“I just came back from seeing him,” she said, suppressing a sigh and looking at the sleeves of her dress. Under the harsh lights inside the lonchería she thought her hands looked ugly and rough.
“What did he say? Does he know where Leonora is?”
She hid her hands in her lap, clasping her purse tight. “He doesn’t know where she is. She wanted to go see a journalist last weekend, but Emilio couldn’t drive her there, and he’s not sure if she ever made it. He’s worried about her.”
“So am I,” Rubén muttered.
Maite looked around the lonchería. It wasn’t busy, and the cashier was far from them, behind the counter, looking up at the television set. They were broadcasting an old movie with Miroslava. Still, Maite leaned forward and spoke in a whisper.
“A man came to speak to me at my office yesterday. He was also looking for her, and he mentioned your name.”
“He mentioned me?” Rubén asked, frowning.
“Yes. He said he was from the Dirección Federal de Seguridad. He said you were a…a ‘subversive element.’ What does that even mean? You wouldn’t be, right?”
“The government calls everything subversive,” he said. “A poster of Mao Tse-tung is subversive. They can accuse you of promoting social dissolution and jail you because you went to a rally. They’ll spy on you if you’re a journalist who writes the wrong sort of columns.”
“Sure, but Emilio said something about terrorists. But you aren’t terrorists, right?” Maite insisted.
“We should eat our food and then pay Jackie a visit,” Rubén said.
“What for?”
“If someone from the DFS is going around looking for you and me, then she needs to know.”
A teenager yelled their order number. Rubén stood up, went to the counter, and returned with two plates, placing one before Maite. While they ate, she kept glancing at Rubén. Discreetly, of course. Or as discreetly as she could.
Rubén hadn’t answered her question. That could mean he was really a terrorist, after all. One of those radicals the papers mentioned. If only she paid more attention to that sort of news. But Maite was forever skipping the front pages. And yet, he didn’t fit with her, albeit limited, knowledge of those people. If there were guerillas, they were in the countryside, in places like Guerrero.
Bandits. That’s what one of the papers had said one time. Bandits in Guerrero.
Was she having lunch with a modern-day Robin Hood or someone more sinister? A cold-blooded killer, a kidnapper, a lurid, cartoonish monster. A villain! She shouldn’t be messing with villains, bad guys who tied women up with rope that scratched their soft wrists. And the villain’s lair…
The thought of meeting Jackie, of seeing the place where these people hung out, excited Maite. Maybe they were cigar-chomping outlaws with rifles. She wondered what would happen if there was a guerilla in Secret Romance. Funny, she’d never pictured such a thing. This turmoil was impossible. The island of her comic books was replete with melodrama, but distasteful reality didn’t intrude there.
“You didn’t tell the guy from the DFS anything, did you?” Rubén asked.
“As if! I grew up in the Doctores. You don’t ever tell cops anything, it makes it worse,” Maite said, and she sipped her soda.
He seemed surprised by that answer. “That’s good,” he said.
“It’s not like I know anything, either. Will you have to blindfold me when we go to see Jackie?”
He chuckled. “No need for that. It’s not top secret.”
The building Rubén took her to was quite ordinary. There were no sentries, no vicious dogs barking to announce their arrival. They went up the stairs and into a gallery space that appeared equally mundane—a little sign on the door proclaimed this “Asterisk Art Gallery and Cooperative.” An art gallery. Not Maite’s sort of place. She’d gone to the National History Museum on school trips a couple of times but never set foot in an art gallery.
There was a party at the gallery, judging by the number of young people milling around, drinks in hand. Maite wondered if there were parties every weekend. Maybe Leonora attended these events regularly, together with Emilio.
A couple of women glanced at Maite. She wondered what they must think of her, in her too-young yellow dress. Fussy. She looked fussy. Maybe they weren’t looking at her, maybe they were looking at Rubén.
“Where are we going?” she asked him.
“Told you, we’re looking for Jackie,” he said, glancing around the room.
“You sure she’s here?”
“She should be. She must be in the office. Come on.”
The gallery’s office came with the expected contents: paintings leaning against bookcases, small sculptures on shelves, a tall pile of boxes. Two desks had been placed together in the center of the room with two typewriters on them. Rickety tables and chairs were scattered all around. The room was hot, even though the window was open and a fan whirred in a corner. It was also smoky from many cigarettes, five people crammed inside smoking for god knew how long. Three men and two women.
One of the women sat behind a desk and was busy going through documents while the other one was standing in front of the fan, trying to cool off. Two of the men were sitting on the other side of the desk. One of them had recently been in a serious scuffle. He had two black eyes, and his arm was in a sling. It was an alarming sight.
“Hey, this is Maite, that friend of Leonora’s I was telling you about,” Rubén said as they walked in and the five people in the room stared at them.
Maite nodded. The woman who had been sitting behind the desk stood up. She wore a white shirt with flowers embroidered around the neckline. Over this she had a vest; its pockets were also embroidered. Her hair was in a messy braid. She didn’t look much like a revolutionary. None of them did, and they were all very young.
“I’m Jackie. That’s Luz,” the woman said, pointing to the other woman in the room, who gave Maite a tiny smile. “This here is Sócrates,” Jackie continued, placing a hand on a young man’s shoulder. He wore a bandana and was drinking from a pocillo, which he put down to wave at her.
“Hey,” Sócrates said.
“And this here is Casimiro.”
The man with the arm in a sling nodded at Maite. Jackie didn’t introduce the fifth person in the room, the man in a suede jacket and a turtleneck sitting in the back, smoking a cigarette, his legs stretched out.
Maite smiled at them, the smile tense, trying to keep the corners of her lips from wavering. “It’s nice to meet you.”