Life As Performance Art 85

Here is one of my short stories, Gentle Reader. Pardon the bad formatting, which is the fault of Blogger, and not me. Here also is the link to my other stories, should you care to purchase (four bucks, Canadian. A deal) https://www.amazon.co.uk/Tigresa-Negra-Black-Tigress-Stories-ebook/dp/B07NF3JRFV LA TIGRESA NEGRA This city is for Anne a most pleasant surprise. None of the stories of crime and danger and murder seem true. Six days already she has been staying in this bed and breakfast in the heart of the world’s largest city and she still feels safe here. In the cold mornings she walks the oval Avenida Amsterdam, a distance of two kilometres, surrounded by trees and lovely and brightly-coloured art deco houses that suggest to her freshly iced birthday cakes. It is a boulevard with a broad sidewalk and green wrought-iron benches in the middle and hibiscus bushes blooming everywhere in an embarrassing abundance of red, orange and yellow flowers. From time to time there is a square with a fountain, and tiles of white, blue and golden-yellow shimmering beneath the cool undulating water. There are lovely little native doves of brownish grey plumage being frightened from the sidewalk by workers wielding brooms composed of branches tied to sticks. Their wings flash red when they fly away, as though showing their indignation. They make her think of witches' brooms, such as the Wicked Witch of the West rode through the sky across the TV screen in the Wizard of Oz. They wear uniforms, and she imagines them to be from the campos outside of the city, having come to Mexico City in search of employment, or they live in poor barrios where they were born, and likely will die. They are never going to travel outside of Mexico and maybe not even beyond this famous megalopolis. She wonders if the garbage collectors are paid at least a little better than the sweepers, for doing equally thankless work. None of them could ever afford to live in this lovely neighbourhood where she is seated idly with her smartphone and a trashy novel at a patio table, and certainly none of the muchachas who cook and clean for her daily in the hotel could ever live here. Anne never before was in the habit of thinking of people less fortunate than her, outside of their utility as providers of services and goods. But this is her first time ever travelling by herself, and she has had nearly a week to reflect on life in general and her own in particular, and she has already become downright introspective. To her surprise, this is not making her feel at all nervous or anxious. Even though this colonia, this neighbourhood, is relatively well-off, there are still beggars everywhere, just as in her own comfortable Canadian city of Vancouver. In the many cafes lining this elliptical avenue she at first tried to ignore them, or if they persisted, which they often did, wave them away like so many annoying fruit flies: the itinerant organ grinders, dignified in their caps and beige uniforms, accordionists and child beggars seeking alms among the tables on the sidewalk. There are also singers with guitars, some of them so good that she is surprised that they are not already famous and still have to busk for a living. Just yesterday there was a woman, perhaps a little older than Anne, her long black hair showing a little grey, and suggesting a younger Mercedes Sosa, with a guitar, singing folk songs and ballads nearby in front of a sidewalk café, in such a pure contralto voice so laden with pathos and passion as to break even the hardest and most obdurate heart. The patrons became a rapt audience, applauding enthusiastically between songs. She is looking for this singer again, because it has taken this much to melt her habitual resistance to life, as her sister tends to call it. Now her resistance is eroding. First World guilt is finally winning the war over her soul and yesterday, for the first time, she gave an old woman a ten peso coin. Her sister, Vanessa, would be very proud of her. All the cafes open onto the street because of the mild climate, leaving ambiguous the division between inside and out. Her scant Spanish is beginning to improve, and Gustavo, the silly but handsome and kind manager of the hotel, gives her thirty minutes of Spanish practice every morning after breakfast. He is rather flamboyant and fastidious and she is almost certain that he is gay. She appears to be moving into the intermediate level, and already at times, feels almost fluent in the language of Cervantes. Anne is done with beach resorts and all-inclusives. She blames this on her age. She hates, now, being around drunk, loud and obnoxious tourists, as much for the lack of privacy, as the lack of freedom to go where and when she pleases. Such has been her experience in the resorts, where she visited other parts of Mexico: the Mayan Riviera with her husband, later with her Venezuelan boyfriend, Puerto Vallarta. She couldn't go anywhere alone and the lack of quiet often left her wanting to scream out in rage and