Gringa

by Sandra Scofield

  Abilene remembered Hallie’s talk. “What about Paris? The students nearly shut it down.” She regretted what she said as soon as she said it. She had no idea what was going on in Paris now! Gato didn’t care, though.

  “The students are bait,” he said. “They make incipient repression more visible. It’s a good thing for the federales to yank bankers’ children. They’re little seeds. The real roots are in the country.” He stared at her coldly. “It’s all nothing to you. American. Not your matter.”

  “I’m curious, though.” Her remark, oddly enough, seemed to please him. He leaned forward, his hands on the floor in front of his knees. He was like any other man, zealot or not; he needed release. Let him think it was all his idea.

  She thought him least attractive when he was most didactic. Why did all men like to lecture! She thought she would divert him with sex, but he had a schedule for it, just before he slept. Once she succumbed, she relished the way he took her attention. Adele was all caught up in a new role she had made for herself as social historian. Pola was starting back to school. Hallie and Ceci and their friends were always going at full speed, as if every day had to mean something. There was so much to accomplish. Abilene liked thinking about Gato. He was fine and lean, his belly inconspicuous, and he was nimble, not so much like a dancer as a burglar. He moved with intention, but it couldn’t be apprised until it was accomplished. His very gait was full of secrets, he defied scrutiny. His ordinary Mexican-ness made him almost invisible on the streets, good for rabble-rousing. Abilene had an idea that beneath his sheen-less hair his ears were blocked off, and so he had a way of looking around jerkily, a way of bringing his nose up sharply at some sudden scent. His eyes were narrow and slanted, the bones under his eyes took too much room; he had an altogether sly look.

  She tried to think of what Tonio would say. (She didn’t know why she hadn’t heard from him. She had thought he would send someone for her: Constanzia, Bruni, Felix, maybe even Tacho. To tell her to get to the ranch or else. What she wanted to know was or else what?)

  She thought of Tonio and her skin was cold. She was afraid. She was lying in bed beside Gato, who stared at the ceiling and thought great thoughts.

  “If you had a lot of money what would you do?” she asked.

  “Such a stupid question!” he said. “I’d buy guns, of course.”

  Though he hadn’t asked, she said, “I’d go to the south of France and try to learn French.” She had read somewhere that the beaches of France were pebbles, but she didn’t care.

  “You’re a dumb bitch,” he said. She caught her breath, afraid he would get up and get dressed and leave, when what she needed from him was something to do.

  He turned on her with gruff insolence and made love harshly, short of pain or insult, but pushing past detachment for the first time, straight to the quick, where the body is carried away; and in one moment, one evasive, tricky, deceiving, compromising moment, she felt free.

  She forgot Tonio. At least there was that.

  He took her out to Netzahualcoyotl. She could not believe the insects! Half a million people lived in seventy square kilometers. One-room dwellings of metal sheeting, beaten from cans and drums, of cardboard and wood scraps. They walked across a street in which garbage glided along on a film of putrid water. There was an elderly woman on a pallet in a dark smelly room. Gato squatted by the woman, speaking rapidly, and he gave her something from his pocket—money, Abilene decided. Outside the shack he said to Abilene, “She is from my village in Guerrero. She’s not much older than you. Her children are away, in the streets, stealing.” Abilene was gagged by the smells and sounds and colors. Gato took her arm, steered her back to the avenue and the bus. On the way she began to call out, wildly, the names of things she saw: the paint of buildings, an old woman with a basket of clothes on her head, little girls in white socks swinging on a metal bar. Gato’s face grew dark, full of contempt. “Damn you!” she shouted. “What do you want me to say?”

  “I don’t want you to say anything. I want you to look.”

  He took her out again, on a long jostling smelly series of rides on the cheapest buses. He took her to a municipal garbage dump, and before she knew where she was, she smelled its incredible stench. It was a lake of odor more than a quarter mile across, and as they approached it, coming up among low-lying bushes at its crest, she was met by the spectacle of acres of rubbish. In and among piles of refuse, she saw pigs, goats, dogs, chickens and children scrabbling and grunting. Adults with boxes and bags stooped into piles of trash.

