The Hot Country

2

She more or less came with the rooms I rented in a house just off the zócalo. I’d barely thrown my valise on the bed and wiped the sweat off my brow when she peeked her head in at the door, which I’d failed to close all the way. These two big dark eyes and a high forehead from her Spanish grandfather or whoever. “Señor?” she said.

“Come in. As long as you’re not one of Huerta’s assassins,” I said in Spanish, which I’m pretty good at. I figured that accounted for the smile she gave me.

“No problem, señor,” she said. She swung the door open wide now, and I saw a straw basket behind her, waiting. “I’ll take your dirty things,” she said.

“Well, there was this time with Roosevelt in San Juan. .” I said, though it was under my breath, really, and I let it trail off, just an easy private joke when I was roughed up from travel and needing a drink.

But right off she said. “You keep that, señor. Some things I can’t wash away.” She did this matter-of-factly, shrugging her thin shoulders a little.

“Of course,” I said. “It’s probably a priest I need.”

“The ones in Mexico won’t do you much good,” she said.

She kept surprising me, and this time I didn’t have a response. I just looked at her, thinking what a swell girl, and I was probably showing it in my face.

Her face stayed blank as a tortilla, and after a moment, she said. “Your clothes.”

My hand went of its own accord to the top button on my shirt.

“Please, señor,” she said, her voice full of weary patience, and she pointed to my bag.

I gave her some things to wash.

“I’m Christopher Cobb,” I said. “What’s your name?”

“I’m just the local girl who does your laundry,” she said, and I still couldn’t read anything in her face, to see if she was flirting or really trying to put me off.

I said, “You’ve advised me to keep away from your priests even though I’m plenty dirty. You’re already more than a laundry girl.”

She laughed. “That was not for your sake. I just hate the priests.”

“That’s swell,” I said. Swell enough that I’d said it in English, and I spoke some equivalent in Spanish for her.

She hesitated a moment more and finally said, “Luisa Morales,” and then she went out without another word, not even an adios.

And I stood there staring at the door she’d left open at exactly the same angle she’d found it when she came in. And I’ll be damned if I wasn’t disappointed because I couldn’t explain to her about my name. Christopher Cobb is how I sign my stories but Christopher Marlowe Cobb is my full name and my editors right along have all wanted me to use the whole moniker in my byline, but I find all those three-named news boys — the William Howard Russells and the Richard Harding Davises and the George Bronson Reas — and all the rest — and the host of magazine scribblers and the novelists with three names are just as bad — I think they all make themselves sound pompous and full of self-importance. And it’s not as if I don’t like the long version of me: My mother gave me the name, after all, when she first laid me newborn in a steamer trunk backstage at the Pelican Theatre in New Orleans and she went on to become one of the great and beautiful stars of the American stage — the eminent, the estimable, the inimitable Isabel Cobb — and Christopher Marlowe was her favorite, though he didn’t understand women and probably didn’t like them, because he never wrote anything like a true heroine in any of his plays, and maybe that tells you something about my mother’s taste in men. She did love her Shakespeare as well, and she played his women, comic and tragic, to worldwide acclaim, but she named me Christopher Marlowe and she called me Kit like they called him, and Kit it is. I just keep the three names packed away in a steamer trunk, and if Luisa Morales had only stayed a moment longer, I would have told her to call me “Kit”—everyone close to me does — though no doubt that would have meant nothing whatsoever to her, and if I’d actually explained all that about my name the day I met her, she would have thought me a madman. Which is what I was thinking about myself. I was a madman to want to explain all this to a Mexican washer girl.