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chapter 11
Café Chino was a busy place at eight in the morning. Shopkeepers and clerks sat huddled over cups of coffee, greeting each other and exchanging chitchat. From somewhere could be heard the strains of a radio, competing to be heard above the din.
I'd arrived early to meet Chayo. We were going to visit the ranch which had once belonged to her father.
Scenes from my previous night's dream floated through my mind, and I began thinking about them. There was a story very similar to my dream in the Icelandic Edda, about a man who journeyed to Niflheim to rescue his brother and bring him home. Their home was high up in the mountains, and Niflheim, the land of the dead, was situated in a cold valley down below. It was a nine-day ride through dark canyons, and when the man got there, he came to a bridge guarded by a woman who asked him why he was riding the Hell-Road.
It was strange that here in México I was dreaming those events of Norse mythology. Maybe it was because the geography of this region reminded me of places described in those ancient Scandinavian poems and stories. And maybe some part of me was suffering a bit of nostalgia for my ancestral homeland.
Suddenly I felt someone nudging me, and I looked up to see Chayo smiling down at me.
"¡Olaf! ¡Despiértate!"
"¿Quieres café?" I asked.
She shook her head. "We don't have time. ¡Vámonos!"
A bus was coming just as we reached the corner. The destination read Jucutacato, another of those tongue twisting names this region was so famous for. We got on board and rode for the first time down the same street we normally walked each evening--Calle Cupatitzio. Over the bridge, past Chayo's house, across the ancient lava flow at the edge of town, and further on past a small volcano. All those familiar places zipped by as though time were being condensed, confounding the laws of physics.
Chayo was unusually quiet, becoming rather pensive as we approached the village. It was a short ride from where we'd gotten on the bus, only some fifteen minutes. We got off at the small village plaza, and set out on foot down a street which was really no more than a narrow path between the adobe houses.
The village was soon behind us, and we were walking through pine forests and avocado groves. It was still the height of the summer rainy season, and, as always, we risked being trapped in a downpour. But I couldn't imagine Chayo getting caught in the rain. We continued on down the trail, for half an hour or so.
Pine-covered hills rose on both sides of us. We were following a valley that was a few hundred meters wide. Along the way we passed several dwellings, some of them hardly more than shanties. Chayo told me they were for ranch hands and their families. Up ahead among some coffee trees was something that appeared to be a larger building.
"All of this used to belong to my father."
"Oh, you mean we're already there?" I said. "This is part of the ranch?"
"Everything in sight. This whole valley."
I glanced around. The trees around us made it difficult to get an exact idea of the size, but it appeared to be on the order of several square kilometers.
Chayo told me she hadn't been here for years. She remembered cattle grazing in pastures. Now in their place were large avocado groves. We crossed a stream bed. Water used to flow all year round in this creek, she said. Now it was dry, even though this was the rainy season.
She looked at it sadly. "They stole the creek and used the water to irrigate the avocado groves."
The building I'd glimpsed in the trees up ahead turned out to be the ranch house. It was deserted, and part of the roof was beginning to cave in. It was built of adobe, but very differently from houses in town. This one consisted of a single, long, one-story building with no courtyard It was rather modest considering the large amount of land.
"It doesn't look at all like the ranch house in the movie." I'd no sooner said it than I bit my lip, wishing I hadn't.
"Those are the movies," she said. "This is a typical ranch house here in Michoacán."
I nodded. "I guess movies exaggerate a bit. They do in the States too."
"This was my room," she said as we stepped into a debris-filled chamber under a broken roof. "I shared it with Catarina."
"Your sister?" I said.
"She's married now. Lives in Morelia," Chayo said, and paused to look at the door, now broken and hanging by a single hinge. She touched it tenderly with her hands, then showed me a scuff mark. There were many scuff marks on this door and this one didn't look different from the others, but Chayo said it was from a horse's hoof.
She told me of a night many years before, when she was a little girl, and a horse had brought her father home, to this very door. It was late and everyone was sleeping when they were awakened by the horse pounding at the door with his hoof. Chayo and her sister found her father bleeding badly and faint from loss of blood, but still clinging to the saddle. He'd come upon cattle thieves, and they'd shot and wounded him. Somehow he'd gotten away, and managed to stay in the saddle. The horse had done the rest, thus saving her father's life.
"That was Azabache," Chayo said, remembering the horse's name. Her eyes looked damp.
I happened to notice a clump of flowers growing by the house. They were perhaps the remnant of a garden. "Permítame," I said, and went to pick a small bouquet which I brought back and laid next to the door.
"Para Azabache," I said. "In honor of his memory."
As we turned away to continue down the trail I fantasized for a while about someday coming back here with Chayo to fix up the house, make it livable again. We might move in and live together among these pines at the edge of the world. The trail wound its way through the trees and across the fields. At times it was no more than a cow path. Now and then it nearly vanished, only to reappear again.
"Do you mind if we sit down for a minute?" I said after we'd been walking for some time.
"Of course," she asked. "¿Estas cansado?"
"It's just that it's so beautiful here."
"I'm glad you like it. I remember so many times as a child running across these fields."
We sat on a rock by the path, looking out over the waving fields of grass. I thought I heard the whinny of a distant horse. Then all was silent, except for the gentle sound of the wind. Our arms were wrapped around each other, and it was sweet just to hold her like that. There was a faint aroma of flowers, and I just wanted to sit together with her forever.
It was the ideal setting for some nineteenth century romantic poetry. If only I knew some verses to recite.. I just said, "Te quiero."
"Y yo a ti," she said in my ear. "Te quiero mucho."
We sat there like that for a long time, then finally got to our feet and continued on our way, rather awkwardly attempting to walk hand in hand on the narrow trail that only allowed us to go single file.
Eventually, we came to where the valley ended and in the distance there was the sound of water. I thought it was just the wind whispering through the trees, but the trail had brought us to the banks of a river--the Río Cupatitzio. Here it was several times wider and deeper than back in town.
