Dancing with the Tiger (34 page)

On the eighteenth day, the papershop girl received his letter. She read it once, folded it into her diary, then went to the bathroom and looked in the mirror. A wavy line creased her forehead, a gentle but unmistakable groove, her first wrinkle. Timeline. Tightrope. Arrow. The girl studied it until she made up her mind.

That night, she tiptoed to her parents' bedroom. Her skin smelled like almonds and her heels were soft and her chest rose and fell as her heart beat like a blacksmith's anvil. She wore her lace gloves, and her nightgown was thin as a shadow; sparkling script stitched across the front read:
Salma Hayek Versión 4.
The girl went to the bed where her parents slept, and pressed a kitchen knife to her father's neck. He woke at the prick and gasped,
“Hija,”
and she hissed,
“No me toques. No me vuelvas a tocar.”

Don't touch me. Don't ever touch me again.

OAXACA
—For generations, art historians have disagreed over whether the Aztec Emperor Montezuma II was buried with a mask, and if so, if it would ever be found. The hunt now appears over.

The highlight of the Galería Xolotl's thrilling new show, “The Many Faces of Mexico,” is a 16th century mosaic mask that scholars believe was the emperor's death mask. The turquoise mask has conch-shell teeth. Two intertwined snakes cross the forehead, the royal sign of Montezuma.

“This is an astounding discovery,” said Lorenzo Gonzáles, retired director of the Anthropology Museum of Oaxaca. “As the mask has no eye openings for the wearer to see through, we know this is a funerary mask. I only wish we had it for the museum.”

The show is the first public viewing of the collection of private businessman Óscar Reyes Carrillo. With works from all 31 states, the collection offers a colorful panorama of Mexican history, from antiquities to contemporary Carnival masks. Reyes said he purchased the Aztec mask from a Swiss collector, who wishes to remain anonymous.

“Everyone loves masks,” said Reyes, who arrived at his opening wearing a Lucha Libre wrestling bodysuit, a face mask, and a pair of
chuntaro
cowboy boots with pointy foot-long toes. “Because everyone has something to hide.”

A second mask collection, belonging to Thomas Malone, an American living in Oaxaca, was supposed to be shown at La Fábrica Gallery. The two rivals characterized the twin openings as an artistic duel and jousted openly in the press about whose collection would trump the other. But Malone abruptly canceled his show after a fire burned down the chapel where his masks were stored. Most of his collection was destroyed. Malone could not be reached for comment, but his wife, Constance Malone, said a falling candle ignited the blaze.

“The Malone affair is a tragedy,” Reyes said. “But people who cannot safeguard art should stop collecting.”

Montezuma II ruled his vast empire from Tenochtitlán when Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés arrived from Spain in 1519. Montezuma lived in opulence, with a staff of cooks, wives, servants and concubines. Visitors to his chambers were required to wear simple robes and enter barefoot. They were not permitted to look the ruler in the eye. Indeed, one account maintains that no one had ever seen Montezuma's face.

She dreamt she was riding a fast train, past olive trees and slate-blue hills. She sat alone. Without warning, the train shot under a tunnel and the car went dark. Pressure built in her ears. She yawned to release it. This first yawn led to a second, a third, to a yawn so wide her mouth got stuck, open, gaping. Her eyes watered. She screamed but no sound came out. And still the train went faster, rushing deeper and deeper underground.

Anna woke up with a cry. It took a minute to remember where she was. She shook Salvador. “I need to talk to you.”

“Tell me in the morning.” His voice was groggy. “It will be better then.”

Anna said no. She needed to tell him now. He dragged himself up and they sat side by side and he listened as she told him about her days before David. How she followed a rock band and was passed among
players. How she'd wander home barefoot from parties, still wearing a cocktail dress, having no memory of the night before. How later, in the city, she had met a married man and he kept an apartment for her. Nothing in it but a bed, two chairs, champagne and crackers. How he gave her money that she justified as gifts. How she stopped speaking to friends, filling the fridge from his charge account at the gourmet shop, little boxes of overpriced salads that she gobbled down with chopsticks, always hungry. She dropped to 105 pounds, worked as temp, fact-checking articles and books, losing herself in reference materials, the Web, the Library of Congress. She liked confirming information. Facts. The census. Anything undeniably true. That the sun had shone on a certain April morning in 1932. The chance one blue-eyed parent and one brown-eyed parent would create a child with blue eyes. The man never kissed her. He never spent the night.

