Description of Service - Chapter 8

8. The Mayor in the City

Something hidden in the disorganized bustle of that hectic capital had called to me since the day I set foot in this country, perhaps even before. At night, from the perch of Doña Marta’s home on the hillside in Santa Lucia, I would often gaze transfixed at the city lights, as they illuminated the broad expanse of the valley below. There, the city resonated with life, crying out expectantly into the dark, sleepy countryside.

For months, those lights in the valley had served as a constant reminder of the transitory nature of my situation. Shining there, the light beckoned me back to the familiar from the brink of the unknown. When I departed for San Juan, I crossed that threshold, and that shining beacon in the valley was darkened. The shadow of that isolated village had immediately begun its deliberate work of slowly enveloping me in its peculiarities. But still, in the back of my mind I carried the memory of the city and its lights, over the mountains and past the valleys. Already, on the those weekends during my stay in Santa Lucia, when I would ride the bus down the hill to roam about for a time among the buzzing streets, with their roadside stands and dilapidated homes scattered among crumbling infrastructure, the busy days and bright nights of that incorrigible metropolis had etched their essence indelibly onto my spirit.

Given its chance, the city wasted no time pulling me further into its web. I was surrounded with activity and budding relationships, among the first of which was the friendship with Jorge, begun on that night out on which we first encountered him. Jorge Luis Raudales lived in a small, indistinct home among a row of similar dwellings on the outskirts of the capital. That house, in which he, somewhat unusually, lived alone, was much like his life, in that it seemed to have plenty of extra room that he was anxious to fill with friends. The residence had been built in the 1960s, when the Raudales family arrived in the still small capital from the countryside nearby, having won, in a government lottery, an empty lot in this new neighborhood called Kennedy, named after that famous American president who so influenced affairs in this nation, even if no one was quite sure anymore just how. The lots were parceled out by the benevolent government on high ground, far enough at the time from the busy downtown area to have little feasible economic use, at least for the relatively immediate future that those leaders had in mind. The Raudales home proceeded to grow over the years, along with the prominence of the neighborhood, which, as the capital expanded, gradually became a busy and congested urban zone, with easy access to the rest of the city. But the particular piece of real estate upon which the Raudales family built their home had fallen on hard times more recently, beginning around the time Jorge’s mother had decided, over a decade ago, to join her sister in the United States. In the following years she had conspired to transplant the entire immediate family, and a good number of more removed relations, one by one, to that magical land to the north, from where, for a time, occasional reports reached Jorge, the family’s only son, left behind with his aspirations in this less promising land, to make his own way and to watch over the family’s single story abode, by then dwarfed by the neighboring buildings springing skyward all around, among which the home sat meekly behind a once proud but now rusting gate enclosing a crowded front patio shaded by overgrown trees, under which Jorge parked the dilapidated old car in which he, whenever he could manage to get it in working order, navigated the streets of the capital.

The house offered the advantage of being among the few with direct access to one of the streets that split the immense blocks of the neighborhood, traversed primarily by narrow pedestrian corridors. But any such benefit could do little to distract attention from the advanced state of disrepair in which Miguel and I found the house on our first visit, a condition matching Jorge’s disinclination, not atypical of this land, to undertake any work not completely and immediately necessary. Upon passing through the tall gate, kept double or triple locked against the perceived threat of burglary, the façade of the house came into focus behind the thick foliage of the large trees growing on the edges the patio. Once neatly painted, the cement block of the exterior walls was now visible in spots, where large strips of paint had peeled off and fallen to the ground. Large cement planters, still filled with soil and an occasional dry plant, long perished from lack of water, were scattered around the driveway, where clearly, once upon a time, a well kept garden had grown.

