by Kris Radish
“What?” I demand to know.
“Because there were many things in your life that you did that drove her half crazy and she did not understand why you never followed your heart.”
“My God.”
“When we found out you were coming, when Linda came to find my father, he knew that you would travel the same path.”
“The same path?” I ask, confused and on the brink of tears.
“The path by the beach, for one thing. You are following her path, which has been your path all along. Same path, different direction.”
I do not even know this man who appears to be reading my palm. He has a singular energy that makes me want to fall into his arms. Strong. Kind. Slow and gentle. Wise. How could he be so wise?
“It is a lot. I know it is a lot,” he tells me, reaching out again with his hand to touch me.
I want to know everything, every single thing about him and his father and my aunt, but Tomas will only tell me about his life, and it does not strike me as odd or strange or anything but wonderfully cosmic that I am sitting at this old table, on a beach in Mexico, with a man who makes my body tremble when he touches me and who begins to tell me a story, a small part of the whole story, that I swallow as if I have not eaten for days and days.
“My father will tell you more later today,” Tomas says. “But I owe you my story now while we drink our coffee and watch the sun. This is my favorite spot. It has always been my favorite spot.”
It has been a long time since I have enjoyed the company of a man. A very long time since a touch has ignited a spot anywhere on my body, and as his story unwinds and our unlikely worlds begin to merge and touch here and there, I wonder what it would be like to know a man again. This man, any man. I push the thought away hastily because it does not seem appropriate, and I dig my elbows into the table and savor every word of his life story.
Tomas is a computer engineer who has come home to help his father, Pancho Gonzales Quintana, die. When he tells me this part of the story, I keep the news in a place of reserve because I cannot deal with it now. I do not know his father or love him, but I know I will come to that place, and when I do the grieving and invent my own new story, the places I am about to discover, will be extraordinary.
He tells me his story—divorced, a bit of a wandering heart, a world traveler who has spent a great deal of his life close to me in the Chicago area. I tell him how strange it seems now to think that we may have passed on the loop or walked next to each other along the lakefront or eaten at the same downtown restaurant.
“Life is more of a mystery to me every day,” he says. “Yesterday, I wondered how long it would be that I had to live here and how I could deal with my father's death, and then I look up and a beautiful woman in a purple skirt is walking across the beach and into my life.”
“Am I walking into your life?”
“Here you are. That says it all.”
“Thank you for dropping out of the clouds for a bit,” I say not as shyly as I should have.
I ask him to tell me more. His father owns many properties, and Tomas manages this small restaurant while he is here, juggling through paperwork and accounting files to settle his father's estate before his father can no longer communicate his wishes and hopes. He is an only son. There is no one else.
The prostate cancer, he tells me, has moved from this part of the body to the next until there is no place else for it to go but back around again. There is maybe six months at the most, and Tomas, who readily admits that he loves working in the restaurant, says he has no idea what he will do or where he will go after his father's death.
“I am a wandering heart now,” he says, quietly, softly, and then asks for my story.
“What do you know about me?”
Very little, it seems, and I tell him as much as I can, as much as I know, and then for the first time I say something out loud that I did not even know myself.
“I have to leave for good and divorce him. I have not loved him for a very long time . . .” My voice trails off. It is a broken vibration. I have been holding this thought, and now, as I release it, I want to slump onto the table and rest.
Tomas touches me again, damn, and finishes my sentence for me.
“And you are terribly unhappy and walking this beach and finally coming to the heart of the world, this Mexico, as your aunt requested so many years ago.”
“Yes,” I say firmly and with the knowledge that now something new will happen, is about to happen, is happening.
We talk for two hours and drink so much coffee, I feel a bit stoned. I have shared stories of my children and my work, which he senses do not “fill me up,” and of my three friends, dead asleep miles behind me. Tomas invites me for a larger breakfast inside his restaurant, but I tell him my friends and I have a date with a mysterious man who likes to stand on the hill and flag in women off the beach.
We laugh together and he reminds me that he is more American than Mexican.
“What does this mean?” I ask him.
“It means I am bold enough to ask you to join me for a drink and dinner after you meet with my father this afternoon.”
“Like a date?”
“It would be a date in America, but here, because you are still a married woman, it will be a meeting. A meeting where you will offer me help with my father's estate and offer me advice on what to do with the rest of my life.”
“How could I say no? Especially because I am so good at figuring out everyone else's life and not my own?”
“It is impossible to refuse me. Because I am Tomas, the son of Pancho Gonzales Quintana, and I am a handsome computer nerd turned waiter.”
We laugh, and before I hurry back so that my friends will not think I have run off into the jungle, I ask him about my aunt.
“Did you know her?”
“Yes, but I cannot tell you more. The story is tragically beautiful. Prepare yourself, Ms. Meg. Your heart will ache.”
“We leave you alone for a few hours and you get a date, have coffee with a mysterious stranger and decide to file for divorce?”
