Chapter 6
Stepping inside the café that first time, my impression was of a deep shift in temperature, as if we were entering a cave or a chapel.
That particular reverence of cool, dark places.
The small, narrow room had an old-world sort of elegance, with round marble tables and bentwood chairs and worn Moorish floor tiles in shades of turquoise and cobalt. We were the only ones there.
I followed Louise to a table near the back.
As we settled into our seats, her face bloomed into a broad smile.
An asymmetry I hadn’t noticed before. There was a faint scar above her jawline, around which the skin had the unnatural sheen of scar tissue; was this the result of the same accident that had damaged her leg?
A new warmth had come over her, as though we were old friends.
She began to reminisce about the man with the peaches, laughing about the look on my face when she handed it to me, asking solicitously did I like the café; wasn’t it simply marvelous?
I nodded and prattled my agreement—it was charming, so chic, the very sort of space I covet.
“Ah, so you covet spaces,” she said, narrowing her eyes as if the fact were worthy of deep interest. I half waited for the dry remark, but her archness had vanished. “I knew you’d appreciate it. Mexicans have such an extraordinary sense of style. And wait until you taste the coffee!”
“In those days, I used to walk everywhere, miles and miles, clear out of town. I met my husband here, Allan. He was an extraordinary painter. Everyone admired him, important people whose work already hung in museums. We were so poor we barely had enough money to eat,” she said, laughing as though it were wonderful to be penniless, an extravagant gift.
“I used to hunt for maguey worms and jumiles, which are small beetles. A woman named Nuria taught me how to cook them. She was one of Fernando Navarro’s lovers—of course you know Navarro. ”
I nodded, though I didn’t. A woman had stepped into the café, and I followed her with my eyes as she sat, setting her pebbled leather tote bag onto the floor.
She was youngish, maybe twenties, with a scarf tied around her neck.
She must have been a regular because, without taking her order, the waiter nodded in her direction and she smiled back her assent, then crossed her legs, reaching to remove a worn paperback and, tucking a thick strand of black hair behind her ear, starting to read.
I could see the black marks of words on the page.
I suddenly wanted to know what the book was; to be the book held in her hands, or to be her, so perfectly self-contained.
Louise was animatedly speaking of her life with Allan, how they used to run far out along the Obraje road at dawn before that was a thing people did; the parties they threw that lasted until morning, everyone crowded into their tiny living room.
“Everyone came to our place, passing through. Burroughs, Ginsberg, Kerouac.”
“What about Neal Cassady?” He had famously died here, passed out on the train tracks.
“Oh, sure,” Louise said, as if it were of no account. “I met Paul Bowles here, too. Later lived with him in Morocco, in fact.”
I gaped. “You lived with him?”
“You don’t know the half,” she laughed, pronouncing it in her old-Hollywood way, haahf.
“Among our set, though, it was the Mexicans that most interested me. Fernando Navarro. Now there was someone worthwhile.” She narrowed her gaze in the already familiar way.
Her beauty could be almost startling, revealing itself in flashes, only at certain angles, like suddenly seeing a woman’s shape beneath a dress in a gust of wind. “And Nuria you would have loved.”
The declaration seemed to announce an intimacy between us: not liked, but loved.
In its wake, I blushed. “A woman like Eve,” Louise continued, “free and without shame,” telling me how the two of them had roamed through the hills and washed each other’s hair with a hose in the barren yard behind Louise’s apartment, shrieking at the cold.
As she was finishing this memory, the waiter arrived with our coffees on a small silver tray.
He set the cups down with exaggerated care, turning them slowly in their saucers, some inscrutable rotation that only he knew where to end.
He was short and sturdily built, with dark Indigenous features, his crisp white apron reaching clear to his knees.
Louise watched him and leaned back in her chair, resuming her air of superiority and reserve.
Given her quasi-socialist affect and talk of having been penniless, this surprised me.
And yet it seemed correct in a way I couldn’t fully pinpoint.
As he was straightening to leave, she said something to him in an undertone, gesturing, after which he smiled appraisingly at me.
“Muy bonita, ?sí?” Louise said with disinterest, as if I were a photograph.
“Sí, senora. Se parece a usted.” She resembles you.
“My God, this coffee,” I said, to mask the pleasure I’d taken at being mistaken for Louise’s daughter, although it was truly the best coffee I’d ever tasted. Glancing back into Louise’s face, I saw that something had shifted.
“Sometimes I wonder if I should have come back. They say places change more than people do. Do you believe that?”
I didn’t think people changed at all, but before I could answer, she said, “I lost him here, you know. My husband. Allan. I was pregnant at the time. I know, poor me, blah, blah, blah.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said, adding the customary platitudes that I didn’t fully believe, how horrible life could be, how unfair.