The condition of the front patio created expectations for the interior that were not wholly unfounded. Through a heavily weathered front door hewn from the type of heavy wood that must have been abundant in the area many years ago, a plain living room opened, furnished simply with a few vintage chairs, and an old television. The main luxury was a deteriorating but comfortable old couch, somewhat of a rarity, placed along the stark cinder block wall. In the corner, under a lamp which could no longer be switched on or off, and had to be unplugged after use, sat an old rotary dial telephone that, nearly alone among technological devices in its staunch entrenchment against incessant progress, had managed to remain useful for the last few decades. To the immediate left of the entrance, a small foyer facing the street incongruently housed the appointments of a small and basic dentist’s office, where one of Jorge’s sisters had practiced her trade before retiring from that life to follow her mother north.

Further towards the back of the house, also off the main living room, was a bedroom, where Jorge slept in one of two large beds. At its far end, the living room gave way to a humble but neat kitchen, stocked with the necessary adornments for preparing a variety of dishes, trappings which were seldom if ever utilized by the lone occupant of the house, who preferred the instantaneity and convenience of the many small restaurants or mobile vendors who operated on the busy streets nearby.

The kitchen opened to a back patio, around which the house had been haphazardly expanded in the crowded space available. As if by afterthought, two more small bedrooms had been constructed to one side of the patio, their rackety wooden doors hardly sufficient to separate the outside from the interior. Jorge had converted the room at the far extreme of the property into a storehouse for the remnants of the family life for which the entire house once served. The second back bedroom Jorge referred to as his, though he did not sleep there anymore. The suggestion that the room, detached as it was from the otherwise open floor plan, might have belonged to him in his childhood, helped explain some of the more confounding aspects of his personality. The space had likely once afforded him a good deal of privacy, though isolated as it was behind the main house, with no other way in or out but through the living space of the rest of the family, Jorge had grown up facing the conflicting reality of essentially being ostracized from family life, while at the same time trapped in it. The room, which I often used myself, would have continued to offer a good deal of intimacy, had the surrounding homes not grown by several stories in recent years, to the point that their upper floors now commanded a clear view down into the back patio. That detail was doubly inconvenient for those like Miguel and I, less accustomed to the familiarity bred by relative poverty, since the house’s outdoor bathroom also opened onto that patio, where, as running water was seldom available, Jorge had become accustomed to bathing in the open, half-nude, by scooping water out of the large pila and pouring it over himself. I quickly formed a preference for taking my baths, such as they were, under the cover of darkness, when the cold water pouring over my body combined with the cool night air to revitalize me for evening activities.

It was in those back two bedrooms that the mayor and his cousins spent the night, after our aborted return to San Juan following the shopping excursion. With darkness falling over the city, we had crossed town in the mayor’s truck, as I pointed out the route to yet another part of the metropolis with which my now trusting travel companions were unfamiliar. Jorge was, predictably, nowhere to be found when we arrived at the house, but that was of little concern since, before I left for San Juan, he had entrusted me with my own set of keys, as he had Miguel, while encouraging us to come back as soon as we tired of village life, which Jorge was convinced would be very soon. It was almost dawn, and I was asleep on the extra bed in his room, when he finally arrived home.

“Kawil,” he said, in a festive stupor, still inebriated after a long night out. “So you’ve returned from, where is it – San Jose? Whose car is that out front? Where is Miguel?”

The late hour was of no concern to Jorge, who was anxious to catch up on the details of my expedition to the countryside, from which he was sure I would be ready to take a long, if not permanent, break. We talked for some time, as I related the more believable happenings of those first weeks in San Juan, ending with a detailed description of the trip back to the capital with the mayor.

“We will have a good time in the coming days,” Jorge said, as he finally lay down to go to sleep, still fully clothed. “I should get some sleep. I have to go to work in two hours. How many weeks will you stay for?” I knew that if it were up to him, I might have never again left the capital. In that moment of anticipation, I might have felt the same.

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Jorge had already left for work later that morning when I went out to the back patio, to find the travelling party fully dressed.

“Ready to go?,” the mayor asked.

“Well,” I said, debating how to remind him that I was not planning to return with them to San Juan. “Now that I have thought about it, I am going to stay a few days here in the capital and take care of some official business for work.”

The mayor smiled. His cousin elbowed him in the side. “Official business, with the ladies,” he said, laughing.

