The Hidden Light of Mexico City

by Carmen Amato

  “Ah,” he said.

  Luz looked up, suddenly realizing how arrogant her words must have sounded. “I’m sorry, señor. That was a rude thing to say.”

  “Not at all,” he said. “I can respect that. You’re probably very good at what you do.”

  “Hardly.” Luz continued to gently rub at the errant pencil lines. “I’m just stubborn.”

  “Do you mind if I watch?”

  Luz swallowed hard. “Not at all, señor.”

  She brushed away the erasures and selected a soft lead pencil. She redrew the shading, her eyes moving between the Tamayo building across the plaza and the paper on her lap. She was acutely aware of the man watching her, glorious in his leather jacket and hazel eyes, sunglasses dangling from his hand.

  Luz switched to a harder lead to fill in the three story stairway behind the glass facade, then chose yet a different one to soften the roofline with some fluffy clouds. As the drawing emerged in sharper detail, the humor was evident. The line of the building curved as if it was preening while the clouds leaned curiously, trying to see behind the glass.

  “You’re fantastic,” the man standing next to her said.

  Luz glanced up and electricity drilled right through her.

  He was smiling a wide genuine smile that lit his face and made the hazel eyes sparkle. His teeth were perfectly straight and white. He could have been a toothpaste ad, the kind with “Cleanliness is Healthy” on the bottom.

  “What are you going to call it?” he asked.

  “My sketches aren’t good enough to name,” Luz murmured.

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “See for yourself.” Luz held out the sketchpad.

  “Do you mind?” He indicated the bench next to her and Luz nodded. He sat down--not too close, not too far away--and clipped the sunglasses to the neckline of his shirt. She handed him the pad; it was half-filled with about 15 sketches.

  He studied the pictures. “These are very good.” He flipped to a detailed sketch of Santa Clara, all sepia tones and sad gravestones. “There’s a lot of soul in these pictures.”

  “Thank you,” Luz said faintly. There was a humming sound in her ears and she was dangerously and inexplicably happy that this beautiful stranger liked what she’d done.

  “But the funny ones are the best.” He turned back to the picture of the Tamayo. “This one is important. You have to name it.”

  “Really?”

  “Definitely.” He handed back the sketchpad.

  Luz selected a red pencil. She drew a tiny tomato sitting on top of one of the stairs about halfway up the flight. It was the only spot of color in the otherwise black-and-white drawing. She gave it a green stem and it became a perfect miniature vegetable, poking fun at the grandeur of the preening museum. She started to grin as she wrote “Tomato Tamayo” at the bottom.

  Luz turned the sketchpad so he could see it.

  “Tomato Tamayo?” He gave “tomato” the English pronunciation; he had understood the rhythm of the words right away. “Excellent. Very clever. But you didn’t sign it.”

  “It’s just a sketch.” Luz folded her hands primly in her lap, very conscious that he was solid and confident and knit together with a sort of taut energy. The humming sound was still in her ears. She fought a crazy urge to reach up and feel the muscle over his jaw and the smoothness of his shave. She put the red pencil back in the case instead.

  “You should sign everything you do,” he said seriously.

  “All right.” She found a pen and wrote “Luz de Maria” in black ink across the bottom corner. “There.”

  He cocked his head. “Your name is Luz de Maria? Is that right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Luz de Maria. That’s lovely.”

  “Thank you,” Luz said. The humming mixed with the scent of leather and soap and citrus to make her lightheaded.

  “I’m sorry for not introducing myself sooner. I’m Eduardo. Eduardo Cortez Castillo.”

  Of course his name is Eduardo Cortez Castillo, Luz thought wearily, crashing back to earth. There were no two more Spanish surnames in all of Mexico. He could probably trace his bloodline directly to Hernán himself.

  He looked at her expectantly.

  “I’m Luz de Maria Alba Mora,” Luz said, feeling all over again that she had no business talking to him.

  He offered his hand and she shook it. His grip was firm and dry. He didn’t try to hold her hand any longer than was appropriate or do anything else but give it a friendly shake.

