Gringa (20 page)

I was totally surprised by the Arcadia, by Claude Girard. The hotel was a world of intrigue and surprises, the guests were old and had their lives to tell, the food was wonderful. Besides, no matter where I was, I managed to find a way to prove myself to myself over and over again. What Adele had called the “muggy sluggish tropics” seemed just right for me. I moved slowly through without caution; every time I poked into the brush or went out at night, there I was.

I know how my life would sound to a stranger. I know I've never accomplished anything. I know that my life in Mexico reads like a litany of non-events, a grocery list of sins. Mickey said I was “undoing” myself. Was I? Was there something to be undone? I think that was taken care of quite effectively a long time ago. There were things I wanted. I wanted not to be bored, not to pass my life trivially, I wanted not to be a waitress, a clerk, a wife, a teacher, or any other kind of servant to the world. I had no ideas about what to do instead. I had no pictures in my head of what might make a good life. I tried to imagine what the girls in cashmere sweater sets would be doing at thirty; I saw them married, with domestic help, golf lessons, shopping, dinners with their husband's associates. (I knew about these things because I'd gone to the movies, of course.) I wondered what smart girls would become, and I simply didn't know. The thought that you could study and become Margaret Mead or Marie Curie—come on, I would have to say. Didn't they have a few advantages I didn't? Besides, I knew I wasn't very smart. I would have to do the best I could. I wanted to be loved, too, I guess. I couldn't pin that down, and I didn't really think about it all that much. I didn't need parents anymore. I didn't know what love was about.

Meeting Tonio was like being catapulted into outer space. Here was a life I'd never have dreamed up in a hundred years! Here was a man who knew everything, could do everything, and he liked me. Five years came out of that. I stopped thinking about whether he loved me; I thought only: there's a place for me here.

I thought: Kermit should see me now.

Mexico was more than Tonio (more than the other men, too). It was a smell in the air, different with seasons, redolent in the worst heat, before the rains. It was the sensation of moisture around you all day, like an invisible sea, so that you pushed your way through a day and knew it was the cost for all the lushness, the colors, the sounds. There was a whole world entirely unlike my own, and I never stopped loving that part of it. The Arcadia was fresh experience. It opened up the Huasteca to me. It opened up my self, too. When I left, I knew the one thing I must have always wanted and never had: intimacy. I had just a taste of it, to let me know what it was, but I was resigned to a life without it. I didn't think it was something you could work for.

Claude Girard let me know that he disapproved of me. He gave me a room near the center hall, so that I awoke too early in the morning. He told me I would have to have a separate bar bill and Bruni would have to pay it every month. He even scolded me for coming in from the pool barefoot! He didn't bother me at all. I moved to the far end of the building, near an exit to the hot pool. I went to the kitchen in the late morning to get a glass of juice and a slab of bread, and smiled at Claude if he saw me on the way. I made myself useful, helping the clerks with long-distance calls, the guests with plane reservations. I learned to pass the time with the old tourists, mostly midwesterners, retired, who stayed two or three months every few years. I learned to play pinochle, bridge, and Parcheesi. I went on endless outings. There were many things to see in the region of the hotel and I had seen almost none of them. Caves and bats, groves, hill villages. We went in caravans to Tamazunchale, a lovely tropical village forty miles into the mountains by the Moctezuma River. We went to see the market and the sixteenth century church. The American guests loved the drive through lush mountain scenery, the increasing sense of the tropics that began east of the hotel, where a finger of Veracruz lay in lowlands along the coast, and then broadened as it went farther south to Guatemala, and southeast to the Yucatan. Coming back from the village we all bought honey from Indians along the roadside. They sold it in any old container, and the honey had a taste almost of brandy; we dipped our fingers in and sucked the sweetness while we stood there.

