Crazy Sorrow

by Vince Passaro

  You know how expensive this is? George said.

  We’ll charge for it, Burke said. The four-dollar ceiling will be breached.

  Which lowers the volume so I ask again do you know how expensive this will be?

  We’re gonna sell the beans, man. The beans. We shall become purveyors of some of the finest coffees in the world and be a standing example of how those coffees should be handled.

  They opened their first coffee bar in the West Village, appropriately enough, in the space where their third store had been. They had to close for two weeks to adapt the place. It was large enough. Or so they thought. There was a surprising amount of publicity, the Voice covered it, some of the free weeklies. The Times had called but so far no one had come.

  And it was a success. It had been a loss leader and a heavy one at first but Burke was right: when they got the beans the net slowly, grudgingly turned positive.

  This was George’s introduction to Mexico. In 1996 after the first peace agreement he flew down and visited the fincas in the Soconusco region of Chiapas, the rich coastal lands with the Pacific on the western edge and the shaded mountains on the east. The big city on the coast, Tapachula, was a smaller version of Marseille and Bari and other coastal crossover towns, roiling with illegality. Immigrants, drugs, other goods traveling between Mexico and Central America. You could almost smell the blood on the knives. George managed to find a good guide (the fellows in San Francisco made an introduction) who took him up into the mountains. The roads were rough even in the dry season and even with a Jeep; they were stuck a few times. Haberman, it turned out, was a native of Chiapas, born in La Concordia on the other side of the mountains, moved to this estate when he was two; he’d gone back to Europe to attend school and university, returning to take over the finca. You could see the German in him, he was a head taller or more than everyone around him, deep-tanned, bald, blue-eyed. In his midfifties. Rangy with a slight stoop.

  He had a twenty-seven-year-old daughter, Isabel, part Tzotzil Maya, from her mother’s side. Fairer and taller than the others, than her mother certainly, but not so much that one didn’t recognize her as from that part of the world. Her mother and other women on the finca wore traditional dresses or wide pants and the embroidered blouses made locally, with much red and deep purple; Isabel was in boots, fatigues, belted military shirt-jacket. George checked her for a gun but she didn’t appear to be carrying one; just a sheath with a knife, typical for the place. Typical for the men of the place, that was to say. She was something else altogether. Neither friendly nor unfriendly. Not in the coffee business, it seemed clear.

  Three days he stayed with the Habermans and saw the workings of the finca. It was early October and the harvest was full on. Bringing in the cherries from around the finca, sorting them for the ripest, laying them out on drying beds, keeping at them every day, turning and raking to make sure there was no fermentation. Once the cherries were dry the outer husks broke open and were easier to remove, leaving the beans. Some cherries were cultivated for more bushes, taken into the greenhouse, kept in shade, nurtured along. Every bit of it was labor intensive. George thought about what they were getting per sixty-kilo sack of beans and wondered how in hell they kept it profitable. The family all spoke English with him, the mother least well but adequately for informational purposes and sometimes he could make her laugh. He didn’t understand her name and so couldn’t retain it—her husband and daughter had a diminutive nickname for her, something like “Credi” but not quite—so he called her señora to stay safe.

  Hot water was in short supply but so was cold water so it worked out. The shower ran just hard enough to wash and rinse in. Which was good because the humidity was such that he needed two per day, rather than be soaked with sweat that wouldn’t dry. After each he coated himself in DEET. The spray became like a cologne. He’d brought only four shirts but the servant—another unpronounceable name—washed his. They came back lightly starched and pressed. Life wasn’t hard enough, she had to starch and iron the linen—his shirts included. At dinner the first two nights Isabel had been seated beside him. She warmed to him a little. He found her breathtaking, almost literally: every time he had to talk to her directly his throat felt like it was closing on him. On the second night, as on the first, the dishes were cleared by her mother and, George had been startled to see, her father, along with the lone servant who’d done George’s shirts, who besides her house duties cooked and served all the meals. There was a dorm for the workers (that’s where his guide was staying for three days) with its own mess provisions. After the first meal George had tried to help but he’d been sat down with dispatch. On this second night, before the coffee, which was superb, served black, small cup, sweet with its oils and saccharides and particular acids, Isabel leaned over and said, You know about our revolution, yes? Our struggle against the corporations and the neoliberal servant governments?

