And yet if not for the murder of the human rights bishop and General Cara de Culo, and if not for the Key Witness, too, without whom the case would never have gone to trial, I would never even have met Lulú. That chain of circumstances is a little weird to think about—and to acknowledge.
Now, though, I think it’s as if, without ever deciding to, I withdrew from life in some way during those five-plus years since things finally ended between Gisela and me. I can’t really explain what happened. Often when I try, my inner voice stammers to a stop … Is it just that I reached age forty-four and told myself, Time to stop, take a break, in order to … so that before I ever try this again … need what in order to … and now I’m forty-nine, the sort of self-sufficient man people think must not really require or especially want anyone to be close to … he has his books, and an eventful past to ruminate on, just look at him, invited on the radio to talk about his enemy General Cara de Culo … to talk about José Marti, in order to … happy to be going home to visit his mother in her nursing home, to have dinner with Marianne, to see Feli, though probably he won’t make the time to visit his sister, too, depends on … on how impatient he’ll be by then to get back to New York … forty-nine, the perfect age at which to sit back on this train and gaze out this window in order to think that five years have passed and that it’s all led exactly to … this, ready to try again … we’ll see.
Lulú’s stayed over at my apartment twice, though we only made love the first time, such raucous sweet bliss from deep within like I hadn’t felt in years; not even with Gisela. It was all so different with Gisela, who possessed what Mexicans call morbo, a moody sultriness like human opium.
Lulú and I met a little less than two months ago, at the beginning of January, at that learning sanctuary for immigrant kids in Bushwick where I lead a Wednesday evening story-writing workshop. I have four students. Betzi writes stories about the adventures of a character she calls Sushiman. Ashley has been writing about her trip last summer to her abuelos’ village in Zacatecas. Jazmery is obsessed with peregrine falcons, but her story has yet to get past its first line: “Peregrine falcons are the fastest birds alive.” Marisela has been writing about her long trek north from her village in Veracruz with her mother and their pet pigeon in the back of a dark, smelly truck. Along the way a man in long white robes gave them a matchbox with a ladybug inside and said, This is Vaquita. She will get you over the wall. When they reached the wall, her mother opened the matchbox, set it down on the ground, and the ladybug turned into a small cow, red with black spots. The pigeon flew up to make sure it was all clear on the other side, and her mom, holding tiny Marisela in her arms, climbed onto Vaquita’s back, and the cow jumped over the wall. Marisela always adds: Like the cow that jumped over the moon.
Those girls are often chatty and restless. It’s a lot, after their long school days, to ask them to sit still into the evening, working on their stories, so sometimes not much writing gets done. Last night, they spent part of class passing my phone around, huddling over it, trying to crack the lock’s four-digit code. That group giggling fit should have been a clue. Later, when I was home, waiting for my delivery beef chow fun, an email came in from Teresa Fijalkowski, my book’s editor. A little nervously I opened it and found just a “?” I saw as I thumbed down that it was Teresa’s response to a message sent from my email a few hours earlier: “Sushiman is coming to get you!”
One section of the long, green chalkboard in the one-room learning sanctuary is covered with conjugations of Latin verbs: amõ, amās, amat. Books piled everywhere, an upright piano, music stands. The kids, arriving from their various public and charter schools in midafternoon, get time and help for homework, but when I arrive, just before 4:30, when the writing workshops start, I usually find most of them, boys and girls, out on the sidewalk exuberantly kicking a soccer ball around, even in freezing cold. Other days they have classes and workshops in other subjects, including the Latin classes taught by Stephen, who founded and runs the learning sanctuary. He also has them reading Milton’s Paradise Lost together. Stephen’s a sort of saintly mad visionary genius, he even has the deep-set dramatic eyes and nearly platinum tousled hair. I know that if I had small children of my own there’d be no one better to entrust them to after school.
