Spanish Surrender, page 28
The words hurt on so many levels, but none of them compared to the pain she felt thinking about the loss and trauma Loreto had faced.
“I’m sorry, and I’m sorry for being sorry, but I don’t know what to say.”
“Then don’t say anything.”
“But I want to help.”
“There’s nothing you can say that will fix my life.”
“I didn’t say fix. I honestly mean help. There has to be a way to—”
“To what? Produce a birth certificate for a kid who wasn’t born in a hospital and who got carried across a river in the dead of night before I could even walk?”
“Well, no, but if you know you were born somewhere in Mexico, you could—”
“Go find some town I don’t even know the name of and talk to people I’ve never met to try to get them to produce some forms that don’t exist to prove I’m a citizen of a place I have no record or memory of ever being? Do you think this fictional official will take the secondhand word of my dead parents, who, incidentally, risked their lives to flee there? I have no way to prove Mexican citizenship. How does anyone in Mexico know I’m not an illegal immigrant to Mexico from Guatemala or Honduras?”
Simone’s frustration level grew. “I suppose if you have no record of ever being in Mexico, you aren’t likely to find resources to support a visa, but maybe on the American side I could—”
“Get me a social security number? A passport? Why stop there? How about full-blown American citizenship?”
“That has to be a possibility,” Simone said weakly.
“Does it? I don’t qualify for political asylum. I can’t get a legitimate job without a work visa, and I can’t get a work visa without paperwork that doesn’t exist.” Loreto’s voice was level, almost bored, as she listed all the things she must have been through a thousand times, but beneath the surface something seething underlined her exasperation. “So unless you’re proposing a marriage, which I don’t want, there’s no way for me to legally get into America, much less stay there.”
Simone’s stomach knotted as her mind kept trying to wander down different avenues, only to find each one blocked. Still, she couldn’t believe there was no way. There was always a way, or at least there’d always been a way for her.
“My very existence is against the law in the country of my birth, the country where I grew up, and the country where I live.”
Simone shook her head. She couldn’t accept a world in which Loreto’s very existence was an affront to every country on the planet. Loreto knew too much, she’d seen too much, had done too much, for no one to see her value. “Wait. You got into Spain. You left America at some point without any documents and you entered a different country.”
“Here’s the point where your neat little world gets extra uncomfortable, because I’m undocumented here, too. No matter how you look at it, you’ve employed an undocumented worker, or as your boss will probably see it, an illegal immigrant.”
“Please stop saying that.” Simone pinched the bridge of her nose.
“Why? You can’t handle the truth, Rubia?”
“Because I don’t care!” Simone shouted. “I don’t care that I paid you, I don’t care that I slept with you. I mean, I do care, but not about what documents you have and which ones you don’t. I care about you.”
That was the first thing that seemed to slow Loreto’s steamroller of an argument. She paused, mouth open, eyes wide, long enough for Simone to take a single breath and ask, “How did you get from America into Spain?”
“I got hired under the table to do dishes on a cruise ship.” She shrugged but refused to meet Simone’s eyes. “After seven days holed up below decks, retching my guts out in tubs full of the food rich people threw away, I wanted off badly enough to drag my body over a barbed-wire fence at the customs point.”
Barbed wire. More pieces fell into place. “Your scars . . . the customs point . . . what was on the other side was—”
“A new life. A new chance. A choice I made for myself because I wanted to, not because I had to.” She made a soft snorting sound. “When I felt the levant blow through my hair, I felt like my parents were pushing me. I finally, truly understood the choice they’d made. I would’ve climbed a thousand barbed wire fences to cross a thousand borders for a shot at something better than what I’d have if I went back.”
A thousand borders, a thousand fences. That must have been what so much of Loreto’s life had felt like. Simone’s mind jolted to a stop again as it landed on another sticking point. Borders and fences. “How did you get into Gibraltar?”
She rolled her eyes. “Gibraltar isn’t nearly as tricky as some of the places I got into or out of growing up. All that one cost me was a hundred euros and a sizable chunk of my pride.”
“You could’ve told me.”
“Could I?” Loreto asked sharply. “Could I have turned to you the morning after we’d fucked in a bathroom and told you I was an undocumented, double immigrant?”
“Yes,” Simone said emphatically, mentally pushing away concerns about what her own response would have been that morning. “We could’ve made other plans.”
“No!” Loreto snapped, all the anger back again. “I did my job. I’m not lazy. I did what you wanted.”
“I didn’t want you to break the law.”
“Every moment of my life is breaking the law.”
“I didn’t want to put you in danger.”
“Have you not heard a word I said?”
The sense of being trapped, confined, helpless pressed down on her so firmly, she shouted, “I could’ve helped!”
“I don’t want your help.”
“Because you’re stubborn? Or prideful?”
“Because I don’t want your life,” Loreto practically spat. Clenching her fists and bringing her outward anger to one notch below boiling, she added, “I don’t want to play games I can’t win. I don’t want to become a citizen of the country that worked my parents to death. I don’t want to compromise my beliefs to get ahead. I don’t want to sell my soul for decades for some compromise palatable enough to feed the dumb, tasteless masses.”
