“You can’t stay here forever,” he said.
“I have a visa. I’m not leaving.” The joke was it was a student visa, renewable every year.
“Where can it lead?” His words had a sharp edge. He was always a little angry when they talked seriously. He had never really forgiven her for using him. “Texas would be better. I could bring my son up there. What will he ever have here?”
“What would he have in Texas?”
“Opportunity! A life that depends on no one’s favors.”
Abilene laughed. “Like I had? The opportunity to grow up and get a shitty job and live in debt and envy? You think that’s different? Better?”
Mickey’s face turned bright red.
“Mickey,” she said gently. “Do you want me because Tonio—” There was no good way to say it. “Because Tonio has me?”
Mickey exploded. “He treats you like a second-rate horse, Abby, and you go for it. You like it! It’s sick. He orders you around, sends you off to have your face shaved, abandons you for months at a time, passes you around—” Abilene stood up. “He knows what you’re like! He knows what you’re doing here! He’ll make you sorry, make you wish you hadn’t. He beats you, doesn’t he? Doesn’t he?”
“Of course he doesn’t!” Mickey lunged for her arm as she said this; he grasped it and used it to pull himself up. As he stood, the table tipped and dishes clattered onto the terrace floor. The table wobbled and Mickey, seeing it, made a growling noise and gave it a vicious kick. A man at a nearby table stood up and screamed at them. Waiters ran out, followed by the maitre d’. Abilene held onto the back of a chair. Mickey shouted in every direction that it was all an accident. He held onto Abilene so tight he was cutting off circulation. The other diners yelled that they saw him do it, that he was a clod, a drunk, not civilized enough for restaurants. “Eat your tacos on the street!” they yelled. Mickey reached into his pocket and pulled out his money, squashed in his pocket like balled-up hankies. He let go of Abilene, and she rubbed her arm. He threw money onto the chair and onto the toppled table on the terrace. He stuffed bills into the maitre d’s hands. The maitre d’ was a figure of calm, but he said he would call the police if he ever saw either of them again. He said that they were pests and clods. A waiter on his hands and knees was picking up pieces of dishes.
“Jesus, Mickey,” Abilene said, shaking, halfway down the block. Her arm was burning. “You’re crazy. You’ve gone daffy.” Mickey pushed her against a light post. She could feel his hot breath on her throat. So close to her, he looked wild and ugly and threatening. “I’ve seen pictures,” he said. “Tonio has pictures—”
Tonio had so many pictures, Swedish girls with their labia held apart, their sex turned to winking eyes. “So what?” she said. Then she realized that Mickey meant pictures of her. Her mind raced—what pictures were there? Tonio had a Polaroid. There had been pictures, long ago. But Tonio wouldn’t show them. Not to anyone, not to Mickey. He wouldn’t.
“What pictures?”
Over his shoulder she saw a girl had stopped a few yards away. She was a child, maybe fourteen. She was country girl, dressed in a long skirt and reboza; her feet were bare. She had no expression whatsoever; the blankness of her stare was alarming. I won’t come closer, her stare seemed to say, but I want to see. As if seeing were everything. Abilene stared back, and the girl dropped her eyes. She looked like one of the maids at the ranch, called in for scolding—humble, resigned, unrepentant.
Mickey was talking on and on. He had seen pictures. He described them, pictures of Abilene with her hair down over her breasts in tangles, her chest glistening with sweat, pictures with her mouth open, her tongue wetting her lips. “Oh God,” Abilene said. Pictures of the two of us. It made her sick to think of him mooning over them. He was a weasel, a snake! She wouldn’t let him make her care. What was it to her if he fed his lust? “So what?” she said coldly.
Her eyes darted back and forth from Mickey and the girl. The girl had something in her reboza, a package; she backed up a few steps and looked down into the shawl. A baby. The child had a baby. Abilene grabbed Mickey’s arm. “Look!” she said, pointing to the slowly retreating figure. “What’s she doing in Lomas, and with a baby?”