frustration. Now she has three weeks alone to spend with the ordinary people of Mexico. To breathe their air, to eat their food and to walk on their pavement. She is also wanting to improve her Spanish. Three years living with Juan, her Venezuelan, had been enough to give her some foundation in the language, which eventually became the language of their lovemaking. Even now, more or less celibate, she wants to build on her skills, and despite her bland disappointment in Juan's lacklustre performance in bed, or as a lover, she wants to return to that place of joy and pure bliss that was the dense sweet air of new love she inhabited with him for maybe just a little less than their first three days together. He has another girlfriend now, a surgically-enhanced Colombian who took him in when she kicked him out of her condo after less than three years together. It turned out they had been seeing each other since before Anne had first met Juan. In fact, they had even enjoyed a few trysts in Bogotá, where he lived for a few months before emigrating to Canada. She only found this out later, though knowing of that woman’s existence during their time together had still been for her one of the many irritants in their relationship. Anne wants to live again in that atmosphere of fresh-off-the-shelf love and romance, and she wants to live there forever and her passport will be the language of that magical country. Her twin sister, Vanessa, has challenged Anne to try to get off her privilege on this vacation. She hopes that she can without having to sacrifice too much comfort. Anne has heard many horror stories about Mexico City: violent crime, kidnappings, drug-wars and rapes. She finds all this rather sexy and exciting, even if she has known nothing but peace and tranquility since she got off the plane. She has even entertained fantasies of being abducted and held for ransom by a handsome Mexican drug lord who ends up falling ass over teakettle for her...Even though she keeps this nonsense to herself, Anne is red-faced with embarrassment about entertaining such garbage, and tries to blame it on her diet of soap operas in her teenage years, and since divorcing her husband, her proclivity for shallow and short-lived affairs with very useless young men indeed. Here she is in the heart of this city of alleged danger and infamy, every day, being perpetually spoiled by the incredible kindness of hosts who couldn’t do enough to guarantee her comfort and happiness, from Spanish conversation, to anything she wants for breakfast and good wine and craft beer on the house while chatting on comfy sofas with other guests in the evenings. She does scan the breakfast table and the sofas every day for any eligible young, or not so young men, and so far she has drawn nothing but blanks. Almost all of them are in couples, and the rare single man seems either gay or otherwise inadequate to the challenge. Perhaps she has become too fussy in her middle age, but she thinks there might be another reason. She simply just doesn't want to anymore and is still struggling to adjust to this new phase in her life, since she has always thrived on being desirable to men. So different from Vanessa who is her identical twin, who since her early twenties has always been with Roy, her husband, with whom she is raising three teenagers. She can walk anywhere she wants and feel relatively safe, every bit as safe as she does in Vancouver, alone and unaccompanied. Apart from the beggars pleading for handouts (and finally she does willingly part with handfuls of change), apart from the kind strangers who have been offering her directions or assistance as she navigates the Metro, she is usually left alone, which she doesn’t always seem to mind. She likes riding the Metro. It isn't exactly comfortable, and the trains of ten bright orange cars with lime-green hard plastic seats inside seem rather old and out of date. Usually she has to stand, jostled and crowded by the real people of Mexico, workers, students, families, poor and middle class, all on their way to whatever they have to do in order to get through their day and get by in life. She has managed to subvert her Canadian preference for personal space and zero physical contact with strangers, and actually enjoys being touched and rubbed up against by the bodies of indifferent strangers. It isn't quite erotic, but she receives it as a loving maternal embrace from this city where she finds herself feeling strangely and preternaturally at home. Sybil, her best girlfriend since university, would suggest that she had probably lived in Mexico City before, in a previous life. She would almost believe her. Even the itinerant vendors, as they come on hawking CD's and chocolate bars or notebooks or pens or whatever, have caught her affection. Some of them are small children who should be in school. Sellers of CD's carry ghetto blasters concealed in their backpacks from which the latest rap, reggaeton, dance or mariachi tunes can blast throughout the car. Sometimes a busker, usually