Mexico Page 6

  “Enrique watched me eat like a wolf, and at one point he began to laugh, after I told him a little about working for La Señora, and as he watched me eat the fruit with my fingers. ‘She tormented you,’ he said. ‘She turned you into an animal. That’s what I like, a beautiful animal. The regular women out there, they are either too soft or—if they are tough—they have no physical beauty. But you have both, because of the way you were raised.’ He told me he was going to buy me all the clothes I wanted. He told me he was going to let me see just how beautiful I was. He told me I was the most beautiful young woman he had ever seen. He was no older than twenty-nine, but I liked that he didn’t look like a boy. I wasn’t looking for a teenager then, like the boys I had sometimes stared at with longing in the marketplace. I wanted someone who could keep me safe, and he had everything I needed then.”

  She stopped, suddenly, and came out of her dream for a second. She looked over at the secretary in the waiting room, but it was clear there was no movement forward from the doctor to speak to either of us. We were two patients who were going to have to wait to see the doctor. It was a Tuesday around lunchtime, and who knew if the doctor was even with a patient, or if it was just going to be one of those waits, in Mexico, that can take forever?

  “And the scars?” I said. “What happened with the scars?” The lady’s story was engaging, but I had to admit I was getting impatient to hear about the scars. I was still trying to figure out what any of this had to do with my potential double mastectomy. The lady had suggested there was some connection. I was glad she was getting her story out, and I wanted to hear more, but I was feeling anxious about what the doctor would tell me, and this story wasn’t necessarily comforting me.

  “The scars are always there. Even before they give them to you. But I told you, you will have to let me finish the story. You want everything to be revealed quickly, you want this story to be immediately about you. Just listen. This story is not instantly about you. It’s about me. And you will have to not judge me.”

  “I promise,” I said. “I guess I promise.” I was beginning to lose my patience, a bit.

  “Do you want to hear, or not? Just listen to what someone else has to say.” I heard her say the word “selfish” under her breath. She shook her head and pressed her hands, anxiously, one against the other. She looked at the palms of her hands, where the scars were. She looked at them, seemingly in disbelief, and continued.

  “Over the next two years, once Enrique picked me up off the streets, I began to shop and to buy clothes, voraciously. I bought long, bright gowns, purple and gold, with sequins sewn all around the necks of the dresses. I was only sixteen when I met Enrique, and I had never had a quinceañera party, so Enrique gave me a sort of party like that, even if it was a year too late. He invited the various other small-time leaders of the drug cartel he was in. It was a way of trying to move up the ranks. At the same time as he was selling more drugs and killing more people and proving he could be tough enough to become one of the bigger leaders of the cartel, he wanted to show me off as his girlfriend and as the woman he intended to make his bride. A couple hundred people were going to come to the party, and he wanted me not only to look good but to be able to perform something for the guests. ‘I think you could be a good entertainer,’ he told me. ‘Most of those singers who get all the attention on TV, they start out like us—people who the rich try to keep down—but then they show their pure soul and their talent and they prove the rest wrong. I don’t see any reason why you couldn’t be a famous actress or an entertainer. Just look at you. You’re more beautiful than Ninel’—a popular singer, at the time. ‘We’re going to turn you into something, too. You and I, we’re going to rise, together.’

  “ ‘Really?’ I said. ‘You really think I can be something? You really think I could be someone people would admire, with talent?’ When I said ‘talent,’ I was thinking of the soap opera stars. It never occurred to me to think of a serious stage actress or a serious opera singer, or a simple singer in a church choir. I wanted to be like the pop stars and the soap opera stars and the stars of the movies in the theaters, which La Señora Elvira had never let me go to, and that I went to with Enrique religiously.

  “ ‘With your beauty, anything is possible,’ Enrique said. ‘Life is for the taking. You have to take what you want. The people who want to stop you from becoming what we want to become are everywhere. But I’ll be your prince. I’ll make you into what you want.’

