Mexico Page 7

  “I saw him less and less because of his work, and because I tried to appear in movies and TV shows, just as he desired. I had a bit of success but not nearly as much as his. I had the looks but not, necessarily, the full talent. And soon, I had even less of the looks. Much less.

  “The night when they came and hurt me so badly, a group of three men, the rival narcos, came into the bedroom. Two held me down on the sprawling, custom-made bed. They did not rape me. I will never understand why, though I think they understood it would torment Enrique more if he could never know, for certain, whether they had raped me. Instead, they carved one of the Xs on one of the palms and the scar on the back of my neck, and an extra scar which I haven’t shown you, an X that is the same as the others, on my stomach, just over my belly button. It is important to know they did not make the scar on my other hand. That would come by me, later.

  “I could go into gory details of how they carved the scars into my body, but why turn this into a horror movie? The facts are bad enough, aren’t they? The fact they took their time as they cut me. The fact they knew what they were going to do, before they came. It wasn’t a crime of animalism, in the heat of the moment as they fought with my husband—who, in fact, was not there. It was a crime of meditation, a well-thought-out act to send my husband a message that his most precious object, the one he had shown off for years as the beauty queen of Sinaloa, was not untouchable, was scarred and belonged to them, and was deflowered.

  “Only, my husband had already, even before the incident, begun to care less and less about me. He was already beginning to lose interest in me. He was already beginning to look at other women, and I suspect to sleep with them, and once I was scarred by these men—in the middle of the night, with blood soaking into the sheets, and especially with the mark over my womb, which had failed to produce a child for us—he lost all interest, completely. He simply almost never came home.

  “The absence of his attention, even though he had hit me over the years, even though he had always treated me more as his possession than a mutual love built by the two of us, made me feel more and more insecure, more and more desperate to win his attention back. I bought brighter and richer clothes, if that was possible. I went shopping for Louis Vuitton and Prada handbags, dresses from Versace, not the most expensive haute couture dresses because those were out of Enrique’s league, but I bought whatever he could afford and whatever he would allow me to afford. I bought gold and platinum baubles and sat in front of the mirror and combed and recombed my hair, feeling the brush scrape against my neck, sitting in front of the boudoir off the room where they had scarred me, combing my hair just as La Señora Elvira once had me comb her hair for hours. Once free of her, I was now acting as if she still possessed me, as I tried to repossess Enrique.

  “But Enrique was with other women now, barely hiding them anymore. Once, when I confronted him about an especially young woman, who looked as young as I’d been when Enrique had first found me on the street, but whom, looking at her at a party, I felt had none of the charm I had originally had, none of my toughness, I wondered what he saw in the woman he was nudging up to so closely at the large party, a party now with five hundred. I had sung at the party, and people had politely clapped. I sang better than that first party Enrique had me sing at. I had the moves down now, after years in the profession. But I was still the mediocre performer I had started out as, a beauty queen who was no longer all that beautiful, with the scars on my hand and neck and on my womb, which I now hid. ‘What is it about her that makes her so perfect for you?’ I asked him at the party. If it seems strange I asked him then and there, directly to his face, it was no stranger than when you, earlier, asked me why the gods had made me so perfect. What I am saying is, the question was involuntary, a question I should not have asked, unless I wanted to be nearly destroyed.

  “ ‘What makes her so perfect,’ Enrique said, ‘is that she is what you once were but no longer are. She has potential, and what kind of potential do you have now, with the scars they did to you? But I want you to know I am not rejecting you because of your scars alone, though they are hideous. I am rejecting you because you have lost your edge, your talent, your drive, your animalism. Look at you now, so soft and draped in all of these clothes. I can barely see the puma inside of you that I once wanted. You have failed to give me a child. You have failed in the most basic task of a real beauty queen. Infertility is hardly becoming. Every king needs his heir. Every king must have his concubines. And I have to say, when I look at the scars on your body, I can’t help but wonder if they raped you, too, but you just won’t admit it.’

