The ranch nestled in tropical deciduous forest and ran out into scrub and savannah grasses. Along the water border, broad-based cypresses were sometimes awash in river. The land was pocked with swamps here, pits there, rolling out into tangles and thick brush, to lowland jungle, to the sea.
Tonio had grown up a wild boy on the ranch. Outside the hacienda walls there was a bunkhouse that smelled of formaldehyde. Its walls were from shoulder height to ceiling a catalog of slaughter. Like frames of mounted butterflies, whole groups of identical little deer heads lined the walls, interspersed by sections of great heavy-scaled fish resembling garpike or barracuda. In death the animals bore so little resemblance to what they had once been, it was hard to believe they had ever lived at all. Why would any boy have thought to have undone so many? Without scheme, the heads and carcasses of local game hung forlorn: deer and puma, porcupine and squirrel, peccary and bird. The young Tonio had been to darker jungle, too, perhaps Campeche; tapir, turkey, a pitiful ocelet, toucans, snakes and a large white vulture hung agape, and beneath these boyhood trophies you could play pool or Ping-Pong in the poor light and ponder how great a score it takes to be a man.
Across from the bunkhouse was Tonio’s aviary, the size of a public building. Made of net and fencing, with an intricate dome mesh, crisscrossed with perches, the aviary was filled with plants and feeding cups, and of course with birds: macaws, parrots and parakeets, orioles and vermilions, green jays and cuckoos, pyrrhuloxia (looking like faded cardinals), and blue-hooded euphonias. Tonio spent time with his birds at dusk, after he had been riding. He mimicked their calls with uncanny precision and spread his arms as roosts.
The house itself, two stories surrounded on all sides by balconies above and verandas below, was a monument to extravagance and bad taste, rooms filled with massive furniture and gilded frames. Walls full of Mexican masks of wood, clay, tin, goat hair and gilding. Mirrors. Paintings and even a huge mosaic of the Velez family: Tonio at eight, at twelve, at sixteen. Only Tonio’s room reflected him. It was furnished as a coffee farm in Africa, with straw matting, crossed spears and shields on the wall, and a lovely patio with high-backed rattan chairs and a table. Opposite Tonio’s bed, on the wall, was an antelope’s head—a blesbok from Africa, with curved horns and a white mask.
Except for his room and his office, in another building across the bricked walkway, Tonio seemed to care only for his stables, done in bright blue Mexican tiles with high domed ceilings. The rest of the estate, with its grottos, empty swimming pool, groves of limes and oranges, guavas, avocados and papayas, had an air of disuse, as if its owners had died and left it to a child who never came.
It wasn’t by ornate furnishing that the hacienda revealed the wealth of its owner. It was by the mass of dead beasts (trophies along every hallway, and in his Colorado-styled bar), the fine quality of his livestock, and the numbers of peasants who poured in every day to work. There were men for cattle and others for the horses, droves of Indians for the grounds, seven or eight maids, cook and cook’s helpers, secretary, guard and ferryman, an electrician, carpenters, a foreman. For some the ranch was home, or a second home. Tonio’s personal secretary Bruni, wealthy in his own right, had nevertheless devoted seven years to looking after Tonio’s affairs, and he had his own luxurious apartment downstairs. He walked with a deep dipping limp, the result of an overturned truck on the way to Tampico. (Bandidos, he had explained; he had been transporting bees.) Besides Bruni, there was an old Canadian who had lived in the generator shed since just after World War I, and there was Tacho, who had come in his boyhood from somewhere on the West Coast, passionate to fight bulls. Esteban, Tonio’s other banderillero for many years, lived at the ranch, but was the relative of dozens who lived in San Marta and worked for Tonio in one capacity or another. His brother held a responsible position in the San Marta packing plant. There were in fact so many people on the ranch, Abilene never felt free of the gazes of others except in her own room or Tonio’s. Yet on Sundays, when no one came, she spent most of the day out at the guardhouse with Sapo, listening to the radio.
She tried to explain some of these things to Pola.
“Are you lonely there?” the girl asked. “Is there no one to talk to?”
