Chapter 11
With Henry clambering about in the back like a puppy, we drove her home, navigating the potholes on the Obraje road where I’d first seen her. Louise sat very erect beside me, lapsed into one of her extended silences.
“Why are we going this way?” Henry asked, resting his hand on my shoulder, then bunching my hair into his little fist as he sucked his other thumb.
“We’re taking my friend home.”
“That lady?”
“Yes, Louise.”
The small sucking sounds as he considered. “Your hair’s wet.”
“Is it?” I said in a false voice, rushing to fill the silence as I tend to do when nervous.
“Well, it’s because I went to the most amazing place.
You would love it so much, Henry. It has pools, but—you’ll never guess—the water?
It’s warm like a bath! And there’s a tunnel you can swim through, and a huge waterfall.
I’ll take you there sometime if you want. ”
“Daddy, too?”
Beside me, Louise made a noise, like she was clearing her throat.
“Of course Daddy will come!” I said in the same emphatic voice.
Some people were trudging along the side of the road.
I recognized the young produce seller I frequented, walking beside two young women, his sisters perhaps.
As our car overtook them for a moment, our eyes met.
I had an urge to look away; probably he wouldn’t recognize me anyway.
But his face immediately brightened. He waved cheerfully, calling buenas tardes.
I glanced sideways in gratification, as though I’d proven myself a good person; the vegetable seller knew me!
But Louise hadn’t even noticed. She was telling me about a restaurant she had owned outside of Rome; about her Italian, which was much better than her Spanish.
“There’s my house on the right,” she interrupted herself, “across from that empty field.”
The building site. I reflexively looked for Tom, though he was, of course, out of town, and the site empty.
I pulled onto the shoulder. The house was not nearly as rudimentary as she’d led me to believe.
Two full stories, attractive save for the color, a pungent acid green.
Beside it, almost touching Louise’s, sat a squat house with only a single window and rebar sticking out the top, clearly awaiting the addition of a second floor.
On its stoop, two barefoot children of about Henry’s age were playing with Tazos, tossing the plastic disks you got out of chips bags.
“There used to be so many colorful houses when I lived here with Allan,” Louise sighed. “Now it’s all so tactful, so tastefully restrained. The whole town’s been all but ruined by rich Americans. But isn’t that always the problem?”
I made a sound of agreement, surreptitiously glancing across the road.
The field was now mostly cleared, and a large fountain that had been built off-site had been installed.
There were a few shells of a structures, the smaller units presumably.
Other than that, little had changed since our arrival.
“Mommy, can we go to the market and get a licuado?”
“How about a nice glass of water at my house?” Louise said.
In the mirror, I caught Henry’s expression of mingled irritation and disbelief, as if he had fallen prey to some sleight of hand.
The house was dark after the blinding sun, the rooms separated by wide Moorish archways.
Laughter from a television show drifted in from the house next door.
I followed Louise from the kitchen area, holding my glass of water.
Henry had refused his, fleeing instead to Louise’s back patio.
He’d stripped off his navy plaid school sweater that was polyester and felt like recycled plastic.
Even without it, he must have been unbearably hot; the patio was bald concrete, fully in sun.
“Thanks for the water,” I said. “It’s just what I needed. I think I’m still a little tipsy.”
“Oh, please! I can’t stand that I don’t have anything else to offer you.”
We had stepped into a large open room with a red-tiled floor, its monastic white walls decorated with African tribal masks, a woven basket resembling a hornet’s nest, a few abstract paintings in a vivid palette.
It had the look of certain ad campaigns you might see in Vanity Fair, in which dazed and very beautiful people sprawl over artfully disarranged furniture.
In lieu of a couch, a twin bed was wedged into a corner, covered with a sheepskin rug and several embroidered Moroccan pillows.
On the other side of the room, an old turntable sat on the floor, several records leaned against the wall beside it.
Every surface held interesting objects: a dark green ceramic ashtray, a leather box embossed with faded lettering, a silver lighter.
“It’s a terrific house,” I said, thinking it was the kind of house I wanted to have, the house of someone who’s really lived.
“It’s hardly the house of my dreams, but for the price I paid! Well, I can tell you, why not? It was seventy-five thousand dollars US. Of course now I don’t have enough money for a telephone, much less a maid.”
Through the tall doors at the back of the house, glass and wrought iron, I could see Henry playing with an amber-colored chicken.
Somehow the vision enthralled me. Henry’s brow furrowed in concentration, the top of his head ablaze in sunlight.
Some cardboard boxes were arranged against a high wall as a coop, with arched doorways that mimicked the house’s cut into their sides.
“I see he’s found Bella,” Louise said.
“Bella! What an absolutely perfect name; she’s the most beautiful chicken I’ve ever seen. Not that I’ve seen many.” I laughed.
“Smoke?” She had picked up a blue pack of cigarettes from a small octagonal table inlaid with what looked like mother-of-pearl.
