Gringa (11 page)

Hallie reacted to Abilene's slightly puzzled look. (Abilene was noticing how the plaza was blocked in by buildings, with only alleys out.) “Look,” Hallie said. “There we have the sixteenth century, and behind us, the present. Under us, the Aztecs.” She was smiling broadly. “Three cultures! Tourists come here all the time and stand, just like us, waiting for the meaning of it to come clear.” She was half-laughing, and her voice had a sweet bell-like quality. She seemed very young.

“Great slaughters took place here,” Isabel said solemnly. “And feasts of human flesh. No one has ever had quite the taste for blood that the Aztecs had.”

“But why!” Abilene asked before she could think that it did not matter.

“Their gods demanded it,” Isabel said, and added, “And—because.” She frowned. “Because it was the way it was. The way it is.”

“Oh Isabel!” Ceci cried. “You can't miss a chance to scold. I know what you mean to say. You're warning me about the university, about Cuba Day, about all of it. The way things are. Say what you like, that isn't the way it ought to be! And it doesn't have to be that way!”

Hallie walked near the edge and stood looking down on broken temple ruins. In a perky voice she said, “Don't you think the Aztecs are terribly overdrawn? I much prefer the art of the Mayans. It is elegant, where the Aztec is bulky—”

Isabel was near laughter. “Come on, ladies,” she said, leading them to her car. Her suppressed laughter gave her voice a percolated quality. “You have been to your lectures, haven't you?”

Hallie was unperturbed. “Oh yes, and to the museums. And—” she gestured back toward the project—”to your real life, or some part of it. But now what I'd really like is to go to Benny's and have a hamburger!”

At that Isabel smiled, kindly.

“My father would crap if he knew what's going on down here,” Hallie confided when she had eaten her cheeseburger. Abilene, expected at Adele's at eight for dinner, settled for Hallie's discarded potato chips.

Hallie twirled a straw in her glass. “He's so uptight lately. One night I came upon him reading, and he had tears in his eyes. He looked at me so sadly, and he said, ‘Hallie, neo-Marxism is dead.' God! You look up to your father as somebody who has matured into, well, if not wisdom, at least equanimity.”

Hallie was in motion as she spoke. She fiddled with the straw, refolded her napkin and then opened it again, used her fork to move a pickle around on the platter. She fingered the buttons on her blouse.

“My poor dad. He's just out of step,” Hallie continued. “All my life we've eaten beans on Friday night, to think about the hungry, and we've sent off our family checks to charities. I grew up on the word liberal. But that's a joke! Liberal is absolutely right of where it's at. I mean, Johnson is a goddamned liberal! And he thinks he can buy off the Vietcong with Texas cows! Well, we've had it! We want a government that doesn't lie to us, doesn't take away other people's right to choose for themselves.”

“I'm surprised your father let you come down here. I'd think he wouldn't want you out of his sight.”

“He thinks I'm studying Spanish and making ceramic pots. It was his idea. He didn't want me to spend the summer in Berkeley. The movement there is getting very bad press.”

“You aren't making pots, though, are you?”

Hallie made a face. “How could I? There's so much going on! I do go to the museums, I'm taking art history. But it's the streets that have the real art. You know, in Berkeley when we had a demonstration they'd always say, oh they're just spoiled brats. It was hard to argue, even if it wasn't true. But these kids, what can anybody say about them except that they're pure and brave and smart. I love them.”

She pushed her dish toward the edge of the table. “My friends would barf to see what I just ate. Are you vegetarian?”

Abilene said, “I eat whatever is set in front of me.” Hallie seemed befuddled by the answer. Abilene thought only how true a thing she'd just said.

It was six, a time when nobody was out. Shops were closed; clerks sat on folding chairs and napped. In their homes, wealthy women lay on beds with clean sheets, waiting to dress for the evening. Impulsively, Abilene asked Hallie along to Adele's.