Mickey looked at Abilene as if she had said something very stupid. He whistled to the girl, who stopped at the sound. “Come here,” he said roughly. Her face was thrust forward, almost as if she were off balance, too far out over her feet. Her hair was tied back with string. “Come,” he said again. The girl approached slowly, tentatively, glancing over her shoulder to check her escape route. Mickey dug into his pocket for change and gave it to her. She took the coins and trotted away.
“She’s like you,” Mickey said. Except for the sweat on his face, he now looked nothing like he looked two minutes ago, in the midst of his feverish monologue. “She has heard there’s life in the city. Maybe she had a cousin come here, someone who was lost in the maw and didn’t come back. She decided to follow. Anything is better than the village. She walked to Mexico, to find her cousin. Now she sees how it is, and she’s waiting for someone to notice that she needs a place to live. She’ll go with some young man, if she is lucky, maybe to one of the caves below Lomas; or she will go with bad men and do whatever they say, for tortillas. Her baby will die of diarrhea. But now, knowing none of this, without an ounce of perception, this stupid stupid girl is walking around. At night she sleeps in the street.”
“When did you see the pictures?” Abilene asked softly. “Did Tonio show them to you?”
Mickey, now embarrassed, or ashamed, answered quietly. “They were on his dresser. It was a long time ago. Years ago.”
“And now you tell me?”
“Can’t we go back to your apartment? Please?” His whole posture had changed. She remembered a story Tonio had told her, about Mickey showing up, passport in hand, begging to go with Tonio to Spain. He wanted to get novice fights, but if he could not do that, he would place the beribboned barbs for Tonio, like Tacho, as crazy and brave as Tacho, he would place himself in the path of death, to humble and provoke the bull, to make Tonio look good. On his knees he had said these things! Of course Tonio had told him he was a fool. Chilling, Tonio could be, in his disinterest. Mickey on his knees had hardened his heart. Only a woman should kneel, he would have said.
“Please? Please?” Mickey was moaning now. Something had tipped him right over the edge.
“I have plans.”
“Change them.” He put his hands on her shoulders.
“You leave me alone. You stay away from me!” She turned and ran, the bag with the box with the shoes inside bouncing off her thigh. She didn’t look back until she came to a busy street where she could get a taxi. Mickey was nowhere in sight. In the taxi she opened the bag and the box, and changed from her expensive sandals back into her comfortable old ones.
In the apartment she went to the bathroom and stood looking into the mirror for a long time.
She thought she looked like the Indian girl, her face like a statue’s. Wandering around in a state of stupid faith.
Knowing that Tonio was away, Abilene threw herself into the life of the city, with unusual energy. She spent her time with the girls’ brigades. Ceci and her friends were very high-spirited. They went to the Merced market to make street theatre, and to La Lagunilla; they went to parks and cafes. They rode trolleys and buses and talked to everyone! Hallie had not gone back to school at all; she had moved in with the family of a student in Tlatelolco.
Felix came by one day and took Abilene to lunch. He said he was worried about her. Tonio had returned, and he wanted Abilene to come home. “The city is no place to be, anyway,” Felix said. He was a big engineer for the government; it was his job to keep certain buildings from sinking into the ground. He heard things.
“Oh, but it’s all exciting,” Abilene said airily. She had seen plenty of Mexican girls sit
ting in little groups in the expensive cafes through the long afternoons, with nothing to do but gossip. She liked what she was doing: belonging to no one, running around as she liked with a bunch of girls. She thought this must be what college would have been like, if she had been luckier, if she had made friends, had money. Of course, in college there would have been classes!
“Is it exciting to see a shark in the water?” Felix asked.
“Tonio is a real chump,” Abilene said. “He had to come right through the city, and he didn’t try to see me. Now he wants to snap his fingers and have everything back in place.”
Felix replied, not unkindly, “Remember it’s his hand that feeds you. He can write you off altogether. That will be the end of your little vacation in the city. He can cut you dead. In a matter of speaking.”
Petulantly, Abilene said, “That goes two ways.”
