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chapter 26
More hours passed, but eventually a tractor-trailer came trundling down the road hauling a bulldozer. The configuration was so big that, had I not seen it, I would have thought it impossible to drive such a large vehicle on such a small road. There were no other passengers, so the driver invited us to get into the cab with him He was around thirty and stockily built. We sat, crammed into a narrow seating space, practically on top of the huge roaring engine, which made such a din that it nearly overpowered our attempts at conversation.
By shouting we were able to communicate. Yes, the driver was heading for Colima.
Splashing through puddles and stirring up clouds of dust, we wound our way along. Beside us was the river which had carved its way down into the depths of the mountain and built this very narrow strip of flood plain. The eternal brush closed in as always, above and on both sides of the road; now and then there'd be a large tree. When we did pass through a rare open place, we could see that the valley floor was hardly more than a couple hundred meters wide. Steep mountain slopes squeezed in from both sides; looking up at them was like seeing the world from the bottom of a well.
Though we lurched from side to side and occasionally bounced, we didn't pound and crash as we had on previous roads. This flat river bottom provided a fairly gentle surface, paved with dust and mud rather than rocks.
From time to time we'd see a horseman. The animal would startle, and the rider would rein it to a halt and wait for us to pass. Few people could've lived around here; there wasn't that much cleared level ground. There were fields here and there, but not many. In one was a herd of Brahmin cattle together with a flock of white birds. Some sat on the backs of the cattle. I thought it unusual to see a whole flock of them together. They looked at us as if they knew our mission, and were silently bidding us to continue onwards, on our journey to Apatzingán. Cuauhtémoc watched them intently.
The cattle in these parts lived in the brush, where there was no grass. Ranchers I'd met in Villa Victoria had told me that their stock ate leaves and seed pods; that had impressed me as strange. I'd never seen a cow eat anything but grass and hay.
With difficulty I exchanged occasional bits of conversation with the driver, as always, shouting back and forth to be heard over the engine. He told me the kind of work he did with the bulldozer and mentioned a couple of place names around Villa Victoria that I didn't recognize. His home was in Apatzingán, he happened to say, and asked if we'd ever been there.
"Not yet, but we eventually hope to see it," I told him. I didn't think it appropriate to tell him our whimsies about Apatzingán. I said we were touring Michoacán and that we intended to travel down the coast, from Colima to Lázaro. "¿Hay camino?" I asked him if there was a road.
"No," he said, and waved his finger to add extra emphasis.
"¿Ninguno?"
"Un camino de herradura. Nada mas."
I groaned in silent disappointment. A truck driver was likely to know. Still, I wondered. Had he actually been on the coast and seen for himself? I chose not to ask. It's a delicate matter to question a man's knowledge and experience, not a good thing to discuss when you're shouting. Anyhow, there had to be a way to get through. I clutched Cuauhtémoc, and he turned his head to give me a reassuring look. Hopefully, MacClayne hadn't understood the driver's comment. I was pretty sure he hadn't. But, if there were only a horse trail, would he still be willing to accompany me?
The valley had never been more than a kilometer wide, but suddenly it narrowed down to a deep gorge. There was just the river shooting along some thirty meters below us. Foaming white with anger at the boulders in its midst, it was no longer the gentle flow it had been just minutes before. Hight above those rapids, we crept carefully along, on a road carved into the cliff face. The near-vertical walls of the opposite side were only a stone's throw away.
Emerging from the narrows, the canyon widened out into another valley, and the river descended through a series of rapids to the flood plain below, where it resumed its existence as a slowly meandering stream. From up here the valley looked beautiful, but when we got down to the bottom we were once again enveloped by dense brush. I felt like a flea crawling through a shag rug.
Soon the valley widened substantially. Corn patches proliferated, and green fields stretched out to the mountains on either side.
A group of dwellings appeared, and we drove up and parked. "Time for a soda," announced the driver as he turned off the noisy engine. Silence. It felt tremendously good to be free from that thundering roar even though it would only be for a few minutes. We climbed down from the cramped cab to stretch our legs, and walked over to a tiny roadside restaurant which consisted of a single table under the shade of a roof fashioned of banana-palm fronds. It impressed me that even along this rarely traveled road there was an eating place.
Meanwhile, the driver was looking at the back of his truck and shaking his head. "My spare tire's missing," he said. "It must've fallen off somewhere along the way." So, instead of sitting down for a refresco, he got back in his truck, turned it around, and headed back to search for the tire.
"What happened?" MacClayne asked me. I told him, and for a moment we just stood there. My first thought was that we'd lost our ride, my second was a vague feeling that we were somehow responsible for the lost tire. But there was nothing we could do to help him.
Anyway, it felt as if we had come a long way, and it was already late afternoon. A heavyset lady who seemed to be the proprietress had emerged from a nearby dwelling, and I asked her, "¿Estamos en Colima?"
"Michoacán," she replied.
"¿Todavía?" I sighed. After all our efforts, we'd covered less than twenty five kilometers. I then asked the next important question. "¿Hay café?"
"Sí," she said. She set a small jar of instant coffee on the table and went to heat up some water.
"Can you imagine that?" MacClayne remarked as we sat down, "Instant coffee in a remote place like this!"
"Fresh fruit, and now coffee," I said. "Everything comes in cans and jars."
"They grow coffee around here, don't they?"
"Maybe not commercially, but I know people back in Uruapan who have a few coffee trees for their own use. Chayo's aunt does."
I took out the map, and, when the lady returned, I asked the name of this village, but it wasn't on our map. Not even the road we were traveling on was shown.
"So where are we?" asked MacClayne.
"In a blank spot." I said, and pointed out the general area on the map.
MacClayne frowned. "Did the driver tell you about the coastal road?"
"Yes," I said lamely, hoping MacClayne wouldn't ask what the driver had told me.
"What did he say?"
I took a deep breath and told him, "According to him there isn't any."
MacClayne sighed and shook his head.
I stared into my coffee and then it occurred to me to take a sip. Cuauhtémoc stood on the bench beside me, drinking his water. Poor bird, there was no backrest for him to perch on.
By now some of the villagers had gathered around and engaged us in conversation. Foreigners must've been rare in these parts, and people were curious about us.
"Somos de California," said MacClayne with a cheerfulness that belied his disappointed look of a moment before. The opportunity to be the center of attention had apparently put him back in a good mood. He chatted with the villagers; I just sat there.
"¿Su amigo no habla español?" someone asked, looking at me and wondering if I didn't speak Spanish.
"Sí, lo habla," MacClayne assured them.
The others looked at me rather skeptically; I just grinned and let MacClayne do the talking. In English he was a great talker, but in Spanish he was usually glad to hand the conversation over to me. At this moment for some reason it was different.
Not much got said, but a lot of good feeling was expressed and exchanged. In any language, MacClayne gave the impression of being a consummate conversationalist.
I surveyed our surroundings. The dwelling nearest us was fashioned of tree branches woven together. Some of its walls were plastered with mud, some were not. The other houses were of similar construction. I guessed that this must be what was called mud-wattle, something I'd seen only in photos till now.
MacClayne was still holding forth and doing it well, and Cuauhtémoc, along with the rest of the audience, was listening attentively when a bus rolled up. It was the afternoon bus from Villa Victoria which had finally caught up with us. This was the second time we'd been overtaken by a bus which we'd decided not to wait for. We gulped our coffees, said our good-byes, and climbed aboard to continue our journey to Colima.
