Gringa

by Sandra Scofield

  I stopped going to him. I avoided looking at him. I clung to Tonio when he was there until he told me he was annoyed by it. Worry went off in me over and over like tiny firecrackers. I had acted out of impulse and perversity, I scolded myself, when what mattered was staying where I was. The idea of Tonio sending me back to Texas was horrifying. I wondered how I could kill myself if it came to that. I didn’t want to do something that hurt.

  Tacho came to me one more time. A tremendous rain and wind blew in from the gulf. The palms shook violently, and the bamboo lay down on the ground to wait out the wind. The hounds bayed. I lay in my bed in the middle of the night and thought: How odd it is, how odd I am, lying here in a house in a cleared-out jungle, alone with no future. How odd, I thought, because I knew damned well I was pleased with myself. I had to do no more than blink to see the alternatives: me behind a counter selling who-knows-what. My legs sprawled beneath dull ignorant men. The longest life in the world. I had escaped all that, for as long as I had, for as long as I could.

  Out of nowhere—off the balcony—a drunk Tacho came in, shouting and sobbing. I couldn’t get him out. Tonio was just across the hall, probably reading. Tacho crawled into my bed and then there was a tremendous clap of thunder, a great clatter as doors flew open. Tonio’s hounds, a dozen of them, had come through the front doors into the house and were racing everywhere. Tacho jumped naked from the bed and ran through the house screaming at the dogs. The watchman from the little hut at the gate came, and someone from the servants’ shed, and above them all I heard Tonio calling his dogs to heel. Frantic, I scooped up Tacho’s clothes and threw them under the bed.

  The dogs cleared out. Tonio looked in on me but didn’t stay. I slept fitfully.

  In the morning I took Tacho’s clothes out like a rolled up wad of rags and went to look for him. He was gone. All of a sudden I felt safe again. Tonio and I had our routines: his ride in the afternoon while I watched, gin rummy before dinner, long evenings in the library. Sometimes while he read I smoked marijuana and floated around the room. If Tonio gave me dope, he was very indulgent about it. If I asked, though, he was always curt, he always said no.

  One afternoon I was dispatched, with Tacho as driver, to a town some thirty miles away, on the other side of the village of San Marta. I had a bladder infection. I dreaded the ride, but I dared not argue with Tonio’s churlish instructions. I slid onto the car seat not looking at Tacho or greeting him. He told me to get in the back seat. I said I wouldn’t. He put his arms across his bull’s chest and stared straight ahead. I screamed at him that I had an appointment, and he was my driver! He had instructions from the señor. He laughed in his cold barking manner and said something about women being driven—he said this as though it were something nasty—and he said that women belonged in the back, that was the way it was done in this country. Men sat in the front, and women were lucky to get a ride at all.

  I saw myself as a cartoon. Gringa or not, I was, by virtue of sex, a secondary person. I might have argued class, but I didn’t have the courage or the language for the argument. Who was I but the daughter of an oil-field roustabout? I had been raised in tin houses, and I was a cold man’s whore. I felt myself crumple. All the times couples had come to the ranch and the wives would not speak to me. The times Tonio had patted my ass and sent me off to fetch something he wanted. The times I looked in the mirror and wondered my value. I had never felt this cheap! I had been angry and confused before, I had been lonely, but my bad feelings had always been moored in a kind of sublimity, as if I lived in a sauna and everything was heated out of me. But Tacho sucked from the marrow. Reduced me. When I collapsed the distance between us I made myself subject to his code, an amalgam of machismo, paternalism, and violence. I realized it was Tonio’s code too; it was the central precept of the culture. The man (lover or father) has authority. Only marriage and children and age give women any weight.

  Now Tacho was getting even. He had picked this ridiculous moment—and how I smarted! how I itched and burned!—to face me down as if I were a mad cow and he, capeless, swordless, was prepared to let me hurt him knowing that it would all be reversed, the goring, the revenge. Tonio, embarrassed—the ultimate insult—would throw us both away like dead toads stinking in the sun.