The comment burned in a new way, not like the sharp sting of a slap, but a slow scald that spread across her skin and began to sink toward her core. Even with all the horrible experiences she’d had, even with all the terrible restraints and indignities and dead-ends, Loreto would rather live indefinitely in her precarious position than live the life Simone had spent hers trying to build. “I don’t know what to say.”
“Get it through your head. I don’t need you to say anything. I’m building my own life by my own rules here. I have a job I enjoy. People value my contributions more than they care about where I was born. Lina and Ren are in the process of sponsoring me for a refugee visa, which is more than any businesswomen in America did.”
Simone exhaled at the news. She didn’t even care about the dig at American businesswomen. She just felt an overwhelming sense of relief that someone cared enough about Loreto to stand up for her, even if she felt a twinge of regret at not having the chance to do so herself. “I’m glad they’re in a position to help you. If there’s anything I can do to expedite the process—”
“Stop,” Loreto commanded. “Don’t do that. Don’t act like some white, rich savior who can swoop in with your money or your reputation and make me a more palatable case. I don’t need your pity or your platitudes. I don’t need someone who can’t find her own damn moral compass to assuage her guilt by tossing a few scraps my way.”
“I’m not assuaging anything. I want to help.”
“What you want isn’t more important than what I want. You’re not better than me. You’re not smarter than me or stronger than me or superior to me. You just have more privilege.”
“I agree. I’ve spent my whole life trying to use my privilege to lift up—”
“No, you haven’t,” Loreto cut her off again.
This time Simone’s frustration at the situation tipped over to anger. “Stop interrupting me.”
“No. I’ve listened to your bullshit all week.”
Simone’s face flushed. “My bullshit?”
Loreto shrugged. “You want to do this? Because I will lay it out.”
“Enlighten me.”
“Your work-hard-and-get-rewarded mind-set is bullshit. I think we’ve already established that you might’ve worked, but you didn’t get where you are by working harder than the millions of people picking your food or sewing your fancy suits in sweatshops. Your I-make-things-happen mind-set is bullshit because you’re no more responsible for the doors you had open to you than I am for the ones I had slammed in my face.”
“Okay.” Simone held up her hands. “I understand why you’re upset. The system is broken. I get that, which is why I’m working as hard as I am on this acquisition.”
Loreto snatched Simone’s notes off the desk. “This? This is your answer? Your great fight?”
“I’m trying to give voice to an author the world needs to hear.”
“He doesn’t need you to have a voice. He’s already got one.”
“I can give him a bigger platform.”
“Only if he conforms.” Loreto shook her head. “Do you want to know what feels so off about this presentation? Why it feels so empty?”
She didn’t. She wanted this whole conversation to be over. She was having a hard time drawing a deep breath as Loreto circled her like a cat preparing to pounce.
“Your pitch feels wrong because what you’re doing is wrong.”
“You don’t understand.”
“Yes, I do. You said so yourself. I see people, I hear people, and you’re coming in loud and clear.” Loreto stepped nearer again, causing Simone’s emotions to war between the desire to pull her close and the equally strong impulse to push her away. “You’re selling your soul for a sliver of some pie you don’t even really want.”
“I do,” Simone said weakly.
“You don’t. You can’t even taste it anymore. You just keep swallowing the same lies you’ve told yourself for years about working inside the system, about changing the game. None of them are true.”
Simone’s last reserve of anger kicked in. “You don’t understand a thing about what’s true in my life.”
“I understand that you’re killing your soul under the illusion that if you play like the men in power long enough, you’ll become one of them, only you’ll be a kinder, more benevolent version of the guy who came before you.”
“I will.”
“Yeah, you’ll get to sign all the important books and hand them over to the exact same people who are bastardizing them right now. You can sit in your corner office and watch them get carved up like cuts of meat. Is that the shift you want to see in the system? A few more good books to dumb down? A few more sharp minds to dull enough for Middle America to turn them into a movie? That’s the change you wish to see in the world?”
“It’s better than no change.”
“It is no change, Simone,” Loreto yelled. “There’s no changing that system, the same way there’s no changing the immigration system.”
“So what?” she exploded back. “We give up? On those books, on those voices, on the people who haven’t found a way to bum around Spain long enough that they’ve stopped caring?”
A muscle in Loreto’s jaw twitched, and Simone suspected she’d hit a nerve. “How many siestas do I have to take before I stop caring? How many churros do I have to eat until nothing matters anymore, or until I just become good at pretending it doesn’t, because that’s what you’re doing, right?”
Loreto shook her head.
“You’re a hypocrite, talking about me deluding myself. Look in a mirror. If you really didn’t care, you wouldn’t have blown your top over some offhand comments in the mosque at Cordoba. And if you didn’t care, you wouldn’t have fallen apart when you had to cross the border at Gibraltar. And if you didn’t care, you wouldn’t be yelling about me wasting my time in a job you also claim not to care about.”