“Mm, yes.” Putting the cigarette to my lips, I said, “Tom doesn’t approve of me smoking,” then laughed to conceal my embarrassment.
Louise held the silver lighter forward. “Then it’s a pleasure to corrupt you.”
“Jesus Christ, that’s good.” I sighed through a thick cloud of smoke, taking a few steps deeper into the room so Henry wouldn’t see me, stopping before an abstract painting hung on the wall.
It was a series of stacked geometric shapes on a blue-black plane, although from the uppermost rectangular shape two rudimentary limbs sprouted, like the kind children will draw. “Is this your husband’s?”
“Yes,” she said, and in unison, we moved a bit closer. There was a signature in the lower right corner. Pearlman, it looked like, though the letters were loopy enough that it might have been Nieman.
“It’s wonderful,” I said before I’d really formed an opinion.
“It’s got an unexpected tenderness, the way this rectangle becomes almost figural?
There’s something so… fragile about it.” Louise seemed pleased; I was encouraged.
“Fragile, and yet persistent, you know? Even this tone of orange here. It’s like the remnant of sun after it’s finished setting. ”
“Ah! I adore the way you speak about his work.” She lifted her finger, wiping at her eyes. “It’s clear you’ve studied art.”
“Well, my husband did, before he became an architect. He has a wonderful eye.”
“You have a wonderful eye.”
There was a knock at the front door, a woman’s voice calling through the window, “?Hola, senora? ?Está en casa?”
Louise set her mouth in irritation. “My neighbor. Will you excuse me?”
As soon as she had gone, I began to look around, picking up objects and setting them back down: a clay sculpture of a dog; an octagonal leather box; a small paperback book set open on a wooden crate-cum-table, the text in French, its title partly worn away.
I went over to the bed with the sheepskin thrown over it and ran my hand over it, letting the deep fibers sift between my fingers.
The wall behind was of stacked stone, with a high square window I had assumed opened onto the courtyard, but now realized opened onto another, smaller room through a narrow archway.
I glanced cautiously toward the front door. I could hear the woman’s voice, higher than Louise’s, more nasal, saying, “Please, senora,” and Louise answering in her colorless Spanish, “I told you last week I don’t have the money. I’ll tell you when I do.”
They continued this way back and forth, bored and aloof, like students reading out of a book.
I quietly stepped inside the hidden room.
It wasn’t much larger than a walk-in pantry, the bulk of the space taken up by a wooden desk strewn with black-and-white photographs.
Street scenes of San Miguel mainly: people lingering in cafés, strolling through the square.
I assumed they were old, perhaps from the time Louise first lived here.
Lifting one, I was surprised to discover they were contemporary.
I picked up another. There was something strange in discovering the familiar stage with all its players, frozen between my hands.
The shoeshine man, the toy vendor. One photo, of the Jardín crowded with people, caught my attention for no reason I could discern.
I held it closer, examining it. A boy and his dog.
Some pigeons. In the upper right corner, a couple was about to step out of the frame.
My eye caught on them with that faintly queasy, groping sensation of struggling to awaken after a heavy sleep.
The two were holding hands, their backs to the camera, the woman’s face turned slightly toward the man.
It was nothing about either one of them, but something between them; the angle at which their shoulders leaned together, the blank space between their hips. It was me and Tom.
I dropped the photo as if burned. At the front door, Louise’s voice had grown louder. “Tal vez en el futuro,” she was saying. Then the would-be maid’s downtrodden voice, “Sí, senora. Tenga buen día,” and the door being loudly shut.
I hurried back to the living room, Louise calling ahead to me, “Mexicans! They refuse to believe an American can be poor.” She drew up short when she saw me. “What’s wrong? You’re all flushed.”
“Am I? It must be all the sun.”
She made as though to put her hand on my forehead. I could see Henry behind her, chasing Bella along the low concrete ledge. Suddenly the bird fluttered upward, Henry falling onto the pavement, beginning to wail. In an instant, I was at the door. There was a moment of confusion, trying to open it.
“These damned Mexican latches,” Louise said calmly, limping up behind me. “I can never remember, do I push or pull?”
At last, the door swung open with a whine and I rushed forward, scooping Henry into my arms, blowing on his skinned knee.
As his tears subsided, Henry asked in his little voice, “Does she make eggs?”
I hadn’t fully tracked, so it was Louise who answered him, “Not yet, but she will soon. You’ll have to come back and hunt for one, you and your sister. If you find her first egg, you can taste it. Would you like that, Henry? To taste an egg right from its shell?”
“Yes.” His voice was so trusting and eager that my eyes filled with tears.
“He’s tired,” I said, turning. “I should get him home.”
If Louise noticed my upset, she didn’t show it. She followed me to the door, calling happily as we climbed into the car, “There’s a big celebration in town tonight. You should take the kids.”