The previous night was the first any of them had spent in the city, and after some convincing, and enlisting the aid of the mayor’s cousin and nephew, I was able to get the mayor to agree to an outing for a few beers at a local club. The sight of the mayor sitting at the bar, with dance music playing loudly all around, as he looked about, distracted by the attractive, smartly dressed young women surrounding us, was one I would not quickly forget.

“But I will go with you as far as the road out of town, so you can get your bearings from there,” I said. I feared the mayor could become disoriented in the web of avenues around the neighborhood, and I didn’t want him to stray into one of the more dangerous areas that dotted the urban map.

So I rode with the mayor one more time, down the long thoroughfare, to the beginning of the main road leading out of town to the north, where we said our goodbyes.

“It’s only one turn to San Juan from here,” I said, recalling the mayor’s comment the previous day. “Make a left at the restaurant where the nice looking girls work.” Chago insisted on giving me money to take a taxi back to the house. He wasn’t willing to discuss the matter, he said with his broad, kind smile, before driving away, up the road that would, eventually, lead back to San Juan.

I was suddenly alone, my feet planted firmly on the hard cement of the city streets, removed from the safety of the mayor’s car, no longer surrounded by well-meaning, sincere friends.

And I wasn’t quite sure how to get back to Jorge’s house. I knew the route, along which I had guided the mayor. But in my haste to assure that my companions from San Juan were taken care of, and to demonstrate the depth of my knowledge of the city, for which I had gained so much respect from them, I had refused to let on that I didn’t know exactly how to get back without a car.

Of course I could have simply taken a taxi, as the mayor had urged, but I faced several days of expensive city life, and the money the mayor had given me could be put to better use in many other ways. So I set off on foot to find a cheaper, collective option for transport.

“Where can I find a stop for the busses that run along this street as far as Kennedy?” I asked an old man who I soon came across standing by the roadside.

The man paused reflectively. “Kennedy?” he said slowly, as if it was the first he had heard of the neighborhood. Then he pointed up the road. “Two blocks down that way, and three blocks over,” he said decisively.

I thanked him, and continued quickly off in the direction he had indicated, anxious to get the bus and get back to Jorge’s house. But I was disappointed, upon following the instructions precisely, to find absolutely nothing of interest to me at the indicated spot.

Confused by authoritative manner in which the man had sent me off in the wrong direction, I repeated my request for guidance to a group of middle aged men who appeared to be passing the morning lounging in front of a corner store by the roadside. After their own contemplative delay, during which they consulted each other at great length, with frequent gesticulation, an older man who appeared to be the leader of the group directed me back the way I had come.

I began to suspect something was amiss, as I was quite sure there were no bus routes in the area I had come from. Still, with the group of men watching intently and urging me on, though I knew I was wasting my time, I felt obliged to head in at least close to the direction indicated, lest I be judged unintelligent. So I walked back towards the main road, a bit annoyed that twice in succession now, I had been energetically and authoritatively led astray in a manner that was at best disingenuous and worst close to intentional.

I began to suspect an ulterior dynamic at play in all this false direction giving. Perhaps, I thought, these men had conceived the erred instructions mainly to put an end to the uncomfortable possibility of potentially having to admit that they simply didn’t know. Maybe they weren’t even willing to admit to themselves that such a large group of neighborhood residents could be unaware, while still maintaining their manly dignity, of a detail of their local environment such as this. As such, the main goal of this exercise, whether consciously contrived or otherwise, would seem to have been to send me far enough away as to eliminate the possibility of any further contact between us, thereby reducing the chance that the direction giver would be forced to face his lack of knowledge on this particular, if somewhat trivial, issue. If that was the intent, the plan had worked perfectly, I thought as I made a broad turn around a neighboring block to avoid crossing paths a second time with those who had just given me another set of useless instructions.