  “It’s been a pleasure meeting you this morning, Luz de Maria Alba Mora. Thank you for letting me see an artist at work.”

  “You’re welcome,” Luz said. The humming was gone and she felt vaguely dishonest and foolish. Dishonest for letting him think she was a real artist, foolish for feeling so let down.

  Some people walked by, heading for the museum, and Luz glanced at her watch. He saw her looking at the time and stood up.

  “I guess the museum is open now?”

  “Yes.” Luz felt cold. She pulled down the sleeves of the pink sweater.

  He took a step backwards and looked at the museum. The huge doors were open. “Thank you for your time,” he said.

  “Enjoy the exhibits, Señor Cortez.”

  He nodded at her, almost a bow. A formal, old-fashioned gesture. He walked a few steps toward the museum then turned back to her. “Are there any exhibits you’d recommend?”

  “Oh. Well.” Luz tried to look nonchalant and not supremely happy he hadn’t just walked away. “I have the review of October’s artists if you’d like to see it.”

  “There’s a review?” he asked.

  “I read it every month.” Luz dove into the Prada tote for her notebooks and found the current Tamayo review. “Let’s see. There’s an exhibit of ‘vast multi-dimensional multi-medium works reflecting the solitude and insanity of the polar winter.’ It’s by an artist from Finland whose ‘works were expressed directly onto his personal structures.’”

  “Ah.”

  Luz looked up. “I think that’s a nice way of saying big murals with odd things jutting out of them, done on a barn door. And that he used lots of white.”

  Eduardo Cortez Castillo laughed, the wide smile lighting up his face. “Thank you for the translation. I think. What does what does ‘multi-medium’ mean?”

  “Like this.” Luz picked up her pencil case and rattled the pencils inside. “The pencil and the paper are my mediums of creativity. It just means what the artist uses to create. This artist just used many different things to create a single piece of artwork.”

  “I get it. So this ought to be pretty good?”

  “Yes.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Well, there is a new exhibit from Nadia Porov. She’s Russian, very clever.” Luz read the review to him. “‘Nadia Porov proves once again that she can enthrall and stimulate the viewer with her exceptional choice of materials, elevating the mundane and juxtaposing the ordinary with the necessary to achieve the sublime.’”

  He gave her a questioning look, seemingly on the brink of laughter.

  Luz fought a great wave of silliness. “Nadia Porov is really quite good. I saw one of her exhibits two years ago. Took up the entire wing.” Luz gestured at the left side of the Tamayo. “It was amazing. She’d made this enormous ship, all out of . . . of . . .” Luz trailed off as she remembered.

  “Yes?”

  “It’s not important.”

  “But now I need to know,” he said, as if she was making a joke.

  “Toilet paper,” Luz replied, her face scarlet to be sure.

  He threw his head back and roared unabashedly.

  “Are you laughing at me?” Luz started to giggle.

  “Yes,” he said breathlessly. “How many rolls?”

  “Seven thousand four hundred and two.” It had been a memorable exhibit.

  He dropped onto the bench and his shoulders shook with laughter. The silliness rolled over Luz
and she found herself nearly hysterical. Several people in the plaza looked at them, helpless with mirth on the bench.

  “Ah, Madre de Dios, I needed that.” Eduardo Cortez Castillo took a deep breath and shook his head. “I haven’t laughed that hard in a long time.”

  His eyes sparkled at her. The museum and the woods and the people in the plaza all faded away. The sun shone brightly and Luz felt happiness bubble up inside her.

  They kept smiling at each other, something connecting, the electric current humming again, until Luz remembered who she was. She closed the notebook and picked up the pencil case just so her hands would have something to do.

  “Right. Of course,” he said and stood. “I guess I’d better go see some art before the crowds get too bad. My apologies again for intruding on your time.”

  “Not at all.” Luz didn’t meet his eyes. “It was very nice meeting you, Señor Cortez.”

  “Egualmente, señorita.” He bowed again, that beautiful formal gesture, then turned and went toward the museum. Luz watched him go. He had a powerful, athletic stride; one foot precisely in front of the other. The back of the leather blazer swung gently from side to side as he walked away.

