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chapter 18
The waiting room was filling up with passengers. When you bought a bus ticket to a remote village like Tancítaro, you wanted to plan ahead and get one with an assigned seat number on it. Otherwise, you might have to stand. Our tickets had no seat numbers.
As departure time neared, people began to mill around and talk nervously. Then I remembered the report of storm damage to the road. Had it been washed out? I'd forgotten to ask about that. We might not be leaving at all.
I went back to the ticket window. Others were asking the same question, and the reply was: "We don't know yet."
MacClayne looked up from Sunny Days in the Tropics. "What's happening?" he said.
"There's a rumor that the road is out."
"So what does that mean? That the bus won't go?"
"We'll have to wait and see," I said, and tried to think of alternatives. Go back to the boardinghouse and wait for a better day? No. Having set out, we couldn't turn back so casually.
More passengers entered, one with several lady chickens which attracted Cuauhtémoc's attention; he shamelessly made an uncouth, cocky sound, something like, "Rhhhhhhhhhhh!"
"That is extremely improper!" I scolded him, and started to take him off his perch to set him where he couldn't stare at the objects of his desire. Only a moment before, his countenance had expressed spirituality, now it was lust. He clung to the backrest with his talons, not willing to let go.
MacClayne watched and grinned momentarily. Nobody else was looking at the chickens. The people around us were speaking in low tones, presumably worried that the bus might not leave.
"What do you think our chances are?" MacClayne asked, looking around a bit apprehensively at the obvious concern of our would-be fellow passengers.
"About the bus leaving?" I said. MacClayne nodded.
"Hard to tell," I said. Then the loudspeaker blared out something in a squawky tone that I didn't catch. The driver opened the door and began accepting tickets.
"Looks like our fears were a false alarm," MacClayne said, looking relieved. We both began laughing, not at anything in particular, maybe just to relieve the tension. Others were laughing too.
But when I finally handed our tickets to the driver, he told me he might not be going all the way to Tancítaro. We boarded anyway, and I told MacClayne, "We're only certain of getting as far as San Juan. That's about 15 kilometers from here."
"How much farther is it from there to Tancítaro?"
"Another 40 kilometers," I said. "I suggest we just go and see how things work out." I could see MacClayne starting to frown, and so I added, "A quest for the Holy Grail was never a sure thing."
His frown changed to a chuckle. "I suppose uncertainty is part of our quest."
We exchanged more comments on the sufferings and hardships to be endured by true chevaliers on their way to the fabled and forbidden city. As we'd expected, we found ourselves standing on this bus, and MacClayne quipped, "It appears that they don't reserve seats for Holy Grailers."
"You have to get tickets hours, or even a day, ahead of time, if you want one with an assigned seat number," I told him.
We were not only standing, we were packed in like sardines for what would be at least a three-hour ride--assuming we could get through.
Our bus drove first to the town plaza where even more passengers were picked up and squeezed in, and then we turned south onto the familiar street down which I'd walked Chayo home every evening. We crossed the bridge over the Cupatitzio, passed Chayo's house, and then the malpaís.
"This is the legendary Thirsty Mountain, the one that drank the river dry," I said, speaking loudly enough for him to hear me over the din. MacClayne attempted to catch a glimpse of it as we sped by.
We passed the cinder cone known as Mount Jicalán, then the village of Jucutacato.
"The local OK Corral?" he asked with a grin when I told him where we were. These were the things and places we'd originally planned to take our time and spend as much as a week visiting. Now, as we rode along I made an effort to point out what I could, but it was hard to see because we had to bend over to window level and peer between the heads of other passengers.
Cuauhtémoc sat on my arm and craned his neck to look around, probably wondering where the lady chickens were.
"San Juan is where refugees from the Paricutín eruption settled after their village was covered with lava," I said. "We'll be there soon."
The road curved back and forth, but it was blacktopped and our ride was smooth.
"We're on a good road," MacClayne said.
"Not for much longer," I warned him.
San Juan was a new and fairly large village with broad streets and few, if any, buildings of adobe. Most houses were concrete. There were also two or three windowless plank houses with steep roofs, the kind seen in Indian villages. I tried to remember what Chayo had said they were called. Were they troje style?
The driver got out, presumably to ask about road conditions. Less than two minutes later he was back. "¡Vamonos!"
So we were off for Tancítaro, hopefully. Two or three women were shouting back and forth across Cuauhtémoc and me, wondering if the bus would really be able to make it all the way.
Many people had gotten off in San Juan, but not enough to empty any seats, so we were still standing. The pavement ended abruptly as we exited the village, and we were now on a horrible, unpaved, washboard mountain road. Forty kilometers of it lay ahead.
With fewer passengers, there were fewer heads and shoulders obscuring the view as I bent over to window level to look out. What I saw was pine forest. And mist.
Rain drops streaked the window panes from time to time. It had rained on us when we walked to the depot, and apparently stopped only so that it could threaten to start again.
The bus wove back and forth, often up hill in low gear. The engine droned on while we bounced along, enduring the punishment of the horrible road which made the bus rattle as though it were about to fall apart. It hammered at our ear drums and nearly shook the flesh off our bones. Cuauhtémoc grew heavy on my arm, and I perched him on my shoulder where he hung on with his talons and extended his wings as best he could in the narrow space to keep his balance.
As we gained elevation, the trees got thicker, the underbrush denser, and the branches more festooned with vines. Mist became fog, and eventually spruce began replacing pine. The fog forest, it was called. We were ascending the elevated slopes which I had so often gazed at from Uruapan; even on sunny days they were sometimes hidden by clouds.
Our bus eased by several minor mudslides which had dumped dirt and rocks onto the road. We finally came to one that completely blocked our way.
Everyone got out. Some grabbed shovels, others pushed or carried boulders. MacClayne and I joined a group who were dragging a tree trunk to one side. With everybody working it didn't take long. Then I glanced around. Where was Cuauhtémoc? He'd been at my side only moments before, watching us clear the road. Then suddenly I knew where he must've gone, and I ran to the bus. I climbed aboard, and there he was. My wayward bird!
He gave me a look of casual innocence, as if to say, "Are you back so soon?" Near him was one of the lady chickens, straightening out her ruffled feathers.
"¡Sinvergüenza!" I scolded Cuauhtémoc in a voice that was low but sharp, then glanced around, hoping MacClayne hadn't seen or heard any of this. Fortunately he was still outside.
The road had been cleared and the other passengers were reboarding; we were soon on our way again, but with a triumphal sense of camaraderie after having pitched in together to clear the road. Someone opened a bottle of tequila and passed it around. It came my way and I pretended to take a swig without actually swallowing any. Cuauhtémoc nudged me with his beak. "No," I told him firmly. Then I saw it handed to MacClayne. He'd promised not to drink on this trip, and I held my breath as he lifted it up and cheerfully declared, "¡Salud!" Then without taking any, passed it on.
From time to time the bus stopped at tiny hamlets of four or five small huts and a few people got off at each one; it began to look like I might eventually get a seat. Here and there was a clearing with a corn field or two. Then the forest closed in again. So did the fog.
Passengers were suddenly crossing themselves in the manner that Catholics so often do. I glanced around. We were passing a small roadside shrine, rather like one you might imagine seeing in Japan or in Tibet. The shrine could have been Shinto, Buddhist or even Bön. Of course it was Catholic. México is a Catholic country, but in these mountains you could easily forget which continent you were on, which world you were in.
All at once, sunlight was flooding in through the windows, and it made me realize how gray and dim everything around us had been till now. I bent over and looked out. The sky was clear and the fog was gone from around us. We were driving along the edge of a cliff, and I saw the valley far, far below.
This was my first brief look at the Valley of Infiernillo, a flat, barren landscape broken only by river gullies and treeless cinder cones stretching off into the distance, ending in faraway bluish mountains. I shuddered involuntarily. It was a glimpse into the abyss, the uncomfortably familiar nightmare world that had been haunting my dreams. I could almost hear the guard woman at the river, saying "Hvi riðer thu her a Helveg?"
Somewhere down there lay Apatzingán, though it wasn't to be seen right now. It was probably concealed by a fold in the mountain. As quickly as we'd emerged into the blinding sunlight, we dove back again into the forest, darker each time than before.
More fog, and sometimes less fog. Underbrush and vines. Spruce, and some pine. The continual pounding and hammering and rattling of the bus on the washboard road. Occasional rain drops on the window.
There were more scattered clearings and dwellings where more people got off. The fellow with the lady chickens left the bus at one of these. Cuauhtémoc watched them until they disappeared into the mist.
Eventually I got a seat next to a fellow with a small pig. He lived on a ranchito a bit this side of Tancítaro, he told me. But the constant banging and rattling on the washboard road made conversation impossible to sustain. Cuauhtémoc hopped down on the floor to exchange greetings with the piglet. The little animal gave a squeak and the bird responded with a cluck, then returned to sit in my lap.
