|
TOURIST By Lenore Carroll
She bought a cafe con leche at La Parroquia where a young waiter, almost obsequious in his service, made her want to throw caution away and eat strawberries in Venice. A slim boy with a bony Indian face and huge, melting eyes, he smiled easily and served deftly. Why had Miss Kidder, a school teacher a year from retirement, subjected herself to the stress of travel? Didn’t she get enough of school in Iowa the rest of the year? She felt the dry grit of chalk in her hands. Cancel the school year for summertime. She wandered through the heart of the city, admiring the classic lines of the government house, studying the imposing cathedral, then strolled into a park. Paved paths confined the straggly vegetation, nurses watched their charges, the shoeshine man did a steady business and the man selling foil pinwheels became giant metallic bird fluttering in the wind. She turned brittle and flat, then her four corners curved into the center. The pin stuck the shiny points to the stick, then she whirled, glittering in the sun. She walked on, watching her image in shop windows, then went inside a dress boutique. Her drab tan slacks and white shirt fell away like shed skin. Embroidered roses covered her gauze bosom. Ruffles and lace, a fuchsia dress she’d never wear at home. Her hair came loose from the band, which held it. Sandals replaced her Reeboks. To find her way back, she oriented herself to the snow-capped mountain, once a volcano, sixty miles to the west. Orizaba appeared and disappeared in the mist. When she couldn’t see it, she couldn’t remember how to go. She tried a different path through the park, circled the fountain in the center, where trickling water disturbed her reflection in the basin. The jungle closed in. Heavy-scented flowers ate insects, macaws and monkeys screeched from the rank trees. The undergrowth writhed with barely hidden animal life. Then she saw the statue of Juarez and in the distance, the soft green breast of Orizaba rising to a snow-tipped nipple. She attended the first classes at the university, enjoying the familiar atmosphere of the schoolroom, but she did not feel humble or respectful of her instructors. Their methods were behind the times and their examples and metaphors were obvious. She reminded herself she could still learn something. The writing teacher agrees to take the student’s work seriously for the period of instruction. Miss Kidder was interested in writing her own stories as a way of understanding how to teach her students. She had no pretensions about her work and would not ask if she had “talent.” She would trudge through the assignments, as she now trudged back up the hill. Many writing teachers wrote, but rarely wrote about teaching writing. She wondered why. She regained the house, passed through the iron gate standing ajar, and crossed the patio bordered with blooming plants. The city was pretty, except for inevitable pockets of squalor, and her room was comfortable, a pilgrim’s room with signs of passage -- odd books in a wall niche, scuffed furniture, fingerprints around the light switch, a cloudy full-length mirror that had reflected all the visitors. She thought some earlier inhabitant of the room must still be caught in the mirror, but it was her holiday dress. She had chosen this workshop for its exotic locale and expected it to be a tax-deductible vacation. Writing stories seemed an indulgence, not work. She had an hour before the midday meal so she switched on her laptop, entered the manuscript directory and opened a new file she titled ENCOUNTER.
...The Tourist bought a copy of Time at the newsstand just off the plaza on Enriquez Street from a smiling girl with gleaming hair. In the restaurant, a handsome young waiter placed her cup of cafe con leche on the table with a murmured phrase and a smile. She studied his deft movements, his unconscious grace. He wished her a polite buenos dias and backed away from the table.
