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chapter 10
Chayo and I were sitting one evening in Café Pisa, one of the more elegant restaurants along the plaza arcade. Three rather ostentatiously dressed men were at a table near us. I recognized one of them, a short, broad-shouldered, balding guy I had met at the market place the day before. What remained of his hair was sandy brown, and his face was freckled, not really typical of this region. He appeared to be the leader of the group.
The three of them were pushing their plates away and getting up to leave when a pistol tumbled out and landed on the floor.
"Pendejo," muttered the leader, and, as the culprit leaned over to retrieve his gun, a gold cross on a chain fell out of his open-necked shirt.
I looked away, pretending not to notice, though I could hardly miss seeing that the hammer of the pistol was cocked. It was a Colt .45 semiautomatic. Presumably the safety was on--but what an unsafe way to carry a weapon.
As they passed our table on the way out, the leader glanced at me and said in English, "How ya doin' there, Olaf?"
"Fine, thanks. And you?" I replied, not wanting to be rude. The fellow continued on his way out the door, and I let out a sigh of relief.
"You seem to know each other," Chayo said.
"No, not really. Well, sort of. He spoke to me the other day in the market place. I was having a snack at a stall in the Antojitos, and he sat down next to me and struck up a conversation. He's pretty overbearing, maybe a little on the rude side."
"He speaks English?"
"Yes, quite well in fact. He told me he'd lived in Miami, Florida. I think he said his name was Raul something."
"Raul Rodriguez," Chayo told me. "He's commonly known as el Cubano."
"Really? Do you know him too?"
"I know of him. Being a foreigner and a big spender, he attracts attention. Something of a showoff.
"Yes, he's a guy who needs an audience."
"What sort of story did he tell you?"
"Quite a yarn," I said. "That he was at the Bay of Pigs invasion, part of the fight to overthrow Castro and Communism. Later he was in Vietnam, working for the CIA. Even said he knew Gordon Liddy and worked with the Plumbers, that he's just going to be here in México till things blow over. I don't know how much of that I believe, but everything he brags of having done is something I detest."
"The CIA? That's interesting."
"I'm just repeating what he told me," I said. "He boasted that he used to smuggle heroin into the US on CIA aircraft. But if that were true, I don't think he would've told me about it."
"I could believe it's true," Chayo said.
"You could?"
"That's where he probably got his training, his contacts and his start in the business."
"What business?" I asked.
"The one you just mentioned. Es traficante."
"And that's why his companion was carrying a pistol?"
"All three were carrying pistols," she said.
"They were? I didn't notice."
"Son pistoleros."
"¿Pistoleros?" The word was new to me, but I could guess its meaning.
"But I don't see them around here too often," she said. "I think they mostly stay in Apatzingán."
"¿Apatzingán? Where's that?"
"At the foot of these mountains. El Valle del Infiernillo."
"Infiernillo. They actually call it that?"
That was the first time I recall any mention of Apatzingán, though in the days that followed I began to notice it on the destinations of buses, and on other things as well. It piqued my curiosity, and I found it on my map, about fifty air kilometers from Uruapan. I liked the sound of Apatzingán, the way it rolled off my tongue.
As for the restaurant, after that we called it Café Pistolero. Nobody else called it that. It was just between Chayo and me. It was a nice café, but rather expensive, and on my budget I couldn't afford to go there very often.
But that was no problem. There were other cafés along this arcade. One was just a plain hole-in-the-wall and was so banal, insipid and unimaginative that it defied description. Inside, it looked more like a concrete pillbox than a restaurant. This was the not-so-very-famous Café Chino. But even banality had its charm, especially when it fit my limited budget.
Except for the three pistoleros, I rarely saw anyone openly wearing a pistol, but there must've been a lot of guns around. I often heard shots fired in the night. And that evening on my way back to don Pablo's after walking Chayo home, I heard them again. It wasn't that people were out there shooting at each other or anything like that. From what I was told, guys would sit around drinking beer, and at a certain point someone might haul out a gun and fire a few rounds into the sky.
Having a gun was a macho thing. Naturally the bird honchos owned one, which they treated with loving care, and I'd often seen them in the dining room, going through the ritual of cleaning their well-oiled piece while sipping tequila and listening to ballads on their tape recorder. With great ceremony they'd disassemble the weapon, carefully inspect each part for dust and dirt, apply a thin coat of oil, and eventually reassemble it.
Their pistol was a U.S. Army Colt .45 semiautomatic, Model 1911. It seemed to be a popular handgun around here and was also the kind that my uncle Rolf had taught me to use. That had been years before, when I was in my early teens, but watching these two at their task brought to mind a painful mixture of nostalgic and angry memories of my uncle, an ex-Marine who prided himself on his knowledge of weaponry.
"You know anything about guns?" Palomo had asked me one evening.
Normally I would've just smiled, shaken my head and said no. And if pressed, I might've expounded my view that guns were for killing and should therefore be banned. But such views seemed inappropriate at that moment, so I said, "I used to have one just like that."