  Zapatistas? he said.

  We say EZLN, she said. Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional. But it is more than that. It is a movement of the Indigenous people. Against global capitalism.

  I wish you luck with that, he said.

  You are a global capitalist yourself, she said. No?

  Well, no. I’m not rich enough—we’re not rich enough. We just have a chain of cafés. We’re not looking to move production around the world in search of cheap labor while strong-arming governments to drop worker protections and environmental protections and the usual tariffs on moving goods in and out of the country. So no. I’m not a global capitalist.

  So you get it? she said.

  He was silently amused at her use of you get it. The colloquial had a slightly comic feel when delivered, even with a mild accent, in a foreign place.

  If not approving of all that qualifies as getting it, then yes. But I’m still a rich northerner who has never suffered as a result of these things.

  Do you vote for the Democrats?

  If I absolutely must, he said. I often vote third party but we don’t really have any effective third parties.

  You should have voted for Perot! she said, and laughed. Anti-global, yes?

  She pronounced global as GLOW-bal, the last syllable rhyming with the name Al.

  Yeah, but there was some other crap attached to it that didn’t look so good. You know the word crap?

  Mierda, she said.

  Yeah, basically, he said. Crap also means just claptrap—which is junk. The kind of things that fall out of your closet when there’s too much stuff in it.

  Claptrap, she said.

  Yes, he said.

  EZLN are not claptrap, she said.

  No, I don’t think so, he said, looking at her. Her eyes were tea-brown.

  We need your support, she said.

  We? George said, gesturing around.

  My parents too, yes. They support. Some of the coffee money goes there. The government does not like it.

  No doubt.

  She looked at him.

  How much are you looking for? George asked.

  Twelve percent of the coffee price.

  I can’t have the company paying. It’s totally illegal. Which means it endangers everyone who works for us. What about ten thousand dollars right now, from me? Personally? We have to leave the company out of it.

  Twenty, she said.

  My my, he said. You’re something.

  I am what thing?

  You’re very—remarkable, George said.

  Thank you, she said. So it is twenty thousand.

  You can’t take a check, I assume, George said. Obviously I don’t have the cash. I’m going to have to call the U.S. to set up a transfer to a bank here. You tell me which one.

  In Tapachula, she said. I have a bank. But it cannot go into an account here. You have to get it in cash.

  Call your bank and get the information to transfer the money, then we’ll go to pick it up.

  When she had the information he called, and after some muscular, New York–rich-asshole
finagling got the manager of his banking group to promise the money in twenty-four hours. He rode with her next day in one of the ranch’s Land Rovers, which handled the terrain better than the Jeep had done. It was a drive of an hour and a half or a bit more, down to the coast. She knew the bank; she knew which banker. Something illicit, clearly, and well established. It was not, on the Mexican end, legal to turn it into cash, but they did. Anything for a price. George never set his hands on it. A sum less than twenty thousand—mostly in dollars, he noticed—was put in a yellow envelope. The peso was losing value by the day, so dollars in an envelope offered the best interest rate around.

  How much did you have to kick back, he asked Isabel on the way home.

  Three thousand, she said.

  He whistled.

  It could be worse, she said.

  He asked her, Did you go to university?

  Of course, she said.

  Mexico City?

  Yes.

  What did you study?

  You will laugh, she said. Poetry. You yanquis always laugh at poetry.

  I don’t laugh at poetry, he said.

  Do you know any Mexican poetry? I mean know of it? Not to say out loud from memory.

  I know Octavio Paz.

  Octavio Paz is very great, she said. You should know also Jaime Sabines. He’s from here. From the capital, up north. Tuxtla. You know Tuxtla?

  I had to come through it to get down here, George said. Big town.

  Sabines was born the year they opened the library in Tuxtla. The first library in Chiapas. He wrote love poems.

