Other weekends we would visit Gustav and Peggy Regler in Tepoztlán, a valley surrounded by rock mountains that rise straight up from the valley floor. The Reglers were the only foreigners living there. To get to their house you had to drive down a hill so steep that I was convinced our car would turn somersaults. After following a rough dirt road for about a mile and a half, we came to a river that surrounded the Reglers’ house on three sides. During dry season there was at most an inch of water in it, but during the rainy season the river could be two feet deep. It was touch and go whether we would to get across and up the hill to the Reglers’ gate without stalling.
Gustav Regler was a German writer and Communist who served as commissar of the XII International Brigade during the Spanish Civil War and was wounded in the Battle of Guadalajara. He immigrated to Mexico in 1940. In marrying him, Peggy Paul had rebelled against her proper Philadelphia upbringing and became part of Mexico’s intellectual bohemia. When he settled in Tepoztlán, Regler, a lover of Goethe, built an octagonal tower for his living room. Goethe, he said, believed that an octagon was the most harmonious space to inhabit. The Reglers’ house (which my mother bought in 1953) had a patio with a fountain in the middle. The first time I visited, Gustav took me by the hand and led me to a low stone wall on the far side of the patio and told me that since I was living in Mexico it was important for me to know that under every rock was a scorpion or a tarantula. He then lifted a rock off the wall and out sprang a tarantula—not a huge one, but horribly furry. In all the years I lived in Mexico I never saw another tarantula, but I did see many scorpions, especially after earthquakes when they emerged from their hiding places and scuttled across the floor.
My mother’s favorite time to go to Tepoztlán was on the Day of the Dead, when at night everyone visited the graveyard in the fields below the village. Families brought food for their dead and spread out their own meals on the ground. I was embarrassed to be watching this ritual. We were atheists, and they were believers. We were tourists observing the natives, but as in Harlem at Easter, my mother didn’t feel out of place. All she cared about was the beauty of the scene. There were candles everywhere. The graves were like little temples painted in bright colors. Children ran about eating pastries in the shape of bones and dangling toy skeletons whose clay bones were connected by springs to make them dance. That morning in the plaza my mother had bought me one and for herself she bought a sugar skull decorated with pink sugar frills that looked like birthday cake icing. The skull had her own name written in pink on its forehead. “It’s a way of making fun of death,” she explained. “If you laugh at death you can keep it at bay.”
The other time that my mother made sure to go to Tepoztlán was during the February carnival when men called Chinelos dressed up in velvet tunics, tall conical headdresses, and masks with pointed beards. In the evening they gathered in the village plaza and hopped up and down in a dance called El Brinco (which means “the jump”). As the night wore on, they stumbled from too much tequila. The first time we went to this festival, I danced with two different Chinelos and was thrilled to be accepted as if I were Mexican. But a year or two later, the frenzy seemed ready to burst into violence. I could tell that the men were hostile toward gringas. I refused to dance. I felt like sexual prey.
For me the most exciting place to go was to the pyramids of Teotihuacán, which lay about an hour northeast of Mexico City. When we climbed to the top of the Pyramid of the Sun, I felt I was part of something magical, something ancient. What Carlos told me about human sacrifices and blood flowing down the stone steps enhanced the mystery. Climbing back down, my mother and Carlos walked slowly in zigzags to make the descent less steep. I was proud that I could dance my way down.
Carlos Basurco and my mother in the belltower at Acolman, on the way to Teotihuacán, c. 1951
After a picnic lunch, we walked among the dusty furrows of a nearby field that my mother said was an Aztec graveyard. I had a quick eye for spotting anything that didn’t look like earth, so I filled my pockets with pieces of pre-Columbian pottery as well as legs and arms of clay dolls, incense burners, the occasional small stone head, and fragments of faceted obsidian knives.
Carlos liked to go to inexpensive local restaurants where he always ordered steak and fried potatoes. My mother encouraged me to try Mexican dishes such as rabbit stew or roasted goat. If Carlos’s steak wasn’t served to him medium rare, he would have a temper tantrum. It was embarrassing, especially because he, too, was a foreigner, and his Spanish sounded strange to Mexican ears. Moreover, many Mexicans disliked Spaniards—a hangover from colonial days. The odd thing was that even with this hostility, most Mexicans connected class with skin color, and light skin was prized.
