Mexico Page 5

  At the mention of the word “daughter” his eyes widened for a second, then they resumed their half-open shape of deep meditative prayer. If this plea wouldn’t work, then I thought I would try one more. I turned to him and whispered, “I’ll do anything. I will do anything to make you happy.”

  He turned up to the balcony to see if Sara was there. He must have found she was. He turned back down, not acknowledging my presence. Then he turned to me directly and said, “Will you accept there is only one God, that he is the God of Abraham and Isaac, and that he is your God? Will you denounce that you don’t believe in God?”

  What he wanted me to do was to denounce who I was. What he wanted me to do was to be only who he wanted me to be. What he wanted me to do was to believe in rote faith for no more reason than that I had been born into a faith. And even if I did that, I knew he would find other problems with me: that I wasn’t Orthodox enough, that I didn’t keep kosher, that I didn’t follow my daily life as he wanted me to. He wanted to find divisions; and wanting to find divisions, he would always find them. Who was he to try to tell me what to do, when I had done nothing but try to treat him with respect, and to give love to his daughter? Sara wasn’t asking me to make this choice. She had asked me, in fact, not to come see her father. She had had that wisdom.

  And yet, looking up at the front of the temple at the scrolls of the Torah, it came to me that what the man was asking me to do was to give a name to a feeling that was mutual. We both believed there were mysteries to the universe. We both believed the ways and reasons why men acted were often unknowable, and that they were often worthy of punishment. We both believed a life should be lived as morally as possible. He wanted faith, and faith I couldn’t give him. But there is wisdom in seeking common ground, in breaking down walls that don’t need to exist. If his faith meant I would honor him and his daughter and that I would seek to live a moral and just life, then I would say what he wanted me to hear. In naming, each hears the name they want to hear, and if it’s the same name it will be heard as the same, even if it is different. “Yes, I have come to tell you I believe in God,” I said. “I will no longer call myself an atheist.”

  He turned to me and hugged me, coldly, but with a pat on the head that let me know he was giving me forgiveness. He looked up at Sara and nodded for her to come down so he could talk to her. He went out behind the main room of the temple to the entryway to speak to her. And as he went up to Sara and hugged her, and whispered something into her ear, speaking to her for the first time in eight years, I thought to myself, I believe in the God of family. That will be my God, however we have to name it. It was not that I would believe in his God. I couldn’t. But I would believe in the God of common names.

  I WANT TO LIVE

  I was waiting in the waiting room of the Spanish Hospital in Mexico City. I’m a nurse. Or at least I used to be, until I retired down to Mexico. I came down, in part, because the cost of living had become more than I expected in the U.S. and mainly because, at a relatively young age, I decided I wanted to live my life to the fullest. I didn’t want to die with the regret I never did all the things I would like to do. So, at the age of fifty, after working as a nurse for twenty-five years in Cleveland, I came down to Mexico City. For five years I integrated myself into the city and the culture. I learned Spanish, taking intense language classes and generally speaking to everyone I could.

  Things were going swimmingly until three weeks ago, when I came in to get a checkup at the hospital for the first time. I hadn’t exactly come in with no idea of what they would tell me. My mother died of breast cancer and my aunt died of breast cancer and my grandmother died of breast cancer. It runs extra-prevalently in certain families. The same way some families have heart disease or mental health diseases, others have a risk for breast cancer. I usually avoid sharing such information with doctors, precisely because I am afraid of what they will tell me. My whole adult life I was a nurse giving out logical, rational information to patients, but the minute the tables were turned on me and I was a patient, it felt the other way. As a new patient at the Spanish Hospital, three weeks ago, they gave me a sheet with a checklist of all the health problems that might be troubling me. I could honestly check no for almost everything on the list. When it came to a history of breast cancer in the family, I checked no, at first. Then I scratched out my check mark. Then I left the yes box blank. And then, after tapping the pen they had given me on the clipboard, I finally checked yes.

