Irma Voth (22 page)

I wish I was as smart as you, Aggie, I said.

I know, me too, she said. I pray for that every night.

Thanks, I said.

I’ve almost given up, though, she said.

Yeah, I understand, but thanks anyway, I said. Not only are you exceptionally smart you’re also kind-hearted and considerate.

She moved her shoulder over a few inches so that it touched mine and then she moved back.

Are you being affectionate? I asked her.

When we woke up, Ximena had soaked the bed, right through her diaper and sleeper, through the blanket and
the top sheet and the mattress protector and the mattress.

Shit, this kid is a lot of work, said Aggie.

We rinsed all that stuff in the shower and hung it over the balcony railing to dry. It was getting dark again. We went downstairs to find Hubertus and Natalie but they weren’t around. There was a note for us. It was written on the back of an envelope and taped to the door of the office. They would be back late and there was some cash in the envelope that we could use to buy some food and diapers and there was also a small key to the kitchen, where the washer and dryer were. I’d start work in the morning. We went into the kitchen and ate some tortillas and cheese and salad. Then we wandered off into the neighbourhood to find a place where we could get our hair cut. We would use some of the food money. We wanted what we referred to as pixie cuts. Jagged and short. It was the only style I could remember from when I lived in Canada. Katie got one before she left for Vancouver, before she
tried
to leave for Vancouver, and it was maybe the first step on the road to our father’s mad ness. I remember her showing it to me in our room and her whispering to me that it was called a pixie cut and this’ll make him blind with rage and me agreeing and experiencing intense pain in my chest and stomach while she pranced around admiring herself, smiling at her reflection, fearless.

While we were getting our hair cut in a small shop on Avenida Michoacán the power went out and we were in the dark. The haierdresser asked us to wait for a few minutes but the power didn’t come back on and Ximena was getting restless in my lap and banging her head against my
collarbone and I was pulling bits of my hair out of her mouth and off her face and so we decided to pay and leave. The hairdresser asked us to come back the next day so that she could finish cutting our hair. When we got outside we saw each other in the light of the street lamp and Aggie laughed so hard she said she thought she’d wet her pants and I told her to try not to because she only had one pair.

You look like Wilf! she said. Wilf was my younger cousin, the one who lived in the filmmakers’ house before he and his family went back to Canada. Three men walked past us and called us ugly
gringas
and Aggie swore at them in the coarsest Spanish slang I had ever heard. Not even from Jorge. Or Diego. We went back to the bed and breakfast and went into the kitchen and found a pair of scissors and took them back to our room. We brought a chair onto the balcony and Aggie finished cutting my hair. I picked up the blond strands and felt their baby softness between my fingers and then I threw them into the garbage can. I put my feet up on the railing. I offered to finish cutting her hair too but she said she liked the asymmetry of it and I shouldn’t bother. Then we stared off at the city of Mexico, the D.F., the borough of Cuauhtémoc, our new home. We stayed out on the balcony for a long time looking at the lights and listening to the traffic and all the sirens. Way off in the distance we saw a building on fire. We talked a little bit about the things we had left behind, but not much. We talked about the universe, about loneliness. We talked about how to fall, the right way and the wrong way, to prevent injury, and if we could see our shadows from the light of Venus. We got a little cold but neither one of us wanted to go inside to get
our sweatshirts because Ximena was dormant on the bed and we didn’t want the sound to activate her.

That night Ximena woke up every hour on the hour howling at the world for all its timid resignation and coy duplicity and also, I think, at me directly for having no hair that she could twist around her little fist and pull until it came out by its roots. She could still vomit on me, though, so she did that a couple of times and then to top it off she head-butted me in the nose which actually brought tears to my eyes and made me plop her on the bed next to Aggie more roughly than I should have. Aggie woke up and said no, get her away from me and I said no, you have to walk around with her for a while now. I have to sleep.

