Fatima surely had options other than throwing herself on his mercy. He told her yes, anyway; he could help. But when he pulled out his wallet to see whether he would first need to visit an ATM machine, she looked alarmed and gestured for him to put the wallet away. Schermerhorn wondered if she was concerned for him, worried that he would attract trouble if he flashed money around. Or was she worried for her reputation? Perhaps both. She rose abruptly and as she did so mentioned an address on Obregon, a quiet street on the back side of the market. It seemed best to let some time pass before he showed up. Perhaps forty minutes later Schermerhorn confronted the door at the Obregon address. The buzzer’s plastic housing had broken free of the wall — if it was ever attached — and dangled on its electrical wire. Schermerhorn grasped it and pushed the buzzer. He could hear it ring faintly somewhere inside.
Fatima had changed her clothes and paid some attention to her makeup, and it was clear to Schermerhorn that she assumed she would have to pay with sex for any generosity on his part. He gave her the thousand pesos, but when she took his hand and looked over at the bed in the corner of the room, he told her that wouldn’t be necessary. And when she looked up at him — a look that mixed worry with a twinge of wounded pride — he put his hands on either side of her face and kissed her. Then he left.
Their respective roles at the drug rehab center did not overlap. He was a board member who sometimes guided prospective donors on tours of the place. She was a staffer, mainly involved in assessing newly arrived addicts and telling them about available services and mandatory rules of behavior. But sometimes the board invited staffers to sit in on their meetings to provide information pertinent to the day’s agenda.
On one occasion, fully three years ago, Schermerhorn had arrived a few minutes early for a meeting to find a man ensconced on the sofa in the room allocated for staff to use on breaks. The man had given his name as Armando and had risen to shake hands with the gringo before settling back down beside Fatima. He sat there with his arms spread-eagled over the back of the couch, leaving Schuyler to wonder if the one extended toward the woman was possessive in a romantic way or evidence of unselfconscious indifference to her. He was a talker and something of a blowhard, Schuyler decided. He spoke of his frequent trips to Houston and Mexico City and found a way to mention that the BMW parked two doors down was brand new but already costing him a fortune in repairs. Fifteen minutes of this, with other board members arriving, and he was giving Fatima a hug and extending a hand to Schuyler without quite looking him in the face. With that, he was out the door.
Schuyler asked no questions, but his silence was interrogatory.
Fatima broke it: “He’s an old friend. Yes, once upon a time we were more than that to each other.”
“Who is he?”
“You mean, what does he do? I couldn’t tell you exactly, which probably means that if he were to tell me, it would be on the condition that I keep it quiet. She smiled to signal that she knew she was being slyly euphemistic. Of course, he is a trafficker of some sort. Import/export. Or maybe it’s just export. I don’t know what he handles: Dinnerware? Textiles? Drugs and undocumented workers? I prefer not to know.”
He wondered sometimes if it would have come to much at all without the ambiguous presence of the visitor who draped himself over her sofa that day. Whatever the reason, on their next meeting — a chance encounter not far from the center — there was an edginess in their otherwise routine salutations, a tension that would not be relieved without sex, whether or not either of them realized it right then. She was a desirable woman, he was a man, no longer able to take refuge in the role he had assigned himself: that of a generous benefactor waving aside her offer to repay him in the only currency older than mammon.
She accepted his invitation to join him for coffee at the Gran, and the waiter had only just splashed refills into their empty cups when he put his hand over hers.
“I made a mistake,” he began. “I did not want you to think my willingness to help you out of a financial jam was conditional on our making love. But I wanted to make love to you. I wanted that very much and I want that still. They repaired to a small hotel — the Concordia — that friends had found when, on a spur-of-the-moment visit, the guest rooms on Madrigal were filled. Schuyler had come by and met them in the lobby, which was pleasant enough, but he had never seen the rooms. The one he and Fatima were assigned to was spare but clean, with a window that looked out over the rooftops in a nondescript part of town. They did not leave until late in the afternoon, and Schuyler was relieved of any concern that Fatima’s friend Armando was an impediment to frequent encounters like this.