Till now I'd seen only these half dozen houses, and I thought that was the entire village. But, as we rode on, they became more numerous. Most were also of mud-wattle, but there were two or three of brick and concrete. None was of adobe. Nearly every dwelling had a couple of banana palms in front. We passed a school which was constructed on the standard pattern of schools everywhere in rural México--a row of concrete rooms with a playground. Not beautiful but practical. From what I'd heard, there'd been few if any schools out here until recently. Literacy was making its way even into these remote parts of the republic.
Cuauhtémoc stood on my lap, high enough to look out the window and peer wistfully at the occasional lady chickens we passed.
Along the river women were washing clothes. It was the same river which flowed by Villa Victoria, and we'd been following it till now, along narrow flood plains and through gorges. But now we were parting company with it, as our bus turned northward onto another unpaved road which crawled up a steep mountainside, winding back and forth along hairpin curves, as we left the valley with the small village far below us. The road was carved into the mountainside, revealing the same thinly bedded shales we'd been seeing since Villa Victoria, and, as before, they were twisted and contorted. At length we reached a crest from which we could see a series of ridges.
In the distance rose a single, tall, snow-capped volcano. It was one of the Needle Peaks, which we'd first seen the morning we left Tancítaro, only now it was to the north of us, and we couldn't see the second peak from here because it was concealed behind the first. By now I'd learned their names: Volcán de Colima and Nevado de Colima. They marked the extreme western end of the Valley of Infiernillo, and rose to a height of four kilometers. A small cloud of vapor still trailed from the apex.
We crossed over the crest of the ridge and descended into another narrow valley like the one we'd left. The same bushy foliage predominated here as well, and continued on with hardly a break.
"This damn jungle never ends!" MacClayne groaned, loudly to make himself heard above the din of engine and road noise. He called it jungle, but I still wasn't certain how to categorize it. Expressions like cane brake and briar patch came to mind.
As before, there were hardly any people, just cattle, often accompanied by flocks of white birds. The avians always seemed to peer at us knowingly. In time we left this valley too, again turning north to crawl up another steep ridge and then descend down into another narrow valley. And, before too long, we repeated the entire process.
The sun shone brightly, but in a fierce and hostile way that dried the mud into dust to be kicked up into a cloud behind us. On and on and on this went. The road was unpaved as always. Sometimes for a stretch it was in fairly decent shape, but never for long. Mostly it was bad and much of it awful. We were bounced and pounded. The noise was incredible.
The bus was about half full, and everybody was pretty quiet. There were no drunken women swearing in English and vomiting out the window, and no escaped chickens flying around. Cuauhtémoc was the only bird on the bus; he stood on my lap and looked out the window. A radio played traditional Mexican music; mostly familiar tunes that Chayo and I had enjoyed together.
No hay ojos mas lindos
en la tierra mía
que los negros ojos de la . . .
There are no eyes more beautiful
in the land I'm from
than the dark eyes of the . . .
The music was mostly lost in the din, but I caught enough to recognize the tune, and my memory filled in the words. I thought of Chayo and her sparkling eyes.
The driver stopped briefly at a tiny village to let on a few passengers, and also to put water in the radiator. It was the first settlement we'd passed since the one where we'd boarded, and it bore many similarities. A couple houses of concrete, the rest of mud-wattle, none of adobe.
Adobe construction seemed to belong to the higher country. This was la Tierra Caliente, as these hot lower regions were called, and everything was different from the pine-forested plateau around Uruapan. It was different world, a different México from the one I'd come to know.
While we were waiting, I asked a passenger across the aisle what the hamlet was called.
"Guayabo," he replied, and we chatted briefly till the driver started up the engine and the clamor of the road ended our conversation.
There's a tree called the guayabo. It bears the guava fruit which was sold in the marketplace of Uruapan. Botanists believe it originated in the Yucatán, but by the time Europeans arrived in the New World, it was cultivated by Indians throughout México, the Caribbean and even South America. With the introduction of cattle, the tree began to spring up everywhere like a weed and became a serious rampaging pest; a sixteenth century chronicler recorded that the cattle ate the fruit and spread the seed in their dung. Presumably the tree still grew like a weed, and the hamlet must have been named after it.
Someone back in Villa Victoria had told me of a battle fought back around 1870 at a place called Guayabo, and I wondered if that could have been here. I also wondered how opposing armies could've found their way to so inaccessible a place as this to meet up and fight. That was at a time when this region was even more isolated than now, and traversed only by mule trails.
Another village whose name I recorded was Puente de Fatima. None of these places was on our map, which really wasn't a great guide to the back country, but was at least something to hold in my hand. It did at least show major towns, such as Villa Victoria. Unfortunately it didn't extend beyond Michoacán. In Colima we'd be off the map and flying blind.
But that's the way it had to be. Ours was a journey to a fabled city. And when you set out for such a place, you don't always have a detailed map to guide you every step of the way. In fact, the whole idea of a fabled city is that you've only heard of it and don't really know how to get there. You're not supposed to know. You're out there to break new ground and traverse unmapped terrain and endure the uncertainties. After all, if it were easy to get there, then it wouldn't be a fabled and forbidden city.
I smiled to myself as I thought of that; sometimes fantasy interacted and merged with reality. I glanced out the window. We were passing another small herd of cattle accompanied by white birds. Were those birds really looking at us? I had that impression. Or maybe they were just looking at the bus. As I was thinking that, one took to the air and flew past our window, so close I could see his eye. Cuauhtémoc clucked; he too was watching the white birds.
"Those white birds were expecting us," MacClayne remarked with a chuckle.
"We're still being led by the golden thread," I replied.
Then I caught another glimpse of the Needle Peaks, still lined up one behind the other, appearing as a single volcano. During the last couple of hours, we'd seen them at this angle from the crest of every ridge we'd crossed, and now we were even seeing them from the floor of this valley, sometimes to the right of us and sometimes to the left, but we were generally heading towards them. They got larger each time they reappeared.
The valley was wider now, and, in the distance, a vertical cliff face stood tall and bare, in a way that is typical of volcanic ash deposits. Further on down the road, a roadcut exposed a lava flow. These volcanic materials overlaid the sedimentary strata.
Off to the right of us I saw an open-pit mine. One of the few places shown on this part of the map was one called La Minita. Could that be this? I asked the passenger across the aisle.
"Capela," he said. "Se llama Capela."
"Did he say we're in Colima?" MacClayne asked me.
"No," I said, and looked again at our map. There was no Capela on it, nor anything else that I could use to figure out where we were right now. I asked the fellow across the aisle, "¿Estamos todavía en Michoacán?"
"Sí, todavía," he affirmed.
How could that be? Colima was only twenty five kilometers by air from Villa Victoria; even on these curving, twisting mountain roads it couldn't take this long. We'd been traveling all day, and the sun was moving off to the western side of the sky where it was about to sink behind the ridge.
Suddenly we turned onto a blacktop road, the first paved surface I'd seen in days. The bus stopped and some passengers got out. This was where we'd have to change buses, the driver told us. Other than the paved road, there weren't any signs of civilization; not so much as a single dwelling was in sight. Colima wasn't far now, the driver told me.
The name of this junction was Balastre, and, like the other places we'd passed through, neither it nor the paved road was on our map. Ironically that struck me as encouraging, and I said to MacClayne, "Maybe there's also a road down the coast that's not on this map."
"Maybe," he replied skeptically.
A bus drove up. The conductor asked us where we were going, and I said "Tecomán."
Tecomán was the only city in Colima that I could name, and I knew it was somewhere on the coast. The tickets cost twenty-five pesos each, indicating another fairly long ride. It was already six o'clock. It would be dark in an hour, and so we'd be doing some night traveling--a thing we always tried to avoid because we couldn't see the countryside in the dark. But what else could we do? We bought the tickets and took seats on opposite sides of the aisle. There were plenty of empty seats on this bus, and sometimes on a long journey it's good to sit apart.
