The Real Story
“Janus” by Lucie Ware
The real story is that we went to three bars that night, maybe four. It’s Cuernavaca, so everyone knows everyone. The first bar was an open-air shared space around a long empty pool between several bars and eateries, strewn with lights and papelillo. We sat at a plastic table and walked up to whichever bar we wanted to order from, starting with a too big mug of beer. I had tried to order a mezcal, but they were out of the kind I wanted. Sometimes I just go with the flow when I am in Mexico, rather than spend energy obtaining the exact thing I want, so I sat, holding the oversized mug with two hands tipping the salty rim to my lips.
Leo met me and Larisa there. He had been living in northern New York State for graduate school and showed us pictures of high mounds of snow around the campus buildings. “Los americanos en el programa son idiotas. Mi grupo de amigos son inmigrantes de todo el mundo y los estudiantes gringos no nos dan el tiempo” This sounded about right to me. A bunch of Americans in grad school giving no fucks about building relationships with the diverse international students among them. I know this arrogance. This lack of curiosity I see in Americans, sometimes feel in myself, the urge toward the familiar. I have also felt it in reverse in Mexico. It takes energy to engage with me, a foreigner. Sometimes they engage by poking fun, sometimes they ignore me. On that night, both occurred.
At some point early on in our talk, I made a comment, something fairly trite, but said with enough sincerity to become the joke of the evening. My comment, no, my sincerity, became our evening joke. The joke, a motif that served as an easy transition or interruption in a night that was already tipsy with end of year amusement.
Leo told us about his girlfriend, the one he left behind to go to grad school. She was pressuring him, confusing him. He would need advice. We drank. I watched the edge of the empty pool, a just warm enough air settling on my shoulders. Twenty years ago, there was a bar right next to this courtyard, perhaps even in the same space that we walked through to enter. I can’t remember exactly. It was dark and noisy. I watched a flamenco performance with some of the students in the program for American students I had just started. We drank light beers and sat close to people speaking a language I did not know yet. I ordered a tequila and drank it, my almost 20 year old self thrilled with the possibility of ordering alcohol. My eyes were on the women. The way words blossomed from their mouths, each syllable a season.
I’ve reviewed the evening countless times since. The locals, the people, the longing, the eventual misunderstanding. The second bar, El Frances, was a place I knew well. It did not exist twenty years ago, very few bars were the same as 1996, but on more recent visits, I often went to there to read and write. As we entered, Larisa and Leo made the rounds to hug and kiss everyone they knew there. I am forever enchanted by a small city, where one can easily find friends. I smiled and nodded. People looked at me quizzically and said things like “¿Donde has estado?” or “We met a fucking long time ago.” Some remembered me as the girl who used to hang around Camilo, who was sort of local legend in Cuernavaca. Some could not place the memory. Was it a party? A bar? Who knows?
This was the night before Christmas Eve. Larisa introduced me to Jesús and we all began to laugh as the introductions rolled off her tongue, Jesús meeting Maria on Christmas Eve. Jesús smiled and hugged me and said, “Hasta luego Maria.” Hasta luego of course is an insincere as the English equivalent of see you later, but sometimes we need something to splash the surface of our everyday desires, to squeeze our lime into and watch bubble. I hoped that we would see each other later. I remembered him from some party or bar years ago. Tall and pale with a sexy way of simultaneously inviting you into and excluding you from a joke. I wanted him, immediately.
I am fairly sure that my few encounters with him in the past were fraught with this wanting. He lived in Mexico City now, maybe he always did. Maybe his parents lived in Mexico City, but kept a house in Cuernavaca. Everyone was in town for the holidays. We drank dark beers from the bottles with limes perched on top. We pinched the limes and pushed them through the narrow necks of the bottles. A woman met us there and told us about her job. At the time, I was interested, but now I can’t remember.
The real story is that, I can’t keep up with my Mexican friends anymore. They are younger than me. They can drink for longer. They are more relaxed. Years ago, in Cuernavaca, my friends Jimmy and Camilo often reminded me that gringos were neurotic, especially gringas. The real story is, I am a quieter person now. That I have mediated a lot of my anxiety and depression through rest, introversion, and tapering my drinking. The real story is, I no longer smoke cigarettes, but I love to smoke at outdoor parties and I smoked that night. I smoked to tolerate the empty space that is forged in me by the jubilant drinking of others. The way it waltzes through me, cracking the dry branches, shaking the birds’ nests. It is dry, this territory. I drink, but I don’t feel fun anymore. I often feel tired. I smoke to drink less. To take a break from vapid conversations or conversations I can’t follow.
The real story is that from the moment I saw Jesús, I wanted to lean into him on a stone wall outside one of those Centro bars. Wanted to lick the sour taste of beer off his lips. I remembered the feeling of being around the cultivated, educated boys I met in Mexico in the 90s. How they jolted me back to being around cultivated boys in Manhattan as a teenager and the dullness I felt around my edges. Then in Mexico, how I wanted them and how they stayed long enough just to leave a charming residue on my heart. Jesús was one of those boys. I could not resist.
Under the twinkling lights of El Frances, everyone discussed their families and holiday beach plans. The laughter was loud and I saw the humans who I knew as kids in their late teens, being the grownups they had become. And I was doing that too. The truth is, I felt older. I was already tired.
