Cuauhtémoc & me:a novelby Daniel Borgström

The Spring of Urð

2008-11-24T13:00:00.000-08:00

When I was a little
boy in Minnesota, my grandmother used to tell me of the days when our ancestors sailed in open boats with dragons’ heads at the prow. “They crossed the northern seas and found their way to America,” she said. “Grapes grew wild for the picking. So they called it Vinland.” She also told me about the Spring of Urð, which watered Yggdrasil, the world tree, and of a nine-day horseback ride to the netherworld.

She told me many such stories, of remarkable things and places. As I grew older, I came to understand that these accounts were from a long, long time ago. But when I was a little kid I took all of them very literally and believed they were happening in the here and now. I thought the mythical Spring of Urð was just down the road from where we lived. I even seemed to remember having once been there--a quiet pond with swans gliding about on the surface. Around it was a garden of flowers and a grove of trees which hid it from sight, so only Grandma and I could find it.

One day I said to her, “Grandma, let’s go see the Spring of Urð.” But she shook her head and said it was in a faraway country. Then she saw the sadness and disappointment in my eyes, and she said, “When you’re grown up, Olaf, then you can go and look for it yourself.”

continued in Chapter 1

.

chapter 6

2008-11-24T12:48:00.000-08:00

A few days later I went to meet Chayo at her aunt's shop. It was early afternoon and Chayo and I were going to see the Stone Gardens which were right on the western edge of town, just below the volcanoes. These gardens, she had told me, were in a small canyon which cut back into a low hill, and where, if I'd understood her right, was to be found the source of the Río Cupatitzio. "It flows out of the rock," she'd said.

Arriving at the shop I passed through the door, and there, perched on a table across the room from me, was a cat. A domestic cat. A kitty cat. A very handsome, dignified, short-haired feline who gazed upon me with bright, soul-piercing eyes that he seemed to share in common with the humans of this establishment. Most remarkably, his coat was white, pure white, a glowing whiteness that could almost have shown in the dark, like the white cougar I had apparently tripped over in the doorway just before that strange experience in the courtyard.

"¿Que pasó?" Chayo asked. She looked at me and then at the cat.

I said nothing for a moment, transfixed by an odd notion forming in my mind. To assure myself that it was indeed a cat, I spoke to him. "Hello, Kitty," I said, approaching him. He hopped down to the floor and slipped by me out the door to the street, as if to avoid interaction with me. Turning back to Chayo, I asked, "Is he your aunt's cat?"

"He lives next door and comes by to visit now and then. His name is Blanco."

"Blanco," I called out in a soft voice, but he did not reappear. "Truly a handsome cat," I said.. "Was he by any chance here the first day I came here?"

"No."

"He wasn't? Are you sure?"

"Of course I'm sure. Why do you ask?"

"I wonder if I haven't seen him before," I said.

"You could have. As I said, he lives next door."

"I mean the day I arrived in Uruapan. The day I first came to this place."

Chayo shook her head and looked at me wonderingly. "Would you care to tell me about it?"

Many thoughts and questions were flashing into my mind, more than I could hope to express in my limited Spanish, especially as it would require a description of that very strange experience I had had in the courtyard. Even in English, all this would've been difficult. The very nature of what I wanted to know seemed to put me a bit beyond the pale. I did have a feeling that Chayo would understand, but still, I didn't feel I knew her well enough. Not yet anyway. After all, people who have visions are automatically suspect, especially people who turn kitty-cats into mountain lions.

For now, I felt I should leave this for another day. Chayo was looking at me more inquisitively than ever, almost looking through me with that gaze of hers, as if she saw something in me in a world beyond both of us. Maybe she already knew, since she was there that day. I wondered what her experience had been, what she had seen in that courtyard. Maybe she had seen it all, just as I had. But it was all far beyond any Spanish I could summon up, for the time being at least. I said to her, "Please give me a hug," and she did, putting her arms around me and murmuring something soothingly in my ear.

Moments later, I glanced up and there in the doorway sat the white kitty on his haunches, intently watching us as we made ready to leave for the Stone Gardens.

The Cupatitzio was the river we'd crossed each evening when I walked her home, and, as rivers went, it was relatively small. But it still carried a sizable volume of water. What puzzled me was that I'd never seen a spring that produced much more than a trickle, and I couldn't imagine one large enough to create an entire river. Maybe I hadn't heard her rightly.

The Gardens were only a fifteen minute walk. They had been a national park for several decades, the tiniest one in the republic, she told me, only a kilometer long and consisting of twenty hectares. The official name of this park was "Barranca del Cupatitzio."

We entered through a large gate, then followed a path among the trees till we found ourselves looking down into a small canyon. Exposed in the walls of this canyon were ancient flows of black lava, presumably basalt. At the bottom, the Río Cupatitzio rushed along, swirling around large boulders.

We followed it upstream along a path which had been carved into the rock, then we crossed the river on a stone bridge. There were decorative fountains, fed by water diverted into pipes so it could be spouted upwards. In another place water cascaded down a wall of black stone masonry. These footpaths, bridges and fountains were so well designed that they looked quite as natural as the rock itself, and were done on an impressive scale that must have taken decades of effort, blending the best of human craftsmanship with a unique work of nature. The builders had been careful not to overdo it. The river still followed its natural course, its channel left the way it had been since its inception through geological forces.

In a couple of places the river formed pools deep enough to swim in, and children were splashing gleefully around. "An idyllic scene in paradise," I remarked to Chayo. "The water looks invitingly warm."

"No," she said, "step down to the water's edge and put your hand in it."

I did, and it was surprisingly cold.

Continuing upstream we came to a series of springs in the canyon wall. Again I tested the water with my hand, and again, I found that it was almost frigid. How could water here in the tropics could be so cold?

The water flowed out from between a horizontal layer of basalt and an underlying bed of red clay. These springs were relatively small. The main source of the river was just up ahead. When we got to it, I saw a pool nestled among the trees. It was large enough to swim in. Out of it issued the Río Cupatitzio.

The far end of the pool was bounded by black rock--basalt. It appeared to be part of the same lava flow which was exposed in the canyon walls downstream. An underwater spring fed the pool. As Chayo had said, the river flowed out of the rock.

I shook my head in amazement. Despite my studies in geology I wasn't prepared for a spring of this size.

We retraced our steps and followed the river downstream to a place where a side path took us to a ledge in the canyon wall. Here we sat in comfortable silence, gazing down into the water rushing over the rocks.

"That is what I imagine Iceland looks like," I said.

"Iceland? It looks like this?" she said, gesturing at the foliage around us. There was even a palm tree nearby.

"The cold water flowing over the black lava," I said.

She looked down into the water. "You've been in Iceland?"

"Not yet. I hope to see it some day."

"So do I," she said.

"You do?" I looked at her.

"Yes," she nodded, "It's one of my aspirations."

I doubted that she could be referring to the same Iceland I was thinking of, and I asked her, "What do you know about Iceland?"

She recited a poem. About all I caught was the word "Islandia." Then she wrote it out on a page in my journal. I read it carefully, several times over. I could read Spanish much better than I could understand it spoken.

Islandia de la nieve silenciosa
y del agua ferviente.
Isla del día blanco que regresa,
joven y mortal como Baldr.

Iceland of the silent snow
and boiling water.
Island of the white day that returns
young and mortal as Baldr

"Where did you hear it?" I asked. I was surprised and impressed that she knew a poem about Iceland.

"It's by Borges."

"¿Jorge Luis Borges?"

"Yes." Chayo in turn was impressed that I knew who Borges was. Although he was a well-known author, Chayo was surprised that a person from the States would know much about Hispanic literature. "Have you read any of his stories?" she asked.

"Several," I said. "La espera, also El muerto and--" I was about to include Emma Zunz, but that was such a morbid story that I didn't want to mention it. The first two were grim enough.

"¿Emma Zunz?" she queried.

There were moments like this when Chayo seemed to read my thoughts. During these few short days I'd known her she'd done that several times. "Well yes," I conceded. "I was thinking of Emma Zunz."

"What did you think of it?" she said.

"Of Emma Zunz, you mean?"

"Yes."

"A bizarre account of how a daughter avenges the death of her father," I said and paused. "I avoided mentioning it because I thought the story was quite perverse."

"What did you find perverse?" Chayo studied me as I struggled to find words to express my thoughts. "Would you consider Emma Zunz a criminal?"

"No," I said. "I believe Emma was justified in killing the man. He'd betrayed her father's confidence in a business matter, causing his ruin and ultimately his death."

Chayo nodded, and I continued.

"The tragedy," I said, "was that Emma herself obviously didn't feel justified, and so she created a hideous subterfuge to justify her actions to the police, and even to herself. That's what I consider perverse."

Chayo quickly leaned forward and kissed me on the cheek. "Thank you," she said. "That's what I wanted to hear."

I was taken by surprise and couldn't think of anything to say at that moment.

"Yes," Chayo said. "Emma's stratagem was disgusting. But that's how she was able to deal with the situation. That's the kind of person she was."

"Tragic," I said.

"Yes, tragic. But there is another way for a woman to be. A less tragic way."

"How would you have written the story?" I said.

Chayo looked at me for a long moment before replying. She bit her lip and clenched my hand tightly. "The woman in my story would've been a different person. Very different from Emma Zunz. My protagonist wouldn't have felt the least qualm about killing the man who caused her father's death. She would've felt completely justified, and she would've gotten away with it."

I wondered why Chayo felt so passionate about the motivations of Emma Zunz, who was after all just a fictional character. Had someone caused the death of Chayo's father? She'd once told me that he'd passed away some years earlier, but had said nothing about the circumstances. Perhaps it was best not to ask, at least not now.

Gradually the intense look on Chayo's face softened as she gazed into the water. The tight grip of her hand on mine relaxed. "Perdóname," she said.

"For what?"

"For . . . , for getting so serious. How did we get on that subject? What were we talking about?"

"Iceland," I said. "And Borges."

"Yes, Borges," she said the name slowly, almost significantly.

I said, "I'm amazed to hear that Borges wrote poetry about Iceland."

She nodded. "He traveled far and wide, studying the literature and traditions of many lands. I believe that in Iceland he found a land of poetry."

"Yes, poetry. And stories too," I said. "My grandmother used to tell me stories that came from there. We call them sagas."

"I'd like to hear them."

"You would?"

"Of course I would," she said, taking my hand.

I glanced down into the cold water flowing over the black lava. For a few moments I continued to gaze at it, and then something came to me--Urð! For days now, ever since my arrival here in Uruapan, that name had been floating around in the shadowy recesses of my mind, but it hadn't quite come out into the light. Now I'd finally remembered it.

"There was a story about Urð," I said. "She was a mythical person who sat by a magnificent spring, like the one right here."

"¿Urð?" Chayo repeated the name thoughtfully, "That name sounds as though it were taken from the name Uruapan."

"It does," I said. "I was just thinking of that too."

"And what does this woman do as she sits there by the spring? Anything? Or does she just sit there?"

"Her name, Urð, is the Old Norse word meaning fate," I said. "According to the myth, she determines the fortunes of men, and where their journeys will lead them. She writes it all down on slips of wood in the ancient runic script."

"Have you read any of Carl Jung?"

"Some," I said. "Why do you ask?"

"Then you may know that myths contain underlying truths." With an ironic smile, she added, "Could it be that Urð brought you to Uruapan?"

I assumed she was joking. "No doubt about it," I chuckled. "I'm sure it was Urð."

"Perhaps," she said chidingly, "you still think it was an accident that you got on the bus for Uruapan."

That night I had a dream. Grandma was in the kitchen, working and cooking, and talking with someone in Norwegian. From time to time she and the other woman laughed. The two of them were having a good time together. Then I saw that the other woman was Chayo.

continued in Chapter 7

Chapter 1

2008-11-19T17:15:00.000-08:00

México. June 1975.

It was my ninth day on the road and I was now in the southwestern region known as Michoacán. The ancient Aztecs had given it this name, but they never got this far. Each of their attempts at conquest had been driven back with bloody losses, and this land had forever remained beyond the limits of their world.

The proprietor of the inn where I'd stayed the night before had proudly told me this, thus introducing me to the traditions of Michoacán. That inn was in the town of Zamora, and my talk with the innkeeper had been my first lengthy conversation in the Spanish language--outside of a classroom that is. I was out of school now, and at last out in the world, on a journey which I'd been planning for years. I was traveling leisurely, pausing for a day or two here and there. This morning I'd set out for Pátzcuaro on a regional bus, and had been riding for a couple hours now. It gave me a special thrill to be gazing upon a landscape that had been denied even to Moctezuma.

The countryside was rather open, almost a prairie, but as the morning wore on, that changed and I found myself entering a mountainous world of pine forest and volcanoes. There was first one volcano, then another; after half a dozen, I lost count. The forest was full of them. As volcanoes go, they were strangely undersized, hardly much larger than the ancient pyramids which were said to dot this land. Cone-shaped with hollow craters, these volcanoes were grown over with pine trees.

At villages along the way, passengers boarded with their bundles of market goods and even with their animals. A pig was squealing and radios were blaring. The bus was nearly full of people; all were dark skinned with the black hair of their pre-Hispanic ancestors. I was the only one with blond hair and blue eyes, and I felt self-conscious. Even the chickens were dark brown; the fellow in the seat beside me held one in his lap. From its plumage, I could see that it was a rooster.

The bird was contemplating me. As I glanced at him our eyes met. For a moment he glared at me--an intruder in his domain. Then his neck feathers rose and he clucked angrily.

Haven't you seen anybody with blue eyes before? I felt like saying. But he was just a chicken.

The owner, whose skin was as brown as the chicken's feathers, was reaching for a tequila bottle which was being handed to him from across the aisle. After taking a hefty swig he passed the bottle to me, and, unexpectedly, I found myself holding it, looking at it, and wondering what to do with it. Other passengers were looking at me, also wondering what I was going to do.

Very decisively, I raised the bottle to my lips and pretended to take a swig--though without actually drinking any. But at just that instant the chicken cut loose with an abrupt squawk. I gasped and got a mouthful of tequila.

It tasted awful. Absolutely awful. But I tried not to let that show on my face as I bravely swallowed it and returned the bottle. The fellow grinned, took another swig and passed it on.

My feathered antagonist cocked his head sideways, looked at me out of one eye and clucked with malicious satisfaction.

Well, he was just a chicken. Only a chicken.

More volcanoes kept appearing, and the road wove in and out among them as we sped along. We skirted the edge of a hillside where I looked down upon a small valley and got a top view of an especially low volcano. I peered down into the hollow crater as we passed--a natural amphitheater.

I noted it in my journal, along with other topographic details I'd been seeing along the way. Then I looked at my map and tried to figure out where we were, but nothing seemed to match anything on the map. We were heading deep into these mountains. Except for the volcanoes, this land of pine forest looked like the Canadian Rockies. Hardly a tropical jungle, even though this was indeed the tropics, somewhere around twenty degrees north latitude.

Pine trees don't grow at sea level this far south. I figured we must be at a fairly high elevation, maybe a good fifteen hundred to two thousand meters. Despite the bright sunlight, the air flowing in through the window wasn't warm. I took out my jacket and put it on.

My ears popped from the altitude.

Another village, larger than most. Perhaps it was on my map, but there was no sign to indicate the name.

"¿Dónde estamos?" I asked the fellow with the chicken; and he said something, but I didn't catch it. I could hardly hear anything over the din of radios, motor and voices. He offered me the bottle again, but this time I shook my head, "No, gracias."

He took another swig and reached around to pass it to someone behind us, but the bottle fell to the floor with a loud thud as the bus swung into yet another sharp curve. The fellow went sliding off his seat and plunked into the aisle, carrying the chicken along with him, and somehow landing on top of it. The bird gave off a muffled squawk. Several g's of gravity were pulling me in the same direction; I somehow managed to hang on. Pine tress whizzed by as I glanced out the window.

The fellow climbed back into his seat and carefully lifted the dazed bird onto his lap while five or six of his companions crowded around, everyone talking at once and a couple of them applying artificial respiration to the chicken. These people were showing an awful lot of concern over a mere bird, and I guessed that he must be a highly-valued fighting cock--one of those famously pugnacious Mexican warrior chickens.

At this moment the bird lay there gasping for breath, and I almost felt sorry for him. "Pobrecito," I said and gave him a pat of sympathy. With great effort the chicken feebly raised his head, and, with his last milligram of strength, sank his beak into my hand.

I jerked my hand back. It began to bleed slightly, apparently nothing serious.

The tequila bottle rolled under my feet as the bus swung around in the other direction. I retrieved it and returned it to one of the onlookers who then took my hand and poured a generous amount of the liquid on my wound. It burned, powerful stuff. Another fellow produced a piece of cloth from somewhere and wrapped up my hand, while others poured tequila down the chicken's throat.

Just what you deserve! I thought to myself as I gingerly touched the bandage on my sore hand.

It may have been the tequila. The bird recovered quickly and, to the delight of all, stood up, flapped his wings and crowed lustily. Everyone cheered wildly. A moment later the bird crapped on the floor, barely missing my foot.

The party got off at a rather large village a few minutes later. I was really glad to be rid of that obnoxious chicken. Despite the ongoing din of voices, the radio, the pig squealing and all else, there was a feeling of silence, and now I even had the seat all to myself.

Lake Pátzcuaro should appear any minute now. Or had we passed it? No, I couldn't possibly have missed it, it was so large on the map. But where exactly were we right now? I studied my map carefully. These mountains didn't seem like a place for a large lake. Was I on the right bus?

We kept going higher into the mountains, deeper into the forest, often shifting down to second gear as we climbed. Finally we seemed to have passed the summit, for the road began to descend. We rounded one long mountain curve, and suddenly down below there came into view the red-tiled roofs of a town. It was rather large, almost a city, but it didn't seem to be on my map. I turned to a passenger across the aisle and asked what it was called.

The name he gave was fairly long and I only caught the first syllable of it, something that sounded like "oor".

The town was bordered on the right by a cluster of volcanoes, and beyond it extended a flat plain of farms and forests, but only for a few kilometers. After that, everything seemed to suddenly drop off, with nothing but haze in the distance. I tried to picture what, if anything, might lie beyond it. Nothing, perhaps. It gave me the sensation of coming to the end of the earth, and, had I lived back in medieval times when many people believed the world was flat, this is what I would've expected it to look like as I approached the edge.

Soon we were in the town itself, cruising by the plaza and finally arriving at a depot. I stepped off the bus, and there on the side of a building I saw the name of the town painted in large red and black letters: Uruapan.

Uruapan? I finally located it on my map--a full sixty kilometers to the southwest of where I intended to be! I stood there shaking my head. How could this be? I had so carefully checked the departure schedule, my ticket and the bus number.

At that moment I was just very glad to be traveling alone, with nobody along to witness my error--I could just picture myself with a bunch of people who'd left the navigating to me, fretting, worrying, glancing at their watches and looking at me, wondering why we weren't where we were supposed to be. People always expect you to know what you're doing, even if they can't do any better themselves.

I looked at the departure schedule on the wall. Buses left almost every hour. My destination was Pátzcuaro, and, provided I didn't make another bonehead mistake, I'd have no difficulty in getting there ultimately. Basically, my object was to see the country, and, since I'd heard that Pátzcuaro was a picturesque city from the colonial era, I'd decided to go there and spend a few days. But nobody was waiting for me, so it didn't really matter if I got there today, tomorrow or next week.

Having figured out where I was, and how to get where I wanted to go, I wasn't really lost any more. I'd unexpectedly found myself in a place where I hadn't planned to be, that was all, a serendipitous result of traveling in a country where I hardly knew the language. It was all part of the adventure, and I felt a sense of freedom.

Since I was here, I might as well have a look around. But what was the name? I glanced at the sign again: Uruapan. It vaguely suggested some legendary place that wouldn't come to mind at the moment. Everything about this town intrigued me, from the name itself, its type style and the way it was printed in red and black letters, the way the town was nestled up against the side of a mountain, and the way I had accidentally gotten here. It all gave me the feeling of finding myself in a realm of mythical enchantment.

I glanced at my watch. It was still only 10 o'clock and I had the entire day ahead of me. Maybe I'd even visit the volcanoes. They seemed to be within walking distance. I felt a thrill of excitement. Sometimes it's fun to get lost.

I checked my pack at the baggage counter and set out on foot. The central plaza was only a couple blocks away. Every city, town and village in México has its plaza, an open space surrounded by shops, restaurants, local government offices, churches and often a lot more, depending on the size of the town. It's the center of activity, and, like a human face, each town's plaza has its own distinct personality.

Uruapan's plaza was exceptionally long and narrow. A few large broad-leaved trees spread their branches protectively, and in the shade below there were pruned hedges and grass with numerous park benches. People were coming and going, some taking a moment to sit down and enjoy the pleasant surroundings. For a while I took a seat and watched the people. As on the bus, nearly all were dark skinned. I wondered if I were the only foreigner, the only blond-haired, blue-eyed person in this whole town, perhaps even in this whole region. It made me feel a bit uncomfortable, but there was also the excitement of finding myself in a world where few outsiders seemed to enter.

Across the street from me stood an ancient-looking adobe building which attracted my curiosity. I walked over to it and found it was a museum, but it wouldn't be open till noon. In the courtyard beside it was a stone fountain. I sat on the edge, then unbandaged my hand and washed it in the water. It was still sore, and hurt slightly when I flexed my fingers, but there was no major injury, except to my pride. What an obnoxious chicken! I dispensed with the bandage, and continued on to explore the arcade which surrounded most of the plaza.

At a theater I paused to look at the movie posters. There was one with a handsome woman leading a horse by a corral. La hija del ranchero--the Rancher's Daughter--it read. It'd be playing today; maybe I'd come back and watch it later on.

All around me were people busily coming in and out of shops and restaurants. I was walking down a crowded arcade, a kind of covered sidewalk along the plaza. Some people glanced my way, but nobody stared. I came upon a newsstand with a large display of newspapers, magazines and sundry publications. One, titled Uruapan, cuatro siglos, caught my eye. It was a collection of essays, poems and historical bits about this town. Naturally, it was in Spanish, but, having studied the language in school, I was able to read it.

I bought it and sat down at a sidewalk café, ordered a cup of coffee and began paging through the booklet. Paricutín, the cornfield volcano ... an article began. An event from the 1940's was being remembered:

"The campesino planted corn, and expected to get corn. He got a volcano, and Uruapan got a harvest of ash and cinders."

So that happened around here? The story had been in my third-grade reader. While in high school I'd also read an account of the eruption, and finally, as a geology student, I'd found it mentioned in my textbooks. Although I'd always known that Volcán Paricutín was somewhere in México, I'd never gotten around to finding out exactly where. This was like coming into a strange town and hearing that a lifelong acquaintance lived nearby. I'd have to stay a while and pay a visit.

Then the waitress came back and said something. I had to ask her to repeat it twice before I understood she was asking if I wanted more coffee. Well, that's the way it was. I'd been studying Spanish for years and could read it with a fair degree of proficiency, but rapid-fire speech was hard to follow.

I had a second cup of coffee, then resumed my tour of the town. For a while I ambled through the long, crowded galleries of the arcade. Then, as I was about to cross a street, I nearly bumped into a fellow. Somehow, I hadn't seen him standing there.

I stepped back, trying to think of the Spanish words for excuse me. Strangely, it came to me in Norwegian--a language I hadn't spoken since Grandma died.

The man gazed at me but said nothing. He wore a wide-brimmed sombrero and a neatly trimmed gray beard. He might've been around fifty. There was a sense of dignity in his face even though he wore a patch over one eye. His visible eye was blue, like mine.

"Perdóneme," I said, finally remembering the Spanish phrase. I felt like a fool for forgetting something so basic.

For another moment the man continued to look at me. Then he nodded, turned and continued on his way. I stood there watching him as he went, feeling that he was somehow familiar. Of course I didn't know any one-eyed person, and certainly not here in this region. Logic suggested that the fellow had to be a total stranger, but a peculiar gut feeling told me I knew him.

No doubt he was a local rancher who just happened to resemble someone I'd known, one of my professors perhaps. Maybe a character in a movie, or the portrait of a Spanish nobleman I'd seen in a painting. No, I couldn't think of anybody. But the sense of acquaintance didn't diminish. I should have spoken to him.

By now he'd reached the end of the block where he rounded the corner and was gone. Maybe I could catch up with him. I hurried to the corner, and when I got there, I saw him in the distance. I followed, walking as swiftly as I could without actually running. He was a fast walker and had a good head start, but I was catching up.

The late morning sun glared down from directly above, leaving few shadows. It was extremely bright and reflected up off the cobblestones and into my eyes, causing me to squint. The air was warm, but not unbearably so; this town was high up in the mountains, at pine-tree elevation.

Then the man turned up another street, and when I reached it he was nowhere in sight. I continued my search for another block, and finally concluded that I'd missed him. Well, obviously he wasn't anyone I could possibly have known. I felt a bit silly about the whole thing, but so what? I shrugged my shoulders. This too was part of the adventure of being abroad.

I continued with my tour. For a while I strolled up one street, then down another, randomly exploring. Mostly the streets were narrow, and the houses were of adobe. They came up to the sidewalk without space for lawns, and were tight up against each other, with no daylight between. I could tell from the thickness of the walls, visible at door and window jambs, that these buildings were constructed of adobe rather than concrete. That meant that the neighborhood was quite old, perhaps from the turn of the century. I enjoyed the ambience.

One street had many shops, which occupied rooms in the private houses. A street-level room was easy to convert into a shop because every room in a Mexican house generally had it's own door. These were things I'd been noticing during the past few days.

Why not step into one and take a look, just out of curiosity? The thought had no sooner crossed my mind than I again saw the one-eyed man. He was standing there, looking my way, less than a dozen meters up ahead of me.

Startled at his unexpected appearance, I stopped in my tracks and blinked my eyes. No. He wasn't there after all. I glanced up and down the street. Nobody in sight. Absolutely nobody. It'd been a figment of my imagination, a trick of vision caused by the glaring sun. It was slightly disconcerting.

I walked up to the door of the shop where I thought he'd been standing. Had he stepped inside? I doubted it. His appearance had been an illusion; I was sure of that--I even wondered for a mad moment if he'd been real the first time, when I'd nearly bumped into him in the plaza arcade.

I stepped inside the shop, entering through the tall door that was typical of these adobe buildings. The walls inside were whitewashed, and the ceiling was high, even though the room was not extremely large. On display were saddles and ranch gear, burro harnesses, kerosene lanterns, tools and numerous other items, anachronistic in a world of automobiles and electricity. Nobody was around at the moment.

I'd been looking at the wares on display for several minutes when I heard someone entering from another room, and, turning around, found myself looking at an attractive, dark-eyed woman with brown skin and shiny black hair. Over her shoulders she wore a dark blue, pin-striped rebozo, the traditional shawl of this region.

She was far more than merely attractive; she was absolutely beautiful. Along the left side of her face was a noticeable scar, but, for some strange reason, even that added to her beauty. I felt slightly overwhelmed. My tongue had somehow lost its connection with my brain, and words seemed to fail me.

She said something I didn't understand.

"Me llamo Olaf," I said finally, and she told me her name was Chayo.

We exchanged a bit of conversation, though with considerable difficulty, as she spoke rather rapidly. Then she asked how long I'd be here in Uruapan.

I was trying desperately to force my mind to function in Spanish, to follow what she was saying, and at the same time respond as quickly as I could. And what I replied was: "Todo el verano."

And suddenly I realized what I'd told her--that I was staying all summer in this town. The shock of it hit me and I felt like a complete idiot. What I'd meant was that I was spending the summer in México. On a tour of the country, I'd meant to say. I struggled for words to correct my mistake.

I opened my mouth to say that, but no words came out.

She smiled, and I was sure she was laughing at me.

