“We have to hurry,” she said. “Or they get warm.” They guzzled, and the day looked better still. They got lost on a shortcut, backtracking from Greater Pozos, and by the time a main road turned up, they weren’t sure where or which. Thirty miles up, another road crossed, just like the last road. She turned right, and in awhile they came to a town.
“Seems different here,” he said.
“Yeah. No gringos.”
Guanajuato, the city, is capital of the state of the same name. She took him to Diego Rivera’s house and told him Rivera’s wife, Frida Kahlo, was a stark beauty with a rapacious unibrow who understood that a man needs other women and cocaine as long as her man understands the harmless nature of a woman having lovers. Tony bought a picture of Frieda Kalo looking beautiful and unibrowed and another of Rivera in old age, fat and decrepit in a chair. “I could look like that,” he said.
“If you’re lucky,” she said, taking his hand and leading him down the street. “Then you’ll look like this.” They arrived at los momes, the mummies, a place of rare chemistry that inhibits decomposition—of the flesh at any rate. She explained how dead people got stacked in tiers in the caves of los momes because graves were rented; eternity on a month-to-month. She suspected missionary influence. Poor people came to the caves sooner or later, then got dug up when the rent ran out. “It used to be better,” she said.
“How good could it get?”
“It was open caves full of dead people instead of an exhibition hall. Some were fresh dead, in the last ten years or so. Their faces drooped. Their breasts melted. Breasts are nothing. They go first, like wax.”
“Hm. Goes to show you. I always thought they held up the longest.”
The cave had been walled with a proper ceiling and linoleum floors and viewing windows on compartments holding forty or fifty bodies, each with a photo from the deathday to demonstrate the miraculously retarded return to dust. Two guys dressed like pimps—living guys in velvet hats, hip-huggers, brocaded vests and heavy cologne—charged three grand for a walk-through.
Shadows slid across the gruesome walkway. Children played there. “That’s good,” Tony said. “Learning the score from a tender age.”
The clock pushed six, time for solid food and nightfall, so they headed back, asking directions at a fuel stop. The pump jockey said, “You mean the town with all the gringos.”
“Yeah, yeah, that’s the one.” Gassed up they headed across the twilight plains. She fired another joint, and homeward bound felt good. “Don’t worry,” she said. “We’ll ride another time.”
“Yeah. Something to look forward to.”
The long haul was a straight shot to the horizon, scrub plains going gray to black. He slept, waking when they slowed, wondering who, what, where. They cruised through a village. “Dolores,” she said. “They make ceramic.” He asked if Dolores depended on the gringo pottery market up the road. The natives watched them pass from forlorn shadows. “Nobody depends on anything,” she said, easing up to sixty.
He said it looked tough, being Mexican in a sleepy town, and he slept again. He woke suddenly when the cobbles rumbled. He’d slept the whole way, but she was younger, hardly past thirty. “Yup,” he said. “Something to look forward to.”
They got out and stretched. They started up the sidewalk. She took his hand. “Eighteen hours,” she said. “Six more and we’re past the one night stand.”
“Ought to be cake from here.” They ate burritos and he fell out while she read, ending day one in comfort. He woke in the dark beside her. He kissed her. She said thank you. He didn’t know if it would last but repressed consideration of alternatives.
In a few days she showed him the range of her wardrobe and moods. She had a skimpy dress that hung off her hips and shoulders and made her nipples point. She liked the effect. Skimpy could go to denim and from there to dirt or naked or both—she cut loose when she could, seeking the depth of every well. Moods ran from lollygagging and goofy-footing outside the corral to holding hands and touching. Or she had a bone to pick with the world she’d fled. She ran away from what went bad and took the loss personally. People should be good, and look what they’ve done.
Tony Drury and Heidi Heller seemed well-matched. He wondered if she really cared about goodness. She measured his indifference.
She showed him how to ride. “You relax and pay attention or the bones in your ass get pounded up into your neck.” Out on the trail they approached a stretch of green that stood out brilliantly against the plains. She scanned the horizon, laboring with a theory. She said, “Let’s face it. It all fits. That doesn’t even matter. Sexual intercourse is nothing next to spiritual communion. That’s what we have.”