almost as good as the young Mercedes Sosa, will entertain them till the next station. Not once has anyone inappropriately touched her so far. Each time she leaves the train she feels strangely and supernaturally cleansed. She is sipping hot chocolate laced with cinnamon, a Mexican specialty, her chair positioned insecurely on the margin between the interior of the café and the sidewalk. To her surprise, all her food indulgences so far haven't increased her weight, and neither, even more to her surprise, does she particularly care. She has gladly relaxed her usual strict regimen of daily exercise, and now can't even be bothered with going out for a jog in the mornings. She has found that she prefers walking, that it helps her relax, she can see, observe, listen, absorb everything around her, she can this way, by walking as opposed to running, actually feel at one with her surroundings...She has bought a sandwich for a ten year old boy. He is gaunt, and tired-looking, with the eyes of an old man. He reminds her of Juan, from some family photos he showed her, even if he knew neither hunger nor privation growing up in his native Caracas, enjoying the privilege of an upper-middle class upbringing. It is the eyes that are the same, that same look of tiredness, wariness, hunger and cunning. Quietly he devours the sandwich, like a young Aztec god swallowing as a votive offering a still-beating human heart. In five minutes the child is gone, not even a word of gracias. She squelches her annoyance - she has no tolerance for ingratitude - then distracts herself with the young waiter who moves dancer-like among the tables of the half-occupied cafe. He is lean and graceful but there is also something of the forward aggression of a futbolista or professional soccer-player in his movements. He looks familiar and she rakes her memory to recall where she has seen him. He slips past her and suddenly she knows him. Several times she has seen him at the bed and breakfast, sometimes working the front desk, or searching his laptop at the dining room table. Gustavo’s brother. Remembering his name, she pronounces awkwardly, “Buenos días, Arturo.” He flashes a smile and in equally awkward English says, “You are from the hotel.” This is her first time in this café. For a couple of minutes he hovers over her table, practicing his English with comments about the weather and how to be safe when riding the Metro, the same smile never once leaving his face. She has never seen him smile in the hotel: this is why she didn’t recognize him? Arturo is four years younger than his brother and they share an apartment in nearby Colonia Roma along with their sister. She chooses not to mention that she has a twin sister, with whom she shared an apartment only briefly after they both moved out on their own, when Vanessa decided to get married and Anne went off and satisfied her wanderlust by travelling and working her way across Europe, Southeast Asia, and a half dozen or so short term relationships with rather feckless and unremarkable young male backpackers and locals, then ending up in Australia where she lived in Melbourne for more than a year, and met her future husband, a transplanted Canadian. Arturo offers her a postre, la torta de tres leches, on the house (cortesía de la casa) and tells her to look for him in the afternoon at the bed and breakfast. The cake is excessively sweet but the bitter sips of her black coffee make it tolerable as she continues to observe from the corner of her eye Gustavo's little brother, flirting with equal skill and finesse with both female patrons and male patrons alike. She picks up her trashy novel, but cannot focus on the steamy sex scene and, feeling embarrassed reading something so sordid and lurid in a public place, shoves the book into her backpack where no one can see it and stares out onto the sidewalk and the park across the street. Anne has spent the day walking. She isn’t much of a walker in Vancouver, where she doesn’t have time between running her business and caring for her aging parents, even if her sister spends more time with them than she does. The fitness spa in Yaletown looks after itself, since Juan, who started the business with her, now basically runs the place. Having left Venezuela as one of the privileged class immigrants now being courted by Canada, he found that the Bolivarian Revolution of Hugo Chavez was not going to be particularly kind to his lucrative cosmetic surgery practice. It was he who had to strong-arm Anne into going on this holiday, not because she was overworked, she suspects, but because he feels he can operate the place better without her interference. It was their chronic inability to agree on how best to balance the books that eventually eroded and corroded their relationship, making it totally impossible for Anne to tolerate any further the looming existence of the surgically-enhanced Colombian into whose arms she finally drove him. He never did anything that she could exactly call illegal, but she soon found herself getting