Pasadena (18 page)

She was just a girl when she first visited Café Fatal, arriving with a fan looped around her wrist. Not ten minutes after her arrival she was dancing with a man with a bump on his bald, thumping-veined crown. She tried not to look at the soft gray egg-size lump, keeping her eyes on the three-member band, wrongly believing they would come to her aid. The money she and Pavis earned at Café Fatal paid for the room in the hotel basement where they slept and stored their few possessions in a blanket chest. In that dark, cool room, Valencia had learned to dance with the son of the hotel owner, a boy named Paco, fifteen years old, shell-white hands and small, hairless arms, a perpetual tremble in his lip. Pavis called him Paquito: “What a pretty little boy!” And Paco didn’t mind, he preferred hiding in the basement with the chambermaids who worked for his father to sitting behind the reception desk and requesting, in a quavering voice, the hotel’s guests to deposit their guns and knives in the bronze-cast safe. Paco would bring the two girls plates of sugar dough and cups of milk warmed on the stove; he stole satin ribbons to braid through their hair; and one day he arrived at the foot of the basement stairs with his hands behind his back. “For you,” he said, offering a silk fan with a blue tassel. Valencia snapped open the fan, its panel painted with the scene of a smoking volcano. And then, blushing, he said, “You’re like a sister to me.”

Valencia wondered why he was saying such a thing, why he had given her the fan, looping it around her wrist. She had been living in the basement for only four weeks. A sister after four weeks? But there was something brotherly in Paco, in the way he would stand close to her but never touch her, in the way he eyed her lovingly but never with longing, with overwarmed breath. There was a song that he’d taught her:
You are the spring for which I longed in the frosty wintertime
. And he would sing to her, and on the day he offered her the fan, he also offered to teach her to dance, his hand fluttering to her shoulder. His lip started
to quake, and Paco began to sing in his head voice:
O, let me come close to see the noble light in your eye
. He guided Valencia around the room until they bumped into the blanket chest and fell onto the bed. She felt the fast thud of his heart as they landed, but soon it slowed, her own following, and to Valencia’s surprise and relief, they fell asleep in embrace.

And so Paco became Valencia’s secret friend during those first months at the San Poncho, sneaking into her room to dance when Pavis was busy sitting on the lap of one of the men at the hotel bar. He would say, “You shouldn’t have to spend time with those men.” He would say, “You shouldn’t have to visit Café Fatal.”

“Easy for you to say,” Valencia would reply. “Not only do you own the Hotel San Poncho, you also own the candle factory and the livery and I understand you own a rancho somewhere between Mazatlán and Villa Vasquez that stretches for the length of Spain.”

“Nothing stretches for the length of Spain but the length of Spain itself.” And he would brush the hair out of her eyes and take her hands and move close to her, but never kiss her.
Mi hermana
.

And so it was on that night at Café Fatal, when the man with the tumorous bump atop his head led Valencia around the hall, that she vowed never to dance again. The man paid her for the dance, and Valencia returned to the table where she had left Pavis and the silk fan. The man had left her with two silver coins and a grimy feeling that made her think that his oniony stink would never wash from her blouse. “He wasn’t all that bad,” said Pavis, her lips clamping around a paper straw. The gold rum rose through the tube and filled her cheeks. “They can be worse.”

And Valencia knew that Pavis was right; why, hadn’t Valencia witnessed a menagerie of men pawing at the mole on Pavis’s throat: a man with a radish nose; a man with the hair of his armpit creeping from his sleeve; a man with stains on his trousers; a boy no older than Pavis with a cigarillo stub lodged in the corner of his mouth. So many, so many more to come, Valencia knew, and she was at the age when she both wondered about her future and doubted it: for she knew in the pit of her heart that her life would have to change, that she would one day flee the San Poncho. Yet, even so, it felt that life had condemned her to this: to the windowless basement, to the steaming stove where she boiled the sheets, to the endless chatter of Pavis, who rattled off her dreams of a villa overlooking the sea and a team of chambermaids to sweep her tile
floors and to carry her on a crêpe de chine chaise to the outhouse carved into the volcanic rock. “It’ll happen,” Pavis would say. But Valencia doubted it. No, she couldn’t imagine anything beyond the present, even though she knew there was a future; there had to be. But she worried that she would pay the rest of her life for surviving the flood; that her life would be the payment, her debt to the silent, already-dead faces of her father and mother and little lame Federico as they watched the flood descend on them with the vastness of something Valencia could attribute only to her God—whom she abandoned from the next dawn until the day Sieglinde was born.