"You did?" They both looked at me with some interest. Even Cuauhtémoc turned to gaze at me, as if to say, "Really?"
I told them my uncle taught me to take it apart and reassemble it. He used to time me. "I think I can still do it," I said. "Do I have your permission?"
The bird honchos glanced at each other, nodded, and passed me the weapon. "Go ahead," said Morito.
I then field stripped the .45, laying the parts neatly on the table. But as I was about to reassemble it, Palomo turned the lights out, leaving us in the dark. "¡A ver!" he said. "Now let's see you do it!"
When he flicked the lights back on a few seconds later, I had the gun fully assembled.
"Well done!" they both exclaimed.
Till then the two of them had been polite but rather distant with me, always prefacing my name with the honorific don--don Olaf--and addressing me with the formal usted. But after that, they dispensed with the formalities and treated me as one of them. In their circle, a knowledge of guns was an important thing, and I seemed to have been admitted into their club. Even Cuauhtémoc began to look at me in a way that indicated some newfound respect.
* * *
I usually went to meet Chayo at her aunt's shop at the end of her workday. But once in a while we'd meet at Café Chino, that inexpensive and not very elegant coffee shop which had somehow caught our fancy. On one occasion I happened to be in that establishment, drinking coffee and waiting for her. We were going to a movie that evening. While I waited, I opened a letter which had just arrived from MacClayne, my poetry-writing sailor friend.
The postmark indicated that he'd mailed it from Nova Scotia, where he'd been spending the summer. The letter was written on the reverse side of an old mailer advertising cut rates on termite inspection. Paper cost only a penny a sheet, but lifelong habits of frugality prevailed. MacClayne was from Scotland, and I often wondered if all Scots could really be as tight-fisted as he was. Maybe the fact that he'd grown up in the pre-World War II depression era also had something to do with it. Anyway, MacClayne's thrift was downright proverbial.
Included with the letter were two or three of his recent poems. One was to an avian personality, presumably a rooster.
Bold. Brash.
Swashbuckler.
Dressed to kill
in your Aztec plumage.
Unafraid of men
you descend to earth
in a flurry of feathers.
An ode to Cuauhtémoc? I'd never in any of my letters to MacClayne mentioned the bird or his bout with Diosdado. That event was now a month into the past. There was a date on the poem, indicating that he'd written it the very same day of that event. It seemed to be one of those unexplainable coincidences that Jungian psychologists called synchronicity. Back a thousand years ago, my Norse forefathers would've had no difficulty in accepting such a notion, but I wondered if they would've attributed it to Urð, who sits by the spring and carves the runes on slips of wood.
I then read MacClayne's letter. It was typewritten, a page and a half long. He was still in Canada, where he'd spent the summer. Did he still plan to come to México this fall? I was also wondering if he'd said anything about the Holy Grail, which I'd mentioned in a tongue-in-cheek letter I'd sent him a few weeks back. Towards the end of his letter, he wrote:
So you figure the Holy Grail is somewhere in México? Goddamn! Find out where it's supposed to be and we will set off in quest of that chalice. A pair of modern day chevaliers we will be, and if we end up hanging by the neck from the old apple tree that too will be our fate.
I smiled to myself. That was MacClayne's way of taking me up on my suggestion that we go somewhere on an excursion for a few days. I'd have to come up with some intriguing place, preferably somewhere in this part of Michoacán. Maybe there was a town that had some interesting legend--a place to fit the fantasy. It occurred to me that Apatzingán might be that town.
I was mulling this over when Chayo arrived.
"Let me have a sip of your coffee," she said, taking the cup and raising it to her lips. "It's cold!"
She called to the waitress and ordered fresh coffee for both of us.
Over her shoulders she wore her rebozo, the one she had on the day we met. Yesterday it was blue jeans with a denim jacket, but today she looked very traditional. Whatever she wore, Chayo was beautiful.
She glanced around to see if the coffee were coming, then asked who the letter was from. I told her.
"Is he the one who's coming to visit you this fall?"
"Yes." I showed Chayo his poem about the bird, and she read it through with some interest.
"¿Qué quiere decir swashbuckler?" she asked.
I stopped to think. "A dashing swordsman who wears a feather in his hat and struts around challenging the world."
"Cuauhtémoc," she said.
We both chuckled.
The waitress came with our coffee.
"So your friend's a poet."
"Sí, lo es." I wanted to add that he was a Holy Grailer, but I didn't know the how to say that in Spanish, so I said, "Es soñador. He's a guy who dreams of faraway places. He's spent his life living such dreams."
"¡Que simpático!" That was one of her favorite expressions when something amused her.
I told her MacClayne was a World War Two veteran who had served in the British Royal Marines and survived the wreckage of two ships that were sunk out from under him. After the war ended, he sailed in the merchant marine, hitchhiked around Europe, found jobs in remote corners of the world, and eventually came to America.
"For thirty years now, ever since the war, his life has been an on-going odyssey." I wanted to say "MacClayne's a beachcomber from the Canary Islands," but I didn't know the word for "beachcomber." I tried the phrase "vagabundo de la playa."