The banks were fairly low here, and we were able to climb down to the water's edge without difficulty. Over our heads the river was crossed by a rusty cable with large pulley wheels at both ends. It was the remains of a cableway, Chayo told me. There'd been a carriage in which you could sit and pull your way across the river, a substitute for a bridge.
"My father built it. Whenever he went to Apatzingán he'd ride his horse to this point, cross on the cableway, and then on the other side he'd walk to the highway and catch the bus."
"Your father used to go to Apatzingán?"
"Every now and then."
"¿De veras? So what did he do in Apatzingán?" I asked curiously.
"Negocios," she said. "Business. That was part of running a ranch."
I nodded. That pretty much satisfied my curiosity, until she happened to add, "My father also spent the last week of his life in Apatzingán. He died there."
"A natural death? A heart attack or something?"
"He was murdered."
"Did the police catch the killer?"
"That's not the way things work here in México."
I waited for her to say more, but she didn't. We stood there in silence, listening to the softly flowing water. I was dying to know more about what'd happened to her father, and it was difficult for me to keep from asking.
"Would you like to see the waterfall?" she said.
"There's a waterfall?"
"La Tzararacua. I'm sure I've told you about it. It's one of the major sights of this region."
"Yes, of course. I just didn't realize it was so close to the ranch."
After a short walk, we began to hear the roar of the falls, barely audible at first, but growing to a deafening roar which made all conversation impossible. A huge torrent of water poured over the cliff and dissolved in foam below. A thick flow of lava formed the rim, originating perhaps from Mount Jicalán, the cinder cone we'd passed while riding on the bus. That was the nearest potential source of the lava, but it could've come from any of several other small nearby volcanoes.
Across the river we could see numerous sightseers. People came from all over México to see this waterfall, Chayo explained, and if we'd come by the highway, on a bus, that's where we'd have been. There was no nearby bridge crossing the river.
Since the day of my arrival in Uruapan, I'd somehow imagined that this plateau, the Meseta Volcánica, must abruptly end in some incredible drop-off at the top of a sheer-faced cliff, from where I'd be looking down into endless nothingness--a view such as might've been expected by a Medieval traveler as he approached the edge of the world. And when Chayo had told me about the Valley of Infiernillo, I'd modified my mental image, envisioning instead a fantastic lookout point, like the one above Death Valley in California, where you can look down and see everything below.
I was disappointed. We were standing at the approximate edge of the plateau, and from here it began to slope downward. Not far downstream from this waterfall were the Cupatitzio Dam and the lake it formed. After that the river continued its descent. But there seemed to be no place around here where we could get a panoramic view of the valley below, or even of the lake.
The sun was still shining brightly as we turned back the way we'd come, but by the time we walked past the old ranch house, thunder was rumbling in the distance. When we reached the village, the sky had darkened and lightning flashed. Scattered rain drops were beginning to fall. Fortunately there were the eaves of buildings to step under. Once again I thought of how remarkable it was that Chayo never got caught in a rain storm.
A bus was about to leave as we arrived at the plaza, but Chayo was in no hurry to return to Uruapan. We turned off into a labyrinth of narrow streets, little more than confined passageways, and walked till we came to a small adobe house where Chayo paused to knock at the door. The raindrops were getting larger. The storm was almost upon us.
An elderly lady emerged and looked at us for a moment, then burst into a broad smile. "¡Chayo! ¡Que milagro!" she exclaimed happily, and invited us in.
Greetings were followed by introductions. Chayo presented me as her novio--her boyfriend.
The lady's name was doña Lucía, and I sensed that she'd known Chayo from the time she was little. As they talked she lit a gas burner to heat water for coffee. This would have to be home-grown coffee, I figured, since through an open door I could see a coffee tree in the courtyard. But when doña Lucía set cups on the table, she brought out a jar of instant.
The rain which had begun only minutes before was now pouring down with all its tropical intensity. Buckets-full came down, as if somebody had turned on a faucet in the sky, transforming the pathway outside the door into a creek of rushing water. The racket of the storm made it difficult for me to follow the conversation, but it didn't bother Chayo and doña Lucía. They were reminiscing about the good old days back on the ranch. After a bit, the storm subsided enough for me to hear what they were saying.
"Your father was a good man, gentle and kind," doña Lucía was saying. "When a family had nothing to eat he would butcher a steer and give them beef to take home. And he expected nothing in return."
The old rancher had been an outstanding horseman, the lady recalled, and was also skillful with a pistol. He could knock a hawk out of the sky with one shot, she said.
Knowing that pistols didn't easily lend themselves to such a degree of accuracy, I wondered if doña Lucia might be taking some poetic license with her memories. Even so, it was clear that Chayo's father had impressed her favorably. She went on to recall how elegant he'd looked when he dressed up for fiestas in charro, the traditional Mexican ranch costume with embroidered jacket, trousers and wide-brimmed hat.
From their conversation I gathered that this lady had apparently been a cook on the ranch. Despite her years, she was still a handsome woman and I guessed that she must have been very attractive back in the days when Chayo's father had the ranch.
I listened for comments on what might have happened to the old rancher, any hints of how he'd met his end, but, if anything was said, I missed it.
The rain which had been pouring down so intensely was soon over. I watched the water in the pathway trickle away and disappear. Colors returned, gray becoming green again. We stayed a while longer; Chayo and the lady had a lot to talk about. Eventually we rose, said our goodbyes, and stepped out into the bright sunlight. The dark clouds had moved on, taking the storm with them.
"I'll bet she had a crush on your father," I said as we continued on our way.
Chayo nodded with a sly grin, "Yes, I think she did," and added that almost every woman around there did. "My father was a good-looking fellow."
After following the narrow street for a few more twists and turns we came to an adobe building which was larger than the others. "This is where they found a manuscript dating back to the 1500's. It's one of the oldest surviving historical documents of the region."
"This place must be quite ancient to have had something like that. How far back does it go?"
"The building might have been constructed only a couple of centuries ago. As late as the 1950's it was a girls boarding school operated by nuns. But I'm sure the village was here when the Spaniards arrived, and it was probably ancient even back then. Here in the Meseta Volcánica, a thousand years is not a long time."