  Meekly, with no argument, I complied, and to compound my own indignity and his, I chose not to open the doors and go around, front to back, but to climb over the front seat, head first and rump in the air, and thence to settle in defeated silence for the long dusty bumpy ride to town. I was sure the groundsmen had seen it all. The peacocks had grown still. I slid down in the seat and shut my eyes.

  Later, when I came out of the doctor’s office, and remembered the strain of riding with Tacho, I thought, to hell with him. Let him play chauffeur. As I approached the car, though, I saw him at the wheel, his dark eyes shadowed by heavy brows, his glum mouth hanging slightly slack and dry on the lower lip. I recalled the cold condescension of Tonio at my “woman’s problem,” and the stern coolness of the doctor. I felt, all at once, affection and pity for Tacho. I felt outrage for all the things that were outside and above us both, and I felt longing, gut-deep and burning, though I didn’t know for what. I just wanted to have had a different chance at life, and I wanted Tacho to have had it too. And I saw humor in all this. Who did Tacho and I have better to hurt? Tacho turned, and caught me bemused, and I think he understood. We broke into witless laughter, shrieking and hooting and slapping one another on the arms. He bought us sour lime ices; the ice melted faster than we could eat it, so we tossed them into the billowing dust. All the way back to the Tecoluca, now sitting side by side, close together, in the front, we sang cantina songs and sealed not a truce but our conspiracy. Though we would never dare to wonder aloud at how we had betrayed Tonio, we gave ourselves glorious license to be friends, to place ourselves, despite the life that had been allotted us, in a kind of wonderland, where men and women sat where they wanted, at least between town and somebody else’s house. I never went to Tacho again, but I liked seeing him. I liked it that he lived at the ranch, and I missed him when he was away.

  Oh Tacho! There was never a chance in the world, but I swear I loved you. I wish you had been my brother. I wish Tonio had sent you away while you were young, so that you could have made your own life and not one in his shadow. I wish life were fair. I wish we had our rightful share of it.

  Tonio no longer treated me like a lover. I would wake up to the sound of his plane leaving, and he would not have said a word. If I wondered where he had gone or how long it would be before he came back, I would have to ask Sofia, his hateful secretary, and sometimes, not often, I did. She always called him the señor, but her tone told me it was not out of respect for him, but disrespect for me. It was like she was saying: I am his trusted employee and he knows my worth. What can you say about yourself? Yet I wasn’t afraid of being sent away. I knew by now how Tacho had come at fourteen or fifteen years old, hoping to be a bull-fighter, and had been taken on by the young matador and trained to be his dart-sticker. I knew that I used up nothing, and that Tonio liked my presence, as he liked the monkey’s, the jaguarundi’s, the Huastecan cook’s.

  When he said he was going away again, for a whole season in Europe, and taking Tacho and Esteban with him, my heart sank at the prospect of so much lonely time, but I heard the news and was immediately resigned. The surprise was that he had made some kind of plans for me. He wanted me to spend the time at his hotel, the Arcadia, which was only twenty miles away, where, he said, I would have some company and some occupation. Anything I needed I could have by asking Bruni. He, Tonio, would be gone, doing the things he did in Europe (fighting bulls, visiting ranches, consorting with the beautiful people, who really existed), and I, Abilene, would lie dormant like an insect to await his return. “My manager Girard is a pendajo and won’t like it,” Tonio warned, “but you can ignore his Chinaman’s queerness and make the best of it. After all, it is a resort.”<
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  I was totally surprised by the Arcadia, by Claude Girard. The hotel was a world of intrigue and surprises, the guests were old and had their lives to tell, the food was wonderful. Besides, no matter where I was, I managed to find a way to prove myself to myself over and over again. What Adele had called the “muggy sluggish tropics” seemed just right for me. I moved slowly through without caution; every time I poked into the brush or went out at night, there I was.

