Worst of all, while the old woman gripped Amelia’s hand and swore she’d never leave her alone again, Amelia raised her head and caught sight of the person who had hired her for this gig. It was the old woman’s surviving daughter. Her eyes were hard and distant.
Amelia wondered what it must be like for her, to accompany these look-alikes to her mother’s bedroom, to have them sit next to her, to hold the woman’s hand. What did she feel, being the daughter the old woman did not want? The one who was superfluous?
Perhaps she might have obtained more bookings at that house, but Amelia refused to go back and even though Miguel said she was being stupid — there was talk about terms of agreement, clauses — she refused. Miguel let it go. For once.
***
The tower where the client lived was a thin, white, luxurious needle, the kind the ads assured would-be buyers was not only ‘modern,’ but ‘super modern.’ Many warehouses had been scrapped to make way for these monstrous buildings. The old housing units that remained — homes of the descendants of factory workers, of lower-class citizens who toiled assembling cars and bought little plots to build their homes — existed under the shadow of behemoths. Since the expensive buildings required abundant water and electricity, the poor residents in the area had to do without. The big buildings had priority over all the resources. There were also a few fancy buildings that had halted construction when the latest housing bubble popped. They remained half-finished, like gaping, filthy teeth spread across several gigantic lots. Indigents now made their homes there, living in structures without windows, while three blocks away, women were wrapped in tepezcohuite at the spa, experiencing the trendiest traditional plant remedy around the city.
Amelia walked into the lobby of the white building. A concierge and a guard with a submachine gun both stood behind a glistening desk. The concierge smiled. The guard did not acknowledge her in any way.
“I’m expected. Number 1201,” Amelia said. The client had not given a name, although that was not unusual.
“Yes, you are,” the concierge said, the smile the same, pleasant without being exactly warm. The concierge walked Amelia to the elevator and swiped a card so she could board it.
When she reached the door to 1201, Amelia saw it had been left unlocked and she walked in. The apartment was open concept. The portion constituting the living room area was dominated by a shaggy rug and a modular, low-slung sofa in tasteful gray with an integrated side table. Floor-to-ceiling windows allowed one to observe the cityscape.
She could see the kitchen, but there was a gray sliding door to the right. She assumed a bedroom and bathroom lay in that direction.
“Hey, I’m here,” Amelia said. “Hello?”
The gray door opened and there stood Elías Bertoliat. For a minute, she thought it was merely a man who resembled Elías. Who just happened to have Elías’ mouth, his nose, his green eyes. Because it didn’t sound feasible that she had just walked into the apartment of her ex-boyfriend.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” she said at last. “You booked me?”
He raised his hands, as if to pacify her.
“Amelia, this is going to sound nuts, but if you’ll let me explain —” and his voice was not quite the same. The years had given it more weight, a deeper resonance, but there was still the vague choppiness of the words, as if he’d rehearsed for a long time, attempting to rid himself of his Northern accent, and almost managed it.
“It doesn’t sound nuts. It is,” she said clutching her cell phone and pointing it at him. “Are you stalking me?”
“No! I saw your profile on Friendrr by chance. I don’t have your contact info, or I would have gotten a hold of you some other way. I just saw it and I thought I’d talk to you.”
Just like that, so easy. And yet, it sounded entirely like him: careless, swift. To see her and decide to find her, like he had decided once, on the spur of the moment, that they ought to go to Monterrey for a concert. Fly in and fly out.
“Why?” she asked. “You were a dick to me.”
“I know.”
“You don’t date someone for two years and then take off like that. Not even a fucking text message, a phone call.”
She didn’t care if ghosting was fashionable, or her generation simply didn’t care for long-term relationships, or whatever half-baked pop psychology article explained this shit.
He approached her, but Amelia moved away from him, ensuring the sofa was between them, that it served as a demarcation line. Sinus Meridiani in the middle of the living room.
“My dad pulled me from university. He didn’t like all my talk about going to Mars and he forced me to go back home,” he said.
