He eats casually as the mentors tease him on the difficult schedule of a young man on the rise.
Mrs. M is in her place, already in full array. She’s back to grasping hands and lies in strategic overview on a chaise lounge angled to present herself to the sun for maximum sauté with an optimal view of her husband and his friends. She seems basted with more cosmetic than usual, but that could be the direct morning sunlight that reveals the depth of her foundation and perhaps is melting it as well.
Antonio clearly sees through his fog that she is a classic beauty under the putty, and no man could tire of what the plastic hands tirelessly grasp. Mrs. M is in fact amazingly reminiscent of the sex-goddess/film legend Tina Torino, whose defiant beauty at fifty-two also denies the aging process, whose very face tells us this sculpture is stone, not clay. This beauty is for the ages and will not sag.
Tina Torino was on TV and said she would never grow old. She’s coming here. She said so. Antonio eats, trying to remember the name of the daytime series that took the country by storm and gave her a household word for a name.
Clouds drift to the horizon.
He catches himself staring and sends the M an assuring nod. He will be willing and able to meet her briefly for years to come. If Tina Torino wants to relax by the pool, she too will be made to feel welcome as any beautiful guest. What else can he do but what he does, no matter what numbing clouds distract him?
Mrs. M calls softly, “Are you okay?”
Antonio laughs. He has heard this question often in the movies made in California, and he knows the answer. “Yes,” he calls back. “I am okay.”
Out front a taxi pulls up to deliver a beautiful movie star to the luxury of Hotel Oaxtapec. Perhaps her fame is yesterday’s newspaper, but it was, and so it is. She is no longer prime for a poster shot highlighting her taut nipples for ogling by millions of teenage boys across the lower quadrant of the continent. But Part of our Lives is the indelible imprint she will carry to eternity. Her beauty is classic, her stardom an easy memory.
The door staff and lobby staff gather round for recognition and welcome, if not homage.
The taxi driver stares at the two pesos this notable woman has left for a tip. With her jewelry and plastic surgery, her scent of dying flowers and haughty airs, she is ignorant of the needs of a poor driver with children and a wife to feed. Does she know the value of two pesos? Two hundred pesos won’t even pay for this welded chain steering wheel only twenty centimeters across. The chromium paint was fifty!
He wears the red-and-yellow plaid shirt he found in his taxi along with the houndstooth trousers common to the kitchen trade. The huaraches are a little snug but will loosen easily with slight cutting here and there. Perhaps this clothing is slightly the worse for wear, but it’s clean and freshly stitched across the chest and thighs.
These repairs were a good deal of work but seemed warranted, the trousers and shirt fit so well and weren’t all that threadbare, so what should he do, throw them out?
XVIII
The Pinnacle of Developmental Success
Lyria Alvarez and Antonio Garza will soon marry. They don’t yet have a date but hope it will be prior to the birth of their child. Yet commitment to a date is made problematic by the vagaries of the construction schedule for La Mexico, the Resort.
Antonio wants his wedding poolside for spiritual reasons, for it is by the pool that success continues in all things. It only makes sense when you consider the dynamic symbiosis between himself and a perfectly dazzling pool surrounded by guests.
On a practical level a poolside wedding will prime the pump, as it were, on the idea of poolside weddings, which commerce will engage the entire hotel staff and generate much tipping and will carry a handsome premium on catering and rental rates.
Antonio can’t officially conduct weddings, but he can keep the receptions lively with singing and dancing for a pretty peso, which shall be billed a la carte by Maestro de Ceremonia LTD., a private concessionaire.
Are you kidding? Weddings? Who is dry-eyed or sober at a good wedding? Moreover, everyone is so—what is the word?—verklempt, that higher prices for everything just slide on by with hardly a notice. So why not reap what we have sown?
