![](daniel_novel_photo_small.jpg")
Chapter 47
When I awoke, the gray light of day was stealing in through the window. Cuauhtémoc was perched on the backrest of the chair, crowing in the new day, and MacClayne was stirring on his bed.
"Buenos días," I said when he sat up, and we exchanged our customary round of greetings in Spanish.
"Let's see how the weather's doing," MacClayne said, and went to the door. Bleak sunlight and cold damp air poured into the room as he opened it and peered outside. At least it wasn't raining at the moment.
He frowned and glanced my way. "Shall we stay another day and hope for it to clear up?"
"I'm ready to move on," I said. "I would be very happy to get as far as possible from this land of cold rain and dreary skies."
MacClayne nodded. "That's the way I feel too."
We tossed our things together, returned our key to the office and ventured out in search of a place to eat breakfast.
Water dripped down on us from overhanging eaves, and the streets were full of dirty water which vehicles splashed up at us as they drove past. Buildings were gray to match the sky; even gaily painted ones looked dark and somber. My trousers were still soggy from walking through the rain the night before, but they at least functioned like a wetsuit to give me some protection against the chill which hung in the damp air.
We found a restaurant and stepped in just as a sudden shower hit. The proprietress brought us two glasses of water as we sat down. I asked for a third.
"¿Tres vasos?" the proprietress repeated.
"Sí, por favor. Tres," I said.
The lady brought the additional water and glanced at the door, perhaps expecting another member of our party to come walking in to join us. I set the glass in front of Cuauhtémoc; the woman watched with a strange expression as he dipped his beak in and drank thirstily.
MacClayne grinned. "She may not have too many roosters among her clientele."
The menu offered the usual choice of carne de res or carne de puerco, with beans and tortillas. The price was ten pesos more than what we were used to; everything seemed to be more expensive here in Lázaro. We placed our orders and glanced around the room while we waited for our food to arrive. A print of the Virgin of Guadalupe and a calendar with a portrait of Juan Gabriel were the only adornments on the otherwise bare concrete walls.
If MacClayne had any remaining desire to spend more time in this city, this final example of exorbitantly high prices made him as ready to leave as I was.
"So what's our next destination?" he said. We'd finished eating and were drinking coffee.
I pushed our coffee cups to one side of the table and spread out our map. Besides being damp, soiled and splashed with the coffee stains of many restaurants, it had been folded and unfolded so many times that it was falling apart. Like ourselves, this map was a well-worn traveler on the road to Apatzingán.
The road ran north, up into the Coastal Range. "We could stop in Arteaga," MacClayne said, "Anything of interest there?"
"Could be. It's up in the mountains. We can see that on the map," I said and took a sip of coffee. "But I think I'd just as soon go all the way to Nueva Italia and get there today."
"Nueva Italia. That's in the Valley of Infiernillo?"
"Yes, it's a crossroads about 35 kilometers from Apatzingán. We'll probably have to change buses there." I pointed to it on the map. Apatzingán lay halfway between Nueva Italia and Buenavista. Buenavista was the half-ghost-town, half-boom-town at the other end of the valley which we'd passed through nearly three weeks before. At that point we'd been only 30 kilometers from Apatzingán, but we'd decided against entering the fabled city through the back door. So we'd come all this extra distance, taking this roundabout way, to reach what we called the front gate.
"I don't see Apatzingán on this map," said MacClayne.
"It's where the hole is," I said. "Cuauhtémoc crapped on it the other day and I guess the acid ate through the paper."
MacClayne glanced at the culprit who was perched in his usual position, on the backrest of a chair.
"Okay, so we'll just go on to Nueva Italia," he said. "I wonder how it got that name."
"I'm told that a group of Italian immigrants settled there. That was back in the early part of this century."
"I think the rain's let up," he said. "Shall we head on to the depot?"
I wasn't sure where the depot was so I asked the lady. It turned out to be only a block down the street. Apparently we'd been going in circles the night before.
When we bought our tickets I asked how long the bus would take to reach Nueva Italia. The evening before I'd been told it was a five hour ride, but I wanted to verify that.
"Cinco horas," the ticket seller replied.
We sat down to wait for our bus which would be leaving in half an hour. Our tickets had seat numbers, so we wouldn't have to stand. The waiting room was dark and dreary; a cold dampness pervaded the air. I was getting used to wearing wet trousers. Not feeling much like writing in my journal, I took out a mystery novel I'd acquired while in Caleta.