At first, I had liked Carlos, even admired him—he was a musician and also, my mother said, a war hero. But more and more, I came to fear his anger. In one of his bad moods, he nearly kicked Pancho. One day I came home from school and called Pancho in order to take him out. My mother told me that Carlos had taken him for a walk and Pancho had broken free and been run over. I was certain that Carlos had let Pancho off his leash on purpose. He had murdered my dog. I hated him, but I had to hide my hatred to make life easier. My mother depended on Carlos just as she had depended on Edmundo. She had no money of her own except for the $100 that my father was supposed to send once a month for child care. His checks were sporadic, and often we were broke.
Once my mother sent me to buy pan dulce at the local bakery. Enveloped by the bakery’s warm sugary smell, I piled my tray with pastries. When I took my tray to the cash register it turned out that I didn’t have enough money for pan dulce. The saleslady advised me to buy bolillos (rolls) instead. Bread was subsidized by the government in order to make it affordable. Going home with a package of bread instead of pastry made me see how precarious life could be. When I was in first grade at Dalton, my mother had been disdainful about all the rich parents, so being poor carried no shame. My mother told her friends that Dalton had given Blair and me scholarships because we were poor artists’ children. Now that I was older, having no money made me anxious. I must have written to Blair about our finances because she sent a dollar bill in her next letter. And that dollar actually helped.
My mother did try to earn money. Briefly she taught art at Greengates. Another moneymaking scheme was to take bolts of her friend Lena Gordon’s hand-woven cloth and sell it in the United States. We had to drive to the border every six months to renew our tourist cards, so we could take the cloth with us and mail it from there. Lena delivered bolts of fabric to our apartment, and my mother and I sat on the floor and unrolled the cloth. Before we rolled it back up, my mother brought out baskets full of pre-Columbian clay figurines. It was not legal to take them out of the county. If we got stopped at the border, she would pretend that they were folk art. We wound brightly colored crepe paper around the figurines to make them look like toys. Then we rolled them into Lena Gordon’s bolts.
The drive to Brownsville took two days. On the American side of the border we mailed the cloth stuffed with figurines to someone in New York. Trouble came when we tried to get back into Mexico. The Mexican officials said there was something wrong with our tourist cards. They didn’t believe that we actually lived in Mexico. My mother explained that we had been living in Mexico for over a year. The officials just looked grim, so we went back to the American side and spent the night in a hotel. The following morning, we bought a bag of peaches and pears and some sandwich materials for a picnic lunch and headed back to the bridge. At the American side of the border a man in a uniform looked at our papers, took off his glasses, and slowly, slowly wiped them with a tissue. “What,” he asked, “is the purpose of your trip?” “Pleasure,” said my mother, looking him straight in the eyes. His forehead was sweaty, and a roll of fat bulged over his collar. “Pleasure,” he said with a slow fake smile as his eyes went up and down my mother’s body. “A Mexican holiday for the little girl, right?” “Yes,” my mother said in a voice as icy as Greta Garb
o’s. “Well, bring me back a piñata,” he said as he stamped our papers. My mother smiled her most superior smile. “Thank you,” she said. As we moved toward the door, he reached out to pat my head, but I ducked just in time and moved to the other side of my mother.
At the Mexican customs office, my mother once again told the officials that we lived in Mexico. They relented only after my mother showed them my diary, which proved that I went to school in Mexico City. We had driven only a few miles into Mexico when I realized that I had left my Brownie camera in the hotel room. My mother just turned the car around and headed back to the United States. The customs officer on the American side of the bridge peered into the Coche de Mama. “You can’t take that fruit into the United States,” he announced, pointing to my half-eaten peach. “But it’s American fruit,” my mother protested. “We just bought it on the American side.” “I don’t make the rules, ma’am.” “All right,” said my mother. “We’ll eat it here.” We sat on the Coche de Mama’s fender and ate the entire bag of fruit. She offered the customs officer a peach. He said it was against the law for him to accept it, so he just stood there and watched us eat. I was embarrassed, but my mother didn’t mind at all.
Soon after our return to Mexico City, my mother announced that she and I were going to visit Lena Gordon in Erongarícuaro, a village on Lake Pátzcuaro in the state of Michoacán. The timing of our visit had to do with a particular fiesta, a day on which at a certain moment all the village craftsmen and shopkeepers throw samples of what they make or sell into the air and children, even adults, scramble to pick them up.