For another moment I stood there, still unable to speak. My face burned red with embarrassment and everything blurred before my eyes. Then I turned to leave the shop.

I heard her voice behind me. What she said, I didn't understand. Probably ridicule and insults, or so I assumed, but I didn't turn to answer. There wasn't much I could say in a language I found myself speaking so poorly. I just wanted to get away.

But I was barely out the door and into the bright sunlight, when something came dashing up from behind and brushed against me. I stumbled. A flash of white fur with a long tail swirled around me. A huge cat, the size of a cougar. The sidewalk came slamming up to whack me in the face.

continued in Chapter 2

dedication

2008-11-19T12:00:00.000-08:00

This novel is dedicated to

Leonard George Irving,

soldier, sailor, beachcomber, poet,
and raconteur.
An old warrior from the land of the thistle,
a Border-country Scot,
free spirit and frugal soul,
my companion through the back country of Michoacán on our journey to the fabled and forbidden city.
Without him this book would never have been written. The poetry and anecdotes ascribed to MacClayne are actually his, and he has kindly allowed me to reprint them herein.

Poetry by Leonard Irving is at Tae a Haggis

.

Chapter 3

2008-11-18T23:00:00.000-08:00

My first waking awareness was a feeling of impending doom--I'd heard the low, clear voice of the Chichimeca with the obsidian-edged war club. That voice was silent now, and the Shining Cougar's heavy paw was no longer on my knee. I no longer felt the cat's breath on my face. Instinctively, I tried to pull the blanket tightly about myself, but I was lying on part of it, and as I struggled with it, I could feel an accumulation of grit on my hands. Cautiously, I opened my eyes and glanced around.

A thin ray of brilliant sunlight sliced in through a crack in the door and illuminated the floating dust. There was no window. The ceiling was low, and clouds of dark cobwebs filled the corners and extended down the concrete walls of the tiny room.

I was reassured to see there was no cougar and no Chichimecas. They must have been the fleeting remnants of a dream. The images were fading from my mind, but leaving a dislocated fear. Where was I, anyway? Not in a courtyard. Not now, anyway. I remembered the courtyard, the wraiths that had surrounded me, and that huge, white panther sitting amongst them. Had I dreamt about something that had actually happened?

I stared at the dusty spider webs as I tried to think back and sort things out. I saw my pack on the chair beside me, and then I remembered coming here and renting this place. A little boy had helped me find my way here. A small brown-skinned boy.

More images came to mind. Narrow streets of adobe buildings. A busy plaza. A world of brown-skinned people. Volcanoes. Endless pine forest. An obnoxious chicken.

Yes, of course! I was in México, my ninth day on the road. That was all real. It wasn't just a weird dream I was awakening from. At the very least, this room was real.

The walls were painted a greenish blue, and smeared with dirt. Wads of used chewing gum were stuck to the bedpost. On the floor lay the rag of a shirt and a couple of empty beer cans, left by some previous occupant. Who knew when this place ever got cleaned?

I sat up and dug into my pack to take out my journal. In the semi-darkness I struggled to make out the final entry. It was in my handwriting, jagged and jerky, recorded on a lurching bus:

"10:03 a.m. Town ahead. Not on map."

I remembered writing that. I also remembered events that followed my arrival. My tour of the plaza. The strangely familiar one-eyed man I'd chased after, eventually ending up at the shop where I'd met the woman with a rebozo. I almost had the sense that the one-eyed man had led me there. I kept wondering why I felt him to be so familiar, while at the same time convinced he was someone I'd never seen before.

The woman with the rebozo. She had been so unbelievably beautiful. No, not unbelievably, I'd simply never met a woman so attractive to me, leaving me almost speechless. And then things got certifiably weird and stopped being the kind of stuff that could have happened. Not here. Not anywhere.

I remembered falling on the sidewalk, the sunlight inexplicably turned off, sudden darkness, surrounded by the Chichimecas with their war clubs and painted faces, while at the same time sitting at the pila having my face washed by the woman with the rebozo. A woman whose name was Chayo. Chayo?

Had I got that right? In Spanish, feminine names didn't normally end in 'o'. Well, yes, some did, but it was rare. I'd never before heard of a name like Chayo.

My dreams were often vivid, and the most unbelievable images had often stayed with me for hours or even days. Once, a couple of years before, I'd gotten up in the middle of the night to go out in the back yard to look at an ancient Norse runestone. Of course there'd been no runestone, and I'd known very well that there couldn't possibly be any such thing out there. Nevertheless, for the next several days the absurd notion had persisted, even though I'd repeatedly gone out there in person and confirmed that the runestone didn't exist.

That was the bizarre thing about my dreams: impossible images could sometimes seem absolutely real. The reverse also happened – real stuff could seem like fantasy, and, sometimes, somebody or something that I'd concluded to be fantasy would occasionally turn out to be real. It was hard at times to keep daytime reality and my dream stuff separate.

I sighed and tried to think of something else. Something solid and reassuring.

The name of this town. What was it again? I looked at my map, holding it under the ray of sunlight that cut in through the door. Uruapan. Why did that word tug at my mind?

I glanced at my watch. 11:35. How long had I slept? According to my journal, I'd arrived here on Wednesday. Now it had to be Thursday. That meant that I'd slept for more than 24 hours. Was that possible?

I opened the door and stepped out into the bright tropical sunshine; I was on a balcony overlooking a courtyard. My room was on the second story and this balcony ran the full length of the building, functioning as a sort of open-air hallway. At both ends of it were stairways. Across the courtyard was another row of rooms, also part of this hotel, but they were only one story high. This kind of construction was fairly typical of the hotels I'd been staying in for the last nine days, though not all had a second story.

In the courtyard below, a woman was washing clothes in a pila. It was in such a pila that Chayo had rinsed out the cloth with which she'd wiped my face. And that's when the white cougar had padded up to me and put his heavy paw on my knee, in that incredible untimely darkness. And the Chichimeca with the war club had spoken to me in a strange language which I had somehow understood.

Really? Had all that really happened?

And if so, what had he said to me? I couldn't remember.

I shook my head and gazed at the pila. Every house had one, and they all looked like they came from the same factory. It was a simple, rectangular concrete basin for holding water, and at one end was a flat space for washing clothes and dishes.

Near the pila stood a tree with shiny green leaves and large yellow flowers. White clouds floated across the blue sky above, and the rattle of noisy vehicles came from the nearby street.

The rather low angle of the sun suggested late afternoon--or early morning. Whatever my watch said, this couldn't be eleven thirty five. I took another look at it. The second hand wasn't moving. No? How could that be? This was a reliable watch. I'd had it for years now, and this was the first time it had ever stopped.

Holding it to my ear, my hand brushed across my face and touched something. The bandage! I pressed it and felt a tinge of pain. Then I remembered the woman applying it. So that part of my memory was valid.

She existed! The woman with the scar on her face and those eyes that peered straight through me. I sighed deeply.

By degrees, my sense of disorientation was clearing up.

From sheer force of habit I glanced again at my watch. The second hand was moving now. It had started again. I went downstairs to the registration desk to get the correct time. I recognized the clerk as the one who had checked me in. It was 5:20 p.m., he told me. I was too embarrassed to ask him what day it was. Fortunately, there was a newspaper lying there, and I glanced at the date. It was still Wednesday, the day of my arrival. I asked if it was today's paper and he affirmed it was. So I'd slept only for a few hours, not an entire day.

I was about to return to my room when the clerk remembered there was a message for me. For me? Yes, a little boy had been here an hour ago and left it for me. I struggled to think of who that might be and then it came to me. Panchito, who'd brought me here.

The message was signed "Chayo." I gasped. To think that she not only existed, but had even sent me a note!

I took it upstairs and read it several times. It was in Spanish, but brief and simply written. She expressed concern about me, hoping I was okay. Since I was new in town, perhaps I might like to accompany her to an event in the plaza this evening. She'd get off work at eight o'clock. A las ocho. There was also an address, presumably of her shop.

I felt reassured and also elated. I was going to see her again, this attractive woman with the piercing eyes, this woman who had ushered me into such an amazing other-worldly experience, right there in her aunt's courtyard.

A las ocho--that would be in another two and a half hours. Then it occurred to me that I should write down the events and experiences of that morning: the volcanoes, the chicken on the bus, my first sight of this town in its edge-of-the-world setting, the one-eyed man, my meeting with Chayo, and finally the Chichimecas. It was best to do it while it was still fresh in my mind. I just wished that my utter fatigue hadn't precluded my recording it before I'd fallen asleep, especially the scene with the Chichimecas--that would've eliminated any doubt that my memory of the vision was not just a product of my exhausted sleep.

I took up my journal and began writing. I omitted nothing, no matter how bizarre. I spent some time at this, and I felt much better about the experience as I wrote. The act of putting these images on the pages drained off some of the trauma and cleared my mind to recall more of the details. But when I got to the part where the Chichimeca with the obsidian-edged war club spoke to me, I couldn't recall anything he'd said. It disturbed me profoundly.

At the time, I thought I'd understood every word. He'd spoken slowly and clearly, but now I wasn't even sure what language he'd spoken. Presumably it was the language of an ancient, indigenous people, a language perhaps no longer understood by any living person, certainly not by me. And yet I'd understood every word of it.

Except for one thing. I had the vague remembrance of something they had wanted me to do for them. Some kind of task. What could it have been?

Maybe it would come back to me later. I continued with my account, bringing it up to where I'd arrived at this hotel, and included the dream I'd woken up from. When I finished it was nearly seven o'clock. Time to get ready.

The thought that I'd shortly be seeing Chayo began to give me a feeling of apprehension. It was more than just a concern about my usual social awkwardness with women. There was a sense of something mythological about her, something beyond flesh and blood. I stepped out onto the balcony, stretched my arms and back and took a deep breath as I looked out across the roof tops at the gently rolling hills beyond. The volcanoes. There weren't any volcanoes! How could that be? I'd seen so many that morning; the town was nestled among them.

Something was very weird about this place. This whole town. I gripped the balcony handrail tightly, very tightly, desperately trying to hang on to reality. As I did so, a brief stab of pain shot through one hand--that obnoxious chicken who'd jabbed me with his beak. That damned chicken!

I looked at my wound, and, as I did so, another thought came to me. That damned chicken had character!

Maybe there was a good reason for me to be here, in this strange town I hadn't planned on coming to. Perhaps, in some weird sort of way, I had even been slated to meet that chicken. If I'd really wanted everything to be easy and free of risk, then I shouldn't have come to México in the first place.

Hurrying to get ready, I went to take a shower and found there was no hot water. So I showered with cold water, but didn't stay long. When I emerged, it was dark. Night had fallen. Twilight is short in the tropics.

Without too much difficulty, I found my way back to the shop. At the entrance I hesitated, took a deep breath, then stepped through the tall door.

"Buenas noches," I said as Chayo looked up at me.

A warm look appeared on her face, almost a smile. She was putting some things away and I stood there watching her as she finished up. Her dress was long, falling nearly to her ankles, but displayed a well-shaped figure as she moved about. Everything about her was attractive to me, even her feet, clad so simply in the sandals she wore.

"¿Puedo ayudarte?" I said after a bit, offering to help. I said it out of courtesy although I didn't really see anything for me to do, but she put me to work moving some heavy items across the room.

All this time I was hardly able to take my eyes off her. The scar on the side of her face was faintly visible; it made her more vulnerable, which added to her attractiveness.

She soon finished what needed to be done, after which we walked over to the plaza. It was the same one I'd visited that morning, though it appeared different in the night. On all sides of it ran the busy streets full of noisy cars, trucks and buses--perhaps the traffic had been just as congested that morning, but I hadn't paid it much notice. The blaze of headlights added to the glow of shops and restaurants of the surrounding arcade. The plaza itself was dark, the trees and hedges forming a shadowy patch of jungle in the midst of the bright lights and activity.

The plaza was also longer than I remembered it. Music came from the far end, where a mariachi band was playing on a stage. They wore charro, the embroidered sombreros, jackets and trousers which was the traditional costume for festive occasions. I'd seen charro in movies and photos, but it surprised me to find people in México wearing these clothes.

"My father dressed like that for fiestas," Chayo remarked.

I asked if he lived here in town. She shook her head, and explained that he'd died some years ago. The family had owned a ranch, she told me during an interlude between sets. A brief look of pain passed across her face when she mentioned her father.

The band began their next set. For a moment I thought they were playing dance music, and that worried me because I didn't know a single step, but to my relief nobody seemed to be dancing. People mostly stood still or milled around, enjoying the music. Sometimes it was just instrumental music, and sometimes there were also vocals.

I closed my eyes and listened; even with them shut I could feel Chayo standing there beside me. I wondered if I dared hold her hand. A new song was starting.

Una pasión me domina
y es la que me hizo venir

A passion dominates me
and that's what brought me here

For once I was able to understand the lyrics. I touched Chayo's hand. She responded by taking my hand in hers and giving it a squeeze. It was my sore hand and a slight pain shot through it, but it didn't matter.

The music continued, sometimes with lyrics. The mariachis, the lights, the shadows, the ambiance, and even the mystical-sounding name of this town created a sense of enchantment. Eventually the mariachis took a break. Chayo and I stood there holding hands, looking at one another. For some moments neither of us said anything. We were standing in the shadows, but her face was lit up and animated, almost shining in the darkness. I wished for a way to make this moment last.

Chayo gave my hand another squeeze, and seeing me wince, asked if my hand hurt.

"No," I said.

"¿No?" She squeezed again, grinning wryly as she did so. This time I admitted that yes, it did hurt. She looked at the wound closely and said, "This didn't happen when you fell, did it?"

I told her how I'd been stabbed by an obnoxious chicken.

"A chicken?" she said. "A chicken inflicted such a wound?" Then she held my hand up to her lips and kissed it. Instantly, the pain was gone.

I wondered how she'd done that, but it seemed almost natural. From the very first moment I'd seen her that morning, I'd sensed that she might be a person with unusual gifts and powers.

It also helped that she'd stopped squeezing my sore hand. I was still thinking about that when she said, "What brought you to Uruapan?"

I didn't want to admit that I'd gotten on the wrong bus, or, even more importantly, that I hadn't intended even to come to Uruapan in the first place, so I tried to think of a face-saving explanation that wouldn't be a total lie. Finally I replied that it was my interest in volcanoes.

"¿Los volcánes?" she repeated.

I told her I'd studied geology and that volcanoes were a subject of interest to me. It then occurred to me that by having expressed a professional interest in the natural phenomena of this region, I'd also established a credible pretext for staying here for a while. After all, as much as I now wanted to stay, I certainly didn't want to say that my interest in her had anything to do with my decision. That would've been too forward.

I went on to mention Paricutín, the cornfield volcano, and told her I'd read about it several times since I was a child. "Is it difficult to get there?" I asked.

"I'd be happy to show you the way," she said. "If you'd like."

I assured her that I'd like that very much. I added that there was also another matter I could use her help in.

"Yes?"

I thought about the fact that I needed a place to stay, something a bit cleaner than the hotel I was in. A place where they served meals was what I had in mind, and I tried to think of the word for boarding house. Then it came to me--pensión. I told her I was looking for a "pensión."

"For your car?" she said.

"My car? I don't have one. I came here by bus."

"Then why do you need a pensión?"

"To live in."

For a moment she looked puzzled, then told me that a pensión is where one keeps an automobile.

"Oh."

She suggested that I perhaps meant casa de huespedes.

"Yes." I remembered the words now that she said them. "But doesn't "pensión" also mean the same thing?

Chayo looked at me for a moment. "You're right. Pensión is a Spanish word for hotel. But here in Michoacán we use some words differently."

"I see."

She told me of a place she had in mind. The proprietor had been a friend of her father. She would take me there tomorrow afternoon, during the lunch time. If I liked it, then fine, and if I didn't, then she'd help me look somewhere else. There were several hotels that offered monthly rates.

The music started up again.

continued in Chapter 4

chapter 19

2008-11-18T14:00:00.011-08:00

Morning came and I woke up shivering, even though I was under three blankets. MacClayne was stirring in his bed, and Cuauhtémoc was strutting about, ready to start the day. At last I got up, wrapped myself in one of the blankets and moved my arms to get the circulation going as I went to open the door.

A world of white met us. I stood in the entrance, watching as Cuauhtémoc stepped into the courtyard to investigate. He pecked and scratched at the strange fluffy, white substance, took a few more steps, then pecked and scratched again, discovering that it was the same everywhere. "Remarkable!" he seemed to be saying each time he lifted his head to reflect on the situation. "Quite remarkable!"

I wished Chayo were here so I could throw a snowball at her, though it would have been hard to scrape together enough to manufacture one, considering that the snow was hardly more than a centimeter deep. In the room behind me, MacClayne had gotten up and was putting on his shoes, which must've still been damp from wading across the street the evening before. "Do you think we can travel in this?" he remarked as he came to look.

Why not? I thought. In spite of the snow, Cuauhtémoc was stepping about with relative ease. The air was clear and the sun was shining. It was the nicest day I'd seen in weeks, and presumably the buses would be running as usual.

The bird was soon back looking for his breakfast, and I gave him the remainder of the tortillas. While he ate, we got ready to go. I sucked in my breath and shivered as I put on my damp trousers, then my damp shirt and finally my damp jacket which hadn't dried much since the soaking of the night before. It was like wearing a wetsuit; hopefully my clothes would dry out as I wore them. I thought longingly of my childhood in Minnesota where rooms were heated and you always had something dry to wear.

Then I realized that I hadn't bothered to bring any of my maps, not realizing that we'd be traveling this far afield. Although maps of this region weren't terribly good at showing where all the back roads went, they at least gave an idea. Well, we'd just have to ask. The landlady seemed well informed.

I told her we were looking for the road which led down the mountainside to Apatzingán.

She shook her head, "Go back to Uruapan. Take the bus from there."

"There's no other road out of here?" I asked.

"No. Only the trail to Apo."

"Apo?"

"From here it's a five hour walk," she said. "Sometimes a pickup goes through, and you might get a ride.

"There's no bus?"

She wagged her finger, a gesture which in México means no.

"Which direction is Apo?" I wished I had my map.

"You go north."

Apatzingán, of course, lay to the south.

I translated for MacClayne, who had understood some but not all of the dialogue. "Perhaps we could find someone else to ask," he suggested. "A second opinion."

We decided to go have breakfast; we could ask directions at the restaurant. There had to be a road.

"Maybe we could leave the rooster here in the room while we eat?" MacClayne said. "Things might be simpler that way."

"Cuauhtémoc," I said. "Do you mind?" The look in his eye told me that he did mind. No, things wouldn't be simpler that way; I could see that. So I took him with.

The snow had mostly receded from the plaza, leaving only scattered patches behind, and the cobblestone street we'd waded across the night before was drying under the morning sun. The air was almost warm and the sky was almost clear. Mount Tancítaro was still hidden in clouds.

The restaurant on the corner wasn't open, but we found a nearby market where food was served. And there was not only food. Vendors sold everything from oranges to blankets to pots and pans. It was a miniature of the covered market in Uruapan which consisted of booths and stalls under a corrugated metal roof. It was probably the only concrete structure in the village.

"Not very aesthetic, but practical," MacClayne said. "I remember markets like this in Veracruz."

"Were you in the merchant marine then?"

"No, I was out of the merchant marine by then. It was after I came to America, some time in the mid-1950's."

The market was nearly empty, probably because of the weather. The air was so chilly our breath turned to vapor, but there was the delicious smell of food, and my damp clothes didn't feel so cold now. We sat down at a small booth and I asked the lady what she had to offer.

"Carne de res, y carne de puerco," she said.

It was what we'd had the evening before, and again, MacClayne had one and I had the other. This time I had the beef and he had the pork. As was the custom, these were served with beans, rice and tortillas. From time to time I shared a tiny morsel with Cuauhtémoc; he liked the beans.

"What weather!" the lady remarked after serving us the food.

"Does it often snow here in the village?" I said.

"Not at this time of year."

We chatted with her while we ate. She asked us about the bird, and where we were from, the usual stuff. Finally I asked about the road to Apatzingán.

"Go to Uruapan, take a bus from there," she said.

"Isn't there a road or trail going down the mountainside?"

She stopped to think, and then asked the vendor of a nearby stall that happened to be open. That person expressed belief that such a trail existed, but didn't know where to find it. Word went around, but nobody knew for certain.

Customers were trickling in. After eating we decided to have coffee and wait a while. Somebody who knew the way might turn up.

"It's strange that these people have lived here all their lives and don't know the roads," MacClayne remarked.

"That's the way it is," I said, "People know the way to the nearest large town or city, but they don't know the back roads of their own region. Nobody goes into the hinterland. Almost nobody, I should say. Chayo is different. She's been everywhere and knows these mountains well."

"It would be helpful if she could show up now," MacClayne said. "To give us directions."

"Yes," I said, and sighed. Without Chayo I felt a bit lost. Maybe this was one of the reasons why I needed to make this journey without her, to learn to find my own way in this new world.

Cuauhtémoc hopped onto my lap, reassuring me with his presence.

MacClayne took a long, slow sip of coffee, then reflected for a moment. "Apatzingán is a fairly large town, isn't it?" he said. "Don't people go there?"

"These are mountain people and, when they go to town, they go to Uruapan," I said. "The mountain is one world. The valley below is another."

Indeed, everything around us did seem to be split up into separate worlds, not only the mountain and valley, but even the languages we spoke: English, the private language between MacClayne and me, and Spanish, the public language which MacClayne was generally left out of unless I translated it for him.

Just then the lady told me that there was a customer who knew a road which went downhill to Apatzingán. He was a large, robust man and had the self-assured look of a professional, perhaps an engineer. The lady introduced us to him.

Yes, a route did exist, and he'd occasionally taken it himself. But it wasn't a road, it was a horse trail, inaccessible to vehicles. We'd have to walk. "If you start now, you might get to Apatzingán by evening," he said. "But in this weather--no, it's not a good idea. You could easily get lost. If you don't want to return to Uruapan, then take the trail to Apo, it's much easier and you might get a ride."

I translated for MacClayne and suggested that in spite of the difficulties, we should take the way which went directly down the mountainside. That was why we'd come to Tancítaro, to take that trail. But he shook his head and asked, "Did Chayo recommend that route for us?"

"She mentioned it, but she didn't tell me where to find it."

"When?"

"Recently, some time during the last month or so."

"Not in the depot when she met us there?"

"No."

"She didn't specifically instruct you to take that trail?"

"I never said she did."

"Well that's what I'm asking, and you made it sound like she had."

"I only meant to say that she'd told me of a trail going directly down the mountainside. So I think that would be the way to go."

For some moments we sat there in a tense silence, which was finally broken by MacClayne. "What other road is there?"

"The trail to Apo."

"Another isolated village?"

"Apparently," I said. I kept wishing I had my map.

"So what happens when we get there?"

"Then we can get a bus to Los Reyes, and from Los Reyes--"

"Los Reyes is in down in the Valley of Infiernillo?"

"No. It's the other way," I said.

"So we begin with a five hour walk. Go north to get south, and get deeper into these mountains? Is this how you plan things out?" MacClayne's voice was becoming somewhat raspy, the way it was when he was impatient.

"We're in the back woods of Michoacán, and this is how the road system works around here."

MacClayne glanced up at the bare concrete restaurant wall and sighed, apparently disappointed, frustrated and perhaps even angry. I wondered if he felt misled, that I'd done him a disservice by getting us into this apparently dead-end situation.

I took another swallow of my coffee, pondered a moment, then said, "We're in quest of a fabled city, so we can't expect the going to be easy. If the roads don't go where we want them to go, that's perhaps the way things are supposed to be."

"We're Holy Grailers," he said. I wasn't sure if it was a question or a groan.

"I should hope so," I replied.

A long silence ensued, punctuated only by the sounds of the market around us. MacClayne stared at the remains in his cup, perhaps looking for an omen. "Then let us set out," he said at last, returning to his previous good humor. "We must not delay in our quest for the chalice."

I was glad to see him getting back into the spirit of things.

We finished off our coffee. Over to one side of us was a booth where they sold oranges, and nearby was one where they had oats which would serve as bird food. We stocked up for the journey ahead and then stepped out onto the bright sunlit street. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust.

Snow had left the village and was retreating up the mountainside, which was by now free of clouds. We walked to the middle of the plaza for a better view, and saw the green forest rise upwards to where it turned white, then narrowed to a pointed pinnacle.

From Uruapan I'd seen the mountain as a long, extended ridge, but this village was at the end of that ridge, so from here it had the appearance of a peak. It was like looking at a long, sloped roof from a new angle. I wished Chayo were here to see it with me.

We got our things from the room and set out.

The road to Apo was a pair of tire tracks going off into the forest. At first the trail was fairly straight, but it soon began to make hairpin curves, doubling back on itself as it clung to the edge of one steep ravine after another which cut deep into the mountainside and exposed outcrops of ancient lava flows. The thick woods prevented us from seeing what lay to either side of us, but we could look upwards through the treetops and catch glimpses of the snow-covered slopes above.

There were water puddles here and there, but not a lot of mud. Though I couldn't imagine anyone driving a vehicle on this trail, it was easy enough to walk on, and walking kept us warm.

We weren't carrying much. My backpack was just big enough to hold three books, some oranges, a small sack of oats for Cuauhtémoc and his blanket. MacClayne carried a bag of similar size slung over his shoulder in which he had a few personal items, a book or two, and perhaps a change of socks.

Cuauhtémoc scurried along on his short little legs, doing his best to keep up. Back on the malpaís where we'd had to fight our way through underbrush, the bird had gotten around much better than me, but here on this open trail he was at something of a disadvantage. When he fell behind he took to his wings, flew over our heads and landed on the trail up ahead. Then he turned around and stood there looking at us. "Slow pokes!" he seemed to say. As we approached he hopped on my arm and let me carry him.

From time to time the pine forest closed in so tightly on both sides that I felt as if we were winding our way through a tunnel. I glanced at my watch and found that we'd been hiking for over an hour, but the surroundings were so pleasant that it didn't feel that long.

The path curved along the edge of a cliff. We rounded the bend when suddenly the trees opened up and we found ourselves gazing raptly at a magnificent pair of snow-capped volcanoes. Their steep slopes rose almost vertically; a small, lonely cloud clung to one of the peaks.

We stood there in dumb amazement. I was astonished to see volcanoes so tall and slender. "A pair of needles," I exclaimed. They dwarfed the tiny cinder cones around Uruapan, and must have been even higher than Mount Tancítaro.

The valley below spread out before us. That gave us a better notion on how very distant the volcanoes must have been. I would have guessed at least 70 kilometers. Paradoxically, some peculiar atmospheric condition must have brought the peaks up close and made it appear that we'd soon be climbing their slopes.

"I think I'll have an orange," said MacClayne.

"An orange break?" I said. "Sure."

We stood there, peeling oranges and admiring the view. Although the sky was clear, the valley floor was covered with a sea of fog. Only the rims of scattered cinder cones poked through. They were brown and treeless.

"So where would Apatzingán be?" MacClayne said, thinking aloud.

I shook my head and offered a piece of my orange to Cuauhtémoc, but the bird's attention was fixed on the misty scene below.

"Can that really be a desert down there?" said MacClayne.

"It apparently is. That's because it lies in a rain shadow."

"Which means?"

I pointed to the bluish silhouette of the distant coastal range which rose up on the south side of the valley. "The wind comes in from the Pacific Ocean and drops its moisture as it rises up over those mountains. That's where the rain falls, so the air is pretty dry when it reaches the valley."

"And that makes it a desert? It looks like something out of one of your Norse myths. What did you call that place?"

"La Tierra Caliente--the Hot Country," I said. "Some call it the Valley of Infiernillo."

"In the Norse myth, I meant."