I don’t know what happened after that because Aggie took over and I lost consciousness. When I woke up they were both lying on the pullout couch, their eyes closed, their mouths wide open like sleep had caught them by surprise. If they’d been my captors this would be the moment I’d choose to run. A vile odour emanated from Ximena’s ass. I peered closely at her chest and saw it rise and fall and rise again and thought: you live.

I went into the tiny bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror. Short and jagged. Good. I stroked the naked nape of my neck. I lifted up one lock of hair near my ear and measured it. One, maybe one and a half inches. Good. I looked at myself some more. Did I look like Katie? I don’t know. I wanted to show my mother my new haircut. She would have smiled and shaken her head and kissed me. She
would have been afraid for me. She would have covered her eyes and then peeked through them. She would have admired my daring. She would have rejoiced quietly, silently, and stored this moment in some dark and hidden pocket of her soul. I stared at myself a bit longer and tried so hard to see Katie. I tried to see my mother and I even tried to see my father.

The stuff that happened next was almost calm and manageable so I won’t go into much detail. Aggie started school in September. She has a navy blue and white uniform that she hates and a clarinet that she practises on the balcony and one or two friends that come around every once in a while. She is drawing murals on our walls, on large sheets of wrapping paper that Hubertus buys in bulk. She has a so-called boyfriend whose name is Israel and who is also, coincidentally, a hemophiliac, so they must be careful when they punch each other and play around or he’ll bleed to death. That’s her type. The kind of kid who understands a soft and wounded interior. Israel told her that even sharp words can injure him but that was just a joke. His latest plan is to become a chainsaw artist. I’ve seen Israel run up the side of a building and then do a backwards somersault and land on his feet. He says that’s his calling card.

I’m working. Cleaning rooms, making meals. Ximena, my antagonist, sits in her baby chair and watches me. Aggie and I both have cellphones. I tried to phone Jorge again and the operator told me that number was no longer in service. Otherwise I have Aggie’s number and Hubertus’s
and Natalie’s numbers and also Noehmi’s number. We go for beers sometimes when she’s not too busy with university classes and anarchy. Sometimes I walk over to the park to spy on that bookseller. I think and wonder a lot about Jorge. I wonder if he ever thinks about me or if he misses me at all. I wish I had been a better wife. And sometimes I pretend that I see Wilson. In bed, before I get up to work, I lie in the dark and imagine conversations with him and I remember the way he moved his hand across my body.

Ximena has learned how to bite and sit and point and lure people with her good looks. The tourists here at the bed and breakfast love her at first and then she starts to fight with them, stiffening her body into a blunt weapon, grabbing their noses and cheeks and lips and ears and twisting, screaming like an injured bird, and they give her back to me. Natalie says that when Ximena learns to walk Mexico City will know destruction similar to the scale of the 1985 earthquake.

Aggie’s murals are almost all of our family. But they’re conceptual, she says. Katie is a ghost that hovers over every scene and sometimes takes the shape of a crow or a breeze and Aggie is a rabbit. Our little brothers appear, when they appear, as raindrops. Our mother is a barn and I’m a tractor and our father is a big bell or the wreckage of the broken crop-duster. Aggie paints murals with these figures in different positions and doing different things. Sometimes she has us saying things, even the barn, but not usually. Aggie doesn’t talk much about her murals and I’ve learned not to ask too many questions. One thing I like to ask and she
doesn’t seem to mind answering is: where’s Katie in this one? I don’t know if the purpose of each of her murals is to create a picture in which Katie can appear, or if she feels more free talking about the thing that represents Katie because she doesn’t remember much about her so she isn’t hampered by reality. One day I asked her where God was in her murals and she said TBA. I asked her what that meant and she said she didn’t know but I’m pretty sure she does.

The other day I went out to buy some avocados and I took a different route to the store. I noticed a building with a sign on it that said
Citlaltépetl Refuge House
. There was a white poster in the window at the front of the building and there were black words on it that said,
When I came to Mexico City, I was dead. And here I started to live again.
There was a small open archway at the front of the building that led into a quiet courtyard. I walked inside and stood next to a wall with photographs on it. A woman came out of a little office and asked me if she could help me with anything and I told her I had seen the white poster in the window and it had made me curious about the building.

