by Mary Morris
"All right. So they went. They were at the bazaar one day and his wife wanted to buy a dress. She was a pretty woman, blond. So they went into a store and after a while he got bored and said he wanted to take a walk. He said he'd go have a cigarette and be back in half an hour. They had a little fight about this, but he went anyway. When he came back, the dress shop was closed and no one was there. So he thought they'd closed early and he went to the hotel and waited for his wife to meet him there. But she never went back to the hotel. He waited and waited, but she never came back. He talked to the police and the next day they went to the shop, but the people, people he recognized from the day before, said they had never seen the woman and she'd never been there. He stayed in Istanbul for weeks, but they never found his wife."
"And he thinks she was kidnapped by the people who owned the dress shop?"
Josh nodded. "Kidnapped. And sold."
"Sold?"
"That's right. Sold."
We sat in silence for a long time, listening to the jungle noises. After a while, Josh pulled me by my hand. "Come on," he said. "Let's go to sleep."
In the morning we boarded the minibus. The women who got on all had holes cut in their dresses where their nipples hung out and small children suckled. The men carried machetes, which they checked with the bus driver by tucking them under his seat. Many of the men had slash marks on their arms or faces and many were missing fingers and limbs, so it appeared that this precaution was a necessary one. I was reminded of the movies about the Wild West, where the gunslingers check their guns at the saloon door.
Several hours later we reached La Entrada. Everyone there carried a machete. We went to a bar to have a beer and a man walked in. Both his hands had been chopped off above the wrist and his nose was missing. "A machete did that," Josh said.
Suddenly I could not bear the thought of spending a moment alone. The story he had told me of the woman in Istanbul stayed in my mind and I knew that having heard it, I'd never be quite the same.
Josh was undecided about which direction he would take and I was undecided as to whether or not I would go with him. I wanted him to ask me. I thought that if he asked me, I'd go. From La Entrada there were buses to either coast and points east and west. The choices were infinite. But Josh had taken a liking to inland Honduras and the guidebook said there were some things to see in a neighboring town called Florida. "Look," Josh said. "How often are you going to be in this part of Honduras?"
"Not often," I said. And we hitched a ride with a farmer in the back of his pickup truck.
Josh had heard about a gas station attendant in Florida who knew everything there was to know about the Mayan ruins in the vicinity.
"I thought you were tired of ruins."
"Well, we're here. We may as well make the most of it."
We found the gas station attendant and he sent us in the direction of some ruins not far from the border. We crawled around in the heat of the day while Josh tried to decide what kind of people lived in this place. A dog that was skin and bones followed us. I threw him scraps of sandwich, but Josh kept trying to chase the dog away.
Later that night while a tropical breeze blew in through the windows of our small room, Josh told me he was going to go to Salvador. I thought to myself how, having lost all sense of proportion, I'd follow this man anywhere, and after about thirty seconds I said, "Mind if I come with you?"
"Not at all," he said. "But what about your boyfriend in Mexico?"
"What about him?"
"Well, won't he be upset?"
"Do you want me to go with you or not?" I asked, pressing the point.
"I want you to do whatever makes you happy," he said.
"Well, then I'm going with you."
He drifted right to sleep, but I stayed awake. I could not stop thinking about that woman he'd told me about the night before, a captive in some harem, a woman used and tossed aside, trying endlessly to plan her escape. A blonde among dark people. A woman who could not speak their tongue. Perhaps she had been ingenious, learning their ways, and had made a life for herself wherever her prison was. Perhaps she had fallen into the hands of a benevolent sheik who took pity on her, and though his pride would not permit him to release her, he would not abuse her, either.
But I think the scenario is much darker than this. That woman would never be free. She would never return. If it were me, when I realized that rescue wouldn't come, that I would not be found, that I would never go home and would always be a prisoner of men, I would lose my mind. I would die of grief or by my own hand.
In the morning we stood at the crossroads at La Entrada, waiting for the bus for Salvador. Until the bus arrived, I wasn't sure what I was going to do, but as soon as I saw it, kicking up dust, puffing in the distance, I knew what lay before me. When the driver stopped and opened the ancient door, I kissed Josh. "Have a safe journey," I said.
"What? Aren't you coming?"
"I'm going to Tegucigalpa." If he begs me, I told myself, I'll go.
"Well, whatever suits you."
He wasn't begging. He wasn't even asking. "Yes, I guess this suits me." I waved good-bye. Sitting on my duffel in the sun—though dreaming of the way I could have gone with him—I felt sure I was on the right road. About an hour later the bus for Tegucigalpa approached. The bus driver asked me if I was a gente de la sandía, a watermelon person. A joke on the Sandinistas, and I said no, I was a tourist from the United States. He nodded and I took a seat in the rear.
It was a big bus this time, heading for the capital. Not long after I boarded a young girl and her father got on, and they sat near the front. After about an hour the bus stopped and the father got off. He kissed his daughter good-bye and waved as the bus drove away. The girl was perhaps thirteen or fourteen and after a few moments she began to cry. She cried uncontrollably and the driver stopped. Women rushed to her, then came away shaking their heads. She was an idiot, one of the women told me. Her father had abandoned her here on this bus. "Too expensive to feed," the man behind me muttered. "Too expensive to keep."
