Chapter 10
It seemed to me then, and still does, that she was genuine in her role of guide and teacher.
On those occasions, she devoted herself to me completely, as if she wanted to communicate in a few hours everything she’d learned over the course of a life.
She would passionately interpret our surroundings, their import, their relevance to us and to art, gender, politics, social justice—not that she believed in this last notion.
Through her, I came to regard even the places and people I already knew quite differently.
La Parroquia, the town’s most famous church, was an abomination, I saw now, its late-nineteenth-century neo-Gothic pink towers vulgar and entirely out of keeping with the town’s austere beauty.
Handsomer and more to our taste was the Templo de San Francisco, with its Spanish Baroque facade.
“If you’re going to live in this country,” she instructed me early on, “you have to know its history. You can’t merely enjoy it, the way a child enjoys a candy that’s been given to her.”
Despite the harshness of that statement, or maybe because of it, I was gratified. I wanted her to see me as a serious person, well educated—even if I didn’t always want to do the work to become that person, would rather sit passively beside her and be told.
That first day at the hot springs, perched on the edge of her lawn chair, Louise spoke in urgent tones about water that had been warmed by the earth’s core.
Wasn’t it astonishing, to have bathed in liquid that had traveled nearly four thousand blind miles?
She was animated and even gleeful about the man who’d grabbed my wrist. Had I noticed the boyish face, the smooth skin?
He’d certainly never been a laborer, never learned a trade, and so lived with the disgrace of not knowing how to make anything with his hands.
He was incapable; just look how easily she’d disposed of him.
“Men are all like that in Catholic countries. Strutting cocks, making a show of their machismo. Deep down, they’re cowards. It was exactly the same in Italy.”
“You lived in Italy?”
“Yes, in Rome, after my husband died. My daughter and I,” she clarified after a slight pause, as if she’d initially held back the fact to spare me; I had a pang of jealousy toward the girl who’d lived in Rome, surrounded by artists and writers. “I’ve lived a lot of places.”
“Is that why you have that accent?”
She laughed warmly. “I have an accent?”
A man in an apron came traipsing over the grass, asking Louise did we lovely ladies require anything?
A massage? Drinks? I grew fascinated watching the way they interacted, the man’s flirtatiousness despite being thirty years her junior, Louise’s complete indifference.
“Have you ever had a michelada?” she asked me.
Before I could answer or ask what it was, without redirecting her gaze, she said loudly, “We’ll take two.
” It was a drink made with beer and spicy tomato juice, she explained as the man walked away.
“Beer,” I said, “you’re joking.” It was barely ten thirty in the morning.
But when it arrived, I drank thirstily. It was surprisingly refreshing.
A woman had claimed a lounge chair across from us, very elegant, fully made up, her chest strewn with gold chains.
She began to speak on a cell phone. I caught only pieces of her Spanish.
“Listen, I told him, no music,” she said.
“And then the mariachis, my God!” She gave a shrill laugh, shrieking incomprehensible words.
“?Las trompetas!” she cried, repeating it several times as she howled with laughter.
“Rich Mexicans are almost worse than rich Americans,” Louise said.
I spread my sweater over my legs, stretching beneath the sun.
The waiter returned with a fresh drink, replacing my empty glass.
“Did I order this?” I said in English as he padded off, laughing a little sloppily.
Maybe it worked that way, I thought; they kept bringing more until you told them to stop.
Louise’s drink was still half full. She had taken a black-and-silver camera from her bag, two differently sized lenses.
She was going to hunt for images, she said.
“Sounds nice,” I said drowsily, stretching my legs long, closing my eyes beneath the hot sun.
“You remind me of her. My daughter.”
My eyes flickered open. “Do I?”
“You’re tired.”
“Not really.” But I must have been. I fell asleep, only for a few minutes. When I awoke, Louise was smiling down at me curiously, the camera in her hands. “Are you a photographer, then?” I said, remembering her telling me she’d worked in fashion.
“I dabbled.” She had begun taking pictures of me. “At the moment, I’m doing a bit of work at a gallery owned by an old friend of mine and Allan’s.”
I wondered what kind of job it was, but didn’t ask. It was off-putting to speak to her through the barrier of her camera. I felt self-conscious, not knowing where to direct my eyes, how to hold my mouth.
“Your face is so clear, like a porcelain doll.” It seemed an insult somehow. “You seem—don’t take this the wrong way—like someone to whom nothing horrible has ever happened.”
“Maybe you just need to get to know me better.”
“So, then. Tell me something about yourself.”
She was turning the long lens in her fingers—perhaps zooming in closer on my face?—and I leveled my stare at the camera for a moment, then laughed and hid my face in my hands in a playful, almost flirtatious way, as the desolation of my girlhood briefly assailed me.
In the early days with Tom, I had shared certain things about that time.
The grief at being taken from my father; the poverty we lived in after the relationship my mother had fled to fell apart; that I’d lived as a young girl believing myself ugly and unwanted; then, as an adolescent, intoxicated by my newly discovered power over men, compulsively engaging in reckless sex.
Lying in Tom’s cramped bedroom, I was aware there was something calculating in these confessions, that I was using them to hasten in him the very things I’d been deprived of: protection, adoration, concern.
“Tell me a secret,” Louise pressed.
“What, am I supposed to tell you about how I lost my virginity at thirteen or something?” I laughed. “Are we bonding now?”
“Really? I’m shocked there was anyone before your husband.”
“Anyway, there’s nothing to tell.”
“So make something up. Love,” she said, setting the camera into her lap and raising her voice as if she were about to quote some famous poem, “is one person saying to the other: Tell me a story.”
Just like that, we were no longer talking about my story but ours, the burgeoning feeling between us, what were to be its terms. It was one of her great tricks; extracting information was another. Except on this occasion, I didn’t give her any.
“I’m too tired to talk,” I said.
“One secret and I’ll let you sleep.”
“Lay off, bitch,” I said, immediately aghast at my coarseness. But she threw her head back and laughed with delight, as if my calling her that had announced to the world a new level of intimacy between us.
“So, it’s like that,” she said, and I laughed in my turn. It was easy again being with her; I didn’t have to hide away all my rough edges.
A few minutes later, glancing at my watch lazily, I saw it was nearly time to get Henry.