Dr. Brinkley's Tower (23 page)

— Sí, she said. — I think so.

Suddenly Brinkley's smile returned. — But enough with
that! It was dreary of me to bring it up. Please forgive me. We are here, after all, to celebrate your success. Should we have some more champagne?

The doctor had another glass while Violeta only pretended to sip at hers — she'd begun to feel a little light-headed, and she realized she would get drunk if she continued imbibing in earnest. With the tenderloin in morel jus that followed, the doctor served a red wine he referred to as claret. Though it was delicious, she took only a few prudent sips.

Meanwhile the good doctor asked her questions about herself. She told him about her schooling, about growing up in a poor Mexican town on the border, about her desires for the future. She even found herself opening up about the losses that the revolution had brought to her family, an admission that brought her to the verge of tears yet at the same time left her feeling unburdened. By the end of dessert, a jiggling white substance called blancmange, she found that she was taking notice of the doctor's features. For some reason she had never noticed how high his cheekbones were, or how soft his skin was, or how his eyes were a mysterious shade of bluish grey; her father's eyes, she suddenly realized, had not been dissimilar. She felt her skin flush. When she thought of all that Brinkley, a campesino from an apparently poor place called North Carolina, had accomplished, she felt as though anything was possible for her own life. This possibility made her feel emotional, and sufficiently vertiginous that she swayed a little in her chair.

Brinkley noticed this. — Is everything all right, my dear?

— Sí, she said.

— You look a little …

— No, no, doctor. I feel wonderful. It's just that I've had a long day, and I think the big meal has made me a little tired.

A look of deepest sincerity passed over the doctor's features.

— I wonder if we should call it an evening.

— Sí, she said, her regret perhaps too expressively written on her lovely features. The doctor escorted her to the door himself, and said goodnight with a handshake and yet another expression of gratitude. She was then placed in the limousine that had brought her there and returned to the home of her mother, who naturally had waited up for her daughter so as to pepper her with questions about Brinkley, his wife, and their lavish American lifestyle across the river. Violeta answered some of the questions truthfully, some of them falsely, and some in accordance with the grey area that exists between the two.

The following week, when she accepted another invitation to dine with the doctor in his mansion —
The place is so big and lonely, Violeta, and I find you to be such wonderful company
— Violeta told her mother that the doctor was now hosting dinner parties every Saturday night for the staff of XER. At the end of that evening she was again delivered back into the arms of her mother, only to return to the doctor's mansion the following week.

That evening, having acquired a fondness for the taste of champagne, she imbibed far more than a single glass, only to discover that the beverage had a magical quality: it
somehow conjured feelings of elation along with a bemused acceptance of the world and its foibles. At the end of the night Violeta found herself discussing art with the doctor, something she would never, ever have attempted with the loutish, ignorant males of Corazón de la Fuente (even Francisco, though undeniably clever, wouldn't know a da Vinci from a Raphael).

— To see Diego Rivera's mural in the National Preparatory School! she told him. — What I would give!

The doctor smiled and leaned across the candlelit table. — Would you like to know something?

— Sí, claro.

— I own a Rivera. It's a minor work, I admit, painted when he was unknown and his art wasn't so burdened with revolutionary themes. Nonetheless I could show it to you.

— Oh, Dr. Brinkley, I would love to see it.

— It is upstairs, Violeta. In one of the chambers. Would you like to follow me?

She peered at him, heat rushing to her cheeks. On the one hand she was conscious of the dictates regarding the propriety of women and the thousand and one lectures that her mother had given her regarding the satyr-like desires of men. On the other hand was the unaccountable fact that the empty, mournful feeling that assailed her at all times mysteriously lessened when she was in the presence of this courtly foreign, and significantly older, doctor. She closed her eyes and listened to the peacefulness of her heart; in this way she prolonged the tortured delight that was this moment.

Finally she opened her eyes. Just as she had suspected, the doctor was still there. Beneath the table, she pinched the
fleshy part of her right leg. When she failed to awaken, she smiled bashfully and said: — Ay sí, doctor. Of course.