hopelessly weary of his indelible skill at finding loopholes. She had never in her life known anyone so opportunistic, even if he wasn’t quite totally lacking in business ethics. Still, despite her masters’ in business administration, Juan always managed to kick her butt for business savvy and had this incredible talent for generating profit. She still doesn’t think she can quite admire him for this. He also feels safer, he has told her, illegally practicing plastic surgery in the back of the clinic without her incriminating presence. No matter how many assurances she has tried to give him that her lips are sealed, that she would never rat him out to the authorities, no matter how much gratitude she has expressed for the work he has done on her own face and body. She owes her youthful appearance to her ex-lover’s skill and handiwork. He once called her his own personal work of art, his masterpiece. She just narrowly avoided throwing her drink in his face. He could not afford to retrain in Canada, and for Juan, the show must always go on. Today she walked the entire length of the gigantic Chapultepec Park. Visiting the zoo and the castle on the hill and walking in places unknown to tourists where she came out onto a broad pedestrian causeway empty for its half kilometre or so but for herself, paved with bricks and lined with fountains. It was like being in a dream, or a surreal altered state of consciousness, this strange walkway of golden- brown brickwork with benches and fountains where she walked, and walked, and continued to walk without encountering another human soul. She is almost sure that she has seen this place in a few dreams, or perhaps she was really just dreaming today while walking this causeway alone, away from the crowds, not even one solitary other to occupy a bench, stand by a fountain, or walk ahead or behind her. All shrouded in silence, with a shimmering silent light causing each brick to glow like molten copper underneath the Mexican sun. She is tired now, and wants to rest before dinner, which she will be eating early, just as they do in Vancouver. She cannot adjust to the late-hour hora de la cena mexicana, which would have her eating a full meal of enchilada and mole at ten pm She lies on her broad double bed, her entire aching body finally sinking into a delirious slumber, splayed spread-eagle near the right edge by the window, her black hoodie crumpled next to her in a heap like a sleeping cat. She has always slept in double beds, but never in the centre, as though side by side with an invisible husband or a phantom lover. She doesn’t feel quite tired enough to actually sleep, and the cheerful voices of the muchachas who clean and cook breakfast are still ringing out across the courtyard. She wonders about the women who work, cook and clean here. She has been told they are members of Gustavo and Arturo`s extended family, and therefore must live a little bit better than others who do their kind of work. Or so she would hope. The light in the room is soft and suffused and clearly the light of the short Mexican day is beginning to wane a little. She glances at the little clock radio on the dresser. It is 5:15. The muchachas have all gone back to their homes now, wherever they might happen to live, and the courtyard, but for the splashing fountain is quiet and still, which is fine with her. Occasionally there will be other guests, their voices heightened by just a little too much alcohol, holding court outside her window. She is really coming to dislike unwanted noise. It must be a feature of aging, she imagines. Just as Anne is about to drift into another dream state, there is a soft knock on the door. She pulls herself grudgingly from the bed, smoothes the counterpane, then quickly smoothes back her tousled hair, puts on the black hoodie and approaches the door. Deftly lifting the edge of the muslin curtain from the glass she sees Arturo. She opens the door slowly, reluctantly, a little wider than a crack. The splashing of the fountain is louder, almost musical downstairs where she notices the dark blue ceramic tiles that surround it. “Excuse me, Anne,” he says in slow, carefully thought-out English. “Would you like to join me for drinks?” “When?” It hasn’t occurred to her to formally say hi to him, as though she had been expecting his coming, and naturally had spent the past hour of her nap considering all sorts of possible places they could visit together. The truth is, Anne has not thought even once of Arturo, nor of any other man today, except for Juan who still squats in the back of her mind like a fetid and lingering shadow. “Meet me downstairs in the sala and we will go from there?” “Fifteen minutes?” she says noticing that his eyes are a lovely shade of golden brown and that he has perfect even white teeth. She closes the door quickly. Only after she has heard him go down the stairs does she pull open the curtain. There is a vague whiff of the cologne he is wearing. She pushes open the door as though to remove the invading aroma. In the bathroom