Chapter 5
Nearly a week passed, and I didn’t see her again.
My days were filled only with my children, with Tom and María, the people I encountered in town.
The handsome fruit seller with whom I’d begun exchanging shy hellos.
The manager of the carnicería where I bought ground beef, who knew my name and had taken it upon himself to help me learn Spanish.
Certain strangers, too, had become familiar.
The men sprawled drinking in the doorways of the Cuesta, the maids trudging uphill.
The amputee in his Yankees hat who sat outside the market.
The old blind couple who danced for spare coins, him playing a harmonica, her banging a tambourine.
One night as we lay naked in bed, Tom told me he had to fly back to Minneapolis to reassure the American investors.
He was anxious about what he would tell them.
We had a way of calming one another, laughing at adversity.
I pressed my body close against his. “What if you get fired,” I teased him, “and Bill kicks us out?”
“Most likely that’s what will happen,” Tom said with a laugh. “We can always live in a yurt back home.”
“Yeah, I don’t think so. The kids—you know—we’ve become accustomed to a certain way of life.”
“One day, my children, all of this…” He gestured into the darkness, both of us laughing at the absurdity of it, that this could be our life.
Underneath our banter, though, I was childishly nervous about being alone.
In the fifteen years since we first met, we’d scarcely spent a night apart.
What if María asked me something I didn’t understand?
What if the children were late to school?
In Mexico, schools are gated; after the final bell rings, no student is permitted to enter.
I had occasionally seen late parents cursing and banging in vain at the tall locked metal door, or children in their plaid uniforms trailing their mothers through town in the middle of the day.
The next morning, when I drove him to the airport in Léon, although the directions were hardly complicated, I kept asking him nervously, Am I going the right way?
When I return, I’ll take this same route?
Enacting a particular kind of helplessness out of habit.
I had lived my childhood in a similar state of disorientation whenever we moved to another street, another town or city.
That evening, we spoke several times via Skype, Tom reassuring me.
The next morning, I wrote down the things María needed for comida, making a phonetic approximation of the words I hadn’t yet learned.
When I went downstairs to check that the children were ready, I found Ida still in her underwear.
“Why aren’t you dressed?” I demanded. With agonizing slowness, she began to argue about which uniform she was supposed to wear.
There were two, depending on whether it was a gym day or not, the schedule shifting often with the seemingly endless string of holidays.
María had washed and ironed the skirt; I could hear her moving about upstairs, and in desperation thought of enlisting her.
Ida’s Spanish was better than mine, and she respected María unquestioningly. But there wasn’t time.
“Fine,” I relented, “wear the one you want.”
“So you agree I’m right?” she said, her eyes flashing brightly.
Hurrying them through the door and down the long, narrow stone staircase, I looked for other children in uniforms on the sidewalk and didn’t see any.
After all my worrying, they were going to be locked out of school.
I’d have to take them to the market with me and everyone would know what had occurred, my incompetence.
Then, halfway down the hill, something wonderful happened: A battered pickup truck pulled over just in front of us, and a mother I recognized from school leaned out the window. “Come on,” she called. “Throw the kids into the back with Adriana; otherwise, no way you’ll make it!”
Henry’s and Ida’s eyes grew wide watching Adriana, in her spotless uniform and immaculately braided blond hair, clamber into the dusty flatbed.
They glanced at me, not believing their good luck when I nodded my consent.
I was already sliding into the passenger seat.
As we pulled forward, the woman introduced herself in English. “Fabiola.”
“Mucho gusto, me llamo Sally.”
“Yes, I’ve wanted to meet you.” She laughed. “I’ve been curious, you know?”
Behind us, I could hear Henry screaming with joy each time we jostled over a pothole.
I turned to smile at them through the window, Ida not meeting my eye but instead staring ecstatically into the emptiness before her.
“This is like an amusement ride for them,” I said.
