"No, I was very muy muy glad for her. She felt more bad than I did about it so she introduced me to her boss's bear friend—an old bear who was a friend of her boss—how ever you say it. That is another story. Where did you study Spanish?" Gabriele just said that she had dabbled in a few Spanish classes long ago in school but that she was now living here to give the language a try.
"An American living in Tijuana, asked Hilda.
"Stranger things have rocked the planet, I'm sure," said Gabriele coldly. She then ordered two quesadillas and two cokes for herself and her friend.
"You Americans are lucky. You can go here and there and stay as long as you want— wherever you dream. Most Americans just step into Tijuana just to say they have been in Mexico but you dream about studying here and do it. It isn't much of a paradise—this place. Maybe you have gone to other places." Gabriele gave an abridged account of the places where she had lived.
"To travel is good; but if it was me to do something as this I think I would be dizzy to stay a long time in one place and then another place to meet and to lose people."
"Strangely, it has made me dizzy; but not from the travels really. Maybe a bit from the travels — a combination of things. Before this I never needed anyone. I had my own convictions, my own ways, and my own mode of life. When I was younger I removed men like ticks a lot of the time, screwed and bit off their heads some of the time—not really but metaphorically, and thought of them — everybody really — as unwanted distractions on my studies and independence most of the time. I never felt lost and lonely until I was married and was living in Japan."
"There isn't a more lonely thing than this to live together with someone," commented Hilda. She changed to Spanish. "People don't grow together. They grow apart if they are capable of any growth at all— especially if they started out as strangers." To Gabriele nothing could be said that was any truer. These ideas were identical to her own even if hers were as yet kept confined into the cellar of her thoughts (a place she restrained all ideas until they seemed more incontrovertible). To hear these secret ideas that still had not dispersed widely in her own brain come from someone else's mouth was startling. So rarely did Gabriele hear truth that she often imagined it as something that only she conceptualized or fabricated. Her muddy puddles of cynicism were evaporating under the light of the sun. Gabriele smiled her first real smile in months.
Hilda elaborated that this friend of the sister's boss, Stranger X, also from Guadalajara like her family, promised to her father that if married to Hilda he would contribute to the family's household expenses and pay for Hilda' s education. The father told him that if Hilda consented so would he.
"It was a practical decision, really."
Gabriele nodded distastefully. The calculative and the irrational were always in a woman's head when entertaining marriage. All people had to prostitute themselves a little to make a living but, according to Gabriele's assessment, women who contemplated marriage were complete whores. She almost felt sorry for men if it were not for loathing them so much. Hilda was a whore for knowledge and so this got Gabriele's approval. "Go on. I'm listening," said Gabriele.