by Zoë Folbigg
Thirty-One
October 2018, Xalapa, Mexico
Hector mounts the pavement on his moped, turns off the coughing puht-puht of the engine and kicks out the stand. A short man with a round face and a big nose presses his knuckles into Hector’s and the men loosely hug.
‘Eh, Hectorcito, we don’t see you round here no more, qué pasó?’
Marriage happened. Sobriety. And another headless corpse. All of which made Hector more insular.
‘Ah, you know, Tote, my body is a temple…’ he shrugs.
Tote’s tiny confused eyes shrink behind the thick bridge of his nose.
Hector tries again. ‘I’ve been working hard, buddy,’ he says as he pats the bouncer’s stocky shoulders.
‘Yeah, man, I heard you work in the restaurant at Lazaro’s now. What’s going on with your little drawings?’
‘Oh, I’m still drawing. Still at La Voz. I did a kids’ book too. Pablito the Panda? But…’ Hector notices Tote’s eyes glazing over and stops himself. ‘Pilar in there?’
‘Yeah, man, she’s with Benny.’ Tote gives Hector a sympathetic look as Hector swallows hard.
‘See you later, compadre,’ Hector says, pressing his knuckles against Tote’s again, as doors are pulled open and he’s welcomed into the dark and crowded tavern.
Hector snakes through past the bar to his left, past a DJ cramped in the window to his right, past little round tables full of empty vodka and tequila bottles, shot glasses and plastic cups. A reggaeton beat pumps. The air is heavy with dry ice, revelry and fear. Hector inhales, drinks it all in, and realises he doesn’t miss it one bit. He rubs his temples, to attempt to shield his face from all the people he doesn’t want to engage with. In the back corner, around three little circular tables pushed together, sits Benny Trujillo and his crew. Hector can’t see the conflicted face of the little boy who arrived at the Villa Infantil all those years ago, the day both of their lives changed forever. Only the anger remains. Hector’s wife is at Benny’s side.
Pilar’s tight white dress clings to her bones like a bandage. She looks up.
‘Hey, baby!’ she says, half startled, half bemused, beckoning Hector to the tables where she and Benny hold court with six other men. Hector looks for signs of another woman in the group. He can’t see Xochitl’s handbag on the table and he didn’t see her earthy brown Nahua skin and deep red lipstick smouldering quietly at the bar as he walked in.
Hector scratches the back of his head and his T-shirt tightens around his arm.
‘Xochitl went home?’ he asks exasperatedly, while trying to keep his cool.
Pilar and Benny give each other a conspiratorial glance.
‘With Draco!’ Pilar lets out a husky cackle.
Hector looks uncomfortable. ‘Was Xochitl OK with that?’
‘She led him out! We couldn’t believe it, baby, could we Benny?’
Benny sits back, the lined wide front of his square head creases further as he looks teasingly, knowingly, challengingly at Hector as he puts his hand on Pilar’s leg next to him.
*
If there’s one thing Hector was ashamed to admire in Benny it was his audacity. Benny was the one who dared them to steal mementoes from the officials outside the Palacio de Gobierno; Benny was the one who made things go missing from inside the Villa Infantil; Benny dared Hector to take money from his own grandfather’s wallet. And although he turned down that particular challenge, something in Hector admired Benny’s bravado for suggesting it. Fortunately, Hector had his grandfather’s ‘off’ weeks, time away from Benny, to dampen that admiration. Even though at times he was tempted to rise to Benny’s challenge, he wouldn’t take twenty pesos from Abuelo’s wallet, he couldn’t do it. And Alejandro would quietly and stoically drum into Hector the importance of an education over friendship and tomfoolery.
‘Education is a light in complete darkness,’ he would say as he stirred his pozole, knowing that Benny had already failed his exams, that he was trying to get Hector to skip school ahead of his. ‘If you have a good education, then good friends will come to you.’
Alejandro would tell Hector about how Hector’s father was the first person in a family of peasants to go to university. ‘Abuela and I were so proud of him. I’m still proud of him – because education can never be taken away, even if the people you love are. And it was through your father’s education that you came to be.’