In Tegucigalpa, exhausted and beginning to come down with a cold, I checked into a fairly expensive hotel, the Prado, for sixteen dollars. I was promised hot water, which was why I took the room. Upstairs, I unpacked, relaxed, and went to shower. There was no water at all. I called downstairs and waited for an endless period of time until they told me that none of the rooms on my floor had water and that I should move to another floor.
I wended my way lower and lower into the bowels of the hotel, in search of water, past broken windows, shrieking children, rooms above nightclubs and bars, past a parrot that kept screaming in Spanish, "Take out the garbage," into a kind of dungeonlike darkness of windowless basement rooms until I met a man whose mother had died in Madrid that morning and he had water and let me shower in his room. The man was very nice and I took the room next to his, a cheaper room than where I'd started, where I rested in this now dreary place, listening through the walls to the man whose mother had died, trying to get his call through to Madrid.
The Land of the Dead
AS I JOURNEY BACK FROM HONDURAS, I THINK OF my parents and try to make sense of the past. I wonder what has brought me from a small town in Illinois to what has now become my life. I imagine myself in other scenarios. Suburban housewife, veterinarian, pomo queen. This one I am living feels more viable, though I have no idea how it came to be. I wander the world, drifting between places and people. All I ever wanted was consistency, a kind of coherent life. What I have is flux.
I do not understand my relations with men. I have searched for love, yet always find those men who cannot love. These are the ones I care for with a deep passion. And the others, those who could love me, I mold into friends. I know I am not the only woman in the world who does this. I know many women who do the same.
My parents knew each other for six weeks before they married. He was forty-four. She was thirty-four. Neither of them ever thought they'd marry, though they were both attr
active and could have married many times. They were brought together by a gypsy. A woman who told my father, who had been away from Chicago for many years, that he would be called home by his brother and meet a woman through him. It was not long after the gypsy told him this that my father received a letter from his brother, pleading him to come and work with him.
My mother worked in the lingerie department at Saks. She had gone to grammar school with the wife of my father's brother, the woman who would soon become my aunt. My aunt stopped in to return a peach nightgown that my uncle had given her as a present. She recognized my mother. My mother once told me that she thought the nightgown would have looked very good on my aunt and that it was just a whim that made her return it. If my aunt had kept the gown, my mother says, I never would have been born.
It was not long after that that my father called. He said he had been going through the pants he was sending to the cleaners and found her number, which my aunt had stuffed into his pocket. Would she like to have dinner? When she walked out the door that evening, she told my grandmother that if she didn't like him, she would be home at ten. At nine-thirty my father said he was tired and would she mind if he brought her home. When she walked in the door, my grandmother was dismayed. "Oh, you didn't like him."
"On the contrary," my mother replied, "that's the man I'm going to marry."
Six weeks later she did. I was born exactly a year and a month after the wedding. They hardly knew one another at all when I was born. They learned about each other through having me. In the process of learning, they argued. Quarrels about lights being left on, dishes in the sink. My father longed for the neat, ordered, empty life of his bachelorhood. He could not stand the disorder of a family, the disarray children brought with them. And my mother, in this house of conflict, recognized the home life she'd thought she'd left behind.
To alleviate all this tension, I was the perfect child. I was obedient and cheerful, disciplined and polite. Unlike my younger brother, I did everything right. I played the piano, had many friends, got straight A's. I kept order and knew how to get out of the path of an oncoming tornado. I knew exactly how to break my bread and put away dishes to thwart a fight. But I was also leading a secret life.
I'd go to prom with the nice Jewish boy whose family belonged to our temple, then sneak off on school nights with the leader of a Puerto Rican gang. I'd make faces at my mother's cigarettes and smoke marijuana in the garage. I wrote thank-you notes, kept an accurate birthday book, twirled the baton on Flag Day, marched with pompons in the homecoming parade. I also stole car keys, slid down drain pipes, slipped off to the beach for a night of bonfires, beer, and adolescent boys.
No one could fault me. No one knew that underneath my propriety I was boiling over. On the surface I gave my parents whatever they wanted. I was a demilitarized zone, the buffer between them. I let them try to love each other through me. But beneath it all, I was plotting my escape, and when the time came, I was gone.
WHEN I RETURNED ALONE TO ALEJANDRO'S BARREN walls, his cold, lifeless apartment, only two days late, there was no sign of him anywhere. The laundry that hung on the line felt as if it had been dry for days. There was no food in the refrigerator. No sign of life. No soup or cold chicken, which wasn't like him. No note of greeting. He wasn't expecting me. Yet here I was, where I had no desire to be.
I waited. At about ten o'clock Marta arrived, looking miserable. "Oh, these buses. I can't stand it. Every week, the same thing. What are you doing here? Alejandro said he had no idea when you'd be back. We thought you'd be gone for months."
"I was gone for a few weeks," I reminded her, feeling hurt that my absence wasn't long enough.
"Yes, well, we didn't think you'd be back yet, that's all."
"Well, here I am," I said.
