The Return: A Novel (25 page)

“Speaking of Lourdes, what’s the story with this trip? You’re going to buy her clothes and get her in the telenovelas?”

“That’s the plan.”

“Huh. Well, that’s funny, because I didn’t figure you for short eyes.”

“Oh, you think I’m buying a sixteen-year-old a bunch of stuff and helping her out because I want to fuck her.”

“You don’t? God,
I
sure do. And she wants it too. Some little pistolero is getting all of it these days, or that’s what it looks like.”

“What do you mean?”

“She’s taking off that chaste school uniform and slipping into the tube top and hot pants and sneaking out at night with some dude. Looks to be late twenties. Giggling in the chapparal, and a blanket down on the beach under the cliff. Little cries of delight. Pretty horny-making, as a matter of fact. I almost had to cover my ears.”

“Well, it’s her life,” said Marder after a pause. “She’s not my daughter.”

“He says wistfully. Your rescue complex is kicking in again. You need to watch that, chief. Many don’t want to be rescued, and a lot of the ones who want to can’t be.”

“Yes, and you speak as a fellow sufferer, I know. In any case, fuck it. It’s Mexico.”

*   *   *

Marder’s actual daughter was at this moment standing disconsolately outside the smithy of Bartolomeo Ortiz. She’d been there since this morning, trying to make herself useful in the hand manufacture of ornate door hinges and wrought-iron chandeliers, but the blacksmith had indicated by increasingly gruff responses that she was not welcome to help at the forge.

She wandered away down the main street of the
colonia,
through what looked ever more like a permanent construction site and miniature industrial area. She could hear the distant sounds of the bulldozer flattening brush and clearing land, and, closer, the whine of power saws, the rumble of the diesel generator, the whir of potters’ wheels, the clack of looms, and throughout the expanding settlement the peculiar clink of concrete blocks knocking together. New residents were arriving hourly, it seemed, for these people all had cheap cell phones and they had been quick to inform their friends and relatives that a crazy gringo was giving away homesites and money and funding start-ups for anyone who had crafts to sell or labor to contribute.

She entered the pottery workshop of Rosita Morales, an open shed roofed with rusty corrugated steel and even hotter than the hot street outside. Statch could see the heat coming off the kiln in wavy ribbons; its bright yellow eye gleamed in the shadows. Rosita was at her kick wheel, throwing a pot, and Statch watched as what looked like a cow plop morphed in the brown, slick hands into a pot: delicately walled, round, tapering, elegant.

As always, Statch was fascinated by the fact of making, of the human ability to turn nothing into something beautiful and useful. This whole experience is important, she told herself, this is going to make a difference in what I do with my life. But at the moment she could not tell how.

“Where did you learn to do that?” she asked the woman.

“My mother,” Rosita said, as she took the finished bowl and placed it on a rough plywood shelf with the other unfired pots. “And my grandmother taught her. We’ve always been potters in my family, from way back, way back before the Spanish, when we lived up by the lakes.”

Statch was looking at a line of glazed ware, pots of different sizes, each designed for a traditional purpose, for some particular domestic task, and each glazed with an original design of iridescent black figures against matte white—a woman grinding corn, a raven, a squash blossom. We don’t really do this anymore, she thought, decorate our tools like that—we would think it kitschy to stick a picture of a flower on a Cuisinart—but this is just a kind of delight in making common objects beautiful. We still have it, but we call it design, and it’s not the same thing at all.

“My mother used to sell pots like this in the market at Guadalajara for fifty pesos.
El patrón
says I can get a hundred dollars for one like this if I sell to the
comuna
. Do you think he was serious?”

“I’m sure he was. These are works of art. I’ve seen pots not as good as these for sale in New York for two, three, four hundred dollars in fancy shops.”

Rosita shrugged. “It seems crazy to me. They’re just pots. You can help me now if you like. I’m going to load my other kiln, and the girl who usually helps me went to Cárdenas today with her cousins.”

“I’d be glad to,” said Statch.

“Yes, you can do this work, because, you know, it’s proper for women. But stay away from the forge. They say if women are around, it weakens the metal.”