MacClayne sat next to me, jotting down some thoughts for possible use in a poem,
"Overcoat buttons painted yellow,
to remember the sun in Lázaro"
"Better paint those buttons gray," I advised him. "There isn't any sun in Lázaro."
The loudspeaker squawked out an announcement and people started lining up at the gate.
"That's our bus," I said.
It was a large stub-nosed bus, the kind we called "good-road" buses, and the destination plaque above the windshield read: URUAPAN. That name evoked a tinge of homesickness; it was where this bus eventually would go, to where Chayo lived, though we'd be getting off before that, at a crossroads town in the valley.
Lázaro was soon behind us as we sped out across the flat delta and then began ascending the Coastal Range, winding our way back and forth along the curvy but well-paved mountain road.
Somewhere off to the right of us, some ten or twenty kilometers distant, but running roughly parallel to this road, was the Río Balsas which was the outlet of the Río Cupatitzio and all the other tributaries which flowed down into the Valley. It was the largest river system in México.
At the height of their power, the Tarascans extended their empire down along this river to the Pacific Ocean. That was in the late fourteen hundreds, shortly before the Spaniards arrived. Archaeological evidence indicated that the Tarascans established a small seaport in the vicinity of today's Lázaro and some scholars believed they traded with the Indians of Peru, who may have sailed up the coast either on rafts like Kon-Tiki or possibly in ships constructed of reeds.
Other scholars speculated that the Peruvian connection went back much farther and deeper. The Tarascans dressed in a manner similar to the ancient Peruvians and not at all like Aztecs or any other people of pre-Hispanic México. Some linguists suggested that even the language of the Tarascans was related to the Quechua of Peru and Ecuador.
The road continued to wind back and forth. These mountains were extremely rugged; there was rarely a flat space large enough for a corn patch. Once or twice we passed tiny hamlets consisting of just three or four dwellings built of woven branches, some plastered with mud. They were the kind we'd seen on the coast. Few people seemed to live in these hills, which were densely covered with vine and sticker-bush jungle. Once in a while we passed along the edge of a cliff which gave us a panoramic view. But I saw only brush and more brush; it was one huge briar patch.
"Not terribly breathtaking," I said.
MacClayne shook his head. "It doesn't have the variety of the coast."
"Nor that of the Meseta Volcánica."
From time to time we saw large trees, there were a few with trunks nearly a meter in diameter. We exchanged remarks when we saw one; there wasn't much else to comment on.
The road climbed for a while, then descended a bit, and then climbed some more, always winding back and forth. I expected to see pine trees soon. In these latitudes they seemed to grow at the 1500 meter level and above.
The sky remained overcast, with intermittent showers, and the windows were frequently streaked with water. I shivered slightly from the cold. It seemed like an eternity since I'd been really warm.
Then suddenly the road straightened out and stayed that way for a whole kilometer or more. Soon we found ourselves entering the town of Arteaga. It was surprisingly large, and I wondered how such a sparsely populated countryside could support a town of this size.
The driver announced that this would be a half-hour lunch stop, so MacClayne and I made a quick tour of the plaza. Cuauhtémoc hopped down to the ground, but only long enough to get his feet thoroughly muddy before bouncing back up on my arm.
The town had a certain archaic charm. There were many handsome adobe buildings, though they were poorly kept up and some were even caved in. The wooden pillars of the plaza arcade were worm-eaten and rotten. There was a desolate look about the town which seemed to reflect the surrounding landscape. This was how I had envisioned Apatzingán.
We briefly considered changing our tickets and spending a day here. But not now. At this moment I just wanted to get to our destination. I was spurred on by the notion that the completion of our journey would spell the end to my troubling dreams. But I didn't feel like explaining that to MacClayne, so I just said, "I'm looking forward to seeing the place we've talked about for so long."
After leaving Arteaga we began descending, and continued to descend, winding back and forth as before. We were over the hump of the Coastal Range and now on the valley side, but without having reached pine tree elevation. I was disappointed.
"Why?" MacClayne said when I mentioned it.
"I like pine trees."
"What's the big deal about them?"
"Nothing," I said. I was a trifle annoyed by the way he'd asked me that and I suspected he was about to try to drag me into another of his question-and-answer sessions. I took out the murder mystery which I'd been reading.
We sat in silence. From time to time I glanced out the window to see the same monotonous brush, then returned to my novel. MacClayne eventually asked me what I was reading, and I showed him the book, Muerte a la zaga by Elvira Bermúdez.
"Muerte--that's death?" He was looking at the title.
"Death in the Wake," I said.
