1.      

Nestled between Relojeria Sinaloa and Servicios Garza, below a sunken power line, was a small café. It had mint tiles, wooden chairs and table, and a red bench with circular pillows. A painting of the Port of Altamira hung on the east wall.

Because it was built on clay, the café was slowly sinking. The monthly earthquakes didn’t help. You had to duck to enter and leave because the sidewalk hung above the café floor by three and a half inches.

A girl, maybe twenty-five, sat at the far right table, with a cellphone, screen shattered, in her lap. The horizontal stripes on her t-shirt accentuated her belly and matched her aubergine lipstick. She watched a YouTube video. When she laughed, she kicked the chair in front of her and reflexively apologized to nobody. She had bangs. Her name was Delfina.

2.

“You’ll get a disease.”

It was Tenoch’s duty to remove the lizards that entered through the hole near the yellowing kitchen. He’d pick them up with his forefinger and thumb, lay them head-first in a wooden basket, and brush his fingers against his apron at awkward angles to rid them of limo. Once he finished, he’d ask Charro, the elderly dishwasher, to help him lift the sewer out front and shake the lizards into the green water. Tenoch would do this when the café opened and just before it closed. He had grown so accustomed to the job that, to Patli’s disapproval, he eventually decided to go without gloves.

“I’m only touching the tail.” Tenoch turned to face Patli, whose back still faced him as she twisted coffee into a loose porta filter. The green lizard swung from his fingers and grasped air for stability.

“Look.” Patli didn’t look. The lizard pendulumed. Tenoch gave up trying to prove his cleanness and collected more reptiles.

“I just saw you pick one up by the head.”

“No you didn’t.”

She did.

“I did.”

3.

Patli and Tenoch met each other eleven years ago at a Christmas party. Their fathers were both legislators in the city chamber, and although they hailed from opposing political parties and fought doggedly — once asked to leave the room for a shouting match over a tax cut— they happily bonded over their children, just a year apart from one another, outside session.

Tenoch attended the British school in Coyoacán. He was considered somewhat popular and had a particular affinity for trick-taking card games. Patli attended the French school a few miles north in Santa Maria La Ribera and only knew of Tenoch from her father and mutual friends.

Patli hoped he would bring his famed cards to the party, maybe teach her a game or two, so that she could brag to her friends that they were cerca and that he taught her the basics of, perhaps, Écarté or Piquet. It would be a fun and interesting story for them, she thought. Telling it would satisfy her.

4.

That especially polluted morning was also a slow one for the café. Thus far their only customer was Delfina, who normally came in the early afternoon and stayed until an hour before closing. Delfina never ordered Patli’s sweet corn tamales served in a damp banana leaf, Patli’s favorite dish to make. Patli didn’t like her for that — did she mention she also didn’t like her for using the wifi for hours on end, only ordering drip and a bread roll?— but she mostly didn’t like her for the way she looked at Tenoch and the way Tenoch looked at her.

She noticed this on the first day of the lizard problem, back when Tenoch wore gloves, and when, after he had collected twenty-ish lizards in the basket from the hole in the kitchen, he tripped over Delfina’s sneakered foot and spilled the lizards all over the mint tiles.

Patli screeched. Tenoch sighed. Delfina pushed herself out of her corner, flipped the bottom-half of her t-shirt into a makeshift pocket, sniped the lizards that scampered near her by the tail, and laid them in her cloth enclosure. Tenoch thought this was a brilliant idea despite having the basket and copied her in the adjacent corner. When Delfina saw the reticent café owner do that, she laughed a little. Tenoch laughed, too. Charro swiped an empanada from the refrigerator and ate it quickly.

Once they exterminated their respective corners, they focused their efforts underneath the red bench. Patli generously handed Tenoch a flashlight. It was hard to see under there.

“Nothing.” The first word Delfina spoke to Tenoch that didn’t include café. Tenoch agreed and thanked Delfina for her help. They both emptied their t-shirt pouches of lizards into the sewer out front.

Tenoch got back to cleaning the floors and reflected. He realized he didn’t expect that spontaneity from Delfina, and that, because of her spontaneity, she was beautiful. He wondered if he should make a few more mistakes around her so he could talk to her again. He wanted to know what she was watching so intently on her phone.

He also thought about how her eyes weren’t completely caca brown, as Patli told him, but a tiny bit yellow.

They didn’t speak for a month but they looked at each other warmly, Tenoch from the sink and Delfina from her seat on the bench. Delfina liked his abundant black hair, and Tenoch liked her spontaneity and yellow eyes. Patli knew all of this.

5.

Among greasy cabinet ministers and their pearled wives, Patli and Tenoch talked about their names.

They both had Aztec names, and they realized this was likely because their fathers had entered politics just before they were born and wanted to seem like bona fide nationalists to their constituents. That made sense to the children, from a political standpoint at least, and they didn’t mind it. They sipped their colas and scanned the bureaucrats before them.

“My dad tells me you like cards.” Tenoch nodded and traced a vein in his palm with his pinky.

 “Did you bring them?” Tenoch said yes after a few seconds and they found a leather couch wide enough so that they could sit on opposite ends and treat the middle like a table. The politicians moved like human chess-pieces around them.

