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Chapter 48
Rain kept us indoors for the remainder of the afternoon, but, as evening approached, the weather eased up slightly. Normally, we would have gone in search of the central plaza, but, not knowing whether the rain might start coming down again, we settled on a sidewalk café in the arcade just down the street, which, as I've said, was also the main highway. Despite the noise of the traffic, the café was a rather pleasant place to sit as the intermittent showers came and went. After the meal we tarried over a cup of coffee.
Although people at some of the other tables were drinking beer or wine, Cuauhtémoc seemed content with a glass of water. Suddenly he perked up, and I looked to see what had drawn his attention.
A couple of guys at another table were arguing rather loudly. One of them slammed his fist on the table, and with that both of them burst out laughing. I recognized the laughter of one. The guy was wearing a sport jacket and a white shirt with a necktie--the same dark blue necktie he'd always worn. I gasped. It was Juan Diosdado!
At that moment the man looked squarely at me, and our eyes met. No, it wasn't Diosdado. This was a person I'd never seen before, and now that I looked again, he didn't even resemble Diosdado that closely. Slightly embarrassed, I averted my eyes. Cuauhtémoc was peering at me, as though wondering what had startled me.
"Something happen?" asked MacClayne.
I shook my head. "I thought I recognized someone."
"A look-alike?"
"There was a guy who had a room at don Pablo's boarding house. One night he tried to kick Cuauhtémoc."
"Yes, I remember you telling about it. There was a fight, and Cuauhtémoc maneuvered him into kicking a concrete wall."
"The kind of guy who makes a totally unprovoked attack on a dumb animal."
"Little did he know."
I glanced towards the two men. They were getting up from their table, and then I saw that the one I'd mistaken for Diosdado was using crutches. His leg was in a cast, as Diosdado's might have been for a while. But that had been some months back, and clearly this man was not him. The look-alike and his friend hailed a taxi and rode off into the night.
"Did you see him after that fight?"
"No, he moved out the next day," I said. "But he told somebody at the boarding house of all the dire things he was going to do to Cuauhtémoc to get even."
"Like Captain Ahab and the White Whale," suggested MacClayne.
"Captain Ahab was a man of character. That's the difference," I said. "This guy's a ferret-faced dirt-bag without the least pretense to socially redeeming qualities."
"Could you be in any danger from him?" said MacClayne.
"I doubt it. Actually, he was kind of pathetic. A guy you almost want to feel sorry for." I didn't care to admit that Diosdado's threat really had disturbed me. I guessed the reason I thought I saw him right then was because I'd heard he was originally from this area. Not that I ever expected to run into him down here, but maybe the thought sort of crossed my mind.
"Well if anything arises, I'll be there with you."
"I appreciate that," I said, and felt reassured. Despite being difficult at times, MacClayne was a person I felt I could count on. Then I looked up and saw a bus coming to a stop across the street. The destination on its placard read "Apatzingán." That was where we'd be catching the bus in the morning. There didn't seem to be a depot around here. This town apparently didn't even have a central plaza. Or, maybe it was somewhere else--it was hard to imagine a Mexican city without a plaza.
"Shall we have another coffee?" MacClayne said.
"Yes, I can always use another round of coffee," I said, and ordered them.
We chatted for a while longer and eventually returned to our room where MacClayne proposed we read something together. There followed the usual deliberation on which book to choose. Finally I suggested, "Remember the one we were reading back in Villa Victoria? Stories of the Postwar, I think. It was by an Italian."
"Italo Calvino?"
"Yes, that's the one. Since we're spending the night in a town founded by Italian immigrants, Nueva Italia, I think it might appropriate to read something by an Italian author."
MacClayne still had the book, and the stories were from the late 1940's--the era when World War II was finally over and people were struggling to recover and readjust. To MacClayne it represented the time when he was young, about my age, free at last, his long years of military service done with, and his life ahead of him.
We read several of these Italo Calvino stories. All were quirky and most were humorous, but the last was tragic.
The Minefield was about a man returning to his village during the war. To get there, he had to take a mountain path which had been booby-trapped with mines. The fellow knew the danger, but decided to take the chance. So he carefully made his way along the trail and finally got to within sight of the village. Just as he thought he'd made it, he stepped in the wrong place and was blown to bits.
"Rather sad," I said.
"Yes, you want the guy to make it."
