Lyria feels a mortal difference between last night and today. She has met the source of her anxiety, and the source met her. More importantly, at a level we can safely call critical, that source is now the source of salvation. Lyria must speak with Mrs. Mayfair, who springs to mind just as water flows freely in a weary traveler’s fancy.
Need is the overwhelming sensation of the hour, and it is upon her and her men. Just as any man or woman from any class in Mexico knows, so Lyria learns of the fundamental need of a radically different practicality. Antonio is gone forever, unless this basic need can be met.
Stocking her cart in the laundry room, filling the modular holders with soaps, shampoos, lotions, cream rinses, shower caps, shoe cloths, tissues, toilet papers, bath towels, and face towels, she cannot imagine how to make contact again with the Mayfair woman without looking entirely suspicious.
For one thing, Lyria is dark-skinned. For another, she has nothing to wear but this foolish dress that won’t do by the pool, and even if it would, she shaved her legs, and how in the world would that be construed? A maid by the pool in a party dress with shaved legs? She’s mixing in, attempting to climb; that’s how. Next thing you know she’ll be attempting to climb out, ordering fancy drinks with fruit slices for facial features. No, that won’t do and will only result in her losing her job, which is all that separates her from the fundamental abyss, on the edge of which she can barely live the lovely life through next week. Unemployment would starve her and her poor mother.
The only alternative is her maid uniform. She thinks this in the act of changing into her uniform, the spare she keeps for midweek, and here she is changing on Sunday. No; it’s a bad idea. Maids at the pool are in violation of hotel policy and again she would risk immediate termination.
Yet properly attired and with her cart stocked, she sees another way. The clock says seven-thirty, so she isn’t so late, maybe fifteen minutes, or thirty, depending on early checkouts for early flights.
Watching the clock, she moves with faith and beyond with the most fervent prayer; that a lowly maid can rise como el burro que toco la flauta, with the best of luck, like the burro who played the flute. She knows she has only to knock on the door—Mrs. Mayfair’s door—as knock she must. The shortest route is often best and is always a straight line, or so Antonio would say. The straight line in this application will require information from the room monitor. Asking is easy as punching in the letters to spell the filthy name, and she experiments with spellings for Mayfair, beginning with Mefer on floor two but going directly to Mayfair, because the red-haired whore with the pechas grande is not Mexican, nor does she stay on the twelfth floor. This we know for certain. If the puta were on the twelfth floor, Lyria would have changed floors for practical reasons.
If Lyria can only find the room number, she can simply go and knock, which will entail the risk of running into the maid for that floor, but that risk is certainly better than the pending avalanche at poolside. She can most likely see where the other maid’s cart sits and then duck down to Mrs. Mayfair’s room at the right time. Alone. Without her own cart, which she will park on the twelfth floor as if working there.
Good. But where is the whore dog daughter of a whore? Only up to floor nine in her search of the listings, Lyria fears an assumed name, or perhaps the name of a man. Or of several men. She scans, losing the composure so recently gained, fearing too much time lost in this hopeless search. She jumps when Theresa comes in. Running her gamut of silly facial reactions to this guest leaving, that guest staying, those guests checking out sooner or later, Lyria wonders how anyone can be as stupid and slow as Theresa. Taking another lesson from Antonio, she casually goes back to the listing by names of the guests and finds Mrs. Mayfair, finally, in 1801, the nasty bitch. She, Lyria, should have known that such a shameless one would need the best room in the hotel for her pornographic games. Never mind, because the past is no more than imagery that may well be gone forever, imagery of a hard-working young woman who loves life and wants the chance to raise a family in moderate comfort. Imagery compounds with pinga-thrusting and ear-holding, because circumstance can make for strange bedfellows. But if all is lost, what difference will it make?
