NEW IRISH FICTION:In the latest of a series of short stories, a ruined hotel in Mexico brings on a kind of revelation.
IT ISN’T ALWAYS OBVIOUS, the moment at which we lose someone. Think of a possession, something you’d assumed was in its special place until you went to look for it. Or someone having died, and you not hearing of it for days, or even months. Does it change how you see the past, to find out that things weren’t where you thought they were, or that someone wasn’t, after all, ticking over on the far side of the city or the world? Or is the past the past, independent of your errors and your blind spots, independent of whatever came after?
We were best friends since forever, 20 years old, standing inside that ruined hotel and high as kites. I can tell you that when she looked at me there was a shining in her eyes, and I still don’t know if it was fear or a trace of mania or just the dope, but I know that a minute later I saw a shadow cross her face. It was the look of someone who’s heard terrible news. And then she said to me with an odd gravity: “I want to leave something here.” She had a tiny leather pouch, smaller than her palm, that she’d bought at a stall on the street, and she dug into her shoulder bag for pesos, stuffed a few into the pouch and looked around the room. There were loose tiles here and there, and she lifted a couple in the corner and tucked the pouch underneath, then turned and brushed the dust from her hands.
We were in Mexico. Each year, my mother and three of her friends took a ladies-only tennis-and-bridge holiday to Puerto Vallarta, where they stayed in four-star hotels and drank piña coladas. Each year at least one of them was felled briefly by Montezuma’s revenge – a situation they regarded with good humour, just another wacky south-of-the-border adventure.
The photos from these trips showed water of marbled aqua and a landscape baked white as chalk. There were always waiters and tennis pros who popped up in the photos – the hair a black bouffant, the moustaches full, the grins a little leering. Not that my mother and her friends got up to anything, but for weeks after their return, coded references to Pedro or Juan would pass between them, causing them to throw back their heads and laugh, or raise their eyebrows and hmm wickedly. When Anna and I were in our final year in college, I convinced my mother to take us along.
In the mornings, the two of us would walk into town for plastic cups of fruit, meandering through the bustling narrow streets while the men hissed at us. Sstss. Sstss. We pretended the hisses were flashbulbs going off, and we walked with our heads held high, competing to see who could look the more absurdly famous. Everything was for pennies, and we felt the illusion of wealth. It was the first time I had seen poverty, and epiphanies arose randomly. I looked at whole families walking down the street and realised, suddenly, that this was where our cast-off shirts and pants wound up. All those trips to Good Will we’d made, the annual culling of our closets, and never once had I imagined actual people putting on our clothes.
In town we had a seen a poster for an upcoming bullfight, and one afternoon, when my mother and her friends were playing in a round robin at the hotel, Anna and I, in a spirit of social anthropology rather than bloodlust, set off for the arena. We never actually made it to the bullfight. In the nearby plaza, we got to chatting to two American guys who tried to interest us in buying timeshare in a condo. When we told them we had no money but could ask my mother to call them, they invited us to their apartment to get high. They were in their 30s. They wore polyester-blend slacks and leather sandals, and they had, like too many men in those days, moustaches.
I looked at Anna and she at me, then she turned to them and said: “Okay.”
From their apartment I called my mother at the hotel and told her we’d decided to take a boat trip, and then we smoked and drank some beers and afterwards walked to a little taquería for some arroz con pollo. Their names were Bob and Cliff, one short and stocky, the other tall, and Anna said that she would remember which was which because Bob was like a ball, a bobbing thing, while Cliff was long and straight and sharp. For a moment, we all looked at each another as though something quite profound had been uttered, and then Bob began to bob, and Cliff pulled his skinny arms to his sides and listed a bit, and everybody collapsed into giggles.
They asked us if we wanted to see a property about 20 minutes down the coast that they were hoping to buy. Bob and Cliff wanted out of the timeshare game, they wanted to become developers. We had seen nothing outside of Puerto Vallarta, so we agreed. A half-hour later, we pulled into a palm-lined drive that led to a sprawling dilapidated hotel set back from a deserted beach. The place must’ve had 100 rooms. It looked like somewhere that had had a heyday, and a terrible sense of grief hung over it, as though it were in mourning for itself. I thought I had never seen anything so beautiful.
