Caramelo (32 page)

50.

Neither with You Nor Without You

      A
fanfarrón
, nothing but a big show-off, she’ll confess in disgust, first to the best friend, Josie, and later and always to us. She’s talking about Father, what she thinks when she first meets him. How he’s full of the sweet scent of Tres Flores hair oil and full of shit. But she never says why she kept seeing him. Zoila Reyna couldn’t tell her sisters or herself. She’s not the kind to tell someone her feelings. She’s not one to think about
those
things.

Better to not think.
Ni contigo ni sin ti
—tumbling and repeating itself in her head, like a jingle from the radio.
Neither with you nor without you …

Friday. 8:49 when a skinny private with a face like Errol Flynn steps in with eight of his friends and a cigarette in his mouth. He never goes anywhere without a cigarette and a whole bunch of hangers-on hanging on. His army buddies. And you can bet he pays when they haven’t got a dime. He’s a good sport like that.

—It’s that I’m a gentleman.

—A fool, mumbled she.

Better than sitting at home, Zoila thinks, with the clock ticking toward and then past the hour Enrique
^*
used to telephone. The clock, the calendar, the hours, weeks, months. The silence. The silence like an answer. The silence an answer. There was a little hole in her heart where he’d once been, and when she breathed, the air hurt her there, there. Before. And then after. Before. After.

The dance hall smelling of the men in uniform, of Tres Flores hair
oil, of Tweed cologne. The wooden floor old and stained like a pissy mattress. Women wearing hair snoods, silk flowers bought at the five-and-dime bobby-pinned behind one ear like Billie Holiday.

The Reyna sisters. Aurelia, Mary Helen, Frances, Zoila. In flowered crepe and open-toed platform shoes. The best friend, Josie. The swish of skirt and lipstick pressed on toilet paper. Nylons that cost a whole dollar. —An hour of standing at the cookie factory these cost me!

—Full of himself, she’ll say. —A big talker. Nothing but talk. A mile a minute. Can’t fool me.

Wants to go to Mexico. —Ever been there? Never? I’ll take you there. I’ve got a new car. Not here. Over there. Miss, would you care to dance?

—Get a load of her.

Looked after a redhead with big floppy breasts. —
Chiches
Christ! Looked at a
morenita
with a heart-shaped ass.
—¡Nálgame Dios!
Did the jitterbug with a flirtatious
tejana
with a dress so tight you could see the mound of her
panocha, te lo juro
.

Zoila Reyna dressed in a crepe skirt and a pink see-through blouse she borrowed from her older sister Aurelia after three days of begging.
—Huerca
, you’ll ruin it! —I won’t, I promise—please—I’ll wash it by hand. A pink blouse with rhinestones and pearls sewn around the collar. Hair brushed a hundred times each night and draped over one eye like Veronica Lake. Zoila has a way with hair, does all her sisters’. Her sister Frances won’t let anyone touch her hair but Zoila.

—Comb me like Betty Grable.

First you put a rat in, and comb the hair over it like this. Then you dip the comb in that clear green gel, and you use plenty of bobby pins, and then you finish with a hairnet. She takes her time. She likes doing hair. Maybe she’ll even take classes at the Azteca Beauty College on Blue Island. Zoila, who studies the magazines
—Mirror, Hollywood
. She can tell you anything. Who Linda Darnell was married to before she got famous. How Gene Tierney paints her eyebrows into a perfect arch. The secret to Rita Hayworth’s shiny hair.

Zoila Reyna looking in the crowd for his face. Enrique. The crowd of black-haired men.
Enrique. Enrique
, she had said to herself, and every cell inside her filled with light.

She couldn’t admit that she still telephoned, would hang up before anyone answered. Once she had let it ring and someone answered, but the
voice on the other end was a child’s voice and said no one with that name lived there. Some nights, she still walked past the house,
that
house, though she knew Enrique no longer lived there. Even the street name made her shiver.
Hoyne. Silly, ain’t it? Silly, just plain goofy. A silly girl. That’s me
.

Records starting before the band. Peggy Lee’s sassy voice singing “Why Don’t You Do Right?” Bodies pressed against each other, sad swishing sounds of feet dragging across dance floor.

