The Go-Between Read online

  The Rich Kids of Mexico City is, of course, Sergio’s worst nightmare, but it’s also like a car wreck from which he cannot turn away. “Did you see the latest?” he says whenever he calls. “Some tool posted a photo of his arm on the stick shift of a Ferrari, with three Bulgari watches on. This in a country where the average national income is fourteen thousand dollars a year, for a large family. But there are the super/mega-rich, just much less than the one percent in the US. Where is the respect?”

  If you’re above the age of twenty-one, then you call these spoiled kids “Juniors,” since the money they are spending is always from their parents, never anything they actually earned. True, I am technically one of this shameful cohort, but thanks to my brother’s influence, you’ll never see a scandalous photo of me online.

  The #RKOMC crew likes to refer to themselves as “Mireyes,” which sounds like a family name but really stands for “mi reyes,” or “my kings.” And lest you think that it’s all for show and that the pictures, though in poor taste, are meaningless, you should see how the Mireyes flex their influence offline. One of these princesses famously showed up for Sunday brunch at Misol-Ha, one of the top restaurants in the city. She then proceeded to throw a fit when they wouldn’t seat her and her friends without a reservation. It just so happened that her father ran the government agency that does health inspections. Within twenty-four hours, the restaurant had been shut down.

  My friend Patrizia, much to Sergio’s annoyance, made frequent appearances on #RKOMC. She’s an old-school rich girl—her dad owns a whole construction empire, so she’s seen it all before—the big house, the fancy cars, the bodyguards, and the bling. I used to try to be friends with the nicer, less vulgar girls at school, but it was always the same thing. Whenever they came over to my house, they’d ask my mother for autographs. “Not for me,” they’d insist. “Por mi madre/tia/abuela.” For their moms. Aunts. Grandmothers. Whatever.

  It’s one of my rules: you can’t be my friend if you ask my mother for an autograph. You can’t be my friend if you take a selfie with my mom. You can’t be my friend if you post a picture of my house on Instagram or tweet, “OMG. Hanging @ casa de @CarolinaDV #pinchme.” You may be a nice girl. You may have an Einstein brain and a heart of gold. But it doesn’t work for me—fandom. Every year, ever since I was old enough to arrange my own playdates, I tried to make new friends. But they always broke one, if not several, of my rules.

  In fourth grade, I became close with Eva Jiminez. Eva was a quiet girl with dark hair and big round glasses, kind of like a Latina Hermione Granger. I met her in gymnastics class and we used to talk about how cool it would be to represent Mexico in the Olympics. The truth was that the only thing I was ever really good at was the floor routines, but Eva had mad skills: she was a somersaulting, flipping machine. Imagine how embarrassed I was when, at my ninth birthday party, she announced that she was “dedicating a performance to Cammi and her super-talented mother.” She began flipping around the living room and broke my mother’s favorite vase. My mother didn’t mind. “People first, things second,” she always said. But I was mortified. It was like watching someone audition for one of those reality shows. The way she stomped around the room and flipped and flipped and flipped, it seemed like she was hoping that maybe a casting director was in the room and she might be “discovered.”

  Sergio said that I was being ungenerous, that after all, she had said she was dedicating her performance to me and my mom. But then Eva came running over to us and whispered, “Do you think any of the producers from your mother’s show are here at the party? Wouldn’t it be great if they did a telenovela about a talented little gymnast and your mother could play my mom?” It was hard enough for me sometimes to accept that my mother loved me and Sergio above all, that she wasn’t just “playing my mom” when she came home from work. I didn’t want to, I just couldn’t be friends with girls who thought that having an actress as a mother was a total fantasy.

  In fifth grade, Laura Garcia, who shared my love of making comecocos, or fortune-tellers, was my best friend. The first time she visited our home, she spent the whole time asking my mother for autographs. “Not for me,” she said. “But for my mother and my aunt, and my neighbor and the lady who runs the restaurant down the street, who are all your biggest fans.” At our next playdate, she brought both her mother and her aunt, who spent the entire time in the kitchen, quizzing Albita about my mother’s favorite meals and workout habits.

