Living Up the Street (19 page)

At the park I let her crawl with those harmless ants. Later in a rented rowboat we drifted like so many others while Mariko greedily sucked a snow cone, something I shouldn’t have bought for her but did anyway. From there we took a taxi home, but instead of going inside I carried her around the block, bouncing her quietly in my arms as I told her how I was going to miss her, how I loved her. She smiled, made noises. She played with a button on my shirt, squirmed to be let down, and said “flower,” a new word for her, when she saw a balloon in a child’s hand. “Flower, flower,” she said, legs kicking with happiness. Not a bad guess, for such a little one.

Today I met with Carmen to practice Spanish. Afterward I went alone to the Restaurante Gato Azul. Do you remember the place? I went there once with Dianne’s family who were shocked when, after a graceful lunch of soup, sopa, and steak, the waitress hurried over with the bill, pulling out bananas from her pocket as she came. She offered them as dessert and, not knowing what to do, we
took the bananas and held them like candles. Feeling silly, we peeled them and ate them with big smiles. This afternoon I had custard for dessert. Later I walked to the Biblioteca Benjamin Franklin where I looked at magazines and at people, mostly Americans but some Japanese, who came and went with anchors of books under their arms. Some looked so happy and so bright that you could read from their exuberant faces, while others were gray, disheveled, and sad as crushed hats. But I found it difficult to concentrate, so I slouched in the chair, eyes closed, and tried to recall something beautiful, like an aria or our old apartment in Laguna Beach. I rested my eyes, then left the library and walked toward the Metro, stopping occasionally to look into shop windows, since I had time to kill and the rains would not start for another hour.

At home I opened a beer and joined Dianne at the table where she was playing cards and nursing a glass of wine. We played solitaire and talked, first about Lindsay, her hometown, and then ways to make money. A restaurant, we first said. Something in Iowa City, where the bored were as numerous as corn. But we figured it would be too much work, though we were on the right track, since most people make their best decisions with their mouths, not their minds. Ernesto came home, beautiful as ever in his tailor-made suit, and joined us at the table. He suggested that we make popsicles, natural ones filled with slices of banana and apple, pinches of coconut, juices squeezed from real fruit. He told us how his uncle in Mexicali once made and sold popsicles. As a kid he’d sit on top of his uncle’s truck and call out, “Helados, muy deliciosos helados,” to the kids who were, no doubt, like those from my own childhood: Brown, skinny, and crowned with spiky hair. So we talked and made sense; with beer and friends things are so clear that wealth is possible, even in the abstract. We could sell what we know, and isn’t that what I am doing now, teaching I mean. A few
books read, some theory or other dissolved like sugar in your speech, and you’re pushed in front of a classroom where students believe at least half of what you say.

The truth is, I am unsure about where we will be in a year and what life we will wake up to; we’ve had close calls in the past when our passbook read close to zero. Anything is possible. Just a few days ago, while I was walking Banjo, I saw a mother and daughter who were absolutely filthy and in rags not even the dead would wear. They were walking up the street, with mother carrying a sack of things and the daughter with a soiled blanket across her shoulder. They were not your typical Mexican poor because their clothes were, from what I could tell, once fashionable, once in style. The mother had on a polyester pantsuit and the daughter wore a mini skirt and red patent pumps that were cracked like mirrors. They passed me without looking up and made their way to the end of the block only to look left and then right, and then started back up the street. When they passed me again, the girl’s face met mine and I saw a fear so great that it made me step back. I was shaken because they seemed so average, in both looks and dress (if their clothes had been clean and less tattered) and in most ways aren’t we average? If poverty could happen to them, then are we far behind from that day when we’ll carry all our belongings in a sack and call a blanket in a doorway our bed? When we look up, we’ll have the power to make people step back.

We drank and talked. The way to make money is by way of the palate, or so we think.

Remember my jacket, the leather one the Guggenheim people paid for? A Mexican cop is wearing it today, feeling perhaps handsome and smug at a street corner in this crazy city. It’s gone, that fine jacket that smelled of ham and was so unhumanly new.