He was, certainly in the early going, wild about Fatima. Her body, the secret they shared. They both had an investment in keeping their relationship clandestine. A gringo board member taking up with a Mexicana staffer was a relationship that smacked of sexual exploitation, in the eyes of the drug center and also the expat community. And in due course the relationship had flagged under that weight. She had taken up with a marriageable Mexican man. Schuyler, waving off her efforts to repay the two thousand peso loan had returned to the comforts of the bed he shared with Ariana.
Now Fatima and Schermerhorn are together again, under very different circumstances, harrowing circumstances. Schermerhorn is the one in trouble. Fatima is distraught. “I was careless, Schuyler. Not evil. Careless. Armando is a friend of my brother. OK? He asked about you. He wanted to know if you were rich. It’s the question that obsesses him in his dealings with every man from el Norte.
“And what did you tell him?”
“‘How would I know if he’s rich?’ I said that to Armando. He said, I don’t know how you will know, Fatima, but I suggest you find out. If he has money, then perhaps he would share it with us, with you. The rehab center pays you next to nothing. It could make a big difference in your life. And he is not a bad-looking man, Fatima. Perhaps he would become more generous if he got to know you better.”
Now crying softly as she clutches Schuyler’s head to her chest, Fatima says that at the time she dismissed Armando’s chatter as just so much bullshit: “Mierda. It seemed to me he was just talking crazy. I mean, how am I supposed to get a rich man’s money. Maybe a not-so-rich man’s money. How am I supposed to do that. Armando came up with this idea. We kidnap him for you, Fatima. Not just for you, for his own good. We peel away the money as a ransom. I will give some of it to you. A lot of it, if there is a lot. He needs to get away from that cock-teaser of a wife he has. I have seen them together in the plaza. She is fucking some guy behind his back, a Mexican. With the money, you could live happily together.
“I said, ‘Armando, you are talking crazy again.’ He said, ‘Watch me be a crazy man.’ No, he didn’t say watch me, he said, ‘Obras son amores y no buenas razones.’”
Schuyler understood that to mean something like the English adage: “Actions speak louder than words.”
day twenty-one
Schuyler Brevoort Van Nuys Schermerhorn, who blamed his sexual obsessions for undermining a professional career marked by fits, starts and repeated failure, died Wednesday in Bangkok, reportedly in the arms of a 12-year-old girl. He is survived by various wives and mistresses; children, uncertain in number even to their mothers. His passing drew sighs of relief in high places at McDermott Schwartz, the public relations firm where he worked for a decade and which would have dumped him long since but for fear that various members of Mr. Schermerhorn’s family might be ensconced on the boards of corporations it was worth the price of his small salary not to offend.
Or something like that.
Schermerhorn had been at a dinner party with Ariana years ago, witty types from The New Yorker, and somebody thought it would be jolly fun if they played Obituary. Obituary, as explained, involved writing humorous obits for each other, not the whole thing, but just that overlong and hopelessly convoluted first paragraph that had become a hallmark of obits in the New York Times, the longer and more convoluted the be
tter. Maybe the conversation had begun to lag.
The funnier ones laced the obsequies with mockery, giving the exercise a Tom Sawyer touch, the Tom Sawyer who sneaks in to his own funeral and hears the weeping and the encomiums to the good boy he never really was. Ariana did Schermerhorn’s obituary. He remembered most of it verbatim.
Locked again in his room in the emptying cartel house, Schuyler tries to remember the one he came up with for Ariana. When he can’t, he tries making one up:
Ariana Siracusa Altobelli, who worked tirelessly and to no apparent avail as associate producer of some of the most mediocre nightly news shows in the history of broadcast television, died quietly of boredom Thursday, in New York City, during a brief respite from her expatriation in Mexico where, in recent years, she had begun work on a never-published novel about her husband’s kidnapping and eventual execution at the hands of a narco syndicate.
He says it back to himself a time or two, and as he does so, he begins to weep, then blubber outright. He is not crying for himself alone. The tears are also for Ariana, for her love of Mexico and its culture and her dauntless campaign to break down the barriers that kept her from fully entering it.
