She stopped responding to Gaspar’s phone calls and instead focused her attention on Cristóbal.
At first their interactions were limited to having an ice cream or watching a movie, and all the things young couples are supposed to do. Eventually, though, he wanted more than hand-holding or the quick squeezing of her leg at the cinema. He arranged for them to visit cheap hotels for quick fucks. Maite, who was afraid of sinning, cringed each and every time they walked into one of those places, but once he was kissing her and taking off her clothes it was another story.
In between lovemaking sessions she told him about her passion for music, her many records, her acquisition of classic books, her vocabulary lessons by mail. She wrote him love notes and bad poetry. She could not express her feelings, nor render the beating of her heart upon a page; she poured herself into every smile and every touch, attempting to clutch an ocean of passion between her hands for him.
He did not understand a single thing she told him.
It lasted almost a whole year, their relationship. He dumped her near Christmastime for a different secretary on a different floor because Maite had begun to talk marriage, and quite frankly Cristóbalito found her a boring fuck.
Maite quit the job. She pretended she was sick so she could stay home, and then she really felt sick and spent most of the summer and quite a bit of the autumn of 1962 dragging her feet around her mother’s apartment, without a purpose nor much thought. Eventually her mother forced her to get a job at an office supply store, which she loathed. And eventually, too, she stumbled upon an issue of Lágrimas y Risas. Before that, she had read Susy: Secretos del Corazón, which contained many romantic stories, but it was Lágrimas y Risas that enraptured her. Then came her current obsession: Secret Romance.
The latest storyline concerned Beatriz, a young nurse sent to a distant tropical island to care for an ailing old woman, who is torn between her passion for two brothers, Jorge Luis, a chivalrous doctor, and Pablo Palomo, a dissolute playboy nursing a broken heart.
She lived for those stories. She woke up, fed her parakeet, went to work, came back, put on music, and pored over each panel in the comic books; she gnawed at each word like a starving woman. She loved the characters she found between the printed pages, and she suffered bitterly with them, and somehow that suffering was like a sweet balm erasing the memory of Cristóbalito.
And now Jorge Luis had been in an accident and must have surgery. It almost didn’t matter, her upcoming birthday, compared to that. The car, still at the repair shop, didn’t matter. She concentrated on the problem of injured Jorge Luis, on trying to imagine whether Beatriz would learn the truth about his disappearance or Jorge Luis’s evil mother would keep his medical condition a secret. The story was a pink cloud that blotted reality away.
Until Friday. On Friday the rains came and scrubbed clean the pastel colors that had intoxicated her. Friday, and the next issue of the magazine was finally there, finally between her hands. She saved her reading for the evenings, when she could sit in her old green chair and play Bobby Darin, Frank Sinatra, or Nat King Cole. She had bought a set of records to teach herself English and dissect the lyrics of songs but couldn’t be bothered with them. If she really wanted, she could have bought the Spanish language covers that were much more affordable and easy to find, although in many cases she realized these didn’t resemble the original lyrics by a long shot. She didn’t mind the mystery the songs posed. In the end, she liked the music even if she couldn’t understand the words. Sometimes, she penned lyrics to go with the tunes. The Illustrated Larousse was handy, helping her find new words she could rhyme with “love” and synonyms for “misery” to sprinkle inside spiral notebooks.
Maite was so nervous she made an exception that morning, and she read through Secret Romance before lunch, leafing through it while the other secretaries were busy typing or proofing documents.
On page twenty-five Jorge Luis fell into a coma. Maite was aghast. She rushed to the bathroom, locking herself in one of the stalls, and went over the last pages again. But there it was. Jorge Luis was in a coma! There was no mistake.
Maite wasn’t sure how long she stayed in the bathroom, but by the time she walked back into the office, the secretaries were putting their money in the collection box. She stared at Laura as she held up the box and shook it in her face.
“Laura, I forgot.”
“Maite, you always forget. This is not how it works,” the woman said, and the other secretaries shook their heads.
“Fine,” Maite muttered. She found a bill and tossed it in the box.
After work she dashed down the stairs instead of waiting for Diana like she normally did. She had eaten nothing that day and had a headache again. She wanted to go home and go to sleep, but her mother was expecting her.
Maite glanced at the phone booth ahead of her, but if she didn’t show up her mother was liable to pop by her apartment to check up on her. She still didn’t agree that a woman should live on her own. Women didn’t leave home until they were married, but two years before, Maite had grown tired of the limits of her mother’s home and decamped for her place at the Escandón. She knew she didn’t really earn enough to afford the apartment, which was located close to the edge of the elegant Condesa and therefore commanded a higher price than if she’d been living at the edge of Tacubaya. That, the furniture she’d acquired, the car, and her proclivity for buying LPs, books, and magazines torpedoed her budget.
Maite made it to her mother’s place in the Colonia Doctores. The area had been for many years lower middle class, but these days it was leaning toward lower despite the names of the illustrious physicians that had given the area its moniker. Even if she’d had her car, she wouldn’t have brought it to her mother’s place. They stole anything with four wheels there and also picked pockets. Cheap motels and rowdy bars further provided the area with an air of seediness. When Maite was growing up, she had lied and told her classmates that she lived in the posher Roma.