One thing she liked about stories: she could make things happen as she wished. She wrote a note: how handsome, how young is the waiter? Metaphor? In the evening, after the long break, the conferees gathered in the big living room for drinks and coffee. Comfortable couches and chairs were grouped in front of the windows and around a small table. After an evening buffet of sandwiches and salad, everyone was eager to get acquainted. Several instructors had dropped by. Noisy Frankie, a carefully groomed gay man from Los Angeles, told mildly funny stories about encounters with other gay men. “And this woman said it was because I was prejudiced against blacks and I said, ‘Girlfriend, I’ve been with more black men than you have.’“ Laughter rippled through the living room. Miss Kidder counted three other teacher-ladies, several young men, a retired U.S. Army major and Frankie, who touched up his hair. “Where do you live?” asked a man with icy green eyes. It was McCoy, a widower who taught some of the conference sessions. “Des Moines,” replied Miss Kidder. “Do you live in Xalapa year ‘round?” “Yes. But I teach only when the gringos come down in the summer. Will the credits keep you certified?” “Yes,” said Miss Kidder. “How did you know?” “It’s usual at this conference, plus I taught school myself for years before I moved here.” “Call me Helen,” she said. “How long have you been here?” Miss Kidder asked. She found McCoy’s shaggy silver hair attractive, forget baggy eyes and an incipient paunch. She wondered how much they really had in common. “Long enough to appreciate American women.” His glance locked hers. She was rusty, but flirting must be like riding a bicycle, because she immediately found her balance. “And what about them do you appreciate?” She smiled and felt herself warming. “I don’t have to explain who the Everly Brothers were, or the significance of a ‘55 Chevy or how to make a root beer float.” “You could get that from a game of Trivial Pursuit.” McCoy pursed his lips, then said, “Well, it’s nice to meet a woman who calls my bluff.” “You’ll be getting one of my stories in a week. My students always ask, ‘Are you a hard grader?’“ “I try to bounce writers out of their ruts -- no stereotypes, no hackneyed plots. But writing is so personal -- mostly I point out what works and offer encouragement. Tell me how you teach,” he said. They chatted and yes, flirted. Miss Kidder exercised the unused muscle, found it was stiff, but still worked. She learned he lived in rooms in a house at the bottom of the city where a flourishing park framed man-made lakes and a museum of folklore artifacts. When she returned to her room, she booted up again, but when she got into ENCOUNTER and moved to the end of file, she read, “...And Miss Kidder got into bed and listened to the night sounds outside her window.” She hadn’t written that! She scrolled back and discovered an edited version of Frankie’s gay bar stories. She couldn’t have written it. How had someone used her computer? She was too tired to worry about it. She blamed the altitude and her walk and meeting too many new people. She pulled the bedspread down, turned out the lamp and stretched out on fresh sheets. The night-cooled air teased her skin and she breathed the fragrance of unfamiliar flowers. Out the open windows engines in low gear whined up the hill and she heard voices, music, TV, even a cock’s crow -- the city’s random lullaby. The next day Miss Kidder read one of her stories in Workshop and withstood half an hour’s critique from the class. Another student read, then they met with the teacher for de-briefing. The instructor was a good coach, who told her if she could put a little more passion, a little more effort into it, the story was workable. That afternoon she didn’t rest after the big midday meal, but booted up ENCOUNTER and wrote a dialogue between the first-person narrator, the woman tourist, and an imagined McCoy. This version had double entendres and meaningful glances and a whiff of Obsession. She wrote a scene that put The Tourist and the fantasy McCoy together for steamy sex. You want passion, you’ll get passion. She looked up once during the hour and saw in the mirror a Frida Kahlo woman without skin, all muscles and organs visible, sitting at the laptop. A beating heart pumped arteries of words onto the screen. Her fantasies glowed on the LCD, released from her core. No skin between her self and her feelings. She didn’t stop. Her back hurt and she was thirsty, but she kept going all afternoon, emotion pouring onto the screen. She typed the end of the scene blind with tears, breath ragged, hands shaking. She hit Save. Time had stopped. She was sweaty and aroused and wished she had never started. Writing this scene tapped her contained sexuality and its force shocked and drained her. She felt feverish and cold and wished she had a partner to make love with. The afternoon was gone and she needed a shower. She had wondered why her students wrote private, painfully revealing narratives that they couldn’t read in class, that they begged her to keep confidential. Now she knew how that happened. Once you started, you kept going. At dinner she expected McCoy, the nucleus of her fantasy, but he did not appear. When she got back to her room she was surprised to find the bedclothes disarranged. Had someone been in her room again? She booted up ENCOUNTER and checked, but End of File was her sex scene as she had written it. She fell asleep teased by Obsession. The next morning she plotted ENCOUNTER to include McCoy’s avowal of love, his jilting by The Tourist, and his driving jealousy. The story grew violent. That day at lunch McCoy snarled as though he had been betrayed. He called her slut and nobody noticed. She was hurt. He was unfair! She certainly couldn’t understand what was wrong. Late that afternoon, after the rain, she went down to El Centro for a newspaper. The afternoon shower left puddles in the stones of the park, which reflected the trees and sky. She turned suddenly when the wind caught her hat and she saw McCoy lurking in the portales of the government building. Then he hurried past without acknowledging her. Miss Kidder smiled at the attractive young waiter at La Parroquia, the same one who served her the first day. He reminded her of her students. His serving was adroit and he returned her smile. The next day Miss Kidder toured the cathedral with several other conferees. McCoy met them there, which surprised her, but he might be their unofficial guide for the day. