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The first time Marisol and I made love was in a hotel room in Mexico City near the Monumento a la Revolucion. This was a graceless, modern, rather lurid part of the city but one where I was fairly certain that, at one o’clock in the morning, we would be able to find a sentient hotel clerk. We had met a week before in Chapultepec Park when she approached the bench where I was reading the newspapers and tried to sell me a dyed-pink ball of sweetened popcorn. I had just arrived from San Miguel de Allende, was just getting over the evaporation of my connection with Nina Vasquez. My plan was to explore the capital for a couple of weeks then carry on south to Oaxaca and maybe Chiapas. Awaiting me in the fall, of course, was Providence and grad school.
Nina had been like a beautiful deer, graceful and instinctive,
inclined to come and go — especially go — with neither
hesitation nor the slightest sound. She was emphatically a well-off
girl from the provinces, lazy and unambitious, equally entertained
watching telenovellas on the family couch or sitting on a cement
bench at the local bullring watching a matador plunge a sword
between Toro's shoulder blades. Marisol was a very different kind
of chica, less lithe and golden but more poetic and curious and
energetic, a city girl born and bred. She disapproved of bullfighting
and preferred visiting museums to watching television. Not to
say she was easy to get your head around. Cute, petite, and pitilessly
sexy, she had a short mop of black hair, light brown skin, self-consciously
elegant manners, gorgeous eyes, a caressing voice, a thousand
secrets, a Latin Catholic girl's churrigueresque attitudes toward
sex, and the independence of a peregrine falcon. Nina had tempted
by embodying the fantasy of total escape from my ordinary universe.
Marisol's world was demonstrably linked to mine: the continental
culture kings — Beethoven, Picasso, and Camus et. al. —
informed the mental landscapes of us both; but this only
heightened the tug of our differences. Certainly our communication
was hindered by the frailty of my Spanish. I gathered through
the language fog that she was studying classical guitar at the
conservatory and that her father worked in the Tourism Ministry.
I was interested in meeting him and told her so, but she kept
me well apart from the heart of her world. All in all she was
a girl you would never be foolish enough to love in the basement
of your soul, but the flags and streamers of you would have killed
to have her.
That night we got out of a taxi, entered the hotel, and asked for a room. The clerk, perceiving at a glance the shakiness of our bond, tried instantly to interpose himself between us. His weapons were a dismissive glance at me, a smile and quick remark to her in Spanish, a long look at her figure — the usual Mexican-male pony show. Marisol talked to him with a heightened softness and deference that, in my mind, said more emphatically than anything else could that my connection with her would be fleeting while this clerk and men like him would be part of her world for life. Upstairs I locked the door with relief and a soaring excitement. It would have been utterly in character for her to suddenly remember an appointment and fly away, but she didn't. We made splendid use of the armchair, the bed edge, the bed. My greatest joy in it, perhaps, was not what I felt physically but what I saw. The bedside lamp was on, and I was able to gaze at her body from every angle while she, wearing nothing but a bracelet, made no move to cover up or hide. I didn't want it to end but eventually, knowing there was a risk of things sputtering out if I dallied any more, I let go and went over. Thunder and lightning. Earthquakes and cataracts. And then we flopped down and pulled the sheet up and I was free to begin worrying about the future. Before, in campaigning to get her in bed, I had had the idea that in sleeping with her I could penetrate to the heart of both her and Mexico. Had I? I had my doubts, but there was at least one way in which I felt I had irrevocably broken through a significant barrier. When I was first exploring her body I had discovered what appeared to be a fallen eyelash resting on her nipple, all ready to be blown away and wished upon. On closer inspection it had turned out to be a slim black hair rooted in her skin. Though disappointed at first — she was otherwise so flawlessly feminine — I soon had the idea that my knowledge of this homely little secret might be a kind of insurance. Now that I knew about it, I thought, how could she possibly bar me from making love with her in the future? Suddenly I had to see it again. Rolling to face her, searching her eyes, I grasped the sheet and began gently drawing it down the plane of her chest — but as the tops of her breasts came in view she reached up smiling and stopped my hand.
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