A few minutes later we were back at the village plaza, and Chayo pointed to a small shop.
"You see that store?" she said, and told me about a famous gunfight which took place when she was a small child. A fellow who lived back in the hills quarreled with the owner of the shop. So he got his friends together and they rode into town in the classic style of a ranchera movie. However, the shop owner was expecting them and in the meantime he'd gotten his people together and ready for action. Two or maybe three men died in the plaza that day.
"Feuds are part of our tradition," Chayo said as we leisurely strolled around the plaza, pausing here and there to look in a shop or at anything else that caught our fancy. "Isn't that also how you said it was back in the world of Icelandic sagas?"
"Quite so," I said with a grin. "It makes me feel at home here."
The afternoon was getting hot now and there were only a few scattered puddles to remind us of the storm that had passed over less than half an hour before. The ground had dried and gusts of wind were already raising small dust clouds.
"Why was the ranch house allowed to fall into such disrepair?" I said after a while. It was one of the many questions I'd been wanting to ask, but somehow felt that I shouldn't.
"Nobody wanted to live in it."
"They didn't? Why?"
"People thought it was cursed. Haunted."
"How come?"
"Someone died there."
"Is that so unusual? Don't people often die at home?"
"Not like this one. He died a horrible death."
It didn't seem that she was talking about her father, who'd apparently been murdered in Apatzingán. I said, "Was it someone you knew?"
"He was the man who stole the ranch from my father."
* * *
It was still only mid afternoon when we got back to Uruapan. I sat down on a park bench in the central plaza, wondering what to do with the rest of the day. Chayo had gone home. She'd said good-bye and gotten off the bus at her house. Usually on her day off we spent all of it together, but today there were some errands she had to attend to. She'd told me about it before we'd set out that morning, so it was nothing unexpected.
Nevertheless, this day had been extra special. She'd taken me to a place that was sacred to her, and--she'd introduced me as her fiancé. "Mi novio," she'd said of me for the first time, and that phrase still reverberated in my mind. Why did this day of all days have to be cut short?
The sun shone brightly and a gentle breeze rustled the leaves of the branches overhead. It was just the sort of day that folks back in Minnesota might have chosen for a picnic. A single white cloud floated in the sky overhead. It looked lonely up there all by itself. I empathized with the cloud.
Even the eternally bustling arcade was relatively quiet. Maybe it always was a bit empty at this time of the afternoon and I just hadn't noticed before.
Perhaps I should go to a movie. I got up from the bench and strolled over to the theater. The matinee was about to start, but for some reason I didn't bother to go in. I walked down to the market place and bought some oranges, mostly to be doing something. From there I ambled over to the Stone Gardens where I sat by the pool at the source of the Cupatitzio.
I came here frequently, sometimes to study the geology, but often just to stroll along the paths of the canyon or sit and gaze into the water. Urðarbrunni--the Spring of Urð was the name which Chayo and I had given it, and we'd decreed it a tenet of our private mythology that it had been Urð herself who'd brought me to this town, and even to Chayo's doorstep.
The troubling side to this nicely romantic interpretation had been the implication that none of what I did was really me, that I was only an actor, cast in a role that had been scripted by some master playwright. I didn't like all that predestination.
One day I'd asked Chayo her opinion and she'd given me the key to the resolution of my dilemma.
"Urð does not write your script," Chayo had explained. "Urð may send you to an appointment, and when she does, she'll make very sure that you don't miss it--but what you say and do when you get there is up to you."
It'd taken me some time to digest that, and, when I did, I suddenly realized something more, something I must have known all along--that Chayo had a profoundly intuitive understanding of mythology. It was the very essence of who Chayo was.
The previous evening I'd told doña Josefina what a remarkably rare and gifted person I found Chayo to be.
"You're in love with her," doña Josefina said, and then asked, "Have you two had a fight yet?"
"No, we haven't. We get along very well," I'd told her. "We're the ideal couple."
Doña Josefina smiled. "If you haven't had a quarrel yet with Chayo, then you still don't know her."
I looked at her in astonishment, but before I could respond, she added, rather soothingly: "But you're right, Olaf. Chayo is indeed remarkable and I do believe the two of you are made for each other."
For some time I sat there gazing into the pool, pondering on these things. From time to time a ripple broke the smooth surface. Then a pair of small boys paused to skip a few stones across the surface. I glanced at my watch. Still a couple hours till dinner time. Perhaps I should bring my journal up to date.
I headed back to the boardinghouse. Carlos and Huero Marco were playing Go as I passed the dining room, and Cuauhtémoc was perched on the back of a chair, presumably critiquing the game.
The shadows were lengthening in the empty courtyard and my room was becoming a bit dim in contrast to the bright afternoon outside. I sat down and opened my journal to the last entry. I had a lot to write about.
* * *
The dining room was filling up as I entered. I took my place at the table, sitting as usual across from Carlos and Huero Marco. They'd apparently finished their game; I could see the Go board back in its usual place.
"Did you and Chayo go somewhere today?" doña Josefina asked. She knew that this was the day I usually went places with Chayo.
"Jucutacato," I said. "We visited the old ranch."
"De veras? What's it like out there now?"
"Planted in avocado," I said, and told her how the creek water had been stolen to irrigate the avocado groves. "Chayo was sad when she saw that."
"I imagine she would be," said doña Josefina sympathetically.
"Pánfilo should have planted avocado himself," don Pablo said. "If he had, he might have kept the ranch and not lost it."
"How's that?" I asked.
"Avocado's the money-making crop nowadays. But Pánfilo couldn't see that times had changed. He continued to raise cattle."
"¿Pánfilo? Was that her father's name?" I asked. I'd seen it in old novels, but I'd never actually met anybody named Pánfilo.
Doña Josefina nodded and told me it was very common back before the time of the Revolution, but not so much any more.
"How did it happen that he lost the ranch?" I said. It was one of those questions I'd been wanting to ask.
"They stole it from him," said doña Josefina.