Chayo looked at me rather dubiously.
"He jumped ship and then lived on the beach," I explained. "That was when he was in the merchant marine."
"¡Que simpático!" she said again.
"He's a free spirit."
"Where's he now?"
"In Nova Scotia, a remote province of Canada." I showed her the postmark on the envelope.
"Has he been in México before?"
"In Veracruz and Oaxaca, I think. He's also visited various ports along the coast of South America. Montevideo and Buenos Aires. And he even worked for a year in the Falkland Islands.
"The Falkland Islands? Where are they?"
"In the South Atlantic. The most desolate place in the British Empire, he told me, just sheep and penguins. The penguins love it. MacClayne has a way of winding up in places like that."
"Oh you mean las Malvinas. Where did you meet your globe-trotting friend?"
"In San Francisco at an antiwar demonstration. People came from all over, just like us. I was a student, studying geology in southern California, and he was working at Trona, a borate mine a couple hundred kilometers away, out in the Mohave desert. He invited me to come up and see the place, which I did.
"After that I visited him quite often. I'd spend the weekend, and we'd go on excursions out into the surrounding desert, visiting old mines and ghost towns. There was a lot of fascinating geology around Trona and I guess MacClayne was glad to have someone along who had some background in the subject. I was in my third year then.
"He used to talk a lot about the old country, Scotland. He'd reminisce about his childhood in Dundrennan, and sometimes about his drinking exploits during the war.
"After a year or so MacClayne quit his job at the Trona mine and moved on to somewhere else. That's the way he is, never staying in one place too long."
"So that's how you came to know MacClayne," she said. "How long has it been since you last saw him?"
"It's been over a year now. But we've kept keep in touch by mail," I said. "He sends you his greetings."
"You've told him about me?"
"Of course! I mention you in every letter I write."
"What have you told him?"
"About the things we see and do together. Our visits to the Stone Gardens, the lava flows, the Indian village, Paricutín. I also told him that you're the most beautiful, charming, wisest woman I've ever met."
"You actually said that?" She forced the corners of her mouth downward into a frown, but I could tell she was secretly pleased.
"He's your older brother, isn't he," Chayo said, setting down her cup and peering directly at me. "I mean, he's the older brother you never had."
"I don't know. There've been times when I've felt like wringing his neck. MacClayne can get into moods when he's really obnoxious."
"That," she said, "is an older brother."
The waitress came back to ask us if we needed anything more. We ordered pastries.
"So where are we going tomorrow?" I said. The next day would be Chayo's day off.
She thought for a bit, but didn't have anywhere in mind.
"How about Apatzingán?" I said. Ever since that day in Café Pistolero when she'd mentioned that place, it had been intriguing me.
Chayo shook her head.
I looked at her, waiting for some explanation.
"There's nothing there." she said at last.
"¿Nada?"
"Nada."
"How can there be just nothing?" I asked. Almost everything I'd seen in this region, even the most banal and prosaic of buildings, places and things, had been delightfully interesting.
"It's a hot, dry, dusty town in the desert."
"Desert? You once told me it was down in the valley."
"The valley's a desert."
"Really?" In my imagination, valleys were pleasant rustic settings with small rivers meandering their way through green meadows. Even though my studies in geology had taught me to know better, I still retained those sentimental images and associations.
"It's notorious for its hellish heat," she said. "That's why it's called Infiernillo."
"People live there, don't they?"
Chayo nodded, rather gravely. "Did you see the fellow who just left? He was sitting at that table there. I saw you glance at him."
"The man with the skin peeling off his face?" I said. I could hardly have avoided noticing the unfortunate fellow, though I had tried not to be obvious about it. Large parts of his dark brown skin looked as if they had fallen off, leaving blotches of white.
"Yes him," she said. "Pobrecito."
"What about him?"
"He lives in Apatzingán."
"He does?"
"You asked me if people live there."
I took a deep breath and shook my head slightly. I'd also seen others with that affliction from time to time. Mal de pinto is what don Pablo called it. Literally translated, it means bad paint job. He said it was a type of skin cancer, common in the Hot Country--which I had thought must be somewhere far from here. Only now did I realize it was Apatzingán.
"What time do you have?" Chayo said. Her last watch had stopped on the day and the hour of her father's death, and she had never worn one since.
"Almost time for our movie to start."
Chayo loved movies, and the ones she loved most were the rancheras. The film we went to see that evening was of that genre. It was set in contemporary México and presented a colorful, romanticized version of ranch life where the protagonists rode horses, wore sombreros and embroidered jackets, and played guitars. They expressed their hopes, frustrations and sufferings in song, and resolved problems with pistols.
Chayo enjoyed the film immensely. She smiled and laughed, sometimes frowned or even shook her head angrily. I didn't catch a lot of the subtle ironies and humor, but here and there she clued me in with a word or two. Normally she was rather reserved. It was during these movies that her other side came out, and watching her was as much fun as the movie itself.
As I walked her home that evening, she recalled some of the scenes, vicariously reliving them. One character reminded her of a neighbor from years back, another of someone else. It was an overcast night, but Chayo's animated voice lit up the darkness of the nearly deserted street. We heard the pleasant chirping of crickets as we strolled along.