They went to Claude's apartment to wash up. As they went out again, Hallie said, “It's been an amazing year. I used to think history was what had gone by. Now I know it's as recent as this morning, and it hauls you with it, scraping you across stones. It's been a shitty year, really.” Then she brightened. “But it's only half over. Anything could happen. Wait to see what happens in Chicago, at the convention. God I wish I could be there, but my dad would kill me first.” As they walked, Hallie's step lightened, grew almost bouncy. “I feel it, I swear I smell it.” She took Abilene's hands and swung her around like a schoolgirl. “Life!” she cried. “Change!” She slipped her arm into the crook of Abilene's and drew her close “It's like a warm wind. This is the best of all places to be.”

A thousand street lamps suddenly came on.

“You see!” Hallie exclaimed. “You see!”

Hallie was welcome at Adele's. Dinner was informal: piles of sopa seca, ropes of sausages, hard rolls and fruit. The playwright Simon Augusto was there with an actress from the Belles Artes, Elena Ybarros. Soon after the two women arrived, a professor and writer came in within moments of one another. The writer, Arturo Reza, sometimes worked with Daniel; they often referred, in a kind of shorthand, to their shared experiences.

Abilene ate little and fed on talk. The room had the disjointed sound of an orchestra warming up—tension, crescendo, but no melody. The actress Elena tossed her hair when Simon looked her way, and laughed at his sarcastic jibes at God, the Revolution, Art. When they had drunk several bottles of wine and cleared away the food, the talk became more intense. They rambled among topics: the deterioration of the Mexican film industry into cheap, banal mass entertainment. Rumors of a lynching in a northern state. The pervasive “Americanization” of Mexican culture through Televisa. The chaos of sprawling migrants' slums. The price of coffee. Minor but frequent student commotions. In Spanish, so many words of disconsolation had the mournful sound of a gypsy song, and they came easily, like verse.

Pola sat at one end of the high-ceilinged room with her handwork on her lap. She had a sulky, dusky look to her, dark eyes that looked you over and rejected you, thought you too common. Though she smiled at Abilene when Abilene first arrived, she never said anything to her. She didn't speak to anyone until just before she went to bed. She said, “If you change the world, don't wake me until morning. I want to be surprised.” Daniel looked unhappy. Adele rose to go to her daughter, but Daniel pulled her back.

The actress, always flirting with Simon, freshened drinks and made a great occasion of each walk across the room. She had a modest bosom and a shapely waist, but her buttocks were very large, and she swayed from side to side so that they moved provocatively under her clingy dress. When she thought she knew something pertinent, she stood perfectly still and recited bits of dialogue, once a speech of several minutes. No one reacted, except for a muffled giggle from Hallie. Abilene did think Simon was especially alert when Elena was near; once when she stood near him he pulled her to him and planted his face into the flesh of her buttocks. Hallie jabbed Abilene in the thigh and stifled a laugh with her hand. Abilene thought ashamedly of how it must have looked to others, all those times Tonio touched her so intimately in front of others, pinching or fondling, and always so casually, not even bothering to look. On a boat in Acapulco, she had seen someone Tonio knew put his hand down into a girl's bikini bottom and hold it there while he ate shrimp with his other hand.

When Elena turned, Abilene saw her eyes were bright, saw how Elena had liked the vulgar affection.

Simon's “kiss” had come at a moment's silence; now everyone sat awkwardly with nothing to say. When Hallie realized this, she seized center stage. She had been interjecting remarks all evening, with more and more aplomb. At first they had all spoken Spanish, but as so often happens when the languages are mixed and everyone is bilingual, they switched to English after a while. Hallie talked on and on. The Berkeley scene. Girls with flowers in their hair and their breasts loose under gauzy blouses, music and theatre in the streets, demonstrations and protests.

“There's such an appetite for revolution there!” she said, as if revolution were a particularly spicy curry. “It's not enough to go around without a bra!” Elena burst out laughing, and Abilene felt herself blush. Hallie went on. “It won't be enough until it means something to peasants in Vietnam, to black mothers in Oakland, to the migrants, the poor—”

“A revolution,” Simon began in an arched tone. “It does clean out the intestines.”

Hallie quickly challenged him. “Isn't it our business? Isn't it serious business?”

“To do what?” Simon asked lazily.

“To speak for those who have no power.”

