The Falling Woman

12 Diane

That night, we went to the university basketball game and watched Marcos’s team lose. The game was played in a central courtyard, surrounded by tall stucco buildings. A few stars showed in the dark patch of sky above our heads. Spectators’ shouts echoed from the yellow walls, and a small boy kept the score on a large blackboard. Marcos’s team, long-legged young men dressed in bright green, ran and shouted and stole the ball from long-legged young men dressed in blue. High over the courtyard, the stars moved slowly across the rectangle of the sky.

Barbara and I sat at the top of the concrete bleachers, the only North Americans in the crowd. Barbara leaned against the building that served as the back of the bleachers and put her hands behind her head. Her eyes followed the men as they ran from one end of the court to the other. ‘Wrap them up,’ she said softly. ‘We’ll take them all home.’

On the court, Marcos fumbled the ball and lost it to a blue-clad giant. I could recognize Marcos only by the number on his shirt. ‘Somehow I think Liz would object.’

‘Yeah, she would. She deals with sex by avoiding it.’ I glanced at her and she shrugged lightly. ‘As far as I can tell.’

‘How long have you known her?’ 1 leaned back too, imitating Barbara’s casual pose.

‘Seven years,’ she said. ‘We’ve been working together at the university for three years.’ She lifted her eyes from the court to look at the stars overhead. ‘She’s not an easy person to get to know. She likes to keep people at a distance. I’d been working with her for a year and a half before she ever invited me to her house.’

‘Where does she live?’ The question was out before I stopped to think.

‘It’s a little apartment in an old building. One-bedroom. Crammed with books and pots and artifacts. Tiny kitchen. I think she eats out mostly.’ Barbara glanced at me, still casual. ‘You know, you still haven’t told me the story here. You’re Liz’s daughter, but you don’t know her and she doesn’t know you. You turn up here unexpectedly and you stay.’ She shrugged without looking at me. ‘Tell me if you want to.’

‘She and my father were divorced when I was five. My father raised me,’ I said. ‘I only saw my mother a few times after the divorce. My father didn’t want her to have anything to do with me. So I don’t know her. 1 don’t know her at all.’

‘Your father kept her from seeing you? Didn’t Liz have anything to say about that?’

I shrugged. ‘Apparently not.’

The courtyard erupted with cheers when Marcos’s team grabbed the ball and made a basket – their first in ten minutes. Barbara waited for the echoes to die, her eyes following the running men. ‘So, do you think you’ll sleep with him?’

I shrugged, grateful that she had changed the subject and knowing that she had done so for my benefit.

‘Don’t expect much if you do,’ she said. ‘Mexican men play by a different set of rules.’

‘That sounds like the voice of experience.’

‘I’ve heard tales,’ she said.

I did not get to hear any of the tales. Emilio hailed us from the bottom of the bleachers and made his way up to where we sat. He sat on the level below us, leaned against Barbara’s legs, and grinned up at her, showing his gold-rimmed teeth. ‘I knew Marcos and I would have luck today,’ he said.

Sunday morning, Barbara and I woke early to the sound of church bells calling the people to Mass. Marcos and Emilio arrived at the café just as we were finishing breakfast.

Emilio dropped a stack of hammocks beside the table, collapsed into a chair, and waved for the waitress to bring two more coffees. ‘Qué hacemos?’ Marcos asked, sitting beside me. ‘What are we going to do?’

‘Want a hammock?’ Emilio said to a passing couple, and what we did for a while was watch the intricate quick-step of careful negotiations. The woman said no and the man said yes, then after a while the man said maybe and the woman said maybe. Then finally, after much bargaining, the woman said yes and the man said yes. Emilio returned to the table smiling.

‘So what are we going to do?’ Barbara asked, but Emilio, distracted from romance by the promise of profit, had spotted two French tourists on the other side of the café and was watching another hammock vendor try to convince them to buy a hammock.

‘I will sell them a hammock tomorrow,’ he said.

‘Let’s leave these guys here and go somewhere cool,’ Barbara suggested to me.

Marcos leaned forward and said, ‘We could go to the park. You haven’t seen the park, have you?’

We caught the crosstown bus, a battered vehicle that had come to Mérida to die. Clattering, wheezing, overloaded, and much abused, it had, I would have bet, served many years hard time in the States or in some wealthier province of Mexico before it reached Mérida. The bus took us to the park, which was not cool, but was a little cooler than the café.

We rode the small train that circled the park, squeezed in one corner of a car packed with fat women in peasant dresses and sticky happy children who smelled of cotton candy and hot sauce. We rented a small boat with clumsy wooden paddles and journeyed slowly across a tiny cement pond filled with pale green water no deeper than waist-high. Barbara and Emilio paddled enthusiastically. Halfway across, we collided with a boat piloted by a solidly built Mexican father; his wife and two children watched us with round eyes as we called out apologies in English and Spanish. On the way back, we rammed a boat piloted by two high school boys, who seemed to regard the collision as a challenge of some sort. The taller boy smacked his paddle against the water to send a cascade of green water in our direction, and we hastily retreated toward shore.