  No matter how hard I tried to explain, they never seemed to get how many hours my mother worked, how surreal it was sometimes to turn on the TV or open a magazine and see her there. It was easier for Sergio, I think. One because he was a genius and he had this way of figuring things—even the tough, confusing, life things—out. But he was also a boy and no one ever compared him to our mother. My parents did their best to keep me out of the press, but reporters still managed to find the dorkiest school pictures of me and run them with cruel captions like

  DNA DISASTER: Carolina sobs, “She is a brain, but no beauty.”

  Patrizia may be an imperious spoiled brat, but she doesn’t ooh and aah around my family, and she gets points for that. Patrizia was fond of saying, “I may be a bitch, but I’m your bitch, Cammi,” and I took it to mean that no matter what, she had my back.

  As for Patrizia’s appearances on #RKOMC, I’d say they were respectably tame. Most of the photos were of her out and about in the city, looking just a little like Audrey Hepburn in her oversized shades and giving abrazos to Che, her adorable little pug. Che even had his own Instagram account with more than a thousand followers—@jajaconcheche. “Ja” means “ha-ha” in English, but people in Mexico use it the way Americans use “LOL.”

  —

  One night, Patrizia invited me to a club in Coyoacán. I hardly ever go to clubs. I’m sixteen, which means that while girls my age can get in, most of the guys can’t. House parties, especially since all the houses have pools, are way more popular. But Coyoacán is an old colonial village, about twenty minutes south of the city. Its name means “place of the coyotes” or “place of the wells,” depending on who you ask, and it was once the seat of the Aztec empire. It’s where the Tepanec chief first welcomed the Spanish conquistadores, and where Cortes began his assault on the Aztec empire. It’s where Leon Trotsky lived and was murdered by Stalin’s agents, and where Frida Kahlo fell in love with Diego Rivera. It was the home of the great Mexican poet Octavio Paz and the oh-so-elegant queen of Mexican cinema, Dolores Del Rio. It’s still the place where writers and artists and actors like to live, and if my mother had not become so famous, it’s where my father said we would have lived too. When I was little, I used to imagine an alternate universe where we lived in a little Moroccan-style casita and my parents acted in local productions of classic plays. We don’t go to Coyoacán often, but it’s one of my absolute favorite places to hang out.

  Mexico City during the day can be like a hundred-degree hurricane: too hot, too many people, moving too fast through this vortex of time and space. But at night, the city cools down and slows down, especially on the weekends. My father said I could go out with Patrizia as long as Samir drove us and came along to chaperone, which was fine with me. I’d never known anyone who had been kidnapped, but we read about the kidnappings every day. Having Samir along made me feel safe, like nothing bad was going to happen.

  From the moment we piled into the black SUV, I was excited. As we rolled past the city limits, I cracked the windows and stared out at the stars peeking through the jacaranda trees, in their full, show-offy purple bloom. When we arrived in Coyoacán, it was still a little early to hit the club. The sun had barely set, so we decided to walk through the plazas. I love to see all the stalls where the artists have set up their work. There are a hundred copycats of the region’s most famous residents, so many of the paintings are done en el estilo de Frida o como Diego. I, for one, can never resist buying a three-hundred-peso Frida knockoff (around twenty US dollars). I have si
x in my room already. But when we walked through the stalls, Patrizia insisted on treating me to a copy of one I didn’t have yet, The Two Fridas.

  “Por mi mejor amiga,” she said, handing the painting to me. For my best friend.

  I gave her a hug. I was genuinely touched.

  After we put the painting in the car, I would have been just happy spending the rest of the night walking around the plaza. When I was a kid, we never visited the big outdoor markets like this. We couldn’t; my mother would have been bum-rushed. Every once in a while, I would visit Coyoacán or someplace like it with my dad and Sergio, but not so often that I ever got my fill of it.

  Walking through the town square, or zocalo, I understood why they called this particular part of the city the Barrio Magico. I never felt as deeply Mexican as I did at an open-air street fair. (Well, a professional soccer game was a close second.) Like a kid, I couldn’t get enough of the elotes, corn on the cob grilled over an open flame, then doused with mayo, lime, chili pepper, and grated cheese.