“It depends. Have you asked them what they want?”

“We're talking about food, shelter, civil rights!”

Arturo Reza spoke softly, like a mother to a child. He said they knew something of such things in Mexico. “Though we are bored with our poor. They need so much, and they are so many.”

Hallie was undeterred. “You're—intellectuals—aren't you? Educated men? Lucky men? You can't squat on your education, your good fortune—” She paused to breathe noisily.

Simon interrupted before she could speak again. “Arturo here was in prison almost three years, after the railroad strikes. He was a nuisance, worrying about the rights of workers. In the prison the workers told him his hands were soft. What do you think of that?”

Hallie was young, without cynicism. She turned to Arturo with a gaze of admiration and pleading. “So you know what I mean! And now it's our turn. The young. We've got to stand up for the oppressed who can't stand up for themselves.” She pointed at Abilene, whose barking laugh expressed her surprise and dissent. “The world is unfair!” Hallie cried. “Your fight—” this was when she pointed—”and my fight, they're part of the same thing, the reshaping of the world.”

Abilene raised her eyebrows comically. “Who, me?” she said.

Simon laughed. “Once they thought a play had to have three acts.” He had been drinking heavily. “One big stage. Anything goes. A theatre of the absurd.”

Elena went into the kitchen. Simon trailed behind her, cupping his hands low, a few feet behind her bottom.

Hallie sat down, put her chin on her hands for a moment's reflection, and then jumped back up. She paced back and forth across the large room. The wood floor resounded sharply under her steps. “It's not absurd! Not what we're trying to do! What's absurd is the establishment. We've got to make them all back down. We're responsible for one another. I can't buy the world the way my parents did—the militaristic, capitalistic, chauvinistic world, hanging out there like a rotting fig.” Simon, returned, now stood near her. He jiggled the fresh ice in his drink. She glared at him. “And I tell you this, I accept the responsibility, because my country is the worst of all. It stinks with its rotten politics, stinks with the stench of lynched niggers and clubbed workers. Everything is for money and power. I've got to make my own definition for love and work, for family. I want to be a member of the true human race, of a world nation. What's going on, here, in Mexico—I'm concerned. Didn't my nation help your politicians build progress on the backs of workers? Isn't that what I heard you making speeches about a couple of hours ago?”

Daniel spoke quietly. “You're speaking for the underclass, and no one can accuse you of not caring. But sometimes the oppressed have their own spokesmen, and they say nothing will change except through violence. They say people like you have to die, Hallie.”

Dismay flickered across Hallie's face, but she recovered. “Nonsense. They need us.” Her face was screwed up in great earnestness. “We can choose sides.”

There was a general recess while a jug of wine was found and opened. Simon pressed money into Adele's hands. Hallie stood transfixed (by the possibilities of Daniel's suggestions?).

Abilene was relieved that no one was intent on putting Hallie down. Daniel's exception to her rhetoric had been gentle, though Abilene could see it had affected Hallie. She might have been sport for this cynical circle, with her right ideas, her high purpose, her resolve, but it was her beauty they had attended to. She was lovely in a way that never went out of fashion: long legs, high breasts, strong lines, and that healthy hair that moved like cloth. She walked with the long, hearty stride of an athlete, and sat with the grace of a dancer. She was something Abilene had seen from a distance in school: a secure child. She had always had what she needed, had had enough to give some up. Now she was outraged that others had so little. Abilene thought that Hallie looked down from too far up to see how many layers there were below her. She took too many people in with her, made her class occupy too broad a space, made too many people responsible. Had Abilene been privileged? Hardly! Had her father perpetrated oppression? The idea was ludicrous; even his death had been petty. Abilene found that she liked Hallie, despite the differences in their backgrounds, but she also found that she was edgy with resentment, to be accused in Hallie's silly assessment of Abilene's place in the world. Abilene thought: She should know what my world is like! She should watch who she hangs around with!

Simon consulted with Daniel and put on records. The jazz they chose made Abilene nervous. It too keenly reflected her own emotional tenor. She didn't want to be in the middle of all this disconnected discussion. She wanted to talk to Adele.