She told Pola about all the workers. “It’s like a little town of its own,” she said. “And there are often visitors. Tonio likes to show off with big house parties. He has friends who come from Mexico and Acapulco, from Texas and California, to hunt. To have a good time. He feeds them boar and venison, beef from his own slaughterhouse, iguana, ant eggs—”
“Ant eggs!”
“Oh yes, like caviar. And mounds of rice, black beans and chiles. After dinner the men play poker in the wine hut, while their wives or girlfriends drink brandy across the way, in Tonio’s Wild West bar.”
Pola made a face. “That part sounds boring.”
“While the guests relax, Tonio has Esteban come in to play his twelve-string guitar, and Tacho to sing. They are his banderilleros, or used to be—the ones who put the darts with crepe paper streamers into the backs of the bulls—”
“Poor bulls!”
“Now Esteban works with the brave bulls, and Tacho drinks and feels sorry for himself. But you should hear him sing! In Portugal he learned fado. He heard gypsies in camp and went out to sing with them, and ran away with them! His voice is rough and terribly sad and hoarse, his face is full of pain, really it’s beautiful, Pola. A man from Mexico who works in television was there one year and he told Tacho, ‘I can get a record made. You can be a big singer!’ Tacho was furious! He says actors and singers are mariposas, butterflies—”
“Like Paul and Jay.”
“Oh how dumb of me, I’m sorry. I don’t mean—”
“It doesn’t matter. Besides, they are gay. They are—were—something like butterflies, with bright colors and lightness of heart. I miss them terribly!”
“I’m so sorry.”
“They were so funny, and so nice to Mommy and me. Daniel is okay, I know Mommy loves him—but he’s boring, and he looks at me—” She faltered.
“How does he look?”
“Like I just stumbled in! Like he doesn’t know how I got there!”
“I don’t think that’s it. I think he looks at you and he thinks; I wish I hadn’t missed the first thirteen years with Pola. What odd creatures girls are, and I know nothing about them.”
“Really? You think he’s like that?”
“I’m sure of it. He’s terribly pleased to have you in his life.”
Pola plumped a pillow behind her head and picked up her embroidery. “Paul and Jay used to take me to the park to see the jugglers, the kites and clowns. They liked to have fun. I don’t think they worried about the world. And they helped Mommy in her work, they introduced her to important people—”
“Didn’t Jay introduce her to Daniel?”
Pola was pouting. “I suppose he did. And Jay wanted to go away by then. It all worked out. I just miss the way it was.”
“I think I understand, Pola. It’s like—well, I miss certain things, too, with Tonio. Like running into him in the middle of the night in the library, and talking for hours. One night we went into the kitchen and made a pineapple cake, and while it was baking we went out on the patio off the kitchen, and he said, ‘This is the hour when the wild cat hunts.’ I nearly jumped out of my skin!”
“Does he tease you so much?”
She hadn’t thought of it like that. “Yes, I suppose he does tease.”
“Daniel never does. My mother never does. We never have any fun.”
Tonio liked for Abilene to meet him at the practice ring at five, when he rode, and she liked to do so. Tonio and his horse were one as he rode. The peccary that lived in the forest thicket always trotted out to join Tonio on his ride. It went round and round the ring with him. When Tonio sat on a bench afterwards, the peccary came to rub again
st his leg like a cat. Tonio had a monkey that he let run free too. Usually it stayed away from people and mocked them from up in the trees, or across the mesh roof of the aviary. Sometimes it went into the guardhouse with Sapo and other men who gathered there. When the phone rang and Sapo went to answer it, the monkey went crazy, screeching and banging his ear. When Tonio was around, though, the monkey pranced and preened in his sight, begging for his approval. There was a little wild cat, too, caught not long after Abilene first came to the ranch. It was an onza, a jaguarundi, caught in the thicket and chained to the front of the guardhouse. The monkey got just beyond the reach of the leash and screamed at the cat. Abilene thought Tonio kept these animals around as a way to say to the natural world: I am in charge. For her there was something wonderful about the presence of animals turned from the wild by his affection.
