Chaquetas mentales

Pero hay algo que no se puede explicar,
¿por qué la niña ríe en vez de llorar?
-- Sui generis “Fabricante de mentiras”

Sitting in the central plaza, with his back to the kiosk, Saúl’s balding head reflected the early morning sunshine, a glancing glare in the eyes of the girl who watched. The summer months were always the most exciting for Natalia, out of the confines of school, her mother too busy with the restaurant to be bothered with her comings and goings.

Saúl had probably watched her pass a few hundred times without noticing, milling around among the tourists and adolescents, the balloon vendors, the ice-cream barrels, the elote-grillers whose roasted corn smell permeated the entire plaza. It was mid morning by the time he finished reading “La jornada”, his head slightly bent forward, causing a surge of pain to throb in his third cervical bone, broken in a bizarre motorcycle crash 15 years before in Medellín, oddly enough, the town of his birth. He always liked to tell people he was from Madrid, though nobody who had ever spent any time there would have believed that lie, but for the lusty young girls that he liked to listen to, to massage their necks and backs, while his wife finished medical school, were, fortunately for him, insular in their knowledge of the world.

This was a small town, an ex-pat haven, where little blond-haired Americans sprung up here and there, their parents teaching at the local Instituto Allende, or creating social programs to create provincial theater or to teach Spanish to foreigners like themselves. The restaurants in the town, like that of Natalia’s Argentine mother, were more likely run by South American or European immigrants, inviting classier tastes, or larger sums of money, catering to the French and German tourists that would visit in the several weeks after the American and Canadian vacationers left.

San Miguel is a sad place during winter months, after the “Fiestas Patrias” of September and before “Semana Santa” in April. Natalia would get bored and turn to other things for entertainment, but that would come later. Saúl, for his part was visiting this town because he was researching a historical novel. His primary interest and area of expertise was Golden Age Spanish poetry, he was a professor at a somewhat prestigious university in New York, and during most months of the school year could be found visiting a local, highly academic women’s college, offering an open ear and strong hands for free back massages. It seems that he and his wife, a previous student of the same university, had an agreement, or that was the version that the young women were always fed, and which they gulped down happily – it is not often that one is offered a free massage, no questions asked, no further obligations… But this summer, Saúl was in search of the “siglo de Oro’s” effect on the colonies, and so here he was in the “cuna de la independencia” where the first murmurings of revolution had boiled up into anti-clerical shouts, where agrarian reform and autonomous government were a logical extension.

He didn’t notice Natalia watching the gleam of his head, this strange solitary man that neatly folded his newspaper into four equal squares, and then slipped it into the outer pocket of his camelback. Today he was going for a hike alone, his wife, Rebecca, busying herself with a course on muralism at the Instituto. He decided to walk with his dog, Beto who had made the journey with them, by car all the way from Ciudad Juarez, where they had flown to the border and then driven three days, through the desert, stopping in San Luis Potosí, before arriving at their rented villa on Terraplen, halfway down, past the “Buen Café”. Beto was a good yellow dog, no particular breed, in fact more like the perros de la calle, of Saúl’s youth, than any other he had met. That was why he liked Beto, very simple, nothing exquisite, but good company all the same. Beto needed to lose some weight, and Saúl needed to clear his head, and so, after the morning paper, he was ready for the hike, unsuspecting of the girl-child, following him with her green eyes.

Natalia paused for a moment, and then, as quickly as she had become interested, she withdrew her attention, and bounded off in the direction of her friend Gabriel’s house. He was much older, and always invited Natalia to party with the local bands that played at Mama Mía’s. She had learned most of her English from him, a half-English, half-Venezuelan, son of someone important in the town. He was decidedly not a good influence on her and her mother truly wished that Natalia would meet more wholesome friends, she just didn’t know how to broach the subject with her. On the way to Gabriel’s, she was sidetracked by her friend Vel, whose black eye shocked her, but did not surprise her. Vel had been fighting and drunk the night before at “La Cucaracha” a den of iniquity if ever there was one. Vel was one of the few Americans who frequented La Cuca, because it was generally too far off the beaten path for the tourists, and too full of campesinos, drowning their sorrows or nursing their habits, for it to be a welcoming place for a young girl. She hadn’t been alone, but with her boyfriend, and having grown up in the Arkansas hills, having escaped a life of familiar misery, an abusive relationship where someone apologized and said they loved you afterwards was better than one in which you didn’t get even the pretty words at the end.

Vel was precisely the kind of friend Natalia’s mother wished she would not have, and that Saúl might have preyed on in another time and place, but it was not to be. Her wild and grimy, curly haired halo, would not in fact attract Saúl, it would be Natalia’s lithe, boy-like head, quiet, watchful, persistent, that would inevitably bring Saúl to his knees, quite literally.