A few minutes later the door opened and Alejandro walked in with his brother, Ruben. Ruben had his saxophone in hand and it was clear they'd been drinking. They were laughing as they came in, then looked surprised to see me. "Maria," Alejandro said, rushing to me. He kissed me on the cheek. "You are back. What a surprise."
"Yes, here I am," I said again, wondering what I was doing here. "You didn't get my cable."
"No," he said.
"I can't believe you didn't get my cable." I thought how I could have gone with Josh all the way to Panama. On the other hand, it had been my choice not to.
"This is Mexico" was his reply.
For the next few days Alejandro and I hardly spoke to each other. At night we drifted to opposite ends of the bed. I was distracted and wanted to leave. But for some reason I found I couldn't be alone, even if it meant only going through the motions of being with someone.
After several days he said, "So, Maria, tell me. Is there someone else? Did you meet someone on your last journey?"
"I didn't meet anyone," I lied.
"Why is it so hard for me to believe you?"
"Look," I told him. "I really care for you."
"I know you met someone. You are not the same person who left a few weeks ago."
I debated telling him the truth, but it didn't make much sense, really. Josh was not someone who was going to be important in my life and Alejandro was someone I cared for, and I saw no reason to hurt him. But as I sat there in his apartment that evening, staying up late, smoking cigarettes and drinking beer, I wondered just what it was I was doing with my life. "Where will you ever find a man who will take care of you the way I do?" he said.
"Alejandro," I replied, "I am glad you take care of me. I appreciate it."
In truth, I was bored with it. I had been with men where I had to do all the work and I had hated that. I had been with men who didn't care and wouldn't lift a finger. But the opposite wasn't very satisfying, either, and I felt in my relationship with him more like a man than a woman.
"But I want something more equal. I want to share my life," I said.
Then he grew irate. "You don't know what you want, Maria. You say you want to share, but you don't do anything."
He was not entirely wrong about this, but he wasn't entirely right. "I do want to share, but we are very different. I come from a different culture."
He opened another beer. "You and your goddamn culture. You North Americans, you think you can just come down here with your dollars and take advantage of us."
I reached for his beer. "I am just trying to understand."
He pushed my hand away. "Fuck your understanding. Fuck all you gringos."
Later he came over and wrapped his arms around me. "I'm sorry," he said. "I love you."
"Don't drink so much," I told him.
He buried his head against my chest. I ran my hand through his thick black hair. "You know that I love you," he said.
Solitude became my profession, my calling, and what I did, I did alone. I practiced it as a physician practices his trade. I studied. I apprenticed. I developed expertise. I dwelled in these rooms with Alejandro and his stepmother, with the yellow TV, with books wrapped in brown paper, and could not find my own language anywhere. I lived with only one small, cracked mirror over the sink, and I could not find myself. Even when I was with Alejandro, I locked myself away. In my heart, at my core, I was alone.
I was surprised by my own skill. In New York, before departing, I had not been able to spend one minute alone, except to work. And as soon as it was done, I was out the door. I made frantic social dates with people I hardly knew and didn't care about. People who would invariably cancel, leaving me bereft and frightened by the prospect of solitude.
And now suddenly, unexpectedly, I turned inward. I encircled myself in solitude. I didn't know it at the time, but it was a kind of cloak around me. I convinced myself that it was language and culture that separated me from those around me. I did not need to go off into the woods, to the Arctic tundra, to a desert island. I was living in a city of eighteen million people, the most densely populated city of the world next to Tokyo, and I found that without much effort I could make myself completely alone.
I wanted to be near water, and thinking that perhaps we could patch things up, I suggested to Alejandro that we go to Veracruz for the weekend. Veracruz was on the gulf; it was supposed to be like Havana before the revolution. On Saturday morning at five A.M. we were on the first bus out. By about eleven, we had arrived in this city of arcades, promenades, mosaics, Caribbean music, mariscos, men in guayaberas, and the sea. I was thrilled to be near water and we checked into a hotel. We were both very tired and so after a long walk around the town and a stop for a beer and lunch of ceviche with horseradish sauce, we wandered back to the hotel for a rest.
When I woke, it was raining. It was raining hard, so I went back to sleep, thinking that the storm would pass. But when I woke again later, the storm was worse. The wind whipped past buildings and the sky was black. We could see the sea from our window and the waves were extremely high. We never left our room that evening. We slept and read and waited, but the storm did not subside. I kept waking up, thinking I must talk to Alejandro. I must tell him what is wrong. But I couldn't bring myself to wake him. In truth there was nothing wrong except that he wanted me to marry him and spend my life in Mexico, and I was dreaming of some drifter I'd encountered on the Honduran border.
I dozed in and out of sleep until dawn. Then I looked out and saw nothing but water. No streets, no sidewalks, no cars.
I woke Alejandro. There must have been five feet of water on the ground and we were stuck in this flood. Alejandro said there was nothing to do but wait, so I read and slept for a few more hours. When I next looked out, the water was gone. This storm, we learned that morning, is called an aguacero, and it comes with the wind they call El Norte. It brings a flood like that, but the city has learned how to cope, and the streets and sidewalks have drainage holes that take the floods out to sea.