Читать книгу One Life - David Lida - Страница 15
ОглавлениеI woke up in what may have been the finest three-hundred-peso hotel room in all of Mexico. There was a firmish mattress and a newish bedspread in a repulsive yellow-brown print. The walls were chartreuse stucco, the light fluorescent and buzzing like a mosquito. The room was equipped with telephone and TV, hot and cold water, a ceiling fan and even air-conditioning. The latter seemed like a good idea in Puroaire, a town situated in an area that extended across three states called Tierra Caliente.
It was given that moniker long ago because of the tropical heat and merciless humidity, but since drug traffickers claimed it as part of their turf a few years ago, the tag had taken on a more sinister connotation. The cooling system turned the room into a meat locker in five minutes. I turned on the fan and lay naked atop the synthetic sheets. After a while I got used to the smell of insecticide fluid, a shield against cockroaches the size of roof rats.
When I got off the bus in towns like Puroaire, I would ask a cabdriver to point me to the best hotel in town. He’d tell me to hop in, drive around for about ten minutes, and drop me off somewhere in the vicinity of where he picked me up. At $100 an hour I could be a sport about such extortion. The “best” lodgings were mostly along the lines of the Hotel Central, where I was spending the night in Puroaire. A doctor in Mexico City wrote me a script for Xanax for nights in places like this. Three tequilas and half a pill usually took care of me for a few hours.
I woke a little before seven and pulled on yesterday’s clothes. The hotel was built around an open-air patio with a gnarly Guadalupe palm in the center. At a desk by the door a heavyset man dozed in an office chair, despite a TV on his desk noisily broadcasting a grisly car crash in Mexico City that morning. He had curly salt-and-pepper hair and slept in his black-framed eyeglasses. An unbuttoned guayabera exposed thatches of swirling body hair. His prolonged snore discharged in a continuous dissonant volley.
Trying not to wake him, I looked around the patio to see if I could find coffee. I was useless before I had caffeine in the morning. Without it, I was on irritated automatic pilot, a day of the living dead.
Suddenly the honking cascade ceased. “Can I help you?” asked the large man, folding his arms across his chest in an attitude of utter officiousness.
“Is there any coffee in the hotel?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said.
I nodded, waiting for additional enlightenment. None was forthcoming. “Where might it be?” I asked.
“On top of the table over there,” he said. “Monday through Friday. When the girl comes in to make it.” He smiled and shrugged. “Today’s Saturday. Sorry.” He said the last word in English, trilling the double r.
“Is there anywhere open this early where I can find a cup?” I asked.
“The market.”
I enjoyed crossing the plazas of these little towns so early in the morning, before the heat rose. There was no activity in the church, the town hall, the police station. One or two enterprising women in aprons mopped the sidewalks outside the storefronts with plastic brooms, but the shops and the banks were dead to the world.
After seven a few of the dreamy-eyed began to set up their stalls in the market. With long wooden poles, they hoisted hangers with made-in-China jeans and blouses, attaching them to the upper rungs of the metal mesh stalls. The market people believed the barely perceptible morning breeze contained harmful toxins, so they wore sweaters and knotted scarves at their necks.
Around the corner, in a storefront adjacent to the market, I saw her: my patron saint. The woman who arrives earliest and sets a table to serve fresh orange juice; bananas mashed with milk, sugar, and cinnamon in a mixer; or, for the belligerently health-conscious, blended concoctions of weeds, raw beets, and quail eggs. Her wavy hair was colored dark red. She had smooth olive skin and was about my age, maybe a couple of years older. There were laugh lines beside her eyes. She wore a yellow sweater and tight nylon pants.
“Good morning, señora,” I said, sitting on a square plastic stool.
“Good morning, joven.” Her smile exposed strong white teeth. She didn’t call me “young man” because of my youthful appearance. Unless she knows us, all of her customers are joven or señorita or caballero. Unless and until we are friends, she is señora and I am joven. I will be joven until I am about seventy, at which point I will graduate to señor.
“Have you any coffee?” I asked.
“Of course.” She poured hot water from a huge percolator into a Styrofoam cup and set it before me, along with a barrel-shaped jar of Nescafé Clásico and a white plastic spoon.
“Cream?” she asked, pointing to a blue plastic bucket full of powder. “Sugar?”
I opened the jar of pulverized brown particles. I loved the generosity of handing over the whole bottle. If I had started to eat the Nescafé out of the jar, spoonful by spoonful, she probably would have encouraged me, like a mother feeding her baby. I dropped one heaping spoon, and then a level one for good luck, into the polystyrene. I stirred and smelled the bitter blend through the little cap of sand-colored chemical foam that formed at the top, even without the benefit of compressed “cream.” I was in heaven.
When I was a child in Brooklyn, my father used to take the subway to Greenwich Village to the only store in all of New York that roasted its own coffee beans. He would get a special blend, three-quarters of a pound of dark French roast and a quarter of milder Colombian. That was the first coffee I drank, from the age of twelve, when my parents allowed me to mix a few drops into my milk, until later in adolescence, by which time the proportions had been reversed. As a result, I grew up to be a complete coffee snob. In Mexico City, I bought organic coffee from the highlands of Chiapas. I would order a fine grind, which I prepared in an octagonal Italian espresso pot. Any woman who spent the night with me would get a cup of that in the morning, mixed with milk I heated on top of the stove.