The Wednesday night workshops are led by volunteer writers, all on the young side; there’s even an MFA student. The kids sit at separate tables crowded into that one square room, grouped by age and gender, from my four chamaquitas to sixteen-year-olds. Stephen has the three oldest boys, Mexicans, two with broad, thick shoulders seemingly set in perpetual wrestling hunches and young masculine faces so tender and apprehensive that sometimes when, as just now, their expressions come back to me, I feel a vague distress; the third is a brilliant boy from Michoacán, cheerfully aloof, tall, shock of hair falling into his eyes, in his first year at one of the city’s top public high schools, a going-places boy. The older teenage girls, the largest group, sit at the table in the farthest corner, one girl at a time talking, moving her hands, the others listening, expressions deepening, lightening. Often they all break out in laughter or gaze with intense adoration as they listen to Angie, a Chicana writer who grew up in South Texas, whose memoir won a big literary award and who keeps her black leather jacket on inside while her Yamaha 450 waits by the curb outside.
Most of the mothers of the learning sanctuary kids work as housekeepers in Manhattan, the fathers at various blue-collar jobs in the boroughs and even Long Island or New Jersey. In the evenings when the classes end, the mothers, sometimes fathers, or other relatives, come to take the children home; only the older teens head out on their own. The mothers are mostly Mexican or Ecuadoran. There’s one Guatemalan boy, a nine-year-old, diminutive even for his age, with close-cropped black hair and an owl-like face, who is always picked up by his grandmother, a husky Maya woman who wears a traditional corte under her winter coat and a gray cloth bomber hat with long furry earflaps.
The first time I saw the woman who came for Marisela I thought she might even be one of Angie’s writing students. But no, her clothes seemed too refined, and she really didn’t look like a teenager. That night it wasn’t that cold and she was wearing a chic tan raincoat with black buttons. She was taller than most of the other mothers I saw come by that evening, slenderer, too, with a noticeably erect posture. Elongated teardrop black eyes in an oval face, high cheekbones, a pretty, pursed mouth, hair a very dark brown, a bit coarse and wavy, loose locks curled in over her cheeks, her complexion a shade lighter than her hair. When she turned her head sideways, I saw her classic Mesoamerican profile. It turned out she’s Marisela’s mother’s cousin and lives with them. Marisela’s mother, Stephen told me after they’d gone, works a night shift as a waitress, so it’s always her cousin who comes for her. She works, too, he said, in Manhattan, as a daytime nanny.
The next time she came to pick up Marisela it was colder out, and she was in one of those puffy parkas and a thick, knitted blue wool cap and sneakers. I walked toward the door with Marisela, who said, Lulú, isn’t it true that Mami and I crossed la frontera on a cow? I realized that Lulú had probably been in the country less time than Marisela had when she, with a bashful smile, answered in a low, accented voice I could barely hear: Oh yes, that is the true.
The next week I left the sanctuary when they did, falling into step beside Lulú and Marisela as we walked up the sidewalk past the Hindu temple with its mural of a blue-skinned goddess floating in the winter darkness, the street otherwise lined with plain three- and four-story walk-ups. Mostly Latino immigrants live on those streets, though gentrification, as Stephen often scornfully remarks, is underway all around there. Corner tiendas where neighbors like to gather to chat and gossip are being replaced with coffee bars where bearded blanquitos in eyeglasses sit on stools behind laptop computers at long front windows staring out at the street. With those words my seven- and eight-year-olds have described it to me; it seems to be
the emblematic image of what’s going on in their neighborhood. Staring out from behind their eyeglasses at the street that one day will be all theirs. What will Stephen do then, when all the children in the neighborhood are the sons and daughters of hipsters and young couples who’ve purchased their Bushwick starter homes with mommydaddy money? His educational vision is partly about erasing the privileges and advantages those kids are born with, not about helping them get even further ahead of poor and immigrant kids. I don’t see Stephen keeping the learning sanctuary open for rich kids, motivating them to read Paradise Lost at age seven.
That first evening, as we walked up the sidewalk, Lulú and I made small talk about how crowded the subways are at this hour. The subways in Mexico City are faster than the New York trains and much quieter. They’re chido. Yes, they’re definitely chido, I agreed. You never have to wait so long between trains like here. And the Distrito Federal metro is not, she said carefully, a refuge for homeless people who have nowhere else to get out of the cold or heat and crazy and unstable scary people. Well they seem crazy to me. That’s true, I said. But in New York there are plenty of crazy and unstable people aboveground, too, even riding around in limos. And the DF and New York subways both have gropers and perverts, but which do you think has more, I asked. And she said, Oh, definitely Mexico. In New York you worry about a terrorist attack on the subway, but in Mexico you worry about earthquakes, she exclaimed with widened eyes and a helpless shrug that made me laugh. At the L train stop on the corner of DeKalb I said goodbye and descended the station steps, headed back to Carroll Gardens. Lulú and Marisela live only two blocks ahead and one over, on Wyckoff.
