“Fancy seeing you here,” he said lightly. He patted his breast pocket. “I have some things to give Sofia, things I have to take care of with Antonio when he returns. I won’t be long.” I didn’t bother to comment on his ruse.
“I haven’t had lunch. Would you like to stay?”
“I’m starved. Let me guess. Black beans and dry sopa.”
“What else?”
His voice dropped half an octave and came from some place deep inside him. “You know what I want.”
I rose and stepped away to put some distance between us. “Not that,” I said.
I saw his top lip quiver like a horse’s at the gate. “I intend to have what I came for,” he said.
“Not here.” He glared at me. I knew I would go with him to his plane, to fly to Louisiana, where he had grown up, or south to Costa Rica or El Salvador. Distance would have made a difference. “I’m going back to the hotel after lunch. Whatever you say, after that.” I knew he didn’t want to come to the hotel. He kidded himself, thinking we were unnoticed at the ranch.
We ate lunch in the kitchen at the counter while a maid washed the pots from the warming table. I saw the maid looking at Sage’s back. Square and squat and brown, she must have been awed by his breadth and height. I smiled. The maid saw it and sent me a look full of good wishes. She was a new girl, come since Tonio was away. She turned the deep metal pots upside down along the counter top and hung the rags she had used on the stones of the barbecue pit on the patio just beyond the screen door. I was teasing Sage by then, saying how fascinating he must be to kitchen maids, when the girl stuck her head back inside for one last look. Sage turned to look at her and caught her with her face thrust forward. The maid broke into girlish giggles and ran. We could hear her feet slapping on the outside stairs. I laughed, my hands flat on the counter in front of me. Sage closed his hands over mine and bent toward me for a kiss. After that, he told me what we’d do.
We constructed an affair full of intrigue. I had developed some taste for subterfuge. I suspected that we deceived no one, but Sage insisted on the air of secrecy. It may have been an ethical pose, rather than a strategic one; he would cheat, but he would not do it boldly. He called infrequently. Usually he buzzed the hotel to let me know he was coming. All day then I waited for the night. The guests wouldn’t have cared if he had driven straight up to the front door, and Claude couldn’t possibly have been fooled, but under cover of darkness, I plunged into the thick perfume of oranges, finding my way down a path among the trees, meeting Sage where the path came to the road a quarter mile or so from the hotel. The dark and the noises spooked me, but they were aphrodisiacs, too. Seeing Sage took all of a day to get ready and all of the next to recover.
At first it was something like I used to think dating ought to be. Sage made meals for me, sometimes quite elaborately, and other times simple omelets or sandwiches. He brought things from Tampico that I wouldn’t otherwise have, like pastrami, dill pickles, cans of Texas-style chili. He played records he had brought from the states: Judy Collins, Joan Baez, Peter, Paul and Mary, The Beatles and Bob Dylan. We danced. We told one another the stories of our lives.
He had grown up the son of a postal clerk. His father’s brother had a small ranch in south Texas, and there, summers, Sage had learned the work of animals and crops. His wife had been his girlfriend in high school and when he was home from his three years away at college. He had come to the Huasteca a spelunker, with friends. They had explored some immense caves north of here, he had seen vampire bats, and had gotten the idea of living here. His girlfriend’s father, well-placed in an oil company, knew people in Tampico. Someone knew the General. One thing led to another, and marriage brought the money to lease the land. His wife hated the country on first glance. She led her own life in Tampico with their small sons and spent part of the winter in Houston, where her parents now lived. Sage loved the ranch. He had had an eight-year lease, and now he was more than halfway through another. He couldn’t buy the land, so everything he did was for the good of the Velez family as much as for him. “Someday I’ll want to renew the lease and Antonio will say no.” I said I thought it was the old man’s ranch. “Old is the key word,” Sage said. “His son runs everything. One of these days Antonio will see the writing on the wall and sell the Tecoluca, if he can, and then he’ll want this land back with his father’s La Palmita.”
“He would never leave the Tecoluca!”