PART THREE
It’s the season for thoughts about death, and not just because of Schuyler’s lengthening secuestración. Fatima has left him, ordered out of the house by Armando, not because he resents her interest in Schermerhorn but because he wants to put it to better use. As she rises from the cot and prepares to leave, she warns Schermerhorn to stay calm, not to attempt escape from the depleted but still deadly knot of sicarios holed up in house. “I will reason with Armando,” she says. “I will beg him. He has no desire to spill your blood unnecessarily.” The word stays with Schermerhorn: unnecessarily. What would make his death necessary, he wonders.
In Patzcuaro, the late October/early November collision of craftsmanship, tourism and reverence for the departed — Muertos by name, short for Noche de Muertos (Night of the Dead) — is a day or three past its sell-by date. The stalls set up under long tents on all four sides of the Plaza Grande have begun to empty out. The vendors who paid good money for their booths (puestos) pack up unsold merchandise: stacks of rebozos, hand-crafted guitars and Ocumicho figurines of unfired clay, the huge and maudlin crucifixes of gnarly wood, the baskets and furniture and lamp bases woven of reed (specialties of a village called Ihuatzio), giant stumps carved into life-sized pietas from down near the embarcadero and, of course the ceramic Catrinas — the lady skeletons in fancy hats and long gowns. They are the icons of Muertos, and they are everywhere. The potters and wood-carvers and weavers and guitar-makers, the sellers of art and trash and tchotchkes, pack unsold wares into cardboard cartons big enough for a washing machine, stuff crumpled newspaper in around the edges and lash the boxes tight with hairy yellow twine.
Many of the Indians are already en route to their pueblos higher in the mountains or down the sierra toward the Pacific coast, either because their wares quickly sold out or because the craftsmen decided they had already made whatever money they were going to make. “Los gringos tienen miedo este año,” Ariana hears one say to another. (The gringos are afraid to come this year.) The vacated booths have been quickly taken by vagabond Mexican hippies up from Puebla and Mexico City, a faction that, at the height of the festival, had sold its wares on blankets stretched out over paving stones on the temporarily carless side streets or on tables set up along the sidewalk near the Santander bank branch on the northeast corner of the Plaza Grande. (To relieve themselves, the hippies can go into the nearby Palacio Huitzimangaro, a Purépecha community center with a public toilet.)
Ariana spends a part of each day roaming the tienditas and puestos. She has one eye out for anything she hasn’t seen dozens of times before; inwardly she is relieved to see nothing new, nothing that might distract her from her more important purpose, which is to have no evident purpose at all — beyond strolling anonymously in a throng big and varied enough to disappear in.
(Or am I being watched, she wonders — watched idly? closely? Maybe not.
After all, there are easier ways to keep track of her comings and goings: a car down the block within sight of the house, for example; an SUV with windows tinted impenetrably dark — like the one that was there an hour ago as she stepped out onto Madrigal and dropped down the stone staircase, to tour the last of the crafts on display, to search the faces of the vendors for the signs of restlessness or dismay or boredom that suggest haggling will be productive.) Anything to distract herself from this interminable wait for … for what?
While some of the hippie jewelers claim squatters’ rights in abandoned puestos, others of them lounge around plaza walkways, twirling hoops, juggling, displaying themselves in acrobatic poses inspired by the rhythms that drummers pound from skin stretched tight over gourds or hollowed sections of a tree trunk, drums that haven’t sold. A tiny Chihuahua bitch chases pigeons not much smaller than she is, stopping in bewilderment as the flock rises suddenly into the air. An Indian girl, a Purépecha, in sweatpants thinner and tighter than tights, stands on her hands spreading her legs this way and that, ostensibly to keep her balance, more purposefully to tease the men with this aggressive display of the prize between her legs. One of the boys stands about, cheering her on. His left arm has been severed just above the elbow— a childhood accident? — and what’s left of it, a bicep as thin as a little girl’s, has been tattooed to look like it is veiled with spider webs. Young couples nuzzle each other or stand arm in arm staring vacantly at nothing in particular, benumbed by love and lust. They radiate an impossible allure, the women lithe and only just beginning to swell in the hips and breasts, the men as thin and sharp-edged as the blade god must have used to slit their buttocks with such delicate precision.
