The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966

by Richard Brautigan

  A jukebox was playing square pop tunes from the time that I had gone into the library. It was strange to hear those old songs again.

  There was a young couple waiting for the bus in front of us. They were very conservative in dress and manner and seemed to be awfully nervous and bothered and trying hard to hold on to their composure.

  There was a man standing in the line, holding a racing form under his arm. He was old with dandruff on the lapels and shoulders of his coat and on his racing form.

  I had never been to Tijuana before but I had been to a couple of other border towns: Nogales and Juarez. I didn’t look forward to Tijuana.

  Border towns are not very pleasant places. They bring out the worst in both countries, and everything that is American stands out like a neon sore in border towns.

  I noticed the middle-aged people, growing old, that you always see in crowded bus depots but never in empty ones. They exist only in numbers and seem to live in crowded bus depots. They all looked as if they were enjoying the old records on the jukebox.

  One Mexican man was carrying a whole mess of stuff in a Hunt’s tomato sauce box and in a plastic bread wrapper. They seemed to be his possessions and he was going home with them to Tijuana.

  Slides

  As we drove the short distance to Tijuana it was not a very pleasant trip. I looked out the window to see that there was no wing on the bus, no coffee stain out there. I missed it.

  San Diego grew very poor and then we were on a freeway. The country down that way is pretty nothing and not worth describing.

  Vida and I were holding hands. Our hands were together in our hands as our real fate moved closer to us. Vida’s stomach was flat and perfect and it was going to remain that way.

  Vida looked out the window at what is not worth describing, but even more so and done in cold cement freeway language. She didn’t say anything.

  The young conservative couple sat like frozen beans in their seats in front of us. They were really having a bad time of it. I pretty much guessed why they were going to Tijuana.

  The man whispered something to the woman. She nodded without saying anything. I thought she was going to start crying. She bit her lower lip.

  I looked down from the bus into cars and saw things in the back seats. I tried hard not to look at the people but instead to look at the things in the back seats. I saw a paper bag, three coat hangers, some flowers, a sweater, a coat, an orange, a paper bag, a box, a dog.

  ‘We’re on a conveyer belt,’ Vida said.

  ‘It’s easier this way,’ I said. ‘It will be all right. Don’t worry.’

  ‘I know it will be all right,’ she said. ‘But I wish we were there. Those people in front of us are worse than the idea of the abortion.’

  The man started to whisper something to the woman, who continued staring straight ahead, and Vida turned and looked out the window at the nothing leading to Tijuana.

  The Man from Guadalajara

  The border was a mass of cars coming and going in excitement and confusion to pass under an heroic arch into Mexico. There was a sign that said something like: WELCOME TO TIJUANA THE MOST VISITED CITY IN THE WORLD.

  I had a little trouble with that one.

  We just walked across the border into Mexico. The Americans didn’t even say good-bye and we were suddenly in a different way of doing things.

  First there were Mexican guards wearing those.45 calibre automatic pistols that Mexicans love, checking the cars going into Mexico.

  Then there were other men who looked like detectives standing along the pedestrian path to Mexico. They didn’t say a word to us, but they stopped two people behind us, a young man and woman, and asked them what nationality they were and they said Italian.

  ‘We’re Italians.’

  I guess Vida and I looked like Americans.

  The arch, besides being heroic, was beautiful and modem and had a nice garden with many fine river rocks in the garden, but we were more interested in getting a taxi and went to a place where there were many taxis.

  I noticed that famous sweet acrid dust that covers Northern Mexico. It was like meeting a strange old friend again.

  ‘TAXI!’

  ‘TAXI!’

  ‘TAXI!’

  The drivers were yelling and motioning a new supply of gringos towards them.

  ‘TAXI!’

  ‘TAXI!’

  ‘TAXI!’

  The taxis were typically Mexican and the drivers were shoving them like pieces of meat. I don’t like people to try and use the hard sell on me. I’m not made for it.

  The conservative young couple came along, looking very frightened, and got into a taxi and disappeared towards Tijuana that lay flat before us and then sloped up into some hazy yellow poor-looking hills with a great many houses on them.

  The air was beginning electric with the hustle for the Yankee dollar and its biblical message. The taxi drivers seemed to be endless like flies trying to get you into their meat for Tijuana and its joys.

  ‘Hey, beau-ti-ful girl and BE-atle! Get in!’ a driver yelled at us. ‘Beatle?’ I said to Vida. ‘Is my hair that long?’

  ’It is a little long,’ Vida said, smiling.

  ‘Hey, BE-atle and hey, beauty!’ another driver yelled.

  There was a constant buzzing of TAXII TAXI! TAXI! Suddenly everything had become speeded up for us in Mexico. We were now in a different country, a country that just wanted to see our money.

  ‘TAXI!’

  ‘TAXI!’

  (Wolf whistle.)

  ‘BE-atle!’

  ‘TAXI!’

  ‘HEY! THERE!’

  ‘TAXI!’

  ‘TIJUANA!’

  ‘SHE’S GOOD-LOOKING!’

