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MEXICO CITY was about to empty out for a holiday weekend. El Distrito Federal, or el D.F., as Mexicans called the capital city, was a sprawling mass of concrete blocks, intricately designed bronze statues, and colonial-era buildings, some bereft of character, others lovely Latin American haciendas. A thick haze of pollution formed a perpetual milky umbrella over the city; cars, especially lime-green Volkswagen Bug taxis, choked the wide avenues. The DF’s sprawl and chaos was intimidating, uninviting.
Marion already had a new boyfriend, a professional mountain biker who led tours through the countryside for semiprofessional mountain bikers. On Easter weekend, they were going to the nearby state of Veracruz, and I suggested that Marion and I go along with them. I was a tomboy growing up and didn’t think it could be that hard to ride a bike. From the town of Papantla de Olarte, a dozen of us set off through countryside lush with the yellow flowers of vanilla plants. The first time I hit the front brakes at top speed, I flew over the handlebars.
I decided to spend the rest of my weekend riding in the support van. A young Mexican man with a thick mess of brown hair named Uxval was one of the guides. He spoke Spanish, English, Italian, and just enough of every other language to be able to charm women around the world. He was engaged to be married, but there was an uncomfortable chemistry between us immediately. Like most mama’s boys, he was strategically in touch with his feminine side. Everything about his personality was deliberate. When we said good-bye, I wished him well with his marriage.
Two days later he called and asked if he could come by the apartment I shared with two American roommates. I gave him my address, and he arrived within a few hours. He walked in the door and pulled me close and kissed me. We stood there embracing for what seemed like hours, and when we stopped, he turned around to leave.
“I just had to do that before I did anything else,” he said and walked out the door.
Uxval broke off his engagement with his fiancée that night. I was apprehensive about getting involved with someone who would break an engagement over a gut attraction to a relative stranger, but I was attracted to his decisiveness. A few years earlier my grandmother Nina sat me down at her kitchen table in Hamden, Connecticut, to talk about love. I had just broken up with Miguel, who was reserved and passive, and I was at that tender age when decisions about love and life seemed somehow intertwined, when the questions of whom to love and what profession to choose seemed essentially the same question: How do you want to live? “I’ll tell you a secret,” she said coyly, as if she were going to tell me that she and my grandfather French-kissed before they were married. What she told me would stay with me for life.
“I used to go with this fellow, Sal,” she said. “Years ago Sal would pick me up from work and walk me home to my doorstep. We used to sit on the concrete steps for hours on Sherman Avenue. We would walk from Sherman to Chapel Street to pass the time and see the shows, the Paramount, you know. He was funny and spontaneous, and back then there was nothing to do but walk and go to the theater for twenty-five cents. He made me laugh, and he would grab me and kiss me all the time. But he didn’t have a pot to piss in. He had no money. He was a hard worker. He worked long, long hours and helped his mother out taking care of his brothers and sisters. But he never had any money. No future.
Nina and Poppy having coffee at home, May 2005.
“We went our separate ways, and soon enough my friend Eleanor fell for him. She was crazy for him, and he liked her, too. He treated her real nice, and she was mad about him. She cooked for him all the time and tended to his every need. He was a hard worker. He always made sure that she was all right. I was already with Ernie.