Meanwhile, at the bottom of the lower steps between the pool deck and beach, Baldo tends to the turtle babies with one eye southward. The woman and children rifle the dead coals and tortillas. So what is Baldo to do, tell them to stop? No, he only watches with one eye and wonders what kind of man could go through the motions of finding a woman and having babies of his own while living with so little regard for the lives of others. Did he think his hunger a justification for murder? Baldo stops and stands straight and considers himself as a murderer but then shakes his head. This is a very difficult reality to accept. Condemning a man to death may seem justified in a moment of passion, but here he stands with little pieces of innocent fish. Is he not guilty too?
No, he is not. For one thing, these little pieces were game fish, creatures of high speed and predatory habit who understand the nature of killing or being killed. Trumpet fish are reef fish merely seeking contact and dialogue. They hurt nothing and eat only the tiniest specks, and a tiny speck doesn’t know if it’s swimming in the dark depths of an ocean or on its way to becoming a fish turd anyway, so no harm is done. No, he, Baldo only enforced the greater law of God and nature, which stipulates compassion and quickness in all killing, or at least in most killing. This law often differs from the law of men. And women—like the one now shrieking lament, hurling faggots and avocados.
What is she mourning, the loss of love, or the loss of her provider? She looks unlovely, but Baldo suspects that most women do, sooner or later, once the marriage and children are done with. He suspects the same of men, but men are different, as long as they can make the pinga stand up straight. When a man grows very old and cannot perform, then he too is of little use. Baldo cannot reason how or why it is that the men stay with the women when the women turn too ugly for what the men want. The men may turn ugly too, but the women always want what the men have, as long as the men can pay. But none of these things matter. Nor does Baldo care who turns what or when, for he thinks he’ll grow old in the company of thriving and abundant nature, in which beauty fades and comes again every day. He won’t worry for any woman or man, especially if they are old and ugly.
He suspects that some men and women do stay in the bond and care for each other and that the reason is love, which comes from familiarity and convenience. Maybe what is intimately known becomes part of oneself, which must make a thing easier to love, because we love our self. If we didn’t, we would change. You might think nobody would want to fuck a trumpet fish, but then another with just such scales and funny fins and long snout would want to.
Or, take the tone-deaf bird, who most people assume to live without romance with such a discordant serenade. Rrrik. Rik Uk. Urik Rik. Rrrrrik. Yet those from whose heartstrings a chord is plucked, also know that a call of love, however ghastly, is tuneful to she of the similar feather, beak, and persuasion. Only once did Toucan warble his throaty song, sounding more like Gustavo Garza after a night of drowned sorrows than a troubadour. Toucan’s effort for vibration and tone comes no closer to melody than a big fat bill stuck through the bars can come to flight. Toucan mostly only whispers, yet some comprehend his forlorn rasping and what he wants to say. He does say it. He wants something different. Who in the world could not see this or hear this or know this? This comprehension is as well the stuff of love. Yet how loveless the world remains for him and his cage.
Baldo speculates that love comes from memory too, which has a way of shaping things for the good, lovably. His love for his mother is perhaps greater than it would be in person, had she not died and taken her nasty habit with her. At least his father called it a nasty habit and called it good riddance when she left with the last of it. Baldo was only a baby then and knew her so briefly that she remains unsullied in memory as the lovely woman who introduced him to touching and whe
tted his appetite for the suckle.
His few memories of her have played a million times but still they play with fervor, recalling her just as she was, which was perfect and silent, like him. De tal madre, tal hijo, he laughs; from such a mother, such a son, which is a joke of course, because everyone knows a son should reflect his father. His father appears frequently in his thoughts as well, yet the years of struggle soil the memory of his poor father with fatigue, poverty, hunger, and a paltry longing that seems his prevailing legacy.
Still, the perfect love he holds for his long-dead mother can’t be the same as romance. Romance makes a pinga grow tall and requires candles and flowers and perhaps some chocolate. He wonders if he would have wanted to fuck his mother and glances down. No, he knows such a thing cannot be good, or else the boys on the street wouldn’t glare with such hatred when making reference to it.