Statch’s jaw gaped for a moment and then she laughed inwardly. She thought, Girl, you are a long fucking way from MIT.

*   *   *

Three hours later, hot, dusty, and besmirched with clay, Statch went back to Casa Feliz. As she passed the front of the house just beyond the gate, she saw a line of people waiting patiently in the scant shade of the ornamental trees. Amparo and a young man she hadn’t seen before were talking to the first man in the line, an
indio
in worn jeans and a clean but ragged T-shirt. He was showing Amparo a wooden carving. Statch waved as she passed into the house, and Amparo waved back distractedly. The young man looked up, smiled, a flash of white against dark skin, and then wrote in a notebook.

Statch went to the kitchen to get a cold drink. There was a large, middle-aged woman, another stranger, stirring a pot, from which entrancing
mole
-ish smells arose. Her name, it turned out, was Evangelista, and she was a cousin of Amparo’s, brought in from Apatzingán to help with the housekeeping, since Amparo was now too busy with setting up the
comuna de los artesanos
to keep up with it all. Statch commented favorably on the sauce, grabbed a beer from the refrigerator, went to her room, took a fast shower, and donned a tank suit.

She swam. She had to do twice as many laps, because this pool was shorter than standard Olympic size, something of a pain but at least she got to practice more turns. She recalled the last time she swam so, back at MIT, and how she was thinking about her father and what he’d been up to; now she knew, but she was more concerned about him than she had been in her ignorance. Coming here was strange enough, but what he was doing here, the engineering specs behind it all, were still obscure, as were, she now realized, her own reasons for staying on. She’d seen him; he was healthy and no crazier than he was before. He was shooting people and getting shot at—not the usual plan for a midlife crisis—but it was his life. She was not ever going to be the kind of daughter who infantilized her parent out of some misbegotten guilt.

She did a hundred laps, not bothering much about her time, focusing on perfecting the turns. After the final lap, with her limbs burning and her breath coming in gasps, she slid in her usual dolphinesque way up on the edge of the pool. As she sat there, recovering her breath, someone handed her a towel.

It was the young man who had been standing with Amparo at the gate. She took the towel and wiped the water from her face and looked at him again. He had, she now observed, a young man’s look and carriage, but there were fine lines on his brown face that indicated he was not quite as young as he appeared. He was wearing worn jeans and a white short-sleeved shirt, and he had sunglasses pushed up over his crow-black coarse
indio
hair. He smiled delightedly at her and said, “That was quite a performance. I’ve never seen anyone swim like that.”

“Well, I practice a lot,” she replied. “Do I know you?”

He held out his hand. She took it. It was warm and rough. “You do now. I’m Miguel Santana.”

“Carmel Marder,” she responded.

She noticed he was looking intently at her, but she didn’t pick up what she normally felt when an attractive man stared at her, as, for example, Major Naca had. Santana was looking at her face and not her nipples, which the cooling of evaporation had caused to berry out through the thin nylon of her Speedo suit. She stood and wrapped the towel around her and sat on the side of one of the lounge chairs. He followed and perched on the edge of another.

A moment later Pepa Espinoza walked onto the pool deck, wearing a short terry robe and a bikini that was remarkable for both the brightness of its colors and its exiguous dimensions. Statch thought that women of Señora Espinoza’s age should not wear such outfits, but she had to admit that she carried it off well. The reporter nodded briefly and went off to the other end of the pool. She took a cell phone out of her straw bag and tried to make a call. Statch noticed that Santana’s eyes had not followed the reporter’s progress across the deck. Gay, perhaps? Or only polite?

“Was that you I saw with Amparo a while ago?” she asked. “Out by the gate?”

“Yes. With all the people coming in here from the countryside and La Cielo, she’s a little swamped.”

“So you’re like the administrative assistant?”

“Something like that. I’ve got some experience managing things, and she asked me to help with assigning homesites and registering names and figuring out who can do what. I mean the crafts. There’s actually a strong craft tradition in the area. The Tarascos were fairly isolated until recently, and their traditions are more or less intact. And we have a number of migrants from Oaxaca.”

“The Tarascos are the Indians?”

