Points of Departure (13 page)

“Here and there,” she said. And then, when he kept looking at her, “California, most recently. Los Angeles.”

She did not act like a Californian—Californians talked too much and were very friendly—but he let that pass.

“You on vacation?” he asked.

“More or less,” she said. “Always a tourist.”

They talked about the weather for a time, about Merida, about the surrounding ruins. Gregorio could not put this woman in a category. She did not seem like a tourist. She was not relaxed. Her long fingers were always busy—twisting the paper napkin into meaningless shapes, tapping on the table, tracing the lines of the
checks on the tablecloth.

He asked her if she had been to visit Uxmal and Chichen Itza.

“Not this trip,” she said. “I visited them before. A long time ago.”

The church bell at the nearby church rang to call the people to noon mass; the pajaritos screamed in the trees.

The woman sipped her cafe and stared moodily into the distance. She made him think of the tall storks that stand in the marshes
near Progresso, waiting. He liked her; he liked her long legs and the small breasts that he knew must be hidden by her baggy shirt. He liked her silences and moodiness. Quiet women could be very passionate.

“You would sleep well in one of my hammocks,” he said.

She smiled, an expression as fleeting as a hummingbird.

“I doubt that.”

“You will never know until you try it,” he said. “Why don’t
you buy a hammock?”

“How much are your hammocks?”

Gregorio grinned. He quoted her his asking price, double the price he would accept. She bargained well.

She seemed to know exactly when he was serious in his claim that he could accept no lower price, and she seemed, in a quiet way, to enjoy working him down to the lowest price he would accept. The hammock she bought was dyed a deep purple that
shimmered in the sun.

Gregorio finished his coffee, hoisted his bundle of hammocks, and returned to work, hailing two blond gringos in university T-shirts. He lured them into a bargaining session before they realized what was what.

Tourists stroll through the Zocalo, stare up at the cathedral built from the ancient stones of Mayan temples, admire the colonial architecture of the buildings in
the city. Many regard the hammock vendors as pests, like the pigeons that coo and make messes on the lintel above the cathedral door. Many tourists are fools.

The hammock vendors know what happens in T’hoo.

They are a select company: only thirty men sell hammocks on T’hoo’s streets, though often it seems like much more.

Each man carries a bundle of hammocks, neatly bound with a cord. Each man
carries one hammock loose, using it as a cushion for the cord looped over his shoulder. When he hails a tourist, he stretches the loose hammock open wide so that the tropical sun catches in the bright threads and dazzles the eyes.

Hammock vendors live at a different tempo than the tourists. They sit in the shade and talk, knowing that the luck will come when the luck comes. They can’t rush the
luck. Sometimes, tourists buy. Sometimes, they do not. A hammock vendor can only wander in the Zocalo and wait for the luck to come.

While they are waiting, the hammock vendors watch people and talk. The French tourists who are staying at the Hotel Caribe will never buy a hammock; they bargain but never buy. There are pretty women among the Texans who have come to study Spanish at the University
of the Yucatan, but all of them have boyfriends. The tall thin woman with pale hair is always awake very early and goes to her hotel very late.

“There she is,” said Ricardo, looking up from the hammocks he was tying into a bundle. “She was in Restaurant Express last night until it closed. Drinking aguardiente.”

Gregorio glanced up to see the thin woman sitting at the same table as the day before.
She had a lost look about her, as if she waited for a friend who had not come.

“She was here at seven this morning,” observed Pich, a gray-haired, slow-moving hammock vendor. “She needs a man.”

Ricardo looked sour and Gregorio guessed that he had suggested that to the thin woman the night before without success. The hammock vendors discussed the woman’s probable needs for a time, then continued
an earlier discussion of the boxing match to be held that evening.

The woman was of passing interest only.

Still, when Gregorio wandered on to search for customers, he passed her table and said hello. Her notebook was on the table before her, but he could not read the writing.

Not Spanish, but it did not look much like English either.

Though the morning sun was not very bright, she wore the
dark glasses, hiding her eyes behind them. “
Buenos dias
,” she said to him. “
¿Que tal?
”

“Good,” he said. He sat down at her table. “What are you writing?” He peered at the notebook on the table.