When she was little and had a wound on a hand or knee, some place that broke the body’s symmetry, she would look at the unharmed twin and compare it with the limb that was now swollen and plum-colored. This is how my hand had been before the fence tore it open and this is how my hand is now. Before. And after. Before. And now this.

Something like this happened to Zoila Reyna when she met Enrique Aragón. There was her life before him, smooth and whole and complete, without her ever being aware or grateful for its well-being, and then her life after Enrique Aragón, taut and tender. Forever after.

Dressed in a borrowed pink blouse and skirt too big for that skinny girl’s body, hangs on her hips, pinned it with a safety pin. Bring-me-luck blouse, and a pair of gold earrings bought on layaway.

Not Hank. Not Henry. “Enrique,” he’d said. Enrique Aragón, in Spanish
. And not a crooked Spanish either, like her own. A Spanish luxurious as gold silk wrapped in tissue, an English crisp and creased as a pocket handkerchief. A tongue that leapt from the whir of one to the starched linen of the other with the ease of an acrobat on a flying trapeze. Enrique, this name with its tongue trill, with its patent leather shoes and toe taps clacking down an ivory stairway built by Ziegfeld, this name in tux and tails, began its reign of terror. She had taken to writing the name beside her own a thousand times in ballpoint pen, on napkins, in between the lipstick print of her lips on toilet paper. Enrique Aragón. Enrique Aragón. Enrique Aragón. And sometimes if she dared, Zoila Aragón.

“
Mi reina
,” Enrique had said once. “Neither with you nor without you,” he’d told her. That’s what he’d said. And it’s as if love is some kind of war. “Are you brave enough to sacrifice everything for love? Are you?” he’d said
.

Enrique Aragón. Mr. Aragón’s son, who traveled and was here in Chicago for a little, and then there, Los Angeles. Because los Aragón owned a lot of movie theaters in Chicago and L.A. —Teatro San Juan, Las Américas, El Tampico, La Villa, El Million Dollar—all raggedy and
run down, with a flickering version of some old black-and-white Mexican western.
Jalisco, no te rajes. Soy puro Mexicano. Yo maté a Rosita Alvírez
.

Ni contigo ni sin ti …

The Reyna sisters, always loud. Making so much noise in English, so much noise with their crooked Spanish. Winking over the shoulder of this sister being taken out to dance, the others giggling, —Not if you paid me! —Want him?
Te lo regalo. —Tú que sabes de amor, tú que nunca has besado un burro. —¡Un burro!
Do you know what that means? —Your mind’s in the gutter. —Want that one, Zoila? I’ll give him to you after I’m through. —I’m telling you, you can have him, I don’t want him.

Her sisters nudging Zoila when the private with eyes like little houses and a pointy mustache comes over and asks Zoila to dance, in Spanish, and how the Spanish reminds Zoila of Enrique Aragón. And how she shrugs and joins him out on the dance floor, with a couldn’t-care-less attitude. He does all the talking. —Inocencio Reyes at your orders. Mexico City is where I’m from. My family very important. My grandfather a composer who played for the president. Me, my, my, have you ever been there? I’ll take you. I have a car. Not here. Over there. And her eyes glazed over his shoulder. The language taking her back to Enrique.

Enrique had held her face, drew it up like water, drank from it, drank from it and let it go empty as a tin cup. How she had wanted to jump out that window, like a sparrow found in the snow, wouldn’t that have been hilarious? The sisters would’ve had to gather her in a blanket and carry her home, like a fairy tale she read about. All the fractured little bones. How she wanted to jump out of that window of his flat on Hoyne Street. She would’ve liked to have jumped and bubbled in her own juices, wouldn’t that have been cute?

But it’s this one who’s talking a mile a minute. —Do you smoke? Would you like a cigarette? Putting out one cigarette and already lighting the next. —What?
¿Qué?
Yeah, I mean no, I mean I don’t know. Inocencio Reyes so close she can hardly see him. And she tired, exhausted, dragging the body around the dance floor, this body, with its nagging need of washing and feeding all its necessary hungers, this
her
inside the borrowed pink blouse with its stained armpits and the skirt held together with a safety pin. This human being talking and talking right in her face, she has to lean back. For sure her sisters are watching and laughing. A strange face. Mustache thin as Pedro Infante’s, those sad little eyes like if he just finished crying.

Neither with you nor without you.