Maite wished she had been born in Monaco or New York. Most of the girls in the comic books she read looked like they’d never set a foot in places like the Doctores. If they had toiled in poverty, then they had been lifted to a higher plane by the fat wallet of their beloved. Cinderellas, dreaming. Maite dreamed too, but nothing came of it.
Thirty. She was thirty and her hair was beginning to sprout gray strands. Her body betrayed her.
When she walked into the combination kitchen–dining room, the first thing Maite’s mother did was chide her for being all wet from the rain.
“I mopped today,” her mother said.
“Sorry.”
“Sit down. Manuela should be here soon.”
Maite shuffled into the living room and turned on the radio. She had hoped the rain would keep her sister away. Manuela was two years younger than Maite and had been married for five years already. She had two annoying kids and an equally annoying husband who was going prematurely bald and was never home. Maite’s mother watched over the children in the afternoons. If they weren’t in the apartment already, it meant they were on their way, soon to interrupt the blessed sound of the music in the living room—“Can’t Take My Eyes Off You” was playing. In her purse, Secret Romance weighed heavily. She wanted to read it again. To make sure that she hadn’t read it wrong.
Manuela walked in then with her children. The kids proceeded to ignore Maite and immediately turned to their grandmother, demanding cake.
“Very well,” Maite’s mother said, and they went to the kitchen–dining room. She took out the cake she’d baked that day while Manuela found a package with candles.
“It’s chocolate,” Maite said, eyeing the cake.
“So?”
“I don’t like chocolate.”
“Everyone else likes chocolate. Besides, it has cherries too. You like cherries.”
“Manuela likes cherries,
Mama. No, not that. I don’t want candles,” she protested.
“You can’t have a cake without candles,” her mother said as she began systematically placing each candle.
“You don’t have to put them all on the cake.”
“Nonsense, Maite. Thirty years and thirty candles.”
Maite crossed her arms and stared at the chocolate-and-cherry cake.
“I got the promotion, by the way,” Manuela said at the point when their mother had counted to twenty candles. “And the boss gave me a new fountain pen. Look, isn’t it lovely?”
“That’s beautiful. Look, how pretty!” their mother said, and she put the candles down, now cooing over the new fountain pen that Manuela was flashing before them.
Manuela hadn’t even wanted to go to secretarial school. She had merely copied Maite. When they were kids she hoped to become an airplane stewardess. Now she worked at a bigger and better firm than Maite, one where they apparently gave their employees fancy fountain pens.
Maite wondered if she could swipe the pen without her sister noticing, but she hadn’t stolen from her since they were teenagers. Now she limited herself to stealing small things from the tenants in her building and occasional items from the drugstore or department stores.
Maite’s mother recounted the candles and found a box of matches.
“Ask for a wish,” Manuela said.
Maite stared at the tiny flames and couldn’t think of a proper wish. The children began to complain, calling out for cake. Maite’s mother warned her she’d get wax all over the cake, and Maite finally blew out the candles without wishing for anything. Maite’s mother cut the cake, serving the children first, then Manuela.
“You know I’m watching my figure,” Manuela said, making a face. Her sister was skinny, but she liked to make a show of everything.
“Come on, you must have a little.”
Maite’s mother pleaded with Manuela, who finally agreed to have a thin slice of cake. Finally, Maite was handed a slice, almost as an afterthought. She was hungry, but toyed with the cherries on her plate, rolling them from one side of the plate to the other, unwilling to eat any of it.
Manuela liked chocolate-and-cherry cake. Maite should have known their mother would cater to her, even on this day. She wished she had waited for Diana and taken her up on her dinner offer. Now it was too late.
Maite thought of Jorge Luis, and she started to convince herself that his accident hadn’t really happened. Next episode there would be an explanation. Maybe it had been a bad dream. Yes, that was it. Beatriz would wake up, the sound of the drums playing in the distance…
The jungle, yes. How she loved the jungle they drew in Secret Romance. The flowers, unnaturally large and lush; monkeys and exotic birds taking refuge in the foliage. Jaguars, waiting in the dark, and the night made of cheap ink; pinpricks of stars and the round moon festooning the sky. Lovers holding hands, lovers swimming in a waterhole…
One of Manuela’s kids was walking around with his hands filled with cake. He placed his hands on Maite’s jacket, which was hanging from the back of her chair, smearing chocolate over it. Manuela chuckled, caught the kid, and wiped his hands clean with a napkin.
“I’ll have to dry clean that,” Maite said, staring at her sister pointedly.
“Scrub it with a bit of soap.”
“It’s not washable. You’re supposed to dry clean it.”
“Don’t be silly. Go wash it. It’ll take a minute. Go.”
Maite grabbed the jacket. She went into the bathroom and furiously scrubbed the stain, but it did no good. It was firmly set in place. When she came out, her mother and her sister were giddily talking about a cousin of theirs. Manuela had lit a cigarette. Her sister’s brand of cigarettes gave Maite a headache and Manuela knew it.
“Can you smoke somewhere else?” Maite asked.
