ARTISTS/WRITERS: VICTOR

Every time I ask for a glass of water in Mexico I think of Victor Cuevas. Odd, what can invoke another person in experience or memory or imagination. 

My first long-term residence in Mexico was a hotel, the Ambos Mundos. (See last week’s post here: Ambos Mundos) The rent was $5 a night and I was happy there among the mostly transient clientele and rambling, ill-kept grounds. I was a fortyish writer working on a book, and living there echoed some charming, dissolute fleabags I’d inhabited in my wandering youth, short on amenities and long on ambience. Among the guests at the Ambos Mundos were Gabriela, the daughter of a prominent local family and her boyfriend, Gustavo, a flamenco guitarist in a local restaurant, who acted out their tormented relationship nightly with screams, flying vases and mescal bottles. A doddering, lecherous painter known as Emil sat in a rocker beneath the courtyard eaves in skullcap and robe, discussing his imminent demise to anyone within earshot. An angelic-looking German photographer named Heinz and his teenage Mexican wife stayed in a tiny room near the kitchen alongside Jason, a sallow weed dealer. A Huichol couple in full regalia, in town to sell their peyote yarn paintings, occupied the room next to mine. And a hulking, taciturn ex-Marine called “Jeem” popped amphetamines and lifted barbells in the courtyard, determined to lose 100 pounds fast and “get me a Mexican wife.” 

A painter had a studio there in a long, low, tile-roofed space that had probably once been a storage shed. Daily he came and worked and taught a few private students. This was Victor Cuevas, and after some weeks of nodding as we passed each other, I visited his studio. He spoke almost no English, and I was just starting out with Spanish, but we found ways to converse. He was around fifty, an assiduous, well-trained painter. He lived alone in a rented room nearby, subsisting upon teaching and occasional sales of his work. I suspect I was drawn to his studio because he seemed to be one of the only people around the Ambos Mundos who was doing any work. Victor was all about art. It was an obsession I recognized.

I have two works of his, both shown here, though I don’t recall how either came into my possession. I’m guessing the figure drawing was a gift and the other I bought, most likely for very little. At the time, Victor could have used the money for his weekly trips to Mexico City for cancer treatments, which began not long after I met him. 

There is no website displaying Victor Cuevas’s work. In fact, a Google search won’t turn him up at all, although he lived, painted, and taught as devotedly as my more prominent artist friends I’ve been commemorating recently. 

Sometimes I’d bring him my Spanish language questions. One day I asked him which was correct when asking for a glass of water: un vaso de agua or un vaso con agua. He said, “Well, if you’re Octavio Paz or Carlos Fuentes, you probably would say un vaso con agua. Because un vaso de agua literally suggests a glass made of water. But you hear un vaso de agua all the time.”

“People say una botella de cerveza,” I said, “and nobody thinks you are ordering a bottle made out of beer.”

“Actually una cerveza is usually the way you ask for it.”

“In English we only have one option: a glass of water. Nobody would think that means the glass is made of water.”

“Un vaso de agua. Un vaso con agua. Either way, you will not die of thirst. You will get your water.” 

Some time after that, Victor began losing weight, looking a little querulous, gray. He started missing days at the studio. Meanwhile life at the Ambos Mundos was gradually becoming insupportable. A rock band moved in and began rehearsing. “Jeem,” the speed freak, broke into a woman’s room and busted up her furniture. A performance artist from Canada took up residence and started painting the hotel trees and walls with mystical inscriptions. It was getting to be time to move on. 

I hadn’t seen Victor for some weeks when one afternoon I saw a woman I recognized as his sister packing his studio. Easels and stretcher bars and canvases and paints. She didn’t have to tell me.

***

When I ask for water, sometimes I say un vaso con agua, other times de agua. It is always a decision, which way to say it. I still puzzle over it and have queried others about it, with varying answers. During the recent heat wave I’ve found many occasions to ask for water. Some people I ask simply repeat my request, whichever way I said it, or some say it back to me the other way, perhaps to correct me. But however I choose to say it, unfailingly I recall Victor and our conversation that day.  And I always get my water.