MacClayne was by now sitting diagonally across from me, next to one of the fellows who'd helped push the tree off the road. They were making an attempt at conversation. The tequila bottle was still going around; MacClayne lifted it up as before with a hearty "¡Salud!" and passed it on.
I took out my journal and noted down the things I saw along the way, writing in a much-worse-than-usual version of my unreadable handwriting. A radio was playing, and at times it overpowered the road din. I caught bits of a song by Javier Solis.
Occasionally I leaned over to say something to MacClayne. He shook his head, couldn't hear. I'd tell him later.
Eventually, after we'd been bounced around for over three hours, the forest opened up into a world of corn fields. The land was relatively flat, rolling. We passed a couple of volcanic cinder cones, and a few kilometers later there were houses. We were in a fairly substantial village. Could this be Tancítaro? It had to be.
The bus let us off in the plaza, an open space surrounded by an elegant arcade of tall galleries and well-built adobe buildings which might have dated back to the turn of the century. A cloud of cold mist hit us as we stepped off the bus, and Cuauhtémoc shuddered. He hopped to the ground and fluttered his wings, trying to shake off the damp chill.
"Chayo loves this place," I told MacClayne, "She talks about it often. She's always wanted to live in a small mountain village like this."
"Idyllic. Yes. But the isolation would soon become intolerable."
"Maybe that's why she only talks about it," I said.
MacClayne smiled, then suggested that the first thing we ought to do was find a hotel--hopefully there would be one. It was about five o'clock. A couple hours of daylight were left, but it already felt like dusk. Actually, the whole day had felt like dusk.
We asked around, and were directed to an establishment which was between some shops in the arcade. Like the other buildings along the plaza, it was an adobe structure with thick walls, tall doors and tall ceilings. A middle-aged lady appeared.
"¿Hay recamara?" I asked.
She led us to a narrow courtyard with a single row of rooms. The one she showed us had the usual thick, whitewashed walls, and high ceiling. It was plain, but tasteful and dignified. I'd seen many adobe buildings by now, but I never tired of them.
Separate from this was the hotel washroom, equipped with a very tiny hot water heater for the shower. It burned wood scraps from a nearby sawmill and the landlady told us it could be heated on request. I'd never seen one of these before but it looked quite modern for this region. It was one of those ingenious devices that utilized limited resources to the maximum. This water heater and the bare electric light bulbs were about all there was in this place to remind us that this was the last quarter of the 20th century.
MacClayne glanced around and said, "Did you ask her how much it will cost?"
The price turned out to be sixty pesos a night for the two of us, the equivalent of three US dollars. I paid for both of us; MacClayne would reimburse me afterwards. We'd decided to do it that way because it was simpler.
"¿Es gallo de combate?" The landlady looked admiringly at Cuauhtémoc.
"Jubilado," I said, telling her he was retired.
"¿Su mascota?"
"Mi amigito." I stroked his feathers, and asked, "Has there been any snow?"
"Higher up on the mountain," she said. "Not here in the village."
"Some weather, isn't it?"
"I've never seen it like this before," she said, "and I've lived here all my life! This is the dry season. Usually it's warm at this time of year." The lady might have been around fifty, so she had certainly seen a lot of weather in this village.
We chatted briefly about the village. She told me how it got its name.
"Tancítaro means the place where tribute is paid. Emperor Caltzontzin himself came here to receive it," she said, then she went to look for blankets.
While we waited I translated for MacClayne and added a few comments of my own. "Can you picture that?" I said. "The boss of the Tarascan empire trudged all the way up here to collect taxes."
"When was that?" MacClayne asked.
"Some time before the Spanish Conquest. Five centuries ago."
"He was probably the last celebrity to visit this village."
"Except for us," I said. "But I wonder if he really came in person. There couldn't have been much to collect in a small place like this."
"Probably sent an underling, maybe a second lieutenant who had gotten himself on the shit list," MacClayne said.
Cuauhtémoc was strutting about on the floor, impatient to get out and see the town. The landlady soon returned with blankets, and I asked her what there might be of interest to see around here. She mentioned several things, including a 'pedregal'. "It's two blocks from the plaza. You'll see it from there," she said. I wasn't too clear on what she meant, except that it was probably something made of rock.
We left our things in the room and went out to the arcade. Cuauhtémoc took to his wings and flew past us into the plaza. Then he waited for us to catch up.
The sky was dark as ever, but it wasn't raining. To the north, the forested slopes disappeared into the clouds. Up there somewhere was the snow-capped peak. I wished I could see it.
"The twilight zone," MacClayne remarked.
"Yeah, we're at the edge of the world," I said.
"And below us lies Apatzingán."
"Right. It's off the edge."
Cuauhtémoc strutted along beside us.
"So what was that thing the lady was telling us about?" he said.
"Something made of stone, apparently," I said. "She called it a pedregal."
"The ruins of a pre-Hispanic pyramid?"
"Maybe. This was an urban settlement going back to pre-conquest times, and it probably had some status."
A short walk took us there, and instead of being the ruins of an ancient edifice, it turned out to be a lava flow which looked surprisingly new and fresh. Hardly any trees or vegetation had taken root in it.
"Quite a pile of rock!" MacClayne said. "I presume it's lava?"
"Yes, and I can't believe how recent it looks," I said. "In this whole region there've been only two recorded volcanic eruptions since the Spanish Conquest--Paricutín in 1943, and Jorullo back in 1759. There's also the Thirsty Mountain event which appears to have gone unnoticed except for that legend. And now here's a fourth."
"How recent do you think it might be?--or is it possible to say from looking at it?"
"It's guesswork," I said. "But when I see a barren pile of rock in the midst of this verdant landscape where grass and trees are growing everywhere else, I've got to conclude that it hasn't been here awfully long. It's certainly a lot newer than the malpaís which is covered with trees and brush. It could be less than a century old."
I chipped off a piece of the lava to inspect a fresh surface. The rock was almost black, and sparkled with tiny crystals of feldspar. It was basaltic andesite, the same material I'd seen everywhere on the Meseta Volcánica.
A drizzle began, and we decided to head back to town before we got caught in a shower. I could come back some other time and visit this on my own.
"Mount Tancítaro used to be the one and only volcano in this region," I said, glancing off in the direction where the clouds were hiding it. "That was maybe a hundred thousand years ago and it must have been a fantastically tall mountain."
"How much higher do you think it was?"
"Maybe a third taller," I said. "Just imagine it back when it was an active volcano. But it's still the highest peak in Michoacán. It's about 3845 meters."
"Why did it cease its volcanic activity?"
"I don't know. That's something I've been puzzling over. All I can say is that for some reason it stopped erupting and started eroding down. That's when all the little cinder cones started popping up."
"A bit like when you cut down a redwood tree and a bunch of little saplings start springing up in a circle around it," MacClayne said.
"Yeah, like that," I said, admiring his metaphor. MacClayne had a way with words.
We'd come to the church at the far side of the plaza. The building was made of stone, and was fairly typical of churches throughout México, but larger and more elegant than one might expect to see in a remote village. It was a masterpiece of architecture, almost a cathedral.
"Poor villages with hardly anything else sometimes have expensive churches," I said.
MacClayne shook his head. "That's why they're poor."
"Maybe, but it's probably quite old and no strain on the current economy. I'd guess it's probably older than the lava flow."
The entrance door was open. Nobody seemed to be around.
"Don't you dare shit in here," I admonished Cuauhtémoc as we walked in, "You'll burn in hell if you do." Just to be sure, I lifted him up and carried him in the crook of my arm
The interior was even more impressive than the outside, with magnificent baroque furnishings and decoration, all except for one horrible blemish--from the ceiling hung an uncovered light bulb suspended by a bare electric wire, as in some back-yard shed.
MacClayne smiled sympathetically. "That's México."
We stepped outside into the oncoming drizzle. In spite of the precipitation, the air was getting colder as we strolled around town. At one end we passed a small sawmill, but the lumber was apparently sold elsewhere; all the houses in this village were adobe. The very elegant ones with traditionally tall doors and high ceilings were concentrated mostly around the plaza; those along the outer streets were much smaller and had lower doors and ceilings, but they too had their charm. Eventually we turned back towards the hotel.
Suddenly it was dark, and MacClayne remarked on how quickly night had fallen.
"That's the way it is here in the tropics," I said. "Day one minute, night the next."
The drizzle had become a slow but chilling rain. We weren't hungry yet, but on our way back to the hotel we kept our eye out for a restaurant that we could come back to later in the evening. There was one on a corner of the plaza that looked okay. I stepped in and found that it would be open all evening.