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw him scamper up the smooth stucco facade of the unfinished bell tower and perch, a living gargoyle, fifty feet up. Then he turned to stone. Nobody noticed. Her group studied the architecture of the church. The exterior was classic, the stucco almost without ornamentation, but inside it was elaborately rotten Spanish baroque, lacking all restraint. A scourged Jesus revealed exposed ribs. A raw corpus dripping blood hung defeated from a huge wooden cross. Votive candles lit the peasant boy and La Se eq \O(~,n)ora de Guadalupe against her garish backdrop. The saints begged, suffered, simpered, triumphed. A virgin stood dressed in elaborate embroidered doll clothes. McCoy, dressed in rags and sandals, knelt before La Se eq \O(~,n)ora de Guadalupe. Blood-red roses tumbled from his cloak. What a carnival! How tasteless compared to the serene Episcopal saints that guarded the gates of her Anglo-Saxon heaven. What could she expect from people whose old gods demanded still-beating hearts ripped from victims, whose kings ritually bled their tongues and penises, and whose conquerors invented the auto da f eq \O(',e)? She shouldn’t have used McCoy as a model for the character in her story. She didn’t really know him. She checked her file when she got back and found a description of the cathedral inserted before the sex scene. When she read the fictional narrator’s reaction to the cathedral’s Latin flamboyance Miss Kidder didn’t like The Tourist much -- the narrator had sexuality and snobbery, but no humanizing qualities. That weekend the conferees went in a group to the festival of Magdalena at the nearby town of Xico. The holiday atmosphere of the little town, the mild climate, the beauty of the countryside mellowed Miss Kidder, who thought: This is paradise. She joined the others to watch the running of very small bulls. Irregular policemen kept the crowds back. Then she watched the bullfight. She stood again on the bloodstained sand of a pyramid’s plaza. The villagers ceased chanting and the drums stopped. The thick breeze stirred the priests’ plumage as the blood thickened on the stones. Afterward she drifted around the festive town where street vendors sold local sausage and sweet country wine. Afterward a band with too many trumpets played and people danced in the street. Fireworks capped the evening. As they boarded the van to return to Xalapa, McCoy materialized out of the crowd brandishing a pistol. He was drunk and incoherent. His shirt half-escaped his belt and the knees of his trousers were stained. The director of the conference tried nervously to talk him into relinquishing the pistol, but McCoy raved on, a Lowry apparition at the fiesta. Miss Kidder walked up to McCoy. Pain lit his eyes when he saw her. In her best teacherish tone she said, “Give me the gun.” And he placed it in her outstretched hand without a word. She put her arm around his shoulder and led him away from the group to one of the tables set up in the park for the festival. “What ails you?” she asked. McCoy looked around as though he didn’t remember where he was. “I’ll kill him,” he declared. “Who will you kill?” “Your lover, that bum, that cabron.” “I don’t have a lover. Who is my lover?” “The coffee waiter. Don’t lie. I’ve seen you together.” “Why do you want to kill him?” “You left me for him.” “When?” “On page 14.” “But that’s not real,” Miss Kidder said. “Then why do I hate him?” Miss Kidder had no answer. McCoy’s head nodded forward and he slept on the table. She waved the conference director on. McCoy must have driven here in his own car. He awoke after an hour and seemed calmer, but not sober. “I have a solution,” said Miss Kidder. “I’ll delete that part of the story where you become jealous.” He gave her his keys and she drove him back to Xalapa. Zopilote rose from bloody roadkill, hungry raptors picking the bones. Scavenger memory stripped away the parts she didn’t want to remember and left cleaned bones. McCoy lived on the second floor of a house near the lakes. It felt warmer here at the bottom of the city, and more humid. Mosquitoes big as warblers menaced Miss Kidder. She smelled thick, decadent flowers, heard mildew creep toward her. The traffic on the Ring Road racing between Vera Cruz and Mexico City droned beneath the night melody. She watched McCoy tack toward the door, then drove uphill until she found a familiar street. He could claim his car later. The next morning she got into the story file as she promised and did a Mark Block/Save/Delete. But then the story didn’t make sense with the jealous reaction gone. How tiresome! That evening the after-dinner conversation was closer to Miss Kidder’s expectations of a writers’ conference -- bright and wide-ranging -- from the Xico festival to dormant Orizaba to Lowry’s book with its ominous symbolic volcano. Were Anglos fated, like Lowry’s consul, to disintegrate in the heat of Mexico, and reveal their core? She went back to her room, re-read the almost-completed story and put the jealousy back. Where did it all come from? How could she write emotions, events, and characters that aroused her, made her cry, and elicited pity? It was like tickling yourself -- she would have thought it impossible, yet it happened. The next morning she took up the story again.