In the late afternoon, Lena led us to the central plaza to watch the tossing up of craft objects. She carried a basket full of carefully wrapped samples of her cloth, which she planned to fling into the air. Dark clouds were amassing to the north, and we could hear distant thunder. All of a sudden it began to rain so hard that the water came down from roofs in sheets. We took shelter in a portico on one side of the plaza. “They are going to have the fiesta in spite of the rain,” Lena said. A band set up in an ornate covered bandstand played loud music, and there were a few halfhearted fireworks. When a horn blew, the gifts were thrown up into the rain-filled air. People ran to collect what they could.
Except for a few people under the portico and the musicians who were packing up to go home, the plaza was soon empty. But then I saw a little girl, maybe eight years old, running across one corner of the plaza. She must have seen some bundle that no one had taken. There was a flash of lightning and she fell. People rushed to help. When they picked her up, her body was limp. Lena went over and took her pulse. The girl was unconscious but alive. Because Lena was the only foreigner living in this village, she had some authority. She asked the girl’s parents to let her drive their daughter to the nearest town that had a doctor. They refused. Instead, they carried the girl home. We followed at a distance. The girl’s family laid her on a metal cart outside of their house. Lena kept telling them that their daughter should be inside and wrapped up in blankets. A little brandy would help. No one listened. Lena lost her temper. The girl’s rain-soaked dress stuck to her body. On the surface of the cart where she lay there were pieces of broken glass. Raindrops bounced off the glass shards, then pooled around them. Lena drove off to find a doctor in a nearby town but returned without one. The doctor had been summoned to another village.
By this time, the girl’s family had brought her inside and laid her out on a sheet spread on the floor. At each corner of the sheet a candle burned. Her family thought they were sending her to heaven with their prayers. The girl still had a pulse, Lena said, but they were treating her as if she were dead. Now Lena kept her rage in check. It is not for a foreigner to oppose the rituals of her adopted home. Back at Lena’s house, my mother and Lena poured themselves tequila with no ice. I watched the storm clouds pass over the lake. Pátzcuaro’s fishing boats with their butterfly nets were not out. The water looked gray. The sight of the dying girl did not leave my eyes. It was as though a tiny image of her dying body was stuck under my eyelids. I had always believed in the efficacy of willpower. Now I saw that sometimes even a powerful adult cannot change the course of events.
28 Escuela Pan Americana
At first the girls in my form at Greengates School had crushes on our handsome young math teacher. His English accent was a big attraction. But what he was teaching was incomprehensible. One day when an American girl named Toy Bauman was whispering in my ear, the math teacher walked slowly over to her desk and slammed the spine of a book onto the side of her head. Johanna and I were shocked. We didn’t think that teachers had the right to hit a child. At recess Johanna, Toy, and I huddled near the school’s gate. We decided to walk out of Greengates and never return. On the sidewalk outside the gate we laughed and joked to keep up our courage. What if our parents made us go back to Greengates? Then we would be in real trouble. When I got home and told my mother what happened, she telephoned Catherine Renouf, and together they decided to send Johanna and me to the Pan American School.
I had to take two different buses to get there. That was okay most of the time. From the bus window, I saw fancy apartment buildings and rundown houses, and I thought about the multitude of people living behind those windows. Like me, each person thought their home was the center of the world. I liked the anonymity of riding on a bus. I could pretend I was just a Mexican girl on her way to school. And buses were fun: passengers chatted as though they knew one another. Many Mexican voices talking at once makes a gentle warble, quite unlike the grating sound of New York City bus riders. Some passengers carried enormous bundles, even bunches of live chickens tied by their ankles. Mothers with their babies wrapped in rebozos seemed so calm, so accepting of the life fate had dealt them.
One bad thing about riding a bus was sitting next to a beggar. I was afraid of catching leprosy. Once a ragged and filthy man sat down next to me. Soon his shoulder and thigh were intruding in my space. I glared at him, but he looked straight ahead. Every time I moved closer to the window, he moved closer to me. I was about to change seats when I noticed that his fly was open and his penis, which looked diseased, lay on his lap. I pretended I didn’t see it. I couldn’t change seats because I would have had to pass in front of his knees and his penis was right there. Should I feel sorry for him, I wondered. Could his penis be out because the cloth of his trousers chafed? I just held my breath and looked out the window until, at last, he stood up, turned to look at me, and got off the bus. Even with him gone I felt sullied.