  After a brief talk with Dr. Rodriguez, the general practitioner who examined me, they brought in another doctor, Jiménez, a specialist in breast cancer. “I see you have mentioned there is a history of breast cancer in your family,” Dr. Jiménez said. I explained to him who had died in my family. He insisted we do a standard genetic test to see if I had inherited the gene for having a high probability of breast cancer. The test was arranged that very day; they took a sample. And a week later, two weeks ago, they told me I had the gene BRCA1, which gave me an 87-percent chance I would develop breast cancer, unless I had a double mastectomy.

  It was under these circumstances that I was waiting in the waiting room when I saw a woman across from me waiting, too. She was quite young, no more than thirty. She had long, brown, perfectly combed hair and a stunningly beautiful face. Her eyes were wide and round in a way that reminded me of Japanese anime dolls. Her cheeks were fleshy and healthy. Her ears were petite, and she wore a couple of big fake diamonds that seemed an effort to show off her whole face. It was hot in the waiting room. We were in the waiting room for reconstructive surgery. I was very torn by the idea of having my breasts removed. I wasn’t sure, at all, that this was something I was willing to let happen. At the same time, I was deeply worried about the consequences—a near certainty of getting breast cancer, sometime in the next five years—if I didn’t.

  Looking across at the other woman, I couldn’t help but say, aloud, without thinking, “It must be nice to still be so pretty and perfect.”

  The woman stared at me, then turned sharply away. I saw her fold one hand under the other in her lap. The suddenness with which she moved her hands struck me as odd. She played at the hemline of her skirt. The skirt was long and floral and accentuated the fact that she had a surprisingly fit body. She was in all ways, it seemed, a near perfect specimen of beauty, and it certainly didn’t escape my notice that her breasts were perfectly intact. She had on a red silk chemise that attracted attention to her breast area, and when she bent forward and down to fix the hemline of her skirt, smoothing it, I couldn’t help but see her young, well-formed breasts. Her body was evenly tan and her breasts curved firmly upward, so that even with her bending forward, the firmness of the curve, and the health of her breasts, was more than evident.

  “It’s so unfair,” I found myself saying, involuntarily aloud. “Look at you. Just look at you.” There were only the two of us in the waiting room, so there was no way for her to avoid me or to misconstrue what I was saying. She looked simply gorgeous in the most stereotypical of ways. She looked like she could be on the red carpet of an Oscars awards ceremony, with cameras taking photos of her. “You could be a movie star,” I said. “And me, now they want to take away my breasts. Option A, they say, is to do a double mastectomy. Option B is to die. I used to tell patients about these kinds of crazy dilemmas and I would tell them all rationally, just like they have told me, but it’s different when you’re suddenly on the side of being a patient…But you, the gods seem to have made you perfect.”

  In the quickness with which the woman in front of me kept moving her hands, I could only notice her perfection, even her perfume smelled sweet. The woman tried not to listen to me; she looked away and laughed, a kind of shocked laugh when I continued insisting on her beauty, but when I declared the gods had made her perfect she shot up her right hand, holding the palm in my direction, and on her palm I saw, carved in a pink hideous X, a large scar that took up the whole of her hand. She raised her other hand, and the palm had the same hid
eous scar. She was marked with two Xs, puffy and thick, fleshy and with a rawness that indicated they would most likely never disappear, even with the best of reconstructive surgery.

  She turned away from me and lifted her perfectly combed hair, held with hairspray that kept it perfectly in place, light brown with streaks of blonde, thick and rich. She bent to show me her neck even more clearly. It was a thin, pale brown, delicate long neck made for caressing; only, in the center of the back of her neck there was another X, marked as crudely as the first two.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said. “How did it happen?”

  “Some things are not meant to be shared,” she said. She spoke in Spanish. “You’re asking something too private.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I’m listening.” Over the years, as a nurse, I have learned that what everyone really wants to do, what they really need to do, is to tell their story, locked inside. If they can just get the story out, it can do more good than even the surgery they are facing. I have learned that—more than running around changing IVs and helping doctors prepare for surgery and changing bedsheets for patients—the biggest role a nurse plays is psychologist. “Yes, tell me. Tell me,” I said. “Tell me and maybe your story will help me feel better, too.”

