One morning, I spied Alice through the large living room windows talking with somebody out in the park. The sun was strong and, because of her height and the light reflecting off her blond hair, it took me a moment to identify the gringo. They were chatting without the slightest trace of hostility.
“What were you talking about with the neighbor?” I asked as soon as she returned to the house.
“He’s a vulnerable old man,” she replied.
In those first days in Mexico, the process of liquidating my family’s businesses was frequently bogged down by my ignorance. I didn’t have a sense of the bigger picture, and this caused tremendous paranoia: as far as I was concerned, the partners, lawyers, and accountants were a gang of conspirators trying to rip me off. Besides, my mother-whom I stopped believing was on her death bed when I saw her playing golf after just one week in the hospital-had signed over power of attorney to me so I could do whatever I wanted, which I considered confirmation of my suspicions that, rather than dying, she was merely retiring, and was unloading everything on me. I canceled the sale of stocks, reinvested dividends, raised wages, and upped benefits as an act of revenge, just as neoliberalism arrived in Mexico with the new president, Miguel de la Madrid; I washed my hands of any possibility of profit and figured things would crash when they needed to crash. Alice just shook her head. I had given her an update on the family businesses at a less-than-ideal moment.
The night before, believing she was still away on a trip, I came home with one of the company secretaries directly after a little office party. That next morning, Alice showed up in the breakfast nook, dressed to play tennis. I was forced to introduce her, so I gave her name, and she added, “His wife.” The secretary almost spit out her coffee; immediately, she blurted, “What a big cat, and what huge fangs!” Wilson stopped rubbing himself against Alice’s thighs and moved toward his dish. The secretary asked “my wife” if that was her natural hair color. They started chatting as if they had studied fashion and makeup at the same school. As she left, the secretary said again, “What an enormous cat!” I told Alice about the party and the change of plans with the family businesses. She shook her head. I explained that the partnership would benefit from the privatization policy with which Miguel de la Madrid was ridding the nation of its excessive goods, handing them over to the domestic and foreign bourgeoisie; that the profit from the divorce would be even larger. None of it went over well with her.
“If you’re going to continue bringing your viejas…”
They aren’t actually very “old,” I explained to her.
Did I always like café-colored women?
“Alice, we say morenas-brown, if you like.”
“Well, if you’re going to keep sleeping with them, at least be sure I’m not at home.”
Later, just as I was sliding my car out of the garage, a young man started attacking the gringo. I jumped out of the car and shoved the guy before he began to kick the old man. The gringo got up and, after spitting and wiping some blood off his face with the sleeve of his shirt, growled at me to stay out of it, that it was none of my business, and then he called me an idiot. What?
A couple days later, I found Alice and the gringo having coffee and chatting amiably in our living room. I greeted her with a kiss and she said, in Spanish, “You remember him, he lives next door?”(“We say neighbor,” I whispered.) I remembered him, of course. I made eye contact with the old man for a passing second. Then I locked myself in the study. Alice soon appeared with a drink for me, took a seat on the rug next to the armchair where I was reading, and hugged my legs.
“You know,” she began, “I think that cabrón killed somebody, perhaps many people, and I don’t mean in a war. He’s like a serial killer.”
“He’s gotten away with the murder. In Spanish we say, he got away with it, Alice.” Of course, there was no need to ask why she thought this: it was female intuition. “They almost killed him the other day,” I said, and I told her what had happened.
“Ah, yes,” she responded, apparently aware of the incident,“that’s how it is with his kids.” Alfonso, the handyman on our street, had told her about worse incidents, even shootings; he’d never been hurt badly, but imagine the shock. “Did you know that Wilson fascinates him? He likes cats. He has a kitten now, he doesn’t know what kind, but she’s spotted. He actually named her Spots.” How imaginative, I thought. “He says she has a face like a whore, a made-up whore,” Alice laughed, “like in Cats. And she wears a flea collar. But when the gringo tried to pet Wilson, he clawed the guy.”
“We say scratched, Alice.”
Things changed, or went to hell, after that day. When I think of it now, it’s as if I woke up and the new situation was already there, just waiting for me to open my eyes.
I grew anxious as I headed out to the garden. There was a short ladder up against the garden wall, which I would have to climb in order to leave food and water for Spots.
A few days before, I’d woken up in the middle of the night and met her. I’d seen some branches move through the bedroom window-a rustling of leaves on the garden wall-and thought it was Wilson coming back from a night of mischief. But what emerged from the weeds instead was a spotted kitten, with a flea collar and the face of a whore; she took a few steps around the cornice when-suddenly-Wilson appeared behind her. Frightened by the sheer size of the “sabertoothed tiger,” Spots fell on her back. Wilson simply watched and smiled.
That same morning, Alfonso, the handyman, had knocked on my door and asked, on the gringo’s behalf, if I’d seen a spotted kitten in heat. It was impossible to know for sure (of course, that same dawn, I’d suspected, by virtue of the meows and shrieks outside my window), but the possibility of more than one spotted kitten wandering the neighborhood was remote: she had to be his cat. What was the plan? Alfonso shrugged his shoulders. Just imagine, I said, how difficult it will be to catch a female in that state. “If she were human, at least I’d have a chance.”
How many weeks had it been since Spots deserted her house and began subsisting on the water and croquettes I was leaving for her on top of the garden wall? Time had lost its coordinates since Alice made her final trip back to Texas, and marks on calendars and clocks meant nothing. I suppose I could calculate the months since I’d come home with company and Alice was still there, her flight canceled. This time it wasn’t a coffee-colored woman but a European, as blond and tall as Alice. They had looked each other over as I introduced them, and I’d considered it a good sign that Alice didn’t feel the need to clarify our relationship. I’d already decided to sleep with the European. “Will you excuse us?” I was on my way up the stairs when I heard about the canceled flight; she’d try to book another in the morning.
Alice went away and didn’t come back. On the phone, in Spanish and with Mexican irony, she recommended I do whatever I wanted; it was my life, after all, and she was no longer interested in my well being or whatever earthly goods she might be entitled to in the divorce.