"If I'd written it, I think I would've let the fellow make it safely through the minefield and then get killed in the village."
Just then Cuauhtémoc let out a god-awful squawk.
MacClayne looked at the bird and said, "I haven't seen him like this before."
"He does seem unusually ill at ease."
The bird strutted over to me and hopped on my lap, then put his head under my arm.
For a long while neither MacClayne nor I spoke. There was just silence, punctuated by the intermittent sound of vehicles in the street outside. Our hotel was near the foot of a hill, where north-bound trucks and buses shifted gears as the slope steepened. That noise had been going on all afternoon and continued throughout the evening and on into the night.
As usual, MacClayne went to bed first. I took out my journal and brought it up to date, though there wasn't much to write, since I'd written a lot while on the bus.
Since there were no blankets, I slept in my clothes, which had dried out during the day. I didn't exactly freeze, but I wasn't warm either. Well, I was getting used to that, and I slept remarkably well.
Morning came, with gray light and the sound of vehicles from the street outside. The first thing that occurred to me was the fact that I couldn't remember any dreams. Perhaps I hadn't had any. Their absence seemed remarkable.
"Buenos días."
MacClayne was up and about. I returned his greeting and asked about the weather.
"Cloudy, but not raining," he said. "Should we eat, and hope for the sun to come out before we leave?"
We discussed it briefly. A fabled city should rightly be entered with the morning sun rising overhead, but the sun wasn't visible yet today, and it was hard to say when it might emerge.
"Let's just get there!" I think we both said it.
So, without pausing for breakfast, we boarded a bus to complete the final thirty-five kilometers of our journey. The road was paved, smooth and straight as we rolled out along the valley floor.
As we neared Apatzingán, the road jogged slightly to pass between two volcanic cinder cones which stood like guard posts.
"The gates of the Fabled City," MacClayne remarked.
"The front gates!"
"They exist!"
"They do! Fancy that!"
Well. They had to exist. That's why we'd embarked on this roundabout journey.
"Apatzi put them here, just for us!"
We laughed and said all of this tongue-in-cheek, but there was a strong feeling of vindication. The gate-like cinder cones were a sign that we'd done this journey right.
Then my gaze turned to the Meseta Volcánica, the volcanic plateau which rose above the valley, and I said, "Look at Mount Tancítaro, so beautifully covered with snow!"
"Where?"
I looked again. The entire sky was low and overcast; perhaps it was about to rain again. Neither Tancítaro nor any part of the Meseta Volcánica was to be seen.
"I thought I saw it, but maybe not," I said. Was it all an hallucination? Rain drops were splashing on the window as we entered the city some minutes later.
Time and again I'd been told that Apatzingán was just a colorless, uninteresting, nondescript city of thirty thousand people. Modern buildings of concrete, and little if anything from the romantic past. "Just a hot, dusty town in the desert," Chayo had said.
Nevertheless, I'd conjured up a town of adobe buildings, rather like the village of Tancítaro, though on a much larger scale, and perhaps a bit decrepit, like Arteaga. Wooden pillars of the plaza arcade would be worm-eaten and rotting, a few of the adobe buildings caved in. There would be an abandoned, desolate feeling as the hot desert winds whipped clouds of dust along the unpaved streets.
To my intense disappointment, it was nothing like that. What I saw from the bus window was exactly what I'd been told to expect. Unpaved streets with concrete houses, not terribly ugly, but hardly anything to fit my romantic expectations.
And, instead of hot and dusty, it was cold, damp and rainy.
"We're here," said MacClayne as we got off the bus.
What a banal phrase for a poet to be uttering at that moment, I thought. I tried to think of something better, some momentous words fitting the occasion. But, although this was supposed to be our big moment of triumph, I couldn't think of anything beyond my disappointment.
As usual, our first move was to find a hotel. It was only midmorning, but on stepping off the bus I was suddenly overcome by intense weariness. All the exhaustion of the days and weeks on the road had piled up and was waiting for me here at the end of our journey. I wanted nothing more than to lie down and lose myself in sleep.
It seemed to take forever to get to a hotel, which was only a hundred meters away from the bus depot. When we got our room, I plunked myself down on a bed and fell asleep at once.