Four or five more passengers got aboard, then the driver started the
engine and set out on a smooth blacktop road that was marvelously quiet. It was such a relief to be free of that incessant road noise. MacClayne and I were even able to exchange comments across the aisle without shouting at the top of our lungs.
Within minutes, we were out of the endless briar patch and passing through a prosperous rural countryside. Through the window on my side of the bus, everything was lush and green, including the mountains we had just come out of. Then I glanced out the window on MacClayne's side. There wasn't anything to look at. Nothing. I stood up to look again, and then saw that there was a lot to see.
"There's a canyon down there," said MacClayne.
"Yeah, it's breathtaking!" I gathered up Cuauhtémoc and moved to the seat in front of MacClayne, a position which afforded me an excellent view.
The canyon was deep and wide, several kilometers across, and we were cruising along the rim. Far below I could see a river with a toy-sized bridge and tiny vehicles crossing over it. Our map showed a major river which bordered Michoacán, and I guessed this must be it.
"¿Río Coahuayana?" I asked a woman with a small child.
"Sí," she said, and was about to say more when her tiny daughter pointed at Cuauhtémoc. "¡Cucúi!" the child exclaimed.
"No es Cucúi," the mother laughed soothingly. "Es gallito."
"¡Sí es Cucúi!" the child insisted, not the least bit frightened. The bird hopped over to the seat beside her, and she put her arms around him.
We'd left the rim and were speeding along on a road carved into the canyon wall. We continued to descend, switchback after switchback, as I watched the river and the bridge below as they kept appearing and reappearing, getting larger at each turn.
The bottom was a long way down. Finally, after many twists and turns, we were on the valley floor, rolling across the bridge I'd seen from above. It was much larger and longer than I'd thought, having been dwarfed by the massive scale of the landscape. The towering canyon wall on the other side seemed to lean over us as we neared it. We followed along the base for a while and then began to ascend upwards to the opposite rim. We'd crossed the Río Coahuayana.
"Colima, at last!" I announced. MacClayne raised his fist in a gesture of victory and Cuauhtémoc crowed.
As we reached the rim, the nearer of the two Needle Peaks again came sharply into view, larger than ever, its snows glistening in the last rays of the late afternoon sun. The fields continued green, the countryside prosperous, and the road well paved. Roadcuts exposed ash and lava. I'd also seen layers of lava in the canyon walls. There must have been a tremendous amount of volcanic activity in this area during the last million years. And that activity was still going on. I wondered if that tall volcano or its twin might some day explode in a tremendous searing blast that would sweep every tree, bush and blade of grass from this landscape and perhaps even fill that canyon back there from brim to brim with burning rock. Not soon, I hoped. Ten thousand years from now, perhaps. A mere millisecond, however, in the geological history of the world.
The sun was sinking closer to the horizon, where it seemed to hover for a while just above the gently rolling hills. We were speeding straight towards the snow-capped peak. It rose steeply from a flat plain, appearing so close that I imagined we'd soon be driving right up onto its flanks, when suddenly we veered off to the west. The sun chose at that moment to set, and in the ensuing twilight we entered a city. A very large one.
"Is this Tecomán?" said MacClayne.
"If it is, it's in the wrong place. We can't possibly be on the coast," I said, and turned to ask the lady with the little child who'd made friends with Cuauhtémoc. But they weren't there. Apparently they'd gotten off somewhere. Strange that they hadn't said good-bye. Somehow I hadn't noticed them getting off.
I asked the conductor what city this was.
"Ciudad Colima," he told me.
That was unexpected. Colima was the name of this state; I hadn't realized that it was also the name of a capital city. Streetlights flickered on as we approached the depot. The brief twilight was almost over.
Had we known of this city, we would have planned to stop here and spend the night. Actually, I could still have gotten our tickets changed, but that didn't occur to me till we were again on our way and the city was behind us.
We were now on a well-paved, four-lane highway, rolling along with ease, moving deeper into the darkness and further into this unknown state of Colima. The next city should be Tecomán. I sat there with Cuauhtémoc on my lap, slightly mesmerized by the rhythmic sound of the engine and the steady movement of the bus.
Black masses of trees and low hills whizzed by, silhouetted against the moonlit sky. Forty minutes later we were there. Tecomán.
We got off near a small plaza. It was poorly lit and almost deserted. The whole city was dim and dark. It was eight o'clock.
Not far away we found a hotel which charged us fifty pesos each for a large room with two big beds and a single chair. It was an ugly concrete pillbox, and not very clean either. I didn't see any blankets, so I asked for some.
"Es la Tierra Caliente," the clerk said, and assured me we wouldn't need any blankets.
"What was he saying about 'Tierra Caliente'?" MacClayne asked me. We'd left our things in the room and were back out on the street, looking for a place to eat.
"That's where we are now," I said. "In a tropical region."
"I thought that's where we've been for the last week."
"Where we walked in the snow, it wasn't tropical," I said.
"Aren't we below the Tropic of Cancer?"
"Yes, but it's not just a question of how far south, it's also a matter of how high up. Snow-capped peaks that rise above the tree line are defined as boreal. The spruce forests of Mount Tancítaro are alpine, and the climate of Uruapan is temperate, not tropical."
"Anyway, now we're in the tropics?" said MacClayne.
"Yeah, I'm sure we are," I said. The night air felt warm, but from habit I'd taken my jacket.
"Are we or aren't we?"
"Well I'm trying to figure this out myself. I've never been in the tropics before."
"You haven't?"
"No."
"I didn't know that," he said dryly.
He knew this was my first visit to these parts, and that until this year I'd never been out of the US and Canada. At any rate, he had to know more about the tropics than I did; he'd sailed across the equator several times and had traveled in all sorts of places. I wondered if he purposely asked those questions just to irritate me. Only moments before, he'd been cheerful, but he slipped from mood to mood in ways that mystified me.
Ahead of us was the small plaza where we'd gotten off the bus. It was lined with tall, slender palms. A slight breeze rustled the leaves and they glistened in the moonlight. But not a single light shone. If there were any shops, they were closed. We'd hoped to find a restaurant near this plaza.
"Another of those towns where they roll up the sidewalk when the sun goes down," MacClayne said.
"It does look that way," I said cautiously. His observation sounded innocent enough.
"Or perhaps this isn't the main plaza."
"I wouldn't know," I said. I wondered if I was being overly wary, but I wasn't about to let him drag me into another argument.
"Could you ask somebody?"
I stopped a passer-by who told us of an eating place, and we headed up a street as he directed. On the way we happened to pass a movie theater and paused to look at the posters. One showed a guy on horseback.
"This must be a Mexican cowboy movie," MacClayne said.
"It's a ranchera," I said. "Ever see one?"
"When I was in Veracruz I may have. That was years ago."
"Maybe it's time to see another," I said. It struck me that we needed to spend a couple hours in some fantasy world where we could get away from our own personal reality.
"If we have time to eat first," MacClayne said.
People were already lining up to buy tickets; I looked at the schedule and found it would be starting in about ten minutes.
"Some other time."
"Let's go eat."
But then we noticed that the ranchera would not be showing till the next week. The one for tonight was the German movie Aguirre, directed by Werner Herzog and starring Klaus Kinski. There was a poster showing a bunch of characters wearing breastplates and visored helmets, the kind that Spanish conquistadors wore.
