I think I’m going to put the Sunday paper aside for a while, Dragoness. That editorial was too boring.
* * *
Δ “Yes, if you want me to, I’ll tell you how I pass my days.”
“Fine. Let’s start with getting up. Do you find it hard, Dragoness?”
“Hard to wake up, caifán. Not hard to get up. The moment I sense myself awake, before I open my eyes, I feel around with my feet for a cool spot, a spot that hasn’t been slept on, you know, and when I find one, there’s a terrific temptation to go back to sleep.”
“But you put down the temptation.”
“Usually, yes.”
“Because Javier has to go to the office.”
“That’s right. And I have to get up before he does.”
“Why? To cook his breakfast?”
“Of course not. You won’t believe me.”
“I believe everything you tell me, Elizabeth, even when you don’t believe it.”
“Some time I’ll have to think about that. Well, I get up first to win a little victory over Javier. To prove that I’m very active and energetic, that while he still lies there in bed, I’m already ready for whatever the day may bring.”
“The war between the sexes narrowed down to the civil war of wife against husband.”
“What else? And while he watches me with eyes that keep falling shut again, I open the window, oh, very briskly, and do my yoga exercises. And that’s another victory. I haven’t changed a pound or an inch in twenty years, and he is beginning to develop a pot.”
“And so you prove your Yankee mental and moral superiority to a drowsy Mexican male. That’s psychological imperialism, Dragoness.”
“My drowsy Mexican male brings it on himself, like most forms of imperialism. God, how he provokes me. His laziness, his hypochondria, his flabby body.”
“What else provokes you? I don’t necessarily mean Javier. Don’t you like Mexico?”
“I think I may love Mexico, but I’m damn sure I often don’t like it. This city is impossible. You have a secret code by which you communicate here. And just when an outsider thinks he has it figured, everything backfires. I mean, he goes into Bar X and buys a drink for the house and they love him and cry with him and call him cuate, mano, whatever you want. Then he goes into Bar Y and buys everyone a round and they take out their knives and ya, the communication ends with his guts spilling out.”
“Well, at least it’s spontaneous.”
“Spontaneous, shit. It’s merely unconscious premeditation. Death and fiesta, they are your two poles, caifán, and everything in between is ceremonial rigidity.”
“If we’re stiff, Elizabeth, it’s because we’re scared stiff. Mexico is a country with a tiger sleeping on its belly and we’re all afraid that at any moment it may wake.”
“Yes. And in the meantime you keep it knocked out with the sleeping pill of corruption. Do you know that I gave up driving and we sold my car? Every time I went out, a cop would stop me and I would have to pay him a bribe. Every time, the same cop, as regular as Sunday. And I always believed that he was hooked up with the burglars that would rob the apartment periodically. When he saw me out and stopped me, he would phone them and tell them the coast was clear. It stinks, caifán. It really stinks. The crook robs the citizen and splits with the cop, who splits with his captain, who robs the cops under him and splits with the mayor, who robs from his captains and department heads and inspectors, and so on, and splits with the district commissioner, who robs from all the mayors he controls and splits with the PRI delegate, who robs all his districts and splits with the governor, who robs from all his delegates and splits with the minister, who robs from everyone he can and splits with the president. In Mexico you end up paying yourself a bribe every now and then. It’s lunacy.”
“It’s the old pyramid of power, Dragoness, that’s all. Can’t you admire its aesthetic? Everything in Mexico forms a pyramid: politics, economics, love, culture. You have to step on the poor bastard beneath you and let the son of a bitch above you step on you. Give and take. And the man above always solves the problem for the one below, right up to the supreme father at the top who is disguised in the name of society itself. We’re all disguised, one face when we look down, another when we look up.”
“I know. But you’re the worst actors in the world just the same. When I first came here, I enrolled in a theater-arts class to kill time and to learn Spanish. And you know, not one of the people in the class could act. I mean act … repeat words written by someone else with authenticity enough to make them your own words. Play a role. The people I was in the class with couldn’t come even close. Everything was always phony, phony, phony.”
“Because they had been playing a role, each one of them, all their lives, and to have taken on another would have been redundancy. You have to be somebody before you can pretend to be somebody else. And the only person you can really successfully pretend to be is yourself, which is the secret, I suspect, behind our excellent gunmen and our lousy bullfighters. How long did you study acting?”
“Not long. Then I joined an English-language group and we did Noel Coward plays, one after the other, until that became a bore too. And then I read novels and that’s how I’ve passed my days since I came to Mexico, fifteen years of days, lover caifán. Ugh.”