  “Wow, not afraid at all of the carbs,” Patrizia said disdainfully after I scarfed my first elote down.

  “Not at all,” I said. Then I ordered another.

  I ate the second one more slowly, savoring each bite as we walked toward the club. I loved the range of street performers, from the mimes and the clowns to those break-dancing to reggaeton beats. But what I loved best was the old couples dancing the bailes folkloricos. The men in their short-sleeved starched shirts, tucked neatly into their pants. The women were all like aging ballerinas: postures just so, gray hair swept into the most elegant buns, delicate feet clad in the softest leather shoes. Everything in their careful, considered motions seemed to say, “Slow down, slow down.” Patrizia, in contrast, made it clear that she needed me to Apurate, apurate!

  She had scoped out this new nightclub called the Big Bling, and all the cocktails had luxe, metallic touches. But their signature was champagne with twenty-four-karat-gold flecks.

  So let’s be real. My parents don’t want me to drink. But I figured a night out in Coyoacán was a special enough occasion that I could take a few sips of champagne without too much trouble. Especially with Samir there to keep a watchful eye.

  The club was on the garden level of this old mansion. You walked through a beautiful ballroom, then down the back steps to the garden, which was landscaped to look like one of those Alice in Wonderland English maze gardens. The paths were lit with fairy lights and torches. It was ah-mazing. Then I saw him.

  He was tall and skinny, almost a little too skinny. Except that he was perfect, so on him the skinniness was also perfect. He had black wavy hair that was just a little too long—somewhere between rock-star-cool and long enough for a man bun. He was wearing a white shirt, a tie, a dark vest, and jeans. And this is the thing: when we walked in, he seemed to smile at me as if he knew me.

  I was sure that he was smiling at someone else, so I took a quick glance around to see who he might be looking at.

  Then he pointed at me.

  I was so confused.

  I pointed at myself and mouthed, “Me?”

  He nodded and mouthed, “Yes. You.”

  I was so taken aback by the whole interaction that, well, I missed the first step down to the garden. Having bungled that first one, I went tumbling down the other seventeen. Did I mention that I was wearing a pair of three-inch heels that I had “borrowed” from my mother and that I was absolute crap at walking in? By the time I’d landed at the bottom of the steps, all I could hope was that I’d fallen on some sort of sacred Aztec burial ground and that the earth would open up and swallow me whole.

  Samir scooped me up and seated me at a nearby table, but not before Patrizia had snapped a photo of me, lying in a heap, holding on to my mother’s shoe with a broken heel as if it might have helped me catch my footing. “For future blackmail purposes,” she said, and smirked.

  Samir was examining my ankle and said, “No se, Cammi. Tal vez debo llamar un doctor.”

  Then, as if it was one of those crazy-coincidence moments in a telenovela, Handsome to the Point of Distraction showed up and said, “Soy un doctor….Well, I’m a medical student at UNAM.”

  Patrizia whipped around and flashed him one of her Instagram-famous smiles. “I’m Patrizia,” she said.

  He nodded, then turned to me. “What’s your name?”

  Patrizia laughed and said, “Tamila la Torpe.”

  “Torpe” means “clumsy” in Spanish, and she knew that when I was little, my brother used to call me Tamila la Torpe.

  “My name is Camilla,” I said, as Handsome examined my swelling ankle.

  “I’m Amadeo,” he said.

  Patrizia bent down and whispered in a faux-sexy voice loud enough for all of us to hear, “Ooooo, Amadeo, I’d like to play doctor with you.”

  Both Samir and Amadeo looked at her like she was nuts. But I was used to it.

  “It doesn’t look too bad,” Amadeo said, addressing Samir. “But if she can’t walk on it tomorrow, she should definitely see a doctor. It might be sprained.”

  Then he asked Samir, “Hey, man, can I talk to you privately for a second?”

  The two of them walked away from us.

  “What’s that about?” I wondered.

  “He’s probably gay,” Patrizia said dismissively, signaling the waiter.