Loreto backed toward the door once more. “I don’t care what you think of me.”
“Now who’s dealing in bullshit? You’re clearly just as upset as I am about so many things in the world, but you’d rather demean my efforts than lift a finger to try to effect change on your own.”
Loreto stared at her for a long second, those dark eyes filled with animus. “You don’t know what I’ve seen. You don’t know what I know. I refuse to kill myself caring about things I can’t change.”
“So what does that include?” Simone shot back, “because from here it looks like the list of things you’re refusing to care about includes everything.”
“Not everything.” Loreto swung open the door and turned to face Simone one more time. “But it does include you.”
The slam of the door behind her shook several of the photos on the walls and rattled through Simone.
Chapter Fifteen
Loreto hadn’t even checked into her usual hotel yet. She’d merely plopped herself down at the bar and kicked her small suitcase far enough under a table that it wouldn’t trip other patrons. Not that there were any other patrons. Too late for tapas, too early for dinner. In other words, the time of day Simone was generally at her most annoying.
She scoffed at her own internal dig and took another swig of sangria. So much for sipping. She couldn’t consume the wine and fruit fast enough. Then again, maybe the problem wasn’t her pace but the drink itself, because she was halfway through her third and the tension hadn’t even begun to slip from her shoulders. She needed something stronger if oblivion was the order of the evening, but damned if she’d let Simone drive her to drink something coarse like tequila or vodka. She’d seen enough sappy movies to know drinking like that meant you cared about someone enough to let them wreck you, and if there was one thing she’d made abundantly clear this afternoon, it was that she didn’t care.
She lowered her forehead to the table, relishing the coolness of the wood against her flushed skin. There had been so much burning today. It seemed like every part of her body had been on fire at some point in the last twenty-four hours—her muscles, her throat, her cheeks, her lungs. Another reason not to switch to vodka. She needed something soothing, though she didn’t know what that might be. She hadn’t been the kind of person who needed to be soothed in years, and even back when she had cried out for such things, those cries had rarely been answered.
“’Reto?” a familiar voice asked.
She sat up, grateful for the distraction, for any distraction.
“Dios mio,” Lina exclaimed. “Que paso?”
What happened? If she knew how to answer that question, she wouldn’t be sitting here right now. “Nothing.”
Lina rolled her eyes. “Stay there.”
Loreto shrugged. She hadn’t planned on going anywhere, except maybe to bed at some point, but she watched Lina stride purposefully over to a group of approximately thirty people waiting in the lobby. She suspected the front desk would be busy for a while, so she might as well follow Lina’s order. It was easier than trying to think for herself at the moment. Even if the sangria wasn’t kicking in, she wasn’t clear-headed enough to rebel right now. Plus, she needed her job back, for so many reasons.
“Hola, amiga,” Ren said cheerfully, as she separated herself from the crowd a few minutes later. “May I join you?”
Loreto nodded to the empty chair across the table. “So she sent you over, huh?”
Ren smiled as she sat and slouched back. “I drew the short straw.”
“No, you’ve been sent in to play good cop.”
“I thought the bad cop came in first, then the good cop. Maybe I’m here to play bad cop.”
They both grinned at the absurdity of the idea.
“You drinking?” Loreto asked, gesturing to the pitcher of sangria.
“Looks like you’ve only got enough left for one. Better save it for my wife.”
“I can order more.”
“I wouldn’t if I were you.”
Loreto nodded. If the first few hadn’t done the job, there probably wasn’t any use returning to that well.
“We missed you on the last run,” Ren said, her voice light but sincere.
“Yeah, me too,” Loreto said.
“Really?”
She thought about the question a little harder. Had she missed the tour? At times, she’d missed the ease of working with students who didn’t push her. Maybe she’d missed the ease of neutral encounters. Or not. Even when she’d gotten her most frustrated at Simone, she’d never wished to be back with thirty high schoolers. She missed the ease of working with Ren and Lina today, though. Didn’t she? Funny, she’d hadn’t really thought of them until now. She hadn’t had any great yearning to go back.
“You know, if you have to think about it that long . . .” Ren let the ending of the sentence dangle.
“No, it’s not that. I was just replaying the events of the last week.”
“And.”
“Working for you is easier.”
Ren laughed. “I bet so.”
“Maybe we need to work you a little harder,” Lina said, joining them.
“Everybody all checked in?” Ren asked.
“Sí,” Lina confirmed, snagging a chair from another table and sitting down next to Ren. “Now spill.”
Loreto shook her head and turned to Ren. “I told you she was the bad cop.”
Ren burst out laughing. “Damn. Someday I’ll get there.”
“You will never get there.”
“I might. She’s worn off on me in other ways. Did you ever hear about the time she had to haul me out of a lesbian bar in Chueca?”
“No. Do tell.”
Lina drummed her fingers on the table and sighed. “Ren, you know I love you, but this is why you will never play bad cop.”
Ren looked from Lina to Loreto and back again. “Oh.”
Lina smiled at her so sweetly it made Loreto’s heart ache, another new feeling she didn’t want to get used to.