  “So I started to take dancing and singing lessons. I started to pose in front of the mirror as I sang, and to practice my moves. I learned to sway dramatically in those most sentimental of moments, when you want to hold the audience enraptured with your song. I started out learning traditional songs, because tapping into the traditional songs was all I knew, at first, and they were easier to learn in voice lessons. I put on more and more jewels. Fake ones, at first, much bigger than these fake diamonds you see me wearing now. I covered myself in big hoop earrings and rubies. I watched videos of the pop stars, and I did the same moves with them on TV, walking back and forth on my imaginary stage. Jumping and shaking and twirling. Enrique told me I had always had the talent within me to be a star, it’s just that others were preventing me from being what I could be.

  “You see, we were in this together. The idea was we were going to both rise up until people could admire us the way Enrique said we should be admired. That’s why Enrique wanted me to compete to be a beauty queen, and that’s why he was strategizing and working so hard to move up the ranks of his cartel. And I want to tell you, I could see how much we needed each other. At the party for me that he threw with his couple hundred guests, he would pull my hand, bringing me forward from one group of invited men to another, showing me off, telling everyone I was his novia—his girlfriend. He told me to wear a bright red dress, because he knew no other woman would have the guts to be dressed so brightly, so young, and at a party where I was meeting all these men for the first time. As each of the men would come up to me and Enrique, to shake his hand and to show their loyalty to him, or for him to show his loyalty to them, the men would whistle under their breath, as if to say, ‘Oh my god, how did you get such a beauty?’ They gave Enrique the look that said, ‘I wish I could be in bed with her. Caray!’ They shook their hands rapidly in front of their faces up and down when speaking to the others, just next to us, after they had met me with Enrique. It was the waving of hands that said: ‘She’s too hot! Fuck, man. That Enrique is one lucky cabrón.’

  “You might think a young woman would feel like a cow on display, like a sex object these crude men wanted to rape, if they could. And you might not be far off, if you did think that. But that’s not how I felt, at the time, at all. What I felt was that I was radiating. What I felt was that, for the first time in my life, I was the object of attention, not because I was the servant being called to attention by La Señora Elvira but because I was envied and admired.

  “When I sang at that first party, up on stage with a group of sixteen mariachi players Enrique had brought in just to make me look good, I sang so-so. I looked beautiful on stage, but my voice wasn’t as good as how I looked. Enrique was furious with me, afterward, that my voice wasn’t good enough. ‘You are going to have to do better,’ he would tell me. ‘You are simply going to have to do better. I am not going to let you embarrass me in front of the people who I invite to my parties.’ And then he hit me. It was the first of many times he would hit me on the cheek. But out in public, after I had sung that first time, he came up confidently on stage, holding the microphone so close it gave a reverberation feedback, a wince-inducing high-pitched echo as everyone watched Enrique on stage, and he said, ‘Wasn’t that just beautiful? Please, everyone, give a round of applause for Esmeralda Sanchez. She is going to be the next movie star and pop star of Mexico.’

  “People clapped politely, but without much enthusiasm. Enrique went backstage to tell me to do better, and he hit me. I felt the pain so sharply, after ha
ving tried my best, after feeling I was finally beginning to be someone more than what La Señora Elvira had told me I was, after having been presented to all the other men at the party. But I didn’t take this as a sign Enrique was at heart what he, of course, was—a violent man. I took it as a sign I had failed and that I needed not to fail the next time. I would need to work harder.

  “And so, I did work harder, one dancing and singing class after another. Pushing myself harder and harder. Singing with records and tapes in the dance studio Enrique constructed for me. The dance studio began to feel like one of those birdcages La Señora Elvira had in her house. At times, I felt I wanted to stop practicing, but Enrique would come and check in on me. He would even lock me in there, occasionally, if I told him I was tired of practicing so much.

  “ ‘I need a break,’ I told him, once.

