Gringa (17 page)

Adele said, “You were very wrong.”

“I want to help Cleo.”

“With what!”

“Her mother works at the Red Cross station in their colonia. Cleo says they need help. They're getting ready.”

Adele said nothing. Abilene gathered the dishes from the table and took them to the sink.

“Getting ready!” Adele's voice skidded off into a shriek.

“The Red Cross is always ready, isn't that what they're for?”

“Yes! For earthquakes and volcanoes and fires and floods.”

“Cleo's mother says they have to be ready for trouble.” Abilene thought Pola had gotten ruder, as she saw her mother's distress.

“You're to come home directly from school, do you hear!”

“I don't see why I have to go at all,” Pola said, pouting.

“To embroider. To improve your French.”

“It's summer!”

“I want to know where you are.” Adele grabbed Pola's arm. “All the time, I want to know.”

“How can you?” Pola asked, slowing down her words, gaining the advantage. “How can you know where I am, when you're not here? How can you know where I am, when you don't see me? How? How?”

Adele slapped Pola's face, and then burst into violent tears. Within the moment, she had slipped to the floor, crying. Pola screamed. “I want to go to California! I want to go to Yannis for good! I hate you! And stupid Daniel too!” She turned and fled to her room.

Abilene sat down on the floor beside Adele and put her arm awkwardly around her shoulder. She wondered at the easy anger of Adele and Pola. It seemed to Abilene to be over so little, an outing without permission. Of course it was over being a child, being a mother, Abilene could see that, too.

“Couldn't you spend more time here?” Adele asked. “Couldn't you do things with her? She likes you, she says so. You could go to the movies, to the museums, like you said. Couldn't you, Abilene? Couldn't you do this for me, for a little while?”

Abilene, surprised, said, “Yes, if Pola will.”

And she thought to herself, so I'm good for something, am I? A babysitter. She would have laughed, but Adele wouldn't have understood.

Adele wiped her face with the backs of her hands. “I'm a mess. Daniel will be home soon.”

“Go and wash up. I'll take Pola her soda.”

Abilene sat on Pola's bed. Pola, at the chair by her table near the bed, drank thirstily. “Do you remember what it's like, having people tell you what to do just because you're thirteen? Do you?”

Abilene said yes, though she could not remember. Her mother had never kept track of her coming and going, but there hadn't really been any, not at thirteen.

“I've never seen your mother so upset.”

“She'll get over it. She'll tell Daniel everything, and then they'll feel better. It'll be me in here by myself.”

“Pola, they're married! What do you want?”

“I want to go to California. You could go with me!”

“And do what?” Abilene said, making it seem an outlandish idea, making a face to show she didn't take it seriously.

“We could get good tans,” Pola said.

“Ahh,” Abilene answered. She thought California did sound nice. Far away. Not Texas. A fresh start. Why not California? “But I have to stay out of the sun,” she said, touching her face. “For a whole year.”

Pola tittered. “I'll buy you sunglasses and a hat with a big brim. Everyone will think you're someone famous and don't want to be seen. We'll have a lot of fun.”

ONE LONG RAINY afternoon, Pola asked Abilene about the ranch. “Is it terribly exotic, and dangerous, like Mommy says?”

“I never thought of it as dangerous.” What a funny thing to have told Pola, Abilene thought. “There are wildcats in the brush, though, and snakes and insects. And bandits on the roads.”

“What about the pits?”

So Adele had remembered what Abilene told her. Why had she never come? Was she afraid of Tonio! “Much of the land is limestone and there are places where the earth has fallen in. The Indians call them basement caves.”

“Why hasn't Mommy taken me to see it?”

“She says she doesn't like the country.”

“You could take me sometime.”

