I asked one of the girls where the telephone was and she pointed out the direction to me.
‘It’s over there,’ she said in good-looking English.
I went over to the telephone with Vida spreading erotic confusion like missile jam among the men in the store. The Mexican women, though very pretty, were no match for Vida. She shot them down without even thinking about it.
The telephone was beside an information booth, next to the toilet, near a display of leather belts and a display of yarn and the women’s blouse section.
What a bunch of junk to remember, but that’s what I remember and look forward to the time I forget it.
The telephone operated on American money: a nickel like it used to be in the good old days of my childhood.
A man answered the telephone.
He sounded like a doctor.
‘Hello, Dr Garcia?’ I said.
‘Yes.’
‘A man named Foster called you yesterday about our problem. Well, we’re here,’ I said.
‘Good. Where are you?’
‘We’re at Woolworth’s,’ I said.
‘Please excuse my English. Isn’t so good. I’ll get the girl. Her English is… better. She’ll tell you how to get here. I’ll be waiting. Everything is all right.’
A girl took over the telephone. She sounded very young and said, ‘You’re at Woolworth’s.’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘You’re not very far away,’ she said.
That seemed awfully strange to me.
‘When you leave Woolworth’s turn right and walk down three blocks and then turn left on Fourth Street, walk four blocks and then turn left again off Fourth Street,’ she said. ‘We are in a green building in the middle of the block. You can’t miss it. Did you get that?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘When we leave Woolworth’s, we turn right and walk three blocks down to Fourth Street, then we turn left on Fourth Street, and walk four blocks and then turn left again off Fourth Street, and there’s a green building in the middle of the block, and that’s where you’re at.’
Vida was listening.
‘Your wife hasn’t eaten, has she?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘Good, we’ll be waiting for you. If you should get lost, telephone again.’
We left Woolworth’s and followed the girl’s directions amid being hustled by souvenir junk salesmen, the taxi drivers and gum kids of Tijuana, surrounded by wolf whistles, cars cars cars, and cries of animal consternation and HEY, BEATLE!
Fourth Street had waited eternally for us to come as we were always destined to come, Vida and me, and now we’d come, having started out that morning in San Francisco and our lives many years before.
The streets were filled with cars and people and a fantastic feeling of excitement. The houses did not have any lawns, only that famous dust. They were our guides to Dr Garcia.
There was a brand-new American car parked in front of the green building. The car had California licence plates. I didn’t have to think about that one too much to come up with an answer. I looked in the back seat. There was a girl’s sweater lying there. It looked helpless.
Some children were playing in front of the doctor’s office. The children were poor and wore unhappy clothes. They stopped playing and watched us as we went in.
We were no doubt a common sight for them. They had probably seen many gringos in this part of town, going into this green adobe-like building, gringos who did not look very happy. We did not disappoint them.
Book Five: My Three Abortions
Furniture Studies
There was a small bell to ring on the door. It was not like the silver bell of my library, so far away from this place. You rang this bell by pressing your finger against it. That’s what I did.
We had to wait a moment for someone to answer. The children stayed away from their play to watch us. The children were small, ill-dressed and dirty. They had those strange undernourished bodies and faces that make it so hard to tell how old children are in Mexico.
A child that looks five will turn out to be eight. A child that looks seven will actually be two. It’s horrible.
Some Mexican mother women came by. They looked at us, too. Their eyes were expressionless, but showed in this way that they knew we were abortionistas.
Then the door to the doctor’s office opened effortlessly as if it had always planned to open at that time and it was Dr Garcia himself who opened the door for us. I didn’t know what he looked like, but I knew it was him.
‘Please,’ he said, gesturing us in.
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘I just called you on the telephone. I’m Foster’s friend.’
‘I know,’ he said, quietly. ‘Follow, please.’
The doctor was small, middle-aged and dressed perfectly like a doctor. His office was large and cool and had many rooms that led like a labyrinth far into the back and places that we knew nothing about.
He took us to a small reception room. It was clean with modern linoleum on the floor and modern doctor furniture: an uncomfortable couch and three chairs that you could never really fit into.
The furniture was the same as the furniture you see in the offices of American doctors. There was a tall plant in the corner with large flat cold green leaves. The leaves didn’t do anything.
There were some other people already in the room: a father, a mother and a young teenage daughter. She obviously belonged to the brand-new car parked in front.
‘Please,’ the doctor said, gesturing us towards the two empty chairs in the room. ‘Soon,’ he said, smiling gently. ‘Wait, please. Soon.’
He went away across the corridor and into another room that we could not see, leaving us with the three people. They were not talking and it was strangely quiet all through the building.
Everybody looked at everybody else in a nervous kind of way that comes when time and circumstance reduce us to seeking illegal operations in Mexico.
The father looked like a small town banker in the San Joaquin Valley and the mother looked like a woman who participated in a lot of social activities.
The daughter was pretty and obviously intelligent and didn’t know what to do with her face as she waited for her abortion, so she kept smiling in a rapid knife-like way at nothing.
The father looked very stern as if he were going to refuse a loan and the mother looked vaguely shocked as if somebody had said something a little risqué at a social tea for the Friends of the DeMolay.
The daughter, though she possessed a narrow budding female body, looked as if she were too young to have an abortion. She should have been doing something else.
I looked over at Vida. She also looked as if she were too young to have an abortion. What were we all doing there? Her face was growing pale.
Alas, the innocence of love was merely an escalating physical condition and not a thing shaped like our kisses.
My First Abortion
About forever or ten minutes passed and then the doctor came back and motioned towards Vida and me to come with him, though the other people had been waiting when we came in. Perhaps it had something to do with Foster.
‘Please,’ Dr Garcia said, quietly.
We followed after him across the hall and into a small office. There was a desk in the office and a typewriter. The office was dark and cool, the shades were down, with a leather chair and photographs of the doctor and his family upon the walls and the desk.