The Sand Trap (33 page)

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Estella Munoz first met him twenty-five
years ago when she was a shy twenty-three year old children's tutor
and he a brash and confident seventeen-year-old working in the
gardens of a large estate in Puebla. At six feet, he was taller
than most Mexican boys she had known over the past five years, and
with a head of curly, glossy black hair and a confident swagger,
she imagined this is how a conquistador general might have looked.
Even at such a young age he was the 'general' of the gardening
gang, ruling the other boys with uninhibited cruelty and control,
once cutting off the finger of a younger boy with a pair of garden
shears who was hesitant to do his bidding. From the sanctity of the
estate he ran a petty crime spree; everything from pick pocketing
tourists, to extortion of the owners of small market stalls, to
eventually acting as a mule for minor drug traffickers. But he had
a touch for gardening. He had come to the city from a small farming
community near Acapulco looking for work. His family had been
farmers but when he was five years old they left the farm in search
of a better income and joined the gardening crew at a large tourist
complex. He knew the Mexican soil and the plants that thrived
there. He had just shown up working in the gardening crew one day,
and everyone else thought someone else had hired him. By the time
the head gardener figured out no one had hired the energetic
fifteen-year-old, he had demonstrated his knowledge and they kept
him on. Two years later when the head gardener had an unfortunate
accident on his bicycle, Jose took over managing the eight workers
and the gardens of the six-acre estate. He was happily tending his
gardens and managing his petty crime sprees when Estella joined the
staff.

Estella had had finished her degree in
English Literature the previous spring at the Autonomous University
of Mexico in Guadalajara and was looking for her first job. There
weren't many options for young women in Mexico in 1983, even ones
who could speak English and had acquired good university degrees.
One of the obvious choices was to teach English as Second Language
somewhere, but after a few job interviews she realized the wages of
schoolteachers would hardly pay her living expenses, much less
leave her something to save. She had started university with some
savings she had brought to Guadalajara, but even with the help of a
part time job at a tourist restaurant that paid extra for her
English skills, her savings were almost depleted. She also knew
that, even after four years of university, her Spanish needed some
additional work to become Mexican native fluent. Up until this
point she had been able to put off questions about her slight,
non-Mexican accented Spanish by saying she spent her youth in
Spain. Then she saw the ad on the Department bulletin board:

Wanted: Tutor for a Family of 5 children
under the age of 8 in Puebla.

All subjects plus English. Good pay and
with all room and board included
.

Ph. 893 245 6798
.

It turned out that a wealthy Puebla
manufacturer had placed the ad and when Manuel Ricardo heard the
quality of her English he hired her on the spot. The job turned out
to be perfect for her at that time. The family was kind and the
children were well behaved and diligent students. She had her own
small casita in the gardens on the property. She taught the
children in the mornings and had her afternoons to herself. And she
could save enough to help her eventually move to the next step in
her life.

At the end of her first year on the estate,
Estella and Jose Gorges, the young gardener, had sex in her garden
casita.

She had a few dating adventures at
university but Estella the tutor was far from experienced. She had
the natural sex urges of any young woman, but past events in her
life had left her with an emotional detachment from the act that
diminished the experience and made her hesitant to seek out sexual
experiences. And when she did give it a try, she had to be in
complete control in order to never let the endorphins of sexual
arousal impede her judgment, or dissolve the mistrust she had with
any man. It didn't make for good sexual relationships and most men
did not stick around very long. But Jose had a certain Latin
bravado that suggested a guaranteed romantic pleasure that was hard
to ignore. Passing glances between them as Estella walked the
garden in her free afternoons signaled a meeting that would be far
from chance.

In Jose’s case, he was just a randy kid
looking for any chance to score. In Estella’s case, it was the
opportunity to break the boredom and the pattern of sleepy
inspiration that comes from the constant companionship of children.
One late afternoon when Jose knocked on the door of her casita and
she invited him in to fill his water bottle from the kitchen tap,
they both knew what would transpire. Estella could remember the
details of the encounter, even over 25 years later.

Jose stood in the centre of the kitchen,
suddenly not looking quite as mature as he did when leaning with a
leering grin on a shovel. She walked up to him with the bottle and
watched as he drank and put the bottle down. She reached over,
grabbed his shirt collar and pulled him into a kiss. It was short
and amateurish on both sides, but she can still taste the chili
peppers he had put on the lunchtime taco. The follow up kiss was
more urgent and they simultaneously realized where this was going
and standing in the middle of the kitchen they started to
frantically take off each other’s clothes. She reached down and
undid his belt, unzipped his jeans and reached in to pull out his
very stiff penis. He fumbled with the zipper on the back of her
dress and gave up and just reached up under her dress and thrust
his hand under her underwear and felt her wetness.

And he came.

All over her hand and the front of her
dress.

“I’m sorry,” was all she remembered him
saying as he pulled up his pants and ran out the door leaving her
standing in the middle of the kitchen with her own juices running
down the inside of her thigh. She sat down on the floor and
finished what Jose had started and rolled on the floor in laughter.
“The wonderful sex life of Estella Munoz!” she said out loud to
herself, “I can’t even seduce my way into good sex!”

They tried it again periodically over the
next year, usually with more satisfactory results for both,
although Estella was always the instigator and always in control of
the event.

Then Ricardo fired Jose for stealing tools
and reselling them at the local market and he left her life.

For Estella the next step in her life was
still many years away.