“Go on,” Pavis said. “Have a sip of rum.”

Valencia pressed her lips around the straw. It wasn’t her first time tasting rum, but the heat surprised her nonetheless, the burning in her throat. She returned the glass to Pavis, and it was just at this moment, as the rum burnished the color in Valencia’s cheek, that a man neither girl had ever seen before entered Café Fatal.

He was tall, but not tall like the man with the overbite who had paid Pavis to dance with him behind the café. No, this stranger was tall in a head-turning way, with black hair feathered around his face and a trim black beard. Valencia and Pavis both noted that his clothes were finer than those of the other patrons of Café Fatal: a waistcoat with a standing collar and high Hessian boots, the soft black leather folded just under his knee.

“Who’s that?”

“I don’t know,” said Valencia. “What do you suppose he wants?”

The man walked about the room, Panama hat in hand, nodding at the girls who huddled at tables or along the wall, their collars yawning open around their throats. He shook hands with a few men, stopping to laugh with a pallid clerk who was sweating as if he owed money: Valencia had danced with him last week, her hand sinking into the damp folds of his back. Then the stranger approached Pavis and Valencia.

The girls turned their faces in his direction. If you were to look at them like this—two young faces, one, Valencia’s, shaped like a valentine—you would notice the small differences that would change the course of their lives: Valencia’s forehead was higher, and smooth; her eyes were imperceptibly wider than Pavis’s, her nose possessed of
one less scrap of flesh. The careful observer, the evolutionary eye, would register the subtle differences in beauty. The stranger asked Valencia to dance.

He asked her name, her age, where she was from.

“Yes, Villa Vasquez,” he said. “Swept away in a flood.”

Out of the corner of her eye, Valencia could see Pavis’s shoulders pinched over her rum.

“Have you returned since the flood?”

She shook her head.

“Yes, well. New families have moved in. There is corn in the field, the silver mine has reopened, the smeltery belches filth once again into the sky.”

“I had no idea.”

“How would you know, here in Mazatlán?” And then he asked, “Do you want to return?”

“To Villa Vasquez? No, there’s nothing there for me.”

“The bells in the tower are ringing again.”

“They never stopped.”

He pressed her closer, and she could see the needles of whiskers in his throat and the dense curl of his beard. He smelled of salt. His eyes were small in his face, the pupils nearly filling his sockets, and they narrowed on her.

“Where do you live?”

She told him.

“Do you want to leave?”

“For where?”

“Do you dream of leaving Mazatlán? Of your life changing forever?”

“Sometimes.”

“I didn’t come to dance,” the man said.

“If you think you’re not going to pay for this—” Valencia said, pulling away.

“No, no, hush. Of course I’ll pay you for this dance. I’ll pay you more than you’ve ever earned.”

She stood erect, fear filling her.

“I run a shipping company,” the man said. “My ships always need a girl or two to feed the sailors and to scrub the cabins.”

Something in Valencia sank; at first, the man had seemed to promise so much more.

“If you ever want another job,” he said, “you can find me at the harbor. My name is Fernando Moya.”

“Señor Moya.”

“Ask anyone at the harbor. They’ll know how to find me.”

“All right then,” she said. The music had stopped, and Moya paid her. He tipped his hat and said good-bye.

“What did he want?” asked Pavis.

“He’s hiring girls for his ships.”

“Is that all?” And then: “By the way, Paco came by.”

“Paco? Just now?”

“Yes, Paquito. He was looking for you. But then he saw you dancing with the stranger and he ran away.”