When we got back to our hotel room I realized that Cuauhtémoc was soaked to the skin. He was one wet chicken, and I looked around for a towel to dry him off. There were only two, one for me and one for MacClayne, so I used mine. Then I wrapped the bird in his small blanket which I'd brought with. Then I remembered that the poor bird hadn't eaten, and I'd forgotten to bring any grain. Where in Tancítaro could I get oats or corn or barley? I guessed that any kind of grain would be okay.
"You wait here," I said to the bird, but of course he insisted on accompanying me out the door and to the arcade where I began asking in one shop after another. It was raining quite heavily now, and I was glad that several stores and shops were under this section of the broad roof of the arcade. I soon learned of a place where animal feed, including grains was sold. However, it was around the corner and down the street, and to get there I'd have to walk through the rain and get soaking wet. But then I saw that the shop I was in had corn tortillas. I looked at my bird, wondering if he'd settle for tortillas. Yes, he would, I decided. He'd love to dine on tortillas this evening.
So back in our room, after Cuauhtémoc had finished his meal of tortillas, which to my relief he ate without complaint, I again wrapped him up in his bird blanket and fastened it with a safety pin. He looked cozy and content, sitting there on the seat of the chair next to me, with just his neck and head protruding from the blanket. I thought again of Chayo, and how the bird would never have accepted this blanket in the first place if it hadn't been her present to him.
MacClayne had lain down on his bed to take a nap and was already snoring faintly. Cuauhtémoc had also closed his eyes. I could hear the rain on the roof; it sounded intense. The air felt colder.
I put a blanket over my shoulders and sat down with my journal, glancing over what I'd written earlier of the day's events, then I started a new paragraph: Our meal at Antojitos and our subsequent visit to the Stone Gardens. Had MacClayne seen that white bird? I kept wondering about that. I wrote on for some time.
Eventually, MacClayne woke up, yawned, stretched and asked me if I were hungry. "Yes I am," I said, and we got ready to go out to eat. I replaced Cuauhtémoc's blanket with a make-shift raincoat consisting of a plastic bag with a hole for his head to stick out.
"You ready?" MacClayne asked. He was looking at the bird.
"We are. Let's go."
The rain was by now a heavy downpour. Exiting the hotel, we walked under the broad arcade until we reached the corner. Our restaurant was across the street.
"Just look at that river!" MacClayne said, and stepped back from the curb. The street was flowing with dark, muddy water, reflecting the twisting image of a street lamp.
We stood on the high curb, protected from above by the arcade roof, and looked for a place to cross. With Cuauhtémoc on my arm, we found a place where the water took a narrow channel which we stepped over with ease. Without much difficulty we reached the other side, and paused under the long protective eaves of the restaurant. There we shook off the water; even those few seconds under the downpour had gotten us wet. Only Cuauhtémoc was dry; I took off his raincoat, and we made our entry into the restaurant.
It wasn't too crowded, and we found seats at a small wooden table. Cuauhtémoc stepped off my arm to perch on the backrest of a chair, and I laid a napkin on the floor below him, just in case. Like the other buildings in this area, this was of adobe, probably dating from before the Revolution. MacClayne admired the simple elegance of the room with its massive rose-colored walls and high ceiling.
"This could be the setting of a Western movie," MacClayne said, still wiping water from his face and hair.
"A scene where the desperados pause for a meal and a drink as they head south with the loot."
"Not desperados," he corrected me. "Heroes searching for the lost city of El Dorado."
"Okay," I said. "And the bird, can he be in this movie?"
"Better ask him if he'd want to be part of it."
Cuauhtémoc turned to MacClayne and clucked. MacClayne gazed back at the bird and said, "I almost get the feeling that that damned rooster understood what I just said."
"A number of people have made similar observations, and at times I wonder about it myself."
A teen-age waitress appeared beside our table, smiling shyly, perhaps wondering if we spoke Spanish. It was probably unusual to see foreigners in this establishment.
"¿Qué hay de comer?" I asked.
"Carne de res, y carne de puerco," she replied.
"Beef or pork," I translated for MacClayne; the beef was twenty five pesos and the pork was twenty--about one US dollar.
"I'll have one and you have the other," he said. "How's that?"
While we waited for the food, we munched on corn chips. I broke off pieces of mine to share with Cuauhtémoc. Although he'd already eaten, he still seemed to be hungry. On the wall beside us was a portrait of a man in an early 19th century military uniform and a bandana tied around his head. MacClayne wondered who he might be.
"That's General Morelos," I said. "He was a leader in the War for Independence, and he's the one who presided over the writing of the first Mexican constitution, which happened, coincidentally, in Apatzingán. That was in 1814. Morelos was originally from this state of Michoacán, and he started out as a muleteer. He spent a good many of his early years driving teams of pack mules up and down the back roads of Michoacán, across the Valley of Infiernillo."
"That was before he became a military officer?"
"Morelos never was trained as a professional military man, but he was quite good at it." I went on to say a bit more about him.
"What eventually became of this Morelos?"
"The bad guys put him up against a wall and shot him."
"The Spaniards?"
"It's often phrased in those terms, but it wasn't at all that simple. The worst of them were actually Mexican landowners, men like General Iturbide who eventually took over and proclaimed himself emperor."
Our meals came; both the beef and the pork were served with beans and corn tortillas. I asked the waitress about the pedregal. She knew that it was from a volcanic eruption, but not when it had occurred.
While we ate, the waitress brought beer to three or four fellows at a table near us. At the sound of cans popping open and liquid pouring into glasses, Cuauhtémoc perked up his head. I offered him some choice bits from my plate, but he'd lost interest in food.
"Shall we have coffee?" MacClayne suggested as we finished our meal.
Rain hammered at the roof and poured down loudly outside; no doubt more snow was falling on the mountain above. It felt good to be sitting there nice and dry, hearing the rain. MacClayne recalled adventures from his seafaring days, just after the war:
". . . To be young is the good time, the best time, perhaps the only time. I had recently finished five long interminable and often unendurable years in the Royal Marines. The enemy had been destroyed and forced into unconditional surrender and so there I was, returning to a world at peace, or so we were told.
"I suffered through the job routine; builder's laborer, factory worker, worked on the railway, navvying, house-painter and shipped out too. Going to sea was a terrible disappointment, although I was and still am consumed with a wild and romantic dream of the sea, of the movement of waves and the pull of sail, raising the anchor by hand . . .
"I remember once I was shipping out from the old country and I had missed a ship and was on the beach in Las Palmas in the Canary Islands. A lovely group of islands. Beautiful beaches, marvelous climate, and I truly had the time of my life because I was young then.
"I had finally managed to escape that dank, damp, dreary, gloomy and grey British climate and emerge at last into the sun. It was like a second birth. I emerged into a world flooded with sunlight and it was love at first sight."
A nostalgic smile came over MacClayne's face as he spoke, and his voice blended pleasantly with the storm. His story was from the late 1940's, shortly after the War, still some years before I was born. As a British seaman he was required to complete the voyage he was on. But MacClayne was a free spirit. He jumped ship.
"I needed no coaxing, no convincing . . . I saw the sun, I fell in love and that particular love has never left me. Gone, forever I hoped, those sodden thistled Scottish highlands and moorland. Grey Glasgow and Gloomy Edinburgh with their rain-washed mackintosh-muffled streets and refrigerated bedrooms with goose-pimpled wallpaper falling away from the walls because of the damp. I was as exultant as a bird trying his wings; swooping, diving, soaring, holding his flight."
The party at the table near us were downing their beers, and Cuauhtémoc nudged me with his beak. I knew what he wanted, but I ignored him, hoping that if I didn't pay any attention he might forget about it. I went back to listening to MacClayne's story.
"There were three of us: an Englishman who was also a seaman from my ship, and a Welshman who'd been on the island for some time. We lived in a makeshift tent made of poles and canvas that the Welshman had inherited from some predecessor.
"When a merchant ship docked we would go aboard and eat. The seamen are great and why should they not be? After all they are our brothers. Sometimes we even raised money for the wine."
Cuauhtémoc nudged me again. I continued to ignore him.
"We also became friends with some local fishermen. Any fish left over from their catch they would give to us. Despite something of a language barrier we got to know them very well. They must have figured we were a wee bit different and probably realized that our aim and purpose in life was not to wear a suit and collar and tie and work in a bank or laboratory and certainly not a factory. We were not particularly inclined to industry of any kind. We were children of working class parents and none of our fathers had any great praise for hard work except to keep the wolf from the door. School was over at fourteen, and if you had asked us about our education I am sure we would have told you we did not even miss it.
"Ah it was a great life all right, a great life!
