After we quarreled, I went to the beach. The devalued peso had continued to drop, and in the remodeled fishing village of pastel hotels, lines stretched uneasily in front of the bank. Wandering the fake cobblestones of what were once dusty village streets, I finessed jewelry stores, open late, searching for a cheap place to eat-- my first meal in Mexico without him. At the door of a small restaurant in a hollow alley, a tiny, iridescent woman beckoned customers in.
      Her lacquered French twist was pinned by a love bird's aqua feather; her stenciled lips were cerise. "Come in, do come in!" she invited in high, lilting English, "Ye-es, truly, our food is so very good! Perfect for your lunch or dinner. Not at all expensive!" She grasped my arm with vermilion nails and squeezed it. The Menu del Dia, proclaimed a blackboard, was Sopa de Chayote, Pulpo or Huachinango Chilacate, and postre, only ten pesos, less than two dollars at yesterday's exchange rate. The name of the restaurant was "Kafe Kohfi," I think.
      A miniature white poodle, its ringlets pin set, barked at the Dona's tango stilettos, fastened to her ankles with a webbing of straps. "Tabatha, callate! Quiet! Tab-by, please!" she scolded fondly. "Por favor, sit down! Sientese. Sit down, Senorita!" With her voice, she pushed me.
      "What's a chayote?" I asked.
      "A chayote is a chayote!" the vivacious patrona explained to her only customer. She rushed away, then back, to present me with a raw version of the sticky, brain lobe-shaped squash. "And you know, of course, that pulpo means octopus?" she asked.
      The Dona stood over me, as I tasted the soup's bitter tang in a cream of smooth sweetness, bracelet-bound arm thrust behind flounces. Beneath its false brightness, I could see that her face had been drawn up to her ears and the scars tightly stitched. She was born in Germany, lived in the United States after the war, where she learned her "ter-rible" English, moved to Argentina, then to this place, she informed me.
      "Oh, and look, please, here are some letters from New York, from our favorite customer, a Puerto Rico playwright, coming here since the year one-nine six-three; but this winter, a pity, she has no money to travel, as she has invested it all in her play." Scanning the hand-written pages she placed on my table, I recognized the name of the playwright as well as the play. "Ye-es, many, so many American celebrities came here to us, from New York, from New Orleans, even San Fran-cisco. But the times they have changed. There are too many restaurants, many big restaurants, empty most nights, much too expensive." I had seen them, waiters lolling, candles burning on pink tablecloths. "The tourists have gone to Ixtapa... the big hotels....paying too much, and for what? For nothing! For ugly buffets, for hamburguesas...." The Dona sniffed contemptuously.
      A fat girl with sweaty skin carried in the red snapper, bathed in a complex red-orange sauce, perfumed with cilantro and a delicate chili the color of saffron. A tall elderly man-the Dona's husband?-- bent into a tuxedo jacket, limped to an elephantine white piano in the rear. He began to play, raising heavy veined hands, twisted like rigging, to vaudevillian heights before he dropped them into fluid chord relays.
      The chic nightclub sound flowed out of the restaurant, over the false cobblestones, to the shores of the unhealthy Pacific, gummy with plastic, to the luminous, smog-softened moon. He played Manhattan, and I applauded, as if I were wearing a plunging décolletage and elbow-length gloves with tiny pearl buttons instead of a sun-faded tee shirt and dirty shorts. My claps echoed in the empty Kafe Kohfi.
      "Ye-es, he plays magnificent, truly," the Dona said with profound indifference. She kissed beringed fingertips, then smoothed her thinning coiffure with them.
      The pianist stooped over to my table, lifting his white linen trousers to preserve their crease. Even his shoes were white-patent wing tips. He spoke English with a serious intent, if not as fluently as his wife. "Ah, yes, Man-hattan!" he exclaimed, "I love Man-hattan. Or the idea of Man-hattan is what I love, perhaps! All of my life I wished to visit this city to meet Keem Novak, but when I did succeed to go there at last, I did not meet Keem Novak, or any such beautiful girl, but a gor-illa. So many gor-illas, there in Man-hattan." He growled, shaking a rat in his teeth, then sucked in his cheeks. Did the Senorita, by chance, know some person who desired to purchase a grand pleasure cruiser, he asked.
      "A magnificent boat, truly," chimed in the Dona. "A yacht! Twenty-five feet! Perfect! We no longer have the time to use it and so must give it away. Only twenty thousand dollars--nothing for such a wonderful ship." She spoke sharply in Spanish to the dark waitress, who balanced a quavering caramel flan to my table, pinching the saucer between her fingers as if it had metamorphosed into a struggling moth. "These girls are so lazy! Every minute I must watch them," commented her boss. She gazed into a gilded compact and sedulously thickened her lipstick. The mascara icing her glued-on lashes had shed some black bits.
      Her husband limped back to the white piano, set a foamy pink cocktail on top, and pounded out Cole Porter's Nice Work if You Can Get It. Pumping the pedals with theatrical stomps, he played Some Enchanted Evening and Shall we Dance, tunes my Shakespeare professor sang long ago, before his daughter jumped out of the window, and Wrongside on the Hudson burned. Swaying to the medley, I danced with myself, with the images washed up by the music deep into the moonlit, Mexican night.
      The next morning I returned to The Kafe Kohfi for breakfast. Although the sun was high, firing its rays through a fecal dust haze, the bank had not posted the exchange rate yet. The ancient pianist passed me in the doorway with a curt nod, stepped into an olive jeep, chauffeured by a soldier, a bandoleer of machine gun cartridges crossing his chest. The old man had exchanged his ivory tuxedo for a stiff khaki uniform, decorated with flags, silver and gold medals, and carried a briefcase.
      The Dona, applying her make up at a wrought iron table, wore a white peasant blouse of freshly starched lace, and a sprig of bougainvillea in her sparse, shellacked twist. Her naked skin, I saw in the polluted morning light, was not only wrinkled, but a chemical yellow, and as unyielding as a fossilized leaf. Tabatha, soiled, twitched in her lap. The proprietor cast dragging lids, minus lashes, at me, murmured a cheerless good morning, and did not seem delighted that I had come back. Possibly she didn't recognize me.
      The tortillas were stale, the Nescafe weak, and the undercooked huevos rancheros wobbled blind golden eyes in a tepid salsa. I wouldn't eat here again, I thought, the lonely day before me, desolate, adrift.
      A woman on a balcony attached to a concrete apartment block across the alley shouted "Mira!" Rendering her lips a precise magenta, the Dona glanced crossly up from her compact mirror. The neighbor was waving a large green dragon that writhed sinuously in her triumphant grasp.
      "What's that?" I asked, shocked.
      "That is a... an Iguana," the Dona replied, her voice suffering my intrusion. "There was many here once, but now they are few. The big hotels have driven them away. But sometimes the peasants catch them in the desert and brings them to sell on the Playa--how do you call it in English? -- 'The Beach of Silk Clothes.'" She called a shrill question to the woman on the balcony. "She paid only forty pesos...It is too cheap. The peasants do not know of the devaluacion."
      I asked what the woman would do with the lizard.
      The Dona rouged her dead cheek with a brush. "She will cut his throat before she cooks him." "Then..." She tipped an imaginary glass toward her crinkled lips. "..., she will drink his blood. For health."

Vicki Lindner is a fiction writer, essayist, and journalist, who teaches writing at the University of Wyoming. Her work has recently appeared in Gastronomica, Ploughshares, Bearing Life: Women's Writings about Childlessness, and The Best of Terrain.

  Vicki

  Lindner