Felix snapped his fingers. “Wake up, little gringa. Tonio can’t help you if you’re shot dead. They’ve set up hospitals all over the city. And jails. I hear they’ve picked up one of the leaders, and he has told them about plans for an insurrection. Do you know what that means? M-1s and tanks if the Army wants. In the streets of Mexico.
“Let me tell you something else. I think Tonio didn’t like Europe all that much. I think he gets very bored with nice girls and music. I think he has been a very tough guy to be who he is, and he has never had to be tough with you. You’re the only girl to come along who never seemed to want something from him.”
“Now I do.”
“What?”
“Something.” Abilene knew she sounded stupid. “Fuck it, Felix. I’ve gotten used to being amused.”
“He wants you to settle down and stop playing around with risky ventures that have nothing to do with you.”
“What would I do at the Tecoluca?”
“Stay alive.”
Her stomach did a flip-flop. “You exaggerate.”
“Five years in Mexico, chica, and you don’t know where you are,” Felix said. They drank half a bottle of wine without speaking. Felix called for the check, disgusted, or perhaps merely bored with her.
“Felix?”
“Yes?”
“Do you really think he wants me there? Not just to make me, but because he really wants me there?”
“I do.”
She had an idea. “Then let him get hungry, Felix. Let him wait a while. I’m in the middle of something here.”
Felix put her in a cab. He gave the driver money and bent to say goodbye. “Don’t make too much of yourself, Abby,” he said. “Remember there are more women than men in the world.”
She stopped at Tonio’s office to see if there was money for her. There wasn’t. Muñoz said he had a ticket for her to San Marta. Abilene was embarrassed.
Later, she told Isabel, and laughed at herself. “I was embarrassed because the money wasn’t there, but I’ve never been embarrassed when it was.”
Isabel was worse than Felix. She laid a wad of bills down on the chair beside Abilene. “Go get your hair cut and go home,” she said. “I expected you to have some common sense. Demonstrations are not sport.”
“You’re being a stuffed shirt.”
“I’m worried about my sister.”
“I thought you were going to let her hang herself with her own noose. You know a lot of English, Isabel.”
“My mother is sick about it. I’ve got a business to run. I went out to Lecumberri to see my cousin’s son Jaime. He says the cells are full of students and professors, even lawyers.”
“Ceci isn’t doing anything dangerous. We’re going to distribute pamphlets this afternoon at the chocolate factory.”
“My mother worked there once. It made her vomit.” Isabel tapped her fingernails on her purse. “Don’t kid yourself that you’re doing this for fun. You know you’re going to get in trouble, and you think it will be something new.”
“What’s wrong with that!” Isabel had touched a tender and true spot; Abilene felt her pulse in her temples. If she left now, what an anticlimax! As if she had not, for once, been where something was going on!
“You’ll have to find out.”
“They want to catch the workers at four when they change shifts. Park on the street in front and wait. I’ll tell Ceci you’ll pick her up. You can take her home for dinner with your mother. Relax. Everybody’s so full of threats. You thought Tonio would cut off Sage’s balls, and all he’s done is cut off his lease.”
“A little past four,” Isabel said, disgusted. “You make sure she’s there. And Abilene, about Sage. Maybe he was lucky. Maybe he didn’t have any balls in the first place.”
AIDEE HAD AN ORANGE VW bug. She parked it on the avenue near the factory exit. They went into the cafeteria and gave flyers to the few people there. One of the men wadded up a paper and threw it back at Aidee. “You fucking kids are showing your dirty linen at the wrong time!” A woman whispered to Abilene, “He’s management. He thinks the kids are unpatriotic. He feels very strongly about it.” The woman saw the manager look at her and she fled the room.
The girls huddled to discuss strategy. They decided to station themselves by the outside of the exits. Aidee and Abilene stood at one near the car, Ceci and Estrella stationed themselves at another door on that same side, and Hallie went around the corner. They would meet at the car when the shifts changed.
The flyers repeated the demands of the strike committee for the release of political prisoners, the disbandment of police units, the repeal of the “dissolution” provision in the penal code, under which hundreds had been detained without charges, and other statements that had to do with university life. The flyers also listed groups that had publicly declared their affiliation with the strike, including unions, artists and writers congresses, university professors, and many others.
