All About Jane's Ranch

CHAPTER EIGHT

Outside, Lili heard the tamale seller’s bell ring— the sound of a small toy. “Tamales. Ricos tamales,” he chanted. It must be eight o’clock she thought, walking down the hall to the living room and opening the shutters. It had only been a week since Vivienne’s funeral, but already Lili was learning the rhythms of the neighborhood. The vendors’ calls were like the hands of a clock—eight am tamales, ten am the broom seller.

The smell of charred cornhusks roasting on the tamale vendor’s comal wafted up through the open window and reminded Lili that she was hungry. She had forgotten to ask Fatima to prepare breakfast the day before by three pm—that was the protocol, another hand of the clock, another thing to get used to. She would have to go to a café.

Lili ran through her plans for the day. She had to get downtown to Bellas Artes to buy tickets. Cecilia Bartoli was performing in two days, and the price—and the fact that tickets were still available— was too good a deal to pass up. After that, there was lunch with Gabi at an expensive place on the Plaza Tolsa. A business expense, Gabi had reminded her, which made her wonder just how many of those he was used to ringing up. Lili opened the door to the chiffonier, picked out one of Vivienne’s more conservative outfits, and an hour later, dressed and ready, she opened her apartment door. The acrid smell of polish and the sight of a strange man vigorously rubbing a brass finial on the wrought iron banister, greeted her. The finial was a bright gold, now. Lili had never known they were any other color than dull brown. There must be a great deal she didn’t know about this house’s secrets.

Just then, Fatima emerged from her quarters with a stack of mail.

“Senora Lili, para ti.” Fatima waved the envelopes Lili’s direction.

Lili walked down the stairs.” Gracias,” she said, stuffing the mail in her bag. “Mucho trabajo, verdad?” She waved her arm at man cleaning the brass, wondering how Fatima hired all the help she did on the money Lili had given her last month. They all seemed to be primos, according to Fatima. Well, thank God for her, Lili thought.

Lili stepped through the heavy, wooden door and saw that the sky had cleared. The plane trees in Rio de Janeiro Park reached up into blue, early December light, and poinsettias, planted recently in the foliage around the plane trees’ trunks in preparation for Christmas, shone like bright, red stars amidst the Bird-of Paradise plants and the garbage tossed around them.

Lili headed toward a hole-in-the-wall café on Avenida Obregon for a cappuccino and pan dulce. She looked up through half-bare trees along the sidewalk and noticed Feliz Navidad signs drooping red and green above stop lights, saw shabby tinsel wreaths hanging from street lamps. Suddenly, in spite of old, worn tinsel and garbage-strewn parks, Lili felt herself filled with end-of-year elation. In a few weeks, the longest night would be here. After that, the days would lighten. The slate would be washed clean. Maybe the guilt she felt living her dead sister’s life would be washed away, too, and she would be left with just the pleasure of it. Lili winced in shame at her desire, shook her shoulders as if to free herself from its mantle.

Lili sat down at one of the tin tables outside the café and ordered a cappuccino. She opened her bag and looked at the thin lines of envelopes, bills mostly, ones she would go over with Fatima who would take the money in pesos to the appropriate offices— water, gas, electricity, phone. No one, she’d learned, sent checks through the mail here.

Just then the waiter placed a frothy cappuccino in a glass goblet in front of her along with a basket of sugary rolls. Lili closed her bag. She would look at the bills later. Now, she only wanted to savor her coffee and the lovely, almost winter morning.

In the median under the falling fresno leaves, Lili watched booksellers open their stalls, watched businessmen in fine tailored suits stop under the canvas tents, pick up a volume, buy one. She tried to imagine their lives as they walked away, their footsteps drowned by the sound of traffic, horns, lottery ticket sellers’ shouts. She wondered where they lived, behind which of the billions of apartment windows they would cut the plastic wrapping off the book at night, settle in a chair. So many people, so much activity. Twenty-two million crammed into this city alone. Actually, it was a miracle the place functioned as well as it did, garbage or no garbage. Lili dipped her spoon into the cinnamon-scented milk and lifted it to her lips.

Soon the coffee and cakes were gone, and Lili pushed her glass away, brushed the crumbs off the table. She lifted the letters out of her bag and went through them. Telmex, Bancomer credit card bill, a legal-size envelope written in a familiar hand—Joel. Oh, Jesus. This was not something Fatima could help with. Lili reached her hand up. “Joven,” she called to the waiter. “Mas café, por favor.”

Lili stuck her thumb under the envelope. She pulled out a typed letter. Her eyes blurred the words—Their relationship had to end. He needed more support than she was willing to give. Had she considered the consequences? What should she say? She felt she was turning her face to something—what was it? Light, warmth, excitement—a certain energy Vivienne would have called it— and Lili couldn’t walk away now.