I was in a dream, trudging through the pines on the snowy slopes of Mt. Tancítaro, pursuing the One-Eyed man. Then suddenly the one-eyed man disappeared around a bend. When I got to where I had last seen him there was a fork in the road. I started down one direction, but there was the shining cougar standing in my way. I tried to go around him, but he seemed to block the path on every side, so I went back and took the other way. Far ahead of me, I spied the One-Eyed man, and I hurried along, hoping to catch up with him. In the distance I saw a beautiful wooden building with carved gables and a steep, sloping roof. An ancient Norse banquet hall. The One-Eyed man disappeared inside, and when I reached it I followed him in.
I awoke to the sound of a door closing. It was MacClayne who had just entered.
"You're here too!" I said in amazement. Though sitting upright, I was still not quite out of my dream.
He gave me a bewildered look. "We came here together."
"We did?" I said, and glanced around at the strange room which looked nothing like the interior of the wooden banquet hall. The walls were of unpainted concrete and a small bare electric light bulb hung from a cord. "Where are we?"
"In the Grail city," he said. "Apatzingán."
As I swung my legs around and put my feet on the floor, it all came back to me. "Imagine, waking up to find myself in Apatzingán! The Grail city."
"So what is this Grail we're seeking?"
"A quester never really knows till he finds it," I told him.
"When he finds it, how does he know that's what he's found?"
"He just knows, somehow. That's what the grail does. In some kind of mysterious way, it makes him know, by his just being in its presence. That's a property of the grail. In all the legends, the seeker always seems to know when he's found it."
"Could it be a sword that he's supposed to pull out of a stone?" MacClayne said.
I smiled. "Possibly, but I couldn't imagine it to be that obvious. Anyway swords are too medieval, it really should be something you'd find it the 20th century."
"Ok, then how about a pistol that he pulls out of a holster?"
"It has to be something you wouldn't expect," I said.
"So a pistol in a holster is what you'd expect?"
"No, of course not."
"Why?"
"Because that would be just silly," I said. "A pistol is easy to pull out of a holster. A sword out of a stone isn't. It has to be something that seems impossible, so when you do it, it leads to a profound experience."
"Like what, for example?"
"Coming to terms with yourself, finding out what your life has been all about."
"Don't you know that already? What have you been doing all these years?"
I sensed the imminence of another Socratic dialogue. I glanced at my watch. It was nearly seven o'clock. "My god," I said. "Is it really that late?"
"Yes," he said. "You slept the whole afternoon."
"Oh."
"Are you hungry?" he asked. "¿Tienes hambre?"
"Not really, but I guess we should eat something." Then it occurred to me that Cuauhtémoc must be hungry, and I started to get some oats out for him.
"I fed him," MacClayne said.
But the bird just scratched at my pack as if he hadn't eaten at all. I guessed he fancied a second meal.
"¡Qué pájaro!" I grumbled, but gave him a few more kernels which he quickly scarfed up. "What's it like outside?" I asked MacClayne.
"Still raining on and off."
"This town is supposed to be a hot, dusty place."
"Not today."
"Thank goodness they have blankets here," I said. I'd been lying under two of them. I didn't remember them being there when I went to sleep.
"The lady at the desk gave them to me," he said. "You looked like you needed them so I covered you up."
It didn't occur to me to thank him. I just said, "For once I didn't wake up cold and shivering."
"We finished the journey, so we're no longer obliged to suffer," he said.
Semi-darkness met us as we stepped out the door, and a moment later the street lights went on.
It wasn't raining at the moment, but the streets were wet and vehicles splashed through mud puddles. We went to the plaza where we found a sidewalk café under the arcade. Crickets chirped in the darkness while we sat there bathed in lamplight. It was a pleasant ambience, almost like sitting in Van Gogh's Café de nuit.
After eating, we just sat there in comfortable silence. MacClayne took out his notebook and began jotting something down. Ideas for a poem, no doubt.
My thoughts drifted back to various events of our expedition, and I took out my journal and wrote for a while, then tried to think of a line or two that would capture the ambiance of this town. But nothing came to me.
Except for one thing. A gnawing sense of incompletion. I'd halfway expected that in the course of this journey I might, like finding the Holy Grail, come up with some enlightenment about my future with Chayo. So far I hadn't.
I sighed and glanced at MacClayne, who was staring at his notebook. "How's the poem coming?" I asked.
He shook his head. "The muse has not yet arrived."
"She hasn't?" I chuckled.
"So what are your thoughts?"
"On what?"
"The town," he said. "How would you characterize it?"
"I was thinking about that myself. Maybe it's better not to put it into words."
