Gringa

by Sandra Scofield

  Let it be for something.

  I don’t think she heard me.

  On All Soul’s Day the hotelkeeper’s wife, Nando Piñeda’s mother, came to the apartment for me. We took flowers and candles to the Plaza. Women hid in the shadows. Then one of them went out and laid a photograph on the ground and beside it, a votive candle. She made the sign of the cross and knelt.

  The rest of us came out of our shadows with our flowers and candles. Into our half-lives.

  I looked at the mothers, and I thought: We’ve counted your dead, Daniel and I. We’ve saved their stories. Some day I will be able to tell them.

  For the mothers.

  Sister Rita:

  I remember the day Adele told me she was taking the stories from the students and supporters. She came out to see me. I was in a courtyard bathing a wretched baby whose legs and face were covered with sores. Adele offered to buy me lunch. Before I could even think, I laughed. We were miles from anything other than a place to buy pulque, and maybe a taco with meat from a goat’s head.

  We went back to my little place and ate bread and cheese. Adele couldn’t believe I hadn’t heard about the demonstrations. I told her the shouts I heard were angry men beating their wives or children. Neighbors screaming at neighbors. That upset her, she said, “But you’ve always said that they were so good.” She didn’t understand how desperate they are, the poor. How they worry about the most basic elements of staying alive. They don’t have time for politics. They’ll be dead and nothing will have changed, whatever gets written up as policy and law. All I can do is patch up tiny holes in the fabric of their lives. Little holes.

  I realize now that Adele had come to me for some kind of approval. She thought what she was doing was important, and it probably was, but I was tired and distracted and busy and I couldn’t be very thrilled about her playing at Man on the Street.

  I was a spoiled surburban California girl who grew up and looked around and couldn’t see a single reason to get up in the morning. I was halfway through college, so bored I thought about killing myself. But I was Catholic. I went to talk to a young priest on campus. He had just spent two years in Bolivia. He said I ought to stop worrying about myself and worry about people who have real troubles. One thing led to another. Now my superiors decide who will have my help. I am such a tiny drop in the universe. But I’m not bored, I’m not unhappy for myself anymore. I just try to be my small bit of good displacing bad. I’ve never had any interest in the rhetoric of revolution, although plenty of my fellow sisters have. I guess I have too small a vision. I can’t see ahead. Or maybe I haven’t the courage. But when someone finally comes along and shows me how to do it, I’ll probably join in. Listening to the Gospel for the first time. Listening to what people are saying about Him. Letting Christ take on a new face, one the angry students would like. Christ the fighter. God help us, He’s coming.

  Abilene:

  The archeologist Martin once talked about how the Huasteca was changing, the old ways being lost. When he first started to dig in the Huasteca, the Indians who helped him would recognize pieces of pottery as they took them out of the ground. They didn’t seem to understand that the objects were old.

  Now young workers say, “What’s this old thing?”

  During his last visit, the winter of 1966, Martin, lover of old things, hiked with Antonio to the place they call Golindrinas, the Pit of Swallows. They went to the end of the road above Valles and hiked past little plots of coffee and bananas, into the forest. The rim of the pit was thick with bushes and vines. They arrived at dusk and stayed away from the edge. They chose a flat place for their tents, careful to see that there would be no chance of stumbling, in a dream state, into the abyss. In the morning they woke to see clouds of swifts ascending from the pit, and behind the swifts, bright swaths of parakeets. They looked down into the pit and saw how the light picked up the color and the striation of the limestone, and then vanished into the depths. A rock tossed out toward the middle plunged and then wobbled out of sight like something made of paper or cloth. I guess that’s when Tonio got it in his head that he had to climb down. Martin said he didn’t have time—it would be a big venture—and then news came within a year that he was dead of some fever he had had many times—left over, probably, from one of his trips to Indonesia.

  Martin had seen right away that I had a taste for the exotic. He said he hadn’t wanted to live in Switzerland since he was old enough to decide. He told me about a favorite Indonesian island. He loved its seacoast and bay, the river and stream, forest and beach, the coco palm and spices. He told me a legend. There was a woman who lived in a garden and went down the shore at night to watch for a proa to come and carry her away. Some said she was young, some old.

  He said, “Once I heard the indios across the river saying that sometimes they saw a woman along the river bank here, on your side, but only at night. They didn’t know anything about her. Then I met you, and I wondered if you sometimes walked down to the river at night.”

  Of course I didn’t. The bank is too steep and tangled. In the dark you would be caught in the brush, or you might slide into the water.

  Martin said it was my red hair that fascinated the indios. Then he said, “There are so many places where the souls of women have been trapped by circumstances and their own nature. I think of them as women with longings too great to be lost in death.”

  I said I don’t believe in ghosts.

  He said he believed in an after life. He said it might be a mirage, a mere vapor, but does it matter? When you die, he said, disappointment goes with you.

  Unless you cannot die, unless you wander.

  I asked if he had ever seen a woman like he described, the island wanderer.

  He said, “Only in the eyes of living women.”

  The night after Pola was killed, I dreamed of the pit. I was on the bottom, where the earth was soft with rich rotted vines and mosses. I had landed easily, like a child in hay or snow or sand. Tonio had said: Don’t lose the rope.

