Dancing with the Tiger (5 page)

“
Santísima Virgen
, mother of us all, it's Soledad again. I know it's late, but I cannot sleep. Hugo says we will leave soon for
el otro lado
. I am scared,
Virgencita
. I should be happy, but I don't want to live with Hugo's cousin in Texas. Jaime snorts all day, with his clogged sinuses, and Alicia lets cats eat from her plate. These relatives do not love us. They do not want us to sleep on their floor. I tell Hugo I want to go with him so he will not leave me behind. Men who go to the North by themselves are seduced by American sluts who lift weights in gyms with their boy bodies, and when the men return home they don't love their wives or their country anymore. I am learning English.
Hallo. How are you? My name iz Soledad.
Are the days nicer in the United States? They say so. I hate Sam's Club,
Virgencita
. There is one in Oaxaca, as you know. Towers of cereals and jam and televisions touch the ceiling. I am ready to live in
a box and eat from a box and drive in a box and shop in a box, but how will I get pregnant without Señora Magda's rose water? The last time there was so much blood I thought I was dying. Even chubby Leticia is pregnant again. After we make love, I lie in bed and imagine my womb is a garden. Sometimes I want to stand naked in a field and shout at God. Shake my fist. How do you get His attention? I worry Hugo keeps another woman. He doesn't smell right and he looks guilty when I hold him. Make me strong, blessed Virgin. You see how confused I am. My thoughts are dirty laundry in a basket. Sometimes I listen outside Señor Thomas's chapel. Maybe the sounds I hear are nothing, a movie or a dream, but the big house vibrates with bad feeling. I pray none of its sickness touches us.”

Anna drove past barren fields, pole barns, and warehouses. February outside. February inside. The trees were skeletons against the dun sky.

She could drive back to David.

She could drive back to her dad.

She could drive west until she reached the desert and lie under a tree.

Instead, she forced down a sick cocktail and ranted to the radio.
I travel the world and the seven seas. Everybody's looking for something.
Outside Norwalk, she stopped at a discount cigarette shack. They only sold cartons. She bought 199 more cigarettes than she needed.

Driving, smoking, she inventoried all the ways she hated David. She hated his face. His intense blue eyes, wide forehead, the way his thin lips conveyed simpering confidence. How he pushed food around
his plate when it wasn't up to snuff. She hated his elite art friends with their judgments of worth and good taste. His inability to relax—always fidgeting a crossword or a German dictionary, his ambition brooding like bad weather. How dare he assume his own handsomeness with such smug regard? She hated his bulletproof résumé. He'd never scooped an ice cream cone. Never bagged groceries. His first internship in high school was at the Guggenheim. Paid.

But she had fallen in love with him. It was true. She could pinpoint the moment. He had been leaning against a wall at a party, holding a beer by its neck, eyeing her, glib. Was that the word? Charming? Consuming her. Talking Warhol. “He said he didn't have to
explain
his art. It was all right there. On the surface.”

Could hate replace love in an instant? No, it could not. Hate had not replaced love. She now loved him
and
hated him. F. Scott Fitzgerald said the ability to hold two opposing emotions while still functioning was a sign of intelligence. That made her a fucking genius. Except she wasn't functioning. She was drinking Cuervo. She was ripping her thumbs, wiping the blood on her boots.

—

By evening,
she was back in Brooklyn. Harmonica was spending the weekend at an ashram in Vegas. The Post-it on the fridge read:
Center. Stretch. Olive Leaf Extract 2X a day. xoxoxo.
Anna filled the tub, propped the urn next to the herbal shampoo. Wineglass in hand, she sank low in the water, tried to picture her mother's face, the shape of her fingers on the piano, her knees. Her parents had met at an auction. Her mother had kept the books for an architectural salvage shop, pricing corbels and Tiffany lamps. It wasn't much of a stretch to move from antiques
to masks, to fall in love with a man who collected. Would her mother have chased a death mask? Of course she would have. She had. She had risked her life to help Anna's father, and that was why she was dead.

When the bath water cooled, Anna got out and dried herself, put on a dress, no underwear, set the urn next to her computer. Photographs of the Warhol opening had been posted online. David posing with the director of the Met. David posing with a woman posing as Edie Sedgwick. David posing with Clarissa. Clarissa was younger than Anna, shorter, perky, enormous teeth. David looked happy, relieved.