"Chayo's father was a good man," said don Pablo. "But he wasn't shrewd when it came to dealing with crooks."
"You're saying he was a fool?" the lady objected. "No! They didn't outsmart him. They murdered him."
There was a moment of hushed silence.
Palomo asked, "And they got the ranch?"
Don Pablo nodded.
"Yes, they got the ranch," said doña Josefina. "But they didn't get away with it."
Everyone at the table was looking at doña Josefina, waiting to hear her tell the rest of it. But, perhaps to let the suspense build, she paused to sip her coffee. Or maybe she'd said all she was going to say, so I asked, "What happened?"
"Perhaps Chayo didn't tell you," she replied. "The man behind it all was Juan García. He took over the ranch and moved into the house. But he wasn't there long before the Cucúi began to torment him. You've heard of the Cucúi?"
"Yes, I have. Spirits of the mountains," I said, remembering my own meeting with them in the courtyard. I still wasn't sure what to make of that experience.
The lady nodded. "Thick walls and locked doors couldn't keep them out. They didn't kill him outright; they just terrorized him, playing with him the way a well-fed cat plays with a mouse. They didn't let him sleep at night. Slowly, over weeks and months, he grew haggard and thin. Eventually, after a year or more, he died."
"Wasn't there anything he could do?" I asked.
"He employed a priest to exorcise the Cucúi, but that didn't work. And more than once he tried to defend himself with his pistol, poor man. Though I shouldn't say poor man. After all, he was evil and deserved it."
"Are you sure it was the Cucúi?" I said. "Did anyone else see them?"
Don Pablo shook his head. "No one that I know of. Somebody heard it from a cousin who was told by a neighbor who got it from who knows whom."
"I saw what they did to him myself," doña Josefina shot back. "His hair had turned white, and he was a walking skeleton. That was the week before he died."
"You saw Juan García when he was sick," her husband rejoined. "You did not see the Cucúi. Nobody has ever seen the Cucúi. They don't exist. It's just a superstition, something mothers use to scare their children."
"Fine!" she retorted. "Then explain what happened to him."
"It could've been cancer, or some other ailment," don Pablo replied. "¿Quien sabe? People die of a lot of things."
The lady turned to me, "What does the house look like now?"
"Abandoned," I said. "It's in ruins."
"People don't abandon a good house without a good reason," she said. "It's haunted. There's a curse on it. Everybody around there knows that."
"Those are country folk. They believe anything," don Pablo said.
"And the gunfire in the night? You heard it yourself." She turned to me. "Olaf, did you see the bullet holes inside the ranch house?"
The other people at the dinner table were following this with more-than-casual curiosity, and now they all looked at me in a way that suggested my seeing or not seeing bullet holes implied some sort of proof.
"I didn't look for any bullet holes," I said. "I didn't know about him shooting the place up."
"The man went crazy," said don Pablo.
"Really? You know that?" his wife remarked sarcastically. "And just what makes you think he was crazy?"
"He shot the house up."
When the dinner conversation was over, I still wasn't clear as to what had happened to Juan García, but there seemed to be no doubt that he'd come to a bad end.
Alone in my room that evening, I fantasized about him still being alive, and me hunting him down to make him pay for his crimes. I envisioned scenes in which I went back to the ranch, entered the old house and rid those halls of the evil monster known as Juan García.
These fantasies were like replays of stories I read when I was a child, stories where the hero seeks out a monster in its lair. One was a children's version of Beowulf, a hero who traveled abroad to a land where he fought barehanded against a powerful monster.
As a little kid I used to associate Beowulf with my uncle Rolf, a dragon slayer who would've been very much to home at the banquet table of King Hrothgar. Actually, this was more than just imagination. My uncle was in fact a hero in his own right. As a Marine he'd gone to the South Pacific to fight hand-to-hand with the Japanese during the Second World War.
He was the one who took me camping, taught me how to swim and handle a sailboat, as well as how to shoot. I admired him and sought his approval. But my relationship with him took a bad turn when the war in Vietnam came along, a war which I would've gone off to fight, like my uncle twenty years before, but this was a war I couldn't identify with.
Uncle Rolf and I had argued repeatedly over Vietnam. I was outraged that America was picking on a small, third-world country whose people were courageously defending themselves, and that our leaders were lying to us about why we had to fight them. I came to know the subject well, reading every book and article I could find on it. I became pretty knowledgeable on the subject. But I couldn't persuade my uncle that we were wrong to be there. My arguments just made him angrier.
Instead of joining the Marines, I took part in anti-war demonstrations, and even burned my draft card. When my uncle heard about that, he called me a pacifist and a coward, and that was when I went and threw away the Colt .45 which he had bequeathed to me. It was a painful thing to do, because I'd become sentimentally attached to the weapon, which was by then a family heirloom. Getting rid of it, however, was my way of saying once and for all that I was anti-war, anti-military and anti-gun.
We never spoke to each other again, and, when he died about a year later, I didn't attend his funeral.
"I'm glad you opposed the war," Chayo had said a few days before when I'd told her about it. "But you could've been more respectful to your uncle."
"He refused to understand," I told her.
"Perhaps so, but there are times when people don't understand, even when they should. They can still be good people, and it does sound like your uncle cared a lot about you."
"I suppose so."
"You suppose so? He clearly did, and, you in turn, used his feelings to hurt him."
"Well, he didn't consider my feelings when he called me a coward."
"I understand that," she said. "But think about it. You might remember that Jesus advised us to love our enemies, and that could also mean showing patience with our friends and family when they're acting like enemies."
"Well, it was a gun that I threw away."
"It was an heirloom, right? Something your uncle had entrusted to you."
"It was still a gun, and guns are for killing."
"Olaf," she said. "Please listen to me. Here in México we love our parents, we respect our elders, and we show compassion to strangers. We're a Catholic country and we do our best to follow the precepts of Jesus. He told us to love our enemies, but He didn't promise that we'd never have to shoot some of them."
