Un asunto familiar

After the movie, the American made his way to the taco stand outside the local panteón, the cemetery on the outskirts of Mexico City. A few strangers gathered in the fluorescent light and wafting steam. At the counter, he ordered two steak tacos, and the man slapped four tortillas onto the hissing comal. Settling onto a stool, he noted that the three apparent family members who had greeted him with such enthusiasm were now haranguing the men behind the counter good-naturedly about another worker who was very rude, very grosero. One of the workers grinned over the steaming meats and sought to appease his clients without saying anything that might see his work imperiled. That man was their supervisor, he explained. 

Odd that anyone should be out so late on a Monday. The three customers spoke in a chorus of fast-flowing accusation. The most strident voice belonged to the girl, who was somewhere under twenty years old and hazel-eyed, lambasting the taqueros with her child’s voice in the stark light. Facing the stall window, she had the profile of a woman, but when she looked down the counter toward him, the extra fat around her features said otherwise. She was accompanied by the man that the American assumed to be her father, though his complexion was somewhat darker, and by a brother, pimpled, with a floppy hairstyle.

Tiring of harassing the cooks, they turned suddenly to the American. He was not the only other customer at the stall but might as well have been. 

“Did you come from the cinema?” the father asked.

“You look like you came from the cinema. With your tote bag,” the girl said, denominating the accessory in English. 

He said he had and admitted to having a certain look while squeezing a lime over his tacos. He used the English look but pronounced it the Spanish way, Luke. The girl gave a short laugh.

The father asked the American what he’d seen, and he told him. The older man behind the counter asked whether it was good, and he said there wasn’t much plot but that the photography was incredible. The American asked if they’d also been to the cinema just now. They’d seen Pinocchio. The father complimented his Spanish and asked if he had been in Mexico long. A year and a half. The American asked if they knew the United States, and the father said some, but it was a while since they’d been. Maybe five years, the son said. Everything was very copy-paste up there, the father said. The American agreed, saying that was why he moved to Mexico.

“Pues bienvenido,” the father said.

He felt the father’s eyes on him as he chewed. Her eyes. The teenaged son, more typically sullen. The father said his daughter taught English, you know. The American told him he did too. Really? Why don’t you speak English together. Go on.

“How long have you been teaching English?” the American asked.

“A few years. I teach kids, mostly.”

“I recently started with a ten-year-old boy. At first I was kind of nervous ’cause I had only been working with adults, but now I like it.”

“I like working with kids too. The ones that don’t scream.”

“You must have gone to an English school?”

“Yeah, in Coyoacán. You know Coyoacán?”

“Of course.”

She looked down.

“Your teachers must have been American, then?”
“Yeah.”

“Because you sound like an American.”

“Thanks. Do you go to the cinema often?”

“I do.”

He felt her father’s hovering, which when he considered it, did not seem entirely censorious. He finished his tacos, paid, and made to leave, wishing all a buen provecho. 

“Do you live close by? How are you getting home?” the father asked. His English was almost as good as his daughter’s but bore a definite accent.

“In Del Valle. I’m going to take the train.”

“I think the metro is closed by now. Wait a minute and we’ll give you a ride.”

The American looked down the deserted avenue as the others finished their second round of tacos. The sense of purification he’d felt leaving the theater lingered, and he sat breathing the Mexico City night. He thought of lighting a cigarette but then thought better of it. 

The family led him across the street to a German SUV. The son got into the passenger seat next to his father, and the girl and the American got in the back as the man started the engine. Neither of the two in the front sought to turn on the radio or play music, the boy with his phone aglow in his lap. They pulled away down the undulating avenue, as the silvery night lapped over traffic. 

In the front seat, the man started up a murmured exchange with his son. The girl asked what else he did besides teach English and go to the movies.

“I go as an extra in productions around the city sometimes. Novelas, mostly.”

“Really? Which ones?”

He named a few and asked if she watched telenovelas. She frowned a moment then said not really.

“What else have you been in?”