"It takes place aboard a ship?"
"Yes, it does." I told him about the story, and said. "It's a bit strange though. The author's a woman, but her protagonist, the detective, is a guy."
"What's strange about that?"
"She portrays the guy as being clever, but none of the women in it are especially smart, and there's even a woman who faints."
"So?"
"Did you ever see a woman faint?" I said.
"No."
"Well, that's what I mean. It's not only unflattering to women, it's unreal."
"What would you expect of her?"
"To be promoting women's equality," I said.
"When was it written?"
"In the late 1940's."
MacClayne shook his head. "That's how mystery novels were written back then. Dorothy Sayers and Josephine Tey had male detectives. So did Agatha Christie."
"They did?"
"Haven't you read them?"
"No. I'm just surprised that you have."
"I've looked at one or two," he responded, almost defensively. "Just to see what was in them."
"Oh." I couldn't suppress an indiscreet smile. MacClayne was terribly pretentious about his reading. Downright snobbish, in fact. Detective fiction was beneath his dignity, or so he'd have me believe.
The bus was rounding an especially sharp curve, and we hung onto our seats so as not to go sliding off into the aisle.
"Well, I suppose it was a different world back in the '40's. Male-dominated," I said as we came out of the turn. I glanced out the window. The same eternal brush was going by. I sighed, opened my novel and looked for where I'd left off.
"I don't understand why you read such books," MacClayne said, rather abruptly.
"You don't?" I looked at him. "The way you say that, it sounds like you're telling me I read dumb books."
"What do you get out of that novel?"
"It's an intriguing mystery. And the story gives me a peek into the rather superficial middle-class world of the 1940's. Whether I approve of it or not is beside the point. And I'm also improving my Spanish."
"So it's just something to practice your Spanish on?"
"That's not really what I said."
"Then what did you say?"
"I'm reading a novel that I enjoy, in addition to learning Spanish."
"Then you're learning Spanish to read commonplace books."
"Please just let me read my commonplace book," I said, and opened it up to where I'd left off.
"Do you have to be rude?"
I wanted to respond with something blunt, like, When you insult me, yes--but I knew better. It would just lead more deeply into a dead-end quarrel. So I said, "Can we just end this, right here?"
"We're having a discussion, and suddenly you want to end it?"
"This is no discussion!"
"I don't understand what you're trying to say."
I sighed. MacClayne was a master at creating arguments and keeping them going. "I don't want to argue, that's all!" I got up from my seat. "Excuse me, I'm going to sit across the aisle where I can get a better view of the countryside."
For some time I sat there staring at the unending, unchanging brush as our bus wove back and forth. There were no straight segments of road even a kilometer long.
Out of the corner of my eye, I glanced over at MacClayne. He was dozing now. Terribly lonely, he seemed, forlorn.
'Self-marooning!' his former lady-friend had said of him. She'd taken all she could stand and called it quits. There were times when MacClayne reflected the saddest aspects of the human condition, when he seemed determined to drive away the people who were closest to him. I was like his little brother, so he gave me the worst he had to offer. But to people outside of his innermost circle, he could seem like the nicest guy they ever met.
I once asked a mutual friend who'd known him for a decade. "Have you ever seen MacClayne when he was not in a cheerful mood?" I'd asked.
"No, I don't think I ever have," the guy replied. "MacClayne has a personality that brightens up your whole day."
Well, that was the MacClayne most people saw, and the cranky fellow in the seat across the aisle was the MacClayne I knew.
The brush was thinning out and the countryside was becoming arid. There was a lot of tall cactus.
But where was Cuauhtémoc? I suddenly became aware of his absence. I glanced around and saw nothing, then I thought I heard a sound and looked under the seat.
There he was, with an unchaperoned pullet, and they were doing what you might expect them to be doing.
"¡Oh válgame díos!" I said to myself with a deep, embarrassed groan, and leaned back in my seat to look out the window and watch the cactus go by. I just hoped my bird was practicing safe sex.
I thought of Wendy. And poor Jeff. I suddenly realized I felt very angry at both of them, but mostly at Wendy. It wasn't just that I'd gotten a whack on the jaw; that was only part of it. They'd resolved to split up and repair their lives--aspirations which they'd each expressed in the evening and abandoned the following morning. I'd listened to their stories and believed them. I felt disappointed.
I kept looking out the window.
Cactus. That's what was out there now. There were also a lot of bushes with pretty yellow flowers. From time to time I saw deposits of volcanic ash in road cuts.