Hector’s father Victor Herrera had met Lupe Treviño in the faculty of medicine at the Universidad Veracruzana. Lupe had wandered in from the Fine Arts building next door and blushed when she walked into a lab and couldn’t see a single easel or paint tube as she scanned the room with her huge smile and wild curls. She locked eyes with Victor, setting up his work station with a microscope, a new notepad and pencils, and the look lingered that bit longer than any exchange either of them had experienced in their eighteen years. A look that would ignite a love to last for the rest of their lives.
‘But what’s the point of university, Abuelo?’ Hector asked one evening, when he was struggling with his maths homework. ‘It didn’t serve Mami and Papi very well did it?’ Hector laughed and Alejandro slammed his fist on the table in outrage. It was the only time Hector heard Alejandro raise his voice in anger.
‘Oh yes it did. Your father was a doctor! He was respected; he was an honourable man. Your mother was an artist before she had you. That’s what you come from. Education and honour! Imagine if you were that bastard Benny and you didn’t know where you came from? You do, and you should honour that.’ Hector was so taken aback he never forgot it.
Hector did go to university, to the same Fine Arts department his mother had studied in. He sketched, refined and exhibited in the same building Lupe Treviño had, next door to the science block where Victor Herrera had studied medicine. And although he knew that was where it had all begun, Hector would never fully understand just how bright the sparkle was in Lupe’s eyes when they widened that day she first looked at Victor, quiet and serious, setting out his belongings in the lab.
Even though he had heeded his grandfather’s advice, he still couldn’t leave Benny behind. While Hector was studying animation and illustration, he took a job in Benny’s juice bar on the high street. It was another reason to admire his bunk-mate. Benny had shunned education, but he had the audacity to open Jugo’s California, a juice bar under the arches next to the Palacio de Gobierno, opposite the cathedral. It was tiny, but it had three stools at a counter and two licuadoras that whizzed up fresh blends of papaya, mango and maracuyá for townspeople on the go. Benny was rarely there, but it was his business, and it was doing well, which was another reason for Hector to admire Benny’s bravery to invest what little money he had into a business.
Sometimes Sister Miriam and Sister Juana would come in for a juice while they were doing their errands, while Sister Virginia watched the children back at the Villa Infantil. Miriam liked a 50/50 blend of strawberries and watermelon juice; Juana liked a few leaves of chepil thrown in to her 100% mango. A girl called Gabriela opened Jugo’s California on the mornings Hector was in class. Gabriela managed the production line of which fruit needed using first and would tell Hector when she handed over to him for the afternoon shift which fruit and herbs needed reordering for the next day. Benny would pop in around sunset to cash up; his visits increasingly felt like they were something to fear and Hector couldn’t work out why. But Sister Miriam and Sister Juana were always delighted to find Hector behind the counter so they could catch up, hear about university life, ask after Alejandro and the home on Calle Bremont, where Hector now lived permanently. Except he was so busy between university life, the juice bar, and going out dancing with girlfriends in the evening, Hector barely saw his grandfather.
When Hector graduated, he got a second job on the local newspaper, La Voz de Xalapa, illustrating stories and horoscopes, or helping out on the picture desk when they needed it. Hector noticed another shift in Benny around that time. He’d come back from tr
ips meeting fruit suppliers and pace around the tiny jugeria like a hungry jackal.
‘What’s new in news then?’ he’d ask Hector, suspiciously.
‘Nothing, I’m just on the art desk, Benny.’
It was around that time when the shift went from bunk-mates and equals, from Olmeca and Zapata, to something more sinister.
‘I want you to start delivering juices, Hector,’ Benny said one day, pointing his finger while a thick gold watch jangled on his wrist and a faded pink moustache of watermelon hugged the curve of his wavy thick top lip.
‘Deliveries? We’re slap bang in the town centre, everyone comes to us. How would we deliver?’
‘Leave the logistics to me, I’ll set you up with a moped, you won’t even need to use your own, but I need a reliable driver.’
