by Chris Power
‘He’s showing off,’ Nuria said, smiling at the dog. For a few minutes neither of them spoke. Sounds drifted from other houses: the banging of a pan, a lawnmower’s drone. Xoco opened the kitchen door, dropped a bulging plastic bag into a bin and went back inside. Liam stood up, lit a cigarette, and wandered back and forth across the garden as he smoked. Helecho orbited him like a deranged moon, pounced on his shadow then streaked into a bush. The bush shook furiously.
‘What was the carving in that book?’ Liam said.
‘What carving?’
‘A woman with her arms and legs torn off. Wearing a big headdress.’
‘Coyolxauhqui,’ said Nuria.
‘Coil …?’
‘Coyolxauhqui; an Aztec goddess. Her brother killed her. Huitzilopochtli, the god of war and the sun.’
‘Why did he do that?’
Nuria, her eyes closed, tilted her head back so that her face caught the sun. ‘Coyolxauhqui’s mother was Coatlicue, the earth goddess. She was made pregnant by a ball of feathers.’
Liam laughed. ‘A ball of feathers? Really?’
Nuria cocked open an eye, her head still tipped back. ‘You want to hear it or not?’
‘OK,’ Liam said, his hands held up. ‘OK, a ball of feathers. Of course.’
Nuria closed her eye. ‘So Coatlicue got pregnant, but all her other sons and daughters thought she’d been …’ – she waved her hand – ‘sleeping around, you know?’
Liam nodded.
‘So her daughter, Coyolxauhqui, came up with this plot to kill her. But as she and all her brothers – it was an army; Coatlicue had, like, hundreds of kids – as they got near the cave where their mother lived, Coatlicue gave birth to Huitzilopochtli. He came right out of the womb ready for battle, in armour, and he killed his sister and all her brothers ran away across the sky and became the stars. Then, because he saw Coatlicue was sad, he chopped off Coyolxauhqui’s head and threw it into the sky where it became the moon, so the mother could always see her daughter.’
‘Her daughter’s severed head.’
‘Right. Sweet, no?’
Liam looked at Nuria, her eyes closed and her smiling face upturned to the morning sun. He liked her, and felt sorry for her. He wished there was some way to apologise. A tiny brown bird landed on the garden fence. Helecho sprang up, barking, and it flew away.
*
The wedding was in the town of Cuautla, a couple of hours south of Mexico City. The night before the wedding, at the hotel where most of the guests were staying, there was a dinner for close friends and family, to which Cameron and Liam were invited. Liam knew his invitation was a matter of politeness. Cameron was in the bathroom getting ready, and Liam was sitting outside on a small brick patio that belonged to the room. He smoked a cigarette and gazed at the sunlit lawn stretching away from him, studded with small sprinklers. Unexpectedly, he saw a rabbit crouched in the shade of a low hedge, frozen except for its twitching nose. From somewhere out of sight he heard the hum of machinery, a hypnotic sound. A hand gripped his shoulder and he jerked in his seat, his iron chair squealing against the brick.
‘Jesus!’ said Cameron, laughing. ‘What the fuck is wrong with you these days?’
‘Fuck’s wrong with you?’ Liam said, standing.
‘Christ, Li, nothing,’ Cameron snapped back. Then, anxiously, ‘Are you OK?’
‘That fucking tone, Cam, give it a rest. Yes, I’m OK. I’m OK.’
Cameron stepped closer, their chests touching. ‘Fuck off, Li,’ he hissed.
Liam’s breath came fast, shallow. They hadn’t fought physically since they were teenagers, but he wanted to lash out now. He slowed his breathing and forced a laugh. It wheezed out like air from a bike pump. ‘You just surprised me, I’m sorry.’ He brushed ash from his shirt. ‘Look at this, Jesus,’ he said, trying to get Cameron to smile, but he only turned and went back inside.
At dinner Nuria’s father gave a speech that sounded very suave, although Liam had no idea what he was talking about. Miguel’s father, who spoke next, was obviously nervous. Every few lines he would chuckle, but Liam didn’t see anyone else finding what he had to say particularly funny. On the wall, throughout the dinner, a slideshow of photographs played: Miguel and Nuria as children, as teenagers, and together as adults. The pictures showed them on snowy mountains and at beach bars, around tables covered with food, in grey European streets and green forests; already a sprawling life together in a few short years. Liam recognised some of the pictures from Nuria’s Facebook. Gulping wine, he looked at Miguel several tables away, leaning over to hear something his mother was saying. How could he talk to him? He wished he hadn’t come.
