by Mary Morris
"But sir," I said obsequiously, "I am involved in important work and cannot leave at this time. Can't you grant me an extension?"
"We have been sent by immigration, Doctor. You must return to your own country. At the border you will be issued a new visa."
For a moment I thought they would deport me then and there, but they gave me two weeks. "If you are not gone by then, Doctor, well, we will have to come for you again."
Though I had seen Alejandro only sporadically in the past few weeks, he had written to say he'd visit on the weekend. When he arrived in Carlos's car, which he'd borrowed, I told him about the visit from the federales.
"Oh, it's a technicality. It's a bureaucratic matter," he said.
"I know, but it seems I can't renew it on this end."
"Oh, these federales ... Didn't you bribe them?"
I shrugged. "It never occurred to me."
"Well, you'll have to come to Mexico City and we'll clear this matter up."
I didn't want to go to Mexico City. In fact, I couldn't bear the thought. "Come and stay with me for a while," Alejandro said.
"I don't know if it's a good idea."
"Well, I have a surprise for you. I have moved to a new apartment. It is much bigger, with three bedrooms, and you will have your own room to work in."
I was fearful of not having a renewed visa when the federales returned, and so somewhat reluctantly and against my better judgment, I went to Mexico City to try to straighten out my immigration problems and to live with Alejandro for a while.
I believe in miracles. I always have. I believe that incredible things can happen if we recognize the signs, if we know how to watch for them. Things happen to us for reasons, and we must accept our fate, even if it makes no sense to us at the time. I believe it was my fate, thanks to the federales, that led me back to Mexico City. I believe that a part of me knew what was going to happen and that I went there in order to survive.
We packed up the few things I needed and set out at the end of the weekend. We drove down the road with the dangerous curves, down the dusty road toward the main highway to Mexico City. We were happy, laughing, and we stopped to buy oranges. Then we reached Avenida de Torres, Number Eight, where I was to live for a while.
The apartment was in a gigantic housing project almost an hour outside the center of town. The project must have consisted of ten thousand units, all of them the same. The grounds around the project had not been completed, and so the whole neighborhood was a swirl of dust and construction debris. The apartment was on the ground floor and consisted of cement walls and a cement floor. The windows had bars on them and it was, for all purposes, the equivalent of a cell block.
I didn't know what to do or say. "I can't live here," I blurted out. "I can't stay." I sat down on the bed, weeping. He had moved in part on my account, and though I had told him not to do this, he had done it, and I felt responsible. I also felt trapped. I knew somehow I had to stay.
My time in that dust-ridden barren tenement dwelling was like solitary confinement to me. We still had no phone, no way of communicating with anyone. When Alejandro left for work at seven I was completely alone, isolated for hours in a place where I hated to be. Sometimes I'd go to the pay phone outside and make frantic calls to the States. Women from the project, their hair in curlers, would line up impatiently behind me. They smoked cigarettes while screaming children, like monkeys on leashes, dangled from them.
Other afternoons I'd visit the embassy or the immigration office and try to find someone who would give me a new visa without much grief. I went from bureaucrat to bureaucrat, doing everything I could except what I knew would get me a new visa—grease a palm. One gave me a two-week extension. Another told me to forget about it. A third threatened me with jail, and I lied to him about my address, petrified that he'd track me down and I'd go to jail for lying to the immigration service. (The resolution would only come when I crossed into Guatemala on another trip. My old visa was taken from me by a distracted border guard whom I captured with a smile and a glance. He did not notice that it was long expired, and a new one was issued upon my return, ending months of turmoil and irrational fear.)
I buried myself in work, and when I could do that no longer, I went into the center of Mexico City. I worked at a library or a museum and left Alejandro messages telling him where to meet me. There were other diversions. The arrival of Marta in a frantic, melodramatic state. An earthquake that rocked me from my stupor. A letter that was slipped under the door weeks after it was sent. But mostly I lived a pale life without excitement. I don't know why I stayed, but I stayed and stayed even though I longed to be in San Miguel.