...The waiter called farewells inside the restaurant, then closed the door behind him. He slung his jacket over his shoulder and found a taxi waiting on Calle Enriquez. McCoy’s car pulled out behind the taxi and the two cars drove to a discoteca on the edge of town. The waiter entered the dance hall with a jaunty stride and McCoy followed the boy into air layered with cigarette smoke and salsa music. The youngster bought a bottled beer and leaned against the wooden bar and watched couples weave intricate dance patterns. Men led their high-heeled partners over the slick floor. The palpable hum of sexuality taunted McCoy. The dancer’s intricate movements distracted him, then he remembered why he was there. He felt his pocket. The knife lay against his thigh, waiting. The young waiter turned to put his bottle on the bar and glanced at McCoy. His cafe con leche face was unlined, his body slim, his movements sure. “You think you’ll live forever,” said McCoy “You have time to steal another man’s woman. I’ll teach you a final lesson.” Before the youngster could speak, McCoy pulled the knife and flicked it open. He paused an instant to savor the glint of the blade and the bewilderment on the youngster’s face, then the knife flew forward and found a place between the boy’s ribs. The boy clutched the bloody wound, backing away, his hands pressed to his side, his head shaking No! No! Then McCoy lunged again with the bloody knife. The boy dodged and McCoy lurched and fell. Then he was on his feet feinting and jabbing. A local tried to wrest the knife away, but McCoy’s mad strength threw him off. Time slowed. McCoy lunged again. He felt each shift in his balance, saw each staring face, heard each brassy note, smelled the yeasty beer and the tang of blood. The knife found the youngster’s heart. The boy cried out and fell, arms outstretched. Several men grabbed for McCoy. He shook them off and charged out of the dance hall.
Miss Kidder hit Save. She struggled to breathe. She turned at a sound. McCoy emerged through the cloudy mirror. “What brings you here?” she asked. He held a rose of congealing blood in one hand and his trousers were torn. “Why must you torture me, Helen?” he said, anguished and weeping. “All I ever did was love you. Why do you take up with a younger man, humiliating me, making me crazy?” Miss Kidder hit Delete and changed it to, “‘Why make me crazy?’ asked McCoy.” “I thought it made a good story,” she said. “The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone. Night of the Iguana. Summertime. Death in Venice. Somehow the story got away from me.” “You are making me miserable for a story?” “How can it possibly happen if I don’t imagine it?” “Do you think you imagine the world into existence?” He knelt with his hands clasped. “If we had an affair, it would be banal, just another forgettable encounter. But if the woman dropped you and went on to a younger man -- lust in the tropic mountains! That’s the American woman’s fantasy.” La Se eq \O(~,n)ora’s starburst glowed around her, bathing her in colored light. She stood with hands together in prayer, standing on a crescent moon, permeated with the scent of roses. She looked down at the ragged man kneeling before her. “Your stories are cruel,” he said. “In real life most of the time I hope for love but I’ve written a script and the other person doesn’t know his lines.” Helen ran her fingers through McCoy’s silver hair. “Wasn’t I good enough?” he asked bitterly. “I imagined you were superb, since that’s what I wanted.” “So why did you leave me for that bum, that gigolo in the restaurant?” “I wanted a hard body. I wanted to be twenty-two again. I wanted everything.” “So you invented it.” “I reminded the young man of his mother and he pushed me away. Page nineteen. You weren’t in that part of the story.” “I beg you,” he murmured. “I like that part. In real life, nobody ever begs.” She smiled. “This will never do.” Miss Kidder turned to her laptop and hit Exit. When the program asked if she wanted to save Y/N, she hit NO, then checked the directory and deleted all versions of her story. She switched the computer off to obliterate the fiction. The starburst dimmed, the roses faded. She expected McCoy to vanish, but when she turned he was still there, shaking his head. “That should take care of it,” she said. She felt empty and cold, without skin again. “Many thanks,” said McCoy. His voice sounded normal. His eyes were steady. He rose. His hand was clean, his pants tidy. “I’m nothing like that, you know.” “I projected my fantasies on you,” she said, extinct, snow-covered. “Then you fell in love with them.” McCoy. “I thought I heard you calling, but it was just the echo of my desires.” “What will you do now?” he asked. “Listen for more echoes.”
END |
Miss Kidder checked her purse for pesos and set out down the hill to
explore Xalapa. All of the people attending the three-week workshop
at the university lived in a big, cool hacienda on the top of the
ridge that framed the western quadrant of the city. Iron balconies
with flowering pots jutted from the building facades. She was
delighted when she reached El Centro, the heart of the city. She
bought a copy of Time magazine in English from a newsstand.
The salesman said “Hola!” which Miss Kidder thought was rude,
something like “Hey, you.”