* * *
It’s there when I take a cold breath in, let a warm breath out.
* * *
I wander past Notre-Dame almost daily, but don’t go in. I don’t like churches when they’re filled with people. That’s the way it is for me. Some things I prefer to enjoy in private. Dancing. Or listening to music. Admiring a painting or a cloud.
* * *
When the October rains come, the wind from the North Sea gives me an earache like an ice pick. That’s when I give up the walks along the river and burrow underground. I trade the Seine park benches for the métro.
* * *
At the Concorde station, eight Peruvians with goat-skin drums and smokey flutes. Corazón, no llores. Heart, don’t cry, reedy and sad. I give them all the change I have, the tinkly centimes as well as the thick brown ten-franc coins that rip the seams in your pocket, because it’s so good to hear Spanish, safe and tender and sweet. Corazón, no llores…no llores, mi corazón.
* * *
The Peruvians ask where I’m from, offer me cigarettes, recommend the university cafeteria as a cheap place to eat. That’s when I’m invited to the Latino party at 1 rue Montmartre.
* * *
—There are lots of us here in Paris. Come to la peña tonight. You’ll see.
* * *
Soon I know all the underground artists. Javier the magician from Montevideo. Raulito and Arely, tango dancers from Lima. The Yamamoto brothers who ride from Porte de Vincennes to Les Halles and strictly play Beatles songs. Meryl the Black percussionist from Frisco. Al from Liverpool who can’t sing but sings anyway. The Argentine puppeteers Carlitos and José Antonio.
* * *
—Been here going on two years—Carlitos says—. It’s decent. You can do it, you can do it.
* * *
Carlitos looks exactly like his marionette, does he realize the resemblance? Like a scruffy black bear that’s escaped from the circus. All he’s missing is the muzzle. José Antonio is carved from pure alabaster. A pale flame of a man, bearded like an El Greco Jesus.
* * *
—The skits are all timed to take as long as the ride from one stop to the next, see? Get off at one of the transfer points. Opéra. Les Halles. Odéon. Take the train going the opposite direction. Back and forth all day. It’s decent, it’s decent.
* * *
I ride along with them and watch. Carlitos boards the car through one door and José Antonio the other. Carlitos and his bear marionette lumber down the aisle, the bear poking inside shopping bags, peeking under skirts, scratching his behind by rubbing against a pole.
* * *
People start laughing and looking at one another. Métro citizens don’t usually look at one another and never smile, at least not at me.
* * *
At the other end of the aisle, José Antonio shadows a musketeer puppet with a butterfly net. The children clap as if we’re in the park and not in a subway car. Even the adults chuckle. When the musketeer finally captures the bear, the whole car breaks into applause.
* * *
Because he can speak flowery French, José Antonio passes his fuzzy woolen cap around the car. —Thank you from my heart…Beautiful madame…Kind sir…
* * *
—It’s decent. I can teach you—Carlitos promises, grabbing my hand and holding it for too long before I tug it away.
* * *
If a letter from the artist foundation on the Côte d’Azur arrives before my money runs out, maybe I can stay in Europe till the end of January. I can live where real artists once lived. Isadora Duncan. Matisse. Fitzgerald. Hemingway.
* * *
If I can make my money last a bit longer, I won’t have to go home yet. Just a little more time, just a little.
* * *
But when I call Chicago from the broken pay phone that lets you call home for free, my father shouts, —Ya ni la amuelas, Corina. Regresa a tu casa ahorita mismo. Come home now!
* * *
—I can’t hear you, Papá. The line is crackling. Sorry, I can’t hear! Adiós, adiós.
* * *
I don’t tell my father I don’t like Paris. It’s winter and cold. And the Parisiennes don’t like me. I’m as dark as a Tunisian. With this Arabic nose, they take me for North African, or Southern Italian, or la Grecque, la Turque. And I haven’t met any writers, only artists who work in the métro as puppeteers, or musicians, or singers even when they can’t sing really.
* * *
It’s taken all my courage to get this far. I can’t go home yet. Because home is bus stops and drugstore windows, elastic bandages and hairpins, plastic ballpoints, felt bunion pads, tweezers, rat poison, cold sore ointment, mothballs, drain cleaners, deodorant. I’ve quit three jobs to get here. I can’t return. Not yet, Papá, not yet.