At the bridge over the Río Cupatitzio we paused as usual to lean over the railing and gaze down into the dark, swirling water which sparkled here and there with reflected light. The noisy little river filled our ears with its loud but somehow soothing sound. It was a powerful little river. Less than a kilometer downstream from where we stood, it carved a deep, narrow channel as it rushed off towards the edge of the plateau.
"So when are you going to show me the old ranch?" I asked. I was referring to the one that had had been her childhood home. It was apparently somewhere along the banks of this river, a few kilometers out of town. She'd promised to take me there sometime.
For a long while she said nothing, then, "We could go there tomorrow if you'd like."
I said that I would, and with that it was decided. But for the rest of the way we walked in silence till we reached her house and said good night.
By the time I got back to don Pablo's hotel it was fairly late, as it usually was on evenings when we went to the movies. For some reason, the night light was out. I groped my way through the entrance passageway and emerged into the courtyard which was dark under a starless sky.
In my room at last, I fumbled for the switch, glad to see the whitewashed walls and high ceiling suddenly blaze into being. Despite the lateness of the hour, I wasn't sleepy. I sat down at the small table which served as my desk and took out MacClayne's letter. Find out where the Grail city is, he'd said.
Okay, I would.
Once again, I thought of Apatzingán. From Chayo's description, it could hardly be an inviting place, but her downplaying of it somehow intrigued me all the more. I opened my journal and drafted a reply to MacClayne:
. . . Yes, I've managed to learn the location and name of the Grail city.
It's at the foot of these mountains, in a region that's said to be a desert, notorious for its hellish heat. I've been assured there's nothing to see there but clouds of dust. It is, of course, in exactly such a place that I would expect the chalice to be awaiting us.
The name of the town is Apatzingán--which means the place of Apatzi. Apatzi was a pre-Hispanic deity who presided over the world of the dead.
That last bit, the meaning of the name, was something that my tutor, don Javier, had told me just that morning, and I considered it an extremely fortuitous bit of information. Apatzi was just the touch I needed to fit our whimsy.
As I finished, I glanced up at the wall and happened to notice a small place where the paint was peeling. I thought of that poor fellow in the café, suffering from mal de pinto. I didn't mention that in my letter.
By the time I got done addressing the envelope I was starting to yawn, and I went to bed. That night I had another of my vivid dreams:
I was strolling through a pine forest, like those around Uruapan, when I happened upon a small river. It was the Río Cupatitzio and I began to follow it downstream through the canyon it had cut. Sometimes there was a path, but sometimes there was none, and then I had to wade in the river, slipping and sliding on the wet rocks.
The walls of this canyon rose to a towering height where the rims seemed to meet and close in above me, blocking out the sun. I groped along in the depths of darkness. I trudged on for what seemed like hours. At first I thought I was going to the ranch of Chayo's father, but it gradually became apparent that my destination lay far beyond that. I'd passed the edge of the plateau and was now descending down the mountainside, still following the river gorge. The going was much steeper, and more treacherous.
It was getting colder, and the wind howled up through the canyon as if it were a wind tunnel, cutting through my thin shirt and driving icy mist into my face. Sometimes the canyon widened out and its walls receded into the distance, only to close in once again, taller and deeper than before. I stumbled onwards and downwards, losing all track of time.
At last the canyon opened up and I looked out across a flat, barren plain under a twilight sky. Treeless volcanoes were scattered here and there. I'd reached the valley floor, and it was all white--covered with snow.
The howling wind was gone, replaced by frozen silence. Cold haze filled the air. I stood there, shivering in my wet, soaking clothes which were turning into ice. Then I continued on.
I was on an easy trail now. There was just the steady crunch, crunch, crunch of my feet in the snow. It was early evening, with a long winter night about to follow.
Up ahead was a bridge, with fresh hoof prints in the snow leading up to it. A troop of horsemen must have recently traveled this way. As I approached and was about to cross, a guardswoman appeared. She stood in the middle of the bridge, and, in a loud voice, called out in a strange, yet vaguely familiar language:
"Hvi riðer thu her a Helveg?"
I understood, and froze in my tracks--Why ridest thou here on Hell-Road?--was what she'd said, in what sounded like an ancient dialect of Norwegian. She wore a long fur coat that came down to her feet. Her hair was blond and one eye was a sparkling blue, the other was a dull, dead gray, and then I saw that the skin was peeling off and falling from the dead side of her face.
I asked her if this were the road to Apatzingán, but she responded only with an icy stare, so I tried again, saying, "I'm looking for MacClayne, the brother I never had. Is he beyond the river?"
The guardswoman stepped aside and motioned for me to cross the bridge. But, as I was about to do so, a luminous shape suddenly blocked my way and pushed me back.
I lost my footing and fell into a snow bank. When I was at last able to look up, I saw that it was the Shining Cougar. I put my arms around him, and the gentle glow of his warm white fur passed through me and I was no longer cold. All I felt was warm loving kindness.
