He found out about a lot through Rodger, because the man loved to talk. You could see it in his face when the others spoke Spanish that he was dying a thousand deaths. Te gusta el chisme, Rodger? Matt had asked him once when they were gathered on the terrace, to make the Mexican girls laugh. Rodger gave him a pained look. You like to gossip? Matt repeated in English. Don’t you know it’s a woman’s vice? But Matt knew, even then, that the aloof cannot be that way alone, and that he required the retired trucker from northern Georgia.
The older man would seek him out at reception when there was no one else in the hostel to speak English with. The proficiency of the Mexican staffers in their language was limited. Rodger had the custom of speaking like a Spanish-inflected caveman in their presence, thinking this would make him more intelligible. I go now to di store, he would tell the Mexican girls. The thing was, Matt could not be sure Rodger’s efforts to make himself understood were entirely redundant. But this form of locution must have grown tiresome to Rodger, who remarked to Matt once in his abrupt Appalachian dialect on the thickness of the Mexicans’ accents.
When Rodger was in need of accompaniment in his native tongue he would come down to the front desk and buy a Coke and tell Matt for the second or third time about his son’s collection of Crocs, for instance, which filled the walk-in closet of a house in the Atlanta suburbs. He always concluded with the joke that, if his son wanted a free pair of Crocs, he could always go to jail, because they gave you a pair of Crocs in jail. The son had been adopted from Guatemala and ran a landscaping business, and although Matt found his take on the American Dream depressing, he usually ended up glad in spite of himself that Rodger had come down to interrupt his reading.
At times Rodger’s ostensible role as Matt’s unlettered pug was called into question. One day a twentysomething Londoner arrived at the hostel and booked a bed for one night. Later, on the terrace, when they had gathered for the dinner that Rodger had prepared, the guest had chatted with the Americans. It was thanks to her gregariousness that she had been invited to eat with them in the first place, Rodger’s plain but satisfying meals usually being reserved for the members of the staff. Over steak and mashed potatoes they shared the contours of their lives in broad swaths, the Americans learning that the young woman was a kindergarten teacher in the British capital taking a summer holiday. It was not difficult to believe her stated profession. She had the unfathomable lunatic tenderness common to teachers of small children. After they had finished eating, when Rodger took out his cigarettes from his breast pocket and offered one to his compatriot, she asked for one herself and joined Matt to smoke by the railing as the sun descended between the twin volcanoes. In the yellow light her skin was ruddy and supple. He had the intuition that she did not regularly smoke, but did so now as a pretext to talk. She was easy to talk to. They went back and forth on topics of small consequence, not exchanging information so much as echo-locating, like bats, and after a few minutes twisted the butts of their cigarettes into the ashtray and that was the last time he spoke to her.
Later in the evening, during his shift at reception, he saw her pass through the lobby out the door, followed by Rodger. She had changed into a green dress which accentuated curves he had not noticed before. In a few seconds she traversed the lobby like some lusty figment, five-foot-seven-ish Rodger trailing puppyishly in his eternal baseball cap, and was gone.
Two days later Matt sat chatting on the terrace with Rodger. As usual, the former trucker did almost all the talking. After a lull the older man brought up the Englishwoman.
“You know that British gal who was here the other night,” he said. “She was crazy, man.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Oh yeah. We go downtown, have us a couple drinks. I ask her, when we’re out, what’s the craziest thing you’ve ever done. Sexually. You know what she says?”
“What.”
“She says, what I’m about to do. And she takes me back in a alley, and we do it right there up against the wall, a quickie, five or ten minutes like. Crazy, man.”
Matt looked at him skeptically. The other stood, held up a palm.
“Swear to fucking God.”
Though he made no sign of it at the time, Matt believed him. He did not doubt that the other was prone to exaggeration, if not outright pathological mendacity, fuelled by the Corona he drank throughout the day, but in this case he found his claim credible. He considered that if there was a type of young woman who would fuck a Georgia redneck twenty-five years her senior who looked a good deal older due to the effects of tobacco in an alley in Mexico, then the kindergarten teacher had been that type. Even so, the revelation etched a frown on the younger man’s face for the next few hours.