* * *
I’m waiting for something to happen. My father doesn’t remember that when he was my age, he went vagabonding north from Mexico and wound up in a city filled with dirty snow.
* * *
Just a little more time. Just a little. My heart wheezing like a harmonica.
* * *
The boys forge the expiration date when my train pass expires.
* * *
—Don’t worry, mi reina. We’ll doctor it up for you. We do it all the time.
* * *
With some white ink and José Antonio’s touch, it looks pretty good so long as you don’t hold it up to the light.
* * *
—Remember—José Antonio says—, keep talking to the conductor when he looks at it.
* * *
—What’ll I say?
* * *
—Just ask questions—Carlitos says—. Flirt, kiss him. Just try not to look worried or you’ll give it all away.
* * *
I can’t remember how I meet Carlitos and José Antonio. Both at the same time, or first Carlitos? Maybe through the Peruvians, or maybe at 1 rue Montmartre, or most probably Carlitos comes up to me on the métro platform. Maybe Carlitos sees my face of Morocco and, because I say I don’t speak French, he begins to ask questions and discovers I speak Spanish as well as English. And he’s from Buenos Aires, how about that?
* * *
When they invite me to stay with them rent-free, it sounds like a good idea. Because my money is disappearing at an incredible rate and I didn’t expect Paris to be so expensive. And if only a letter would arrive from the Côte d’Azur, I’d know whether I can stay or whether I have to go home.
* * *
—You can stay with us as long as you want. One day we’ll show up at your doorstep and you’ll do the same for us, right?
* * *
That’s how I come to share a studio with the boys in Neuilly-sur-Seine. I sleep on the floor between Carlitos and José Antonio on a foam mattress we unroll each night beneath a canopy of marionettes. One small room with a kitchenette and a tiny bathroom like the ones on airplanes. Take the Pont de Neuilly line past the Arc de Triomphe and get off at the last stop. You can see the Arc in the distance, but only if you stand outside. The studio’s one window faces a dark air shaft. It’s a corner apartment building off a street that’s spelled like poison but means “fish.”
* * *
In the fridge: some cheese, a little butter, always the same diet of ham sandwiches. One of us sent to the boulangerie for the daily baguette.
* * *
—Ham sandwiches are economical, Carlitos says between bites, the crumbs resting on his stubbly chin.
* * *
I look away when he eats, his blue teeth chewing and chewing. His oily hair. Even the whites of his eyes are dingy, discolored aged linen, like people who live in huts and cook with wood fires.
* * *
When it’s my turn to run to the boulangerie for the day’s baguette, I try warbling a little French, but the shop girls giggle
and call out to each other and laugh. That day, I give Carlitos and José Antonio my share of the money and beg them to please never send me again.
* * *
Six girls from Barcelona arrive.
* * *
—They traveled all day on the train; they’re tired. I told them they could stay—Carlitos says to José Antonio—. And who knows, one day we may need a place to stay in Barcelona, right?
* * *
The boys blow up air mattresses, unfold blankets, lay out grids of foam. We are nine bodies in that little room that stinks of feet and armpits and groin.
* * *
—No, no, stay. There’s no problem, really. You’d do the same for us, right?
* * *
It’s too late to do anything about it. Everyone is exhausted. The six women from Barcelona, the boys, the puppets, me. The room whistles like teakettles. These españolas are big girls. Because they’ve fallen asleep first, they stretch and stray beyond their original borders. They sleep the sleep of salamanders, in curly S’s.
* * *
In the middle of the night I dream a gun is being held to my temple, but when I wake, it’s only someone’s elbow.
* * *
I can’t sleep. It’s so crazy I laugh out loud in the middle of that noisy darkness, with only the marionettes dangling above listening.
* * *
One night when Carlitos is gone and I’m asleep, one of José Antonio’s long thin hands crosses my belly, a fly crawling across my skin. His fingers make little circles that burn round and round my navel.
* * *
—Don’t you want to be my lover, no?
* * *
It’s because José Antonio’s pretty that he’s that way, tall and smokey-limbed as a mirage. I just keep my eyes shut, don’t say anything, because I’m not sure what I want. But after a long while, when he sees how stiff I am, he gets tired and leaves me alone.
