brought this document into the kitchen and left it there?
She reaches for the landline, sets the receiver back in its charger and takes out her cell. She calls Jorge and gets voicemail. He calls back five minutes later.
“This is going to sound crazy, Jorge, but we need to talk. Can you join me in the plaza? Can I come to your place?”
“But we just left the plaza.”
“I’ll explain when we get there.”
Descending the stone steps of the escalera yet again, Ariana wrestles a last time with whether to reveal what she has been ordered to tell no one. Jorge is good with secrets, she reassures herself. He burned through two wives and was raising three kids before he figured his way out of the closet. He lived a secret for a decade, perhaps a secret even to himself. He must know how to keep one.
She is the first to arrive. From her bench in a corner of the plaza, she can see two of the four porti
cos in their entirety. In framing the square, the columned walkways sweep past familiar shops and cafes and restaurants. To Ariana’s right: the dark and brooding entrance to the Hotel Iturbe, the gift shop called Sueños. And so on.
What she never much noticed before now are the unmarked doorways — negative spaces that recede between the shops. She ponders their mystery, wondering what might lie through an unmarked doorway and up a flight of stairs. Opaque with dust and soot, second-story windows peer out over the plaza like rheumy eyes. She imagines Schuyler sequestered so close at hand, knowing that his captors would never be that foolish. There are countless hundreds of obscure streets and alleyways lined with buildings where he could be hidden more easily: a truck stops, a gagged man is bundled inside, a sombrero pressed against his face to conceal it. But what could be more clever than a hideout in plain sight, right here in the center of it all, the Plaza Grande. Ariana pictures a dusty upstairs storeroom with a cot in one corner and a water closet to the side; the captive is lashed hand and foot to a straight-back chair. He rocks back and forth, trying to budge the chair closer to the grimy window. He envisions somehow ramming it with his forehead and shouting for help. The guard, noticing the few inches of progress he’s made toward the window, punches Schuyler in the gut and shoves the chair back against the far wall.
Ariana spots Jorge strolling along a plaza walkway. Even as he delivers the perfunctory kiss and settles onto the bench beside her, Ariana is talking fast in the tone of voice — not too loud, not too whispery — that she would use to talk about the weather, not that anybody is close enough to overhear her. Jorge reacts to her report with greater urgency than she expected: “You need to take these people seriously, Ariana. They may be a cartel. More likely they are wannabes, gang-bangers back from Los Angeles and looking to make their mark. You need to contact the embassy, or the DEA. Somebody. Sure, it’s a risk. They can fuck things up. But you may need them. You may need them badly, and you may need them on short notice.
“Let me drive you down to Mexico City, Ariana. First thing tomorrow. I can knock off some errands while you talk to the people you need to talk to. This is more than a phone call. Especially if your phone is tapped.”
Ariana melts with gratitude — for Jorge’s offer, for his understanding. He does not say she is being overly dramatic when she tells him she’s worried they might be followed out of town.
She stays up late into the evening, sleepless, photo-editing recent takes to distract herself from the dread that is eating at her. The cell phone is on the table beside her as she works. She normally turns it off when she finally turns in. Instead, she sets it on her bedside table with the volume high. Just in case.
No calls at all. Nothing.
day three
Jorge has some editing to finish, and can’t leave until late morning. Which is fine with Ariana. Calmed by the sense that she is finally doing something, taking action — or about to — when she finally winked out she got her first decent night’s sleep since the llamada. By ten , she is waking herself up with a cup of black coffee at the kitchen table. She clunks the empty cup into the sink, grabs her satchel with a change of clothes, steps out into the street. She avoids the Plaza. Jorge meets her at eleven at the designated street corner in a nondescript part of the Centro Historico. If anyone is trailing Ariana, they are doing it on foot. There are no cars in sight and none appear to be following Jorge’s VW as he zigzags to the edge of town and onto the highway toward Mexico City, the big enchilada, five hours away, population 20 million.
Within a few miles of Patzcuaro, they have ramped up onto the cuota, as Mexicans call their toll roads. This part of the cuota, like most parts of the cuota, is a two-lane highway — one lane in each direction — with a narrow median strip between them. The shoulders are broad enough to accommodate the right-side wheels of a semi, or, if you’re in a compact passenger car, as Jorge and Ariana are, the whole vehicle. The shoulder becomes a slow lane. That leaves the rest of the roadway for cars tearing past at 70 miles an hour.
Ariana is struck again by the cooperative — call it “collectivist” — aspect of Mexican highway etiquette. As you approach from the rear, cars and trucks pull over, onto the shoulder, to let you pass. And the passing is between the two of you, a largely opportunistic decision made without regard to “no passing” signs or highway stripes. There is the occasional warning that speed is monitored by radar, but police are a rarity unless you count the plywood patrol cars, silhouetted on distant bluffs against the brush and cropland.