South of Tamazunchale was an Augustine monastery of Moorish character, and off the road along the same highway, Xilitla, where indios (speaking a language that linked them to ancient Mayans) grew coffee, bananas and oranges among palm and large-leafed bushes in profusion. To the north were the falls at El Salto, and quite near—on the senior Velez' small ranch La Palmita, in fact—was a beautiful grotto called Nacimiento, where a small river began and then flowed into the greater one and out to sea. I went to Nacimiento many times with tourists, and every time I wondered, where does the water come from, so clean and clear and cold? Where, in the belly of the earth, is it so sweet? I mentioned my question to a knowledgeable old gentleman who lectured me all one afternoon on the wonderful anomalies of the region; he said it was a topography of collapsed surfaces, classic karst, as if it were Adriatic terrain. I thought, why it's just like love, with sinkholes all around. I sometimes went with the man, whose name was Riley, into the nearby town, but it wasn't much, a dusty collection of cobbled or dirt streets coming off a drab square and a church gone seedy. On Sunday the square filled with residents, and the young people passed one another going in opposite directions, around and around, as their parents had done too. But these kids sometimes had radios, bright colored shirts and dresses, a longing for television, white bread, a different life.

Birdwatchers, three cars of them, came through and stayed a few days to swim and rest from their camping and hiking. The baths had attracted them. They called themselves “birders”—they were amateurs, not ornithologists—and they said there were hundreds of species of birds along the slopes of the Sierra de Guatemala. They had come up from the Yucatan, which was gaudy with tropical birds and butterflies, and they were going to camp in the cloud forest north of us. They knew of a Canadian hermit and botanist named Harrison who had cleared some of the land and done some building there. He raised flowers—orchids, they thought—and lived alone. A Texas college had a cabin there, and one of the group had a letter from a friend on the faculty. They asked me to join them for dinner. I liked their company, and I thought they admired me in some way, maybe just for my happenchance settlement in so beautiful and extraordinary a place, as though that were my own accomplishment.

I told them some of the stories Beto had told me, about the Indians' bird fetishes, their fear of snakes, the rites of the old brujos, like witchdoctors. I knew something of the history of the region, all from Martin, and I felt good, passing it on in this way. The birders ate crayfish from the river, delicious as lobster and to some extent renowned. They ate voraciously and then sat idle over their salads (which they asked for as a last dish). They had heard there were chachalas in the area, though higher, in the forest. I said I knew them, olive-colored birds the size of bantams. I had seen them in Tonio's aviary. At that, the birders had nothing more to say to me. The conversation shifted to the Christmas bird-count in Florida. They told me I ought to look around at the free birds, their voices punctuated the free; they said it was too bad there was no adequate field guide for the region. One of them said, “So the Huastecans don't cage any birds, you say?” and I said that was what I understood. They all gave me such a look, as if I were guilty of some transgression, and it dawned on me that they were disapproving of Tonio! As if I had anything to say about what he caged! Was it my fault if he wanted to enclose a bit of jungle and wildlife for his amusement? Did my confederacy with him extend to his birds, his big game trophies, slaughterhouse gore, business done with embrazos and then bribes? Just how did I get so large a responsibility in this world! I was suddenly self-conscious, and then quite angry. I shook my shoulders and excused myself. I was sure to avoid the hot pool because I knew they would spend the evening there, talking about birds and flowers.

The mayor of San Marta died, and to my amazement, Claude invited me to go with him to the funeral. It was a long service with both a priest and a brujo present; the old indio fumigated the whole area with a charcoal torch smelling of pine pitch. In the church yard, women had laid out huge quantities of food on long tables. The mood was one of cordial seriousness; the mayor had been a very old man. I ate tiny bites of everything, wondering about the state of the kitchens where it had been prepared. There were huge tamales with wild game shredded inside, wrapped in banana leaves and baked in pits. There were smaller tamales with chicken and pineapple, a strange combination. Indians with violins joined a man with a small harp and a woman with a timbrel (like a tambourine), and they sang mourning songs, beautiful songs, centuries removed from the modern Mexico's ubiquitous cantina music. As we drove home in the hotel jeep, Claude told me that the mayor had been Huastecan, and that it was the custom of these people to wash the feet of the dead and then use the water in the making of tamales for the funeral guests. “They honor you, and you honor the dead,” he said. I believed him. When had he ever shown a trace of humor?

