Martha Hipley
Embrujada
Leti hardly ever stops, so when she sits down to talk you know she has some real shit to say. Anyone who says they don’t like small talk or girl talk or gossip or chisme is probably first and foremost a misogynist and possibly a misanthrope more broadly. At the very least, they don’t know anyone as interesting as Leti. No one wants to hear about how hard it was to change your internet plan to the one that includes all the sports channels, or how your last online date was a quiet disappointment, or how that streaming show starts out really slow but is worth it if you watch the whole season. I don’t even want to hear my own petty, stupid thoughts, so why would I care about yours? But tell me too much about your mother’s nasty medical procedure or how you saw your cousin’s husband kissing someone younger in the Sanborns on Reforma, and I will pay for a round of beers just to go home feeling lucky that I’ve never had a cyst on my rear or proud that I’ve never disgraced my family in a department store. Leti always knows who is cheating on whom, and better yet, she probably has a story about taking a bus through Sri Lanka and ending up in a funeral procession. That’s the kind of girl talk I want to hear.
So Leti texts me after she gets home from backpacking around Europe and asks me if I want to go salsa dancing. I never want to go salsa dancing, but I always want to have a tequila and soda. The salsa club that Leti likes best, the one in Centro, has two-for-one drinks on Thursday nights and no cover before ten. If you want to spend time with her, it usually means going rock climbing or mountain biking or taking a jiu-jitsu class, so going dancing as a pretense for hearing about her trip sounds easy. She’s been gone for nearly a month—she loves to quit a job and travel while she lines up a new one—and she’s told me nothing about this trip. She’s too enlightened to use social media, so I haven’t even seen the usual teasing photo of a disembodied hand holding a croissant against a cobblestone backdrop with some pink text that reads “Paris, je t’aime.” I’m excited. I even put on a little makeup and a skirt.
I meet her at the club, and we begin the usual routine of everyone lining up to dance with Leti while I enjoy my drinks in peace. There’s a live band on Thursdays, and for an hour she spins nonstop to the classics while I make myself pleasantly buzzed. Finally, the band takes a break, and so does Leti. A DJ takes the stage, the dance floor clears, and I wonder why they can’t turn the music down just a little bit for us to talk for a goddamn minute.
“So tell me everything,” I say. “You started in Portugal, right?”
And she says, “Yes, but I have to ask you, what do you know about Bruges?”
We are both nearly screaming over the buzz of the speakers, so at first I think she says, “What do you know about brujas?” and I say, “Brujas?” and she says, “Yeah, the city in Brussels!” and I say, “Oh, like the movie.”
“What movie?” she screams, and I start to tell her about the film with Colin Farrell, and how it’s maybe his best work because he is so handsome that he has to be very stupid or very cruel or very pathetic in a film to be taken seriously, and even though In Bruges is a comedy, he gets to be all three at the same time. And Leti nods along and asks what other movies he has been in because she doesn’t recognize his name, and I can’t think of anything other than Daredevil thanks to the tequila. So I tell her just to get back to her story.
She tells me that Bruges was one of the last stops on her trip, and after a month of traveling, she had fallen into a lapse in vigilance that can only happen when you spend too much time in those amusement park towns where the trash cans beep a “thank you” jingle when you throw away your coffee cup and every hill has a little castle where surely a fairy queen still lives. She would never walk home alone from this club in Mexico City tonight, but in Sintra and Arles and even Amsterdam she felt like she had slipped into some other reality where she could go out for a drink alone without imagining her own brutal murder.
In Bruges, she says, she had splurged on a queen suite in a decent hotel along the canal after so many weeks in hostels. One night, after a heavy dinner of stew and potatoes and a few glasses of wine, she decided to walk along the water to clear her head before bed. It was one of those perfect nights, those Eat, Pray, Love nights that even someone who wouldn’t be caught dead reading Eat, Pray, Love has to admit makes life feel magical. She was a real Disney princess, strolling along the cobblestones, humming a love song to herself.
She was maybe a few blocks from her hotel when a little black kitten hopped down from a windowsill and rubbed up against her ankles. As she tells me this, the band shuffles back onto the stage and I glance around the room, sending my psychic hatred to anyone who might come near to ask Leti to dance. She continues.
She bent down to pet the cat. It had that stringy, skinny look of a street cat, but its fur was clean and soft. It purred as she scratched behind its ears and then down its spine to that little spot on its back where most animals always want to be scratched. She slipped into one of those wine-drunk vacation fantasies: what if she took the cat back to the hotel, what if she got a little carrier, what if she jumped through all the hoops of paperwork and fees it would take to bring this perfect, magical cat back to Mexico? What if she named it Guisado for the stew she had just eaten, what if she named it León, what if she named it Franky? What if she moved to Bruges? She was falling in love with the cat, with Bruges, with herself, when suddenly the cat contorted in fear, hissed, and pulled away. Leti stood up in surprise. Her head spun, and her vision blurred from the wine and her sudden movements. The cat was gone. The city lights were gone. A woman stood next to the canal, staring at Leti.