We walked around to the beach side, and from there you’d think a bomb had brought its glorious past to an end and the sadness we were hearing was the lowing of all the dead. We climbed the stairs to a balcony that ran the length of the second floor and looked into some of the rooms. Sheets of wallpaper peeled from the wall or pocked like blisters. There were a few towering old wardrobes with their doors missing, there were bed frames without mattresses, and in one room there was a huge old desk of dark wood.
Bob said you could get three blocks of condos on the site.
Anna and I turned to him and stared dumbly. It had not occurred to either of us that the hotel would be knocked. “You’re going to demolish it?” Anna said.
Cliff and Bob laughed, and Bob said: “No, sweetie, it’ll be a refurb.”
Seeing the looks on our faces, Cliff attempted to recover our favour. “It’s not like we’re going to personally demolish it,” he said.
I rolled my eyes. “Whatever.”
“It’s too beautiful here,” Anna said softly. Too beautiful. As though we couldn’t quite bear it. And we almost couldn’t. The place was painful. I felt like I was witnessing the slow dying of some great majestic beast. All of it – the broken tiles, the way the fruit hung from the trees in the scattered light, the coconut husks strewn like split hemispheres in the sand, the fat tangles of aloe – spoke of decay. Cliff and Bob looked around, and you could tell they were seeing something they hadn’t seen five minutes before.
“Man,” Bob said, attempting a chuckle, “don’t get me on a downer.”
Before we left the hotel, I took a picture of Cliff standing with his back to the camera at the far end of the long balcony, looking out over the sea. He was just a silhouette. I was big on lone silhouettes during that trip – an elderly cleaning woman sweeping a church floor in a shaft of light, a tired labourer standing by the roadside at sundown – and for years afterwards, I tacked these photos to various walls, testaments to the dignity inherent in solitude. But I especially liked the one of Cliff: from the back you wouldn’t know he was a moustachioed timeshare salesman, and I thought that said something about the transformative power of art.
We smoked another joint on the way back to Puerto Vallarta, and the melancholy that had gripped us at the old hotel lifted. Bob and Cliff regaled us with anecdotes from the world of condo sales. You could tell they wanted to believe that because they were in Mexico, none of this counted. It wasn’t a real country, this wasn’t real money. Time wasn’t passing and they weren’t really stuck. But they weren’t bad guys, and at the end of our excursion they sent us out into the warm evening, giggling and unmolested. Anna and I reeled through the streets to our hotel, where we lay on our beds and swapped impressions of the day as a wistful druggy tiredness rolled in like fog.
***
I don’t believe in signs, or in miracles, or that anything happens for a reason. Things happen. We find ourselves places. We make mistakes, and we fail to pay attention. The world and whatever happens in it are like light-emitting objects, and, just as we turn wavelengths into colour, we make meaning where there was none. And isn’t that the miracle? That we are animals who can turn this one-damn-thing-after-another into sense?
I went back to that hotel once, years later. Mexico by then was racked by drug wars. Anna had disappeared from my life. Within a month of our trip, she’d had her first episode, which had taken the form of an exuberant foray into the squalid underworld of our midsized college town. She’d got her degree that summer, barely, and spent the few years after ricocheting between calamities, looking at me all the while with disdain and pity, the way some people do when they come home from a war you can’t even imagine.
I tried, for a while, to live with the person she became, to be large enough in my own mind to contain her, but I failed. It was as though I went blind, or she stepped outside the spectrum of what I could perceive. I have photos of her taken at that hotel, and the look in her eyes unsettles me. That was the day, I think, the day something in her turned. Of course it’s stupid, there was no day, but it helps to put a marker down, it preserves something of who we were, and who we were to each other, so that everything before that time remains blessed by our unknowing, and even the decadent days have their own peculiar innocence.
I’d expected to find only rubble where the hotel had been, or else a block of condos. But the place was still standing. The dilapidation had reached the point where it lacked the agonised beauty of some years earlier. Or maybe I just couldn’t accommodate the change. I looked for the little leather pouch, knowing it was long gone. I looked around as though she were there. As though we both were, young, shining, on the brink of ourselves.
