Dancing with the Tiger Page 17

  “Maybe it isn’t,” she said. “Just kidding. I’m sure it’s—”

  She ducked his mock punch. He led her across a terrace of broken bricks. He’d been expecting her. That was something.

  “How are you feeling?” she asked.

  “Tired. I couldn’t sleep. All yesterday, I wonder what that dead tiger planned to do today. I want to do those things for him, but I don’t know what they are.”

  “Are you friends with all these people?” Anna pointed to apartments along the garden. She pictured late parties with philosophers and sexy ceramicists.

  “Not really. A few. Close your eyes.”

  Salvador guided her the remaining steps, then pulled back his hand. No dead babies. Salvador Flores painted still lifes. Plates and bowls and pitchers. The green of fresh peas. Butter yellow. The paintings were feminine; no, Anna corrected herself, domestic. The curve of a spoon. A mug by a white curtain. Simplified. Elemental. Morning, Anna decided. His paintings feel like morning, even in the afternoon.

  She sat on the floor before a half-finished painting of a red bowl and a sky-blue pitcher. They are a couple. A family in the making. The bowl is pregnant. The pitcher is proud of the bowl. It makes him feel strong to be at her side. They are not touching but they’re together. The bowl is thinking. Expectant. Ready to be of use.

  “I would like to crawl inside your paintings.”

  Salvador sat next to her. “Crawl?” He didn’t know this verb.

  “Climb into your paintings and live there.” Anna pantomimed with two fingers.

  “Échame más flores.”

  This time, she was confused.

  He cupped her knee with his palm. “Throw me more flowers. You are saying nice things, and I am asking for more. How is your cheek?”

  “Better.” Anna gestured to the paintings with her chin. “Is this what your life was like growing up?” She tried to contain her resentment. A happy childhood would make even friendship impossible.

  “No, more like that.” He pointed to his palette, a mess of colors, false starts, possibilities.

  “You have a big family?”

  “It only feels big. You would like my brother. He’s smarter than I am, and better-looking. Even my mother likes him best. When we were young I was so jealous of Enrique, I once took una honda”—he mimed a slingshot—“and hit him in the eye with a rock.”

  Anna couldn’t help smiling. “Was he okay?”

  “No, not really. He can’t judge distances well. He is a handsome man with a fucked-up eye.” Salvador smiled, tentatively. “The women all baby him, and he likes that.”

  Anna covered his eye with her hand. “He looks like a pirate?” She laughed. “The other day, you looked like one.”

  “Me?” He considered this. “Enrique lives in Guatemala, but he says when he is forty, he will come back to Mexico, find a wife, become a papi, and make our mother happy. You want a family? Oh, I forgot. You don’t like children.”

  “I like children from afar.” Anna tapped her boots together. “Do you have a bedroom piece?”

  “A what?”

  “Bedroom piece. Artists hide their best work in the bedroom because it’s not for sale.”

  “If I hung my paintings in my bedroom, I would never sleep. In the middle of the night, I would start painting, changing things.”

  “You’re a perfectionist?”

  “No. I just hate most of my work.”

  “That’s crazy.”

  “Maybe,” he agreed. “You like what you write?”

  “I don’t really write.” She caught herself. She was supposed to be writing a book. “I’m just starting to write for myself. Before, I mostly corrected other people’s mistakes. I was a fact-checker. I checked their facts.”

  “Facts.” He shook his head, skeptical. “Never believe facts.”

  Anna felt affronted for no good reason. “So what do you believe in? Science? Religion? The lottery?”

  “Children.”

  “But you don’t have any.”

  “It’s easiest to believe in something you don’t have.”

  He took her hand in his lap. They sat there, leaning against the wall. The paintings didn’t move. Nothing moved except the birds outside. They could not see the birds, but they could hear them. The sun from the window fell across Anna’s face. They sat like this for a long while and didn’t say a thing.

  —

  Salvador said there were two places he wanted to take her, if she had time. Anna said she did. They climbed into his gray sedan. Images of the Virgin Mary and Che Guevara hung from his rearview mirror. The virgin and the outlaw. He touched them both before turning the ignition. They drove into the hills.