“Maybe I shouldn’t tell you this,” says Leti, and she takes the hand of this guy who is always there to dance on Thursdays. I can never remember his name, but I remember that Leti thinks he is cute. I let him spin her away. As the band plays a song with a fast beat and sad lyrics, I wonder what she shouldn’t tell me.
At the end of the song, Leti’s crush walks her back to our table and invites me to dance out of sheer politeness. Leti is already on the floor with someone else, so I take his hand just to avoid another three minutes of lonely mania, wondering what Leti started to say but didn’t. He tries his best — he’s a decent lead — but I still trip over my own feet, caught up in the way that Leti shivered as she mentioned the woman, and the way she seems to be scanning the club now, as though she is expecting someone besides the regular crew of weeknight dancers. She looks flushed and unfocused, and as the song ends, I grab her hands and pull her back to the table. I flag a waiter for another round of drinks.
“You said you saw a woman?” I ask.
“Not a woman,” she says. “I don’t know what it was. But it looked like a woman, I guess. I think it’s bad to talk about these things; it makes them real.”
But I push, and she tells me that the woman was tall and thin, with long, yellow hair and skin that was paler even than the palest women she had seen anywhere in the European winter. She wore a white dress, the kind of plain, essential dress that I can imagine on a Zara rack yesterday or on a seamstress’s lap three hundred years ago. She looked at Leti with eyes that were so milky gray that Leti thought they might have cataracts until she could feel how clearly and fiercely they focused on her own eyes. She heard a voice in her head say, “Come with me.”
I jump as the waiter returns and places two drinks between us. Leti, who I’ve never seen drunk, just bubbly and buzzed, downs half of hers in one gulp.
“I could feel a force, like someone reaching out to grab me,” she says, and she reaches across the table to grab my sweater right by my heart and pull it towards her. “She was pulling me towards her, and I felt her saying, ‘Follow me. Follow me.’” She lets go and picks up her drink again. She begins to take a sip and then pushes it away.
She tells me that she could feel the woman, whatever she was, pulling at her, beckoning Leti over and over without ever opening her thin, grey mouth. The woman turned slowly and began to walk down a little dirt path that led under a bridge. Leti felt a strange hot flush and began to let the woman pull her along, first one foot, then the other. She felt as though all she had ever wanted in life was to walk behind the woman, to follow her under the bridge, to follow her into the darkness. She finally reached the edge of the cobblestone and stumbled a little onto the dirt path. As her left foot touched the soil, another voice then screamed behind her: “Do not go!”
She felt like a bucket of cold water had been dumped over her head. She looked over her shoulder towards the new voice and saw nothing. When she looked back to the bridge, the strange woman was gone. She ran away from the canal and down a well-lit street until she jumped almost in front of a taxi to get the driver’s attention. She climbed into the backseat and slammed the door. He laughed when she told him her hotel address. He asked her if she really wanted to pay for such a short drive. He drove her the three blocks to the hotel door and waited, at her request, until she was safely inside.
“I didn’t sleep all night,” she says, “and I barely made it to the train station on time in the morning, but the minute I was in my seat on the way to Paris, it all felt so stupid.” Leti laughs and almost looks like herself. She pulls her drink close again and takes a sip. “It’s stupid, right?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” I say. I think a lot of stupid thoughts, and I do a lot of stupid things. I finish my drink and want another. I wave to the waiter again.
“After that, everything was a blur,” she says. “From Paris, I flew back here, and then I started my new job on Monday. I haven’t had time to think about it, but when I do, I think I see her. I see that white dress. I think I can hear her again. So stupid!”
“Well, you could always go for a limpia,” I say. I try to laugh.
“What if I told you I already went for one? I know, I know, it’s crazy! But I felt so strange when I landed, I dropped off my bags and went to see this woman in my neighborhood who reads cards and sometimes does that kind of thing. She said she couldn’t keep her away; she doesn’t really know what kind of magic they have in Bruges, but she said these things can only hurt you if you let them.” She flashes her wrist at me and reveals a cheap string bracelet with a little glass bead of an evil eye. “She also charged me a hundred and fifty pesos for this.”
I watch as Leti shoos away another potential dance partner, and I wonder how anyone could make her do something she didn’t want to do. “So you just say no?” I ask. “That’s not so bad.”
“Did you ever smoke?” she asks. “I used to smoke a pack a day, if you can believe it. I keep thinking I see her, and it feels like when you haven’t smoked in years, and you never want to smoke again. You think of the way it made all your clothes smell, and the way you always felt out of breath, and how bad it felt when you couldn’t have one, and how good it felt when you quit and started doing yoga, and how good your skin looks now, and all that. But then you see someone with a cigarette outside a bar, in just that right kind of moment, and all you want in the world is to ask them for one.”
“So what will you do when you see her again?” I ask.
“The same thing as with a cigarette. I’ll just keep moving. What else?”
Martha Hipley is a writer and filmmaker from Baltimore, Maryland who lives and works in Mexico City. Her fiction has been published in Maudlin House, The New Limestone Review, and surely magazine, among others. When not writing, she enjoys training as a triathlete and boxer.
Banner Art:
Photo by Ezgi Deliklitas, Unsplash, 2022