“Poetry,” she said. “Bad poetry.”

“What about?”

She glanced at the notebook. “Do you know the fairy tale about the princess who slept for a thousand years? I’ve written one about woman who did not sleep
for a thousand years.”

“Why do you look so sad today? You are on vacation and the sun is shining.”

She shrugged, the slightest movement of her shoulders.

“I am tired of being on vacation,” she said. “But I can’t go home. I am waiting for my friends. They’re going to meet me here.”

“I understand.” He knew what it was like to be homesick.

She looked at him long and hard and he wondered about
the color of her eyes behind her dark glasses. “Did you sleep in my hammock?” he asked her at last.

“I strung it in my hotel room.”

“But you did not sleep in it?”

She shook her head. “No.”

“Why not?”

She shrugged lightly. “I don’t sleep.”

“Not at all?”

“Not at all.”

“Why not?”

“I slept at home,” she said. “I can’t sleep here.”

“Bad dreams? I know a
curandera
who can help you with that.
She’ll mix you a powder that will keep bad dreams away.”

She shook her head, a tiny denial that seemed almost a habit.

“Why not then? Why can’t you sleep?”

She shrugged and repeated the headshake. “I don’t know.”

He stared at her face, wishing that she would remove her glasses. “What color are your eyes?” he asked.

She moved her sunglasses down on her nose and peered at him over the frames
with eyes as violet as the sky at dusk. … Her eyes were underlined with darkness. A little lost, a little wary. She replaced her sunglasses after only a moment.

“You don’t sleep really?” Gregorio asked.

“Really.”

“You need a man.”

“I doubt that.” Her tone was cool, distant, curious. It did not match the lost look in the violet eyes he had seen a moment before. She gestured at two American
women taking a table at the other end of the cafe: “Those two look like they need a hammock,” she said.

Gregorio went to sell them a hammock.

Gregorio did not mention to the other hammock vendors that the thin woman did not sleep. Odd that he should forget to mention it—it was an interesting fact about a strange woman. Nevertheless, he forgot until he met her again, very late at night. He was
wandering through the Zocalo, cursing his bad luck. He had missed the last bus to his village, Tixkokob, because he had taken a pretty young woman to the movies. But the young woman had declined to share her bed with him and he had no way home. He was in the Zocalo looking for a friend who might have a spot to hang a hammock.

He noticed the thin woman sitting alone on a bench, watching the stars.
“What are you doing out here so late?” he asked.

She shrugged. “The cafes are closed. What are you doing here? All your customers have gone home.”

He explained and she nodded thoughtfully and offered him a drink from the bottle of aguardiente that sat beside her on the bench. Aguardiente was a potent brandy and the bottle was half-empty. He sat beside her on the bench and drank deeply. With
his foot, he nudged the paper bag that rested on the ground by her feet and it clinked: more bottles.

“I like this drink,” she said slowly, her head tilted back to look at the stars. “It makes me feel warm. I am always cold here. I think, sometimes, if I found a place that was warm enough, then I would sleep.”

The guitarists who serenaded tourists were putting away their instruments, grumbling
a little at the evening’s take.

The Zocalo was almost deserted. Gregorio shifted uneasily on the bench. “I should go to Parque Hidalgo and see if Pich is still there. He would let me stay at his house.”

“Keep me company a while,” she said. “You can stay in my room.” She glanced at him. “And don’t bother looking at me like that. I plan to sit up by the hotel pool tonight.

It’s a good night to
watch the stars.” She leaned back to look at the night sky. “Tell me—have you always lived in Tixkokob?”

“I come from Pixoy. But it is better that I am not there now.”

“Better for you?” Her eyes were on the sky, but he felt vaguely uncomfortable, as if she were watching him closely.

“Better for everyone,” he said.

“I understand,” she said. She drank from the bottle and gave it back to him.
They watched the moon rise.

Her room was on the bottom floor of the Hotel Refonna.

It was a small dark room, very stuffy and hot. His hammock was strung from rings set in the walls. A stack of notebooks rested on the small table beside the bed. On the dresser, there was a strange small machine that looked a little like a cassette player, a little like a radio. “What’s this?” he asked, picking
it up.

