Fourteen Escaping with Gabriel
wasn’t easy. She couldn’t take a single step in that house (which, since things began with Gabriel felt as overpopulated as an anthill) without a relative or servant appearing behind a door. People lurked everywhere, wanting to know where she was going, when she was coming back, how, when, and with whom.
She and Gabriel lived roused by hope and exhausted by frustration, unable to plan ahead, seeking moments to steal hurried kisses. Which is why Sundays were the perfect day to disappear with Gabriel. Half the servants had the day off. Her dad went to play golf. If Natalia didn’t join him at the club, the manicurist would do her nails at home.
But sometimes Roberto either had a guilty conscience or wanted to ruin everyone’s day, so he’d organize a family lunch at the Miravista. On those days, the family arrived in three separate cars. Lucía in Ricardo’s, Adolfo in his Jetta, and the Orozcos in the Mercedes.
Fito was always the last one to arrive, looking haggard and dehydrated. Lucía was always in a foul mood of epic proportions for reasons only she could fathom, and Natalia defended Fito to get a rise out of her husband. When the hostilities began at the table, Ricardo would fix his gaze on his Tampiqueña steak, while Roberto downed several tequilas and put on his martyr face when the check arrived.
“I’m going with my friend Chantal to a luncheon in Pedregal.”
Lucía dipped her concha in the yolk of her soft-boiled egg (Zenaida served them to her without the whites because she hated them).
“Chantal who?” her mother inquired.
“Chantal Bellini. Her parents are Italian diplomats. You don’t know them.”
She had borrowed the last name from a brunch menu.
“You’re not seeing Ricky?”
“In the early evening.”
If everything went well and people didn’t ask too many questions, four o’clock would arrive and Lucía wouldn’t be seized by the claustrophobic anguish that crept up on her every Sunday of her life. She’d only feel sad when she came back from her romance downtown to a dark house, her mom locked in her bedroom, her dad and brother gone, and her boyfriend’s messages on her cellphone.
Gabriel had gone to the hotel by minibus and metro (Sunday was his day off and it was not wise for them to go together). He was very late. Waiting for him in the room creeped her out, so Lucía waited in the lobby, across from the receptionist who ogled her with lewd complicity. She had been sitting on the edge of the little stone fountain for half an hour. Exasperated, she peeked out the big wooden door. Gabriel was walking calmly towards her, as if they had an eternity to spend together.
“I brought you a Tin Larín. A sweet for my sweet,” said Gabriel, all smiles.
“Look at the time,” Lucía replied.
“The minibus was late.”
“We have no time! I’m supposed to see Ricardo tonight.”
“Oh, fuck that shit.”
“I have to see him at some point. They will suspect something if I don’t.”
“Yeah, go tell your grandma that it is for our sake that you fuck the architect. I’m not that big a fool. Are you going to give me the money or what?”
“I already paid.”
“No shit. Really?”
Lucía scowled and took the money out of her wallet.
“You better not,” said Gabriel, snatching the bill.
“What if I pay the guy one day?”, she asked.
“They’ll think I am your private escort.”
“Don’t be so macho.”
She knew that Gabriel didn’t have much money, but she thought that once in a while he could buy her a meal in a cheap place like Vips or at least spring for a movie and popcorn.
“I’m fed up with coming downtown. I’m fed up with this hotel,” she said.
“We can go to the Camino Real if you want.”
“We can, but I’d have to pay for it, like I do everything else.”
“Why are you so stingy, with all the money you have?”
“I pay for everything, and you tell me I’m cheap? Besides, I have no money. You know my dad gives it to me.”
“Come on, tu papá caga lana—your dad shits money.”
“Here we go again. What, you didn’t save any money in the United States? You have nothing left?”
“No. I have nothing left, go figure. Vete al carajo.”
Gabriel stormed out. She ran after him.
“Gabriel! Wait!”
Lucía started crying. The topic of money provoked tears of guilt. She always felt like the villain of the story, not only stingy and insensitive to her lover’s struggles, but as if she were to blame for the fact that he didn’t have a cent.
“Come on, let’s go to the room,” she said. “Here’s the cash. Don’t be mad.”