mirror she sees that she doesn’t need to retouch her light makeup. She has naturally dark eyelashes and perfectly formed eyebrows, a blessing of nature. She decides not to change out of her black tank top and khaki green jeans. She wonders about wearing her new sandals, sexy with delicately-laced black leather thread, then decides to go in her usual walking shoes. The Botox that Juan injected last year is beginning to give out as the little vague lines on her forehead and underneath her eyes have started to show again. That little sag under her chin is something new. She will be in this city long enough to make an appointment with the surgical clinic she read about online. She could get it from Juan again for free, but decides not to, perhaps because she has long feared that he is really trying to reinvent her in his own image. It was her best friend, Sybil, who mentioned that recently over a pumpkin-spiced latte in her local Starbucks. Sometimes, and just sometimes, she takes her friend's advice seriously. Or she might forget about it altogether and just live with the consequences. She still hasn't made up her mind. Her body could belong to a woman twenty years younger. Her careful diet, the Pilates, and her daily fitness regimen have not failed her, but neither has Juan’s deftly maneuvered scalpel with all the minor, with all his deftly executed subtle enhancements to various parts of her body. She appears lithe, with an illusion of gracefulness belied by the increasing stiffness in her knees. She is forty-five and fears arthritis. It is almost too late for a child. Every test and every fertility treatment has failed her. For ten years Anne has not been married, and having a child was never part of the agenda when Juan and she were together. Definitely not father material. She descends the stairs, bracing against the chill wind that sweeps across the courtyard and she holds down her hair as though it were a sunhat. The friendly yellow lab that lives in this house rises up from her resting place near the dining room entrance, wagging her tail for a pat. Behind, seated at the table, Arturo is studying his laptop. He doesn’t look up to see her, and only when she has said his name twice does he appear to notice her. A vase full of supernaturally tall calla lilies stands between them on the huge mahogany breakfast table. Only when she sits down at the other end does he begin to smile. He did not come into her room with her afterward and she knew that she should have kept her mouth shut about her age. Arturo’s English, while not polished, was sufficient for them to communicate. He took her to a bookstore with a café inside on three levels, called “El Pendulo" on calle Nuevo Leon. Over glasses of red wine he wanted to hear the story of Anne’s life, and she gave him the facts: graduating from university more than twenty years ago then setting up her own accounting firm after two years of travel and working in Europe, Asia, and Australia where she met her future husband, a Canadian like her. She mentioned casually her divorce, and the fitness spa she helps run, while saying nothing about Juan. He seemed sad when she said she doesn't have children. He mentioned his young son and daughter, who live with their mother and her parents. They are not married. He tries to see them every week. He is no longer seeing the mother of his children, he said. He has never been outside of Mexico. All through the four or five hours they were together she examined, assessed and evaluated …she couldn’t put what she was feeling into words. Not as a couple, and certainly not as a one-night stand, though even now as she sits on the edge of the bed staring at her aging reflection she still has to quell her floating disappointment. He insisted on buying her drinks and food, even while they both knew that she earned nearly as much money in a single month as he would expect to see in almost a year. She wants a child, a baby, and she couldn’t bring herself to mention this, and she even wondered if even in this last year or two that nature would still be granting her, just a little more time, if... she could not fully form this thought, much less put it into words. Maybe had she offered him money… She wants a baby. Not a dog, not a cat. She wants a child. She is not interested in adopting. She wants her own…her own flesh, blood and bone, her own genes replicated in a new and hopefully improved form. This she has always wanted and even now, as the clock moves inexorably on, she can hear her belly screaming, the weeping echo of her uninhabited womb. Only after her divorce from Nathan did Anne begin to feel this loss, this emptiness, and with each year relentlessly and without pity drawing her nearer and nearer still to the cold and grey inevitability of her encroaching cronehood, the yearning has grown. Even though the doctor never diagnosed infertility, she did warn Anne that her chances of ever conceiving normally would always be remote. She could live with that, being too busy, as she was with her