“Yes, including me, as a matter of fact.”

“No kidding? You know, I’m embarrassed to say this, but you’re the first Indian I’ve ever met. I mean aside from the ones from India, who’re all over the place where I come from. But you got an education.”

“I did,” he said, but in a tone that did not encourage inquiry.

Pepa Espinoza let out a vile curse and tossed her cell back in the straw bag. She had discovered the unreliability of cell service at Casa Feliz. She pulled a laptop out of the bag and began to type.

“And what do you do when you’re not organizing a craft commune?” Statch asked.

“I work at San Ignacio.”

“Where’s that?”

“It’s the church. Here in Playa Diamante?” He grinned at her. “You’re not a Catholic, I’m assuming.”

“Oh, but I am. Baptized, confirmed, and everything. My father’s a pillar of the Church.”

“But you’re not.”

“No, I ditched it when I was thirteen. I decided to believe in facts.”

“Yes, that too is a very ancient religion. What do
you
do when you’re not in our beautiful town?”

“I’m in grad school at MIT. I’m an engineer.”

In Statch’s experience, this admission tended to stop conversation, except if the other person was similarly engaged in engineering. But Santana’s faced flashed an interested look and he said, “That’s wonderful! It must be a terrific thing to be able to do, build and design things. What kind of engineering are you studying?”

She began to talk and, amazing herself, she kept on talking: about her work at MIT and Schue and her team, and her problems with the Escher machines and her gigantic breakthrough and what it meant and how she had apparently thrown it away to come here, and why she stayed and watched manufacturing by hand and how it made her feel. And she talked beyond that, about her life, and the swimming, and why she didn’t have the champion’s edge, and what that meant, and about her emotional life and why that didn’t seem to be working out so well either. And about her family, her dead crazy mother and her father, and how she felt that there was something she had to
do
so that her father didn’t go down the crazy tube too. She hadn’t had an intimate conversation in Spanish for a long time, but she used to all the time with her mother, and she found herself telling him things she could not have readily articulated in English.

The sun crossed the terrace as she talked. Pepa Espinoza swam briefly and left. The children came home from school. Amparo brought out a tray of taco chips and salsa and a tin bucket filled with ice and local beer, and still Statch talked, now beyond embarrassment, pouring it all out into the remarkable, depthless black eyes of Miguel Santana. Throughout he had asked few questions and had not (remarkably, him being a man) offered a word of advice, yet she found herself wishing for his approval and feeling, as she recounted some of her life’s more outrageous incidents, an unfamiliar sense of shame.

When the sun began to dip behind the roof of the house, Santana looked at his wristwatch and said, “Unfortunately, there is something I have to do.”

“Throw up from boredom?”

He didn’t smile. She felt a brief embarrassment at the remark and reflected upon how often she did this, made a silly joke to dispel the burden of sincerity. “Not at all,” he said. “I enjoyed hearing about your life. It’s so different from my own experience. I have four sisters, and all are married and living within a few kilometers of where they were born. You’re a remarkable young woman.” He held out his hand and she shook it. “Well, I expect I’ll be seeing you again.” He smiled. “In church perhaps.” He left.

She went back inside the house, changed into shorts and a Hawaiian shirt, and followed the sound of voices to the kitchen. The voices were loud and angry and belonged to Lourdes and her aunt. When Statch walked in, she saw that Epifania and Ariel were sitting at one end of the long table, apparently doing homework, in the extreme quiet mode that children adopt when their elders are behaving like children. Amparo and Lourdes were standing by the kitchen doorway, clearly in the midst of some confrontation, flashing eyes and flushed faces much in evidence. They fell silent when Statch entered.

“What’s going on?” she asked.

Lourdes said, “She says I can’t go on Monday. She’s stupid!”

“I’m stupid? I’m not the one who’s failing in school.” Amparo turned to Statch. “The school called me today. She hasn’t even been going half the time.” She made a helpless gesture with her hands, and Statch saw that she was close to breaking down. “I can’t do all these things, all these
new
things, and keep up with her.”

“Who asked you to?” shouted Lourdes. “You’re not my mother. And when I’m on television no one will care if I can do geometry.”