I fell asleep in the midst of these thoughts and found myself in a dream where I was back in Minnesota, stumbling through the woods, searching for my uncle's old Colt .45.
continued in Chapter 12
I'd arrived early to meet Chayo. We were going to visit the ranch which had once belonged to her father.
Scenes from my previous night's dream floated through my mind, and I began thinking about them. There was a story very similar to my dream in the Icelandic Edda, about a man who journeyed to Niflheim to rescue his brother and bring him home. Their home was high up in the mountains, and Niflheim, the land of the dead, was situated in a cold valley down below. It was a nine-day ride through dark canyons, and when the man got there, he came to a bridge guarded by a woman who asked him why he was riding the Hell-Road.
It was strange that here in México I was dreaming those events of Norse mythology. Maybe it was because the geography of this region reminded me of places described in those ancient Scandinavian poems and stories. And maybe some part of me was suffering a bit of nostalgia for my ancestral homeland.
Suddenly I felt someone nudging me, and I looked up to see Chayo smiling down at me.
"¡Olaf! ¡Despiértate!"
"¿Quieres café?" I asked.
She shook her head. "We don't have time. ¡Vámonos!"
A bus was coming just as we reached the corner. The destination read Jucutacato, another of those tongue twisting names this region was so famous for. We got on board and rode for the first time down the same street we normally walked each evening--Calle Cupatitzio. Over the bridge, past Chayo's house, across the ancient lava flow at the edge of town, and further on past a small volcano. All those familiar places zipped by as though time were being condensed, confounding the laws of physics.
Chayo was unusually quiet, becoming rather pensive as we approached the village. It was a short ride from where we'd gotten on the bus, only some fifteen minutes. We got off at the small village plaza, and set out on foot down a street which was really no more than a narrow path between the adobe houses.
The village was soon behind us, and we were walking through pine forests and avocado groves. It was still the height of the summer rainy season, and, as always, we risked being trapped in a downpour. But I couldn't imagine Chayo getting caught in the rain. We continued on down the trail, for half an hour or so.
Pine-covered hills rose on both sides of us. We were following a valley that was a few hundred meters wide. Along the way we passed several dwellings, some of them hardly more than shanties. Chayo told me they were for ranch hands and their families. Up ahead among some coffee trees was something that appeared to be a larger building.
"All of this used to belong to my father."
"Oh, you mean we're already there?" I said. "This is part of the ranch?"
"Everything in sight. This whole valley."
I glanced around. The trees around us made it difficult to get an exact idea of the size, but it appeared to be on the order of several square kilometers.
Chayo told me she hadn't been here for years. She remembered cattle grazing in pastures. Now in their place were large avocado groves. We crossed a stream bed. Water used to flow all year round in this creek, she said. Now it was dry, even though this was the rainy season.
She looked at it sadly. "They stole the creek and used the water to irrigate the avocado groves."
The building I'd glimpsed in the trees up ahead turned out to be the ranch house. It was deserted, and part of the roof was beginning to cave in. It was built of adobe, but very differently from houses in town. This one consisted of a single, long, one-story building with no courtyard It was rather modest considering the large amount of land.
"It doesn't look at all like the ranch house in the movie." I'd no sooner said it than I bit my lip, wishing I hadn't.
"Those are the movies," she said. "This is a typical ranch house here in Michoacán."
I nodded. "I guess movies exaggerate a bit. They do in the States too."
"This was my room," she said as we stepped into a debris-filled chamber under a broken roof. "I shared it with Catarina."
"Your sister?" I said.
"She's married now. Lives in Morelia," Chayo said, and paused to look at the door, now broken and hanging by a single hinge. She touched it tenderly with her hands, then showed me a scuff mark. There were many scuff marks on this door and this one didn't look different from the others, but Chayo said it was from a horse's hoof.
She told me of a night many years before, when she was a little girl, and a horse had brought her father home, to this very door. It was late and everyone was sleeping when they were awakened by the horse pounding at the door with his hoof. Chayo and her sister found her father bleeding badly and faint from loss of blood, but still clinging to the saddle. He'd come upon cattle thieves, and they'd shot and wounded him. Somehow he'd gotten away, and managed to stay in the saddle. The horse had done the rest, thus saving her father's life.
"That was Azabache," Chayo said, remembering the horse's name. Her eyes looked damp.
I happened to notice a clump of flowers growing by the house. They were perhaps the remnant of a garden. "Permítame," I said, and went to pick a small bouquet which I brought back and laid next to the door.
"Para Azabache," I said. "In honor of his memory."
As we turned away to continue down the trail I fantasized for a while about someday coming back here with Chayo to fix up the house, make it livable again. We might move in and live together among these pines at the edge of the world. The trail wound its way through the trees and across the fields. At times it was no more than a cow path. Now and then it nearly vanished, only to reappear again.
"Do you mind if we sit down for a minute?" I said after we'd been walking for some time.
"Of course," she asked. "¿Estas cansado?"
"It's just that it's so beautiful here."
"I'm glad you like it. I remember so many times as a child running across these fields."
We sat on a rock by the path, looking out over the waving fields of grass. I thought I heard the whinny of a distant horse. Then all was silent, except for the gentle sound of the wind. Our arms were wrapped around each other, and it was sweet just to hold her like that. There was a faint aroma of flowers, and I just wanted to sit together with her forever.
It was the ideal setting for some nineteenth century romantic poetry. If only I knew some verses to recite.. I just said, "Te quiero."
"Y yo a ti," she said in my ear. "Te quiero mucho."
We sat there like that for a long time, then finally got to our feet and continued on our way, rather awkwardly attempting to walk hand in hand on the narrow trail that only allowed us to go single file.
Eventually, we came to where the valley ended and in the distance there was the sound of water. I thought it was just the wind whispering through the trees, but the trail had brought us to the banks of a river--the Río Cupatitzio. Here it was several times wider and deeper than back in town.
The banks were fairly low here, and we were able to climb down to the water's edge without difficulty. Over our heads the river was crossed by a rusty cable with large pulley wheels at both ends. It was the remains of a cableway, Chayo told me. There'd been a carriage in which you could sit and pull your way across the river, a substitute for a bridge.