Not long after the episode with the Englishwoman, a man from Quebec in his early seventies named Michel came and booked a bed in the same room as Rodger for over a month. Michelle? Rodger had scoffed to Matt once the other had lugged his bags up the first flight of stairs. Soon, however, Rodger discovered that the newcomer spoke near-perfect English, and was glad to have him for a roommate. For his part, Matt knew he need only ascend to the terrace where he would find Rodger sitting with a cigarette and a beer in order to be briefed on the new guest, and he did so a few days later.
The man was a retired chef who received multiple pensions from the Canadian government, at least one of which was devoted entirely to Viagra and prostitutes, according to Rodger. He had been bouncing around Mexico for a number of years now, sampling the hookers of various cities. He had no spouse and no children and this was the way he preferred to spend his latter years, along with his money. Every other day he caught the bus to fuck in the hotels set apart for this purpose. It was unclear how the opportunity had arisen, but Rodger had accompanied him once to the plaza where the women convened, and the two men had sat on a bench as Michel commented on the often underage girls as they passed, their rates, the ones he had been with, the ones he had not. His most frequent contractors even came by to offer him a freebie from time to time.
“Some of them were looking real good, man,” Rodger said. “I was tempted. There was this one girl, looked just like Eva Mendes. Eva Mendes, that’s my celebrity crush. This girl looked just like her, I’m telling you. I never been with a working girl like that. Never done it. But for the price she wanted I was real tempted, man.”
Though Rodger fully inhabited the manner of a bumpkin, to the point of confirming even the most facile stereotypes—the debauched ZZ Top concerts, the symmetrical deer head tattoos on his pectorals—and had on at least one occasion referred to himself as a redneck, his pockets seemed deeper than might at first be suspected. He had spent at least part of his career making deliveries for the Department of Defense, his rig escorted by sizeable convoys. More than likely he received a pension to make Michel’s look a pittance. It was not clear that he lived in the hostel out of economic necessity. Rather the older American seemed always to be offering to take others on as hirelings. Shortly after arriving in the hostel he began speaking of opening a business selling hot wings to the locals. He would hire Rebeca, a volunteer from Aguascalientes who spoke the best English out of the Mexicans and who was also the most capable cook, as his helper in the kitchen, and the rest of the female volunteers in the hostel as waitresses. Armando, the janitor, he would hire to make deliveries in the immediate area. By the end of the two Americans’ acquaintance the older man had taken steps towards this ambition, ordering a fryer and other appliances to the hostel, giving volunteers a few pesos to interpret for him at the market, sending Armando off with a few inaugural orders. For this reason Matt was not overly surprised the afternoon he encountered Rodger in the plaza where the prostitutes gathered, looking to make another cheap hire. Still, it was curious. He remembered Rodger relating to him one night the plight of a young girl who sold trinkets on a street corner nearby.
“I go up to her, I says, you come work for me and I’ll pay you four times what you’re making now. And she looks at me horrified, like horrified, and she says no, don’t talk to me, they’re watching me, up there on the roof. And then I realized, man, in a year, two years, she’s gonna be up at the plaza, you know. Selling that pussy. It was real sad, man.”
The Americans’ convergence in the plaza had been preceded by Michel’s exit from Puebla. Rodger had given Matt the lowdown.
“So Michel had an accident today,” he began, lowering his voice and leaning towards the other. “You hear?”
“What happened?”
“Had an accident. So he goes to the hooker plaza today, like usual. And he’s there in the hotel room with the girl, doing his thing, you know. Tells me he thought he had to fart. Only it wasn’t a fart. He shit himself, man. Right there in the hooker hotel with the girl in the bed. But that was just the start, cause they wouldn’t let him shower, clean up, do nothing, they put him in the street. He tries getting a taxi, but none of them would let him in the car. So he walks the ten, twelve blocks back here and he comes in the lobby. Man did he smell. Walks right past the girls who were there having coffee, shit all over him. Nobody said nothing. I guess he washed it off in the shower, but man, it was bad.”
The day following the Canadian had checked out of the hostel, presumably to make a fresh start with the streetwalkers of some other Mexican city, having soiled his rapport with the poblanas. It did not seem to any of them like he tended to stay in one place for long, anyhow.