But in a one-burro Mexican town, all bets were off. In some of them, you might have been able to get a cup of flavorless brown water at the local cafeteria. I would have jumped over a thousand cups of that swill to get to some Nescafé—particularly if I were handed the jar and allowed to do my own loading. After stirring in a little sugar I took that first familiarly vitriolic sip. Pure pleasure.
“Qué rico,” I told the lady with the vibrantly painted hair.
“Is it?” she asked through her smile. “I don’t drink coffee.”
“Not even in the morning?”
“Nunca de los nuncas.” She fluttered a hand by her bosom. “It gives me palpitations.”
“To your health,” I said, raising the Styrofoam cup.
She tilted her head, a twinkle in her eye. “What are you doing in Puroaire, joven?”
“Just passing through,” I said. “I have some Mexican friends in el gabacho and they have relatives around here.” She looked at me as if she expected more. “It’s beautiful—the hills.” I always tried to change the subject as quickly as possible. For discretion’s sake, I never trumpeted to locals that I was around to help one of their neighbors’ kids who was facing death row in East Buttfuck, Kentucky. What’s more, explaining what I did for a living involved taking a deep breath and expending a lot of wind.
“It’s pretty quiet in Puroaire,” she said. With a long wooden stick, she stirred sugar, corn flour, and water in a pot to make a breakfast drink called atole.
“That’s not what they say.”
“What do they say?” she asked, a smile on her face.
“You know. That there are a lot of conflicts. That it can be dangerous.” I seldom referred directly to drug trafficking. That was supposed to be one of my strategies to sneak quietly into old age.
She smirked. “Take a look around. Do you feel threatened here?”
“No. Last night I took a walk and there were old people and kids all around the plaza.”
“That’s the way it is,” she said.
“Good morning, Doña Inés,” said a woman in her early twenties, skinny with long eyelashes and protruding teeth. She joined the older woman behind the table, removed her jacket, and put on an apron. “Sorry I’m late. Panchito has colic,” she said.
“Don’t worry,” said Inés, stirring the atole. Her young assistant began to slice oranges in half. The morning light glimmered off the freshly cut flesh.
“I went to Cucaramácara last night to see the Los Dandys concert,” said Inés. “And you know what? They didn’t even show up.”
“Don’t tell me!”
“It took me an hour to get there. They had to give everybody their money back.”
“How rude!” The assistant began to place each orange half in a hand-operated contraption that squeezed out the juice, half by half. Mexicans refer to their true love as their media naranja—their other half of the split orange.
I sipped my Nescafé and enjoyed the slight breeze. Within an hour, the air would stop moving in Tierra Caliente, and the temperature and humidity would squeeze us all in an oppressive embrace. I would be trying to get Esperanza’s siblings to tell me heinous, painful, and humiliating secrets about their mother and father. But meanwhile, savoring the coffee in the market, listening to the women gossip, and watching the vendors set up their stalls, I was happy.
One of my virtues was that I didn’t have to become miserable in order to ruefully recall that in the distant past I had been content. When I felt good, it was tangible, palpable—I could hold the feeling in my hand. My work was demanding and intense, but it was full of what I came to think of as “stolen moments.” These were the instants when somehow, despite the desolation and misery that I was documenting, I recognized a feeling of serenity, or even joy. I noticed them all the time. When I ate or drank something that tasted good, when I felt the reprieve of a breeze against my skin, when I saw a breathtaking landscape, or when a pretty waitress turned her head to give me a second look. I enjoyed a free hour to walk around the broken-down houses and unpaved streets of an unfamiliar town. When I told people about my work, they tended to assume that it overwhelmed me with sadness. On the contrary. Being so close to other people’s tragedies that I could kiss them was a constant reminder of how fortunate I was.
“You don’t even know Los Dandys,” said Inés to her assistant. “Your generation doesn’t listen to those songs.” She smiled, closed her eyes, and began to sway her hips. “You are like a precious stone, a divine jewel, truly valuable,” she trilled, her arms posed as if she were dancing with a lover. “If my eyes don’t lie, if my eyes don’t deceive me, your beauty is without equal....” She stopped abruptly and laughed, and, although facing her helper, she glanced at me from the corner of her eye.
“Gema” was Inés’s siren song. Maybe she was my media naranja. I could marry her, settle down in Puroaire, and get all the Nescafé I could drink. I looked at the curve of her neck, still smooth and lovely. Her hips had not yet spread egregiously and her stomach was only slightly rounded. She had not let herself go. Her children were probably grown. It would just be the two of us in a small cinder block house, probably on the outskirts a mile out of town, with plastic window curtains and an embroidered picture of the Last Supper in the living room.