"My father built it. Whenever he went to Apatzingán he'd ride his horse to this point, cross on the cableway, and then on the other side he'd walk to the highway and catch the bus."
"Your father used to go to Apatzingán?"
"Every now and then."
"¿De veras? So what did he do in Apatzingán?" I asked curiously.
"Negocios," she said. "Business. That was part of running a ranch."
I nodded. That pretty much satisfied my curiosity, until she happened to add, "My father also spent the last week of his life in Apatzingán. He died there."
"A natural death? A heart attack or something?"
"He was murdered."
"Did the police catch the killer?"
"That's not the way things work here in México."
I waited for her to say more, but she didn't. We stood there in silence, listening to the softly flowing water. I was dying to know more about what'd happened to her father, and it was difficult for me to keep from asking.
"Would you like to see the waterfall?" she said.
"There's a waterfall?"
"La Tzararacua. I'm sure I've told you about it. It's one of the major sights of this region."
"Yes, of course. I just didn't realize it was so close to the ranch."
After a short walk, we began to hear the roar of the falls, barely audible at first, but growing to a deafening roar which made all conversation impossible. A huge torrent of water poured over the cliff and dissolved in foam below. A thick flow of lava formed the rim, originating perhaps from Mount Jicalán, the cinder cone we'd passed while riding on the bus. That was the nearest potential source of the lava, but it could've come from any of several other small nearby volcanoes.
Across the river we could see numerous sightseers. People came from all over México to see this waterfall, Chayo explained, and if we'd come by the highway, on a bus, that's where we'd have been. There was no nearby bridge crossing the river.
Since the day of my arrival in Uruapan, I'd somehow imagined that this plateau, the Meseta Volcánica, must abruptly end in some incredible drop-off at the top of a sheer-faced cliff, from where I'd be looking down into endless nothingness--a view such as might've been expected by a Medieval traveler as he approached the edge of the world. And when Chayo had told me about the Valley of Infiernillo, I'd modified my mental image, envisioning instead a fantastic lookout point, like the one above Death Valley in California, where you can look down and see everything below.
I was disappointed. We were standing at the approximate edge of the plateau, and from here it began to slope downward. Not far downstream from this waterfall were the Cupatitzio Dam and the lake it formed. After that the river continued its descent. But there seemed to be no place around here where we could get a panoramic view of the valley below, or even of the lake.
The sun was still shining brightly as we turned back the way we'd come, but by the time we walked past the old ranch house, thunder was rumbling in the distance. When we reached the village, the sky had darkened and lightning flashed. Scattered rain drops were beginning to fall. Fortunately there were the eaves of buildings to step under. Once again I thought of how remarkable it was that Chayo never got caught in a rain storm.
A bus was about to leave as we arrived at the plaza, but Chayo was in no hurry to return to Uruapan. We turned off into a labyrinth of narrow streets, little more than confined passageways, and walked till we came to a small adobe house where Chayo paused to knock at the door. The raindrops were getting larger. The storm was almost upon us.
An elderly lady emerged and looked at us for a moment, then burst into a broad smile. "¡Chayo! ¡Que milagro!" she exclaimed happily, and invited us in.
Greetings were followed by introductions. Chayo presented me as her novio--her boyfriend.
The lady's name was doña Lucía, and I sensed that she'd known Chayo from the time she was little. As they talked she lit a gas burner to heat water for coffee. This would have to be home-grown coffee, I figured, since through an open door I could see a coffee tree in the courtyard. But when doña Lucía set cups on the table, she brought out a jar of instant.
The rain which had begun only minutes before was now pouring down with all its tropical intensity. Buckets-full came down, as if somebody had turned on a faucet in the sky, transforming the pathway outside the door into a creek of rushing water. The racket of the storm made it difficult for me to follow the conversation, but it didn't bother Chayo and doña Lucía. They were reminiscing about the good old days back on the ranch. After a bit, the storm subsided enough for me to hear what they were saying.
"Your father was a good man, gentle and kind," doña Lucía was saying. "When a family had nothing to eat he would butcher a steer and give them beef to take home. And he expected nothing in return."
The old rancher had been an outstanding horseman, the lady recalled, and was also skillful with a pistol. He could knock a hawk out of the sky with one shot, she said.
Knowing that pistols didn't easily lend themselves to such a degree of accuracy, I wondered if doña Lucia might be taking some poetic license with her memories. Even so, it was clear that Chayo's father had impressed her favorably. She went on to recall how elegant he'd looked when he dressed up for fiestas in charro, the traditional Mexican ranch costume with embroidered jacket, trousers and wide-brimmed hat.
From their conversation I gathered that this lady had apparently been a cook on the ranch. Despite her years, she was still a handsome woman and I guessed that she must have been very attractive back in the days when Chayo's father had the ranch.
I listened for comments on what might have happened to the old rancher, any hints of how he'd met his end, but, if anything was said, I missed it.
The rain which had been pouring down so intensely was soon over. I watched the water in the pathway trickle away and disappear. Colors returned, gray becoming green again. We stayed a while longer; Chayo and the lady had a lot to talk about. Eventually we rose, said our goodbyes, and stepped out into the bright sunlight. The dark clouds had moved on, taking the storm with them.
"I'll bet she had a crush on your father," I said as we continued on our way.
Chayo nodded with a sly grin, "Yes, I think she did," and added that almost every woman around there did. "My father was a good-looking fellow."
After following the narrow street for a few more twists and turns we came to an adobe building which was larger than the others. "This is where they found a manuscript dating back to the 1500's. It's one of the oldest surviving historical documents of the region."
"This place must be quite ancient to have had something like that. How far back does it go?"
"The building might have been constructed only a couple of centuries ago. As late as the 1950's it was a girls boarding school operated by nuns. But I'm sure the village was here when the Spaniards arrived, and it was probably ancient even back then. Here in the Meseta Volcánica, a thousand years is not a long time."
