A Southern Girl (41 page)

“It was hotter than Charleston on the hottest day in history. There weren’t five other people in the car, and they slept. Philip and I each had a window on opposite sides of the aisle and he would cross often to take in my view, not much different from his but he was too excited to stay in his seat and he kept saying how unbelievable it was we were really in Mexico.”

Margarite smiles. “He loved adventures, even as a small boy. When other moms got calls from homesick sons at camp, I never worried.” She pauses thoughtfully. “Where were you headed?”

“Mexico City, to see the bull fights.”

“But you never made it. Why?”

I cross my legs and pick at a tiny tick of leather protruding from the sole of my shoe. “Tequila,” I say with a wry grin, not looking up. “We changed our money into pesos at Laredo. The train stopped outside Monterrey and these Mexicans got on selling everything you could want. We each bought a sombrero, a serape—those blankets in the photograph, some tamales and our first bottle of Tequila and neither of us knew a word of Spanish so I stuck out a bunch of pesos and the Mexicans made change out of my hand and after thirty or forty minutes they got off and the train started moving again.

“We ate the tamales and watched the sunset out my window and you’ve never seen anything more beautiful. Philip said it looked like a giant gold coin had been heated to a liquid and balanced on the edge of a mountain. We broke open our Tequila and didn’t really know how to drink the stuff and we didn’t have anything to mix with it so we drank it straight out of the bottle. When the sun went down it got cool so we put on our new serapes and with the Tequila going to our heads we felt like real Mexicans even though we’d only been in the country a few hours.”

I study her reaction. She has an ethereal calm about her, a dreamy peace like she’s on the train with us, seated in the back so as not to be part of action but able to observe every word and act of her son. I am pulling her with us toward Mexico City. I remember a few details of that night’s long ride south. The car rocked along in the dark with Philip and me facing each other and nipping from the bottles. We were high in practically no time. I stared at him in the dark as we talked and I can still, almost thirty years later, recall the exhilaration of being eighteen and cocky and free and a little drunk miles from home in a strange land. Damn, we had a time.

“We passed out sometime that night and I awoke with my head splitting like some Mexican had stolen onto the train and wrapped it in steel cable and Philip didn’t feel any better. We were stopped at a small station and we got off and I walked a few yards into what looked like the beginning of a desert and threw up behind a bush that had some wicked thorns all over it. Philip felt so bad himself that he couldn’t even make fun of me. We decided there was no way we were getting back on that train; I’d have died. A sign on the station told us we were in San Miguel, wherever that was.

“Philip went back into the car for our stuff and we walked into town. Between puking my guts out and the walk I felt better, which is not to say good. I squinted so hard to filter the daylight that it was tough to see where we were going. We walked up a long, gradual hill and after a while we were on cobblestones, which added a homelike touch to the place because I was so used to the cobblestones on Church Street. We came to the town square and through the trees I saw on the other side the spire of a huge gothic cathedral. We were standing in front of what looked like a hotel, and Philip told me to stay there with the stuff while he checked it out and he left me standing there beside a couple of burros. One carried some broken sticks and the other some metal cans that I later learned contained milk.

“Philip was smiling when he came out. He had us a room for the equivalent of $2.50 a day. We grabbed the stuff, walked inside and across a brightly lit courtyard and up a flight of stairs. He pulled out a key that looked large enough to have belonged to some medieval castle and we stumbled into this spacious room, sparsely furnished but all I cared about was the bed. I fell on mine, he on his, and the next thing I knew it was
evening. Philip was still snoring. I got up, splashed water on my face from an ancient tile sink, and opened the doors to a balcony.”

I pause, forgetting for a moment that Margarite is with me. So far in the past, and I am just realizing how very long it has been since I have dwelled on Mexico, relived it.

“Margarite, have you ever felt so awful that bouncing back to normal is euphoric?”

“I certainly have,” she says. “I got a flu bug one winter that did that.”