What he knows with greater certainty is that the fisherman was guilty of murder, cruel and senseless murder, which must be the very worst kind. He, Baldo, feels neither guilt nor regret but rather relief that such a man no longer exists. He did not choose to enforce the law of nature or wield the hand of God any more than he could have chosen to refuse. He simply yielded to the ineluctable source within, which he feels with certainty was God and is God, so soundly was the need for action revealed to him. The action was easy insofar as it came natural as sunrise, without thought or predilection, merely swinging decisively at that which is wrong, which is different than right. As for two wrongs failing to make things right, well, life is a messy business. Justice is approximate, equations hardly ever balanced.
Such assessment could be damned in church, but Baldo is content to conduct his own services, they’re so much easier to follow. Jesu Cristo, the fisherman said, as if Chuco Himself would condone such sinful behavior there at the scene of the crime in God’s own surf.
What? A wanton casual murderer can relax with Chuco, Who picks his teeth and reads a newspaper while standing by with Divine Intervention for the evil fisherman who idly murders trumpet fish while waiting for a decent bluefish to swim along? No, Señor, Jesu doesn’t fish. He has greater consequence to process, like cruel and senseless murder.
Like his brother before him, Baldo wonders how The Maestro let it come to this, and why a skinny, mute brother like himself was chosen to swing the blade of justice. He returns to his work with vigor as the woman and her children slog laboriously up the beach under the burden of what the fisherman left behind and their grief over his loss, whatever that loss represents.
Lyria knocks on the door and listens, perhaps for the fat red man in Mrs. Mayfair’s room. Hearing nothing, she knocks again and could then enter, in compliance with hotel policy that allows entry and a good-morning call after two knocks. Knocking a third time to be sure, she doubts she’d find the fortitude to knock at all if Antonio wasn’t on his way to jail.
With no response to her three knocks, she fears a lost chance. She unlocks the door, opens and calls, “¡Buenos días!”
She hears the eighteenth-floor maid only four rooms down and ducks back to avoid further botching, but as slim chance narrows to nothing, Mrs. Mayfair speaks, “Nnnnn. Oohhhhh!” Lyria laughs, though the night and day are further from humor than any in her life. She wonders if this is what Antonio wakes up to as she steps quickly inside to see the truth many women fear, which is first thing in the morning.
Lyria stands triumphantly before a badly hungover woman in her mid-fifties whose ridiculously orange hair with platinum highlights is mashed and ratted like yesterday’s mop. Mrs. Mayfair rises rickety as los muertos in October, her face sagging with smeared foundation, her huge breasts hanging like overripe casabas, one of them plopping out the stretched sleeve hole of her nightie. Mrs. Mayfair oozes like a lump of melting wax. She tucks her stray pecha back through the sleeve hole, squints, and says, “Go away, please. I’m not even up yet.”
“I am Lyria,” Lyria says. Mrs. Mayfair falls back on her four pillows and moans. “Antonio is in jail. They say he is guilty of murder.” That works; like time-lapse spore growth Mrs. Mayfair is up, pushing the covers aside and hauling her legs over.
She repeats the news as sleepy people do to gain time and awaken. “Murder? In jail? What?” Her consciousness rises slowly like little bubbles here and there from the depths of her slumber. She reaches for something to grab onto but only flounders among the surface flotsam of her age and the abuse she’s endured. Wiping away the detritus first with a knuckle, then with the back of her hand, she looks out the window and regulates her breathing. “Where’s my bra?” She sees it on a far chair and shakes her head.
“Come in. Sit down,” she says.
VII
Women United for Justice
Down on the beach Baldo will not stop working, even as the sorry, haggard woman stands before him with her children and tells him the bandits killed her husband.
So? What does she want him to do?
She zeroes in on the only uniformed guard on the beach, as if restitution was ever so available. “They killed him,” she says. “Killed him.” Baldo looks up and smiles halfway and finds himself stuck, staring at a five by three mound of flesh so loathsome it inspires pity. She is so fat you can’t see her pregnancy until you wonder how fat can protrude from fat, and why it would jut from just under the sternum. Then you see it and wonder why she wants one more. Maybe she doesn’t but doesn’t want damnation from the Pope either. Or maybe she drinks like her poor dead husband once did, and her liver is big and round as the world and just as crowded, like that of Joaquin the old bartender. “And now he is gone.”