Nevertheless, Wendy had been there for me. Wendy of all people! My degree in geology was fraudulent--hardly something I could proudly present to family, friends or prospective employers. Wendy had listened to my problem and helped me work it out.
I also remembered her saying, "They call themselves your alma mater and want you to believe a diploma is some mystical thing, taken from the lamb's body. A piece of the Holy Grail. They make graduation seem like a sacred rite. Well, it's all bullshit! A degree is a degree, and when they give you one, the validity is their problem. You got a degree, so use it."
I pictured myself back in California, at a job interview. Being hired. Doing the job. A geologist at last.
Suddenly, plunk! Cuauhtémoc landed on my knee, crashing in on my daydream.
We were passing through a tiny hamlet. A few buildings were of brick or concrete and some were of adobe, but most were of woven branches covered with mud. Las Cañas was the name of the place.
A lake appeared between the hills. It seemed to grow larger as we approached it. I looked at my map and realized I was looking at the waters of the Infiernillo Dam on the Río Balsas. We were getting down into the hot country now. La Tierra Caliente.
Sometimes you just need a change of sky--that's how MacClayne once put it. At this moment I was glad to be away from the coast, to be out of Lázaro, that horribly gloomy place where the sun didn't shine. Well, it wasn't shining here either, but I felt as though it were. I glanced at my watch; we should soon be arriving in Nueva Italia.
Rain drops began to splatter on the window, and the light shower soon intensified to a downpour. We were on a bridge crossing a broad river. It had to be Río Tepalcatepec, which ran along the southern edge of the Valley, the same river we'd crossed upstream, more than two weeks ago now. It was much wider here.
Through the rain-streaked pane I could make out the form of a small cinder cone.
The road had become straight, and for the first time during this long ride, there were no curves and no swaying from side to side. We sped northward across the flat valley floor. Within a quarter of an hour we were entering a fairly large town, which could be no other than Nueva Italia.
"Is this it?" MacClayne asked me from across the aisle. He seemed to have slept off his bad mood.
"I think so. I'll ask."
Rain was pouring down as we stepped off the bus. We dashed across the sidewalk and took shelter under the broad eaves of a shop. The main street was the highway itself. Noisy traffic roared up and down, splashing water.
Apatzingán was now only 35 kilometers away. It was mid-afternoon, and the buses were running. All we had to do was cross the street and catch one.
"How much of a ride is it?" MacClayne said.
"Half an hour, but . . ." I considered the criteria we'd invented for entering a fabled city. Present conditions were wrong--it was mid-afternoon and it was raining.
"Apatzingán," I said, "must be entered in the morning, with the sun rising overhead."
MacClayne nodded for a moment. "Yes, having come this far, we should finish our journey properly."
These formulae, which also included the requirement of entering by the front gate rather than by a back door, had of course began as a bit of tongue-in-cheek humor, just as had our epithet of fabled and forbidden city. But during the days and weeks of our trek, we'd come to take all of this very seriously. I suppose we were a bit like rock climbers who choose to scale the vertical face of a cliff rather than get in a vehicle and take a road to the top.
The decision was that we would stay here in Nueva Italia for the night.
"I'm sure that in dry weather there's a permanent cloud of dust hanging over these streets," MacClayne said as we stood under the eaves, waiting for the rain to let up.
The shower soon passed. We went to look for a hotel and found one, a block up the street. HOTEL GAMBARA was painted on the front in large letters; the name seemed appropriate.
"Gambatte-ne is a common greeting among the Japanese," I said. "Kind of like when we say: 'Hang in there.'"
I was half hoping MacClayne would ask me how I knew that, but he just said, "So, it sounds very fitting. Shall we go in and ask if they have a room?"
"¿Porqué se llama Gambara?" I asked the desk clerk as she was showing us the rooms.
"Así se llama el dueño." She told me that Gambara was the owner's name and that he'd immigrated to this country from Italy.
Like other hotels in hot regions we'd passed through, the beds had sheets but no blankets. Because of the rain, there were no towels either; they had all been washed and hung on the line--where they couldn't dry.
This was a two-story concrete building, and, although I generally disliked concrete buildings, this one was rather nice, with balconies on both sides. One overlooked the busy street; the other offered a view of a nearby cinder cone, right in town, only a few blocks away.
Cuauhtémoc hopped up on the railing to get a better look; then, after observing it carefully, he crowed.
"We're back in volcano country," I said to him. "Feels like home, doesn't it?"
He crowed again.