  She ordered two champagnes “de oro”—laced with gold—and before Samir and Amadeo returned, our drinks had arrived.

  “Compliments of the house,” the waiter said, winking at me. “Sorry about your slip.”

  The wink did not go unnoticed by Patrizia. “What about being clumsy is such a turn-on?” she asked. “You do know that in this friendship, I’m the hot one.”

  This was something I did know. I was not in any way hot. I lived with one of the most beautiful actresses in the world—my mother. I had no interest in competing on the beauty front. But now it felt strange, strange in a good way, to be out and getting so much attention.

  —

  Amadeo and Samir returned, and Amadeo approached me. “Camilla…,” he began. Maldita sea, how I loved how he said my name.

  He handed me his phone, and I punched in the number to my cell.

  “I’ll call you,” he said.

  “I’ll look forward to it,” I said.

  “Rest that ankle,” he cautioned, smiling. Then he kissed me on the forehead.

  Patrizia watched the whole thing with a look of unmitigated confusion that matched the way I felt. Then she gulped down her champagne and drank mine down too. She was about to order another round when Samir said, “Okay, chicas, enough. Time to go.”

  In the car ride home, Patrizia turned belligerent. “I can’t believe you would go after Amadeo when you knew I liked him.”

  I was stunned. We’d met him at the same time. He’d smiled at me first, I thought. But what I said was, “How was I supposed to know that, Patti?”

  “You saw me flirting with him!”

  I wanted to say that she flirted with everybody. I wanted to explain that I’d spotted him first and that he was kinda sorta the reason I fell. But she was being such a nightmare that I kept my mouth shut.

  Samir dropped me off first, and when I got out of the car, I asked Patrizia for my Frida painting, but she wouldn’t give it to me.

  “No gifts for vendepatrias,” she said. No gifts for backstabbers.

  The next morning when I couldn’t stand on my ankle, my mother called our family doctor, Dr. Gomez. She came over, examined my ankle, declared it officially and completely sprained, and ordered me to a weekend of bed rest. I was just trying to decide what I was going to binge-watch on Netflix when my mother’s publicist called. She reported that I was on Instagram, the latest brat to be featured on #RKOMC. I grabbed my mother’s iPad, and there I was, sprawled on the floor, looking like a mess, clutching the shoe with the broken heel. The tag line read “Loca en su Louboutins.” It already had 697 likes.

  My mother looked
at the photo and said, “Wait! Are those my shoes?”

  Despite her posting my photo to Instagram, Patrizia and I remained friends. I also went out a few times with Amadeo. He was nineteen, premed. My parents thought he was a little old for me, but he was so buttoned-up and responsible that they let me go out with him as long as Samir stayed within shouting distance. My love life, so to speak, was pretty solid. But at home, things were rough.

  Back in Mexico, we had this greenhouse. It was as big as some people’s houses. There must have been more than five hundred plants in there. The greenhouse was my father’s haven, and the rare orchids he collected were his pride. One night, my parents came home from an awards show, and I could tell from the moment the front door opened that my mother had not won any of the awards she had been nominated for. At first there was just peace and the smells I loved. My mother’s perfume, the scent of my father—a mixture of cigars and the Bay Rum cologne he liked. Then came the symphony of screams that said all was not well. My mother was cursing in her high soprano voice. My father, his voice big and bold, was uttering assurances and compliments. “You are so beautiful and talented. You know how jealous people are. It’s not easy to be a big fish in a small pond. Everybody wants to put a hook in your mouth. This is why we should move to the United States. You need a bigger stage, cara mia.”

  “Cara mia” is Italian for “darling.” For some, Mexico is a romantic destination. But in Mexico, Italy is a land of allure, and certain phrases, such as “ciao” and “cara mia,” pepper our everyday speech. For those who can afford to, Italy is a favorite destination. Spanish and Italian are close enough that you can travel throughout the country and make your way. The food is divine, and of course the shopping—Gucci, Prada, Dolce & Gabbana—is splendid. We had been going to Italy on vacation for as long as I could remember.