  “ ‘You can take breaks another day,’ he told me. ‘Everyone out there in this city, they think the only way to make it in this world is to be born with connections, to be born rich. But you and I know otherwise. When you have nothing, you have to make it yourself. I’ll be your connection for you, but you have to have the talent, too.’

  “ ‘And how do you show your talent?’ I asked him.

  “ ‘Excuse me?’ he said, with indignation. ‘Are you saying it doesn’t take talent to lead my business? To make my business decisions every day?’ He was building up his section of the cartel, more and more. He was rising, quickly, in the cartel. This is what he told me regularly, and it was something I could see, as well. The men around him were becoming more solicitous. They started to walk with him, his old friends, less as equals and more as men showing respect to their leader.

  “A year later, I finally fulfilled Enrique’s dreams. Not his final dreams for me at all, to become a big star, but his dreams for me in Sinaloa, as a first step to the big time. I competed to be Miss Sinaloa. My makeup was caked-on thick, and I had extensions on my lashes. I posed in evening gowns and in a green bikini with bows. I crossed one leg alluringly in front of the other. The men whooped, in the audience. They hooted and hollered with lust. The announcer had to tell them to keep their shouts down and to show some respect. I felt the heat of the lights and the sweat on my forehead, and I worried the heat might somehow ruin my makeup, that something out of my control might cause me to be just a little off and to lose the contest, which would cause Enrique to lose faith in me and to hit me, as he had done, by now, a number of times. I began to associate my beauty with the pleasure of Enrique’s adoration, but also with the pain when I disappointed him.

  “But on this day, when I completed my dance and singing routine, I was relieved to see I had not failed Enrique. The announcer on stage, dressed in a tuxedo with big white ruffles, placed the crown on my head, and I felt like a true princess wearing that tiara. I felt the love and adoration and appreciation of the crowd. I began to cry on stage, as all beauty queens cry, but I was crying not only because all of my hard work had paid off, and not only because I knew Enrique would be proud of me and would love me more, and because he was right, he had pushed me hard and proven to me that with hard work I could be something more than I thought; I was crying because I felt for the first time I had escaped the clutches of La Señora Elvira and the clutches of the orphaned life, the wheel of life that had first made my mother an orphan and then me. I was escaping from that past. The wheel of life could no longer control me. And so, I cried on that stage, letting my mascara run a bit beneath my eyes, a mark of imperfection that was perfectly meant for the moment.

  “Enrique didn’t wait to meet me after the contest, behind stage. He ran up the side of the stage and took the microphone from the announcer, who looked at him as if this was a bit odd, but by then everyone knew who Enrique was and that they shouldn’t disappoint him, or their personal safety might be on the line. Enrique lifted my hand in the air, as if I was the champion boxer of the country, as if I was not the beauty queen of Sinaloa but the real queen of the city and nation. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, this is my queen,’ he said. ‘And I wish to announce we are going to get married.’ I was as surprised as everyone in the audience. Enrique hadn’t said anything definitive about marriage, up to this point. He had kept me close, as if I was the only one who mattered to him, but I knew well that a man like Enrique could lose interest and suddenly want to be with another woman. He was tough and full of intensity, full of whatever he needed at any moment. Announcing the marriage, on stage, I was both filled with elation and relief, a sense that now he would be mine and I would be his, that we would truly fulfill, together, our dreams and his dreams. As I said, I felt he knew more than me at that point. But I also wondered why he hadn’t asked me, in private, as he should have. The side of me that had been caged for so long could not help but ask him, behind stage, why he had made the announcement before asking me what my intentions were.