And so that was the mix-up that would change Valencia’s life: later that night, after Pavis left Café Fatal with a butcher who had blood beneath his fingernails, Valencia returned to the Hotel San Poncho, and upon descending into the basement, she found her room destroyed—the mattress hurled to the floor, her clothes ripped apart as if by an animal, her Bible open, a page torn from it, and the blanket chest gone. Valencia stood in the room, a candle close to her face, and then heard the creak on the stairs. She knew that Paco had ransacked her room, and she knew that it was he coming back for her. She wasn’t angry, and she imagined the remorse in his face as he reached the bottom of the steps, she imagined his hands clutched over his heart, and as she looked up to greet Paco’s eyes, she saw that it wasn’t Paco at all but Paco’s father, his face slick with kitchen grease, feet bare and thick with callus, his few strands of white hair adrift on his head. “What did you do to him?” Señor Costa demanded.

“Nothing.”

“Why’d he do this?”

“I have no idea.”

Paco’s father didn’t believe her—
You’re lying!
—and his voice rose as ropes of spittle swung from his lips. Valencia dropped her candle and the basement fell black, and nothing moved in the room except her feet pushing her back until she was against the stone-cold wall, in the corner, and Señor Costa, the man who fed her and paid her and ogled her
and told her she was worth no more than a load of soiled sheets, descended upon her, as Valencia somehow had always known he would. Her eyes—which had been open and alert since the day of the flood—closed, and the world around her, her small world, closed, and there was the jolt of a fist to her cheek, but it didn’t matter; there was the child’s cry of a grown man:
He said he’d never come back, you drove my Paquito away!;
there was the grunt of a man forcing himself into ecstasy, and her own muffled sob. And the world was closing, and soon she would flee the Hotel San Poncho and Mazatlán, and in the blackest instant of this one night, Valencia told herself to remember the name Moya. And even before it was over she imagined herself asking the fishmongers at the harbor if they knew a Señor Moya, and she imagined an office on the second floor across the street from the pier where Señor Moya sat in a room with maps on the walls, and he, less handsome in daylight, would light a cigarette and tell her that he wanted her to join the crew of a ship called the
Santa Susana
. “It’s sailing for Los Angeles tomorrow,” he would say. “Join the crew. You’ll be gone for three weeks. When you return, we’ll see if you want to stay aboard or not.” And because Señor Moya had turned out to be nothing more than a businessman, a man who counted pesos in his sleep, a man whose wealth was measured in the heads of horses and sailors under his employ, a man who saw a pretty girl and didn’t think about keeping her for himself, no, figured out a way to turn her beauty into a small but desirable mound of gold, he shook Valencia’s hand and said that the ship was sailing at dawn, and that she could take nothing more than a change of clothes. “You’ll be provided for on the ship,” he said. Valencia, who had no other choice, both believed him and did not, and thought of the anchor dropping into the harbor off Los Angeles; she thought of the slap of the dory’s oar as it hit the sea, carrying her from ship to shore; she thought of the pavement of a city she knew nothing about, and the town called Pasadena where Pavis assured her the hotels always needed a chambermaid. It would be a place where no one knew her, where she could look into a stranger’s face and introduce herself as someone else, in possession of the dreams and history and future of someone other than herself. Where no one would ever know that Paco’s father had ever touched her. She passed the fan and the Bible and the coral pendant to Pavis—“I’ll send for them when I can”—and in the morning, Valencia
felt the
Santa Susana
sway beneath her as it set sail up the blue coast to Alta California.

Much later, after Valencia had finished telling her story, Linda lay atop her blankets in her white nightdress, and after a long time she got up and crossed the onion field to the Vulture House. There was no light in the window, and as she pressed her face to the diamond pane in the door, Bruder greeted her.

He opened the door and led her inside. He had been expecting her, and he told her so. His suspenders were tight across his shoulders, and he had scoured the onion from his fingertips, and he didn’t own a mirror but tonight he had wished for one. The Vulture House was empty but for his bed and a small table and a shelf for his books, and Bruder gestured for Linda to sit on the bed and he sat next to her, the mattress denting beneath them. The moon pulsed through the window and lit Linda’s face and made her nightdress glow.

She wasn’t aware of Bruder’s anticipation; his back was to the window and his face was darkened by the night, and she had come because she had learned something and she wondered why no one else had learned it too.

Bruder pulled the rucksack from beneath the bed and moved to spread out its contents as he had done before. “They’re hers,” Linda said. His shadow fell across the Bible and the fan, and he startled her when his fingers peeled open her fist and placed the coral pendant in her palm.