Maybe she had never been right for him. David with his Ivy League degrees, Nantucket summers, his imported peppered crackers. Her previous boyfriend had given her a sweater for her birthday. David gave her a nineteenth-century etching of Aphrodite. Yes, he came from money, but he worked hard, appraising, appreciating, in a way that made Anna go limp when he was admiring her. She was happy to be swept out of her mediocrity, to join the art world of the little black dress. True, her father was an art collector. But without an art degree or museum pedigree, Daniel Ramsey was a scrappy amateur, acting from the gut, which Anna both admired and distrusted.

She took down their book from Harmonica's shelf, slumped on the couch. The masks were as familiar as friends: the glaring Moor, the lewd
negrito
from Tabasco, the
chivo
mask with real horns. Anna's favorite was the plainest: a concave slab of wood painted pine green, beak for a nose, two square eyes about the size of Scrabble tiles, and a ragged slash of a mouth, frozen in a worried intake of breath. What this bird or person, this bird person, wanted most of all, it seemed, was to fly away.

Grief rose inside her. Now she was combing through her mother's ashes, sifting the gravel as if she might find something precious inside.
A last note. Her mother's voice. Anna opened her journal, found the diary entry she'd read many times, a series of Juan Rulfo passages that her mother had copied down in Spanish. Back in high school, Anna had snuck a translation of them inside the journal for safekeeping. She liked to read the Spanish for the sound, the English for meaning.

“I've finished
Pedro Páramo
, the Juan Rulfo novel. Beautiful but spooky. The narrator's dying mother makes him promise to visit Comala, the village where she was born.
‘There you'll find the place I love most in the world. The place where I grew thin from dreaming. My village, rising from the plain. Shaded with trees and leaves like a piggy bank filled with memories. You'll see why a person would want to live there forever.'
But when the son goes back to Comala, he finds nothing but ghosts! I want to be buried in Oaxaca. There is so much color here, so much life. The dead don't die. They linger.”

Her mother's ashes had sat in a closet for two decades, but for the first time, Anna acknowledged a sad truth: If she didn't bring her mother to Oaxaca, no one else would.

The apartment was dark, except for a strip of light shining under the bathroom door. Timeline. Tightrope. Arrow. Anna studied it until she made up her mind.

She opened her father's e-mail and copied the rendezvous address into Google Maps—15 Jardineros was in Tepito, one of the worst neighborhoods in Mexico City. Switching to Images, Anna skimmed through photographs of market stalls, police in riot gear, tough men with tattoos scrawled on their foreheads, like graffiti drawn with a Sharpie.

She'd fly to Oaxaca, then take an overnight bus to Mexico City, though the State Department discouraged night travel of any kind.
The following items are recommended for extended road trips: cellular telephone with charger; maps and a GPS; a spare tire; first aid kit; fire
extinguisher; jumper cables; flares/reflectors; and an emergency tool kit.
The list made Anna laugh. As if objects could protect you from people. As if precaution could protect you from tragedy.

Feeling light, almost gleeful, she set out enough clothes for a week, combat boots, red lipstick, her little black dress. She packed a pocket Spanish–English dictionary, a headlamp, and earplugs. She packed a Swiss Army knife. She packed Tums. The worse the trip sounded, the better she felt. She was proving something, but wasn't sure what.
Who needs a honeymoon
when you could go to Tepito?

She was betting on her father. She was betting on herself.

She would buy Montezuma's death mask, the last mask that would save the rest.

And David? Forever after, the Ramsey Collection would live on in the Met's permanent collection, while in three months, David's precious Warhol show would be shipped off to Pittsburgh or Tampa, then disassembled, scattered, forgotten. At the Met, every so often, he'd have to walk through the Ramsey gallery, be forced to remember what he'd thrown away.
Who
he'd thrown away.
Her.

Tepito. Wikipedia claimed the barrio got its name because nervous policemen would tell their buddies,
If there's danger, I'll whistle
.

I whistle for you.
Te pito.
Tepito.

Anna repeated the word in a whisper. She was going to Tepito, where no one would save her if she put her lips together. She typed an e-mail to her father, knowing he wouldn't read it until morning.

Stay home. I've gone to Mexico. I'll bring you back the mask.

The looter dreamt it was raining and woke up curled around a fountain in Chapultepec Park, a cop's boot pressed to his nose.
“Váyase andando, patrón.”
The cop whapped him twice with his bully stick.
Get going, boss.
The looter sat up, stretched his stiff legs. Bile circulated in his stomach, a toilet of acid. He thought about toast, the normalness of two buttery squares, but wasn't sure they'd sit well. Something better might be found in his satchel. He remembered the mask, panicked that he'd been robbed, but old blue-face peered out, all grimace and attitude.

Buenos días, amigo.
What the fuck is for breakfast?