  I saw it dangling above me, almost invisible. To look up the side of the pit was to look up a cliff.

  I heard my name. It was Pola, half-hidden in the ground cover. She was naked, and her body was as white as talc. She kept whispering my name. She opened her arms to me.

  I scrambled to my knees. I didn’t know what I wanted to do. Pola began to roll away. Like a ballet dancer in a turn, she looked at me as her head came around each time. She rolled and rolled, into the caves.

  I looked for the end of the rope. I couldn’t see it, and I began to wave my arms in an arc, to catch it with my hand. The sky was a hole of light above me. I knew I’d never find the rope again.

  Abby! Pola cried from the blackness.

  Pola! I cried back, but she was gone. Somewhere in the caves she waited.

  I will go to Tonio, and I will wait for him to tell me how things will be. I will wait for him to say what he knows about me. I will wait for him to say what will happen to me, or if this is my life and it will go on and on.

  Part VII

  Chapter 14

  “SO,” TONIO SAID. “Look who’s back.” He seemed glad.

  He was just coming out of the stables. He was wearing tight jeans, boots, and a blue shirt like Abilene’s father used to wear to work in the oilfields. Abilene wondered if Tonio knew that shirts like his were worn by men who worked hard and got very dirty. Probably there were people wearing them now who didn’t ever get dirty. Probably they were in style in the states, and that was why Tonio was wearing one of them. Abilene had ironed her father’s work shirts once—she was eleven or twelve then—and he had been embarrassed. There had been sweat stains under each arm. “You don’t have to do that, honey,” he’d said. “Shoot, don’t.”

  It was the middle of the afternoon. Abilene said, “I thought you would be at siesta.” She had seen herself going in the house quietly, lying
down in a room with pulled drapes, getting used to the idea of the country again.

  “Too much going on,” he said. He didn’t kiss her, or touch her, either.

  Together they walked to the guardhouse. “I want Sapo to put in a call to Mexico,” Tonio said. He went in, and Abilene waited outside. The way the light hit the screens, she couldn’t see inside. She wondered why Sapo would put in a call instead of Sofia, unless Sofia was sick. Sofia never missed work. If Tonio wanted her to, she would come in on Sundays. She felt important doing Velez business. She liked it especially when Tonio sent her to give someone an order for him. “The señor says to hose down the plane and get it ready to go to San Luis Potosi.” “The señor says to bring beer and a plate of caviar and crackers to his office for his guests.” Before Abilene came, there had been some times when Tonio asked Sofia to work late, to stay over, a different sort of business. It didn’t bother Abilene that Sofia didn’t like Abilene; it bothered Abilene that she minded.

  The little jaguarundi was pacing on the ground in front of the guardhouse. Back and forth it went, in a pattern of double arcs, and you could see the path it had worn in the dirt. It went as far as it could in one direction, twisted its head against the tug of the chain, and then went the other way.

  When Tonio came out of the guardhouse, he reached down to scratch the cat’s head. The cat stretched, extending its front legs and pushing up against Tonio’s hand, then pulled back, arching and tucking the head. Tonio grabbed the fur on the top of the cat’s neck and tugged on it hard. The cat’s head dipped down toward its neck, and its eyes closed to slits.

  They went through the gate into the grounds of the house. Abilene had been nervous as she climbed the bank up from the ferry. She had not known how Tonio would act, if he would be angry or contemptuous, or if he would be indifferent. She had not asked him before she came. Then Tonio had disarmed her with the casual affection of his greeting. Now the familiarity of the ranch rushed around her like water. From the climbing vines above their heads, the heavy scent of flowers fell on them.

  On the right of the covered walk was the building that housed Tonio’s sleek, well-appointed office. The other half of the building was his saloon, ornate Victorian, with a brass footrail and a matching backbar of Honduran mahogany. Framing the back of the bar was an array of mounted trophies from the northern Rockies. A pair of massive bighorn rams were heavy-necked, with ridged, coiled horns and jaundiced eyes. Two mule deer heads hung frozen in taxidermy, their antlers locked as if in mortal combat. At both upper corners of the mirror, whole carcasses of mountain lions hung by their front paws as if they had just been killed.

  Tonio wanted Abilene to see the new pinball machine he had acquired during the summer. It was a gift from a friend in Houston who was going to go with Tonio to hunt cats in Campeche. Tonio plugged in the pinball machine. Lights flashed zanily, and he assumed a pose suitable for his purpose, one leg bent behind, leaning into the other. Of course he was an expert player.

  He insisted that Abilene try her hand. Everything about the game seemed random. There was no way she could make the balls go anywhere. There was no way to control her game.

  “Here, you want a beer?” Tonio was down behind the bar, where he had a half-sized refrigerator, actually a much better one than the big one in the house. That one was in a closet with cases of beverages. It had to be defrosted. Abilene had done it for something to do, in the middle of the night, four or five times in the years she had been here. In between, ice had built up, inches thick in the freezer, until it was like a cave. When it was like that, the refrigerator wasn’t very cold.

  “Is there a Coke?” she asked.

