Ariana did not set out to find herself a Mexican lover. Or, if she did, the lover she wanted was Mexico itself, its brooding and savage beauty, its crazy cultural mix of hair-trigger impulsiveness and paralyzing fatalism. She would have told you — she had convinced herself — that she had finally outgrown the era of conventional affairs. These affairs had been, yes, a rather redundant feature of her marriage to Schuyler. It had been a marriage marked by serial betrayals on her part, and Schuyler matched her, affair for affair. The move to Mexico held the promise of a milestone, an opportunity to disown what had become, at least in her view, a silly little cult of infidelity. She had decided it was time to stop rationalizing betrayal as a test — an enhancement — of their devotion to each other. For a long time, they really had bought into that marital meme. This much could be said for it: a silly little cult of infidelity was better than the bitter recrimination that most couples visit upon each other when a vow of monogamy is broken. It worked. Or something worked. They had stayed together going on twenty years.
And so Enrique — the man, the circumstances surrounding her capitulation to him, the whole “Enrique thing” as Jorge once put it — had caught Ariana by surprise. He was an artful seducer. He had women, plenty of them, from what she could tell. He truly didn’t need another. He had convinced himself of this.
The open-air market, the mercado central, is the great equalizer in a place like Patzcuaro, with its catacombs and narrow alleys and general hubbub. It’s like the subways in New York. You run into people you know in the market. You brush up against people you don’t know and, after apologizing, ask them if they’ve seen any good guayaba or ajo or noni (a maguey extract that the Indians insist can cure everything from diabetes and hypertension to cancer — assuming you survive the unspeakably foul taste.)
Class barriers break down in the mercado. You knock up against your own kind and your opposite. Ariana was standing before the overturned crates heaped with fruit and vegetables that constitute the puesto — the stall — of an indigenous couple she knows as Pablo and Alicia. She was in the market for a couple of avocados — an addiction. They run about 25 cents apiece. She can’t quite reach the one she wants. Alicia is nowhere in sight; Pablo is chatting with another customer, and so she turns to the man standing next to her contemplating his own selections from the heaps of melon and tomato and guayaba and mango and grapefruit that are Alicia and Pablo’s stock in trade. “Could you help me?” She points at the avocado she wants and the man puts two fingers on the one beside it and looks at her. “No, the one next to it, to the left.” He eases it out of the mountain of them, taking care not to trigger an avalanche. “What are you making,” he asks. “I garnish chicken consommé with a few slivers of avocado,” she tells him. “Slivered avocado, chopped onion, a few slices of jalapeño, seeds and all. Season to taste. It brings the consommé to life. The rest of the avocado goes into the salad.”
He smiles. “It is the brave American who eats salad down here” — a reference to the concern among tender-bellied expats that salad is one of Moctezuma’s favorite ways of wreaking revenge. “Oh, rest assured … like every good gringa I wash the lettuce with microdyne,” she says, referring to a popular disinfectant.
The man chuckles and moves on.
And so, a week or two later, when fate throws them together again, they have a past. They go back aways. Ariana is at her usual table in front of the Gran when the man walks by, talking animatedly with another man trailed by a silent teenager. She assumes the boy is a son to one or the other of them, probably the one she met in the market. He looks over at her — Enrique Sepulveda has yet to tell her his name — as though trying to place a vaguely familiar face. The men and the boy pass on. A few minutes pass and he doubles back, alone. He asks how the consommé turned out. “Oh fine, Don Pablo’s avocados are always good.” He stands there a moment. When she doesn’t invite him to sit down, he asks if she’d mind his doing so.
She notices his wedding band and thinks to herself: “Perhaps your wife is the one who’d mind.” In a movie, she’d raise her ring finger scoldingly while saying those words and touch the diamond with her thumb. But this is not a movie. And anyway, however deferential she might be to his wife, with a comment like that she would be the one sexualizing what could be an innocent encounter. Mexico may be old fashioned, she tells herself, but we are adults and this is not the 1950s. The man tells her his name and asks hers. He orders coffee. They talk a bit and, because his English is good, she asks where he learned it.