We walked together again the next week and the one after. I learned that Lulú’s given name is Lourdes, and she takes care of three-year-old Tani for a Mexican couple who live on the Upper West Side. The father, el señor Juan Carlos, is an opera singer, un baritono, who sometimes has to go away for weeks or even months to perform in an opera somewhere else, and the mother, whom Lulú always refers to as Verena, is a financial analyst who advises rich Mexicans about where to invest their money and usually works from home or meets clients in their homes or for lunch. She sometimes travels, too, though on much briefer trips than her husband’s. They have a dog called a Pomeranian, Lulú explained, and when the opera singer has to be away for more than a few days, he takes the dog with him. Last month the dog traveled to Vienna. As if she were sharing a remarkable piece of information, Lulú exclaimed in her characteristic way: When Verena was in university she studied linguistics! She speaks four languages and Spanish and English! Lulú’s voice is ordinarily so gentle and quiet that sometimes to be sure I catch what she’s saying I have to hold my breath, but I was taken with this funny way of talking, her voice climbing in a way that sounds almost like indignation until you realize it’s how she expresses enthusiasm or amazement. It’s a Mexican country-girl inflection.
I lived on the Upper West Side when I first came to New York, I told her. Infamous seventies New York. Hard to believe sometimes that this is still the same city. It’s probably best not to go on too much about that time, call her attention to how long ago that was, I thought, though she’d like the part about seeing some of the famous punk bands at CBGB. When I’d asked what her favorite music is, she answered punk. Also cumbia, oh, Escorpion and Queen.
I wondered how old Lulú is and thought she could be anywhere between twenty and thirty. I wondered about that not just passingly but as if by concentrating hard enough, I could make her twenty-nine or thirty.
The sophisticated clothing Lulú sometimes wears are hand-me-downs from Verena. Her teeth are uneven, lusterless. Poverty teeth, bad childhood nutrition, rural Mexico in the post-village-agriculture economy. It doesn’t make any difference to me; it’s just that I noticed. My lower incisors are crooked but could easily have been fixed with braces. Considering my father’s profession, I remember Gisela teasing me, his not having had my teeth fixed in childhood was comparable to a blacksmith having at home only a little wooden knife to carve his roasted turkey with. En casa de herrero, cuchillo de palo is how she said that.
The third week, a freezing evening at the end of January, as we headed up the sidewalk to the L train stop again and just as I was about to say goodbye and descend the stairs into the station, Lulú said that she was stopping into the Dunkin’ Donuts on the next block for the hot chocolate she’d promised Marisela and asked if I wanted to come.
We sat for a long time, talking, switching back and forth between English and Spanish. Lulú is a determined English speaker. She makes mistakes but can get across most of what she seems to want to say. She ordered a hot chocolate for herself, too, and I had a coffee and ordered us each a donut. I’m mesmerized by the extraordinary hues and texture of Lulú’s hair, a dark rich buffalo-pelt brown with faint coppery shadings, a whirly wild complexity like a Jackson Pollock painting but one in only those colors. She has a habit, I noticed for the first time that evening, when she’s wearing her hair loose, of impulsively taking two long locks, one from each side, into her fingers to twirl the ends before pulling them around to the back of her head and then, holding her elbows out in the air, she twists a black elastic band around those two wound locks, knotting them together. Though it’s something that can take a while to get right, her fingertips twiddling at the band, she keeps on calmly conversing and listening through the whole operation.