Maybe she let him know they could be pals forever, that friendship is best. He heard disappointment but let it pass. “I don’t know what you’re thinking,” he said. “I like the sex.” He shrugged in concession to weakness. “All green in through here.”
“It’s an aquifer fed by hot springs. You can see where it flows by the green.” She turned to him. “Don’t tell me different from what I know,” she said. “It won’t work.” She kicked into a gallop, leaving him with condescension and deep currents and a pain in his ass. His filly wanted to follow but he reigned her down, not yet ready to run.
V
Curing the Common Need
Only months before Marylin Sweeny’s first film fest she began the arduous process of failure. She wondered later if she’d known deep inside that it was a bad idea, that it was doomed to failure all along. Some people are destined to propagation and labor; others simply keep themselves down.
Marylin wondered like an athlete reliving each flex of a critical play, to savor it or else isolate the germ of its failure. Contemplation intensified until her once-endearing oddities turned harsh. Her thick glasses on a safety chain pinned to a cardigan sweater, her clipboard, her pleated skirt and wedge pumps, her focus, synthesis and conclusion described a woman comfortable to be in charge. In charge of what didn’t matter; in charge of lunch, in charge of seating, in charge of the blue sky or the lazy afternoon. In charge of the general welfare of those around her. She was content until she wasn’t, until caring became matronly and then turned frumpy. She outgrew her self-perception and no longer fit her own sensibilities. The brujas would have diagnosed demons, perhaps of a minor nature but foul ether nonetheless, who would darken the situation until purging or death cast them out.
In the meantime, instinct haunted her. Like a mouse in a terrarium discovering a strange lump of muscle, she contemplated hunger and feeding, who and when.
Hardly unaware of vagaries in auric perambulation, she hunkered down on positive thinking. She considered her life in its waking moments, one to the next. She thought she needed psychotherapy, even if just for a spell, and she decided to give in. She would call the number advertised weekly in the gringo tabloid, if she still suffered in a week or two. She focused on nothing and let go, as the age prescribed. Then she wondered what next. She sought goodness and called upon the skills of application that endeared her to friends. She wondered about her skills and those people she considered her friends. She let go more, as the saying goes. She assayed, eyeballed and sought feeling from those in her radius.
The Film Festival of the Hills, Year I, required drama in execution. Marylin knew this going in as she contemplated the event in her own center stage. She smiled the savory smile, understanding that glory often requires the same promo as buffoonery. What if nobody came? Because you should be at least aware of downside potential. She thought these things through with great sincerity, sometimes in public, folding her arms, tapping her cheek and wondering what. She looked impatient, on the verge of a scolding, like she could cry at any moment, ‘People, please, whenever you’re ready.’
Tony Drury crashed her contemplation with, “Cut. Cut. Cut. This is all wrong. Okay, let’s take it from the top. Quiet!…”
Marylin gathered her things and left, because a playful pup i
sn’t cute if he keeps missing the paper.
Many people in the forty-to-sixty age group come to town traveling light, free of material need and competitive pursuit. Many simply throw in the towel and grin ear to ear with welcome. They welcome themselves, mostly, to the kingdom of relief, to the little town in the faraway hills where a person can greet and be greeted, where someone can’t care less with the kindest intentions, where social contact seems spontaneous as flies on meat, where compulsion fuels the engine of good cheer, good friends and good times.
Most come from years of effort and a nest egg. Most gain clarity on arrival, suspicions confirmed: life in America is fucked, mas o menos, but here, here one can prosper in the non-industry of living. Just look at the Mexicans, happy with the basics of meal preparation, cleaning up, crafts, elegant, spicy meals with drinks for two for under thirty dollars. Well, some of the Mexicans can find happiness.