This is the chorus that greets me when I find my friends pacing outside our temporary home. All I can do is roar with laughter, because they are semi-serious. I had no idea, I tell them, that so many life-changing moments would occur while they were sleeping off last night's festivities. Now they want to hurry. They want to see how this story plays out; they want to watch as I make another life-altering decision.
A part of me wants to know what will happen, where I will live, what I will do with the rest of my life, but another part of me, the part that I am just beginning to know for the first time, wants not to rush blindly into a present that excludes the now. I want to savor the moments, but I also want to think.
“My mind is flying,” I admit. “I want a hundred years to figure things out and to remember and to understand.”
“You can't have it,” Elizabeth says as if she knows something that I do not. “You have already wasted too goddamned much time, and what you need to know and learn will not take that long to swallow anyway. You too, Jane. Snap to it.”
“You're cruel,” I tell Elizabeth.
“Honesty always has a hint of cruelty,” she replies. “You get there, we all get there in our own time, but you are so close. Sometimes it drives me crazy.”
“Especially if you have a bit of a hangover,” adds Linda.
We head first inland and then out past a long stretch of jungle. It takes us close to two hours to get where we are going and I am wondering how my ill friend Pancho could make this trip twice in one day. We pass fields of sugarcane and Linda finally pulls into a dirt driveway that is partially blocked by a steel gate. When my hands touch the steel bar and push it open, my heart races. Was my aunt here? What happened? Will I hear her story and will it somehow blend into mine? This is the unsureness of my existence. One minute making a huge decision and the next ready to pee in my pants because I cannot decide which of the three th
ousand trees I should go to the bathroom behind.
I expect nothing as we glide for a good mile down a well-traveled path. There are groomed bushes with wide pink flowers, and paths that wend away into clumps of trees. We see no one, but when we pass through a simple clearing, here is what I see: a grand house with adobe walls and a porch that flows from roof to earth like a solid hammock. Gardens everywhere, and one, two, at least five men working in the yard, and then we park and I see that the front of the house slopes gently into that aqua ocean. It all takes my breath away.
“Beautiful,” Jane says for us all.
A woman, perhaps a maid, is waiting for us, and she greets us with kind words in Spanish and takes us to a room that is wide with unusual windows for an adobe building. They are huge windows shaped like pears, and of course there is no glass in this climate and each window has a built-in chair that is wrapped along its edge, and at the base of each window are fresh flowers. Every window in this enormous room has a view of the ocean. The last time I saw something like this I was in a waiting room at my dentist's office reading Islands magazine. Everything is spectacularly beautiful. Clean. Quiet. I feel a sense of great comfort and calmness just being in the room.
When we sit in three chairs that are facing the windows, the kind woman brings in four glasses and a huge crystal pitcher filled with red wine. She tells us that our host will be here soon. As we know, she announces, he is not well, and so everything takes a bit longer.
While I sip my wine and imagine what I am about to hear, I let my hand drop to my skirt and finger it with my thumb and forefinger just as I still sometimes finger the silk on top of the old green blanket in the house where I used to live. I do not expect to hear anything terrible, just a story about my aunt and a portion of her life that has been stored away for me until this moment.
We are each well into our second glass of wine when Pancho Gonzales Quintana comes into the room. I notice immediately how pale he is. When he pauses in front of the window, I swear I can see his bones, the ragged edges of his veins. But even in what is left of his shell, he remains handsome. Tall, elegant, with dark, intelligent eyes, and hands that move when he speaks.
We have all risen, and he comes first to Linda, whom he kisses on the cheek, and then to Elizabeth, whom he also kisses and embraces, then Jane and finally to me. He stands with his arms outstretched and looks at me closely with those dark eyes, and the hint of sadness in them makes me wonder if he is going to cry. He whispers my name, and then pulls me into his chest and murmurs, “Marcia's girl. How wonderful to meet you.” He uses the same blend of English and Spanish as his son, Tomas, when he speaks.
Pancho thanks us for coming and lets me know that he will share the story with all of us, because he knows these women are my friends and that they are now part of whatever it is that is happening.
“I may cry,” he warns us as he sits in the chair across from me. “Everything makes me cry these days, and especially this, the story of your Aunt Marcia and Mexico. It is also the story of me, because I loved her very much. I want to tell you this story and it will be all I can do today, because of the trip I took into town this morning. Then, Margaret, would you please walk me to my room, because I would like to speak to you privately.”
Pancho pours us all more wine and closes his eyes for a moment as if he is gathering strength, and then he tells us:
“Your Aunt Marcia, she thought of you as the daughter she never had and she worried about you until the day she died, as if she were your real mother.”
“I know,” I say quietly. “She was and remains a very fierce and important part of my life.”