“What do you want to play?”

“Écarté.”

“Do you know how?”

“No.”

Tenoch tried to teach Patli. Although she pretended to understand, she didn’t. She asked questions that made it seem like she was following along, but when he asked if she was ready to play, she said she needed to check-in with her mother and disappeared. Easy escape; after some thought he figured he would do the same. Tenoch shuffled his cards, thought of Thalía’s golden collarbones longingly, and watched his father make small-talk with the Minister of Logistics.

6.

Tenoch and Patli absolutely hated when Charro used steel wool against the chicken-filling pan. It didn’t bother the old candy vendor because he could hear only Tenoch’s voice and little else. Patli said nothing and ground her teeth deeper with each metal scratch.

She was relieved by the sound of a wooden chair scratching against tiles. Delfina was leaving.

“Goodbye, Delfina.” Tenoch had never said that before.

Delfina dug through her pocket and tossed a few extra pesos on the table and held eye contact with Tenoch. Her smile was milky. A weight had been lifted from Tenoch’s skinny shoulders.

7.

Like all children from connected families in Mexico City, Tenoch and Patli enrolled at the same university on the other side of the city and reconnected at a party their second official day of classes while they were both high. They didn’t remember what happened then, but they knew they shared a slobbery kiss and phone numbers, hung unto each other, and vowed to meet again, perhaps at the Espacio Escultórico for a walk. Patli didn’t mention the Écarté incident five years ago. She didn’t mention she never forgot it, nor that it kindled her insomnia from time to time.

Patli and Tenoch saw each other at parties every two weeks. Tenoch was a library science major, so he spent a lot of time at the library, of course, reading and smoking everything that crossed his path. Patli was the only blonde economics major. She studied this because her father was affiliated with a bank and could get her a high-ranking position if she did well. The only goal Patli had after her four years was the ability to shop without looking at the price tags, so she studied feverishly.

Each time Patli and Tenoch saw each other at a party, they kissed for a while. It never went further than a kiss until a weird thing happened when their close mutual friend fell out of a window at a party and died. Startled, Patli slept in Tenoch’s dorm room that night, and they did everything they could think of to each other before they fell asleep.

8.

“I think I love her.” Tenoch said this as he gathered the lizards for the second time that day. He didn’t have to say it softly because the car horns on Reforma sang so loudly that Delfina wouldn’t hear a word. In fact, he had to raise his voice just so Patli, who seasoned the chicken-filling only a few feet away, could hear him.

 “I want to be with her.”

“Then go.” Tenoch looked at Patli befuddled. He removed his apron.

“Are you angry?”

“Will you still work here?”

“On the weekends.”

“Then no. Go.” Tenoch picked up the lizard basket and left the kitchen. Patli turned her head away as Tenoch slid his hand behind Delfina’s neck and touched his nose to hers. Delfina wrapped her headphones around her shattered phone and met Tenoch and Charro at the sewer out front, laughing as the green creatures splashed into the brown water.

Patli wondered if they corresponded before and planned to ask her permission — it seemed too calculated — but she didn’t care. Tenoch was absent, and she suspected he wouldn’t come to the café on the weekends, which was fine. She and Charro could run things better on their own. Lizards and all.

9.

By the end of their four years, Patli and Tenoch still weren’t dating, but they knew they’d be spending the rest of their lives with each other. Maybe not kids, but certainly living together or something like that.

They were also all each other had. Their fathers, implicated in a corruption scandal, fled to South America. Their mothers reluctantly tagged along. Their friends stopped talking to them for many reasons.

Tenoch asked the provost if he and Patli’s diplomas could be sent by mail instead of going to graduation and scoured Roma for property while retail rent was still barato.

Tenoch tried to hold Patli’s hand, but she placed it behind her neck instead.

10.

Tenoch moved into Delfina’s blue apartment in Zona Rosa after a few nights at the Buenavista Motel. It was now Wednesday. On Sunday he left Patli.

Tenoch found out interesting things about Delfina from talking to her for three days. How, for instance, she was an assistant school teacher — teachers had been on strike for five months, so this would explain why she spent so much time in the café —  but longed to be one of the celebrity make-up artists she watched on YouTube everyday, evidenced by her drawn-on eyebrows and thick glitter in the corner of her eyelids. Delfina could only sleep if she stuck her head in the nook between Tenoch’s left neck and shoulder. She’d leave a track of silver glitter every time.

Delfina and Tenoch slept a lot together, in both ways, and walked through parks when they were bored of sleeping. They didn’t visit the café.

Tenoch suspected Patli would say she didn’t need him at the café, but he wanted to help with the lizards. Patli nor Charro didn’t understand the lizards like he did. They were probably struggling.

11.

“The clay is especially soft beneath this building, so there have been problems,” the landlord said. His lips were chapped, and Patli was almost certain he was from Aguascalientes. He also said the building had sunk a whole inch below the sidewalk just that year, but the rent was good, Roma was on the up and up, and all the brewing supplies were included — that made choosing the purpose of the space easier — so it didn’t really matter to them. If anything, it would make the café all the more memorable and would help their business.

