The Return: A Novel (27 page)

“Why don’t we have a relationship? Do I disgust you physically?”

“Oh, Jesus fuck! I don’t know who you are or what you’re doing. For all I know you’re some kind of gangster yourself. You certainly don’t handle a gun like a book editor, and I’ve known a few. Or, worse, you’re a rich guy with a guilty conscience and some crackpot ideas about how to save the poor of Mexico. And, as long as I’m being frank, I think it’s appalling what you’re doing with that little girl.”

“Lourdes? What do you think I’m doing with her?”

“You’re feeding her fantasies of becoming a television star. It’s terribly cruel and I have no idea why you’re doing it.”

“You don’t think she’s beautiful enough?”

“She’s exquisite, for an
indio
peasant. She doesn’t know how to move or talk or dress, and even if she could be taught, her skin is three shades too dark. I’ll tell you what her film career will be like, Señor Expert on Mexican Culture. If she spreads her legs for the producer and the director and the assistant director and the assistant director’s best friend, she will get a walk-on part as a maid or a nanny, and the only lines she’ll say are ‘Yes, Señora,’ and ‘Right away, Señor.’ If she’s extremely clever, which by the way I don’t see any evidence of so far, she’ll be the girlfriend of a star or semi-star, kept in a tiny apartment in Polanco until she gets boring or ages out. After that, high-class call girl, then a low-class call girl, and then, if she’s really lucky and hasn’t died from drugs or abuse, she’ll be back in Playa Diamante as a fifty-year-old waitress.”

“I don’t believe it,” said Marder. “That’s just
no importa madre
and unworthy of you. Why in hell are you risking your skin to tell the truth about what’s happening here? Because you believe things can change even in timeless Mexico. Things
are
changing. And even if you’re right and she’s doomed, it’s still a good thing if once in her life a completely disinterested person does something nice for her. She thinks expensive junk will make her happy. I intend to buy her all the expensive junk she can handle, and maybe she’ll find that expensive junk isn’t what life’s about. Who knows? Maybe she’ll learn to act. As I’m sure you know, Mexico City has more theaters than practically any other city in the world. Maybe she won’t fuck the producer, or turn whore; maybe in ten years she’ll be with a nice guy and doing Lope de Vega or Felipe Santander in a side-street playhouse in Coyoacán and very happy. And, yes, it’s Mexico, the land that consists entirely of the fucker and the one who is fucked, but it’s not actually a requirement. I mean, it’s not written on the passport,
chingón
or
chingada
, and in fact there are millions of Mexicans who don’t believe that either. My wife was one. And I’m sorry you have that view of life. You must be unhappy a lot of the time.”

“I’m
not
unhappy,” she snapped. “What the hell gave you the idea I was unhappy? I’m at the top of my profession. I’m a reporter for Televisa, for God’s sake!”

“The camera certainly loves you.”

“What’s that supposed to mean? That I’m a bimbo?”

“Of course not, but clearly you’re sensitive to the accusation, and that’s why you’re writing what you hope will be a serious book.” He pointed to her laptop screen. “Which it may well be, but judging from what I can see here, you’re going to need a good editor.”

“Oh, go fuck yourself, Marder!” she cried. “Why don’t you go sit somewhere else? The fucking plane’s half empty.”

True, but it was also a small, quiet aircraft and she had not toned down the volume of her last remarks. Marder saw Skelly’s eyes appear over the back of his seat and then Statch’s face poking out into the aisle. Skelly’s look was antic; Statch’s, worried.

Marder said, “I will, if you want. I’m sorry to have disturbed you so much.”

He sat next to Skelly, who said, “Shot down in flames. I’m going to have to give you some tips, chief, or you’re never going to get into those pants.”

“I wasn’t trying to get into her pants.”

“Really.”

“Yes. To be honest, I was lonely. I miss Chole and I thought I could have a little intelligent conversation, possibly of a literary nature, with an attractive and intelligent and
literary
Mexican woman. And I embarrassed myself. I forgot that a certain class of Mexican looks on Americans very much like Americans look on … I don’t know, who’s the lowest, most vulgar, most violent scum on earth?”

“Mexican drug gangs?”

