Busybody, Part I

When we arrived in the city Coyote tried going about our apartment hunt using newspapers and the internet and telephoning strangers. We had very little luck, so he resorted to the good old facebook to continue the search. Within a few hours of sending out the message we had an appointment to meet with a friend's neighbor, who was renting an apartment in our friend’s building.

The place is perfect. The building is beautiful and well-maintained, a few blocks from the Metrobus stop and less than a block from the market, where I am happily ripped off on my produce purchases, still cheap compared to the Bay, even with the special güera pricing. Coyote thinks it's like living in a small town, with the plaza down the street full of promenading citizens on the weekends and the possibility of living automobile-free without much suffering. I think it's like living in a small town that has a population density of 3 people per square foot and is surrounded by the world's biggest city. It's great.

The place is furnished with the owner's old belongings. She lived here while they remodeled her own apartment, downstairs, in 1985. When it was time to move back, she decided to refurnish her place and leave her 70s-era furniture behind. It's all painstakingly maintained and inventoried, with forty-year-old French cooking utensils and groovy orange sofas and walls. I feel like I'm living at grandma's house, and it's a peaceful, easy feeling.

As soon as we signed the contract the owner, Agathe, started spilling her gossip guts. "Well, your apartment used to belong to the man who lives across from you, Al, when he first married his ex-wife. I tease him--I say it was their love nest, and he gets so angry--what love???--he says to me. But then they bought the place across from it and moved in there, and I bought their place. Well, his ex-wife, have you seen her? She is a red-headed banshee...do not talk to her if she tries to stop you. She lives upstairs now. Well, his ex-wife, she had children from another marriage, twin girls, Al was her third husband, and they bought the apartment above yours for the girls. Those girls threw the craziest parties. There were hypodermic needles everywhere, people passed out in the stairwell, it was horrible. Now a very nice person lives there, very quiet, doesn't bother anyone. But watch out for the redhead. She is crazy."

I met Al myself one morning while doing laundry on the roof. He was very nice, and told me his life story, sans wives, in the thirty minutes we chatted. I wasn't surprised when a red-headed little woman appeared and followed Al back into his workshop after he finished talking to me. If you decide to live in the same building with your ex, there must be some contact still.

I was surprised when I spied her through the window at his kitchen sink, doing his dishes. "Coyote! Al´s ex still cleans up after him!" My investigation continued and the story grew more and more intriguing. I would see Al arrive home late with the redhead, I would see her leaving his apartment early in the morning, and even with these facts, I was blind to what was really going on. That is, until the day Coyote surprised our landlady talking with Al one morning. Agathe jumped back into her apartment and Al ran to his car as the redhead descended the steps behind Coyote. It finally hit me that Al and his wife are, even if they may be divorced, very much living in some sort of domestic union. In the same apartment.

Our landlady's ideas about who is sleeping where in the building are quite vivid and, it would seem, laughable. One night Coyote's sister came over to visit. He met her downstairs and, as they climbed the stairs together, noticed our landlady looking out her cracked door. When he passed by a little later, alone, she asked him pointedly how his wife was doing. Apparently the Coyote family resemblance isn't strong enough to give away the boring reality of her perceived soap opera.

And while I can count on her to keep Coyote in line, she does her part to let me know how to act too. One day when we delivered the rent she had us come in and have a seat, graciously. She took off the surgical mask she wears most of the time to let the gossip flow unobstructed, and slipped in the fact that she had heard me vacuuming the other day. This was really a chance to find out whether we'd hired a maid without taking her recommendation. When she found out that I was, in fact, the one who had cleaned up after myself, she said that she thought it must have been an inexperienced maid because of the way I kept whipping the vacuuming around and causing a racket. "I thought, oh, Julie must be angry!" I smiled and decided not to say a word, hoping not to fuel any fires that she had burning in her gossipsmith. Since she didn't get a reaction out of me she continued, "It was okay, I wasn't asleep or anything, I just thought you must have been mad." Still nothing, so she continued. "Oh, and one other thing, it hasn't happened again, so it's not a problem, but ten days ago, in the morning, you wore high heels while you got ready to leave. I kept hearing you walking all over the place. I almost went up to ask whether you were going or what." She almost laughed, and I definitely didn't. She offered Coyote a book he had picked up off her dining table to browse through, and complimented his shirt.

When we moved in Agathe gave us a list of "suggestions" for how to take care of the apartment. For example, we should turn off the lights when we're not using them. She even went over the list point by point, making sure we understood. The bathroom is equipped with an exhaust fan. It is advisable to only use it for fifteen minute intervals. I looked up at her after this point, and must have looked inquisitive because she rushed to explain (her explanations are like video recordings of an avalanche rewound and played over and over and over again) that it makes noise, that it might bother the woman upstairs, but that the woman upstairs actually seems very nice, that when Al’s ex-wife's twins lived there it was awful, but that still, fifteen minutes is the best, just in case the neighbor upstairs gets bothered by the sound.

I initially understood that she was trying to help us make nice with our neighbors. Now I believe she didn't want us to bother her with the fan but, for some reason, is unable to say so. The other day when Coyote went downstairs to pay the rent she spent the obligatory twenty minutes that every Agathe encounter implies recapping Al’s ex-wife's reaction to the party we threw on September 15, celebrating the bicentennial of Mexican Independence. According to Agathe, at midnight the redhead called her on the phone to tell her that people were out in the hallway making noise. Agathe claims that she defended us, telling the redhead that Mexico was turning two hundred, not two, and that people were going to celebrate. She then proceeded to show Coyote a copy of the condo contract, which specifies that noise in the hallway is prohibited after one A.M, which means we were well within our rights at midnight. She then went on to explain that the redhead had paid her a visit that very day, asking for the contract. This is all taking place over a week after the party, in whose aftermath we'd been quiet as the worms at the bottom of the mezcal bottle.

"She said she only wanted the copies for Lázaro in number three, but if she slips them under your door you'll know it was her. And another thing, look right here, it says that pets are prohibited, so if they give you any trouble you tell them that you can make noise until one A.M. and that they are breaking the rule with their little dog."

The very next day the redhead did approach me, while I was bent over picking up spilled papaya seeds off the kitchen floor and chatting with Coyote. "¡Oigan!" she hollered, and I stood up to see who was there. She was waving one of Coyote's socks, and wondered whether we had dropped it when bringing the wash down from the roof. We smiled at each other as she passed it through the open kitchen window. This is the extent of my contact with the redheaded banshee.