For all that they were different, the reasoning that brought the two Americans to the plaza on the same afternoon was likely identical. Michel had laid out the whole process for Rodger the afternoon the two had gone to the plaza together, and Rodger had in turn relayed the information to Matt. With Michel gone there was no one in the hostel who would know in the event that either of them paid the working women a visit. In his case, Matt had been subject to mounting agitation after so many run-ins in the vein of his interaction with the kindergarten teacher, warm enough to stir him below the waist, but too fleeting to consummate at his preferred pace of seduction. Privacy in the hostel being at a premium, he was tormented at night by the moans of the more opportunistic. And so on the afternoon in question he stuffed a few hundred pesos into his pocket and set out for the plaza.
When he reached the corner opposite the plaza, some forty yards square, he spotted Rodger talking to one of the girls. To Matt’s relief the other appeared not to have seen him. The younger man lingered across the street so that with a single step backwards he would be hidden from view. After a few minutes conversing with the prostitute, shifting his weight with his hands on his hips and tipping his hat off his head involuntarily by the brim, Rodger followed her around a corner on the far side of the plaza and out of sight. Matt turned and traced his steps back to the hostel.
For once Rodger withheld his exploits of the day from the other as they sat smoking after dinner, and for once Matt was privy to a piece of intelligence he had gathered of his own account. The next day, having confirmed Rodger’s presence at the hostel for the next few hours, Matt set out for the plaza.
He went later in the day this time, and when he arrived he saw that there were more women at this hour. His gaze went to a girl he had not seen the day preceding. In Mexico, outside the areas most frequented by tourists, if you saw a person of African extraction, it was a safe bet they were Haitian, the latter country being so deeply riven that migration to a middling economy like Mexico warranted the considerable peril of the voyage. In the capital Matt had seen her countrymen gathered outside the migration offices or hanging around with their scooters waiting to pick up people’s food. Prior to the girl in the plaza, the only Haitian he had seen in Puebla had plied one of the major intersections with three parallel rods affixed to either flank which led to the hands, hips, and ankles of two near-lifesized female dolls, one in front of him, the other behind, which dancing he made to dance.
He started across the dark birdstained plaza with the idea he would try his French on her. As he approached he eyed the sturdy figure, the twin pears of her breast, the full limbs. Her hair was straightened and gathered near the nape of her neck. Either unable to afford or disinclined to buy the more eyecatching getup of her companions, she wore a blue top, a fitted skirt that went to the middle of her thighs and slippers. Her arms were crossed beneath her breasts as she stood watching him approach.
“Bonsoir,” he said.
“Bonsoir.”
When he stumbled producing the followup she asked in Spanish what his plans were for the evening. Her grasp of the language was that of a penniless migrant, devoid of vocabulary foreign to her milieu. Likewise her English. She watched him sputter with dark placid eyes. They exchanged a few innocuous biographical facts but in the end he decided that circumstances were not propitious. The plaza and the buildings around were in a poor state of repair and there was an intermittent smell of sewage and the sky was cloudy and turgid. Maybe after a few drinks. As things stood he didn’t have it in him. He made an excuse and left.
That might have been their last interaction, had developments not come about. Matt suspected that Rodger continued visiting the tolerance zone over the next week, given his relative quietness during the same period. Should this be true, he knew it was only a matter of time before Rodger was compelled to share. In the end the older man held out longer than Matt thought likely. One Thursday night, Matt having spied Rodger in the plaza Wednesday of the week preceding, Rodger divulged his adventures, working on his third or fourth post-dinner Corona.
“I finally gone down to the hooker plaza and fucked me a hooker, man.”
“In honor of our old friend.”
“That’s right. I been with a few of em now actually. They got all kinds. Little tiny things, big fat ones. I like a little more meat on the bone, you know, the right amount. But yeah, I gone over there.”
“What’re the hotels like?”
“Not as bad as you might think. They got so many people looking for work in this country, soon as you’re done in one of them rooms a lady’s in there with fresh sheets, cleaning. They must flip them rooms fifty times a day.”
