American Dirt : A Novel (2020) (5 page)

‘She’s a saint!’

He spoke frequently of his only child, a sixteen-year-old daughter who was at boarding school in Barcelona. Everything about him changed when he talked about her – his voice, his face, his manner. His love for her was so earnest that he handled even the subject of her with tremendous care. Her name was like a fine glass bauble he was afraid of dropping.

‘I joke about my many loves, but in truth, there is only one.’ He smiled at Lydia. ‘Marta.
Es mi cielo, mi luna, y todas mis estrellas.
’

‘I am a mother.’ Lydia nodded. ‘I know this love.’

He sat across from her on the stool she’d come to think of as his. ‘That love is so vast I sometimes fear it,’ he said. ‘I can never hope to earn it, so I fear it will disappear, it will consume me. And at the same time, it’s the only good thing I’ve ever done in my life.’

‘Oh, Javier – that can’t be true,’ Lydia said.

The subject made him morose. He shook his head, rubbed his eyes roughly beneath the glasses.

‘It’s just that my life hasn’t turned out as I intended,’ he said. ‘You know how it is.’

But she didn’t. After weeks of learning about each other, this was where their common language faltered. With the exception of having
only one child, Lydia’s life had turned out precisely as she’d always wished it might. She’d given up hoping for the daughter she could no longer have; she’d accepted that absence because she’d worked at it. She was content with her choices, more than content. Lydia was happy. But Javier looked at her through the warp of his lenses, and she could see the yearning on his face, to be understood. She pressed her lips together. ‘Tell me,’ she said.

He removed the glasses and folded the stems. He placed them in his breast pocket and blinked, his eyes small and raw without their accustomed shield. ‘I thought I would be a poet!’ He laughed. ‘Ridiculous, right? In this day and age?’

She put her hand on top of his.

‘I thought I would be a scholar. A quiet life. I’d do quite well with poverty, I think.’

She twisted her mouth, touching the elegant watch on his wrist. ‘I’m dubious.’

He shrugged. ‘I guess I do like shoes.’

‘And steak,’ she reminded him.

He laughed. ‘Yes, steak. Who doesn’t like steak?’

‘Your book habit alone would bankrupt most people.’

‘
Dios m
í
o,
you’re right, Lydia. I’d be a terrible pauper.’

‘The worst,’ she agreed. After a beat she said, ‘It’s never too late, Javier. If you’re truly unhappy? You’re still a young man.’

‘I’m fifty-one!’

Younger than she thought, even. ‘Practically a baby. And what have you got to be so unhappy about anyway?’

He looked down at the counter and Lydia was surprised to see genuine torment cross his features.

She lowered her voice and leaned in. ‘Then you could choose a different path, Javier. You can. You’re such a gifted person, such a capable person. What’s stopping you?’

‘Ah.’ He shook his head, replacing his glasses. She watched him pushing his face back into its customary shapes. ‘It’s all a romantic dream now. It’s over. I made my choices long ago, and this is where they’ve led me.’

She squeezed his hand. ‘It’s not so bad, right?’ It was something she’d say to Luca, to shepherd him toward optimism.

Javier blinked slowly, tipped his head to one side. An ambiguous ges
ture. ‘It will have to do.’

She straightened up behind the counter and took a sip of her lukewarm coffee. ‘Your choices yielded Marta.’

His eyes shined. ‘Yes, Marta,’ he said. ‘And you.’

The next time he came, he brought a box of
conchas
and sat in his usual place. There were several customers in the shop, so he opened the box and placed two of the sweet treats on napkins while Lydia walked the aisles helping people with their requests. When they approached the counter to pay for their goods, Javier greeted them as if he worked there. He offered them
conchas
. When at last Lydia and Javier were alone, he withdrew a small Moleskine notebook from the interior pocket of his jacket and set it on the counter as well.

‘What’s this?’ Lydia asked.

Javier swallowed nervously. ‘My poetry.’

Lydia’s eyes grew wide with delight.

‘I’ve never shared it with anyone except Marta,’ he said. ‘She’s studying poetry in school. And French and mathematics. She’s much more gifted than her old
pap
á
.’

‘Oh, Javier.’

He touched the corner of the book nervously. ‘I’ve been writing poems all my life. Since I was a child. I thought you might like to hear one.’

Lydia pulled her stool closer to the counter and leaned toward him, her chin resting on her propped and folded hands. Between them, the
conchas
stained their napkins with grease. Javier opened the book, its pages soft from wear. He leafed carefully through them until he came to the page he had in mind. He cleared his throat before he began.

Oh, the poem was terrible. It was both grave and frivolous, so bad that it made Lydia love him much, much more, because of how vulnerable he was in sharing it with her. When he finished reading and looked up for her reaction, his face was a twist of worry. But her eyes were bright and reassuring, and she genuinely meant the words she gave him in that moment.

‘How beautiful. How very beautiful.’

The maturing friendship with Javier was surprising in its swiftness and intensity. The flirtation had mostly ceased, and in its place, she discovered an intimacy she’d seldom experienced outside of family. There was no feeling of romance on Lydia’s end, but their bond was refreshing. Javier reminded her, in the middle of her mothering years, that life was exciting, that there was always the possibility of something, or someone, previously undiscovered.

On her birthday, a day Lydia did not recall revealing to him, Javier arrived with a silver parcel the size of a book. The ribbon said,
jacques
genin
.

‘The principal chocolatier in Paris,’ Javier explained.

Lydia demurred, but not convincingly. (She loved chocolate.) And she accidentally ate every last one of the tiny masterpieces before Sebasti
á
n and Luca arrived at her shop that evening to take her out for her birthday dinner.