After dinner Liam and Cameron joined a group going into Cuautla for a fiesta. The main street of the town was lined with people. Floats moved slowly down the centre of the street and children waved sparklers in the mild winter night – it was much less cold here than it had been in Mexico City. Cameron bought a bottle of tequila and he and Liam passed it back and forth between them. Both of them had been drunk before dinner was over, and were in a rhythm now that would carry on until neither of them could drink any more. If his parents knew how much they sometimes drank together, Liam thought, they would have reconsidered entrusting him to Cameron’s care. He tilted the bottle again. The night flickered and spun. He threw his head back and stared at the sky. Above the floats he saw power cables strung between buildings in single strands, or gathered into sinewy tubes. They ran up and down walls like jungle vines.
They moved through the crowds as the procession wound on, floats filled with drinkers and dancers, and paintings of the Virgin banded with flowers. The braid on the jackets and trousers of the mariachis caught the white of sparklers and yellow from the streetlights. Liam lost Cameron and stumbled alone down quieter streets, with no destination in mind. He decided to take every turn he came to. Some time later, he didn’t know how long, he found himself in a blind alley where a sound system had been set up. The music, breakbeats and blaring trumpets, was deafening; it engulfed him. A man dancing beside him smiled and called out, but Liam couldn’t hear what he said. Was it mockery, or was there desire in the way the man looked at him? He thought of Will in Soho Square. The man called out again, but turned away when Liam didn’t answer. Liam drifted towards the wall of the alley and stared at the ragged posters for clubs and wrestling matches pasted across it. Luz Roja, one said, a red palm tree on white. No cover. He lit a cigarette and picked at the damp label of his beer: green and gold, with a picture of an Indian on it. Later, leaning against a wall somewhere, he watched pebbles on the ground move in diagonals, left to right, without ever getting anywhere. In his hand he held a white plastic bag containing a six-pack of beer and a bottle of mezcal.
He took a taxi back to the hotel. The brightly illuminated grounds were silent and empty. The bushes were emerald lumps, the trunks of the trees seared white by spotlights, the still swimming pool lit to a milky glow. Walking beside it, Liam thought of the Virgin, far to the south, standing on the seabed in the cold night water. He would write a letter, he thought, a letter that would tell Miguel everything. That would explain and change everything.
Cameron wasn’t back from the fiesta. Liam opened the doors to the patio, turned on his bedside light and sat up on the bed, a pad of hotel notepaper resting on a book. He placed an ashtray on the pillow beside him. He alternated sips of mezcal with gulps of beer. Time is always opposed to what is, he wrote. Had he read that somewhere? He didn’t know. He looked at it, crossed it out and took a new sheet of paper. Then he wrote it again. He wrote M above it, and the date. He didn’t know where to begin. He and Miguel had never really talked about how they felt. In fact they had barely talked at all. He decided to write what he would say – what he thought he would say – if things were normal: if Miguel wasn’t with Nuria, or maybe, he didn’t know, if Miguel were a woman. Would that make any difference? He didn’t think so. Once he started he had too much to say. He wrote fast and fille
d pages, the words bunching into jagged peaks and spreading into wormlike lines that spilled off the paper’s edge and onto the cover of the book he was leaning on. He pressed down so hard that his writing veined the back of each sheet of paper. At some point, the sky pink through the open doors and birds calling, he reached for the mezcal bottle and found it was empty. The beer was all gone. Nothing seemed more terrible. He lifted the bottle and tossed it at the wall. The sound was incredibly loud, but as he stared at the shards, waiting, no one came to shout at him, or to ask him what was wrong. The silence hissed in his ears. He leafed through the letter: ten pages. He stretched and felt a wave of fatigue surge through his body.
When he woke up Cameron was standing above him. ‘Li,’ he said sorrowfully, ‘you look like absolute fucking shit.’ He shook his head and waved his hand around the room. ‘What the fuck did you do in here?’
Liam lifted his head a few centimetres from the pillow and saw the stain on the wall where he threw the bottle, the broken glass beneath it.
