Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Pata Negra

2022; Emerson College; Volume: 48; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/plo.2022.0088

2162-0903

Alexia Arthurs,

Latin American and Latino Studies

Pata Negra Alexia Arthurs (bio) Gabrielle said I was always pining over a white girl, which wasn’t true, except for that night, when I was in fact pining over a white girl named James. Though none of us were girls anymore. Gabrielle and I were twenty-nine. That’s what I hated about being close to someone who had known me since I was fourteen. I felt like I could never be anyone else to her. Or anyone else to me? Was I seeing myself through her eyes or seeing myself as myself because with her I was the truest version of me? No matter. We were in Mexico City, in a bar called Pata Negra, and Gabrielle was grinding against a black man on the dance floor. I rarely saw black people in Mexico City, except in neighborhoods like this one and the one next door, Roma Norte, where tourists, expats, and artistic, affluent Mexicans were plentiful. We’d been standing at the bar, sipping mezcal cocktails, admiring the bodies dancing to reggaeton. I noticed when the black man walked in. I watched as he made a beeline for my friend. My back against the bar, I watched them dance. Maybe everyone imagined what their friends were like in bed—the sounds they made, how they moved, the power dynamics of their fucking. I memorized the details Gabrielle had told me about what she liked: once, she said that she liked to have sex like a man threw her out the window and ran down the stairs to pick up her bruised body from the sidewalk and continued to fuck her, whatever that analogy meant. When we were twenty, I visited her in college. Deep in the closet, I refused to make anything of how I stared at her breasts when she undressed to hop in the shower. She kept saying she was on a diet since she’d gained twelve pounds, but it looked like she’d gained all of it in her breasts. That night, lying in bed next to her, I jilled off while she slept. I’ve always wondered whether she knew. Gabrielle, who would correct you if you called her Gabby with a “That’s not my name,” was the most self-assured person I knew. Once, she told me, “I know I’m not the cutest girl,” by way of an explanation when a man turned down the advances of a more conventionally beautiful woman at a party because he wanted to “chill” with Gabrielle. [End Page 23] But I found her beautiful too—her angular, freckled face, her long legs, and how her body curved at the best places. I knew without her telling me that her dancing partner wasn’t as tall as she liked, though she admired his broad chest and smooth, dark skin. They held each other in an easy way, talking as they swayed. I wondered what they were saying to each other. A man came up to me, tall and handsome, his English accented, probably an Argentinean. I shook my head. “I’m waiting for my friend,” I said. He moved on quickly. I caught Gabrielle looking at me, shaking her head because I was being antisocial. Pata Negra was suddenly packed with the usual hipster Mexicans, expats, and tourists. To my left, a British man with a face full of piercings was saying that Mexico City was to become the next fashion epicenter, but his date, an American white woman with a shaved head and big hoop earrings, disagreed, saying that the city had earthquakes too frequently to become the epicenter of anything. Just last week, I had stood in my bedroom doorway in the early hours of the morning, waiting for the building to stop shaking before my housemate and I ran down the five flights of stairs to join my neighbors in the street. I’d never felt the earth move before—it terrified and thrilled me. When it had seemed certain that the building wouldn’t fall, we went back to our beds. I ordered another drink. The British man and American woman were debating whether it was a good sign that...