Late yesterday Carmen and I had beers and taquitos at the restaurant in Chapultepec Park, where we talked in English (it was her day to practice). Afterward we returned to her car and were about to drive away when a man stepped up to the car window, knocked on the glass, and held up his wallet for us to look at. Carmen rolled down the window to ask,
Que paso?
He said he was a policeman and that he wanted to warn us that there were thieves in the park, especially at night, and that we had better leave. But not before we proved, of course, that we were not thieves ourselves. He asked for the car registration, then Carmen’s license. When I showed him my license he stopped chewing his gum as he read my name, street, and give-away-state, California. He looked down at me, eyes narrowing like a dog’s, and began very quietly to accuse me of “eating” cocaine.

“Los californios son ‘jipis’ y jotos, no?”
he said.

I tried to be jolly as a good friend of his, and I told him that he was mistaken, that we had had a few beers but most certainly not cocaine. He accused me of smoking marijuana, of being a hippie. Suddenly he pulled a gun from his waist, shaking it and ordering me out of the car. Carmen stiffened with anger and I got out without saying anything. The cop came around, yelled at me to place my hands on the hood and spread my legs, and it was like a scene from a movie made for TV. He patted my jacket and pants and then pushed me in the direction of his car where the door opened and a fat, very fat, cop got out with a taped stick.

When he said, “
Cabron
, we’re going to do what American cops do to our people,” I knew I was really in trouble. The one cop with the gun drove like a maniac through the park. Fat Guy took my wallet, which he greedily opened like a sandwich, and pulled out pesos and credit cards and even my library card—anything that looked like money to him. I emptied my pockets and handed over comb,
Chiclets, and metro tickets. When he ordered me to pull down my pants, I played dumb and shrugged my shoulders. But that didn’t help. He poked my stomach with his stick. Screamed: “
Andale, pinche cabron. Jipi
shit!”

I unbuckled my pants to show him that I wasn’t hiding anything there. Disappointed, he made me roll up my sleeves, unbutton my shirt, and take off my shoes and socks. A real thorough guy. He even tousled my hair to see if I was concealing money up there.

By then we were driving up Reforma where we stopped for a few minutes at a corner that was so gaudy with neons and Christmas lights it was like a poor man’s fair. And the poor were there, along with children and the crippled selling lottery tickets, flowers, cough drops, peanuts, and balloons. Fat Guy got out to talk to someone at a
taqueria
, then got back in. We drove from there to a residential area, Lomas from what I could tell.

I was scared because I thought they were going to shoot me. A routine bang in the head. I was shaking and thinking of you and Mariko, forever gone, as I waited for something to happen. What happened was that Fat Guy asked me to turn my pockets inside out. He grabbed my jacket, which I gladly took off, and searched the pockets. Again he was disappointed. He crumbled it on his lap and turned to the driver. They spoke softly as drunken priests and, without warning, screeched the car to a halt, throwing me almost into the front seat. I was ordered out of the car with no fanfare or final threats, though I did have to jump back when the car revved its engine and roared away. I walked backward, almost on my heels, feeling so relieved that I thought I was a reborn Catholic.

I walked for a while, giddy with life for you and Mariko, before I flagged down a taxi and made it home to kick off my shoes, open a beer, and sit in the dining room with Ernesto and Dianne, to again turn over ideas about making money without so much as leaving the apartment.

O
nce, when we were bored and irritable in our apartment in Mexico City, the four of us—Ernesto, Dianne, Carolyn, and I—got into the Renault we had bought the previous week and risked the rough and sometimes unfair roads that wound to Cuernavaca. We were happy in the car when we left and happier when we drove into town and discovered a fuchsia-like vine with red-flamed flowers. Carolyn took pictures of the vine from the car window—a vigorous vine that seemed to grow everywhere, on the houses of the poor as well as the rich. Dianne remarked it was the most beautiful flower she had ever seen.