“You think I enjoy having you pay for everything?”
“No. Please, forgive me.”
Gabriel paid the receptionist and went up the stairs without waiting for her. He was lying in bed when she came in.
“Fuck me,” she whispered, getting flushed just from expressing the thought.
“Beg me,” he said.
“Fuck me, I beg you, te lo suplico.”
He penetrated her without putting on the condom. She writhed like a tadpole, she scratched, bit, and pinched him but she let him overpower her, turned on by their wrestling and by his naked sex pumping inside her without the rubber membrane that was the last barrier against their intimacy. Not without panic, she thought he might come inside her, and imagined his viscous seed spreading quickly, trying to reach her ovaries. But he pulled out.
Satisfied and grateful, Lucía snuggled next to him under the sheets, showering him with kisses. The only sound they heard was the labored breathing of the boilers and generators. There he lay right beside her, naked and placid as a sleeping baby, and she knew nothing about him: what his life was like, where had he gone to school, how had he grown up, if he had ever been in love before. She was afraid to find out, worried that this would increase the differences between them. Yet she felt that in some way she already knew his story: a story of ugliness, cruelty, and deprivation, the story of all of Mexico’s poor. Her mom used to say that Mexicans were a bunch of losers who didn’t know how to succeed in life. Everything they touched, they turned to ashes.
“Why did you come back from the States?” she roused him.
She was eager to hear her lover’s story, excited and alert like when she was a little girl and her daddy used to help her with her homework.
“Because I got deported.”
“How?”
“When I worked at a restaurant in Soho.”
“Which restaurant? Maybe I know it.”
“Le Bistrot.”
“Doesn’t ring a bell. Was it good?”
“Yes, very good.”
“Were you a cook?”
“No, I was a busboy. I was going to be promoted to waiter.”
“And how much did they pay?” Lucía asked.
“Seven dollars an hour. Minimum wage was eleven eighty.”
“And how much do you make here?”
“Not even worth mentioning.”
“Tell me.”
Gabriel took a long pause.
“Tell me. I want to know.”
“Two hundred dollars a month. How about that?”
Even though math was not her forte, Lucía figured that Gabriel’s monthly salary was less than the price of a cocktail dress from a so-so brand at Bloomingdale’s.
“It’s not a lot,” said Lucía.
“It’s nothing.”
“Okay, tell me about New York. Isn’t it the best?” she said.
“It’s great once you get used to it. But in the beginning, it’s a bitch.”
“Why?”
“Because those of us who aren’t there as tourists, like you, at first you don’t know shit. You don’t speak a word of English, you don’t know anyone, and there are another eighty thousand desperate idiots looking for work, just like you.”
“How did you manage to get there?”
“I paid a coyote 1200 green ones to cross me over.”
“How did you get that much money?”
“I saved, working with my mom in her juice stand. Then my brother and my uncle chipped in, along with some money that a friend loaned me.”
“And how did you cross?” Lucía asked.
“Well, first you arrive at a town called Naco...”
“You are making this up.”
“I swear to God that’s the name of that stupid town,” laughed Gabriel. “Do you want me to tell you or not? In Naco, you stay at a hotel the coyote gets you and you wait until they tell you when they’re crossing you over, three or four days jerking off. And once they let you know, you meet at night with a bunch of people, and you start walking through the desert. You can’t see anything, and it’s fucking freezing. And you walk and walk, and you don’t get anywhere. You cross by sliding under a torn iron fence. The moment the sun rises, the heat is unbearable. Cactus thorns stick to your clothes. You run into poisonous snakes. It feels like you have a red-hot iron on your head. People get tired. They faint. They get disoriented. They get lost. And the coyotes don’t wait.”
“You didn’t help them?”
“At first, I was watching out for them, but they kept falling behind and if I stayed with them, we would all get lost.”
He didn’t tell her that they were women, some with little children, who came from who knows where in El Salvador or Guatemala, who asked for help.
“You think they died?”
“I hope not. But with that heat, I don’t know.”
“You didn’t feel guilty leaving them there?”
“I did. But what do you expect me to do? Would you have waited for them?”
“And what happened once you crossed over?”
