Nothing That Meets the Eye (11 page)

For six months he charmed a score of American women out of their senses, but none seemed to want marriage. American women expected casual romances as part of the village's entertainment. They enjoyed the jealousy of the American men, their nervous anger or their badly pretended boredom, when they made engagements with young Mexicans. The women seemed to play a game just for the pleasure of reconciliation with their men at the end of their stay. Alejandro took his disappointments with a smile and a shrug. American women were not all so elusive. The woman for him would come.

One day, a woman like none Alejandro had seen before strolled into the plaza on the arm of a well-dressed gentleman with red hair. Was she American? Alejandro examined her from head to toe. She held herself as proudly as he did. She carried a long cigarette holder and wore high-heeled green lizard pumps in which she seemed to glide rather than walk over the cobbles that turned other women's ankles even when they wore straw sandals. She looked bored, and it seemed to be the man's idea that they see the town, though it was she who selected him as their guide. She did not look at the things he pointed to, but kept her gray-green eyes on him in a sleepy, thoughtful way that gave Alejandro an odd feeling. She was not attractive and yet she was. At any rate, and the thought gave him his bearings again, there was no doubt she had much money. Earrings of hammered gold circles hung below the lacquered upswept black hair. The pale green tweed skirt had been made for her and the gray silk blouse, too, and perhaps also the green lizard belt that matched her shoes.

She did not want to enter the cantina with the others at the end of the tour. She stopped just outside the door, looking at Alejandro, who hung there, too, as if she were the only member of his party.

“What is your name?” she asked him in a voice like a distant pipe organ and with a smile that revealed interesting teeth, one partially of gold.

“Alejandro Palma, at your service.” He could not look back at her face after his bow. Never had he felt like this, and he did not know if it was shyness, attraction, or dislike.

“Alejandro,” she repeated, rolling the r as easily as he. The gray-green eyes, half shaded by crinkly lids, blinked at him affectionately. “Well, perhaps I see you tomorrow again, Alejandro. Today I was too tired to enjoy your village.”

“My pleasure.” Alejandro bowed.

Her escort offered his arm with an absentminded resignation, and Alejandro watched her move off in a slinking gait that set one foot in a line with the other. Then he dispatched for fifty centavos a small boy to ascertain at what hotel she was staying, her name and that of the man. The boy reported back that she was a Countess.

The next morning, she was in the plaza before nine o'clock, before Alejandro had begun to make up his first party. She wore flat iguana sandals now that made her feet look even longer and narrower. She said she wanted a drink, so they went to Cesar's Cantina, a tequila-soaked niche in the wall of one of the lanes off the plaza, since the better cantinas were not yet open. In Cesar's, the fleas were so thick one could see them hopping here and there on the red-tile floor in search of a human leg. Two dirty Mexicans slouched over the low bar.

In an open-collared white shirt and white linen trousers, Alejandro sat erectly at a little table with the Countess. He spoke English loudly and distinctly, proud to be seen by Cesar and the two Mexicans with the elegant woman who also spoke English, used a holder for her Russian cigarettes, and was in every respect beyond the iron tradition that forbade women to enter such a cantina. To her questions, Alejandro replied that he was eighteen, though he was only sixteen, and said that he had been educated at the Academia Inglesa in Mexico City.

She lifted the tiny tequila glass in her bony hand, drank it off without salt or lime, and looked at him calmly. “You are very handsome. You appear a little Spanish. Is it so?”

“My father and mother—they were pure Castilian,” Alejandro said, lowering his eyes sensitively. One of Cesar's fighting cocks, combless and limping like an old man, was entering the cantina pecking at the floor.

The Countess smiled and blinked her eyes at him, and though it was a tender smile, he felt she knew he lied. “Me, I am nothing. Because I am everything. Do you understand?” She smiled again. “Like you.”

He did not understand, and he did. “What about your friend?”

“Robert?” She laughed and waved a hand that drifted back to the silver cigarette case that had initials on it and a crest. “Robert told me yesterday a good-bye forever.”

Again Alejandro could not look at her, could not say any of the things it was now time for him to say.