"Aguirre," MacClayne said. "Isn't this the one about some guys searching for El Dorado?"
"I'm sure it's the one," I said. "Imagine finding it here."
"We can't miss this."
"Dinner can wait."
"Maybe we can get popcorn inside."
As we got in line, I recalled that a theater back in Uruapan had once objected to me bringing Cuauhtémoc inside. Things might be simpler if I just smuggled him in, and so I hid him in the jacket I was carrying on my arm, taking special care not to crush his plumage.
The theater was built like those in the US. Inside there was a lobby with a refreshment stand where we bought popcorn and then went to be escorted to our seats by the usher, a teenage girl. She had a sweet smile which suddenly disappeared as she let out a shriek and jumped back.
Everybody was looking at me--at Cuauhtémoc, actually. He'd poked his head out from my jacket. Still unabashed, he looked at the startled girl. I heard tittering, and I felt my face blushing slightly. I took the rooster from under my jacket and said weakly and apologetically, "Mi gallito."
More tittering came from all around us.
MacClayne glanced at the others, then gave the bird and me a disapproving look, and I could almost hear him say, "See what happens when you insist on bringing that bird along to every damn place we go." The usher recovered her composure and, without further ado, escorted us to our seats where I perched the bird on the armrest beside me. He didn't turn a feather at all the ruckus he'd caused.
"¡Sinvergüenza!" I scolded him. He cocked his head to one side and looked at me out of one eye, then thrust his beak into the popcorn.
Nobody sat next to us, but people kept looking our way, and I was glad when the lights went out and the movie began.
The drama began to unfold, in German with Spanish subtitles. The year was 1560, and the place was South America. An expedition of conquistadors was trudging through the mountains. But a madman in the party somehow diverted them from their course and led them off into the jungle in a deluded search for El Dorado.
Cuauhtémoc watched the screen with his usual interest. He seemed to like movies. My eyes kept darting back and forth from the picture to the Spanish subtitles, and from time to time I translated key bits for MacClayne. People around us were also chattering, some reading the subtitles and others exchanging comments. What did it matter? After all, how many understood the language of the sound track?
The conquistadors penetrated the mapless unknown, but so far all they found was jungle and then more jungle.
"They're in the Amazon basin," I whispered with a grin. I was tempted to crack a joke about their not having a road map, but I held my tongue.
"That jungle extends for thousands of miles. But they don't know that, do they," said MacClayne. "They think they're going to find El Dorado out there."
The madman, whose name was Aguirre, had by now completely taken over and dominated the expedition. He wasn't lovable, not even likable, and certainly not very sane. Nor did he have rank, status, experience, common sense or any other qualification for leadership--except for his single-mindedness of purpose. But the rest were somehow inspired by him, and together they all persisted in this journey to nowhere. The expedition members died off, one by one, till finally only the madman was left, talking to himself, still dreaming his mad dreams. That's where the movie ended.
The lights came on and we were suddenly back in reality. We exited the theater and found ourselves once again on the dark street, hungry and hoping to find a restaurant that was still open. It was 11 o'clock and everything in this area was closed.
The night was warm and the air heavy. Dark buildings closed in around us like dense foliage, the labyrinth of narrow streets like paths in a jungle. From a window above us came the shrill voice of a woman cursing, perhaps beating a drunken husband. A single vehicle skidded around a corner and raced by at full speed, like a solitary hunter of the night in search of prey. For some time after it disappeared in the distance, we could still hear the roar of its engine and the screeching and skidding of its tires. And then all was quiet once again.
"Do you think we're going to find anything?" MacClayne said.
I wished I'd asked someone at the theater. Here there wasn't even a passer-by from whom I could ask directions. And I was beginning to fear that if we went much farther, there might be a problem in finding our way back.
"Maybe not," I said.
We gave up and returned to our hotel, where we sat and peeled oranges. Fortunately, I had replenished my supply of oats, so at least Cuauhtémoc didn't have to go hungry.
"Wasn't he some character," MacClayne finally spoke up. We hadn't said much for a while.
"Aguirre, you mean? The one played by Klaus Kinski?"
"Yes. The one who got them into that damn jungle."
"Nobody knew what was out there," I said, suddenly feeling defensive. The feeling surprised me; I certainly did not identify with Aguirre, but I sensed that MacClayne was pushing a comparision.
MacClayne nodded and reached for another orange.
"There weren't any maps back in those days," I said.
"It does help to know where you're going."
Cuauhtémoc finished his meal of oats and hopped on my knee. I shared a piece of my orange with him.
"But you know," I said. "If there had been an El Dorado, he's the guy who would have gotten them there."
"There wasn't any El Dorado!" MacClayne sounded dour and disappointed, as if he were speaking for the rank-and-file soldiers who were lost in that adventure.
"Well, they were in the wrong jungle," I said.
"Is there a right jungle?"
For a while we just sat there quietly peeling oranges. I offered Cuauhtémoc another piece, but he'd had enough.
MacClayne broke the short silence. "You speak German, don't you?" he said.
"Me? No. I read the Spanish subtitles."
"But you do speak it. You understand it."
"German?"
"That's what I asked."
"I'm Norse," I said. "Norwegian is the only language I know, outside of English and Spanish."
MacClayne finished his orange-eating. "Turn out the light when you go to bed," he said as he lay back and closed his eyes. I glanced at my watch; it was well past midnight.
Cuauhtémoc had dozed off, still on my knee. I carefully lifted him up and perched him on the backrest of the chair. It was warm and the bird wouldn't need any special shelter. Then I got between the sheets. They smelled moldy, like they'd been hanging in a damp cavern.
Eventually I drifted off to sleep and into a dream where I found myself among MacClayne's shipmates. It was in the same drippy dungeon where I'd met them before. But this time across the table from me sat an officer; on one side of him was a sergeant and on the other a corporal. Packed in with barely room to stand were many others, all of them in battledress. His Majesty's Royal Marines. Among them was the lad whom I knew to be MacClayne. This time he wasn't drinking; none of them was.
"Are you German?" the sergeant demanded.
"No. I'm American."
"You told us you were Norse."
"Well, that too."
"Are you Norse or are you American?"
The Marines crowded in close, all of them glaring at me with fierce hostility. The officer said nothing, but gave his subordinates a slight nod from time to time. The insignia on his shoulder indicated that he was a major and he looked to be about forty. He had an almost fatherly appearance.
"Or German?" the corporal barked.
"No. I'm not German."
There was a hushed silence, then the major spoke. His voice was soft, not unsympathetic. "Sie sprechen sehr gut Englisch," he said.
"Of course I do. Like I've been trying to tell these people, I'm American."
MacClayne sat near the end of the table, writing a poem. I wondered if he knew me. Perhaps not.
"Americaner? Aber Sie koennen Deutsch verstehen," said the major.
"No I don't," I said, and shook my head for emphasis.
The major smiled, slightly amused. Then he glanced sideways at the Sergeant who slapped his hand on the table and said, "You're the torpedoman."
"You sank our ship," barked the corporal.
"It's him!" came a voice from the assembled company, and it was immediately echoed by the others.
"He brought us here!"
"It's him! It's him! It's him!"
They were all shouting at me, and closed in even tighter. Only MacClayne said nothing, he was still writing poetry, perhaps expressing his distaste for military life in verse.
At that moment a crack appeared in the ceiling of the bunker. The fracture rapidly widened and suddenly burst open to the moonlit sky above. There was a loud flutter of wings descending towards me, and the Marines stepped back. Talons seized my arm and lifted me upwards, away from the table, away from the bunker, and high above the tree tops.