“Come along, we’ll walk in the thicket,” Tonio said one afternoon, that first year. He had been riding in a silvery sweat suit, to lose weight. He stripped to his soaking trousers and took Abilene by the arm, his riding whip in his other hand. They walked in leisurely pace around the hacienda wall, medieval with its gargoyles and iron spires, down the smoothed road ribbed by palms and jacarandas, leading to the hangar and airstrip. Along the way, Tonio flicked his whip at a darting snake, at a fat bug on a leaf, at the ground. By the time he and Abilene were thirty feet into the thicket they were in another world. They strolled down an aisle deeply shaded by trees and shrubs. Their arms were brushed by drooping branches that shone as if with polish. They went past tall shrubs, sweet of scent and tangled, with large heavy leaves. Abilene heard cries and rustles, sounds unlike those of the more open grounds; she hoped her shudders were unnoticed by Tonio, who walked with his chest high, a slight smile on his lips, as if he were going to meet a lover. Abilene stayed close to him. Now and then he poked through a tangle of brush with his crop.
They walked in silence, and then Tonio abruptly turned around. He almost caused Abilene to lose her footing, but she regained her balance and turned back to face the way they had come, as Tonio had done, and she saw light as at the end of a tunnel. They were shrouded in a tomb of foliage. Abilene felt frightened, though she knew it was silly. Nothing could happen with Tonio there. Tonio let his whip fall to the ground and took her against him. He was slick with sweat; he smelled of horses. He kissed Abilene eagerly and long. Abilene responded, but was aware that her senses were played upon by the thicket as much as by Tonio. Tonio unbuttoned her blouse and pressed his flesh against hers; they made a sticky popping sound as they slid apart. He slid her pants down and bent slightly to come up under her. She felt impaled and ecstatic, thrown upward by his swift thrusts.
He said, “If I left you now, bears would come from the north, or puma, eh, beasts of the night, at the smell of woman.” He was delighted at her bewilderment; she was out of focus, as in a dream. He threw his arm across her shoulders all the while they walked back to the road, and he stopped once to murmur in her ear, “I’d never feed you to them, I’d eat you myself first.”
They played Ping-Pong in the bunkhouse. Putting the balls away, Abilene found herself almost into the face of an opossum hanging by its feet. Tonio came behind her and put his arms around her middle. “There is a local folk belief that says the male fucks the female’s nose,” he said. He pointed at a place, barely discernible in the wasted hide. “What other paired opening exists for his forked penis?” She asked him if he was kidding. “I haven’t the time for jokes,” he said. But in his room he jabbed at her ears, her nose, her mouth with his erect penis; she was laughing so hard she gagged, and tears sprang to her eyes. Soon after, a neighboring rancher, Michael Sage, came for lunch, and Tonio told him how gullible Abilene was. She was embarrassed and resentful until she saw how surprised Sage seemed to be. The rancher was studying Tonio, truly perplexed. Tonio cut straight across his guest’s gaze to look at Abilene with open fondness.
“I’ll do anything for you,” she gasped that night. She had fallen into a dark thick fairyland, and he was the Prince.
He answered softly. “Wear a collar? Fuck a dog?”
They laughed at this silly notion, but she shivered in her sleep that night, dreamed of cats on chains, and woke cold and startled.
“Who else, Abby? Who else came? Only hunters, to kill things?”
“Oh no. There were spelunkers, exploring caves. The region is full of them. And there are birders. And a wonderful man, an archeologist, Martin Dufour, from Switzerland. He spent five years coming in the winters to excavate just across the river from the ranch.”
“Did you go to see?”
“Yes, I went. To the dig, it’s called. But it was awfully dull stuff. They brush away the dirt, tiny tiny bits of it at a time, in the hot hot sun. I tried to be interested—I liked Martin, and it would have been something to do—but it gives me a headache to go out there. I liked it better when Martin came to dinner and told us about his travels all over the world. He had been to India and China, Indonesia and Japan. He and Tonio used to talk about outfitting a boat to explore the ocean for a year at a time!”
“Wouldn’t that be something? Oh, I want to go everywhere and see everything, too. You realize, we could live anywhere we wanted, Mommy and I. We could move every year, but instead we stay here.”
“Your mother has made her life here. Daniel, and her work. She has to work!”
“Oh no she doesn’t. My father sends us money, lots of it. Do you think Daniel would pay for the lycée?”