She called for the bill, placed the pesos on top and headed across the earthquake-damaged sidewalks to a taxi sitio on Insurgentes Sur. She would let the sheer exertion of having to get across town push away thoughts of Joel. He was just throwing a tantrum. When the taxi pulled up, she told herself she would open Joel’s letter again this evening in the calm of the roof garden, where she could think. The taxi pulled out into traffic like a river-rafter heading through white water, turning and weaving with confidence on his way to the Alameda.

“Fancy meeting you here,” Hanes tapped her on the shoulder as she waited in line at the Ticket kiosk inside the Bellas Artes lobby.

She jumped, still unsettled by Joel’s cold letter, and her heart raced as if Joel had tracked her down. But it was just Hanes. She waved to the man who was holding her place and held up one finger. “Un minuto,” she called out.

The man shrugged.

“So what are you buying tickets for?” she asked

Lili told her. “And you?”

“Havana.” Hanes pulled out a cigarette. “The film festival, at least part of it. Five days of sun, surf and anti-imperialism. Gabi will be in heaven.”

Lili felt a rush of anger. “He didn’t tell me.”

“Here’s some advice, Lili, though advice is never appreciated.” Hanes blew smoke over Lili’s head. “Don’t act like too much of a boss. Anyway, he’s going to tell you at lunch. Act surprised, okay?”

“How do you know about lunch?”

“Lunch at Girasoles on Plaza Tolsa? Wouldn’t miss it for the world. Chicken stuffed with huanzontle, smothered in guajillo chili. I’ll feel like an Aztec Princess, especially since the gallery is paying.”

“Generous of me, isn’t it?”

“Generous of Senor Hellmann, one might say.”

Lili felt stabbed with a sense of illegitimacy. Why had Hanes said that? Why had she turned on her suddenly? Problems with Gabi no doubt, and Lili was just an easy target. Lili counted the people ahead of her—three college girls, an older couple, not many. After she got her ticket, she’d tell Hanes she was Christmas shopping. She didn’t want to hang around, let Hanes make jabs at her because she was in a bad mood over things Lili knew nothing about.

“I’m just asking you to let Gabito get his way for a while until all this settles down, comprendes?” Hanes sounded as if she were pleading.

“Sure. Whatever,” Lili said.

“Mil gracias, darlin’. Tootaloo,” Hanes said and headed toward the bookstore across the Bellas Artes lobby.

Lili had the sinking feeling she’d agreed to something she shouldn’t have, but it was too late now to undo the damage.

Lili waved to Hanes through the bookstore glass as she left, ticket in hand. “See you at lunch,” she called out, beating a hasty retreat.

She turned left on Madero and wandered down the narrow, dark street. Baroque buildings loomed on either side, leaning like too-heavy stage sets about to fall. She really had nothing to do for another two hours but worry about her next conversation with either Joel or her school’s principal. She could have another coffee at Café La Blanca, but she’d already had enough caffeine. She could buy a lottery ticket at the old shop Gallo de Oro, but it seemed she’d had enough of fortune’s caprices, too. Better to leave well enough alone. She wandered down Isabel la Catolica Street and tried to find the tiny pawnshop where Vivienne had once taken her.

Vivienne’s pawnshop, Lili remembered, had been utterly charmless— a white painted room, fluorescent lights, a hand printed sign in front saying, “We buy gold, silver by the gram.” There were tens of such places, several on each crowded alleyway. They were all piled high with sacks of coins, plastic bags of watches and chains. The old man had let Vivienne pull out silver bracelets, set them on the grimy floor.

“Look,” Vivienne had said when they’d walked far enough away. She’d stopped, pulled the bracelets out of her purse and showed Lili where they’d been signed. “Collector’s items,” Vivienne had said. “You never know what you’ll find in there.”

Now, all the shops looked the same to Lili. She would never find Vivienne’s old man.

She thought about trying her luck in the dingy, little estate jewelry stores. She hesitated a minute in front of a dusty windowpane where swags of gold, pearls, and colored stones hung on frayed, velvet bars and peered into the dark high-ceilinged room. She saw anxious salesmen looking for an easy touch. Without Vivienne guiding her, Lili knew she would be such a victim. She couldn’t tell a ruby from a garnet, from glass. Beside, Lili could choose to wear anything of Vivienne’s, even if it did feel creepily on loan from the afterlife.