  Ah, said George.

  The best love poems.

  Why are they the best?

  Because they are mystical and, how do you say it… Of the earth?

  Earthy?

  Yes, earthy. They are mystical and they are earthy.

  I’ll read him. In English, I’m afraid.

  Better than nothing, she said. Then she said: un olor a tierra recién nacida, a mujeres que duermen con la mano en el sexo, complacidas…

  George looked at her. She had a particular smile. Throwing erotic lines at him in the Land Rover.

  She said, Y se van llorando, llorando, la hermosa vida.

  That’s crying crying, George said. The beautiful life.

  Si, profesor. You could read the poems in Spanish.

  I’ll get a dual-language copy, he said.

  Okay, she said. She said almost nothing the rest of the ride, nothing that night at dinner, and early in the morning he left with his guide to see the fincas farther east in the mountains. As they drove off the ranch he saw her standing outside the gates. When she saw them coming she turned and walked into the forest. No wave, no smile. He got the message: she had waited there to show him she was carrying in the money.

  Coming home, the guide drove him to Oaxaca, where he got a direct flight to Houston. Arriving he’d had to fly to Veracruz, hop to Tuxtla on a propeller plane over the mountains, then hire a car to take him down to Tapachula. He couldn’t get the place out of his mind: the mountains, the clouds topping them, pink skies, the deep sounds of the rain forest, and how the birds and insects and other animals, the monkeys and anything else that could make noise at night, did. He kept wondering why the Europeans had to come and fuck it all up—but then he wouldn’t be standing there taking it in, would he.

  When he told Burke on his return that he’d given her twenty thousand dollars, Burke almost jumped out of his executive desk chair.

  You what? You what?

  My own money, George said. A bank transfer.

  Oh man, you must have a thing for this woman. You left a trail as wide as Sherman marching through Georgia. You’re fucking crazy.

  It was a charitable donation to the poor of the village around the ranch, George said. I was very moved by their strength and nobility. Nothing wrong with that.

  Yeah, wait til the SWAT teams arrive at your house. It’ll be way worse than if you were giving classified information to the newspapers. They’ll probably just shoot you.

  And you’ll mourn, George said.

  Yeah, Burke said. Right.

  * * *

  NEW STORES PLANNED: Denver, Portland, LA. In the east, Charleston, Georgetown, New Haven, Boston (three), Burlington, Portland. Discussions about whether to go into the malls. George’s position was that there was no other way to reach the suburban market. Small local malls. Separate structures in the parking fields. Burke was against it but not ironclad so there continued to be meetings. George accused him of snobbery.

  High-end branding relies on this thing you call snobbery, Burke said.

  Cold drinks: iced regular tea, iced medium-roast coffee, iced Americano (espresso with cold water). Iced herbal teas, a rotating crew of them.

  Hot tea and various roasts of coffee with steamed milk, foamed milk, warm milk (skim, 1 percent, whole and half-and-half), soy milk, almond milk. Or, as George and Burke had always taken it: black. Cranberry tea, lemongrass and mint tea. Chamomile, the preferred herbal tea of Peter Rabbit after he’s eaten too many vegetables from Mr. McGregor’s garden. George never forgot Mrs. McGregor having baked Peter’s father in a fucking pie. The kids hearing the story never reacted to this—after he read it to Nate he started asking around. They completely took this in stride.

  George brought in linden-flower tea. It was seasonal like the pumpkin stuff. A big hit. Iced and hot.

  Where’d you get that? Burke asked him.

  Our nanny makes it, George said. Picks the flowers in the park in June. Though she told me—she was very grave on this point—she’s Ecuadoran but linden tea is not Ecuadoran, it’s Cuban. She had a Cuban tía abuela who used to give it to her. With sugar.

  Within a few years, linden tea and all the rest would be in seven hundred stores in sixteen countries.