TWO NIGHTS LATER, FOLLOWING A DINNER OF PORK
stew with rice, Francisco Ramirez went out. He headed towards Violeta's, a task that involved navigating around entire dirt-smudged families that seemed to be camped out in every space sufficiently large to host a flattened cardboard box. Francisco, with graver matters on his mind, was more or less oblivious. Over the past week or so he had sensed a change in his relationship with Violeta, a slight cooling that could very well be a product of his imagination. Her face did not brighten upon seeing him the way it used to. More often than not she looked a little sheepish, an already gnawed fingernail travelling to her mouth, her eyes flitting from left to right. She now seemed impatient with his invitations to have a euphemistic walk in the desert, and the last time she had assented, her kisses seemed as though they were coming from someplace other than her broiling latina soul.

Yet as he approached Violeta's door — an approach accompanied by the howling of feral dogs — he also knew that
Violeta's reticence could all be a conjuring of his imagination. Having had a boyhood that coincided with a decade of revolution, it was true that he sensed darkness hiding around every corner. He knocked on the door, and suffered an eternity of waiting. Malfil Cruz answered.

— Ay, Francisco! she exclaimed. — How
are
you?

— I am fine, Señora Cruz.

— And is it me you're here to see, or is it my lovely daughter? Francisco grinned and looked at his boot tips.

— I might have known, Malfil jibed. — No time for an old woman? Wait here. I'll fetch her.

Malfil stepped back into the gloom of the house. Francisco listened to her footfalls grow fainter and then cease altogether. These sound effects were followed by a pair of deliberately lowered voices. Malfil returned.

— I hate to tell you this, Francisco, but Violeta has a big test tomorrow.

— She does?

— I'm afraid so. She needs to study. She's so busy these days, the poor thing barely has time for her schoolwork.

— She wouldn't be free for a minute?

— She doesn't want to lose her train of thought … Don't worry, Francisco, just come by this time tomorrow.

Francisco left, his disappointment flavoured with an emotion that he didn't understand at first, but that he came to realize was a disorienting fearfulness: it felt as though the packed-earth street might not be there to catch his next step, or that the sky above were losing patience with the sun and on the verge of telling it to go warm some other planet. With a shake of his head he dismissed this sensation,
attributing it to an excitability that seemed to be the primary side effect of infatuation. The following night, at the exact time prescribed by Malfil Cruz, he arrived at Violeta's door. Again Malfil answered, and again she retreated into the lye-scented shadows in order to summon Violeta. This time he heard her having a low, impatient conversation with her daughter, a discussion that terminated with Malfil spitting
Está bien, Violeta!
Then, just as he heard Malfil begin her return to the entranceway, Francisco noticed something of a disturbing nature resting on their dinner table. Hurriedly — for Malfil was a woman who bolted, as if forever late for a train — Francisco focused his eyes so as to pierce the low light, and realized he was looking at a bouquet of scarlet roses that must have numbered in the dozens.

Only one man
, he thought,
could have sent those flowers.
His mouth immediately went dry, his hands clammy. When Malfil informed him that Violeta wasn't feeling well, alluding to a discomfort not experienced by males, it was as though she were speaking from several hundred metres in the distance.

Francisco thanked her and walked off, his movements now accompanied by a plummeting of spirits so profound it threatened to affect his balance. His stomach churned and his temples pulsed with discomfort. The sensation worsened. Upon reaching home, he expelled his dinner into the beige porcelain bowl in which his grandmother had once bathed him, a lie about questionable vendor tripe coming up between retches. When he was done, his father gave him a cold compress and suggested he take to his bed.