MacClayne had gone down the hall to the restroom, and on his return he commented, "There must be somebody in México with about 800,000 toilet seats stored away in a warehouse, waiting for the market price to rise."
continued in Chapter 48
"Buenos días," I said when he sat up, and we exchanged our customary round of greetings in Spanish.
"Let's see how the weather's doing," MacClayne said, and went to the door. Bleak sunlight and cold damp air poured into the room as he opened it and peered outside. At least it wasn't raining at the moment.
He frowned and glanced my way. "Shall we stay another day and hope for it to clear up?"
"I'm ready to move on," I said. "I would be very happy to get as far as possible from this land of cold rain and dreary skies."
MacClayne nodded. "That's the way I feel too."
We tossed our things together, returned our key to the office and ventured out in search of a place to eat breakfast.
Water dripped down on us from overhanging eaves, and the streets were full of dirty water which vehicles splashed up at us as they drove past. Buildings were gray to match the sky; even gaily painted ones looked dark and somber. My trousers were still soggy from walking through the rain the night before, but they at least functioned like a wetsuit to give me some protection against the chill which hung in the damp air.
We found a restaurant and stepped in just as a sudden shower hit. The proprietress brought us two glasses of water as we sat down. I asked for a third.
"¿Tres vasos?" the proprietress repeated.
"Sí, por favor. Tres," I said.
The lady brought the additional water and glanced at the door, perhaps expecting another member of our party to come walking in to join us. I set the glass in front of Cuauhtémoc; the woman watched with a strange expression as he dipped his beak in and drank thirstily.
MacClayne grinned. "She may not have too many roosters among her clientele."
The menu offered the usual choice of carne de res or carne de puerco, with beans and tortillas. The price was ten pesos more than what we were used to; everything seemed to be more expensive here in Lázaro. We placed our orders and glanced around the room while we waited for our food to arrive. A print of the Virgin of Guadalupe and a calendar with a portrait of Juan Gabriel were the only adornments on the otherwise bare concrete walls.
If MacClayne had any remaining desire to spend more time in this city, this final example of exorbitantly high prices made him as ready to leave as I was.
"So what's our next destination?" he said. We'd finished eating and were drinking coffee.
I pushed our coffee cups to one side of the table and spread out our map. Besides being damp, soiled and splashed with the coffee stains of many restaurants, it had been folded and unfolded so many times that it was falling apart. Like ourselves, this map was a well-worn traveler on the road to Apatzingán.
The road ran north, up into the Coastal Range. "We could stop in Arteaga," MacClayne said, "Anything of interest there?"
"Could be. It's up in the mountains. We can see that on the map," I said and took a sip of coffee. "But I think I'd just as soon go all the way to Nueva Italia and get there today."
"Nueva Italia. That's in the Valley of Infiernillo?"
"Yes, it's a crossroads about 35 kilometers from Apatzingán. We'll probably have to change buses there." I pointed to it on the map. Apatzingán lay halfway between Nueva Italia and Buenavista. Buenavista was the half-ghost-town, half-boom-town at the other end of the valley which we'd passed through nearly three weeks before. At that point we'd been only 30 kilometers from Apatzingán, but we'd decided against entering the fabled city through the back door. So we'd come all this extra distance, taking this roundabout way, to reach what we called the front gate.
"I don't see Apatzingán on this map," said MacClayne.
"It's where the hole is," I said. "Cuauhtémoc crapped on it the other day and I guess the acid ate through the paper."
MacClayne glanced at the culprit who was perched in his usual position, on the backrest of a chair.
"Okay, so we'll just go on to Nueva Italia," he said. "I wonder how it got that name."
"I'm told that a group of Italian immigrants settled there. That was back in the early part of this century."
"I think the rain's let up," he said. "Shall we head on to the depot?"
I wasn't sure where the depot was so I asked the lady. It turned out to be only a block down the street. Apparently we'd been going in circles the night before.
When we bought our tickets I asked how long the bus would take to reach Nueva Italia. The evening before I'd been told it was a five hour ride, but I wanted to verify that.
"Cinco horas," the ticket seller replied.
We sat down to wait for our bus which would be leaving in half an hour. Our tickets had seat numbers, so we wouldn't have to stand. The waiting room was dark and dreary; a cold dampness pervaded the air. I was getting used to wearing wet trousers. Not feeling much like writing in my journal, I took out a mystery novel I'd acquired while in Caleta.
MacClayne sat next to me, jotting down some thoughts for possible use in a poem,
"Overcoat buttons painted yellow,
to remember the sun in Lázaro"
"Better paint those buttons gray," I advised him. "There isn't any sun in Lázaro."