I wanted to ask him what else he knew. What sort of magic did the witches practice? What did he know of their animas and totems? But I was peeved; he had set me up, hoping to shock (or gag!) me and I wouldn't give him the satisfaction of my interest. We rode in silence. Then in a little while Claude said to me, “Why do you make love?” I thought I must not have heard him.

“Make love?” I said in a silly voice.

“Yes,” he went on, “I wonder about American girls, I haven't known them well, but they are so free with these things, with lovemaking. I wondered why this is.” I saw that he was perfectly serious. It was still an intrusive, stupid question. I told him I made love to avoid answering personal questions.

The next day he asked if I would help him with some repairs on the mural in the upstairs hall. It was a picture of the Velez family on horseback; Tonio was about sixteen. It had faded and was badly chipped—bad paint in the first place, Claude said. He was perfectly civil as we worked. He had a scaffold constructed, and he mixed paint himself. I spent hours on end, for most of a week, repairing the leaves, the legs of Tonio's horse, the long skirt of his mother, the blue sky. Behind the family young girls with gardenias in their hair were skipping along; a miniature General Velez, like an elf, peeked out of a bush at them. Toward the top of the mural, flowering orange trees filled the canvas like stars. Doves, parrots and parakeets, hanging like flat ornaments, contrasted with the pheasants and plump round quail that pranced along on the ground. The pose of the family was similar to the one done in tile on the first floor of the hacienda. Guests loved the mural, and they all traipsed by to visit with me and commend me for my work. Little by little I pieced together stories of Tonio's family I had never heard before. His father was an infamous general, one of the last caciques of Mexico, dictator of the state. It had taken a virtual shutdown of public services to force him out. And he was known to love young girls. Once I heard this—it was hardly surprising, though I had never actually seen him myself—I couldn't keep my eyes off his portrait. He seemed about to burst his clothing. Behind him, the teenage Tonio was slim and elegant, a blond, blue-eyed European, a nobleman in a pagan land. The mother was garish in brilliant blue, her hair an unnatural red.

Bruni came over to see how I was doing and said the mural looked great. He said he knew that the General and his wife had asked Claude to do something about it, and that he would be sure that they understood that it was “Tonio's friend” who had done such a patient job of repairing it. (Claude had said only that it was “satisfactory.”)

I walked Bruni back to the parrot-green Tecoluca pickup. “Tonio's corridas,” I asked. “How are they going? How is he doing?”

I was amazed when Bruni said that he talked to Tonio at least once every week. “He's a hero,” he bellowed to me as we stood by the truck. “You don't know just how good he is, do you?” He stooped down to hug me. I was wearing jeans and a halter top, and his big hand on my bare back made me uncomfortable. He made a show of kissing me loudly on each cheek, and as he did so, he dipped his hand into my pants and slid along the sweaty skin as far as he could reach. I was so surprised I didn't say anything; he withdrew his hand and got into the truck. That sonofabitch, I thought. He was supposed to be looking after me while the matador was gone. In his way, he was. He asked if I needed money and he cleared the matter of the bar bill. But he knew how my keep was earned. He was a slimy bastard and he just had to remind me.

I withdrew from the sightseeing, the card playing, the endless story-telling of the hotel. I stayed to myself in my room, taking a brisk swim in the early afternoon when the other guests went to lunch and then to siesta. At night I went out to the hot pool after the hotel was dark and quiet. Sometimes I saw Claude on his way to see his pet doe, or going up the walk to the little hut he had built himself above the gardens. He had a house on the side of the hotel where the orange groves were, but he seemed to favor his perch. One night I saw, as he was walking by, that he was wearing a cloth, wrapped like what I guessed was a sarong. He was wearing sandals, and carried a walking stick. Suddenly I saw him an entirely new way, not as the nagging, shrill manager who was always scolding the help, nor as the cold distant man who obviously looked down on me and couldn't be bothered to get to know me. I saw him as a stranger in this land, as much as I was, and he was a whole history of exotic places. He had been born in Vietnam of a French father and a Chinese mother—one of the guests had told me that. He had lived in North Africa, in France, in the South Pacific—I had heard him telling stories to the guests. How had he ever ended up in so unlikely a place? What was there here to keep him?