Abilene wasn't sure what she should say. “I'll tell you what it's like to wake up there. First I hear the birds. I lie in bed and imagine the peacocks spreading their tails. Outside the walls a monkey shrieks. Campesinos in white trousers tied with string come over the river in the back of a cattle truck and swarm over the grounds. Everywhere you look one is digging or picking at the ground or the bushes or the trees. When I pass them, they freeze and wait for me to go by, their faces hidden under their big hats, their bare feet deep in grass. All day the ferry grinds with its loads of workers, calves, trucks full of bottled water, grain, and other supplies.”

“What time is it? When do you get up?”

“Let's say it's eight o'clock. Across the hall Tonio is taking a shower while his valet Asuncio brings his breakfast of coffee and toast. Tonio shouts at him from the bath. Asuncio moves on his feet like a boxer. I hear him shouting, ‘Si, Matador!'

“I don't want to get up yet. Maybe I read half the night. Maybe it was three o'clock before I went to bed. I go and open the balcony door to look out across the tile, through ivy and vines, past bougainvillea and palm, across avocado and plantain plants.”

“Tell me what you see.”

“The hacienda walls. A sliver of sky bordered by the balcony roof. I can hear the maids coming down the walk, they're so silly. They're only your age! I hear the secretary Sofia in her high heels, yelling at the maids to get out of the way. Every once in a while the hounds howl. Maybe it isn't really hot yet, but I turn on the air-conditioner, for the noise, close the balcony door again, and crawl back into bed.

“I can hear Tonio stomping hard with his heels in the hall outside my room. Then he goes down the stairs. His head floats along the length of the crocodile on the wall, it's right at its snout that he takes the last step. Under an arch of ivory he passes through the front door. Now that he is outside, the din of birds is incredible. The monkey beats its chest. The dogs lie like sphinxes along the border of the walk. As he approaches, their noses twitch. He nudges them with his sharp boot toe. They yap and tumble around. Just past the gates there's a little wildcat on a chain. It snaps and claws at everyone, but when Tonio comes up to it, it purrs like a house cat. Animals love him!

“I put the pillow over my head so I can go back to sleep. There is nothing I have to do, nothing to get up for. I like sleeping with all those things going on. I like eating lunch for breakfast, with the foreman and the guard, I like listening to the cook Beto tell stories about the Huastecans. Many years ago he was caught stealing on the ranch; he couldn't even speak Spanish! Tonio beat him and then gave him a place to sleep. Later, Beto went and got his twin brother, who now cooks at Tonio's hotel, the Arcadia. Beto is big as a bear with a huge belly where he wipes his hands on the expanse of white apron. One of the maids spends the whole morning making tortillas and orange juice. When she sees me, she slides me a glass of the juice as though she is afraid of me. A gringa, who sleeps all morning: maybe I'm sick and it is catching! She keeps her eyes down and won't look at me.”

Pola was fascinated. “If I came to visit, I'd want to go all over the ranch! I'd want to see everything—all the animals, the cowboys!”

“Yes, you'd see it, and you still wouldn't believe it is real.” It was paradise, or maybe hell. “There's no place like it. It never stops being strange. I think that's why I love it. I think that's why I feel at home there.”

The ranch lay hacked out of tangled low jungle along a wide muddy river. Tecoluca, it was called, a word of no particular meaning, or, like the totems of the indios there, forgotten over generations. In early summer, the river went down in places to the depth of alley puddles. When August rains fell, it could swell almost overnight, and run roiling brown. Abilene saw campesinos bathing in the river and dipping water out of jars. “What do they do when the river is low?” she asked Tonio.

“It's never dry,” he said without bothering to look at her. He would talk an hour or more about the Tecoluca, but not about the indios. “What do you care?” he said when she asked.

The indios lived in tin or grass-roofed huts walled with branches. Trucks, jeeps and taxis passed them thousands of times, yet as each vehicle approached, they stopped to watch. Abilene wondered what they thought.

