Rain Village (26 page)

I looked at the clock. I had fifteen more minutes—just enough time to get Lollie’s opinion. I ran through the bathroom to the other side and knocked on her door, which swung open almost immediately.

“Tessa!” she said, pulling me inside.

“Can you lend me some makeup?” I asked. “Mauro is taking me out tonight, and I want to look nice.”

“That’s wonderful!” she exclaimed, a little too happy. I realized I hadn’t seen Geraldo around for several days, though Lollie had seemed fine at practice that morning.

“That skirt is
muy bonita,
” she said. “Why don’t you see how this necklace looks with it?” She led me over to the sweeping bureau covered in jars and bottles. Her eyes were red and slightly swollen.

“Are you okay, Lollie?”

“Of course,” she said, smiling as she clasped a thick silver band around my neck and let it nestle into my collarbone.

In the mirror, I was surprised at how it glinted. I never wore jewelry. Behind me Lollie looked transformed, glowing. For a moment my mind went to the ring wrapped in a sack at the bottom of my suitcase, and I imagined placing it on my finger, dazzling everyone we passed. I pushed the thought away immediately.

“Thank you,” I said, turning to her. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

“Sí, sí,”
she said. “Now let’s get a little makeup on you,
princesa.
”

She reached for a tube of lip gloss, then coated my lips with a series of small dabs. Next she poured powder over my skin, rubbing it in with a large puff.

“Cierra tus ojos.”
I closed my eyes, and she pulled a pencil across the lids. I pointed to the pot of glitter, laughing, and she sprinkled a few specks on my lids.

“I used to spend hours getting ready for my big dates,” Lollie said. “The boys used to beat down our door to get to me, once upon a time, in the last century.”

I squeezed her hand and kissed her. When I looked in the mirror I was still myself, but shimmery, better.

Mauro drove and I sat beside him. He told me stories about his family and the villa, but I was so nervous that I only heard every few words.

We drove out of the valley and into the city. I had only seen Mexico City in the daytime; at night it was another world completely, with lights draped everywhere and music filling the streets. I loved the little bands of
mariachis,
squat and bird-like, with their silver-spangled pants and sombreros. They seemed to be everywhere as we pulled the car into the center of the city, near one of the huge plazas lined with restaurants and bars and elaborate buildings.

Mauro looked at me. His eyes glimmered in the dark car.

“Ready?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said, smiling up at him, thankful that the nighttime masked the redness of my face, the sweat gathering at my neck. I forced myself to swallow.

He stepped out of the car, then moved around to pull open my door and extend his hand, shutting the door behind me after guiding me to his side. We strolled through the plaza. My skirt swished around my legs. The
mariachis
gathered around us as we walked.

“Care for a song?” they asked.
“Una serenata?”

“Señor Ramirez!” one cried, and began tiptoeing along the ground in a straight line, mimicking Mauro walking over the wire. “A song for your
novia?
”

Mauro laughed as a small crowd gathered around us. The plaza was full of people: young and old, children and drunks and young lovers and old people singing along to the music. Lights splashed on the stone, and the Mexican flag waved above us. The cathedral bordering the plaza on one side was as elaborate as a wedding cake.

“Por favor,”
Mauro said, bowing and laughing to the old
mariachi
in front of us. The
mariachis
were all over the place, playing song after song to small groups of listeners. There must have been fifty songs playing at the same time, and the effect was blissful, like a dozen fireworks going off at once.

The old
mariachi
bowed and stepped back, lifting up his violin. A group huddled around him with their own instruments and suddenly the sweetest, saddest song in the world burst out of them. Mauro pulled me in to him, wrapped his arm around my waist, bending down.

“Dance with me,” he smiled, and I let my body press into his as he guided me in a slow circle.

“Mauro!” some of them shouted. Or, like the
mariachi:
“Señor Ramirez! I want to join the ceer-kus, too!”

We laughed and laughed and I was dizzy with it.

Later, at the restaurant, everyone knew who we were. The Ramirez family was legendary in Mexico City, and the other patrons kept walking by to look at us, see what we were eating, how we were dressed.