Lili gave up trying to buy herself a present, deciding instead to line up at the famous bakery—Pasteles Ideal— and order a Tronca Navidena—a Mexican Buche de Noel, another remnant of the French occupation. She wound her way around many-tiered wedding cakes, all white confection and iced columns, their images multiplying in the wall-to-ceiling mirrors on each side of the store. Lili reached the end of the line, gave the dark-skinned girl in a candy-pink dress and jaunty white cap her order, pointing to a cake in the glass compartment. The girl wrote Lili’s order and pulled off a receipt from the pad and gave it to Lili, telling her the cake would be ready on December twenty-second.

Back out on Avenida Madero, the narrow, shadowed sidewalks were even more crowded. Traffic cops blew shrill whistles on each street corner, but no one paid any attention. Pedestrians all merged into one moving throng. Lili decided it would be easier to just wait in the restaurant in Plaza Tolsa, away from pickpockets, away from cell-phone-using, distracted businessmen bumping into her.

She stood on the corner of Filomena Mata, about to turn left, when a book in a shop window caught her eye. The name Alejandro Perez- Luna was written in big, black letters against a beige-colored paper background. Lili walked to the doorway and peered around the gold lettering on the glass window at Alejandro’s book, Dos Vistas de la Utopia. Two Views of Utopia. Lili pushed open the heavy glass door. The air was cool like a humidor, no smell of musty pages here.

“En que pueda servirle?” a middle-aged clerk looked up from a book-filled glass counter she was cleaning with Windex. How might I help you?

“That book, there.” Lili pointed to the beige volume, and the woman retrieved it. Lili paid, left the book-lined walls, strangely excited by her discovery— a few hundred pages of the way Alejandro’s mind worked. It seemed almost more intimate than their other encounter, which really hadn’t been about him at all.

By now, that night was a blur anyway, almost as if it hadn’t happened. She passed the outdoor cafes on Filomena Mata, avoiding the scrawny accordion player offering her a song for ten pesos. “Solamente una vez,” he crooned sourly. Just once in a lifetime, the song went, have I ever loved with sweet and total renunciation.

Lili remembered translating the song for Joel once, who had sneered, “They actually sing things like that?”

Lili stopped in the sunlit Plaza Tolsa. After the darkness of the narrow streets, the sun made her eyes water. She used to think she’d never feel such a thing, but now she knew she had. That night with Alejandro had not necessarily been sweet, but it certainly had been close to total renunciation. All because of Vivienne.

And yet she’d run from it, from him. When she had seen him the day Joel had arrived, she had tried to push him away. Of course, he stopped her from acting like a complete idiot. She remembered his words—un caballero verdadero no tiene memoria.

Since then she had seen him only briefly and from a distance, had only heard his footsteps coming and going on the stairs early in the morning, late at night, and the sound made her heart race, hoping he would stop at the door, try again, but he didn’t. After a while, Lili no longer saw his car parked in the space below the house, and Lili was afraid he’d left. Fatima sneered when Lili asked about him and said he was on some kind of campaign tour, a thief like all politicians. Thank you God, Lili had whispered to herself, climbing the stairs. She stopped for a minute, clinging to the banister, shocked by how glad she was he hadn’t left.

Lili stared at the large stone buildings— the Venetian style post office, the Belle Époque Teatro Hidalgo with its slate, curved roof, and at the statue of Carlos Rey on horseback in the middle of the plaza. A few feet away, she saw the bright, yellow awning of Girasoles. Lili crossed the plaza and asked for a seat outside behind the iron grille where the yellow light through the awning spilled onto the white linen. The waiter brought her a complimentary tradicional, a shooter of clear tequila, another of blood-colored tomato juice. Lili set her book on the table and pierced the plastic wrapping with her thumbnail. She opened the book to the back page—no picture of Alejandro just some useful facts—date of birth (he was older than he looked), education—UNAM—Harvard.

“Ah, you’re early,” Gabi said as he pulled out the chair next to her. “I see they’re treating you well.” He pointed to her tequila. “Hanes is joining us.”

Lili slid her book onto the empty seat and lifted her drink. “Salud,” she said, hoping the tequila would make this meeting easy.

“Drinking already, Lili?” Hanes let her arm rest on Gabi’s shoulder and brushed his cheek with her lips. “You’re getting more Mexican every day. Better watch it.” Hanes motioned to the waiter. “Lo mismo. Por favorocito. ,” she called out. Bring the same.

“Why watch it?” Lili asked.

Hanes ignored the question. “ Lili, now I call this the Plaza of the Mexican Identity Crisis. Did you see the Doge’s palace over there?” Hanes pointed to the post office. “And over there, we’ve got a bit of French Seventeenth century, the maison de Madame Sevigne, and of course,” she waved her arm at the National Museum of Art, “the Spanish Siglo de Oro.”

