There were the serious types like Angélica working to put themselves through university or to finance some entrepreneurial project: they begrudgingly suffered the humiliation of taking orders from children screaming for more ketchup for their papas fritas, or from their parents complaining that the rum-and-Coke had a suspicious abundance of Coke. Then there were the ambitious types who eagerly tolerated the abuse in the hope that they too might bark out the very same orders to a court of underlings someday. And then there were the types who endured, who quietly absorbed insult, rebuke, or even the monotony of the day simply because they had to.
She knew which type she was, but her only child Miguel was not so easily classified. Miguel worked as a driver for a tourist agency in Mérida. This he did for the same reasons as everyone else, yes, but also for his own reasons. In fact, everything he did bore an element of difference, a sign of independence that at times made Lucita nervous, at times proud, and at all times, uncertain.
“Mi ángel.” How she missed him.
He wanted to be an architect, of all things! She understood what it meant to be a doctor or a dentist, a teacher or a lawyer, even el presidente, but an architect? She didn’t understand the appeal of such a profession nor what kind of life it would ensure for her son.
“Architects build, Madrecita, not destroy,” he explained.
“Like the Empire State Building,” she remarked, looking at a postcard that Ramón had sent them on a family holiday to New York. But Miguel had scoffed at the analogy. “Why do we always look outside ourselves for greatness?” And he showed her some colourful pictures that archaeologists had recreated of the ancient cities. “Before the conquistadores came,” he said proudly, puffing out his chest like a quetzal; as if he himself had been there to protect his city from what he referred to as “the worst tourists” they had ever had the misfortune of welcoming.
It was the same excessive pride that made Lucita wonder how long it would be before he’d quit his job at the agency. “Don’t worry, Madrecita,” Miguel would mollify her whenever she warned him to hold his tongue. “In what other job will I be able to visit Chichén-Itzá almost every day? If that means putting up with that pendejo, Jaime, then so be it!”
In her circle, nobody paid attention to a past that didn’t involve complex family trees or even more convoluted feuds that spanned multiple generations. That was the kind of history she understood. But the ruined cities that Miguel adored and the tourists came in the droves to see—that was another kind of history she didn’t feel any connection to. She could understand why they might be a curiosity, those funny looking pyramids that seemed to serve so little purpose. She could even understand why they might be admired for their unusual designs, but beyond this they had little meaning. To her, they were good for tourism, and what was good for tourism was good for Siete Mares, and what was good for Siete Mares was good for her.
But Miguel saw them through another set of eyes. Lucita once heard her son complain to his friend Salvador: “Jaimé would rather think of himself as a Cortéz than a Cuauhtémoc. That’s Mexico for you. He doesn’t even bring up the Toltecs when he’s showing them Chacmool. Everything is just Mayan this, and Mayan that. Like it’s all the same damn thing! Blood sacrifice and idol worship! Que fufurufo es! And he’s the one with the archaeology degree. Five hundred years of imperialism and what do we have to show for it? Intellectuals like Jaimé!” Seeing his friend Salvador nod in earnest agreement, Miguel wiped the sweat off his beer bottle and continued: “Chichén-Itzá, Machú Pichú, Tikal … these are the symbols of our future. Just look at Bolivia, Ecuador … Los pueblos originales will decide what our future will be, not ‘the Jaimés’ of this world.”
Lucita recalled the conversation with a certain degree of maternal awe, if not a little dread. It scared her when he spoke like this. She worried that he might have gotten involved with some fringe militia group. Her mother, on the other hand, had a different view of Miguel’s fascination with the past. “La brujería!” she would holler at him. As far as she was concerned, the sites were laced with the hexes and curses of witches. If anything, she held Lucita accountable for what she called her grandson’s obsession with “those pagans.” Nothing good would come from it, she ranted. Though at some point in the tirade, the focus had shifted from Miguel’s idolatry to Ramón’s “godless” children. Still, Lucita had to give her mother credit for predicting Miguel’s departure. Somehow she had presaged that her grandson’s preoccupation with the past would steal him from their future.