They decided that Patli would cook and brew the coffee and Tenoch would do the decorating. Later that month the couple hired Charro, the raisiny candy vendor on Reforma, to help with the dishes.

That red bench, believe it or not, was Tenoch’s idea. He also chose the green tiles and wooden furniture with the circular pillows. In a few weeks he would hang up a painting of the Port of Altamira on the east wall, a late, lopsided addition.

Patli, meanwhile, acquainted herself with the silver machinery; it came naturally to her. The espresso machine was just beat-up enough that it left a few grounds on the bottom of the cup. Just the way she liked it. That, alongside the sweet tamales, would be the café’s marca. Patli had never been an expressive person, but this made her particularly excited.

After a few days, they opened the café for business and decided that it would do for a while.

12.

The lizards were, in fact, getting on Patli’s nerves. Badly. Sometimes she’d skip the afternoon sweep and lock up early. The café was strangely becoming more popular, so Patli’s limbs were more tired, and she simply didn’t have the energy to catch a score of tiny lizards at the end of the day. Charro didn’t help all that much. The lizards also reminded her of Tenoch.

One morning when the air in Roma was especially brown and stale and stubborn and Charro was off with his nephews, Patli unlocked the gate to the café and saw that the lizards multiplied by at least three and were scattered across the tiles and walls motionless. She yelped, walked out the door, pulled herself together, walked back into the café, walked across the tiles into the kitchen without sending lizards guts everywhere, got a broom, and swept the lizards — who didn’t fight back — into the wooden basket. She had to empty the basket’s contents into the sewer every ten minutes to prevent overflow.

An hour later she finished and opened the café to passerby. No one came and Patli was sure that all of Mexico City somehow knew the lizard problem was especially bad that day. That was fine because Patli had never been this angry with herself. She brewed herself a drip, sat across from Delfina’s spot on the bench in the corner and angled herself in such a way that she could be on her feet in a moment’s notice if a customer were to come inside.

Patli had been staring at the bench for thirteen minutes before she felt a sudden impulse to itch her ear. She reached her forefinger to inspect and instead of feeling waxy skin, she felt something slinky. Her thumb joined her forefinger and together they lifted a rogue lizard from her concha. They caught it by the tail but rearranged so that they were holding it by the neck. It was so tiny that Palti could see every fine detail with only her right eye.

Patli squeezed it a little and watched as its jaw opened. Like a puppet, this green thing. It had yellow spots on its tail. Dumb and poisonous, perhaps.

Patli went into the kitchen, still holding the lizard, and brought out a knife in her left hand. This would do. She grabbed the lizard around its abdomen and raised it up as high as she could. One of her knees nestled the bench for stability.

Patli adjusted the grip of her knife, then adjusted it back to where it was because it was more comfortable, and stabbed the lizard into the wall. It hung there, right next to the painting of the Port of Altamira. It was only then that she fixed its lopsidedness.

The lizard bled light green and you could only see that a lizard was pinned to the café wall through its heart by a knife only if you looked very closely.

Patli washed her hands. She organized the spice cabinet a little and started the bean filling for the empanadas.

13.

Friday evening, Tenoch decided his relationship was too abrupt and that he was no longer comfortable with this young and heavily-makeuped woman. The teacher strike had also ended, and she was preparing to resume her job. He was anxious because he wanted to go back to the café the next day to help out. It wasn’t that he missed Patli.

He also didn’t know how he could tell Delfina all of this. So he didn’t.

14.

“I want to come home.”

“Okay. Did you tell her?”

“No.”

“Come tomorrow.”

Bastard.

15.

The rest of the café was clean aside from the lizard-blood on the east wall. It had been there for days now, yet Charro didn’t notice. Patli didn’t want Tenoch to see slumped reptile when he came home in an hour. It would offend him deeply, so she removed the knife and let the lizard fall onto the green bench.

The lizard made a cracking sound upon impact. Ya seco? Patli picked it up, curious to see how hollow it was. Very. She could turn its whole body into flakes if she closed her hand.

16.

Twenty minutes before the café was to open and Tenoch was to come home, Patli stared at the lizard on the edge of the sink as she ground coffee beans with a rolling pin. Tenoch, for some reason, loved when the grinder malfunctioned and Patli had to grind the coffee beans with a rolling pin, and she wanted to make his return special.

Patli placed the dried lizard atop of the coffee beans and stroked what remained of its skinny tail. Demasiado difícil, so Patli placed the lizard beside the coffee grinds and smacked it with the pin. It broke like a croissant.
 

Then she rolled the coffee grinds, let them extend into the dried lizard flake pile, and mixed and rolled them together. A minute later the rusty espresso machine was burping and snorting and spitting out Tenoch’s dark liquid.

17.

Patli had a sweet corn empanada and drip ready for Tenoch for when he walked into the café. She told Charro to leave for an hour and stood behind the chair closest to the entrance.

Tenoch ducked as he entered — the café sunk a little more in his time away — and sat in the chair before Patli.

He looked up at her with syrup eyes.

“Drink, my love.”

And so he did.