"We literally lived on fish. Clams for breakfast with a banana. Fish for dinner. Many a time there would be a big fish on the plate and nothing else. No salad, no baked Idaho, no tartar sauce or melted butter garnish, no sprig of parsley and certainly no silver fish knives. We had fried fish, boiled fish, fish cooked in a home-made steamer, grilled fish, fish cooked on a spit over a flame, fish in a chowder. I ate so much fish my stomach used to rise and fall with the tide. . . ."
Our coffees arrived, and Cuauhtémoc glared at me with a where's-my-drink look on his face. I offered him a bit of corn chip, but he pushed it away and nudged me again. He wasn't in a mood to be ignored. It was time to take him back to the hotel, but I was enjoying MacClayne's story and I didn't want to interrupt. There was only one way to appease this bird and keep him quiet.
I glanced around, feeling an irrational need to assure myself that Chayo wasn't watching, then I cleared my throat and said to MacClayne, "Do you mind if I order a beer?" Because of MacClayne's eternal struggle with alcohol, I felt it proper to ask his permission.
"Go ahead, feel free," he said.
"Una cerveza," I said to the waitress.
"I didn't know you drank beer," he said as the woman left.
"I don't."
"Didn't you just order one? Not that it's any of my business. I have no objection. I'm only curious."
I cleared my throat again and tried to think of something to say. My mind was blank.
The waitress returned with the beer and a glass into which I poured some and set it in front of the bird. He eagerly dipped his beak into the brew.
MacClayne just stared. No expression on his face. The waitress stood there, eyes glued to the bird. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see that people at other tables had turned to look. I heard tittering. Even the cook came out of the kitchen to watch. But the bird himself was not the least bit self-conscious. He just went on plunging his beak into the glass and lifting his head up to swallow.
The room had fallen silent. Eating and drinking and talking had ceased. There was just the sound of the rain. And the penetrating silent looks of the entire establishment. I was beginning to understand what people go through when a close friend or family member is addicted to drink.
The bird was nudging me again. I poured more beer into his glass. What else could I do?
Then I remembered our conversation. MacClayne's adventure. A moment before I'd found it very amusing and entertaining. Now, I just wanted to be talking about something other than my bird's drinking. "You were telling about the Canary Islands," I said, trying my best to sound nonchalant.
MacClayne nodded, took a sip of his coffee and paused to think. "Och yes, were was I?"
"There were three of you, living in a tent," I said.
"Yes, we lived on the beach.," he said. "Norman, our Welsh comrade, was drinking heavily and was in the D.T.'s a good deal of the time. In his worse periods he would rant on and on about the terrible creatures planning to encircle him. He described them as a mixture of huge red-and-black feathered spiders with luminous eyes and sharp-clawed, swarming octopi with the flesh-devouring teeth of piranha fish."
Cuauhtémoc, as though intrigued by the description, paused to listen. Soon he was again dipping his beak. I surreptitiously glanced around. Thank god! The waitress was elsewhere, and people at other tables were back to their own affairs.
"One evening a fisherman gave us a lobster. When we returned to camp with it, we found Norman staring wild-eyed into space and howling like a dog. We gave him a big swallow of wine and he lay down and almost instantly fell asleep. For a laugh we laid the lobster on his bare chest, and then wandered along the beach to lie around and take our ease, when we heard a terrible scream.
"In the moonlight we saw the Welshman streaking across the sands like a wild man, leaping and flailing the air with his arms and throwing his knees high. He raced past without even seeing us. Every few steps he leaped into the air like a hurdler or a male ballet dancer, throwing his front foot horizontal to the ground and making you think he might sprout wings, hold his flight and sail away into the horizon. We finally brought him down with a rugby tackle and had to sit on him to keep him quiet. The sweat was lashing out of him and he was still clutching the lobster. Gradually he calmed down enough to talk but even then it was with the voice of a man who had narrowly escaped death, 'I kept telling you bastards about those monsters I was seeing. Well you'll have to believe me now for I've caught one.'"
Cuauhtémoc hiccuped.
"He was in such a state of agitation we had to hold the jug to his mouth and after a few gurgles he quieted down."
Cuauhtémoc hiccuped again. Poor bird, he was pickled. MacClayne seemed not to notice, and he made no comment on the alcohol that had just been consumed at our table. But when you're traveling with two alcoholics, and one gets to drink and the other doesn't, there's bound to be tension. Sooner or later.
"Shall we head back to the hotel?" he said. That was all he said, and I was grateful.
We finished off our coffee. I quietly lifted Cuauhtémoc off the chair, and went to pay our bill. The fat lady who operated the cash register gave us a weird look, but she didn't make any comment. Just the same, she somehow looked like a real gossip, and I could just guess that my bird and I would be the talk of this place for the next week.
The rain was pouring down more fiercely than ever as we stepped out the door and stood under the eaves. I tried to put the bird's raincoat on, but he fought against it, and finally I gave up. "Pobrecito," I said. "You've got to lay off the booze. It's bad for you." That was all I said, knowing that it had really been my fault for giving it to him, for taking such poor care of him.
"Now we have to cross that," MacClayne said, looking at the street which had become a river. The flooding had continued to grow while we'd been in the restaurant. Light from street lamps cut through the rain and danced on the water. For the moment, we stood high and dry on the curb which rose a good half meter above the street.
Suddenly I saw her! There, across the street, stood Chayo. She glared at me through the rain, clearly faulting me for the bird's condition. I gasped and closed my eyes, then looked again. No, it was just a pillar of the arcade. I sighed with relief, and looked down at the waterway between.
Slightly shaken, I rolled up my trouser-legs, took the bird in my arms, and looked for a place where MacClayne could follow me across. Someone had attempted to fashion a makeshift footbridge out of planks, but one of the timbers had been washed away. I stepped in and waded, hurrying to avoid being in the downpour a second longer than necessary. The water in the street was only ankle deep, but my jacket and even my shirt underneath got soaked with icy rain. I tried to shield Cuauhtémoc as best I could. He was still hiccuping.
MacClayne waded in to follow, shoes and all. He should've gotten himself a decent pair of boots. That's what I'd advised him to do in one of my letters. So why hadn't he? Scotch frugality was the reason! MacClayne had probably violated and defied all the other rules and accepted norms of Scotland, but frugality was the one tradition he held sacred.
So the water flooded into his shoes. But he took it well, not allowing it to dampen his spirits, and once back in our room he simply hung up his soggy footgear in hopes that it would be dry by morning.
Before dealing with my water-logged clothes, I attended to Cuauhtémoc. I carefully wiped the water off him with my towel. Then I draped a large blanket over the back of a chair, forming a small, cozy, tent-like shelter over the seat, where, after wrapping the bird in his small blanket, I placed him.
Having finished, I peeled off my wet shirt and trousers, wrapped a blanket around myself, then sat down and reached for my journal when MacClayne said, "Would you care to read something aloud together?"
"Sounds like a good thought," I said.
We decided that I'd read first, and I dug into my library which consisted of about three books. "Here's one on sedimentary petrology," I said teasingly. "It's great for reading aloud."
"What does it say?"
"That 70 % of the rocks at the earth's surface are sedimentary in origin," I said.
"That's very good to know," he replied with a smile. "What else do you have?"
I took out a small volume of Spanish poetry. "Can I read something in Spanish?" I said. "I think I have something appropriate, by Antonio Machado, Voy soñando caminos--I Go Along Dreaming Roads."
I read the poem in Spanish, then paraphrased it in English. MacClayne asked me to read it again in Spanish. Being a poet, he liked to hear the sound of things in their original language. When I finished he applauded. Cuauhtémoc gave no response; he was sleeping it off under the blanket. From time to time I checked to see if he were okay.
Then MacClayne took his turn, choosing a story from the collection he'd been reading earlier: Sunny Days in the Tropics.
I already had one blanket wrapped around my shoulders, but I added a second, and MacClayne began a tale that took place on a warm tropical evening somewhere in the South Seas. There wasn't much in the way of plot or action, but MacClayne read it so well that I could almost feel the warm, gentle breeze coming in the window, carrying the sounds of insects chirping in the balmy night.
I smiled longingly and let out a deep sigh which formed a small cloud of vapor in the frigid air. The whitewashed adobe walls reflected the cold back at me like the ice blocks of an igloo. I shivered and pulled the blankets tighter about me.
"Were the Canary Islands like that?" I asked when he finished the story.
"Beautiful beaches, marvelous climate. Indeed it was paradise," he said. "I'm sure we suffered our aches and pains; nevertheless it was what you might call a poor man's idyllic existence."
"It's gotten terribly cold in here," I said, rubbing my arms in an attempt to get my blood circulating. Then I stopped and listened for a moment. "I don't hear the rain any more."
"Maybe it's let up," MacClayne said.
I opened the door to look.
