Although, in truth, this revulsion she feels toward her belongings has only developed over the last few months, since she left the hospital.
‘If there are two million cushions, and a rug, and a sofa,’ she asks in her session, ‘how am I ever going to get out of here?’
‘Where would you like to go?’ Mr. Therapist asks.
But she doesn’t want to go anywhere. Quite the opposite, she’d like to spend more time in her house. She wants to be home when the whomise lights up her wall. She’s twenty years old, is that so much to ask? She opens the fridge. Beer, pickles, two tomatoes, mustard. A couple of yogurts, a collection of jellies and jams that Chihuahua buys and then dishes out sparingly as if they contained gold dust. There isn’t any blue cheese in the fridge. There is, however, an egg. Also a set of Tupperware containers that have been there for ages and which she doesn’t dare open. There’s a bottle of ketchup with so much dried sauce around the hole that the top won’t close, like those people who talk so much a thin layer of crust grows in the corner of their mouth. Some carrots she bought weeks ago fester in the tray at the bottom. She used one to masturbate with, then threw it away. The rest are still there. She never worked up the energy to peel them. Fuck, she’d bought them in curative mode. Linda always has a Tupperware full of crudités. Whenever Marina is over there she takes one every time she passes the fridge. Why can’t she be more like Linda: seemingly laidback, but an impeccable master of juliennes?
‘Popcorn. That’s it. Yes,’ she thinks.
It’s a tiny sign, no saliva or taste-pore activation or anything, but she finds some popcorn in the sideboard and quickly pops the bag in the microwave. While it cooks, she takes the carrots out of the fridge to peel one, but instantly changes her mind. They’re soggy. And that’s not all. A few of them have what looks like hair on them, gray-green hair: penicillin, maybe. Disgusted, she throws them back in the vegetable tray, takes out a beer, and closes the fridge. The popcorn goes pop, pop, pop.
‘You should eat, Marina love.’
I know.
She puts the popcorn in a bowl, takes it over to the sofa and turns on the TV. Chihuahua turned up the other day with a TV and now it lives on the living-room floor.
‘Can I hook it up to my computer to watch movies?’ Marina asked him.
But Chihuahua had other ideas: he said he’d found something in the closet that looked to him like a ‘Cable cable’.
‘Huh?’ said Marina.
She was also going to ask, ‘What were you doing rummaging around in my closet?’ But Chihuahua was already dragging over the cable; a great long thing rolled up in a neurotic figure of eight which could only be his doing. They moved the TV to where the cable reached, plugged it in and NBC news blinked onto the screen. The presenter was a blond in a pantsuit, the day’s dramas racing across her chest on a rotating sash, like a Miss Tragic Universe 2003.
So the cable was hooked up to cable TV. Marina couldn’t believe her eyes. Chihuahua had never mentioned it. But then, so what if he had? She wouldn’t have given it a second thought. She certainly wouldn’t have gone out and bought a TV just to test the thing. Who could have known that all this time, lying in her closet, there was a portal to another dimension, to the day-to-day lives of the rich, of grown ups, of people who watch US TV when they get back from work to shake Mexico off, as if following a twenty-first century version of Manuel Carreño’s Manual of Urbanity and Good Manners — ‘Be sure to dismount from Mexico before entering the dining room’? Chihuahua was who. Chihuahua knew because he’s a big-city boy. It was him who explained to her that the shoes hanging by their laces in the street mark drug-dealing spots; he also showed her who in the neighborhood steals the phone cables to peel them and sell the copper. What annoys Marina is that Chihuahua isn’t even from the capitaclass="underline" he’s from Ciudad Juárez. She once asked him, ‘How much less provincial could your border town be than Xalapa?’ To which he replied, ‘Oh, Juárez is provincial, all right. But it’s two countries’ provinces at once.’
Chihuahua pronounces English the same way Linda does: seamlessly. Marina tries to copy him but he gets annoyed when she obsesses over his accent.
‘You lot are the ones who are wrong with your litter-a-tour!’ he snaps. ‘It’s called literature.’
For Chihuahua, ‘you lot’ means anyone from the green states. And that’s anything south of the deserts. Marina likes arguing with him about this. It makes her feel more defined in her identity, like she belongs to something; in this case, to the South of Mexico. Chihuahua pointed out to her that all Southerners eat quesadillas without queso and sort of sing their sentences. She ticks both these boxes. Well, apart from the fact she wouldn’t get a whole quesadilla down her these days, cheese or no cheese.
One piece of popcorn for every commercial. That’s the deal she’s made with her herself. And she’s more or less sticking to it when the doorbell rings. Finally! She freezes on the spot. She knows Chihuahua can see her through the window, because many a night, before entering the mews, she watches the neighbors from across the street through their sheer curtains, which are just like hers. Unobserved, Marina studies the motionless figures, which look like cardboard cutouts offset by the blue light of the television, and she confirms another of her suspicions: that routine kills love.
After the doorbell, Marina eats four pieces of popcorn in a row. That makes twenty-three, or maybe twenty-five. The movie’s soundtrack is the rain against the water tank: she likes watching the TV, not listening to it. Then, three bangs on the window facing out onto the street. Typical. She doesn’t move. Chihuahua goes on banging. He must be soaked. Marina wants to know if he’s drunk, so she stands up and opens the curtains with the most neutral face she can muster. But it’s not Chihuahua. It’s a woman. A stranger holding a black plastic bag above her head: a sorely ineffectual substitute for an umbrella. Her hand is resting on the window she’s just pounded on for a fourth time. It’s a small hand, and something about the way she rests it on the wet glass fills Marina with tenderness. It’s as if she were holding it there waiting for Marina to do the same. Marina points at herself with her index finger.
‘Me?’
The woman nods.
‘Don’t talk to strangers,’ was one of the pearls of wisdom her brother gave her when she finally called home to confess she’d moved to Mexico City.
‘Don’t open car windows either: not to street vendors, not to the police.’
‘I don’t have a car,’ Marina told him.
‘Well, in case you happen to go in one,’ he’d said. And she remembers this had pissed her off. Why didn’t he say, ‘Well, when you do have one’?
To open the main door to the mews Marina has to leave her house and run to the entryway. Oh, what the hell. She slips on her flip-flops, opens the door and makes a run for it. She hadn’t taken into account the haiclass="underline" now the floor drains are clogged and the central passageway is a river, out of which only the very tip of the bell pokes out. Marina opens the main door and the woman steps inside.
2002
Belldrop Mews is so called because, when my grandparents’ house partially collapsed in the 1985 earthquake, a huge bronze bell set inside a niche on the facade fell and buried itself in what was the house’s yard and is now the open passageway connecting all the houses in the mews. Almost all of us who live here have to skip over the tip of the bell (a chunk of metal protruding from the floor) to enter or exit our houses.