Harriet Doerr (3 page)

On the way home we discussed possible reasons for the transfer.

“He let the hose run overnight,” one of us said.

“He forgot to fill the birdbath,” said another.

But I knew another reason. They feared he might start to love this garden more than heaven.

The second impossibly flawless piece, or pieces, of my life were the ones spent in various parts of Mexico. How is it, I think now, that I cannot find a familiar name anywhere on the map of Mexico without seeing, in the most brilliant colors, something that happened to me there twenty or thirty or forty years ago?

Once after a late-summer rainstorm we skidded off the road between Querétaro and Toluca, dropped a few feet into a field, completing two full turns as we went, and stopped at last in a pasture among a dozen cows. From the tree stump where he sat, a few yards away, the man in charge of these animals regarded us without comment or concern. A number of star-shaped white flowers sprang from the stony ground at his feet, like petals before a bride.

“This must happen to him every day,” I said in the direction of my husband, who was already out of the car, examining the mud and the depth of the wheels in it, and saying, “We’ll have to get a mule.”

But almost immediately, the dilemma began to resolve itself, as dilemmas often do in Mexico. I recall no conversation. The cows’ keeper, in his poncho the color of wet earth, simply raised one arm, and a small boy materialized from behind a clump of magueys. This child, happy to discover strangers and a car in trouble, ran off barefoot down the highway, to return ten minutes later sitting among coiled ropes on the back of the mule an old man was leading toward us.

During the towing operation that followed, I had time to see that, behind the meadow where we were mired, a thousand more of the white flowers shaped like stars had thrust up their stems everywhere—in the furrows of the field, in the ditch beside the road, between the broken boulders on the slope behind.

Then the car was back on the road, the meadow, mud, the cows, and white stars out of sight.

Once again on pavement and heading south, my husband, as though I had asked, said, “Those white wildflowers are called estrellas de San
Juan.”

When we lived in Mexico City, we occupied one of two houses not far apart that had the same street number. We lived at Alpes 1010, and so, farther down the block, did someone else.

The mailman, considering this no problem, made few mistakes.

“Why not speak to someone in authority at the post office?” we asked him, and the
cartero
said, “That will not be necessary. I already know the people in both houses.”

On Mailman’s Day we gave our orderly-minded friend an extra bonus.

On the Day of the Garbage Man, ours came to the door dressed for Sunday, and so did the street sweeper on his holiday and on his the night watchman, whom we never saw by day. Each night, these guardians of our safety patrolled their assigned number of blocks, blowing at intervals, as they went, whistles of so plaintive a tone they might have been designed to mourn the death of a child in the family or a major natural disaster.

Carpenters and masons had their day, and construction workers in hard hats, who balanced on steel beams and marked their ascent with a wooden cross at each new level. This is a country where accidents are anticipated and frequently occur.

Instead of houses across our street in Mexico City, there was a
barranca,
whose steep slope, wooded with eucalyptus, fell abruptly to a drainage ditch at the bottom. People who had things to throw threw them here.

When our old dog, Bowser, died, Camilo Corona, the
mozo
who came with our house, suggested that we throw his body into the
barranca.

I asked, possibly through tears, if he truly meant to dispose of a member of our family among rubbish that included grass cuttings and hedge clippings, rotting pineapples and broken bottles, rusty automobile parts and the skeletons of animals long since discarded there, and he nodded.

He said, “That is the easiest way, señora.” Then he paused and added, “Where else?”

At that, I instructed the
mozo
to dig a grave at one corner of our small square of lawn, and immediately drove to Sears Roe-buck on Insurgentes Sur. Here I bought, not a shroud, but something else, which seemed to be Bowser’s size, a heavy canvas zipper bag.

Arrived at home, I saw that Camilo had dug a shallow hole.

“At least half a meter deeper,” I told him.

Camilo’s eyes were on the canvas bag. It was then I saw the
mozo
considering my excesses in his mind. First, the probable price of the canvas bag, then the mound of earth he had dug up so far and the amount he had yet to dig, then the image of Bowser himself, in death, as in life, plainly not a thoroughbred.

“The ground is damp,” I told him, “and the afternoon is cold,” all the while knowing Camilo had four children at home, and estimating the number of blankets the money spent on the bag would buy, I still went on without hesitation. “The bag is for the dog to be buried in.”

Thus are our nightmares born.

After we had been in our house a month and Camilo had settled into a routine of mopping the tile floors, washing the windows, and sweeping the sidewalk, we began to notice that the telephone usually rang, not for us, but for him. He would stand, a short, somehow pathetic figure, with solemn eyes and stubbled chin, near a table in the sala, his head bowed, with the instrument at his ear, while he listened in silence to a voice speaking at length at the other end. As for Camilo, he spoke only two words,
“Bueno”
and
“Adiós.”
When we inquired, after several weeks, about the caller, Camilo would always say, “Mi
tío.”

When we asked, “Is your uncle in difficulties?” Camilo would shake his head, look at the floor, and start to sweep.

One late-October day, Camilo approached us and, staring down at the mop and bucket, said, “There is illness in my family.”

“Whose illness?” one of us said, and on hearing it was the
mozo’s
frail old mother, the other said, “We will lend you the money.” Then a quantity of cash was handed to Camilo and an agreement made that this loan would be repaid out of his salary at the rate of ten pesos a week.

But the telephone calls continued, and after four or five of them, Camilo told us that his wife was in the hospital with an infection connected with childbirth, Again we lent money, again we established a loan, but this time we had to raise the
mozo’s
salary so that he could make the weekly payments.

Still the calls came, and each time the
mozo
hung up, we said,
“Su tío, otra vez?”
and Camilo answered,
“Si.”