career, too busy falling out of love with her husband, too busy making the divorce as tolerable and endurable as possible, even swallowing and being swallowed alive by the popular lie of the amicable closure to the postmodern marriage, and she found herself too busy yet again managing her relationship with Juan while knowing full well that any possibility of having a child with him would also be a non-negotiable, and not just because she was practically infertile. She would not tolerate having a child fathered by...a child, and particularly not by a boy-man so without ethics, so lacking in a basic moral compass as to bring him dangerously close to the shadow realm of psychopathy. In the bar with Arturo she felt compelled by his perfect amber eyes and his perfect white teeth, and repelled by the slightly receding chin, fleshy lips and…she cannot put her finger on it, not as though it was a pulse she could read and measure. But there was no pulse. She sat across the small table from this handsome, yet not quite handsome, young Mexican, yearning naturally and irrationally for a baby, yet feeling prepared to walk away at the slightest... indiscretion?. Even if she was nearly infertile. She didn't feel done with trying. He walked with her back to the hotel and lingered to talk with the night staff. She sat in the living room nearby, not knowing what she was waiting for. Then he walked into the room, and sat not next to her on the couch but in the adjoining chair. They were the only people in the dimly lit room and Anne could feel her head spinning from alcohol and tiredness. He said good night and left. He did not kiss her, only lightly touching her on the shoulder Now she sits quietly in the semi-dark, waiting for her head to settle. She could log onto her laptop, but can’t think of anyone to send an email or a text to, nor anything to search for on Google. She wants only distraction. She has already watched a telenovela in Spanish on the TV in her room, but the language in TV dialogue is perfidiously hard for her to follow and she wants to give her ears a rest from Spanish, if only for the night, and she feels exhausted from the operatic dimensions of the melodrama and emotions. Probably she will check her Facebook status, then watch a couple of crazy cat videos on YouTube before knocking off for the night... but she also wants to send her sister a text. She struggles against the gravitational pull of the broad and empty bed. She is writing an e-mail to her sister, Vanessa. They are identical twins and live very different lives. In high school no one could tell them apart. They would exploit this, covering for each other in class if one wanted to skip for the day. Two perfectly blonde, blue eyed roses and cream little girls. Vanessa has been married for twenty years to a husband who still loves her and they have three teenage children. Vanessa, unlike Anne, is no longer pretty. She has never taken Botox, her face and body have never been enhanced by a surgeon’s skill. She has never dyed or coloured her hair, which went naturally dark and now is already showing grey. She has never lost the weight she gained from her three pregnancies, has bags under her eyes, lines on her forehead, and her breasts are already drooping. Last month they were having lunch together near her fitness spa and the waitress innocently assumed that Vanessa was her mother. Vanessa laughed, thoroughly reveling in the joke and Anne just wanted to sink into a very deep and bottomless pit. She works as a psychiatric nurse and has long ceased to care much about her appearance. She appears proud of looking like a frump. Anne used to privately despise her for this, but now she is starting to feel almost envious. Her sister, her identical twin, who even as a beautiful young girl, equal to Anne, cared not a damn about beauty or glamour, and seemed, instead, always focussed on,art and poetry, and involving herself in social and political causes. She never once said anything to or judged Anne about her preoccupation with clothes, fashion, make-up, glamour or boys or men. Vanessa was the first to emerge out of the womb, and she must have been touched by some angelic hand to make her so saintly and kind and given to good works and religious faith, while Anne, following just on her heels, should end up a shallow and now surgically made-over little tart, more secular than Quebec, with very little of a soul, and now rapidly diminishing sex appeal. Next year, Anne wants her sister to come back here to Mexico City with her, to stay with her in this lovely pension. They have done so little together in recent years but now her children are older. She has a little more time. They are still close. But there is also the care of their parents. Their mother is showing early stage dementia and their father is still recovering from heart-surgery. She reminds herself that Vanessa lives much closer to them than she does, even if she has three teenagers to manage, even if she works in a pitiless and demanding occupation. It is four am