“And it’s so kind of you to help us out. ”
“Please, it’s nothing. We women have to stick together.”
It was the sort of sentiment I would never have spoken; as a rule, I counted on no one but Tom, and least of all women. Still, I was touched, gratified at being thought of as something other than an outsider. “Your English is excellent, by the way.”
“It has to be,” she said with a dry laugh. “I work in the Fábrica.”
The Fábrica Aurora was a former textile mill that had been converted a decade before to expensive shops and galleries that catered to wealthy tourists.
I felt a flash of dissonance, wanting to commiserate as I would have done back home, to distinguish myself from the people she waited on.
Ida loved going there, walking among the little studios where the artisans allowed you to poke around or to get a hot chocolate from the overpriced café.
I sometimes took her as a treat, following the dirt path that ran along the arroyo beside school.
We were by now crossing the little bridge.
Fabiola pulled to a stop, and I thanked her again, the children already leaping from the truck bed and running across the dusty street.
I stood on the sidewalk, watching them scatter across the grass toward their classrooms, Fabiola’s daughter stopping halfway to tie her shoe. A moment later, the secretary appeared with her heavy ring of keys, her heels clicking over the tiled corridor.
I ran my errands, exultant. When they were done, rather than go straight home I walked to the Jardín.
On a bench in a narrow strip of sunlight, I watched the town waking up.
The newsman arranging his papers along the low stone wall, lurid photos offering peeks at car crashes and drug killings.
The shoeshine man still awaiting his first customer, singing to himself as he slowly lit his cigar.
Some children ran up, too young for school or else too poor.
The youngest carried a box of Chiclets. “What flavor,” they clamored, “how many,” falling against each other, their chins wet, mouths full of gum.
“Hey, lady, where are you from?” one said in halting English before, laughing wildly, they ran away.
I tilted my face to the sun. Vivo en Los Balcones, I smilingly recited to myself.
Vivo cerca de la Cuesta de San José, en una casa blanca.
Tengo una buena vista. As I was repeating this last phrase, a shadow fell over me.
“Oh, hello,” I breathed, tenting my eyes to make out her backlit form.
“I know you, I think, from the school?” I’d spoken in English, making my voice lift into a question though there was none; I’d recognized her immediately as the woman from the hill.
She still hadn’t spoken. “I’m Sally, by the way. ”
“Marvelous,” she said. There was a trace of an accent, the way old film stars speak, mah-velous. “Sally! I’ve never met one of those before.”
“Well, I’m honored.”
She stared as if to say, We’ll see about that. “You’re very pretty,” she finally said. “Whatever that’s worth.”
I laughed, liking her archness. She told me her name was Louise Nieman.
We began to chat, the way people do in a foreign country when they discover they speak the same language, despite the twenty or so years’ difference in our ages.
She was curious how long I had lived in San Miguel and whether I liked it.
Wasn’t it nice now that summer had ended and so many of the tourists had gone?
She had an eager and engaged way of listening—not the way most people listen, as if already composing their answers, but as though a mutually delightful surprise were slowly being unwrapped.
I found myself recounting to her the way it had stormed the day we arrived, releasing the heaviest rainfall I’d ever seen.
In minutes, the Cuesta was gushing, brimming above the gutters.
The four of us had run into the emptied streets of our neighborhood that always reminded me of an abandoned movie set, lifting our arms, the rain striking us like buckshot.
When I finally stopped speaking, I was flushing hotly. Louise continued to stare down at me, blinking slowly, assessing me. After an excruciating silence, she announced, “You’re interesting. ‘Rain like buckshot.’ You must be a writer.”
I shrugged as if to allow for that possibility, pleased by it. “But what about you, Louise? Have you lived here long?”
“Only a month, although I lived here before, with my husband—oh, ages and ages ago. No doubt before you were born,” she added disapprovingly, then abruptly laughed, as if deciding I couldn’t be held responsible for that, my relative youth.