"No?"
"The Apatzingán that can be described with words or photographed with a camera would not be the Grail city we dreamed of for so long and came so far to see."
"Not even in a poem?" he said with a grin.
"Perhaps not."
"Then maybe that explains why the muse is staying away," he said. "We'll have to add that to our criteria for visiting fabled and forbidden cities. It's not enough that you endure weeks of hardship, trudge through snow, sand and mud, cross deserts, mountains and rivers, spend nights in the cold rain--once you finally get there, you can't take photos or even describe the place."
"Yes," I said, "because the Grail city is by its very nature undescribable."
MacClayne thought for a bit, then said, "The Grail city is undescribable only because its essence is masked by an illusion of ordinariness."
"So the architect of the forbidden city has purposely made it look drab and uninteresting, so as to put off the unworthy, to deter them from finding its secret meaning."
We both nodded, very solemnly. We'd been extemporizing these criteria, making them up and adding to them as we went along, creating our own official version. It was still tongue-in-cheek, on the surface at least, but, in our own private way, we'd taken it very seriously, and, having done so, we shared a sense of accomplishment.
"A three-week journey," said MacClayne. "And how far did we come? A thousand kilometers? What's that in miles?"
"Maybe six hundred miles," I said. "It would've been a ninety minute bus ride, but we turned it into a three week ordeal."
"We did it right."
"Yes, we certainly did do it right."
A sense of celebration hung in the air; we only lacked a fanfare of trumpets.
I looked at Cuauhtémoc, and said. "Can't you crow?"
He ignored me, dipping his beak into the water glass and raising his head to swallow.
A fellow at the next table grinned and said in English, "A handsome rooster."
"Yes, and a swashbuckler too," MacClayne told him.
This led to a conversation about my bird, who, as usual when finding himself the center of attention, fluffed out his feathers, proudly displaying his warrior plumage.
The man was a good-natured fellow of about MacClayne's age. He introduced himself as Bernardino Portillo, a reporter for the local newspaper. Not many foreigners visited this region, he told us, certainly none accompanied by a rooster, and he politely asked what had brought us to Apatzingán.
We told him. The reporter lifted his eyebrows on learning that this town of Apatzingán was a fabled and forbidden city. He wanted to hear more. So we told him more.
Normally, it would've been proper to address a man of his age as "don Bernardino," or, since we were speaking in English, as "Mister Portillo." But, as we chatted, I felt an easy-going sense of rapport that made such formalities seem out of place.
MacClayne spoke with his usual eloquence, relating anecdotes of our journey, and also told him that this locale had been the thousand-year-long objective of Norse explorers who'd reached North America back around the year 1000 AD.
"What a story!" he laughed. "May I take your photos?"
"Our photos?" I repeated in surprise.
"For the newspaper," he said.
MacClayne and I looked at each other. It hadn't occurred to us that this might be a press interview. MacClayne started to shake his head, but before he could refuse, I said to him, "Famous explorers always get in the newspaper on completing a journey. Why shouldn't we?"
Bernardino took our picture, and was about to leave when a thought occurred to me. I said, "Can I ask you about something? An incident from ten years ago."
"Please do."
"There was a murder here at that time," I began.
"A murder?" He sighed and shook his head. "I have to tell you there are so many killings in this town that we don't report half of them. You say this one happened ten years ago?"
"Well, I was just hoping--"
"Please go ahead with your story. I didn't mean to cut you off."
"The victim was a rancher from Uruapan. Don Pánfilo . . ." I told the reporter what I knew of the case.
He thought for a moment. "Yes, I do think I remember it. There was a suspect."
"Juan García?" I said.
"No, that doesn't sound familiar. But who is Juan García?"
"The guy who had don Pánfilo killed. Or he may have done it himself," I said. "At any rate, he took over the victim's ranch."
"Is this Juan García still there?"
"At the ranch? No. He's dead," I told him. "Apparently he went insane, shot up the ranch house, firing at Cucúi."
"Interesting. Not many people shoot at Cucúi. I imagine they're hard to hit," said the reporter with a grin. "But that doesn't sound like anything in this case. As I recall, the rancher was murdered for the money in his pocket and maybe for his watch."
I wondered if Bernardino might be confusing this with some other murder. After all, it was ten years old. I asked him if the newspaper kept files of back issues.