"Niflheim--which means land of icy mist. It was said to be an extremely cold, desolate, miserable place. And it apparently lay at the bottom of a valley somewhere below Asgarð. There are accounts in the Edda of men who went there. It was a nine day horseback ride down through dark canyons."

"Nine days? That's quite a horseback ride."

"Yeah, but if you were to go there nowadays you'd probably find a bus service," I said.

"So where would the spring have been located?"

"The Spring of Urð? That would've been in Asgarð."

"Up in the mountains, then," MacClayne said. "So this is like a geographic setting from Norse mythology, and we're looking at it. Walking on it. Passing through it."

At the mention of Nieflheim, a chill seemed to rise from the valley below. Cuauhtémoc gave a low, mournful squawk. It was a sound I didn't realize his vocal chords were capable of producing.

"¿Estás bien?" I said. I hugged him gently and turned away from the valley, but he craned his neck around, unwilling to take his eyes away from it. He made the same sound again.

We moved on and were soon back in the forest. Cuauhtémoc seemed to be okay now. He hopped down to exercise his legs.

"Do you think the Vikings ever visited México?" MacClayne said after a while.

"Remotely possible, but extremely doubtful," I said. "They reached Nova Scotia, perhaps also Maine and Massachusetts, but not México."

"Maybe you're here to fulfill a destiny," he said. "To see this land and complete a project that Norsemen began a thousand years ago."

We came to a ravine crossed by two large logs, spaced the width of a vehicle axle apart.

"Can this be a bridge?" I said.

"What else it could be?"

"Can you imagine trying to drive a pickup across this?" I said.

"There's tire tracks on both sides, so vehicles must be using it."

We crossed with a bit of trepidation. It was only a few meters deep, but I still felt like a tight-rope walker.

The morning that had begun with snow on the ground was turning out very different. It was a good day and a good place to be walking. We talked as we went, daydreaming of how it might be fun to someday get a burro and spend a summer traveling around in these mountains, leisurely wandering from village to village.

With that and many other thoughts we passed the time as we walked, and couldn't have been too far from Apo when the forest behind us began to vibrate with the sound of an approaching vehicle. It was a pickup, and the driver offered us a ride.

Two elderly women rode with the driver, so we got on the flat-bed and rode standing up, hanging onto the roll bar. Cuauhtémoc perched beside me, using his wings for balance as we swayed from side to side and bounced along on the rough trail.

In less than ten minutes we reached the turnoff for Apo, where we got off, expressed our thanks, and chatted briefly with the driver. He was about the same age and build as don Pablo. He was taking his two elderly passengers to the village to visit the shrine of a virgin. One of them was ill and hoping for a miraculous cure.

"How did you cross that log bridge?" I asked him.

He grinned, and said, "In these mountains it's part of a day's drive."

We said our good-byes and, as it was getting on in the day, we felt we didn't have time to visit the village of Apo. We had hopes of reaching Apatzingán that afternoon and continued on foot. As we left the turnoff behind, the trail immediately widened out and became a road. It was still a horrible washboard surface, but it looked more traveled and our chances of catching a ride looked better.

Before long the needle-shaped mountains came into view again. The tiny cloud still clung to the peak of one as if it were pinned there. Maybe it was vapor trailing out from the volcano.

"Would that mean it's active?" MacClayne said.

"Probably. It must be scary to live under."

The slender cones appeared as close as ever, but we decided they must be a lot farther away than they appeared to be. They were due west of us and I had heard of a tall, twin-peaked volcano out in that area. But that was way over in Colima and Jalisco, perhaps a hundred and fifty kilometers away.

"What's that in miles?" MacClayne said.

"Almost a hundred."

Could we be looking at something so distant and be seeing it so clearly? MacClayne doubted it.

Above and immediately behind us were the snowy slopes of Mount Tancítaro. It too had once been a proud active volcano; its eroded remnants still dominated this region.

The fog had nearly disappeared from the valley below, revealing a dry, treeless landscape with eroded cinder cones. Still no sight of any large population center that could be Apatzingán.

We took another orange break. There was something about orange eating that went together with traveling like this. We didn't bother to carry water; oranges were handier. I again offered bits of mine to Cuauhtémoc, and this time he accepted them.

From there we got a short ride in a truckload of sawdust and emerged covered with the stuff, with packs, bags, and pocketfuls of sawdust. But it didn't bother Cuauhtémoc; he just shook it off.

A short walk took us the rest of the way to a road junction with a very tiny hamlet consisting of only three or four habitations.

"Do you have any idea of where we might be?" MacClayne said.

"It should be Copertiro. The driver of the pickup said we could catch a bus in that place."

There was an asphalt road which went northward, up into the mountains and presumably to Los Reyes. The road began here, or, rather, it ended here. We would of course go south, and in that direction there was only an unpaved washboard surface.

No vehicles were in sight.

In front of one of the houses was a tiny roadside restaurant which apparently catered to truckers. It consisted of a crude table with a bench on either side, but lacked anything overhead to shelter customers from the sun and rain. The only person around was an elderly lady who was apparently the proprietress.

"¿Es Copertiro?" I asked.

"Sí."

I asked if there was a bus for Apatzingán.

"Ya viene," It's on its way here. she said, and told us it would take us to Buenavista. There we'd have to change buses.

I glanced at MacClayne, who gave a nod to indicate that he'd understood. "We seem to be at the right place," he said to me, then to the lady, "¿Hay café?"

The lady shook her head. She didn't have much else either, except for several crates of soft drinks. I had a cola and requested water for the bird. MacClayne didn't want anything. Hopefully, the bus would be here soon; if not, maybe we could hitch a ride on some other vehicle. Either way, we expected to be in Apatzingán by evening; it was now mid-afternoon.

MacClayne read one of his books, and I took out my journal. Cuauhtémoc scratched in the pebbles nearby.

The Needle Peaks weren't visible from here, but the long, snowy ridge of Tancítaro still towered above and behind us. This was the western side of it, the hidden slopes I'd never seen before. The ridge now lay between us and Uruapan, separating me from Chayo.

I sat there thinking of the night we'd spent together in Los Reyes, that town to the north of us, the place where the paved road went.

Walking had kept me comfortably warm, but as I sat there I began to cool off. My clothes were still slightly damp from the soaking of the evening before, and they began to take on the chill of the air around me.

An hour went by. No bus, and no other traffic either. The proprietress was the only visible inhabitant of the entire region. Everything around took on a desolate appearance; even the trees and grass were dry and brown, a prelude to the parched valley below. Only the empty road connected us with the rest of the world.

Cuauhtémoc hopped up to perch on a branch beside me, looking over my shoulder as I wrote. The cold didn't seem to bother him. Or MacClayne either, who sat reading in a silence broken only by the occasional turning of a page, making a faint rustling sound that echoed out into the emptiness.

Insects didn't chirp and birds didn't sing. At long last, the beginnings of a faint vibration resonated in the distance. An approaching vehicle? But it was more a feeling than a sound, something so subtle that I wasn't sure if I heard it or not. Cuauhtémoc raised his head. MacClayne lowered his book and looked up. I got up and stretched my arms and legs, but still didn't see anything. Minutes passed; eventually a tiny speck appeared on the road above us, It was a bus, winding its way down the mountainside from Los Reyes. Hopefully, it was the one that would take us down into the valley.

MacClayne waved to flag it down while I gathered up Cuauhtémoc and took a last look in the direction of the snow-capped ridge. The mountain was no longer to be seen; then I realized the sun was also gone. The sky had turned gray and hung low overhead.

"Is this our bus?" MacClayne asked.

It had come to a halt beside us and the door opened. The destination read: BUENAVISTA.

We got on. It was only a third full, and we found a seat near the front where we could see through the windshield as well as the side window. The bus began to move, and almost immediately came to the end of the smooth asphalt surface where there was a jarring crash. We were pounding our way down the washboard road towards the valley.

A huge rain drop splashed on the window beside us. It was followed by another, and within seconds it was raining fiercely.
hillside of scrub

Through the water-streaked panes I saw oak trees, or maybe they weren't oaks; anyway they were deciduous. The pines were gone, so we'd lost elevation and were entering another ecosystem. Before long, the deciduous trees themselves thinned out, and eventually there were only nopal cacti scattered here and there. Several cinder cones loomed in the canyon below and ahead of us.
I imagined that all of this would normally be a dry brown, but the storm had turned everything into a bluish gray.

Icy water trickled in around the loose, rattling window frames, and with each jarring bounce I got spattered in the face.

We came to a stretch where the steep hillsides receded, and the canyon broadened out to form a narrow plain where the road was flat and the water puddled up. We squished and splashed our way along, at times like an old-time paddle-wheeler chugging down a river of soupy mud.

"Can you picture this place ever being dry?" I said.

"It must be a dust bowl," he said. "Another Ecclefechan."

"Eccl--?"

"Ecclefechan. It's a town in Kirkcudbright, about thirty miles from Dundrennan." He paused to recall a refrain and shift gears to Broad Scots of the Border Country:

"Ecclefechan--where the craas flee erse-wise
tay keep the stoor oot o' their een."

"'Craas flee' would be 'crows fly'?" I said.

MacClayne grinned and nodded.

"And they're trying to keep the 'stoor' out of their eyes," I said. "What's stoor?"

"Dust," he said, and finished the translation: "The crows fly ass-backwards to keep the dust out of their eyes."

"Dust, you say. I should've guessed. The Norwegian word is støv." There were a lot of Scandinavian words in Lowland Scots--"bra," meaning good, "foo" meaning drunk and "flit" meaning move were a few I'd come across in MacClayne's stories and poems.

The bus squished on.

"¡Que mierda!" It was a woman's voice, slightly slurred, and came from the seat behind us. I stole a quick glance. There were two of them sharing a bottle. I hoped Cuauhtémoc wouldn't smell it and demand a swig.

The windshield wipers oscillated back and forth, each swipe clearing water from the pane long enough to allow a brief and distorted glimpse down the road. Directly ahead was a treeless cinder cone which gradually grew in size as we approached.

Between it and us, in the near distance, I could make out an indistinct mottled mass that covered a wide area. As we drew closer, I could see that it was composed of individual creatures, which, as they came into focus, turned out to cattle blocking the road in front of us. We came to a halt as horsemen rode back and forth to divide them up and herd them to one side or the other to make way for us. The action was in slow motion as the animals slogged through the mud. The cattle were Brahmans, which I had been told were imported from India and cross-bred with European cattle to make them more resistant to the intense heat for which this region was famous.

At last we were moving again, nearing the cinder cone. We were slightly above it, so I could see into its hollow crater. Although I'd seen dozens of these small volcanoes, I was always curious to see one more, and I watched intently as the road curved around it. On the slopes there grew a few scattered nopal cacti, ubiquitous in this part of the world.

The volcano behind us, we were again pounding and crashing our way down a washboard surface. Hillsides were closing in from both sides as the canyon narrowed and deepened. There were especially loud crashes that shook the bus to its very chassis as the wheels fell into larger holes.

"Fuck! This shit sucks!" It was one of the women in the seat behind us, and for a moment I mused over how such a phrase might be translated into English. MacClayne glanced at me and grinned. Had he understood it? Then it hit me that the woman was expressing herself in English--not in Spanish.

In the next instant something flew past us, narrowly missing MacClayne's head. Cuauhtémoc let out a loud "Rhhhhhhh!" and then jumped from my lap and took off after it. It was a lady chicken and she reversed direction, half-flying, half-scurrying toward the back of the bus with Cuauhtémoc hot on her tail. The owner was also in the chase, running a poor third. I was fourth and last, slipping and sliding on the wet floor as I pursued Cuauhtémoc.

"¡Ariba la pollita!" shouted one of the drunken women.

"¡Ariba el gallito!" shouted the other.

The birds scurried under seats, then flew back over the tops of them. Back and forth they went, from one end of the bus to the other.

The chicken owner finally cornered his hen, and I grabbed for Cuauhtémoc. Just then the bus gave a lurch; the owner landed on a nearby passenger and I fell on top of the owner. The passenger cursed the owner and the owner cursed me, and I pretended I didn't understand Spanish.

"Cuauhtémoc!" I said, after finally apprehending him and hauling him back to our seat. "How could you do this to me?"

MacClayne was laughing.

The booze-guzzling women in the seat behind us were snickering and snorting. A moment later there was a loud rattle as one of them opened the window, shoving it upwards with all her might, sticking her head out into the wind and rain, vomiting into the storm.

My curiosity overcame me and I turned to look, and found myself staring into the face of one of the female drunks.

"What are you looking at?" she said in English, slurring her words and sitting almost immobile in her seat. She paused, then let out a torrent of four letter words that ended with: "Fucking assholes! Go to hell! You're on the road to hell anyway! You know that? You're on the road to hell!"

Having said that, she passed out and collapsed across the lap of her companion who peered at me through a drunken haze.

Cuauhtémoc hopped onto the backrest and gave their bottle a thirsty look.

"Let's move," I suggested as I grabbed hold of my bird.

We found some empty seats towards the rear of the bus. We couldn't see through the windshield from here; but the chances of getting puked on were less.

"I suppose people who die of drink also end up in Niflheim?" MacClayne said with a grin.

Across the aisle was another drinking party, this one more discreet. Three or four guys were quietly passing a bottle back and forth. A couple seats ahead of them sat the chicken owner with his hen. She raised her head over the backrest, spied Cuauhtémoc, and gave a conspiratorial cluck.

"Por favor, Cuauhtémoc," I pleaded, "Pórtate bien."

MacClayne eyed the booze as it went from hand to hand. Perhaps he was thinking nostalgically of his seagoing days when a sailor might smuggle a bottle aboard and pass it around in the forecastle.

At my instigation, we got up and moved again, this time to a seat over the rear wheels. It was the worst place on the bus. There was no leg room because of the wheel configuration, and we also got the full impact of every rock and pothole the wheel slammed into.

Rain beat on the roof and struck obliquely against the side window. We were heading into the full intensity of the storm. I looked out the window, but all I saw was water and darkness.

Suddenly, the road noise stopped, and we found ourselves cruising along smoothly on a paved surface. Within minutes the bus came to a stop. Everyone was getting off.

I slipped Cuauhtémoc's makeshift raincoat over his head as we waited for the crowd to clear. Eventually only the female drunks remained in their seat. One growled an indistinct phrase as we passed by on our way to the door.

"¿Buenavista?" I asked the driver.

"Sí. ¿A dónde van?"

"Apatzingán," I said.

He pointed up ahead, and told me that's where we'd find our bus.

Torrents of rain pelted down as we dashed to a sidewalk where we stood under the eaves of a nearby roof and then paused to look around. The bus had let us off on what appeared to be the town's main drag. That was unusual; normally passengers disembarked either at the plaza or at a depot.

The passengers who'd gotten off with us were also huddled under whatever would serve as shelter. As I peered through the sheets of rain I could barely see the other side of the street. According to the driver, the bus for Apatzingán should be here soon.

The two drunken women finally came stumbling out of the bus. Somehow they made it onto the street where they stood in the midst of the downpour, holding on to each other for support as they looked around.

"It's raining," observed one.

"Is it really?" responded her companion. The two deliberated for some moments longer, then wandered off through the downpour.

A bus drove up with a destination that read: APATZINGÁN. I'd gathered that the road from here on was excellent, so we could consider ourselves almost at our destination. People began to board.

I looked at MacClayne and he looked at me.

"What do you think?" said MacClayne.

For a long time I gazed at the bus. Finally I said, "Apatzingán should be entered in the morning, as the sun rises overhead. That is my vision of how it ought to be."

continued in Chapter 20

chapter 20

2008-11-18T14:00:00.010-08:00

We decided to spend the night here in Buenavista. First we needed to get away from the rain and find a place to eat. We followed the sidewalk, trying to stay under eaves and avoid stepping into the water that filled the streets as well as the sky. Around a corner and not too far away we soon found a restaurant.

"Like the inside of a pillbox," MacClayne remarked as we entered.

A moldy print of the Virgin of Guadalupe adorned an otherwise bare concrete wall. Only a small electric light gave a tinge of yellow warmth and indicated that somebody might be around.

There were a few small tables. We chose one and sat down facing one another, with Cuauhtémoc at one end, perched on the backrest of a chair. I stood up long enough to take off my jacket, shivered slightly, then put it back on. Although wet, it helped to insulate me from the cold.

MacClayne was smiling at something, and I turned to see what it might be. It was a little pig, poking its head out of the kitchen for a peek at us.

"Not many foreigners travel in these parts," I said, "We might be the first the little animal has ever seen."

"No doubt he leads a fairly cloistered life."

Cuauhtémoc eyed the piglet curiously, then hopped down and strutted over to introduce himself. The piglet snorted and the bird jumped back with neck feathers raised; for a moment they sized each other up. Then the piglet gave a friendly-sounding grunt which cleared up the misunderstanding. The bird dropped his hackles, clucked a greeting, and returned to his perch.

Eventually the proprietress appeared. She was an attractive woman, despite large blotches of pale white skin, where the brown had ostensibly peeled off.

I asked what was on the menu, and she replied, "Carne de res, o carne de puerco."

It was becoming our custom for MacClayne to have one and me the other, and that's what we were about to do now, when another thought came to mind. I said to MacClayne, "With such a cute little pig officiating as our co-host, I think it would be in poor taste to eat pork."

MacClayne felt the same, and I ordered beef and beans for both of us. But a moment later the lady was back to tell us she was out of beef.

"So there's only the beans and tortillas?" MacClayne said. "Does she have pork?"

I nodded, but with a frown.

Cuauhtémoc looked at MacClayne, and MacClayne looked past both of us, towards the little piglet. The little pig looked back at MacClayne.

"I guess I'll just have beans and tortillas," he said.

So that's what we ate. I also asked for an empty dish on which I put some oats from my pack and added a few beans and a bit of a tortilla from my plate. Cuauhtémoc dug in hungrily.

"Couldn't the rooster eat on the floor?" MacClayne suggested.

I moved the dish to the seat of the chair.

Cuauhtémoc ate quickly and was soon back on his perch. MacClayne and I took our time and then had coffee. The roof leaked in a couple of places and water was dripping into pans on the floor. The muffled sound of a vehicle splashing its way along the street could be heard from time to time. The rain had momentarily stopped, and we lingered a while, hoping the storm would be completely over with before we ventured out.

"So this is the Valley of Infiernillo," MacClayne mused.

I wasn't sure if he meant that ironically or was asking a question. I said, "They also call it 'la tierra caliente'."

"Which means 'the hot country'?"

"Yes. It has several names, more than one of which reflect the fact that normally this place is like an oven. Dry and dusty. Actually, Infiernillo is a hundred kilometers from here, but Chayo applies it to this whole valley."

"Her father died down here, didn't he?"

"Yes. In Apatzingán."

"How recently was that?"

"Chayo was a teen-ager," I said. "You know, I think the storm is over with, at least for now."

MacClayne nodded, lifted his cup and finished off the few remaining drops of cold coffee.

As we paid the proprietress, I asked where we might find a hotel.

"Go to Apatzingán," she advised us.

"Aren't there any hotels here in Buenavista?"

"One," she said. "But I don't think you'd find it suitable. It's run-down and dirty, quite filthy in fact."

"At least we'll look at it," I said. "¿Dónde está?"

The lady directed us to a place a couple of blocks away, and we stepped out into a premature evening. Still an hour till sunset, street lights were not yet lit, but the dense, leaden clouds had already ended the sunless afternoon.

"She was good-looking," MacClayne said as we set out down the street. "It's unfortunate that her face is disfigured."

"Mal de pinto," I said. "It's said to be quite common here in the valley."

"It's not contagious?"

"Apparently not. You have to live here for ten or twenty years to catch it," I said. "But you can imagine how people in ancient times must have thought of a place where the inhabitants were afflicted by such a malady. They probably thought the valley was an abode of hostile spirits."

"Was this part of the Tarascan empire?"

"Eventually it got included, at least for a while. But the Tarascans were mountain people, and it appears that they generally avoided this region."

The hotel we arrived at was made of concrete, rooms on three sides around a large courtyard, the center of which sagged down into a shallow pond with an island of junk which included old mattresses and broken bed frames. Small birds were splashing in the water.

The landlady showed us a room. "There isn't any key," she explained, and reached in through the window with a stick and poked around till she found the lock. As we entered she flicked a switch, and a small electric bulb revealed a barren room with two beds and a chair. Four gray cement walls with a roof overhead.

"Another pillbox," MacClayne observed. I noted that there were sheets but no blankets on the beds.

"¿Las cobijas?" I asked.

"No hay."

The price was forty pesos. I glanced at MacClayne and he nodded, so we took it. It was the only hotel we'd seen. Leaving our things in the room, we set out to see the town.

"What did she say about blankets?" MacClayne asked.

"That she doesn't have any. Nobody uses blankets down here because it's normally so hot."

Only the main drag was paved, and, leaving it, we strolled down streets that were as bad as any of the roads our bus had ridden on. Nevertheless, most of the water had collected into pools which we were able to walk around without getting muddy. There was little traffic, so it was safe for Cuauhtémoc to use his own legs. He walked for a while, but eventually got tired. Before letting him hop back on my arm I tried to rinse his feet off in a puddle. In that effort I received less than his wholehearted cooperation.

MacClayne wanted to see the plaza, which is the center of activity in any Mexican town. But when we got there we found it not only deserted; it was nearly abandoned. Trees and shrubs were untended. Even some of the surrounding buildings were gone, leaving empty lots in their places. Those that remained had fallen into various stages of decay; a larger one with a caved-in roof must have been the city hall. Dim lights in the two or three buildings which were still occupied only added to the sad and desolate feeling.

One of these still housed a small shop where I bought a piece of coconut candy. The proprietor was old and gaunt, a fitting part of this scene. No doubt he remained in this once active place to live out the remaining years of his life, tending a business he'd owned for decades. As I paid him the money, a single street light went on to counter the darkness of the oncoming night.

"Like a setting from an Akutagawa story," I remarked.

"Akutagawa?"

"A Japanese novelist. His stories were often set in places like this. One of them, The Spider's Thread, is about a criminal who's given the chance to climb out of hell using the thread of a spider."

"Did he make it?"

"No."

As we walked, we munched on the coconut candy and I shared a piece with Cuauhtémoc.

The business district had relocated to a new area, five or six blocks east of the plaza, centered on the street where we'd gotten off the bus. By this time it was bustling with activity. People were doing the shopping they apparently hadn't been able to do during the stormy afternoon.

"Let's see if we can find a bench where we can sit," MacClayne said. "I want to take in the atmosphere."

But, since this wasn't a plaza, there weren't any benches, so we just strolled around. The sidewalks were lined with vendors and jammed with crowds of people who did their best to avoid the muddy water splashed up by passing vehicles.

The buildings appeared new, but makeshift and shabby, as if they were thrown together in a hurry. Not even the concrete structures looked very permanent.

"It has that boom-town atmosphere," MacClayne said, "Like something that just recently sprang up."

In reality it was a fairly old town, dating back to the previous century, and probably much further.

The inevitable radios played; one was crying out a song: "¡Soledad! ¡La horible Soledad!"

"Soledad?" MacClayne mused. "There's a prison with that name somewhere in the Salinas valley, I think. I knew a guy who spent five years there. He killed a guy, or at least that's what he was accused of. He said he was drunk, blacked out and had no memory of it. Didn't even know the victim."

"You think he actually did it?" I asked curiously.

"I wouldn't know. He didn't seem like a bad sort. Maybe he just happened to be at the wrong place and got picked up by the cops. Apparently he didn't have money for a good lawyer, and that's usually what makes the difference."

"Yeah, I can imagine," I said. "Sounds pretty tragic. At least it's an appropriate name for a prison. Soledad. Gives a feeling of dead silence and isolation."

The radio was playing something else now, but the words "¡Soledad, soledad!" still rang in my ears. They resonated with the melancholy scene around us. Despite the noise and activity, the yellow lights from the shops were lost in the massive darkness.

"How did this town get the name Buenavista, I wonder. That means 'good view', doesn't it?" MacClayne mused, "What kind of a view could you get in a place like this?"

"On a clear day you could probably see the Meseta Volcánica dominated by Mount Tancítaro to the north, the coastal range to the south, and possibly the Needle Peaks to the west."

"If it's that exceptional, they should've given the town an exceptional name," he said critically. "Buenavista sounds like something a land developer would come up with."

I had to agree. Back in California one became very accustomed to such. Although the older towns of California had authentic Spanish names, a lot of the newer places possessed pseudo Spanish names that were glaringly ungrammatical. Especially street names, which often included the word 'vista', and nearly always used it incorrectly. Throughout the state of California there were street signs on many a corner which stood as monuments to linguistic ineptitude.

Nevertheless, I took issue with MacClayne on his criticism. "This is México," I said. "And so you can be sure that Buenavista is real Spanish."

"What do you mean by 'real Spanish'?" he demanded

"Well, I suppose I would say that it's a place name given by a native speaker of the language."

"A native speaker with no feel for language," MacClayne shot back, "Do you think every Spanish-speaking person is a Frederico García Lorca or a Pablo Neruda?"

I started to respond, but MacClayne cut me off and went on, now with rising passion, to castigate the linguistic limitations of humanity. He said, "People the world over speak their native language without the least sense of poetic imagery. They regurgitate cliches and proclaim them as the most original innovations in human speech since the time of Homer."

MacClayne carried on for some time with his monologue, till at last he said, "But maybe you would care to disagree?"

"No, not at all," I said, feeling slightly beaten down. At times MacClayne got into these moods where he just had to dish out some of his righteous condemnation, and I had heard enough for now. But I did make a mental note that I must record in my journal that somebody had erred greatly in giving this town a name which did not meet MacClayne's approval.

"So what would you suggest they rename it?" I said.

"What's wrong with the one we were just talking about?"

"You mean name it 'Soledad?'"

"I think you're on the right track," he said.

"Then how about 'The Gathering Place of Lost Souls'?" I said. "For short they could just call it 'The Gathering Place,' and we'll make it a required stopping place for all true Grailers."

That seemed to meet with MacClayne's approval.

Lights reflected in the pond and silhouetted the island of junk as we returned to our hotel. A mangy dog wandered around looking lost. I could hear chickens roosting nearby; Cuauhtémoc was too sleepy to notice.

MacClayne went right to bed. Cuauhtémoc perched on the seat of his chair and I wrapped him up for the night in his personal blanket. I felt like reading, but the light was weak. I wrote in my journal for a while, barely able to see well enough to write in a straight line. Finally I turned in.

The sheets were gritty with sand; somebody must have stepped on the bed with muddy feet. It didn't matter; I was far more concerned with staying warm, which was a difficult task without a blanket.

I dozed off, and, the next thing I knew, I was in a dream. We were in a Mercedes with air conditioning and even a coffee machine. I was driving and MacClayne was pouring himself a cup of coffee as we sped down a smooth, asphalt highway towards Apatzingán.

The heat was stifling, but I shivered from the cold. Bright sunlight shone through the windshield, causing a frightful glare, but the sky was covered with black clouds.

Apatzingán was up ahead and we could see it in the distance, but the countryside suddenly changed. It was no longer the parched Valley of Infiernillo; it had become a windswept rocky landscape of some cold northern region. We entered the town, but the buildings didn't have the red-tiled roofs of a Mexican city.

"Stop here," MacClayne ordered.

He walked off and disappeared down the street, leaving me standing there alone. Cuauhtémoc wasn't with me.

A cold wind was blowing and the sun was setting. MacClayne had been gone a long time by now, and night fell. The Mercedes was gone, but its disappearance didn't concern me. I seemed to be waiting for something.

There was the sound of wings beating against the dark sky. The clouds parted, and Cuauhtémoc descended in the silvery moonlight and landed on my arm.