The next thing I knew I was lying on my bed, cold and shivering, hugging my pillow, groping for my blanket which I'd apparently kicked off in the night.
continued in Chapter 11
The three of them were pushing their plates away and getting up to leave when a pistol tumbled out and landed on the floor.
"Pendejo," muttered the leader, and, as the culprit leaned over to retrieve his gun, a gold cross on a chain fell out of his open-necked shirt.
I looked away, pretending not to notice, though I could hardly miss seeing that the hammer of the pistol was cocked. It was a Colt .45 semiautomatic. Presumably the safety was on--but what an unsafe way to carry a weapon.
As they passed our table on the way out, the leader glanced at me and said in English, "How ya doin' there, Olaf?"
"Fine, thanks. And you?" I replied, not wanting to be rude. The fellow continued on his way out the door, and I let out a sigh of relief.
"You seem to know each other," Chayo said.
"No, not really. Well, sort of. He spoke to me the other day in the market place. I was having a snack at a stall in the Antojitos, and he sat down next to me and struck up a conversation. He's pretty overbearing, maybe a little on the rude side."
"He speaks English?"
"Yes, quite well in fact. He told me he'd lived in Miami, Florida. I think he said his name was Raul something."
"Raul Rodriguez," Chayo told me. "He's commonly known as el Cubano."
"Really? Do you know him too?"
"I know of him. Being a foreigner and a big spender, he attracts attention. Something of a showoff.
"Yes, he's a guy who needs an audience."
"What sort of story did he tell you?"
"Quite a yarn," I said. "That he was at the Bay of Pigs invasion, part of the fight to overthrow Castro and Communism. Later he was in Vietnam, working for the CIA. Even said he knew Gordon Liddy and worked with the Plumbers, that he's just going to be here in México till things blow over. I don't know how much of that I believe, but everything he brags of having done is something I detest."
"The CIA? That's interesting."
"I'm just repeating what he told me," I said. "He boasted that he used to smuggle heroin into the US on CIA aircraft. But if that were true, I don't think he would've told me about it."
"I could believe it's true," Chayo said.
"You could?"
"That's where he probably got his training, his contacts and his start in the business."
"What business?" I asked.
"The one you just mentioned. Es traficante."
"And that's why his companion was carrying a pistol?"
"All three were carrying pistols," she said.
"They were? I didn't notice."
"Son pistoleros."
"¿Pistoleros?" The word was new to me, but I could guess its meaning.
"But I don't see them around here too often," she said. "I think they mostly stay in Apatzingán."
"¿Apatzingán? Where's that?"
"At the foot of these mountains. El Valle del Infiernillo."
"Infiernillo. They actually call it that?"
That was the first time I recall any mention of Apatzingán, though in the days that followed I began to notice it on the destinations of buses, and on other things as well. It piqued my curiosity, and I found it on my map, about fifty air kilometers from Uruapan. I liked the sound of Apatzingán, the way it rolled off my tongue.
As for the restaurant, after that we called it Café Pistolero. Nobody else called it that. It was just between Chayo and me. It was a nice café, but rather expensive, and on my budget I couldn't afford to go there very often.
But that was no problem. There were other cafés along this arcade. One was just a plain hole-in-the-wall and was so banal, insipid and unimaginative that it defied description. Inside, it looked more like a concrete pillbox than a restaurant. This was the not-so-very-famous Café Chino. But even banality had its charm, especially when it fit my limited budget.
Except for the three pistoleros, I rarely saw anyone openly wearing a pistol, but there must've been a lot of guns around. I often heard shots fired in the night. And that evening on my way back to don Pablo's after walking Chayo home, I heard them again. It wasn't that people were out there shooting at each other or anything like that. From what I was told, guys would sit around drinking beer, and at a certain point someone might haul out a gun and fire a few rounds into the sky.
Having a gun was a macho thing. Naturally the bird honchos owned one, which they treated with loving care, and I'd often seen them in the dining room, going through the ritual of cleaning their well-oiled piece while sipping tequila and listening to ballads on their tape recorder. With great ceremony they'd disassemble the weapon, carefully inspect each part for dust and dirt, apply a thin coat of oil, and eventually reassemble it.
Their pistol was a U.S. Army Colt .45 semiautomatic, Model 1911. It seemed to be a popular handgun around here and was also the kind that my uncle Rolf had taught me to use. That had been years before, when I was in my early teens, but watching these two at their task brought to mind a painful mixture of nostalgic and angry memories of my uncle, an ex-Marine who prided himself on his knowledge of weaponry.
"You know anything about guns?" Palomo had asked me one evening.
Normally I would've just smiled, shaken my head and said no. And if pressed, I might've expounded my view that guns were for killing and should therefore be banned. But such views seemed inappropriate at that moment, so I said, "I used to have one just like that."
"You did?" They both looked at me with some interest. Even Cuauhtémoc turned to gaze at me, as if to say, "Really?"
I told them my uncle taught me to take it apart and reassemble it. He used to time me. "I think I can still do it," I said. "Do I have your permission?"