“That’s good I guess.”
“Yeah, man. Cheap, too.”
“I can imagine.”
Rodger dragged his cigarette, exhaled.
“They even got a black girl over there. From Haiti.”
“Have you been with her?”
“Oh yeah. It was good, too.”
“Got to try them all I guess.”
“She was probably my favorite, that Haitian girl. I think I’m gonna try to talk her into working for me. If them guys at the hotel don’t rip my fingernails out.”
“Making wings, you mean?”
“Yeah, you know, whatever. Real sweet girl.”
From what Matt gathered Rodger usually arrived in the plaza with a buzz and an appetite. After the abrupt return to sobriety effected in the hotel, however, he went back to his schemes like an ant that resumes scurrying along the ground after falling from a branch. It was not difficult to envision him treating the girls, once services had been rendered, with the fatherly deference he showed the female volunteers at the hostel.
“What’s her name?”
“The Haitian girl?”
“Yeah.”
“Cheree. Why, you gonna go over there?”
“Who knows.”
The next day, Friday, Matt went to the plaza around three. He asked around. She was with a client. He waited on a bench until she rounded the corner and took up her station once more. He went up to her and asked to be taken back to the hotel before he could talk himself out of it.
He had stayed in worse rooms that were not in brothels. Sun came wan through the sheer curtain of a single small window near the ceiling. Neither turned on the light, because why would you. A potent air freshener had been sprayed recently. She sat on the edge of the bed and he lay on his side looking at her with his head propped near the pillows. Walking over from the hostel, with every step towards the plaza, he had been stripped of his intention, enumerating the reasons why not. Now, in the hushed privacy of the hotel room, with the weak light on her shoulders, beyond which he could see the outmost sliver of her breast, he felt his reservations dissipate by the second. His heart pounded. They remained as they were without speaking for a minute or so, outwardly impassive as if waiting on some software update. Then he crawled over, and kissing her neck took the fabric of her top between his fingers as she raised her arms.
They sometimes spoke fifteen minutes afterward. On his second visit she asked him why he had come to live in Mexico. He had given her the usual lines about the culture and the weather and the food, adding that he had debt in the States. Higher education was very expensive in the US, he said, and he had no intention of paying in full. She asked what he had studied. When he tried to explain his master’s thesis, which had treated Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo, set during the Haitian Revolution, incidentally, he found himself unable to articulate even a broad outline. Her guardedness suggested she was herself privy to things few others could be expected to comprehend. Beside him on the hotel bed she raked her fingers lightly over his stubble, explored his ears.
A few weeks into their dealings he noticed a change in her attire. The bright dresses she wore appeared new and she sported a number of bracelets along with a necklace with a pendant in the form of a heart. When they had completed the act, and he had recruited his senses, he asked her had business improved. She said that it had, lately.
“Any other gringo clients?”
“One.”
“Short guy? Always wearing a hat?”
“You know Rodger?”
Though the other’s adventures were no secret to him, he was surprised how her mention of his name rankled him.
“He recommended this place to me.”
Walking back to the hostel that evening he did not give the other’s activities much more thought than was due. Rodger’s own conspicuous silence on the matter of his visits to the plaza in the days following changed this. Matt wondered whether Cheree had told the other about their ongoing encounters. He estimated Rodger went to the plaza at least twice as frequently as he did, and contrived to match the other’s pace. Supine in the hotel room, with his anxiety momentarily abated, he found the older man unavoidable in conversation.
“You are good friends, you and Rodger?” she asked.
“I wouldn’t say that.”
“He’s a generous man.”
“He’s a moron.”
“What?”
“He’s a pendejo.”
“If he’s a pendejo don’t eat his food.”
“I would starve.”
“Por eso.”
After that he avoided bringing up the other. Instead he found himself reminiscing about the country of his birth in a way he would not have predicted a month ago. How beautiful the leaves were this time of year, for example. You didn’t really get seasons in Mexico like you did up there. The privacy, the quiet. He wished he could take her there and show her around.
“But you have debt,” she said.
