She was hoping there would be no one ahead of her, but two men were standing in line. Maite bit her lips and clutched her purse. The papers were all talking about the confrontation that had taken place on Thursday. “The president is willing to listen to everyone,” declared Excélsior. She hardly paid attention to the headlines. Sure, she’d heard chatter about the student demonstration, but politics seemed terribly dull.
Love, frail as gossamer, stitched together from a thousand songs and a thousand comic books, made of the dialogue spoken in films and the posters designed by ad agencies: love was what she lived for.
The young man ahead of her was buying cigarettes and chatting with the owner of the newspaper stand. Maite stood on her tiptoes desperately trying to signal to the newspaper stand owner, hoping he might send the man on his way. Finally, after another five minutes, it was her turn.
“Do you have the latest Secret Romance?” she asked.
“It hasn’t come in yet,” the newspaper stand man said. “There’s some kind of problem over at the printer. But I’ve got Lágrimas y Risas.”
Maite frowned. It wasn’t that she didn’t like Lágrimas y Risas. She had loved the adventures of the Gypsy girl Yesenia, the exotic world of Geisha, and the suffering of the humble maid María Isabel. Most of all, she had been taken by the evil ways of Rubí, the antiheroine who was desired by all men, a seductive, dangerous devourer of hearts. But the current story at Lágrimas y Risas hadn’t caught her fancy. This stand didn’t carry Susy: Secretos del Corazón, and frankly she was addicted to Secret Romance. The drawings were top-notch, and the writing was excellent. She wouldn’t even consider one of the Western comic books dangling from clothespins or the raunchy ones that featured naked women.
In the end, Maite ended up deciding against buying an issue of Cosmopolitan for the romance story in the back and purchased a bag of Japanese peanuts and indulged herself in the latest Lágrimas y Risas, which was cheaper than glossy magazines. She was supposed to be saving money, anyway. She had to pay the mechanic. A year before she had bought a car. Her mother warned her against such an expensive purchase, but Maite stubbornly plunked down the money for a secondhand Caprice.
It was a huge mistake. It broke down after the first two months, then she was in a collision, and now it was back with the mechanic. Mechanic! Armed robbers, that’s what those men were. They took advantage of an unmarried woman and charged more than they would have if they’d been dealing with a man, and there was nothing she could do about it.
A man. That’s why she was fearing Friday. It was Maite’s birthday. She would be turning thirty. Thirty was the age of an old maid, the point of no return, and her mother would no doubt remind her about that, insisting that she knew some young man or another who would be perfect for Maite and couldn’t she be less picky? Maite’s sister would agree with her mother, and the whole evening would be ruined.
To make things worse, Friday was also the day she contributed to the savings pool. It was company policy. Well, not really. But Laura, who was the most senior of the secretaries, maintained a monthly office pool which everyone had to contribute to so that at the end of the year they received a lump sum. The one time Maite had declined to participate in the “voluntary” office pool, Laura had been incensed. The next time, she tendered the money.
It was a racket. Laura said the savings pool helped people keep their money safe, so the greedy banks couldn’t get their claws on it and they didn’t have to pay the fees on an account, but Maite was certain Laura dipped into the pool during the year. Besides, if they’d had a real savings account, that would generate interest, wouldn’t it? But no. They had to have this ridiculous cushion of money sitting in someone else’s lap, and if Maite dared to ask for her share early in the year Laura would have a fit.
Friday and that silly racket, and then her birthday to top it off.
Maite could already picture the cake and the pink icing spelling out in big letters “Maite, Happy Birthday.” She didn’t want to be reminded about her age. Earlier that month, she’d found a gray hair. She couldn’t be graying yet. She couldn’t possibly be thirty. She didn’t know where her twenties had gone. She could not recall what she’d done in that time. Maite couldn’t name a single worthy accomplishment.
Maite rolled the comic book up and tucked it in her purse, walking at a faster clip. Rather than waiting for the elevator, she braved the four flights of stairs up to Garza Abogados S.C. She was ten minutes late; thank goodness most of the lawyers hadn’t streamed in yet. When she was a young girl, just out of secretarial school, Maite had thought working for lawyers would be exciting. Perhaps she would meet an interesting, handsome client. They would elope. But there was nothing exciting about her line of work. Maite didn’t even have a window that opened and the plants she brought to liven up her desk kept dying.
Around ten a.m. the woman with the coffee trolley and sweet breads rolled in, but Maite remembered that she was supposed to be on a budget and shook her head. Then Diana came up to her desk to tell her that the boss was in a mood.
“How come?” Maite asked. Her desk was far from the green door with the name “Licenciado Fernando Garza” emblazoned on it. Instead she worked for Archibaldo Costa, who was a distracted, bald man. The other secretaries said the reason Archibaldo remained on the payroll was that he had been old man Garza’s best friend, and Maite could believe that. His spelling was atrocious, his writing was worse, and Maite did the real bulk of redacting acts and certificates.
“The Corpus thing with those students. He was railing about professional agitators, about commies.”
“He thinks it was communists?” replied Yolanda, who sat at the desk next to Maite’s.
“Sure. He says they’re trying to make President Echeverría look bad.”
“I heard it was some sort of foreign plot. Russians.”
“Same thing, isn’t it? Reds are reds.”
“It’s refried Tlatelolco.”
More secretaries joined the conversation, expounding on what they’d read in Novedades and El Sol de México, with a couple of them questioning the accuracy of those newspapers, saying they’d read El Heraldo de México and a journalist from that paper said thugs had beat him up. This comment earned them an angry “pinko” from another secretary. Maite didn’t know who was right, only that people were talking about Hawks and conspiracies and it was all a little bit much. She had been running errands for Costa the previous Friday and hadn’t gone into the office, so she had missed the chatter about what happened Thursday afternoon in San Cosme. She hadn’t paid much attention to the news over the weekend and had assumed it would have all blown over by Monday morning and she needn’t bother disentangling the politics at play. Maybe she ought to have bought the paper that morning, if it was going to become something everyone was discussing. Maite never knew what was important and what wasn’t. But then, before she could ask for more information, Fernando Garza himself walked by, and the women returned to their seats.