The bird honchos glanced at each other, nodded, and passed me the weapon. "Go ahead," said Morito.
I then field stripped the .45, laying the parts neatly on the table. But as I was about to reassemble it, Palomo turned the lights out, leaving us in the dark. "¡A ver!" he said. "Now let's see you do it!"
When he flicked the lights back on a few seconds later, I had the gun fully assembled.
"Well done!" they both exclaimed.
Till then the two of them had been polite but rather distant with me, always prefacing my name with the honorific don--don Olaf--and addressing me with the formal usted. But after that, they dispensed with the formalities and treated me as one of them. In their circle, a knowledge of guns was an important thing, and I seemed to have been admitted into their club. Even Cuauhtémoc began to look at me in a way that indicated some newfound respect.
* * *
I usually went to meet Chayo at her aunt's shop at the end of her workday. But once in a while we'd meet at Café Chino, that inexpensive and not very elegant coffee shop which had somehow caught our fancy. On one occasion I happened to be in that establishment, drinking coffee and waiting for her. We were going to a movie that evening. While I waited, I opened a letter which had just arrived from MacClayne, my poetry-writing sailor friend.
The postmark indicated that he'd mailed it from Nova Scotia, where he'd been spending the summer. The letter was written on the reverse side of an old mailer advertising cut rates on termite inspection. Paper cost only a penny a sheet, but lifelong habits of frugality prevailed. MacClayne was from Scotland, and I often wondered if all Scots could really be as tight-fisted as he was. Maybe the fact that he'd grown up in the pre-World War II depression era also had something to do with it. Anyway, MacClayne's thrift was downright proverbial.
Included with the letter were two or three of his recent poems. One was to an avian personality, presumably a rooster.
Bold. Brash.
Swashbuckler.
Dressed to kill
in your Aztec plumage.
Unafraid of men
you descend to earth
in a flurry of feathers.
An ode to Cuauhtémoc? I'd never in any of my letters to MacClayne mentioned the bird or his bout with Diosdado. That event was now a month into the past. There was a date on the poem, indicating that he'd written it the very same day of that event. It seemed to be one of those unexplainable coincidences that Jungian psychologists called synchronicity. Back a thousand years ago, my Norse forefathers would've had no difficulty in accepting such a notion, but I wondered if they would've attributed it to Urð, who sits by the spring and carves the runes on slips of wood.
I then read MacClayne's letter. It was typewritten, a page and a half long. He was still in Canada, where he'd spent the summer. Did he still plan to come to México this fall? I was also wondering if he'd said anything about the Holy Grail, which I'd mentioned in a tongue-in-cheek letter I'd sent him a few weeks back. Towards the end of his letter, he wrote:
So you figure the Holy Grail is somewhere in México? Goddamn! Find out where it's supposed to be and we will set off in quest of that chalice. A pair of modern day chevaliers we will be, and if we end up hanging by the neck from the old apple tree that too will be our fate.
I smiled to myself. That was MacClayne's way of taking me up on my suggestion that we go somewhere on an excursion for a few days. I'd have to come up with some intriguing place, preferably somewhere in this part of Michoacán. Maybe there was a town that had some interesting legend--a place to fit the fantasy. It occurred to me that Apatzingán might be that town.
I was mulling this over when Chayo arrived.
"Let me have a sip of your coffee," she said, taking the cup and raising it to her lips. "It's cold!"
She called to the waitress and ordered fresh coffee for both of us.
Over her shoulders she wore her rebozo, the one she had on the day we met. Yesterday it was blue jeans with a denim jacket, but today she looked very traditional. Whatever she wore, Chayo was beautiful.
She glanced around to see if the coffee were coming, then asked who the letter was from. I told her.
"Is he the one who's coming to visit you this fall?"
"Yes." I showed Chayo his poem about the bird, and she read it through with some interest.
"¿Qué quiere decir swashbuckler?" she asked.
I stopped to think. "A dashing swordsman who wears a feather in his hat and struts around challenging the world."
"Cuauhtémoc," she said.
We both chuckled.
The waitress came with our coffee.
"So your friend's a poet."
"Sí, lo es." I wanted to add that he was a Holy Grailer, but I didn't know the how to say that in Spanish, so I said, "Es soñador. He's a guy who dreams of faraway places. He's spent his life living such dreams."
"¡Que simpático!" That was one of her favorite expressions when something amused her.
I told her MacClayne was a World War Two veteran who had served in the British Royal Marines and survived the wreckage of two ships that were sunk out from under him. After the war ended, he sailed in the merchant marine, hitchhiked around Europe, found jobs in remote corners of the world, and eventually came to America.
"For thirty years now, ever since the war, his life has been an on-going odyssey." I wanted to say "MacClayne's a beachcomber from the Canary Islands," but I didn't know the word for "beachcomber." I tried the phrase "vagabundo de la playa."
Chayo looked at me rather dubiously.
"He jumped ship and then lived on the beach," I explained. "That was when he was in the merchant marine."
"¡Que simpático!" she said again.
"He's a free spirit."