‘I’m going to breakfast,’ Cameron said. ‘See you whenever.’ He slammed the door behind him: a spike driven through Liam’s head.
When he got out of the shower the bathroom was clouded with steam, the mirror impenetrable. He didn’t wipe it; he didn’t want to see his face. Thinking about the day ahead made his stomach cramp. He put on a pair of black suit trousers and a white guayabera, an embroidered wedding shirt that had been provided for every male guest from overseas. Liam’s seemed to be intended for a shorter, fatter man. Leaving the room he remembered the letter, which he found under his pillow. He started to read it, but stopped himself. He was afraid that if he read it he would throw it away, and then he would never know what could have happened. Passing reception on his way to breakfast he asked for an envelope, and stuffed the letter inside. With a shaking hand he wrote ‘Miguel’ on it. The letter felt heavy in his trouser pocket.
Cameron was sitting at a table beside the pool with two young women Liam recognised from Mexico City, cousins of Nuria. He waved Liam over, making a joke to the women about the sorry state of him. Liam wanted to ask Cameron where he had been all night, but it seemed too difficult to talk. Unable to eat breakfast, Liam shrugged at his ill-fitting shirt and drank cup after cup of black coffee. He knew it was ridiculous, but he felt like the cousins might know, just by looking at him, that he had fucked Miguel.
A few hours later, within the blessedly cool space of the church, he was shrugging still, slumped on the kind of hard, heavily varnished pew he remembered from the Sunday mornings of his childhood. He didn’t pay much attention to the ceremony, but nevertheless found himself murmuring responses from memory. He felt himself tipping into sleep, and bit the inside of his mouth to wake himself up. He was incredibly thirsty, and a cut on his index finger – he had no idea where it was from – was throbbing painfully. Standing at one point, he watched a guest in the row in front of him – a German he had first met in Nice – run his hand down the back of his girlfriend’s tight silk dress and tenderly squeeze first one half-grapefruit buttock, then the other.
There were four hundred guests, and outside the church lines of taxis and minibuses stretched down both sides of the street. The reception was at a finca outside town. Aperitifs were served on an island in the middle of a small lake, where two guitarists and a trumpeter moved through the crowd playing lulling music.
The more margaritas Liam drank, the better he felt. He stood at the bar drinking glass after glass. He chain-smoked. Every few minutes he stuck a finger into his back pocket to feel the letter.
For dinner they moved to a large, open-sided pavilion. On one side of it lay the lake, beyond which a steep wooded slope ran up to the finca. On the pavilion’s opposite side, a long grass lawn climbed gently to a distant line of trees. ‘When you get to your table, tip your waiter,’ Nuria’s elder brother had said. ‘Your glass will never be empty.’ Liam handed over all the money he had and drank several glasses of wine before the first course was served. He was sitting with two Mexican couples and a couple from Belgium he had spoken to in passing in Acapulco. When the Belgian woman asked him what he did he said, ‘Nothing,’ and when one of the Mexican men asked him how he knew Nuria and Miguel he said, ‘I don’t.’ He was ignored after that. He looked around for Cameron but couldn’t see him. Miguel and Nuria sat at a small table for two, in the centre of the floor, with a large belt of open space around them. Liam watched them eating, each one occasionally murmuring something that made the other smile. Miguel had his back to Liam, but Liam kept looking at him in the hope that he might turn around.
At the closest table to Miguel and Nuria sat the parents. Father talked to father, mother to mother. Liam decided the men were talking politics while the women spoke about Miguel and Nuria. Mothers always know their children better, he thought that was probably true. But they don’t know everything. He tried to imagine Miguel’s parents sharing a table with his own mum and dad. Even as a fantasy the image wouldn’t cohere. All he could see were his parents sitting alone in some undefined space. How could he ever explain this to them?
As the starters were being cleared Liam raised his glass. ‘Miguel and Nuria,’ he said. Everyone at his table raised their glass and loudly repeated the toast. Hearing them, Miguel and Nuria looked over, smiled and raised their own glasses in response. The parents did the same, smiling curiously at Liam.