  * * *

  SOME GIRL’S GONNA see that dress and crave that day like crazy… It was mid-1990s and she was near forty when she decided she had to accept the fact that she would be childless: she had not expected to be so; had not expected to marry so briefly and so badly; she had been, back in her college days, visibly ambitious and, it seemed to some, smart at a level that was intimidating; but she’d never been doctrinaire about men or marriage or family… It turned out that everyone was so conventional. At twenty, at Barnard, after the thing with Susan and her boyfriend, which she did not repeat despite entreaties, she’d had an affair with a woman, a graduate student in philosophy who, as far as Anna could guess, had likely still not finished her dissertation, something about phenomenology, Teilhard de Chardin seen in the light of Heidegger or vice versa, she couldn’t remember. Now Anna was doing so again; it wouldn’t last long, she knew. She’d have to remember to have another affair with a woman at sixty. Which would be when, 2017. An unimaginable year. She would work on keeping her figure; there were hot women at sixty. That’s what she wanted at the moment. Since there would be no child. This woman, Helen, was six or seven years older than Anna and had achieved early greatness by being put out of her prep school in 1970 for refusing to remove her black leather gloves and sunglasses in class and then raising the Viet Cong flag during the national anthem at a football game. She drifted across country. Hitchhiked as bait. Men, cars. She had been one to keep her psychic bruises fresh back then. And physical and sexual bruises. She made some use of it all: for half a dozen years or a bit more, she’d made a living as a dominatrix in Brooklyn.

  You get your underwear at Target? Helen said. Helen was kneeling and Anna was standing before her holding her head: funny as she heard the voice to feel with her fingertips the words vibrate slightly in Helen’s skull… It’s the vowels that vibrate. Uuuuhhhnn-deeehhr-weaaahhhhrr. Helen had begun to roll Anna’s underpants down. Standard bikini, black, lacy waist, cotton and Lycra.

  Anna looked down to her underwear. Do they look bad? she said. I don’t think they look bad.

  No, I like them, Helen said. Of course I like them better rolled up on the floor. She pulled them
down to Anna’s feet and Anna stepped out of them, first left foot, then right.

  But I mean, Target.

  They’re fine, Anna said. Don’t be so fucking bourgeois. You were a revolutionary, weren’t you?

  The word bourgeois sent a bolt of aggression through both of them. Anna felt the arousal like waves rising and receding and crashing back and, not quite regular, rising again and crossing paths at the shore; and there was this strong pull like the undertow, a pull pulling at her, as if Helen’s whole mouth were pulling something out of her, and she tried to let it go, to give it, but she couldn’t. Not yet. They stopped, both heaving. Helen’s face shone, wet; she left a trail up Anna’s belly, kissing it.

  It all had started because she’d looked up voluptuous Susan on the Internet at work. Voluptuous Susan from that night against the wall of the library, the wind, the wind, she’d felt it running up her legs like a strong hand. A reference in the Barnard magazine class notes. Susan lived in the city. They had a drink and it was clear what Anna was thinking about; but Susan was married and not looking for that. She insisted Anna meet Helen. You’ll like Helen, she said.

  But she always went back to men. Some habit: some goddamned unabated longing—for her marriage? For her lost brother? For her absent-even-while-present father? Some recuperation. But she hadn’t really meant it, any of it, in a while. Just the company. She liked the sexual companionship, needed it, from a certain kind of man she had trouble finding and, with them being that sort of man, would never be able to hold on to; nor should she ever want to hold on to them if she knew what was good for her. They had to be smart and they had to be aloof to the point of granite incapacity for emotion; they could not feel need, they could only feel want. Then some nice man would come along and, sure, she’d give it a try. She should like such men, after all. But immediately they took everything more seriously than they had any reason to take it, which was a drag, and not really a surprise. Men yield so easily to their grandiose dreams, their romantic visions of themselves. And so now, here was a three-month relationship destroyed by a man saying “I love you”—after sex, the worst time, although, with him, there would never have been a good time. In the moments when he built up to it, just before he spoke, she felt it coming. She thought, No, no, don’t do it. Her Don’t—! coincided with his I lo— so that no further discussion was needed. She rolled away from him, onto her back, covered her face with her hands, as if she’d just seen a friend die.