I am not saying I was any great prize, but how many like me passed through Puroaire in a day, a month, a year? Inés would probably be happy and even grateful to have a man who didn’t beat her, who had a modicum of patience, who listened to her when she gossiped about her customers. I vaguely remembered in a novel—was it written by García Márquez?—a description of two old people, after many decades of marriage, in their dotage coupling like two little earthworms. Would Inés and I merge our bodies like that in twenty or thirty years? What would we talk about?
“I’m working for the lawyers who are defending your sister,” I said when he came to the door. “May I come in?”
Joaquín, Esperanza’s eldest brother, opened up without a word. He was a little taller than me, an inch or two over six feet, and lanky. At fifty-three, his thick wavy hair was more salt than pepper, but his heavy eyebrows were black. The flesh in his face was beginning to fall. He could have packed for the weekend in the bags under his eyes. I found his house on foot, about ten unpaved blocks from the market.
I walked into the living room. There was a modest table and four chairs, a sagging sofa, a framed image of the Virgin of Guadalupe. A boy of about three or four with a bowl-shaped haircut stood in the doorway to the kitchen. Joaquín’s son? His grandson? Beyond the boy, a somber, heavyset woman dried her hands on a dish towel. She stared at me with impassive, almond-shaped eyes.
“Could we please speak privately?” I asked.
He led me through two more rooms. Each had furniture of unadorned wood with the kind of cushions that began to slump before they got home from the store. Still, by the standards of a town like Puroaire, Joaquín was doing well. We got to the last room. Through a screen door, I glimpsed an overgrown patio, a deflated soccer ball, a tricycle on its side as if it were napping.
“Take a seat, licenciado,” he said, pointing to a sofa covered with an old blanket. He sat in a wooden chair, his hands on his knees. That he called me licenciado meant that he thought I was a lawyer. During my investigations, Mexicans called me licenciado all the time. At first I tried to disabuse them of that notion, insisting that I wasn’t a lawyer, merely an investigator who worked for lawyers. Yet even after the explanation, they continued to call me licenciado. Finally I realized that they wanted to believe I was a lawyer. Who was I to spoil their illusion?
He wore a checked shirt with snaps for buttons, untucked and with the sleeves rolled up, jeans and snakeskin boots. While he exuded masculinity, he was not your garden-variety macho. He was quieter, more introspective.
“This is a nice house,” I said.
“Thank you.”
He’d hardly uttered a sound. I hoped small talk might warm him up. “What do you do in Puroaire?”
He let the question sink in before he answered. “What do I do? Nothing,” he said. “I sit around the house.”
“Okay.” I smiled. “Nice work if you can get it.”
His gaze was penetrating. “This house comes from Montgomery, Alabama,” he said, “where I washed dishes and cooked at Marcello’s Italian Restaurant. This house comes from Millersville, North Carolina, where I picked tobacco, and Tar Heel, where I worked twelve-hour shifts killing pigs in a slaughterhouse. This house comes from planting and picking cotton in Mississippi, sorghum in Missouri, and corn in Kansas. I was a cabinetmaker in Iowa. I built doors and bookshelves. I worked for Fleetline in Nebraska, moving houses with trailers.” He made the speech in a flat monotone. “This house is twenty years of my life, away from my family in el gabacho.”
“I understand,” I said, and took a deep breath. “Look, Joaquín. I am what is called, in English, a mitigation specialist. There is no reason for you to know what that is because you come from a civilized country where there is no death penalty.” Those bags under his dark eyes and the lines around them made him seem exhausted, or ineffably sad. “You know that the prosecutor’s office in Louisiana is seeking the death penalty for Esperanza?” I asked.
He said nothing, but there was a slight intake of breath that assured me he’d had no idea.
“My job is to put a human face on Esperanza. I put together the story of her life and of her family. Whenever the prosecutor arrests someone in the U.S., he makes up a story that he has captured a monster—Hitler, Jack the Ripper, and Hannibal Lecter rolled up in one. I try to show him that Esperanza is a human being who may have made mistakes but who nevertheless deserves mercy and consideration. I try to help convince him to take the death penalty off the table.” I paused to see if Joaquín had any questions. “If that doesn’t work, and in the worst of cases there is a trial and she’s found guilty, we tell the story to the jury. To convince them that Esperanza’s life is worth saving. Do you understand?”
After a moment, he nodded. It’s a terrible lot of information to absorb in a couple of minutes, particularly when it pertains to someone you love. I’m not trying to get them to understand the gringo justice system. I’m just trying to get them to trust me.
“All I ask is that you tell me the truth, Joaquín. The good, the bad, and the ugly. Todo se vale. Okay?”
Once again, he nodded.
“I’m going to ask you to go back to the days when you were a little boy. Maybe six or seven years old. Tell me about Puroaire back then. What was it like here?”
He looked at me, then up at the ceiling, and then back at me. He inhaled deeply through his nose. Putting the palms of his huge hands together, he brought his fingertips to his mouth. He tried to say something but there were no words. Tears came to his eyes. “It was hard, man,” he said finally, his voice cracking. “It was hard.”
In my heart I thanked him a thousand times. He had conjured a memory from before I was born. More than forty-five years later, it still broke his heart. Now we were getting somewhere.