and Arturo is driving her to the airport. Despite her poor and brief sleep she feels strangely alert and aware of every detail of the passing moments. For the first time in her life, Anne has slept the whole night that she could sleep, lying right in the middle of the bed. She didn't move once from the centre. Arturo appears tired, slow, but jovial if quiet. He asks her if she has enjoyed her time here. “My time in the bed and breakfast, or in Mexico City?” “I was thinking both.” “They are different. But yes, both.” “What did you like best?” “About the hotel?” “Sure.” “The artist.” Staying in the bed and breakfast was a fellow Canadian and Vancouverite who left ten days following her arrival. He was a bit older, in his fifties, balding, greying and not at all glamourous or handsome. Frumpy and a bit overweight with his baggy white shirt and faded and fraying blue jeans. Just now, she realises, he seemed almost like a male version of her twin sister, a parallel self. He looked rather down on his luck, for which reason she really wondered how he could afford to travel, and especially how he was able to stay in a boutique bed and breakfast such as where he was with Anne and other fortunately-incomed guests. He was rather on the quiet side, but very friendly and seemed to engage well with everyone at the breakfast table where he appeared to hold court in the mornings. He also remembered everyone’s name. Even though he lives less than a ten minute walk from her condo in a government-subsidized apartment, she is sure she has never seen him before. In fact, when he first introduced himself, she really felt tempted to tell him that she lived not in Vancouver but in Toronto. She decided not to lie, and she owes this to whatever reform or personal transformation this vacation appears to have been having on her. When she saw the small sketchbook drawings of tropical birds and flowers he was executing in the courtyard Anne knew that she had to have one. He was going to give it to her, a brilliant green, black and violet hummingbird hovering over an orange hibiscus on a background of intense turquoise and sapphire blue. She insisted on paying him for it. He tried to refuse, but she laid down on his table five American twenties and told him not to argue any further with her as she walked away from him with her booty. That was the only thing she bought in Mexico City. While visiting the pyramids at Teotihuacan she had left nearly all her money in the safe in her room, and so she was prevented from purchasing from the many irritating vendors swarming the site some items of jewelry and a beautifully coloured bedspread that caught her eye. Of course they were annoying. They were desperate, and what else would they do to survive? Sell drugs? Many did. “The other Canadian?” “Yes. We live in the same city. I bought one of his drawings. “True souvenir of Mexico City”, he said smiling. “Well, it was done here, anyway.” “He is very good. His work looks authentically Mexican.” She was going to say that she was disappointed he didn’t stay longer. She had grown rather fond of him. She said nothing. “And what did you like about the city?” “The zoo.” “The zoo?” In the huge park she went several times to the big zoo, on the artist’s recommendation. Like the artist she disapproved of zoos on principal, but for this one she would make allowance. She could not figure out why. She remembered the birds, which reminded her of his drawings, but particularly the black jaguar. El tigre negro lived behind a glass window in a rather dark looking chamber. On her last visit he seemed restless. He kept pacing back and forth, from the back to the window, his green beryl eyes never once looking in her direction but past her, as though seeking a route of escape. The size and muscular grace of the huge cat left her dizzy with awe, and later she thought that she might have felt honoured had he pounced on her, killed and devoured her from head to foot. The beautiful huge cat reminded her of the black panther she saw in a zoo in Germany once, when she was travelling across the world. It too paced nervously, leaping back and forth in its glass enclosure, like every bit the trapped animal that it was. She recalled also a rancid stench of freshly rotting meat, and wondered how often the big cat’s cage was cleaned.. Through the quiet dark streets they drive, closer and closer to the air terminal. She feels disappointed that they have spoken only in English, but she is tired from poor sleep and has enough trouble focussing on English. She will be home before noon. She might get a pet after all. Perhaps a dog, maybe a cat. A big black tom with green beryl eyes. Or perhaps a cocker spaniel. Anne doesn’t want a pet. She wants children and now as she slips Arturo some money for the ride and steps out of the car she thinks of the barrenness that awaits her and the barrenness that she will be carrying home with her. Even now she has resolved to spend more time with her sister, and, if they’ll have her, with her nephew and nieces. Even