Working within that context I was eventually compelled, after considerable time walking about aimlessly, to accept that there was no noticeable correlation between the directions that presumably well-meaning bystanders, one of whom directed me back to the place where the first man had begun the whole process, were giving me, and the location of a bus stop. After a string of such false starts, as the sun rose in the sky, I found myself in a neighborhood that looked as if it would have been frequented by individuals I might rather not have come across, had it not been the common practice of delinquents to sleep in well past that hour of the morning. I hailed a taxi.

“Where are you from?” the taxi driver asked as he drove me back down a particularly steep incline up which I had come on foot, following the whim of a shopkeeper who claimed to be intimately familiar with the location of the departure point of the busses that run to Kennedy.

Before I was forced to answer the taxi driver’s question, traffic slowed. A policeman appeared, and signaled for the taxi to pull over to the side of the road.

The officer stared coldly into the car. “Documents,” he said, unceremoniously, to the driver, and then looked over at me. “Your identity card, please.”

The Peace Corps, before dispatching workers around the country, had anticipated situations like this one, and furnished each worker with a number of identifications. As the driver reached into the glove compartment and pulled out a stack of well-worn papers of different colors, I handed one of my identification cards to him to give to the policeman.

The officer glanced through the driver’s paperwork with a frown, then looked back down into the car. “Your authorization to carry passengers has not been properly stamped,” he said to the driver. Used to such routines, the taxi driver complacently began to reach into his back pocket for his wallet. But before he could extract the subtly requested payment, the policeman handed the papers back to him, along with my identification.

“Your passenger’s status exempts you from problems, this time,” the officer said, as he gazed down the road, intent on identifying the next target of his scrutiny.

The driver took a long look at the identification before handing it back to me. When he did, I looked at it closely for the first time. On the card was the wildly scrawled signature of someone identified as the High Commissioner of Police, along with instructions to a group of people whom he referred to as his “sub-alternates,” who, upon being presented the card, were commanded to let me and my party, which in the estimation this officer, at this moment seemed to include the taxi driver, pass without any unnecessary inconveniences.

“I have seen these roadblocks all over the capital, as if there isn’t enough traffic and crime in this town,” I said, as we pulled away. “Don’t these police have anything better to do?”

“Actually, most of the time that you see a policeman inspecting the documents of passing motorists, stopping cars like that, he’s not even on duty,” the driver explained matter-of-factly. “They’re just trying to make their money for the month. Each of these officials has a quota of fines that they must turn over to their commanding officers. Those officers have bosses and quotas as well. It works that way all the way to the top. Even the correct permits can’t prevent the police from extracting their bribes. In this case, that card of yours says the man at the top doesn’t want his bribe from you, so this guy didn’t bother to ask for it. I would have had to pay him fifty lempiras otherwise.”

“But if there was nothing wrong with your car, why would you pay?” I asked, naively.

“There’s always something wrong. If it’s not a missing stamp, it’s some paper that I didn’t even know I needed. They’ve passed so many laws in this country that there is now a law for and against absolutely everything. It’s impossible to not be violating one law or another.”

“I’ll give you an example,” he continued, “take that taxi over there.” The driver pointed out a yellow taxi with darkly tinted windows. “A few years ago, the government passed a law that taxi windows should be tinted, to protect the identity of passengers, after the President’s daughter was kidnapped while she was riding in one. But because of all the crime these days, they just passed another law prohibiting tinted windows, so that the police can see what is going on inside cars. When they passed the new law, they never cancelled the first law, so right now, a taxi is illegal whether it has tinted windows or not. There are countless examples like that.”

“It sounds like being a taxi driver is more trouble than it’s worth,” I said.

“It can be a difficult job, my friend,” he said, “with the security problems on top of the everyday stresses of car maintenance, and the rising gasoline costs. But the biggest problem is the corruption. That really eats into profits.”

“So why do you still do it?” I asked.

“It’s not really a choice, my friend. Taxi driving is one of those professions that someone starts as a last resort, between other goals and dreams,” he said with a hint of sadness. “I went to college, and studied to be an economist, but here, there is no economy to speak of, and no work in my profession. Every taxi driver is something else before, and hopefully after, he belongs to this profession.”