“Maite, sit and eat your cake,” her mother said.
“I should get going,” she announced.
Neither her mother nor her sister replied. Manuela’s youngest child had started crying. Maite fetched her handbag and left without another word.
Back at her apartment, Maite turned on the lights and said hello to the green-and-yellow parakeet she kept in a cage by the living room window. Then she went into the kitchen and made herself a ham-and-cheese sandwich. She ate it quickly, then unrolled the magazine she had been carrying around all day and looked at the panels again.
There was a knock at the door. She ignored it, but then came another knock. Maite sighed and opened the door.
It was the art student from the apartment across the hallway. Sometimes Maite saw her walking up the stairs carrying a canvas under her arm. She didn’t know her, but she knew her type: modern, free, young, a member of a new generation who didn’t have to pay their respect to their fussy mothers and their irritating sisters, instead happily drinking, smoking, living it up.
“Sorry, I hope it’s not too late,” the girl said. She was wearing a poncho with exuberant floral designs. Maite was still dressed for the office, in her white blouse with the frilly high collar and her tan skirt, though she had taken off the soiled jacket. Next to this girl, she looked like a school matron.
“It’s fine.”
“I’m Leonora. I live across the hall from you.”
“Oh, yeah. I know,” Maite said. The girl had been in the building for six months. Maite had timed it. She kept good track of the tenants in the building.
“I’m sorry if I haven’t introduced myself, you know how it is. Anyway, I was talking with the building’s super, and she said you take care of pets sometimes.”
The building’s super, a tiny, gossipy old woman called Doña Elvira who lived on the first floor, was allergic to both cats and dogs. This turned out to be a small boon for Maite, since she offered her services to her neighbors when they needed a pet sitter, a job that might ordinarily have been filled by the super.
“I do. Do you need me to watch a pet for you?”
“Yes, my cat,” Leonora said. “It would be for a couple of days. I’m going to Cuernavaca tonight, and I’ll be back by…well, Sunday night. Monday morning, tops. Would you be able to do it? I know it’s last minute, but I’d appreciate it. The super says you are reliable”
The super had complained that the girl had men over and they were loud. She said it with a raised eyebrow that left no doubt about the source of the noise. Maite wondered if Leonora was going to meet with one of those men, preferably in a location where the neighbors didn’t mind the operatic lovemaking. She bet the girl had an impressive number of boyfriends. She was beautiful. She looked like the girls in the comic books, with her green eyes and her chestnut hair. But she wasn’t weeping. Many of the girls on the covers were either weeping or kissing a man.
“What do you say?” the girl asked. Her smile was both pleasant and nervous, like watching a butterfly flutter around. Maite shrugged.
“I’m usually booked for more than a handful of days. It’s hardly worth the effort if it’s anything less than a week, you know?” she lied, wondering how much she could charge without the girl bolting away. The earrings in Leonora’s lobes looked like real gold, not the fake stuff they hawked downtown and that turned green after a few days. Maite sniffed money.
“Oh, please, I don’t want to take off without knowing someone’s watching the cat. Animals might get into all sorts of trouble when you’re not around. I had a dog that ate a box of chocolates and died.”
“I know. No responsible pet owner leaves an animal without someone around, and I can see you’re in a hurry. Very well, let me think,” Maite said and quoted the girl a higher rate than usual, which Leonora agreed to, grateful for Maite’s kindness.
Leonora handed Maite her apartment keys.
“Would you mind if I get your phone number?” the girl asked. “I…in case…the cat, you k
now. In case I need to communicate with you about the cat.”
So she was that kind of pet owner, the type who fussed about their little angel, calling them baby and darling and dressing them in ridiculous outfits. Maite had never particularly liked pets, except for her parakeet. Taking care of them simply gave her an extra source of income and allowed her the chance to purloin the personal items of their owners.
As she wrote down her number, Maite wondered what would be the first thing she’d steal from Leonora. She took great care in choosing her loot. It was never anything extravagant, anything people would notice, but it must always be something interesting.
The girl, still nervous about the cat, detained Maite with an explanation about the spot where she kept the cat food before departing.
Maite went back to the kitchen and grabbed her magazine. There was no doubt about it. Jorge Luis would be back; he’d wake up in an issue or two. Cheered by this thought, she walked into the spare room and looked through her records. She played Bobby Darin and let herself imagine that a dream lover was waiting for her.
That night Maite dreamed of drums in the jade-green jungle. But in the morning the view from her living room was still of a gray city, rooftops crammed with TV antennas, and there was no lover for her, no matter how much she hoped and prayed.
3
LAY LOW, THAT’S what El Mago said when he phoned. Elvis was utterly willing to comply, considering the big fuss people were making over the night of June tenth. Officially, nobody tied to the government was willing to admit there was such a thing as the Hawks, and some newspapers that toed the government line had pointed out the students were all commie agitators, which should have been enough to quiet the bitching. But other newspapers, and some folks—stupid protesters and their friends, and even a columnist or two who didn’t know how to keep his mouth shut—were wagging their tongues, talking about brutes who had chased them down and even shot at them. It was getting messy.
Velvet Was the Night Page 3