“Then you’ll understand how I felt at that balcony. The coolest breeze surrounded me as I leaned on the wrought iron railing. Our room overlooked the square, what the Mexicans call the
jardín.
A small group of mariachis played somewhere under the trees. I couldn’t see them but the music floated up along with the smell of tortillas being cooked by a street vendor just below the balcony. I yelled for Philip to get up and he must have been awaken by the new air in the room because he joined me a minute or two later and I could tell that balcony had the same effect on him.

“Philip looked down to see where the smell of food was coming from, then asked how much money I thought it would take to buy the vendor out and haul that cart up to our room. We were both ravenous and we hit that tortilla stand like a couple of locusts.”

Margarite pours herself more Kahlua, holding the bottle out for me, but I decline. “Philip had an odd appetite,” she says, staring into her cup. “He could go for days without eating anything substantial but then gobble up everything in sight for a meal or two. But milk? He never lost his passion for milk.”

“You don’t drink milk in Mexico, or water. Only beer.”

“Oh, my,” she says. “It’s a wonder you two didn’t turn into alcoholics. I’m beginning to see why Philip never told us the details.”

No, Margarite, I think as she sips from her cup, our drinking was not the reason Philip refrained from stories of Mexico. There was something else.

“There was a girl, wasn’t there?” she asks as if reading my thoughts. “I seem to remember something about you falling in love. Philip said only that she was Mexican and very beautiful.”

“Yes,” I acknowledge, “there was a girl.”

“I hope you boys didn’t fight over her.”

I know what you mean, Margarite. You imply a rivalry between friends for the affections of one girl. No, in that sense we did not fight over Adriana.

“Tell me about her,” she urges. “That is, unless it’s private.”

“Not at all,” I say in the kind of clever half-truth we lawyers master early. “The following morning, the roosters were going nuts while it was still dark and the bells of the cathedral sounded like they were in the next room so Philip got up at dawn to go exploring.”

“Of course. He would want to get his bearings right away,” she confirms decisively.

“I stayed in bed, lazy but feeling great. Just as I started to get up, I heard the key in the door. It opened, and into the room came a girl about my age. She walked straight to the bed, looked down at me, and said in broken but understandable English that she was there to make up the room.”

“And this was her, the girl?”

“This was Adriana. I don’t think I had ever seen a Mexican girl up close. What I remember most is her skin. The only thing I can compare it to is a peach with a suntan. She had a trace of rouge on her cheeks which I thought was unusual for a chambermaid, but then I learned that her family owned the hotel. When she looked down at me her black hair fell to either side of this perfect face and the darkest, most inviting eyes I had ever seen. She wore a white dress that was immaculate against that skin and I had trouble breathing for a moment, thinking an angel had come to make up my bed. ‘I will back come,’ she said. She had an endearing way of mixing the order of her words in English but I always understood and since I knew no Spanish I shouldn’t have laughed but I did. She figured I was making fun of her and she turned abruptly and walked out and closed the door rather forcefully.”

“How romantic,” says Margarite. “You made it up to her?”

“That morning. I found an old woman selling flowers, bought an armload, and tracked her down in the back of the hotel supervising maids who were washing bed sheets by hand. She seemed embarrassed but the flowers pleased her and she agreed to let me take her for a walk. I said I needed to get to know the town and she said she would show me only to practice her English because the nun at her school spoke it only during the lesson
and her skills were ‘dusty,’ by which she meant rusty. So we concealed our instant attraction in logic and spent the day together.”

“And where was Philip?”

“He joined us that afternoon. The three of us walked everywhere. The sidewalks are stone and so narrow you must go single file at times. We would pass a decrepit door set into a pock-marked wall and I remember thinking that behind the wall lay squalor worse than any I had seen even in the dreariest slums of Charleston. But a couple of those doors opened as we passed and inside were formal gardens with tile fountains and bougainvillea in explosive reds and purples and pinks. That was my first clue that Mexico is nothing like the facade it presents to the world. Lining the tops of these walls were glass shards embedded in the mortar to discourage encroachers, and if that wasn’t enough fierce dogs who live their entire lives on the roof would bark as we approached below. Much later, Adriana led us to a promontory overlooking the town. We watched the lights flicker on as the sun went down. This sunset was even more spectacular than the one I’d seen on the train and I decided then that Mexico had found the secret for perfect sunsets.”