This day was the first time Natalia took notice, and in her childish mind, decided that she would meet this man and that she would make him hers. Saúl, for his part, was only intent on hiking and exploring the desert landscape, perhaps learn something about cactus cultivation, agave processing and finally have time to write his book. He was on a one-semester sabbatical and after the festivities of September died down, and all but a few die-hard tourists had evanesced into the nothingness that settled yearly upon the town, he began to seriously contemplate the reality of his project. He had felt extremely distracted this summer, not wanting to cause excessive outrage, or the wrath of misunderstanding husbands, he had not been partaking in his usual daily sessions of girl-talk, or girl-listening, coupled with only slightly inappropriate physical contact. He was feeling the need to involve himself in some other, non-academic pursuit, for the fun of the chase, or the danger, his wife’s loving, sweet but somehow not enough, not completely satisfying, and sadly so. He truly wished that he were a person content in the pleasures that life had allotted him, but he wasn’t, and as he again sat, this time facing the kiosk, watching as the straggling mariachis left the plaza, night was falling, in such a way that the upper firmament was almost black and the lower plane of the sky was a deep blue, fading into the last round warmth of daylight, like the Magritte paintings that seemed so real, except for one bizarre element. The element in this painting was the central cathedral, back lit and flaming, pink by normal daylight, but a flaming red in the crepuscule, the death of the day. The cathedral had amazed him upon first inspection, its outside a highly decorated gothic, with spires and plunging lines all about, but on the inside a completely anachronous era, neo-classical, simple, clean lines, very little decoration and a less than spacious nave. He preferred the view from across the plaza to the view from within, especially since he had abandoned all faith at a very young age, when Father Sebastián had made him sit down, holding his hand in both of his clammy ones, resting on his knee, in the oppressive confines of his office, asking him to detail all of the impure thoughts that he had had in the week.


Natalia decided that now would be a good time to walk past, to examine this man, old enough to be a very young father to her, young enough to pose an interesting challenge. He seemed lost in thought, and she needed to rethink her strategy, merely walking by wouldn’t be enough. What she didn’t know was that he had already picked her up on his radar, and was only watching very subtly, not breathing, not turning his head. This was a dance he had played a million times before, and he could see that this little girl would be quite a good deal of fun if he played his cards right. She laughed with some local friends, and ordered an exquisite hamburger, now that dark had finally descended and the man had opened his nightly stand. She ordered a Hawaiana, replete with pineapple, bacon, cheese, ham, ketchup, mustard, onion, lettuce tomato and chile.

He decided to casually approach, forming the tail end of the line awaiting service. The cathedral’s nightly lights illuminated the façade and the local businesses that had not yet closed cast a haze about the plaza, suddenly shrinking it into a world of only two. This was, of course, a very small town. Rebecca had since left, returning to finish her third year of residency at the hospital that she had chosen, working with juvenile cancer patients, and Saúl didn’t think twice about circling, enclosing, capturing this little girl.

After a few evenings of similar semi-encounters, he was emboldened and she receptive to his approach. They walked up and down the main streets, only a few restaurants, including the one that Natalia’s mother owned, remained open in the down season, the streets damp from a late-season rain, pouring out of the sporadic gutters, getting them wet in short bursts as they paraded themselves past empty shops. Saúl began the asking, and Natalia was so bored that everything he suggested seemed exciting and worth trying. He talked about how she would make a fabulous model, and asked her to pose nude for him. She agreed, free of guilt or inhibition. His hands trembling as he lead her back to his still-rented villa. The only other person there, an ex- Navy Seal, Mike, who offered him joints on occasion, made himself scarce, or was lost among his own ghosts when they arrived. Natalia offered herself up to him, and he was, of course, trembling like an autumn leaf, rustled by a gust of wind. He was almost unable to steady the camera, to trap the light on her strangely androgynous body, he was shaking and then, frightened at the power of his physical reaction. Things never went this way, there was always perhaps a little petting, but he could not control his desire. Therefore he handed her the clothing, got up and asked her to leave.

Natalia was too young to know that this was not the way it was supposed to work, Saúl left the next morning, shaken and alone, heading south to the capital, to lose himself among the millions. Natalia arrived the following evening, hopeful, waiting at their rendezvous spot. And the next night and the next and the next for a week, until she finally realized, after the giddy explanations to Vel, and the sorrowful days of school, writing his name over and over in every combination with her own, that he was not coming back. She cried for a moment, a week, a month, furious for believing, for wanting, for losing.

And then one morning she got up, laughing, she looked in the mirror, and she moved on.