It was snowing. Large white flakes were floating down from the dark sky, and I shut the door to keep out what I could of the cold.
continued in Chapter 19
As departure time neared, people began to mill around and talk nervously. Then I remembered the report of storm damage to the road. Had it been washed out? I'd forgotten to ask about that. We might not be leaving at all.
I went back to the ticket window. Others were asking the same question, and the reply was: "We don't know yet."
MacClayne looked up from Sunny Days in the Tropics. "What's happening?" he said.
"There's a rumor that the road is out."
"So what does that mean? That the bus won't go?"
"We'll have to wait and see," I said, and tried to think of alternatives. Go back to the boardinghouse and wait for a better day? No. Having set out, we couldn't turn back so casually.
More passengers entered, one with several lady chickens which attracted Cuauhtémoc's attention; he shamelessly made an uncouth, cocky sound, something like, "Rhhhhhhhhhhh!"
"That is extremely improper!" I scolded him, and started to take him off his perch to set him where he couldn't stare at the objects of his desire. Only a moment before, his countenance had expressed spirituality, now it was lust. He clung to the backrest with his talons, not willing to let go.
MacClayne watched and grinned momentarily. Nobody else was looking at the chickens. The people around us were speaking in low tones, presumably worried that the bus might not leave.
"What do you think our chances are?" MacClayne asked, looking around a bit apprehensively at the obvious concern of our would-be fellow passengers.
"About the bus leaving?" I said. MacClayne nodded.
"Hard to tell," I said. Then the loudspeaker blared out something in a squawky tone that I didn't catch. The driver opened the door and began accepting tickets.
"Looks like our fears were a false alarm," MacClayne said, looking relieved. We both began laughing, not at anything in particular, maybe just to relieve the tension. Others were laughing too.
But when I finally handed our tickets to the driver, he told me he might not be going all the way to Tancítaro. We boarded anyway, and I told MacClayne, "We're only certain of getting as far as San Juan. That's about 15 kilometers from here."
"How much farther is it from there to Tancítaro?"
"Another 40 kilometers," I said. "I suggest we just go and see how things work out." I could see MacClayne starting to frown, and so I added, "A quest for the Holy Grail was never a sure thing."
His frown changed to a chuckle. "I suppose uncertainty is part of our quest."
We exchanged more comments on the sufferings and hardships to be endured by true chevaliers on their way to the fabled and forbidden city. As we'd expected, we found ourselves standing on this bus, and MacClayne quipped, "It appears that they don't reserve seats for Holy Grailers."
"You have to get tickets hours, or even a day, ahead of time, if you want one with an assigned seat number," I told him.
We were not only standing, we were packed in like sardines for what would be at least a three-hour ride--assuming we could get through.
Our bus drove first to the town plaza where even more passengers were picked up and squeezed in, and then we turned south onto the familiar street down which I'd walked Chayo home every evening. We crossed the bridge over the Cupatitzio, passed Chayo's house, and then the malpaís.
"This is the legendary Thirsty Mountain, the one that drank the river dry," I said, speaking loudly enough for him to hear me over the din. MacClayne attempted to catch a glimpse of it as we sped by.
We passed the cinder cone known as Mount Jicalán, then the village of Jucutacato.
"The local OK Corral?" he asked with a grin when I told him where we were. These were the things and places we'd originally planned to take our time and spend as much as a week visiting. Now, as we rode along I made an effort to point out what I could, but it was hard to see because we had to bend over to window level and peer between the heads of other passengers.
Cuauhtémoc sat on my arm and craned his neck to look around, probably wondering where the lady chickens were.
"San Juan is where refugees from the Paricutín eruption settled after their village was covered with lava," I said. "We'll be there soon."
The road curved back and forth, but it was blacktopped and our ride was smooth.
"We're on a good road," MacClayne said.
"Not for much longer," I warned him.
San Juan was a new and fairly large village with broad streets and few, if any, buildings of adobe. Most houses were concrete. There were also two or three windowless plank houses with steep roofs, the kind seen in Indian villages. I tried to remember what Chayo had said they were called. Were they troje style?
The driver got out, presumably to ask about road conditions. Less than two minutes later he was back. "¡Vamonos!"
So we were off for Tancítaro, hopefully. Two or three women were shouting back and forth across Cuauhtémoc and me, wondering if the bus would really be able to make it all the way.
Many people had gotten off in San Juan, but not enough to empty any seats, so we were still standing. The pavement ended abruptly as we exited the village, and we were now on a horrible, unpaved, washboard mountain road. Forty kilometers of it lay ahead.
With fewer passengers, there were fewer heads and shoulders obscuring the view as I bent over to window level to look out. What I saw was pine forest. And mist.
Rain drops streaked the window panes from time to time. It had rained on us when we walked to the depot, and apparently stopped only so that it could threaten to start again.
The bus wove back and forth, often up hill in low gear. The engine droned on while we bounced along, enduring the punishment of the horrible road which made the bus rattle as though it were about to fall apart. It hammered at our ear drums and nearly shook the flesh off our bones. Cuauhtémoc grew heavy on my arm, and I perched him on my shoulder where he hung on with his talons and extended his wings as best he could in the narrow space to keep his balance.
As we gained elevation, the trees got thicker, the underbrush denser, and the branches more festooned with vines. Mist became fog, and eventually spruce began replacing pine. The fog forest, it was called. We were ascending the elevated slopes which I had so often gazed at from Uruapan; even on sunny days they were sometimes hidden by clouds.
Our bus eased by several minor mudslides which had dumped dirt and rocks onto the road. We finally came to one that completely blocked our way.
Everyone got out. Some grabbed shovels, others pushed or carried boulders. MacClayne and I joined a group who were dragging a tree trunk to one side. With everybody working it didn't take long. Then I glanced around. Where was Cuauhtémoc? He'd been at my side only moments before, watching us clear the road. Then suddenly I knew where he must've gone, and I ran to the bus. I climbed aboard, and there he was. My wayward bird!
He gave me a look of casual innocence, as if to say, "Are you back so soon?" Near him was one of the lady chickens, straightening out her ruffled feathers.
"¡Sinvergüenza!" I scolded Cuauhtémoc in a voice that was low but sharp, then glanced around, hoping MacClayne hadn't seen or heard any of this. Fortunately he was still outside.
The road had been cleared and the other passengers were reboarding; we were soon on our way again, but with a triumphal sense of camaraderie after having pitched in together to clear the road. Someone opened a bottle of tequila and passed it around. It came my way and I pretended to take a swig without actually swallowing any. Cuauhtémoc nudged me with his beak. "No," I told him firmly. Then I saw it handed to MacClayne. He'd promised not to drink on this trip, and I held my breath as he lifted it up and cheerfully declared, "¡Salud!" Then without taking any, passed it on.
From time to time the bus stopped at tiny hamlets of four or five small huts and a few people got off at each one; it began to look like I might eventually get a seat. Here and there was a clearing with a corn field or two. Then the forest closed in again. So did the fog.
Passengers were suddenly crossing themselves in the manner that Catholics so often do. I glanced around. We were passing a small roadside shrine, rather like one you might imagine seeing in Japan or in Tibet. The shrine could have been Shinto, Buddhist or even Bön. Of course it was Catholic. México is a Catholic country, but in these mountains you could easily forget which continent you were on, which world you were in.
All at once, sunlight was flooding in through the windows, and it made me realize how gray and dim everything around us had been till now. I bent over and looked out. The sky was clear and the fog was gone from around us. We were driving along the edge of a cliff, and I saw the valley far, far below.
This was my first brief look at the Valley of Infiernillo, a flat, barren landscape broken only by river gullies and treeless cinder cones stretching off into the distance, ending in faraway bluish mountains. I shuddered involuntarily. It was a glimpse into the abyss, the uncomfortably familiar nightmare world that had been haunting my dreams. I could almost hear the guard woman at the river, saying "Hvi riðer thu her a Helveg?"
Somewhere down there lay Apatzingán, though it wasn't to be seen right now. It was probably concealed by a fold in the mountain. As quickly as we'd emerged into the blinding sunlight, we dove back again into the forest, darker each time than before.
More fog, and sometimes less fog. Underbrush and vines. Spruce, and some pine. The continual pounding and hammering and rattling of the bus on the washboard road. Occasional rain drops on the window.
There were more scattered clearings and dwellings where more people got off. The fellow with the lady chickens left the bus at one of these. Cuauhtémoc watched them until they disappeared into the mist.
Eventually I got a seat next to a fellow with a small pig. He lived on a ranchito a bit this side of Tancítaro, he told me. But the constant banging and rattling on the washboard road made conversation impossible to sustain. Cuauhtémoc hopped down on the floor to exchange greetings with the piglet. The little animal gave a squeak and the bird responded with a cluck, then returned to sit in my lap.