We ordered heaping plates of
carne asada
and turkey
mole,
and the waiters kept bringing out beans and rice and guacamole. Mauro ordered us each a tequila cocktail, and I laughed and protested as I drank it down.

“Are you trying to get me drunk?” I asked, flirting, surprising myself. I took a sip of tequila, and the salt stuck to my lips. Mauro reached over and wiped it off, then licked his fingertips, gentle as a cat. He stared right into me. The blush that came up on me must have started at my toes.

The horns and violins and
guitarrones
and
vihuelas
enveloped us.

“So, Tessa,” Mauro said, “what do you think of Mexico now?”

“Oh,” I said, “it’s perfect. I love everything about it.”

He smiled. “
Dime.
Make me see it the way you do.”

I mashed down the beans on my plate. The waiter brought over two new drinks for us in icy cocktail glasses.

“It’s always sunny,” I said. “And the air has perfume in it, with all the flowers. They drape over everything like necklaces, and it makes me think of a fancy woman at a big dance. I love all the buildings and crosses. The music.”

“Sí,”
he said. “It suits you here. You look healthy and dark, almost like a
mexicana.
”

I giggled. “Oh, and everyone is so peaceful and relaxed, not like at home. There it was always worry and looking to the sky for rain. You know, the farm and everyone not getting along. Telling secrets. Hating things. The world.”

“What about your family?” He reached for a piece of meat on my plate, popped it into his mouth.

“They weren’t at all like your family. Not one bit. You are so lucky, having the brothers and sisters you do. Such a beautiful mother.”

“Dime,”
he said.

“We were nothing alike,” I told him, beginning to smile. Something I had never done while talking of my family before. “My sister and I shared a room but barely even spoke. I mean, we practically looked right
through each other whenever we were unlucky enough to be awake at the same time, in the bedroom.”

He laughed. “When we were kids we just worked and worked, all the time.”

“Us too,” I said. “Well, not me, really—I was too small to help much in the fields—but my brothers and sister were always out there, breaking their backs.”

“You saved your body for other things.”

I looked up sharply, afraid he was mocking me.

His eyes were warm and liquidy. “I would hate for you to be any different than you are now,” he said.

I let out my breath, unsure of where to look, what to think.

“I think it sounds wonderful,” I said, finally, “to spend all day working in the circus.”

He laughed. “People think we are free in the circus,” he said, “but all of us, we were born into it. It is as natural for me to be on the wire as it is for me to breathe. But you can be anything you want to be, the way Mary could. You are a streak of light.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” I said. “It must be wonderful, knowing exactly who you are and what you are, the way you do.”

I felt like I could say anything to him. He was, I realized, just like Mary and like Lollie: someone who’d slipped through the cracks, a friend. I do not think I had ever been more myself than I became at that moment, with him.

“Maybe,” he said. “But you can cut a space for yourself in the world. Sometimes, when it’s all you know, it’s different. You want to have more than one life. You envy the people for whom everything is possible.”

His voice was as deep and warm as baking bread. His lips were full, and as I watched him talk, I could feel them on me, grazing my cheek
and the sides of my mouth. His hair fell into his face. He smiled as he spoke, and I watched his lips, fascinated.

“I liked you from the first day you came to the circus,” he continued, smiling shyly. “I thought I had never seen anyone like you. You just showed up, slipping from one life into another.”

“Thank you,” I said, not knowing what else to say. I was afraid that if I said anything more, the moment would disappear. I didn’t trust anything, yet my life was so different now. It almost made sense for me to be here, for me to be staring at Mauro Ramirez and he back at me.

“Are you excited for the season?” he asked softly.

“Yes,” I whispered. “Excited, and scared. Scared to perform in front of everyone.”

“You will be amazing,” he said. “Enjoy these last two days, Tessita, because everything will change afterward. Everything.” He stretched his hand across the table and took mine in his palm.

“I will,” I tried to say, but the words seemed to get caught on my tongue.

We drove back to the villa in silence. When Mauro looked over at me I could feel his eyes on me as if they had weight to them, as if he were pressing on me with his fingertips. I lost every breath in my body. It was as if we weren’t even part of the world, with the way the moonlight cast shadows through the windows.