  “They were words, in short, of pure bile. Pure hate. They were words to hurt me like a boy who holds a magnifying glass in front of an ant, keeping the focus of light that is too hot on the ant until it burns and dies. And here is the part where you will surely want to, and have to, judge me. Because after that evening, when he said those things to me and touched his new, young female thing, I went up, into the room in the house where we lived, and I took a sharp knife from the kitchen, a small one usually reserved for paring apples and potatoes, and by my own will and with my own self-loathing and with loathing and anger for Enrique, I took my left hand out, a hand that had never been scarred by the three men who had tied me down, and I carved slowly and methodically, and then faster and deeper, with punctures of pain, with pain more that I had let myself become Enrique’s thing and his object, and then that I could no longer be that object of desire for him. I wanted him to know I was in torment. I wanted him to wake up from his smug certainty that he knew everything and controlled everything. I wanted him to feel for a second, when he would hear about this carving of my flesh, and when he would be forced to see it, that I loathed him now and myself now so much that I had had the strength, the animalistic strength, to do this self-mutilation.

  “After sleeping, most likely, with the other young woman at the party, he came in the door at four a.m., smelling of sex, with the smell of his cologne mixing with the perfume of another. He came up to his bedroom. By then, we didn’t sleep in the same room. Like a phantom, I walked into his bedroom, once he was undressed and getting into his bed. I held my palm up in the air, with blood dripping on the carpet, on a tiger skin rug he had brought from Hong Kong, which stood at the base of his bed. I held the palm up in the air until he could tell something was wrong, something was desperately wrong.

  “ ‘I did this,’ I said. ‘I did this because of you!’

  “He rushed up to me and looked at the hand, and the wound was so fresh even he could not deny what he had done. ‘Oh, Esmeralda, Esmeralda, what have you done? What have you done? You should never have done that. Never.’ He looked at me with a look of pity, and yes, some concern, and maybe even, oddly, a bit of pride that I could be, momentarily, an animal. But I was no longer the queen he wanted. There was a new queen. She would be his new pretty face. The concubine, in those old Chinese tales I would read later, replaces the queen, and even my most desperate cry out could not win him back.

  “The rest of the details of my story are hardly worth noting, how the police and military finally set up an operation to take him out. Usually they took their cut and left Enrique alone, but one day they came in force to kill Enrique, and he got word of their plan first. He met them in a full gun battle in the center of town. The one surprise for this story, perhaps, is that I fought beside him. I, too, carried an AK-47 and fired in the direction of the police who were firing at my husband. We hadn’t had sex for a year, when he was shot and killed. The bullets, they truly riddled his body and he fell in the street. He had taken me with him to flee to the next compound. He had rejected me in almost all ways, but he still seemed to want to keep me in the cage of his house, and he still insisted I continue to try to make it in the music business, though my recordings were fewer and fewer. But when the cops came, I was standing next to him, a loyal follower to the end, admiring his drive and talent, loathing my own body, wanting to do what I could
to please him. He was my man, and I foolishly still loved him.