  ‘TAXI!’

  (Wolf-whistle.)

  ‘TAXI!’

  ‘TAXI!’

  ‘SENORITA! SENORITA! SENORITA!’

  ‘HEY, BEATLEI TAXI!’

  And then a Mexican man walked quietly up to us. He seemed a little embarrassed. He was wearing a business suit and was about forty years old.

  ‘I have a car,’ he said. ‘Would you like a ride downtown? It’s right over there.’

  It was a ten-year-old Buick, dusty, but well kept up and seemed to want us to get into it.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘That would be very nice.’

  The man looked all right, just wanting to be helpful, so it seemed. He didn’t look as if he were selling anything.

  ‘It’s right over here,’ he repeated, to show that the car was something that he took pride in owning.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said.

  We walked over to his car. He opened the door for us and then went around and got in himself.

  ‘It’s noisy here,’ he said, as we started driving the mile or less to Tijuana. ‘Too much noise.’

  ‘It is a little noisy,’ I said.

  After we left the border he kind of relaxed and turned towards us and said, ‘Did you come across for the afternoon?’

  ‘Yes, we thought we’d take a look at Tijuana while we’re visiting her sister in San Diego,’ I said.

  ‘It’s something to look at all right,’ he said. He didn’t look too happy when he said that.

  ‘Do you live here?’ I said.

  ‘I was born in Guadalajara,’ he said. ‘That’s a beautiful city. That’s my home. Have you ever been there? It’s beautiful.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I was there five or six years ago. It is a lovely city.’

  I looked out of the window to see a small carnival lying abandoned by the road. The carnival was flat and stagnant like a mud puddle.

  ‘Have you ever been to Mexico before, Senora?’ he said, fatherly.

  ‘No,’ Vida said. ‘This is my first visit.’

  ‘Don’t judge Mexico by this,’ he said. ‘Mexico is different from Tijuana. I’ve been working here for a year and in a few months I’ll go back home to Guadalajara, and I’m going to stay there this time. I was a fool to leave.’
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  ‘What do you do? I said.

  ‘I work for the governinent,’ he said. ‘I’m taking a survey among the Mexican people who come and go across the border into your country.’

  ‘Are you finding out anything interesting? Vida said.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s all the same. Nothing is different.’

  A Telephone Call from Woolworth’s

  The government man, whose name we never got, left us on the Main Street of Tijuana and pointed out the Government Tourist Building as a place that could tell us things to do while we were in Tijuana.

  The Government Tourist Building was small and glass and very modern and had a statue in front of it. The statue was a grey stone statue and did not look at peace. It was taller than the building. The statue was a pre-Columbian god or fella doing something that did not make him happy.

  Though the building was quite attractive, there was nothing the people in that little building could do for us. We needed another service from the Mexican people.

  Everybody was shoving us for dollars, trying to sell us things that we didn’t want: kids with gum, people wanting us to buy border junk from them, more taxi-cab drivers shouting that they wanted to take us back to the border, even though we had just got there, or to other places where we would have some fun.

  ‘TAXI!’

  ‘BEAUTIFUL GIRL!’

  ‘TAXI!’

  ‘BEATLE!’

  (Wolf whistle.)

  The taxi-cab drivers of Tijuana remained constant in their devotion to us. I had no idea my hair was so long and of course Vida had her thing going.

  We went over to the big modern Woolworth’s on the Main Street of Tijuana to find a telephone. It was a pastel building with a big red Woolworth’s sign and a red brick front and big display windows all filled up with Easter stuff: lots and lots and lots of bunnies and yellow chicks bursting happily out of huge eggs.

  The Woolworth’s was so antiseptic and clean and orderly compared to the outside which was just a few feet away or not away at all if you looked past the bunnies in the front window.

  There were very attractive girls working as sales girls, dark and young and doing lots of nice things with their eyes. They all looked as if they should work in a bank instead of Woolworth’s.

  I asked one of the girls where the telephone was and she pointed out the direction to me.

  ‘It’s over there,’ she said in good-looking English.

  I went over to the telephone with Vida spreading erotic confusion like missile jam among the men in the store. The Mexican women, though very pretty, were no match for Vida. She shot them down without even thinking about it.

  The telephone was beside an information booth, next to the toilet, near a display of leather belts and a display of yarn and the women’s blouse section.

  What a bunch of junk to remember, but that’s what I remember and look forward to the time I forget it.

  The telephone operated on American money: a nickel like it used to be in the good old days of my childhood.

  A man answered the telephone.

  He sounded like a doctor.

  ‘Hello, Dr Garcia?’ I said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘A man named Foster called you yesterday about our problem. Well, we’re here,’ I said.

  ‘Good. Where are you?’

  ‘We’re at Woolworth’s,’ I said.

  ‘Please excuse my English. Isn’t so good. I’ll get the girl. Her English is… better. She’ll tell you how to get here. I’ll be waiting. Everything is all right.’

  A girl took over the telephone. She sounded very young and said, ‘You’re at Woolworth’s.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘You’re not very far away,’ she said.

  That seemed awfully strange to me.

