Cry in the Night

by Hart, Carolyn G.

  “I do not believe in the United States that you have the same feeling for family that we have here.” He shrugged. “When I said that Ortegas have always been traders, I meant it. For almost four hundred years there has been an Ortega trading house in Mexico City.” The car slowed a little more to wing onto an exit ramp. He added quietly, “I have a great affection for my father.”

  I liked Tony Ortega very much. It might not be, it certainly wasn’t, the approach to life in the United States. But I admired him for his choice.

  “Now,” he said briskly, and I knew the discussion was closed, “straight ahead is Chapultepec Park. The loveliest park in the world. This is our Hyde Park and Bois de Boulogne and Central Park. It has everything—a zoo, children’s playground, roller-skating, lakes, rowboats, restaurants, theaters, a castle, a polo field, and several museums, including the Museum of Anthropology.”

  He turned into the main drive through the park. The drive wound past huge stately trees with gray-green leaves and rough bark. You could tell the trees were old by their size. Tony called them ahuehuete trees and explained they were a kind of cypress native to Mexico.

  “Some of them are two hundred feet tall,” he said. “There is one in the park that is forty-four feet around. It’s called Moctezuma’s Tree after the Aztec emperor who was in power when Cortés came.”

  He pointed up through a grove of the beautiful old trees at the castle crowning Chapultepec Hill, the castle where Maximilian and Carlota lived during their turbulent fateful years in Mexico. We passed a monument with six gleaming white pillars of marble and Tony told me the touching story of the boy heroes. In 1847, the castle housed a school for military cadets. When the United States invaded Mexico and tried to take the castle, the cadets fought to the death. When only one still lived, he wrapped himself in a Mexican flag and flung himself over the side of the steep hill rather than surrender.

  Next we passed the Museum of Modern Art, and then we turned left into a wide avenue, which I later learned was Reforma Avenue, the most famous and loveliest in the city.

  Reforma passed through the huge park and, beyond the traffic on either side, there rose old trees and rolling hilly land. Tony pointed ahead to an enormous monolithic sculpture that marked the entrance to the Museum of Anthropology. Huge, squat, massive, the statue was a brooding embodiment of power.

  As we turned in, Tony said he was Tlaloc, the rain god, and that he had assured himself of undying popularity among Mexicans by performing as a god should. The huge statue, discovered in a ravine not far from San Miguel Coatlinchán, was brought into Mexico City in August 1964 a few days before the museum was to be officially opened. The statue weighted 168 tons and was carried on a huge truck with twenty wheels. People lined the streets to watch him pass and some taunted him for bringing no rain. However, the moment he arrived at his destination, there was the greatest cloudburst of the year.

  “So the old gods are not entirely out of power in Mexico even today,” he concluded.

  We were at the beautiful white stone steps that swept up toward the museum.

  “I wish I could come with you,” he said as I started opening the passenger door. I knew that if urged, he would. But that wouldn’t do at all.

  “I’ve taken too much of your morning as it is,” I said quickly. “But thank you so much, Tony, for stopping at the university, for all the marvelous things you’ve told me, and for bringing me here.”

  I was out of the MG now and leaning down to say good-bye.

  “Do you intend to be long at the museum?” he asked.

  “I’ve several people to look up. On behalf of my museum. I’ve no idea how long it will take.”

  He nodded understandingly.

  I saw disappointment in his eyes and hoped he didn’t think I was rude.

  “If you should be free in time for lunch, call me.” A car tooted behind us. Tony ignored it and wrote a number on a card and handed it to me.

  “I will if I can.”

  The MG bucketed off and I turned to climb the gleaming, shallow white steps and I no longer thought about Tony or any of the Ortegas.

  In only a few minutes, I would see Jerry.

  Chapter 6

  Water drummed steadily down. A fine spray gently touched my face. A sparkling curtain of water fell in a ring around a huge carved gray stone column that supported an immense glistening aluminum canopy.

  Water that washes away our sins, water that breathes life to growing things, water that can save, water that can destroy. Elemental. Essential. The water slapped endlessly against the gray volcanic stone blocks of the courtyard, impervious to man though falling at man’s design.