“He will someday. Why do you think he lent his plane to the campaigning president? With each new administration, his life enters a fresh period of risk. It is as if he has his leases, too, six years at a time.”
“But why?” I had never considered such a thing.
“Their revolution wasn’t all sham. There are laws about land. They are bent in all ways to help the rich, but each president returns some land to the peasants. Tonio has land registered in the names of cousins and nephews, in his mother’s name, and his. He is no fool. He is building an empire out and away from the cattle. The Tecoluca is not his life.”
He moved his hands to distract me. “Antonio will grow up some day and move to the city,” he said. That dismissed Tonio as a topic. Sage wanted to know about me. He was endlessly curious. Little by little I told him everything. He loved the story about my brother and Natty Mooster. He followed my teenage years like he was reading a cheap novel. He cheered me and booed the boys.
“I love your nose,” he said. “Your tiny wrists.” He said he was going to count my freckles. He liked to smell and taste and feel. He was truly with me, he gave me all his attention. Going to bed with him was something different. He was a large man, in all ways lean. I liked to stretch out beside him while we talked. I liked to run my hands over his back and legs. I couldn’t believe his attention.
He said his wife was cold now that she had his children. He always kept village girls around—one or two to do his laundry, clean the house, sometimes to cook. He kept them a year or two and then traded them in on sisters and cousins. I said that didn’t seem Mexican of them, to be so willing. I didn’t want to think of him coercing the girls; I remembered the fascination of the kitchen girl at the Tecoluca. Sage said I was naive. “What I pay one of these girls feeds the whole family, maybe is the reason a brother can go on to a few more years of school. They have chicken now and then, because of me. Because she fucks me.”
It wouldn’t be so bad, I thought. I told Sage that Bruni liked the maids. When I started telling about Bruni, I realized that Sage might be insulted to be linked with him, but I went on anyway. When I had been at the ranch a few weeks ago, Bruni had gotten drunk at dinner, and I had locked my bedroom door, afraid he would want to come to my bed. Instead, I heard fumbling in the hall, and muffled giggles. I had opened my door to see the back of Bruni and the youngest laundry maid, maybe thirteen, disappearing into the bedroom by the library. It surprised me that Bruni would bring a girl upstairs, even with Tonio gone. Sage had no problem with the idea. He said the girls were wide-eyed, dull and willing. He had once told one of them to take off her clothes so he could fuck her. She had complied dutifully and bent over, “like a little red-assed baboon,” he said.
Like a dog, I thought.
Sage had a beautiful little parrot, a real loro real, not a macaw like the ones at the Tecoluca. The loro had the run of the house and patios, as well as a perch in the kitchen and another on the patio outside the bedroom door. It loved to screech and laugh, and sometimes sounded like a monkey. Sage had had a monkey too, but the two creatures had quarreled incessantly, and the monkey lost the toss. The parrot had a vocabulary of outrageous English phrases, including, Fuck a duck, Kiss my ass, Eat my grits, and Praise the Lord. Sage explained that the parrot had originally been in the Tampico house and that both he and his wife had become attached to it. It had been much prized by the city maids who were known to ask its opinion on important matters of style (“Shall I cut my hair?”) and love (“W
ill he marry me?”). Sage wanted to take the bird to the ranch, so he began to teach it vulgar phrases. He won; his wife wanted Birdie out of the house and hearing of their children. Thus it was that I could lie with him in his bed and suddenly hear, “Kiss my ass!” Birdie also whistled. One night as Sage was closing the patio door against its epithets, the bird suddenly began a rousing rendition of “Coming ‘round the mountain,” which I immediately recognized as the song Sage had whistled that day he landed at the Tecoluca to look for me. It became “our song,” a cherished joke.
Sage said he loved the color of my pubic hair. He called it my “strawberry site.” He often kissed and touched me for long stretches of time, insisting that I lie still and enjoy it. “Don’t you think you deserve it?” he said.
