Chapter 7
Undoubtedly there were a few more words exchanged between us. But in that way memory has of burnishing things to their essence, they are the last: Here’s one of my own. Her holding my hands in hers, telling me that she wanted to give me something.
At one point, remembering where I first saw her, I had asked if she had a connection to the school.
Not at present, she’d said, although she hadn’t ruled out the possibility.
She might teach English literature to the advanced students, or European history.
The only impediment was having to walk to and from school—not that she lived far away, but the afternoon sun was so punishing.
“It must be dreadful for you, too,” she said with a knowing smile, “walking your little ones all the way up the Cuesta de San José.”
I might have asked how she’d guessed I lived in Balcones, and knew I lived off of the Cuesta. Instead, I was self-deprecating:
“I’m embarrassed to admit it, most afternoons I drive.”
“Never apologize for yourself. I’d kill for a car.”
“Where do you live?”
“Montes de Loreto.”
“No!” I said, worrying it had sounded gruff, as if I didn’t believe her. Or, worse, that I was horrified by the notion of living in such a place.
She must have taken my surprise for unfamiliarity, because she laughed and said, “Believe me, it’s not what you’re used to. There’s basically nothing there. I don’t even have a phone.”
I was eager to maintain her misperception; it was in Montes, after all, that Tom’s development was being built, taking over a neighborhood that had been deemed negligible, a project I was certain she’d disapprove of. I said, “I’d be happy to give you a ride whenever you want.”
“Don’t be absurd,” she said flatly.
“No, really, I’d love to! I love seeing other people’s houses.
And you could meet my daughter,” I added, guessing Louise would be impressed by her.
How quickly we offer up our children, without even a thought.
I looked at my watch, alarmed at seeing it was nearly noon.
“Ah, but I need to go. My son will be getting out soon.”
“Go, then—off with you!”
As I was about to leave, on an impulse, I bent down to kiss her cheek. At the last second, she lifted her face to me, my lips glancing her mouth. I tried to pass it off, laughing and kissing the other cheek in the European way before rushing out.
As soon as I reached the sidewalk, I realized I had no idea how to get back.
I hurried to a corner, looking helplessly for a landmark.
Where was I? I went blindly down another street, as I would in a dream, dazed.
At the corner—a miracle—I saw a cab and ran to catch it, breathlessly telling the driver the name of the school.
I was amazed when, after no more than a few turns, we began to speed along a familiar stretch of the Ancha.
In relief, I leaned back, the wind picking up, stirring the heat in which people were going about their day beyond my window.
Mothers and their young children. A stray dog limping along the side of a high stone wall, ribs jutting.
I was intoxicated with belonging, as though I had arrived into a truer version of myself.
I even chatted with the driver, my Spanish for once coming easily.
As we were pulling up to the school, I found a pen and a scrap of paper in my purse, scribbling ALLAN NIEMAN and, in smaller letters beneath that, Fernando Navarro.
Then I handed the driver two twenty-peso notes, refusing any change even though the set fare anywhere in town was only thirty, brimming with confidence as I crossed the street to the courtyard.
The children were just being brought out, all of them holding hands.
Two tidy rows. Some—the ones who had been especially good, all of them girls—had little gold stars stuck to their foreheads.
When Henry reached me, I hugged him and kissed him, overjoyed.
“Why are you so happy?” he said.
I laughed. “How would you like to have lunch in the market?”
We went to the counter where I had only ever seen Mexican families sit, drinking mango licuados out of plastic bags tied around thick paper straws.
When he’d finished, I walked him to the butcher’s, the only shopkeeper I knew by name, so that he could see how handsome my son was and read the name of the town’s best school on his uniform.
“Impossible, you cannot be old enough to be the mother of this young man,” he said, rising from the desk where he always sat, rumpling Henry’s hair.
“?Quieres un chocolate, Henry? ?Un caramelo?” He took the sweets from the drawer.
“Ah, but I see it now, he resembles you,” he said, using the same phrase the waiter had used with Louise.
“Sí, en los ojos.” Lifting a finger, he recited a little rhyming couplet: “Más lejos ven los sesos que los ojos.” The eye sees, but the mind sees farther.
“Her Spanish lesson for the day,” he told Henry, crossing his arms over the brightly colored sweater he always wore regardless of the weather.
In an earlier life, he had taught English literature at a university in Guanajuato.
He kept a stack of Great Books on his desk; when the shop wasn’t busy, he would read over the phone to his wife.
“You must help your mother remember,” he said in Spanish, Henry nodding solemnly.
“Isn’t José Luis nice?” I prompted him as soon as we’d left.
“Don’t you love it here?” I wanted him to confirm my feelings, that way we crave to hear our opinions in the mouths of our children.
Yes, he said. He asked to visit the stall where they sold luchadora masks.
This time, I didn’t just let him look but bought him one, and a blue cape.
We went to the library to wait for Ida to be done, to the outdoor pavilion where the old men sat all day playing chess.
Henry danced around the fountain, kicking his feet high into the air, uttering Spanish phrases he’d learned from television, making the old men laugh.
It was only after we’d collected Ida and were halfway up the Cuesta that I remembered the groceries.
For the remainder of the walk, I was plagued by thoughts of what María had done when I didn’t come home; had she worried, been angry?
Already our lives had become inseparable.
From the trash we discarded, the bedsheets, the air itself, María knew when I had my period, when Tom and I had made love, when we were fighting.
On a shelf in the laundry room, she kept broken toys we’d thrown away, wrinkled magazines, even torn underwear.