  Tonio held up a Fanta orange. Abilene shook her head and said she’d take the beer. She reached down and unplugged the pinball machine. She sat down at the bar. Tonio gave her the cold bottle, and she smiled at him. She never forgot how beautiful he was, but it was different, actually looking at him.

  “You Americans fall into two categories,” he began pleasantly.

  Abilene felt her scalp prickle. She tried to hold the smile. Tonio was going to lecture her, but if he was including all her countrymen, maybe his criticism wouldn’t be as bad as it could be.

  “One kind is the suspicious guy, always guarding things against the thieving Mexicans: his wallet, his car, his daughter. He doesn’t mind paying a lot, but he doesn’t want to feel he was taken.

  “Then there are gringos like you, down here for the ride. Sure of yourself because you’ve got so little to lose.”

  Abilene’s face began to burn. She could feel the sting start all along the edges of the surgery, like someone drawing a mask on her face with a hot pen.

  “You never figure you’re going to be taken here, in a foreign and backwards country, the way you are taken in your own. You’re not a fool, whatever the natives think. When things go wrong, you can say it was the language, the climate, the food. You don’t plan things, so it’s no surprise when they don’t turn out. You can dismiss anything as misunderstanding.” He leaned over the bar, putting his elbows on the smooth dark wood, eye to eye with her. “It’s what the experts call cultural dissonance. You use it for self-forgiveness. You think it’s to your advantage.

  “The problem, Abilene, is that you badly underestimate the scope of the trouble you can get into when it turns out you were wrong.”

  It took her a moment to collect herself. Tonio’s speech was not a warning, it was condescension. She had already proven his case. She licked the tip of one finger and, very carefully, she slid it in a short stroke across the top of the bar between them. “Your score, Tonio,” she said.

  Tonio put his hand over hers so quickly she jumped. She could feel the pressure of his body on hers, at the site of their two hands.

  “It’s my game, Abby,” he said. Then he kissed her.

  They ate at half-past seven, in the breakfast room at the kitchen. The light of the chandelier, set on a dimmer, was low. The small room was dark and crowded with heavy furniture.

  Tonio always ate the same supper: a small piece of thick steak, and a tortilla warmed and folded with hot salsa and crumbled cheese over it.

  Abilene wasn’t hungry, but she tried to eat. She had not eaten steak in months, not since the one she ate with Constanzia the night before she went into the hospital. She realized that she didn’t like steak anymore. She could hardly chew it.

  The maid had left a pitcher of orangeade. Abilene drank it, a little at a time in her glass, keeping busy with the pitcher and the pouring.

  Tonio told her about the call. He said, “I had auditors in this past month. They went over the books at the hotel, the ranch, and the packing plant. I had them arrive one morning without warning.”

  He seemed to be waiting for Abilene to say something. To oblige, she said, “Is that what you do, in business? Make sure your books are in order?” She couldn’t imagine anyone having the nerve to cheat Antonio Velez, though she had heard that the hotel manager before Claude Girard had robbed Tonio’s father blind.

  “Claude Girard gave me his notice. November 1 he’s going to move to Aruba. I thought, you fat old fag, you should have just walked out. Immediately I decided to find all the ways he had cheated me.”

  “He seems so scrupulous,” Abilene said. “The type of person who worries about his honor.”

  Tonio lifted his lip in a brief sneer. “He has suffocated me for years in blankets of figures. Why does he do this? I asked myself, if not to hide?”

  “He picks at things like the bones of fish.” Abilene meant to insist that Claude was honest. She had despised him for his moral superiority. She remembered him, every morning, in his glassed-in office, going over the market receipts with whoever had gone in to shop, shouting and screaming numbers, accusing.

  “I’ve had enough of him,” Tonio said.

  Abilene was certain it must have galled Tonio to have Claude
quit. He would much rather have fired him, but the truth was Claude was a good manager. The hotel made money, or so Claude had told her. He had run a tab for her bar bill, and for her room. She was a drain on his profit. “He speaks five languages,” she said. It was the best thing she could say about Claude.

  “He’s not the only one.”

  Abilene shrugged.

  “And your Spanish? Did it improve over the summer, with all your practice?”

  “I suppose it did. It didn’t seem hard.”

  “You must have confused the authorities! Is the gringa a bright girl who has bothered to learn our language? Or is she a spy?”

  “A spy!” Abilene sputtered.

  “A troublemaker.” Tonio was smiling now. Abilene assumed he knew everything.

  She wasn’t ready to talk about the city. She didn’t want Tonio to decide what had mattered and what had not. She didn’t want to hear him say anything about Pola, ever.

  So she said, “Did he?”

  “What?”

  “Did Claude Girard cheat you?”

  Tonio laughed. “He was exact, to the very peso. The auditors say a blind man could have read his books, they are in such perfect order.”

  “So it was for nothing.” There was no side to be on in this matter. Either way, she could have enjoyed the outcome.

  “On the contrary. I’ll let you wait. You will see what I learned.”

  Abilene shoved her plate toward the center of the table and folded her hands in front of her. “I want to know about Anne Lise,” she said. “Are you going to marry her?”