MacClayne was by now sitting diagonally across from me, next to one of the fellows who'd helped push the tree off the road. They were making an attempt at conversation. The tequila bottle was still going around; MacClayne lifted it up as before with a hearty "¡Salud!" and passed it on.
I took out my journal and noted down the things I saw along the way, writing in a much-worse-than-usual version of my unreadable handwriting. A radio was playing, and at times it overpowered the road din. I caught bits of a song by Javier Solis.
Occasionally I leaned over to say something to MacClayne. He shook his head, couldn't hear. I'd tell him later.
Eventually, after we'd been bounced around for over three hours, the forest opened up into a world of corn fields. The land was relatively flat, rolling. We passed a couple of volcanic cinder cones, and a few kilometers later there were houses. We were in a fairly substantial village. Could this be Tancítaro? It had to be.
The bus let us off in the plaza, an open space surrounded by an elegant arcade of tall galleries and well-built adobe buildings which might have dated back to the turn of the century. A cloud of cold mist hit us as we stepped off the bus, and Cuauhtémoc shuddered. He hopped to the ground and fluttered his wings, trying to shake off the damp chill.
"Chayo loves this place," I told MacClayne, "She talks about it often. She's always wanted to live in a small mountain village like this."
"Idyllic. Yes. But the isolation would soon become intolerable."
"Maybe that's why she only talks about it," I said.
MacClayne smiled, then suggested that the first thing we ought to do was find a hotel--hopefully there would be one. It was about five o'clock. A couple hours of daylight were left, but it already felt like dusk. Actually, the whole day had felt like dusk.
We asked around, and were directed to an establishment which was between some shops in the arcade. Like the other buildings along the plaza, it was an adobe structure with thick walls, tall doors and tall ceilings. A middle-aged lady appeared.
"¿Hay recamara?" I asked.
She led us to a narrow courtyard with a single row of rooms. The one she showed us had the usual thick, whitewashed walls, and high ceiling. It was plain, but tasteful and dignified. I'd seen many adobe buildings by now, but I never tired of them.
Separate from this was the hotel washroom, equipped with a very tiny hot water heater for the shower. It burned wood scraps from a nearby sawmill and the landlady told us it could be heated on request. I'd never seen one of these before but it looked quite modern for this region. It was one of those ingenious devices that utilized limited resources to the maximum. This water heater and the bare electric light bulbs were about all there was in this place to remind us that this was the last quarter of the 20th century.
MacClayne glanced around and said, "Did you ask her how much it will cost?"
The price turned out to be sixty pesos a night for the two of us, the equivalent of three US dollars. I paid for both of us; MacClayne would reimburse me afterwards. We'd decided to do it that way because it was simpler.
"¿Es gallo de combate?" The landlady looked admiringly at Cuauhtémoc.
"Jubilado," I said, telling her he was retired.
"¿Su mascota?"
"Mi amigito." I stroked his feathers, and asked, "Has there been any snow?"
"Higher up on the mountain," she said. "Not here in the village."
"Some weather, isn't it?"
"I've never seen it like this before," she said, "and I've lived here all my life! This is the dry season. Usually it's warm at this time of year." The lady might have been around fifty, so she had certainly seen a lot of weather in this village.
We chatted briefly about the village. She told me how it got its name.
"Tancítaro means the place where tribute is paid. Emperor Caltzontzin himself came here to receive it," she said, then she went to look for blankets.
While we waited I translated for MacClayne and added a few comments of my own. "Can you picture that?" I said. "The boss of the Tarascan empire trudged all the way up here to collect taxes."
"When was that?" MacClayne asked.
"Some time before the Spanish Conquest. Five centuries ago."
"He was probably the last celebrity to visit this village."
"Except for us," I said. "But I wonder if he really came in person. There couldn't have been much to collect in a small place like this."
"Probably sent an underling, maybe a second lieutenant who had gotten himself on the shit list," MacClayne said.
Cuauhtémoc was strutting about on the floor, impatient to get out and see the town. The landlady soon returned with blankets, and I asked her what there might be of interest to see around here. She mentioned several things, including a 'pedregal'. "It's two blocks from the plaza. You'll see it from there," she said. I wasn't too clear on what she meant, except that it was probably something made of rock.
We left our things in the room and went out to the arcade. Cuauhtémoc took to his wings and flew past us into the plaza. Then he waited for us to catch up.
The sky was dark as ever, but it wasn't raining. To the north, the forested slopes disappeared into the clouds. Up there somewhere was the snow-capped peak. I wished I could see it.
"The twilight zone," MacClayne remarked.
"Yeah, we're at the edge of the world," I said.
"And below us lies Apatzingán."
"Right. It's off the edge."
Cuauhtémoc strutted along beside us.
"So what was that thing the lady was telling us about?" he said.
"Something made of stone, apparently," I said. "She called it a pedregal."
"The ruins of a pre-Hispanic pyramid?"
"Maybe. This was an urban settlement going back to pre-conquest times, and it probably had some status."
A short walk took us there, and instead of being the ruins of an ancient edifice, it turned out to be a lava flow which looked surprisingly new and fresh. Hardly any trees or vegetation had taken root in it.
"Quite a pile of rock!" MacClayne said. "I presume it's lava?"
"Yes, and I can't believe how recent it looks," I said. "In this whole region there've been only two recorded volcanic eruptions since the Spanish Conquest--Paricutín in 1943, and Jorullo back in 1759. There's also the Thirsty Mountain event which appears to have gone unnoticed except for that legend. And now here's a fourth."
"How recent do you think it might be?--or is it possible to say from looking at it?"
"It's guesswork," I said. "But when I see a barren pile of rock in the midst of this verdant landscape where grass and trees are growing everywhere else, I've got to conclude that it hasn't been here awfully long. It's certainly a lot newer than the malpaís which is covered with trees and brush. It could be less than a century old."
I chipped off a piece of the lava to inspect a fresh surface. The rock was almost black, and sparkled with tiny crystals of feldspar. It was basaltic andesite, the same material I'd seen everywhere on the Meseta Volcánica.
A drizzle began, and we decided to head back to town before we got caught in a shower. I could come back some other time and visit this on my own.
"Mount Tancítaro used to be the one and only volcano in this region," I said, glancing off in the direction where the clouds were hiding it. "That was maybe a hundred thousand years ago and it must have been a fantastically tall mountain."
"How much higher do you think it was?"
"Maybe a third taller," I said. "Just imagine it back when it was an active volcano. But it's still the highest peak in Michoacán. It's about 3845 meters."
"Why did it cease its volcanic activity?"
"I don't know. That's something I've been puzzling over. All I can say is that for some reason it stopped erupting and started eroding down. That's when all the little cinder cones started popping up."
"A bit like when you cut down a redwood tree and a bunch of little saplings start springing up in a circle around it," MacClayne said.
"Yeah, like that," I said, admiring his metaphor. MacClayne had a way with words.
We'd come to the church at the far side of the plaza. The building was made of stone, and was fairly typical of churches throughout México, but larger and more elegant than one might expect to see in a remote village. It was a masterpiece of architecture, almost a cathedral.
"Poor villages with hardly anything else sometimes have expensive churches," I said.
MacClayne shook his head. "That's why they're poor."
"Maybe, but it's probably quite old and no strain on the current economy. I'd guess it's probably older than the lava flow."
The entrance door was open. Nobody seemed to be around.
"Don't you dare shit in here," I admonished Cuauhtémoc as we walked in, "You'll burn in hell if you do." Just to be sure, I lifted him up and carried him in the crook of my arm
The interior was even more impressive than the outside, with magnificent baroque furnishings and decoration, all except for one horrible blemish--from the ceiling hung an uncovered light bulb suspended by a bare electric wire, as in some back-yard shed.
MacClayne smiled sympathetically. "That's México."
We stepped outside into the oncoming drizzle. In spite of the precipitation, the air was getting colder as we strolled around town. At one end we passed a small sawmill, but the lumber was apparently sold elsewhere; all the houses in this village were adobe. The very elegant ones with traditionally tall doors and high ceilings were concentrated mostly around the plaza; those along the outer streets were much smaller and had lower doors and ceilings, but they too had their charm. Eventually we turned back towards the hotel.
Suddenly it was dark, and MacClayne remarked on how quickly night had fallen.
"That's the way it is here in the tropics," I said. "Day one minute, night the next."
The drizzle had become a slow but chilling rain. We weren't hungry yet, but on our way back to the hotel we kept our eye out for a restaurant that we could come back to later in the evening. There was one on a corner of the plaza that looked okay. I stepped in and found that it would be open all evening.