The loudspeaker squawked out an announcement and people started lining up at the gate.
"That's our bus," I said.
It was a large stub-nosed bus, the kind we called "good-road" buses, and the destination plaque above the windshield read: URUAPAN. That name evoked a tinge of homesickness; it was where this bus eventually would go, to where Chayo lived, though we'd be getting off before that, at a crossroads town in the valley.
Lázaro was soon behind us as we sped out across the flat delta and then began ascending the Coastal Range, winding our way back and forth along the curvy but well-paved mountain road.
Somewhere off to the right of us, some ten or twenty kilometers distant, but running roughly parallel to this road, was the Río Balsas which was the outlet of the Río Cupatitzio and all the other tributaries which flowed down into the Valley. It was the largest river system in México.
At the height of their power, the Tarascans extended their empire down along this river to the Pacific Ocean. That was in the late fourteen hundreds, shortly before the Spaniards arrived. Archaeological evidence indicated that the Tarascans established a small seaport in the vicinity of today's Lázaro and some scholars believed they traded with the Indians of Peru, who may have sailed up the coast either on rafts like Kon-Tiki or possibly in ships constructed of reeds.
Other scholars speculated that the Peruvian connection went back much farther and deeper. The Tarascans dressed in a manner similar to the ancient Peruvians and not at all like Aztecs or any other people of pre-Hispanic México. Some linguists suggested that even the language of the Tarascans was related to the Quechua of Peru and Ecuador.
The road continued to wind back and forth. These mountains were extremely rugged; there was rarely a flat space large enough for a corn patch. Once or twice we passed tiny hamlets consisting of just three or four dwellings built of woven branches, some plastered with mud. They were the kind we'd seen on the coast. Few people seemed to live in these hills, which were densely covered with vine and sticker-bush jungle. Once in a while we passed along the edge of a cliff which gave us a panoramic view. But I saw only brush and more brush; it was one huge briar patch.
"Not terribly breathtaking," I said.
MacClayne shook his head. "It doesn't have the variety of the coast."
"Nor that of the Meseta Volcánica."
From time to time we saw large trees, there were a few with trunks nearly a meter in diameter. We exchanged remarks when we saw one; there wasn't much else to comment on.
The road climbed for a while, then descended a bit, and then climbed some more, always winding back and forth. I expected to see pine trees soon. In these latitudes they seemed to grow at the 1500 meter level and above.
The sky remained overcast, with intermittent showers, and the windows were frequently streaked with water. I shivered slightly from the cold. It seemed like an eternity since I'd been really warm.
Then suddenly the road straightened out and stayed that way for a whole kilometer or more. Soon we found ourselves entering the town of Arteaga. It was surprisingly large, and I wondered how such a sparsely populated countryside could support a town of this size.
The driver announced that this would be a half-hour lunch stop, so MacClayne and I made a quick tour of the plaza. Cuauhtémoc hopped down to the ground, but only long enough to get his feet thoroughly muddy before bouncing back up on my arm.
The town had a certain archaic charm. There were many handsome adobe buildings, though they were poorly kept up and some were even caved in. The wooden pillars of the plaza arcade were worm-eaten and rotten. There was a desolate look about the town which seemed to reflect the surrounding landscape. This was how I had envisioned Apatzingán.
We briefly considered changing our tickets and spending a day here. But not now. At this moment I just wanted to get to our destination. I was spurred on by the notion that the completion of our journey would spell the end to my troubling dreams. But I didn't feel like explaining that to MacClayne, so I just said, "I'm looking forward to seeing the place we've talked about for so long."
After leaving Arteaga we began descending, and continued to descend, winding back and forth as before. We were over the hump of the Coastal Range and now on the valley side, but without having reached pine tree elevation. I was disappointed.
"Why?" MacClayne said when I mentioned it.
"I like pine trees."
"What's the big deal about them?"
"Nothing," I said. I was a trifle annoyed by the way he'd asked me that and I suspected he was about to try to drag me into another of his question-and-answer sessions. I took out the murder mystery which I'd been reading.
We sat in silence. From time to time I glanced out the window to see the same monotonous brush, then returned to my novel. MacClayne eventually asked me what I was reading, and I showed him the book, Muerte a la zaga by Elvira Bermúdez.
"Muerte--that's death?" He was looking at the title.
"Death in the Wake," I said.
"It takes place aboard a ship?"
"Yes, it does." I told him about the story, and said. "It's a bit strange though. The author's a woman, but her protagonist, the detective, is a guy."