Then he began to ask me to tell him stories about myself over again, with all the details. He wanted lengthy descriptions, which he said aroused him. It seemed perverse to me that his sex should rise at the memory of other men, but when I protested, he cajoled me, saying fantasy was part of the range of it, part of the fun. Once I had told him about Farin and his “Christmas tree,” Sage sometimes pretended to behave as crudely, and I tried to laugh. He didn’t want to hear anything about Mexico. Tonio was never mentioned. After a while I wanted to know more about him, too. I asked him about his wife. This irritated him. A simple fuck, he said, and besides, she was his wife. Only his wife called him Michael. He said he didn’t like the name.
We had exhausted what we had in common, and we began to seek continuance in the novel. I realized that I was more experienced than he, and when he realized it too, he seemed angry. I wished I had told him nothing.
He told me his wife wouldn’t let him in her bed if he had not just showered. I took this as a hint of some sort, and stopped coming to him freshly bathed. He began to give me small slaps and pinches, not enough to hurt. Then a bruise appeared on one breast, another on my thigh. He wanted to sit on the couch while I undressed in front of him, and when I was naked he began to slap: on the breasts, lightly, harder on the buttocks, arms and legs; hard again, and startling, on the face, and then the buttocks more, until I whimpered. That was when he was excited.
Claude came to me one morning at breakfast and said he wanted to talk to me. He said, “I know you are a foolish and ignorant girl, but now I think maybe you are out of your mind.” I got up and spun on my heels, gave him the table with my cocoa in a china pot. I imagined my waiter at lunch eyed me with rash abandon, and when a guest remarked on the pouches under my eyes, I was offended and acted rudely. Sage was as agitated as I was. He howled one night that his schedule was upside down, his children hadn’t been to the ranch in months (hardly my fault!). He stopped cooking for me, stopped his wooing, drove without caution, and hit me until I cried. He picked me up one afternoon, a surprise, an hour before dusk, and took me to see bats swarm out of a cave like a cloud of soot. Away from him, I knew things were getting out of hand. But there were fine lines in sex (and pity, fear, and loss), and I thought we were on the reasonable side. He wasn’t really kinky. I had read the whole of Olympia Press from Tonio’s library. What Sage and I did was nothing. It passed the time.
He went home for a weekend and didn’t reappear until the middle of the week. He called me to set a time. He sounded strange, but I decided he had had a bad time with his wife, and I would set it straight.
I plunged into the blackness of the grove, adrenalin pumping, breath coming short and hard. He wasn’t where he said he would be, and I wasn’t early. I sat on the edge of the road at a place where gravel spilled toward the trees, able to see nothing, hearing frogs and insects, what I thought was a growl, and far away the lowing of an animal as mournful as a dirge. It was a cool night, and I was underdressed for the wait. I clasped my knees for warmth and leaned my cheek against one’s bony rise. If I kept this up, I thought, I would be ruined for Tonio’s return. Tonio had become a ghost, never quite out of mind but no longer clear in my mind, either. If Sage asked me to go with him, I knew I would go. With an American, I could understand what was what. I thought. The wife he didn’t love could go home again. I could love Sage and the ranch as well. Was that what it was, love? Or English without pauses? Was it just that he was there and I was lonely? I knew this much: when I left Tonio, if I did, I would always wonder what there might have been. I would miss the comfort of his authority, I would sigh for his beauty and long for what had never come, his praise. But I knew I could never have those things, no matter how long I stayed; there could never be a Tonio attained. Sage, blond and broad and less complex, was more my friend than Tonio had ever been. If there weren’t the blasted barriers (the children more than her), he could be truly mine.
In this way I passed the time, waiting for him.
He came too fast and stopped too short. His wheels dug into the gravel and spewed grit all over me. “Come on! Get in!” he called from the cab of the truck. I clambered in and reached for his arm. He moved it away to change gears. He drove a few miles from the hotel and found an off-road, and parked. I turned to him again, expecting his embrace, and he hit me with his fist. I do see stars! I thought. He punched at me viciously, while I screamed for him to stop. His blows caught my ear, my arms, my back, and once I’d turned, my head and neck.
“Oh why oh why?” I cried when he stopped.