Lili wanted to say, “A little advice Hanes, though it’s seldom appreciated. Don’t be so snide.” She didn’t.

Gabi speared an olive from the hors d’oeurves plate with a toothpick, popped it in his mouth, and took a quick sip of tequila. He dabbed his lips with the napkin. “What my companera is saying,” Gabi said to Lili, “is that Mexicans are excellent imitators. We can fake anything. Isn’t that right, mi amor?” Gabi speared another olive.

Oh God, Lili thought. The last thing she needed was a public spat. Hanes seemed to be on the attack for some reason, so her jab at her at Bellas Artes hadn’t been personal.

“Now the only truly Mexican building,” Hanes continued. “Is that low-roofed pink one over there with the tiny barred windows. Impregnable, I’d say, dark and mysterious.” Hanes swallowed half her tequila. “That’s the Mexican Senate.”

Lili turned her head. The senate building was small, as Hanes said, squat and rose-colored. The windows were the size of tiles. They were barred and impenetrable. There was nothing to indicate the building’s importance. In front of it, two armed soldiers leaned on the pink wall by the door. Stone pavers led to a sunken plaza, where Pemex widows had set up a tent city and were protesting cutbacks in medical services. A few people milled in front reading protest signs. So that was where Senedor Alejandro Perez-Luna worked. Well, what was it to her anyway? Lili remembered her thrill at finding his book and quickly brushed the feeling away. She buried her face in the leather-bound menu. “Huachinango,” she said to the waiter, “and another tequila.

An hour later, the plates were cleared, the crumbs brushed from the white damask cloth. Only a few chili stains remained, a few dribbles of green tomatillo sauce, a spoon print of chocolate mousse. Gabi, Hanes and Lili all had white cups of espresso in front of them. Lili watched Hanes and Gabi exchange glances. Here it comes, she thought, Havana.

“Lili,” Hanes said, following some unspoken cue from Gabi. “Gabi and I,” Hanes’s well- manicured hand shaped a figure eight in the air between them, an invisible lasso. “We think you should sell the gallery to Gabito.”

Lili felt the forced smile she’d maintained during lunch collapse. “You what?”

“Just hear me— us— out.” Hanes’s hand snaked between Gabi and herself again.

Lili had no intention of listening. She squinted through the iron grille, past the juniper topiaries, the flower-boxes to the grey stones of the plaza. Hanes’s words were an annoying background sound, like music in a dentist’s office. She heard snippets, the words inexperience dealing with Mexican bureaucracy… lack of knowledge of contemporary Mexican art… no proven ability to sell, heard Gabi chiming in about how Hellmann was unreliable. Oh, Lili thought, and Gabito Beltran is reliability personified.

“Besides,” Hanes’s hand settled on Lili’s arm, “we think you should leave Mexico, go home.”

Lili’s arm dropped to the table, the espresso cup too heavy in her hand. “Excuse me?” Had they been in contact with Joel?

“Don’t get trapped here, Lili.” Hanes pulled out a cigarette. “Lili, you’ve got a good life in the States. Don’t be dazzled by all this bizarreness.” She waved her arm in the direction of Porfirio Diaz’s grand buildings. “It can be pretty compelling.”

Lili didn’t know where to begin. Did she leave? Did she get angry? She heard herself sputter, “I didn’t come here to get advice about how to live. I thought this was a business lunch, Gabi. You don’t know anything about my life in the states, unless Vivienne told you, and she was hardly in a position to know. I’m quite prepared to learn about the business, Gabi —but if this is a question of money…” Lili watched Gabi’s face go flat, watched Hanes wince.

“This, Lili, is exactly what I mean. Frankness. Not a virtue here. Will never help work out the little problemas.” Hanes shook her head as if Lili were a terminal case.

“You’re here, Hanes.”

“That’s different. Anyway, it’s too late for me.”

“Is it?” Lili asked, looking the other way, trying to get her composure. She stared at the doorway that led inside the restaurant, heard a clatter of footsteps coming down a narrow flight of stairs from a second-story dining room, saw three men emerge. Lili felt the blood drain from her face. Alejandro.

Lili turned around, dizzy, hoping he hadn’t seen her. “So Gabi, Hanes tells me you are planning a trip to Cuba,” she said, blurting out the secret, chattering a bit too quickly. “ Fine. We all could use some time off I suppose.”

Lili felt a hand on her shoulder and froze. She looked up. Alejandro beamed down at her. He did not move his hand.

“You’ve found my office, I see,” Alejandro said, waving his free hand toward the restaurant’s door. Behind him stood two men, briefcases in hand. “Raul, Pepe, come and meet my hippie commune.”