A few minutes later we were back at the village plaza, and Chayo pointed to a small shop.
"You see that store?" she said, and told me about a famous gunfight which took place when she was a small child. A fellow who lived back in the hills quarreled with the owner of the shop. So he got his friends together and they rode into town in the classic style of a ranchera movie. However, the shop owner was expecting them and in the meantime he'd gotten his people together and ready for action. Two or maybe three men died in the plaza that day.
"Feuds are part of our tradition," Chayo said as we leisurely strolled around the plaza, pausing here and there to look in a shop or at anything else that caught our fancy. "Isn't that also how you said it was back in the world of Icelandic sagas?"
"Quite so," I said with a grin. "It makes me feel at home here."
The afternoon was getting hot now and there were only a few scattered puddles to remind us of the storm that had passed over less than half an hour before. The ground had dried and gusts of wind were already raising small dust clouds.
"Why was the ranch house allowed to fall into such disrepair?" I said after a while. It was one of the many questions I'd been wanting to ask, but somehow felt that I shouldn't.
"Nobody wanted to live in it."
"They didn't? Why?"
"People thought it was cursed. Haunted."
"How come?"
"Someone died there."
"Is that so unusual? Don't people often die at home?"
"Not like this one. He died a horrible death."
It didn't seem that she was talking about her father, who'd apparently been murdered in Apatzingán. I said, "Was it someone you knew?"
"He was the man who stole the ranch from my father."
* * *
It was still only mid afternoon when we got back to Uruapan. I sat down on a park bench in the central plaza, wondering what to do with the rest of the day. Chayo had gone home. She'd said good-bye and gotten off the bus at her house. Usually on her day off we spent all of it together, but today there were some errands she had to attend to. She'd told me about it before we'd set out that morning, so it was nothing unexpected.
Nevertheless, this day had been extra special. She'd taken me to a place that was sacred to her, and--she'd introduced me as her fiancé. "Mi novio," she'd said of me for the first time, and that phrase still reverberated in my mind. Why did this day of all days have to be cut short?
The sun shone brightly and a gentle breeze rustled the leaves of the branches overhead. It was just the sort of day that folks back in Minnesota might have chosen for a picnic. A single white cloud floated in the sky overhead. It looked lonely up there all by itself. I empathized with the cloud.
Even the eternally bustling arcade was relatively quiet. Maybe it always was a bit empty at this time of the afternoon and I just hadn't noticed before.
Perhaps I should go to a movie. I got up from the bench and strolled over to the theater. The matinee was about to start, but for some reason I didn't bother to go in. I walked down to the market place and bought some oranges, mostly to be doing something. From there I ambled over to the Stone Gardens where I sat by the pool at the source of the Cupatitzio.
I came here frequently, sometimes to study the geology, but often just to stroll along the paths of the canyon or sit and gaze into the water. Urðarbrunni--the Spring of Urð was the name which Chayo and I had given it, and we'd decreed it a tenet of our private mythology that it had been Urð herself who'd brought me to this town, and even to Chayo's doorstep.
The troubling side to this nicely romantic interpretation had been the implication that none of what I did was really me, that I was only an actor, cast in a role that had been scripted by some master playwright. I didn't like all that predestination.
One day I'd asked Chayo her opinion and she'd given me the key to the resolution of my dilemma.
"Urð does not write your script," Chayo had explained. "Urð may send you to an appointment, and when she does, she'll make very sure that you don't miss it--but what you say and do when you get there is up to you."
It'd taken me some time to digest that, and, when I did, I suddenly realized something more, something I must have known all along--that Chayo had a profoundly intuitive understanding of mythology. It was the very essence of who Chayo was.
The previous evening I'd told doña Josefina what a remarkably rare and gifted person I found Chayo to be.
"You're in love with her," doña Josefina said, and then asked, "Have you two had a fight yet?"
"No, we haven't. We get along very well," I'd told her. "We're the ideal couple."
Doña Josefina smiled. "If you haven't had a quarrel yet with Chayo, then you still don't know her."
I looked at her in astonishment, but before I could respond, she added, rather soothingly: "But you're right, Olaf. Chayo is indeed remarkable and I do believe the two of you are made for each other."
For some time I sat there gazing into the pool, pondering on these things. From time to time a ripple broke the smooth surface. Then a pair of small boys paused to skip a few stones across the surface. I glanced at my watch. Still a couple hours till dinner time. Perhaps I should bring my journal up to date.
I headed back to the boardinghouse. Carlos and Huero Marco were playing Go as I passed the dining room, and Cuauhtémoc was perched on the back of a chair, presumably critiquing the game.
The shadows were lengthening in the empty courtyard and my room was becoming a bit dim in contrast to the bright afternoon outside. I sat down and opened my journal to the last entry. I had a lot to write about.
* * *
The dining room was filling up as I entered. I took my place at the table, sitting as usual across from Carlos and Huero Marco. They'd apparently finished their game; I could see the Go board back in its usual place.
"Did you and Chayo go somewhere today?" doña Josefina asked. She knew that this was the day I usually went places with Chayo.
"Jucutacato," I said. "We visited the old ranch."
"De veras? What's it like out there now?"
"Planted in avocado," I said, and told her how the creek water had been stolen to irrigate the avocado groves. "Chayo was sad when she saw that."
"I imagine she would be," said doña Josefina sympathetically.
"Pánfilo should have planted avocado himself," don Pablo said. "If he had, he might have kept the ranch and not lost it."
"How's that?" I asked.
"Avocado's the money-making crop nowadays. But Pánfilo couldn't see that times had changed. He continued to raise cattle."
"¿Pánfilo? Was that her father's name?" I asked. I'd seen it in old novels, but I'd never actually met anybody named Pánfilo.
Doña Josefina nodded and told me it was very common back before the time of the Revolution, but not so much any more.
"How did it happen that he lost the ranch?" I said. It was one of those questions I'd been wanting to ask.
"They stole it from him," said doña Josefina.
"Chayo's father was a good man," said don Pablo. "But he wasn't shrewd when it came to dealing with crooks."