  “They’re looking for salvage to buy a bowl of beans for their day’s food,” Gato said. His voice was cold, unmoved. Abilene was clutched by nausea. She despised Gato for bringing her. She walked quickly away from the dump.

  “They’re not so bad off,” Gato droned behind her. “They have a water ration, better than hundreds of thousands in shanty towns. Every day they find a little salvage, enough for a peso or two. Not so bad, when you think of it.”

  “Oh stop!” she said, as if he had been teasing her.

  Stubbornly she made a beautiful soup for dinner, with a whole plump chicken and yellow squash, red tomatoes and rice. He ate with satisfaction. She watched him bitterly. Is it for them you eat my soup? she wanted to say. She banged dishes and pots, putting things away.

  When she went into the room where he was sitting in the near dark, he made an ambiguous gesture to her, an invitation, she thought. She sat down beside him. Then he revealed to her how ignorant he was, how dismal was his knowledge of her country. He was a believer of myths. He said he wanted her to remember what she had seen, and to tell all her friends when they make their plans to grow brown on Mexican beaches. “You can make them a little less ignorant. Maybe it will mean something when they hear that poor people seek liberation in Latin America.”

  He thought she was like all Americans, rich and vacuous.

  “I don’t have any friends,” she said icily.

  He sighed. “Then what are you good for?” he said.

  One night the students stayed late, folding their pamphlets and eating pots of rice. They set their bowls aside and found places and positions to relax. A girl lay with her head in another girl’s lap; a boy leaned against the wall. Someone had brought down Abilene’s pillows from off her bed.

  “Talk to us, Gato,” they said.

  “In the mountains, they are weary of waiting. They move against thievery and repression.” He went on, telling a long story about his father. Abilene sensed that the story was familiar to the students; their heads nodded expectantly, they sighed and murmured. There had been a fiesta. The governor’s party paid for pulque and mariachis, for paper to hang on poles around the square. It was the time when the president-to-be was “campaigning” to gain popular support for his already certain election. The governor wanted to be “in touch” with his people as well. He wanted to hear his people’s needs, he told them. The townspeople made a kind of throne for him under an awning. In the afternoon after the drunken dance, the people came from their huts, many walking miles into the village. They wanted to hear what the governor would do for them. First a bold boy of sixteen stepped forward. He played the guitar, but he couldn’t afford new strings. “Music is in our soul!” cried the governor. He would buy the strings; he would buy more instruments to make more mariachi bands for the village. Then a shy nun came forward. She said she tried to teach the people to read, but she had no books. The governor said he would buy slates for her. Then she could teach them to write stories of the Revolution, and to read them. (This was the students’ cue. ‘The Revolution!’ they mocked.)

  Next Gato’s father, a communal landowner, came forward. He wasn’t afraid to look the official in the eye. He was a brawny man, short but strong, like a brave bull. He said he and his fellow landowners had been given the wrong lands by mistake. “What mistake?” the governor said, biting the hook. “We’ve been gi
ven all the dry land,” said Gato’s father. “There is only one area with water to irrigate for crops. It belongs to one man alone, and he lives most of the year in Acapulco.” Gato’s father said he had submitted claims against this man’s land; he had asked for wrong to be righted, according to the laws of Mexico. But in the city he learned that there were thousands of such claims, that they lay about in large rooms until they grew brittle, and cracked and fell to dust. A hush like hot cotton lay over the gathering. The governor glared. “I have no authority over these things!” he shouted. “You must follow the letter of the law and wait for wheels to turn. Are you more important than the man who waits before you?” Gato’s father was bitter beyond caution. “Wait?” he cried. “In silence? Forever?”