"Where's he now?"
"In Nova Scotia, a remote province of Canada." I showed her the postmark on the envelope.
"Has he been in México before?"
"In Veracruz and Oaxaca, I think. He's also visited various ports along the coast of South America. Montevideo and Buenos Aires. And he even worked for a year in the Falkland Islands.
"The Falkland Islands? Where are they?"
"In the South Atlantic. The most desolate place in the British Empire, he told me, just sheep and penguins. The penguins love it. MacClayne has a way of winding up in places like that."
"Oh you mean las Malvinas. Where did you meet your globe-trotting friend?"
"In San Francisco at an antiwar demonstration. People came from all over, just like us. I was a student, studying geology in southern California, and he was working at Trona, a borate mine a couple hundred kilometers away, out in the Mohave desert. He invited me to come up and see the place, which I did.
"After that I visited him quite often. I'd spend the weekend, and we'd go on excursions out into the surrounding desert, visiting old mines and ghost towns. There was a lot of fascinating geology around Trona and I guess MacClayne was glad to have someone along who had some background in the subject. I was in my third year then.
"He used to talk a lot about the old country, Scotland. He'd reminisce about his childhood in Dundrennan, and sometimes about his drinking exploits during the war.
"After a year or so MacClayne quit his job at the Trona mine and moved on to somewhere else. That's the way he is, never staying in one place too long."
"So that's how you came to know MacClayne," she said. "How long has it been since you last saw him?"
"It's been over a year now. But we've kept keep in touch by mail," I said. "He sends you his greetings."
"You've told him about me?"
"Of course! I mention you in every letter I write."
"What have you told him?"
"About the things we see and do together. Our visits to the Stone Gardens, the lava flows, the Indian village, Paricutín. I also told him that you're the most beautiful, charming, wisest woman I've ever met."
"You actually said that?" She forced the corners of her mouth downward into a frown, but I could tell she was secretly pleased.
"He's your older brother, isn't he," Chayo said, setting down her cup and peering directly at me. "I mean, he's the older brother you never had."
"I don't know. There've been times when I've felt like wringing his neck. MacClayne can get into moods when he's really obnoxious."
"That," she said, "is an older brother."
The waitress came back to ask us if we needed anything more. We ordered pastries.
"So where are we going tomorrow?" I said. The next day would be Chayo's day off.
She thought for a bit, but didn't have anywhere in mind.
"How about Apatzingán?" I said. Ever since that day in Café Pistolero when she'd mentioned that place, it had been intriguing me.
Chayo shook her head.
I looked at her, waiting for some explanation.
"There's nothing there." she said at last.
"¿Nada?"
"Nada."
"How can there be just nothing?" I asked. Almost everything I'd seen in this region, even the most banal and prosaic of buildings, places and things, had been delightfully interesting.
"It's a hot, dry, dusty town in the desert."
"Desert? You once told me it was down in the valley."
"The valley's a desert."
"Really?" In my imagination, valleys were pleasant rustic settings with small rivers meandering their way through green meadows. Even though my studies in geology had taught me to know better, I still retained those sentimental images and associations.
"It's notorious for its hellish heat," she said. "That's why it's called Infiernillo."
"People live there, don't they?"
Chayo nodded, rather gravely. "Did you see the fellow who just left? He was sitting at that table there. I saw you glance at him."
"The man with the skin peeling off his face?" I said. I could hardly have avoided noticing the unfortunate fellow, though I had tried not to be obvious about it. Large parts of his dark brown skin looked as if they had fallen off, leaving blotches of white.
"Yes him," she said. "Pobrecito."
"What about him?"
"He lives in Apatzingán."
"He does?"
"You asked me if people live there."
I took a deep breath and shook my head slightly. I'd also seen others with that affliction from time to time. Mal de pinto is what don Pablo called it. Literally translated, it means bad paint job. He said it was a type of skin cancer, common in the Hot Country--which I had thought must be somewhere far from here. Only now did I realize it was Apatzingán.
"What time do you have?" Chayo said. Her last watch had stopped on the day and the hour of her father's death, and she had never worn one since.
"Almost time for our movie to start."
Chayo loved movies, and the ones she loved most were the rancheras. The film we went to see that evening was of that genre. It was set in contemporary México and presented a colorful, romanticized version of ranch life where the protagonists rode horses, wore sombreros and embroidered jackets, and played guitars. They expressed their hopes, frustrations and sufferings in song, and resolved problems with pistols.
Chayo enjoyed the film immensely. She smiled and laughed, sometimes frowned or even shook her head angrily. I didn't catch a lot of the subtle ironies and humor, but here and there she clued me in with a word or two. Normally she was rather reserved. It was during these movies that her other side came out, and watching her was as much fun as the movie itself.
As I walked her home that evening, she recalled some of the scenes, vicariously reliving them. One character reminded her of a neighbor from years back, another of someone else. It was an overcast night, but Chayo's animated voice lit up the darkness of the nearly deserted street. We heard the pleasant chirping of crickets as we strolled along.
