“I’m not sure I—”
“Aren’t you worried about Leonora?” Rubén asked.
“The cops—”
“The cops can fuck themselves!”
“Will you let me finish a sentence?” Maite asked, shoving the sugar basin away.
They stared at each other for a minute. He looked like a child who’d had his knuckles rapped, and this gave Maite some satisfaction.
“I’m not going to contact the cops . God knows I don’t want to be talking to any policeman! What I was trying to say is her family might get hold of the cops, and then it wouldn’t look too good if we’re nosing around. Besides, even if this is our business, why am I supposed to phone Mr. Lomelí? Why not you? You seem to know the guy.”
“He’d hang up on me,” Rubén said. “We don’t like each other. I broke his nose.”
“Why?”
“He put the moves on Leonora back when she was my girlfriend. She ended up dumping me.”
Maite couldn’t blame the girl for improving her love life, but it still made her uncomfortable to picture Emilio Lomelí as the kind of man who went around sweeping other men’s girlfriends off their feet. It didn’t square with her image of him. She had cast him in the role of the romantic hero, not the lothario, though lotharios could be fun. Take Pablo from Secret Romance. True, before meeting Beatriz he had been slipping in and out of the beds of countless beauties, but only because Magdalena Ibarra had perished in that dreadful scuba diving accident. Perhaps it was the same for Emilio.
“I’m sorry about that,” Maite said.
Rubén shrugged. “It was a while back.”
“You two study together?”
“We used to. We weren’t in the same faculty, but we were both at the UNAM. I left a year ago.”
“You obviously still care about her.”
“We’re friends now.”
Maite didn’t get that. People being friends after a breakup, especially a bad one like this one must have been. She could have never been friends with Cristóbalito after what happened between them. One time, two years ago, while walking down Bucareli, she’d thought she’d seen him coming in her direction, and she had been possessed by an irresistible desire to run. She dashed into an alley and promptly vomited up her guts there, on top of a pile of wet cardboard.
She had been terrified of him laying eyes on her, of seeing the disappointment in his face, her paltry charms having grown paltrier in the years since they’d been lovers. That night, at home, she pinched the flabby skin of her belly and thought about cutting it with a pair of scissors. Then she wept over an issue of Secret Romance.
She supposed such encounters didn’t rattle men. Besides, Rubén was young. He was in his early twenties. He still had possibilities.
“Something bad has happened to Leonora. If Emilio has any idea where she is or what happened to her, then I want to know. And I think you want to know too, no?” Rubén asked.
Well, yes, obviously. There was the practical question of the money Leonora owed her, but also the fact that Maite wasn’t going to be stuck eternally taking care of that cat. But she was also plain curious. She wondered what the girl was up to. Most of all, it was a great excuse to chat with Emilio Lomelí.
Maite grabbed a paper napkin and began tearing it into strips. A bored waitress behind the counter switched on a radio and Los Shain’s began playing.
“What would I even tell him?”
“Tell him what you told me. That Leonora hasn’t come back and you’re looking for her. And don’t mention me. Like I said, the guy hates me. If he thinks I’m the one looking for her, he won’t say a peep. He’s a spiteful bastard.”
“That bad?”
“Oh, yeah. I broke his nose. Well, he ruined my car.”
“How?”
“He paid someone to steal it and drive it directly into a telephone pole. I can’t prove it and even if I could it wouldn’t matter, but it was him.”
Maite began rolling the strips and turning them into tiny balls of paper, sliding them to rest in the center of the table, and thought about Beatriz, who was desperately trying to find out what had happened to Jorge Luis, and poor Jorge Luis in a coma. It was possible something similar had happened to Leonora. She could be held by a shadowy villain in an old mansion. The idea of drifting into one of the storylines from her comic books appealed to Maite immensely.
She looked up at Rubén and shoved a ball of paper in his direction. The waitress had switched off the radio, still looking perfectly bored.
“I’ll give him a call.”
“That’s great, thanks.”
He smiled. Although he wasn’t good looking and she didn’t quite like him, she wondered what would happen if she asked him to walk her home to her apartment and invited him in. It was that old fantasy of behaving badly, the thought of a stranger between her thighs. She didn’t know how other people did that sort of thing. But she didn’t really want him. She was merely bored, and the memory of Emilio Lomelí had ignited a sharp erotic impulse that made her cheeks warm. It was similar to that feeling she got sometimes when she stood in front of the newsstand and glimpsed the adult comic books on sale there. Westerns filled with women with huge breasts. It was trash, the lot of it.
They left the coffee shop. It was raining, a drizzle, and they were walking under the awnings taking their time to reach her building. Or at least she was taking her time, and he wasn’t rushing her.
“You really think the Hawks beat those students just so the president could kick the regent out?”
“I know it sounds odd, but Martínez Domínguez was Ordaz’s man. When Ordaz picked Echeverría to succeed him, it was Martínez Domínguez who wrote his speeches, at least before Echeverría turned on Ordaz. It could be the other way around, that Martínez Domínguez wanted to weaken the president. The PRI is a single party but that doesn’t mean it’s united. Ordaz and his favorites, they’re not the same as Echeverría. They’re the old guard. I would say Echeverría is worse, he’s sneakier. He drinks agua de chía or horchata at parties to make you think he’s not one of those stiff pricks who imports brandy and champagne. But I know he mails a crate of Dom Pérignon to the director of Novedades every Christmas. He wears a guayabera to an official function to show that he’s oh-so-Mexican, telling anyone who’ll listen that he’s firmly against Yankee imperialism, but he provides intel to the Americans.”
“Then it’s infighting.”