  “You want me to tell you such a personal story, but you want me to tell it for you rather than for me,” the woman said. “Do you think you can stomach such a story?” She held her palms in the air for me to clearly see the two Xs. It wasn’t like me to blurt things out the way I’d done. I must have looked tense, an animal lost at sea. I had no family in Mexico. I was, completely, all alone. She was right, I wanted the story for me and not for her.

  “Yes, I’m sure I want to hear about the scars,” I said. “I’m all alone, here in Mexico. I’m waiting to see if they’re going to remove my breasts. I never had kids, and the man I was once married to left me. I’m divorced. I could use hearing your story. I’m in deep trouble. I don’t know what I will do if they get rid of my breasts. I think I’ll feel like I’m just going to die, like they’re getting rid of my body and soul.”

  She sucked in deeply and examined me. I must have looked well on my way to becoming a grandmother. She must have felt pity for a woman my age having to confront breast cancer alone.

  “Forgive me,” she said, “but I can see you are a foreigner. Only a foreigner would insist so much I tell a personal story for them. Yet, since you insist, I’ll tell you, because it seems it might help you—on the condition you don’t judge me before I finish telling you the entire story.”

  “Oh, I won’t judge. I can see someone did something wrong to you.” Since she spoke to me in Spanish, I did the same.

  She leaned back and closed her eyes, as if retreating to a time far away. She kept her eyes closed as she began to speak, opening them only as she got into her story, so rapt in her tale she barely saw me as she talked.

  “I have been a very foolish person. I have used beauty like a drug. But I became the person who did so much wrong, I think, or who participated in so much wrong because I grew up with nothing, first. When I was a kid, I was completely an orphan. I grew up in Sinaloa, and I grew up in an orphanage. My father ran off, away from my mother before I was even born. I have no idea where he went. He was a man who just wanted to plant his seed in every woman he could find. I hear he was from Brazil, but I really don’t know. He came and went, arriving on a boat in a storm and leaving only a few weeks later, after he had wooed my mother. My mother was very beautiful, they tell me, and she died when I was two. She had been raised as an orphan also, so when you say the gods have made me perfect and that everything has been given to me, I laugh, because the only thing I know is that life is like a wheel that circles and circles. What happened to my mother was passed on to me. She chose a bad man to live with and to have a baby with, and I guess I did the same.

  “But I loved my bad man. That’s the thing—I suppose I loved my bad man just like my mother loved hers. Bad men are like addictions. They lure you in with sex and fulfilling whatever dream you have, and they make your heart rush with their masculinity, and that’s what Enrique did to me.

  “But every addiction starts somewhere, and my addiction to my beauty began when I lived in that orphanage. I didn’t know that I was beautiful, and what the power of being beautiful is, until I was six years old. Yes, of course, I knew that people always looked at me longer than they looked at other kids. When you are beautiful people envy you, they look at you and they want to get close to you. But they also want to punish you and harm you because you are everything they want to have and what they are jealous of.

  “When I was six, a wealthy woman came to the orphanage where I was growing up. The orphanage was run by nuns. There were children crying all over the place. Each group of children had to look after the others. One room had the kids who were infants, on up to three-year-olds. Another had the kids who were from three to eight, which is where I lived. And then there were the oldest kids, who were, by then, considered untouchables who would never be adopted by anyone, destined for failure. The three- to eight-year-olds were expected to change the diapers of the babies. I was changing the diapers of one of the infants when the wealthy woman, La Señora Elvira de Castilla, came into the orphanage. She had a long face, full of wrinkles that had been stretched tight with plastic surgery. Her gray hair was as brittle and dry as dusty straw. She walked with her body rigid, like she was afraid of bending over because it might hurt her bony figure. She was someone, I would discover, who always looked in mirrors. The mother superior took La Señora around the orphanage, bringing her into each room, and when La Señora saw me she said, ‘Stop. Stop. That one is beautiful. She is exactly what I am looking for.’ She grinned at me like a cat looking at its prey. She came up to me and stared deep into my eyes, seeming to see a reflection of beauty too alluring and powerful for her, which reminded her of whom she had once been, or wanted to be. She pinched my cheek until it left a sting I could still feel the next day, when I was delivered by a nun to her dark, front house door.

