We chatted. She and Fernando had two cups of coffee each. His without sugar. Hers with a full spoonful. We talked about places: Rio de Janeiro, Albuquerque, Colorado, Puerto Rico. We talked about people: me, my mother, my foster aunt, Carlos (we didn’t talk about Fernando).
Do you want to be an actress? I asked at some point.
I used to, she said. Before. But it didn’t end up happening.
But you studied theatre. June told us.
For a while. I came here to go to college.
So if you’re not an actress, what are you?
And she held her palms up and tilted her head to one side in a pantomime gesture.
I’m not anything.
But Carlos exclaimed, from his podium, that she did aikido (even though he didn’t know what aikido was, but it sounded Japanese and serious). A person who does aikido and wears aikido clothes can’t not be anything — was his argument.
And she laughed and said I’d like to have you all over for dinner at my place. Can you come? I bought some things that we used to make at your mother’s place — at your place (and she turned to me and then to Fernando, who could claim that possessive adjective to different degrees and for different reasons). For old times’ sake.
The old times were just that, old times. Times gone, past, yesteryear, a long time ago. Back when the “in” thing was for Isabel and my mother’s friends to get together in the house on San Pablo Street, when Fernando wasn’t part of Suzana’s life anymore and I had yet to be. So the old times were also pages from another calendar — and I thought again about what Pope Gregory had taken (I confess that I was kind of obsessed with the story: the omnipotence of a man of the cloth who stole time).
But we were there, we were with Isabel and having dinner with her seemed to be an imperative of the new times, more than an homage to the old. And at any rate she was enchanting. And at any rate we didn’t have anything else to do.
We followed her car from the coffee shop in Nob Hill to the suburb of Vista del Mundo, where she lived, in an enormous house that was one hundred percent contrary to anything that I might have imagined for her and her aikido clothes and green belt and green jacket, and her thin wrists and thick hair. It was enormous and looked a lot like the confectioner’s houses I had seen in Denver’s wealthy suburbs. It was a placid color in an undefined pastel tone and there was a cypress on each side of the door, like little green soldiers with conical bodies.
Isabel made mojitos for Fernando and herself and I noticed his relief at having the glass to put his hand on, and the rum to sip. It hadn’t been an easy day.
You live in a very big house, he said — and perhaps added mentally: for someone who isn’t anything.
It’s not mine.
And she went over to the sound system to put on some music. I couldn’t understand why adults only half-answered so many things. Maybe it was a mature, civilized habit and I should just get used to it. I was going to turn fourteen the following month. Fourteen was at least a nose in the adult world. And I had to unlearn all the codes I had learned to make way for others. Curiosity, for example: children had a gift for curiosity. Adults kept it chained up. In adults, curiosity shook paws, fetched balls and played dead.
I looked around at that house that was bigger than Isabel. Everything was more than necessary, as she appeared to live alone. There was too much floor, too many windows, too much furniture for just one person.
We would have dined in Vista del Mundo with Isabel, who had gone upstairs to her room and come back ten minutes later in civilian clothes with wet hair, hair that was very curly and hung in the air exactly like the questions that we all wanted to ask about her life (present, past) but weren’t sure if we should. And before the clock struck midnight we all would have been in our motel-room beds and Carlos would have written up every stage of the dinner at Isabel’s place in his notebook, beginning, middle and end. And I would have bathed and also taken care to dry my hair better this time, and it’s possible Fernando would have listened to Mexican soccer commentators on TV.
But Carlos and his chocolate cake were conspiring, in silence, in his stomach. They were planning a small guerrilla war. A mini-revolution.
He started complaining of nausea at 7.23pm after eating tortilla chips with guacamole. At 8.11pm, he started throwing up tortilla chips with guacamole (together with the chocolate cake, the main conspirator).
Because of those unruly, restless foods, and Carlos’s stomach’s desire to return them as one might return faulty merchandise, we ended up spending the night at Isabel’s house. After midnight, after a febrile Carlos had vomited enough and gone to bed, and I had gone to bed too, to dream memories of houses that I didn’t remember, I felt thirsty and got up, almost sleepwalking, to get a glass of water. The door of the next room, where Fernando should have been sleeping, was ajar. I glanced through the crack and even in the leaden half-light I could see that his bed was untouched and the room empty.
I wondered if maybe I shouldn’t get that drink of water from the kitchen. I could have a drink from the bathroom sink, which was on the same floor as the bedroom. I was rather dubious as to what I might find in a house with doors ajar and men missing. But because my curiosity still wasn’t a well-trained Labrador, I went downstairs anyway. Silently and slowly.
On the curve of the stairs, I craned my neck to peer into the living room and there they were, dancing to the sound of almost inaudible music, their bodies so close together that I felt embarrassed for seeing what I wasn’t supposed to be seeing. And I went back to the bedroom before I could see anything else, like a kiss, like one of them sliding their hand down the other’s back, like an opening in a blouse being explored by five fingers and a breast being found by those fingers. No, I didn’t want to see any of that. And no, I didn’t want to think about any of that either, but unfortunately thoughts are different: their freedom paralyzes ours. Thoughts do as they please.
WHAT FLORENCE DIDN’T FIND IN ME: 1) My father’s eyes. They couldn’t be found because, as I discovered later, he had blue eyes, and mine are brown. 2) Reasons not to believe me. As she was staring at me, I thought about mummies and how the ancient Egyptians used to remove the brains of their dead by stuffing hooks through their noses during the process of mummification. Perhaps she was trying, in those silent instants that lasted a few seconds that lasted a few decades, not to extract parts of me (courage? cheek?) for posterior embalmment but to appraise my trustworthiness using a method of her own. Which didn’t involve hooks threaded through my nostrils, but two equally penetrating eyes and a prolonged absence of words. 3) The granddaughter she had always prayed for.
WHAT FLORENCE DID FIND IN ME: 1) The granddaughter she hadn’t always prayed for — and surprises, in my opinion, have their charm. They’re a kind of bonus. For example: you buy two packets of cookies in the supermarket and when you go to pay you discover that there’s a special promotion that day: buy two packets of those cookies and get a packet of instant lemonade for free. 2) Some invisible, unspeakable merit which, faced with her two available options (putting me in contact with Daniel or not putting me in contact with Daniel), made her choose the former. 3) Something in my smile, a millimeter of curvature of my lips, that she would process over the following years until she told me one day, definitively: you have your father’s smile.
Canis latrans
It has been said that coyotes, like crows, mediate between life and death and are common characters in mythology. They are extremely adaptable, omnivorous mammals and will eat almost anything available: rabbits, mice and squirrels, as well as birds, frogs and snakes, as well as insects and fruits, as well as carrion. In urban areas, the contents of trash cans and dog food. They have been known to attack domestic pets. In general, they hunt at night. In the wild, their average life span is six to eight years. They are found throughout Central America and most of North America, from Panama in the south as far as Canada and Alaska in the north. They sometimes starve to death, or fall victim to disease, or are caught in traps, or are killed by other animals, or are run over by cars. Some coyotes live alone, others in pairs, yet others in packs — which usually consist of a pair of adults, yearlings and cubs. Coyotes with a different scientific name smuggle illegal immigrants from Mexico into the United States.