When we got back to our hotel room I realized that Cuauhtémoc was soaked to the skin. He was one wet chicken, and I looked around for a towel to dry him off. There were only two, one for me and one for MacClayne, so I used mine. Then I wrapped the bird in his small blanket which I'd brought with. Then I remembered that the poor bird hadn't eaten, and I'd forgotten to bring any grain. Where in Tancítaro could I get oats or corn or barley? I guessed that any kind of grain would be okay.
"You wait here," I said to the bird, but of course he insisted on accompanying me out the door and to the arcade where I began asking in one shop after another. It was raining quite heavily now, and I was glad that several stores and shops were under this section of the broad roof of the arcade. I soon learned of a place where animal feed, including grains was sold. However, it was around the corner and down the street, and to get there I'd have to walk through the rain and get soaking wet. But then I saw that the shop I was in had corn tortillas. I looked at my bird, wondering if he'd settle for tortillas. Yes, he would, I decided. He'd love to dine on tortillas this evening.
So back in our room, after Cuauhtémoc had finished his meal of tortillas, which to my relief he ate without complaint, I again wrapped him up in his bird blanket and fastened it with a safety pin. He looked cozy and content, sitting there on the seat of the chair next to me, with just his neck and head protruding from the blanket. I thought again of Chayo, and how the bird would never have accepted this blanket in the first place if it hadn't been her present to him.
MacClayne had lain down on his bed to take a nap and was already snoring faintly. Cuauhtémoc had also closed his eyes. I could hear the rain on the roof; it sounded intense. The air felt colder.
I put a blanket over my shoulders and sat down with my journal, glancing over what I'd written earlier of the day's events, then I started a new paragraph: Our meal at Antojitos and our subsequent visit to the Stone Gardens. Had MacClayne seen that white bird? I kept wondering about that. I wrote on for some time.
Eventually, MacClayne woke up, yawned, stretched and asked me if I were hungry. "Yes I am," I said, and we got ready to go out to eat. I replaced Cuauhtémoc's blanket with a make-shift raincoat consisting of a plastic bag with a hole for his head to stick out.
"You ready?" MacClayne asked. He was looking at the bird.
"We are. Let's go."
The rain was by now a heavy downpour. Exiting the hotel, we walked under the broad arcade until we reached the corner. Our restaurant was across the street.
"Just look at that river!" MacClayne said, and stepped back from the curb. The street was flowing with dark, muddy water, reflecting the twisting image of a street lamp.
We stood on the high curb, protected from above by the arcade roof, and looked for a place to cross. With Cuauhtémoc on my arm, we found a place where the water took a narrow channel which we stepped over with ease. Without much difficulty we reached the other side, and paused under the long protective eaves of the restaurant. There we shook off the water; even those few seconds under the downpour had gotten us wet. Only Cuauhtémoc was dry; I took off his raincoat, and we made our entry into the restaurant.
It wasn't too crowded, and we found seats at a small wooden table. Cuauhtémoc stepped off my arm to perch on the backrest of a chair, and I laid a napkin on the floor below him, just in case. Like the other buildings in this area, this was of adobe, probably dating from before the Revolution. MacClayne admired the simple elegance of the room with its massive rose-colored walls and high ceiling.
"This could be the setting of a Western movie," MacClayne said, still wiping water from his face and hair.
"A scene where the desperados pause for a meal and a drink as they head south with the loot."
"Not desperados," he corrected me. "Heroes searching for the lost city of El Dorado."
"Okay," I said. "And the bird, can he be in this movie?"
"Better ask him if he'd want to be part of it."
Cuauhtémoc turned to MacClayne and clucked. MacClayne gazed back at the bird and said, "I almost get the feeling that that damned rooster understood what I just said."
"A number of people have made similar observations, and at times I wonder about it myself."
A teen-age waitress appeared beside our table, smiling shyly, perhaps wondering if we spoke Spanish. It was probably unusual to see foreigners in this establishment.
"¿Qué hay de comer?" I asked.
"Carne de res, y carne de puerco," she replied.
"Beef or pork," I translated for MacClayne; the beef was twenty five pesos and the pork was twenty--about one US dollar.
"I'll have one and you have the other," he said. "How's that?"
While we waited for the food, we munched on corn chips. I broke off pieces of mine to share with Cuauhtémoc. Although he'd already eaten, he still seemed to be hungry. On the wall beside us was a portrait of a man in an early 19th century military uniform and a bandana tied around his head. MacClayne wondered who he might be.
"That's General Morelos," I said. "He was a leader in the War for Independence, and he's the one who presided over the writing of the first Mexican constitution, which happened, coincidentally, in Apatzingán. That was in 1814. Morelos was originally from this state of Michoacán, and he started out as a muleteer. He spent a good many of his early years driving teams of pack mules up and down the back roads of Michoacán, across the Valley of Infiernillo."
"That was before he became a military officer?"
"Morelos never was trained as a professional military man, but he was quite good at it." I went on to say a bit more about him.
"What eventually became of this Morelos?"
"The bad guys put him up against a wall and shot him."
"The Spaniards?"
"It's often phrased in those terms, but it wasn't at all that simple. The worst of them were actually Mexican landowners, men like General Iturbide who eventually took over and proclaimed himself emperor."
Our meals came; both the beef and the pork were served with beans and corn tortillas. I asked the waitress about the pedregal. She knew that it was from a volcanic eruption, but not when it had occurred.
While we ate, the waitress brought beer to three or four fellows at a table near us. At the sound of cans popping open and liquid pouring into glasses, Cuauhtémoc perked up his head. I offered him some choice bits from my plate, but he'd lost interest in food.
"Shall we have coffee?" MacClayne suggested as we finished our meal.
Rain hammered at the roof and poured down loudly outside; no doubt more snow was falling on the mountain above. It felt good to be sitting there nice and dry, hearing the rain. MacClayne recalled adventures from his seafaring days, just after the war:
". . . To be young is the good time, the best time, perhaps the only time. I had recently finished five long interminable and often unendurable years in the Royal Marines. The enemy had been destroyed and forced into unconditional surrender and so there I was, returning to a world at peace, or so we were told.
"I suffered through the job routine; builder's laborer, factory worker, worked on the railway, navvying, house-painter and shipped out too. Going to sea was a terrible disappointment, although I was and still am consumed with a wild and romantic dream of the sea, of the movement of waves and the pull of sail, raising the anchor by hand . . .
"I remember once I was shipping out from the old country and I had missed a ship and was on the beach in Las Palmas in the Canary Islands. A lovely group of islands. Beautiful beaches, marvelous climate, and I truly had the time of my life because I was young then.
"I had finally managed to escape that dank, damp, dreary, gloomy and grey British climate and emerge at last into the sun. It was like a second birth. I emerged into a world flooded with sunlight and it was love at first sight."
A nostalgic smile came over MacClayne's face as he spoke, and his voice blended pleasantly with the storm. His story was from the late 1940's, shortly after the War, still some years before I was born. As a British seaman he was required to complete the voyage he was on. But MacClayne was a free spirit. He jumped ship.
"I needed no coaxing, no convincing . . . I saw the sun, I fell in love and that particular love has never left me. Gone, forever I hoped, those sodden thistled Scottish highlands and moorland. Grey Glasgow and Gloomy Edinburgh with their rain-washed mackintosh-muffled streets and refrigerated bedrooms with goose-pimpled wallpaper falling away from the walls because of the damp. I was as exultant as a bird trying his wings; swooping, diving, soaring, holding his flight."
The party at the table near us were downing their beers, and Cuauhtémoc nudged me with his beak. I knew what he wanted, but I ignored him, hoping that if I didn't pay any attention he might forget about it. I went back to listening to MacClayne's story.
"There were three of us: an Englishman who was also a seaman from my ship, and a Welshman who'd been on the island for some time. We lived in a makeshift tent made of poles and canvas that the Welshman had inherited from some predecessor.
"When a merchant ship docked we would go aboard and eat. The seamen are great and why should they not be? After all they are our brothers. Sometimes we even raised money for the wine."
Cuauhtémoc nudged me again. I continued to ignore him.
"We also became friends with some local fishermen. Any fish left over from their catch they would give to us. Despite something of a language barrier we got to know them very well. They must have figured we were a wee bit different and probably realized that our aim and purpose in life was not to wear a suit and collar and tie and work in a bank or laboratory and certainly not a factory. We were not particularly inclined to industry of any kind. We were children of working class parents and none of our fathers had any great praise for hard work except to keep the wolf from the door. School was over at fourteen, and if you had asked us about our education I am sure we would have told you we did not even miss it.
"Ah it was a great life all right, a great life!