Lucita’s memories were interrupted by the sound of flip-flops hitting the concrete floor. As she looked up, a young couple rushed passed her. The young woman was in pursuit of the man. She held on to the unfastened ends of a lime green sarong, revealing a tall, slender physique and small, cupped breasts protruding through a skimpy bikini top. The young man’s bare chest and legs revealed a golden matte of sun-bleached body hair.
With the English she had come to learn by osmosis, listening to staff interact with guests, Lucita made out the words, “Screw you!” As the young woman flew past her, a light spray of chlorinated water settled on Lucita’s arms and face. She followed their trajectory to one of the rooms at the end of the open-air corridor. She had learned not to take playfulness for granted, as she had seen it turn ugly on many occasions, a tendency aided and abetted by what she considered to be the overly liberal all-you-can-drink policy included in the hotel’s vacation package. How often had she had to liberate the rooms of plastic glasses reeking of tequila shots, margarita, and beer, remnants from the previous day’s and night’s revelries. The first thing Lucita did when cleaning rooms was open the windows to air out the combined staleness of alcohol and semen, mixed with the heady smells of deodorants, hair sprays, body washes, facial creams, and other lotions and potions for parts of the body she could not even identify. It was a wonder they used the complimentary hotel items at all, given the amount of products they brought with them.
Lucita stopped to see what the couple would do next, just in case security assistance might be required. Her concern dissipated when she saw the young man groping his shorts for his room key card while the woman, who had now caught up with him, slipped her hand into his bathing shorts and coiled her leg around his thigh. As they clumsily fell into the room, their lanky bodies wrapped around one another, Lucita remembered her early days at the hotel. She didn’t think herself a prude, but no amount of Salve María’s could expunge the things she had witnessed here. These days, she did not even know which room belonged to which guest, because “partner switching” was, according to her co-workers, a new fad. And resorts across Cancún were promoting themselves as “adult only hotels,” or “temptation hotels.” Angélica once translated one of Carmen’s brochures promoting a new Siete Mares affiliate where “sexual freedom was guaranteed under blue skies and a meridian sun.”
Lucita couldn’t help but wonder why the gringos came to Mexico for such freedom. Wasn’t America the land of the free? But she knew it wasn’t fair to judge only the turistas. How often had she found some of the married staff carelessly leave their name tags in rooms, which she would discreetly pick up and return to them. Sometimes she couldn’t tell the difference between what she called “the visible staff”—the poolside animators, the fitness club trainers, the lifeguards, the bartenders—and the guests. They were usually lighter skinned, spoke English, and were generally perceived as untouchable, unlike the invisible army of chambermaids, security guards, busboys, gardeners, dishwashers, and sweepers, who were not meant to be seen. At least their youth and beauty brought them some benefit, Lucita would think to herself, neither in envy nor reproach.
Angélica carried those privileges as well, but she broke staff rank and fraternized with the invisible ones like Lucita. “See, Lucita,” Angélica pointed out ironically, “we’re lucky we work in a hotel that only guarantees sunshine.” Indeed, it was a small mercy that Siete Mares still promoted i
tself with the slogan: “Sun, sport, and fun for the whole family.” Not that such distinctions held any merit in reality. She had endured more than her fair share of inappropriate advances. If her husband Oscar were alive, he would certainly have disapproved of her job at the hotel.
How much like his father Miguel is, and he doesn’t even know it, she thought regretfully. The conversation between herself and her son before his departure was as vivid to her as the last words she had shared with her husband before his death: “Dime, hijo! Is she from America? Are you going to join your Tio Ramón in Toronto?” To Lucita, Canada and the United States were interchangeable: both were “America” insofar as both were the land of the gringos in el norte.
But she had spoken in haste, forgetting Miguel’s antipathy toward his uncle and his migration north. “Madrecita, Tio Ramón lives in the north but we all live on this continent, don’t we?”