  I looked slowly around the long enclosed courtyard—at the silver-colored canopy that soared above the water-circled column, at stone latticework decorating the walls at a pool near the far end—and marveled at the imagination that had conceived this open, airy, sunlit setting for a museum.

  I had inquired for Jerry when I first entered the museum but was told he was not in his office. He was expected back soon, so I left my name and said I would be looking through the exhibits. I bought a ticket and a guidebook and walked out into the courtyard, around which the display halls were built, and was caught and held by the power of the falling water.

  When I finally left the courtyard and entered the first hall, I found that the grace of the falling water typified the museum. Every exhibit seemed touched with light and color and I had never seen a better exposition of man’s beginnings than the introduction to general anthropology in the first room.

  I didn’t try to absorb everything at one. I wandered a little haphazardly from one area to the next, admiring a figurine here, a vase there, a monumental sculpture along the way. I had a nice busman’s holiday in the Egyptian section.

  I was halfway around the rooms off the courtyard, among the relics of the Mayas, when I spotted doors leading out to a garden. Through the glass walls, bright green ferns beckoned. There was a reconstructed temple in the garden, but I had seen enough of ancient monuments for the moment and instead delighted in the feathery light green leaves of tall, slender trees. I moved out of the shadow of the temple to sit upon a retaining wall and enjoy the soft warmth of the sunlight.

  It was very quiet in the small garden. I was alone. I could hear, and it seemed far away, the smooth flowing spiel of a guide. Children laughed somewhere nearby, but in this small sun-dappled enclosure it was quiet and still.

  I heard someone coming fast. He exploded into that oasis of serenity. I turned and saw him and began to back away until I came up against a wall and was trapped.

  Jerry caught my wrist in a painful grip. He leaned so close I saw a nerve flicker in the hard, ridged muscle along his cheek. Through the pain that burned along my arm and the shock of this totally unexpected reception, I scarcely heard his harsh, angry words.

  “When they said you were the courier, I didn’t believe it, couldn’t believe it. Not the girl I’d met in Washington. I asked twice if they had the right name.”

  He shook with anger.

  I felt a sudden wash of panic. I tried to pull away, but he held me tighter, pulled me closer. “You’ve got a hell of a nerve, that’s for sure, to come here.” He glared at me. “Did you think nobody knew? Well, you and your stinking museum ought to know that somebody always talks. Always. It’s like dead meat and buzzards. That kind of money makes talk.”

  Abruptly he let go of me and I thumped back hard against the edge of the retaining wall. He turned away and crossed the small grassy plot. He stopped at the exit and looked back at me, a look so filled with contempt that I felt shriveled and shaken.

  His bony face was hard and bleak. “If you know what’s good for you, you’ll get out of Mexico. Today. Because no matter how clever you are, no matter how you plan and scheme, you aren’t going to succeed.” He clenched his hand into a fist and raised it. “I’ll see you in hell first.”

  Then he was gone.

  Once again it was pe
aceful and still in that small pocket of greenery. Only the buzz of a bee and the ragged sound of my breathing broke the quiet. I rubbed my arm, up and down, trying to erase the imprint of that hard hand, the bruises that I knew would darken, staining my arm.

  Damn him. Damn his priggish, self-righteous, hateful arrogance. Damn him. Damn him and his museum.

  Later, I never could remember how I made my way out of the museum, never remember passing through the courtyard and the lobby to the wide esplanade outside.

  Tears slipped down my face. People turned to look as I went by. Somehow I left the museum behind and walked, head down, oblivious to traffic and passersby, until I was a long, long way up Reforma. Slowly, slowly, my breathing came back to normal and the tears dried on my face.

  I stopped finally and sat down on a wide stone bench in the shade of an elm. Traffic, spewing fumes, hurtled past. I sat and tried to make some kind of sense out of that frightful scene in the museum.