The new hotel will be everything the investors and Antonio had hoped for. The pool will be bigger, some say much bigger, with a cabana for continuing festivities in inclement weather. With twenty floors instead of merely eighteen and a higher rack rate, La Mexica should attract a better crowd, meaning a crowd with a higher demographic, meaning greater discretionary income and increased upside potential. The stats have yet to lie. More money means more affluence if not influence, which can only lead to more of the same, and of course much, much more.
Cyclical prosperity is expected and factored into the equation for less traffic in the off-season or downward trending seasons. Traffic can only be sustained through the long, sultry summer with a lower demographic, meaning less revenue on greater volume. What can you do? Only peons and cheapos come to a sweat camp like this in August.
Unless of course they were not so cheap and are already dead, bringing us to the next level of dynamic enterprise, the rest lawn, which has a much nicer feel even in the saying than does the cemetery. The 19th Fairway will be down the road three miles and on the other side, closer to the trees than to the beach, because, well, let’s be practical. Though three miles down, The 19th Fairway will be nonetheless adjunctive to La Mexica, the Resort in all manners pertaining to administrative function, flawless service, aesthetic excellence and, of course, spirituality.
What difference can a few miles make if you’re, you know, and besides, The 19th Fairway will have an excellent view (as if anyone needs a view with golf on the wind) of the eighteenth green, which is where every golfer wants to finish.
More importantly is that this kind of diversification will bolster cyclical softness while shoring the bottom line with plenty of bench strength. Let’s face it, the cheapos aren’t going away, and we really don’t want them to. Who else will fill the steamy months?
With the airlines putting more seats in the air at ever-lowering prices and then offering special-combo packages, as if every seat and room isn’t already taken, is it any wonder that we work for less in the most difficult time?
Still, things are looking plentiful, with more on the way. Happy guests who ponder life and the thereafter may soon ponder frequent flyer miles earned at La Mexica through flight partnerships. Those miles may apply toward the eternal flight at The 19th Fairway. Why shouldn’t they travel first class and earn the peace of mind that comes with arrival at your final destination in luxurious tropical surroundings?
Antonio asks this last question and waits, not with the cocky presumption of a young man on the rapid rise, but rather with the seasoned confidence of a man who knows his rhetoric is solid gold, a man himself arrived. The answer to the question of first class and tropical luxury through frequent flyer miles is so obvious it need not be uttered. This could be the eternal essence of frequent-flyer partnership.
Well, of course it is, and its simple beauty nearly screams at you, once you’ve been made to see it, as Antonio so deftly makes the vision accessible to his colleagues. Moreover, as a seasoned man of proven instinct, his ascendance is assured. Antonio Garza is the maestro and more; he will also be the poolside manager of La Mexica, the Resort.
Antonio has no need to service the hungry women anymore, except of course if an occasional young one persists. As it is said, el campo fértil no descansado, tórnase estéril. All work and no play make Antonio a dull boy. Or practicality calls when an elderly one now and then needs a service for a thousand-peso minimum, which is a very fair rate once you factor devaluation. A thousand p is not what it was, and besides, it’s all play money to them. Like Tina Torino, looking hardly forty in the prime of her preservation. Her flourish and flamboyance are grist for a maestro’s mill. So seasoned herself, so capable of appreciating what is made to look so easy, she understands sho
w business. Her compassionate observation fans the flame in a man of uncanny skill. They have seasoned equally, he and she, concurrently on different sets but with the same timing, nuance, and ellipsis. Instinct hones to a fine edge in both of them.
These things come to Antonio with the bittersweet tang that any person surviving the seasoning will taste. Life goes on.
The numbness nature provides to deaden the pain soon inures the man to his past. Like waking from a deep sleep with still-sleeping limbs, he feels them tingle. Circulation returns slowly, and so does Antonio.
It’s true that he stares seaward with notable frequency. Still, he again counts push-ups, sit-ups and crunches, though now with conviction that only a young man needs to press the limits. A man of continuing maturation requires moderation, such as that reflected by sets of one hundred, three days a week, schedule permitting.