"What's strange about that?"
"She portrays the guy as being clever, but none of the women in it are especially smart, and there's even a woman who faints."
"So?"
"Did you ever see a woman faint?" I said.
"No."
"Well, that's what I mean. It's not only unflattering to women, it's unreal."
"What would you expect of her?"
"To be promoting women's equality," I said.
"When was it written?"
"In the late 1940's."
MacClayne shook his head. "That's how mystery novels were written back then. Dorothy Sayers and Josephine Tey had male detectives. So did Agatha Christie."
"They did?"
"Haven't you read them?"
"No. I'm just surprised that you have."
"I've looked at one or two," he responded, almost defensively. "Just to see what was in them."
"Oh." I couldn't suppress an indiscreet smile. MacClayne was terribly pretentious about his reading. Downright snobbish, in fact. Detective fiction was beneath his dignity, or so he'd have me believe.
The bus was rounding an especially sharp curve, and we hung onto our seats so as not to go sliding off into the aisle.
"Well, I suppose it was a different world back in the '40's. Male-dominated," I said as we came out of the turn. I glanced out the window. The same eternal brush was going by. I sighed, opened my novel and looked for where I'd left off.
"I don't understand why you read such books," MacClayne said, rather abruptly.
"You don't?" I looked at him. "The way you say that, it sounds like you're telling me I read dumb books."
"What do you get out of that novel?"
"It's an intriguing mystery. And the story gives me a peek into the rather superficial middle-class world of the 1940's. Whether I approve of it or not is beside the point. And I'm also improving my Spanish."
"So it's just something to practice your Spanish on?"
"That's not really what I said."
"Then what did you say?"
"I'm reading a novel that I enjoy, in addition to learning Spanish."
"Then you're learning Spanish to read commonplace books."
"Please just let me read my commonplace book," I said, and opened it up to where I'd left off.
"Do you have to be rude?"
I wanted to respond with something blunt, like, When you insult me, yes--but I knew better. It would just lead more deeply into a dead-end quarrel. So I said, "Can we just end this, right here?"
"We're having a discussion, and suddenly you want to end it?"
"This is no discussion!"
"I don't understand what you're trying to say."
I sighed. MacClayne was a master at creating arguments and keeping them going. "I don't want to argue, that's all!" I got up from my seat. "Excuse me, I'm going to sit across the aisle where I can get a better view of the countryside."
For some time I sat there staring at the unending, unchanging brush as our bus wove back and forth. There were no straight segments of road even a kilometer long.
Out of the corner of my eye, I glanced over at MacClayne. He was dozing now. Terribly lonely, he seemed, forlorn.
'Self-marooning!' his former lady-friend had said of him. She'd taken all she could stand and called it quits. There were times when MacClayne reflected the saddest aspects of the human condition, when he seemed determined to drive away the people who were closest to him. I was like his little brother, so he gave me the worst he had to offer. But to people outside of his innermost circle, he could seem like the nicest guy they ever met.
I once asked a mutual friend who'd known him for a decade. "Have you ever seen MacClayne when he was not in a cheerful mood?" I'd asked.
"No, I don't think I ever have," the guy replied. "MacClayne has a personality that brightens up your whole day."
Well, that was the MacClayne most people saw, and the cranky fellow in the seat across the aisle was the MacClayne I knew.
The brush was thinning out and the countryside was becoming arid. There was a lot of tall cactus.
But where was Cuauhtémoc? I suddenly became aware of his absence. I glanced around and saw nothing, then I thought I heard a sound and looked under the seat.
There he was, with an unchaperoned pullet, and they were doing what you might expect them to be doing.
"¡Oh válgame díos!" I said to myself with a deep, embarrassed groan, and leaned back in my seat to look out the window and watch the cactus go by. I just hoped my bird was practicing safe sex.
I thought of Wendy. And poor Jeff. I suddenly realized I felt very angry at both of them, but mostly at Wendy. It wasn't just that I'd gotten a whack on the jaw; that was only part of it. They'd resolved to split up and repair their lives--aspirations which they'd each expressed in the evening and abandoned the following morning. I'd listened to their stories and believed them. I felt disappointed.
I kept looking out the window.
Cactus. That's what was out there now. There were also a lot of bushes with pretty yellow flowers. From time to time I saw deposits of volcanic ash in road cuts.
Nevertheless, Wendy had been there for me. Wendy of all people! My degree in geology was fraudulent--hardly something I could proudly present to family, friends or prospective employers. Wendy had listened to my problem and helped me work it out.