if they are teenagers, they do love her as their cool aunt, or so she has always assumed. She has never permitted herself the luxury of envy, and she knows that she is on the threshold of deciding that she is going to stop colouring her hair, and never again is she going to see a surgeon, not even Juan, for anything that is not life-endangering. She wants to look more like Vanessa, her twin sister. For years she had tried to separate herself, unable to really drive her away, since the two women have always loved each other too much, at times, way too much. For years they communicated only sporadically, then, during the divorce, there was only one person there for Anne. Vanessa. Her doppleganger, as she used to call her. Even if she wanted to pull away from her again, this time she couldn’t. She knew it in Mexico City, and now that she is on her way home, she knows better than ever. They look different now. Their distinct life vocations and paths have shaped and formed them as two very unique, two very individual women, though formed from the same ovum: different vocations, different politics, different lives. Vanessa is still a lefty, still attends demonstrations, and now her big thing is saving the world from climate disaster. She couldn’t seem to fathom her sister’s lover’s desire to flee from Hugo Chavez and his Bolivarian Revolution, given all he was doing for the poor of his country, even if it meant well-heeled burgueses, or bourgeoisie, such as Juan, finally having to pay their share. But now Juan is having the last laugh, however bitter, with Victor Maduro at the helm and rapidly destroying his country and more than three million Venezuelans now leaving as refugees because there is no more food to eat. The twins no longer discuss politics. They simply want to be together again. And Anne wants to look like her twin sister again. It is just past noon when she arrives home in her small condominium. She welcomes the cool grey weather of a Vancouver December day and revels in the wet, oxygen-drenched air and the quiet streets and the calm traffic. She also misses all of a sudden the heavy acrid reek of cornmeal tortillas being cooked on sidewalk griddles in the barrio by the loving hands of the señoras. She never bothered to eat from any of the sidewalk taco stands, fearing food-poisoning, and preferring to stick to some of the better restaurants and cafés. After more than two weeks of dodging twelve lanes of traffic in a city notorious for its horrible drivers she is happy to be home again. As soon as she puts down her luggage she pours a tall cold glass of water from the kitchen faucet. Here she can drink water from the tap and she is celebrating this, savouring the pure bliss of clean Canadian tap water like it was vintage French champagne. The quiet emptiness of her place, rather than frightening her, seems to enfold her in a welcoming embrace as she puts her feet up on the couch and studies her mail. Vanessa has been kind to retrieve her mail for her during her trip. Juan said he'd be too busy, and didn't mention that he still couldn't bring himself to visit the home from which she had nearly bodily hurled him. She has also agreed to returning with Anne to Mexico City next year, if they are able to make arrangements for their parents. On the plane were two crying children: a baby and a toddler. She had to wear earplugs during the entire flight. Now, in her home, forgetting even to switch on the TV, she relaxes against the cushions, and closes her eyes. She’s still sort of fond of Juan, though she can’t say that she ever loved him and despite his shallowness, despite his lack of ethics, and despite that pneumatically-enhanced Colombian girl who will never let him go. Tomorrow, in the cold grey December rain, she will keep an eye out for the artist. She forgot to ask him for his card. Like her sister he is religious. She feels strangely okay with this. She would really like this man for a friend, someone to have coffee with from time to time, if he will see her. Anne really has very few people in her life whom she could honestly call her friends. She wonders how anyone so evidently poor could afford a trip like that. She reaches for her laptop, opens it, and begins an email to Arturo, who wanted her to let him know that she arrived safely. She doesn’t know what she is going to say to Juan. But why tell him anything? She just might even sell him the entire business and go work somewhere else, perhaps even move to Mexico. She might even turn him into the police. He has only to piss her off one time too many. She wonders what to say to Arturo. She pulls out the drawing she bought from the Canadian artist. It is still beautiful, and the colours shine jewel-like in the dim light of her living room. She will first get it properly mounted and framed, then she will hang it to the left of the window, right above the bromelia. She picks up her smartphone and begins a text to Arturo, but still doesn't know if she should try writing him in Spanish. She might not be ready to.