  I know how my life would sound to a stranger. I know I’ve never accomplished anything. I know that my life in Mexico reads like a litany of non-events, a grocery list of sins. Mickey said I was “undoing” myself. Was I? Was there something to be undone? I think that was taken care of quite effectively a long time ago. There were things I wanted. I wanted not to be bored, not to pass my life trivially, I wanted not to be a waitress, a clerk, a wife, a teacher, or any other kind of servant to the world. I had no ideas about what to do instead. I had no pictures in my head of what might make a good life. I tried to imagine what the girls in cashmere sweater sets would be doing at thirty; I saw them married, with domestic help, golf lessons, shopping, dinners with their husband’s associates. (I knew about these things because I’d gone to the movies, of course.) I wondered what smart girls would become, and I simply didn’t know. The thought that you could study and become Margaret Mead or Marie Curie—come on, I would have to say. Didn’t they have a few advantages I didn’t? Besides, I knew I wasn’t very smart. I would have to do the best I could. I wanted to be loved, too, I guess. I couldn’t pin that down, and I didn’t really think about it all that much. I didn’t need parents anymore. I didn’t know what love was about.

  Meeting Tonio was like being catapulted into outer space. Here was a life I’d never have dreamed up in a hundred years! Here was a man who knew everything, could do everything, and he liked me. Five years came out of that. I stopped thinking about whether he loved me; I thought only: there’s a place for me here.

  I thought: Kermit should see me now.

  Mexico was more than Tonio (more than the other men, too). It was a smell in the air, different with seasons, redolent in the worst heat, before the rains. It was the sensation of moisture around you all day, like an invisible sea, so that you pushed your way through a day and knew it was the cost for all the lushness, the colors, the sounds. There was a whole world entirely unlike my own, and I never stopped loving that part of it. The Arcadia was fresh experience. It opened up the Huasteca to me. It opened up my self, too. When I left, I knew the one thing I must have always wanted and never had: intimacy. I had just a taste of it, to let me know what it was, but I was resigned to a life without it. I didn’t think it was something you could work for.

  Claude Girard let me know that he disapproved of me. He gave me a room near the center hall, so that I awoke too early in the morning. He told me I would have to have a separate bar bill and Bruni would have to pay it every month. He even scolded me for coming in from the pool barefoot! He didn’t bother me at all. I moved to the far end of the building, near an exit to the hot pool. I went to the kitchen in the late morning to get a glass of juice and a slab of bread, and smiled at Claude if he saw me on the way. I made myself useful, helping the clerks with long-distance calls, the guests with plane reservations. I learned to pass the time with the old tourists, mostly midwesterners, retired, who stayed two or three months every few years. I learned to play pinochle, bridge, and Parcheesi. I went on endless outings. There were many things to see in the region of the hotel and I had seen almost none of them. Caves and bats, groves, hill villages. We went in caravans to Tamazunchale, a lovely tropical village forty miles into the mountains by the Moctezuma River. We went to see the market and the sixteenth century church. The American guests loved the drive through lush mountain scenery, the increasing sense of the tropics that began east of the hotel, where a finger of Veracruz lay in lowlands along the coast, and then broadened as it went farther south to Guatemala, and southeast to the Yucatan. Coming back from the village we all bought honey from Indians along the roadside. They sold it in any old container, and the honey had a taste almost of brandy; we dipped our fingers in and sucked the sweetness while we stood there.

  South of Tamazunchale was an Augustine monastery of Moorish character, and off the road along the same highway, Xilitla, where indios (speaking a language that linked them to ancient Mayans) grew coffee, bananas and oranges among palm and large-leafed bushes in profusion. To the north were the falls at El Salto, and quite near—on the senior Velez’ small ranch La Palmita, in fact—was a beautiful grotto called Nacimiento, where a small river began and then flowed into the greater one and out to sea. I went to Nacimiento many times with tourists, and every time I wondered, where does the water come from, so clean and clear and cold? Where, in the belly of the earth, is it so sweet? I mentioned my question to a knowledgeable old gentleman who lectured me all one afternoon on the wonderful anomalies of the region; he said it was a topography of collapsed surfaces, classic karst, as if it were Adriatic terrain. I thought, why it’s just like love, with sinkholes all around. I sometimes went with the man, whose name was Riley, into the nearby town, but it wasn’t much, a dusty collection of cobbled or dirt streets coming off a drab square and a church gone seedy. On Sunday the square filled with residents, and the young people passed one another going in opposite directions, around and around, as their parents had done too. But these kids sometimes had radios, bright colored shirts and dresses, a longing for television, white bread, a different life.