“How did it end?”

Anna shut her eyes. “He arranged for me to meet his friend. I thought we were all having a dinner together, but when I got there, the friend invited me in and he had a bottle of wine and two glasses. Two hundred-dollar bills lay on top of the napkin. I told him there had been a mistake.”

She released each word, a bird from a cage.

Salvador buried her head into his chest. “Is that it? Is that the worst?”

Anna said it was.

“Okay, then. It's my turn.”

She checked his face to see if he was making fun of her, but he turned her head so he could whisper in her ear.

He told her all manner of things. And she listened.

Emilio Luna rose from bed and felt, though his furrowed hands attested otherwise, that he was still a young man. The mask carver made coffee, padded onto the concrete patio of his home in San Juan del Monte, a hill town outside Oaxaca. His tools lay strewn in yesterday's wood chips. The air smelled like cedar. He bent to touch his toes, came close, reached toward the sky, came close, hiked his pants, sat down on his tree stump, propping a pillow behind his back.

A familiar figure appeared, pushing open his gate with an air of entitlement. He was tall and lean. His eyes flickered, candle flames in the wind.

“Buenos días, Emilio Luna.”

The carver greeted his guest cautiously. It was rare to see Thomas
Malone in the village. Emilio Luna did not like selling the American his masks, but what choice did he have? He had his pride, but he also had a belly. Every man, woman, and child came to him with a hand open wide. The old man stood. Compromise was its own sort of courage.

“
Buenos días, señor.
It gives me much happiness to see you in our village today. I have finished a mask that is perfect for you.”

The collector looked older, his cheeks gaunt. He was using a cane.
Someone died, or he has suffered an illness or loss. His good faith has been shaken or his bad faith confirmed.

“Have you been well?” The old carver had heard rumors, but wasn't sure what to believe. He showed Malone a chair.

The collector sat, rested his cane. “Give a man a mask and he will tell you the truth.”

Emilio Luna passed him a tiger from the pile. With a weak smile, Malone took it and stared down the road, as if something better was waiting there, like he wanted to get it first. And Emilio Luna thought:
He would take the sun from the sky if he could reach it.

The American said, “Even ugly things become beautiful after sixty years.”

“That's good news for me.”

“You can't tell people the truth all the time. It would crush them.”

“Like medicine, you must serve only a spoonful.”

“But every day you can start over. More directed. More precise.”

“I carve a new tiger each morning.”

Malone handed back the mask. “A collection begins with a single decision, one right choice. You find something you love. Set it apart. Say,
I will build a world around it.
”

A cool tremor passed through Emilio Luna's chest. He'd carved this man's face many times. Different versions of the same thing.

“
Señor,
you prefer the front room or the back today?”

The carver kept his voice neutral, as if he didn't know the answer already. The
señor
motioned down the steps. The two men crossed the patio. Emilio lifted the curtain door. It was dark inside, as always.

Tickets in hand, they waited in the second-class bus station. It was an hour ride to the town where Mari lived. Chelo had to use the bathroom. She went all the time now, and Cruise kept expecting her to return with a baby nicely wrapped in a blanket.

“¿Estás bien?”
he asked.

She licked her braces and smiled. It was getting like he needed to see that smile a couple of times an hour to feel right.

“No te preocupes,”
she said, patting his shoulder. Don't worry.

She hoisted herself out of her plastic seat and waddled to the ladies' room. From the back, she didn't look pregnant. Cruise was pretty certain that baby was his even though he hadn't been there at the start. God would see to it. God would make sure the baby looked like him, because he was the one who'd stood by her. The asshole deserter didn't
deserve to have his face plastered all over the place. Jesus looked like Joseph, not God. If Jesus looked like God, he would have been some fucked-up-looking dude no one would have trusted.

Cruise checked his dope, then stashed it away. He liked knowing it was there. Sometimes that was enough. He touched his skin. Even the raw parts had healed. He peeked at the needlepoint Chelo had wrapped in white tissue paper. The best presents were the ones you made yourself. His grandmother had taught him that.