Our entire night was spent within about 4 blocks in downtown Cuernavaca. “Vamos al bar con lesbianas cantando karaoke.” Larisa beckoned. The right side or Barcito looked like a dive bar with butchy lesbians and their flowery girlfriends singing karaoke. The left side was a small space, where we packed into seats with Jesús and his friends. Jesús made room for me on a stool next to him and we sat with our legs touching. At a loss for words, I sipped my beer dutifully and laughed at the jokes made about my earlier sincerity or at other jokes I did not understand. The feeling that I was 20, just learning Spanish, nurturing a new crush grew with each moment that I caught his scent on my nostrils, each time he bumped me or said my name, “Maria,” conspiratorially. And this feeling of being 20 again was like a domino effect, causing me to feel 14 again, crushing on boys. I wonder how far I could have gone into my past selves.
Jesús left after half an hour with a quick kiss on my cheek. I finished my beer and went to pee, passing an inspired rendition of “Bésame Mucho” on the way. The burning feeling that I never get the guy I want mixing with my dull edges, drying on me like a crust. Anyway I’m too queer for boys, I thought. I would get a little drunker still.
“Vamos al bar con queers,” Larisa motioned and we walked a block to a little street with two boxy bars. We sat inside the one with the young Mexican queers. Larisa had a crush on one and they chatted. We were brought our oversized cervezas in thick glass mugs with handles and the chatting continued. I went outside to take a break, crossed the street and sat on the curb with my cell phone to send messages to Camilo, who would definitely be asleep in his little house in a small village in Veracruz. Sticky fingers finding letters on the phone to communicate how our friendship had bridged parts of my life pre Mexico and post Mexico. How we are similar in our lonely desires for solitude. Drunken shards of thoughts. A white car that looked like a Cuernavaca taxi approached me.
Two men in the front looked down at me there on the curb, one asking something I could not make out. Instinctively, I said “estoy bien gracias,” a phrase I have asserted a thousand times, to politely get a man out of my space, to say “no” to any possible offer he might consider making. “I’m fine thanks,” chopped at the end for finality. But something lingered in the air between the car with the men and me, so I calmly, quickly stood, forging a path that kept me at arm’s length of the car door and crossed the street. Outside the bar, a group that had been engaged in happy conversation stopped, watching my path around the car. I don’t know what they saw in the front seat, what looks or postures, but the moment I arrived at their shore, as the car drove off, they began to ask if I was OK. I told them what happened in that 30 second interaction, that I had felt a mala vibra. They understood, perhaps confirmed in their suspicions that what they saw when they peered across the dark street was shady, dangerous. They ushered me into their circle and back into the bar where I found Leo, Larisa and the friend still perched, talking. I expressed desire to leave, sensing that we could actually stay for several hours more. An extrovert, Larisa has an energy that expands infinitely when she is drinking and being social. First we finished our massive beers, then said our goodbyes and walked up the dark street to Larisa’s car.
We left the Centro on a street I can never remember the name of and began to traverse neighborhoods, a path that for some reason, I can never duplicate in my mind. I don’t know how to get to this house she has lived in for the past ten years. The ride culminates with a long straight road, large viveros that sell plants and trees, on either side, and no turn outs. In the bright sunshine, it is wonderous to imagine how many plants and trees one could have in her garden here. A road like this, at night, means trouble, means people will want to take advantage of your isolation. As she drove, Larisa scolded me about my lack of caution. “This is not the Cuernavaca of 1997 Maria, no puedes estar sola en la calle de noche. Hay secuestros, matanzas!” She was describing the Cuernavaca of now, where men were found hanging from a bridge, where drug dealers, who used to hide discreetly in their large weekend houses were orchestrating who knows what horrors from behind those Bougainvillea clad walls. The Cuernavaca of hoy was the one of those men hanging, one with more kidnappings, murders and extortions. In 2016, it was starting to get better, but people could not relax yet. “We don’t live the way we used to Maria.”
She was upset by my potential unsafety and continued to lecture me as we drank beers at her house. She yelled at me about kidnappings and murders and somehow in her anger, I could tell she was scared. Suddenly she was describing to me, her own feeling of unsafety when she was living in Chicago. The ways people talked to her on the street. The racial tension she experienced between herself and Americans. The intimidation she felt, as an undocumented Mexican person with only a mediocre command of English. Nothing was safe, no taxi or road. No memories. She spoke about tattoo clad gangsters, entering the bar next to the queer bar, locking the door behind them, murdering the barman. All of her fears were real and none of them came true that evening. All of the facts seems soured by the taste of rinds on our lips, by her fear and my melancholy.
That evening, even though it is one of many I have spent drinking in Cuernavaca, returns in the tracks of lingering recollections. On many occasions the thought, I should write about that thing that one night in Cuerna, comes to me as if something monumental had occurred. Something other than the relaxed partying that happens before Christmas. Larisa only sort of remembers it. Leo and Jesús definitely don’t remember it or me, yet it remains somehow a turning point. A few hours during which I time traveled, emerging older, a worn version of myself that can be taken down, made to feel 20 or 14 again by lust or danger; by being stuck in between two languages, by the body’s tenderness, by the possibility of one more night our drinking.
Meredith Arena is a queer writer from New York City, where she spent most of her life. She moved to Seattle in 2011 and learned how to drive in 2015. She is an interdisciplinary teaching artist working in public schools. Her work can be found in Silver Needle Press, Longleaf Review, Paragon Press and a few other journals. She holds an MFA in creative writing and a Certificate in the Teaching of Creative Writing from Antioch University Los Angeles.