"We literally lived on fish. Clams for breakfast with a banana. Fish for dinner. Many a time there would be a big fish on the plate and nothing else. No salad, no baked Idaho, no tartar sauce or melted butter garnish, no sprig of parsley and certainly no silver fish knives. We had fried fish, boiled fish, fish cooked in a home-made steamer, grilled fish, fish cooked on a spit over a flame, fish in a chowder. I ate so much fish my stomach used to rise and fall with the tide. . . ."
Our coffees arrived, and Cuauhtémoc glared at me with a where's-my-drink look on his face. I offered him a bit of corn chip, but he pushed it away and nudged me again. He wasn't in a mood to be ignored. It was time to take him back to the hotel, but I was enjoying MacClayne's story and I didn't want to interrupt. There was only one way to appease this bird and keep him quiet.
I glanced around, feeling an irrational need to assure myself that Chayo wasn't watching, then I cleared my throat and said to MacClayne, "Do you mind if I order a beer?" Because of MacClayne's eternal struggle with alcohol, I felt it proper to ask his permission.
"Go ahead, feel free," he said.
"Una cerveza," I said to the waitress.
"I didn't know you drank beer," he said as the woman left.
"I don't."
"Didn't you just order one? Not that it's any of my business. I have no objection. I'm only curious."
I cleared my throat again and tried to think of something to say. My mind was blank.
The waitress returned with the beer and a glass into which I poured some and set it in front of the bird. He eagerly dipped his beak into the brew.
MacClayne just stared. No expression on his face. The waitress stood there, eyes glued to the bird. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see that people at other tables had turned to look. I heard tittering. Even the cook came out of the kitchen to watch. But the bird himself was not the least bit self-conscious. He just went on plunging his beak into the glass and lifting his head up to swallow.
The room had fallen silent. Eating and drinking and talking had ceased. There was just the sound of the rain. And the penetrating silent looks of the entire establishment. I was beginning to understand what people go through when a close friend or family member is addicted to drink.
The bird was nudging me again. I poured more beer into his glass. What else could I do?
Then I remembered our conversation. MacClayne's adventure. A moment before I'd found it very amusing and entertaining. Now, I just wanted to be talking about something other than my bird's drinking. "You were telling about the Canary Islands," I said, trying my best to sound nonchalant.
MacClayne nodded, took a sip of his coffee and paused to think. "Och yes, were was I?"
"There were three of you, living in a tent," I said.
"Yes, we lived on the beach.," he said. "Norman, our Welsh comrade, was drinking heavily and was in the D.T.'s a good deal of the time. In his worse periods he would rant on and on about the terrible creatures planning to encircle him. He described them as a mixture of huge red-and-black feathered spiders with luminous eyes and sharp-clawed, swarming octopi with the flesh-devouring teeth of piranha fish."
Cuauhtémoc, as though intrigued by the description, paused to listen. Soon he was again dipping his beak. I surreptitiously glanced around. Thank god! The waitress was elsewhere, and people at other tables were back to their own affairs.
"One evening a fisherman gave us a lobster. When we returned to camp with it, we found Norman staring wild-eyed into space and howling like a dog. We gave him a big swallow of wine and he lay down and almost instantly fell asleep. For a laugh we laid the lobster on his bare chest, and then wandered along the beach to lie around and take our ease, when we heard a terrible scream.
"In the moonlight we saw the Welshman streaking across the sands like a wild man, leaping and flailing the air with his arms and throwing his knees high. He raced past without even seeing us. Every few steps he leaped into the air like a hurdler or a male ballet dancer, throwing his front foot horizontal to the ground and making you think he might sprout wings, hold his flight and sail away into the horizon. We finally brought him down with a rugby tackle and had to sit on him to keep him quiet. The sweat was lashing out of him and he was still clutching the lobster. Gradually he calmed down enough to talk but even then it was with the voice of a man who had narrowly escaped death, 'I kept telling you bastards about those monsters I was seeing. Well you'll have to believe me now for I've caught one.'"
Cuauhtémoc hiccuped.
"He was in such a state of agitation we had to hold the jug to his mouth and after a few gurgles he quieted down."
Cuauhtémoc hiccuped again. Poor bird, he was pickled. MacClayne seemed not to notice, and he made no comment on the alcohol that had just been consumed at our table. But when you're traveling with two alcoholics, and one gets to drink and the other doesn't, there's bound to be tension. Sooner or later.
"Shall we head back to the hotel?" he said. That was all he said, and I was grateful.
We finished off our coffee. I quietly lifted Cuauhtémoc off the chair, and went to pay our bill. The fat lady who operated the cash register gave us a weird look, but she didn't make any comment. Just the same, she somehow looked like a real gossip, and I could just guess that my bird and I would be the talk of this place for the next week.
The rain was pouring down more fiercely than ever as we stepped out the door and stood under the eaves. I tried to put the bird's raincoat on, but he fought against it, and finally I gave up. "Pobrecito," I said. "You've got to lay off the booze. It's bad for you." That was all I said, knowing that it had really been my fault for giving it to him, for taking such poor care of him.
"Now we have to cross that," MacClayne said, looking at the street which had become a river. The flooding had continued to grow while we'd been in the restaurant. Light from street lamps cut through the rain and danced on the water. For the moment, we stood high and dry on the curb which rose a good half meter above the street.
Suddenly I saw her! There, across the street, stood Chayo. She glared at me through the rain, clearly faulting me for the bird's condition. I gasped and closed my eyes, then looked again. No, it was just a pillar of the arcade. I sighed with relief, and looked down at the waterway between.
Slightly shaken, I rolled up my trouser-legs, took the bird in my arms, and looked for a place where MacClayne could follow me across. Someone had attempted to fashion a makeshift footbridge out of planks, but one of the timbers had been washed away. I stepped in and waded, hurrying to avoid being in the downpour a second longer than necessary. The water in the street was only ankle deep, but my jacket and even my shirt underneath got soaked with icy rain. I tried to shield Cuauhtémoc as best I could. He was still hiccuping.
MacClayne waded in to follow, shoes and all. He should've gotten himself a decent pair of boots. That's what I'd advised him to do in one of my letters. So why hadn't he? Scotch frugality was the reason! MacClayne had probably violated and defied all the other rules and accepted norms of Scotland, but frugality was the one tradition he held sacred.
So the water flooded into his shoes. But he took it well, not allowing it to dampen his spirits, and once back in our room he simply hung up his soggy footgear in hopes that it would be dry by morning.
Before dealing with my water-logged clothes, I attended to Cuauhtémoc. I carefully wiped the water off him with my towel. Then I draped a large blanket over the back of a chair, forming a small, cozy, tent-like shelter over the seat, where, after wrapping the bird in his small blanket, I placed him.
Having finished, I peeled off my wet shirt and trousers, wrapped a blanket around myself, then sat down and reached for my journal when MacClayne said, "Would you care to read something aloud together?"
"Sounds like a good thought," I said.
We decided that I'd read first, and I dug into my library which consisted of about three books. "Here's one on sedimentary petrology," I said teasingly. "It's great for reading aloud."
"What does it say?"
"That 70 % of the rocks at the earth's surface are sedimentary in origin," I said.
"That's very good to know," he replied with a smile. "What else do you have?"
I took out a small volume of Spanish poetry. "Can I read something in Spanish?" I said. "I think I have something appropriate, by Antonio Machado, Voy soñando caminos--I Go Along Dreaming Roads."
I read the poem in Spanish, then paraphrased it in English. MacClayne asked me to read it again in Spanish. Being a poet, he liked to hear the sound of things in their original language. When I finished he applauded. Cuauhtémoc gave no response; he was sleeping it off under the blanket. From time to time I checked to see if he were okay.
Then MacClayne took his turn, choosing a story from the collection he'd been reading earlier: Sunny Days in the Tropics.
I already had one blanket wrapped around my shoulders, but I added a second, and MacClayne began a tale that took place on a warm tropical evening somewhere in the South Seas. There wasn't much in the way of plot or action, but MacClayne read it so well that I could almost feel the warm, gentle breeze coming in the window, carrying the sounds of insects chirping in the balmy night.
I smiled longingly and let out a deep sigh which formed a small cloud of vapor in the frigid air. The whitewashed adobe walls reflected the cold back at me like the ice blocks of an igloo. I shivered and pulled the blankets tighter about me.
"Were the Canary Islands like that?" I asked when he finished the story.
"Beautiful beaches, marvelous climate. Indeed it was paradise," he said. "I'm sure we suffered our aches and pains; nevertheless it was what you might call a poor man's idyllic existence."
"It's gotten terribly cold in here," I said, rubbing my arms in an attempt to get my blood circulating. Then I stopped and listened for a moment. "I don't hear the rain any more."
"Maybe it's let up," MacClayne said.
I opened the door to look.
It was snowing. Large white flakes were floating down from the dark sky, and I shut the door to keep out what I could of the cold.
continued in Chapter 19
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