One evening in the spring Alejandro and I went to a movie, and in the middle of the film, I felt a pain in my side. As the movie continued, the pain worsened, and finally I told Alejandro, "Something is the matter with me."
I could not straighten up as we walked from the theater. I stumbled out, bent over. He helped me until we got to a pharmacy. The pharmacist said I must have amoebas, and he gave me some medicine. We took a taxi home. The pain was terrible until I got into bed and lay perfectly still. If I didn't move, there was no pain. I told this to Alejandro. "It only hurts when I laugh." Then I recalled that this was what the cowboys often said in the old Westerns, just before they died.
The next day I stayed in bed, moving in and out of sleep, thinking that I'd feel better soon and that it was just a stomachache. But then the pain came back, worse than before, and at times I felt as if my side would split in two, like a melon. I dozed in and out and then I woke in the middle of the night. My body was drenched; the bed around me was soaking wet, as if someone had tossed a bucket of water on me. The pain in my side radiated through my body.
I woke Alejandro. "You must get me to the hospital."
He looked at me, annoyed, and shook his head. "I can't get a cab now. You have to wait until morning."
"You must get a cab and get me to the hospital now."
He threw off his covers. "I'll never find a cab."
"You have to," I said.
I managed to dress and toss some things into a bag while he went outside. Then I lay there, breathing deeply, praying that the time would pass quickly, but it did not. It was slow and long, but finally Alejandro came running inside.
The cab sped through Mexico City in the predawn light. It would take about forty-five minutes to reach the hospital. At each bump and each stop, I clutched myself with pain. On the Paseo de la Reforma we came to a stoplight, and a boy of about fifteen appeared in the intersection, blocking our cab. He had a torch which he ignited and proceeded to swallow. This late-night fire-eater, perhaps returning home, stood in front of us, spitting fire into the blue-green sky. "Give him something," I told Alejandro. He gave the boy five pesos and we drove away.
When we reached the hospital, I could hardly move. For hours, it seemed, I lay on a table as doctors probed and examined and nurses came and went. White was everywhere. One nurse came in the most frequently. She had a chart and every ten minutes or so took my temperature, my pulse, and my blood pressure, checking my vital signs. Finally I grew weary of the examinations. "Why are you doing this?" I asked.
"Just keeping tabs on you," she said.
"What's my temperature?"
She hesitated, but then told me it was a hundred and five.
"And my pressure."
She read from her chart. Sixty/forty. And finally she told me that my pulse was one hundred thirty. I remember thinking to myself as I drifted off to sleep that once I'd run the six miles around Central Park and when I'd finished that run, my pulse was one hundred thirty.
"I'm dying," I said.
She looked at me oddly, then walked away.
I did not know what time it was when the door opened and a tall, dark man whom I recognized immediately walked in. He was the man in my dream of the wounded cat, the one who had washed her insides. He paused and looked at me for a long time. "I know you," he said.
"I'm the woman who brought in those two Chicano women, the ones in the car accident six months ago."
Dr. Cruz nodded. He wrapped his fingers tightly around my arm. "I won't let anything happen to you," he said.
It was Dr. Cruz who discovered what was wrong with me. "You have some kind of an infection that has ruptured. An abscess of some sort. We call it peritonitis."
"What are you going to do?"
He looked at me hard. "I have to operate. You are lucky to be here. If you'd been in San Miguel, you wouldn't have made it."
I must have looked frightened because he squeezed my arm again. "You'll be all right," he said.
"I know."
He smiled. "How do you know?"
"I dreamed it," I said.
WHEN I WAS WELL ENOUGH TO TRAVEL, I WENT TO San Miguel to recuperate. Alejandro thought I was crazy, but I wanted to go. "Nothing worse can happen to me," I reasoned. "Please take me. I want to go." He borrowed a car, took some time off from school, and drove me to San Miguel. I slept the entire way. When we reached my house, I could barely walk upstairs.
