Mexico Read online

  And so, one day, I’m like checking up on my crew and I see the professor’s daughter, and she’s buying a little bag of coke from one of my guys. And I’m like, ain’t life funny—me I was trying to get into that museum and here’s the professor’s daughter coming to me to get what she needs. That’s the daughter who’s the airline flight attendant. She was telling my man that she didn’t quite have all the money with her, that she was going to have it for him next time, and asking him if he could just hold her over. And sometimes we’ll do that just to make sure the customer don’t stop using, know what I mean? So we’ll let ’em get away with not paying for a little bag as long as they pay the next time. But I told my compadre, when I seen that daughter, I said to him and to her, right in front of her face, “If you want some of this, you’re gonna have to pay interest. You know what I mean? We could go somewhere and we could have some nice romantic dinner, but that’s the only way you’re gonna get some of this for free.”

  She gave me this nasty look like she didn’t need me. Her black hair was cut kinda messy and she looked pale like she hadn’t found her makeup, and her mascara was put on too thick, like maybe she’d been crying. And I thought, man, I’d like to do her. I would like a piece of the professor’s daughter. ’Cause even though she had this messy look, she was as white and pale as they come, and kinda sexy wearing a tight skirt, the way no one does in my barrio—whiter than a güera I ain’t never tasted in bed before.

  And she says to me, “What kind of woman do you think I am? You think I’m some kind of woman who sleeps around for drugs? You think I need your drugs that bad?”

  And so, I says to her, “Well, I didn’t see me coming up to you. Looks like you crawled up here to this place all on your own.”

  And she just spit on the ground in front of me like she was some kind of boss-queen. She bent her head down to spit, and while she did it I could see her shirt open up a little and I looked down into her chest where her breasts were, and I ain’t never seen no breasts that up-close so white and clean. I could almost see her nipples. So I said, “Sooner or later you’re gonna find out everything cost somethin’. Your daddy’s been spoilin’ you. He’s been making you think mangoes fall from the sky. But to get the green mango and turn it orange, without spoiling, you’ve gotta pick it up off the ground when it falls.”

  She still gave me some disgusted look like I was just some parasite telling her she’d been sucking at the teat too much of her daddy. I knew she’d go around and find nobody else was gonna give her that coke for free for long. Maybe once. Maybe twice there’d be someone that would give her a packet for free to get her as their customer. But not for long. And I was right. One day, ’bout a month later, I saw her come up to my compadre and she was asking for me and where I am, and I showed up from behind, a back room where I’d been listening to my compay, and when she saw me she said she was still laid off from being a flight attendant and she didn’t have any money and could I give her some for free for a couple of days, and I said, “I told you that’s gonna cost something.” So she said she’d meet me for dinner at this restaurant I told her where to meet me at. And that night I had the first white pussy I ever had in my life. And I can tell you, she didn’t seem like she was minding it so much. She looked like she was a nymphomaniac. Some of them rich girls, they’ll pretend they don’t have a penny and then they’ll fuck your brains out. I know she didn’t have the money, but she looked like she was OK with it, rocking on top of me in the hotel.

  The professor stood in his studio space in front of a large canvas mounted on its easel—where he had planned on painting earlier in the day before he had to take Carmen to the hospital—and no new painting would come to him. He had been stuck on this painting and series for over six months now. He would put paint on the canvases, and he wouldn’t like what he saw, so he would paint over them. Or he would just stand in front of the canvases and nothing new would come to him. Six months ago, he had finally been able to return to his painting, after giving up directorship of the painting department at the university. The stress of running the program, the numerous faculty he had to direct, the meetings with the administration, the setting of standards, the managing of students, had all worn on him for six years and he had had almost no time to do what he was meant to do—paint. It was like having his purpose removed from him, turning him into a body, a vessel instead of a spirit. Halfway through his time chairing the department, he had felt little edges of his mind bend from the stress. He had attributed it, at first, to giving up the drinking, to the effects of trying to go on the straight path. Maybe he needed the juice to keep himself whole. But that was preposterous, he knew, and so he’d continued forward with the Buddhism and with the meditation, trying to heal himself more, which had helped for a while, but the stress built and built. He wasn’t meant to be an administrator, even though he was good at it. The university had wanted him to continue directing the program, until they realized his behavior was becoming more erratic. One day, he walked into the university and students heard a howling in his office and they didn’t know what was going on. He had locked himself in his office chanting Buddhist prayers and the chanting had risen in sound until it became a full-blown guttural howl, like a sheep trying to find its lamb.

  He resigned quickly. His older daughter took over his painting classes and he moved permanently to Puebla where he thought he could return to being the great painter everyone expected him to be. He had a show lined up in a year. People were expecting great things from him at his gallery in Monterrey. He would have a show at the main museum up there. But six months had passed and nothing but crap would come to the paintings.