The fall my aunt drove to Mexico with her car filled with her girlfriends was the fall everything changed, Pancho begins. The girls took the trip not so much because of their sense of adventure, but because one of the travelers, Gretchen, was pregnant, and because Marcia had been given the name of a doctor who was trained in the United States and who would help them. Things, of course, were different back then, when pre-marital sex was a horrendous act, and because the girls had already planned a great adventure, this aspect simply added one more element to the suspense. It also added a hint of survival. No one was supposed to know. The doctor was Pancho's brother, and it took them almost seven weeks to find him and his clinic in the town where we are staying.
“Your aunt fell in love with Mexico and she fell in love with me,” Pancho says, shifting as the pain coursed its way through his body. “But I was married.”
The four of us are not moving. We want to hear every word. I want to take Pancho's hand, but mostly I want him to take my hand.
“The women stayed at one of the cabins my family owned, and immediately the entire village fell in love with them and they with the village,” he tells us. “My brother performed the abortion, but it was not a perfect procedure and the girl became very ill. This is how your aunt discovered how primitive the medical conditions were here and why she made helping our people, especially our women, a huge priority in her life.”
I am astounded. For years and years, and even now because of a foundation she established, Pancho tells us, my aunt and the women who came to Mexico with her raised thousands and thousands of dollars for medical clinics and supplies and to quietly, and often secretly, teach the women about birth control. What they did was brave and risky because it went against everything taught by the Catholic Church and the Mexican culture.
“But they were fearless, these American women, and our women supported them and so did my family, my powerful family,” he says. “The same family that arranged my marriage to a woman I never loved.”
My aunt began her life's mission and her love affair with Pancho with nothing but her lovely heart and her own passion for life. “I helped Marcia from the first day, when she came into town in her pants, women never wore pants in those days here. Because I had been educated in America, I knew what she needed and I knew too that nothing I could ever do or say would stop her.”
Pancho smiles when he tells this part of the story. He recalls her spirit and how she would not listen when he told the American women they would be in grave danger if people knew what they planned to do.
“I took her into the jungles and we carried vaccinations in tiny boxes and we slept under canvas tarps and went days without sleeping, and then she would go away from me, raise her money and come back to me, and we would do it all over again.”
She never asked, not once, for anything to be different. She knew that he would never leave his wife and at the same time she knew that he would never love anyone else but her.
“People knew, you cannot see two lovers together and not know,” he says. “Loving your aunt was the hardest and the most wonderful thing I have ever done in my life. It is beyond anything I imagined I could feel. And what she did for the people here was almost as remarkable.”
There is more.
“The woman who was pregnant when they left Chicago never went back,” he says. “It was some group of women, these American friends. Imagine, if you will, a cross between Jane Fonda, Gloria Steinem, Mae West, Gertrude Stein—and who is that actress, Susan Sarandon—yes, and that is what you got in each one of these women.”
The pregnant woman stayed and married Pancho's brother Juan, the doctor.
I have to stop him now.
“How come I never knew this?” I ask.
“Your aunt felt that when you were ready to know, maybe ready to carry on her work, that you would come find out where she spent all of the time when she was away. But your mother knew. Your mother helped and she still helps.”
I think I cannot bear to take another ounce of truth. My mother? The same woman who ran off my brother's black lover and who shouted at my wedding and who tried to make me live the life she wanted—helped?
“She is now the executive director of your aunt's foundation.”
“My God. My God.”
Elizabeth, Linda and Jane have not moved.
“Your a
unt talked all the time about simply stealing you and bringing you here to live,” he says, laughing for the first time. “I would not let her do it. You needed your mother, your connection, your time to find out whatever it is in your life you need to find out.”
“And your wife?”
“She died ten years ago.”
The year my aunt told us she was going away for six months.
“She came then, after your wife died? My aunt came for six months?”
Pancho is so quiet, I wonder if he has stopped breathing. His eyes close and he goes away to a place that must be either terribly painful or totally wonderful.
“I built a house for her. Tomas will take you there, because the house is yours now, Margaret. It was the only time we ever lived together as a man and a woman would live together as a couple. Marcia was planning to stay here. But when she went back to the United States, she fell ill. I went to her. I stayed in Chicago for two months. I was with her the night she died.”
Can there possibly be more? I can no longer hold myself back and I go to Pancho, kneel at his feet and place my arms around his waist. “I am so sorry,” I sob.
“But, my dear girl, I was never sorry. I never wasted one second of time that I was with her. We danced and sang and we made love on every beach on this entire peninsula. I miss her every second that I breathe, but soon I will be with her again.”
When I walk Pancho to his room and he leans against me, I realize that soon means very soon. There is nothing left to him but bones and air, and I think that his heart must be taking up most of his entire body. He is a feather, and as I walk him to the edge of his bed and lift his feet and place a blanket over his legs, he asks me to sit for just a moment.
What he gives me next is the world. The deed to the small house that Tomas will show me, a package of letters, old photographs—not the ones by his bedside—and a silver bracelet laced with turquoise that he said was a sign of their love.