It was that look again – testing eyes – Benny was asking Hector to prove himself; to see if he would steal a memento while Benny watched on from Parque Juárez. Much to Hector’s discomfort, he was rising to these challenges every time. He needed the money to help support Alejandro, he always wanted extra money to give to the sisters at the Villa Infantil. And still he didn’t want to disappoint Benny. Meanwhile, Benny’s menace and hold grew like the verdant mint plant on the counter.
Sometimes police officers would come in to Jugo’s California. Without saying a word, they would tick the thin white sheet of paper indicating which fruit and herbs they would like in their jugo, and hand it over to Hector while they studied his face. Sometimes Hector found himself delivering vats of maracuyá and lime juice to their houses after hours; he didn’t speak to them then, either. They’d just wipe their dinner from around their mouths as they accepted the deliveries, and closed the doors. It didn’t sit well with Hector, he was streetwise enough to know something wasn’t right, but he knew it was best not to ask, he didn’t want to get involved. He wanted to make his Abuelo as proud as Victor Herrera had.
After two years working for La Voz, Hector was entrusted with attending daily editorial meetings. He loved feeling more like part of the team, rather than just being instructed by his art director to draw something. But he didn’t like the photos he saw of headless bodies as they arrived on the picture desk. He didn’t like the fact his editor wouldn’t discuss the photos in their meetings; that he didn’t want to report on them in the newspaper. So Hector stuck to court profile pictures, political cartoons, caricatures of sports stars or illustrations for the horoscopes page. Dividing his time between the offices of the newspaper, Jugo’s California, or the student digs of the Australian, the American, or whichever extranjera he had met in a bar the night before. Hector was only twenty-four, but already he felt burned out, mostly from the pressure of being at Benny’s beck and call, without feeling able to question why.
Hector’s final test came the day he went out the back of the juice bar to find a fresh watermelon for Sister Miriam’s blend and saw an axe next to the sink. Benny had popped in and out that morning, delivering some crates of limes and chepil, and had left just as Sister Miriam and Sister Juana had arrived, kissing them on their tiny foreheads, although he wasn’t much taller himself. The axe had been placed next to the sink out the back, its head propped against the wall. Visible to patrons at the counter if the green and fuchsia floral beaded curtain was parted. Benny had left it there, as a test. For Hector? For the women who had brought them up? He wasn’t sure, but he looked at it with a quick flash as he searched for fruit. A shiny brown hue licked the blade. Hector went pale as he thought of Alejandro and how disappointed he would be in him; how Sister Miriam and Sister Juana shouldn’t be anywhere near anything so murky.
‘Are you OK, Hectorcito?’ asked Sister Miriam, seeing the sickly shade on Hector’s face as he turned and tried to ignore the axe. He couldn’t pick it up to secrete it or they would see, so he stood in front of it as he turned on his feet, pretending he had forgotten what he was looking for. ‘It doesn’t have to be watermelon cariño, I can just have fresa.’
‘It’s all right, there are loads back here,’ Hector floundered as he made himself as big as possible and closed the beaded curtain behind him while he went out the back. Hector was always trying to please, always trying to calm a situation. He did it in Jugo’s California that day, and he was still doing it whenever he tried to keep up with Pilar, to put a happy face on a sad situation.
All that afternoon Hector thought he was going to be sick, waiting for Benny to come back and cash up.
Enough.
As dusk hit, Benny walked in through the open façade of the front entrance.
‘Eh Zapata, good trade?’ he asked, his creased forehead rising into crumples above questioning eyebrows.
‘Benny, I quit,’ Hector exhaled in soft exasperation. ‘I have more and more work on at the paper, I can’t be there, here and do deliveries at night too, I’m sorry.’
‘Is this to spend more time with that… gringa?’ Benny spat.
‘No, man, we broke up, she went back to America.’ For a flash, Hector wondered if he ought to have blamed it on a relationship. Women were a handy scapegoat for Benny, he didn’t seem to like them much. ‘It’s time, man, I’m wiped out, I can’t lose my job on the paper.’