What happens here? I asked her.

We are a refuge for exiled writers, she said. The words on the poster are a quote from the Kosovar poet Xhevdet Bajraj.

Oh, I said.

Where are you from? she asked me.

From here, I said. I’m Mexican. I live a few blocks from here.

We have a few apartments for writers who are forced to leave their own countries, she said. And a small bookstore and library and a little café, as you can see. We have readings here sometimes and different types of events. Music, drama. We’ve tried to create a comforting and stimulating environment. She pointed at the tables set up in the courtyard.

Why are they forced to leave their own countries? I said.

For various reasons, said the woman. She explained some of those reasons to me and I nodded.

How do they leave? I said.

In different ways, she said. But always with unfinished business and a broken heart. Freedom has its price.

Where is he now? I said.

Who? she said.

The poet.

He lives nearby, she said. Here in La Condesa.

Well, I said. I didn’t know what else to say. Then I thought of something. I have to go buy avocados, I said.

The woman said she understood. She loved them too. She thanked me for visiting and told me to keep one eye open for future events.

Last night Aggie agreed to guard Ximena, as she puts it, and I went out for a beer with Noehmi at a place called Tinto’s which is sort of a halfway mark between her neighbourhood of Tacubaya and my neighbourhood of La Condesa. We sat across from each other in a red booth and she told me about the play she’s working on.

It’s a one-man show, she said. It takes place in total darkness until the very end. The audience hears voices and sounds but they don’t see anything. She explained to me that at first the audience will hear the voice of a man, obviously suffering in some way. Then we’ll hear the voice of a woman talking to a different man, then other voices, of kids, older people, a teacher. Gradually we’ll realize that this man, the first man, is stuck in an air duct in the attic of a pawnshop that he’s trying to rob so that he can buy drugs. It’s his friend’s pawnshop. The woman is his girlfriend and she’s in the shop asking his friend if he’s seen her boyfriend. He’s been missing for days. His friend says he hasn’t and starts flirting a bit with the woman. The man in the duct can hear all of this and it’s killing him. But he’s dying anyway. He’s been there for a couple of days and he’s dying of thirst. We realize that the other voices are the voices of the people he’s remembering, the people in his life, his parents and his brother and his high school teacher. They are the voices of the people he is leaving behind as he dies. At the end of the play the lights come on for the first time and we see a man in a glass duct on the stage. That’s all. There’s no sound. No more voices. His face is pressed against the glass and he is dead. People don’t know if it’s over. They don’t know if they should leave. Then, eventually, everyone does leave. They figure out that the play is over.

What do you think? said Noehmi. Do you think it’ll work?

Definitely, I said.

Dupont is making the duct right now at his mother’s apartment.

I’d like to see it, I said.

Actually, said Noehmi, I was wondering if you would provide one of the voices. It would just be a recording. But obviously the voices are really important because there’s nothing else. I have to get them right.

I’d be one of the man’s memories? I said.

Yeah, said Noehmi. I think your voice would be good for his second grade teacher. When he remembers her telling him that he can accomplish anything in life if he works hard and wants it badly enough.

I don’t speak Spanish very well, I said.

Yeah you do, said Noehmi. You have an interesting accent and that’s why your voice will be cool in the play. It’ll stand out a bit from the others so that when your voice is heard the audience will be able to differentiate it more easily from the other female voices. You know what I mean?

I guess, I said.

He really likes her sandals and wants to marry her, said Noehmi. They’re white and red and have three straps on them that cross the foot and a wedge heel. He starts putting on a bolo tie when he goes to school and slicking his hair over to one side to impress her.

The teacher?

Yeah, said Noehmi. And once, in the hallway after recess, he asks her to dance and that makes her laugh.

Does she dance with him? I asked. I thought about Jorge trying to teach me that dance, how I had failed him so spectacularly.