Liam made the same toast a few minutes later, as the main courses were being brought out. This time his tablemates didn’t respond with the same enthusiasm, and the newlyweds didn’t hear or acknowledge them. When Liam shouted their names again, a few moments later, he heard only uncertain laughter from those around the table. He sat in silence for a minute, then said, ‘Miguel and Nuria,’ quietly. He stood, knocking his cutlery noisily across his plate, and began to say something about the newlyweds being the sun and all the guests orbiting planets, but he lost his way. ‘They are beautiful,’ he said, which seemed like a way to end it, and fell backwards into his seat. He didn’t say another word during dinner. When the waiter brought dessert, he left Liam a bottle of tequila.
As dinner ended a band started playing on a stage at one end of the pavilion. The tables were cleared and the dancefloor filled. Liam found himself on the stage with Cameron and a few other overseas guests. The bandleader was teaching them a complicated dance routine none of them could follow. A plank was brought out with five tequila glasses stuck in it, and they all had to squat and bend backwards at the same time to drink their shot. Later, Liam didn’t know how much later, he was sitting with Cameron at the edge of the dancefloor, both leaning in so they could hear each other above the band. A half-empty bottle of tequila stood on the floor between them. ‘What the fuck is wrong with you?’ Cameron said. Liam felt like he was repeating the question, but didn’t remember what they had been talking about. He wanted to find Miguel.
Cameron jabbed his shoulder. ‘Are you listening to me?’ he shouted.
Liam stood, shaking his head. ‘I need to do something,’ he said.
It was like stepping into a rowing boat, the way the ground lurched beneath him. He stumbled along the edge of the lake. He climbed the twisting path to the finca. The night air felt like a substance; it gathered itself in buzzing shapes. He walked under large, densely leaved trees and the darkness dripped down from the leaves and pooled at his feet. He stopped and stood still. Had he been going somewhere? He left the path and sat down at the base of a tree. He would give Miguel the letter and then he would stay. He would stay for as long as it took. He knew Miguel had feelings for him. It would be difficult, it would be painful, but it would be worth it. It was everything. He saw images of their life to come, like photographs. He stood up and wiped dirt from the seat of his trousers. He felt energy surge thickly inside him as he stretched his arms up towards the tree’s black branches.
He strode back down to the pavilion, but when he reached it he couldn’t go inside. He walked around it instead. It was quieter on
the other side, and he leaned against a pole and looked in at the candlelit tables, at figures sitting and talking around them, and at the mass of bodies dancing just beyond. He saw Miguel leave the pavilion and walk off into the darkness. He followed. Miguel stopped, and Liam watched him light a cigarette. He wanted me to follow him, he thought, but when he said his name Miguel turned, startled. He started to speak but Liam cut him off. ‘I’m going to stay in Mexico,’ he said. As he spoke one hand went to his pocket and grasped the letter.
‘You love México so much?’ Miguel said.
‘I love you.’
Miguel laughed. Liam shoved him. Miguel shoved him back. ‘What are you even here for?’ Miguel said.
‘I came to see you,’ Liam said. ‘I came,’ he hesitated, ‘I came so we could be together.’
‘This is my fucking wedding,’ said Miguel. He poked a finger into Liam’s chest. ‘There’s nothing between us. Nothing.’
Miguel’s finger remained on Liam’s chest. Liam gently closed his hand around Miguel’s wrist. Miguel tore his hand away and then they were down, twisting on the grass. Liam pressed Miguel’s face into the ground. Miguel put his knee in Liam’s back. Liam put his arm across Miguel’s throat and pressed down, then the world flipped and he was pinned, looking up, the stars crowding around Miguel’s head. Miguel poked his finger in Liam’s eye, a burning shock. He screamed and Miguel froze above him. Liam couldn’t open his eyes. ‘Lo siento,’ he heard Miguel say, panting. Liam shrugged Miguel off and rolled over onto his knees, his eye jagged with pain. He heard Miguel move away, breathing loudly.
A few minutes later Liam re-entered the pavilion, hot and damp with sweat. He had grass stains on his shirt, which he saw was badly torn. Nuria was on the stage, singing with the band. Liam sat down at a table on the fringes of the pavilion, its empty chairs standing at angles to one another, and listened to her. Her voice was deep and strong. Two mariachis, dressed in baize green, accompanied her on guitar and trumpet. She scurried forwards and backwards, impelled by the drama of the song. She knelt down and cut the air with her hand. She pointed accusingly at the crowd, snapped her head away in disgust, then turned back to them with imploring eyes, the words coming from her like sobs.