  “We grew up poor. Chicken poor. Campo poor, which is more hopeless than American poor.”

  “But now—”

  “Slowly, my dad climbs up. I was the first in the family to go to university. My parents think being an artist is a waste of my education. They don’t believe I can make a living. They think I deal drugs.”

  “Do you?”

  “Only on weekends.” He smiled. “I try to live economically, but it’s hard. I was always greedy as a boy. I still fight this. Wanting things.”

  “Wanting what?”

  “Art. Clothing. Food. I don’t know. It’s not the things. It’s the safety of things.”

  “But your family was happy . . .”

  “Not TV-happy, but yes. We were loved. We felt part of something—this big family. Cousins. Aunts. Not lonely or alone. Not hungry.”

  When Anna said nothing, he asked, “Why? You were lonely?”

  “A bit,” Anna said. “But we had a lot of things.”

  —

  Ten minutes later, Salvador pulled in front of a stucco church. It was hot outside, but cool as they entered. They sat in a middle pew. He pointed to a fresco, a blurred image of a man’s face, round as a basketball and no more expressive. A wool scarf wrapped around his head, like a cartoon character with a toothache. His mouth was smudged.

  “Do you like it?”

  Anna shrugged. “It’s pretty rough. Folk art? It doesn’t match the formality of the church.” A pair of giggling teenagers snapped photos in front of the artwork. A boy scratched his armpits.

  Salvador whispered, “This painting of Jesus was made back in the thirties. An art professor gave it to the church.” Salvador pulled a postcard from his pocket. A classic rendering of Christ. Gentle expression. Crown of thorns. The stucco had chipped in places, leaving ragged patches of white. “This is how it used to look.” Anna compared the postcard and the painting. No resemblance.

  “What happened?”

  “An old woman restored it.”

  “She’s an artist?”

  “A believer.”

  Anna muffled a laugh. “Wow. That’s the worst restoration job I’ve ever seen. Even I could do better.”

  “That’s what people call it. The worst restoration job ever. Un fracaso. The old woman says the priest gave her permission. He denies it. They are bringing in experts to see if it can be saved. The piece is an Ecce Homo. Behold the man. But people now call it Ecce Mono. Behold the monkey.”

  Anna laughed out loud.

  “Art disappears from churches all the time,” Salvador said. “Thieves cut paintings from the frame. They steal statues. They even rob the collection box. Drug lords have figured out there is money in antiquities. The government doesn’t pay enough for guards or security. You have to care for art . . .” He paused, searching for a word. “What is the boy who watches the sheep?”

  “Shepherd?”

  “We need more shepherds.”

  Anna blushed. He couldn’t know about the death mask and she was bursting to tell him. To confess. Here, in church, before the Jesus monkey.

  “Every once
in a while, there is good news,” he went on. “A few years ago, the widow of an American dentist gave back eight thousand objects to the Mexican government. For years, her husband bought pre-Columbian art on the black market. Some pieces had been removed with a power saw. He repaired them with dentist glue.”

  Salvador laughed unhappily.

  “We destroy so many things with our touching.” He lifted his hand, changed his mind, put it back in his lap. “Starting with the things we love most.”

  —

  They drove to another village and parked, walked past olive trees, trash bins, a giant Coke sign urging TOMA LO BUENO. Salvador led her to a circular clearing surrounded by a hip-high stone wall. An amphitheater. No, an old bullring. The city below them looked like a Christmas card, nestled and calm. No firecrackers. No dogs. No smoke. Salvador produced a blanket, a bottle of red wine, and cheese.

  “This is the most beautiful place I know in Oaxaca. Remember you asked me? When I was a boy, novilleros practiced here. I tried to build my own museum. I collected arrowheads and feathers and arranged them. One time, I tried to make Enrique pay to see them, but he hit me and stole whatever he liked. I worried if I didn’t collect things, they would be lost. I didn’t want to step on the ground and kill an ant or a flower. Then my family took a trip to Monterrey, three days in the car. When I saw how big the desert was, I cried. What difference could I make in a place so big?” He shrugged, offered Anna some cheese. “Now boys bring their girlfriends here to . . .” He twirled his hand.