Since he had come into contact with Cheree the approach of his end date at the hostel accelerated. Rodger had arrived after him, and would thus remain on once he had left. He could not have said what he hated more, the physical aspect of the other’s dealings with her, or his designs to buy her out. A scheme had already taken form in his mind the afternoon he sat down with Rodger and asked whether he had managed to convince Cheree to come work for him.
“Fuck no, man. Are you kidding? Them guys at the whorehouse are killers. Ain’t worth it. The last time I seen her I asked her and she nearly run me out of there. That was maybe a week ago. Said I’m cutting my losses.”
The intelligence about her handlers gave Matt pause. Then it hit home that Rodger had seen her for the last time. The other’s concerns about the people who ran the plaza were probably based on some Fox News bullshit, he figured. In any case a plot had taken root.
“My gig ends in a week and a half,” he told her in the hotel the next day. “That doesn’t have to mean goodbye.”
After he had laid out his proposal she was quiet a moment.
“Me parece bien.”
He did not see her all that week and his shifts at reception dragged. His cigarette consumption doubled, then tripled, guests dinging the little bell at the front desk as he sucked the remainder of the smoke standing outside the entrance as traffic rushed past. The female volunteers made note of his abstracted state, asking whether he had slept well, to which he replied that he had, the girls later apologizing for having implied there was something the matter, to which he responded that there was no need to apologize. He wolfed the meals Rodger prepared, going back for seconds and thirds.
On the appointed Friday he rose at four in the morning and took up the forty-liter pack he had prepared the preceding evening. He let himself out the front door and walked the three blocks to the plaza, across the street from the government hospital, where nurses with ribbons in their hair smoked and doubled over laughing at the expense of their comrades and homeless shambled around the little square cursing God and cabbies who parked along the perimeter of the plaza slept at the wheel.
He waited twenty minutes on a bench opposite the grimy fountain. Checking his phone, he reminded himself, would bring no news of the girl. The vendors who sold individual cigarettes were not out at this hour. He walked over to the convenience store on the other side of the plaza and through the little window charged the lone employee with bringing him a small americano and a pack of Marlboros. The adolescent went and filled a cup from the carafe and went behind the counter for the cigarettes and returned to the window and handing him the purchases took his cash and went back to the register and brought him his change.
He walked back across the street with the coffee in one hand slapping the pack against his thigh. He sat down again on the bench and realized he had left his lighter at the hostel. He started back towards the convenience store and waited at the window for the employee, who had gone back in the store room. A few minutes later the Mexican returned and sold him the cheapest lighter they stocked, emblazoned with the convenience chain logo.
After an hour and a half, during which he smoked three cigarettes and finished his coffee, she came around the corner of the church in the grey light carrying the shopping bag she had filled with her possessions. Walking to intercept her he called her name, called it again.
“Ya te vi.”
Approaching he saw that the left side of her face was swollen and discolored and her free arm dangled lame.
“What happened?”
“Ya vámonos.”
“Qué pasó?”
“Vámonos ya.”
She would not answer him in the cab to the bus terminal. He reached for her forearm but it was as if he was not there and he drew away. When they had boarded the white van, Cheree turning her face to the window with her things in her lap, he diverted his own gaze to hide the tears that came now.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
Day came dim through the cloud cover as they sped with the half-dozen other passengers across the altiplano toward the mountains. They stopped at the first toll plaza and soon after the driver put the van in low gear to begin the ascent into the sierra. Great evergreen carpets stretched over the foothills on either side, as if they were entering the Black Forest and not another precinct of the tropics. As the six-lane highway grew steeper they began to be passed even by semi-trucks. It being Friday there was more traffic than usual headed toward the capital and the congestion was enough to bring them to a halt on multiple occasions, when the vendors who descended on the highway would walk between the vehicles selling snacks, cigarettes, windowshades, wipedowns. During one of these delays Cheree called to the driver.
“Bajan.”
Before he could react she squeezed past him toward the sliding door on the right, which she hauled open and stepped out of with her things. She did not close the door behind her and he scrambled out after her so that the loose parts of his pack slapped at the other passengers. He jogged around the idling cars to where she was already standing on the shoulder.
“What are you doing?”
“Acompáñame.”
“Where?”