We had lunch and lingered over dark beers, comfortable in the warm sunlight that slanted through an open window. We walked the
zocalo
where we bought trinkets from a child and visited a small museum in which the most interesting display was of rusted pistols and the sepia-colored photographs of those who had owned—or were killed by—the pistols. From there we went shopping: Dianne bought a belt for her niece and Carolyn turned over for the longest time silver charms that she hoped to add to a bracelet back in California. She chose an Italian flag and, with Dianne’s help, argued over the price with the young woman behind the counter.

After shopping we drove outside the city in search of a
nursery, to make our apartment more lush since it was uncomfortably bare: A dining table with chairs, an empty bird cage, two mattresses, and an ironing board that doubled as a writing table. We found a nursery and Ernesto and I haggled over ferns. In the end we paid what was asked and paid again when a boy helped us prop the plants in the trunk.

At the suggestion of a schoolgirl who had watched us shove and twist and grunt the plants into place, we drove farther along the road to a pond that was pressed small by an arena of jagged rocks and wispy trees that were filled with birds. We walked along a leaf-littered path, paired off into couples looking very much like the tourists we were, until we were in view of divers approaching onlookers for a few pesos. We stopped and leaned against a stone fence, first to take pictures of the divers, and then of one another gazing into the distance, in the mock concentration of would-be free thinkers. Finally one diver who had counted and recounted his money stepped out onto a rock that jutted over the water. He took a deep breath, then released it. He took another deep breath, spread his arms, and leaped into the gray water that broke white as his body hit the surface. He came up smiling and pinching his nostrils. The onlookers clapped and smiled at one another.

We walked slowly back to the car, none of us looking forward to the drive back to the city, especially since the afternoon rains would soon start, so instead we started on a walk that ended only twenty feet from the car. Ernesto pointed to a harp player, a blind man who was very handsome in a felt hat and a crisp, white shirt. We walked in his direction behind Ernesto who, after a few minutes of casual remarks about the day, struck up a conversation that led to how the man had come to play the harp.

The story was that a group of Indians had come upon the wooden harp, stringless and warped, on a river bank.
They turned it over in their hands for a long time but couldn’t figure out what it was. Intrigued by this piece of wood, they carried it from the river up some difficult hills and into their village. One of the men carried it on his shoulder, like a slain deer. He was first greeted by children, then women, then the other men, and finally the head of the tribe who, baffled almost to the point of worry, banged at it with his fist. That night talk filled the air. Some said it was a suitcase. Others said it was a boat for very small children, and still others argued it was a loom. One said it was a washboard. Still they couldn’t decide, so the three men who had found the harp took it back into town to sell it. But no one was interested in that piece of wood.

“But when they came to me, I knew what it was,” he said. “When I was a child in Morelia, my uncle played one, a very beautiful one inlaid with ivory and all glittery. That’s when I could see and didn’t need these hands.”

He went on to tell us how the Indians had laid the instrument on his lap and he had run his hands over its body, recognizing it immediately but not revealing his happiness because it would have meant a difficult barter. After a few minutes of friendly haggling, the Indians walked into the countryside and up the hills with a frying pan and pocket knife, very pleased with the trade.

“Young man, I’ll play for you—and for your friends of course,” he said, wetting his lips and propping the harp against his shoulder. “It’s a love song—
Mariposa en la primavera
.” His fingers started slowly, like the butterflies of spring, but soon they plucked vigorously at the strings. He stopped once to cough into his sleeve and another time to wipe his brow, pausing for such a long time that we thought he had forgotten we were there. But he continued and when he finished we clapped and could think of no finer music as we looked at one another, moved by the song and this man who seemed so innocent despite his
age. We thanked him and, as we were leaving, Ernesto tried to give him a few pesos. He refused them with a wave of his hand, “It’s nothing, young man. Be a Mexican and go on.”

We returned to the car, paired in couples and kicking at leaves and thinking how lucky we were. I started to hum. Ernesto joined in, and our wives pushed us away to cover their ears and make faces. We hummed louder, but when they picked up handfuls of leaves and twigs to throw at us, we stopped and mockingly opened our arms to them. Leaves fluttered in the air, and we chased them humming all the way down the hill to the car.