Unlike the expatriate majority, however, Marylin was not far enough along. She needed money and demanded fulfillment. She fended off the defensive frame of mind, avoiding that mentality that calls for a woman’s rights. And she achieved success, mas o menos. Yet she considered untapped potential as some consider a hangnail; she picked, she tugged, she nurtured inflammation. Success was a concept; you get it or you don’t. Year I would fall short on money but could enrich life for everyone, with films. She nearly laughed at the astronomical prospects for excellent conversation. What a change, a possible benchmark in the sediment. How could it fail? Wouldn’t you choose movies if you could? The really great ones? She would bridge the gap, down to up, then to now, empty to full, mañana to esta hora. It could work, and if it did, the money would come next. She held faith.
She rose to the challenge. Joan of Arc didn’t give in. Nor did Lady Godiva or Germaine Greer. Heroines rotated on a common standard, underdog women who would not be denied. She understood the late night clarion: Last call. She ordered up. Next year would be Year II, and it approached already. Time was running, not necessarily out but certainly at full speed.
The mails ran much slower. A canister enroute three weeks could only be suffered. A price increase or an unreturned call could trigger conniptions. Progress seemed elusive and euphoric. She viewed difficulty as pain at shorter intervals; she hated the process but thrived on it. It fulfilled her but she wanted it done. She squeezed toward the miracle. She was happy and glum. She spoke of cultural symbiosis.
“You mean like movies and burritos, and they keep each other, you know, from being extinct?” This from Cisco. But he was easily ignored. She mentioned organics as innate to the dynamic, and though she didn’t come out and promise jobs for the people, she raised an eyebrow or two with oblique reference to prosperity for all. She was willing to expound on the creative influence and formulate a theory, just an idea, really, that festival format was an extension of the creative process.
Rhonda could see her point.
Marylin said, “Creative film making should be organic, and so should the setting for the modern film festival.”
“It’s easy to see,” Rhonda said. “And you state your case concisely.”
“Thank you,” Marylin said.
Rhonda salted the rim. “Without creative people pursuing organic art and creative formatting, this burg would be a wart on the planet’s ass.”
“Exactly,” Marylin concurred. That’s the spirit. Neither one of them really believed the place was anything but uplifting. Both valued the place as unlikely refuge for the world’s moderately mobile women with plenty left to give. But Marylin appreciated the commiseration and confided to Rhonda that the filmfest could be a huge success. She said she simply felt it. “Don’t ask how. I sometimes know things nobody ever told me.”
“I know,” Rhonda said. They giggled.
Knowing things frightened Marylin at first, until she put away her fear and accepted her gift. “I thought it only looked like knowing but was really simple deduction, you know, at lightning speed. But that’s not it. I know things without the first trace of evidence. I’m a channel.” Rhonda’s eyebrows bunched with skepticism; not that she doubted Marylin’s insightful propensities, but that word, channeling, was so passé.
It was back in the freebooting, street-hip days in Los Angeles when Marylin first dabbled in channeling, even then suppressing her power, perhaps fearful of the heights a woman might scale, left to her own devices. Fearful no more, or at least endeavoring in the direction of fearlessness, she reveled in the aggregates conjoining within. A shiver up the spine with a titter and a giggle signaled encroachment of a different nature. Sexual overflow and giddy ignorance made a girl giggle then, but now the world was an oyster poised for shucking. Filmfest prospects felt like adventure and reward in a neat package. And in sudden ripples of knowing a woman of sensitivity could bask in the order of things, could take care and be cared for. Damn the niggling details; like all of life, they too will one day go away. In the meantime, she was the medium. The profit would be pure gravy—there; think of it: profit and prophet. She toyed with gravy, then came up to sauce. Perhaps … She ordered a drink to celebrate simple truth and humble knowing.
Because truth and sunbeams can be repressed but not denied. Realizing her power and accepting it were requisite to actualization. She sometimes laughed at the simplicity of form surrounding omniscience. In another blink she knew the importance of keeping these assessments to herself. She had only to find humility, stop resisting and let it flow. She considered a name change, to Mary Lynn, to tickle the fancies and wake the complacency and change change change, which is the most important step if you want to live live live …
But, no. No one would get it right. Besides, there are no separations; no more dualist bullshit for this gal, no sir. Everything was already worked out, was already everything, as it were, more or less.