Because of an eruption of violence between rival cartels in Acapulco, Lydia and her family, indeed most families in the city, no longer frequented their favorite neighborhood caf
é
s. The challenger to the establishment was a new cartel that called itself Los Jardineros, a name that failed, initially, to evoke the appropriate fear in the populace. That problem had been transitory. Shortly after their formation, everyone in the city knew that ‘The Gardeners’ used guns only when they didn’t have time to indulge their creativity. Their preferred tools were more intimate: spade, ax, sickle, hook, machete. The simple instruments of hacking and trenching. With these, Los Jardineros moved the earth; with these, they unseated and buried their rivals. A few of the dethroned survivors managed to join the ranks of their conquerors; most fled the city. The result was a recent decrease in bloodshed as the emergent winner flung a shroud of uneasy calm across the shoulders of Acapulco. Nearly four months of relative quiet followed, and the citizens of Acapulco cautiously returned to the streets, to the restaurants and shops. They were eager to repair the damage to their economy. They were ready for a cocktail. So, in the safest district, where tourist money had always encouraged some restraint, in a restaurant selected more for its security than for its menu, and surrounded by the shining faces of her family, Lydia blew out the candle on her thirty-second birthday cake.

Later that night, after Luca went to bed, and Sebasti
á
n opened a bottle of wine on the couch, their conversation turned inevitably to the condition of life in Acapulco. Lydia stood at the open counter, leaning across it with a glass of wine at her elbow.

‘It was nice to be able to go out to dinner tonight,’ she said.

‘It felt almost normal, right?’ Sebasti
á
n was in the living room, his legs propped on the coffee table, crossed at the ankles.

‘There were a lot of people out.’

It was the first time they’d taken Luca out for a meal since last summer.

‘Next we have to get the tourists back,’ Sebasti
á
n said.

Lydia took a deep breath. Tourism had always been the lifeblood of Acapulco, and the violence had scared most of those tourists away. She didn’t know how long she’d be able to keep the shop afloat if they didn’t return. It was tempting to hope the recent peace signaled a sea change.

‘Do you think things might really get better now?’

She asked because Sebasti
á
n’s knowledge of the cartels was exhaustive, which both impressed and discomfited her. He knew things. Most people were like Lydia; they didn’t want to know. They tried to insulate themselves from the ugliness of the narco violence because they couldn’t handle it. But Sebasti
á
n was ravenous for it. A free press was the last line of defense, he said, the only thing left standing between the people of Mexico and complete annihilation. It was his vocation, and when they were young, she’d admired that idealism. She’d imagined that any child of Sebasti
á
n’s would come out of her womb honorably, with a fully formed, unimpeachable morality. She wouldn’t even have to teach their babies right from wrong. But now the cartels murdered a Mexican journalist every few weeks, and Lydia recoiled from her husband’s integrity. It felt sanctimonious, selfish. She wanted Sebasti
á
n alive more than she wanted his strong principles. She wished he would quit, do something simpler, safer. She tried to be supportive, but sometimes it made her so angry that he chose this danger. When that anger flared up and intruded, they moved around it like a piece of furniture too big for the room it occupied.

‘It’s already better,’ Sebasti
á
n said thoughtfully, from behind his wineglass.

‘I mean, it’s quieter,’ Lydia said. ‘But is it really
better
?’

‘That depends on your criteria, I guess.’ He looked up at her. ‘If you like to go out to dinner, then yes, things are better.’

Lydia frowned. She really did like to go out to dinner. Was she that superficial?

‘The new
jefe
is smart,’ Sebasti
á
n said. ‘He knows stability is the key, and he wants peace. So we’ll see, maybe things will get better under Los Jardineros than they were before.’

‘Better how? You think he can fix the economy? Bring back tourism?’

‘I don’t know, maybe.’ Sebasti
á
n shrugged. ‘If he can really stanch the violence long-term. For now, at least it’s limited to other narcos. They’re not running around murdering innocents for fun.’

‘What about that kid on the beach last week?’

‘Collateral damage.’

Lydia cringed and took a gulp of wine. Her husband wasn’t a callous man. She hated when he talked like this. Sebasti
á
n saw her flinch and stood up to reach across the counter. He squeezed her hands.

‘I know it’s awful,’ he said. ‘But that kid on the beach was an accident. He was caught in the crossfire, that’s all I meant. They weren’t gunning for him.’ He tugged lightly on her hand. ‘Come sit with me?’

Lydia rounded the counter and joined him on the couch.

‘I know you don’t like to think of it like this, but at the end of the day, these guys are businessmen, and this one is smarter than most.’ He put his arm around her. ‘He’s not your typical narco. In a different life, he could’ve been Bill Gates or something. An entrepreneur.’

‘Great,’ she said, threading one arm across his midsection and resting her head on his chest. ‘Maybe he should run for mayor.’

‘I think he’s more of a chamber of commerce kinda guy.’ Sebasti
á
n laughed, but Lydia couldn’t. They were quiet for a moment, and then Sebasti
á
n said, ‘La Lechuza.’

‘What?’

‘That’s his name.’
The Owl.

Now she was able to laugh. ‘Are you serious?’ She sat up to look him in the face, to determine if he was messing with her. Sometimes he fed her nonsense just to test how gullible she was. This time, his face was innocent. ‘The Owl? That’s a terrible name!’ She laughed again. ‘Owls aren’t scary.’

‘What do you mean? Owls are terrifying,’ Sebasti
á
n said.

She shook her head.

‘Hoo,’ he said.

‘Oh my God, stop it.’

He worked his fingers into her hair, and she felt content there, leaning against his chest. She could smell the sweet red wine on his breath.

‘I love you, Sebasti
á
n.’