Gringa (27 page)

“What?” Estrella looked desperate. The matron gave her a shove that made her fall. When she got back up, the matron said again, “Now bend over, girlie.” Estrella turned and leaned against a wall. The woman pulled one hand down and forced her to bend, to keep her balance. She flipped Estrella's dress up in the back; Estrella's buttocks shone bare. She shoved a finger right up Estrella's backside and then waved it in the air, shouting “phew! phew!” Then the matrons left.

“Oh my God, my God,” Estrella wept.

“This is more awful than I ever imagined,” Aidee said.

“Oh stop it!” Abilene said. “Nothing has happened yet. They've had a good time at our expense. They're making fun of us, they want to frighten us. What can they really do? What have we done? We stood outside a building and handed out pieces of paper. Get yourself together, all of you. You've cried and now you must stop. We have to wait until someone comes and tells us what is going to happen. There's no sense in guessing. And we do have one another.”

“You can call the American Embassy,” Ceci said. They turned to Abilene as though she knew something they didn't. “Yes,” they said in chorus. “Call the Americans to come and get you.”

“Sure,” she said. “Hand me that phone!”

They all shut up. She thought about what the girls had said. She didn't think for a moment that anyone would care what happened to her, Abilene Painter, in some police precinct in Mexico City. What a fool she was! She had asked for this, just like she had got in line for every other fool thing.

Felix had her number!

They sat on the floor for a long time. They all needed to go to the bathroom. In a while men in uniforms came to get them. Abilene got her courage up to ask about the bathroom. The men—these were new ones, they hadn't seen them before—kidded them and told them they could pee in the street like tough boys. Aidee began to cry again. In the end the men let them take turns going into a toilet, but they had to leave the door wide ajar. “Tinkle tinkle!” the men would call out. “Pssshhh!”

They took the girls out to a police van and told them to climb in. There were three other women in the back already. The doors swung shut. The women looked at one another.

An attractive black-haired girl spoke first. “I heard them say they were taking us to Lecumberri. The precincts are too full, and the women's detention center.” She had blood on her cheek.

“You're hurt!” Estrella said.

The girl dabbed at her cheek. “It's not much. A scuffle. I wasn't too meek. I was so mad! Someone scratched me. I don't think he really even meant to.” She shrugged and looked away.

They were in the cafeteria at the prison, two dozen or more women.

“Look at this, we're all political prisoners,” Ceci said. She sounded better, almost excited. The sight of the other women had cheered her.

Ceci began going around the room talking to the women. Most of them knew someone she knew; one had been in a class with her the year before. Every once in a while she came back to report on what she had learned. “That girl in the red pants? She won't be here long. Her father is head of the department that issues drivers' licenses. He has to know somebody!”

Abilene, Estrella, and Aidee couldn't catch Ceci's good spirits. They sat on one of the concrete tables, their bare bottoms very cold. There was a pregnant Dutch girl on the table with them for a while. Her husband was working on a dig two hundred miles away. She had come into the city to do some shopping and to get Olympic tickets. She had been standing near some students outside a department store, her bad luck when the police van came up and took them all away. She said they had all been in the prison cafeteria since mid-morning and so far nobody had questioned them or told them of any charges. She wanted to call the embassy, or an archeologist she knew in the city, but there wasn't anyone to ask for permission. They hadn't been fed, either.

There were other girls dressed in dance clothes. They had been coming out of a rehearsal!

Girls were there who had been picked up the night before with their boyfriends as they left cafes or dance halls. They were worried about their boyfriends, that they were being tortured.

“It's not so bad,” one of them said. “Except for being hungry.” In truth some of the girls seemed very gay. They were the real student radicals, Abilene thought. They knew why they were there. They were talking about meetings and provocations that had taken place. They talked over every detail with relish. Abilene wanted to ask them, don't you think someone might be listening? But what difference would it make. At least they were happy, talking about the meeting in Tlatelolco, where they had been tear-gassed, and some boys had been shot. And just the other day the army had attacked the Santo Tomas campus and occupied the medical school. They had already invaded University City. Abilene knew these things; now she remembered hearing about them. She hadn't paid attention. One meeting, another meeting. A big scuffle, a small one. She hadn't been paying attention.