  Luz leaned against the back of the bench and closed her eyes. She needed to head to the zoo or el lago and come back later. If she went into the Tamayo now she’d see him again and do something stupid.

  As she bent over and put everything back into the Prada tote, she suddenly found herself looking at the crisp hems of a pair of khaki pants.

  “I don’t suppose you would consent to take some time off from your work to play tour guide?” Eduardo Cortez Castillo asked.

  Luz craned her neck.

  “I hate listening to those recordings, you know,” he went on. “The kind you carry around that tell you what you’re seeing.”

  “They don’t have them at the Tamayo,” Luz said faintly.

  “Ah, well.” The perfect eyebrows went up and down in mock consternation. “Right.” The sunglasses tapped across his thumb. “So. The problem is worse than I thought.”

  “A predicament, señor,” Luz said. Her bones left and she sagged against the bench.

  “You would be doing the art world a great service.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Educating the ignorant.”

  The sun was still shining. He stood there and smiled at her. Luz drank in the close-cropped hair, expensive clothes, hazel eyes. She simply had to walk away.

  “I would be honored to be your guide, Señor Cortez,” a voice like hers said. Luz stood up and put the Prada tote on her shoulder, straightened the Chanel sweater, and flipped her ponytail loose from where it had gotten caught up in the Hermés scarf.

  “My friends call me Eddo.” He held out his hand and Luz shook it for the second time that morning. Maybe it was her imagination or just wishful thinking but the handshake lasted a little longer this time.

  “Eddo, then,” Luz’s voice said.

  “And do your friends call you Luz de Maria or just Luz?”

  “Luz is fine.”

  He made a courtly little gesture for her to proceed and together they walked across the plaza and into the Tamayo.

  '

  The first thing they saw was the “polar night” exhibit, composed of huge murals of rough pine, white and complicated. According to the museum description the artist had painted the murals after his wife died of exposure during a harsh winter.

  “He must have loved her a lot,” Luz sighed when she finished reading about the artist and his dead wife. And then cringed inside because she’d said love to a man she hardly knew.

  “These are his scars from loving her so much,” the man she hardly knew said. Luz blinked in surprise.

  They wandered to an exhibit of short video presentations by a Danish filmmaker. Nine flat screens were arranged in a pattern against three black walls. They flashed on as Luz and Eddo stood in the dim room. Each showed a different view of the same train in fast motion, complete with blaring soundtracks. The effect was immediately shocking and disorienting. As they stumbled out of the room Eddo said “Tell me how that was art,” and Luz honestly replied “I can’t, I’m too dizzy,” which made him laugh. He put out a hand to steady her and the clatter of the trains gave way to the humming in her head.

  Next was a curving wall of seascapes by a Chilean painter, long horizontal canvases of rocks and angry seas. Luz pointed out the impasto technique, making Eddo step close to the canvas to see the individual daubs then back away so that the whole picture emerged.

  They walked through several more rooms of sculpture, paintings, and an exhibit of gigantic silk banners decorated with Japanese characters. According to the description, the banners contained important modern poetry railing against the electronic world.

  Eddo turned to Luz. “I guess it’s too much to expect that you read Japanese.”

  “I used to,” Luz replied, her tongue running away with her. “But then my cell phone destroyed my artistic soul.”

  Eddo gave an unexpected guffaw. “Let’s go, Kagemusha.” He ushered her toward the Porov exhibit.

  The exhibit hall was full of enormous puffy white sculptures. They were twice as big as life size. The centerpiece was a fire truck, complete with ladder and hoses and tires as tall as Luz. It was surrounded by faceless firefighters holding hoses. The odd white material, combined with an eerie lighting and discordant background music, gave the space an other-worldly quality.

  “What’s this medium called?” Eddo asked, running his hand over the truck wheel.

  Luz stepped closer, realized what Porov had used, and her face flushed. “Napkins,” she murmured.

  “What?” Eddo said, bending his head down to hers. “Did you say napkins?”