With that he became quiet, and we rode in silence for some time. Eventually the driver picked up where we had left off before the policeman’s interruption. “That card says you’re from Intibucá.”

“Yes,” I said, hesitating slightly before once again assuming the character of a San Juaneño. “I’ve come from Intibucá. I live in a small town called San Juan.”

“You looked like a gringo to me,” said the taxi driver. “I mean with your skin, and your accent, I thought you weren’t from here. “

“My parents are from the outside,” I said, co-opting unabashedly the blanket manner of referring to the vast world outside the boundaries of this small country.

“But then, I thought,” the driver continued, “a gringo would never be roaming around that neighborhood where I picked you up. It’s too dangerous.”

Amidst such generalization, I recognized a problem with disguising my identity. My success in passing for something else was undermining my chance to counteract the stereotypes faced by the person I actually was.

“I hate that word, gringo,” I said, trying to reclaim the identity I had been anxious to divest just seconds before. “It divides us, when we are in reality so close together.”

“Well, anyway, it’s a pleasure to have you here in the taxi, to converse in this way,” he said, as we stopped at a red light just outside Kennedy.

When the light turned green, we started to move forward, but the taxi stalled. Immediately, there was a commotion from behind the car, accompanied by frantic honking. The driver and I both turned around to see a large car behind us, which suddenly began forward towards the taxi. With a loud crash, it rammed into the back of our vehicle, which lurched violently. The driver surged forward and hit his head on the steering wheel. He sat up quickly, then looked at me. Gathering that I was all right, he slowly exited the car, bleeding slightly from the forehead.

I watched in the rearview mirror as an irate man shouted from the driver’s seat of what I now saw was a large Land Rover behind us. “Why don’t you move your heap of trash out of the way,” he yelled at the taxi driver.

“Why did you ram into me? What’s the rush?” the taxi driver asked, quite calmly given the circumstances.

“I have no time for discussion with you,” the other man screamed, as he maneuvered his car into the next lane, and quickly drove away.

The driver jumped back into the taxi, and followed behind the speeding Land Rover, up the road a short way, where it turned into a small hospital just off the main road. From the distance at which we followed, we saw the man get out of his car and run into the hospital.

“My car is badly damaged in back,” the driver said as he pulled alongside the Land Rover. “This will be very expensive for me to fix.”

“Something must be wrong with that man for him to be in such a hurry,” I said, as the driver got out of the car once again.

Waiting in the Land Rover was a middle-aged woman wearing far too much makeup and jewelry. She quickly explained in contrite annoyance that her husband worked as a doctor at the hospital, and they were in a tremendous hurry to pick up his paycheck and get to the bank.

“Your taxi was in the way,” she said with a frown. “It is entirely your fault. My husband and I are due at the airport for a flight. You should stay out of the way of people with more important things to do,” she finished, as her husband emerged from the building with an envelope, most likely bearing his paycheck.

The doctor looked surprised and annoyed to see us there next to his car. He motioned for the guard, who rushed over, brandishing his firearm menacingly.

“Please remove these indigents from my path,” the doctor said to the guard.

I felt I had been quiet for long enough. “How can you act like that after you intentionally rammed this man’s taxi?” I shouted. “You are a doctor, and you are willing to harm someone who is between you and your paycheck?”

The man stared fiercely at me, outraged at my intervention. “Shut up gringo,” he said, “about things here, you know nothing. These taxi drivers are not good people. Now get out of my way.”

I was enraged. In my estimation, this man, who demonstrated great self-esteem but seemed to have no sense of justice, refused to take any responsibility for intentionally ramming the taxi, and had now capped it off by telling me that because of my skin color I knew nothing, proving that he was, on top of everything, a racist. Nevertheless, given his level of formal education, presumably ample paycheck, and possessions like his expensive car, he was convinced, as were his wife and the guard who stood at his command, that no one riding in a taxi could ever know nearly as much as he did.