Had his hand tightened on her shoulder? Lili pressed her palms into her knees to keep from shaking.

A flurry of handshakes went around. Jokes were made. Raul said he wanted to be in the commune, but Alejandro told him conservatives weren’t admitted. Pepe said the commute from the south of town was so bad he was thinking of renting a tarp from one of the Pemex widows. Just then, Raul reached down onto the chair next to Lili. “Oye, Alejandro, look what your hippie roommate is reading.” He waved the book around.

Alejandro’s hand gently carressed her shoulder, or did she just imagine it?

“Hijole,” he said. “I thought that had been recycled into toilet paper by now.”

Raul said it wasn’t old enough to be a classic. The recycling plants were still working on Cervantes and Sor Juana. The joking continued until Pepe’s cell phone chimed and Alejandro said that duty called. His hand lingered on Lili’s shoulder until his colleagues turned to leave, until he said, “Ciao, nos vemos.”

Lili reached for the bill and turned, as if to find the waiter, her eyes searching the sidewalk in front of the senate buiding until she spotted Alejandro, his body moving with a certain swagger and confidence. She felt blindsided by desire.

“Los Dos Utopias,” Hanes read the title. “Which one are we in Gabito? Uno? Dos?”

“Which one has the carjackings in it? And the garbage? And the pinche Catholic church?”

“Get out Lili darlin’ before it’s too late.” Hanes stood up, tossing Alejandro’s book on the table. “Take my word for it, ” she said, and then they both left.

Lili turned back to the senate building, but Alejandro and the other men had already gone inside, leaving only the stone-faced soldiers in front of the door. She paid the bill, lifted her book from the table, and walked past the Carlos Rey statute toward San Juan Letran.

Lili stopped to catch her breath on the marble steps in front of the Palacio de Bellas Artes. The whole building was sinking, and Lili, still off-balance from seeing Alejandro, from her discussion with Hanes and Gabi, felt she was being pulled under as well. She had been so certain about staying when she’d responded to Hanes’s offer. But was she? She remembered Joel’s letter, his cold fury. Alejandro, she knew, wasn’t some sort of savior. She was old enough to know how most love affairs ended.

The early evening light had turned the trees in Alameda Park dark green. The Christmas lights blinked in the dusk, but there was still enough daylight to cross the park safely. She would get a taxi at the Hotel Cortez on the other side. Lili let herself be pulled into the green shadows of the park, let herself enjoy the sound of the fountains’ watery noise, the bright color of the ices she would one day dare to try, stacked on an apple-green wooden stand. Sitting on one of the parks elegant benches, she put her book next to her and watched the uniformed school children with sticks of pink, swirled cotton candy, remembering wearing one of those uniforms herself, until her father had hired a tutor. He’d refused to have her educated by fascist nuns. Hadn’t the church supported Franco, Hitler?

A memory rose up, an image in a dream. Where had it come from? Rather, how had she forgotten? She and Vivienne running in this very park, ices in hand. Hers had been lime green, Vivienne’s magenta. Lili turned back to the steps of the Bellas Artes. She stared at the building, but she wasn’t seeing it. She saw only shattered remnants of her own life. Lili really had no choice. The damage happened when she was very young— the shards of her father’s ruined career, of her mother’s destroyed life, all smashed for such a good and innocent belief—To each according to his need, from each according to his ability.

Lili looked at her watch. It would be getting dark soon. She should get a taxi. The memories blurred the present into a single image—Lili and Vivienne sitting on this park bench like a Frida painting, each one half of the other, the vein cut and bleeding between them. Los Dos Fridas. Lili and Vivienne—Las Dos Hermanas. How could they have understood all the complexities? Her parents’ demons had driven Vivienne mad, and Lili had run from them, trying to erase half of herself. Suddenly, she felt desperate to connect to the lost parts. She could not return to the States now—it was already too late. This had always been her path, and there was no escaping it. That’s what she what she would tell Gabi and Hanes, what she would tell Alejandro if he asked.

She stood and walked across the park.

“Desculpe, Senora.” A man tapped her on the shoulder and handed her Alejandro’s book. She’d been so lost in reverie she’d forgotten. Unbelievably stupid.

“Gracias, mil gracias.”

“De nada. “ He turned and disappeared into the crowd.

It was only at the edge of the park that Lili remembered she’d seen him somewhere before. Of course, she gasped, remembering what Hanes had said. “One of Senor Cementomex’s lackeys. Whenever he shows up Vivienne disappears for a few days.”

My God. Lili felt faint. He’d been following her hadn’t he?