Baldo returns to his work and leans into it with renewed focus so the sorry woman will see he is busy rearranging his tubs for a new angle in which to count his babies again.
“Do you know them? Were you here?”
Baldo works, because a mute man is often deaf as well. Yet he stops again to face this woman, to ease her burden with sympathy. She is not guilty like her unfortunate husband, and this should be a time of forgiveness and truth, within reason. Because anything less than truthful will be found out. So he raises a forefinger to his mouth and shakes his head, meaning he doesn’t speak, which she understands after a few renditions.
“Did you see them?”
He shakes again, opens his arms toward his little babies then brings his fingertips back to his heart with a shrug. This she cannot decipher any more than he intends her to. So she waddles back and forth until Baldo must finally turn away, and she turns too, her bulk moving ponderously as a ship on loose moorings.
She whimpers and asks, “Who will feed my children?”
He looks up as she sees the injured frigate bird in the shade and steps near it. He steps near it too, to intercede if necessary. She asks if he is going to eat it. He wants to shake his head and explain to her that neither he nor this bird will feed her children. He wants to tell her that he will try to heal it so it can fly again, but he finds himself nodding. She says it would be a blessing on both him and the bird if she takes it to feed her children. Three children wait with dull eyes and snotty noses. Another child is twenty paces off and higher up in the softer sand of a shallow dune, squatting over its growing pile of runny turds.
Baldo takes a moment to see if he might be missing something. He shakes his head and explains the situation by opening his arms to the injured bird then bringing his fingertips to his chest again. He wants her to see what she’s been missing, which is the difference between this bird’s behavior and her husband’s crime. One merited personal sacrifice in deference to the law of God and nature while the other does not. But he only watches as she raises a howl in further lament, and he knows nothing that either of them could convey would make a difference to the other.
So the whimpering woman and her children trudge north up the beach. Baldo watches with certain relief in knowing that a love was not ended last night. He rearranges but cannot count the babies, because he’s too preoccupied wondering what the fi
sherman got out of life. He stops and stands straight and watches the shrinking waddle, trying to put himself in the fisherman’s shoes late one night after catching or not catching fish. Walking home to darkness and hunger, snoring, foul smells, and too many children, what can a man think? Caramba, now I will lie with my fat wife and relieve myself in that rank opening between her legs?
Baldo shudders and returns to work, thanking himself as the fish and the birds should thank him and, if truth be told, as the fisherman should thank him too.
Lyria can’t get the story quite right to the point of satisfaction. She cannot answer the endless stream of questions spewing from the old lady with the notable chichonas on the other bed, because she only got the story in bits and pieces herself. Mrs. Mayfair will learn the parts that fill the empty spaces soon enough. But the story makes no difference in the telling anyway, and besides, an accurate chronology at this point would be rare as Toucan’s song and just as jumbled.
With exasperation and impatience rising more quickly than she herself can rise, Mrs. Mayfair waves her hands to bring on the reason, the logic and fundamentally sane behavior she knows humans are capable of, so she can understand, please. What has happened in the few short hours since last seeing Antonio and his “friend”? Her animated urgency has the effect of jiggling her grand melones, so that even Lyria stares.
Lyria catches herself and wonders if she fits the profile she’s heard, of women who desire women and don’t even know it. She would like to feel these chichis for firmness and heft, but she’s only curious to see if the doctor put something inside to keep them from sagging too much, and she would like to compare them to the feel of her own breasts. Her own aren’t nearly as big but seem much nicer with high-pointing nipples. These are long and droopy, perhaps from years of suckling many men, and big, dark chilies dangle from the ends. Who could be aroused?
Toucan Whisper, Toucan Sing Page 10