At first, the awkwardness of conversation carried on into the dance. I didn’t know what messages his hand was meant to convey on my back while we jived or just how to find the beat. But José smiled encouragement and kept guiding me in, out, round, back. We were both sweating, the crowd around us pulsing, my breath ragged from exertion when the tempo changed, slowed to a waltz.
Enveloped in music, black light, and body heat, pelvis against pelvis, hands creeping from waist to hips to flanks, our dialogue took off. A discoteca was no longer the place for us. Thankfully, José’s apartment was nice and close.
The eyes of the woman-of-the-sprouting-crotch followed me. My very first paintings when I majored in art in college — CEGEP — were images of sleds, severed limbs and hearts, broken, bleeding, beating still in the coldest oils I could find. I tired of their garishness though and slowly began to favour watercolours and charcoal drawings of empty chairs, doors ajar, half-eaten meals, and abandoned closets of clothes, trying to convey the violence of the quotidian through the act of watering down. Or at least, that’s how the review committee phrased it when they awarded me my grant.
This last woman I’d created in warm oils was present like none other. Her eyes spoke of the here and now.
I dressed in one minute flat, a specialty of mine, then stepped outside, shut the door, and took the two flights down.
I was glad José’s apartment was within walking distance. This early in the morning, there was no one on my street. A city of 22 million, and no one in sight. This was the time of day, the only one, when I felt Mexico City was a living being that could some day be a friend.
I stopped in front of the panadería and hesitated. Maybe I should bring something along. The sweet smell of bread drew me inside. I wandered up and down each aisle, six in all, finding the staggering selection of breads, cakes, and desserts at this early hour almost too much. I picked out three panques and three buns with my metal tongs, and carried the tray to the cash register to be rung in. I had the girl put one of the buns and one of the panques in a bag. For Faith later, after José.
Past the panadería, I turned right, so busy communing with the heart of the city that I just about crushed a dead sparrow lying at my feet.
It wasn’t the only one. There were four of them in a circle on the sidewalk. I bent and touched the sparrow I’d almost crushed. Its body was plump, its feathers sleek. No teeth marks, no prowling cat. It almost looked asleep.
I looked up through the tree branches to the grey-washed sky above. Was this a sign? At home, the thought wouldn’t have crossed my mind, but here signs existed. An Aztec curse, a father’s ghost.
In Mexico I was ready to believe that people really did commune with the spirits or sprout bougainvillea inside body folds.
The scrape of metal against concrete announced a street sweeper shuffling toward me — shirttails hanging, pants ripped at the knee, dragging a twig broom behind him, a long-handled dust pan in his hand, and a garbage bag looped at his side. He stopped and looked down at the sparrows.
“Otros!” he grumbled. “Qué bárbaro! Qué noche aquella!”
He eased in front of me and started sweeping the birds up with his broom. I walked away, not wanting to see sparrows turned to waste. Two blocks farther down I found the address that matched the one on the metro ticket. I didn’t recognize the building in the daylight.
José must have been sound asleep. He looked rumpled and warm. His eyes were as much a dark welcome in near-sleep as awake. His chest was bare, and his jeans hung low on his hips without the woven belt to hold them up.
I forgot my excuse for being there. I just held out the buns, wrapped in tissue folded like a scarf.
“Qué onda!” he said.
The first time I heard that greeting was in the park. I thought he said Qué honda, meaning how’s my Honda doing. I looked around for a motorbike lying nearby. But I learned it meant how’s it going. Now, here, though, it meant, Isn’t this great. In the little time I’d known him, José had already taught me the expressions of a younger generation, words Papi never knew.
“Hi,” I finally said, remembering. “I’m sorry. It really is early, isn’t it? It’s just... I wanted to catch you before you left to tell you I can’t help out... not today, but...”
“What’s this?” José seemed more interested in my package than any explanation I could stammer out.
“Oh these, I thought you might like some...”
“You thought right.”
He stepped closer to take the package from my outstreched hands and shut the door behind me.
“I’m sorry if I woke you up. I wasn’t thinking. I should have come later. It’s just, my sister’s shown up, and I’ll probably have to spend the day with her today, maybe even tomorrow too, which is why I thought I’d better come by, to tell you that I can’t...”
José set the package down. “I’m not that hungry yet. You?”
“No.” Not that kind of hungry. Knock-on-a-stranger’s-door hungry, yes.
I’d come to the right place. He was warm. I could feel the heat of his chest, his hips, and his mouth through my tank top and jeans. Later, when his hands slid under my top and up, I could feel the soft trail of hair leading from his navel down. José’s hands reached along my ribs and stopped when they encountered not material but flesh.
I pulled back slightly. “I don’t believe in bras,” I said.
“Me neither,” he said as my top came off.
Later in his bed I confessed, “Sex is my favourite sport.”
“Then you’re my favourite jock,” José replied.
I laughed, José put his hands on either side of my head. “What’s the Spanish for jock?” I asked even as he touched his tongue to my eyelids and turned my head in his hands. He didn’t answer.
José, Josecito, Pepe, Pepito, Pepillo, who knows, why not mi amor, amor mío someday. What better language for the making of love than his?
He slid his thumbs to my throat, stroked the lump centred there, whispered, “Manzana for apple,” glided to his knees, murmured, “And now for the forbidden fruit.”
I rolled onto my side, my head at José’s feet. Traced a line along his calf, parting gentle hairs with my nail. In slow motion I traced and watched, reflexes drugged by sex. Thought to myself, he has to go to work. “So tell me, what’s so forbidden?”
José raised himself on one elbow, cast a glance at his travel clock, reached across, stroked a breast, my Venus mound, my ass. I noticed, detached, as my nipples grew hard again. “Not these, or this, or this. All of it. All of you. Gringa’s the forbidden fruit.”
“Gringa.” Funny how the words to describe me multiplied. Baby, girl, sister, daughter, woman, lover. Kid, student, painter. Anglo, Canadian, and now this. Gringa. “I am half-Mexican, remember. Besides, Gringa’s for Americans.”
“Wrong again. We’re the Americans, all of us Latinos to the south. Gringos are North American, that means you too.”
“Not true. Canadians never came in uniform to invade Mexico. Those are the greens the Mexicans wanted to