He said he had gonorrhea and had given it to his wife. It took me a moment to realize what he was saying. I knew very little about such things, only what I had learned from gossip in school. Then I realized he was blaming me. My hands slid up the door and hung on the open window’s pane. I lay slumped away from him, disbelieving. He had fucked maids and whores, yet he blamed me! I said this, now bitter and fully aware. “Not like that, I didn’t get it like that,” he said. “It was you and your French fag. Something he ground out of some boy’s ass. Fag clap. That’s what you brought to me.” He hit me again and I tried to open the door. He had taken the handle off the inside and I couldn’t get out. I crouched toward the floor while he poured blows on my head and shoulders; at least they were now open blows, from palms, not fists. He stopped as suddenly as he had begun, got out and opened the door. With a yank, he pulled me onto the ground. “How could you!” he said.
“I didn’t, you idiot!” I shouted. Why hadn’t he just asked me? I could have made a joke of it. Me and Claude! Claude a fag. Why hadn’t I thought that.
“I know you did,” he screamed, “because I asked him.”
He backed out and I breathed the dust he made. I had to stumble and half-crawl the two miles back to the hotel. A car passed and I lay flat beside the road to keep its lights off me. I stumbled around the back of the hotel and up to Claude’s hut. His light was on. When he opened the door, it struck me that he showed no surprise. “Please,” I begged.
I knew he was cold and superior, that he would not have bothered to deny Sage’s accusations. But he would see what he had done. He would take care of me, though I was an American girl, though he had never liked me.
By the time Tonio returned, there was only a pale bruise on my cheek below the eye. I told him I had slipped coming in from the pool because I didn’t take the time to dry. He touched the spot with his fingertips. I knew it would be yellow for a few days, and then gone.
The fault that had opened with his going had closed again. Whatever had dropped in was lost, and lost, was forgotten.
In June, Bruni bought a trailer in Brownsville and married the laundry maid Octavia. He had acquired a virgin ranch and set about clearing it, as Antonio had done, with AID funds. The land was in the state of Veracruz, where savannah ran to lowland forest, and the trailer was as venerated as a pyramid by the Indians there. Four months later, Bruni’s daughter was born. They named her Enriqueta, in memory of Octavia’s irascible brother, who had hung himself at sixteen after losing a minor altercation with a friend. He was Huastecan, and this had once been their way.
In Portugal, Tacho disappeare
d. Tonio had left him to train and fight and to take the alternativa in Spain when he could. He went away with a band of Romanian gypsies, leaving his suit of lights boxed, his swords safely sheathed, on the ranch of Tonio’s friend Don Amparo. He wrote his patróns Don Amparo and the matador Antonio Velez identical letters, from France, saying he had fallen into a madness wrought by the minor keys.
Estaban, Tone’s other banderillero, and no longer young, married in San Marta and began working with the breeding of brave bulls on the Tecoluca. Though Tonio planned to fight many more years, he took on no more banderilleros, preferring to hire them without attachment. In a Tijuana corrida, Tonio was gored (his seventh injury) and then, for the sake of healing, circumcised. He brought to the ranch a Portuguese novice, Clemente Cortazar, at the request of Don Amparo. Clemente fought on foot and not in the Portuguese way. He had a haughty expression in the ring, which hid quite nicely his bad teeth. He taught Antonio’s young gringa to make the veronica, and he played the bull for her, though it was hard not to laugh. He could have had her in his bed but he was old-fashioned and believed spilled seed was courage lost.
Mr. Mac the Scot-Canadian died a gentle death on his disheveled bed in the corner of the generator shed. At his request the cacique curandero crossed the river in the night. The shaman massaged the old man’s legs and fumigated his sleeping area with a torch of pine. Mr. Mac was buried on a knoll above the new practice ring, after his feet had been carefully washed.
With Bruni gone, Sofia’s job took on new importance. She bought a refrigerator and a bed with a mattress made in a factory. Not long after she was seen in San Luis Potosí by a cousin of Tonio’s head carpenter; she was looking at Volkswagens in a used car lot.
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