  He smelled wonderful. “Yes,” Luz whispered.

  “Dinner napkins? Paper?”

  “Not that kind.”

  “Cotton?” Eddo was still touching the fire truck. Luz wished the guard would tell him to stop but of course no one did.

  “Sanitary.” Luz could barely get the word out. “Feminine hygiene products.”

  Eddo snatched his hand away as if he’d been burned.

  Luz swallowed laughter. “‘Exceptional choice of material,’” she quoted softly.

  “Are we done here?” Eddo’s mouth twitched.

  “Yes, I think so.”

  Once outside they both burst out laughing.

  “Dios mio.” Luz found a tissue to wipe her streaming eyes. “Nadia Porov is just . . . so . . .”

  “A con artist,” Eddo supplied.

  “No, that’s why the Tamayo is so wonderful. People with imagination, such nerve.”

  “Nothing as good as your drawings,” he scoffed.

  “No.” Luz shook her head. The ponytail swung. “I just have these little sketches and some paintings at home. No nerve.”

  While they’d been in the Tamayo the plaza had filled with people. The crowd was mostly mestizo; noisy knots of people with baby carriages and children eating cotton candy from the vendors in front of the nearby Anthropology Museum.

  “I’d like to pay you back for being such a great guide,” Eddo said. “Let’s go over to Jardin del Arte. You must know it. I want to show you that your pictures are better than anything else out there.”

  “Yes, I know it,” Luz said, surprised at his suggestion. Jardin del Arte was a huge outdoor art market, where every Sunday hundreds of artists brought their paintings to sell. It was also the cheapest place to get paints, drawing supplies, frames, and blank canvases.

  “My car’s parked just on the other side of the trees.” He gestured to indicate the dirt lot on the edge of Avenida Mahatma Gandhi.

  Luz swallowed. Going into the museum was one thing, getting into a car and letting him take her someplace was another. A lot of women had died getting into cars with strangers in Mexico City. But this charade she was playing was even more dangerous. Obviously he assumed she was someone other than a muchacha on h
er day off.

  He mistook her hesitation for something else. “Were you supposed to be meeting someone?”

  “No,” Luz said automatically and mentally kicked herself. He’d given her an opportunity to walk away and she’d missed it.

  “Is your car here?”

  “No, I walked,” Luz said.

  “You walked? From where?”

  “Lomas Virreyes,” Luz said, watching for his reaction, waiting for him to finally catch on.

  “Good for you.” He checked out her rubber-soled work loafers with seeming admiration. “So on to Jardin del Arte?”

  “I don’t think so.” Luz took a step back, trying to put some distance between temptation and the smart thing to do. “But thank you for asking.”

  “Look,” he said. “I don’t want you to think I’m some sort of lunatic who goes trolling for pretty women at the museum. There are a lot of locos in this city but I’m not usually one of them.” He pulled out a slim leather wallet and thrust it at her. “Here.”

  “I don’t want your wallet,” Luz exclaimed, more surprised than if he’d pulled out a gun or cocaine or a monster. No one flashed a wallet in Mexico City unless they wanted to lose it immediately and die at the same time.

  “Take it,” he said and tipped the corner toward her. “If I do anything in the car you don’t like, toss it out the window. My license is in there. I guarantee I’ll stop the car to go get it.”

  Luz laughed shakily and pressed a hand to her temple. Everyone knew that getting or renewing a driver’s license was a bureaucratic horror, requiring multiple visits to delegación offices and a couple of bribes as well. Replacing a lost one would be an endless nightmare.

  “You must be a terrible risk taker,” she said.

  “More of a creative problem solver.”

  Luz took the wallet and opened it. The license was encased in a plastic display pocket. “Eduardo Martín Bernardo Cortez Castillo,” she read aloud. There was an address on Avenida Constituyentes and an impossibly handsome grainy ID picture.

  “That’s me,” he said. “Although I’ll have to ask you to forget the Bernardo. Named after my uncle.”

  “Was he loco, too?” Luz snapped the wallet shut and tried to hand it back. “I’m not taking your wallet.”