  Staring at the canvas, in the descending light of the evening as it bent through the fiberglass patches in the roof and slapped against the canvas in harsh dots of light, the light reflected off the white canvas like emergency lights in bright oranges and reds. He watched the light move across the canvas, lost in the sundial. He saw a flash of Carmen coming out of the hospital. He saw a flash of the insolent smile of the gangster in the blood donation room, hooked up to the plasma separator. He saw blood everywhere, sluicing in and out of the machine, and blood on the ground across the street that he had touched earlier in the day with his fingers. The coagulated blood had stuck to his index finger when he’d dragged it through the mud. The images swirled, flashed. He heard a high-pitched buzzing in his ear and then a gong, gong, gong, and he threw the canvas onto the ground and was surprised by the sound of the wood frame clattering against the concrete floor.

  He walked into his younger daughter’s room, which she had been using more and more since she was laid off, and since he had moved to Puebla full-time after finishing up directing the painting department. The words of the gangster in the hospital kept coming to him, that his daughter was snorting coke. Had he failed as a parent, too? Was he not there for his daughters? He had wanted to be there for them, always. Often, the painting had taken precedence. Often, his first wife had to do much of the real, day-to-day raising of the children, while he had worked hard in the studio painting and showing his work.

  But he had felt certain he was there for his daughters when they needed him. He would meditate on the floor with his elder daughter. The two daughters looked nothing alike. The elder daughter was plump and happy in her roundness, radiating light off her smile. The other daughter had black hair and pale skin and had inherited his fervent energy, his need to be absorbed in a project at all times. She had finished school and tried to be a chef, but that didn’t work out, so she had become a flight attendant. Her eyes often looked sad to him, especially since she had lost her job.

  But perhaps, he now remembered, the look in her eyes had begun earlier, ten years ago, on her twenty-first birthday. That was when he was still married to his first wife, Cristina. A party had been organized at the studio compound in Puebla for his younger daughter. It was the custom of his family to get together, every year, in Puebla for her birthday. The party had started at thr
ee, but he had arrived at nine at night, after sleeping in the apartment with one of his female students, whom he had been seeing for six months. His hair was messy from the encounter in bed. He had completely forgotten about the birthday of his daughter. When he arrived at the back of the studio house, at the long patio decorated with his good taste in Mexican pottery that looked like Greek amphorae, traditional Talavera tiles from Puebla, and the trickling fountain, he expected to simply find his good taste reflected back at him, but there, running along the patio, was a table with the tablecloth bent wildly upward at the corners onto the table, as if the process of beginning to clean a big mess had begun. The table was covered with plates dirty with the remains of discarded food, the knives and forks filthy, wine stains covering the tablecloth, and the wax of burnt candles spreading all the way into the fabric.

  Everyone had left the party except his two daughters and his first wife, Cristina.

  His wife looked at him quickly, then continued cleaning. His elder daughter said, “Papá, where have you been? You missed the party.” She looked at him, genuinely baffled he could have forgotten such an important thing.

  “Maybe he was sleeping with some other woman,” his younger daughter said. “Maybe he was sleeping with her back in the house in el DF.”

  Her mother, Cristina, told her to shush. Her mother said, in a high voice, she would have no such wild talk in front of everyone. “Quiet, Alicia. What kind of horrible thing are you making up?”

  “But it’s right in front of your eyes, Mamá. It’s right in front of all our eyes. He’s been fucking these women for years. He’s been fucking them right in front of our nose, and thinking we can’t even see. And there he stands, after forgetting my birthday, and he pretends he doesn’t even know what we’re talking about. Look at him, with his shoulders hunched, like I’m making things up. Look at him running away, into his studio, he’s too cowardly to even admit what he’s done.”

  That was the end of his first marriage. That was the beginning of the sad look on his younger daughter’s face. She had found out about the affairs, he had learned later, from the muchacha who cleaned the house in el DF and from former students who eventually spoke to his elder daughter.

  Inside his younger daughter’s room, he didn’t want to pry, but he began to look at the surface of her desk and then, after he had made the determination to look inside, her desk drawers. He pushed away pencils and pastels and oils. She had decided to paint since she couldn’t find any work. She was painting flowers, lately, and they were three-dimensionally well rendered and with bright colors, but they looked as cold as plastic. He couldn’t lie to his daughter about her work, so he told her nothing about them, and since he said nothing she must have known what he was really thinking. He searched inside her closet, inside her shoes. He had no reason to believe anything would be inside them, but he couldn’t help but pick up the leather shoes, sniffing the smell of the dry sweat inside like a crazy animal looking for water in the desert. He looked under the bed mattress, and there he found two small plastic baggies, the size of an inch, no more, one with the residue of white powder, and the image of the gangster came back to him telling him his daughter was lonely and unhappy and that she had been buying coke from him, and he went back into the closet looking for the upper reaches of the shelf where he had an old box from his father with a gun his father had received when he was in the Mexican Army. The professor kept the weapon in good condition. He’d had it oiled and maintained regularly, not only to honor his father but because the neighborhood was changing.

  He pulled the gun down with the box and put the box on his daughter’s desk and he wanted to swallow the plastic bags and the gun and make them all disappear and he picked up the gun and waved it in the air and hopped on one leg like a warrior and the snaps in his mind were snapping away and he wanted a drink, but he wasn’t going to go for a drink, and he bleated and moaned, but no one was in the house with him. His wife had left, back up to Mexico City, after the shootings the night before. She was scared and he had told her she should go.