His stomach still ripples like a washboard if he’s standing up. It fairly ripples when he’s lying back on two pillows with the remote control in one hand and a resposado in the other as the tight-skinned Tina Torino takes her fill of what she calls her favorite protein smoothie, who is, of course, Antonio Garza himself.
A thousand pesos? How about five thousand? Or ten? And fun?
This is a woman for all seasons, or at least for this season for a man of seasoning. He is a man of service, after all, humble and proud as Grandfather Garza, who worked livery at Hacienda Torino and likely polished the boots of Señor Grandfather Torino. We can’t very well be certain it was the same Torinos. We may ask by and by. In the meantime, the traditions continue in their way. If this development does not factor the past and the future with dynamic overlap, then what?
Comfort settles in his bones as his eyes close to conjure the scene of one old man blacking the boots of another. The old men look down, one at the boots, the other at the servant beneath him. Antonio opens his eyes and looks down, as his forebears did in the same spirit of giving. Yet he is sensitive to the needs of a once-megastar and will not laugh at the TV comedians while she is eating him.
Of course from time to time a joke or a line that is very funny will make such constraint impossible. Still, he has learned: better to hit the mute for the sake of keeping the peace, because Tina Torino is easy to discourage and much easier to admire; she is so … bold.
Home life flows with equal abundance from the cornucopia of life at last. Lyria busies herself with preparation, also rising to growing fulfillment of what the early years promised. Happy as a shorebird feathering her nest, she preps the nursery and talks to the infant as yet unborn.
Antonio suspects the little one might even appreciate her words of comfort, solace and patience, though in many ways they only postpone what the child must inevitably learn. But what harm can they be? She will make a good mother, though he worries over time spent with the one from Venezuela, the pale, frigid one who speaks castellano and can’t be trusted and seems significantly removed from nature’s intention. Yet not one peep will be uttered by the father-to-be.
Why not? Just because.
“You think we’re disgusting, don’t you?” Viorica asks.
“You have never heard me use that word,” Antonio responds. “I would not call you or what you do disgusting even if I thought such a thing. I only said that lying with another woman is not the normal behavior of a satisfied woman.” Unmoving as a stone that dares to be pushed, he waits for her response. But Viorica Valenzuela will not respond, because she too has learned the value of keeping the peace.
Still, it wouldn’t hurt to hear confirmation from his beloved relative to satisfaction. What would it cost her to give the support he so often feels lacking? But Lyria only avoids the eyes of her intimate relations, perhaps embarrassed in mixed company, or maybe she still maneuvers internally through the sordid twists encountered on the road to love. So he shrugs and shakes his head, indicating with adequate certainty that his beloved is in fact among the most satisfied of women. How could she be otherwise with such frequency and attention to detail?
Viorica shakes her head too and says there are some things she will never understand. But one thing she sees clearly is the very good deal Mister Antonio is getting here, so don’t complain or the rates will go up.
Rates? What rates? Forget it. She speaks gibberish. Why torture a thing for meaning when the words flop around randomly as jumping beans? Why take the notion of a woman to task when it can only lead you in circles? Besides, the day is only begun, and a man of many missions has a few stops yet to make. So it’s hasta la hora to the beloved and the shrew, over and out. Up the hill and down to the office, which is not an office per se but is nonetheless the axis on which his world turns.
Mrs. M will soon return here forever, she says, as soon as her penthouse suite at La Mexico, the Resort is complete. In the meantime, she will soon leave for a while. So timing is tricky, which is nothing new for a master of ceremonies who moves among moving parts like a river moves through flotsam, easily with the flow. Who among men needs the complications of a snag? No one is the answer. They are simply unnecessary and avoidable, the snags, if movement is sustained.
The M, as all the guests at Hotel Oaxtapec, is tediously aware of Tina Torino’s grandiose presence, but we can’t be certain she, the M, knows what’s up. She must suspect the worst, but surely she views her one and only in beneficent light. We can only speculate on who knows what or how much, but then how much can these sordid details matter to an older woman coming to terms with fading glory?