  “That’s why we’re here.” Anna twirled her hand.

  He gave a happy shrug. “Depende.”

  The sun was going down. Ragged orange patches of light scarred the sky. The wine warmed Anna’s insides. Feeling playful, she pulled Salvador to his feet, turned her fingers into horns, pawed the ground with her hooves. The torero pinched his arrogant nose, shook his red cape. The brave bull charged and the torero spun the animal, carving veronicas in the dust. His shirt buttons twinkled like the sequins of a traje de luces. Together they danced before the falling sun, as the crowd thundered, as the women tossed roses, as the band oompahed, as the queen smiled behind her black fan, beneath her lace mantilla. The matador could not harm the brave animal. He lowered her to the ground, wiped the dust from her brow, and laid his head on the animal’s heaving chest. A man in love with a woman calls her mi cielo. My heaven. My sky. In that moment, the sky looked like heaven, and heaven seemed close.

  seven THE GARDENER

  The old woman was not hard to find. Black dress, black head scarf, she rattled the chain link with clutched hands. The yard was a dump. Garbage. A pig passed out in cornhusks. Hugo tied on his mask. When he opened the metal gate, the woman rushed toward him. “Que Dios te bendiga y te guarde.” May God bless you and keep you.

  “Where is the mask?”

  He watched a lie form on her lips. “What mask?”

  He shook her shoulders. Her frailness disgusted him. She was half dead already.

  “No games, old woman. Your little Pedro stole a mask from me. From Reyes.”

  The woman swore, fire in her eyes. “He was a good boy.”

  “The mask, woman.”

  “You’re too late,” she spat. “It was cursed. I wash my hands of it. You killed my boy. Santa María, Madre de Dios, ruega por nosotros pecadores . . .”

  The Tiger stormed through her shack, the chicken coop, the outhouse. He slashed shrubs with his machete. He was tired of looking in vain.

  Finding nothing, he shook the old witch. “I ask you for the last time. Where is the mask?”

  “I sold it to an American.”

  “What American?”

  “The one who stays with young Flores.” Her dog wandered over and she pulled its long ears. “He was an innocent boy who made a mistake. A boy who needed his mother. I got rid of it right away. He didn’t have to tell me. I knew.”

  The Tiger couldn’t listen anymore. He pushed her hard, away from him, and the old woman tumbled backward. Her head slammed against the chicken coop and she collapsed without a word, limbs splayed like a broken kite. The Tiger knelt. With a surge of tenderness, he pressed his palm to her forehead. Come back, old woman. I am not as bad as I seem. And he thought, I should get a doctor, but he did not move.

  He watched her die. She died as he watched her.

  He put a finger under her nose, waiting, to be sure. The stink of pig and lye was overwhelmed by his own stench. The dog whimpered, dug its snout under his mistress’s hip. A crow crossed the sky.

  He got up, built a fire.

  The Aztecs cremated the dead to speed their journey to the afterlife. He owed the old woman this much. A week before, he would have recoiled from this task, but now he felt neither fear nor revulsion. When the fire caught, he dragged her body into the flames. She weighed nothing. Her black dress parachuted in the updraft. He watched the crone’s spirit rise. Her wailing voice wrapped around him like a shroud. My beloved sons, we are all going to die.

  —

  That night, Hugo dreamt he was an Aztec executioner working in the Temple of Fire. Blood tasted rich in his mouth, and his arms ached from lifting his flint. A storm blew in. Wind bent the trees. In a cataclysmic flash, a silent lightning bolt struck the temple. The great building shook and leapt into flames. In the fire, of the fire, he cried out for God.

  Hugo jolted awake, his shirt damp with sweat. Soledad had not woken. Wired, he went to the kitchen, opened his Aztec history book. The fall of the Aztec Empire and the death of Montezuma were foretold by eight omens.

  An Aztec fisherman harvesting a crane with a mirror on its forehead.