"We do, and you're welcome to come by the office and look at them." Bernardino gave me his business card with the address of the newspaper office. "I'd be glad to go over it with you. But right now I have to go and write up the story of your arrival in our fabled and forbidden city. My deadline's only an hour away."
continued in Chapter 49
Although people at some of the other tables were drinking beer or wine, Cuauhtémoc seemed content with a glass of water. Suddenly he perked up, and I looked to see what had drawn his attention.
A couple of guys at another table were arguing rather loudly. One of them slammed his fist on the table, and with that both of them burst out laughing. I recognized the laughter of one. The guy was wearing a sport jacket and a white shirt with a necktie--the same dark blue necktie he'd always worn. I gasped. It was Juan Diosdado!
At that moment the man looked squarely at me, and our eyes met. No, it wasn't Diosdado. This was a person I'd never seen before, and now that I looked again, he didn't even resemble Diosdado that closely. Slightly embarrassed, I averted my eyes. Cuauhtémoc was peering at me, as though wondering what had startled me.
"Something happen?" asked MacClayne.
I shook my head. "I thought I recognized someone."
"A look-alike?"
"There was a guy who had a room at don Pablo's boarding house. One night he tried to kick Cuauhtémoc."
"Yes, I remember you telling about it. There was a fight, and Cuauhtémoc maneuvered him into kicking a concrete wall."
"The kind of guy who makes a totally unprovoked attack on a dumb animal."
"Little did he know."
I glanced towards the two men. They were getting up from their table, and then I saw that the one I'd mistaken for Diosdado was using crutches. His leg was in a cast, as Diosdado's might have been for a while. But that had been some months back, and clearly this man was not him. The look-alike and his friend hailed a taxi and rode off into the night.
"Did you see him after that fight?"
"No, he moved out the next day," I said. "But he told somebody at the boarding house of all the dire things he was going to do to Cuauhtémoc to get even."
"Like Captain Ahab and the White Whale," suggested MacClayne.
"Captain Ahab was a man of character. That's the difference," I said. "This guy's a ferret-faced dirt-bag without the least pretense to socially redeeming qualities."
"Could you be in any danger from him?" said MacClayne.
"I doubt it. Actually, he was kind of pathetic. A guy you almost want to feel sorry for." I didn't care to admit that Diosdado's threat really had disturbed me. I guessed the reason I thought I saw him right then was because I'd heard he was originally from this area. Not that I ever expected to run into him down here, but maybe the thought sort of crossed my mind.
"Well if anything arises, I'll be there with you."
"I appreciate that," I said, and felt reassured. Despite being difficult at times, MacClayne was a person I felt I could count on. Then I looked up and saw a bus coming to a stop across the street. The destination on its placard read "Apatzingán." That was where we'd be catching the bus in the morning. There didn't seem to be a depot around here. This town apparently didn't even have a central plaza. Or, maybe it was somewhere else--it was hard to imagine a Mexican city without a plaza.
"Shall we have another coffee?" MacClayne said.
"Yes, I can always use another round of coffee," I said, and ordered them.
We chatted for a while longer and eventually returned to our room where MacClayne proposed we read something together. There followed the usual deliberation on which book to choose. Finally I suggested, "Remember the one we were reading back in Villa Victoria? Stories of the Postwar, I think. It was by an Italian."
"Italo Calvino?"
"Yes, that's the one. Since we're spending the night in a town founded by Italian immigrants, Nueva Italia, I think it might appropriate to read something by an Italian author."
MacClayne still had the book, and the stories were from the late 1940's--the era when World War II was finally over and people were struggling to recover and readjust. To MacClayne it represented the time when he was young, about my age, free at last, his long years of military service done with, and his life ahead of him.
We read several of these Italo Calvino stories. All were quirky and most were humorous, but the last was tragic.
The Minefield was about a man returning to his village during the war. To get there, he had to take a mountain path which had been booby-trapped with mines. The fellow knew the danger, but decided to take the chance. So he carefully made his way along the trail and finally got to within sight of the village. Just as he thought he'd made it, he stepped in the wrong place and was blown to bits.
"Rather sad," I said.
"Yes, you want the guy to make it."
"If I'd written it, I think I would've let the fellow make it safely through the minefield and then get killed in the village."
Just then Cuauhtémoc let out a god-awful squawk.
MacClayne looked at the bird and said, "I haven't seen him like this before."
"He does seem unusually ill at ease."