“Like that. Russian oligarchs, African kleptocrats. Hedge fund criminals. Anyway, beneath contempt, and white American middle-class people aren’t used to that, especially from a people they’ve been taught to think of as producing nannies and fruit pickers.”

“But Chole—”

“Yes, Chole was different. She communicated at the level of pure spirit, lucky for me. Her father was a different story, an old-school Mexican aristocrat, and extra-spiky because he wasn’t a
hacendado
anymore; he was running a second-class hotel in a second-class beach town, and he thought I was taking advantage of his—well, you know all that. But she
reminds
me of Chole in a lot of ways. The intelligence, the fire, even her face and the way she carries herself. It got under my guard and I made a fool of myself.”

“I don’t know, Marder. She was traipsing around the pool in a bikini that could’ve fit into a cigarette pack. I think she’s hot and she wants people to know it. Maybe I should take a crack myself.”

“I think you should. She mentioned she was in the market for a short, violent,
gaucho
American who can barely speak kitchen Spanish.”

“But with an enormous penis.”

“That too. You could go down the aisle right now and wave it in her face. Be my guest.”

“You know, you’re right—she does remind me of Chole a little,” said Skelly. “Maybe she’s what Chole would have been if her life had played out the way it was supposed to, if you hadn’t yanked her out of her native soil.”

He knew that Skelly had not meant this remark to be cruel, but its cruel truth pierced Marder and stunned him out of any casual rejoinder. He rose and sat down in the aisle seat next to his daughter, who was wearing earbuds while plying her laptop. He noticed that the computer screen was covered with complex engineering diagrams. When he sat, she snapped the screen down and popped the earbuds out.

“What was that yelling all about? I could hear it through the music.”

“La Espinoza objected to my presence.”

“Oh, yeah? Well, fuck her! It’s your plane. And didn’t you save her from a bunch of thugs?”

“I’m tired of talking about her, if you don’t mind. You were conversing with Lourdes earlier. What did she have to say?”

“Well, she’s a happy camper, all right. But I’ve never met anyone quite so immersed in popular culture. It’s all celebrities and personal adornment and the opinions of her friends. She has no doubt that she’s going to be famous and rich and that this is her due. But basically she’s a decent kid. She’s going to bring her mother home and put her in a big house. She was surprised that I worked, since you’re so rich.”

She stopped and regarded him curiously. “But you’re not really rich, are you? I mean American rich. I admit I was wondering where you got the money to buy Casa Feliz and toss it around like you’re doing. Chartered planes?”

“I got lucky with some investments is all,” said Marder, and hoped it would not lead to one of those star-chamber interviews he’d occasionally had with his daughter.

It did not. She shrugged and continued, “Anyway, when it was clear that I wasn’t up on the latest telenovela plots, she stuck her earbuds in and went to sit next to a window.”

“It seems like a simple life. I almost envy her. And how is your complex life, daughter mine? How are you doing?”

“I’m a little freaked, to be honest. I didn’t expect this.”

“What did you expect?”

“I don’t know. A depressed father lying in a hotel room drinking himself to death. Instead, Skelly’s here and all this … I don’t know,
stuff
is going on. And somehow I’m in the middle of it, I’ve totally blown my whole grad school thing—”

“Surely not. They can give you a couple of weeks off, can’t they?”

“It doesn’t work that way, Dad. Not in a program like the one I’m in, and not with the competition I have. I made a serious breakthrough in the project design. Schue jumped at it, backed it to the max, and instead of working twice as hard, I took off. He was not pleased.”

“We’re going to an airport. You could be back in Boston tonight.”

“I know. I was thinking about it. But … did you ever, like, get totally dissatisfied with your life? I don’t mean being miserable or anything. I mean your life is going along a track, you have good work, shelter, enough money, friends, sex, but there’s something
wrong
?”

“Yes, I know exactly what you mean. I was like that when I was about your age: settled, decent job, wife, and then one day I got on my bike and rode off to Mexico.”

“Yeah, I know. And the same thing now. I mean you bailing out of New York and coming here.”