A glum woman in prison garb rolled in a wagon with kettles of lukewarm soup. There weren't enough bowls. As soon as the women saw that this was so they began talking among themselves, to decide how they would share, who would eat first and then pass the bowls. They gave soup to all the skinny ones first, including Abilene. Everyone got about a cup of soup, a watery broth with tomatoes and corn in it. Abilene felt the soup go to her stomach. She felt her toes again. She felt the hair on her neck. She felt the awful vulnerability of her bare thighs, her uncovered genitals. She thought of how the woman had treated Estrella at the precinct. She hoped that being overcrowded meant they wouldn't be harassed, that there wouldn't be the time for it. That they wouldn't all be kept, for lack of room.

The pregnant girl began to vomit. Some of the women pounded on the locked doors of the cafeteria until matrons came and took the sick girl away. She never came back.

It was night when a matron brought in tins of canned sweet milk, and pork and beans. The cans had been opened and the lids taken off, but there were no spoons. The women passed the cans from hand to hand, dipping their fingers in for a lick.

Someone began singing a lovely song, a country song, that most of them knew. Once they had sung that song, the singing went on softly for a long, long time into the night. They sang about love and disappointment. Sometimes there was only one voice that wouldn't give up to the night. Sometimes many voices joined in. They tried to make themselves places to sit. The concrete floor was terribly cold, and there were no blankets. There were half a dozen mattresses that had been tossed in, and the women arranged them as though for a giant slumber party, and crowded onto them. There wasn't room for everyone. Some of the girls said they didn't need to be comfortable, didn't need to sleep. They didn't need anything except to be free to fight. They tossed their hair like horses' manes.

Abilene wondered if that made them feel better.

She wondered if Hallie was sorry to have missed this. The idea almost made her smile.

One by one, in the very early morning hours, the prison guards began to call the women out, some by name, some by description. The girl in the red pants! The girl in the green skirt! The fat girl on the end of the mattress!

Abilene was wearing a blue cotton skirt and a white blouse with a scooped neck. She thought it was a good outfit to be wearing, if only she had her panties and her shoes (her expensive Italian shoes!). She heard someone say, The American! The gringa! Quick! She had been dozing. She came out of her sleep startled, like someone from underwater. She clutched at her companions. They were still there, Ceci and Aidee and Estrella. They were all so tired. Outside the high windows the courtyard was lit by floodlights.

A young man shoved Abilene ahead of him down a long hall to a room where several men were standing around. They told her to sit on a chair. A paunchy older man in khakis pulled up a chair across from her. Their knees barely touched. He had a stack of photographs on his lap. He needed a shave, and he smelled of garlic. Abilene thought: This is a put-on. It's a movie!

She thought maybe Tonio was doing it, to teach her a lesson. Well, she would do what he wanted, or she would leave Mexico altogether, she knew that. She thought of Michael Sage. My God, what would she have to say to him, after this? Could he ever understand?

The man asked her her name. He asked why she was in Mexico. She said she was a tourist. They asked her where she stayed. She gave them the address of Claude's apartment. “I met the owner in the country,” she said. The questions were easy to answer. She wasn't going to die of fright. It wasn't horrible.

She hadn't brought this on herself.

The man spoke gently. He didn't seem to be enjoying himself. Probably he would rather be at home in bed with his wife.

The man began slapping down photographs, right side up, on her lap. “Tell me their names,” he said, more curtly than anything he had said so far. “This one. This. And this. Who are these students? Are they really students? Who are these agitators and spies? Tell me their names.” His fingers were round and fat and smooth.