We rode in red-and-gold skyway cars, passing over the pond and dropping potato chips on the high school boys and, accidentally, on the father, who still paddled valiantly in a vain and foolish effort to reach the far shore.

We watched high school students on roller skates careen around a small concrete rink. Marcos bought me a balloon from a withered old man. Barbara and Emilio tried to sell a hammock to two young American men.

Two old women in huipiles sat at a small metal table by the refrescos stand, drinking Coca-Cola and eating potato chips. A troop of noisy children ran along the paths; a middle-aged woman carrying an oversized purse trudged after them. Four high school boys strolled along the path with their hands in their pockets and sunglasses shading their eyes. Emilio bought us all melon-flavored helados, sweet fruit ices that had cantaloupe seeds mashed in with the fruit juice. Marcos held my warm, fruit-juice sticky hand, and we strolled behind the high school boys, taking the day at its own pace.

The zoo was small and smelled of warm animals, warm hay, warm manure. The owl, a small brown-feathered bird with delicate ear tufts, perched in the far corner of his cage, as far as possible from the path. When Barbara hooted at him softly, mimicking the call we heard in the camp at night, he blinked at us, ruffled his feathers, then closed his eyes again.

The jaguar was pacing in his cage, one foot crossing over the other as he turned, took three steps to the far end of the cage, turned again and took three steps back, weaving an endless pattern. He returned my gaze. Marcos leaned on the railing beside me.

‘Are there still jaguars in the monte?’ I asked him. ‘I’d hate to meet one out by the camp at night.’

He shook his head. ‘Not here. Not near Mérida. Not anymore.’ He put his arm lightly around my waist. ‘Are you afraid, being alone in the camp at night? 1 will come back with you and keep you safe at night.’

I laughed. ‘Ah – there may be no jaguar, but there are wolves in Mérida.’

He frowned. ‘I don’t understand.’

I laughed again. ‘Nothing. Never mind. It’s not important.’ I spotted Barbara and Emilio over by the camel’s enclosure and started to lead him in that direction. He held my hand and pulled me back to him, put his hand lightly on my shoulder, and kissed my lips quickly.

‘You should not laugh at me when I don’t understand,’ he said. ‘I don’t laugh when you don’t understand.’

I think I blushed. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I didn’t mean…’ He kissed me again, then led the way to where Emilio and Barbara were feeding the camel popcorn through the bars.

By the time we returned to Parque Hidalgo, the day was fading. The line for the movie theater stretched along one side of the square, and vendors sold balloons to the people leaving the church on the corner. Marcos and I shared a concrete love seat on one side of the park; Emilio and Barbara shared another. The love seats in Mérida’s parks are two concrete chairs joined in an S curve – the person in one chair faces the person in the other chair, yet the two are separated by a wide concrete armrest. Intimacy with separation. I still wore my sunglasses and they made the world seem dim and far away.

Marcos was holding my hand in a companionable way and I was watching Emilio and Barbara. Emilio was trying to persuade Barbara to stay one more night and go to bed with him. Barbara was saying that she would see him next weekend. I knew their conversation because the discussion had started on the bus back from the park. Barbara was laughing and shaking her head.

The heat of the day weighed upon me. On the brick plaza, two pigeons were courting. The male was circling the female, cooing and puffing out his neck feathers so that they caught the light. The female was searching for bread crumbs, oblivious to his attention.

Two small children, a boy in a blue shirt and jeans and a little girl in a faded dress, came to us with a bouquet of flowers. Marcos bought me a flower and I tucked it behind my ear. The little girl grinned: her teeth were crooked and her hair needed combing. I patted her on the shoulder – the way you pat a kitten or a puppy – and gave her a coin.

‘Will you come here next weekend?’ Marcos asked me.

‘Sure,’ I said. ‘I think so.’

He squeezed my hand lightly. ‘Sometimes,’ Marcos said, ‘you look like you are very far away from here. What happens with you then?’

‘Just thinking, I guess. I can’t explain it.’

He studied my face, then shrugged. ‘Whatever it is, it will be OK. You are in Mérida with us.’ He squeezed my hand lightly. ‘It will be good. We will be good friends.’

Across the way, Emilio’s attempts to persuade Barbara had been interrupted by the flower-bearing children. As I watched, Emilio tried to shoo them away and continue his conversation with Barbara, but the boy just grinned and thrust the flowers out again. Clever urchins, they kept grinning and holding out the flowers and watching Barbara laugh. Finally, Emilio threw up his hands with impatience, bought a flower from the boy and bribed the little girl with a coin.

‘Don’t look sad,’ said Marcos. ‘You will come back in a week. One week will pass just like that.’ He waved a hand in the air.

Barbara was walking toward me, twirling a white flower between her finger and thumb. Emilio, defeated but still hopeful, walked at her side. Barbara and I drove away in a car filled with the scent of dying flowers.