Lucita nodded in the affirmative, unsure how else to respond to Miguel’s increasingly bewildering questions.
“Bueno! Then, we live in America too. This is our America.”
He continued more soberly: “Besides, these are all just names. First Columbus and the ‘Indies,’ then Vespucci’s ‘nuevo mundo’ and then ‘America.’ All names. We live in the shadow of too many names. Names with power, but only so far as they trick us into seeing what isn’t there—seeing borders and barriers where there should only be rivers and mountains. Like their new iron curtain, making a show of keeping us out when in reality they’d have no money to build those walls if we didn’t work for nothing, picking their strawberries, cleaning their buildings, weeding their gardens, raising their children. Why do we continue to accept these illusions? Like that God you and abuelita pray to. All false! Designed to rob us of our ability to choose how we see ourselves. I’m tired of this place, Madrecita. I’m tired of believing in someone else’s magic.”
If she could have only made sense of all this; if she could have only found in these parting words an explanation for what she considered another abandonment, maybe then she would not resent this gringa. How many nights had she prayed, pleading with La Virgen Morena, mother to mother, to make her Miguelito change his mind and stay home … to stay where he belonged.
Lucita wanted so much for him. All that knowledge. Where had he got it? So much potential. But for all of his god-given intelligence, he was not thinking straight. By his own logic, how could he explain leaving the land he defended with the conviction of El Papa? As much as she resented Ramón for leaving them, at least her brother’s motivations were clear: he believed in the dream of el norte. But Miguel didn’t want second-hand dreams passed down to him from the likes of his uncle. At least one’s own illusions are better than borrowed ones, he’d say. Still, how was Miguel’s dream any different from her brother’s when it depended on another gringa’s charity?
Bereft of the insight she longed for, she could only surmise that Miguel had, in fact, fallen in love. There was no other explanation for such foolishness. Recalling the photograph of her son, his arm around a woman with pale green eyes and skin the colour of tamarindo, Lucita absent-mindedly dipped the spaghetti-stained napkin into a tub of polishing wax. “Sopas!” she muttered in irritation. Their smiles glared back at her in direct contrast to the sad-looking building they were standing in front of, long and rectangular, dilapidated and overrun by tropical vegetation. Miguel had scribbled on the back of the photo: “Sunita y Miguel en Berbice, Guyana. Casados en Georgetown, 5 de Mayo, 2010.”
Looking at Miguel and then the woman standing beside him, alien but incontrovertibly beautiful, Lucita’s skepticism re-emerged. For one, wasn’t this Sunita “a cradle robber,” a term she had once heard Angélica use to refer to an árabe from Brazil who regularly frequented the hotel with young negritas for companions. Older men with younger women; this was hardly a scandal, she had scoffed. The older Don and his doe-eyed virgin was the kernel at the heart of every telenovela—at least the types she and her mother watched, not the new ones about drug cartels in Colombia and Miami. And by now she was accustomed to seeing female guests in their fifties and sixties flirting shamelessly with the younger male staff. But Lucita couldn’t imagine her son in such company, hungry for a gringa’s fickle attention.
When Miguel had said that Sunita was “a real Indian—like the ones that Columbus was looking for,” Lucita was convinced that her fears about Miguel’s embroilment in some Chiapas guerrilla force were warranted. Realizing he was talking about another country—other Indians—didn’t come as much consolation either. “You’re moving to India! It’s too far, hijo. What do you know about this place? People are starving there; they don’t have clean water to drink. You’ll get killed or captured by the terroristas!”
“Madrecita: de uno, there’s no war in India.” He paused for a moment, as if caught out in a lie. He had, after all, just read a report about the Indian army fighting a war with a Communist group in southern India; it had caught his attention because they were referring to the fighters as guerrilleros. Deciding it best to keep such comparisons to himself, he continued emphatically. “And don’t we have plenty of terroristas right here, like that Mayor abuelita supports because he makes a show of giving money to the church during Semana Santa, the same money he gets from the drug cartel for his silence?”
