“Do you like Diego Rivera?”
I turned to see the businessman, who was smiling at me. I looked back at the mural, aware of the businessman’s hot breath near the side of my face. “Rivera’s a hack,” I said. “This is not the work of an artist, but a testament to the power of his personality.”
“It’s very colorful,” said the businessman.
“As is Cuernavaca,” I smiled.
The businessman smiled a salubrious smile and ran his hanky across his head again. “Is this your first time?”
“In Cuernavaca? Yes.”
“That’s too bad.”
“Why?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I was hoping you might tell me what’s to see here, where I should go next, now that I’ve seen the palace. Just beautiful, I thought. Didn’t you?”
“Pocked with gloom,” I replied. “Why don’t we head back to the Zocalo?”
“Get a snack?”
“Or a drink.”
He worked in the petroleum industry and lived with his wife (shell-shocked) and two children (porcine) on three floors of a sprawling house (white, flat, with whimsical windows) in a (treeless, sun-blind) suburb outside Houston. I handed him back the photo. I was vaguely aware that I was maintaining conversation with the man. A few pleasant nods here, a laugh there (which surprised me because I had no idea what he had just said) were charming enough, apparently. This man and I had the same motivation: he wanted to get me drunk and I wanted to get me drunk. The businessman was drinking too: beer, Dos Equis, no lime, from the bottle whose mouth he wiped vigorously before bringing it to his succulent lips.
“What are you doing in Mexico?” I asked.
“Me?”
I nodded. He laughed as if it were a very personal question. He leaned into me. “I’m a headhunter.”
“You are?”
“I met with the guy in Mexico City yesterday. Made him an offer.”
“Do you think he’ll take it?”
“I would.” The businessman took a bottle of Pepto-Bismol out of his pocket and shook two of the chalky pink tablets onto his hand. He took them both, washing it all back with a mouthful of beer.
“Why do you keep taking those?” I asked. “Don’t you feel well?”
“I take them to keep the stomach bugs away.” He nodded meaningfully. “Montezuma’s revenge, you know.”
“Clever boy,” I said.
“Do you want some?” He offered me the bottle. I waved him off.
“No thanks.” I grabbed my cigarettes and lighter and put them in my handbag. “I wish I was a headhunter.”
“You do?”
I nodded. We asked the waiter where we could go dancing and he gave us some simple directions. I was imagining what I would do with the businessman’s head if it were in my possession. I’d have to shrink it and that would take some time, because his head was the size of Christmas ham. His cheeks hung down, weight and counterweight slabs of flesh. His small, upturned nose poked up through his face like a meat thermometer. His eyes were blue, watery, probably dripping with mucus from all the allergens in the thick Mexican air, but maybe clouded with fat, the same kind that congeals on the surface of cooling broth. A head like that would have to be smoked for weeks—months even—before it was suitable for wearing around one’s waist. I’d seen shrunken heads in a museum, little pieces of demonic fruit with bitter mouths and sockets of crumpled vacancy, eye sockets where the sudden vacuum of death softly imploded upon itself.
Despite his weight, the businessman was a fluid dancer. He had a buoyancy that I would have thought impossible out of the water, but he seemed at home at the disco, favoring seventies standards over the techno and house, switching from beer to shots of tequila. My body—because of the amount of alcohol consumed—was beginning to rebel in not-so-subtle ways. I could still dance, but walking was proving difficult. I had to struggle to keep my torso over my legs as my feet seemed overeager to shorten whatever distances needed to be shortened: the distance from dance floor to bar, from bar to bathroom, from bathroom to table (smoke break) from table back to dance floor. Whatever visual compensating my brain usually performed seemed to have shorted out and the whole evening was being presented to me as if I was viewing it through the lens of a handheld camera. I suggested we get a taxi back to his hotel even though it was less than a mile away. And I probably suggested everything else, even though I can’t remember what everything was, and think this one of the kinder sides of overdrinking, even though the next morning my head felt that it was pumped full of frozen air with my skull threatening to fracture along its original sutures.
I was lying on the floor when I woke up. This was no surprise. That businessmen was girthy and what might have been a double bed for another couple was no double bed for us. I moved my head slowly upward as I came to a sitting position, allowing for the liquids contained to find their level. The businessman’s hand hung off the bed, palms the color of pork loin, relaxed sausage fingers and the University of Texas ring that bound around his pinky (although it must have once belonged to another finger) squeezing deep into the flesh in what must have been a most uncomfortable way. My stomach had sent a warning signal. I breathed heavily through my nose, hoping to calm my stomach, but ended up scuttling to my feet and racing for the toilet. I tell you, I felt very sorry for myself as my stomach purged itself clean. I had skipped dinner the night before, somehow smoked and drank my way through the businessman’s beefsteak, although I’d considered the lengua. But my stomach was full. Three rounds later, I’d emptied myself out. I wasn’t prepared for what I saw floating in the basin. Digestion had not run its course. I saw chunks of something floating in clouds of yellow bile, worn at the edges by my stomach’s futile effort, a stomach unable to match the need of appetite. I felt a cold sweat in my pores, an intestinal shudder, then slowly looked back to the bed.
The businessman’s feet were bare. The toes pointed down, off the end of the bed. He didn’t move. My violent retching had not disturbed him. I had a choice. I could go over to him, bid some sort of farewell, or I could leave. There really was nothing left for me to say. I got up and brushed my teeth using his toothbrush. This disgusted me, but I found my delicacy hypocritical. I washed my face using his soap, dried my face and hands using his towel. And when I purchased my bus ticket back to Mexico City, I used his money, which he had left in an impressive stack of bills on the bedside table.
17
My plane left for New York early on a Monday morning. I had the woman at the hotel desk call for a cab. She seemed suspicious of me and kept trying in Spanish to come up with some sort of explanation.
“Maleta,” she said. “Maleta. Maleta.” She mimicked carrying a suitcase by curling her arm up against her side and grimacing.
“No maleta,” I said. I held up my backpack.
“Su caja,” she said, and with the skill of Marcel Marceau created a box in front of her.
“Oh, that? No. No.” I smiled. “Just me. Solamente mio e la bolsa mia.” I thought “bolsa” meant bag, but might have meant something else. Bolster? Bolo? Who cared? These last few minutes were hardly the time to learn Spanish, although I had some regrets at not knowing more. I stood on the street to smoke a cigarette and wait for the taxi. I could see the woman staring at me still, through the dirty glass. Up and down the street trucks were parked delivering chickens, thousands of them, plucked and pink. I had never seen so many dead chickens and I wondered at the number of people required to eat that much poultry. The sky was hazy and gray and somewhere, from one of the trucks, Mexican pop music was blasting away. The men worked quickly unloading the open crates and there was a festivity in the scene that I knew I would miss once back in the States.