Pico's stash was also safe. Ditto the remains of Reyes's payout and his phone, which had two new texts. First, Gonzáles:
Found buyer. Tuesday 4 pm Tres Perros Feroces, 15 Jardineros. Wait there. $10,000.

He blinked, counted the zeroes.

The second text, Reyes. Three words.
Consider yourself dead.

The disparity was too much for the Maddox Theory to reconcile. The looter downed one of everything in Pico's bag that didn't require a needle or pipe. He stared into the bushes. The spaces between the bushes. Reyes could be anywhere. He could be selling pretzels. He could be running for president. The looter took off, careful not to leave footprints. He stuck to the shade, where he left no shadow. A scrawny African was selling stuff on a blanket. The looter bought a baseball cap that said
I ♥ D.F.
, the Distrito Federal. Mexico City. The guy was hawking shades, too, but had only three pairs left.

“That's all you got?”

“More later,” the vendor answered. “This now.”

The looter brought a pair of “this now.” The cap. The glasses. He was working his way to invisible. The shrooms kicked in. The grass fluttered. The sky was a blue balloon. The carousel spat out white horses. He shoved his hands in his pockets, anchoring himself to the ground, and thought:
I am a wanted man.

Anna got off the airport bus in Oaxaca and did her best not to look lost. Head pounding nasty jazz, she clutched her backpack and the box containing her mother's urn and waited for the driver to unload the cargo hold. She felt disoriented and exhausted from the multiple flights, the sudden heat, the Spanish, the hassle maneuvering the ashes through security—out of urn, into plastic container, through scanner, back into urn,
carefully
back into carry-on. When the bus driver finally produced her suitcase, she marched out of the station, hoping for an air of efficiency and resolve. Discarded snack bags, mango sticks, and cashew wrappers clung to the curb. The smell of roasting corn hung in the air, mixing with wisps of cigarette smoke. Round women sat on benches like salt and pepper shakers. Hungry men paced. Strangers brushed past Anna, almost touching. A thin guy selling roasted peanuts tracked her movements like a gambler with a bet
on a filly. His eyes followed her shifting breasts, a gesture she considered doubly pathetic given that she was so flat-chested.
“Güerita,”
little blonde one, he taunted. Anna sped up. The fact that she wasn't sure where she was going did not hamper her enthusiasm for getting there fast. Besides, she needed a drink.

—

The taxi wove
through the ugly outskirts of the city, past cement factories, tire shops, empty lots of scrap metal. Small fires burned in forlorn fields and barbecue pits. It seemed incredible the mecca for Mexican folk art lay inside this clot of debris. Oaxaca. Population: 250,000. Altitude: 5,100 feet. Chief industries: Mining, manufacturing, and tourism. Visitors flocked to Oaxaca for its mild climate and colorful colonial buildings, for its hot peppers and weak peso. They came to tour Monte Albán, a pre-Columbian archaeological site, former capital of the Zapotec. They came to buy
artesanía
—tin mirrors, painted gourds, fantastical carved wooden creatures called
alebrijes
. Homely girls came to nibble
torta de la soltera
, a yellow cake, which if eaten every Sunday ensured a timely marriage.

The cabdriver thumped his horn—
“Pendejo.”
Anna relaxed, a wave of optimism surging through her. Aggressive cabdrivers made her feel invincible, confirming her theory that misfortune seldom struck people in motion. She tapped out three aspirin, swallowed them dry. She'd fact-checked a piece on hangovers once. Ancient Romans prescribed a breakfast of sheep lungs and owl eggs. Assyrians ground up bird beaks and tree sap. She could use some fucking sap.

She straightened, rallied her Spanish. When traveling, she liked to chat up taxi drivers, waitresses, clerks. Men sometimes misconstrued
her openness for promiscuity, but this was a risk she was willing to take. In her experience, fleeting connections were easier and often more satisfying than intimacy.

“
Disculpe, señor.
Which direction are the towns where they carve masks?”

The cabdriver shifted lanes, watched her in the rearview mirror, then pointed west. “San Juan del Monte, Santa María, the others, are half an hour up the ridge. You can buy masks directly from the carvers.”

“And
torta de la soltera
?”

“Panadería El Alba, near the
zócalo
. Why? You are in the market for a husband?”

“No,” Anna said. “Only cake.”

They passed a church, a paper shop, a chicken joint called Pollo Loco Loco. Anna touched the urn. It seemed amazing that her mother's remains lay inside, reduced to an object she could carry with one hand.

“Another question,” Anna leaned forward. “In your opinion, what is the most beautiful place in Oaxaca?”