“No, do not walk back with me, Alejandro.” With a bored air, she had got up. “Visit me tonight at ten if you care to. You know my name already, don't you? Countess Lomolkov—Paula.”

Alejandro was there at ten. He had been unable to work all day for anxiety. In the disorderly room where her possessions obliterated the Mexican decor, the Countess made bewildering love to him, wooed and won him and covered him with heavy, tender kisses, insulted him by laughing at his lovemaking, though she made Alejandro laugh, too. She told him his language of love was more broken than his English. She made him frantic to please her. All he desired was that she let him see her again.

“Of course. Tomorrow we are going to Acapulco.” She lay on her back, blowing the smoke of her Russian cigarette toward the ceiling. “Already I have telephoned reservations in an hotel.”

In the morning, he packed some of his best shirts and slacks into a valise he had just bought.

“Where are you going?” asked his mother, who was putting on a pot of beans in the outdoor kitchen.

“Quien sabe?” he answered sourly, then began to smile as he walked down the hill. His mother would think he was merely going to Mexico City again, and this might be the last time he would see his home! He did not look back. The world spread bigger and bigger before him. The Countess filled it all.

He drove the Countess's shiny black Jaguar out of the village and turned its chromium radiator cap on the road to Acapulco. The Countess was quiet and thoughtful, and kept her eyes on the road even when she took swallows out of the long thin bottle of tequila añeja she had bought “to celebrate.”

Alejandro had never felt so happy and so carefree. Though his time had always been his own, his days spent in the out-of-doors, he had always been working to earn money. Now he did not think about money. He did not want money from the Countess. He did not want to marry her unless she wished it. He thought of his marriage to anyone as a fraud, and he did not want to cheat the Countess. Just how he felt, he could not say, because he did not know the meaning of the words respect, affection, or love, and they did not occur to him now.

In Acapulco they stayed at the favorite hotel of the season, where their suite and meals were three hundred and fifty pesos a day. The Countess bought him a bathing suit consisting of a strip of chartreuse material splotched with vermilion flowers. With this wrapped around his narrow hips he swam at Hornos Beach in the mornings and at Coleta in the afternoons, lolled with the Countess on the sand, while she, marking with her sunglasses her place in the book she never read for gazing at him, stroked the curls back from his forehead or dribbled the white sand down the brown hairless arch of his chest. Often, after tamarind highballs on the hotel terrace, they drove to Pie de la Cuesta, a promontory fifteen kilometers away. Here they lay in hammocks strung only a few feet from the waves' edge, sipped coconuts through straws, and watched the sun drop into the water like a world on fire. They dined at all the hotels for variety, and had whole banquets sent up to their rooms. Generally, they retired early, because the Countess needed much sleep.

She told him of her childhood in Poland on her father's great estate where three hundred serfs tended vast wheat fields, of her narrow escape when Hitler came, of her life afterward in Paris and in New York. Alejandro did not believe a tenth of it, but he listened with the respect he would have demanded of a listener if he had told a comparable story of his life in Mexico. And this was what drew them together, their common habit of lying, their fellowship of falseness, their dependence on the timid man's fascination by the outrageous. Where had she got her money? She had none, she said. She lived on credit.

“When my credit will be gone, then I shall be gone also.” And when Alejandro looked alarmed, “I could not live at all if I did not live in danger! Neither can you, Alejandro, even after you marry, you will see. Make a wise marriage, not a stupid one. Marry an ugly woman if you can, or if she is pretty be sure she is stupid, but they usually are. . . . You don't yet understand all, but you will.”

She taught him as if she were a school of manners, morals, love, hypocrisy, and opportunism. He was her protégé, son, lover, and husband, because he would finally need to know how to be a husband, quite a different art from that of lover. She supervised the cutting of his hair, dramatizing the ripples in back and at his temples, balancing the curve of his head with an orderly clump that fell partially over his forehead. She imposed an English restraint in his dress, taught him a thousand little graces for different places and occasions, all without embarrassing him, even contriving to flatter him. And Alejandro learned with the ease and pleasure of one whose life is devoted to ease and pleasure and the pleasing of others. He burst into bloom. The Countess and the tropical sun caressed him. He caressed the whole world. Happiness! How could she make him so happy, he wondered, when a thousand times a day she criticized him, caught him in a lie, impressed some trivial matter on his mind like a schoolteacher? Yet he felt that his happiness was traced with every movement of his body like an invisible design in the air. Wasn't that why everyone gazed at him on the beaches? Even men, who always loathed him, took secret pleasure in watching him disport himself. His figure poised for a moment against the bright blue water as he sought the Countess, his flight up the beach to the older woman who was clearly not his mother and to whom he seemed so devoted began many conversations, he knew.