Below was the valley and up ahead the snow-capped peak of Tancítaro, and then I was gently lowered into the courtyard of the Huatapera, where Chayo awaited me. Cuauhtémoc returned to his normal size as he landed beside me.
continued in Chapter 27
By shouting we were able to communicate. Yes, the driver was heading for Colima.
Splashing through puddles and stirring up clouds of dust, we wound our way along. Beside us was the river which had carved its way down into the depths of the mountain and built this very narrow strip of flood plain. The eternal brush closed in as always, above and on both sides of the road; now and then there'd be a large tree. When we did pass through a rare open place, we could see that the valley floor was hardly more than a couple hundred meters wide. Steep mountain slopes squeezed in from both sides; looking up at them was like seeing the world from the bottom of a well.
Though we lurched from side to side and occasionally bounced, we didn't pound and crash as we had on previous roads. This flat river bottom provided a fairly gentle surface, paved with dust and mud rather than rocks.
From time to time we'd see a horseman. The animal would startle, and the rider would rein it to a halt and wait for us to pass. Few people could've lived around here; there wasn't that much cleared level ground. There were fields here and there, but not many. In one was a herd of Brahmin cattle together with a flock of white birds. Some sat on the backs of the cattle. I thought it unusual to see a whole flock of them together. They looked at us as if they knew our mission, and were silently bidding us to continue onwards, on our journey to Apatzingán. Cuauhtémoc watched them intently.
The cattle in these parts lived in the brush, where there was no grass. Ranchers I'd met in Villa Victoria had told me that their stock ate leaves and seed pods; that had impressed me as strange. I'd never seen a cow eat anything but grass and hay.
With difficulty I exchanged occasional bits of conversation with the driver, as always, shouting back and forth to be heard over the engine. He told me the kind of work he did with the bulldozer and mentioned a couple of place names around Villa Victoria that I didn't recognize. His home was in Apatzingán, he happened to say, and asked if we'd ever been there.
"Not yet, but we eventually hope to see it," I told him. I didn't think it appropriate to tell him our whimsies about Apatzingán. I said we were touring Michoacán and that we intended to travel down the coast, from Colima to Lázaro. "¿Hay camino?" I asked him if there was a road.
"No," he said, and waved his finger to add extra emphasis.
"¿Ninguno?"
"Un camino de herradura. Nada mas."
I groaned in silent disappointment. A truck driver was likely to know. Still, I wondered. Had he actually been on the coast and seen for himself? I chose not to ask. It's a delicate matter to question a man's knowledge and experience, not a good thing to discuss when you're shouting. Anyhow, there had to be a way to get through. I clutched Cuauhtémoc, and he turned his head to give me a reassuring look. Hopefully, MacClayne hadn't understood the driver's comment. I was pretty sure he hadn't. But, if there were only a horse trail, would he still be willing to accompany me?
The valley had never been more than a kilometer wide, but suddenly it narrowed down to a deep gorge. There was just the river shooting along some thirty meters below us. Foaming white with anger at the boulders in its midst, it was no longer the gentle flow it had been just minutes before. Hight above those rapids, we crept carefully along, on a road carved into the cliff face. The near-vertical walls of the opposite side were only a stone's throw away.
Emerging from the narrows, the canyon widened out into another valley, and the river descended through a series of rapids to the flood plain below, where it resumed its existence as a slowly meandering stream. From up here the valley looked beautiful, but when we got down to the bottom we were once again enveloped by dense brush. I felt like a flea crawling through a shag rug.
Soon the valley widened substantially. Corn patches proliferated, and green fields stretched out to the mountains on either side.
A group of dwellings appeared, and we drove up and parked. "Time for a soda," announced the driver as he turned off the noisy engine. Silence. It felt tremendously good to be free from that thundering roar even though it would only be for a few minutes. We climbed down from the cramped cab to stretch our legs, and walked over to a tiny roadside restaurant which consisted of a single table under the shade of a roof fashioned of banana-palm fronds. It impressed me that even along this rarely traveled road there was an eating place.
Meanwhile, the driver was looking at the back of his truck and shaking his head. "My spare tire's missing," he said. "It must've fallen off somewhere along the way." So, instead of sitting down for a refresco, he got back in his truck, turned it around, and headed back to search for the tire.
"What happened?" MacClayne asked me. I told him, and for a moment we just stood there. My first thought was that we'd lost our ride, my second was a vague feeling that we were somehow responsible for the lost tire. But there was nothing we could do to help him.
Anyway, it felt as if we had come a long way, and it was already late afternoon. A heavyset lady who seemed to be the proprietress had emerged from a nearby dwelling, and I asked her, "¿Estamos en Colima?"
"Michoacán," she replied.
"¿Todavía?" I sighed. After all our efforts, we'd covered less than twenty five kilometers. I then asked the next important question. "¿Hay café?"
"Sí," she said. She set a small jar of instant coffee on the table and went to heat up some water.
"Can you imagine that?" MacClayne remarked as we sat down, "Instant coffee in a remote place like this!"
"Fresh fruit, and now coffee," I said. "Everything comes in cans and jars."
"They grow coffee around here, don't they?"
"Maybe not commercially, but I know people back in Uruapan who have a few coffee trees for their own use. Chayo's aunt does."
I took out the map, and, when the lady returned, I asked the name of this village, but it wasn't on our map. Not even the road we were traveling on was shown.
"So where are we?" asked MacClayne.
"In a blank spot." I said, and pointed out the general area on the map.
MacClayne frowned. "Did the driver tell you about the coastal road?"
"Yes," I said lamely, hoping MacClayne wouldn't ask what the driver had told me.
"What did he say?"
I took a deep breath and told him, "According to him there isn't any."
MacClayne sighed and shook his head.
I stared into my coffee and then it occurred to me to take a sip. Cuauhtémoc stood on the bench beside me, drinking his water. Poor bird, there was no backrest for him to perch on.
By now some of the villagers had gathered around and engaged us in conversation. Foreigners must've been rare in these parts, and people were curious about us.
"Somos de California," said MacClayne with a cheerfulness that belied his disappointed look of a moment before. The opportunity to be the center of attention had apparently put him back in a good mood. He chatted with the villagers; I just sat there.
"¿Su amigo no habla español?" someone asked, looking at me and wondering if I didn't speak Spanish.
"Sí, lo habla," MacClayne assured them.
The others looked at me rather skeptically; I just grinned and let MacClayne do the talking. In English he was a great talker, but in Spanish he was usually glad to hand the conversation over to me. At this moment for some reason it was different.
Not much got said, but a lot of good feeling was expressed and exchanged. In any language, MacClayne gave the impression of being a consummate conversationalist.
I surveyed our surroundings. The dwelling nearest us was fashioned of tree branches woven together. Some of its walls were plastered with mud, some were not. The other houses were of similar construction. I guessed that this must be what was called mud-wattle, something I'd seen only in photos till now.
MacClayne was still holding forth and doing it well, and Cuauhtémoc, along with the rest of the audience, was listening attentively when a bus rolled up. It was the afternoon bus from Villa Victoria which had finally caught up with us. This was the second time we'd been overtaken by a bus which we'd decided not to wait for. We gulped our coffees, said our good-byes, and climbed aboard to continue our journey to Colima.
Till now I'd seen only these half dozen houses, and I thought that was the entire village. But, as we rode on, they became more numerous. Most were also of mud-wattle, but there were two or three of brick and concrete. None was of adobe. Nearly every dwelling had a couple of banana palms in front. We passed a school which was constructed on the standard pattern of schools everywhere in rural México--a row of concrete rooms with a playground. Not beautiful but practical. From what I'd heard, there'd been few if any schools out here until recently. Literacy was making its way even into these remote parts of the republic.