She had not intended to stay with the estate
for that long, but the days just kept drifting by. At first she
felt she just could not leave the children until they were ready to
go off to university. Armed with her tutoring and their father’s
money they all went to Ivy league universities and graduated with
Honours and returned to working in the various family manufacturing
businesses while raising families of their own. When the
child-rearing job was over and she thought she might move on,
Ricardo died in car accident and his wife asked Estella to stay and
help manage the estate. Over the next decade she gradually assumed
the complete management of the estate as the wife grew older and
the children grew more distant. Estella spent the years immersed in
the management of the estate.

At first her only discomfort was the absence
of any outlet for her special athletic abilities. She often felt
that she simply had to find a way to get her body moving or she was
not content. Golf had always filled that void and satisfied those
urges. Even running and workouts in the estate gym didn't seem to
salve the discomfort. Then Marika joined the estate staff and gave
Estella the energetic physical outlet she craved like an addict.
Marika had lived a hard life. Left at the gate of a North Korean
Buddhist monastery when she was three years old, she was both a
cook and a martial arts apprentice when the Japanese military made
her a comfort woman. After the Koran war, she escaped to the U.S.
and then Mexico. Ricardo found her cooking in one of the
restaurants he owned and brought her home to his own kitchen
shortly after he hired Estella. She was much older than Estella and
since she had never married, Estella became her ‘child’ and they
became very close over the years. She had considerable skill at
martial arts and while Estella taught her English, Marika taught
her the lost art of Hwa Rang Do. Estella discovered, to her
pleasant surprise, that Marika had the same unique ability as her
for ‘slowing motion,’ so their sparring was at speed that most
normal people could not comprehend. They never “fought” anyone else
but themselves over the 25 years they worked together, but that
satisfied both of them.

After the recession of the nineties, the
mother moved in with her older son who lived in Monterey and in
2008 the family put the Mexico estate up for sale. No one except
Estella recognized the buyer.

He was 25 years older than the last time she
had seen him, had a wife and three young children and apparently
seemed to have an endless supply of money. In the Mexico of 2008 it
was not prudent to probe too deeply into how someone managed to
accumulate the wealth needed to buy up the estate, even at a
bargain price, as well as several Puebla maquiladoras that were in
financial difficulty. Estella learned later that he bought things;
nightclubs, sports teams, tourist resorts, golf clubs, and vacant
land all over Mexico. He had a new history as well. The very old
and respected Mexican family that he married into would never have
let their oldest daughter marry a farm boy turned petty thief,
turned gardener.

The first thing he did, as the new owner of
the estate, was to fire the existing estate staff and put his own
people in key jobs. He had a large retinue. Cooks, business people,
a nanny for the children and a dozen or so young men that seemed to
have nothing to do but walk around the estate looking over fences
and through windows. Estella was a different story.

“Hello Estella,” he shook her hand. “How
have you been?”

She gave a wary and perfunctory, “Quite well
thank you.”

“So you wrangled a promotion from teacher to
manager of the estate? Did you blow the old man? Marry that wimpy
son?”

“I see you haven't accumulated manners in
the same way you have wealth?" she responded. “What did you do?
Come all over some rich girl’s dress?”

For a moment she thought he might strike her
but after a short pause he laughed, and she laughed and the tension
dissolved.

“You never married, Estella?”

In actual fact there had been a number of
serious suitors over the years and at least one who proposed, but
she couldn’t get herself to make the commitment. There was still
too much emotion attached to memories that needed to either be
faced or purged, and at 48 she still had not figured out which one
it was to be. Besides, she liked her job at the estate and had
learned much about business, gardening and some other interests
over the years that had kept her preoccupied.

She just shrugged. “Your wife and family are
lovely Jose. You've done well.”

“I married well you mean. Yes. She is a
loyal wife and the marriage of her family connections to my various
business interests has made us very wealthy.”

“So she was a business arrangement?”

“At first. I needed a legitimate entry into
Mexican society and she was willing to believe my story of coming
from a business family in Tampico who all died in a house fire.” He
paused. “Estella, she doesn’t know my history here and you would be
the only person to recognize me.”

“What about your real parents in the
country?” She asked.

“They were one of the fifty-two people
killed in that drug massacre two years ago. They were killed
because they were my parents and because they came from my home
town.”

Estella had read and heard details of the
quickly escalating drug wars in the country and while most violence
occurred near the border where rival gangs fought for supremacy,
there were reprisal killings every week at other locations
throughout the country. Now she realized that Jose’s new wealth,
the armed guards, and the new staff all made sense.

“Does your wife and her family know how you
make your money?”

“No. She believes the manufacturing business
is prospering. Her father suspects, but his greed keeps him from
acknowledging it.”

“So what am I supposed to do now Jose?” She
paused. “Do I know too much? Do I just get fired or get cement
slippers or the burning tire necktie thing that druggies do, or
what?”

“Will you stay?”

This surprised her. “Come on Jose. We didn’t
have that much of a thing going. You must have had many women since
our adventures. And I know that I’m nothing special in bed!”

“I know I can trust you Estella. Nothing
more.”

She thought quickly. This was a turning
point in her life. “ Alright. On three conditions.”

“I’m listening,” he responded, “But I have
to tell you it is me that gives the conditions these days.”

“First. I want to be in charge of the
gardens. What I don’t know I will study. I want to become the head
gardener.”

“Done.”

“Second. I want Marika as my personal
assistant.”

He looked puzzled. “Marika? Who is she?”

“She is a Korean cook. She is seventy-two
years old and she is friend. And my Hwa Rang Do instructor and
partner.”