The answer is predictable. He worked off and on for several years in the States, first at a golf course outside Phoenix. From caddy, he moved on to waiter and then got on the grounds crew, less money than caddying — no tips — but the grounds crew work schooled him in landscaping: tractors, edgers, rollers, pesticides. That opened a door. He was able to break out of the golf course and, with another Mexican, also undocumented, build up a small business doing lawns and hotel courtyards. Enrique speaks freely of these adventures. They came before the eruption of anti-immigrant fervor, the worst of it in the heartland far from any border. In the years before all that, thousands of young men and women streamed up out of impoverished regions of Mexico, Michoacan among them, slipped across the border, harvested crops, mowed lawns, washed dishes, and sent money home. After five years of it Enrique came back to Mexico, a young man now in his mid-twenties with a little cash in his pocket and an education in the ways of the world.
Ariana asks him how he makes his living these days, a brazen question in Mexico, even man to man. Enrique says he is a wholesaler of agricultural goods. Some he trucks to Guadalajara, some to Mexico City, some all the way to the border and across it. She does not ask what commodities he trafficks — tomatoes? coconuts? pot? poppies? wetbacks? — because she does not want to hear him lie, particularly when she has no way of knowing whether what he might say is true. And she does not try to determine whether he manages a fleet of trucks or is no more than a man behind the wheel of one of them. If the latter, then, to judge from his clothing, he has other sources of income that would probably be even harder to talk about honestly.
In other words, seated across from her on a sunny morning in early September 2014 is the real thing, a Mexican not trapped in the tourist economy like so many of the men and women who interact with the expats. Enrique Sepulveda had paid some dues and endured exposure to a culture in which he had no rights and little leverage. He came back with his ego intact and without the obsequiousness that disfigures so many interactions between Mexicans and the expats they hustle for work.
And this was of more than passing interest to Ariana. Expats prided themselves on knowing a Mexican or two. They made a point of trying to involve themselves in local charities — soup kitchens and youth programs were popular recipients of gringo volunteerism. Working on their Spanish was part of it, of course. So was acquiring a deeper knowledge of local traditions and the rhythms of life. But it was an art form, this business of “going native,” because a clumsy aspirant could make an ass of himself or herself. There were the retired physicians who, having performed their last appendectomy in Syracuse, New York, now indulge a long-time yen to buy a ten-gallon hat and strut around the plaza grande in cowboy boots, like pale-faced vaqueros. The female equivalent was overdoing the silver jewelry and never venturing from the house without a rebozo slung over one shoulder. But a Mexican lover was something else again, a truly serious sortie across the ethno-cultural divide. Enrique was more than an acquisition by a spendthrift gringa. The usual dynamic of expat consumerism had been reversed: He had acquired her, and in doing so had made her part of his world more fully than endless study with a language tutor or all the hoop earrings in the world.
You could call Enrique uneducated, but only if you equated education with schooling. He read a lot, as Ariana would soon learn, and he had an intuitive gift for understanding the complex of forces shaping their world, the politics, the economics. Nuance did not extend to his sexuality.
He was blunt and aggressive. Normally this would have been annoying, even threatening to Ariana, a woman accustomed to moody cosmopolitans like the one she had married. But she was completely alive to the Mexican’s charm and that certainly included his flashing eyes, his emery-board face and sinewy hands, his urgent loins.
That said, it was not immediately clear — at least to Ariana — how or even whether they would find a way to consummate an evidently mutual infatuation. He was married. Of course he was married. She was married, if somewhat less so. He was often out of town.
She should not have doubted that Enrique would find a way.
After that first coffee, he said he hoped they would meet again and asked Ariana for a phone number. What the hell. She hoped to see him, too. She jotted her cell number down on the receipt. A week or so later, he rang up to say he was looking out over the plaza from a room in the Hotel Iturbe and, knowing her love of the plaza, she was on his mind. Would she care to come by. Ariana suggested that they meet for lunch in the hotel restaurant, a gloomy place that gringos tended to avoid. Enrique said no, he preferred the privacy of room service. What would she like him to order?