  The governor’s men pushed him back and the crowd parted as if for a man on a stretcher. That night men came to Gato’s hut and took his father out. Gato’s mother held him, her hand over his mouth, and he bit her until he gagged on her blood, but she would not let go. They found his father in a ditch with his throat cut. Soon after that Gato went to Mexico City.

  The students were mesmerized. Gato’s voice was now full of passion; Abilene was amazed at the power of it. “The authorities will learn what is right! The people of the country will teach them. You will hear them, and then you must decide what to do. The peasants will lead you. I promise you this.”

  The students went home. Gato and Abilene lay in bed in silence, as if a gorge lay between them. For Abilene, it was too risky to reach across.

  She felt small, and foolish, and sad. She wasn’t surprised when, in the morning, Gato was gone.

  ABILENE SAW MICKEY again at Tonio’s office, where she had gone to see if Tonio had left money for her. If he cut her off, she would have to go back to the ranch, unless she wanted to spend her little savings, now in a Mexico bank. She realized that her summer in Mexico was nothing more than the sojourn in Zihuatenejo had been—a little time away. She had been excited by the students, by the enthusiasm of Hallie and her friends, even by Adele’s company, dead woman and all. But she was going in circles. She had not written Sage again, nor he her, and the thought of him had grown less real or possible. What she wanted was something new from Tonio, something more than waiting for what he would give. She wanted to be more to him than a cat or a monkey. She wanted to know if he could understand what that meant; if he could, maybe she could love him again, or better. She had felt her spirit push up against his insistent memory, but now she thought it was adolescent of her, the same as Pola wanting to go to L.A., or just to a market without her mother’s okay. Recently she had seen a very simple truth: that she belonged to Tonio, or with Tonio, in a way she had never belonged with anyone. He was not her first lover, but he was her first attachment. In his way, he had looked after her for nearly five years. She didn’t want to go with Sage until she knew who she was with Tonio. Sage had been right, he and Abilene were alike, but Abilene added one important additional factor: Tonio was something else altogether.

  Señor Muñoz said that Señor Velez was out of the country, but he had left instructions to give the señorita what she needed. “He expects you at the Tecoluca after the rains,” Muñoz said. Abilene was surprised; already she had won this concession, when Tonio had seemed so adamant that she return immediately. Of course he wasn’t there! He had never cared much what she did when he was gone, and if he had minded, or even known, how she spent her time, he had never said. She didn’t think that Tonio spent much time thinking about other people, certainly not her. He thought of her when he wanted her. All in all, that hadn’t been so bad.

  Mickey came out from the inner office, his face flushed, and when he saw Abilene, engulfed her in his greeting. She thought, maybe I can talk to Mickey about it, but the idea was silly. Mickey had such a distorted perspective.

  “Oh good, you remembered our lunch date!” he said now, with a huge, false cheer that could have fooled no one. Muñoz had the face of a statue.

  “Sure, let’s go,” Abilene said.

  Constanzia called out. “Oh Señorita, you left a package here the other day. See, I’ve saved it for you.” She handed Abilene the bright yellow bag from the shoe store. Abilene was stunned. Constanzia shook the bag in her hand. “Señorita!”

  Abilene took the bag. “Who brought it in?” she asked in a voice scarcely above a whisper.

  “No one, señorita. You left it here, don’t you remember? You must have been preoccupied to forget your shoes!”

  In the elevator she told Mickey she had lost the shoes. “In a cafe near the museum, or maybe on the bus. But not in the office, I’m sure of that!”

  Mickey cut her short. “You ought to have thrown those old huaraches away anyway, Abby. Your new ones are much better. When he saw her impatient frown, he added, “Everything doesn’t have to make sense.”

  “Well of course it does!”

  “Don’t you know Tonio knows everything?” This he said merrily, like a joke. Though she was incredulous, she argued it no more.

  Mickey said he had to run an errand for his father in the elegant Lomas de Chapultapec colonia. He was carrying a package.