“We got to a road, and they stuck us inside a van with no windows. We could hardly breathe, dying in the heat for hours. Then the van stopped suddenly, and they opened the doors. I almost went blind from the sunlight. I could see some buildings in the distance bending in the heat like rubber. They told us that was Tucson and to separate to avoid getting caught by the migra. And they left us there in the middle of that oven. So, I started walking towards the buildings, no water or anything, alone as a dog. I made it to a neighborhood where each house had a swimming pool, and I was so hot that that I took off my clothes, jumped a fence, and I dove into a pool in my briefs. You have no idea how good it felt. I was so thirsty I drank water from the pool. I got out before anyone saw me, I changed clothes, and headed towards the city.”
“And did you find a job?”
“In Tucson it was impossible. The migra won’t leave you alone. I went to pick apples in Washington State, then to Long Island. My buddy Leandro and I went to a town called Farmington, about an hour and a half from New York City on the train. It was a dump. We found a house to rent with a bunch of Mexicans. We had to walk like half an hour to a godammned corner of the town and wait until a gringo picked us up in a van and took us to work. Farmington was terrible, but twenty minutes away, it was a different story: Mansions with pools and gardens. That’s where they’d take us to mow lawns and plant rosebushes and shit like that.
Two days after we got there, a gringo took Leandro and me to seed grass in his garden. We worked all day long with our backs hurting like hell, but at the end he gave us each a 100-dollar bill. He hired us to paint walls and install air conditioners. He saved a shitload of money with us. He’d tell us, “You’re like little hardworking ants, tiny and dark.”
“Did you make a lot?”
“Honey, I had never had so much dough in my life. In four months, I saved about 3,000 dollars. But being the moron that I am, I sent most to my mom, and I paid what I owed.”
“And then?”
“One morning a pickup truck with two blond jocks pulled up at the corner. They picked Leandro and your humble servant, since we stuck together like dirt to a fingernail. They took us to a house under construction. We could tell it was abandoned. The yard was full of broken glass and used needles. We got a bad vibe, but there we were, chasing after the money. They ambushed us inside a barn, and when Leandro tried to run, one of the gringos knocked him out. The other one pulled out a chain. They beat Leandro to a bloody pulp. They broke four of my ribs and almost took my eye out. And you can’t go to the hospital in case the migra is prowling. It was a shitshow.”
Lucía’s eyes clouded over.
“I’m not telling you this so you can pity me,” Gabriel said.
“I don’t pity you. On the contrary, I admire you. I wouldn’t have lasted two minutes in the desert.”
“Of course not. There is no Zenaida there to carry your water canteen.”
Lucía pretended not to hear the comment.
“Did you miss Mexico?”
“I missed my friends. And the food.”
“Not your family?”
“Honestly, no. They are a pain in the ass.”
“How old were you?”
“Seventeen.”
Lucía could imagine him with his protruding ribs, working under the blazing sun.
“Weren’t you lonely?”
“I got myself some girlfriends.”
“Mexicans?”
“And gringas too.”
“Seriously?”
“Of course, over there it’s a different story,” Gabriel said. “Gringas are much more laid back.”
“Son unas putas.”
“Maybe, but they don’t play hard to get so much.”
Until that day, Lucía’s opinion was that Mexico’s poor insisted on ruining their own lives by having dozens of children they couldn’t afford. The sexual lives of Ignacia, Jacinta, or Zenaida had never crossed her mind. It was a taboo, like picturing her own parents copulating.
“How many gringas did you hook up with?”
“Lots. The güeritas over there don’t look down on you like the ones here, baby. Like Kate, she was all over me.”
“Who?”
“An Irish waitress who worked with me in the restaurant. Every time she arrived, she greeted me with a kiss on the cheek. And again when she went home at night. I used to call her Catalina.”
“And did you score?”
“Of course. She was my girlfriend. But the manager, an asshole gringo called Brian, was after Kate. He saw that she was into me, and he started making my life a living hell. Once, I happened to talk back and the cabrón called ICE. One day, right during lunchtime, they showed up in the kitchen looking for me. They arrested me, locked me up in jail for six months and then deported me.”
