Habitus

David Lida

by David Lida · 08/26/10

Inside her room in a one-story brick compound in Tepepan, Carla puts the final touches on her makeup before leaving for work. Already dressed and made up, Alín, who lives in another room in the house and works with Carla, awaits her. Carla’s room is decorated with a collection of diminutive teddy bears, dolls, frogs (“They’re for good luck,” she says), fans, a wall hanging of the Last Supper, and an altar to a saint known in Tacoaleche, Zacatecas, as the Child of the Doves.

They wear long skirts and blouses. “We don’t like anything vulgar,” says Carla. They buy all their clothes in Xochimilco. “I used to like to shop in the Centro, but now I’m scared. There’s every kind of delinquent over there.” They work as waitresses and hostesses in a beer joint called La Vicenta.

On the wall there is a photo of Carla with a smiling client. —Is he your boyfriend? —Are you kidding? I only see him in the cantina. He’s married.

Alín, who is deaf-mute, produces some photo albums, principally from before she began to dress as a woman. She was a muscular youth with a masculine appearance. There are a couple of photos of her as a woman in the cantina, next to a man whose eyes are either very dreamy or dazed from beer. She makes a gesture in the form of a heart, indicating that the man is her boyfriend. She next mimes her hands as if she’s at the steering wheel of a car, and then waves a palm in the air.

Carla interprets: Alín’s boyfriend is a truck driver and he’s far away. Carla also had a photo album, with images of her as a man and as a woman. But a beau stole it. “One of a million bastards,” she says. “Why bother having a boyfriend? Soon enough they rob you.”

Carla says that Alín became deaf-mute many years ago, after her father gave her a brutal beating. Alín does not communicate with any traditional sign language. She has invented her own. Indicating a ring on a finger means married. Male or female gender is demonstrated with explicit gestures describing genitalia, and a finger ground into the cheek means gay. According to her photos, before dressing as a woman, she worked as a babysitter and in a hamburger stand.

Carla used to work in the family business, making metal sculptures from molds: Don Quijote, female nudes, bulls. She sold them on the street outside the Chilpancingo metro stop. After a while she grew bored.

Which never happens at La Vicenta, not even on the slow weekday afternoons when the few clients tend to be asleep with their heads atop the tables. At those moments, Carla says, “I gossip with my colleagues.”

They earn no salary, only tips. “We used to make a lot,” says Carla. “There were customers who would leave twenty pesos. Now they leave two or three.” Nonetheless, they tend to earn fifty or sixty pesos a day, and sometimes more on a busy Friday or Saturday. “There are also clients who give us perfume, shoes, or underwear,” she adds. Certain unscrupulous waitresses take advantage of the drunkest clients and divest them of their money. In fact, the waitress that introduced Alín to Carla is now in jail, doing three months for robbing a sailor.

Customers tend to behave, except for the drunks, who grab buttocks or other parts of Carla and Alín’s mysterious bodies. Alín has a feminine form thanks to hormones, while Carla’s is pure illusion. “The best lies are true,” she explains.

Theirs is not an easy life. Alín shows some scratches on her chest, the result of a tiff she had with another waitress, who bit her index finger, leaving a notable scar. She also has a majestic hickey on her neck, a gift from a guy who accosted her on the street a few nights earlier.

Alín is 23, Carla 38. Her dream is to open a beauty salon in Xochimilco. Truth, lie, or something intermediate. She says, “I’m not always going to live this way.”

To read more, order Habitus 06: Mexico City

Leave a Comment