Now I had to find MacClayne. I set off down a dark street lined with the shapes of trees and houses. I could sense the inhabitants peering out at me as I walked past with the bird. Suddenly I found myself at a long bridge over a wide river where a female soldier stood guard at a sentry post. She had blond hair and wore a British uniform with a pistol in her belt. A mean-looking dog at her side growled at me. The animal's chest was spattered with blood. There was something uncomfortably familiar about this place. Cuauhtémoc let out a mournful squawk.

"Where's MacClayne?" I asked the guard woman.

"Across the river," she replied. "He goes there every night."

With Cuauhtémoc on my arm, I set out across, but when I reached the other side and looked back, the long bridge I'd just crossed was gone. There was only the strong, smooth sound of the flowing river which blocked my return. A distant bugle sounded taps.

Before me was a World War II dugout piled high with sandbags and surrounded with barbed wire. Nobody seemed to be around.

Inside the bunker was a long flight of steps which descended deep into the ground, till it reached the bottom, and I walked along a dark concrete passageway, silent except for the sound of my footsteps, which echoed back as I went. The place seemed untended and unused, for decades perhaps. Water dripped from above, and tiny stalactites were forming. I stepped through puddles and even waded through pools that were knee-deep.

The passageway divided and subdivided into a maze of corridors and tunnels as I trudged onward. Cuauhtémoc sat on my arm, guiding me; he seemed to know every branch and turn. Eventually I saw a light up ahead, and as we got closer I heard the murmur of voices and activity.

At last I found myself stepping into a low-ceilinged chamber which may have once been a powder magazine. Now it was a pub, poorly lit by small electric bulbs. At a makeshift table sat a dozen men in battle-dress, the uniform of His Majesty's Royal Marines. I somehow knew these were MacClayne's lost shipmates, the ones who'd gone down with the ship that night off the coast of France.

The room was cold and wet. Water dripped from the low ceiling, and the floor was strewn with tequila bottles and beer cans. Adorning a damp concrete wall behind the marines was a poster, tattered and caked with mold. In the weak light I recognized it as the Virgin of Guadalupe.

A barmaid was serving beer. The skin was peeling from one side of her face. I said to her, "What are those men doing here?"

"They were drowned in the war."

"I know that," I said. "But this certainly can't be Asgarð?"

The barmaid laughed derisively, "Did you think it was?"

"But those Marines. They're fighting men, they died in combat. They should be in Asgarð, with Oðin and Thor and all the rest."

She shook her head. "I just work here."

"Is there no justice? Not in the last world, or even in this one?"

"You can take it up with the management," she said. "I have to get back to work now. Shall I get you a drink?"

"No. I came to find MacClayne."

Among the Marines was a lad of about my age with light brown hair--it wasn't gray. Like the others, he was in battle-dress.

"MacClayne!" I called out, loudly enough to be heard over the din of conversation and clinking bottles.

The room fell silent as the marines turned to look at me. Then a stocky Marine with corporal chevrons spoke. "What do you want here?" he demanded.

"I'm looking for MacClayne." I said, a bit defensively.

The corporal turned and called out, "MacClayne! Is this your pal?"

"Never saw him before in my life," replied MacClayne.

"How can you not know me?" I demanded, "You were with me this very afternoon! On the road to Apatzingán. And you promised not to drink!"

"Listen to that!" the others began to laugh.

"I remember no such thing," said MacClayne; he was slurring his words. "But come! Join the company, have a drink and meet my shipmates! And tell me, while you're here, what is this promise I have made to you of not to drink?"

The room resounded with the laughter of the assembled company.

"Just sit down with us and have a drink," MacClayne said.

"I don't want any part of your drinking!"

"Then why are you here?" MacClayne asked. He laughed drunkenly, and, without waiting for me to reply he turned to the fellow beside him and began talking about something else.

"Let's go," I said. "I'm here to bring you back."

"Back? To where?"

"To the world of the living," I said, and took him by the arm and started dragging him towards the exit.

"Let go of me, damn you!" He wrenched himself free.

"These men are dead! It's your drinking that's brought you here."

MacClayne glared at me, speechless with anger. Then he rejoined his pals, some of whom had taken up their rifles.

"Who is this bloke?" demanded the stocky corporal, turning to MacClayne, "He seems to know you."

"A colonial," said another Marine, "judging by his accent.".

"A bloody Yank!"

They all laughed.

"He's no American!" growled another of their number, one who'd been eyeing me suspiciously; "Don't you blokes know a German when you see one?"

"A German?" repeated the corporal, a bit taken aback.

"Yes, a German! The bloody bastard who torpedoed us!"

The angry marines surrounded me and crowded in from all sides.

"I'm not a German!" I protested.

"Grab him!" ordered the corporal.

Cuauhtémoc leapt onto a table and crowed with all his might. Then he danced a circle around me. The men stepped back.

continued in Chapter 21

chapter 21

2008-11-18T14:00:00.009-08:00

Grayish light slipped in through a broken window and illuminated the dirty ceiling above me. I studied the dusty cobwebs and slowly realized that I was in a bed. Turning my head sideways, I saw another bed. MacClayne was in it, asleep. So he was here too.

On the seat of the chair next to me lay Cuauhtémoc's small blanket. But where was he? I raised myself up on an elbow to look around, and then I felt something stirring beside me. It was Cuauhtémoc, cuddled up next to me. His presence made me feel better, though I still hadn't figured out where I was.

My last memory was of being in a room not too different from this one, except for the beds, the window and the grayish light. They were about all that distinguished this dismal place from the dark, drippy dungeon from which I'd just awoken. A gust of air blew in through the broken glass. There were faint sounds of vehicles, distant voices and an occasional shout.

My journal lay on the floor. As I retrieved it, memories of our journey came flooding back to me, and I knew where I was and how I'd come to be in this room. Just the same, I took another careful look around to reassure myself that the floor wasn't covered with empty bottles and beer cans, and that there wasn't a moldy print of the Virgin of Guadalupe on one of the walls. The dream was still disturbingly real, and I felt irrationally fearful, as if a squad of Royal Marines were about to come bursting into the room to grab me.

I wanted to record the dream while it was fresh in my mind. First I arose and gave Cuauhtémoc his breakfast of oats, then I sat down with my journal and began writing. The abundance of intricate detail kept me writing page after page. When I eventually glanced up, MacClayne was sitting on the edge of his bed. He was also writing something, presumably a poem. I hadn't realized he was awake.

"You looked so intent on your notes," he said. "I didn't want to disturb you."

"I had a weird dream," I said. "You and I were riding in a Mercedes. It was really fancy. It even had a coffee maker."

"Where were we going?"

"We were cruising down the road to Apatzingán," I said.

"Did we get there?"

"Not really. When we arrived it turned into something else."

"Like what?"

I hesitated. My vision of him drinking with his lost shipmates--was that something he'd want to hear? Probably not.

"It was a cold place," I said. I noticed that he had a sheet of paper in his hand. To change the subject I said, "You were writing something. A poem?"

MacClayne affirmed that it was. I invited him to share it with me, and after a bit of persuading, he read:

Writhing awake
from some black dream
I come to wonder
am I become phantom?
a ghost alone,
an apparition
in grey robes
lost, even to myself?
Destined to wander
and haunt?
To sidle
subtler than shadow
elusive
indefinable
without destination
within this labyrinth
of lostness?

After he finished the reading, I said, "If you were to appear as a ghost, it wouldn't be in gray robes. You'd be in a Royal Marine's uniform. In battledress, I think you once told me it was called."

MacClayne looked at me quite strangely, then he said, "Yes, we called it battledress."

There was a silence, and I tried to think of something more appropriate to say about the poem, something that would obviate mention of him drinking with his lost shipmates. Finally I said, "I guess I found it a bit disturbing. That's because it's slightly reminiscent of dreams I sometimes have." And having said that, I realized that I'd unwittingly revealed more of what I was trying to avoid.

"Yes, I understand what you mean," he said with a sympathetic nod. The unsettled look in his eye, however, gave me the uncomfortable feeling that he saw beyond my vague explanation.

"I didn't sleep at all well last night," I said, trying to turn the conversation away from the implications of the dream. "It was the cold. I froze all night long. Would you excuse me while I go back to bed and take a nap?"

* * *

It was almost noon when I woke up. MacClayne was reading.

"Do you think you might have the flu?" he asked.

"No, I'm okay now," I said.

"You were pretty green around the gills earlier, but you do look better now. Are you hungry?"

"I guess I should eat something."

"Let me finish this chapter, a couple of pages," he said, and turned back to his book. I glimpsed a name that looked like Italo Calvino, or something like that. MacClayne seemed to have brought a lot of books with him.

I gave Cuauhtémoc some oats for his lunch, and went out to the pila to shave. When the three of us were ready, we set out for the restaurant, taking our things with us.

The sky was overcast and the air was damp and heavy. The town seemed to reflect the weather. "Even in the daylight this town looks unreal," I said as we walked down the street.

We reached the restaurant of the previous afternoon where the little pig had come out to look at us. An inviting odor made me realize I was hungry after all. Today the lady had beef, so we had that.

"¿Hay telefono?" I asked her, and explained that I needed to make a call to Uruapan. I was thinking that maybe Chayo hadn't left on her trip for Chiapas yet, and, if she hadn't, then I wanted to phone her, just to let her know where I was.

"Sí hay," she replied, and told me there was a shop just two doors down where they had such a service. But at the moment it was closed. She didn't know when it would be open.

The piglet made his appearance while we ate, peeking out from the kitchen as before. MacClayne recalled an incident back in the old country, the time a neighbor's pig escaped just before it was to be butchered. It hid in somebody's kitchen.

"Did it make good its escape?"

"For an hour or two," he said, and took a deep drink of his coffee. "So, are we going on to Apatzingán?"

We looked at each other for a thoughtful moment. It had been our plan to get up in the morning--or afternoon as it now was--and take a bus into Apatzingán. It was only 30 km away, and the road from here appeared to be flat, paved and smooth. A half hour ride, or less, and we'd be in Apatzingán. Such had been our thoughts--I shouldn't say "plan" because so far we hadn't really planned anything in more detail than this. But now that we were here, only half an hour from our goal, our assumptions seemed to have suddenly changed in some strange unspoken way.

"If we go there now," MacClayne ventured, "our trip will be over."

"That's true," I said. "Then there'll be nothing to do but go back to Uruapan."

"You're not in a hurry to get back?"

I sighed. "Chayo won't be there, or if she is, she'll be leaving very soon. She'll be gone for at least a couple of weeks."

"I'd like to see more of this region," MacClayne said. "We're still in Michoacán, aren't we?

"Yes. Close to the state of Jalisco, but yes, we're still in Michoacán."

We pondered for some moments in silence. Finally/Soon I broke the silence. "Being true and resolute chevaliers in search of the Grail, I do think we should continue on our way to Apatzingán. But you're right, it doesn't have to be now."

MacClayne nodded and Cuauhtémoc looked at me attentively.

I proceeded, "Remember when we were setting out from Uruapan and were about to board a bus that would have taken us on a comfortable ride down a smooth, paved road? We could have been there in two easy hours. But we decided that was not our road to the fabled and forbidden city of Apatzingán."

"Yes," MacClayne said slowly and thoughtfully, with all the reverence of a Calvinist deacon. "There might still be some more requirements for us to fulfil. Perhaps we could work on that and at the same time see more of Michoacán."

"Right!" I said, "and it wouldn't necessarily be straying from our path to find another route. As a matter of fact, it might be that some other route is the true and proper path. We're not tourists, but since we shall be passing through more of the countryside, seeing it may be part of what's required of us."

"As chevaliers, we'll do whatever the mission requires. Sightseeing included."

"I'm sure that even Grailers are allowed a bit of sightseeing."

We chuckled at our private joke, and Cuauhtémoc crowed lustily.

"Another thing about fabled cities," I said. "One should enter through the city gates, never by the back door."

"So, we must find a road that will take us to the front gate," MacClayne affirmed, then added, "Do you know of such a road?"

"I think I do," I said. I opened my notebook to an empty page and drew three or four parallel lines to represent the mountain ranges, the valley and the distant sea coast.

"The coastal range is on the other side of this valley, it's the bluish mountains we saw in the distance," I began.

"The Needle Peaks, you mean?"

"No, they're to the west of us," I said, and marked a large X at one side. "When we're facing south, looking at the coastal range, then Apatzingán is to our left, and the Needle Peaks to our right. Behind us is the Meseta Volcánica, the plateau we just came from, with Uruapan and Tancítaro." I drew a few more lines to fill in the picture.

MacClayne nodded.

"I would suggest this," I said. "We'll head southward, cross the coastal range, and that will put us at the Pacific Ocean. On a tropical beach."

MacClayne smiled beautifically, and I could almost see the visions of palm trees and blue water and sunshine passing before his eyes.

I took a sip of coffee, then continued. "We'll follow the coast eastward to Lázaro at the Rio Balsas. There we'll turn north, re-cross the mountains and descend into the other end of this valley. That will take us to the front gate of Apatzingán."

"How much of a trek is this going to be?"

I thought for a moment, "On the order of a thousand kilometers."

"What's it like out there?"

"It's one of the wilder backwoods regions of México."

"Are there roads? Buses?

"I assume so."

"You assume?" The tone of his voice had changed.

"It's a safe assumption," I said. "Buses go everywhere in México."

"We just came through a stretch where buses didn't go. Is there going to be a lot of that?"

I tried to think of a response.

"Have you ever been there?" He looked at me skeptically.

"No."

"So you don't know."

"I've met people who lived there," I said. "It's not completely uninhabited."

"We don't even have a map," he said. His dreamy smile was gone, and I could guess that the sun had ceased to shine on the warm sandy beaches of his vision. Mountains had become impassably rugged and rose to formidable heights.

I said, "Have you read The Quest of the Holy Grail?"

"Years ago. There are half a dozen such romances, and at one time or another I read most of them," he said. "But why are you asking me that now?"

"Because that particular account, written by an anonymous Frenchman around year 1220, explains in graphic detail what one must do to find the Grail. When the chevaliers set out on their quest, they struck out into the forest, wherever they saw it to be thickest and darkest, and even where there was no road to follow."

"You're taking this pretty seriously," he said.

"Isn't that the whole spirit of the thing?" I said. Cuauhtémoc clucked as though to affirm that it was.

MacClayne sucked in his breath and tapped his finger on the table. "And so we're going to set off into a trackless wilderness without even a map?"

"I think I can get one," I said.

"You think you can." He gave me a most dubious look.

"Yes, I certainly do!"

"Okay, you get a map. Then we'll talk about it."

"I'll be back shortly." Leaving my backpack on my chair, I headed towards the door. I also intended for Cuauhtémoc to wait there for me, but from behind came the flutter of wings, and I resignedly held out my arm for him to land on.

Even small towns in México have stationery stores which sell paper, pencils and other basic school supplies, including maps. I found one on the next block, and in a few minutes I had bought a large map of Michoacán. It was designed for use in a classroom, and showed cities and villages as well as the townships into which the state was divided. Roads were also shown, though it was not intended as a highway map.

It'd taken me no more than five minutes to find the store and buy the map, so I had time to look in another shop where I bought some barley to take with for Cuauhtémoc, and then headed back to the restaurant. On the way I glanced at the telephone shop, but it was still closed.

MacClayne was ordering another cup of coffee as I walked in the door, and I asked for one too. Cuauhtémoc returned to his perch and I spread out the map before the two of them; it covered most of the table. MacClayne was visibly impressed.

I outlined the proposed route, marking the roads and towns. And since MacClayne was now able to see where these places were, as well as the road we'd use to get there, he seemed content.

We finished our coffee and took a last look at the piglet who was resting by the wall. The little animal seemed relaxed and without the least trace of anxiety for its future.

We paid the restaurant lady and headed out to find a bus.

Even the sky was clearing up. I felt electrified with enthusiasm for the journey ahead. MacClayne was back in an excellent mood, and Cuauhtémoc seemed to be enjoying the prospect of adventure.

First we needed to get across the valley, to a town with a name spelled:
T-E-P-A-L-C-A-T-E-P-E-C

"¿A dónde van?" asked the ticket-seller. I looked at my map again and tried to read it, "Te... Te-pal..."

"¿Tepalcatepec?"

"Sí," I replied and bought the tickets. We boarded and the bus set out.

Groves of grapefruit, oranges, and limes extended out on both sides of the well-paved road as we rolled out across the valley floor. "Surprisingly productive," I remarked, impressed at how these people were able to take advantage of the hot desert with the use of irrigation. "We didn't see any of these orchards from back in the hills. Everything looked brown."

"This greenery is probably not very extensive," MacClayne suggested. "Anyway, we couldn't see much of what was down here. Mostly, this valley floor was covered with fog."

As if in response to his words, the groves ended abruptly, and we were in the midst of barren flatness. The tropical sun, barely out from behind the clouds, was already beating down on the dry rocks and brown earth, reflecting a harsh glare into our eyes. I caught brief glimpses of the distant Needle Peaks. It must have been land like this that was given to the campesinos in Juan Rulfo's sardonic story: Nos han dado la tierra. Actually, the place that Rulfo had in mind when the wrote it was probably in this general region, maybe a bit farther to the west of us over in Jalisco.

A couple of cinder cones shot past us; one was being quarried for the black gravel. "It hurts me to see that," I said.

"It does?"

"Volcanoes should be respected."

We began to descend the terrace-like steps of eroded badlands and before long found ourselves on the rim of a deep canyon. At the bottom was a river, crossed by a bridge. Río Tepalcatepec--the river had the same name as the town we were heading for. It felt good to have a map in my hands, but the sight of this river brought back thoughts of the river I'd crossed in my dream.

In Norse mythology there's a river that flows through Niflheim--the valley of the dead. It marks the final separation between the land of the living and the cold, foggy abode of lost souls. It was called the Gjallar. Every culture seemed to have such a river in its mythology. The Japanese called it the River of Sanzu, and the ancient Greeks called it the River Styx. In any language, it was something you'd hesitate to cross.

Once when I was very little and had done something naughty, my grandmother warned me that next time she was going to send me off beyond the Gjallar River. I didn't really understand where that was, but I definitely didn't want to go there. That evening I had a nightmare about it and woke up screaming. Grandma came rushing to my bedside and when I told her about my awful dream, she assured me that there really was no such river. But I somehow went on thinking there must be such a river out there somewhere, maybe over in North Dakota.

I was thinking about that as our bus drove across the bridge, and for a brief moment I felt just a twinge of uneasiness, as if I were about to cross over to another world. I glanced down at the water, then up at the canyon walls, and almost wanted to shut my eyes. At the same time, I felt a bit silly, like a big boy who shouldn't be afraid of things like that.

I began to write that in my journal, but thought better of it and scratched it out. I didn't want to risk the chance of anyone reading it and thinking less of me.

Looking up from my journal, I saw that we had finally reached the foot of the coastal range, those once-distant bluish mountains, and were ascending into some dry rolling hills where the rocks were strikingly different from what I was used to seeing back in the Meseta Volcánica. Here they appeared to be sedimentary, not volcanic. The geology had become strikingly different.

A few minutes later we entered a town, Tepalcatepec as it turned out, and disembarked at the terminal. We'd arrived just in time to transfer to a bus which would take us on the next leg of our journey, up into the mountains. But MacClayne objected.

"Let's go out and take a look," he said. "Otherwise, we're just riding buses."

We checked the schedule on the wall of the terminal, and saw that the next bus would be leaving in two hours. I jotted down the departure times in my notebook.

The sun was warm now, and we took our jackets off. Dust was blowing around us as we strolled down a concrete street lined with concrete buildings.

"The stoor," I said, recalling MacClayne's refrain about the place in Scotland where the crows flew backwards. I gave it a deep 'oo' sound and rolled the 'r'.

"Another Ecclefechan," he said.

"This entire valley. It's said to be one huge dust bowl. But I think I'll always remember it as a land of rain and more rain."

We walked for some time. There were a few adobe houses, but most were of concrete, an ugly substitute for adobe. All of a sudden, I noticed it was getting chilly. The sun had disappeared behind dark clouds.

"¡Viene agua!" a boy shouted to a man who must've been his father. Curious, I glanced around, expecting to see a water wagon coming down the street.

A large rain drop smacked me in the face. The sun was gone and the sky was black. More drops followed. We stepped under the eaves of a building, wondering what to do now. Across the street was a hotel.

"When does the next bus leave?" MacClayne asked.

"In less than an hour," I said, checking my notes. "We should start heading back if we're going to catch it."

The downpour had trapped us where we stood under the eaves of a shop, looking at the hotel. There wasn't much of the afternoon left, and if we missed that bus and had to take the one after it, we'd be traveling in the dark, unable to see the countryside.

"What's the name of this town?" MacClayne asked.

"I can't quite pronounce it."

MacClayne smiled. "Maybe we should stay a while and learn to say it."

"I don't think I want to stay that long. But we might spend a night here."

We managed to cross the street without getting too wet. The hotel was of concrete, on the usual pattern of rooms surrounding a courtyard. It was functional, reasonably clean and even rather pleasant-looking. We took a room and settled in. For a while we sat there looking out at the courtyard through the open door as rain cascaded down off the roof. MacClayne reminisced about some of the cold, rainy climes of this earth.

"I had a shipmate from Stornoway, a town on an island in the Outer Hebrides," he said. "Could you envision a more descriptive name for a place desolate beyond belief?"

Cuauhtémoc was looking out into the courtyard. Poor bird. He hated the rain too, probably as much as MacClayne did.

"Stornoway?" I repeated. "Yeah, that's a good name for a place on the outer fringes of the known world."

MacClayne continued, "The guy would tell me that there were no windows on the weathered side of the cottages, because the wind was so strong that the rain was horizontal. It makes you shudder just thinking about it."

He dwelled for some time on horizontal rain. For a guy who hated rain that much, it was amazing how much he could talk about it.

Cuauhtémoc crapped on the floor. I cleaned it up, and MacClayne went on to tell about the Falkland Islands, a place which in his estimate surpassed even the Outer Hebrides in severity of climate. He'd spent a year in the Falklands shortly after he got out of the Royal Marines.

"They're a thousand miles from Cape Horn, and there was snow on the ground eight months of the year. Rain the rest. The two industries were seal hunting and sheep rearing. I went there on a construction job, erecting buildings for a slaughterhouse.

"The entire population was two thousand, and men outnumbered the women six to one. I was at a desolate inlet called Ajax Bay where there were no women at all. The one thing to do was drink. Rum mostly. They served it from huge wooden barrels called rumbullions. I found out years later that there was more alcohol consumed per head of population in the Falkland Islands than anywhere else in the British Empire."

"It must've been awful," I commiserated.

Out in the courtyard the rain was pouring straight down, in quantities sufficient to overpower any horizontal wind, had there been one. I marveled at how cold it was. It was hard to imagine that normally this was one of the hottest and driest parts of México. Fortunately, the landlady had managed to dig up a couple of blankets. I wrapped one over my shoulders and sat in a chair by the door, watching the rain.

Eventually the squall passed. For a couple extra pesos the lady gave me a pot of warm water and with that I gave Cuauhtémoc a bath. The bird put up his usual squawk of protest.

I still wanted to phone Chayo, or at least try. The landlady allowed me to use her phone. However, the line was down, apparently damaged by the storm. I decided it didn't matter; Chayo had probably left for Chiapas by this time.

When I returned, MacClayne was reading the Odyssey, an appropriate book for a journey, I thought. He'd once told me that when one has the Odyssey, that's enough reading material for a long journey. He hadn't followed his own advice however, since he'd brought quite a number of books.

I took up my journal, and my eye fell upon the line I'd scratched out earlier. Despite my attempt at eradication, I could still make out the word Gjallar which I'd written as we crossed the Río Tepalcatepec. It disturbed me that the place I encountered MacClayne in my dreams was so much like that mythical Norse hell.

Cuauhtémoc was perched on the chair beside me, looking over my shoulder. It was comforting to have him there. He seemed to share these things with me, and at times I suspected that Chayo had wanted him to go with in order to look after me.

I missed Chayo. Since I might not be able to phone her, maybe I should send her a postcard. I wondered if I could find one in this town. She'd given me the address of where she'd be staying in Chiapas, and so if I found a postcard that's where I could send it.

As I sat there thinking of that, I recalled telling her about the sinking of MacClayne's ship and the loss of so many of his shipmates. She'd asked me how it had affected him and that had led to me telling her about his drinking, his winding up in detox units, being dismissed from jobs and spending occasional nights in jail.

"People drink for reasons," she'd said. "Maybe some part of MacClayne went down with his shipmates."

That observation had somehow stuck in my mind, though I hadn't recorded it in my journal at the time. Perhaps it was a bit too poignant. "Died, you mean? That some part of him died during that experience?" I'd asked her.

"In a sense, yes, you could say that."

"You're suggesting that his spirit might be stuck in a bleak netherworld?" I'd then told Chayo about the dream where I'd visited a snow-swept valley and found myself searching for MacClayne, experiencing a dreamland reenactment of a Norse myth, the one where Hermoð attempts to rescue his brother.

"You might understand more than you realize," she'd said.

"Really?"

"Myths reveal things to us about ourselves, who we are, what we're doing, and even about the people around us."

Out in the courtyard the rain was again pouring down. MacClayne was still reading the Odyssey. Later in the evening, after going out to eat, we took turns reading stories to each other, as we'd done before.

continued in Chapter 22

chapter 22

2008-11-18T14:00:00.008-08:00

I woke up in the morning, well rested and knowing where I was, in a town called Te-pal-ca-tepec. I could say it now, having practiced it diligently the evening before. Since it ended in "tepec" the name was probably of Náhuatl origin; the land of the Tarascans was behind us.

The spooky thoughts of the previous day no longer bothered me, and this morning I felt a thrill to be on this journey. The sun was shining and we'd soon be heading up into the coastal range.

Cuauhtémoc was strutting about, waiting for us to get up and get the day started. MacClayne had already risen and was again reading the Odyssey.

"How did you sleep last night?" he asked. There was a trace of annoyance in his voice. I wondered what it might be due to.

"Fine, and you?" I said.

He looked at the bird for a moment before speaking. "Does that rooster have to crow all night long?"

"I don't think he crows that much. Not any more. He used to, when he first moved in with me, but he stopped that."

"He hasn't stopped," said MacClayne grimly.

"Maybe I've just gotten used to it."

"No doubt you have."

Cuauhtémoc hopped on my lap, and I put my arms around him. "Poor bird," I said. "Sometimes he needs to express himself."

"Express himself? In the middle of the bloody night? He kept me awake with his noise!"

"That's a value judgment," I said. "How would you feel if someone said that about your poetry? Called it noise."

"You think my poetry is nothing more than a rooster's crowing?"

"I see beauty in both," I said, trying to be diplomatic. I seriously doubted that the bird had crowed more than once, maybe twice at the very most. MacClayne was probably exaggerating, but I thought it best not to say that.

"Maybe I should take him to my next poetry reading, have him crow between verses." MacClayne's voice was thick with sarcasm, but it struck me as a thought with some potential merit. "Why not?" I said. "It might go over really well."

The bird and I went out to the water pila where he perched on the edge and preened his feathers while I shaved with cold water. After that I made one more try at phoning Uruapan. The line was still down. Cuauhtémoc looked disappointed. Perhaps he too had hoped to hear Chayo's voice.

"A promising day," MacClayne said when we returned to our room. The beautiful sunshine had apparently put him back in a good mood. He was ready to go, so we set out.

At the depot we learned that our bus would be leaving in an hour, and so there was time for breakfast. Nearby we found a market like the one in Tancítaro, though much larger. Dozens of vendors sold everything from farm products to cooked food. As in markets of other towns, the roof was of corrugated metal, and the stalls were concrete.

"How about here?" I suggested, as we passed a stall where a middle-aged lady was chatting with a young girl who seemed to be her assistant.

MacClayne nodded, and in his charmingly accented Spanish he asked the lady, "¿Qué hay de comer?"

"Carne de res o carne de puerco."