Muertos is a festival, but it would awaken thoughts of mortality even if Ariana were not reduced to wondering if her husband were dead or alive. Gringos give up the ghost all year long in the usual variety of ways, but also in some that are specific to Patzcuaro’s expat colony. There is the sudden crumbling of confidence in a decision that had once seemed bold and progressive, a decision in solidarity with the Mexicans: to forgo the fancy, high-tech deaths available back in the States and instead grow old in the hands of local herbalists and the housekeepers who feed and, in due course, clean and diaper their employers. (Who were we to demand better than that for ourselves? And, really, what’s the point, Ariana and Schuyler had asked themselves.) But comes the first real health crisis, and some of their compatriots are prone to panic. Houses are dumped on the market, and a gringo couple flees back north to the infantilizing tyranny of industrial medicine. Only the stoics remain, the epicureans. But there are a goodly number of us, Schuyler always insisted. We stock up on sleeping pills and Nembutal and prepare to just kick back and enjoy life while it remains tolerable, but not a day longer.
Leave it to Cy Milligan to have timed his passing with Muertos. Over coffees-to-go on a bench in the Plaza, Jorge had mentioned the death to Ariana a day after her return from New York.
Funerals are community affairs in an expat colony and Cy’s long-expected death had been a drumroll that promised to make his funeral a fairly big one. Celeste, a dear friend of his, had rented a hall at what’s known as the ex-Colegio, centuries ago a Jesuit school but nowadays given over to art exhibitions, student piano recitals, crafts fairs. Ariana could see no reason not to go, a decision she regretted upon walking in the door, hugging an old friend or two and taking a seat.
Unavoidably, she thinks more about Schuyler than about Cy as Jack McCollum, a sort of self-appointed chaplain to the expat community, reads Chronicles II, verses one through ten, and Celeste daubs at her eyes and nose with a bit of Kleenex.
In so many weird ways, Schuyler’s absence is like his death foretold. And if Ariana botches the ransom negotiations, an intimation of mortality could become the real thing.
Ariana doesn’t know whether she’s confessing to a crime or having a moment
of dreadful self-doubt. But here’s what’s preying upon her:
Now and then over the years she has found herself imagining what life would be like without him, and these hypotheticals are not entirely grief-stricken: the shriek of a plane crashing as she waits at curbside at the Morelia airport to pick him up — the shrieking sound and then the heart-stopping concussion as the fuel tanks blow up; the consoling words from friends and former lovers as she emerges from a seemly period of mourning and begins to appear at small dinner parties and public gatherings; She now enjoys undivided if temporary access to the proceeds of his estate. (Upon her death, it passes to his sons.) In social settings, she can rattle on with stories about their New York years, no longer restrained by Schuyler’s habit of hosing her down when the embellishments stray too far from the truth.
She forgives herself morbid fantasies of life after Schuyler. (Is anyone immune to them — even the most loving and conventional couples?) And anyway, she knows full well that very genuine grief would quickly overwhelm her.
An even darker scenario occurs to Ariana: Is it possible that — in small and cowardly and perverse ways — she has actually engineered the death she fears she might not dread? Not just the kidnapping but the protracted ransom negotiations that could end with a bullet to his brain, or a furious sicario slicing Schuyler’s jugular? From Ariana and Schuyler’s earliest days down here, shouldn’t she have railed more urgently against his ridiculous excursions into the culture of the streets, the real Mexico, the “authentic” Mexico that he — well, both of them — yearned to penetrate? Did Ariana, in some way push him ever further into deep water, ever farther from the safe harbor of the expat colony?
She harks back to loaded moments that jangle in her memory: bringing Margaret Aldrich into her confidence; playing games with Rogelio about the ransom; the halting conversation with Efraim about Schuyler’s nighttime walks through back streets. (Had she been seeking his feedback on whether this was a dangerous practice, or was she tipping him off the “Mexicans,” that abstraction for which Efraim was an available stand-in?)
We Have Taken Your Husband Page 14