Cuauhtémoc stood on my lap, high enough to look out the window and peer wistfully at the occasional lady chickens we passed.
Along the river women were washing clothes. It was the same river which flowed by Villa Victoria, and we'd been following it till now, along narrow flood plains and through gorges. But now we were parting company with it, as our bus turned northward onto another unpaved road which crawled up a steep mountainside, winding back and forth along hairpin curves, as we left the valley with the small village far below us. The road was carved into the mountainside, revealing the same thinly bedded shales we'd been seeing since Villa Victoria, and, as before, they were twisted and contorted. At length we reached a crest from which we could see a series of ridges.
In the distance rose a single, tall, snow-capped volcano. It was one of the Needle Peaks, which we'd first seen the morning we left Tancítaro, only now it was to the north of us, and we couldn't see the second peak from here because it was concealed behind the first. By now I'd learned their names: Volcán de Colima and Nevado de Colima. They marked the extreme western end of the Valley of Infiernillo, and rose to a height of four kilometers. A small cloud of vapor still trailed from the apex.
We crossed over the crest of the ridge and descended into another narrow valley like the one we'd left. The same bushy foliage predominated here as well, and continued on with hardly a break.
"This damn jungle never ends!" MacClayne groaned, loudly to make himself heard above the din of engine and road noise. He called it jungle, but I still wasn't certain how to categorize it. Expressions like cane brake and briar patch came to mind.
As before, there were hardly any people, just cattle, often accompanied by flocks of white birds. The avians always seemed to peer at us knowingly. In time we left this valley too, again turning north to crawl up another steep ridge and then descend down into another narrow valley. And, before too long, we repeated the entire process.
The sun shone brightly, but in a fierce and hostile way that dried the mud into dust to be kicked up into a cloud behind us. On and on and on this went. The road was unpaved as always. Sometimes for a stretch it was in fairly decent shape, but never for long. Mostly it was bad and much of it awful. We were bounced and pounded. The noise was incredible.
The bus was about half full, and everybody was pretty quiet. There were no drunken women swearing in English and vomiting out the window, and no escaped chickens flying around. Cuauhtémoc was the only bird on the bus; he stood on my lap and looked out the window. A radio played traditional Mexican music; mostly familiar tunes that Chayo and I had enjoyed together.
No hay ojos mas lindos
en la tierra mía
que los negros ojos de la . . .
There are no eyes more beautiful
in the land I'm from
than the dark eyes of the . . .
The music was mostly lost in the din, but I caught enough to recognize the tune, and my memory filled in the words. I thought of Chayo and her sparkling eyes.
The driver stopped briefly at a tiny village to let on a few passengers, and also to put water in the radiator. It was the first settlement we'd passed since the one where we'd boarded, and it bore many similarities. A couple houses of concrete, the rest of mud-wattle, none of adobe.
Adobe construction seemed to belong to the higher country. This was la Tierra Caliente, as these hot lower regions were called, and everything was different from the pine-forested plateau around Uruapan. It was different world, a different México from the one I'd come to know.
While we were waiting, I asked a passenger across the aisle what the hamlet was called.
"Guayabo," he replied, and we chatted briefly till the driver started up the engine and the clamor of the road ended our conversation.
There's a tree called the guayabo. It bears the guava fruit which was sold in the marketplace of Uruapan. Botanists believe it originated in the Yucatán, but by the time Europeans arrived in the New World, it was cultivated by Indians throughout México, the Caribbean and even South America. With the introduction of cattle, the tree began to spring up everywhere like a weed and became a serious rampaging pest; a sixteenth century chronicler recorded that the cattle ate the fruit and spread the seed in their dung. Presumably the tree still grew like a weed, and the hamlet must have been named after it.
Someone back in Villa Victoria had told me of a battle fought back around 1870 at a place called Guayabo, and I wondered if that could have been here. I also wondered how opposing armies could've found their way to so inaccessible a place as this to meet up and fight. That was at a time when this region was even more isolated than now, and traversed only by mule trails.
Another village whose name I recorded was Puente de Fatima. None of these places was on our map, which really wasn't a great guide to the back country, but was at least something to hold in my hand. It did at least show major towns, such as Villa Victoria. Unfortunately it didn't extend beyond Michoacán. In Colima we'd be off the map and flying blind.
But that's the way it had to be. Ours was a journey to a fabled city. And when you set out for such a place, you don't always have a detailed map to guide you every step of the way. In fact, the whole idea of a fabled city is that you've only heard of it and don't really know how to get there. You're not supposed to know. You're out there to break new ground and traverse unmapped terrain and endure the uncertainties. After all, if it were easy to get there, then it wouldn't be a fabled and forbidden city.
I smiled to myself as I thought of that; sometimes fantasy interacted and merged with reality. I glanced out the window. We were passing another small herd of cattle accompanied by white birds. Were those birds really looking at us? I had that impression. Or maybe they were just looking at the bus. As I was thinking that, one took to the air and flew past our window, so close I could see his eye. Cuauhtémoc clucked; he too was watching the white birds.
"Those white birds were expecting us," MacClayne remarked with a chuckle.
"We're still being led by the golden thread," I replied.
Then I caught another glimpse of the Needle Peaks, still lined up one behind the other, appearing as a single volcano. During the last couple of hours, we'd seen them at this angle from the crest of every ridge we'd crossed, and now we were even seeing them from the floor of this valley, sometimes to the right of us and sometimes to the left, but we were generally heading towards them. They got larger each time they reappeared.
The valley was wider now, and, in the distance, a vertical cliff face stood tall and bare, in a way that is typical of volcanic ash deposits. Further on down the road, a roadcut exposed a lava flow. These volcanic materials overlaid the sedimentary strata.
Off to the right of us I saw an open-pit mine. One of the few places shown on this part of the map was one called La Minita. Could that be this? I asked the passenger across the aisle.
"Capela," he said. "Se llama Capela."
"Did he say we're in Colima?" MacClayne asked me.
"No," I said, and looked again at our map. There was no Capela on it, nor anything else that I could use to figure out where we were right now. I asked the fellow across the aisle, "¿Estamos todavía en Michoacán?"
"Sí, todavía," he affirmed.
How could that be? Colima was only twenty five kilometers by air from Villa Victoria; even on these curving, twisting mountain roads it couldn't take this long. We'd been traveling all day, and the sun was moving off to the western side of the sky where it was about to sink behind the ridge.
Suddenly we turned onto a blacktop road, the first paved surface I'd seen in days. The bus stopped and some passengers got out. This was where we'd have to change buses, the driver told us. Other than the paved road, there weren't any signs of civilization; not so much as a single dwelling was in sight. Colima wasn't far now, the driver told me.
The name of this junction was Balastre, and, like the other places we'd passed through, neither it nor the paved road was on our map. Ironically that struck me as encouraging, and I said to MacClayne, "Maybe there's also a road down the coast that's not on this map."
"Maybe," he replied skeptically.
A bus drove up. The conductor asked us where we were going, and I said "Tecomán."
Tecomán was the only city in Colima that I could name, and I knew it was somewhere on the coast. The tickets cost twenty-five pesos each, indicating another fairly long ride. It was already six o'clock. It would be dark in an hour, and so we'd be doing some night traveling--a thing we always tried to avoid because we couldn't see the countryside in the dark. But what else could we do? We bought the tickets and took seats on opposite sides of the aisle. There were plenty of empty seats on this bus, and sometimes on a long journey it's good to sit apart.