We ordered two of beef. The image of the cute little piglet somehow remained with us.

"¿De dónde son?" the lady asked us as she cooked.

"California," I told her. I'd discovered early on that most people didn't know where Minnesota was, so it was simpler to say California. After all, MacClayne and I had both spent some time there, and in fact that's where we'd originally met, at an antiwar demonstration in San Francisco. So it was a handy simplification, and people seemed to like references to places like California and San Francisco.

We chatted a bit, and I mentioned that we were now heading in the direction of Coalcomán and parts beyond.

"¿De veras?" Coalcomán was where she'd grown up, she told us. There had been an iron mine nearby, and the town used to have an ore mill and smelter. Her father had worked in it. That had been years before, when she was a little girl. It was closed now; the mills and smelters had moved to Lázaro, the coastal city where a seaport was being constructed.

MacClayne nodded in an understanding way, so I didn't translate. We finished our meals and headed off to the depot.

The bus we were about to board was large and stub-nosed, the kind we called "good-road buses." This indicated that our ride to Coalcomán would be fairly smooth. The other kind, which we'd ridden back in the mountains, were smaller and had the engine in front, sticking out like a dog's snout. Such buses had a battered look about them, but they were built to take battering; "bad-road buses" was what MacClayne and I had named them.

As we got on and took our seats, I noticed that the fellow across the aisle had a fighting cock on his lap. The rooster glanced haughtily at Cuauhtémoc, as if in challenge. Cuauhtémoc gave the young upstart a look of casual contempt.

Immediately on leaving town we began climbing into the mountains, ascending steadily on a winding but well-maintained gravel road. Fortunately, the weather seemed to be improving.

The countryside was completely different. The rocks and even the trees were unlike those I was used to seeing in Chayo's world of the Meseta Volcánica. Cinder cones and lava flows were behind us now. Here the rocks exposed in roadcuts were sedimentary, and only at the very top was there an occasional deposit of volcanic ash. One such deposit was well over a meter thick, and I tried to imagine a volcanic eruption powerful enough to send that much ash all the way up here. As we rolled on, higher and deeper into the mountains, the deposits of ash thinned out and then disappeared.

There was no forest, only scattered deciduous trees which I at first assumed to be oak, but MacClayne suggested they were probably a variety of mesquite or acacia. In draws and ravines they grew thickly, but not on the rounded hillsides, which were exposed and dry.

The gravel road was good all the way to Coalcomán, and in less than two hours we were there. The bus let us off at the plaza, under the shade of a tremendously large tree. I don't know what kind it was, except that it was deciduous. It was the only vegetation in the square, and its wide branches gave shelter to the many vendors underneath.

"Like the mythical World Tree," I said.

Cuauhtémoc looked upwards with interest, perhaps visualizing one of the upper branches as a potential roosting place.

But, contrary to our expectations, the town was not surrounded by scenic mountain peaks, nor did it seem to retain the atmosphere of its colorful past as a mining center.

"What's our next destination?" asked MacClayne.

"Villa Victoria," I said, and went to ask when the bus would be departing. The answer was four o'clock. It was still only ten in the morning.

"Maybe we should have coffee," said MacClayne.

We walked down the street till we found a restaurant. Along one wall stood a jukebox which MacClayne eyed with suspicion. Classical music was about the only kind he ever listened to. He hated everything else, especially if it came from a squawky jukebox. But the monster was unplugged and therefore apparently disarmed. And there were no other customers.

We ordered coffee for ourselves and a glass of water for the bird. After a few disparaging words about jukeboxes, we got back to talking about the awesome tree in the plaza.

"There was a tree like that in Norse mythology," I said. "Ydrasil they called it. A story goes that Oðin hung himself on it for nine cold and windy days and nights."

"Why did he do that?"

"In pursuit of wisdom," I explained.

"I suppose they didn't have schools and universities back in those days."

We went on to talk about other mythical deeds and experiences of legendary suffering. MacClayne recalled an epic beer famine which had ravaged Britain during World War II, while he was in the Royal Marines and stationed at Sandwich, in Kent.

". . . And then a huge supply of beer suddenly came in. There was as much as anybody could drink. But because of the war there were other shortages as well, and the pubs didn't have enough glasses for the numerous drinkers. Tipplers were drinking from jam jars, pots, bowls, even army mess tins, and we didn't have any. I was wandering about this night with Maudwyn Morgan, a friend whom we called Maudlin Morgan because of his drunk behavior every payday. Surely we were two of the most frustrated drinkers alive, walking around jarless that night; all the beer you could pay for and nothing to drink from.

"We wandered morosely around suffering great misery, and in the course of our dejected meanderings found ourselves outside a cemetery. We glanced over the wall and spotted among old dusty wreaths and faded artificial flowers a pair of coarse china vases, shaped like cornucopia or large green ice-cream cornets. Before the days of plastic they were in common use to hold flowers and other offerings from the living to the dead.

"Slipping over the wall, we secured one each, emptied out the old flowers and wiped them clean. Returning swiftly to one of the pubs, the publican accepted our containers without a tinge of surprise, filling them from the beer pump and passing them back with a big head of foam frothing over the edge."

Cuauhtémoc had been gazing at MacClayne, perhaps entranced by his melodic voice. Now and then the bird shifted slightly from one leg to the other, seeming to inhale the aroma of the frothy brew so deliciously described by MacClayne, and impatient for a glass to appear under his beak.

"Establishing ourselves at the end of the bar with our large beer-filled and re-filled china cones, we no doubt presented a fine image of small Falstaffians and soon other drinkers wanted to know where we had gotten the big green drinking horns. It wasn't long before Marines and soldiers began appearing with large china vessels. The style spread rapidly through Kent and Southwestern England, perhaps as far as London.

"Graveyards were scoured clean, and--"

MacClayne had stopped in mid sentence. His jovial grin was gone. Three young fellows had just walked in and ordered beer. One was at the jukebox.

"I wonder if they're going to play that goddamn thing?" MacClayne growled.

One of the trio plugged it in and fired it up. And so there it was, blasting away at full volume.

"Are you ready to go?" MacClayne said, getting up.

"Yes," I said, but then paused as I recognized the tune. "It's one of Chayo's favorites."

"Are you coming or not?"

"I'd like to hear it," I said.

"I'll see you in the plaza," he said. Leaving his unfinished coffee on the table, he paid for both of us and walked out the door.

I sat back down and listened to the song. It was sung by Juan Gabriel. I had no voice for singing, but I had often recited these lines to Chayo:

No tengo dinero
ni nada que dar
lo unico que tengo
es amor para amar
si asi tu me quieres
te puedo querer

I have no money
and nothing to give
the only thing I have
is my love
if you'll have me, poor as I am,
then I can love you

The Juan Gabriel song was followed by one I didn't care for. But I sat there anyway, wondering why MacClayne had just stomped out the door. He disliked jukeboxes--but couldn't he endure a single song? On the other hand, maybe the beer-drinking at the other table had somehow clicked with old memories of himself as a young drinker, beginning his career in booze.

But poor MacClayne. He couldn't drink any more; that was what a doctor had told him. So had several former employers. Even the director of the San Francisco Zoological Gardens had offered such an opinion--when MacClayne was one day found in a bird cage at the zoo. It was on the front page of the morning newspaper, with MacClayne's explanation that he was passing through the park on his way from a bar when a Crested Grebe called to him by name and asked for a nip of good Scotch whiskey. Unfortunately, the thirsty avian was not available to show up in court and verify the account.

The judge was quite impressed with MacClayne's fondness for cages, and kindly offered to provide him with living space in one for the next thirty days--he wouldn't take no for an answer, and MacClayne was obliged to accept. Although MacClayne was something of a leftwing radical, perhaps even an activist at times, he'd probably spent more time in various jails for being drunk and disorderly than for his political activities.

But his drinking days were supposedly over. Nowadays, like an old salt who sits in a tavern and recalls his days on the water, MacClayne would sit with coffee cup in hand and reminisce about his years on the sauce. But like so many men who were forced into premature retirement from their life's calling, MacClayne had not taken it without dissatisfaction, and at times fell into moods when he expressed bitterness at life itself.

Well, I didn't think it would do any good to go chasing after him at this moment when he was in a bad mood. Maybe if I waited a while he'd get over it. I finished my coffee and ordered another. The guys at the other table continued to play the jukebox, and began another round of beers.

Cuauhtémoc was nudging me with his beak. Lost in my thoughts, I didn't pay much attention till finally he gave me a jab that was difficult to ignore.

"No," I told the bird. "It's too early in the day to be drinking."

I took another sip of coffee, and Cuauhtémoc gave me another poke.

"No," I said. "And that's final." He glared back at me. But I wasn't in a mood to try to reason with him. I stood up to leave and held my arm out for him to hop on to. "¡Vámonos!" I said.

But he just sat there, so I lifted him up. With his talons he clung to the backrest of the chair. I pried him loose and headed out the door, pausing only to leave some pesos for my last coffee.

"¡Travieso!" I scolded him as we stepped out onto the street. The bird gave me a sullen look. For a while I wandered around aimlessly with him on my arm. I thought of finding a phone and making another attempt to call Chayo, but right now I was a bit upset and didn't feel like it. Anyway the line was probably still down and I was pretty sure that Chayo had left Uruapan by now. Finally I went back to the plaza where I found MacClayne sitting under the branches of our huge mythical tree. As I had hoped, he was back in a genial mood.

"I guess we've got at least three hours until the bus leaves. Do you want to see more of the town?" he said. "Or are you ready to move on?"

The sun was still shining nicely. It was a beautiful warm day, just perfect for a day in the country.

"I'm ready to leave," I said.

At that moment Cuauhtémoc leapt from my arm and flew up into the tree.

"Cuauhtémoc! You come back down here this instant!"

The bird just sat there, perched on a limb over my head.

"We're leaving!" I said.

He remained where he was.

I called to him, both in English and in Spanish. Passers-by glanced my way, and a mother with her small children stopped to watch. "Pajarito," I heard a little girl say. MacClayne was giving me an impatient look.

"You wouldn't dare sit up there like that if Chayo were here!" I exclaimed in exasperation. But Chayo wasn't here, and so he did dare. What could I do? I was helpless and so I gave in. I went to one of the shops along the plaza and bought a can of beer. Hopefully this town didn't have an ordinance against drinking in public. I glanced to make sure there weren't any police around. Then I held the can up for the bird to see, tapped it loudly, popped it open, and poured some into a tin cup from my pack.

The bird came flying down and dipped his beak thirstily into the beer. As he drank, I imagined the eyes of the entire town upon me, but when I glanced around, I saw that hardly anybody had bothered to take note. Thank god for that!

I was just hoping MacClayne wouldn't comment on this. He didn't, and I was grateful for his silence. The bird finished what was in the cup and I poured the rest out on the ground. "That's all you get," I said, and gathered him up. He was already beginning to hiccup.

With the rebellious rooster on my arm, we at last set out. We walked to the edge of town, and almost immediately got a ride in the back of a pickup that was going all the way to Villa Victoria.

"Our lucky day!" MacClayne and I said to each other. The road was gravel but in good condition and we sped along. The bird was still hiccuping and still in a bad mood, the beer apparently having placated him only slightly. He was sulking and went to perch by himself on the upturned tailgate.

We hadn't been riding for very long when we hit an unexpected bump in the road, causing us to be sent up into the air, only to crash down on the hard metal truck bed. When I got reoriented and glanced around, I realized that Cuauhtémoc wasn't there. And we'd just rounded a bend so I couldn't see the road behind.

I pounded frantically on the cab, asking the driver to stop. He did. But he didn't have time to go back for the bird, so MacClayne and I got off and lost our ride. It was a good 500 meters back that we finally found the bird, sitting in the middle of the road looking slightly dazed.

"You cost us a ride!" I scolded. The bird hiccuped as he stumbled onto my arm. I was so angry that I couldn't think of anything else to say to him. Meanwhile, MacClayne wore a frown suggesting that he was annoyed at both of us.

There wasn't much traffic, but the next pickup also stopped and gave us a ride that lasted 15 or 20 minutes. This left us still a long way from Villa Victoria, but it improved our spirits greatly, and by now we were some distance into the hills. They were covered with grass, mostly dry-looking with some patches of green. Trees grew only in the ravines.

No more vehicles came for a while; we just kept on walking till we came to a grove of trees which sheltered a small creek where we went wading. Downstream we found a waist-deep pool and swam a bit. Cuauhtémoc waded around in the mud along the edge, and by the time we were ready to go, he'd gotten himself gloriously muddied up.

"You're not riding on my arm like that," I said. I picked him up, squawks and all, and plunked him in the cool water. "You deserve this!" I said grimly, and held him there, only his neck and shoulders protruding above the surface.

Suddenly I realized what an awful thing I was doing. I lifted him out of the water. "Are you okay?" I asked, concerned that the poor bird wasn't traumatized. He was shivering slightly.

"¡Pobrecito!" I wiped him dry and held him close. "Eres mi pajarito, y soy tu humano," I said. "Para siempre."

"You're my little bird, and I'm your human. Forever."

Cuauhtémoc tucked his head under my arm. And as if in response to the intensity of my feelings, a powerful gust of wind swept the hillside, tearing leaves from trees and swirling them around us.

It was a good hour before we saw another vehicle, and when we did, it was heading the other way, back towards Coalcomán. We continued walking, not with the expectation of getting to Villa Victoria on foot, but because we felt like walking.

Except for wooded ravines the countryside was open and grassy with scattered nopal cacti. These were the same type of cacti I'd seen around Uruapan. Except for them, however, everything was different in these hills. Not even the rocks were the same. It felt strange to be in a land without cinder cones and lava. There was just thinly laminated shale.

Cattle grazed here and there, but we saw no people. There were a few clouds in the sky, just enough to make it look the way a beautiful sky is supposed to look.

Off to the north, I could see the bluish outline of the Meseta Volcánica, dominated by snow-capped Mount Tancítaro, which, as our road meandered along, was sometimes to the right of us and sometimes to the left, but usually behind us. It seemed so far away. We took a break to snack on oranges, and I took out the map and estimated the straight-line distance from Uruapan to our present location. One hundred and fifty kilometers. Could that be right? I measured it again. Same number.

I finished peeling my orange and shared some with Cuauhtémoc. "Estamos lejos de Chayo," I said, thinking of the enormous distance that separated us from her. The bird looked almost longingly towards the distant plateau. I had the uncanny feeling that he understood my words.

Uruapan ought to be slightly to the east of Tancítaro, though I wasn't sure exactly where to look. But as I kept gazing, the bluish mountains seemed to turn green, and at last I imagined I could see individual pines and even red-tiled roofs. It was a strange feeling to be looking back at the place where I'd met Chayo, found Cuauhtémoc, and experienced so much--and now see it so far away. I'd been there only a few months, but they had been very eventful months. So much that was now part of my life had been entirely new to me back then.

My memories of California were like something from another lifetime. And, in comparison, my childhood in Minnesota belonged to an even earlier incarnation, almost as far back as the Viking era when the first Norsemen found their way to Vinland.

MacClayne stood up. "I hear a car," he said.

In the silence of the mountains, we could hear it long before we actually saw it. It was a Volkswagen bus, and when it finally got to where we were, it stopped for us.

The driver was in his early thirties and wore a wide-brimmed hat, a denim jacket and blue jeans. This was contemporary ranch style, though not exactly Michoacano. An attractive woman in a rebozo and a smart-looking skirt and blouse was with him, and they had a seven- or eight-year-old boy who was dressed like his father, hat and all.

You can often tell what part of México people are from by their hats. The ones worn by the driver and his son were made of straw fiber and had high crowns but no tassel in back, quite different from the style around Uruapan. After the usual introductions, I asked, "¿Ustedes son Norteños?"

"Sí, yo soy de Chihuahua," he affirmed with a grin, and added that his wife was Michoacana, from Coalcomán. "You've been here a while, I would guess?"

"Just a few months," I said.

"¿De veras? That's about how long we've been here," he said. They'd spent the last five years in California, and had returned to México only a few months before.

They now lived on a ranch up in these hills, he told me. I could guess that it was the realization of a long-standing dream for which they'd spent years working and saving in California. Wages were five or even ten times higher in the US, and many Mexicans went there to get a stake they could start out with.

He then glanced at the little boy and said, "Él habla ingles."

The child smiled shyly. He was handsome and bright-looking.

"Do you speak English?" I asked him, in English of course.

"Contéstale al señor," the driver urged his son, who looked away.

"Where did you learn English?" I tried again.

"En California," he replied in Spanish, but to his parents, rather than to me.

"Really? How did you like California?" I asked him.

"Me gusta Michoacán," he whispered to his father.

"Díle en Ingles," his father urged him again, laughing good-naturedly.

"Didn't you like California?" I continued in English.

Again he whispered to his parents in Spanish: "No hay vacas."

I smiled and glanced at MacClayne. The grin on his face indicated that he was following the conversation. "There are plenty of cows in California," MacClayne assured the boy.

"Yes," I said. "As my friend says, there are many cattle."

"Pero no tienen cuernos."

"They don't have horns," I translated for MacClayne.

In apparent validation of the boy's statement, Cuauhtémoc chose that moment to crow, and I said to the boy, "I think the rooster agrees with you. He's also a true Michoacano."

The boy glanced shyly at the bird, and at that point the family turned off onto a smaller road which presumably led to their ranch. We got out of the vehicle to continue on the road to Villa Victoria. This ride had taken us to the top of a ridge where we walked for a while. From there we had an even better view of the Meseta Volcánica, and off to the northwest we could even see the Needle Peaks. A tiny cloud still clung to the crest of one. From the fact that it was always there, I realized it must have been vapor from the volcano.

As before, the hillsides around and below us were grassy and open. Here the grass was dry looking, and I recalled some lines from an old Marine Corps song which Uncle Rolf had taught me years ago, sung to the tune of When Johnny Comes Marching Home. The verses of it could've been written to describe the countryside around us:

The mountains were high / the rivers were dry / the sun was blazing hot.

Our day was warm, not hot, but the bare, sunburned hills suggested that this might be a very hot place.

Cattle grazed in the distance, and I thought of the little boy who liked cows with horns. Perhaps if Chayo and I were to marry, we might have a little boy like him. He was an intelligent-looking child, and no doubt some day he'd be playing an important role in running the family ranch.

The road followed along the crest of the ridge and around a bend, where we found ourselves looking down into a small, narrow valley with a creek and even a pond like the one we'd swum in. There were also a corral and a building with a red-tiled roof. Like most ranch houses in Michoacán, it was long and single-storied. I guessed that it was of adobe, though at that distance I couldn't tell for sure.

"Chayo dreams of a ranch like that," I said.

"It is idyllic."

"Do you think she would marry me if I could give her that ranch?"

"No question about it. The two of you would live happily ever after."

Cuauhtémoc eyed the ranch and then closed his eyes. I imagined him pleasantly contemplating a life with Chayo and me.

"If only I had the fifty thousand dollars to buy it."

"Is that what a place like that would cost?"

"I have no idea," I said. "It could be many times that, or on the other hand it might be much less. Whatever it is, I don't have it."

I sat there gazing at the red-tiled ranch house, dreaming of how I might come across the money. I pictured myself walking down a street in some town back in California and then suddenly coming upon a money bag fallen out of an armored car. It'd be full of hundred-dollar bills, enough to buy that ranch for Chayo.

"Can you imagine what Alasdair would do with a place like that?" MacClayne remarked. Alasdair MacAlistair was MacClayne's old friend and fellow countryman, the ne'er-do-well scion of a wealthy family who'd lost his inheritance in a card game and hopped a ship to America to escape creditors. There was probably nothing that could outrage MacClayne quite as much as the concept of a Scotlander who couldn't hang onto his money. Nevertheless, the two of them had a common bond in that both were poets, and, in the opinion of some, both reprobates. I'd briefly met Alasdair once when we were both visiting MacClayne at the same time. Alasdair had come by to borrow money, MacClayne told me afterwards. Mostly I knew him from hearing MacClayne rant about him, as he often did.

"Yes," I said. "From what you've told me, Alasdair is always dreaming of a place where he could have a garden and grow vegetables, have a few chickens, write poetry, and eke out a simple living."

"But that was just a dream," said MacClayne. There was profound bitterness in his voice. I'd heard him tell it before and had a pretty good idea of what he was about to say next.

"Suppose he somehow acquired it," MacClayne said, "A rich uncle dies, leaves it to him. Suddenly it's his."

"Yeah, I know," I said.

MacClayne had already told me the story twenty times, so of course he knew that I knew, but he couldn't resist going through the ritual of telling me anyway. "He'd sell it for a tenth of its value and head for the nearest card game. A week later you'd see him, broke and demoralized. Trying to borrow money to pay the rent."

"Yeah," I said, recalling that on the single occasion I'd met Alasdair, he'd asked me for the loan of $20 which I obligingly lent him. He did actually attempt to pay me back, mailing me a check which of course bounced. Well, he tried, poor man. Not that I wasn't angry about it. But I could understand how that gambling obsession had ruined his life. I'd never told MacClayne about that unpaid loan.

"And he never learns. Never changes," MacClayne continued, his voice thick with disgust.

I nodded and gazed down at the red-tiled ranch house which Alasdair would be sure to lose in a card game. A wisp of smoke rose from the house, from a kitchen stove no doubt, and lingered above the roof, almost like a small cloud of doom.

Just the same, I said, "Maybe he could just give that ranch to Chayo and me as a wedding present? Then he could come and stay with us. It would be his home as well as ours."

"That's not Alasdair. He'd have to lose it to some card shark."

Cuauhtémoc stood up and looked at the road, as if suggesting that it was time to be moving on.

A faint sound cut through the silence. An insect perhaps? As it grew louder we could tell it was the steady hum of a vehicle climbing the hill in low gear. Cuauhtémoc saw it first, a tiny dot on the road below, which grew to the size of a pickup. Although it was full of people and supplies, the driver was willing to stop for us. Three or four sat in the cab, and seven or eight others, mostly children and teen-agers, were crammed into the back where they sat wedged in between bags and boxes. It appeared they'd been to town for their monthly shopping.

MacClayne and I climbed in the back of the crowded truck, and people found room for us. I sat on a box with Cuauhtémoc on my lap while MacClayne found room on the wheel guard. Near us a woman of about thirty five sat on a spare tire holding a small girl. She was the only adult in the back and from time to time she spoke to one or another of the youngsters, telling them to do this or that. She gave the orders, but did so gently, and they responded when she spoke. She vaguely reminded me of an aunt who'd occasionally looked after me when I was a child.

Having ascended the slope immediately below, we sped along the winding road which was getting progressively more bumpy. It hadn't been bad for the first stretch after leaving Coalcomán, but by now it was a washboard surface, and in places even worse. The box under me bounced and kept shifting into an unworkable position that left me with insufficient room for my legs. I clung to the side of the truck with one hand and kept pulling the box back into position with the other. Cuauhtémoc sat tenaciously, digging into my leg with his talons and frequently extending his wings for balance.

The road was cut into a mountainside and led upwards much of the time. Again and again I thought we had almost reached the top of the mountain, but we still continued climbing the switchback road. From time to time we caught panoramic glimpses of everything from Mount Tancítaro to the Needle Peaks. From this angle the Needles were lined up almost one behind the other to appear like a single towering volcano with that ever-present vapor cloud. The Valley of Infiernillo could also be seen now, and somewhere on the far side of it would be Apatzingán.

"That's where it happened." It was the voice of the woman with the child on her lap. I glanced around and saw her pointing to a ravine below the road.

"Were they all killed?" a boy asked.

My curiosity got the better of me. "What happened?" I asked.

"A pickup went off the road back there," she said. I craned my neck to see where she was pointing, but by now the place was behind us.

"An accident?" I asked.

"No," she said, and told me of an incident from the previous summer. A young fellow had asked a girl to marry him, but she refused. So he kidnapped her, with intentions of forcibly taking her to bed and then marrying her. He had her in his pickup and was heading towards his ranch when the girl grabbed the steering wheel and sent the vehicle crashing down into the ravine below. Both she and her kidnapper died instantly. Another passenger died a few days later; it was she who told what had happened.

"Who was this third victim?"

"The fellow's sister-in-law. She was the one who had come up with the idea, planned it, and persuaded the man to do it."

"Some sister-in-law!" I said.

"¡De veras!" said the woman, and shook her head.

"But why was she with them on the ride?" I asked.

"She was also a friend of the intended bride. She persuaded the girl to get into the vehicle and ride off with them."

"So the fellow didn't kidnap her at gun point?" I asked.

"No, the girl thought they were just taking her to visit a neighbor's ranch. When she realized what their intentions were, she demanded that they stop at once and let her out. But they wouldn't let her go, so she grabbed the wheel."

Robando su novia, as it was called, kidnapping one's bride, had some status in custom and tradition. It'd been the theme of a ranchera movie which I'd once watched with Chayo. In the film, the girl had wanted her boyfriend to kidnap her, and was angry only because he took so long to make up his mind to do it. I mentioned that film to the woman.

"There are people who get their movie fantasies mixed up with reality," she said.

I translated the story for MacClayne.

"Ask if the guy was drunk," he said.

"It doesn't sound that way," I told him.

"Ask her anyway," he insisted. "It's the sort of thing people do when they get drunk."

I shook my head and said nothing. MacClayne was given to interpreting the dynamics of human relations in terms of alcohol consumption. Usually that amused me; right now I was annoyed. It struck me as sadly ironic that he, a master storyteller, was making no attempt to understand the incident in its cultural context or appreciate the interaction of personalities. I silently sympathized with the plight of the kidnapper. Poor guy. He was a reluctant anti-hero, pushed into action by a meddling sister-in-law. Perhaps she was herself secretly in love with the guy. At the same time I had to admire the lady whose 'no' was final.

Cuauhtémoc gave me a look of understanding. I stroked his feathers and said to him appreciatively, "Tu sí comprendes."

"¿Es su mascota?" the woman asked, apparently sensing that the bird was a pet.

"Sí, es mi amiguito," I said, and told her the bird's story. The children turned their heads to listen. As I finished, a little boy tugged at the woman's sleeve and said, "Mommy, when can I have a rooster?"

A patch of white clouds hugged the slopes above. The engine was now laboring in low gear as we went steadily up, up and up, winding along hair-pin curves. Suddenly we were in dense fog. The sun was gone, visibility was nil and our vehicle slowed to an even slower crawl. I shivered slightly as the damp chill cut through my shirt.

A ghostly pine tree appeared by the roadside and crept past us. Then another. Overhanging branches brushed our heads, and a cone fell into my lap beside Cuauhtémoc. Then suddenly the fog was gone. We were above the clouds, in a world of pine forest. Golden shafts of sunlight angled down between the trees.

I inhaled the fragrance of the conifers, and no longer felt so far from Uruapan. There was another brief glimpse of Tancítaro. Its snowy crest glistened in the sunshine, making it appear very close as I looked out across the sea of clouds. It gave the illusion that I could have stepped out of this vehicle and floated over to it.

Despite the bouncing, the child on the woman's lap was dozing off. "Wake up," the woman said. "Owls eat little girls who fall asleep."

"Is she your daughter?" I asked.

"No, she's my niece, the daughter of my brother. He's the driver," she said, nodding towards the cab. The others, she told me, were also members of her extended family, who lived on three separate ranchos where they raised cattle and horses. There was no electricity, and it was an hour's walk for the children to the school they attended. Originally the family had come from a place near Coalcomán.

She, in turn, asked me about our travels, and I told her we were making a tour of Michoacán.

"Michoacán es bonito, ¿no?" she said.

"Sí lo es," I affirmed. Her comment had surprised me. I hadn't expected these mountain people to be aware of the natural beauty of their region. I'd been to many places in the U.S. where the locals didn't seem to appreciate the scenery.

