Earthquake in Mexico
If you continue the white line to the coast it points right at Salina Cruz.
It was around ten that night when we sobered up a bit, eating a large meal in a dark restaurant. Joel had sent his friend home, happy and thanking us for financing his next few weeks. Robin was looking in her large purse for something when she discovered an unfamiliar piece of paper, folded up. She opens the note and reads it, with a serious look on her face then hands it to Louie. He passes it to me and Joel.
It was a brief note from Sanita, begging us, imploring us, to get her out of the nightmare situation she was stuck in. She had slipped it into Robin’s purse that morning, during the haircut. We were just finishing our meals and felt somewhat embarrassed we hadn’t discovered it sooner, in our drunken afternoon. But after a brief discussion we decided to head back to the motel right away and decipher this mystery and cryptic plea for help.
We went straight to Robin and Louie’s room and then sent Robin to knock on Sanita’s door. We knew she was in the first room of the hall. There was no one else there, except the owners, across from her at the same end. A moment later Robin was leading Sanita by the hand to us. She was crying and had a large, fresh, red and black bruise on her left eye.
We sat her on the bed and huddled around. She told us that a few hours earlier she expressed her desire to her Argentinian companion that she wanted to leave and go back to Dallas and her mother. Then he smacked her in the eye, off the seat of the picnic table into the sand, without a word, and resumed sullenly drinking his beer. She also said he wouldn’t be back until two or three in the morning and in no condition to do anything but fall on the bed face down and start snoring.
She told us she’d met him that summer in Dallas, that he was in the ‘import-export’ business but also dealt cocaine. He was busted in Dallas but out on bail with a trial date ahead. This is when she met him, in a bar.
They had a brief affair and he told her he wasn’t going to face a trial and jail. He was from a rich family in Argentina and had business connections from here to there. He was going to travel through Mexico and then on to Argentina and wanted her to come with him, to a rich and easy life, full of vacations and business trips. She eagerly accepted.
This was the late summer of 1985. They were staying in a high-rise hotel in Veracruz on the morning of September 19, still in bed and just waking up when the 8.1 earthquake hit. She told us the building swayed like a tree in the wind and they thought they were going to die. But it was the shacks and hovels that poles that toppled down, along with five thousand poor souls.
Most telephone communication was down throughout the country for months. He was unable to contact any friends in Argentina and took her by bus to this hole in Salina Cruz where he knew the motel owners well and some local merchants, buying colorful hammocks and other goods there on many previous trips. His credit was excellent, and he could wait for money from home, pay the bills and travel back.
But as weeks and months passed with the phone lines still down, their relationship grew strained. Sanita couldn’t call her parents for an airplane or bus ticket home. He took to drinking more every day and grew angry at everything, to the point of giving her the last of several black eyes that afternoon.
We didn’t need any more pleading on her part after hearing this story. The only question was ‘how to do it’ without a violent confrontation. He didn’t have a car and we did. He didn’t even have any cash left, as Sanita told us she couldn’t even poach a dime from him for a collect call to her father. At this point she got up and peeked out the curtained window, and Robin did the same. We’d all been seated on the bed through this whole, fascinating story, Robin right next to her, holding her hand. You could see the beach from the window and there he was, a lone silhouette, sitting at the picnic table and facing the ocean, his back lit up by the few light bulbs inside the shack behind him, powered from a line run down the slope to work the cooler for the cold beers. It was an eerie scene, verifying everything she said. From then on one of us got up every few minutes to check and see if he was still there.
At this point I moved in and sat beside her, to comfort her. Louie and I assured her we would take her away with us, in the car. We’d leave at 4 a.m. when he’d be out of it. All she had to do was pack her bags. We sent Joel home telling him to meet us in four hours, at the car, with his bag packed for the trip. It was now near midnight. The thrill of this unfolding adventure and intrigue kept us up and talking another hour, like excited children. Robin did most of the peeking and now I did most of the talking, assuring her she’d be safe with us and that we had all the funds and means to get her safely back home.
Sanita crept quietly back to her room around one a.m. to pack and hide a suitcase under her bed. I told her to do it ‘quietly’ because we didn’t want the motel owners, an older couple, to guess that anything was up if they were awake, because they were Alex’s friends, not her’s. My mind was racing with a million details. I was already half-smitten. Alex was still on the beach drinking, which was a good sign, as the more he drank the deeper he’d be passed out when we made our move.
Louie and Robin and I talked on for another hour, about the strangeness of this whole situation. Then I retired to my room to pack my bag and lay down for a few winks, before the four o’clock alarm went off.