He waited two and a half days before attempting to see Violeta again. It was a calculated gambit, Francisco betting that, with the passage of time, Violeta would begin to miss the passion he knew he'd inspired the night she'd won the gumball contest. The next sixty hours passed like mud through an hourglass. Lengthy periods transpired in which its passage ceased altogether, only to suddenly loosen and resume its murky slump downward. Seconds passed as minutes, minutes impersonated hours, hours mimicked days. At school, Francisco conducted himself as though in a dream. In his history class he was hectored by an unfeeling professor after bungling a question involving the War of Independence. That afternoon, playing fútbol in the field out by the old Spanish mission, Francisco collided with another player, knocking him so hard to the ground that the youth looked up with momentary dismay in his eyes. Though the fallen player laughed it off a few seconds later —
A todo madre, Francisco, what's gotten into you?
— Francisco couldn't help be bothered by the way in which his frustration had escaped so suddenly, and with such malevolent results.

Saturday morning arrived, with Francisco brusquely conducting his lessons in the ejido. He stayed for one hour only, and then announced his departure so abruptly that many of his students feared he had developed a dislike for them and might not reappear the following week. Brushing off entreaties to stay and enjoy a rice dish made with squirrel meat and yucca, Francisco tromped off, returned home, bathed, dressed in clean Levi's and a white shirt, and proceeded to the store operated by Fajardo Jimenez. There he bought a packet of tortillas, some carne seca herbed with oregano and garlic,
a tin of peaches packed in syrup, and some chocolate biscuits that had come all the way from Guatemala. After thanking Fajardo, he packed his knapsack and reached the house of Violeta Cruz just before the lunch hour.

He knocked. Predictably, Malfil answered, evincing the same delight she always generated when laying eyes on Francisco. But this time when he asked to see Violeta, her expression faltered. She retreated, Francisco soon hearing the hissed voices of two people struggling to maintain an argument in confidence. There was a long stretch of silence, and then Violeta was at the door, saying only
Hola, primo.

He knew. He knew by the way she had not primped in any way, her long tresses a tangle, her blouse a miasma of wrinkles, her feet bare against the floorboards. He knew by the way in which she kept glancing in either direction, up and down the street, her gaze refusing to meet his own. He knew by the way in which her arms were crossed at the elbow, revealing the fingernails she chewed so ravenously. He knew by the way her left heel bounced, as though enlivened by a nervous disorder. He knew by the way in which she, cruelty of cruelties, had referred to him as
primo.
Not
querido,
not
amor,
not
guapo
 … but
primo.
He was a cousin to her now, a platonic entity.

He also knew that the conversation they were about to have would be a formality at best.

— Hola, Violeta, qué onda?

— No mucho, Francisco.

— You look like you slept late.

— I'm so busy these days, Francisco.

— I heard that.

— My job at the radio station … I can barely keep up with the other areas of my life.

— Sí, sí. Your madre told me this was the case.

There came a long, awkward moment in which the only sound was the rustling of curs in the laneway.

— Violeta, I bought some things to have for a picnic. I thought we could go down to the river for a change.

— You know I'd love to. It's just that … I've got my homework to do, and then I have to help with the cleaning, and then I have to cross the border to the station. Perhaps some other time?

Francisco refused to let his emotions see the light of day, reasoning that the one thing left to him was dignity.

— Cómo no, he said. — Some other time.

He then turned and trudged away, refusing to turn and take a last look at Violeta. In so doing, he missed a sad, unalterable truth: Violeta watched him walk all the way to the end of the block, her teeth so badly assaulting the nail of her left thumb that her tongue was soon visited by the tang of seeping blood.

Francisco, meanwhile, reached the expanse of the town's central plaza. He stopped, looked up at Brinkley's monolithic tower, and gestured obscenely while spitting
Your madre takes it in the culo, cabrón.
He then walked up to a family of grubby peasants camping in the shade thrown by the town hall and offered them every morsel of the food he had purchased for his picnic with Violeta. At first they reacted suspiciously; a tension had developed between the old-time residents of Corazón and the new arrivals, and the peasants' first reaction was that the package must somehow be tainted. Convincing
them that this was not the case required a considerable amount of gesturing, for Francisco did not know how to speak the native language of rural Oaxaca, and the family's knowledge of Spanish was limited to a few common pleasantries. Assured, the squatters finally took the treats, their faces beaming as they dipped their stubby, earth-crusted fingers into peach syrup.