I stared at the doctor with all the intensity of my rage, as, driven by my fury, I considered more drastic options. But just as I had decided to rush him, the taxi driver stepped in front of me. I opted instead to unleash a torrent of obscenities that I had learned on the soccer field in San Juan, where my teammates had made a game of teaching profanity to the foreigner.

“He does know how to be crude,” the doctor’s wife said, taken aback by the intensity of my foul language. I was content to have proved that I did in fact know something.

The guard raised his gun and pointed it at the taxi driver. “Go on, you heard the doctor,” he said. “Your type has no business interfering with the missions of important people. Get back in your taxi and go home.”

The driver shrugged, admitted defeat, and returned to the taxi. I watched as the doctor got in his car and drove away, after which the guard lost interest, and walked away as well, leaving me standing alone.

“Are you coming?” the taxi driver asked me with a smile, through the open window. I returned to the car, and got in.

“That guy is unbelievable,” I said, still fuming.

“Yes, people with money think they can do whatever they want. Where exactly did you say we were going?” the driver asked, as he backed away from the hospital, forgetting the incident and returning to the business at hand.

“Aren’t you going to go to the police?” I asked incredulously. “That guy intentionally rammed your taxi with his car.”

The taxi driver laughed ironically. “Go to the police? No, that would cost a fortune, and it wouldn’t do any good. The best course of action is to get back to work. It is only noon, and perhaps I can make enough today to pay for the damage to the car.”

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The antique stereo in the living room slowly came to life with a hiss. The old couch, upholstered in bright green and yellow, creaked with my weight as I sat down. I was back in the capital, between four walls of cement rather than mud, electric lights over my head, some of which functioned in the desired fashion, and a telephone to connect me to the outside world. I was energized.

From that living room, I thought as I picked up the phone, I could have spoken with almost anyone I knew, anywhere in the world. Even if I wasn’t inclined to call anywhere very far away, this level of interconnection was a far cry from the Don Angel’s telegraph.

I put the receiver to my ear, but there was only silence. The service had been disconnected, again. Jorge seldom paid any of his bills, and I knew I would have to cover this one if I wanted the line hooked up again anytime soon. The phone company, like any other attempting a business venture in a land where unprovoked bill paying is not a common practice, has adapted to the general delinquency of its clientele by installing a system which cuts service remotely when a bill becomes more than a few weeks overdue. Service is restored expediently upon payment of the balance and a reconnection fee, which can conveniently be made at locations all around the capital, including one with which I was already familiar, around the corner from Jorge’s house.

I went out to take care of the bill, since I had calls to make. I had found myself at first overwhelmed by the staggering amount of girls interested in spending time with me. At any given time, there was a collection of half a dozen or more that I had met somewhere around town, or who had met me, expecting my call. I had even acquired a couple fresh numbers on last night’s adventure with the mayor, as an example for his young nephew.

With Miguel, I played an informal game, complicated by the pitfalls of cut telephone lines, uncooperative family members, and the call of work in the countryside, of setting up as many encounters as possible in a day, then trying to break that mark. Miguel held the record, having scheduled and kept four dates in one twenty-four hour period. I found that after two or three, I had tired of the superficiality of most of the girls I met, as well as the omnipresent sensation that lingered just below the surface of these encounters, despite my attempts to postpone a sincere analysis of the counter-motives of my temporary companions, that much of the interest in me was based in economic or social considerations rather than any particular differentiating characteristic that I might exhibit.

If pure economic interest was the worst case scenario, superficial attraction seemed to be the best. The girl with whom I had spent much of my time, Vanessa, described herself as a model, with a level of seriousness which she seldom displayed when addressing any other matter. She was one of a pool of hundreds of young girls who advertising agencies around town would look for when, in one of their ridiculously conceived but constant attempts to promote one product or another, they found themselves in need of an attractive young woman to dress up in a revealing costume designed to create a life-sized incarnation of some consumer good, for example a soda can, or a pack of cigarettes.