She tried to ask Tonio: “Don't you think they wonder about the life on this side of the river? Don't you wonder if they think you are a god?” He was golden, he came and went in a plane like a silver bird. Tonio had no patience for these questions. It was like the time she reached for a brochette of venison and asked him, “Venada or venado? Is it feminine or masculine?” Tonio blew a hair from his mouth. She was interested in the most trivial things! “Puhhh!” he said, instead of answering.

The region was called la Huasteca. Abilene said it over and over, trying different aspirations on the “h” or none at all. It was a diverse region, hot and humid, appearing rich but actually thin-soiled, a land loamed with marl and riddled with sinkholes. It was bordered by tropical hills on the north, into the arches of the Sierra de Tamaulipas that crisscrossed the Sierra Madre. To the east the flanks of the Sierra Madre Oriental were green with pine forest; where the warm trade winds struck the mountains with rain, the slopes were misty, fecund, anomalous: pale-leafed sweet gum rose from ferns and Spanish mosses, while half a mile away gnarled oaks entwined with orchids.

The ranch nestled in tropical deciduous forest and ran out into scrub and savannah grasses. Along the water border, broad-based cypresses were sometimes awash in river. The land was pocked with swamps here, pits there, rolling out into tangles and thick brush, to lowland jungle, to the sea.

Tonio had grown up a wild boy on the ranch. Outside the hacienda walls there was a bunkhouse that smelled of formaldehyde. Its walls were from shoulder height to ceiling a catalog of slaughter. Like frames of mounted butterflies, whole groups of identical little deer heads lined the walls, interspersed by sections of great heavy-scaled fish resembling garpike or barracuda. In death the animals bore so little resemblance to what they had once been, it was hard to believe they had ever lived at all. Why would any boy have thought to have undone so many? Without scheme, the heads and carcasses of local game hung forlorn: deer and puma, porcupine and squirrel, peccary and bird. The young Tonio had been to darker jungle, too, perhaps Campeche; tapir, turkey, a pitiful ocelet, toucans, snakes and a large white vulture hung agape, and beneath these boyhood trophies you could play pool or Ping-Pong in the poor light and ponder how great a score it takes to be a man.

Across from the bunkhouse was Tonio's aviary, the size of a public building. Made of net and fencing, with an intricate dome mesh, crisscrossed with perches, the aviary was filled with plants and feeding cups, and of course with birds: macaws, parrots and parakeets, orioles and vermilions, green jays and cuckoos, pyrrhuloxia (looking like faded cardinals), and blue-hooded euphonias. Tonio spent time with his birds at dusk, after he had been riding. He mimicked their calls with uncanny precision and spread his arms as roosts.

The house itself, two stories surrounded on all sides by balconies above and verandas below, was a monument to extravagance and bad taste, rooms filled with massive furniture and gilded frames. Walls full of Mexican masks of wood, clay, tin, goat hair and gilding. Mirrors. Paintings and even a huge mosaic of the Velez family: Tonio at eight, at twelve, at sixteen. Only Tonio's room reflected him. It was furnished as a coffee farm in Africa, with straw matting, crossed spears and shields on the wall, and a lovely patio with high-backed rattan chairs and a table. Opposite Tonio's bed, on the wall, was an antelope's head—a blesbok from Africa, with curved horns and a white mask.

Except for his room and his office, in another building across the bricked walkway, Tonio seemed to care only for his stables, done in bright blue Mexican tiles with high domed ceilings. The rest of the estate, with its grottos, empty swimming pool, groves of limes and oranges, guavas, avocados and papayas, had an air of disuse, as if its owners had died and left it to a child who never came.

