One Life. David Lida

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СКАЧАТЬ get a special blend, three-quarters of a pound of dark French roast and a quarter of milder Colombian. That was the first coffee I drank, from the age of twelve, when my parents allowed me to mix a few drops into my milk, until later in adolescence, by which time the proportions had been reversed. As a result, I grew up to be a complete coffee snob. In Mexico City, I bought organic coffee from the highlands of Chiapas. I would order a fine grind, which I prepared in an octagonal Italian espresso pot. Any woman who spent the night with me would get a cup of that in the morning, mixed with milk I heated on top of the stove.

      But in a one-burro Mexican town, all bets were off. In some of them, you might have been able to get a cup of flavorless brown water at the local cafeteria. I would have jumped over a thousand cups of that swill to get to some Nescafé—particularly if I were handed the jar and allowed to do my own loading. After stirring in a little sugar I took that first familiarly vitriolic sip. Pure pleasure.

      “Qué rico,” I told the lady with the vibrantly painted hair.

      “Is it?” she asked through her smile. “I don’t drink coffee.”

      “Not even in the morning?”

      “Nunca de los nuncas.” She fluttered a hand by her bosom. “It gives me palpitations.”

      “To your health,” I said, raising the Styrofoam cup.

      She tilted her head, a twinkle in her eye. “What are you doing in Puroaire, joven?”

      “Just passing through,” I said. “I have some Mexican friends in el gabacho and they have relatives around here.” She looked at me as if she expected more. “It’s beautiful—the hills.” I always tried to change the subject as quickly as possible. For discretion’s sake, I never trumpeted to locals that I was around to help one of their neighbors’ kids who was facing death row in East Buttfuck, Kentucky. What’s more, explaining what I did for a living involved taking a deep breath and expending a lot of wind.

      “It’s pretty quiet in Puroaire,” she said. With a long wooden stick, she stirred sugar, corn flour, and water in a pot to make a breakfast drink called atole.

      “That’s not what they say.”

      “What do they say?” she asked, a smile on her face.

      “You know. That there are a lot of conflicts. That it can be dangerous.” I seldom referred directly to drug trafficking. That was supposed to be one of my strategies to sneak quietly into old age.

      She smirked. “Take a look around. Do you feel threatened here?”

      “No. Last night I took a walk and there were old people and kids all around the plaza.”

      “That’s the way it is,” she said.

      “Good morning, Doña Inés,” said a woman in her early twenties, skinny with long eyelashes and protruding teeth. She joined the older woman behind the table, removed her jacket, and put on an apron. “Sorry I’m late. Panchito has colic,” she said.

      “Don’t worry,” said Inés, stirring the atole. Her young assistant began to slice oranges in half. The morning light glimmered off the freshly cut flesh.

      “I went to Cucaramácara last night to see the Los Dandys concert,” said Inés. “And you know what? They didn’t even show up.”

      “Don’t tell me!”

      “It took me an hour to get there. They had to give everybody their money back.”

      “How rude!” The assistant began to place each orange half in a hand-operated contraption that squeezed out the juice, half by half. Mexicans refer to their true love as their media naranja—their other half of the split orange.

      I sipped my Nescafé and enjoyed the slight breeze. Within an hour, the air would stop moving in Tierra Caliente, and the temperature and humidity would squeeze us all in an oppressive embrace. I would be trying to get Esperanza’s siblings to tell me heinous, painful, and humiliating secrets about their mother and father. But meanwhile, savoring the coffee in the market, listening to the women gossip, and watching the vendors set up their stalls, I was happy.

      One of my virtues was that I didn’t have to become miserable in order to ruefully recall that in the distant past I had been content. When I felt good, it was tangible, palpable—I could hold the feeling in my hand. My work was demanding and intense, but it was full of what I came to think of as “stolen moments.” These were the instants when somehow, despite the desolation and misery that I was documenting, I recognized a feeling of serenity, or even joy. I noticed them all the time. When I ate or drank something that tasted good, when I felt the reprieve of a breeze against my skin, when I saw a breathtaking landscape, or when a pretty waitress turned her head to give me a second look. I enjoyed a free hour to walk around the broken-down houses and unpaved streets of an unfamiliar town. When I told people about my work, they tended to assume that it overwhelmed me with sadness. On the contrary. Being so close to other people’s tragedies that I could kiss them was a constant reminder of how fortunate I was.

      “You don’t even know Los Dandys,” said Inés to her assistant. “Your generation doesn’t listen to those songs.” She smiled, closed her eyes, and began to sway her hips. “You are like a precious stone, a divine jewel, truly valuable,” she trilled, her arms posed as if she were dancing with a lover. “If my eyes don’t lie, if my eyes don’t deceive me, your beauty is without equal....” She stopped abruptly and laughed, and, although facing her helper, she glanced at me from the corner of her eye.

      “Gema” was Inés’s siren song. Maybe she was my media naranja. I could marry her, settle down in Puroaire, and get all the Nescafé I could drink. I looked at the curve of her neck, still smooth and lovely. Her hips had not yet spread egregiously and her stomach was only slightly rounded. She had not let herself go. Her children were probably grown. It would just be the two of us in a small cinder block house, probably on the outskirts a mile out of town, with plastic window curtains and an embroidered picture of the Last Supper in the living room.

      I am not saying I was any great prize, but how many like me passed through Puroaire in a day, a month, a year? Inés would probably be happy and even grateful to have a man who didn’t beat her, who had a modicum of patience, who listened to her when she gossiped about her customers. I vaguely remembered in a novel—was it written by García Márquez?—a description of two old people, after many decades of marriage, in their dotage coupling like two little earthworms. Would Inés and I merge our bodies like that in twenty or thirty years? What would we talk about?

      “I’m working for the lawyers who are defending your sister,” I said when he came to the door. “May I come in?”

      Joaquín, Esperanza’s eldest brother, opened up without a word. He was a little taller than me, an inch or two over six feet, and lanky. At fifty-three, his thick wavy hair was more salt than pepper, but his heavy eyebrows were black. The flesh in his face was beginning to fall. He could have packed for the weekend in the bags under his eyes. I found his house on foot, about ten unpaved blocks from the market.

      I walked into the living room. There was a modest table and four chairs, a sagging sofa, a framed image of the Virgin of Guadalupe. A boy of about three or four with a bowl-shaped haircut stood in the doorway to the kitchen. Joaquín’s son? His grandson? Beyond the boy, a somber, heavyset woman dried her hands on a dish towel. She stared at me with impassive, almond-shaped eyes.

      “Could СКАЧАТЬ