Of course her first thought was that she should hose him down, assert herself, refuse this blatant come-on, this clichéd come-up-and-see-my-etchings pitch. She should be insulted by it. She should be wary. He was testing her, trying to figure out if she had the courage to accept his overture or the dignity to turn him down.
But would she have been as uptight about an invitation from a man she was on assignment with her back in her CBS days? Cultural contexts are different, of course, but wasn’t there something condescending — perhaps even racist — in applying a different standard to the same invitation from a Mexican?
And then she thought: You know what? I don’t give a damn. This one needs to know he’s dealing with a modern and independent woman. I will nibble on bocaditos with him in his hotel room and savor the view out over the plaza. Then, if the conversation remains lively, we will go for a walk. If not, I go home.
She climbed the Iturbe’s creaky staircase and found the room number Enrique had mentioned. She knocked, he said come in, indicating that the door was unlocked. As she entered, he set down his Blackberry and rose from a small table, almost as startled to see her as she was to be there. They walked into each other’s arms as though they were lovers long lost to each other. It was a moment of instantaneous mutual accord as powerful and unexpected as Ariana had ever experienced. They made love into the afternoon and then settled back on the bed, exhausted, still in each other’s arms.
What to say? There was a long silence and then the rumble of his voice, murmuring in her ear: “I guess we should get to know each other.” As if they hadn’t just made a long stride in that direction. Ariana chuckled softly at his joke and walked her fingers through the hair on his chest. A breeze from the plaza played with the gauzy window curtains and cooled her sweaty skin. She curled into the warmth of Enrique’s body.
“What do I need to know?” she asked.
“Maybe nothing at all.”
But of course there was everything to learn — about Mexico, about love, and at last, in Enrique, she had the teacher who could pull her across the divide that keeps most expats, in a sort of half-world between cultures. The sex was, to say the least, vigorous, and only more thrilling because it was clandestine. Enrique’s situation — wife, kids — required it. And for a change Ariana felt no impulse to tell Schuyler about her new lover, either to pique his jealousy or to assure him it was not warranted. All that could wait. Enrique was a game with rules she had yet to learn.
Otherwise, nothing was off-limits — not yet. They talked about their youthful follies; they talked about sex; they talked about the cartels — their frightfulness to expats; the curse they were to legitimate businesses; they talked about the wider world. Politics was a mutual fascination, the economics of American dominance and the way it beggared Mexico. He reminded her of the old saw attributed to Porfirio Diaz, Mexico’s dictator as the Nineteenth Century gave way to the next and, within ten years, to revolution: “Poor Mexico, so far from God, so close to the United States.”
Ariana played the privileged cynic, the one who had seen it all and found most of what she knew about the ways of American empire to be lamentable. Enrique was the idealist, the revolutionary, still nursing hope for a better world, or at least a better Mexico, and that would include better relations with Washington. Ariana loved their pillow-talk, political arguments and all, as much as she loved fucking with this man. She felt as though, five years after arriving in Patzcuaro, she had finally reached Mexico.
Money could be tricky with Enrique. He grew up poor, but had bettered himself in obvious ways. He never hinted around that Ariana should help with the cost of the hotel rooms they used and would probably have been insulted if she offered to. He drove a good car. But with Mexicans — the emergent breed of middle-class Mexicans — you never quite know what’s owned and what’s borrowed. The room — not cheap, Ariana determined — could have been courtesy of someone who owed him a favor (or wanted to be owed a favor.) The BMW? Interest rates being what they are in Mexico (sky high) a lot of people leased their cars or bought damaged vehicles not long for this world. Ariana remembered her New Orleans friends saying that thousands of the cars flooded after Hurricane Katrina were declared a total loss by insurers, only to be shipped down to Latin America and sold illegally. That kind of thing was too common, too essential to the cash economy, to be considered a crime. It was business as usual.