Four or five more passengers got aboard, then the driver started the
engine and set out on a smooth blacktop road that was marvelously quiet. It was such a relief to be free of that incessant road noise. MacClayne and I were even able to exchange comments across the aisle without shouting at the top of our lungs.
Within minutes, we were out of the endless briar patch and passing through a prosperous rural countryside. Through the window on my side of the bus, everything was lush and green, including the mountains we had just come out of. Then I glanced out the window on MacClayne's side. There wasn't anything to look at. Nothing. I stood up to look again, and then saw that there was a lot to see.
"There's a canyon down there," said MacClayne.
"Yeah, it's breathtaking!" I gathered up Cuauhtémoc and moved to the seat in front of MacClayne, a position which afforded me an excellent view.
The canyon was deep and wide, several kilometers across, and we were cruising along the rim. Far below I could see a river with a toy-sized bridge and tiny vehicles crossing over it. Our map showed a major river which bordered Michoacán, and I guessed this must be it.
"¿Río Coahuayana?" I asked a woman with a small child.
"Sí," she said, and was about to say more when her tiny daughter pointed at Cuauhtémoc. "¡Cucúi!" the child exclaimed.
"No es Cucúi," the mother laughed soothingly. "Es gallito."
"¡Sí es Cucúi!" the child insisted, not the least bit frightened. The bird hopped over to the seat beside her, and she put her arms around him.
We'd left the rim and were speeding along on a road carved into the canyon wall. We continued to descend, switchback after switchback, as I watched the river and the bridge below as they kept appearing and reappearing, getting larger at each turn.
The bottom was a long way down. Finally, after many twists and turns, we were on the valley floor, rolling across the bridge I'd seen from above. It was much larger and longer than I'd thought, having been dwarfed by the massive scale of the landscape. The towering canyon wall on the other side seemed to lean over us as we neared it. We followed along the base for a while and then began to ascend upwards to the opposite rim. We'd crossed the Río Coahuayana.
"Colima, at last!" I announced. MacClayne raised his fist in a gesture of victory and Cuauhtémoc crowed.
As we reached the rim, the nearer of the two Needle Peaks again came sharply into view, larger than ever, its snows glistening in the last rays of the late afternoon sun. The fields continued green, the countryside prosperous, and the road well paved. Roadcuts exposed ash and lava. I'd also seen layers of lava in the canyon walls. There must have been a tremendous amount of volcanic activity in this area during the last million years. And that activity was still going on. I wondered if that tall volcano or its twin might some day explode in a tremendous searing blast that would sweep every tree, bush and blade of grass from this landscape and perhaps even fill that canyon back there from brim to brim with burning rock. Not soon, I hoped. Ten thousand years from now, perhaps. A mere millisecond, however, in the geological history of the world.
The sun was sinking closer to the horizon, where it seemed to hover for a while just above the gently rolling hills. We were speeding straight towards the snow-capped peak. It rose steeply from a flat plain, appearing so close that I imagined we'd soon be driving right up onto its flanks, when suddenly we veered off to the west. The sun chose at that moment to set, and in the ensuing twilight we entered a city. A very large one.
"Is this Tecomán?" said MacClayne.
"If it is, it's in the wrong place. We can't possibly be on the coast," I said, and turned to ask the lady with the little child who'd made friends with Cuauhtémoc. But they weren't there. Apparently they'd gotten off somewhere. Strange that they hadn't said good-bye. Somehow I hadn't noticed them getting off.
I asked the conductor what city this was.
"Ciudad Colima," he told me.
That was unexpected. Colima was the name of this state; I hadn't realized that it was also the name of a capital city. Streetlights flickered on as we approached the depot. The brief twilight was almost over.
Had we known of this city, we would have planned to stop here and spend the night. Actually, I could still have gotten our tickets changed, but that didn't occur to me till we were again on our way and the city was behind us.
We were now on a well-paved, four-lane highway, rolling along with ease, moving deeper into the darkness and further into this unknown state of Colima. The next city should be Tecomán. I sat there with Cuauhtémoc on my lap, slightly mesmerized by the rhythmic sound of the engine and the steady movement of the bus.
Black masses of trees and low hills whizzed by, silhouetted against the moonlit sky. Forty minutes later we were there. Tecomán.
We got off near a small plaza. It was poorly lit and almost deserted. The whole city was dim and dark. It was eight o'clock.
Not far away we found a hotel which charged us fifty pesos each for a large room with two big beds and a single chair. It was an ugly concrete pillbox, and not very clean either. I didn't see any blankets, so I asked for some.
"Es la Tierra Caliente," the clerk said, and assured me we wouldn't need any blankets.
"What was he saying about 'Tierra Caliente'?" MacClayne asked me. We'd left our things in the room and were back out on the street, looking for a place to eat.
"That's where we are now," I said. "In a tropical region."
"I thought that's where we've been for the last week."
"Where we walked in the snow, it wasn't tropical," I said.
"Aren't we below the Tropic of Cancer?"
"Yes, but it's not just a question of how far south, it's also a matter of how high up. Snow-capped peaks that rise above the tree line are defined as boreal. The spruce forests of Mount Tancítaro are alpine, and the climate of Uruapan is temperate, not tropical."
"Anyway, now we're in the tropics?" said MacClayne.
"Yeah, I'm sure we are," I said. The night air felt warm, but from habit I'd taken my jacket.
"Are we or aren't we?"
"Well I'm trying to figure this out myself. I've never been in the tropics before."
"You haven't?"
"No."
"I didn't know that," he said dryly.
He knew this was my first visit to these parts, and that until this year I'd never been out of the US and Canada. At any rate, he had to know more about the tropics than I did; he'd sailed across the equator several times and had traveled in all sorts of places. I wondered if he purposely asked those questions just to irritate me. Only moments before, he'd been cheerful, but he slipped from mood to mood in ways that mystified me.
Ahead of us was the small plaza where we'd gotten off the bus. It was lined with tall, slender palms. A slight breeze rustled the leaves and they glistened in the moonlight. But not a single light shone. If there were any shops, they were closed. We'd hoped to find a restaurant near this plaza.
"Another of those towns where they roll up the sidewalk when the sun goes down," MacClayne said.
"It does look that way," I said cautiously. His observation sounded innocent enough.
"Or perhaps this isn't the main plaza."
"I wouldn't know," I said. I wondered if I was being overly wary, but I wasn't about to let him drag me into another argument.
"Could you ask somebody?"
I stopped a passer-by who told us of an eating place, and we headed up a street as he directed. On the way we happened to pass a movie theater and paused to look at the posters. One showed a guy on horseback.
"This must be a Mexican cowboy movie," MacClayne said.
"It's a ranchera," I said. "Ever see one?"
"When I was in Veracruz I may have. That was years ago."
"Maybe it's time to see another," I said. It struck me that we needed to spend a couple hours in some fantasy world where we could get away from our own personal reality.
"If we have time to eat first," MacClayne said.
People were already lining up to buy tickets; I looked at the schedule and found it would be starting in about ten minutes.
"Some other time."
"Let's go eat."
But then we noticed that the ranchera would not be showing till the next week. The one for tonight was the German movie Aguirre, directed by Werner Herzog and starring Klaus Kinski. There was a poster showing a bunch of characters wearing breastplates and visored helmets, the kind that Spanish conquistadors wore.
"Aguirre," MacClayne said. "Isn't this the one about some guys searching for El Dorado?"
"I'm sure it's the one," I said. "Imagine finding it here."
"We can't miss this."
"Dinner can wait."
"Maybe we can get popcorn inside."