The road began to descend, and there were no more glimpses of Tancítaro. I guessed we had crossed over to the Pacific slopes of this range, and I expected to catch a glimpse of the ocean which shouldn't be more than 50 kilometers away. But all I saw was pine forest.

At a fork in the road, the pickup turned off onto a trail which would presumably take these people to their ranches. We hurriedly said our good-byes as we got out to continue on to Villa Victoria.

We sat on some rocks by the roadside and peeled oranges as we gradually recovered from the intense bouncing and pounding to which we'd been subjected. I kept thinking of how the woman in the truck resembled my aunt whom I hadn't seen for well over a decade. Of course my aunt had blue eyes and blond hair while this woman had dark eyes and black hair. My aunt spoke Norwegian, and this woman Spanish. But when she spoke I felt I was hearing my aunt's voice. My aunt had gone back to Norway, and it was a while since I'd written to her.

I took out the map. That morning we'd ridden from Tepalcatepec to Coalcomán in less than two hours. Using a twig to measure with, I estimated the distance to be about sixty kilometers. From there to Villa Victoria was only twenty kilometers; it was now late in the afternoon and we weren't there yet. There is no relationship, of course, between straight-line distance and travel time in mountainous terrain.

Shadows were lengthening. The sun still shone on a hillside above us, but not much of the day was left. There was a sound like the flowing of water in a creek, though there was no sign of water nearby. It was probably the wind moving through the trees that made the sound.

MacClayne broke the silence. "After Villa Victoria, where do we go?" he asked.

"Aquila," I said, and circled it on the map. "And we'll reach the coast at La Placita."

"And after that?"

"We simply follow the coast to Lázaro," I said.

MacClayne took the map, studied it for a bit and said, "There's no road down the coast."

There was a brief pause.

"It's probably just not shown," I said.

"How much of a piece is it?"

I retrieved the twig I'd just discarded and used it to measure the coastal segment. "Two hundred kilometers," I said.

"What's that in miles?"

"A hundred and twenty."

"That's a good stretch of road," he said. "Do you think the cartographers would have overlooked it?"

"Well, they did, it appears."

"How could that happen?"

"This is the hinterland of México, basically unexplored and unmapped until quite recently," I said. "The people who've given us rides are recent settlers who've moved up here during the last decade or so."

"A last frontier?"

"Basically yes."

A slight breeze passed through the pines with a faint whistle that the forest reserved for travelers who ventured this way. Cuauhtémoc was scratching in the pine needles which carpeted the ground.

"So what makes you think there's a road along the coast?"

"There has to be," I said.

"Why does there have to be?"

"So people can get places."

"I don't follow your logic."

"No? Roads are a necessary part of modern infrastructure."

"I'm asking if there's one along the coast."

"I guess I'm not communicating."

"No, you're not."

I stared at a pine sapling in front of me and tried to contain my irritation rather than retort with some hasty comment.

MacClayne said nothing more. Cuauhtémoc was still scratching in the pine needles. In a roadcut nearby, I saw an outcropping of slate, the first metamorphic rock I'd seen in these mountains. I went over to study it and tried to get my mind off the irritating exchange with MacClayne. I felt sure the coastal road existed, but it struck me that I had presented my view in a rather dumb way. But what could I have said? After all, there was no evidence of my road. As I stood there, staring rather absent-mindedly at the slate and thinking about the coastal road, Cuauhtémoc joined me and took a peck at the rock, sharing my investigation.

In Britain this slate might have been mined for use as roofing material, in years past at least. MacClayne had been telling me about that just the other day. I wondered if they still roofed their houses with slate in Britain.

MacClayne was reading when we returned. The forest on the hillside above had become a deep, somber green; the sun was no longer on it. I glanced at my watch. Close to seven, and still no vehicle had passed. I took out a book and began reading, but before long I found myself squinting, struggling to make out the words which had suddenly become very indistinct on the page. I blinked my eyes and looked around. Night was nearly upon us. Twilight was very brief in the tropics and I could never quite get used to that.

I sighed, and, just as I was putting my book away, I heard the loud crash of a vehicle which came coasting and bouncing down to us. In the next instant I was blinded by bright headlights. I jumped up and waved my hand.

It turned out to be the bus which had left Coalcomán at four o'clock and had finally caught up with us.

"¿Qué tal?" "¿Cómo les fue?" Voices greeted us as we climbed aboard. It was a couple of fellows we'd talked briefly with back in Coalcomán when asking about the bus schedule. They grinned and asked us how our day had been.

"Pues muy bien," I said, and we began chatting, but not for long, because as the bus began lurching forward, and, on account of the road noise, conversation became nearly impossible. Inside the bus the din was far worse than sitting in the back of the open pickup; it was like being locked in an iron box which was being worked over by sledgehammers.

Hardly five minutes had passed before a patch of lights appeared in the dark hills below. Villa Victoria, no doubt. It couldn't have been more than a few kilometers away; if we'd known it was so close we could have walked instead of sitting there for so long.

The descent continued, quite rapidly in fact. We wound back and forth on switchbacks that went on and on, occasionally allowing glimpses of the village lights which, though not far, didn't seem to be getting much closer.

Cuauhtémoc shuffled restlessly. Poor bird, he was getting impatient. We'd been on this bus for only fifteen minutes, but the feeling of getting nowhere was tiresome.

The lights kept appearing and reappearing as we continued our way down the steep grade. Suddenly we passed a light, then another; we were driving down a village street. The bus stopped to let people out before heading on to the plaza.

"Do they have a hotel here?" I asked the driver.

"Two or three," he told me, "They aren't really hotels, but they do rent rooms. The nearest is here on the corner, another is a couple of blocks further on."

We got off, and as I translated that for MacClayne we noticed that all the houses looked dark and shut down for the night. It was only about seven thirty.

Across the street was a store which I took to be where the driver had indicated. We entered through a tall door in the thick adobe walls and stepped up to an ancient counter which could have been from the previous century. The room was lit by a single candle which strained to hold back the darkness.

An old guy came hobbling out. Actually, he was probably younger than MacClayne, but he seemed eternally old. He'd probably looked like this when he was twenty.

"Do you have a room?" I said.

"I have two. One is quite luxurious," he said, "Which do you want?"

"The cheapest," I replied. Spanish, like English, has a euphemism for cheap. Lo mas economico would have been the polite usage, but something about this guy didn't inspire me to such niceties. I was acquiring some of MacClayne's negative attitude, and I asked for 'lo mas barato.'

"That will be fifty pesos each."

"Can we see it?" I asked.

He led us through the door and into the courtyard and showed us a very tasteful, high-ceilinged room.

"This is fifty pesos?" I asked.

"a hundred each."

"You said fifty."

"This one's one hundred. But I do have one for fifty."

"Well that's the one we want to see," I said, putting a touch of irritation into my voice.

"I'll show it to you," he said, but first he went to find an "aparato."

MacClayne asked me, "Is this the room?"

"No, and it annoys me," I said, "I clearly told him we wanted the cheapest he had."

MacClayne shook his head.

I sucked in my breath and added, "My Spanish can't be that bad. Everyone else seems to understand me."

We stood there alone in the room for several minutes.

"What are we waiting for?" MacClayne asked.

"The guy went to get an aparato," I said.

"What's that?"

"Probably the Spanish word for apparatus."

"A thingamajig?" MacClayne suggested.

Finally the guy returned with an oil lamp. It was like the ones sold in doña Rosario's store.

"Are you sure you don't want this room?" he asked again.

"No."

"It's the very best," he said.

"Just show us the one for fifty."

This time he led us out to the street, and then through a wooden gateway to the courtyard of another house. Even by the light of the moon I could see that the rooms on one side were crumbling. The roof was caved in and a pile of rubble lay strewn in front.

The rooms across the courtyard looked better. The guy opened a door, held up the lantern, and we stepped into a room about half full of large grain sacks. Squeezed in between them were a couple of sagging cots. Each had a single blanket.

Despite its low ceiling that nearly brushed our heads, its bare mud-brick walls, its unswept dirt floor, and its current usage for storage, this was still a rather charming room in an old adobe house. I liked it.

"Is this the one for fifty pesos each?" I asked.

"Yes," the landlord replied

"Can I get an extra blanket?"

"There's a blanket on the bed."

"I can see that," I said, "But I want two. Can I get a second blanket?"

"Yes."

The place was overpriced. Even that elegant adobe room back in Tancítaro had only cost us thirty pesos each. But when you travel you often have to take what you find. I glanced at MacClayne, and he nodded.

"We'll take it," I told the guy, and we walked back to the store where I paid for both of us, a total of one hundred pesos.

"It's a hundred and fifty," the guy said.

"You said fifty each. That's a total of one hundred pesos."

"There are three of you," he said and pointed at the bird.

I shook my head but didn't feel like arguing, I reached in my pocket for another fifty. Cuauhtémoc chose that moment to hop onto the counter and take a crap.

MacClayne grinned broadly as I laid the final fifty pesos on the counter, next to the bird crap. The guy looked at the shit and took the money, but said nothing.

continued in Chapter 23

chapter 23

2008-11-18T14:00:00.007-08:00

Widely spaced street lights lit the cobble stones, casting our shadows ahead and behind us as we set out in search of supper. Crickets were chirping.

"The guy must be hoarding all that grain in hopes of a famine when he can sell it at ten times the normal price," MacClayne remarked. He was referring to all those sacks of corn that were stored in the room we'd just rented.

"I couldn't picture such an event nowadays, but who knows?" I said. "It's probably what the old miser has in mind."

We ambled down the quiet street, exchanging disparaging remarks about our new landlord, and, as we did so, whatever remained of MacClayne's irritation over the alleged lack of a coastal road seemed to dissipate. Thus ended our discord for that day, thanks to the annoyance caused us by the landlord. It was the old story of internal unity restored by the presence of a common enemy. Cuauhtémoc sat on my shoulder, perhaps contemplating the ironies of human society, of which he was an honorary member.

Faint lights could be seen in a few windows, but many houses were dark. The street was empty. Few people, and no cars. Not even the sound of a distant radio. There was only the chirping of the crickets.

"Has the whole town gone to bed?" MacClayne remarked.

It was only eight o'clock, but we began to wonder if we were going to find a place to eat. What made it especially difficult was that in a town of this size, it was always a problem knowing whether a place were a restaurant or not, because there weren't any signs. You could only tell by the presence of a lighted, open doorway which you had to peer into to determine whether it was a place of business.

I asked a lone passerby, and he directed us to a restaurant on the next block. It was two houses up from the corner. An open door led through a thick adobe wall into a room lit by several small lamps, one on each table. Each lamp was a small dish of oil with a wick, simple but tasteful. The soft light added an authentic touch of old-fashioned charm to the high-ceilinged room.

This was really just a room in a family home, but it faced the street so it had been easy to turn it into a restaurant. There were four small tables, each with a plain white table cloth, a dish of unrefined salt, and of course an oil lamp. We were the only customers; as we sat down, a middle-aged lady appeared. I said we'd have each a plate of "carne de res," but she didn't have that.

"¿Carne de puerco?" I asked.

She told me what she did have. It was a food name I didn't recognize.

"Just order it," said MacClayne. "We'll find out what it is."

I did, and then complimented the lady on her tasteful use of lamps. "This is nicer than electric lights," I said.

She smiled and said, "We don't have electricity."

"No? But you have street lights."

"Our generator's very small," she said. "There's not enough power for use in private houses."

I translated that for MacClayne and added, "And there I thought that old miser lived in the dark because he was too stingy to burn some wattage."

When the food came, it was carnitas, wrapped in tiny tortillas and deep-fried, served with salad and cream. I'd eaten them at don Pablo's boarding house where they were served on special occasions and considered a treat. I guessed that in this village the customers would be locals who came for something special they didn't prepare at home.

As always, I shared bits with Cuauhtémoc. He ate carefully and drank from his water glass without splashing, as though taking special care not to soil the clean tablecloth.

A well-built fellow of about MacClayne's age entered. "Buenas noches," he said to us as he sat down at a nearby table. We returned the greeting and thus began a conversation. The man had gray hair and blue eyes; he was a cattle rancher, he told us as we exchanged introductions.

"¿Es gallo de combate?" he asked, glancing at Cuauhtémoc.

The bird flapped his wings in a cocky way, as if to reply, "¡Sí lo soy!"

"Jubilado," I said. "Pero siempre muy gallo."

The rancher chuckled, and invited us to have a beer.

MacClayne shook his head slightly and looked at me. "Tell him I don't want any," he said.

In this society it would have been offensive to turn down a drink. MacClayne was probably aware of that, but he didn't know a graceful way around it. "We'd gladly have an atole," I said. "Or a soft drink."

So he treated us to "atole de tamarindo." It was a thick, syrupy, non-alcoholic drink made of the tamarind bean. MacClayne found it overly sweet, but otherwise good.

I let Cuauhtémoc have a taste of mine, though normally I avoided giving him sweet stuff since sugar wasn't good for him.

We continued our conversation and I asked the rancher about the town. Chinicuila had been the old name for it, he told us. It was built around 1900 when gold was discovered nearby.

"Are the mines still being worked?" I asked.

"Not any more. People raise cattle now," he said. "Mostly small ranches."

"How small?" I asked.

"Two or three head, never more than thirty. I have seven."

He'd gotten his start working in the U.S. during World War II, when Mexicans had been recruited to make up for the shortage of farm hands.

After eating, we went to see the plaza. I noticed a telephone café, a shop where customers could order coffee while waiting for a phone to become free, and once again it occurred to me to try to phone Chayo. The shop was closed now, perhaps for the day, perhaps because of storm damage to the trunk lines. I could try again tomorrow, though Chayo had probably already left on her trip.

In a store lit by oil lamps, we bought candles so we could read that night.

The crickets were still chirping as we headed back to our room. I kept thinking of how strange, almost primitive, it was not to have electricity. I remembered my grandmother telling about using oil lamps years ago in Minnesota, and I mentioned that to MacClayne.

"It was the same for us," MacClayne said, "There wasn't any electricity in Dundrennan. And not in Castle Douglas either."

That would have been in the 1930's, back when MacClayne was a wee laddie. It hit me again what a new thing electricity was; it became common throughout the world within living memory.

By the time we reached the hotel, we'd decided to read aloud to each other as we'd done before.

"I don't know if you've read any of Italo Calvino," MacClayne said while I lit a candle. I let some of the wax drip onto a broken dish I'd retrieved from the courtyard for use as a holder. Cuauhtémoc watched with apparent curiosity from his perch atop a pile of corn sacks. Perhaps he'd never seen anyone light a candle before.

"Italo? Sounds familiar," I said, and posted a second candle beside the first. Together they gave sufficient light to read by and cast a gentle, flickering glow on the brown mud brick walls. Although this room could hardly be called elegant, there was a cozy feeling about it among these sacks of grain. It was a good place for telling stories, even better than a campfire because we were protected from the elements.

MacClayne dug a paperback from his bag and passed it to me. "They're short stories," he said. "I wouldn't call them great, but I like them. They're set in the postwar period."

I sensed nostalgia in his voice. For MacClayne that had been a time when he was at last free to do what he wanted, after five long years of military service. He must've been about my age then, and, like me, just starting out in life on his own.

"Which one should we read first?" I said.

"The Pastry Thieves is good. I read it a few days ago, but I wouldn't mind hearing it again."

I found a comfortable place to sit, and, as I read, MacClayne leaned back on a grain sack to listen. Cuauhtémoc settled down on his perch and closed his eyes, seeming to visualize the story.

It was about a couple of burglars who broke into a bakery on a dark night with intentions of robbing the cash box. But the shop was full of delicious pastries, and the thieves fell to gorging themselves and forgot that they were supposed to be stealing the money.

"That would be hard to imagine in today's world of super abundance," I commented after finishing. "But I guess everything was pretty scarce back then?"

"It was. The war ended, but the shortages went on for years and years."

"My aunt used to talk about what it was like in Norway."

"It was that way everywhere in Europe. In Britain too."

"Those must have been awful times," I said, "And yet, when I hear about them, they almost sound like good times."

MacClayne sighed. "They were good times."

* * *

Only at bedtime did I remember that I'd forgotten to get those second blankets. Fortunately, there was a pile of empty grain sacks which served well enough, and with some I also fashioned a warm tent-like affair for Cuauhtémoc. I went to bed and fell asleep fantasizing about Chayo.

In the morning I awoke from a dream in which Chayo was cuddled up next to me and I had my arm around her. But I opened my eyes and discovered that I was fondling a sack of grain. I looked up at the rafters of the low ceiling, then at the pile of grain sacks on the other side of me. Cuauhtémoc was already up and active, pecking at a tear in one of the sacks from which a few kernels of corn had fallen.

Slowly I remembered where I was, in a miser's storeroom. As I got to my feet I realized I was slightly chilled. I shivered and peered over the top of the sacks. Across the room MacClayne was studying a Spanish phrase book.

"Buenos días," I said.

He glanced up, then grinned. "Buenos días."

"¿Cómo te amanesiste?" I said, continuing in Spanish.

"Muy bien," he said. "¿Y tu?"

"Con frío," I replied, and rubbed my arms, as I edged my way between the sacks to the door. I opened it, letting the fresh air and morning sunlight pour in.

My gaze fell upon the dilapidated rooms across the courtyard. Daylight revealed them to be in an even greater state of disrepair than I had thought the night before. The roof was fallen in and so were the walls. The courtyard was strewn not only with rubble, but even garbage. It struck me as sad that anyone fortunate enough to own an adobe house would maintain it so poorly.

Cuauhtémoc gave a low squawk; perhaps he shared my disapproval. Then, after a moment of hesitation, he flew past me and landed on the water pila where he took a drink. I followed him, stepping over the rubble and avoiding a board with sharp nails protruding upwards. I didn't have a mirror, but I didn't need any; I splashed cold water on my face and shaved. The bird preened his feathers.

When I reentered the room, MacClayne laid his book on a grain sack. "What's in these?" he said. "Wheat? Or corn?"

"Corn," I said. "Cuauhtémoc sampled some."

MacClayne grinned. "I hope he ate fifty pesos worth."

We exchanged a few comments about our landlord and then turned to discussing our plans for the day.

"Tonight we should be on a beach. A tropical beach," I said. MacClayne's eyes sparkled.

I spread the map out on a grain sack and scaled off the remaining distance to the ocean. As the bird flies, it was only forty kilometers. I estimated that it would be two or three times that on the winding roads of these mountains, but it still couldn't be more than a day's ride.

"Our first destination is Aquila," I said, pointing to a village about halfway to the coast. "We could have our breakfast here in Villa Victoria, stop for coffee in Aquila, and eat supper in the coastal village of La Placita."

The map showed a road that would take us there, although there was no indication of any coastal route from there to Lázaro, a distance of two hundred kilometers. That had worried MacClayne the previous afternoon and led to bad feelings, but maybe he'd just been in a bad mood. This morning he was cheerful and optimistic.

He glanced at the map and nodded. "Aquila. That means 'eagle', doesn't it?" he said.

"That would be águila, spelled with a g and accented on the first syllable," I said. "Aquila might come from the verb aquilatar, which means to assay an ore body. That's my guess anyway."

"Another old mining town? A colorful name for one."

We decided to ask the landlord about the bus schedule. Our theory was that he would know about transportation since his customers were transients. We also needed oranges; we could ask him where the local market was. So we got our things together to leave town, and then went to the shop where we'd found him the previous night, which was apparently a sort of general store.

"Aquila?" the landlord looked at me blankly.

"Yes, that's the next town, I believe?"

Still that blank look.

I tried again. "We're going to the coast," I said. "To the Pacific Ocean. Is there a bus?"

A look of comprehension appeared on his face. "You have to go to Colima," he said,

"Colima?" I repeated in surprise. Colima was the next state, and it was way off to the northwest--in almost the opposite direction of where we intended to go.

He turned to a map on the wall. "Here you are now, in Villa Victoria," he began, and tried to locate it on his map. But he was looking in Veracruz which was all the way over on the other side of México, hundreds of kilometers away.

I exchanged glances with MacClayne.

"The asshole can't read his own map," MacClayne remarked.

I smiled to myself and hoped the guy didn't understand English. Not that it mattered. He continued to fumble around on his map; he was now looking in Chihuahua.

"Never mind," I said. "I know where Colima is. Can you tell us where the marketplace is?"

"Right here," he replied, and waved his hand to indicate this shop in which we were standing. "I have a market."

Cuauhtémoc rustled his feathers slightly; he was getting impatient.

"I mean the produce market," I said. "We're looking for fresh fruit."

"I have fruit."

"You do?" I hadn't even thought of such a possibility. During my months in México I'd become accustomed to going to the marketplace for fresh produce. The guy led us to another part of the house. There he had a tiny but complete mini-supermarket of canned goods, tucked away in this room behind his general store.

"Looks like a bootleg operation," quipped MacClayne.

While I glanced around, wondering where the oranges might be, the shopkeeper went to a shelf and took down a can. "Fruta," he said.

"Fruta fresca," I objected. "Queremos fruta fresca."

"Sí la tengo," the guy insisted.

"¿Dónde?"

"Aquí," he held up two more cans of tinned fruit. The paper labels displayed beautiful pictures of peaches and pears.

"¡No!" I groaned. "Fruta fresca."

"¡Fresca!" MacClayne said indignantly. "¡Queremos fruta fresca!"

Cuauhtémoc added his squawk of indignation.

"¡Sí es fruta fresca!" the guy insisted. He followed us all the way to the door, waving a can of peaches in one hand and stewed pears in the other.

"Can you believe that," I said to MacClayne as we walked down the street towards the plaza. "He didn't hear a word we said!"

"Never pass up a chance to make a sale," MacClayne shook his head. "What an asshole!"

"Brain dead!"

Nevertheless, the incident left me with a vaguely uneasy feeling that my Spanish was somehow failing to communicate.

"Technically speaking," I said after some thought, "a chilled can of stewed pears from a refrigerator could possibly be served as fruta fresca. Maybe I should have said cruda, which literally means raw."

"You made yourself clear enough back there," MacClayne said. "We both did. When a guy doesn't understand it's because he doesn't want to understand."

"You know, I feel sorry for him." I said. "He's like a walking dead man. Probably never had a life, never went in search of a fabled city. I bet all he ever did was sell cans of stewed pears."

"The world is full of them," MacClayne declared. "Their only dream is to own a car and a TV set. And if they take a vacation they spend it in a luxury hotel where they pay a hundred dollars a day and have room service."

MacClayne went on to expatiate with relish and eloquence. I smiled to myself. How dearly MacClayne loved to express righteous indignation. Were he not an atheist, he might have become a Calvinist preacher--probably an itinerant one who traveled from place to place, denouncing the sins of sinners and raising visions of hellfire. I just hoped he'd stay sober for the duration of our journey.

I began to take notice of the buildings around us. MacClayne was still into his diatribe, but I tuned myself out. This was our first look at the town in daylight; what had been shadowy silhouettes the previous evening came alive as elegant buildings from the turn of the century. Every one was of adobe. It struck me as remarkable how one town might have nothing but ugly concrete pillboxes, while another preserved the beauty and tradition of the past.

MacClayne interrupted his sermon as we paused to admire a house that was outstandingly magnificent. Brick and rocks were included in the façade. This was quite unusual in even the finest of adobe buildings. A huge, room-length window was open above the street. There was no glass; window panes of that size had perhaps not existed back when this house was built. Inside, people were eating. There was no sign, but a tall door was open.

"Could it be a restaurant?" MacClayne said.

An inquiry established that it was, and we decided to have our breakfast there. But first we'd look for the produce market, and, afterwards perhaps, I could stop by the telephone café. Above all, we needed to ask about the bus to Aquila. The landlord's notion of having to go by way of Colima could no doubt be discounted as a case of map-illiteracy.

Soon we reached the plaza, which was surrounded by a dignified arcade appropriate to the town. Every building had character, except for one--the church. It looked brand-new, and up in the bell tower we could see that the walls were thin, which indicated that it was made of concrete.

"Looks like it's made of cardboard," I said.

"Like a movie set."

"Definitely a low-budget job."

"It doesn't fit in this town."

"The brain-dead miser must have been on the building committee."

After expressing sufficient disapproval, we continued on our way. Near the church was an outdoor market where we at last found our oranges. We selected four each; that was plenty for a day's journey. As I paid the vendor I asked for the bus depot, and was directed to a store across the plaza where tickets were sold. It turned out to be the same shop where we'd bought candles the evening before.

"When does the bus leave for Aquila?" I asked the ticket clerk. She was an intelligent-looking teen-ager.

"Aquila? We don't have any buses going there."

"We're going to the ocean. What bus should we take?"

"You have to go to Colima," she said. "The bus leaves at three o'clock."

"¿De veras?" I said unbelievingly. I was sure there must be some misunderstanding. "Colima is out of our way. Isn't there a more direct route?"

The teen-ager shook her head.

As we left I started to translate for MacClayne, but he'd apparently caught the drift.

"There's no bus for Aquila?" he said.

"Apparently not. So how do you feel about hitchhiking?"

"Did she say if there's a road?"

"I didn't ask her, but our map shows one."

"We'd better make sure."

I wished I'd thought to ask, but I didn't want to go back.

The telephone café was nearby. As we walked past, I saw it was open. Several people were in line to use the phones. We could come back later. Breakfast was first on the agenda.

Around the corner we saw the post office, and stepped in to ask about the road to Aquila.

"Es camino de herradura," a mail-clerk told us.

"A horse trail?" MacClayne asked me.

I nodded, slightly impressed that he knew the word "herradura," which means iron horseshoe. Or he might simply have guessed.

The clerk added that it was not well marked, and that it was easy to get lost in the mountain wilderness.

"Then what's the best way to get to the coast?" I asked.

"Take the bus to Colima," the postal clerk said.

So the brain-dead miser had been right after all. Our hopes for a bus to Aquila were gone, and now the road itself seemed to evaporate.

"Where is Colima?" MacClayne asked me when we were back on the street, continuing on our way to the restaurant.

"It's off the map."

"How's that?" he asked.

"Our map is only of Michoacán. Colima is the next state."

The restaurant with the impressive brick-and-stone facade was only a couple blocks from the plaza. We entered through the tall door, climbed a few steps, and found ourselves in a large, high-ceilinged chamber. A single, heavy, wooden table ran almost the length of the room, as in a banquet hall. On each side was an equally long bench. That was a slight inconvenience for Cuauhtémoc, so I asked the proprietor if he might have a chair with a backrest.

He brought out a tall, ancient, straight-backed piece and placed it at the head of the table. Cuauhtémoc took up his perch. I sat on his right, looking out through the open window, and MacClayne sat across the table, on the bird's left.

Everything about this place gave a sense of size and simplicity. The table was enormous, the ceiling high, and the paneless window huge. The exceptionally thick adobe walls were covered with white plaster, adorned only by a calendar displaying the singer Jorge Negrete clad in charro. Having hung there for nearly ten months by now, it was, as one might've expected, slightly faded and dusty.

"The very unpretentiousness of this establishment adds to the atmosphere," MacClayne said approvingly.

For the time being we had the place to ourselves. Pork cutlets was the house specialty. So that's what we had, and, though it cost a few pesos more than we were used to paying, MacClayne commented favorably on the taste and remarked that it was worth the price. That had to go on record as a major compliment, because, although MacClayne could be generous with his words, he was not so free with his money.

Like most meals in México, it was served with beans, rice and tortillas. Cuauhtémoc didn't seem hungry, presumably because he'd filled up on the miser's corn back in our hotel room. He drank water; I had to hold his glass up for him because his perch on the tall chair back put him beyond reach of the table.

Four or five fellows came in for a beer, and sat down next to us at this same long table. They were carrying on an animated conversation, except for one of them who appeared to have already filled his beer quota for the day. He occasionally interrupted the conversation with out-of-sync remarks that seemed to at times amuse his companions and at other times annoy them.