  “Well then, I’ll see you later. We didn’t really have the date you said we did in the office. That much I do know.”

  “But don’t go now. I was going to come see you next.” He whistled for a taxi. When they had settled into the seat he leaned over her and thrust his hand up on her thigh. “I need you,” he said fiercely.

  “Oh, do stop it!” she said. So Mickey was in a mood. She relaxed as he sat back. They pulled onto a street of old elegant buildings. They stood outside the fence of a large house; over the top she could see the heavy amber panes of windows. He rang for admittance. The door swung open, and he was ushered inside. She wondered what was in the package he carried, and she wondered about her shoes.

  Mickey came out and said, “I know a good place not far from Chapultepec, they do grilled beef Argentine style.” As they walked, she asked him about his errand. Mickey sighed importantly. “A friend of my father’s lives there. He did some work for Tonio and Tonio didn’t pay him. My father intervened. I was returning some property, I’m not sure what it was.” Abilene accepted this explanation; she had been in Mexico long enough to appreciate that everyday things were often cloaked in intrigue.

  They ate on the outdoor terrace of a quiet restaurant in an old converted house. Fawning trees bordered the terrace. The waiters moved slowly, without the self-importance of those in Niza restaurants. She offered to buy a bottle of wine, and Mickey chose a red one, surprisingly dry. They spent a long time eating and drinking. They talked about the students—Mickey said they were looking for trouble, it was the first inkling of his new self-importance—and he said her skin was pink and pretty. She thought of telling him about the abortion, but he would want to know whose baby it was, and she couldn’t have said.

  “Tell me about your new job,” she said. Mickey now worked in the same bank as his father. He described his co-workers. He had a talent for description and mimicry. She wanted to tell him that he was most charming when he imitated himself. His clerkship wasn’t so bad, he said. It was slow work and there would be no reward for hurrying; they had twice as many clerks as they needed. “It’s part of the function of government to provide employment,” he said. She found she was amused by his seriousness. “Of course,” she answered. “It stirs loyalty and devotion.” She also noted that he had been able to get away for a very long lunch, to which he made no reply.

  “I was talking to Tonio recently,” he said instead. Her chest began at once to ache. She ordered more wine. “He is having horses brought from Portugal this year; there is a possibility I might go over there and accompany them back.”

  She could not help smiling broadly. “Will you travel in their stable?”

  “He’s gone to Switzerland, you know,” Mickey went on. He was swollen with this information. Abilene
realized he had been saving it to tell.

  “Why Switzerland?” she asked in a lazy way.

  “He’s gone to a music festival with his mother.”

  “Odd. I didn’t think he was so devoted to her, nor to music.”

  Mickey smirked. “Anne Lise is in Europe. I have a friend at the American Embassy who knows I like to hear what’s going on. Of course it is all circumstantial—” He shrugged, amused. She was perturbed to be caught ignorant. She didn’t think she cared, other than that. She found Tonio a remote concept, harder and harder to retrieve from her store of memories.

  Mickey leaned over and touched her hand on the table. “You know I would love you if you let me, Abelita.” She had to suppress a laugh. Behind his glasses, the lenses terribly smudged, Mickey’s eyes were round dark moons. She half-expected him to weep. They were both drunk.

  “Go ahead,” she teased. He broke off a piece of roll and wiped up the grease from his plate. “If you want, I’ll go back to Texas with you,” he said. He ate a huge bite of soggy roll. With his mouth full he said, “I’ve never divorced Janice, and our kid is American. I could get a permanent visa. Or you and I could get married.” He licked his lips and wiped his face on the back of his sleeve.

  “How can we, if you are still married to Janice?”

  “Maybe she’s gotten a divorce. What do I know? She’s a hippie now.”

  “What brings this on?” Mickey was so often serious about impossible things, about bullfighting apprenticeships and Pemex jobs, falling in love with attaché’s daughters. This most recent idea was the dregs in a bottle of wine.