"You're saying he was a fool?" the lady objected. "No! They didn't outsmart him. They murdered him."
There was a moment of hushed silence.
Palomo asked, "And they got the ranch?"
Don Pablo nodded.
"Yes, they got the ranch," said doña Josefina. "But they didn't get away with it."
Everyone at the table was looking at doña Josefina, waiting to hear her tell the rest of it. But, perhaps to let the suspense build, she paused to sip her coffee. Or maybe she'd said all she was going to say, so I asked, "What happened?"
"Perhaps Chayo didn't tell you," she replied. "The man behind it all was Juan García. He took over the ranch and moved into the house. But he wasn't there long before the Cucúi began to torment him. You've heard of the Cucúi?"
"Yes, I have. Spirits of the mountains," I said, remembering my own meeting with them in the courtyard. I still wasn't sure what to make of that experience.
The lady nodded. "Thick walls and locked doors couldn't keep them out. They didn't kill him outright; they just terrorized him, playing with him the way a well-fed cat plays with a mouse. They didn't let him sleep at night. Slowly, over weeks and months, he grew haggard and thin. Eventually, after a year or more, he died."
"Wasn't there anything he could do?" I asked.
"He employed a priest to exorcise the Cucúi, but that didn't work. And more than once he tried to defend himself with his pistol, poor man. Though I shouldn't say poor man. After all, he was evil and deserved it."
"Are you sure it was the Cucúi?" I said. "Did anyone else see them?"
Don Pablo shook his head. "No one that I know of. Somebody heard it from a cousin who was told by a neighbor who got it from who knows whom."
"I saw what they did to him myself," doña Josefina shot back. "His hair had turned white, and he was a walking skeleton. That was the week before he died."
"You saw Juan García when he was sick," her husband rejoined. "You did not see the Cucúi. Nobody has ever seen the Cucúi. They don't exist. It's just a superstition, something mothers use to scare their children."
"Fine!" she retorted. "Then explain what happened to him."
"It could've been cancer, or some other ailment," don Pablo replied. "¿Quien sabe? People die of a lot of things."
The lady turned to me, "What does the house look like now?"
"Abandoned," I said. "It's in ruins."
"People don't abandon a good house without a good reason," she said. "It's haunted. There's a curse on it. Everybody around there knows that."
"Those are country folk. They believe anything," don Pablo said.
"And the gunfire in the night? You heard it yourself." She turned to me. "Olaf, did you see the bullet holes inside the ranch house?"
The other people at the dinner table were following this with more-than-casual curiosity, and now they all looked at me in a way that suggested my seeing or not seeing bullet holes implied some sort of proof.
"I didn't look for any bullet holes," I said. "I didn't know about him shooting the place up."
"The man went crazy," said don Pablo.
"Really? You know that?" his wife remarked sarcastically. "And just what makes you think he was crazy?"
"He shot the house up."
When the dinner conversation was over, I still wasn't clear as to what had happened to Juan García, but there seemed to be no doubt that he'd come to a bad end.
Alone in my room that evening, I fantasized about him still being alive, and me hunting him down to make him pay for his crimes. I envisioned scenes in which I went back to the ranch, entered the old house and rid those halls of the evil monster known as Juan García.
These fantasies were like replays of stories I read when I was a child, stories where the hero seeks out a monster in its lair. One was a children's version of Beowulf, a hero who traveled abroad to a land where he fought barehanded against a powerful monster.
As a little kid I used to associate Beowulf with my uncle Rolf, a dragon slayer who would've been very much to home at the banquet table of King Hrothgar. Actually, this was more than just imagination. My uncle was in fact a hero in his own right. As a Marine he'd gone to the South Pacific to fight hand-to-hand with the Japanese during the Second World War.
He was the one who took me camping, taught me how to swim and handle a sailboat, as well as how to shoot. I admired him and sought his approval. But my relationship with him took a bad turn when the war in Vietnam came along, a war which I would've gone off to fight, like my uncle twenty years before, but this was a war I couldn't identify with.
Uncle Rolf and I had argued repeatedly over Vietnam. I was outraged that America was picking on a small, third-world country whose people were courageously defending themselves, and that our leaders were lying to us about why we had to fight them. I came to know the subject well, reading every book and article I could find on it. I became pretty knowledgeable on the subject. But I couldn't persuade my uncle that we were wrong to be there. My arguments just made him angrier.
Instead of joining the Marines, I took part in anti-war demonstrations, and even burned my draft card. When my uncle heard about that, he called me a pacifist and a coward, and that was when I went and threw away the Colt .45 which he had bequeathed to me. It was a painful thing to do, because I'd become sentimentally attached to the weapon, which was by then a family heirloom. Getting rid of it, however, was my way of saying once and for all that I was anti-war, anti-military and anti-gun.
We never spoke to each other again, and, when he died about a year later, I didn't attend his funeral.
"I'm glad you opposed the war," Chayo had said a few days before when I'd told her about it. "But you could've been more respectful to your uncle."
"He refused to understand," I told her.
"Perhaps so, but there are times when people don't understand, even when they should. They can still be good people, and it does sound like your uncle cared a lot about you."
"I suppose so."
"You suppose so? He clearly did, and, you in turn, used his feelings to hurt him."
"Well, he didn't consider my feelings when he called me a coward."
"I understand that," she said. "But think about it. You might remember that Jesus advised us to love our enemies, and that could also mean showing patience with our friends and family when they're acting like enemies."
"Well, it was a gun that I threw away."
"It was an heirloom, right? Something your uncle had entrusted to you."
"It was still a gun, and guns are for killing."
"Olaf," she said. "Please listen to me. Here in México we love our parents, we respect our elders, and we show compassion to strangers. We're a Catholic country and we do our best to follow the precepts of Jesus. He told us to love our enemies, but He didn't promise that we'd never have to shoot some of them."
I fell asleep in the midst of these thoughts and found myself in a dream where I was back in Minnesota, stumbling through the woods, searching for my uncle's old Colt .45.
continued in Chapter 12
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