“Monte Albán is very popular with visitors.”

Anna hid her disappointment. She'd been hoping for a secret place, not a guidebook four-star attraction. The driver swept his hand across the horizon. “From the top, you can see the whole valley. Go in the morning, before it gets too hot. How long are you staying in Oaxaca?”

Anna sank into the ripped seat cushion. “I don't know exactly.
Depende . . .
”

She let this word trail off. She had noticed this custom. Mexicans understood implicitly that the fulfillment of every commitment depended on a host of factors too personal, intricate, or uncertain to catalogue. It was enough to say
“Depende”
—a one-word euphemism
for all the contingencies and obstacles that stood between the speaker and happiness.

The cab swung into the old part of the city, jostling under soaring jacarandas, past a chamber of commerce billboard of a grinning devil mask:
OAXACA
,
SHOW
US
YOUR
TRUE
F
ACE
.
The driver slammed the brakes at a red light. Radio voices from other cars filtered through the window. DJs blabbing about contests. A mural painted on the side of a motorcycle shop depicted a life-size skeleton dressed in a hooker's silk robe and spike heels. The skeleton was whipping two thugs who knelt before her like penitent dogs. Anna held up her phone, took a picture.

“What's that mural about?”

“That's Santa Muerte. Saint Death.”

“Yes, I know, but what's she doing?”

The driver accelerated with a frustrated exhale. “She is the patron saint of gangs and drug dealers. The mural is a joke. A fantasy. Santa Muerte will rid Mexico of the
narcos
by giving them a child's spanking.”

More than sixty thousand people had died since Calderón declared his War on Drugs in 2006. In the newspapers every day—killings, dismemberments, mass graves. In the most besieged areas, people were so desperate that vigilante groups had taken up patrols.
Autodefensas.
Anna checked her door lock, though she wasn't much worried about drug lords. They were distant, an abstraction. The people most likely to hurt you were the ones you knew best.

“What do you think would work?” she asked.

The driver sliced the air with his hand. “Clean house. New president. New government. New police. Start all over with honorable people. But that is never going to happen. The corruption is complete, from beggar to priest. How many honest people do you know?”

“Fewer every day.” Anna checked her phone. Nothing from David.
She found her water bottle, drank, drizzled warm drops down her cleavage. “Some people seem good but are actually bad,” she said. Good people. Bad people. She sounded like a comic book. To add a bit of nuance, she said, “Sometimes good people do bad things. And . . .” She had no idea how to say “the other way around.” She fudged with: “And the opposite. It's confusing, no?”

“You need a
brújula
.”

“What's that?”

The driver illustrated a compass needle with his finger.

Anna gave a short laugh. “Sounds like ‘
bruja
.'” A
bruja
was a witch. “You need a
brújula
to tell who is a
bruja
.”

The driver exclaimed,
“Eso mero.”

“But I still don't understand,” Anna pressed. “Why do
narcotraficantes
pray to Santa Muerte?”

The driver threw his hands up—both, before lowering his left back to the wheel. “They see her as their mother, their saint. Maybe the Angel of Death is a comfort if your life is a wreck. They want her power. Her protection. She's the new Virgin of Guadalupe. Sometimes it's better to be a bad girl than a good one.”

The driver's eyes locked with Anna's in the rearview mirror. With a single glance, Anna agreed with his statement and declined his offer. The driver settled back down with a huff and a grumble. “When old religions don't work anymore, people make up new ones.”

—

The hotel lobby was air-conditioned,
but not enough to do any good. A large woman sat sprawled in a fake-leather love seat, buttocks overtaking the space designed for a suitor. Anna set down her suitcase, pack,
and box, fanned her hangover. This was her second attempt to secure lodging. The hotel where she thought she'd made a reservation had no record of an Anna Ramsey. The owner apologized, but had no vacancy. Most hotels were full at this late date, she'd said, but there might still be a room at the Puesta del Sol. Anna knew better than to ask why.

The young clerk turned from his soap opera. He was an effeminate man, gold hoop earring, Peter Pan collar, polka-dotted hairband. She was surprised that such a songbird could exist in this macho society without being crushed, his bones snapped in the fist of a punk or a priest. The clerk pressed his boyish face into the day.

His Spanish was soft, like flannel. “How can I help you?”

“Necesito una habitación para una persona.”

Mariposa.
Gay man.
La terraza.
The terrace.
Hay una mujer gorda sobre un sofá.
There is a fat woman on a sofa. Spanish vocabulary emerged from her subconscious, like old lovers who appeared in disjointed dreams. Some days, Anna couldn't remember whether she'd slept with a man or only dreamt she had. Some days, she wasn't sure it mattered.