Ricardo wanted to stay home and listen to music. Lucía didn’t mind showering, putting on her creams, perfume, and makeup all over again. It turned out that the more sex she had, the more sex she wanted to have. She was turned on by having been with Gabriel only a couple of hours before. She enjoyed comparing her two lovers. She liked sniffing them, tasting them, and identifying their scents and flavors as if she were tasting wines. She liked being desired by two men. And she wanted to feel horny with both, although she didn’t dare do with Ricardo half of the things she did with Gabriel in the hotel, and she had no idea why.
“You seem distracted, Lucía. Are you alright?” asked Ricardo.
“Yes, mi amor. I’m just a bit tired. I didn’t sleep well.”
“Let me put on some chill out music, we’ll have a little wine, and smoke a little weed. What do you want for dinner? We can ask the maid to fix something, or we can order sushi.”
“Sushi.”
“Cool. I have a wonderful sake that I brought from Japan. I can make you some amazing saketinis.”
“Just the sake, thanks.”
“I can add a slice of cucumber for the aroma.”
“I said just the sake!”
Ricardo looked hurt.
“You just don’t listen, Ricky. Let’s go to your room.”
She took him by the hand to lead him there. He didn’t budge.
“Not that I’m complaining, but once in a blue moon when I actually get to see you, it’s either to have lunch with your family, or to fuck,” he said.
“Oh, so if a girl wants to fuck, she is a whore, and if she doesn’t, she is a nun. Are you coming or not?”
Ricardo made a funny frightened face.
“Let me get the weed.”
Ricardo told the maid to call it a night. He ordered an amazing Japanese meal and as background music he chose an album with a woman whispering in French. Lucía would have preferred Luis Miguel, or a normal ballad, but Ricardo said those were cheesy. Her two lovers hated her taste in music. That’s what they had in common.
Lucía was intimidated by the perfection of Ricardo’s apartment. It was like being trapped in a fashion magazine where everyone wore sunglasses and weird Prada clothes, and smiling was frowned upon. After he went to the door to get the sushi, Ricardo came back to the living room looking triumphant.
“Look what I found! Molly! Have you tried it?”
This is too much, thought Lucía. Only a few hours ago, I was melting with the driver and now Ecstasy with this one.
“Never,” she lied.
“Do you feel like trying it?”
“Yeah, why not?”
“Let’s take it after we eat,” said Ricardo.
He artfully arranged the sushi on his Japanese ceramic dinnerware with hammered metal chopsticks and linen napkins that matched his Scandinavian shot glasses. Lucía would not have minded eating straight from the plastic tray with the splintered wooden chopsticks instead of having to wait for Ricardo to stop acting like a Geisha. But once Ricardo started feeding her sushi and the sake had relaxed her, she found her boyfriend’s penchant for the finer things in life quite pleasant. After dinner, Ricardo split the pill in two and made Lucía drink a full glass of water. They hugged on the leather sofa waiting for the pill to kick in, listening to the phantasmagoric music. Half an hour later, a feeling of wellbeing descended on Lucía like a silk membrane. The music notes entered through her pores. Handsome, tall Ricardo, with his angelic curls coiled around his forehead, danced with her, following her moves with telepathic precision, which made her utter little yelps of joy. Their bodies brushed against each other, and the texture of his shirt and his chest below it were deliriously soft. Lucía felt that her own smile was going to drip down her chin like a juicy, ripe fruit. Their bodies floated like anemones to the liquid sway of the music. They were one organism. Ricardo kissed her softly. He tasted of sake and the sea. He caressed her as if she were made of glass.
“You are beautiful, Lucía.”
“Hmm.”
“I can’t believe my luck.”
“Me neither.”
Ricardo looked at her in awe, searching for her love in the depths of her eyes. She smiled sweetly at him. They gazed at each other for a long time, very close together, without touching.
“I love you,” he said.
“Shh. Make love to me.”
And he did, with delicious, sweet, tender slowness, their scorching skins melding, their mouths thirsty, the exquisite fever of their pleasure under the cotton sheets as cool as the water that smooths the pebbles in a stream. Lucía felt that in her heart there was room for loving more than one man, love to give and receive.