The bird strutted over to me and hopped on my lap, then put his head under my arm.
For a long while neither MacClayne nor I spoke. There was just silence, punctuated by the intermittent sound of vehicles in the street outside. Our hotel was near the foot of a hill, where north-bound trucks and buses shifted gears as the slope steepened. That noise had been going on all afternoon and continued throughout the evening and on into the night.
As usual, MacClayne went to bed first. I took out my journal and brought it up to date, though there wasn't much to write, since I'd written a lot while on the bus.
Since there were no blankets, I slept in my clothes, which had dried out during the day. I didn't exactly freeze, but I wasn't warm either. Well, I was getting used to that, and I slept remarkably well.
Morning came, with gray light and the sound of vehicles from the street outside. The first thing that occurred to me was the fact that I couldn't remember any dreams. Perhaps I hadn't had any. Their absence seemed remarkable.
"Buenos días."
MacClayne was up and about. I returned his greeting and asked about the weather.
"Cloudy, but not raining," he said. "Should we eat, and hope for the sun to come out before we leave?"
We discussed it briefly. A fabled city should rightly be entered with the morning sun rising overhead, but the sun wasn't visible yet today, and it was hard to say when it might emerge.
"Let's just get there!" I think we both said it.
So, without pausing for breakfast, we boarded a bus to complete the final thirty-five kilometers of our journey. The road was paved, smooth and straight as we rolled out along the valley floor.
As we neared Apatzingán, the road jogged slightly to pass between two volcanic cinder cones which stood like guard posts.
"The gates of the Fabled City," MacClayne remarked.
"The front gates!"
"They exist!"
"They do! Fancy that!"
Well. They had to exist. That's why we'd embarked on this roundabout journey.
"Apatzi put them here, just for us!"
We laughed and said all of this tongue-in-cheek, but there was a strong feeling of vindication. The gate-like cinder cones were a sign that we'd done this journey right.
Then my gaze turned to the Meseta Volcánica, the volcanic plateau which rose above the valley, and I said, "Look at Mount Tancítaro, so beautifully covered with snow!"
"Where?"
I looked again. The entire sky was low and overcast; perhaps it was about to rain again. Neither Tancítaro nor any part of the Meseta Volcánica was to be seen.
"I thought I saw it, but maybe not," I said. Was it all an hallucination? Rain drops were splashing on the window as we entered the city some minutes later.
Time and again I'd been told that Apatzingán was just a colorless, uninteresting, nondescript city of thirty thousand people. Modern buildings of concrete, and little if anything from the romantic past. "Just a hot, dusty town in the desert," Chayo had said.
Nevertheless, I'd conjured up a town of adobe buildings, rather like the village of Tancítaro, though on a much larger scale, and perhaps a bit decrepit, like Arteaga. Wooden pillars of the plaza arcade would be worm-eaten and rotting, a few of the adobe buildings caved in. There would be an abandoned, desolate feeling as the hot desert winds whipped clouds of dust along the unpaved streets.
To my intense disappointment, it was nothing like that. What I saw from the bus window was exactly what I'd been told to expect. Unpaved streets with concrete houses, not terribly ugly, but hardly anything to fit my romantic expectations.
And, instead of hot and dusty, it was cold, damp and rainy.
"We're here," said MacClayne as we got off the bus.
What a banal phrase for a poet to be uttering at that moment, I thought. I tried to think of something better, some momentous words fitting the occasion. But, although this was supposed to be our big moment of triumph, I couldn't think of anything beyond my disappointment.
As usual, our first move was to find a hotel. It was only midmorning, but on stepping off the bus I was suddenly overcome by intense weariness. All the exhaustion of the days and weeks on the road had piled up and was waiting for me here at the end of our journey. I wanted nothing more than to lie down and lose myself in sleep.
It seemed to take forever to get to a hotel, which was only a hundred meters away from the bus depot. When we got our room, I plunked myself down on a bed and fell asleep at once.
I was in a dream, trudging through the pines on the snowy slopes of Mt. Tancítaro, pursuing the One-Eyed man. Then suddenly the one-eyed man disappeared around a bend. When I got to where I had last seen him there was a fork in the road. I started down one direction, but there was the shining cougar standing in my way. I tried to go around him, but he seemed to block the path on every side, so I went back and took the other way. Far ahead of me, I spied the One-Eyed man, and I hurried along, hoping to catch up with him. In the distance I saw a beautiful wooden building with carved gables and a steep, sloping roof. An ancient Norse banquet hall. The One-Eyed man disappeared inside, and when I reached it I followed him in.
