and Elaine felt, as he put the money down, the pull in him to Be An American – a man who looked at the movies and saw his own home up there on the screen.
Do you ever want to go back?
You have no idea what my high school was like, he said. Everyone had a car. Everyone crashed their car. It wasn’t enough to score a girl, you had to score the girl’s coked-up mother. I went to school with guys so stupid, you look at them on the football field and you think, Why don’t we just eat them? The whole herd of them. That might be more useful.
The sun was sinking like a stone. The meal and the beer made their skin crawl in the heat. The food pulled at their blood, leaving the surface of them a sheet of sensation; prickles and irritations and the sense of someone at your shoulder, leaning in to whisper – what? – your name, or your other name, your secret. At the end of every day in Mexico they were brushed by shame; a dirty bird’s wing someone had dropped on the sand.
For fuck’s sake, she said. The whole world is about America, these days. It’s not a country, it’s a fucking religion. And I don’t mind. I am perfectly happy with you as you are. I am perfectly happy with you as an ethnic product . But can we, from now, for ever, forget the froth on the milk and the weather in my fucking hair?
The next morning at breakfast, she looked at the fried eggs on her plate and thought she must be pregnant, and she gripped the edge of the table in her fright.
But it was Tim who got sick. They went inland, and he stayed in the hotel room, while she took a day trip out of San Cristóbal de las Casas. There was talk of rebels in the hills. Elaine sat in the back of a pick-up truck, high up in the scrublands, andwatched a group of men labouring uphill with sacks of coffee beans on their backs.
After an hour or so, they stopped at a café – just a roof with a table under it, and a broken fridge full of a bright pink cola. In the middle of the table there was a bowl of powdered coffee, turning to gleaming syrup on the communal spoon. A filthy little girl looked at them, with perfect awe as they drank out of plastic cups. Her eyes were the only clean things about her, apart from, when she laughed, the inside of her mouth.
The other people in the pick-up were Swiss. They worked for FIFA, the football organisation, they said: two men and a sharp, hilarious woman, all wearing company baseball caps. She didn’t know what they were here for. She didn’t see boys playing football in the villages they passed; she saw a lot of wooden, evangelical churches, and dirt.
They passed a coffee plantation and Elaine said it was a pity the people didn’t drink the coffee that was growing right there on their own hillsides, that they had to drink horrible dried Nestlé instead. The Swiss looked at her. After a moment, one of the men said, ‘Well, that’s the way the world goes.’ He glanced at the woman and gave a little smirk. She smirked back at him. Then the other man chanced a sneaky little smile. They turned away from each other, airily, and went back to looking at the poor people on the side of the road.
The fucking Swiss. They spoke perfect English to her and perfect Spanish to the guide. They could probably say, ‘Well, that’s the way the world goes,’ in French, Italian and German too. So geht es. C’est comme ça .
Is the war over yet? La guerre, est-elle terminée?
She tried to figure out which one of the men was sleeping with the woman; a good-time sort of girl, who wasn’t a girl any longer. Forty-five at least. She was having a brilliant time on the back of a pick-up truck in Chiapas.
The men were middle-aged. It happened to men all of a sudden, she thought. First the baldness thing, and then Boof! big lunches, cars, overtime, fat already. Well, that’s the way theworld goes. She wondered if it would happen to Tim, stuck back in the hotel with what might be amoebic dysentry – at least that is what they thought
Do you ever want to go back?
You have no idea what my high school was like, he said. Everyone had a car. Everyone crashed their car. It wasn’t enough to score a girl, you had to score the girl’s coked-up mother. I went to school with guys so stupid, you look at them on the football field and you think, Why don’t we just eat them? The whole herd of them. That might be more useful.
The sun was sinking like a stone. The meal and the beer made their skin crawl in the heat. The food pulled at their blood, leaving the surface of them a sheet of sensation; prickles and irritations and the sense of someone at your shoulder, leaning in to whisper – what? – your name, or your other name, your secret. At the end of every day in Mexico they were brushed by shame; a dirty bird’s wing someone had dropped on the sand.
For fuck’s sake, she said. The whole world is about America, these days. It’s not a country, it’s a fucking religion. And I don’t mind. I am perfectly happy with you as you are. I am perfectly happy with you as an ethnic product . But can we, from now, for ever, forget the froth on the milk and the weather in my fucking hair?
The next morning at breakfast, she looked at the fried eggs on her plate and thought she must be pregnant, and she gripped the edge of the table in her fright.
But it was Tim who got sick. They went inland, and he stayed in the hotel room, while she took a day trip out of San Cristóbal de las Casas. There was talk of rebels in the hills. Elaine sat in the back of a pick-up truck, high up in the scrublands, andwatched a group of men labouring uphill with sacks of coffee beans on their backs.
After an hour or so, they stopped at a café – just a roof with a table under it, and a broken fridge full of a bright pink cola. In the middle of the table there was a bowl of powdered coffee, turning to gleaming syrup on the communal spoon. A filthy little girl looked at them, with perfect awe as they drank out of plastic cups. Her eyes were the only clean things about her, apart from, when she laughed, the inside of her mouth.
The other people in the pick-up were Swiss. They worked for FIFA, the football organisation, they said: two men and a sharp, hilarious woman, all wearing company baseball caps. She didn’t know what they were here for. She didn’t see boys playing football in the villages they passed; she saw a lot of wooden, evangelical churches, and dirt.
They passed a coffee plantation and Elaine said it was a pity the people didn’t drink the coffee that was growing right there on their own hillsides, that they had to drink horrible dried Nestlé instead. The Swiss looked at her. After a moment, one of the men said, ‘Well, that’s the way the world goes.’ He glanced at the woman and gave a little smirk. She smirked back at him. Then the other man chanced a sneaky little smile. They turned away from each other, airily, and went back to looking at the poor people on the side of the road.
The fucking Swiss. They spoke perfect English to her and perfect Spanish to the guide. They could probably say, ‘Well, that’s the way the world goes,’ in French, Italian and German too. So geht es. C’est comme ça .
Is the war over yet? La guerre, est-elle terminée?
She tried to figure out which one of the men was sleeping with the woman; a good-time sort of girl, who wasn’t a girl any longer. Forty-five at least. She was having a brilliant time on the back of a pick-up truck in Chiapas.
The men were middle-aged. It happened to men all of a sudden, she thought. First the baldness thing, and then Boof! big lunches, cars, overtime, fat already. Well, that’s the way theworld goes. She wondered if it would happen to Tim, stuck back in the hotel with what might be amoebic dysentry – at least that is what they thought
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