In November, Camilo told us there was an emergency connected with his oldest child. “She fell at school,” he said, “and broke her arm in two places.” She was at the children’s clinic, he said, and partial payment was required.

“Where are these three institutions?” we asked.

Within two days, the
mozo
brought us the addresses, written in pencil on torn.bits of paper. On Saturday morning we drove off with a map, the three addresses, and the legal names of the three patients. Camilo opened the garage door and looked solemnly after us as far as the corner where we turned.

Our first stop was at a stately old house, balconied, porched, and pillared, set in the center of a city block, hidden by a forest of trees and shrubs and the rampant vines that had been allowed to invade them.

“Maximilian and Carlota probably came here for dinner,” I told my husband as he knocked at a wide, heavy door. A nun opened it, smiled, and called another nun. We produced our creased documents and inquired about Camilo’s mother. The two nuns summoned a third. All three shook their heads.

“Yes, we take care of las
ancianas,”
one said.

“But this old woman is not among them,” said another.

“We cannot help you,” the third added, and all three smiled.

Nor had anyone at the women’s hospital, our next stop, heard of the
mozo’s
wife, under either her maiden or her married name.

“We have never registered a patient with those names,” the receptionist said, and turned back to her ledger.

“Do you still want to try the children’s clinic?” my husband asked, as soon as we were outside, and I shook my head.

In the end, we did what we could. We raised Camilo’s wages again, so that he could pay us back more quickly. But this time the agreement carried a condition.

“The
señora
and I have discussed this matter,” my husband said, “and agreed upon a condition of employment.” He paused to look out the window at our sparse-berried pepper tree. “Your uncle must never call you here again.” Camilo, staring down at the floor, nodded without lifting his head.

When we left Mexico at the end of our stay and had to catch an early train to the border, we gave Camilo a cash settlement to cover the required severance pay, as well as accrued vacation time. An acquaintance, learning of this, laughed. “Say goodbye to your money,” this person told us. “Your
mozo
will be drinking it up for the next two months.”

But at five o’clock in the morning, Camilo was there, sweeping the sidewalk, sober. He carried out suitcases. He gave us his key to the house. We said,
“Adiós,”
and shook his hand. When we looked back from the corner, he was waving.

If it is possible to remember too much, then in the case of Mexico, I do. Images spill over and threaten to become lost. But I know that I am better nourished now by images and echoes than I ever was by bread and wine.

Consider, then, my morning drive home from the American High School on my day for the car pool. Entering the district of Tacubaya, almost adjacent to the school, I would find myself in a slum and, driving through it, would often see three small torn boys waiting for a second-class bus. These were children who worked for coins at the supermarket where I shopped. Pushing and shoving their rivals, they crowded outside the automatic doors, waved their arms, and called out, “Me!”

“Yo! Yo! Yo!” the children shouted, leaning singly or in twos or threes into the customer’s path. They fastened their urgent, sometimes infected, eyes on a prospect and called,
“Señora!
Yo!”

When I recognized these children on the street corner in Tacubaya, I sometimes offered them a ride to the market, and four or five of them would push their way in. Benjamin, who was eight years old and often helped me, was usually among them.

As soon as we started off, Benjamin asked me to turn on the radio. All leaned forward from their seats to listen to mariachi music and to the commercials that intervened.

One of these, much repeated on the airways and on marketplace loudspeakers, advertised laundry soap. A woman’s voice would sing to us about the qualities of this soap. She would sing of its softness and its purity. It is like the white snow, she would sing, and my passengers would raise their voices too.

And now, with the car’s windows closed against the cold, the smell of the children’s unwashed bodies mingled with their choir-boy voices lifted in praise of something they saw rarely and at a distance, on the tops of volcanos, snow.

When I write about Mexico, I transfer myself there wholly. I trip over its broken sidewalks, stop for freesias at its flower stalls, wave down its taxis. If there is time, I may still write about my Spanish lessons in a cold formal
sala,
where my teacher and I sat on stiff gilt chairs, with a tiny electric heater at our feet.

“I grew up on an
hacienda,”
my teacher said. “I had a horse named Betty. I watched the revolutionaries ride her away.”

I may write about my rides on the thirty-
centavo
bus to the center of the city, where I got off at the corner of Madero and San Juan de Letrán. “If you want to see marijuana,” people said, “it is growing among the weeds next to the sidewalk the entire length of San Juan de Letrán.”

I may write about a picnic lunch on the island of Janitzio in the middle of Lake Pátzcuaro. We climbed on cobblestones up the steep hill and followed a lane high above the lake’s edge to the house of an absent friend.

“Go in,” he had said. “See the view. Old Juana, who looks after the house, will bring you a
refresco.”

When we rang at the iron gate in the wall, we had a few seconds to look straight down at the named and unnamed shades of blue shifting on the water.

The gate creaked, and there was old Juana, barefoot and braided, clearly the product of centuries of unviolated Tarascan forebears. She showed us to a terraced table, brought beer, brushed away a fly, and watched us as we ate. The garden was edged on one side by the view of the lake, on the other by the abrupt slope behind. When we had peeled and eaten our orange and banana, we walked away from the lake, in case we had missed hillside flowers.

Then, with Juana at our side, we discovered, behind a high clump of calla lilies, a low grotto, lined with rocks, its dirt floor newly swept.

Old Juana smiled and pointed. In the grotto on the right stood a pink-and-blue plaster statue of the Virgin, a candle burning at her feet. To her right, as tall as she, stood the figure of an Indian god, his bulging eyes leering, his square mouth exposing a beast’s teeth, savage hands raised.