  Jerry, obviously, believed I was involved in some kind of illegal trafficking on behalf of my museum. He was, of course, wrong. That didn’t stop the hot prick of tears behind my eyes. It didn’t matter that he was wrong or even that I could prove he was wrong. What hurt was that he would believe an accusation against me without even asking to hear my side of it. No matter what he had been told, why hadn’t he felt inside that I wasn’t that kind of person?

  He had said that he “didn’t believe it, couldn’t believe it.”

  But he had believed it, whatever it was. Believed it and hated me for it.

  I was still too shaken, too upset to feel anything but a great emptiness. I had looked forward too long to seeing him again. Deep inside it had meant so much to me. I had liked him, violent, irascible, and quarrelsome as he was. No matter that he wasn’t the kind of man I had ever envisioned caring for. In a silly, childish way, I had taken the happiness of one out-of-context afternoon and pinned my dreams on it.

  So dreams don’t come true. I was old enough to know that, old enough not to be crushed by disappointment. Old enough, surely, not to let an irrational, ugly happening ruin my visit to a beautiful and fascinating country.

  It wasn’t the fault of Mexico, after all, that I had come on such a foolish quest.

  I sat up straight on the hard bench and opened my purse. The little hand mirror showed a wan face with powder-smeared cheeks and red eyes. I brushed my hair and put on fresh lipstick and powder.

  All right, Jerry Elliot was a clod. I had only imagined a bond, a current of empathy between us. It was lucky that I had learned the truth. I had nothing to be unhappy about.

  I touched the card where Tony had scrawled his number in bold, clear figures.

  I looked about me purposefully. Skyscrapers, sunlight glittering on their glass expanses, rose all along the broad boulevard. Interspersed were small buildings, apartments, shops, restaurants. I found a restaurant with a kind proprietor who telephoned for me.

  Tony was there in ten minutes. One look at his eager face, his dark eyes smiling, and I put the morning behind me.

  We lunched at the Chalet Suizo, dipping bread bits into Swiss cheese melted in white wine. We walked through the Zona Rosa, the Pink Zone shopping area of small, excellent specialty shops. I couldn’t resist a new leather purse, soft as a gardenia petal to the touch.

  I was always to remember that afternoon as a perfect span of hours. Tony was utterly carefree.

  “Are you up to a walk, a real walk?” he asked, when I had finished my shopping.

  I nodded of course, and so we started up Reforma, that broad and lovely tree-lined avenue that Maximilian planned.

  We walked from El Ángel to El Caballito and it took us the afternoon, but what a happy afternoon it was. The graceful gilded angel, poised atop a 150-foot-tall marble column, is the monument to Mexico’s independence. Much of Mexico’s fierce and blood-drenched history is commemorated on that shaded avenue. There is a monument to Cuauhtémoc, last of the Aztec emperors, who fell fighting Cortés. There is El Caballito, which is considered one of the finest statues of a horse in the world. It is only incidental to Mexicans that weak, muddleheaded Charles IV, Cortés’s king, is astride the horse.

  We walked and Tony told me all of this and much more. We stopped often to rest a moment on a stone bench and watch the people pass. We did not, of course, talk of history and statues all that afternoon. We talked about tennis (we both loved it; we would play one day soon) and flowers (yes, they are beautiful but what are their names?) and New York (plays and the Staten Island Ferry) and our families.

  There was only one awkward moment.

  “Why did you come to Mexico, Sheila?”

  I hesitated, then finally answered with a shrug. “I’d never been here before and there was the opportunity to come. So I did.” I was happier when I could turn the conversation back to him.

  He told me, surprisingly, a good deal about his family and about his father’s second wife. His mother had died eight years earlier. “At first Father was so busy with the twins, but then they began to grow up. I think he was lonely. I was busy at the bank and the twins and Juan, my brother, were involved in their own activities. It was last spring that he met Gerda.” Tony shook his head. “I know how they met but it still seems so out of character, Gerda hiking.”

  The story came in bits and puzzling pieces.

  “Father was out riding one day last spring—we have a hacienda in the mountains near Tlaxcala—and he rescued Gerda. She had been hiking and had fallen and sprained her ankle.”