Benny looked incensed. He needed someone loyal like Hector, and now his oldest friend was betraying him. He turned around to pull down the grille on the façade of Jugo’s California and Hector could see veins bulging in his thick neck. The slow high-pitched screech of the steel door rolling down felt like fingernails on a blackboard, hurting Hector’s temples. Benny anchored the grille into place with slow, purposeful precision, and clicked the padlock as he pondered his next move. Hector looked at Benny’s wiry black hair, slicked back to the nape of his short wide neck.
Benny turned around with a forced smile. ‘C’mon, Hectorcito, now why would you do that?’ His new gold tooth sparkled under the strip lighting.
Hector looked at the little exit door in the rolled-down façade and wondered how the hell he could get out for good. He decided honesty was the best policy.
‘Come on, brother, this is beyond me, I can’t do this any more. That axe? It doesn’t look like it was used to chop papaya.’
Olmeca eyed Zapata. His thick brow feeling that familiar horror of rejection for the first time in a long time. It stirred an anger in Benny that was so powerful, he wanted to pick that axe right up and chop off Hector’s thumb and forefinger, to see if he could draw now, anchor him to the business; teach the hijo de puta about loyalty.
Hector looked at Benny with the pleading, sparkling eyes of his mother, stains of strawberry, melon and nopal all down his apron front. And Benny softened. For all his anger and rising hate, Hector’s had been the only real face of love Benny had known since he was nine – and he knew Hector wouldn’t betray him. Plus, it was better to have a friend on the paper.
Benny stepped to one side and Hector opened the little door and walked out, feeling the weight of 4,000 watermelons lifting from his strong shoulders. As he headed through town to his grandfather’s ramshackle house, he heard glass smash, as Benny took the axe to the interior of Jugo’s California and pulverised it.
*
Hector looks at Benny’s thick hand resting provocatively on Pilar’s knee. In the crevice between his thumb and forefinger sit two inked holy crosses, poorly drawn and badly executed. His hand rests on the ivy that crawls up Pilar’s thigh before it creeps out of sight under the tight white canvas of her dress.
‘Baby, I think we’d better go look for Xochitl,’ Hector says, his eyes as cold as the ice in Benny’s michelada.
‘She’s fine, she took Draco off to Parque Juárez, what’s the problem?’
‘She’s not that kind of girl.’ Hector extends his hand. ‘You’re not that kind of girl, Pilar. Come on, let’s get out of here.’
Benny stands. His leather waistcoat sticks to his wide sweaty shoulders.
‘You gotta problem, Hectorcito? Lookin’ down your nose at me again?’ Benny’s friend
Robi rises out of his chair next to him.
‘I think my wife has had enough and needs to come home.’
‘Calm down, baby,’ Pilar says rising, pressing her hand into Hector’s groin to get him to sit down. Seemingly enjoying the conflict, her protest is hollow. Hector takes a step back. ‘Come on, viejo, we’re just having a bit of fun, sit down and join us, you two would get on great – Benny said you did used to get on great, don’t be so boring, have a drink and tell me about the good old days. Olmeca and Zapata, no?’
Hector had tried to keep Benny from Pilar; to hold details of their past back; to protect her from the path of self-destruction he always feared she might take.
Hector stands firm. He doesn’t look at Pilar. He doesn’t break eye contact with Benny. Those same wounded, conflicted, angry eyes Benny had in those first weeks at the orphanage, and with a flicker and a flash, Benny’s eyes show a glimmer of mischief. Or is it the audacity Hector once admired?
Benny sits back down and starts to slowly run his hand up the inside of Pilar’s leg, following the trail of ivy. Pilar’s heavy lids flounder and she smiles coquettishly, as if Hector can’t see what’s right in front of him.
Still, Hector doesn’t break Benny’s gaze, he doesn’t acknowledge the creeping hand. The anger rises in Hector’s throat and he can’t breathe.
You win.
‘I’m done,’ Hector says, staring at Benny, then nodding to Pilar, and turns around to leave. He walks through the smoke, through the crowds, through the people all wanting to say, ‘Hector, so good to see you! Let me get you a drink!’ and they all blur into faces and noise and all he can think of is her face. Purity and brightness, the face of home half a world away, and anger dissipates into comfort with every step.
Thirty-Two