* * *
Another night when it’s time for bed, Carlitos and José Antonio talking to each other as if I’m not there:
* * *
—A valentine of an ass. An ass from heaven, man. I’m not kidding.
* * *
—Did you fuck her yet?
* * *
—Not yet. But this weekend, brother, make sure you get lost.
* * *
—And Marta?
* * *
—All yours.
* * *
I shut my eyes, breathe heavy so I’ll fall asleep faster. The marionettes dangling from the ceiling. The wandering hands of the puppeteers. All my cells with an eye in the center, somnambulant at first, until I grow tired, they grow tired, whoever gives up first.
* * *
Martita and Paola say I can take turns staying at their places.
* * *
—Are those boys misbehaving?—Marta asks.
* * *
Paola is more direct. —Puffina, cara. Don’t you know anything free from a man always is more expensive?
* * *
Paola’s employers are going home for the holidays, and she will have the whole apartment to herself. Can I wait until then? In the meantime, I can stay with Marta.
* * *
—Really, it’s no bother, Puffina. You come now.
* * *
When I move out of the boys’ apartment in Neuilly-sur-Seine, José Antonio says, —Congratulations. You’re the only woman who’s slept here who we haven’t fucked. Felicidades.
* * *
I don’t know what to say, so I don’t say anything. Just wonder about the six españolas.
* * *
Martita rents a room at 11 rue de Madrid, métro stop Europe. Not the rooms that face the street, no, but the ones in back. First you must cross a damp courtyard to a dark rear stairwell, then up six flights of stairs.
* * *
Your side hurts by the time you reach the fourth, and the rail is old and iron. Someone has left a mop in a bucket of dirty water on the landing.
* * *
Marta’s apartment is at the very top, a room with no windows except for a tiny skylight you open with a pole, and no lock on the door except a bent nail, and no bath, just a toilet down the hall. A bathroom that always smells of pipí.
* * *
—Welcome to the Black Hole of Calcutta—Marta says—. You can stay here as long as you want, Puffina, don’t worry. Really, it’s all right.
* * *
We sleep head to foot on a narrow bed with a mattress hollowed in the center like a canoe. But even like that, you wake up with your spine twisted into a question mark. Marta doesn’t say anything about it, though.
* * *
She doesn’t mind it really, because —What do I want to pay a lot of money for a place I only sleep in, right? Well, what do I know—Marta says, and shrugs.
* * *
At night, doors slamming. Footsteps in the hall. Someone coughing on the other side of the wall. I never meet any of the neighbors all the time I’m there. Only footsteps, coughs. An ambulance wailing from a long way off. Somebody’s television murmuring a rosary.
* * *
Martita, I don’t tell you I’m afraid to stay here with the cough on the other side of the wall, the darkness, and that hall bathroom. When I have to go make pee in the middle of the night I hold and hold and hold it till the next day I have cystitis. Martita, don’t make me laugh or I’ll wee-wee the bed, and then what would we do? I’m afraid of the dark. I’m afraid here in Paris. J’ai très peur. Are you afraid sometimes, too?
* * *
And it’s as if your body isn’t an anchor or an iron bell anymore, it’s only your spirit, wide as a sky, as if a thousand sparrows opened their wings inside your heart, and oh, it’s lovely, lovely, Puffina. As if you’ll never feel alone again.
* * *
One day I walk up the six flights looking for Marta, and she’s not in the Black Hole of Calcutta. She’s not anywhere until I think to look in the bathroom. Gray-eyed Marta, face of a Botticelli, kneeling over the commode, one hand absentmindedly swishing a rag around the bowl, the room reeking of disinfectant.
* * *
—Marta, let me!
* * *
—No, it’s all right. I’ll wash my hands later. I got tired of smelling everybody’s cat piss.
* * *
Marta works at Le Roi Soleil, a very chic-chic tanning salon on the Avenue de Wagram. It was even featured in the US issue of Vogue. She got the job easily because Marta is so pretty.
* * *
She has to show customers to their private sunroom, and bring them white towels and oil on a tray, and put oil on their backs if they ask, that’s what she gets paid for.
* * *
But when the salon burns down because of a short circuit in one of the lamps, the owner blames it on Marta’s carelessness, and that morning, a Sunday, Marta returns to the Black Hole in tears while I’m still asleep.
Martita, I Remember You/Martita, te recuerdo Page 2