“And he forced you to ghost me.”
“I didn’t know what to say. I was a kid,” he protested.
“We were in university, not kindergarten.”
He managed to look betrayed despite the fact she should have owned all the outrage in this meeting. He had looked, when they’d met, rather boyish. Little boy lost. This had been an interesting change from the loud, grossly wealthy ‘juniors’ who populated the university and the festive, catcalling youths in the center of her housing complex. And he had an interest in photography, which revealed a sensitive soul. It, in turn, prompted Amelia to forgive whatever mistakes he made, since she was a misguided romantic in search of a Prince Charming.
He still had that boyishness, in the eyes if not the face.
“What do you want?” she asked.
“I was on Friendrr for the same reason other people are. I wanted to talk to someone. I thought I’d talk to you. Maybe apologize. Amelia, let me buy you dinner.”
To be fair, she considered it and just as quickly, she decided, Fuck, no.
“You booked me for two hours,” she said, holding the phone tight, holding it up, so he could look at the timer she’d just switched on. “But I am not having dinner with you. In fact, I’m going to lock myself in your room and I’m going to take a nap. A long nap.”
She closed the sliding door behind her and walked down a wide hallway, which led straight into said room. She promptly locked the door, as she’d promised. The bed was large, no narrow, lumpy mattress, springs digging into her back. She turned her head and stared at the curtains. She didn’t sleep, not a wink, and he didn’t attempt to coax her out of there. When the two hours had elapsed, Amelia walked back into the living room.
“At Friendrr, your satisfaction is of the utmost importance to us. I hope you will consider us again for all your social needs,” she said.
Elías was sitting on the sofa. When she spoke, he turned his head, staring at her. He had enjoyed taking pictures, but did not often have his own taken. Yet, she had snapped a rare shot of him with his own camera. He’d had the same expression in that shot: remote, somewhat flimsy, as if he were afraid the raw camera lens might reveal a hidden blemish.
Three months after he’d dumped her, Amelia had deleted that photo from her computer, erasing him from her hard drive and her life after finally clueing in to the fact that he was never coming back. Now she walked out and walked downstairs, not bothering to wait for the elevator.
I don’t know why you’re on Mars, Carl Sagan once said. Amelia had committed his speech to memory, but she couldn’t remember it now, although she’d played it back to Elías, for Elías. Elías, brushing the hair away from her face as she pressed a key on the laptop and the astronomer’s voice came out loud and clear. Which was maybe why she couldn’t, wouldn’t remember it.
4
Amelia had been tired, busy, upset, but the movie playing was too terrible to remember her worries. Too ridiculous. A man in an ape suit jumped around, chasing a young woman, and Lucía chuckled. Amelia, noticing this, chuckled, too. They both glanced at each other. Then they erupted in synchronized laugh-ter. The ape-man stumbled, pointed a raygun at the screen, and they both laughed even more.
Afterward, a servant refilled their glasses with mineral water. Lucía wore a yellow tu
rban, embroidered with flowers.
“Not my finest performance, I suppose,” Lucía said, smiling. “In my defense, the ape costume was terrible. It smelled like rotten eggs for some reason. God knows where they got it from.”
“That doesn’t sound very glamorous.”
Amelia did not ask questions, she simply listened, but for once, Lucía was offering conversation. Months of starchiness and at last, the old woman had seemed to warm up to her. Perhaps this boded well. It would certainly be nice if she could book more hours. Especially considering that damned fiasco with Elías. Would he attempt to book her again? Amelia had asked herself that question a dozen times already. Each time, she thought she needed to phone Miguel, tell him this was her damned ex-boyfriend trying to book her, but she felt too embarrassed.
“It wasn’t,” the older woman said. “The glamor was in the 40s and 50s. I was born too late. The movie industry in Mexico was eroding by the time the 60s rolled around. We made terrible movies, cheap flicks. Go-go dancers and wrestlers and monsters. I might have done a Viking movie if Nahum had gotten the funding for that, but he was flying low and Armand Elba wasn’t doing much better, either. Can you imagine? Viking women in Mexico.”
