Well, yes, obviously. There was the practical question of the money Leonora owed her, but also the fact that Maite wasn’t going to be stuck eternally taking care of that cat. But she was also plain curious. She wondered what the girl was up to. Most of all, it was a great excuse to chat with Emilio Lomelí.
Maite grabbed a paper napkin and began tearing it into strips. A bored waitress behind the counter switched on a radio and Los Shain’s began playing.
“What would I even tell him?”
“Tell him what you told me. That Leonora hasn’t come back and you’re looking for her. And don’t mention me. Like I said, the guy hates me. If he thinks I’m the one looking for her, he won’t say a peep. He’s a spiteful bastard.”
“That bad?”
“Oh, yeah. I broke his nose. Well, he ruined my car.”
“How?”
“He paid someone to steal it and drive it directly into a telephone pole. I can’t prove it and even if I could it wouldn’t matter, but it was him.”
Maite began rolling the strips and turning them into tiny balls of paper, sliding them to rest in the center of the table, and thought about Beatriz, who was desperately trying to find out what had happened to Jorge Luis, and poor Jorge Luis in a coma. It was possible something similar had happened to Leonora. She could be held by a shadowy villain in an old mansion. The idea of drifting into one of the storylines from her comic books appealed to Maite immensely.
She looked up at Rubén and shoved a ball of paper in his direction. The waitress had switched off the radio, still looking perfectly bored.
“I’ll give him a call.”
“That’s great, thanks.”
He smiled. Although he wasn’t good looking and she didn’t quite like him, she wondered what would happen if she asked him to walk her home to her apartment and invited him in. It was that old fantasy of behaving badly, the thought of a stranger between her thighs. She didn’t know how other people did that sort of thing. But she didn’t really want him. She was merely bored, and the memory of Emilio Lomelí had ignited a sharp erotic impulse that made her cheeks warm. It was similar to that feeling she got sometimes when she stood in front of the newsstand and glimpsed the adult comic books on sale there. Westerns filled with women with huge breasts. It was trash, the lot of it.
They left the coffee shop. It was raining, a drizzle, and they were walking under the awnings taking their time to reach her building. Or at least she was taking her time, and he wasn’t rushing her.
“You really think the Hawks beat those students just so the president could kick the regent out?”
“I know it sounds odd, but Martínez Domínguez was Ordaz’s man. When Ordaz picked Echeverría to succeed him, it was Martínez Domínguez who wrote his speeches, at least before Echeverría turned on Ordaz. It could be the other way around, that Martínez Domínguez wanted to weaken the president. The PRI is a single party but that doesn’t mean it’s united. Ordaz and his favorites, they’re not the same as Echeverría. They’re the old guard. I would say Echeverría is worse, he’s sneakier. He drinks agua de chía or horchata at parties to make you think he’s not one of those stiff pricks who imports brandy and champagne. But I know he mails a crate of Dom Pérignon to the director ofNovedadesevery Christmas. He wears a guayabera to an official function to show that he’s oh-so-Mexican, telling anyone who’ll listen that he’s firmly against Yankee imperialism, but he provides intel to the Americans.”
“Then it’s infighting.”
“Sure. Unless Echeverría and Martínez Domínguez jointly decided to quash the protesters. The CIA is terrified of communists in Latin America and Mexico is dangerously close to Cuba.”
“It all sounds very complicated.”
“I’m not saying it’s one way or another; everyone has a favorite theory.”
“What’s your favorite one, then?”
“Mine?” the young man said with a shrug. “They want us dead, period.”
Maite wondered how someone could say such grim things and look aloof, but her companion managed it. For a second she thought about calling this whole thing quits, but with each step she took her excitement built a little. Rather than being worried, she was invigorated.
It was like in the comics. It was like her words were rendered inside speech bubbles.
“What do I do after I talk to Emilio?” Maite asked. “I’d drop by your shop again, but I don’t think your boss likes it when you have visitors.”
“He’s a grouch. But it’s a steady job. I can stop by and see you on Saturday if you’re around. Lunchtime okay?”
“I don’t have plans,” Maite said and thought that if she wanted to ask him to come in, she could do it then. She’d have to politely dismiss him after that, though. She’d have to say, “Sorry, young man, I don’t think this ought to turn serious.”
She could tell Rubén what Cristóbalito had told her: We can’t have a future together. But she didn’t want to think about Cristóbalito. She wanted to savor this chance to lose herself in a different sort of story.
Rubén and Maite parted by her building’s doorway with a polite goodbye, and she climbed the steps quickly. Once she walked into her apartment that sense of fantasy, of her atoms being suddenly composed of thousands of Ben Day dots, evaporated. It was the sight of her humdrum environment that brought her crashing down to reality. She noticed the dishes that she’d let pile in the sink and the cheap linoleum in the kitchen. In the apartment above her the neighbor’s children were running around like a herd of elephants again.
God! The world was terribly ugly! Maite quickly made her way into her atelier, the sight of the books on the shelves soothing her and yet, at once, her anxiety seemed to rebound as she wondered what she’d tell Emilio Lomelí. She couldn’t call him now, but in the morning she would, and she didn’t want to sound like a fool.
