Her appearance at the bar was as sudden as the wave of a tsunami and no less damaging. Into the center of the cigarette and cold beer addled maze she strolled, confidently, without hesitation, her dagger eyes darting around the room and focusing like miniature telescopes. She was a fearless leopard zeroing in on vulnerable prey.
Everybody at El Decano was at least a little bit uninhibited by that time of the night, and if there is one thing that a street kid in Oaxaca knows, it is the potential for a big score when those who can pay three dollars for a beer quickly down three and decide that they are suddenly the richest individuals on the planet. Alcohol has a way of making even the most bereft pauper feel like Bill Gates. Decano is the well-known haunt of pretentious middle class professionals and their equally pretentious progeny. The kind of folks who are far removed from the real owners of the city, but who nevertheless perpetually aspire to reach the same heights, and without fail, believe they someday can. Dominga, a reluctant nino de la calle who sells few of her imported shawls during the daylight hours, knows too well that a cursory romp through a bar like this could help get her home tonight at a reasonable hour, maybe even before the last bus leaves the Central to snake its way up into Colonia Monte Alban, a chaotic collection of primitive shanties and well-appointed shacks clinging to the hillsides just north of the city center.
Dominga’s eyes met mine by accident, and all four feet two inches of her ebullient frame stiffened into a statue. She was about ten feet away; she would have unsuccessfully cajoled a thickly mustached old man and his cheerless young girlfriend at the table in front of me had I not been there. Suddenly, her eyes lit up like fireflies, the fact of recognition in this forbidding place easing her isolation a bit. I tried to maintain a welcoming gaze, secretly wanting nothing less than to be confronted by her at real close range. Her initial excitement to see me lasted for all of seven seconds, before every muscle in her face contorted into a grotesque “how could you, slimy fucker” type of condemnatory glare. It was Judgment Day, at nine thirty in the evening, and I did not have much of a case.
Her glare remained fixed for about thirty seconds before I could not stand it anymore and looked away. I would have rather looked at anything else at that point. I would have rather stared at an army of Medusas. I would have rather peered at the thoroughly decimated victims of the most horrible auto accident. I could not get up and run away and forget about this moment. I could not do anything but suck it up and wait for her to come up to me and pass her judgment, which was so duly deserved that, deep down, in a perverse way, I even craved it. She bounced across the cold stone floor, over lagoons of spilled beer and islands of peanut shells, like a toy ball, heading right for me.
The gringo volunteer in Oaxaca, or anywhere, is a most odd and paradoxical sort of human being. We volunteer filled to the brim with good intentions and naïve ideals, pretending we are dedicated enough to be saviors and selfless enough to be martyrs. We are attracted to an ancient place like Oaxaca, the land of the sacred guaje tree, because we want to help other people in their vain attempt to live lives as good as ours. We don’t accept the things we cannot change, and we blame everyone but ourselves for the misery that surrounds us on all sides. We come, because we have to justify ourselves to those whose lives are determined by the cruel contours of our privileges. Perhaps, for some of us, teaching a few classes, playing a couple of soccer games, donating a little bit of money, is enough to make the world right. Denial marks the gringo volunteer, and our capacity to block out the realities of our real selves is staggering.
Now Dominga is right there in front of me, and I can almost feel her stale bubblegum breath.
Awkward attempt at a sentence. Hello…What…nothing more than a few empty single words, unconnected to each other, can pour from her lips.
“Why are you in here? I told your mother that these places are bad for you.”
A concise serving of that moralistic, self-delusional First World guilt. So easy for me to say. When I was ten, my mother never told me to sell six scarves or forget about coming home at night. My mother also never pimped herself to heartless tourists, breaking her back in the hot sun to weave culturally significant blouses that had a one in five hundred chance of ending up in some suburban soccer mom’s closet in Forest Hills. Dominga’s mom sat all day in the market over on Morelos, waiting, like a castaway on a desert island, for a passing ship to come by and whisk her to a better place.
I repeated myself for emphasis, really to make myself feel better. “Why did you come in here?”
She instantly felt compelled to answer my pointless query, but with an order. “Buy a scarf, please. Please buy a scarf.”
I could buy a rebozo now, just to send her on her way, but would the gringo sitting here tomorrow night do the same when she walked up to him? Besides, Dominga would never try and get me to buy a scarf at any other moment, in any other circumstance. It would just sound too tacky.
I know Dominga, she is like a daughter to me. I met her four years ago when I first started working at Centro de Esperanza Infantil. Dominga was so small and awkward, with huge sores on her arms and spaghetti strands of hair that stank of garbage. She struck me right away as different, special, a child who had been given even less tools to work with than her indigenous peers. Being born a Triqui in Oaxaca city is like being born with the mark of Cain. Dominga was not only Triqui but mentally and emotionally challenged. Other kids liked to revel in her awkwardness and lack of social competency, teasing her mercilessly and pushing and kicking her like she was an irksome dog. I would jump to her aid without fail at moments like these, and just hold her tight like we were wrapped together in a cocoon, like I could protect her from any danger.