“Nahum?”
“Nahum Landmann. The director. They billed him as Eduard Landmann. Armando Elba was the scriptwriter. They worked on three films before Nahum went to Chile. The first one did well enough, a Western. And then they shot the Mars movie: Conqueror Women of Mars. Then came that stupid ape movie and the Viking project floundered. Nahum couldn’t get any money and Elba flew back to Europe. Maybe it was for the best.”
“Why?”
“The movies were supposed to be completely different. Well, maybe not the Western. That one turned out close to the original concept. But Nahum saw the Mars movie as a surrealist project. The original title was Adelita of Mars. Can you picture that?”
Amelia could not, although that explained the strange costume choices and even certain shots, which had seemed oddly out of place.
“Women wearing cartridge belts like during the Revolution, a guy dressed like a futuristic Pancho Villa. It was more Luis Buñuel and Simon of the Desert than a B movie. A long prologue, nearly half an hour of it. But then the producers asked for changes. Nahum also demanded changes, Elba kept rewriting and then Nahum rewrote the rewrites. I had new pages every morning. I didn’t know how to say my lines. I didn’t know the ending.”
“Did they make any other movies?”
“Elba wrote erotic science fiction. Paperbacks, I don’t remember in what language. Was it in French or German?” the old woman wondered. “Nahum didn’t do any other movies. He didn’t do anything at all, although he sent me a few sketches from Chile. He had another idea: robot women!”
Lucía smiled broadly and then her painted eyebrows knitted in a frown.
“And then it was ‘73 in Chile and the Coup,” she muttered.
Lucía sipped her mineral water in silence, her lipstick leaving a red imprint on the plastic straw. She glanced at Amelia, as if sizing her up.
“Come. Let me show you something,” the old woman said.
Amelia followed her. She had only been inside the one room in the house where they watched the movies. Lucía took her to her office. There were tall bookcases, a rustic pine desk with painted sunflowers. Several framed posters served as decoration. Lucía stood before one of them.
“Conqueror Women of Mars,” she said. “The first poster. They had it redone. Cristina Garza said, since she was the better-known actress, she should be on the poster. They made a terrible poster to promote the film, but this was a good concept. It was better.”
The poster showed a woman in white, cartridge belts crisscrossing her back. There was one brief scene in the movie where Lucía was dressed like that. The ground beneath the woman’s feet was red and the sky was also red, a cloud of dust. She was looking over her shoulder. The colors were saturated and the font was all-caps, dramatic. But there was an element of gracefulness in the woman’s pose that elevated this from shlock to sheer beauty.
“I like it,” Amelia said.
“Then look at this one,” Lucía said, pointing at another poster. “To raise money for the Viking project, Nahum commissioned an artist to paint this. It was a lost-world story but with a science fiction twist. It was set in the future, after an atomic war has left most of the world uninhabited and giant lizards roam the desert.”
“Where did the Vikings come into that?” Amelia said, puzzled, staring at this other poster, which showed a young Lucía in a fur bikini, clutching the arm of a handsome man who wore an incongruous Viking hat. Behind them, two dinosaurs were engaged in a vicious fight.
“I don’t know. But you have to remember Raquel Welch had made a lot of money in One Million Years B.C. and this was just a few years after that. I suppose any concept was a good concept if they could get half a dozen pretty girls into furry bathing suits.”
“So, why couldn’t the director raise the money for it, then?”
“Same problem as always. Nahum had all these strange ideas he wanted to incorporate into the movie and he kept fighting with Elba. Nahum could have been Alejandro Jodorowsky, but things didn’t quite go that way and besides, there already was one Jewish Latin-American director. In fact, I’m pretty sure Nahum went to Chile because he was so pissed off at Jodorowsky. If Jodorowsky had gone from Chile to Mexico, then Nahum was going from Mexico to Chile.”