  “La Señora didn’t treat me like an adopted daughter. She treated me more like her servant. She made me sleep in the servants’ quarters with the other old muchacha she had. She made me wash the floors and clean food in the kitchen and dust the banisters of her house, where she lived, otherwise, alone. She made me wind up the grandfather clock in the old study where her husband had once worked, before he’d died. She made me stand behind her as she sat at the boudoir for hours putting on makeup, having me comb her hair, one long brushstroke after another, the gray, long hair, like pieces from a skeleton, coming off in my brush.

  “She would barely let me go out, since she barely went out. She had caged birds in her house, in large cages I had to regularly clean. The birds stank, even though they were beautiful, exotic tropical birds from South America, and I would watch them gnawing at the bars of the equally exotic birdcages.

  “So it shouldn’t be surprising that, like those birds, I searched for any way I could get out of the house. I looked for excuses to go to the market to buy fruit and vegetables. I never had any money of my own to go shopping. La Señora would give me exactly the small amount she wanted me to spend on the food. She never gave quite enough, so she knew I would have nothing to spend on myself. It was always embarrassing to come to the end of the shopping and to find, with one of the last vendors, that I would have to tell them to take some of the food back because I didn’t have enough money to pay for everything. I would walk home eating a mango or plum, and when I got home La Señora would tell me she knew I was eating some of the food and that I shouldn’t be such a little thief.

  “At the age of sixteen, then, it shouldn’t come as any surprise I ran away, one day. I left without any extra clothes. I was afraid if I left with anything that seemed unusual, La Señora would notice and slam the door before I could leave, or she would immediately call the police and have them search for me. So I ran away with only the black dress I had on, with a whit
e lace top like a maid’s bib attached to the dress. For six days, I wandered the streets. I slept in alleyways so no one would find me, in the corners of stairwells, and once even behind a garbage dump, because I had looked in the garbage for food and then had fallen asleep, so tired. It was the day after that that I found Enrique, or, I should say, he found me.

  “I am not going to lie and say he did not look like a drug dealer, or a pimp. He looked like a criminal, straight-up. He had on a white suit with a red handkerchief. He had on a pair of shiny, gray alligator-skin boots that were so polished they looked like leather mirrors. His black hair was gelled back with tons of oil, and his eyes were hidden by dark sunglasses. His smile was almost nonexistent. If he smiled, it was despite himself. But when he took off his dark glasses his eyes looked through me, and through everyone he saw. His eyes came to black points that shined like glass, which seemed to calculate and take everything in all at once, figuring out the value of anything before him, what kind of gold he could turn something into that looked to others like nothing. He had the eyes of someone who won at cards, who could sit down at a table, assess the situation, and walk away with all the money on the table.

  “He took one look at me and said, ‘Allow me, please, to take you out to breakfast.’ He spoke to me like a gentleman, even though, by that time, my clothes were covered with dirt, and the lace bib attached to the dress was gray with filth.

  “He took me to one of the fanciest places for breakfast, on the main plaza of the city. When he walked into the restaurant, the waiters all stood at attention. The headwaiter came up to him and said, ‘Señor Enriquez, your usual seat?’ and they took him to a table that looked directly out onto the plaza. He ordered me a large breakfast of huevos divorciados, a plate of fruit, coffee with fresh cream, sweet rolls, and an extra plate of strawberries. La Señora Elvira had never allowed me to eat with her, only to serve her. I truly didn’t know how to eat in the company of a man who was well-dressed and who wanted me to sit at his side. I ate, sometimes, with my fingers, because I didn’t know any better. I picked up some of the pieces of strawberry with my hands, without thinking, though I tried to eat with a fork and knife because I knew that was what a lady was supposed to do.