“Just come.”
She handed him her bag, then set out across a small fallow field toward the edge of the forest, and he trudged after. Nearing the woods he saw that she was making for the head of a track.
As they went up the path the temperature grew cooler and the terrain dark and strange, as if they had travelled much further from the lowlands than they had. The pines grew thick and the succulents gave way and moss thrived along the stony contours of the river they now followed. In a narrow clearing where the sun seeped down through the grey they passed some goats being driven by two boys who wished them a good morning, the Mexicans eyeing these foreigners of opposing complexions curiously. A ways on the cliffs to either side began to rise steeply and the tops of trees rooted fifty feet above their heads appeared to converge over them. They rounded a turn and came upon two dogs in coitus at the edge of the path, the male eyeing them worriedly over his shoulder as his mate looked down at the rushing water, apparently unmoved by their passing or for that matter by the attentions of her partner.
They made a last turn and saw smoke on the slopes nearby rising gently to mingle with the mist and followed another path up in the direction of the fires through the black conifers. After a quarter mile they arrived in a clearing where a number of wooden dwellings were visible and the weak sunlight shone on the cropped grass. At the center of the hamlet was a cloister he estimated had stood there no fewer than three hundred years. As they advanced toward the stone structure two figures in habits emerged through the portal.
“Te presento las hermanas Isabela y Caterina,” Cheree said when the four had gathered in the worn earth in front of the building.
He did not dare lean in to kiss their cheeks, which were obscured partly beneath the wimples they wore, nor did a handshake seem appropriate, so he just nodded and said mucho gusto. With no further delay Isabela, perhaps ten years younger than the other with an indigenous complexion that contrasted with her companion’s, led Cheree into the convent. Caterina invited him to drink an infusion. He agreed and she led him around the corner to a sort of wooden outstructure that shared a wall with the convent and a place was made for him near a little wood stove. She brought him a mug of tea then seated herself on a bench beside the crackling heat. In an alcove that caught the glow of the fire there hung an image of the Guadalupe. Before his eyes could adjust to the dark various points of reference floated in the void: the orange square of the stove, the Virgin, the light in the woman’s eyes, which had taken in the surfaces and niches and protuberances of this shadowy dwelling for untold decades and thus bled it of any capacity to arrest the senses.
They spent most of their time in this wooden addition, she explained, the old stone cloister being impractical to heat. The two women were the only surviving members of their order, and it was just as well. With the Church in decline it was the younger sisters you had to watch out for, girls who had been drawn to the Faith in its late, sorry condition. She went on to claim, a little wryly, that she was child of the Sixties. She had earned degrees in biology and political science from the National Autonomous University of Mexico and returned from a European sojourn that lasted the better part of a decade to a changed city. Over the first half of her life the Valley of Mexico had quintupled in population as the peasants were driven from the land. The marshes where she caught ajolotes with her cousins on the weekends could no longer harbor these creatures which regenerated brain tissue and had no other home in the world. The younger generations never stood a chance, any more than they knew what they were missing. The God they thought they worshipped was really the graven image of their own selves.
They were silent for a while finishing their tea. When she had sat down her feet had protruded from beneath her habit and he saw she was wearing a pair of blue Crocs. He glanced at them through her lament, which seemed rehearsed in anticipation of his coming.
“Lo peor de todo,” she said, “es que la gente como yo no sufriremos ni la sombra de lo que van a sufrir los pobres.”
A short time later Isabela and Cheree joined them in the little abode. The latter’s face had been bandaged and her arm was in a sling. Caterina rose and poured a mug of tea and handed it to her. After a few sips she said it was a good thing for the gauze on her face because otherwise they wouldn’t be able to see her, such was the darkness. The nuns looked at their laps. When she had finished drinking the sisters followed them to the door of the dwelling. Matt descended from the sill so that when he turned to face her their eyes were level. She stepped from her ethereal retinue and kissed his cheek, and he began the walk to the bus stop an hour downhill.
Theo Czajkowski is a native of the Detroit area residing in Mexico. His recent fiction is available or forthcoming in Arboreal Literary Magazine, Panorama Journal, Terrain, and Contrapuntos.