I also remembered her saying, "They call themselves your alma mater and want you to believe a diploma is some mystical thing, taken from the lamb's body. A piece of the Holy Grail. They make graduation seem like a sacred rite. Well, it's all bullshit! A degree is a degree, and when they give you one, the validity is their problem. You got a degree, so use it."
I pictured myself back in California, at a job interview. Being hired. Doing the job. A geologist at last.
Suddenly, plunk! Cuauhtémoc landed on my knee, crashing in on my daydream.
We were passing through a tiny hamlet. A few buildings were of brick or concrete and some were of adobe, but most were of woven branches covered with mud. Las Cañas was the name of the place.
A lake appeared between the hills. It seemed to grow larger as we approached it. I looked at my map and realized I was looking at the waters of the Infiernillo Dam on the Río Balsas. We were getting down into the hot country now. La Tierra Caliente.
Sometimes you just need a change of sky--that's how MacClayne once put it. At this moment I was glad to be away from the coast, to be out of Lázaro, that horribly gloomy place where the sun didn't shine. Well, it wasn't shining here either, but I felt as though it were. I glanced at my watch; we should soon be arriving in Nueva Italia.
Rain drops began to splatter on the window, and the light shower soon intensified to a downpour. We were on a bridge crossing a broad river. It had to be Río Tepalcatepec, which ran along the southern edge of the Valley, the same river we'd crossed upstream, more than two weeks ago now. It was much wider here.
Through the rain-streaked pane I could make out the form of a small cinder cone.
The road had become straight, and for the first time during this long ride, there were no curves and no swaying from side to side. We sped northward across the flat valley floor. Within a quarter of an hour we were entering a fairly large town, which could be no other than Nueva Italia.
"Is this it?" MacClayne asked me from across the aisle. He seemed to have slept off his bad mood.
"I think so. I'll ask."
Rain was pouring down as we stepped off the bus. We dashed across the sidewalk and took shelter under the broad eaves of a shop. The main street was the highway itself. Noisy traffic roared up and down, splashing water.
Apatzingán was now only 35 kilometers away. It was mid-afternoon, and the buses were running. All we had to do was cross the street and catch one.
"How much of a ride is it?" MacClayne said.
"Half an hour, but . . ." I considered the criteria we'd invented for entering a fabled city. Present conditions were wrong--it was mid-afternoon and it was raining.
"Apatzingán," I said, "must be entered in the morning, with the sun rising overhead."
MacClayne nodded for a moment. "Yes, having come this far, we should finish our journey properly."
These formulae, which also included the requirement of entering by the front gate rather than by a back door, had of course began as a bit of tongue-in-cheek humor, just as had our epithet of fabled and forbidden city. But during the days and weeks of our trek, we'd come to take all of this very seriously. I suppose we were a bit like rock climbers who choose to scale the vertical face of a cliff rather than get in a vehicle and take a road to the top.
The decision was that we would stay here in Nueva Italia for the night.
"I'm sure that in dry weather there's a permanent cloud of dust hanging over these streets," MacClayne said as we stood under the eaves, waiting for the rain to let up.
The shower soon passed. We went to look for a hotel and found one, a block up the street. HOTEL GAMBARA was painted on the front in large letters; the name seemed appropriate.
"Gambatte-ne is a common greeting among the Japanese," I said. "Kind of like when we say: 'Hang in there.'"
I was half hoping MacClayne would ask me how I knew that, but he just said, "So, it sounds very fitting. Shall we go in and ask if they have a room?"
"¿Porqué se llama Gambara?" I asked the desk clerk as she was showing us the rooms.
"Así se llama el dueño." She told me that Gambara was the owner's name and that he'd immigrated to this country from Italy.
Like other hotels in hot regions we'd passed through, the beds had sheets but no blankets. Because of the rain, there were no towels either; they had all been washed and hung on the line--where they couldn't dry.
This was a two-story concrete building, and, although I generally disliked concrete buildings, this one was rather nice, with balconies on both sides. One overlooked the busy street; the other offered a view of a nearby cinder cone, right in town, only a few blocks away.
Cuauhtémoc hopped up on the railing to get a better look; then, after observing it carefully, he crowed.
"We're back in volcano country," I said to him. "Feels like home, doesn't it?"
He crowed again.
MacClayne had gone down the hall to the restroom, and on his return he commented, "There must be somebody in México with about 800,000 toilet seats stored away in a warehouse, waiting for the market price to rise."
continued in Chapter 48
<< Home