“Why should life be fair?” she scoffed. “Fairness, justice, inalienable right; the inventions of privileged men to justify their status in a brutal world.” She glared at me.
“Of course, being back here, I see Allan everywhere. After I bought my house in Montes,” she went on after a pause, “I hired a man to take everything across the border for me, things I’d had in storage in California.
This is everything I own in the world, you understand, and…
he doesn’t show. Three days I wait for him, without a word.
I’m sleeping on my hard tile floor without so much as a blanket.
When he finally arrives—this idiot I should have known better than to hire, this friend of a friend—I immediately notice the boxes are jumbled together with other people’s things, and some of my boxes are missing.
And then one of my husband’s paintings has a gash in it.
There’s a hole this big”—she gestured—“clear through it.”
“Louise, that’s awful.”
“He had the nerve to tell me it was like that when he put it in the truck.”
“What did you do?”
“I went mad is what I did. For weeks, I was out of my mind, cursing like a crazy woman, wandering the streets. I was going to kill someone.”
Something in the way she said it made me think, She could; she’s capable of it.
The thought didn’t horrify me. On the contrary, it allied me to her.
Through her story, I’d perceived a set of shared beliefs: that life is volatile, and in the end, things are apt to be solved with violence of one kind or another.
As much as I had struggled to eradicate this from my life, some unmovable part of me still accepted it as true and viewed anyone who didn’t—even Tom and my children—as pitiable or weak.
“The things from that time are so important to me,” Louise was saying.
“The few I’ve managed to keep, anyway. Three oil paintings of Allan’s, some notebooks he scribbled in, a few pieces of jewelry.
One afternoon maybe a month after I arrived, I’m walking past a shop near Independencia, and I see my jacket hanging in the window. ”
“What do you mean?”
“He’d sold my things. The van driver.”
I must have looked incredulous because Louise said angrily, “I worked in fashion for years, in Paris. This jacket was virtually one of a kind. I won’t bore you with details.
It was an Ala?a, size 32, black with bronze buttons.
To see it hanging in a junk shop on the side of the road!
The stupid girl didn’t even know what she had. ”
“Did you confront her?”
Louise snorted. “It wasn’t worth it. People like that.”
I had a sudden reckless desire to find the jacket and buy it back for her, as if to dispel any suggestion that I, too, was a person like that.
“Your bracelet is lovely,” she said, apropos of nothing.
I smiled, touching the bracelet I’d bought with Tom, the one he’d looped his fingers through, tugging me to our bedroom.
“May I ask where you got it?”
I shrugged. “The Tuesday market, I think?”
“You don’t understand, do you?”
It was more a statement than a question.
The waiter was approaching with our bill, and for a few breaths, I retreated into the impassiveness of his features.
The high cheekbones and flattened nose, the deep wells of his eyes that seemed as if they had witnessed, unblinking, the whole violent panoply of human existence.
“La cuenta,” he quietly announced, setting it onto the table.
Louise had turned sideways, her eyes brimmed with tears, and after an indeterminate pause, I heard myself ask if I could pay with a credit card, and the man apologize in his overly formal Spanish, “Disculpe la molestia.”
When I laid the fifty-peso note onto the table, Louise did not protest that she’d invited me, or remark on my lie that I didn’t have my wallet.
“I suppose you think me disgustingly bourgeois,” she said, without looking at me.
“Only a bracelet, you’re thinking, a thing.
I don’t blame you. In any other circumstance… ” Her voice trailed away.
“I’m sorry, I don’t—”
“It was stupid of me to pack it in the moving truck when I could have worn it. A gift from my late husband.”
All in a rush, I understood. “Oh my God, this is yours? Here, please take it,” I said, falling over my words, “it’s nothing, I have too many bracelets anyway.”
She shook her head, no, she couldn’t possibly. But I was already pulling the bracelet from my wrist, reaching it toward her with relief and even joy, releasing a tinkling laugh as I pressed it into her hand, as if to declare I was above desiring such things; I had everything I needed.
“Then I want you to have something in exchange,” she said as she fastened the clasp.
“Don’t be ridiculous! I’m only glad to be able to give it back to you. But it’s so crazy, isn’t it? Of all the people to pass through the market, that it would be me who bought it, and then wearing it this morning. It’s incredible.”
I remember I used that word precisely, then immediately smiled, as if I’d raised the specter of credibility only to signal my indifference to it, the relative unimportance of facts in the forging of deep connections.
It was then Louise reached across the table.
That was the first contact between us: her lean hands wrapping mine with surprising strength, all angles and bones; the acquiescing softness of my own hands in hers when she repeated:
“I want to give you something in return.”
I laughed, tilted my head to my shoulder. It’s nothing.
She smiled, showing her beautiful white teeth. “I knew from the moment I saw you. I thought, here’s one of the good ones. Here’s one of my own.”