It wasn't by ornate furnishing that the hacienda revealed the wealth of its owner. It was by the mass of dead beasts (trophies along every hallway, and in his Colorado-styled bar), the fine quality of his livestock, and the numbers of peasants who poured in every day to work. There were men for cattle and others for the horses, droves of Indians for the grounds, seven or eight maids, cook and cook's helpers, secretary, guard and ferryman, an electrician, carpenters, a foreman. For some the ranch was home, or a second home. Tonio's personal secretary Bruni, wealthy in his own right, had nevertheless devoted seven years to looking after Tonio's affairs, and he had his own luxurious apartment downstairs. He walked with a deep dipping limp, the result of an overturned truck on the way to Tampico. (Bandidos, he had explained; he had been transporting bees.) Besides Bruni, there was an old Canadian who had lived in the generator shed since just after World War I, and there was Tacho, who had come in his boyhood from somewhere on the West Coast, passionate to fight bulls. Esteban, Tonio's other banderillero for many years, lived at the ranch, but was the relative of dozens who lived in San Marta and worked for Tonio in one capacity or another. His brother held a responsible position in the San Marta packing plant. There were in fact so many people on the ranch, Abilene never felt free of the gazes of others except in her own room or Tonio's. Yet on Sundays, when no one came, she spent most of the day out at the guardhouse with Sapo, listening to the radio.

She tried to explain some of these things to Pola.

“Are you lonely there?” the girl asked. “Is there no one to talk to?”

She told Pola about all the workers. “It's like a little town of its own,” she said. “And there are often visitors. Tonio likes to show off with big house parties. He has friends who come from Mexico and Acapulco, from Texas and California, to hunt. To have a good time. He feeds them boar and venison, beef from his own slaughterhouse, iguana, ant eggs—”

“Ant eggs!”

“Oh yes, like caviar. And mounds of rice, black beans and chiles. After dinner the men play poker in the wine hut, while their wives or girlfriends drink brandy across the way, in Tonio's Wild West bar.”

Pola made a face. “That part sounds boring.”

“While the guests relax, Tonio has Esteban come in to play his twelve-string guitar, and Tacho to sing. They are his banderilleros, or used to be—the ones who put the darts with crepe paper streamers into the backs of the bulls—”

“Poor bulls!”

“Now Esteban works with the brave bulls, and Tacho drinks and feels sorry for himself. But you should hear him sing! In Portugal he learned fado. He heard gypsies in camp and went out to sing with them, and ran away with them! His voice is rough and terribly sad and hoarse, his face is full of pain, really it's beautiful, Pola. A man from Mexico who works in television was there one year and he told Tacho, ‘I can get a record made. You can be a big singer!' Tacho was furious! He says actors and singers are mariposas, butterflies—”

“Like Paul and Jay.”

“Oh how dumb of me, I'm sorry. I don't mean—”

“It doesn't matter. Besides, they are gay. They are—were—something like butterflies, with bright colors and lightness of heart. I miss them terribly!”

“I'm so sorry.”

“They were so funny, and so nice to Mommy and me. Daniel is okay, I know Mommy loves him—but he's boring, and he looks at me—” She faltered.

“How does he look?”

“Like I just stumbled in! Like he doesn't know how I got there!”

“I don't think that's it. I think he looks at you and he thinks; I wish I hadn't missed the first thirteen years with Pola. What odd creatures girls are, and I know nothing about them.”

“Really? You think he's like that?”

“I'm sure of it. He's terribly pleased to have you in his life.”

Pola plumped a pillow behind her head and picked up her embroidery. “Paul and Jay used to take me to the park to see the jugglers, the kites and clowns. They liked to have fun. I don't think they worried about the world. And they helped Mommy in her work, they introduced her to important people—”

“Didn't Jay introduce her to Daniel?”

Pola was pouting. “I suppose he did. And Jay wanted to go away by then. It all worked out. I just miss the way it was.”

“I think I understand, Pola. It's like—well, I miss certain things, too, with Tonio. Like running into him in the middle of the night in the library, and talking for hours. One night we went into the kitchen and made a pineapple cake, and while it was baking we went out on the patio off the kitchen, and he said, ‘This is the hour when the wild cat hunts.' I nearly jumped out of my skin!”

“Does he tease you so much?”

She hadn't thought of it like that. “Yes, I suppose he does tease.”

“Daniel never does. My mother never does. We never have any fun.”