Dominga knew too much about me already, and at this moment, in this crappy bar with all these phony malcontents, she could have destroyed me if she had wanted to. I was a captive in the spotlight, and the beer I had been nursing for twenty minutes stared at me also, with an equally unforgiving gaze. All I could do was reach for a sip, to show her that the way I sip beer does not make me an alcoholic.
Dominga has surely been abused by adults, maybe sexually, but at the very least she has been hit on the head and face, arms and legs, by them. She has been on earth a mere ten years but already bears more pain, and a heavier cross, than many eighty-year old women. I wanted her to see me drinking so that she could recognize that I was not doing it to block out a dead end street, which is also to say, I do not have to wake up every day and stare down one. For what it was worth, she needed to see me drink. I was like the father she never had and her own had probably come stumbling home at two in the morning on a regular basis, kicking up plumes of dust, knocking over their few possessions, demanding sex from his exhausted, snoring wife, Dominga’s mother. Dominga would get used to hearing either sobs and shrieks or silence and acceptance, depending on whether or not her father had decided to beat mom before inserting his manhood into her.
All I got for my carefully measured sip of rapidly warming beer was a loud shake of the head and a sharp admonition: “If you drink that, you are going to do bad things.”
These last words she said with unbelievable certainty, as if downing a couple of cold Coronas was going to turn me into the Son of Sam. In my mind, and from numerous personal experiences, I knew why most Oaxacan men drank, and it was not for recreation. That is probably not the main reason most men anywhere consume alcoholic beverages. Alcohol is potable deception; it creates the illusion of impregnable strength where there is actually tremendous weakness, and creates a ready-made justification for absolutely deplorable behavior. Alcohol is the reason for countless children who would have been undesirable if produced in conditions of sobriety. Alcohol is both the cause and effect of family feuds, workplace dissatisfaction, and a million and one types of treacherous mayhem. Alcohol, in summation, is a veritable liquid Brutus who first comes as a friend dedicated to making you feel good and reach the height of your powers. Later, this so-called friend stabs you in the back forty times when you are not expecting it.
Dominga’s dad was run over by a bus one night, on the sinister commercial artery known as Colon, which extends eastward from the clamor of Abastos Market to the main square, the zocalo, the physical and spiritual heart of Oaxaca. It is eight blocks of throbbing danger, a never-ending stream of rickety, swerving buses, impatient and macho taxis, furtive motorbikes and scooters, and, most courageous of all, rusty rattling bicycles whose riders pedal with the ferocity of Tour de France contenders. Dominga’s dad was stumbling home under the weight of forty-five pounds of clothing and at least forty-five ounces of mezcal. As a witness would later report, his left leg suddenly twisted itself inside a subtle crack in the sidewalk, and he toppled leftward onto the heated pavement like a falling sabino tree. His skull was crushed by the corpulent tires of a speeding bus before the driver even knew he had run over something. It was shortly before midnite, and the air stank of the intoxicated brain tissue of another invisible campesino turned city dweller. Ultimately, the death of Dominga’s father would be as unnoticed by the larger society as his birth and life.
The air tightened around me like a strait jacket, and it enveloped Dominga as well. A smartly dressed young couple at the next table was sharing a cigarette whose cancerous fumes wafted over to us and made our awkward bubble feel even more toxic. Our eyes could not meet for more than three seconds, we could not force even the most insincere smile, and I had nothing to offer her but my guilt. She had to leave now, she had to exit through the door of this iniquitous escape pod as quickly as she had entered.
As if reading my mind, Dominga dropped her head, let her spaghetti hair cascade down her exceptional face, and swung around rapidly, in an instant sailing through the door and disappearing into the eternal mysteries of the Oaxacan night.
I sighed. I gasped. I gasped. I sighed. I lowered my head into my hands and began to sob uncontrollably, stirring some of my neighboring malcontents out of their alcohol-induced gaiety.
In the following weeks, the once stable, trusting relationship between Dominga and I morphed into something else, something at once unbearable yet well deserved. When we walked hand in hand through the labyrinthine chaos of an aromatic marketplace, her palm did not feel as secure in mine. When we gazed at each other across the limestone plain of an ancient churchyard, her eyes seemed to want to turn away too soon. When we stared at our reflections in a puddle of fresh and sorely needed rain, our faces, hanging there together, did not project the same unity. I would have to work hard to prove, once again, that I was better than most men, a fact I had taken for granted before that fateful encounter in the bar. She desperately needed to believe I could be better than most men, and this organic, sincere hope on her part formed the basis of our intense bond. I was a gringo volunteer in a land I was struggling to understand, and I could never afford to be just a part time role model.