  “But it was not then that I learned what I needed to from the experience. It was two years later, long after all the furs and clothes and houses and boats had been confiscated by the government, and I was living in a very small house that I could barely afford, renting only a room in the top floor which had an attic that was too hot. The police had determined I was not a real narco, just the wife of a criminal, and they had let me free. I was already twenty-six. I was walking through the town, one day, and I saw a young girl, and I could see she was an orphan from the same orphanage where I had grown up. I followed her, as if involuntarily, back to the orphanage. There, despite all the changes to my body, was the structure of the orphanage, almost identical to when I had left. Time had flown by, my body was now permanently marked, and I had attempted to run away from this orphanage for so long, and from the orphanage somewhere else, unknown, where my mother had grown up. And standing in front of that door I realized I had spent my whole life running away from that door and that building instead of running to something. I had been running with the subconscious fear that if I did not become a beauty queen, if I did not please Enrique, if I did not do what everyone else wanted from me, I would end up in the orphanage forever, not just the orphanage in front of me but the orphanage of a trapped spirit, a trapped soul. And in my fear I had ended up scarring my body more than anyone else could have ever scarred me, trying to live for others, instead of ever truly living for me, or ever even truly living. ‘I want to live,’ I told myself. ‘I want to live for me and for me alone and not for anyone else and not out of any more fear.’ I opened the gate of the orphanage. I walked into that door, the porthole that had marked the gatekeeper of my greatest fear, and I walked inside. I looked around the rooms of the orphanage—first in the room for the babies, where I had once changed the diapers of the smallest infants, and then in the room where La Señora Elvira had come and snatched me away, when for a fleeting moment I had felt some hope, until the once beautiful witch had dashed my hopes. ‘I have paid for my beauty,’ I told myself. ‘I have paid more than enough.’ I walked up to the head nun. I raised my palm to her. ‘Mother Superior, I have sinned against myself for not loving myself.’ I walked around the old orphanage, looking into the corners of the place that had once been my deepest fear. I was not going to let the place dominate me anymore, if I could. I was no longer going to run away from myself, couching my fears in my body. I was going to find some other orphanage to work in, a place where I could help some new young girls.”

  She stopped her story abruptly, opened her eyes, and looked straight at me and told me she had gone to work in an orphanage. She had completed her promise to herself. She was exhausted from telling her story, and she quickly walked to a sink in the corner of the room to wash away tears that had come to her.

  While she was at the sink, I thought about her story. It seemed foolish to try to reduce what she had said to one idea or two. Was she saying beauty is only skin-deep and that I should worry less about any scars to my body, because she had suffered much worse? Was it that I should worry less about my fears, and that I should confront them head-on? Was it that I should escape the cycles of life that she had been caught up in, just as my own family had cycles and cycles of breast cancer? Or was it what I think she was really getting at—that to give means more than to take? It was all of these things, perhaps, but when I walked into the doctor’s office, when he finally came, after I’d thanked the woman for telling her story to me, a telling that I believe and hope was of some cathartic use for her, as it was for me, I walked into the doctor’s office and I told him I needed a double mastectomy; I told him I had made up my mind firmly and said to him, “You see, doctor, even with all the pain and cruelty and torture out there in the world, I want to live.” There was nothing more magnificent, more surprising, more awe-inspiring, more mystical than being alive in the world. I thought of the woman with the scars on her body, who had told me the story. I thought of her in her new orphanage; and even with her scars, because of all of her suffering, because of her honesty and her fortitude, her spirit unbowed by the pain, and because she had been there for me when I needed someone to comfort me when I was alone, she was the most beautiful woman I had ever met. She had given me something when I was feeling wholly selfish and afraid. She was much more than her mother could have ever known.

  ACAPULCO

  At 3:42 a.m., according to the police report, we left the nightclub. But don’t take the reports too seriously down here in Mexico. They’re a joke. That time seems about right to me, though. I have a watch, an expensive Piaget my father once gave me, and after the whole shooting was through, I heard the faint Swiss, precise ticking and the time said 3:50.

  I ended up in the nightclub because the client wanted to show me a good time. Never mind that I have a girlfriend/partner who I’ve been living with for two years. She and I are going to get married in a few months. But the way business gets done in Mexico, the older men—say about fifty-five—they don’t care about being faithful to their wives. They have “lovers” on the side. They go to motels on the edge of town to have sex with their secretaries or with their hidden “gem.” Me, I’m not into that kind of tradition. It smacks of a macho culture that I left behind when my parents sent me to study architecture at Harvard School of Design. I grew up in Mexico City. My whole family is from Mexico. But I’m halfway in, halfway out. I consider myself proudly from Mexico, but I’m a citizen of the world. I’m as happy eating sushi in Tokyo as having a quesadilla on the streets of Mexico City.