Lucita chuckled. She too could not bear her mother’s misplaced admiration for that upstart Mayor Velásquez. Everyone knew what a crook he was, wearing his notoriety like a badge of honour.
“Besides,” Miguel added, “Sunita’s never set foot in India. I told you she was born in Inglaterra.”
“So then you’re going to Europa?”
“Not exactly. I’m not sure.”
Lucita’s aggravation mounted. She was getting no closer to understanding what Miguel’s long-term plans were. How could she reconcile herself to his new life if she didn’t know where this life would be lived?
In an effort to reassure her, Miguel clarified: “For now, I am going no farther than Sudamérica. Sunita’s great-grandparents were emigrantes who settled there. You could say that her family is as Americano as the gringos in el norte—as Americano as ‘we’ are! They’ve lived in the continent for generations.”
“Then why doesn’t she speak Spanish, hijo?” Lucita asked in earnest, trying to keep up with this convoluted family genealogy.
“That’s a long history. But let’s just say the Spanish got greedy and tried to grab too much of the continent for themselves. And eventually others grabbed what the Spanish couldn’t hold onto. Why do you think they speak English in Belize and French in Haiti?”
“But what does that have to do with the Hindus? Explicame, por favor!” Lucita’s head was spinning. She had never stopped to consider that Latin America could be anything other than Spanish.
Miguel scowled, recalling his embarrassment when Sunita expressed how peculiar it was for him to ask if she were a “Hindu” rather than Indian. He was not used to being corrected. Now he wanted to correct his mother, but decided not to complicate matters further. “Madrecita, aren’t Mexicanos going to California and Canada to work in the gringos’ farms? Well, long before the Mexicanos were doing this, people from India were coming here. People like Sunita’s great-grandparents. They travelled thousands of miles to places like Suriname, Guyana, Trinidad. They came to work as campesinos. To carry the price of sugar on their backs, Madrecita, like the esclavos from Africa before them. But eventually, Sunita’s mother and father left Guyana and moved to Inglaterra. That’s where Sunita was born.”
Hard work was something Lucita understood, so she momentarily dropped her guard. The gringa did look a little bit mestizaje, after all, which Miguel attributed to the fact that Sunita’s maternal grandmother had a Portuguese mother and a Dutch father. This made Lucita consider the possibility that her grandchildren might have the benefit of being fair-skinned, after all—if, of course, this thing with Sunita lasted lon
ger than the annual visit of la mariposa monarca. Upon further reflection, however, she concluded that any grandchildren her son might conceive with this woman would be as mixed up as their mother: her great-grandparents born in one end of the world, her grandparents born in the other, and she born in yet another. How could anything good come from all those separations? This gave her a newfound appreciation for Ramón’s children: their insolence and entitlement might have been a source of aggravation, but at least they lived among their own, even in America.
Before she had the chance to point out her misgivings about future progeny, Miguel piped up: “Sunita has just come back to learn more about her great-grandparents’ journey from India. She wants to write a book about them. She’s a journalist. Not some babosa who wants to drink margaritas all day long and burn her face in the sun. I’m just lucky that she decided to visit Mexico for a few weeks. She didn’t want to miss the opportunity to see Chichén-Itzá. Can you believe it? That’s how we met: she and her friend asked me to take them back to Chichén-Itzá, because they didn’t care for Jaimé’s tour! Créeme, mamá: she’s the right woman for me.”
Lucita didn’t know what to believe anymore. What did she understand about Hindus from Sudamérica much less Hindus from Europa? All she understood was that her son was more like his uncle than he wanted to admit. If only Oscar were alive. Maybe things would be different.
But it was too late. He had joined Sunita in this country she had never heard of. A tiny country in the South had entered her orbit, usurping the place that el norte—America—had dominated in her imagination for all these years.
Outside People and Other Stories Page 8