MacClayne and I finished our meal and ordered coffee.

A large black tomcat with a white spot on his forehead strolled out of the kitchen and paused to admire Cuauhtémoc's warrior plumage. The bird raised his hackles and glared down at the feline, who apparently decided that the owner of those tantalizing feathers was neither prey nor plaything. With a great display of nonchalance, he resumed his march towards the window. There, he leapt onto the sill and took up his station to watch passers-by on the street below. From time to time he glanced respectfully at the bird, whose perch was higher than his own.

The sleek coat of this feline indicated that he was well fed and cared for. MacClayne observed him with some interest and said, "You can tell a lot about people just by looking at their animals."

Cuauhtémoc gave MacClayne a smug look. Perched high at the head of the table, he sat as though presiding over a banquet, master of the house.

"¿Es gallo de combate?" a fellow across the table asked me. Another wondered if I'd be entering my rooster in an upcoming cockfight tournament. I told them the bird's story, how he'd come to be my friend, and that he wasn't ever going to fight again.

"You could make money off him," the inebriated one spoke up, slurring his words. He sat at the far end of the table.

"¡Martín!" another turned to rebuke him. "Can't you see he doesn't want to? Not everybody's out to make a quick peso."

"I was only saying he could," responded Martín defensively. "I didn't say he had to."

"That's the beauty of it," said another. "He could, but he doesn't want to."

The others nodded, commented approvingly and invited us to a drink. I said we'd have atole or soda, and silently hoped that Cuauhtémoc wouldn't demand a beer. He didn't, thank goodness. He seemed quite content to be the center of conversation.

MacClayne listened for a while, but soon began writing something, perhaps a poem. The conversation continued. The one they called Martín said little, but drank much. For the most part he sat immobile, bending only his elbow and stacking up empties on the table in front of him. The rest were more reserved with their drinking. Most were still nursing their first beer as our conversation drifted from topic to topic, from ranches to corn harvests and, as would be expected, the weather--the freak storm we'd been having. They seemed to know the region well, and I was about to ask about the roads when a pile of cans clattered to the floor and everyone turned to look at Martín.

The cat on the windowsill also looked at Martín, and so did Cuauhtémoc. Neither had jumped at the noise. MacClayne glanced up and smiled sympathetically. One of the company made a remark which brought laughs, and Martín reached down to retrieve the cans and carefully set them on the table in a well-ordered row. With that he retreated back into his own private world, leaving only his warm body at the table.

I asked my question about the way to Aquila. Maybe, just maybe, there was a road. I was still hoping to hear it did exist.

"Camino de herradura," said the one across from me. He'd been that way recently, and his information confirmed the other bad reports I'd heard. There were no bridges over the numerous ravines, and no vehicle could possibly get through. "Colima," he said. "Take the bus to Colima."

"From Colima, will we find a road along the coast to Lázaro?" I asked.

None of them had been that way. One thought there was a coastal road, another said it was a horse trail. The rest expressed diverse opinions, warning me of bandits and other inconveniences when suddenly they all fell silent.

A woman was standing at the far end of the table, facing Martín. She'd apparently just now come in the door, and the fellow seemed unaware of her presence.

"¡Martín!" she snapped in a low voice seething with anger. "¿Qué haces aquí?"

The unfortunate man turned to look at the woman and stared unbelievingly, with the lost look of a sad soul who has seen an angel at the wrong hour. The woman before him was small, thin and delicate, but nevertheless formidable. It occurred to me that she could best be described as shrewish.

"¡Borracho!" she hissed.

The rest sat with their eyes glued to the table.

"¡Borracho!"

"Inez, te quiero," the poor man mumbled.

"Me quieres. ¿Y para mi, te emborrachaste?"

"Te quiero mucho," he said with tears in his voice.

"¡Borracho!" And she gave him a slap that cracked the silence of the room.

"Te quiero," he repeated pleadingly.

She slapped him again. Blood trickled from his nose; the others remained silent, watching only out of the corners of their eyes. The tomcat on the windowsill looked away in embarrassment, and even Cuauhtémoc lowered his head in humility. Never had my bird appeared less cocky.

"Maybe we should go," MacClayne said to me in a low voice.

We paid the proprietor, who was also pretending not to notice. As we left and headed down the street, I could still hear the woman's voice: "¡Borracho! ¡Borracho!" Each rebuke was followed by the sharp report of a slap.

"I never expected to see that in México," said MacClayne.

"This is México--the way it really is," I told him, "Once you get past all that machismo you'll find a land of henpecked husbands."

Then I remembered that I was going to phone Chayo.

continued in Chapter 24

chapter 24

2008-11-18T14:00:00.006-08:00

There were four people ahead of me at the telephone café, so I wrote in my journal while I waited. Eventually my turn came, and this time I finally got through to Uruapan.

"¡Hola!" It was the voice of Chayo's nine-year-old cousin. "Buenos Días," I said, and then the line went dead--before I could even ask if Chayo were still in town. The telephone lines were apparently still under repair from the storm damage. Well, Chayo had almost certainly left for Chiapas by now, and so I hadn't really expected to be able to talk with her anyway, but I felt disappointed just the same, and Cuauhtémoc seemed to share my sense of disappointment. I gave him a hug and he put his head under my arm.

MacClayne had said he'd be waiting for me in the plaza. On the way there I stopped to buy a postcard, wrote Chayo a couple of lines and mailed it at the post office. Then I thought about our travel plans. It was about nine o'clock and the trail to Aquila could be an interesting hike. I hoped MacClayne would see it that way.

I found him at the far end of the plaza, sitting on a park bench reading The Persian Expedition. I saw that as a good omen; the story might put him in an adventurous mood, though it occurred to me that the 13th century novel The Quest of the Holy Grail might be even more appropriate.

"How did it go?" he said as I walked up.

"She already left town."

"So," he said after a respectful pause, "What are we going to do?"

"I suggest we hike to Aquila," I said.

"The horse trail."

"Yes."

"And if it rains?"

"There's hardly a cloud in the sky," I said. "It shouldn't rain today."

"What about tonight?"

"By tonight we'll be in Aquila," I said.

"Will we? The trail isn't even marked. Isn't that what they told us? We could spend days wandering in those mountains. We don't even have a compass."

"It's a risk we have to take."

"I don't understand why you want to go slogging through thirty miles of mud."

I was disappointed, but I could see that MacClayne didn't want to hike to Aquila, and there would be no persuading him otherwise. It would be an argument I wouldn't win.

"We could take the bus to Tecomán. That's in Colima," I said after a lengthy silence.

"Colima's another state?"

"Yes."

"How much of a detour would it be?"

"A hundred kilometers. Maybe a lot more."

"It's not on our map, is it?"

"No," I said. I'd already told him that, and was tempted to tell him he ought to pay attention.

"So we go to Colima," MacClayne said. "And where'll we be then?

"On the coast."

"In a jungle?"

I stared at a shop in the arcade in front of us and sighed. MacClayne was a poet and a dreamer, an Odysseus. But he also wanted to know where the god damn roads went.

"It's the way to Apatzingán," I said.

"Can we get through? That's what I'm asking."

We could reach the coast of Colima. That was reasonably certain. But from there we'd have to get back to Michoacán, on the ocean side of this mountain range. And once we'd done that, some two hundred kilometers of coastal route would still lie ahead of us. That was the critical segment for which our map showed no road at all--MacClayne had pointed that out the day before, and I knew it worried him. The obstacles ahead seemed formidable, but the very difficulties were making it important and giving it meaning.

"We've come this far," I said.

MacClayne nodded and stared into the same shop I was staring at. But he said nothing and we sat in silence.

This was the fifth day of our journey, and I thought of the afternoon when we set out from Uruapan, determined to act out this whimsy we'd invented about getting to our fabled city in the proper way. We could've taken that first class bus and have reached Apatzingán in two hours, but instead, we'd chosen to go by way of Tancítaro. Our own way. That was because the town at the end of an easy ride wouldn't have been our fabled and forbidden city. There would've been no Holy Grail awaiting us.

From Tancítaro village we'd intended to go straight down the mountain to Apatzingán. At that point our travel plan was still relatively simple, but it acquired new dimensions as we put it into practice. Complications caused us to add another loop that brought us to the valley town of Buenavista, which put us only thirty kilometers from Apatzingán. There we again had the choice of an easy ride, which we'd rejected. Instead, we'd decided that a Grail city must be entered through the front gate--never by a back door.

So now we sat here in the plaza of Villa Victoria, staring at shops in the arcade and silently contemplating our next move. I didn't try to argue or even remind MacClayne of the hopes, dreams and fantasies which had brought us here. At this critical moment, persuasion would only backfire because he was a stubborn Scot for whom independent mindedness ranked second only to frugality. Even to influence his decision could only rob him of integrity. His decision would have to be his, just as mine had to be mine.

The silence dragged on.

I glanced at Cuauhtémoc. He was gazing up at a white bird which was passing over the plaza. It brought to mind the avian which had descended into the pond back in Uruapan, the day we began our journey.

MacClayne had also noticed the white bird. The three of us watched it circle overhead and finally alight on a red tiled roof above the arcade. For a brief moment the bird remained perched, looking in our direction. "Are you coming or not?" he seemed to be saying.

Then it took to the sky and was gone. Cuauhtémoc gripped my knee tightly with his talons and turned his head to look at me.

"The answer to your question is yes," I said to MacClayne. "I think we can get through. In fact I'm very sure we can--just so long as we don't break the golden thread."

MacClayne looked at me, perhaps waiting for me to say something more.

"Our connection with the white bird," I added. Cuauhtémoc was now looking at MacClayne.

"There's a Scottish folk tale about a white bird," MacClayne said. "She guides a traveler across rugged mountains, leading him by a golden thread. I guess you know the story too?"

"It was you who told it to me."

"I suppose I did, didn't I. It's one I hadn't thought of for years. Strange though, it suddenly came to me in Uruapan, when we were sitting by that pond. The place you called the Spring of Urð."

MacClayne kept gazing at the red-tiled roof where the avian had perched the moment before. At last he grinned. "The white bird has graced us with her presence," he said in his tongue-in-cheek manner. "She must be bidding us to the fabled city."

I laughed, not because I thought it was funny, but because I was so overwhelmingly glad to hear him say that. Cuauhtémoc gave a sharp flap with his wings.

"Whatever's in Colima might be worth a look," MacClayne said in a more serious tone. "And if we can't get through, we can always come back the way we came."

And so we set out for Colima.

Since the bus wouldn't leave for several hours, we decided to hitchhike. The town was set back from the main road, and we spent the next quarter of an hour walking up hill to get to the turnoff.

On the way, we paused to look back at the town below us and admire the mosaic of red-tiled roofs and verdant foliage which filled the small valley. I hadn't realized before how many trees there were in the town, practically concealing a good deal of it from here.

Along the far side of the town rose a steep cliff of bare rock, and along its base there flowed a river. Several blocks off to the right of the plaza stood a dark shape which we guessed to be the ruins of an old church, a very large one.

We rounded a bend and the town disappeared. Soon we found ourselves at the junction with the main road. It was an unpaved, washboard surface. Would there be any more traffic than yesterday? No doubt we'd be here a while.

Broadleaf trees and bushes grew thickly around us. I'd expected to see pines, but there weren't any. Strange. We'd been in a pine forest when darkness fell upon us the evening before; that was just as the bus had arrived and brought us to Villa Victoria. I recalled how we'd descended the mountainside, watching the lights below till we finally arrived. Apparently we'd dropped below the pine tree line, which in these latitudes seemed to be at approximately 1500 meters--about one mile above sea level.

Rising or dropping from one elevation to another brought abrupt changes in vegetation. So did crossing a mountain ridge. We now seemed to be on the Pacific side, which got the rain, and the lush green foliage around us had replaced the dry grasses that covered the hills we'd passed through the day before.

I also recalled, shortly before reaching Villa Victoria the day before, having seen slate, a metamorphic rock. Here, on the roadbed where we stood at this moment, we were on fissile shale, which is sedimentary. The laminae were twisted in every direction. Beside me the strata stood vertically on edge, and only five meters away they were almost horizontal.

Today the sun was shining on us in a new and intriguingly different environment.

"Come and look at this!" MacClayne called up to me from a creek bed below. I stepped down towards him and Cuauhtémoc flew past, arriving on the scene ahead of me.

MacClayne had discovered a number of large stones lodged in the shale along the creek bank. Several were the size of a fist, and one was almost as large as a person's head. "How do you suppose they got here?" he said.

"The shale must have been deposited as sediment on an ancient sea bottom, quite a distance from shore," I said. "It's mud rock consisting of tiny particles of clay which drifted out to sea as muddy water and eventually settled to the bottom. But the stones were too heavy to have gotten carried out like that."

My explanation probably only confirmed what MacClayne suspected. These stones in a bed of shale were an unusual find, and I was impressed that he recognized them as such.

At that moment a vehicle drove by on the road above us, raising a cloud of dust. A potential ride lost.

"We missed it."

"Doesn't matter."

We continued our discussion of MacClayne's discovery.

"Maybe these rocks were washed out to sea, enmeshed in the roots of a large tree," I suggested.

"And then this region got uplifted, I suppose?"

"Right."

Cuauhtémoc scratched and pecked at a rock which was nearly as large as he was.

"Or could they have been dropped from an iceberg?" MacClayne said.

I paused to think for a moment. "Not likely," I said. "This shale is probably something like a hundred million years old, and there probably wasn't any ice back then."

"No?"

"Except for the last million years, icebergs and glaciers have been a rare thing in geologic history. These are strange times in which we live."

"You mean sandy tropical beaches under a warm sun was the norm?" MacClayne said with a grin.

"That's what the rock record seems to indicate," I said. "Of course there weren't any humans around to enjoy it back then. We're part of this ice-age anomaly that's been going on for the last million years."

"You think the earth will ever be like that again?" he said, sounding almost wistful.

"I don't know. Some meteorologists speculate that we could have a major climate change in the near future due to a buildup of carbon dioxide and other gasses in the atmosphere. But from what I've heard, it wouldn't be anything to look forward to."

MacClayne nodded, then said, "I read something about that in the Bay Guardian just as I was leaving San Francisco on my way to Uruapan. The 'greenhouse effect,' I think they called it. They thought this unseasonable storm we were having was a symptom of it."

"It's frightening," I said.

"If they're right, we're heading for a disaster. What do you think the chances are?

"I have no idea. In my geology classes I learned to look at rocks, not study the sky," I said. "I've been talking with Chayo.
She has a foreboding about the way humans are abusing the earth, polluting the land, the water and the sky. She says the earth will fight back and reject humanity. I fear she could be right."

"She's some kind of shaman, isn't she?"

"I suppose one might call her that," I said guardedly. I was a bit worried that he might dismiss her as a witch. To shift the subject slightly I said, "There's an ancient Scandinavian foretelling of a cataclysmic event called Ragnarøk. The sun turns black, and what follows is drought, famine and war."

"There seems to be a universal instinct that we're destroying ourselves. But I suppose nobody's going to do anything about it till it's too late. Everybody wants two cars and five TV sets, and when they get that they want more. How do you stop such a thing?"

"We all need to be more frugal," I agreed.

The two of us went on to discuss and extol the virtues of Old World frugality, which was so native not only to Scotland, but also in my estimation to Scandinavia. Frugality, frugality. Mankind must be more frugal. That was the Scots' solution to the impending disasters that awaited humanity.

The frugality theme struck us both as a bit humorous and the discussion returned us to a much better mood. Meanwhile, no vehicles were coming, and we began to think of what a beautiful, interesting town Villa Victoria was.

"So maybe we should go back and stay another night there," I suggested.

MacClayne thought for a moment. "Okay, if we can find a different hotel."

"I was told there are one or two others."

We started back, feeling the joy of vagabonding, the freedom to spend an extra day or two where we wanted. Villa Victoria was almost like a new town below us as we descended the hill. And now we could investigate those mysterious ruins that we'd seen in the distance. It wouldn't have been right to leave without visiting them.

First we looked for another hotel, and found one across the street from where we'd eaten breakfast. The landlord was a cheerful, robust fellow in his forties. He showed us a small, low-ceilinged room with a dirt floor. In it were two cots and two chairs. There was no whitewash on the walls, just the bare, brown adobe brick. Nevertheless, it was a cozy little room and had its charm; it was similar to the one we'd stayed in the previous night, but without the grain sacks or the miserly, brain-dead landlord.

Outside our door was a chirimoyo sapling on which a few green fruit were beginning to form. Instead of the usual second row of rooms across the way, an adobe wall separated the courtyard from the next property.

The price amounted to less than half of what we'd paid the previous night, and the landlord gave us extra blankets. With one I intended to make a small shelter for Cuauhtémoc to use that night.

We then set out to see the ruins, which turned out not to be ruins at all, but a single huge megalith, the size of a cathedral. Though weathered black on the outside, a broken fragment revealed a fresh surface which was reddish brown. It looked like an igneous blob, completely out of place among these mountains of shale.

"So what is it?" MacClayne asked.

"I don't know," I said.

"You don't know," MacClayne repeated dryly.

Better to let it pass, I thought, but just the same it rankled me, and a moment later I said, "You know I could've tossed out some ten-dollar technical jargon for that rock--that's what a good many geologists do when they don't know something, but I don't want to pretend I know something when I don't, and I don't see why I should have to."

"I don't understand what you're accusing me of," he said. "Did I say something wrong?"

"Well, you're implying that I should've known what sort of rock that was."

"I was hoping to get information. You didn't seem to have it. That's all. I don't understand why you're upset."

MacClayne seemed to be disclaiming any criticism of me. I wondered if I'd overreacted. We continued on, mostly in silence, visited the river gorge, then leisurely strolled about on the cobblestone streets. All the houses were of adobe; some were large and elegant; others were small and humble. The town was a beautiful, living picture of the past. But we didn't talk much about it. Our irritated exchange had marred an otherwise good moment.

Eventually we found ourselves back at the plaza, next to the ugly concrete church which was the town's only eyesore.

A well-located park bench offered a view of the arcade, and we sat down on it with our backs to the cardboard cathedral and took in the old-fashioned atmosphere. Nearby was a newsstand where I bought Uno Mas Uno, a México City daily. It was two days old. Around the corner was a cinema with movie posters. Despite the isolation and lack of indoor electricity, this town had many of the trappings of the current decade.

I returned to sit on the park bench by MacClayne. He watched the activity of the plaza while I paged through the two-day-old daily. From somewhere behind us I could hear a radio playing El rey, a popular song by José Alfredo Jiménez.

The sky was amost empty of clouds, then I remembered that it hadn't rained all day. Maybe the storm was coming to an end. A weather report in my newspaper indicated that as of a couple days ago it was expected to wind down.

Finally we returned to our hotel. MacClayne went to sit in the courtyard by the chirimoyo sapling, and began to write in his notebook. Perhaps he was composing a poem.

I went to ask the landlord for some extra blankets, and while doing so got into a conversation with him. He was a well-informed person who had followed the outcome of the recent war in Vietnam and President Nixon's impeachment.

He also knew a lot of local lore, and in the course of our talk I told him about my mistaking the megalith for the ruins of a huge building. He chuckled, then told me it was a body of iron ore. A mining company had sent engineers to look at it, he said, but nothing had come of it. Perhaps the deposit was too small, or the hauling distance too great. Scattered throughout these mountains were several ore bodies like it; a very large one was being mined on the coast near Lázaro.

So that's what it was. I was slightly embarrassed at having failed to identify it as such myself. I wondered how many of my classmates would've passed that test.

MacClayne was still sitting by the chirimoyo tree, reading. I went inside our room, set the blankets on one of the beds and sat down with my journal.

The subtle criticism of my expertise that MacClayne had expressed back at the megalith continued to nag at me. It was a unjustified barb that had seemed to arise from nothing. Perhaps the uncertainty about the roads was continuing to worry MacClayne and make him irritable.

Was it really worth mentioning in my journal? I glanced up and discovered Cuauhtémoc looking over my shoulder. My bird, my beautiful bird. His presence warmed my heart.

After updating my journal, I read some more of my newspaper, then lay back on my cot and dozed off. I was in a pine forest and there was snow on ground, but the air was warm. Cuauhtémoc was with me as usual, but he was standing on a rock and I knew something was about to happen. All of a sudden he took to the air and flew upwards. Even in the dream I knew that no rooster could fly very high, and I was surprised. But he kept on flying higher and higher, till at last he disappeared among the tree tops. Chayo then appeared. "Did you really think he was just a chicken?" she said.

At that I awoke with a start. Cuauhtémoc was on the cot beside me. He put his head under my arm, and then I glanced at my journal which I'd left on the chair. Once again, Cuauhtémoc had crapped on it.

"¡Por tus travesuras te quiero mas!" I said. For your mischief I love you even more.

With Cuauhtémoc in my arms, I went to the door and looked out into the courtyard. At the far end were some flowers in bloom. MacClayne was still reading. But he wouldn't be reading for much longer, for the sun was gone from the sky overhead and about to set. I watched the colorful flowers and the green leaves as they faded into the darkness.

This would be our second evening in Villa Victoria. We got ready and ventured out for dinner. The place where we'd had breakfast was closed, and so was the one where we'd eaten the night before. Our landlord had recommended a place on the far corner of the plaza. "The lady there makes good pozole," he'd told me.

Like the other establishments of this town, there was no sign or shingle, just the open door of a high-ceilinged room. It was well lit with a gaslight, and that's how we found it so easily, because everything around it was so dark. It was nearly full of customers. A single small table remained unoccupied.

"People tell me you have good pozole," I said to the proprietress. She was a portly lady in her forties.

"That I do," she smiled proudly. Then her eye fell on Cuauhtémoc who sat on my arm, and the smile froze on her face.

"The bird will just have water," I said.

"Yes, of course," she said, but in a tone which implied that roosters didn't normally dine in her establishment.

"We'll have water too," I added. I was slightly embarrassed and felt compelled to say something. This was a slightly classier restaurant than we were used to. I hoped the bird wouldn't do anything to embarrass me, like crapping on the floor or demanding a beer.

We sat down at the unoccupied table in the usual fashion; MacClayne on one side, me facing him, and Cuauhtémoc on the third.

"Did you find out what's on the menu?" MacClayne asked me.

"Pozole," I said.

"What's pozole?"

"It's soup with meat and corn. Looks like hominy. We had some back in Uruapan."

"Find out what else she has."

"But pozole is her specialty."

"Just because someone told you she makes good pozole doesn't mean we have to eat just that. Ask what else she has."

So I asked, and the lady recited a list of foods.

"I don't recognize a single item," I said to MacClayne. "Why don't we just keep it simple and have pozole?"

"The lady has other foods, doesn't she?"

"Yes."

"Then I'd like to try something different."

Among the items offered in this establishment was something called flautas. Without asking what flautas might be, I ordered us each a dish.

"You know a lot about México," MacClayne said after a brief silence. "But you don't seem to know much about the food."

"I don't pretend to know. I just eat what there is."

"Food is part of a culture," he said.

"I'm sure it is."

"It's also part of the language."

"It's not a part of the language which interests me."

"Knowing food is part of being a competent, well-rounded person," MacClayne went on.

"Then I guess I'm just incompetent."

"I don't know if one should call himself incompetent. It's rather demeaning to talk that way about oneself."

"Can we just eat?"

"The food isn't here yet."

"Well, it soon will be. And for now, if you'll excuse me," I said, and began writing in my journal.

"Whatever you want to do," he said, obviously determined to have the last word.

Cuauhtémoc looked at MacClayne reproachfully, reminding him that this was no way to talk at the dinner table in a nice restaurant. Then he dipped his beak into his water glass and drank, but with finesse, taking care not to spill on the tablecloth.

When the flautas arrived, they were sort of like tacos, though tubular in shape. They were served with guacamole and a salad of grated cabbage. It was a gourmet meal and seemed to confirm my conjecture that there were few transients in this town, so that restaurants were frequented by locals who normally ate at home but wanted specialized treats.

Nevertheless, although I'd managed to avoid another quarrel, MacClayne's barbed remarks had soured the ambience of our meal. We ate in silence, finished up in silence, eventually left the restaurant in silence, and headed back along the arcade in silence.

As we approached a corner, Cuauhtémoc perked up his head to check out a person who was coming towards us, and then brushed against the sleeve of my jacket as he passed by.

"Wasn't that the guy ...?" said MacClayne, looking back over his shoulder.

"I truly think it was," I replied.

"He didn't even see us."

"Probably left his brain in a can of stewed pears."

"Fruta fresca," MacClayne recalled with cynical amusement and went on to recite his well-rehearsed opinions of shopkeepers. I then expounded on the brain-dead members of mankind, and MacClayne followed that with an eloquent discourse on postal clerks, shipping clerks, incompetent military officers of the British Empire and the useless hide-bound aristocracy of old Scotland. Nor did he fail to add a lengthy curse for Bonnie Prince Charlie, the 18th century pretender who led the Highlanders to disaster at Culloden Moor back in 1746.

At length our discussion returned to personalities closer at hand--the seller of canned pears, and the builders of the cardboard cathedral which stood ungracefully at one end of the plaza.

By the time we'd reached our room, our camaraderie was reestablished and the unity of our expedition reassured. Our differences of the day had been forgotten, and I was by now wondering how I could've been so annoyed over such trifles.

Communication between MacClayne and myself having been restored, we amicably resumed our speculations concerning the fabled and forbidden city, expressing at the same time our hopes for wonderful adventures along the way. In a day or two we'd reach the Pacific Ocean.

"A sunlit world of beaches and palm trees," said MacClayne.

"We'll be strolling barefoot on the sand by the waves."

MacClayne recalled the day his ship docked in the Canary Islands and he became a beachcomber. "A world flooded with sunlight," he remembered nostalgically, a happy smile on his face.

Cuauhtémoc was watching MacClayne. As usual, he'd taken over the backrest of the chair, leaving the cots for us to sit on.

"He likes to hear you talk," I said. "Perhaps he's also dreaming of the sunshine."

MacClayne glanced at the bird, and I continued, "You notice how he pays attention when we talk?"

"He does seem to listen up," MacClayne said.

"Sometimes I read poetry to him," I said. "Originally I did that to practice my Spanish elocution and enunciation. Then I noticed that he seemed to be listening and enjoying it. If I'd stop, he'd sometimes nudge me with his beak, urging me to read on."

"I've heard of birds and animals who got used to hearing the sound of human voices."

"At times he seems to understand what's being said."

"I'll take some convincing on that," said MacClayne. "Even so, he's a remarkable bird."

"He is," I said proudly.

"Anyway, maybe we should read something now?"

"Would you like that, Cuauhtémoc?" I asked, and the bird looked at us, full of attention and anticipation. Then I remembered that MacClayne had been jotting something down that afternoon. "Did you write a poem today?" I asked.

"Yes," he said. "It was inspired by an incident that happened some years ago. Seeing the white bird this afternoon brought it to mind." He then recited the poem he'd written in honor of an avian who'd once been his guest.

Once, in some peculiar shard of time,
an egret entered my garden.
White and stately.
All serpent-neck and beak,
his elegant presence arrived.
Stayed for weeks,
beyond summer into fall.

continued in Chapter 25

chapter 25

2008-11-18T14:00:00.005-08:00

The next morning there was hardly a cloud in the sky. It was the kind of day that makes you want to get out and explore new worlds, a perfect day for our trip to Colima.

In addition to the afternoon bus, there was also one at six in the morning. But we'd slept in and missed it. After all, we were on vacation, and an important part of being on vacation is having fun. Getting up before six a.m. is not fun.

Cuauhtémoc had also slept in this morning. MacClayne was sitting on the edge of his cot studying his Spanish phrase book and I'd just returned from shaving at the pila when the sleepy-eyed rooster finally stepped out of the blanket lean-to I'd fashioned for him and crowed to belatedly announce the day.