  ‘When you leave Woolworth’s turn right and walk down three blocks and then turn left on Fourth Street, walk four blocks and then turn left again off Fourth Street,’ she said. ‘We are in a green building in the middle of the block. You can’t miss it. Did you get that?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘When we leave Woolworth’s, we turn right and walk three blocks down to Fourth Street, then we turn left on Fourth Street, and walk four blocks and then turn left again off Fourth Street, and there’s a green building in the middle of the block, and that’s where you’re at.’

  Vida was listening.

  ‘Your wife hasn’t eaten, has she?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Good, we’ll be waiting for you. If you should get lost, telephone again.’

  We left Woolworth’s and followed the girl’s directions amid being hustled by souvenir junk salesmen, the taxi drivers and gum kids of Tijuana, surrounded by wolf whistles, cars cars cars, and cries of animal consternation and HEY, BEATLE!

  Fourth Street had waited eternally for us to come as we were always destined to come, Vida and me, and now we’d come, having started out that morning in San Francisco and our lives many years before.

  The streets were filled with cars and people and a fantastic feeling of excitement. The houses did not have any lawns, only that famous dust. They were our guides to Dr Garcia.

  There was a brand-new American car parked in front of the green building. The car had California licence plates. I didn’t have to think about that one too much to come up with an answer. I looked in the back seat. There was a girl’s sweater lying there. It looked helpless.

  Some children were playing in front of the doctor’s office. The children were poor and wore unhappy clothes. They stopped playing and watched us as we went in.

  We were no doubt a common sight for them. They had probably seen many gringos in this part of town, going into this green adobe-like building, gringos who did not look very happy. We did not disappoint them.

  Book Five: My Three Abortions

  Furniture Studies

  There was a small bell to ring on the door. It was not like the silver bell of my library, so far away from this place. You rang this bell by pressing your finger against it. That’s what I did.

  We had to wait a moment for someone to answer. The children stayed away from their play to watch us. The children were small, ill-dressed and dirty. They had those strange undernourished bodies and faces that make it so hard to tell how old children are in Mexico.

  A child that looks five will turn out to be eight. A child that looks seven will actually be two. It’s horrible.

  Some Mexican mother women came by. They looked at us, too. Their eyes were expressionless, but showed in this way that they knew we were abortionistas.

  Then the door to the doctor’s office opened effortlessly as if it had always planned to open at that time and it was Dr Garcia himself who opened the door for us. I didn’t know what he looked like, but I knew it was him.

  ‘Please,’ he said, gesturing us in.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘I just called you on the telephone. I’m Foster’s friend.’

  ‘I know,’ he said, quietly. ‘Follow, please.’

  The doctor was small, middle-aged and dressed perfectly like a doctor. His office was large and cool and had many rooms that led like a labyrinth far into the back and places that we knew nothing about.

  He took us to a small reception room. It was clean with modern linoleum on the floor and modern doctor furniture: an uncomfortable couch and three chairs that you could never really fit into.

  The furniture was the same as the furniture you see in the offices of American doctors. There was a tall plant in the corner with large flat cold green leaves. The leaves didn’t do anything.

  There were some other people already in the room: a father, a mother and a young teenage daughter. She obviously belonged to the brand-new car parked in front.

  ‘Please,’ the doctor said, gesturing us towards the two empty chairs in the room. ‘Soon,’ he said, smiling gently. ‘Wait, please. Soon.’

  He went away across the corridor and into another room that we could not see, leaving us with th
e three people. They were not talking and it was strangely quiet all through the building.

  Everybody looked at everybody else in a nervous kind of way that comes when time and circumstance reduce us to seeking illegal operations in Mexico.

  The father looked like a small town banker in the San Joaquin Valley and the mother looked like a woman who participated in a lot of social activities.

  The daughter was pretty and obviously intelligent and didn’t know what to do with her face as she waited for her abortion, so she kept smiling in a rapid knife-like way at nothing.

  The father looked very stern as if he were going to refuse a loan and the mother looked vaguely shocked as if somebody had said something a little risqué at a social tea for the Friends of the DeMolay.

  The daughter, though she possessed a narrow budding female body, looked as if she were too young to have an abortion. She should have been doing something else.

  I looked over at Vida. She also looked as if she were too young to have an abortion. What were we all doing there? Her face was growing pale.

  Alas, the innocence of love was merely an escalating physical condition and not a thing shaped like our kisses.

  My First Abortion

  About forever or ten minutes passed and then the doctor came back and motioned towards Vida and me to come with him, though the other people had been waiting when we came in. Perhaps it had something to do with Foster.

  ‘Please,’ Dr Garcia said, quietly.

  We followed after him across the hall and into a small office. There was a desk in the office and a typewriter. The office was dark and cool, the shades were down, with a leather chair and photographs of the doctor and his family upon the walls and the desk.

  There were various certificates showing the medical degrees the doctor had obtained and what schools he had graduated from. There was a door that opened directly into an operating room. A teenage girl was in the room cleaning up and a young boy, another teenager, was helping her.