I awoke to the sound of a door closing. It was MacClayne who had just entered.
"You're here too!" I said in amazement. Though sitting upright, I was still not quite out of my dream.
He gave me a bewildered look. "We came here together."
"We did?" I said, and glanced around at the strange room which looked nothing like the interior of the wooden banquet hall. The walls were of unpainted concrete and a small bare electric light bulb hung from a cord. "Where are we?"
"In the Grail city," he said. "Apatzingán."
As I swung my legs around and put my feet on the floor, it all came back to me. "Imagine, waking up to find myself in Apatzingán! The Grail city."
"So what is this Grail we're seeking?"
"A quester never really knows till he finds it," I told him.
"When he finds it, how does he know that's what he's found?"
"He just knows, somehow. That's what the grail does. In some kind of mysterious way, it makes him know, by his just being in its presence. That's a property of the grail. In all the legends, the seeker always seems to know when he's found it."
"Could it be a sword that he's supposed to pull out of a stone?" MacClayne said.
I smiled. "Possibly, but I couldn't imagine it to be that obvious. Anyway swords are too medieval, it really should be something you'd find it the 20th century."
"Ok, then how about a pistol that he pulls out of a holster?"
"It has to be something you wouldn't expect," I said.
"So a pistol in a holster is what you'd expect?"
"No, of course not."
"Why?"
"Because that would be just silly," I said. "A pistol is easy to pull out of a holster. A sword out of a stone isn't. It has to be something that seems impossible, so when you do it, it leads to a profound experience."
"Like what, for example?"
"Coming to terms with yourself, finding out what your life has been all about."
"Don't you know that already? What have you been doing all these years?"
I sensed the imminence of another Socratic dialogue. I glanced at my watch. It was nearly seven o'clock. "My god," I said. "Is it really that late?"
"Yes," he said. "You slept the whole afternoon."
"Oh."
"Are you hungry?" he asked. "¿Tienes hambre?"
"Not really, but I guess we should eat something." Then it occurred to me that Cuauhtémoc must be hungry, and I started to get some oats out for him.
"I fed him," MacClayne said.
But the bird just scratched at my pack as if he hadn't eaten at all. I guessed he fancied a second meal.
"¡Qué pájaro!" I grumbled, but gave him a few more kernels which he quickly scarfed up. "What's it like outside?" I asked MacClayne.
"Still raining on and off."
"This town is supposed to be a hot, dusty place."
"Not today."
"Thank goodness they have blankets here," I said. I'd been lying under two of them. I didn't remember them being there when I went to sleep.
"The lady at the desk gave them to me," he said. "You looked like you needed them so I covered you up."
It didn't occur to me to thank him. I just said, "For once I didn't wake up cold and shivering."
"We finished the journey, so we're no longer obliged to suffer," he said.
Semi-darkness met us as we stepped out the door, and a moment later the street lights went on.
It wasn't raining at the moment, but the streets were wet and vehicles splashed through mud puddles. We went to the plaza where we found a sidewalk café under the arcade. Crickets chirped in the darkness while we sat there bathed in lamplight. It was a pleasant ambience, almost like sitting in Van Gogh's Café de nuit.
After eating, we just sat there in comfortable silence. MacClayne took out his notebook and began jotting something down. Ideas for a poem, no doubt.
My thoughts drifted back to various events of our expedition, and I took out my journal and wrote for a while, then tried to think of a line or two that would capture the ambiance of this town. But nothing came to me.
Except for one thing. A gnawing sense of incompletion. I'd halfway expected that in the course of this journey I might, like finding the Holy Grail, come up with some enlightenment about my future with Chayo. So far I hadn't.
I sighed and glanced at MacClayne, who was staring at his notebook. "How's the poem coming?" I asked.
He shook his head. "The muse has not yet arrived."
"She hasn't?" I chuckled.
"So what are your thoughts?"
"On what?"
"The town," he said. "How would you characterize it?"
"I was thinking about that myself. Maybe it's better not to put it into words."
"No?"
"The Apatzingán that can be described with words or photographed with a camera would not be the Grail city we dreamed of for so long and came so far to see."
"Not even in a poem?" he said with a grin.
"Perhaps not."