Eleven minutes before the bus departed, three men in black burst through the terminal doors, guns drawn. Feo. Alfonso. Some other punk. Passengers dove under chairs, making animal noises. Cruise darted up, careened to the back exit, where the empty buses parked. Chelo came out of the restroom. She looked thin in her sundress and flip-flops. How could such skinny ankles support not one life, but two? He should have bought her decent shoes. He held up his hand to stop her.

The gunmen spread into a triangle. Cruise screamed for Chelo. She reached across the length of the bus station like she was the golden eagle of Mexico, who could pluck him in her beak and ferry him to safety.

A dispatcher with a microphone told people to stay down, then ducked under the counter. Gunfire erupted. Black guns. Black noise. Milky movement. Cruise felt a warm explosion in his belly. It spread to his heart. He saw the Virgin and knew she was kind.

After she'd kissed his cool forehead, collected his satchel, watched the police chalk the fallen silhouette on the tiles, after the crowd had pressed in, snapping pictures on their phones, and then, bored by the slowness of justice, dispersed, after his body had been draped in a stained sheet and carried outside, after the bus dispatcher had promised
normal service will resume
, after she'd returned to the bathroom to vomit, peed again, rinsed her mouth clean, wiped her shattered eyes, smoothed her face in the mirror—the woman staring back looked frightened, faint, as if she might dissolve in water—after she'd felt the baby kick and roll a warm turn in her womb, after she'd walked outside and seen the sun was still shining and cursed God for this indecency, after she'd climbed on the bus and secured an aisle seat, looking pregnant and irritable, so no one would sit next to her, after the driver had thrown the lumbering bus into reverse and merged
into midday traffic and she'd slid over to the window and pinched her forearm in birdlike chirps—
You are still alive, both of you
—after she'd prayed to the Virgin for courage and told him, for the first time, that she loved him, dead or alive, she checked the needlepoint. It was safe.

The Virgin spoke softly.
“I will watch over you.”

She would bring their offering to Mari.

She would have their baby.

She would name their child after him.

Cruz.

Anna sat at a wrought-iron table at the Puesta del Sol, studying the future tense. It was hard to conjugate but not impossible. Salvador drove up, parked his bike. Anna watched him from a distance, eager for him to come close.

“¿Lista?”
He pointed back at his bike. “I brought apples and two beers.”

Anna closed her book. “I brought you a present. Actually, both of us. Two masks.”

“I thought we were done with masks.”

“This is different.”

Salvador opened the box, pulled back the newspaper, and laughed. “I am not sure the nose is big enough.” He made a sad clown face. “All these years, I thought I was a handsome man.” It was a mask of his face. “Let's see the other one.”

Blond hair, green eyes, the impatient smile of a woman who wasn't sure where she was going but wanted to get there fast—indisputably Anna.

“Yours is good,” Salvador said. “Put it on. We'll see if anyone recognizes us.”

They tied on the masks, breathing in freshly cut cedar. The wood held no patina. No history. No dirt or sweat. Salvador climbed on the motorcycle. Anna slipped behind him. She tucked her yellow blouse into her jeans.

It didn't take long to reach the country. Wildflowers bent in the wind they made. The agave waved octopus arms. The road dropped into a canyon that smelled of mushrooms and moss.
There you'll find the place I love most in the world. The place where I grew thin from dreaming.
A sign warned
CURVA
PELIGROSA
. Their bodies leaned together, riding the engine, achieving, as they rounded the bend, both speed and balance. They passed a shrine, a simple cross decorated with flowers. The wind made a wailing sound, like a call from the grave. Anna shivered, remembering Constance.
Death. Death everywhere. Who wants to think about it?
She touched her amulet of San Antonio. Patron saint of lost people and things. Patron saint of the traveler.

She gave thanks, gripped Salvador tighter.

When they rode out of the canyon into the sunlight, Anna lifted her mask and rested it on her head like a visor. The warm breeze touched her face. Above them,
todo azul
. They would find a strong tree and eat lunch under it. They would take a picture to be sure her father approved. Their masks had not been danced yet, but they would fix that tonight.

No hay mal que por bien no venga.

The good salvaged from the
terrible.