“Your mother is a very good photographer. I’m sure she is paid well.”
“My father pays,” Pola said stubbornly. “She hates him, but she takes his money.”
“He’s your father. He should help support you.”
“Oh never mind! Abby, do you remember that winter in Zihuatenejo?”
“Of course. The people in town called us witches.”
“And the bloody turtle—”
“Why yes, I do remember that. And that poor woman who drowned. What about Lotus? Do you remember her too?”
“She could tell fortunes with cards,” Pola said. “And read palms.” She seemed suddenly sly. “She said my life line was very short—”
“What a terrible thing to have said! You were only—what?—nine years old?” Hovering on the brink of pubescence, bristling with indignation. She still had a child’s poochy stomach, pale nubs of breasts. She could not go by the tin mirror on the door without checking her progress.
“Would it have been better if she lied?” Pola asked.
“That’s nonsense to tell a little girl. It’s a good thing your mother didn’t know about it. Besides, Lotus was hardly more than a girl herself.”
“She was my first true friend, and I’ve never quit wondering what happened to her.”
“She probably went home and back to school. Maybe she has her first job, or maybe she’s married.”
Pola looked at Abilene with outright disgust. “Don’t be silly, she’d never be like that.”
“She has to be and do something!”
Pola knew the answer to that. “Not if she’s dead.”
Abilene hadn’t meant to go to Zi, hadn’t even known it existed until Mickey mentioned it to her on their way down to Acapulco. She had been so upset when Tonio said he was going to Europe. He had told her the same weekend Isabel came for a visit. Isabel called Tonio a “stick in the dirt,” and shaved hash off a gooey ball for them to smoke. The trip to Acapulco was her idea, and Tonio approved, but in the end only Abilene and Mickey went. Isabel had to make a living; she realized it once she was straight again.
On the way to Acapulco their first-class bus caught on fire, and they had to file out onto the side of the road. The baggage was smoldering. They stood off the highway and watched peasants stream down over the hills as though a bugle had been blown. The bus driver threw all the damaged packages and suitcases onto the ground; from so
mewhere buckets of water were hauled. In half an hour the driver told them to get back on the bus.
“What about our things?” Abilene asked. Mickey pressed her lips with his fingertips. “Look,” he said. “Nobody is saying anything. Everyone knows better.” It was incomprehensible. Through the window of the bus, Abilene looked back on peasants scrambling in the blackened suitcases. She saw a large fat woman holding up a lady’s fancy bra. In Acapulco the bus company gave them each forty dollars.
They stayed in the same little hotel where they had stayed the first time, when they came down from Austin to see Tonio fight. Mickey had friends there. Some days they stayed up in the hills above the strip with them all day and never went out until dark. The boys liked to talk about women. They liked to list their attributes, their eyes and legs, their nice bottoms and breasts, the way they pretended not to want it, or the way they were so hot. Abilene, and sometimes there were other young women, simply turned away to something else, a magazine or a newspaper on the table, or looked at the hot clear sky through a window.
Nights they danced. Abilene danced all the dances, with Mickey and his friends, and sometimes with the local boys, who said they went to college but didn’t like it. She wanted them while she was dancing; she imagined going home with each of them. It was quite enough to think about it; she hadn’t sunk so low. Still when a young man told her she was a sweet papaya she almost let him know she understood. She liked to dance the line, too, with boys whose shirts were unbuttoned, with music blaring, and outside on the street, a smell of vomit and decaying fruit.
One night in their room Mickey said, “You really don’t know what effect you have on me, do you?” They had been fucking once a night, like an old husband and wife. “You dance like the cheapest whore, you know that, Abelita? It’s a miracle you aren’t carried off and raped in the streets. You don’t think I could do anything, do you? But then, it wouldn’t really be rape, would it?” She refused to let him bait her. She undressed down to her panties and pulled on a dirty tee-shirt from off the floor while he blabbed on and on. He was running out of energy. He whispered throatily, “You do a hundred things a day to make me crazy. Do you think I didn’t see you today at Marcela’s, folding the wash? I saw how you handled her brother’s shirts, like he was your lover!” Mickey’s eyes met hers. “What will you do for me?”
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