Men coming on the next shift took the papers from the girls and began reading as they went inside the building. Several stopped to express their admiration for what the students were doing. One said his daughter was at UNAM, too. Some of them said, “We’re on your side!” Two men got out of an American car parked close to Aidee’s VW and came over to ask what the girls were doing. They were nice-looking men in casual clothes and they were very friendly and curious.
“We’re just admiring the view,” Ceci said flirtatiously. She was being friendly, but guarded.
“Weren’t you in the Zócalo the other night?” the other man asked. He was wearing white chinos and an Hawaiian shirt. “That was really something, wasn’t it?”
Ceci relaxed. “Yeah, it was. It’s beautiful when you see the people out.”
“Surprising that there are so many citizens with you,” the first man said. “When you think it just started out with some disgruntled students.” He wore jeans, a lightweight khaki jacket and a polo shirt. He walked over to Aidee. “What’s that you’re handing out?”
Aidee didn’t seem to know how to answer. She had an aunt in Lecumberri serving seven years on trumped-up charges. She was naturally nervous.
Ceci called out from her spot, “It’s just a bunch of flyers about the strike. To let people know what it’s about. Nothing, really.”
The man in the jacket said, “We’d like to read those.”
His companion said, “We could take some—say a dozen? We’ve got friends.”
They were all uneasy now, suspended in their doubt. Nobody did anything. Abilene saw Isabel’s yellow Fiat roaring down the street towards them. Maybe Aidee didn’t know Isabel’s car. For whatever reason, the approach of the car threw her into a panic. “Give them the papers!” she shouted. “Ceci, give them yours!”
One of the men took out his identification.
The other said, “Guess who?”
“Police! Oh shit!” Ceci yelled, and headed for Aidee’s car, with Aidee and Estrella right behind. Hallie was around the
corner and had had the sense not to show herself. Abilene looked at Isabel, sitting in her car at the curb. Then she ran and jumped into Aidee’s car just as Aidee pulled away.
Ceci mumbled, “Those sonsofbitches. Those fuckers.” Aidee was driving fast and not saying anything.
The men chased them in their car. Their car was bigger and it began to close the gap. Abilene caught a glimpse of Hallie racing around the corner of the building. Then Aidee shot across two lanes of traffic to get away from their pursuers.
They had raced a mile or so when a little red sports car came alongside. The driver, a nice-looking fellow, smiled and waved at them, and Ceci shouted out her window, “Police! Police!” pointing at the car behind. The sports car began to weave in and out of the traffic very expertly. The driver gave the girls a “V” sign. He had managed to cut off the policemen’s car so that when Aidee made a sudden turn onto an off street, they had lost them. Her hands were trembling. The sports car came up behind and parked. Estrella had made the sign of the cross and was saying a Hail Mary for thanks. The man got out of his car, waving to them. He was handsome and young, some rich family’s darling. The girls got out to go and thank him. “Say, he’s cute,” Ceci said under her breath.
The man’s smile broadened as they approached. He took out a revolver.
He was a plain clothesman too! Just then the other car caught up with them.
The girls stood like stunned animals and watched as the men pulled out knives and slit the tires of Aidee’s car. They were kidding and joking among themselves, enjoying the girls’ fright. They used the ignition key to open the trunk, and took out a tire iron, and broke all the windows. Then they started calling the girls names and punching them on the arms. They laughed and swished knives in the air. Aidee was wearing a dress with a cinched waist, and one of the men reached over and slit the belt—swish!—and the dress bloused out. Aidee burst into tears. The others were white-faced.
The men shoved the girls into the back seat of the big American car. They blindfolded them with black scarves, and when Aidee would not stop crying, they gagged her. The man in the rider’s seat in front said, “Now you babies can find out what you’re into. You didn’t think anybody would mind, pretty little girls like you? You thought you could do what you wanted because you’re so snotty and rich and lazy?” He went on and on reviling them. Abilene tried to listen to another sound in her head, a kind of low buzzing like when Tonio’s plane got close to the ranch.
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