But when we arrived home, the comida was set out like always, and she was perfectly equable, without a hint of bitterness, saying only: “Qué bueno que ya llegaron.”
This, too, stoked my sense of belonging, the particular freedom of knowing your place within an established order. Still, I apologized: “Lo siento, María. Discúlpame.”
She shook her head in embarrassment. “Ay, no. No hay problema, senora. Es una comida americana para los ninos.”
Ida and Henry looked at each other in surprise—an American meal?
As soon as she had gone back to the kitchen, they began peeking under the lids at the strange assortment.
Leftover green beans, zucchini with white cheese melted over it, two hard-boiled eggs cut into quarters.
The main dish was spaghetti, coated in a textureless red sauce.
Henry was the first to taste it. “It’s good,” he proclaimed.
Ida took a minuscule forkful and narrowed her eyes in deliberation.
“It’s ketchup,” she said. She waved her hand, saying in her actress voice, “Waiter, I’ll have the pasta with ketchup sauce, and make it snappy.
” We all laughed, but they gobbled it up.
After the meal, we played a game in the courtyard, pretending to be characters from a favorite picture book, elaborating the story until it started to grow dark.
Then I bathed them, drawing pictures in the suds on their backs; I let them eat cereal in their pajamas on the couch, watching a dumb Hollywood movie on television.
It made us laugh, seeing the well-known faces open their mouths and Spanish come out.
I had to admit, certain things were easier without Tom.
I could do things when they suited me. I could give them my undivided attention, spoil them without reproach.
That night, though, I had trouble settling down to sleep.
In the big bed, I kept to my usual side, listening to the faint tinny sounds of the mariachi bands roaming the Jardín below, the thuds of fireworks that sounded like distant thunder.
I turned the light back on and read, page after page, without comprehension.
I turned the light back off. I touched myself without real pleasure, only to release something, like voiding the bladder.
Still, I couldn’t relax. In my agitation, I had begun to recast the morning’s events as a series of humiliations: my hackneyed attempts at storytelling, my meek docility in following her, my slowness in understanding about the bracelet.
More than anything, I kept returning to Louise saying that she wanted to give me something.
From earliest childhood, I had trained myself not to have expectations.
It’s life, I had insisted to myself when frightening things happened, when the boy from our neighborhood threw rocks at me and, one February afternoon, exposed himself, standing above a dirty crust of snow, his sweatpants bunched beneath his hands.
There’s only you; nothing lasts; don’t let yourself get soft.
Finally I went upstairs, barefoot though the stone floor was freezing and there were sometimes scorpions.
In the kitchen, I found a half-empty bottle of wine.
Drinking straight from the bottle, I went to the living room and opened my laptop.
The sound of it turning on was soothing.
My homepage was the New York Times. An article caught my eye, about a woman who had pretended to be a 9/11 victim.
There was a picture of her smiling next to Rudolph Giuliani.
She’s fat was my first thought, after which I laughed shrilly into the vaulted stillness.
I wanted to confess my reaction to Tom; I could parse such things with him—my internalized self-hatred; the way prejudice persists even, maybe especially, among educated people.
I was about to open my email and write him.
Instead, I typed “Allan Nieman painter” into the search bar, disappointed when nothing turned up.
I tried various different spellings, different search parameters, all without success.
Then again, I didn’t know if he was American, the year he’d died, if he was, in fact, well-known; maybe he and Louise had different last names.
Appeased by this last thought—of course that must be it!
—I typed “Fernando Navarro.” This time, my screen filled with images of artwork, a link to a Wikipedia page, a black-and-white photograph of him above a list of biographical information.
On the website of a gallery in Mexico City, I found a portal of available work, a series of etchings inspired by a Kafka story with which I was unfamiliar.
The first depicted a monkey in a tree, with two hunters aiming guns beneath him.
The lower third of the image was a tangle of vines and blooms shaped like Chinese lanterns in which more monkeys were half hidden, screeching in fear or ecstasy.
After several minutes, I clicked ahead to the next image.
There were seven etchings in all. Farcical, obscene, they depicted monkeys in sailor suits holding phallic exploding champagne bottles; blowing noisemakers; crossing high wires; screaming, fucking, prancing with exposed swollen testicles.
They revolted me. I couldn’t decide if they were good.
After the second or maybe third time through, I realized I was shivering with cold.
Back downstairs, I bundled beneath my covers.
I couldn’t get warm. Scenes from my childhood assailed me.
The gaunt gray-skinned girl who told me she and Leo, the boy who had exposed himself to me, had “done it” in the dumpster.
She was only nine and had that look of malnourished children.
Her pointed chin, her crooked little teeth when she gloated: “He stuck his thing in me.” The filthiness of it filled me.
The stacked boxes from the liquor store holding our things.
Ants in our cereal boxes. In the mornings, rats scattering from the trash outside.
In my exhaustion, these scenes became tangled with the others. Monkeys fucking, screaming.
For hours, I lay unable to stop seeing them, to sleep.
Near dawn came the sound of a couple arguing in the Cuesta, or maybe they were laughing.
I could hear the woman’s voice rise above his, the excitement in it.
Then a shattering of glass. A pool of silence.
Later the rhythmic clop of hooves over the cobblestones: the mounted policeman making his usual rounds.
The last thing I remember thinking is that when I walked Ida and Henry to school, when we discovered the mounds of horse manure, they would seem wholesome, comfortingly old-fashioned.
And then the maids would sweep them away and splash the sidewalks with soapy water, and for a time, everything would smell wonderfully of lavender and masa and baking bread.