  His heart quickened. In his dream the night after Reyes gave him the tiger mask, he had seen a fisherman holding a crane.

  A comet shaped like an ear of corn scattering sparks over the city.

  A wailing woman.

  A noiseless lightning bolt destroying a temple.

  Fear nipped his chest. He’d seen a corn-shaped comet at Carnival. The crone had wailed into the wind. In his dream tonight, a silent thunderhead had destroyed the Temple of Fire. The next four were unfamiliar.

  A boiling lake.

  A comet in the night sky.

  A two-headed creature.

  A burning temple.

  Hugo glared at the kettle, the oven. Every object seemed capable of treason. I am having visions. I am losing my mind.

  He walked outside, threw himself on the damp grass, stared at the stars, a thousand nicks of light stinging the sky. For months, he’d thought of nothing but the papershop girl, but now he was confronting a new kind of danger. Four omens. Four more before the empire fell. But what empire? Was the price of his sins that he would go mad? Were the spirits demanding the death mask’s return? He wanted to ask Soledad, but he was alone with these visions, his sickness, forced to follow the mask wherever it led him. Staring into the night sky, Hugo made two fists and waited for the next missive from the dead.

  eight THE HOUSEKEEPER

  “Santísima Virgen, es tarde otra vez, but I cannot sleep. Hugo says we will leave soon for the North. I don’t want to go. The place I dream of living is Real de Catorce. Real is a holy city, a ghost town. The Huichol say ancient spirits live in the hills, and they eat peyote and walk into the desert with their offerings. Catholics go on pilgrimage to the parish church to worship San Francisco de Asís, the miraculous El Charrito, who cures the sick and maimed. The mountain air is so pure it cleans your insides in a single day. Though I was only eight the summer we went, I remember the beauty of the land. We climbed up from the town into the ruins, and I could imagine how men once mined for silver, how the elegant city once bustled with shopkeepers and craftsmen. All that is left now are crumbling walls, and spirits who refuse to leave. We children sat inside the remains of a stone house, just walls, no roof. Concha said it was three hundred years old. I lay back in the gra
ss and the sky was stained-glass blue and the tuna flowers hung like pink earrings on the prickly pears and a tree shaped like a woman shook in the wind.

  “Those mountains felt like heaven, and every fallen candy wrapper was a jewel from a queen’s crown. All summer I collected trash to make collages. Princesses and dragons. At the end of the summer, my mother threw my art away, saying we couldn’t take it with us, and I cried and rescued my artwork and brought it to you. Mamá got mad—hija, you can’t bring trash to the Virgin—but I knew you would like it. Do you remember? Saints must have memories that go on forever.

  “One more thing. (Are you still listening?) In Real de Catorce, we saw crosses everywhere. The cactus grew into crosses and the trees looked like crosses and the electric wires were crossed and we children spun in the mountains, arms wide, until everything got blurry and we fell down in the sun. Beautiful, spinning children in the shape of crosses. Can you see us, beloved Virgin? I am still that girl.

  “Now I want a child of my own. (I am trying to be patient.) If I have a girl, I will name her Azura to remind me how it felt to stand on the mountaintop of Real de Catorce and hear the goat bells ringing like Sunday morning, and how I scoured the ground for beautiful trash, a bottle cap or a yellow candy wrapper caught in the thorns, waiting for someone to save it.”

  nine THE PAPERSHOP GIRL

  She liked her new bedroom in Veracruz with her Romeo Santos poster and chartreuse beanbag chair. At night, a towering eucalyptus tree stood guard out her window. In the morning, the sun lit her Betty Boop bedspread. The girl had no friends at school. She had arrived midyear and cliques had already formed. Girls who were friends traded charms from their bracelets, shared spearmint gum, slept at one another’s houses on weekends, gossiping about sex.

  During class, boys stared at her chest, but she refused to slouch. Let them imagine all they were missing. She wore lace gloves and tight jeans, and on special days, a yellow dress. At lunch, she ate alone, and her math teacher, Señora Barreto, nodded at her encouragingly, but the girl pretended not to see or understand this kindness.