How she’d gone back to the scene of the crime, over and over, circling that house, those rooms, those corridors, that house that haunted, that held and gripped and bit her in two. Voodoo house that hypnotized her.
“I do not love you,” he’d said. Here I am again. Here I am. And I come back
. Same late-night compulsion.

The way Inocencio Reyes looks at her. More than that, the way he holds her, moves her across the dance floor. He’s not clumsy like other men her age. He dances like he knows where he’s going, like he knows what he is doing with his life. With that confidence that lets you close your eyes and you know nothing bad will happen to you ever. No matter how tangled and muddy everything else, Inocencio Reyes dances with a self-assuredness. A tug to say this way, turn that, a light nudge to direct her in the other direction.

He’d said, “I do not love you.” I do not love you. I do not love you. And my heart opened its mouth into an “oh,” into a wound, a bullet, a circle big enough to push a finger through. “I do not love you,” Enrique said. You said. I said nothing
.

You don’t like me when I don’t talk. Of what good am I if I won’t talk. It’s not nice when I don’t talk. You might as well be alone. You might as well call a taxi and put me in it and send me home. You don’t like me when I begin. You won’t stand for this again. It’s not as if we’re married or anything. And what kind of nonsense are you muttering now? Of course, you’re not mine. It’s a new world and a new love and I don’t own you and you don’t own me and we’re free to come and go and love as we please. A modern age, right?

Except last night, Tuesday or Thursday, or either or both, any day so long as it’s not the weekend, you call and ask me to come and visit you. And I do, but it makes it so hard to get out and travel and take the streetcar and worry when I’m waiting for it, you say come and I do, worrying at night, walking that half block from where it leaves me off to that half block to your house in the dark, not a long ways, not very, it’s no trouble, sure. Not very, but bleak and lonely and me humming so I won’t be afraid of the night. And my shoes hard against concrete, taking me to you, taking me. But I don’t talk. That is, I talk less and less. In the beginning I talked all the time, right? And you talked with me and we laughed and you opened a cognac, a good one—one you paid a lot for, because you know all about cognacs—and played the phonograph—not the kind of cheap music of the dance halls, the kind I used to like before I met you, but music like Agustín Lara and Trío Los Panchos, and Toña La Negra, “High-class music, not trash,” you said, and we danced under the soft light of a lamp with a thick carved glass that shot light up to the ceiling. Me and you dancing, that soft light of your apartment there on Hoyne. And it didn’t matter if we both had to go to work tomorrow, Enrique, right? You just had to see me. I just had to see you. We were a couple of crazies like that, right?
Todo por amor.
You’d telephone and say, “Zoila,” and even though I told myself I hated you, I can’t explain why I’d hop right over. I can’t explain it very well. Never mind, never mind. Only I’d hear it as “never mine.”

We’d dance and then you’d undress me, and I didn’t mind, because what I wanted and waited for was afterward when I held you in my arms. And we’re loving each other, softly, quietly, as if we’d just invented it, as if we never had to go out into the world again, right? And I rock you, hum a little song, rock and rock you and hum, like if you were mine
.

And it’s as if love is some war. And are you brave enough to battle all the world, to defy everyone, and what the world says is right, what they think of you? Are you brave enough to sacrifice everything for love? Are you?

He asks how a girl as young as me got to be so brave. How he knew from the first moment he saw me I was the type of woman who … “Who what?” —a little too angrily. “The type of woman who would appreciate love,” he says, and suddenly I’m as soft as snow. I’m anything he wants. Don’t let me go
.

Ni contigo ni sin ti … ni contigo porque me matas, ni sin ti porque me muero.
Neither with you nor without you. Because with you, you’d kill me. Because without you, I’d die
.

—What? What’d you say? Zoila asks Inocencio, because to tell the truth, she’s been daydreaming again. Hasn’t heard a word he’s said.

—I said you have the cleanest fingernails I have ever seen,
mi reina
.

Instead of the smart-alecky reply she usually tossed, only a little sound came out of her mouth, like the sound one makes in a dream when one is trying to shout. And this little sound with its curly fluted spiral pulled all the other sounds lined together like a train, an animal braying tangled in the strands of her black-blue hair, so that at first Inocencio Reyes thought she was laughing at him.
Mi reina
. Those words in that language of tenderness and home. It was only until she raised her head to the light that Inocencio realized his mistake.