“On a snatch, I mean, a snack.” Dionisio corrected himself but the beauty ignored him, just barely touching herself behind an ear, again as if she were putting on perfume, as if her fingers were a bottle of Chanel.
“Just think, I don’t even need a doctor anymore. You know my bracelet? Well, let me tell you, it’s not just some frivolous piece of jewelry. It’s my portable hospital. Anywhere I happen to be, it can do a cardiogram, check my blood pressure, and even tell me my cholesterol without wasting time.”
Dionisio wondered if this beautiful woman was really a nurse in disguise. A hospital would have rewarded her efficiency, but it was haste, not efficiency, that mattered most to this divine creature. Dionisio began to doubt she was speaking to someone in Holland, but there was certainly no way in hell she was speaking to him. Was she talking to herself?
“So listen, with no time, no address, no name, no place, no office, no vacation, no kitchen, what am I left with?”
Her voice broke; she was going to cry. Dionisio panicked. He wished he could hug her or at least stroke her hand. She was becoming more hysterical by the minute. For the first time, she looked at him, telling him she was Sally Booth, thirty-six years old, a native of Portland, Oregon, voted in high school most likely to succeed, three husbands, three divorces, no children, occasional lovers, farther and farther away, love by telephone, long-distance orgasms, love with security, without problems, no body fluids, safe. I won’t go to a hospital, I’m going to die at home …
Abruptly interrupting her emotional flow, her instant biography, she squeezed Dionisio’s hand and said, “What is money good for? To buy people. We all need accomplices.”
And on that note, she disappeared like the first two, and Dionisio sat there staring at an empty plate where only the juicy traces of a rare steak survived (even though he had explicitly ordered medium).
“You could have been more cruel and less beautiful,” said the Symbolist poet whom Dionisio, to his sorrow although also for his intermittent pleasure, carried within him.
But this time his portable Baudelaire never left the suitcase; the little charro’s pistol went off again, and the blond waiter unexpectedly set down before him a lemon sherbet that Baco identified as the trou normand of French cuisine, the “Norman hole” that cleanses the palate of the main courses and prepares it for new tastes. He was astounded that the American Grill in a commercial center on the outskirts of San Diego would know anything about such subtleties, but he was even more taken aback to find, when he looked up, a woman before him. Without being beautiful, she was radiant — that he saw instantly. Her face, devoid of makeup, both needed and didn’t need cosmetics — they were irrelevant. Everything in her immaculate face had meaning. Her eyebrows, with their blond pallor, were like the meeting place of sand and sea; her lips, appropriately thin, were appropriately furrowed by an insinuation of imminent maturity she didn’t deign to disguise; her hair was pulled back and gathered in a bun, her first gray hairs of no importance to her, floating like lost clouds over a field of honey; her eyes, her eyes of a deep gray, the gray of good cashmere, of morning rain, as gray as an unexpected encounter, intelligent, slate and chalk, announced her special nature — they were eyes that changed color with the rain. They looked past Dionisio’s shoulder toward the television screen.
“I always wished I could play for a baseball team,” she said, smiling, as Baco, lost in the eyes of his new woman, let his lemon sherbet melt away. “It takes a special kind of art to make those low catches.”
“Like Willie Mays,” Dionisio interposed. “He really knew how to pull out those low catches.”
“How do you know that?” she said with genuine amazement, genuine fondness.
“I don’t like American cooking, but I do admire American culture — sports, movies, gringo literature.”
“Willie Mays,” said the un-made-up woman, rolling her eyes up toward heaven. “It’s funny how someone who does things well never does them just for himself. It’s as if he did them for everyone.”
“Who are you thinking of?” asked Dionisio, more and more ravished by this trou normand of a woman.
“Faulkner. I’m thinking of William Faulkner. I’m thinking about how a single genius can save an entire culture.”
“A writer can’t save anything. You’re mistaken there.”
“No, it’s you who are mistaken. Faulkner showed the southerners that the South could be something other than violence, racism, the Ku Klux Klan, prejudice, and rednecks.”
“All that came into your head from watching television?”
“It really does intrigue me. Do we watch television because things happen there, or do things happen so they can be seen on television?”
He went on with the game. “Is Mexico poor because she’s underdeveloped, or is she underdeveloped because she’s poor?”
Now it was her turn to laugh.
“You see, people used to watch Willie Mays play, and the next day they read the paper to make sure he’d played. Now you can see the information and the game at the same time. You don’t have to verify anything. That’s worrisome.”
“You mentioned Mexico,” she said, questioningly, after a moment in which she lowered her eyes, doubtful. “Are you Mexican?”
Dionisio nodded affirmatively.
“I love and don’t love your country,” said the woman with the gray eyes and the clouds crowning her honey hair. “I adopted a Mexican girl. The Mexican doctors who gave her to me didn’t tell me she had a serious heart problem. When I brought her here, I took her in for a routine checkup and was told that if she wasn’t operated on immediately she wouldn’t last another two weeks. Why didn’t they tell me that in Mexico?”
“Probably so you wouldn’t change your mind and would go ahead with the adoption.”
“But she could have died, she could have … Oh, Mexican cruelty, the abuse, the indifference toward the poor— what they suffer. Your country is a horror.”
“I’ll bet the girl’s pretty.”
“Very pretty. I really love her. She’s going to live,” she said, her eyes transfigured, just before she disappeared. “She’s going to live …”
Dionisio could only stare at the melted sherbet he’d had no time to eat; the charro genie, impatient to carry out his orders and disappear, had fired his pistol again, and a cute woman appeared with curly hair and a flat nose, nervous, jolly eyes, dimples, and capped teeth. She gave him a big smile, as if she were welcoming him onto a plane, school, or hotel. It was impossible to know what it meant — appearances are deceiving. Her features were so nondescript she could have been anything, even a bordello madam. She wore jogging clothes, a light-blue jacket and sweatpants. She never stopped talking, as if Dionisio’s presence were irrelevant to her compulsive discourse, which had neither beginning nor end and seemed directed to an ideal audience of infinitely patient or infinitely detached listeners.
The salad appeared, accompanied by the waiter’s scornful gesture and his muttered censure: “Salad is eaten at the beginning.”
“Think I should get a tattoo? There are two things I’ve never had. A tattoo and a lover. Think I’m too old for that?”
“No. You look as if you could be between thirty and—”
“When you’re a kid, that’s when having tattoos is good. But now? Imagine me with a tattoo on my ankle. How am I going to show up at my own daughter’s wedding with a tattoo on my ankle? Even worse, how am I going to go— someday — to my granddaughter’s wedding with a tattoo on my ankle? Maybe it would be better if I had a tattoo on my boob — that way only my lover would see it in secret. Now that I’m about to get a divorce, I was lucky enough to meet this in-cred-ible man. Where do you think his territory is?”