Every morning when I arrived at the Pan American School, the first thing that happened was the entire student body lined up in straight rows in the school’s large yard. A loudspeaker played martial music, and a man’s voice made announcements. For about ten minutes we marched in formation around the yard. Then we saluted the Mexican flag and sang the Mexican national anthem. I liked being part of a big group, but I didn’t know anyone except Johanna, who, because she was fluent in Spanish, was put in the Spanish-language section and a grade ahead of me.
Blair came for spring vacation. My mother and I went to pick her up at the airport, and when Blair cleared customs and came toward us, I saw my mother’s face tighten. Her eyes seemed to bore into Blair’s face and body. I hoped that Blair did not see that look of scorn. It was a look that made you feel ugly. Recently she had not given me that look because, even though I was fat, she was convinced that I was artistic. She gave Blair a kiss on the cheek. Her kisses always felt hard because of her prominent cheekbones. When we got into the Coche de Mama, she turned to Blair and said she thought Blair’s new permanent wave looked common. Worse still, Blair was wearing red lipstick and nail polish. She had lost a lot of weight, and her breasts had grown. Her long legs curved in and out at the right places, and her face looked even more like a Greek goddess than it had a few months ago. The problem was that now that Blair looked almost like a woman, men turned their heads and stared. Our mother was used to being the only attraction.
B
lair’s vacation did not go well. She was angry with our mother, and she thought I was babyish. I had always worshiped Blair. Most of the time she had not minded if I followed her around, and sometimes we played together as if we were the same age. Now I secretly agreed with our mother that Blair’s taste had been corrupted by her boarding-school friends. Thinking this made me feel guilty. I should have protected Blair from our mother’s meanness.
Toward the end of spring, Lena Gordon told my mother that her daughter, Margarita, was going to stop going to school in order to dedicate herself to dance. Margarita was a year older than me, thin, exotic-looking with dark eyes and skin. She looked completely Mayan, my mother said. I was fascinated by Margarita’s outspoken, flamboyant, and willful behavior. She made us laugh. She didn’t care what people thought. We had both given up ballet and were now studying modern dance with a woman named Waldeen (her real name was Waldeen Falkenstein) whose choreography was full of intense and primitivistic gestures that connected more with the earth than with the sky. I was almost as good a dancer as Margarita, so my mother decided that I, too, should give up going to school and just work toward becoming a dancer. I refused to leave school. I thought that my mother’s wanting me to leave school came from her narcissism. She just wanted to show what a free spirit she was. It would be something amusing to talk about.
Me and Blair, Cuernavaca, 1952
In June 1952, my mother put me on a plane. I was to stay at Aunt Carolyn’s in New York for a few days and then take a train to Boston, where my father would pick me up and take me to Cape Cod. Standing in line to give my ticket to an official at the Mexico City airport, I felt almost like an adult. As I climbed the steps and into the Pan American plane, I tried to look nonchalant, as though I traveled alone all the time. The flight was not nonstop. I was supposed to change planes in some Texan city and continue on to New York. When I presented my ticket for the second leg of the trip, the Texan agent said that what I had handed him was a receipt, not a valid ticket. I dug around in my purse. There was no ticket there. What had happened was that the ticket agent in Mexico had taken the tickets for both flights. The Texan agent would not allow me to board the plane. I felt lost, afraid that I would be stuck in this airport forever and would never reach home. I cried and cried, but the man still would not let me on the plane. There was a line of passengers behind me waiting to present their tickets. An American woman came up to me, and when I explained about the lost ticket, she bought me another one. She sat beside me on the plane, and when we landed in New York she took me to Aunt Carolyn’s apartment, and Aunt Carolyn reimbursed her for my ticket. I was glad to be safe, but I also felt embarrassed that the woman had had to buy me a ticket and bring me into the city. Aunt Carolyn was furious at my mother for choosing a flight that required changing planes. My aunt disapproved of my mother anyway. She didn’t like the way my mother kept changing men, and she thought that my mother ought to have a job and help support Granny and Granddaddy.
Upper Bohemia Page 17