I was in bed much of the day with Lupe and the children bringing me fresh flowers and newborn animals. Maria Elena sat downstairs, ripe now and moping, abandoned by her lover, mashing beans or washing lettuce. She looked like a giant beetle with her enormous belly and skinny arms and limbs.
Alejandro was involved in the endless preparation of elaborate Mexican dishes which I could hardly bring myself to eat. He would bring them up on trays and would sit watching until I finished every bite. He hovered over me, insisting I stay in bed and asking at each moment what he could do. After a while it occurred to me that somehow he was enjoying the fact that I was ill and couldn't take care of myself. One day he brought me a tray, and I said, "Don't pamper me. I'll get out of bed." And stubbornly, painfully, I did this. I grew irritable with him until I said to him, "I'm not good for you. I'm not making you happy."
"But I love you," he protested.
"For all the wrong reasons," I replied.
Then he got very angry. "You used me. Just like all your gringos. You think you can come down here and use me."
I was too ill to argue with him. "It has nothing to do with that. We're just not right for each other, that's all."
He stayed around for a few more days, growing silent and remote. Finally I asked him to leave. "I want you to go back to Mexico City," I said. In the afternoon he left, and I felt relieved. I promised him I'd see him soon, but I wasn't sure when that would be.
After he was gone, Lupe came and kneeled down at my bed. She wrapped her hands around mine and rested her face on my hands. "Will you stay?"
"For a while," I said. "Until I feel better. But then I'm going away."
"On another trip."
"Yes," I said rather wistfully, realizing that I had begun to think about going home. "On another trip."
It was then that I noticed that Globo was missing. "Lupe," I said, "where's the cat?"
Lupe looked very sad, as if somehow she was responsible. "She died. We found her dead."
"When? When did she die?"
Lupe thought for a moment. "It was on Friday. Two days after my birthday." Lupe's birthday had been a week before, and I had sent her a card. Two days after, when Globo died, was the day Dr. Cruz operated on me.
I was sleeping the next day when Derek Armstrong came by. He carried a bunch of half-dead snapdragons and a package under his arm. "My God, I heard you almost died in Mexico City. Incredible. That's what you get for screwing a spic. Here." He thrust the wilted snapdragons into my hand. "This is to cheer you up."
"Oh, thanks. Listen, I'm not feeling too well."
"That's why I came by. To do you a favor."
"A favor? That's nice."
"I thought I'd let you be the first person to read the unexpurgated first draft of Flat on My Face."
"What's that?"
"My novel."
"Your novel? You finished your novel?" He tore open the package and thrust several hundred pages into my hands, beaming. "I don't want to read it," I said.
He looked dumbfounded. "What?"
"I'm not strong enough." I handed it back to him. "I don't want to read it."
"Well, how about a chapter, then? It'll give you something to do."
"I don't need anything to do. Now get out." He dangled his chapter before my nose. "Get out."
That night as I lay reading in bed, the rains came. Heavy torrential rains and I knew the season was about to begin. It was not long before the lights went out. I found the matches I kept in the drawer by the bed and lit the candles on the nightstand. I took a candle downstairs to locate my Eveready flashlight. Just as I found the flashlight in the drawer, there was a knock. "Maria, are you all right?"
I opened the door and found Lupe with the smallest children. She had candles in her hand. "I'm fine," I told her. "You don't have to worry about me." Then I kissed the children and said good night.
I LANDED AT SANTA ELENA AIRPORT OUTSIDE Flores, prepared to begin my final jungle venture. This was the region of El Petén in Guatemala and the scene of the ruins of Tikal—the great Mayan center that had flourished, been abandoned, and, like the other great centers, been consumed by the jungle. I arrived late in Flores, an almost mystical city on an island in the middle of a steaming lake. There was a fiesta in town that night, and for a few hours I walked among the carnival rides, the lights, the clowns and popcorn.
In the morning I woke at four-thirty, dragged myself out of bed, and got the five-thirty bus to Tikal. I rode half-asleep through the tropical land. As we approached, toucans flew out of trees. Parrots squawked overhead. I was about to enter Tikal National Park, perhaps the greatest and most mysterious of the Mayan ruins.