“If he had a cast ready, he must have gotten pretty far,” Amelia mused, looking at the names on the poster.
“He had all the main parts figured out. Rodrigo Tinto was going to be the Hero, same as in Mars. He looked great on camera, which is the best I can say of him.”
“You did not like him?” Amelia asked, a little surprised. They seemed to have good chemistry in the movie she’d watched. Then again, it was a film with rayguns and space pirates, nothing but make-believe.
“He had bad breath and a temper.”
“What about the director? Was he likeable?”
“No,” Lucía said. Her smile was dismissive but not toward Amelia. She was thinking back to her acting days.
“Also had a temper?”
“No. Darling, some people are not meant to be liked,” Lucía said, with elegant simplicity.
Amelia did not know what that meant. Perhaps, judging by her lack of gigs on Friendrr, Amelia was one of those persons who were not meant to be liked. And judging by the film director’s lack of success, they might share more than that single quality.
Lucía showed Amelia a couple of more posters before they said goodbye. In the subway concourse, she saw an ad for a virtual assistant, a dancing, singing, 3D hologram: a teenage avatar in a skimpy French maid’s outfit who would call you “Master” and wake you up in the morning with a song.
Her phone, tucked inside her jacket, rang. The specific ringtone she knew. She had a booking.
She pressed a hand against the cell phone and resisted the impulse to check her messages. Finally, in the stairway to her building, Amelia took out the phone and looked at the screen. It was a booking with Elías, just as she’d suspected. She could press the green button and accept it, or click on the big red “no” button and discard it. But Miguel would ring her up and ask for an explanation. He was zealous about this stuff. Each rejected booking was a lost commission.
Amelia’s index finger hovered over the green button. Accepting was easier than speaking to Miguel. She could spend another two hours locked in Elías’ room. After all, he had given her a good rating. Five out of five stars. She remembered when she used to agonize over each rating she obtained, wondering why people hadn’t liked her enough. Three stars, two. Even when it was four, she wondered. She had wanted to be like the popular ones, the ones who got bookings every day. If she could up her ratings by a quarter of a point… and there was a bonus for customer satisfaction. It did not amount to anything, not ever.
There was a sour note in her. It drov
e people away. And Jesus Christ, if she could be more cheerful, nicer, friendlier, she would be, but it was no use.
Green. It didn’t matter. Booking confirmed.
***
The view from Elías’s apartment at night rendered the city strange. It turned it into an entirely different city. In the distance, a large billboard flickered red, enticing people to ‘Visit Mars.’ You could emigrate now; see more information online.
The words ‘Visit Mars’ alternated with the image of a girl in a white spacesuit, holding a helmet under her arm, looking up at the sky. Her face confident. That girl knew things. That girl knew people. That girl was not Amelia, because Amelia was no one.
Elías emerged from the kitchen and handed her a glass of white wine. Amelia continued staring out the tall windows.
“What are you looking at?” he asked.
“That billboard,” she said. The glow of the sign was mesmerizing.
“Mars. It’s always Mars,” he said, raising his own glass of wine to his lips.
“You used to be interested in it.”
“I still am. But things are different now. I just… I thought you’d changed your mind.”
He had definitely changed his mind. There were no photos in the apartment. His old place was small. Photos on the walls, antique cameras on the shelves, hand-painted stars on the ceiling (those had been her notion). An attempt at bohemian living. It had all been scrubbed clean, just like his face, the whole look of him.
“Never.”
“New Panyu, is that still the idea?” he asked.
Amelia nodded. They had weighed all three options. New Panyu seemed the best bet, the largest settlement. They’d quizzed each other in Mandarin. Yī shēng yī shì, whispered against the curve of her neck. Funny how ‘I love you’ never sounded the same in different languages. It lost or gained power. In English, it sounded so plain. In Spanish, it became a promise.
Prime Meridian Page 3