  We were both quiet for a moment, pondering the unlikely vision of golden-blond, husky-voiced Gerda clambering around on a rocky mountainside.

  “It was love at first sight for him,” Tony said dryly. He added grudgingly, “She is beautiful.”

  Her background, so far as Tony had been able to discover, was enough out of focus to make him wonder. “Though, to be fair, she’s probably not hiding anything more disgraceful than the fact that her parents were Nazis.”

  I must have looked shocked at that because he smiled. “Don’t you know how the story goes? A nice German couple moves to Mexico in ’forty-four or ’forty-five and, of course, they came from Venezuela and they had fled that dreadful Hitler years earlier. The funny thing is that they can scarcely speak a word of Spanish for all the years presumably spent in Venezuela.”

  He shrugged. “Not that it really matters but old memories die hard, and there are a lot of Germans in this part of the world who don’t want anyone snooping too closely into when they came to Mexico. Or why.”

  So Gerda was of German parentage and still spoke with something of a German accent though she had grown up in Mexico. According to her, she had been orphaned as a baby and taken in by a German couple in Puebla. The years after she left her convent school and before she showed up on a mountainside in Tlaxcala were a little fuzzy.

  “The first I knew about it, that he had married her, was a telephone call,” Tony said. “I couldn’t believe it. When I met her, it didn’t take me a week to see it for what it was. She married a man twice her age and it was only for money.” He shook his head. “I asked him for God’s sake why had he married her?” He smiled but it wasn’t a happy smile. “That’s the only time in my life that my father ever struck me.”

  The sun was beginning to curve down in the west now and the light was slanting low through the huge gray-green trees. Tony shaded his eyes when he stopped talking and looked at me with a kind of wonder.

  “I don’t believe I’ve ever told anyone else about that.” He paused. “You are very easy to talk to.”

  Perhaps then he felt he had said too much, revealed too much of himself. He looked at his watch and said abruptly, “I’ve made too long a day of it for you. Come, we’ll take a cab back to the car.”

  The late-afternoon traffic had thickened on Reforma, but he did get us a cab and soon we were hurtling back to where we had left the MG.

  We didn’t say much on our drive to the Pedregal. I was tired.
Tony, of course, was a Mexican driver, so we fairly flew out Reforma and onto the freeway.

  It was almost six o’clock when we got there. The house was very quiet. I hesitated, once in my room, but decided I probably had time to bathe before dinner. As it turned out, I had plenty of time because Mexican families traditionally dine late, about eight. I bathed, then lay down to rest for a moment and didn’t waken until a hand touched me lightly on the shoulder. It was the little maid, and she showed me on my watch that it was a half hour until dinnertime.

  It was at dinner that I met Tony’s younger brother, Juan.

  I would never have taken them for brothers. Where Tony was substantial, Juan had a quicksilver quality. He was tall, thin, gangling, somehow unfinished. I calculated quickly from all that Tony had told me about the Ortegas that afternoon. I judged Juan to be nineteen, but there was about him a very adult aura. His face was mocking and weary, his eyes knowing. Something a little wild glittered deep in their black depths. His glance shifted from one to another at the table in quick, probing little looks, searching, testing, taunting. I didn’t at all like the way he looked at me. There was nothing the least bit boyish about Juan’s appraisal.

  It was a strained meal.

  Señor Ortega was abstracted and only roused himself once to smile down the table at me. “What do you think of Mexico, young lady?”

  I began to tell him and then realized, midway through my paean, that he wasn’t listening. To my surprise, it was Gerda who took up my answer and adroitly drew me out about my day. Again I felt I must have misjudged her. She was being kind, keeping a relaxed flow of conversation going to make her guest feel at ease. But her lovely violet eyes were cold and empty when they looked at me. Once again I felt confused and uncertain.

  Abruptly I wished I were out of this house, luxurious and impressive though it was. We were dining in a small dining room just past the family living room. We could look down through long French windows and see the pale pastel colors of the patio lights. Here, where we ate, the lighting was subdued and candles gleamed at either end of the table.