“I was in an ad for a shrimp company once. In Santa Fé. They shoot a lot of things out there because it looks like the States. Generic office buildings and stuff. I was supposed to be a shrimp farmer, and they gave me a bunch of live shrimp from a bucket to hold fanned out like this, and this girl actor had to stand looking down at the shrimp with her hands to her face all amazed. We held the pose for minutes, on footstools. By the end of the day most of the shrimp were dead, but every once in a while one would jump out of my hands, and they’d have to pick it up and put it back. I don’t know if they were trying to kill themselves or escape or what.”

“Wait,” she said, turning to him in her seat. “Let’s re-create the scene.” 

He fanned out the imaginary shrimp in his lap, and she stared at his crotch in astonishment with her palms slapped to her cheeks.

“What else?” she asked.

The American paused, quieting his voice. “I was in a porno once. None of the relevant scenes.”

“Woah. Really?”

“It was supposed to be a birthday party. Balloons, a piñata, and stuff. I’m chatting with a guy over hors d’oeuvres when he sees a girl across the party and tells me to hang on a minute and goes over to her. And then they go and screw, I guess. But they filmed that part another day.”

“Oh my gosh.”

“I had no idea beforehand what it was. I kind of had to put the pieces together when I got there. You never know until the last minute. One time they had me sitting for hours outside this bar in Condesa they’d rented out, and then they told me to come in, and it was a scene where this other guy and I were trying to get with two of the main characters in the club, only for them to turn us down at the end of the night. We’re there on the dance floor, she’s dancing on me and stuff.”

“Were you nervous?”

“I was honestly so shocked, it was just a blur.”

She threw her head against the head rest and loosed a shuddering laugh. She threw her arms around his neck and pressed her forehead against his shoulder and drew away still laughing.

* * *

They drove through a part of the city he did not know, and he was pretty sure it was not on the way to his neighborhood. A poorer area, all cinder blocks and wires. The father announced they would make a few stops.

“I want dessert,” the girl said.

“Dessert?” the father said.

“I want ice cream.”

“We’ll get some when we’re done.”

They went down a tunnel of yellow light past endless city blocks where the capitalinos dwelled in their millions, a whole portion of the city that was alien to him whose hosts rose each morning to attend whatever yoke awaited them and eat and light candles and grow old. Streetwalkers plied the avenue at intervals in neon skirts and heels. They pulled into a small lot in front of a convenience store, and the boy got out with the car still running. Waiting for him in the lot was a youth a few years his senior or maybe the same age in athletic pants and trainers with a wallet strapped slantwise across his chest. The boy approached him, and after a brief exchange that the American could not make out, the boy returned, and they were back on the avenue. 

They would stop three more times, each at a different location of the same convenience chain. The scene was repeated in each parking lot. As her brother sallied to meet each youth, the girl spoke to him of her dogs, of a romance she was reading in antique Castilian, enchanting as she was ill-becoming to the outer world. After the last rendezvous, the boy came to the passenger window, and the father told his children to go get ice cream. The girl slipped out and slammed the door, leaving the American and the father alone in the humming vehicle. The American thanked the father for the ride and asked what his name was.

“Wenceslao,” the father said. “My friends call me Wen.”

“Wenceslao. Like King Wenceslaus, from the Christmas carol. Have you heard that one?”

“I must say I haven’t. I’m going to be brief, while we’re alone. Tell me, why don’t you stay the night tonight?”

“Why would I do that?”

Wenceslao sighed. Since his children had exited the car, his voice had taken on new graveness. 

“My daughter takes an interest in you.”

“She’s a great person. She’s going to make someone very happy someday.”

“Someone. Someday.”

“What does this have to do with me spending the night?”

“What does it have to do with you spending the night?”

“How old is she?”

“Young. Like you.”

“I’m going to need a number.”

“What do you will? What does she will? As her father, whose mandate she decides, what do I will?”

“I don’t like this.”

“You don’t like this. Plying my daughter with porn and perreo. Some parents think it best that their children have their first experiences with drink at home. I subscribe to this belief myself and extend the same logic to the carnal.”