“We have one available.”

“Do the rooms have desks?”

The clerk nodded.

“Is it quiet?”

The clerk tipped his hand. “We have a room facing the garden. It has a desk and an old typewriter.”

“Ice?”

“There is a machine in the kitchen.” The clerk scrutinized her. Women weren't supposed to care about ice. Women were supposed to care about full-length mirrors, sewing kits, the hours of Mass.

Anna smiled. “How much would you charge for a week?”

The clerk looked dubious, as though this question didn't come up
much and if she'd been his friend he would have advised against it. With a pompom-topped pen, he punched numbers into a calculator. His mouth thinned. Money did this to the nicest people.

“Thirty-five hundred pesos.”

Anna playacted her disappointment. The usual dance. “That's a little expensive. I am a student.”

The clerk looked away. He'd heard this lie before. Anna remembered the single most important word in Spanish:
descuento
.

“Is there a discount for longer stays?”

The clerk fluttered, a blizzard of helplessness. “There is no discount this time of year.
It's high season.
My boss would murder me.”

Anna squinted into the blinding sun, momentarily unable to remember the time of year. Time had little traction in Mexico. The air smelled like smoke. The mangoes were two weeks from ripening. The peso was tumbling against the dollar. The governor was a bully. The teachers were on strike. The police chief in Juárez had been gunned down without a single witness. It was Mexico. Any year, any day, was high season when Americans inquired.

“It's Carnival?” she said, hoping to God it wasn't.

“It starts the end of next week.” The clerk slid gloss over his lips. “Each
pueblo
has a celebration. Parades and parties. Fireworks. People dress in wild costumes and dance in the streets. You should stay. You like to dance?”

The question startled her. She had been thinking about money and masks and whether the man she was meeting in Tepito would be carrying a gun. On TV, a blonde woman in a tight dress wept. Maybe her fiancé was sleeping with Clarissa, too. The clerk's face pinched with concern. It seemed the right moment to press harder.

“Would you take twenty-eight hundred?”

Anna found the clerk's eyes, forcing him to turn her down at close range. He shrugged, as if to say,
Money only matters to little people.
He slid her the register. Anna printed her name, nationality, had to ask him the date. She signed her name in large letters. She needed to take up more space in the world now that she was alone.

“Why is the hotel called the Puesta del Sol?” After saving seven hundred pesos, Anna was ready to be friends. “Can you see the sunset from here?” She glanced over her shoulder, as if the sun might be hiding in the utility closet.

The clerk picked up a nail file. “
Hombre
, if you could see the sunset, the rooms would cost more than twenty-five dollars. In Mexico, the sun only sets for the rich.”

—

Wrought-iron furniture
. Bedraggled geraniums. A waterless fountain, a cherub with a broken wing. The hotel's patio was pretty in the same way Anna liked to think she was pretty: enough that she didn't have to try too hard, enough that if she
had
tried hard, she would be very pretty, and knowing this was reassuring enough that she seldom bothered to try.

The guidebook had described the Puesta del Sol as “spartan,” but Anna opened her door to decrepit. The bed was a crushed cereal box. The stucco had cracked into spiderwebs. A cross stood sentry over the door. A faded poster of the Pyramid of the Sun had buckled in its plastic frame, as if attacked by the deity it worshipped. The air smelled like cinnamon and dust.

Anna chained the door and, finding no safe, stuffed the urn, the journal, and the envelope in the back of the closet and covered them
with her coat. A manual typewriter sat on the desk. She rolled in a sheet of paper and typed, ANNA IS HERE, then added: WITH HER MOTHER. She fell back on the bed, exhausted. Overhead, the ceiling fan shimmied, as if it might decapitate her in her sleep. She rose, poured a duty-free shot of tequila, downed it, felt her mouth turn golden and swampy. She got up to pee. The bathroom smelled like cherry aerosol. A disposable razor lay on the tiles. A faint hairball covered the drain. It was hard to imagine getting clean in such a place. More likely, you'd wind up dirty in some new way.

She showered. Under a thin stream of scalding water, she lifted her breasts into cleavage. She liked her small breasts. She could maneuver. She could run. Departures were her forte, though she had planned to stay with David for a lifetime. Perhaps this seedy hotel was the apt setting for an exorcism. Invite a tall, dark stranger from the
zócalo
back for sex in this rancid shower. He'd speak no English. She'd forget her verbs. They'd parse body language. Hard and wet. She wondered if she still had the nerve for such exploits. She'd like to think she was young enough to be daring, and mature enough to know better.