That evening I found out quite a bit more about her. She told me that she’d grown up in a village in Veracruz and that she and her mother had moved to Mexico State, Ecatepec, where she’d gone to high school. When was that? Oh, a long time ago, she said. Then with a friend from school in Mexico City she went to work in Puerto Vallarta for a few years; algunos añitos is how she said that. Not even three years ago, she came north, making the journey across the border with another old school friend. Is the friend living here in Brooklyn now, too? I asked. And she gave an abrupt shake of her head and said no.
I know not to ask what her border crossing was like, or if it was with a coyote or a pollero. When she wants to talk about it, if she ever does, she will. Hopefully, there’s not much to tell. So many who’ve crossed never share what happened with anybody.
When Lulú told me that the family she works for is planning to relocate to Berlin for nearly a year so that el baritono can perform in an opera house season there and that they want to bring her along, I said, encouragingly: Well, that would be a wonderful experience, Lulú, you should do it. I’d only been to Berlin once, for a literary festival, I told her, but I left wanting to spend more time there. Everyone goes around on bicycles, I said. As I was talking about Berlin, her hands went to the back of her head to undo the tie holding her tresses together, which fell forward like two unraveling cords of tangled shadows. Aren’t you excited to go? I asked her. She wrinkled her nose a little and shook her head no, and her eyes seemed to spark with disappointment or even resentment. I was a little taken aback. Marisela, who’d been listening to us the whole time and had finished her second hot chocolate, said, Don’t go, Tía. Then Lulú’s cousin phoned her from the restaurant she works at. After she hung up, Lulú told me that her cousin was surprised that she hadn’t taken Marisela home yet. She had to make dinner and put Marisela to bed. Lulú’s expression remained serene, even as she obediently told Marisela to put on her coat and rose to go, lifting her cup to her lips to finish the last bit of her hot chocolate.
All that week I wondered why what I’d said about Berlin had bothered Lulú. It must have to do with her immigration status, I decided, with Lulú of course not being able to fly to Europe and then fly back into the United States without at least a tourist visa. But wouldn’t her employers have known that? Maybe they had a way of getting her a visa? Was there something about her employers—or one of them—that she didn’t like and that I hadn’t picked up on? Or did it have something to do with her being too attached to Marisela and her mother to be away from them for so l
ong. Maybe she has a boyfriend here, I thought.
The next week, just moments after we’d sat down with our hot chocolates, coffee, and donuts, Lulú told me she wanted to go to college at one of the city colleges. In that instant I understood what had bothered her when I’d encouraged her to go to Berlin: it meant I assumed she was content to go on being a nanny.
In Mexico, Lulú explained, she’d taken the exams to be admitted into one of the public universities, but then she’d left home before even getting the results back. She said, Right after the exams, when I talked to my friends at school who’d also taken them, they all were complaining, Oh, I did so terrible. I’ll never go to university. But I didn’t feel like that.
You mean you thought you did good on the exam?
She nodded yes. It wasn’t hard to answer the questions, she said.
Were you a good student? I asked. Did you like doing homework? I sure never did.
I was okay, she said. I could have studied more, but I never hated studying like some of my friends did. She said the reason she’d decided not to go to university was because she wanted to work, that’s all.
And what finally made you decide to come to this country?
I don’t know, she said in a tone of voice that sounded as if the question had almost put her to sleep.
It must have seemed like I was silently waiting for her to say something more, because she gave her head a willful little shake. I faked a short laugh that turned into a real one, of embarrassed relief, when she laughed a little too. Okay, she just wasn’t going to tell me.
Instead she told me about her Mexican friend Brenda, so pretty and talented, who cleans houses in Manhattan. Brenda wants to be a designer, maybe work in fashion, and she met a Mexican boy here, but a fresa, a guero, here legally, who’d gone to college in New York, a math genius, and now he works in business in the city. He was in love with Brenda and was paying for her to go to Pratt. Though out of her own need for independence—Lulú mimed the Mexican gesture of clutching a stack of bills in her palm—she’d refused to give up all her housecleaning jobs, just enough to leave her time to attend classes. Lulú said that she would find a way to keep working through college too. She supposed she’d have to. Brenda is twenty-seven, two years older than her novio, so I think that is not too old for college here, she said. You’re the same age as Brenda? I asked. Mmmm, yes, almost the same age, she said in a way that made us both grin. She comically rolled her eyes and said, One year older.
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