“Oh, hello,” she said to Elizabeth Staley who just walked into the courtyard of the Posada Robalina. She could have said, “Hola,” as a way of welcoming Elizabeth in the spirit of transmigration, but sometimes she felt the local idiom could put a person off, a person like Elizabeth Staley who hadn’t yet let down her hair. “Don’t you look lovely?” Marylin said. “What I wouldn’t give for your highlights.”
“I wish I could sell them for half what I paid,” Elizabeth said. They laughed, and Marylin explained that the Robalina courtyard had been a special hideaway for years, where a person could gather her thoughts over a half-decent café leche. Elizabeth nodded regally. “Do you mind?”
“Oh, please,” Marylin said, making room at the table as well as in her heart for another denizen of the forgotten class now gathering below the border. Elizabeth ordered the recommended coffee with warmed milk and smiled and waited, legs crossed under her silk gabardine pleated skirt and very smart jacket in carob mousse with raw-chocolate trim and raisin buttons. “Tell me you didn’t get that outfit here.”
“I didn’t. I don’t know if I could tell you anything I’ve gotten here, except confused.” Marylin understood, and so began the balance of an afternoon on new friendship with compassion and alliance. Mr. Staley wouldn’t be coming.
Marylin wasn’t surprised. She said, “Don’t worry. Listen to what I’m doing.” And she shared her dream that went only one way, forward. Because Mr. Staley and his ilk and their schedules and dispositions plain didn’t matter down in the hills of Mexico. What was his ilk? Non-present. Plenty more right here to fill the gap. Just look around. We can live here, really live in whatever context we like. If it’s men, have at it. If it’s something else, your wish is your only command. Elizabeth Staley didn’t exactly see the light but caught a glimmer of womanly purpose in a small town in Mexico, as others that very minute rolled chilies in flour and egg.
Purpose is a novelty in town. Dirt and sweat come with the territory, but for them not us, except for those of us down on our luck. Many people work every day, but not back-bending, dirty work. For us, work means artistry; painting, writing or making music, the colony stuff, the st
uff of fantasy sustained. Careers can now be given to freedom for the few years remaining, call them golden, call them amber, call them anything you like, these are they, here and now. Colony means snug harbor, where art and life and liquor can live in peace together. You can see what draws them, what lets them know in the first blush that this is it, what keeps them and their dream alive. For color and form in nature, rhythm and passion in daily life you can search the world and come no closer. Society among gringos comprises a community and more, an elixir administered daily to those for whom reality blessedly alters, for whom love is an embrace as big as the firmament. Glad to be here and so glad to see you here; the eyes said it above, the mouth flowed under.
Over common ground, cities and professions, Marylin and Elizabeth shared experiences of the long ago, flowing to the realm of social fulfillment. At mere pesos, they were home. Can you believe our good fortune?
Marylin insisted: You can live in a small town in Mexico for the rest of your life and never miss a single iota of the old grind. You can enjoy a comfort and camaraderie bubbling with warmth and acceptance in a dimension possibly remotely rare on the face of the earth.
Or, you might need a tad more. Marylin Sweeny understood the imprudent side of sharing and so shared additional wonders carefully. “We need perspective here. Otherwise, it’s nothing but drunks wasting their lives. We have so many creative people with so much experience, so much to offer. We need format.” Format was key to the future; Marylin was key to format.
She wanted to be good and enjoy the benefits of goodness. She wanted to be known for her goodness and greatness. Fame and fortune should be by-product of greatness and goodness. She wasn’t in it for the money—that’s good. “But I sure as fuck didn’t set out to lose money,” she said later, when her manners failed her. Earlier, she planted a seed in the recently harrowed soil of Elizabeth Staley’s garden. It was a little kernel that could blossom beautifully with a richness including but not limited to equity interest in the creative process. Because a woman needs to apply her resources, even when the settlement is months away. Marylin sowed gently, the woman was so distracted. But it was a lovely outfit and a productive hour. Elizabeth cried—a wonderful purging experience—then shared her pain over accessorizing in silver after so many years of Mr. Staley’s customary gifts in gold. And where was the value now? Marylin listened to profound musings for another hour, ending with a yawn and apology.
Homunculus Page 9