He and she alone.
He and she, inviolable in their solitude.
Separated from the others, she and he face-to-face on an unusual Saturday morning, imagining each other.
What were their names? Both had the same idea. I can give this man the name I like best. And he: Some men have to imagine the woman they love as a stranger; he was going to have to imagine a stranger as a lover.
It wasn’t necessary to say yes.
She wrote her name on the glass with her lipstick. She wrote it backward, as if in a mirror: YERDUA. It looked like an exotic name, the name of an Indian goddess.
He hesitated to write his, such a long name, so unusual in English. Blindly, without reflecting, stupidly perhaps, full of uncertainty — he doesn’t know even today why he did it— he wrote only his nationality: NACIXEM.
She made a gesture as if to ask for more, two hands held apart, open — something more?
No, he shook his head, nothing more.
From down below they began to shout to him, What’s taking you so long up there, aren’t you finished, don’t be so lazy, hurry up, it’s already nine o’clock, we have to get on to the next building.
Something more? asked the gesture, Audrey’s silent voice.
He placed his lips on the glass. She didn’t hesitate to do the same. Their lips united through the glass. Both closed their eyes. She didn’t open hers for several minutes. When she did, he was no longer there.
8. The Bet
To César Antonio Molina
Stone country. Stone language. Stone blood and memory. If you don’t escape from here, you’re going to turn to stone. Get out quick, cross the border, shake off that stone.
They arranged to meet him at the hotel at 9:00 a.m. in order to get to Cuernavaca and back the same day. Just three passengers. A tourist from the United States — you could tell a mile away — blond, pale, dressed in a Tehuana costume or something folkloric like that. A Mexican who kept holding her hand, a low-class boor, dark, with a big moustache and a purple shirt. And a woman he couldn’t place, white, a bit dried out, skinny, wearing low heels, a wide skirt, and a hand-knit wool sweater. Her hair was tied back, and if she hadn’t been so white, Leandro would have sworn she was a maid. But she spoke up for herself, loudly and aggressively and with a Spanish accent.
As a tourist driver, Leandro Reyes was used to all kinds, and this combination was neither better nor worse than all the others. The Spanish woman sat up front with him, and the couple, the Mexican and the gringa, cuddled together in back. The Spanish woman winked at Leandro and nodded her head significantly toward the rear. Leandro refused to take her lead. He was arrogant with all his passengers — no one was going to think they were dealing with an obsequious, submissive little Mexican. He did not return the Spaniard’s wink.
He took off like a shot, more quickly than he intended, but the strangled traffic in Mexico City made him slow down. He put a tape in his player and announced that it gave cultural descriptions of Mexican tourist sites — the pyramids at Teotihuacán, the beaches of Cancun, and of course Cuernavaca, where they were going this morning. He provided, he also announced, first-class service, for discerning clients.
The voices, the theme music, the exhaust from the buses, the polluted air of the city put all of them to sleep except him. And as soon as they got onto the highway to Cuernavaca, he accelerated and went faster and faster. He looked at the couple, the gringa and the yahoo, in his rearview mirror and got mad, as he always did when a dark guy like that took advantage of the chickadees who came looking for the exotic, for romance, and ended up in the hands of sons of bitches like this, crude, disgusting assholes no woman here would give a nickel for. The least he could do was scare the shit out of them.
He drove quickly and began to repeat the descriptions on the tape out loud, until the squatty body in back got riled up and started saying, Careful on the curve here. Listen, don’t repeat what the tape says. You think I’m deaf? And the gringa laughed — how exciting! — and only the Spanish lady next to him showed no emotion. She looked at Leandro with a scornful smile and Leandro said to them, This is not a simple tourist trip. It’s a cultural trip. That’s what they told me at the hotel. If you want to make out, you should have picked another driver.
The dark man in back sank down; the gringa gave him a kiss, and the asshole plunged his circus-clown face — What does this guy think he is, a soap opera star or something? — into the blond hair and didn’t make another squawk. But the Spanish lady said, Why do you work at a job you don’t like?
Lucky you weren’t born stupid. Look at Paquito, the village idiot. Look at how he goes out to the plaza to get some sun, smiling at the sun and the people. You can just see how he wants people to like him. But here in your village that doesn’t work. What right does that jackass have to feel happy just because he’s alive and the sun shines on his fingernails, on the three or four teeth he’s got left, on his almost-always-opaque eyes? Take a good look a him. As if he himself knows that his happiness can’t last long, he scratches his head of short hair, perplexed. His hair’s not combed and not messed up, because it’s so short that the only important thing is knowing if it grows or not. It grows forward, as if invading his narrow and perpetually worried, perpetually furrowed forehead. This morning, the shine of his always-dead eyes contrasts with his wrinkled brow. He looks toward the arches of the plaza. What will happen to him today? He turns off that idea, pushes it shut like an old, dusty drawer. But there is nothing more immediate than the threat. He’s defenseless. He realizes he’s in the middle of the plaza at noon, under the blazing sun, exposed, with nothing to protect him from the eyes of other people. He raises a hand to his eyes, closes them, hides, disguises himself, and with every passing minute becomes more and more conspicuous. Even people who never notice him are looking at him now. Paquito closes his eyes so no one will look at him that way. He feels terrible pains in his head. If he closes his eyes, the sun will die. He opens them and looks at the stone. Stone plaza. If you don’t leave here, you will turn to stone.
The Spanish woman observed him carefully and astutely. First, he wanted to pass for a cultured driver who would show foreigners the beauties of Mexico. It bothered him that instead of him another Mexican was making love to a gringa. It bothered him that they were giving each other sloppy kisses instead of listening to what the cultural tapes said about the Indian ruins. He wanted to get them upset, scare them, drive 120 miles an hour and give his air of culture an edge of savage physical violence. The Spanish woman felt sorry for this little man over forty with the ruddy, almost carrot-colored complexion that she’d noticed in a number of Mexicans in the city, a mixture of blonds and Indians. A sulphur color, really. His carroty reddish-colored hair was obviously dyed, and he wore a blue shirt, a tie, and a suit that was brilliant and silvery, just like the Iberia plane that had brought her to Mexico as the winner of the contest for best tourist guide at the Asturias caves.
Everyone went nuts because she won, but that’s what luck’s all about — you can’t do anything about it.
This man didn’t know the two of them did the same kind of work. Still, she couldn’t figure him out and amused herself watching the faces he made, all of them so phony it was laughable, angry, disdainful the whole time but know-it-all one minute, fearlessly, savagely macho the next, driven nuts by the couple he envied in the backseat. But more put out, the Spanish woman concluded, because she was smiling at him, staring at him, and not reacting to his driving.