As we got in line, I recalled that a theater back in Uruapan had once objected to me bringing Cuauhtémoc inside. Things might be simpler if I just smuggled him in, and so I hid him in the jacket I was carrying on my arm, taking special care not to crush his plumage.
The theater was built like those in the US. Inside there was a lobby with a refreshment stand where we bought popcorn and then went to be escorted to our seats by the usher, a teenage girl. She had a sweet smile which suddenly disappeared as she let out a shriek and jumped back.
Everybody was looking at me--at Cuauhtémoc, actually. He'd poked his head out from my jacket. Still unabashed, he looked at the startled girl. I heard tittering, and I felt my face blushing slightly. I took the rooster from under my jacket and said weakly and apologetically, "Mi gallito."
More tittering came from all around us.
MacClayne glanced at the others, then gave the bird and me a disapproving look, and I could almost hear him say, "See what happens when you insist on bringing that bird along to every damn place we go." The usher recovered her composure and, without further ado, escorted us to our seats where I perched the bird on the armrest beside me. He didn't turn a feather at all the ruckus he'd caused.
"¡Sinvergüenza!" I scolded him. He cocked his head to one side and looked at me out of one eye, then thrust his beak into the popcorn.
Nobody sat next to us, but people kept looking our way, and I was glad when the lights went out and the movie began.
The drama began to unfold, in German with Spanish subtitles. The year was 1560, and the place was South America. An expedition of conquistadors was trudging through the mountains. But a madman in the party somehow diverted them from their course and led them off into the jungle in a deluded search for El Dorado.
Cuauhtémoc watched the screen with his usual interest. He seemed to like movies. My eyes kept darting back and forth from the picture to the Spanish subtitles, and from time to time I translated key bits for MacClayne. People around us were also chattering, some reading the subtitles and others exchanging comments. What did it matter? After all, how many understood the language of the sound track?
The conquistadors penetrated the mapless unknown, but so far all they found was jungle and then more jungle.
"They're in the Amazon basin," I whispered with a grin. I was tempted to crack a joke about their not having a road map, but I held my tongue.
"That jungle extends for thousands of miles. But they don't know that, do they," said MacClayne. "They think they're going to find El Dorado out there."
The madman, whose name was Aguirre, had by now completely taken over and dominated the expedition. He wasn't lovable, not even likable, and certainly not very sane. Nor did he have rank, status, experience, common sense or any other qualification for leadership--except for his single-mindedness of purpose. But the rest were somehow inspired by him, and together they all persisted in this journey to nowhere. The expedition members died off, one by one, till finally only the madman was left, talking to himself, still dreaming his mad dreams. That's where the movie ended.
The lights came on and we were suddenly back in reality. We exited the theater and found ourselves once again on the dark street, hungry and hoping to find a restaurant that was still open. It was 11 o'clock and everything in this area was closed.
The night was warm and the air heavy. Dark buildings closed in around us like dense foliage, the labyrinth of narrow streets like paths in a jungle. From a window above us came the shrill voice of a woman cursing, perhaps beating a drunken husband. A single vehicle skidded around a corner and raced by at full speed, like a solitary hunter of the night in search of prey. For some time after it disappeared in the distance, we could still hear the roar of its engine and the screeching and skidding of its tires. And then all was quiet once again.
"Do you think we're going to find anything?" MacClayne said.
I wished I'd asked someone at the theater. Here there wasn't even a passer-by from whom I could ask directions. And I was beginning to fear that if we went much farther, there might be a problem in finding our way back.
"Maybe not," I said.
We gave up and returned to our hotel, where we sat and peeled oranges. Fortunately, I had replenished my supply of oats, so at least Cuauhtémoc didn't have to go hungry.
"Wasn't he some character," MacClayne finally spoke up. We hadn't said much for a while.
"Aguirre, you mean? The one played by Klaus Kinski?"
"Yes. The one who got them into that damn jungle."
"Nobody knew what was out there," I said, suddenly feeling defensive. The feeling surprised me; I certainly did not identify with Aguirre, but I sensed that MacClayne was pushing a comparision.
MacClayne nodded and reached for another orange.
"There weren't any maps back in those days," I said.
"It does help to know where you're going."
Cuauhtémoc finished his meal of oats and hopped on my knee. I shared a piece of my orange with him.
"But you know," I said. "If there had been an El Dorado, he's the guy who would have gotten them there."
"There wasn't any El Dorado!" MacClayne sounded dour and disappointed, as if he were speaking for the rank-and-file soldiers who were lost in that adventure.
"Well, they were in the wrong jungle," I said.
"Is there a right jungle?"
For a while we just sat there quietly peeling oranges. I offered Cuauhtémoc another piece, but he'd had enough.
MacClayne broke the short silence. "You speak German, don't you?" he said.
"Me? No. I read the Spanish subtitles."
"But you do speak it. You understand it."
"German?"
"That's what I asked."
"I'm Norse," I said. "Norwegian is the only language I know, outside of English and Spanish."
MacClayne finished his orange-eating. "Turn out the light when you go to bed," he said as he lay back and closed his eyes. I glanced at my watch; it was well past midnight.
Cuauhtémoc had dozed off, still on my knee. I carefully lifted him up and perched him on the backrest of the chair. It was warm and the bird wouldn't need any special shelter. Then I got between the sheets. They smelled moldy, like they'd been hanging in a damp cavern.
Eventually I drifted off to sleep and into a dream where I found myself among MacClayne's shipmates. It was in the same drippy dungeon where I'd met them before. But this time across the table from me sat an officer; on one side of him was a sergeant and on the other a corporal. Packed in with barely room to stand were many others, all of them in battledress. His Majesty's Royal Marines. Among them was the lad whom I knew to be MacClayne. This time he wasn't drinking; none of them was.
"Are you German?" the sergeant demanded.
"No. I'm American."
"You told us you were Norse."
"Well, that too."
"Are you Norse or are you American?"
The Marines crowded in close, all of them glaring at me with fierce hostility. The officer said nothing, but gave his subordinates a slight nod from time to time. The insignia on his shoulder indicated that he was a major and he looked to be about forty. He had an almost fatherly appearance.
"Or German?" the corporal barked.
"No. I'm not German."
There was a hushed silence, then the major spoke. His voice was soft, not unsympathetic. "Sie sprechen sehr gut Englisch," he said.
"Of course I do. Like I've been trying to tell these people, I'm American."
MacClayne sat near the end of the table, writing a poem. I wondered if he knew me. Perhaps not.
"Americaner? Aber Sie koennen Deutsch verstehen," said the major.
"No I don't," I said, and shook my head for emphasis.
The major smiled, slightly amused. Then he glanced sideways at the Sergeant who slapped his hand on the table and said, "You're the torpedoman."
"You sank our ship," barked the corporal.
"It's him!" came a voice from the assembled company, and it was immediately echoed by the others.
"He brought us here!"
"It's him! It's him! It's him!"
They were all shouting at me, and closed in even tighter. Only MacClayne said nothing, he was still writing poetry, perhaps expressing his distaste for military life in verse.
At that moment a crack appeared in the ceiling of the bunker. The fracture rapidly widened and suddenly burst open to the moonlit sky above. There was a loud flutter of wings descending towards me, and the Marines stepped back. Talons seized my arm and lifted me upwards, away from the table, away from the bunker, and high above the tree tops.
Below was the valley and up ahead the snow-capped peak of Tancítaro, and then I was gently lowered into the courtyard of the Huatapera, where Chayo awaited me. Cuauhtémoc returned to his normal size as he landed beside me.
continued in Chapter 27
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