“In a way,” said Marder, bending the truth. “But there were some things I had to do. And I’ve been an editor for a long time. I just got up one morning and it was over. And I love Mexico. Being here reminds me of your mother, you know, the voices and the smells and the colors.”

“Yeah, it’s like our loft expanded to the whole world.”

“Exactly. But it sounds as if you really have your life up in Cambridge.”

“I do, but … look, I don’t want this to sound weird, but are you on some kind of suicide trip?”

Marder felt a brief chill. This was the trouble with an intelligent daughter, and moreover one with her mother’s remarkable penetration. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“I mean the guns, and Skelly being here, and what happened the other day, the attack. You’re not trying to, like,
defeat
these guys, are you?”

Marder managed a laugh. “That would be somewhat grandiose as well as suicidal, don’t you think? No, but it’s the case that I want to live here and also that I don’t want to drive off the squatters, and to do that I have to show the gangsters that I’m not someone they can push around without getting their fingers burned. I’ve allied myself with one faction, and I think that’ll suffice. Unfortunately, it’s a cost of doing business in Michoacán just now. But this isn’t your life. I didn’t expect you to come down here, and I think you should go right back to Boston when we get to the airport.”

“Yeah, I get that you’re trying to get rid of me. But, somehow, you seem to be responsible for constructing a small town. Skelly’s a pretty good field engineer, but he’s no me. You’re going to need some type of sewage treatment and a solar generation-and-distribution system, and you need to be wired to the Net, and there’s all the logistics and phasing—someone has got to be the honcho. You could hire someone, I guess … but I think it’s something I could do. Everyone in America expects their kids to go off on their careers and get together once a year, but that’s not the way people are supposed to live. It’s not the way they live here, or at least not the way they want to live. It kills them that their people have to go north to earn a buck. It’s funny—I’m always bullshitting about poor areas leapfrogging technology, jumping to the next level, like they did with cell phones, and here’s the opportunity, dropped in my lap. We could go solar, wireless, state of the art, adapted to a rural craft economy. Autonomous three-D manufacturing—what I was working on—is the obvious next thing in the industrial world, but I’ve been thinking that when everyone has practically free automatically produced stuff, they’re going to want some one-of-a-kind items, lovingly produced by human hands. It’s happening now, and it’s going to get bigger. And then there’s the whole Web marketing thing. We need a webpage and an Etsy account and a fulfillment system and an accounting system—”

“Do you know anything about that? I thought you were a mechanical engineer.”

“Dad, it’s the kind of stuff fourteen-year-olds can do now. Engineering is all about solving problems, and this is a really interesting set of problems. It’d be years before I got this kind of responsibility, and I bet if I wrote it up I could use it as a thesis project. I bet I could get Schue interested in it. I mean, aside from anything else, if I applied for the job, wouldn’t you hire me?”

“Are you sure about this?” asked Marder. His heart was doing peculiar things in his chest.

“No, but it seems like the right thing to do now. I think Mom would’ve wanted me to do it.”

“Okay, you’re hired,” he said, now barely able to get out the words. He hugged Carmel and kissed her on the temple.

Where did this desperate caring come from, he now wondered; what was its source? Something latent in him, was it, or something expressed out of the land of Mexico, out of the situation in which he found himself? He had come down here thinking that it was a shucking off, a preparation for the nakedness of death, but from almost the first minute of his supposed escape, entanglements had reached out like jungle vines and clung to him. And yet he felt no desire to disentangle himself again, to tell the pilot of this plane to take off from Mexico City and go far away, leaving him among strangers. He had tried and failed to escape, and now he was being drawn ever deeper into something strange and dangerous, and he was dragging his daughter into it too. Or not him, really; the ghost of his wife was the strength behind all this.

He looked out the window. The plane had descended to around ten thousand feet. Beneath them the land had turned sere, the desert eastern slopes of the Sierra, and beyond this landscape he could now make out what appeared to be an immense brownish smear extending to the northern horizon.

“That’s the Valley of Mexico,” he said, pointing. “Chilangolandia.”

“Why do they call Mexico City people
Chilangos
?”

“I have no idea. And I believe the more common term nowadays is
Defeños
, those from the
distrito federal
, Defe, as they say. God, it’s certainly huge.”