  He was alone in his castle. He heard the gong, gong, gong, in his brain and he was being called to action. His head felt hollow, and then suddenly full again, like a pile of mercury liquid had been poured into his brain and was sloshing around. But the gong, gong, gong was a knocking at the door. And how had it become so dark? Only fifteen minutes ago, it seemed, the orange light had been moving across the canvas. He pretended the banging and knocking at the door hadn’t happened. It might be the police. Maybe it was the police coming to speak to him. When he’d come home from the hospital, when his wife went back up to Mexico City, he had called the cops and told them they needed to do something about the increasing violence in his neighborhood. He had used all of his connections to speak to an assistant and then to the boss of an assistant, on up the chain of command until he’d spoken to the local chief of police of Puebla. Mauricio was known in the city as “the painter.” People who knew nothing about art still knew his name in the city, even though he was reclusive, and he had told the chief something had to be done. Things could not continue like this in his neighborhood. The bullets were climbing up the wall. Next time he would peek over the wall and one of the bullets would hit him. There were young children, young men, dying in the neighborhood and no one cared. The chief had said yes, yes, something would be done, police would be sent, but no one had come. But maybe now the police were at the door. The knocking was louder and more insistent and he went through his painting studio and continued through the building with the metal molds of socks and out again to the large front doors that kept the world out.

  When he got to the doors he tried to gather his thoughts, to shut the creeping mercury off, and he said in a feeble voice that felt to him like a loud voice, “Who is there? Are you the police? Have you finally come? What took you so long? Who is there?”

  The knocking didn’t stop. It was a persistent bang against the door, but the person banging wouldn’t announce who he was. He could open the peephole, but he didn’t want to see who it was, he wanted to turn back and run into the house. He felt his father’s gun in his hand. The gun felt heavy and pulled down to the ground, the barrel of the handgun pointed at his feet. He needed to look more like a warrior, he thought, so he struggled and lifted the gun into the air and waved it over his head in silent pantomime, wanting to scream, and then he opened the rusted metal box which covered the primitive hole through the thick wood door. On the other side he saw nothing. Not a thing. It must all have been in his head. He must be having hallucinations again. He had to see if it was all just in his head, so he opened the door and looked outside, and he saw emptiness. Absolutely nothing, at all. He left the door open in his shock and scurried back into his compound, forgetting he had left the door ajar, and he went into the kitchen and sat at the kitchen table, an old wood table, and for the first time in years he noticed the paper-mache statue of La Catrina. She was supposed to be a symbol of life after death, but the whiteness of her paper-mache bones came to him now, and he could feel his own mortality coming, and he sat staring at the folds of her rib cage and at her scrawny body, which felt like the withering interior of his body, and in the doorway to the kitchen he felt a presence and he looked over and saw the silhouette of the boy who had turned into a man whom he had seen earlier in the hospital.

  “I told you not to call the cops,” the man-boy said. “I told you that if you did I was going to come here.”

  “Was that you banging at the door?”

  “What are you talking about, old man? You even left the door open. I’ve never seen you do that, but you left it open.”

  “What are you going to do to me?”

  “You’re the one who made the choice to call the cops.”

  “But they haven’t come.”

  “It doesn’t matter. And it won’t matter. They won’t come. We own the cops. Don’t you see? My boss’s boss. He owns the cops. That’s how I know you called them. But we can’t ha
ve you making noise. It gets messy.”

  “Are you going to shoot me?”

  “You need to show me one of your paintings, first. I tried to see them, once, in the museum in Mexico City, but they wouldn’t let me in. So you’re going to give me a private showing.”

  “I’ll show you one of the paintings now.”

  He took the gangster into the studio. He took him in front of the white canvas that he wasn’t able to progress on. He picked the canvas up from the floor and put it on the easel. The light switches were far away, in the corner, and he told the gangster to stand in front of the easel with the canvas while he would turn the lights on. The gangster did as he was told. He stood in front of the white canvas. The room was still dark; the professor hadn’t turned on the lights.

  “Do you see the canvas? Do you see the whiteness there? That is my troubled mind. No one will want to buy this painting.”

  “Then that’s not the painting I want to see,” the gangster said. “I want to see the painting you have that is worth the most money. I want to see the painting that is your most valuable and beautiful one. I want to see the painting that you have been keeping from me and my compays all of this time, hidden in your fortress.”

  The professor threw on the switch and the bright mercury lights started out dull at first and then they screamed with whiteness so hard he could barely see. He pulled the gun out of his pocket, which he had been hiding. He walked up to the gangster, with the gun pointed at the gangster’s head.

  “Go ahead and shoot,” the gangster said. “I know you don’t have the guts to shoot me or anyone else. That’s why you’re a professor. You don’t have the raw power and beauty and evil inside necessary to shoot another person. It takes a lot of power to do that, to just shoot a man at his face. That’s why the new guys they just shoot the AK-47s, because they’re too scared to shoot a handgun into another man’s face.”