“How old is she?”

“Imagine the viewers of the movie of your life. Each in his seat in the darkened theater. What do they anticipate in the moment? Our hero alone in bed at night’s end? An upholding of the laws of God and man?”

“How old is Teresa?”
“One of the many gripes of the Protestants during the Reformation had to do with intercession. First you would pray to one of the saints, who would bring you to Mary, who would bring you to her son. The reformers wanted to go straight to God. Perhaps that is why they were such avid hymn writers. Music having no referent outside itself. Why did all these learned men at a certain point in the sixteenth century suddenly find themselves unable to grasp the fact that the intercession is the thing itself? They loathed the cult of the Virgin, who in Mexico is better loved than Christ. A terrible loss.”

“How old is Teresa?”

“She is eighteen.”

“That’s the truth?”

“Why would I lie to a friend?”

* * *

When they pulled up to the house, the siblings jumped out of the car and ran to the great wooden door, shouldering each other to gain first entry. The home was a sprawling single-story property in Coyoacán with massive caged windows like maws. The broad street lined with black rank trees. By the time Wen and the American entered, the siblings had apparently fled to some recess, and all was quiet. The only light in the tiled main hall came from an aquarium containing a few specimens of the amphibian endemic to the routed lakes of that region and a filter that burbled in the gloom.

The American followed Wen down the hall, which about halfway down opened to an interior garden on the left, and they turned down the arcade along the far wall. Wen turned the knob of the first door on the right, and the American entered past his host. The only window faced the garden, and its shutters were cracked to admit the light from the nearly full moon. The meager illumination revealed a few low bookcases, a desk and chair, and a twin bed against a wall at the opposite end of the room.

“Wait here,” he said and left, closing the door behind him. 

He stood there a time with his hands on his hips. Then he stepped out of his shoes and reclined on the bed with his hands behind his head, looking up at the ancient crossbeams and smelling the garden. There was barking in the distance. He lost hold of time, which had become as obscure as the contours of the chamber, and his eyes burned in the darkness. 

The knob turned, the door opened. Teresa stepped in. A shaft of light that glowed like the object of some dread radiation. She turned toward him and padded across the tiles, and he saw that it was not the girl but some older personification—face lined, shoulders sloping, breasts sagging through the cotton. In that poverty of moonlight, her skin was like marble, as indeed the stuff of such visitations is timeless. 

She straddled him for what remained of the night like a classical frieze. He came three times, and one of the things she whispered to him was to come inside the third time. Between bouts she panted against his ribs and possessed an innate sense of when he had recuperated, at which point she would set to mouthing him.

After their last coupling, he fell asleep. When he woke toward noon she was gone. Light came yellow through the shutters and motes of dust, and birds sang in the garden. He rose and dressed and went out to the arcade. He looked out at the bougainvillea that tumbled vivid from the roof. He then went to where the arcade joined the hall, which he followed toward the back of the house to a kitchen.

Wen sat at a small table with a clay mug of coffee, poring over what looked to be an encyclopedia of animals. His back was to the American, who he wished a good morning and offered coffee without turning in his seat. His guest thanked him and said he should be going. Wen sat there sipping his coffee and turning the pages as the other stood in the threshold. 

“Sexual dimorphism,” he said.

“Sorry?”

“When the genders of a certain species have different traits outside their sex traits. Size, color, behavior. Famously, lionesses hunt while the males lounge around. In certain insect species, like this one, the female dwarfs the male. For all the possibilities, we have something in common, and that is the two becoming one. Not a rule, no. Seldom is there a rule. Some species reproduce alone. But rules sure enough within the category of human, within the category of seahorse.”

He rose and stretched, turned to smile at the other blearily.

“What did you expect from a stay-at-home dad?”

He put a hand to the American’s back and led him through the house. At the portal the visitor shook the other’s hand, thanking him, and then started down the empty street toward the metro. He ate at the taco stand several times after that, but he never saw them again.