  Birdwatchers, three cars of them, came through and stayed a few days to swim and rest from their camping and hiking. The baths had attracted them. They called themselves “birders”—they were amateurs, not ornithologists—and they said there were hundreds of species of birds along the slopes of the Sierra de Guatemala. They had come up from the Yucatan, which was gaudy with tropical birds and butterflies, and they were going to camp in the cloud forest north of us. They knew of a Canadian hermit and botanist named Harrison who had cleared some of the land and done some building there. He raised flowers—orchids, they thought—and lived alone. A Texas college had a cabin there, and one of the group had a letter from a friend on the faculty. They asked me to join them for dinner. I liked their company, and I thought they admired me in some way, maybe just for my happenchance settlement in so beautiful and extraordinary a place, as though that were my own accomplishment.

  I told them some of the stories Beto had told me, about the Indians’ bird fetishes, their fear of snakes, the rites of the old brujos, like witchdoctors. I knew something of the history of the region, all from Martin, and I felt good, passing it on in this way. The birders ate crayfish from the river, delicious as lobster and to some extent renowned. They ate voraciously and then sat idle over their salads (which they asked for as a last dish). They had heard there were chachalas in the area, though higher, in the forest. I said I knew them, olive-colored birds the size of bantams. I had seen them in Tonio’s aviary. At that, the birders had nothing more to say to me. The conversation shifted to the Christmas bird-count in Florida. They told me I ought to look around at the free birds, their voices punctuated the free; they said it was too bad there was no adequate field guide for the region. One of them said, “So the Huastecans don’t cage any birds, you say?” and I said that was what I understood. They all gave me such a look, as if I were guilty of some transgression, and it dawned on me that they were disapproving of Tonio! As if I had anything to say about what he caged! Was it my fault if he wanted to enclose a bit of jungle and wildlife for his amusement? Did my confederacy with him extend to his birds, his big game trophies, slaughterhouse gore, business done with embrazos and then bribes? Just how did I get so large a responsibility in this world! I was suddenly self-conscious, and then quite angry. I shook my shoulders and excused myself. I was sure to avoid the hot pool because I knew they would spend the evening there, talking about birds and flowers.

  Th
e mayor of San Marta died, and to my amazement, Claude invited me to go with him to the funeral. It was a long service with both a priest and a brujo present; the old indio fumigated the whole area with a charcoal torch smelling of pine pitch. In the church yard, women had laid out huge quantities of food on long tables. The mood was one of cordial seriousness; the mayor had been a very old man. I ate tiny bites of everything, wondering about the state of the kitchens where it had been prepared. There were huge tamales with wild game shredded inside, wrapped in banana leaves and baked in pits. There were smaller tamales with chicken and pineapple, a strange combination. Indians with violins joined a man with a small harp and a woman with a timbrel (like a tambourine), and they sang mourning songs, beautiful songs, centuries removed from the modern Mexico’s ubiquitous cantina music. As we drove home in the hotel jeep, Claude told me that the mayor had been Huastecan, and that it was the custom of these people to wash the feet of the dead and then use the water in the making of tamales for the funeral guests. “They honor you, and you honor the dead,” he said. I believed him. When had he ever shown a trace of humor?

  I wanted to ask him what else he knew. What sort of magic did the witches practice? What did he know of their animas and totems? But I was peeved; he had set me up, hoping to shock (or gag!) me and I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of my interest. We rode in silence. Then in a little while Claude said to me, “Why do you make love?” I thought I must not have heard him.