I reached Tikal at about seven and checked into the Jungle Lodge, one of the three accommodations there, all of which were pretty bad—just a step above the straw-mat place at Jocotán on the Honduran border. The Jungle Lodge consisted mainly of a large room with partitions separating sleeping quarters but providing no privacy from sounds. The food would be indescribably bad—I have no memory of having eaten a thing for the two days—and I would spend my entire time there wishing I'd brought a bag of groceries. But the location was pleasant, right at the edge of the jungle. After dropping my duffel in my cubicle, I went out for a walk.
I headed into the thick, tropical rain forest, down paths covered with lianas. Toucans and amazing blue morphos were everywhere. As I passed one tree, a dozen or more toucans, with those incredible orange and yellow beaks, flew from it. I moved deeper into the jungle. A giant rodent the size of a small pig crossed the path in front of me. It looked like a souped-up hot rod, its hind legs raised well above its front. I learned later that in this jungle the world's largest rodent lives.
Everything seemed to come in enormous proportions—the ants, the spiders, the butterflies, the birds—and this frightened me. Soon it began to rain and I headed back. The rain would last the rest of the day and into the night.
Back at the lodge I met an American woman from San Francisco. That night by candlelight she gave me pressure-point massage, which I thought was pure witchcraft, especially when she put her hands over me in order to let the energy flow through. She told me that the blending of auras had a crystallizing effect and would remove the stress from both of us. I didn't care much for the hocus-pocus, but the massage felt good.
Then a crazy Guatemalan tour director who seemed interested in at least one of us appeared at my door. He announced that it was his birthday and he wanted us to help him celebrate, but I wasn't interested. I crawled into my damp, mildewed bed. The feeling of the sheets and straw was awful, clammy to my skin, and it took a while to settle down to sleep.
The rain was heavy all night long. When I went outside in the morning I found fish swimming in the road. They had swum out of the river and into the streams of rain. I reached down and picked up one with my hand, but it writhed and slipped away. It went on swimming up
the road, away from its stream and into the jungle, where it would die. You are going the wrong way, I wanted to tell it, but I didn't know how.
That afternoon when the sun emerged, I set out. I walked back toward the main pyramids, through the center plaza of the ruins. I kept going, past the Japanese tourists trudging up and down the ruins, past the Americans with dozens of lenses around their necks. I went deeper into the jungle. I met a man who told me he'd seen an ocelot, and I went in the direction he pointed.
Leaving them all behind, I crossed the main plaza and headed deeper, to the farther reaches. For the first time in what seemed like a very long time I found myself physically alone. There were no tourists, no friends, no lover to distract me. Like a person about to die, I felt my life come rushing back to me.
It was a decade ago that I lost my way. Somewhere between the Midwest and Manhattan, childhood and old age, between college and life, I arrived at a desert more vast than the Gobi, more empty than space. My purpose escaped me; the meaning was lost. For a long time I lived in an American city in an L-shaped room that looked onto an air shaft. I used to spend hours gazing down into that shaft, until one day the woman who lived across from me stood at her window and shook her head, as if scolding me. "No," she mouthed. With her hand, she shooed me away. I had had no thoughts of jumping, but only then did I realize how I'd been gazing into the abyss.
Late at night I would get phone calls for someone named Marian. They were always obscene and it was always the same man calling. He'd tell me what he wanted to do to me and where he'd place his lips. It seemed as if he knew me, since he knew just what I'd want him to do. I listened attentively, but after a half dozen calls, I grew afraid. "I'm not Marian," I told him. "You've got the wrong number." "Oh, I'm so sorry," he said. "I'm so very sorry." There was something genuine in his voice. I never heard from him again and for a time I missed him. Some nights I lay awake, trying to picture Marian in a singles' bar, giving out my phone number on slips of paper, perhaps not realizing how I was a woman like her, alone and full of wonder.