He showed her dozens of pictures. She saw that one of them was the girl she had seen that first day on campus, with Hallie. What was her name? Carmen, Carlita, something like that. There were maybe half a dozen others whose faces she recognized from meetings or gatherings at the apartment. They were Refugio's friends, for the most part. The rest were strangers. What would this man say if she told him what was true, that Mexicans mostly looked alike to her. She shook her head over and over. “I don't know him. I don't know her.” Her Spanish had gone flat and Texas in her ear. She hoped that was to her advantage.

“Now we will do it all again,” the man said sternly. This time you will tell me.” He laid each picture in her lap and waited for long minutes. His knees pressed against hers. He caught her looking at them and moved his legs so abruptly, she fell forward against his thighs. She sat back up, her face aflame. He was smiling.

“I tell you, I don't know them,” she said. “I don't know Mexicans.” If it got worse, she would tell them she knew Tonio. Felix. She would see if that would help.

The man laid the photos on his chair and they left her alone in the room. She tried not to look at the pictures. She tried to think of Hallie. Hallie must be frantic. Why didn't she go home? Maybe she would now. Maybe her parents would make her come home.

Twice she fell asleep and woke as her head slumped forward. She had no idea what time it was.

She felt a sudden warm stickiness high on her thighs. Had she gone to the bathroom while she was asleep and not known it? Such an indignity would be terrible to bear. The stickiness trickled toward one knee. She put her hand up under her skirt to feel it. When she drew her hand out she realized what it was. It was her period. She was bleeding, here, in a prison room, with no underwear.

It was too bizarre. It made her laugh.

“So it is a joke?” the interrogator said as he came back into the room. An assistant picked up the pictures. The interrogator was wiping his hands on a towel, which he let drop to the floor. Abilene couldn't take her eyes off it. She wanted to wipe her thighs. The blood was warm, thick, dark. It was her first period since the abortion. She had not even worried about it.

“Now tell me what you know, please.”

He wasn't wearing a watch. Abilene looked into his face and saw that he did believe that she knew something. She saw that he would never go away unless she gave him something. He would wait and wait for the names. After that he would do what he would do.

The assistant handed the questioner the photographs again, and rubbed the knuckles of one fist with his other hand. She thought: Will he hit me? Will they hurt me?

She closed her eyes. It was so unfair! To be punished for things she had not done. To pay for sins she had not committed. She was no more a radical than a sheepdog.

There were other reasons to punish her. She probably had it coming. She was so tired.

The man slapped her arm. He hit her quite hard. “Wake up, señorita,” he said.

She couldn't open her eyes.

He hit her again, harder.

He began to lay the photographs in her lap.

She shook her head at each one and said, “I don't know.”

Then she saw Gato's face staring up at her. His insolence was there like the set of his chin. She couldn't believe he had ever touched her. He had a cold ugly face and she didn't care what she said about him.

“I've seen this one,” she said. “I've seen him on campus.”

“What is his name?” The interrogator's face had the same sullen defiance as Gato. Why would she help him?

“But you must know, everyone does,” she said. She hated this man. “They tell me everyone knows him as the Cat.”

“His name. His real name.”

“I don't know. Black-cat. Tom-cat.”

“We will see,” the man said of Gato, and he set the picture on the floor. He showed her others. She began to say, “I saw this one at a meeting on campus,” and she said a name. “I saw this one once in the Museum, in the room with the sun dial. I don't know her name.”

They went through the stack over and over. It went on for such a long time. She pretended Adele was watching her—now would Adele take her story?!—and Daniel, and Arturo. Pola was watching and Pola thought she was brave.

She wouldn't tell, and they would all be proud of her.

The interrogator stood up and left the room. His assistant stayed behind.

Abilene began to cry with relief.

The assistant was a young man, maybe twenty years old. He looked at her with the insolence of a street chavo. It would have been different in a dance hall. He would have worn a nylon shirt and she would have danced with him.

He was repulsive, too young to be genuinely frightening, but hateful. He didn't have any weapon that she could see. She stood when he said to do so, and went out of the room with him behind her. She went to the right. “No, stupid!” he barked. “The other way, back to the cafeteria.”