“It’s paradoxical,” Jorge says, shaking loose a couple of cigarettes and pointing the pack toward Ariana.
“What’s paradoxical?” Ariana lights the two cigarettes, puts one in Jorge’s mouth.
“Mexico may be basically in a state of collapse, a failed state,” he continues. “There’s hideous violence on the social margins, but I wonder if that isn’t precisely what brings out civility in the rest of us. There’s no backstop. You deal gently with people who share your fate because if there is a flap or a fight, there’s no referee, no judge, no politician you can run to in tears.”
Jorge drags deeply on his cigarette. He senses that his little homage to Mexico is comforting Ariana, or at least distracting her from her worries. He continues:
“Hogging the left lane, flipping off the guy who cuts in front of you, the bullying and in-your-face bullshit you get everywhere in the States, it would be suicide down here. And yet, as these things go, the Mexicans — at least the ones I see in places like Patzcuaro — are some of the happier people on earth. You do what you want, park your car where you will, raise a pig and some turkeys in the patio back of your house, set up a brazier out front and sell tacos to your neighbors or anyone else with the courage to eat them. Am I right, Ariana?
“Well, I wouldn’t get too carried away with your ode to the gentle loveliness of Mexican life. There are also the corpses that slide out of dump trucks onto back streets at dawn. Was it 36 of them in Veracruz a couple of years ago — a warning from one cartel to another? Or did the police do the killings?
“And Iguala, Jorge? Iguala was just the other day!” Ariana is referring to fairly headlines: the students who were disappeared by the mayor’s wife in a city called Iguala — 43 of them. Her highness had instructed the constabulary to keep the youthful protesters from marring the speech she was scheduled to give. Evidently, the constabulary did as they were told. The orator fled but was captured, along with her husband.
Jorge exhales a cloud of smoke. “There’s going to turn out to be more to that one than an innocent student protest, but, all right, that is Mexico at its ugliest.”
Ariana settles back. The car heater is on low. She enjoys the sight of the countryside flashing past and the sense of relief that, in driving to Mexico City, she is no longer paralyzed by the inertia imposed by the kidnappers. She enjoys Jorge’s riffs on Mexican politics, even if she has heard this one before — his contention that, when you accept that the cartels have a de facto role in Mexican governance, Mexico and the States are more alike than they are different.
“I mean really, Ariana. What’s the difference between routine extortion by the cartels — protection money — and U.S. taxes. Property tax pays for police back in the States; how different is that from a cartel enforcer extracting a monthly levy from your average shopkeeper or cabdriver?”
“One reality veils another which in turn gets exposed as false or misleading and turns out to mask yet a third level of reality — or irreality — that conceals a fourth. What’s the word the Mexicans are starting to use? Pantalla? The screen? The veil? The army becomes, not a counterweight to the local cartels, but a front for them. Cops are revealed to be crooks, and the crooks — in this case the sicarios — turn out to be a force for order, an enforcer of the economic regimen they then plunder under a so-called government with less local power than the narcos themselves.”
Jorge goes on: “You might even call the taxation progressive, They hit u
p the rich for major ransoms and payoffs, expropriate entire businesses. The rest — the little guys — pay mordidas on an orderly schedule. Better to take little bites, they seem to have decided. That assures there will be leftovers to dine on tomorrow.”
“There are detectable differences,” Ariana suggests, drily.
“Like what?”
“The violence, maybe? What’s the number, the death toll? Ten thousand a year these days, from cartel violence. I read it somewhere.”
But Jorge has already thought about that, woven it into his analysis.
“What about the police killings in the States? What about the generations of cancer and heart patients sacrificed to the oil economy. Well, I guess that’s international: the pollution, the toxic diet. To say nothing of the worldwide carnage Washington has created in defense of its oil supply lines and the Pentagon’s clumsy notion of military hegemony.”
By now Jorge is laughing at his own rant, an ideology more useful to parlor pinks than to practicing politicos.
Ariana is not about to let him off that easily: “Grant me this, Jorge — that the 60,000 corpses racked up during Calderon’s ‘War on Drugs’ is a hard number to match in the States.”
“All right,” Jorge says. “Tell me how many black and brown men die in the U.S. in any six-year period.” (Mexican presidents serve a single, six-year term.) “My recollection is that the homicide rate among people of color averages better than 10,000 per annum. That pretty much matches the Calderon toll. Your dealers, your criminal element bump each other off in far larger numbers than the state takes them out. But that’s true of our cartel turf wars, too.”
We Have Taken Your Husband Page 4