In other words, Enrique’s finances would have been murky to Ariana even if they figured regularly in their conversations. Instead, he preferred to focus on her situation. The financial folkways of El Norte intrigued and galled him. He was astonished by the salary she said she brought down in her TV glory days and was mystified that she claimed to have so little of it left. Ariana was uneasy in conversations like this and tried to brush the issue aside. She told Enrique that her husband had inherited a little money but never made much. Enrique found it paradoxical that Ariana didn’t know more exactly what her husband was worth — not that she’d have told her lover if she did. Enrique also was incensed to learn that Schuyler, whatever he was worth, was a bit of a tightwad, generous in small ways to people they knew — especially needy household help (Efraim) — but constantly scolding her for what he considered her spendthrift ways.
She would joke about it, a way of signaling that they really didn’t have all that much. (She silently chided herself: Why was she telling him anything at all about her financial status.)
“You are a beautiful woman, Ariana. Very, very beautiful. He should give you everything you want. Everything.” And for emphasis, he made a fist with one hand and punched the other palm.
“I am not a greedy person, Enrique. I am not materialistic,” she replied, trying to change the subject. Enrique is only flattering her, she realizes, dwelling on their finances as a way of saying that she is too classy for a man like her husband, too big a trophy for a man of modest worth and accomplishments.
She teases him: “How do you know, Enrique? Maybe I am the lucky one. Maybe in bed he is more beautiful than you!
Some weeks later, Enrique startles her. He says he has got a look at Schuyler, sized him up.
“How did you do that?” Perhaps her lover had seen Ariana walking with a man in the plaza, as she and Schuyler sometimes did after supper. But the man could just as well have been her friend, Jorge. The whole thing made her uneasy and a little angry.
“So you have been stalking gringos, Enrique?”
“I know people,” Enrique said. “The son of a friend of mine drives for a gringo. He delivers him on Tuesdays to the gringo men’s breakfast. You have heard of the men’s breakfast?”
Of course she had. Schuyler showed up as often as any of the regulars.
“I ask the boy, the taxista: Who is the one they call Schuyler Schermerhorn? Point him out to me sometime. No big deal. I ju
st wanted to see what he looks like.”
“And what does he look like, Enrique.”
“He is OK, Ariana, but old. He will die before you do, but what a shame — que lástima! A woman should not have to wait. She should have what is rightly hers while she is still able to enjoy it.”
As they talk, Enrique, the flatterer, has been undressing his lover. He has unbuttoned her bra and nudged her breasts with his nose to make them fall free of it. With his comment about Schuyler’s age, he slides his fingers up under her panties. She is a tailorbird caught in the cobra’s gaze. She does not have it in her to stop him. She does not want him to stop. She knows she should defend Schuyler, an elegant and intelligent man. She should defend herself for marrying him. “Maybe he was a handsome man when he was younger,” Enrique concedes. “Maybe even more handsome than Ben Affleck,” he adds, invoking a celebrity who is, inexplicably, a beau ideal for many Mexicans. As he says these words, Enrique pushes her back on the bed and spreads her legs. “But he does not deserve to do this to you,” he says. Enrique smiles at her and gazes deep into her eyes as he enters her slowly.
PART TWO
The cell is a primitive affair, rustic. Schermerhorn figures it for a troje, but he would need to see the outside to confirm that guess. Three days ago, he was bundled inside by dark of night, with a canvas sack over his head. If it is a troje, it is a shed-like building of rough-hewn planks, on a cribbing of unmilled timbers that can be disassembled and moved from there to there by oxen or teamed horses. With boulders holding down the roof, it would not look out of place on a Swiss mountainside. But in fact trojes are rooted in the culture of the Spanish conquistadors who used them as granaries. The building’s isolation on one corner of a disused ranch is reinforced by a perimeter of spiny cactus more impenetrable than the secondary fence of posts and barbed wire just beyond it.
We Have Taken Your Husband Page 7