She took it from his hand and set it gently back on the table. The aguardiente made her sway just a little, like a tall tree in the wind. “My lifeline. My anchor. And maybe an albatross around my neck.”

Gregorio shook his head, puzzled by her answer, but unwilling to pursue it. The brandy was warm in his blood, and he was very close to deciding that the thin woman had invited him here
because she wanted a man. He came close to her and wrapped his arms around her, leaning his head against her chest. He could feel her small breasts and that excited him.

She pushed him away with surprising strength and he fell back against the bed. She picked up her notebook and the strange small machine, tucked the bottle of aguardiente under her arm, and stepped toward the door. “Sleep,” she
said.

He slept badly. The tendrils of someone else’s thoughts invaded his dreams. He wandered through a warm humid place where the light was the deep purple color of his hammock. The place was crowded with men and women as tall and thin as the thin woman. He asked them where he was, and they looked at him curiously with dark violet eyes. He wanted to go home, but when he asked if they could tell
him the way, they said nothing. He was fired, very tired, but he could not rest in that place. The air was too thick and hot.

He woke, sweating, in the thin woman’s room, and went to the patio to find her. The first light of dawn was touching the eastern sky, but stars were still visible overhead.

She sat in a lounge chair beside the pool, speaking softly into the machine. He could not understand
the words. Two empty aguardiente bottles were at her feet and another was on the table at her side. He sat in a chair beside her.

Fireflies were dancing over the pool. She gestured at the bottle that rested on the table and Gregorio saw that a firefly had blundered inside the bottle and seemed unable to find its way out. It crawled on the inside of the glass, its feeble light flickering. “I can’t
get her out,” the woman said in a harsh voice blurred with brandy and filled with uncertainty. “And she can’t find her way. She just keeps flashing her light, but no one answers. No one at all.”

Without speaking, Gregorio took the bottle to the ornamental flowerbed by the side of the pool. He took a brick from the border, lay the bottle on the cement, and tapped it lightly with the brick, once,
twice, three times. A starburst of fine cracks spread from each place he struck the bottle, and when he pulled on the neck, the cracks separated and the bottle broke. The insect rose, sluggishly at first, then faster, dancing toward the other lights.

She smiled, and he could tell that the brandy had affected her. The smile was slow and full, like a flower unfolding.

“She returns to her place,”
the woman said, blinking at the dancing lights. “Sometimes I think that I have returned home and maybe I am asleep and dreaming of this place.

Sometimes I try to think that. I go for days believing that I am asleep. Then I come to my senses and I know this is real.” She reached for the last bottle, but it was empty.

“Where do you come from?” Gregorio asked.

She lifted one thin arm and pointed
up at a bright spot of light high in the sky. “That one.”

Gregorio looked at her and frowned. “Why are you here?”

She shrugged. “Merida is as good a place to wait as any. It’s warm here, warmer than most places. My friends are supposed to come get me. They’re late.”

“How late?”

She looked down at her thin hands, now locked together in her lap. “Very late. Just over one hundred years now.”

Her hands twisted, one around the other. “Or maybe they never intended to come back. That’s what bothers me. I send out reports regularly, and maybe that was all they wanted. Maybe they will leave me here forever.”

“Forever?”

“Or for as long as I live.” She glanced at him. In the light of the rising sun, he could see her strange violet eyes—wide and mournful. “I don’t belong here. I don’t …”

She stopped and put her head in her hands. “Why are they so late? I want to go home.” He did not understand what she said next—the language was not English and not Spanish. She was crying and he did not know what to say or do. She looked up at him with a face like an open wound. Her violet eyes were wet and the circles beneath them stood out like bruises. “I want to go home,” she said again. “I don’t
belong here.”

“Who are you?”

She closed her eyes for a moment and seemed to gather strength to her. “The explorers brought us here,” she said. “The ones in the spacecraft. They left us to gather information about your people.” She looked down for a moment and he thought she would stop talking, but she looked up again. “We travel with the explorers but we are a different people. When we meet
with new ways, we adapt. We learn. We take on a little bit of the other, retaining a little bit of ourselves. We blend the two.” She spread her hands on her knees. “We are diplomats, translators, go-betweens for merchants. We live on the border, neither fish nor fowl, not one thing and not the other.”