Two blond American women angled for him at the hotel, but Alejandro was not once tempted to be false to the Countess. He spent his evenings close by her side, usually in white linen slacks (the Countess liked him in white linen), a dark green or blue sport shirt with one of her silk handkerchiefs knotted at his throat, listening and talking to her as if she were the only woman in the world. People in the hotel could not figure them out, but how they loved to watch!

Alejandro never stopped to ask himself if he were in love with the Countess, and, probably because his emotions for sixteen years had been so false, he could not have given himself a truthful answer. He dropped postcards to his friends back in the village, telling of his extravagant, carefree life, of how voluptuous was la condesa, and of course of how many new conquests he had made. He wrote also to Concha, his first amor and now the betrothed of Antonio, and sent her a necklace of small gray seashells that he bought from a peddler for two pesos.

After six weeks, the Countess could find only the most minute faults in Alejandro. The sandpapering was over, she told him. The rest would be with emery dust. Now he learned how to make at least one incontrovertible statement on such subjects as abstract art, Negroes in America, communism in Latin America, and Wagnerian opera.

“I do not want you should anymore be a guide,” the Countess said one day in the absent monotone that meant her thoughts were far ahead of her words. “You should be manager of a fine hotel in your village.”

Alejandro said something evasive. He was much too busy being happy to think about working or about the future.

The Countess turned from the window in fury. “Do not be lazy! You have in you that stupid laziness of your stupid country, and if you cannot step it down we say good-bye forever this minute! . . . Yes, your country is full of stupid, lazy people! Like your parents—Yes, I know all about your parents, stupid boy! Like you would be without me! Don't deny it!” She shook him hard by the shoulders. “You will not grow up to be a lazy, fat bum, you will grow up to be zome—zing! Understand?”

Alejandro got up, bowed as she wished him to do, and murmured, “The woman I love can make the impossible possible.”

“And this is not even the impossible, my sly one, you know that.” The Countess smiled.

The next morning, she did not join him on the beach after her usual letter-writing period after breakfast. Alejandro went back to the hotel and was told she had checked out. Trembling, he opened the envelope the clerk handed him, conscious of the dramatic figure he made before the clerk and the two blond Americans standing nearby, of the tragedy in his young face, of the new blue banknotes he let flutter to his feet. A short letter with many interpolated terms of affection told him she had spoken with the manager of the hotel at which she had stopped in his village, and that it was all but certain he could become the receptionist there—second in importance only to the manager himself, she reminded him. The bill was paid at the Acapulco hotel for the next five days, and he was to enjoy himself and not think of her, forget her with someone else if he wanted to. “How strange I should have found in Mexico one so like myself! Bless you and thank you, my darling! But do not try to thank me except by to remember a few of the things I have told you. Never think you may see me again, never think I forget you. Your Paula. Countess Lomolkov.” The last two words were underlined.

Alejandro was too lonely to stay on. Dimly, he realized he cared more for her than he had admitted, and he could not bear to face it, so he caught a bus back to the village. Once more, the world opened itself wide to him on the mountain road. He could face the world more easily than the loss of the Countess. He must turn his eyes outward, live dangerously, as she had said. Before nightfall, he had spoken to Señor Martinez, the manager of the hotel. Alejandro's bearing, his knowledge of English—even Señor Martinez did not know much English—got him the job. Señor Martinez, a shy, serious man eager for the Americanization of the hotel, had agreed with the Countess on the telephone that an English-speaking receptionist would be an advantage. Alejandro then was the likely young man she had promised to send. Alejandro's reputation would have proscribed him, but the manager's monastic habits had kept it from reaching his ears.