The M is a beacon of womanly wisdom who comprehends that physical beauty must one day end for all women. So? What does she want to do? Or be? President of the Women’s League of Oaxtapec? Antonio can help arrange this; not that she will be president overnight, for all women begin in the League as mere members. Is it flowers she wants? Queen of The Orchid Society might also be an appropriate elevation from which to view the golden years.
Except that it’s also not for nothing she’s the M and knows how to season the stew. So hold your physical, queenly horses.
Hardly a devious woman, Mrs. Mayfair nonetheless approaches on cat’s feet bright and early this morning immediately after brunch, silently arriving behind Antonio, where she stands still as a tree.
Prepping his cards and balls, he watches the former megastar Tina T saunter across the deck to her place of exquisite repose.
Speaking so soft and low that the hearer doesn’t even flinch, Mrs. M whispers, “There but for the grace of God.”
What grace? What God? Antonio freezes in her headlights that don’t exactly blind him but press him to stillness from the rear. Remembering the primordial rule of seasoned men, he thaws to a smile under the morning kliegs, matching her bright and shining eyes on a slow turn to display his pleasure on seeing her. He blinks innocently and asks, “What?”
“I only hope I don’t get that way.”
He considers philosophical ramifications, because her wish hinges on a faith as old as the missions and as thoroughly unyielding. She hopes, as many women do, that what is seen and known is not true, that she will beat the rule because of who she is and what she’s seen in the eyes of her admirers. Still, a woman must come to terms with reality as much as any person.
Surely she knows the ultimate development is dust; a woman’s years are what they are, no matter what she says or tries to show. Life and death in the end allow no compromise.
He thinks she does know. Why else would she grow content to have him merely park in her private space without the old contortion or salsa squirting every which way? He knows the reason; it’s what every woman and man wants, which is company in the shadows, a companion with whom to face the last shadow, the one with the hood and scythe. What else could account for her changing needs, for wanting more talk and more hugging? She can rightfully fear the hooded one but should not think that he, Antonio, will forget her. Will the sun forget to rise? If the League and orchid women won’t do, Antonio will make her Empress of the Stars. She will shine among t
he greatest beauties, and nighttime will be best as well for its low light.
Mrs. Mayfair sucks her stomach in and thrusts her chest out, moving in a slow, perfect writhe resulting from diligent years. She knows the effect and is affirmed by the growth in his jams. Yet she slumps when he asks, “How can you not, you know, change?”
Of course she can’t not, but that’s hardly the issue here. The issue is love and support and their meaning as applied to daily life, like today. Her hurtful look lets him know how unloving and worse, how mean he can be. She hits home, causing Antonio to cringe with regret. She caught him playing with matches and forces his hand.
What can he say, Oh, her? No, I don’t want some of that? Or, No, I’ve had none of that? Or, Hey, it’s only a practical thing, you know? Or, What?
Well, at this point he need say nothing because the damage is done, the consequence of carelessness. Putting the fire out may be achieved by letting the river flow over it. He puts his arm around Mrs. M and pulls her near.
Resisting coyly in demonstration of her better judgment, she finally relents and nestles in for a most lovely snuggle by the pool under the sun among the seductively rustling trees for all to see, especially those nosy has-beens seething with envy. It feels perfect, until he pats her on the head and tells her there are plenty more miles left in the old gray mare before anyone should even think about the pasture.
“What? What did you say?” She removes his hand and arm and tells him he really should consider a private tutor in English or a personal trainer in etiquette, and she glides to her own place of elegant repose.
“What? What did I say?”
Too late. The exotic plumage is ruffled but can’t hide the love she’s in, and she knows it and knows he knows it too, which makes matters worse for her, though he feels progress in the making. He stoops to conquer as he did so many years ago on serving her first piña colada poolside with an offer to protect her from the sun. So he now stoops to offer a brief solace upstairs.
Toucan Whisper, Toucan Sing Page 26