"Then maybe that explains why the muse is staying away," he said. "We'll have to add that to our criteria for visiting fabled and forbidden cities. It's not enough that you endure weeks of hardship, trudge through snow, sand and mud, cross deserts, mountains and rivers, spend nights in the cold rain--once you finally get there, you can't take photos or even describe the place."
"Yes," I said, "because the Grail city is by its very nature undescribable."
MacClayne thought for a bit, then said, "The Grail city is undescribable only because its essence is masked by an illusion of ordinariness."
"So the architect of the forbidden city has purposely made it look drab and uninteresting, so as to put off the unworthy, to deter them from finding its secret meaning."
We both nodded, very solemnly. We'd been extemporizing these criteria, making them up and adding to them as we went along, creating our own official version. It was still tongue-in-cheek, on the surface at least, but, in our own private way, we'd taken it very seriously, and, having done so, we shared a sense of accomplishment.
"A three-week journey," said MacClayne. "And how far did we come? A thousand kilometers? What's that in miles?"
"Maybe six hundred miles," I said. "It would've been a ninety minute bus ride, but we turned it into a three week ordeal."
"We did it right."
"Yes, we certainly did do it right."
A sense of celebration hung in the air; we only lacked a fanfare of trumpets.
I looked at Cuauhtémoc, and said. "Can't you crow?"
He ignored me, dipping his beak into the water glass and raising his head to swallow.
A fellow at the next table grinned and said in English, "A handsome rooster."
"Yes, and a swashbuckler too," MacClayne told him.
This led to a conversation about my bird, who, as usual when finding himself the center of attention, fluffed out his feathers, proudly displaying his warrior plumage.
The man was a good-natured fellow of about MacClayne's age. He introduced himself as Bernardino Portillo, a reporter for the local newspaper. Not many foreigners visited this region, he told us, certainly none accompanied by a rooster, and he politely asked what had brought us to Apatzingán.
We told him. The reporter lifted his eyebrows on learning that this town of Apatzingán was a fabled and forbidden city. He wanted to hear more. So we told him more.
Normally, it would've been proper to address a man of his age as "don Bernardino," or, since we were speaking in English, as "Mister Portillo." But, as we chatted, I felt an easy-going sense of rapport that made such formalities seem out of place.
MacClayne spoke with his usual eloquence, relating anecdotes of our journey, and also told him that this locale had been the thousand-year-long objective of Norse explorers who'd reached North America back around the year 1000 AD.
"What a story!" he laughed. "May I take your photos?"
"Our photos?" I repeated in surprise.
"For the newspaper," he said.
MacClayne and I looked at each other. It hadn't occurred to us that this might be a press interview. MacClayne started to shake his head, but before he could refuse, I said to him, "Famous explorers always get in the newspaper on completing a journey. Why shouldn't we?"
Bernardino took our picture, and was about to leave when a thought occurred to me. I said, "Can I ask you about something? An incident from ten years ago."
"Please do."
"There was a murder here at that time," I began.
"A murder?" He sighed and shook his head. "I have to tell you there are so many killings in this town that we don't report half of them. You say this one happened ten years ago?"
"Well, I was just hoping--"
"Please go ahead with your story. I didn't mean to cut you off."
"The victim was a rancher from Uruapan. Don Pánfilo . . ." I told the reporter what I knew of the case.
He thought for a moment. "Yes, I do think I remember it. There was a suspect."
"Juan García?" I said.
"No, that doesn't sound familiar. But who is Juan García?"
"The guy who had don Pánfilo killed. Or he may have done it himself," I said. "At any rate, he took over the victim's ranch."
"Is this Juan García still there?"
"At the ranch? No. He's dead," I told him. "Apparently he went insane, shot up the ranch house, firing at Cucúi."
"Interesting. Not many people shoot at Cucúi. I imagine they're hard to hit," said the reporter with a grin. "But that doesn't sound like anything in this case. As I recall, the rancher was murdered for the money in his pocket and maybe for his watch."
I wondered if Bernardino might be confusing this with some other murder. After all, it was ten years old. I asked him if the newspaper kept files of back issues.
"We do, and you're welcome to come by the office and look at them." Bernardino gave me his business card with the address of the newspaper office. "I'd be glad to go over it with you. But right now I have to go and write up the story of your arrival in our fabled and forbidden city. My deadline's only an hour away."
continued in Chapter 49
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