“It sounds like your enthusiasm for the view might have been influenced by your companion.” Margarite winks at me knowingly. “But did Philip have no interest in this lovely girl?”

“Oh, he did at first. He was as smitten with her as I was. But for some reason she took to me. Philip saw that. He bitched about it but then seemed to accept it and treated her like a sister. They had a great relationship; just friends.”

“But yours was more.”

“I fell in love and there isn’t any other way to describe it. Head over heels, whole hog crazy about her.”

“And she reciprocated.”

“As best she could.”

“What do you mean, or is this getting too personal?” she wants to know. “I don’t mean to pry.”

“It’s okay,” I assure, flipping a hand as if to waive whatever privilege I might enjoy. “Adriana was the only daughter among the six Martinez children. Her parents were fanatical Catholics in the way only Catholics can be fanatic. Suddenly, their daughter was cutting her workdays short to
spend time with a gringo heretic. Their worry turned to panic as we grew more obsessed. One night we stayed out until almost dawn and her father was waiting in the courtyard. He was furious, yelling loud enough to wake every guest in the place. He ordered her to stop seeing me and told me to clear out of the hotel. It was very ugly.”

“But that didn’t stop you,” Margarite surmises.

“It brought us closer, although not in distance because of course Philip and I had no choice but to move out. Once we did, we were totally out of sight of her parents, which actually made things better or worse depending on where you stood.”

“Did they try to break it up?”

“Yes, but it was the way they went about it that created the trouble. At some point they informed Rodrigo, the oldest brother, that the mortal souls of the family hung in the balance if anything came between Adriana and her education, then her marriage to a suitable Mexican. Rodrigo cornered her and, from what she told me, gave her the pitch as though he were Christ Himself.”

“What did she do?”

“Turned on him like she turned on me that first morning in my room. She had a mind all her own, and her plans to attend the university in Mexico City had been thrown in doubt. She even mentioned moving to Charleston.”

“That must have put her family in a real panic.”

“Frenzy might be closer.”

“And you were encouraging her to abandon school?”

“I didn’t think so at the time. All I knew was that I had to be with her whatever it took. She told me she wanted to please her parents but not at the cost of giving me up. We continued to see each other. I think they knew but they couldn’t keep her under house arrest. In Mexico, family is everything and it took courage for Adriana to defy them.”

“What happened?”

What happened, Margarite? That is what I cannot tell you. Not even the ample amount of Kahlua we have shared can loosen my tongue to that degree. I cannot relate the story of the night Adriana’s fate was decided, of Rodrigo’s rashness, of Philip’s role in what followed. I should tell you; you of all people have a right to know. But I cannot. It is my failing, one that is with me still, I suspect. No, I will tell you what did not happen. I
will do what I do best; cast myself in a light most favorable to those who stand near enough to judge. A few lies after all these years cannot hurt, can they?

“What happened, you asked?” and she nods. “With my encouragement she confronted her parents with her decision not to enter the university. There was a furious reaction, as she expected. She described it between sobs that evening. Well, the longer it went on the more troubled I became about taking this girl away from her family. And what were our choices? I mean, I was headed off to UVA in September, and while I was in love with her I couldn’t take her with me, couldn’t promise her anything.”

“That’s true,” she agrees. “You kept your senses.”

“I had to,” I continue in my most self-congratulatory tone. “What right did I have to blow into this small town and change this girl’s destiny if I was unable to offer her an alternative?”

“So true, so true,” mutters Margarite, the Kahlua beginning to impact her speech.

“So Philip and I talked it over and he convinced me that the best for all concerned was for us to leave town before I got in any deeper.”

“Philip wasn’t involved so he could see clearly about changing this young girl’s life.”