At the bridge over the Río Cupatitzio we paused as usual to lean over the railing and gaze down into the dark, swirling water which sparkled here and there with reflected light. The noisy little river filled our ears with its loud but somehow soothing sound. It was a powerful little river. Less than a kilometer downstream from where we stood, it carved a deep, narrow channel as it rushed off towards the edge of the plateau.
"So when are you going to show me the old ranch?" I asked. I was referring to the one that had had been her childhood home. It was apparently somewhere along the banks of this river, a few kilometers out of town. She'd promised to take me there sometime.
For a long while she said nothing, then, "We could go there tomorrow if you'd like."
I said that I would, and with that it was decided. But for the rest of the way we walked in silence till we reached her house and said good night.
By the time I got back to don Pablo's hotel it was fairly late, as it usually was on evenings when we went to the movies. For some reason, the night light was out. I groped my way through the entrance passageway and emerged into the courtyard which was dark under a starless sky.
In my room at last, I fumbled for the switch, glad to see the whitewashed walls and high ceiling suddenly blaze into being. Despite the lateness of the hour, I wasn't sleepy. I sat down at the small table which served as my desk and took out MacClayne's letter. Find out where the Grail city is, he'd said.
Okay, I would.
Once again, I thought of Apatzingán. From Chayo's description, it could hardly be an inviting place, but her downplaying of it somehow intrigued me all the more. I opened my journal and drafted a reply to MacClayne:
. . . Yes, I've managed to learn the location and name of the Grail city.
It's at the foot of these mountains, in a region that's said to be a desert, notorious for its hellish heat. I've been assured there's nothing to see there but clouds of dust. It is, of course, in exactly such a place that I would expect the chalice to be awaiting us.
The name of the town is Apatzingán--which means the place of Apatzi. Apatzi was a pre-Hispanic deity who presided over the world of the dead.
That last bit, the meaning of the name, was something that my tutor, don Javier, had told me just that morning, and I considered it an extremely fortuitous bit of information. Apatzi was just the touch I needed to fit our whimsy.
As I finished, I glanced up at the wall and happened to notice a small place where the paint was peeling. I thought of that poor fellow in the café, suffering from mal de pinto. I didn't mention that in my letter.
By the time I got done addressing the envelope I was starting to yawn, and I went to bed. That night I had another of my vivid dreams:
I was strolling through a pine forest, like those around Uruapan, when I happened upon a small river. It was the Río Cupatitzio and I began to follow it downstream through the canyon it had cut. Sometimes there was a path, but sometimes there was none, and then I had to wade in the river, slipping and sliding on the wet rocks.
The walls of this canyon rose to a towering height where the rims seemed to meet and close in above me, blocking out the sun. I groped along in the depths of darkness. I trudged on for what seemed like hours. At first I thought I was going to the ranch of Chayo's father, but it gradually became apparent that my destination lay far beyond that. I'd passed the edge of the plateau and was now descending down the mountainside, still following the river gorge. The going was much steeper, and more treacherous.
It was getting colder, and the wind howled up through the canyon as if it were a wind tunnel, cutting through my thin shirt and driving icy mist into my face. Sometimes the canyon widened out and its walls receded into the distance, only to close in once again, taller and deeper than before. I stumbled onwards and downwards, losing all track of time.
At last the canyon opened up and I looked out across a flat, barren plain under a twilight sky. Treeless volcanoes were scattered here and there. I'd reached the valley floor, and it was all white--covered with snow.
The howling wind was gone, replaced by frozen silence. Cold haze filled the air. I stood there, shivering in my wet, soaking clothes which were turning into ice. Then I continued on.
I was on an easy trail now. There was just the steady crunch, crunch, crunch of my feet in the snow. It was early evening, with a long winter night about to follow.
Up ahead was a bridge, with fresh hoof prints in the snow leading up to it. A troop of horsemen must have recently traveled this way. As I approached and was about to cross, a guardswoman appeared. She stood in the middle of the bridge, and, in a loud voice, called out in a strange, yet vaguely familiar language:
"Hvi riðer thu her a Helveg?"
I understood, and froze in my tracks--Why ridest thou here on Hell-Road?--was what she'd said, in what sounded like an ancient dialect of Norwegian. She wore a long fur coat that came down to her feet. Her hair was blond and one eye was a sparkling blue, the other was a dull, dead gray, and then I saw that the skin was peeling off and falling from the dead side of her face.
I asked her if this were the road to Apatzingán, but she responded only with an icy stare, so I tried again, saying, "I'm looking for MacClayne, the brother I never had. Is he beyond the river?"
The guardswoman stepped aside and motioned for me to cross the bridge. But, as I was about to do so, a luminous shape suddenly blocked my way and pushed me back.
I lost my footing and fell into a snow bank. When I was at last able to look up, I saw that it was the Shining Cougar. I put my arms around him, and the gentle glow of his warm white fur passed through me and I was no longer cold. All I felt was warm loving kindness.
The next thing I knew I was lying on my bed, cold and shivering, hugging my pillow, groping for my blanket which I'd apparently kicked off in the night.
continued in Chapter 11
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