  We went to the nightclub to close the deal. Gonzalo was the client. Sixty years old. The usual paunch that most older, rich Mexican men have. It’s the paunch of the felicidad—the happiness. Gonzalo wears a gold Rolex. It’s the kind of flashy watch I would never wear because I come from old money, and his money is new. Who knows from where? There are some questions it’s best not to ask, with all the cash floating around Mexico these days. If you’re an architect, as I am, you don’t ask where the dough is coming from, you just ask, “What kind of pool do you want?” You give them an option—large or extra-large. I’ve designed pools that extend off the house and into the ocean, with a long jetty that slices into the Pacific. To me, it’s never made sense why a client needs a pool right next to the warm water of the ocean, but for the clients the pool is where the action is at, the trophy, like the trophy bride, that is always immaculately clean, radiating turquoise up to the sky, the center of their personal temple. And believe me, for the clients, their house is their personal temple.

  My own taste is toward the modern. I’m a good architect but not a great architect. I can do nice, sweeping open-floor plans. I can get you that view you want that makes you feel like your house is worth a few million. I do my best. I struggle to get the details. I love the clean, white look of pilotis from an architect like Le Corbusier. But no one is ever going to remember me. Fortunately, you don’t have to be amazing to make a living down in Mexico. You just need to be willing to give the client what they ask for. There is a long tradition of great architects in Mexico, like Luis Barragán, and, as is usually the case, most people don’t buy their homes or know about them. Bad taste reigns supreme, everywhere. I try to find the clients who have less bad taste so they don’t give me too many problems. I build them what they want, and then, in a few smaller places, I try to design what I really care about. It’s the life of an architect. So it goes. And it goes easier, since my father is a fairly well-known architect in Mexico.

  —

  When we came into the nightclub, the first thing I noticed was the pole dancing. This club was on the edge of Acapulco, out of town about fifteen minutes, up on one of the side hills and at a sharp pullover. The club stands alone, with no other stores nearby, and it has a sign with two cartoon-cutout women dancing with martini drinks in their hands, all lit up with fifty flashing incandescent bulbs. Some of the lightbulbs are gone, so the sign looks like some
teeth are missing.

  Gonzalo’s driver parked his Mercedes-Benz. Gonzalo got out and I followed him in. It was the third club we’d been to this evening. In Mexico, everything’s about excess. If you have a party, the music volume has to be at eleven. If you invite one of your cousins over for lunch, you have to invite their parents and their sisters and brothers. It’s the same in business. There’s no such thing as going to one club to close the deal.

  When we came into the club, the driver waited by the door, acting as a security guard. Most of the drivers do that for someone like Gonzalo. He was traveling light this evening. He only had his one driver for security. Often, a guy like him drives with two extra cars around as his security detail—one in front, one in back, hugging close to him through traffic with a couple bodyguards in each car to make sure no one kidnaps him. This isn’t just for nefarious people. This is for anyone with money. They never know when some group of professional kidnappers or hit men will try to get them. The guards look like Secret Service details. They dress in dark suits and have earpieces to communicate with each other. The main difference is they don’t have to hide their weapons as much in Mexico. They let people know they’re nearby. They try to be a presence, without bothering anyone at the party or at the business meetings.

  I think Gonzalo was traveling with only his driver as his guard because he wanted to be able to take me to some of the smaller, seedier bars, and with four guards it would have been too intrusive. He told me at the beginning of the night he wanted to take me to some of the traditional nightclubs because the women were better there—not so jaded, he said, not so phony. “I like them with fat butts, you know what I mean?” he said. He put his hands up in the air and squeezed, as if he were squeezing a big, round ass. “For me, if they don’t have a pretty face, it’s a plus. It means they like what they’re doing. It means they probably have a sweet boy back home that they take care of. They’re mothers. I like the mothers…”