When we got back to the villa I felt like everything had changed. At the front door, Mauro looked down at me. I couldn’t even see straight. I wanted to stop time, wrap myself around this moment and keep it close. But before I could think or feel, he reached his hand out, cradled my cheek with his palm. I was shocked at the warm softness of it, so different from the skin on my own palms, ravaged by the bar. I stared up at him, unable to move.

As his face neared I saw the flash of his eyes on mine as they moved into the light. I saw the lines of his jaw and then suddenly it was as if I were underwater. His lips pressed on mine, as soft as pillows.

Afterward I stood there in shock, staring up at him. Without even thinking I turned around and ran so fast that everything around me blurred into lines of light and dark.

I rushed into my room, unsure if my legs would still carry me. When I stood in front of the mirror I barely recognized myself with my flushed cheeks and dark, shaded eyes, my body so strangely muscular and bruised from the constant training.

I fell onto the bed. My heart pounded, my whole body trembled. His kiss had crept its way under my skin, past where my father had burned his handprint, past my revulsion at what love could make of a woman like Lollie, or Mary, who had followed Juan Galindo like a dog through the ice and snow. I wrapped my head around it, what would make him do something like that, anyone do something like that, with someone like me. I moved from excitement to fear and back again, watching the stars outside my window.

I did not know what to expect from Mauro the next day. I watched the sky turn pale pink and then slip into yellow, and still my heart would not calm. Again and again I saw Mauro’s eyes as his face leaned into mine. What if I had imagined that moment? One minute I was convinced the world had changed, the next I was sure I had imagined the texture of his hair and lips, the scent of his skin. Everything seemed so fragile then, in my life. But most of all I was afraid to look in the mirror and see the same Tessa Riley, the one who used to lie in the cornfields, staring past her father’s shoulder at the moon.

Finally the sun reached the top of my window, and I knew I had to leave my room, return to the world to see what was different in it. I got up and bathed, imagining his lips, his gaze over my body as I sponged
myself down. I poured water over my torso and watched it drip down my legs to my feet, wondering if I could ever be beautiful to someone like Mauro, or anyone at all. I still was myself, tiny and flat and disappointing: I felt so utterly transformed by Mauro’s kiss that I thought I might look down and see rounded, sculpted legs like Mary’s, breasts that were full like fruit.

I dressed slowly, in my plain white training leotard and shorts, and pulled my hair back with trembling hands. I slapped cold water on my face. I took so long that when I stepped out of the house to where the pool and fruit trees were, they were all already there: Lollie, Mrs. Ramirez, Luis, Victoria, Carlos, Paulo, José, and Mauro, who looked up at me and smiled as if someone had knocked his face clean open.

“Tessa,” Carlos called out, laughing, “we thought you had gone off and run away! Mauro here was about to hop on a horse and run after you.”

I glanced at Lollie, who smiled and winked, then looked at Mauro, whose face, I noticed with surprise, was every bit as red as mine.

I wanted to sink into the floor and, at the same time, run leaping toward them all. Nothing made sense to me that day; it seemed like the whole world had gone mad.

On our last night in Mexico we all gathered around the long table and ate tortillas, sliced avocados, and fried meat. I knew I was crazy, but I felt the way I used to feel when the sun dropped, when it was time for me to leave Mary’s library and head home. My excitement fell into sadness and back out of it again. I wanted to perform, but I almost couldn’t bear the thought of leaving the hushed, tile-floored house, the burst-open flowers like explosions along the dusty streets.

Luis sat at the head of the table. My costume hung like a secret in my closet, wrapped in tissue. I sensed a bittersweet sadness in Mrs. Ramirez and Luis, something all circus people feel: that longing to watch the landscape blur by as you go from town to town, to smell the sawdust and feel the lights beaming on your skin. I looked around the table, at Carlos’s shining face, José’s quiet inward gaze, Paulo’s dreamy secretiveness. I watched Lollie with Geraldo next to her, beaming with a desperate sort of happiness, one I recognized instantly after so many days and nights with her. And I turned to Mauro, who looked at me with his inky eyes that made me feel I was being touched.