She still hadn’t sat down. It occurred to me that it might be painful or difficult for her to do so, because of her leg.
She was telling me that she had seen me around town.
“You and your husband, holding hands. You must be terribly in love.”
“Oh, yes, terribly,” I repeated with a laugh, as though we were sharing a joke about love; there was something foolish about it.
Almost immediately, I had a flash of annoyance, both with myself and her.
I can’t stand women bonding over the inadequacies of men.
I started to gather up my plastic grocery bag, saying, “I should probably get going.”
“Back to your maid and cook?” she laughed.
And for the second time that morning, I wanted to differentiate myself from a certain kind of American, to disavow my apparent privilege.
“I’ll bet you live in Los Balcones,” she went on.
“Some beautiful modern house built by an American. Not that I hold it against you. It’s magnificent, Balcones, no? ”
Hearing her affectation, the no at the end of the sentence, I smiled to myself, gaining back a bit of ground, and was surprised when she said:
“Come have coffee with me.”
“You mean—now?” I glanced toward the big café on the corner of the square, El Rincón, where a waiter stood in shiny black pointed shoes with his hands folded behind his back.
“That place is only for tourists,” she said. “I know a wonderful place, I’m sure you’ve never been.” There was something of a dare in the way she said it. A critique tucked within the flattery of her asking.
As I began to follow her away, already composing the clever things I would say, how I would arrange my face, all the ways I would endear myself to her, I was aware of adjusting my naturally deep stride, falling a step behind her because she limped and the sidewalks were too narrow to accommodate us side by side.
We reached the corner where in the evening a group of men in matching vests sang bawdy songs, passing around a jug of red wine, then began the steep descent along Hernandez Macias.
I looked this way and that. Mostly I looked at the back of her head, expectantly at first, then mindlessly, studying its shape, the curving length of her neck.
She had that ability, especially rare among women, of establishing a companionable silence.
She seemed above the usual feints at getting to know you.
She didn’t ask what had brought me to San Miguel, or the circumstances that allowed us to live here, or what I did for work.
When we’d been walking maybe fifteen minutes, time and distance harder for me to gauge because of her limping gait, I realized that we were now in a part of town I’d never seen.
The sun had risen higher and I was becoming hot.
I took my sweater off and tied it around my waist. “This way,” she said, leading me into a callejón so narrow that I could almost touch the houses on either side.
I had a prickle of foreboding, not entirely unpleasant.
We passed a toothless woman weaving straw dolls in a doorway.
I allowed myself to be led, yielding to her the way I often yielded to Tom or the children; that same fuzzy, pleasurable sensation of receding, allowing my desires to be subsumed by someone else’s.
Louise drew to a stop before a one-handed man selling peaches from a fraying straw basket.
“How much?” she asked in a brusque, toneless Spanish that mortified me.
I was always fastidious in my politeness.
The man, unfazed, quoted her a price for the whole basket.
She raised herself up, rummaging into the big black bag she’d had the day I first saw her.
“I’ll take one,” she said without further negotiation, giving the man a single coin, with the same hand passing me the fruit. “Taste it,” she commanded.
An oppressive smell of cooking hung in the air as I took the fruit from her, warm from the sun; a mingling of exhilaration and fear at the thought of eating something on the street like that, unwashed, her staring at me as I drew it close.
As I was about to take a bite, it struck me: I had left my groceries in the park beneath the bench. “Louise, I’m sorry—”
She cut me off: “Save it for later, then.”
“No, it’s not that. I’m embarrassed.”
She wasn’t looking at me any longer. She’d taken a pack of cigarettes from her bag and was fiddling with it in a display of impatience.
I reproached myself: What was I doing here, with this strange woman?
I wanted to leave, get back to my groceries and on with my day.
Yet for some reason, what I said was: “It’s just that I don’t have any cash with me. ”
“Don’t be daft,” she said. “What do you need cash for? I invited you.”
And with that, we began again to walk.