  “ ‘Are you disobeying me, mi amor?’ he said. ‘Do you think I don’t have good reason to tell everyone out there?’ I could see the well of anger within him bubbling to the surface at the idea I had challenged him, for a second. And then he switched moods, entirely, pretending I had said nothing and that he had said nothing that was acrimonious. He swept me off my feet, with my tiara on my head, and told me he loved me and adored me and that he wanted to make me the happiest wife I could ever be. He pulled out a big diamond ring, which was a real diamond, not like the other fake costume jewelry I so often wore. He slipped the ring on my finger and pulled me out to the car, a long, white limousine he had rented just for the occasion. There was a sunroof. We drove around in the limousine, with a jeep of his cartel compadres carrying weapons in front, and a black SUV with support in back. The three vehicles drove around the city, honking, letting everyone know I had just won the Miss Sinaloa contest and that we were going to get married. Once in a while, Enrique would tell me I should stand in the back of the limousine and peek out the rooftop and wave at my public. ‘Go ahead, wave! Wave to them. They are all your people, now. They all adore you.’ I did as he commanded. I was with my prince, the man I was going to marry. I stood with my head through the roof, waving, with a crowd in the central plaza waving back at me, and Enrique standing next to me. He held my hand, fingering the diamond he had placed on my ring finger. He gave me a big kiss on the lips, in public, in the central plaza. Shouts, egging him on to be manly, made him kiss me again. I wrapped my arms around him, and for a fleeting second, despite the fact I knew I was more and more his possession, despite the fact I knew he was the leader of a cartel that others feared, despite the fact I knew his cartel must be killing hundreds of people, despite all those things I grabbed him closer to me and I felt, ‘This is my man.’ ”

  Listening to the woman, who I now knew was Esmeralda Sanchez, who I thought for a second I had seen on TV, once, in a cantina—now that she’d mentioned she’d been elevated to Miss Sinaloa—I could see she was reliving each experience as she told it to me. She sat in the waiting room waving her arm as she’d once waved at the public. Only now her hand had a scar on it.

  “And the scar?” I said. “The scars…” I tried to remind her she was supposed to be telling me about her scars.

  “The story of the scars will come soon enough. But I cannot just tell you the story about them right away, or you won’t understand, and you won’t understand why this story is important to you and why I’m telling it to you.” She stood and straightened her long flower skirt and walked to the far end of the waiting room and filled a cup of water from a watercooler. She went to the bathroom to freshen up, it seemed. I asked the secretary if the doctor was back yet, and she said he was still busy with another patient, or maybe out to lunch. I’d wanted the doctor to come quickly, before, so I could talk with him about whether I should have the mastectomy or not, and to have the certainty of a decision made crystal clear. But now, before I met the doctor, I felt I needed to hear the rest of the beauty queen Esmeralda Sanchez’s story. I hoped the doctor wouldn’t come before she co
uld tell me what I needed to hear. It seemed to me all of a sudden that she must have the answers, like a fortuneteller, as to what I should do, she was telling her story so passionately.

  She came back from the restroom, sat down, and began to tell her story, again.

  “Three years went by, with Enrique’s business in the cartel growing and growing, with other narcos feeling more and more threatened by him as he took over more of their territory in the drug business, when one night, on June second, a date I will never forget, a group of men broke into the house where we were living, who worked for another cartel. By this time, we lived in a house on the beach that looked out over the water, with high ceilings, crammed full of the art and objects that Enrique felt proved he had made it in his cartel work. He had been collecting large jade and malachite Buddhas and scenes of ancient fantasy landscapes, in the clouds, from China. He bought them not only in Mexico, from dealers who brought to him the art they thought he would like, but also from places like Hong Kong, where he occasionally went for his work. He had a collection of French crystal statues of sports cars, over fifty objects in a case at the base of the stairs leading up to our bedroom. The objects were truly rare, and at his command a number of lights lit the sports cars when he showed off his crystal to guests. At the front door, when visitors came in, there were porcelain cheetahs; and, in an effort to please him, I’d selected red fur coats and suede leather couches of purples and aquamarines, which made the whole place feel like a very upscale home, with rococo designer furniture. A Porsche 911 and two Porsche SUVs sat in the garage. He’d attained more and more of what he wanted, but more was never enough.