That explains why, when I met her, Vanessa was dressed as a bottle of beer. She wore a tight green shirt, and skirt to match, emblazoned with the brand name of the beer in question, placed in the most eye-catching locations of her costume of shimmering material that caught and reflected the low light of the restaurant. Since she sparkled in that distracting fashion, it would have been impossible for all but the most oblivious of observers to not spot her long before she approached the table where I was sitting with Miguel and Jorge.

“Wouldn’t you like to try a Port Royal beer?” she asked us, pointing to the logo that stretched snugly across the curves of her chest.

“You’re quite a large beer, and I have to drive home,” I quipped. Miguel and Jorge laughed, but she just stared blankly, perhaps confused partly because drunk driving did not seem to be actively discouraged, at least by anyone I had come across.

“You look appetizing enough though,” I added, trying to communicate on a more direct level I felt she might better appreciate. It was the type of comment I would have avoided even thinking a few months earlier, but I had quickly learned that such bold observations were better tolerated by women here. She proved me right with a satisfying smile, as she batted her dark eyelashes, and leaned forward.

“I’m not a beer,” she explained patiently. It was impossible to tell if she truly thought it necessary to sort that detail out, since she seemed perfectly capable of being convinced that she was, indeed, whatever she had been contracted to be.

We ordered a number of drinks from her, as she remained standing at the tableside, and spoke with us for a while, until her boss, looming impatiently across the room, began to stare over reproachfully.

“My boss is jealous,” she whispered to me, leaning closer as she placed her hand gently on top of mine, before scurrying away.

An hour or so later, as we got up to go, she hurried back over, as if she had been closely monitoring the table. “Here is my phone number,” she said, handing me a napkin. She grasped my arm firmly and pulled me back, as I inched away in an attempt to follow my friends.

“Allow me to explain,” she said. “This is my neighbor’s phone, but if you ask for her, Diana, she will come get me. Don’t forget to call me,” she said, looking at me for a moment with her deep black, imploring eyes, as she pressed the napkin into my hand and squeezed convincingly with her two hands.

After a number of aborted attempts, I managed to follow the complicated process required to speak with Vanessa on the phone. As she had explained, by calling her neighbor’s phone, when she wasn’t gallivanting about town on other dubious business, she could occasionally be located in her mother’s small house, perched on a precarious hillside, in a recently constructed neighborhood of marginal dwellings not far from Kennedy. “Don’t come around here by yourself, it’s dangerous,” she told me the time I had insisted, boldly and perhaps unwisely unafraid, on accompanying her home.

Soon after our first meeting, she began to frequent the street outside our house, looking for me. She passed by so frequently that Miguel and I, likening her behavior to Jorge’s unfortunate propensity to stalk the targets of his own infatuations, began to think such conduct quite common. Both obliged by her constant presence, and motivated by a tepid but growing desire to find out where a relationship commenced under such absurd circumstances could possibly lead, I had spent a good deal of time with Vanessa, and her model friends, on the weekends at Jorge’s house when Miguel and I were down from Santa Lucia.

Vanessa was representative, in many ways, of the type of relationship it seemed I could expect in the immediate future. To say she was particularly intelligent, or even intellectually curious in the least, would have been a stretch, since any conversation not based in fashion or music fell outside the limits of her tolerance. She had her own charm though, in that she displayed a marvelously unique way of thinking that for some reason I found refreshingly direct. Jorge, who had no tolerance for his countrywomen, particularly those of her ilk, lost patience with Vanessa immediately, and warned me repeatedly about wasting my time with her.

When I first left for San Juan, Vanessa refused to understand the situation, finding the details of my unusual job far too complex to even begin to attempt to comprehend. Even after I departed, she continued to call Jorge’s house so frequently that he was forced to stop answering his phone altogether for a time.

“That girl has called for you about a thousand times,” he had told me with slight exasperation the night before, as we were catching up.

Now, having straightened out the matter of the delinquent phone bill, I called and left a message with her neighbor. When Vanessa called back that evening, Jorge signaled to me to answer the phone.

“My love, you’ve finally returned, I thought you had left me,” she said, in an overly childish voice, even for a nineteen-year-old. “Don’t move. I’ll be right over.”

“That girl, again?” Jorge asked with feigned annoyance when I set down the phone. “Don’t you have any other numbers in that phone book of yours?”

She arrived promptly, and our relationship seemed to instantly resume in much the same way it had been a month before. Vanessa immediately began to enumerate her usual list of desires, and communicated her various demands for the coming hours and days, all of which superseded any interest in my recent life or activities.

“Take me out to dinner, then we’ll go out to a club,” she said, as we sat on the rusted old bench of Jorge’s front patio. Since she didn’t demonstrate the least interest in where I had been or what I had done since last we had seen each other, I sat and listened, thinking about what would become of this relationship the day I ceased to be amused by this sort of behavior.

For the time being, I considered her potentially frustrating narrow-mindedness to be teaching me valuable lessons in patience and manipulation, particularly in evading logic and reason.

“Why should we go out to eat when we just cooked dinner here? There’s plenty left,” I would say, for example.

“Because yes,” would be her predictable and complete reply.

“But why wouldn’t it make more sense just to eat here, since that is what we planned?” I would then follow up, probing the fantastically shallow limits of her rationality, to little avail.

“Because no,” she would say, sure that the matter would be decided at that.

Vanessa habitually answered questions beginning with “why” with those words, “because, yes,” or “because, no.” I saw how that ingeniously elegant answer normally proved sufficient to quench the curiosity of most everyone around, and so it would sometimes have to be good enough for me, as well. Rather than become irritated by the exasperating lack of communication, I instead adopted the strategy myself, and soon was dodging even the most reasonable demands for justification of my own inexplicable behavior with the same befuddling capriciousness.

“I can’t go with you.” I told her, when she finally slowed down for a moment. “I’m going out with Jorge tonight. I already made plans with him.”

She sighed and stomped her foot on the ground like the child that she was.

“He can come too…” she extended the last syllable like a whining three-year-old. The way she acted when she didn’t get her way made me laugh, after which there was little other option but to give in. “I already invited my friends. They are on the way. So there’s really no discussing it.”

I went inside, and found Jorge in his usual position, lounging on the couch watching television. “Are you finished with the romance for tonight?” he asked.

“Why don’t we all go out to dinner?” I said, hopefully, knowing that he would be disappointed with me for changing our plans. “Vanessa told her friends to meet us at the mall.”

Jorge frowned and returned his gaze to the television before he spoke. “That girl takes too much advantage of you. She never stops getting you to take her out. I bet she tries to get you to pay for her friends too, no? Go on, without me. Take the car if you want. I don’t want anything to do with those girls.”

He tossed me the keys to the car, and then went back to watching television. Ashamed to take his car and leave him behind, I put the keys back down on the table before I left.

“You know, you really should get a car if you’re going to be going out with a model like me,” Vanessa said as we rode in a taxi to the mall. There, we ate at one of the more fashionable, and expensive, restaurants. Vanessa spent much of the time on her cellular phone, and the rest talking about her modeling career, before two of her friends showed up, sat down with us, and wasted little time in ordering drinks and dinner for themselves.

I knew this routine well enough from my previous trips out on the town with Vanessa and her friends. Not one of the girls had any money. It was assumed that I would cover whatever expenses were generated by the party. At first I had been surprised by such a brazen arrangement, but I had accepted the economic burden, considering it a bonus of being with several attractive girls at a time. But that evening, as I looked around and saw an overweight, balding, middle-aged man across the room, having dinner with an attractive girl about Vanessa’s age, I couldn’t help but think about what Jorge had said.

I looked at Vanessa, talking with her friends, relatively oblivious to me. She had said almost nothing to me since her friends arrived.

“I’ll be back,” I said, as I stood up. The girls didn’t pay much attention as I walked quickly out of the restaurant, and continued out to the street, where I hailed a taxi.

“To Kennedy, please,” I said when the driver rolled down the window.

I found Jorge still at home, watching television. “What happened?” he asked, surprised to see me back so soon.

“You were right,” I said. “Let’s go get a beer.”