"Huevoncito," I chided the bird. "Do you know it's eight o'clock?"

MacClayne looked up from his book, grinned for a moment at the bird, and then said to me, "¿Estás listo?"

"Sí," I replied. "Listo."

"Entonces. Para Colima."

The restaurant with the elegant brick-and-stone facade was open for business. But first we'd go to the market.

We crossed the plaza, expressed our disapproval once more of the ugly concrete church and were selecting oranges at the produce market. I was holding up a beautiful golden specimen for Cuauhtémoc to give his peck of approval to, when a dreadful screeching assailed us from the plaza. Music?

We looked around, but saw nothing at first.

"Is that a record or is it Mariachis?" MacClayne said.

"It must be live music," I said. "No record could be that awful."

Cuauhtémoc let out a low, deep, extended squawk, his equivalent of a groan. Then we saw it. A band was marching down the plaza, followed by a wedding party. The band was the most out-of-tune bunch of musicians I'd ever heard. They were so bad that they were downright entertaining, and we paused to listen. When they reached the other end of the plaza they disappeared into the ugly cardboard church.

We finished our orange buying and headed back to eat breakfast. Inspired by the off-key music, MacClayne recalled a social event he'd once attended where the musicians were as out of tune as these, but there'd been so much booze that nobody seemed to mind or even notice. As we reached the restaurant he broke off his story and we paused once again to admire the stately facade.

We entered and sat down at the long banquet table. Today the high-backed chair didn't seem to be available, so Cuauhtémoc had to perch on the bench beside me. The poor bird strained and stretched to peek over the top of the table. It was certainly a lesser position than the one to which he was accustomed, but he put a good face on the matter and bore it with dignity.

The pork cutlets were as good as the day before. We ate leisurely, and had coffee afterwards, followed by refills. After all, we didn't know for certain how soon we might reach another place where we could again drink coffee, so we indulged while we could. At last Cuauhtémoc hopped up on my arm; it was his way of letting us know that it was time to hit the road.

We began our hike up the hill towards the turnoff, but before we reached it we heard a vehicle approaching from behind. It was a large truck with a canopy over the back, and it stopped for us.

Cuauhtémoc hopped in the back, then MacClayne and I climbed in after him, and found ourselves packed in among a large number of people, many wearing white shirts and even neckties. Several girls wore colorful dresses. Bridesmaids? This had to be the wedding party we'd seen in the plaza, the one with the incredibly awful music. A few boxes served as seats for some; most sat on a canvas which covered the metal floor. There were several cases of beer, and the fellow beside me was reaching for a can. His lips were swollen and his eye was blackened, but there was something very familiar about him.

It was Martín, of course, and he appeared to be as drunk now as he'd been in the restaurant the day before. He peered at me for a moment, then muttered something I didn't catch.

"Buenos Días," I replied, and glanced at the road behind us. A cloud of dust was rising in our wake.

We'd passed the junction and were now on the main road, coasting down a steep grade. That much I could tell by looking out through the open back; I couldn't see what was up ahead because of the tarp that covered the top, sides and front. The truck was picking up speed and bouncing violently. Suddenly it slammed almost to a halt, and I grabbed the tailgate. Others clung to whatever was nearest them; most went sliding forward, then to one side and were squeezed in tightly against the bridesmaids who sat towards the front. The trailing dust cloud suddenly caught up and poured in from behind.

Peering back through the dust I saw we were rounding a sharp curve, now at a crawl. A moment later we were again gaining speed, bouncing and lurching from side to side. But we were unable to outrun the dust.

The tarp was no doubt intended as protection in case of rain. Unfortunately, the open rear end sucked in the dust, which swirled about, filling the air and covering everyone, even the bridesmaids in their colorful dresses.

How could there be so much dust after so much rain?

"The stoor!" I said to MacClayne, shouting to make myself heard above the din of the bouncing and crashing. "Is this enough to make the crows fly backwards?" MacClayne grinned and said something in reply, but I couldn't hear him.

I was sitting in something wet. It was beer from a can that someone, perhaps Martín, had dropped.

There was another sudden braking; this time people were partially prepared for it. As we slowly rounded the bend, the bouncing and crashing momentarily ceased. Martín tipped his can back and took a swig, then turned to me.

"Ya no tomo." Slurring his words thickly, he told me he no longer drank.

We again gained momentum, bouncing and crashing loudly. People were coughing from the ever-thickening dust, but Martín continued to talk, his throat well lubricated. I caught only words and phrases, but enough to get the drift: He loved his dear Inez. No sacrifice was too great for Inez. Inez's happiness meant everything. For Inez, he'd even given up booze.

Martín paused to take another long draught, then hung onto both tailgate and beer can as we braked to another near-halt. The beer in which I was sitting had soaked into my trousers.

The road behind us continued to twist and turn through endless hairpin curves as Martín rambled on, pausing only for draughts of refreshment. He'd never touch alcohol again, he assured me, not for as long as he lived. On this occasion, however, he'd found himself obliged to temporarily suspend his pledge. It was traditional to get drunk at wedding feasts, he explained, and sobriety would be an insult to the bride.

I hadn't heard of such a requirement before, and I glanced around see to how traditional the others might be. Although a couple of guys had beers in their hands, several people were drinking sodas, and everyone within hearing distance was grinning broadly. It appeared that poor Martín was almost alone in his effort to uphold the honored traditions of Michoacán.

"Hasta los gallos toman," he declared, saying that even the roosters get drunk, and reached for yet another beer.

I glanced at Cuauhtémoc, but the bird wasn't there. I looked at the dust cloud behind us and pictured him somewhere back on the road. Not again! Panic shot through me.

"¡Mi gallito!" I shouted at the top of my lungs. Somehow I had to get the truck stopped so I could get out and search for him. "¡Mi gallito!" I shouted again. All eyes turned towards me.

Then a bridesmaid in a beautiful red dress held up the bird and said something. I only saw her lips move, but people near her smiled and chuckled as they passed the bird back to me.

"¡Travieso!" I scolded him when he was finally back in my arms. I vaguely noticed that the truck hadn't braked to any sudden near-halts for a while now. The bouncing had also diminished, and the engine was roaring; we seemed to be cruising along on a flat surface.

Moments later the truck came to a full stop, and someone told us this was as far as they were going on the road for Colima. MacClayne and I got out and watched as the vehicle turned off onto a very narrow road that was hardly more than a trail. It disappeared into the brush, the omnipresent cloud in its wake.

It was strange to be standing there without motion or noise in the dusty silence; I struggled briefly to regain my land legs. Cuauhtémoc calmly shook off the dust; it didn't bother him. He even took dust baths from time to time.

MacClayne and I exchanged further comments on the "stoor" and brushed off our clothing as best we could. One leg of my blue jeans was soaked in beer and now coated in mud. Even the leaves of the bushes around us were brown with dust.

"The guy sitting next to you was one we saw in the restaurant, wasn't he," said MacClayne. "He would've been at home in the Falkland Islands."

"With the drinking, you mean?"

"Yes, the one thing to do on the islands was drink. Did I ever tell you there was more alcohol consumed per head of population on the Falkland Islands than anywhere else in the British Empire?"

"I believe you have," I said and smiled to myself. Being the storyteller that he was, he no doubt told these things many times and forgot where, when and to whom he'd told them.

We began walking down the road. Dense brush with an admixture of thorns closed in on both sides; we were going through a tunnel of vegetation. We'd been dropped into a briar patch. In contrast to the steep hill we'd been descending, we were now on the floor of a narrow valley, wedged in between mountains. Soon we came to a tiny rivulet which was barely moving; the water lay green and slimy. The soft ground was dented with hoof marks and covered with cow crap.

"I don't think I want to wash my face in that," I said.

MacClayne shook his head in regretful agreement. Perspiration streaked the brown dust on his face, and I imagined that was how I looked too.

I caught a faint whiff of alcohol. My muddy, beer-soaked trousers? Or fermenting vegetation perhaps? Cuauhtémoc sat on my arm, but he was unusually quiet, and the peaceful look on his face was suspiciously serene. Then he hiccuped.

So that was what the bird had been doing during those brief minutes when he'd been out of my sight in the back of the truck!

"¡Pájaro de mi alma!" I exclaimed. "Don't you know that you could die of liver ailment?"

The bird gave another hiccup. Otherwise he appeared content, and liver problems seemed far from his mind. MacClayne was saying something. "Pardon?" I said.

"Not exactly the New Jersey turnpike, is it?" he said. We'd been walking for some time by now and no vehicles had passed.

"I guess not," I said.

"Is something bothering you? You seem preoccupied."

"Just thinking," I said. "Is it true that drinkers die of liver ailments?"

"They don't generally live to an old age."

"Exactly what do they die of?" I asked. We were stepping carefully around the edge of a large mud puddle that covered almost the entire width of the road.

"Alcohol is slow poison to every organ in the body," he said. "And most drinkers smoke. Cigarettes kill more alcoholics than booze."

I wondered if I should at least be glad my bird didn't smoke.

"Why do you ask?" he said.

"My rooster drinks too much."

"Just don't give him any."

"It's not that easy," I said.

"Well, I'm sure he's not hiding bottles."

"No, certainly not," I said, and forced a smile. MacClayne had no idea how adept the bird was at scrounging drinks, and since he probably didn't know what had happened in the truck, I didn't feel like telling him.

"How did he get started?" MacClayne asked after a pause. "It does seem unusual for a rooster to have an alcohol problem."

"It was probably the guys he lived with during his career as a fighting cock. They were heavy drinkers and when they drank, they shared with him."

"People who are cruel to birds are not going to be concerned about their health."

"What do you mean cruel?"

"Isn't it obvious?" he said. "Anybody who uses fighting cocks has got to be brutal."

"In their own way they were kind, loving and caring," I said. "There was an innocence about them."

"Innocence? I'll take some convincing on that. But of course I don't know them. I don't recall meeting them at don Pablo's."

"No, you didn't. They moved out a couple of months before you came."

Up ahead was a small sunlit clearing, but as we got closer we saw that the grass was parched by the sun rather than warmed and nurtured. There were some beehives. We sat down across the road from them, at a safe distance where we could watch the bees come and go. Their gentle humming gave a touch of summer to this otherwise deserted, almost desolate scene.

The clearing provided an opening in the canopy of brush which allowed me to look upwards and see a steep mountainside. It was also covered with thick vegetation. I sensed another steep mountain on the other side of us, but I couldn't see much in that direction because of the brush.

We each took out an orange and began peeling. MacClayne recalled a wedding that took place during his sojourn in the Falkland Islands.

"It was held at Port Stanley," he said, "the only town in the islands. Truly a bleak and desolate place. One of our workmates fell in love with a local girl and everyone was invited to the wedding."

Cuauhtémoc had been a short distance up the road, scratching and pecking, but, as MacClayne began his story, the bird returned and sat nearby to listen.

"On the morning of the ceremony I was in one of the bars drinking, and I ran into this friend of mine, Ernie Baker, whereupon we commenced to have a few together. He bought a round and I bought a round. Then he bought a round and yet another round, and I had to buy two rounds twice to be even and we had several more several times. All at once he peered up at the clock and lurched off in the direction of the door.

"And I asked, 'Where are you off to then, Ernie?' And he replied, 'I'm best man at the wedding.'

"We arrived at the church, breathless and a bit wobbly but in otherwise excellent shape. The ceremony got under way and everything was moving along in good style. Then the bride appeared, and we saw right away it was what in the Old Country we call a vestry job, so close was she to delivery. Her parents simply wanted the ring on the bride's finger and the blessing of the church all in readiness for the imminent christening. Everybody looked somewhat harassed except the bride. Ernie Baker was squirming as though he needed desperately to take a piss.

"The ceremony was moving along, the tension had dispersed and the ritual was almost complete when the minister asked Ernie for the ring. There was a lot of pocket searching, and throughout the aisles a certain restiveness sprang up and people began to whisper and stare toward Ernie who continued to fumble through his pockets. The bride's parents stepped from their pew to help but, as they were approaching, Ernie found what he'd been looking for and dug it out of his hip pocket. He was so pleased he held it up to the light like a prospector who has just found a big gold nugget. Much to the minister's consternation he flipped it into the air like a coin but he missed it coming down and it rolled away under the pews. As soon as he saw the people on hands and knees searching for the ring he dashed out of the church to relieve himself. On his return everyone had miraculously recovered their composure, the ring having been retrieved. The remainder of the ceremony went off beautifully and no doubt bride and groom lived happily forever after in that desolate, treeless, isolated, god forsaken place known as the Falkland Islands. Thousands of miles from nowhere."

MacClayne paused and stared at a mud puddle in the dusty road while I sat there trying to visualize those desolate islands with their sheep, seals, penguins and alcoholic humans of that remote outpost of the British Empire.

"There were no trees," he said after a bit. "Just snow and cold. A Spanish priest who was assigned there back around 1770 said it all: 'I tarry here in this miserable desert, suffering everything for the love of God.'"

"And we tarry here for the lack of a vehicle," I said with chagrin.

A single bee came buzzing our way, circled about my head, then flew on.

MacClayne took out his Spanish phrase book, and I glanced around to see what Cuauhtémoc was doing. He'd strutted down the road a bit and turned his attention to a bush that offered some tempting seeds. I followed him first with my eyes and then walked over for a closer look at the plant. It was full of seed pods. I opened one, pressed a kernel between my fingers and then tried biting it. It was too hard even for my teeth, but Cuauhtémoc had found himself a tasty snack.

Not far beyond that, I saw a huge tree with a thick trunk, a meter in diameter. But only one single such tree? Where were the others?

The bushes and everything that grew here were different from those around Villa Victoria. That relatively short truck ride down the mountain had brought us to a significantly lower elevation and put us in another vegetation zone. This foliage was extremely dense; even the air was thicker.

Could this be a jungle? I wasn't sure. I'd seen photos and TV documentaries which showed forests of towering trees--that was my concept of a jungle. But here, except for that single large tree, I saw hardly anything over five or ten meters high.

This flat ground had to be the flood plain of a river that ran through this very narrow valley. I wondered why this land wasn't cleared for farming. Maybe once upon a time it had been. Perhaps it'd been cleared and later abandoned. Back in Minnesota I'd seen previously cleared land that had become overgrown with thick brush within a decade or two. It might be the same here. Brush grows fast; large trees take longer.

A forest without trees. Or fields without farmers. Of course I didn't know; I was only guessing. But it gave me a weird feeling that something wasn't right about this place. If they logged off this area, why did they miss this one tree?

Even the leaves were strange. They should've been a verdant green under their coatings of dust, instead of a parched, dried out, water-logged brown.

At last I went back to sit down by MacClayne. I hoped a vehicle would come soon, I wanted to get out of here. Another hour went by. No vehicle passed. I wrote in my journal, searching for words to describe the scene. Lines of a tenth-century Japanese poem, one which described a winter landscape, came to mind: "People and grass, dried up and gone." Here even the vehicles were dried up and gone.

continued in Chapter 26

chapter 26

2008-11-18T14:00:00.004-08:00

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

chapter 27

2008-11-18T14:00:00.003-08:00

In the morning we went to a covered market by the small plaza which was near our hotel. We passed vendors of fruit, meat, fish, pots, pans and other items till we reached the section where food was served. There were several such booths.

"Let's find one where the people are genial," said MacClayne.

"Sure," I said, wondering why he was suddenly making such a big deal about geniality when people had nearly always been genial anyway--about the only exception being the brain-dead miser who'd tried to sell us the stewed pears.

We sat down at the nearest stall. The proprietress was an efficient-looking woman of about fifty and seemed genial as well. There was more of a selection than usual, including tamales, enchiladas and chile verde. This was my chance to show MacClayne that I did after all know something about Mexican food. So I began patiently listing and explaining these items in some detail.

"Let's go somewhere else," he said, and started to get up.

"Why?" I asked in surprise.

"When things get this complicated I just leave."

I had to think of something fast. It would have been downright rude of us to just walk off. But the solution was simple. I asked the woman for two plates of chile verde. Turning to MacClayne, I said, "The problem's solved. I ordered for both of us."

He sat back down, apparently mollified. Argument averted.

The proprietress was assisted by two teenage girls. One had seductive-looking eyes, and when she brought us our meals she said something I didn't quite catch. I asked the girl what she'd said.

"Quejas de mí," the proprietress spoke up. "She's complaining about me."

Everyone laughed.

"Are you her daughter?" I asked the teen-ager.

"No, I'm just a worker here," she replied.

"I have three children but none of them work here with me," said the proprietress. "They're lazy."

The way she said that struck me as comical. While the woman took a pot off the fire MacClayne asked me what they were saying, and I translated it for him and he chuckled. She then turned to us again and added, "Of my three children, the oldest has just completed his studies at the university to become an engineer. The second will graduate this year in accounting. My youngest is in high school."

"It's too bad most children aren't that lazy," I said. "Actually you've done well." I knew the average kid didn't get beyond primary school. Many didn't go to school at all.

"I don't want my children to be tortilla vendors like myself," the lady said, and turned to stir a pot. Then she commented on Cuauhtémoc and asked us where we were from.

"California," I said.

The same teen-ager who'd spoken before fluttered her eyelids flirtatiously. "Will you take me back with you to California?" she said teasingly.

Grins on the faces of the other two indicated that this was in jest. So I said, "I would need permission from my fiancée."

After we'd finished our meals and left, MacClayne asked me, "Did you ask her about the road to Lázaro?"

"No," I replied sheepishly. I hated to admit that I'd forgotten all about it.

"Isn't that what you were going to be asking?"

"There's other places we can inquire," I said. We'd already said our good-byes and left on a good note. There's something about going back with afterthoughts and after-questions that damages the spirit of things.

We were still in the market, and I stopped to ask a butcher.

"¿Para Lázaro?" The man shook his head and told us there was no road down the coast of Michoacán, "You have to go to Colima City, then east through Apatzingán to Nueva Italia, and from there you can get a bus going south to Lázaro."

I thanked him for the information, though for our purposes it was useless. A few stalls down I asked another person and got a similar reply. I didn't tell anybody that Apatzingán was the ultimate object of our journey, that it was our fabled city and so we couldn't enter by the back gate. I really didn't want to tell them that we were Holy Grailers.

Back on the street, we strolled around the plaza like a couple of ordinary tourists, visiting shops, looking for postcards and asking about the road to Lázaro. The postcards were easy enough to find, but nobody had heard of any such road. Not along the coast.

"Our map doesn't show it either," MacClayne reminded me.

"Very little of what we passed through yesterday was on the map," I said. "Not every road is shown."

The sun was shining brightly, and we were standing in the shade of a palm on one side of the plaza. Nearby was a park bench, and, by tacit agreement, we sat down to think it over.

"Wouldn't the locals here know?"

"Michoacán is another state," I said, "so they don't inform themselves on roads in that direction. In addition, that area is sort of like the back woods to them, not a place they're likely to go to."

"So how far is it from here?"

"To Michoacán?"

"That's what I'm asking."

"I don't know, but it can't be too far," I said.

"Approximately. Give me an estimate."

I shook my head. In this region; it was the road conditions that made distances long or short. Presumably MacClayne knew that, but he wanted a number, so I gave him a number. "Forty kilometers," I said.

"What's that in miles?"

"A couple dozen."

"That plus 120 means we're 150 miles from Lázaro?"

"Something like that."

"And no road."

"Maybe not," I said. "But we don't know for sure."

"Isn't that what everybody's been telling us?"

"They probably haven't been there so they wouldn't know."

"Then what is out there? Tell me what we're going to find."

"The road to Apatzingán," I said. "I'm very sure of it."

MacClayne looked at me skeptically. "I'll take some convincing on that."

We gazed at the passers-by and said nothing more. This plaza was a busy place with a lot of foot traffic and from time to time buses drove up. Cuauhtémoc sat on the backrest beside me, looking over my shoulder as I took out a postcard and began a couple of lines to Chayo: "Our quest has brought us to Tecomán. . . ," I wrote. Another bus drove up; I kept writing and hardly glanced up.

"I wonder if that bus is really going to Apatzingán," MacClayne said. He'd also been writing on a postcard; now he was putting it away and looking at a large stub-nosed bus, the type we called good-road buses. APATZINGÁN was written above the windshield.

"I think it goes back through Colima. Probably on a paved road, judging from the kind of bus it is," I said. "People in the market told me of such a bus."

Cuauhtémoc turned his head to look at MacClayne. Perhaps the bird sensed something.

"I think I'm ready to return to California," MacClayne said. "But I do want to see Apatzingán. People are going to ask me about it. I know Alasdair MacAlistair will."

I wanted to remind him that he would be entering the city through the back gate, by the very route we'd rejected as unworthy. But he probably knew that.

"My bag's still in the hotel," he said. "It's just my jacket, socks, a few books. I can leave them."

I nodded but said nothing. I guess I'd been expecting something like this. He'd told me several times that he didn't want to go slogging through six days of jungle.

Passengers were boarding.

"I take it you still intend to go down the coast?" he said.

"Yes."

Cuauhtémoc had a sad look in his eye; I sensed that he'd taken a liking to MacClayne. "Maybe you'd like to give the bird a hug," I said.

It was the first time MacClayne had taken the rooster in his arms; he held him gently and stroked his feathers. The bird put his head under MacClayne's arm.

The last of the passengers had boarded the bus.

"¿Vienen?" the driver asked us.

"He's leaving now," I said to MacClayne.

"Ask him if this bus runs at this time every day."

I asked and was told it did.

MacClayne hesitated a moment, then stepped back. "I'll let it go," he said, and we returned to the park bench. "I'll stay another night here in Tecomán and take this bus for Apatzingán in the morning. I'll see you off, then I'll walk over to the beach and spend the afternoon. By the way, where is the beach?"

I inquired and we learned that the ocean was some six or eight kilometers away.

"That far?" he shook his head.

I also was surprised. I'd assumed this city was right on the water.

"Maybe I'll go with you part of the way, as far as the road goes," he said. "We might come to some isolated beach. It would be nice to spend a couple of days in the sun."

I was at least glad to hear that. Neither of us was in a hurry; we could tarry a day or two along the seashore. We went back to the hotel and got our stuff.

Buses were coming and going. I learned that some went as far as Michoacán. One had APIZA as its destination, and I looked on our map to see if that might be in Michoacán. Apparently not. But shortly after it left I was told that it would have taken us there. Well, it was gone now. This was one of those things I didn't need to tell MacClayne about, but I had a feeling he suspected it.

"Maybe we should try at a depot?" he suggested.

Several bus lines served this region, and we hunted down the depots, one after another. They were scattered over an area of two or three blocks, and at last we found one with a bus going our way, down the coast back towards Michoacán. However, it was crammed full of people, with no empty seats, and hardly even any standing room. The sun was beating down and it must have been stiflingly hot inside. Then I happened to look at the schedule which was posted on the depot wall. The bus wouldn't be leaving for another hour. I pitied those poor people having to wait for an hour in that oven.

"Let's go sit in the shade till it's about to leave," I said. But we'd gone only a few steps when the driver started up the engine and drove off. We chased after it, but it was gone.

I went to the ticket office and asked why that bus didn't run according to the posted schedule.

"Hoy es domingo," the ticket clerk told me. I'd looked at the wrong schedule, the one for weekdays. So this was Sunday? I'd completely lost track. Traveling as we were, every day was like a Sunday.

We considered hitchhiking, but, unlike the mountain villages we'd passed through, Tecomán was a fairly large city, and it didn't look like a simple thing to walk out to the edge of town to find the through traffic. Best to look for another bus. I wished Chayo were here. She would've been able to sort this out very quickly and get us on the right bus, but once again I reminded myself that that was why I needed to be doing this without her—in order to see how well I could function on my own in this society.

I continued to make rounds of the buses in the various depots. The schedules were confusing, so I concentrated on asking the bus drivers. In between I sat in the plaza and wrote in my journal while MacClayne worked on a poem. I also kept my eye on buses that went by. FARO was the destination of one that drove up and stopped. The name wasn't on our map of Michoacán, but, remembering the mistake I'd made earlier, I asked the driver, "¿Va usted a Coahuayana?"

Coahuayana was the first village inside Michoacán and I figured that any bus going that way would pass through it.

"No," the driver told me, "Voy a Faro."

So I went back and sat down beside MacClayne. "There's a city in Portugal by that name," he said. "A ship I was on docked there once." He went on to reminisce about how gloriously drunk one of his shipmates had gotten in a waterfront bar.

As MacClayne finished his story we watched the bus depart for Faro's Mexican namesake. Then he mused, "I wonder where this Faro might be?"

"It would be interesting to know," I said. "For the sake of academic knowledge."

"You might inquire. Knowledge is always good."

I got up and walked back to the nearest depot. "¿Dónde está Faro?" I asked the ticket seller.

"En Michoacán."

"¿De veras?" I said unbelievingly. "¿En Michoacán?"

"Sí."

I sighed deeply and looked again at my map. I'd asked the driver of the Faro bus if he were going to Coahuayana. Why had he said 'no'? But as I studied the map more carefully I saw what I'd failed to take into consideration--the village of Coahuayana lay several kilometers off the main road. Clearly, the bus didn't make that side trip, so I'd asked the wrong question.

Having lost three buses in a row, I felt less than competent. More than two hours had passed, and we were still looking for a bus. To be lost in a jungle would be awful enough, but I hadn't even found our way out of the city.

I thought of my forefathers and pictured a crew of Norsemen about to embark on a voyage to some faraway place, perhaps Vinland--but for the moment they are lost in the town of Trondhjem, unable to find their way down to the landing in the fjord.

There always seemed to be a bus pulling up to the curb when Chayo needed one. Could there be times when she couldn't find a bus either? A time when she couldn't even find her way out of town? No, I couldn't really imagine Chayo in a quandary such as this.

I delayed for some time before returning to the park bench, and when I did, MacClayne asked, "Did you find out where Faro is?"

I closed my eyes and shook my head.

MacClayne didn't ask the question again, but a few minutes later he said, "I think I'll just see you off, then spend the afternoon here in Tecomán."

Even Cuauhtémoc gave me a look which didn't express much confidence. I recalled that in the movie Aguirre had people beheaded for attempting to abandon his expedition, but at this moment I felt I was the one who deserved a beheading. I closed my eyes and envisioned a heavy ax blade about to descend upon my neck. End of pain, end of incompetence.

A sharp stab in my hand brought me back to eyes-wide alertness. It was the bird, who gave me a stern look, as if to say, "Shape up!"

"Tienes razón," I said to the bird, and gave him a hug. He put his head under my arm, as though in apology for jabbing me with his beak.

"You okay?" said MacClayne.

"Yeah," I said and forced a smile. "Here, you take the map. You'll need it."

He shook his head. "You keep it. You're the one who's always looking at it."

"Thank you," I said.

"You may be a while in that jungle, perhaps you'd like to take a couple of these books?" He reached into his bag and gave me several, including Sunny Days in the Tropics.

With Cuauhtémoc on my arm, I set out to make yet another round of the depots, but we'd hardly gone twenty paces when MacClayne called out to me. I didn't hear what he said, but I turned and saw a bus driving up. The destination above the windshield read LA PLACITA.

I didn't need to look at the map this time. La Placita was the village below Aquila, and had we hoofed it over the mountains from Villa Victoria, that's where we would've come out.

"This is the bus," I said, faintly hoping that MacClayne might still decide to accompany me. But he gave no indication that he would, and so I said, "You wouldn't care to come with and see La Placita?"

"No, I'll stay here and in the morning take that bus for Apatzingán."

We said our good-byes, and I got in line. Clutching Cuauhtémoc close to me, I said, "It's just the two of us now. You ready to travel the roadless road?"

The bird gave me another peck on the hand, a gentle one this time, and a look of silent determination. MacClayne was standing some distance from the bus, waving. I waved back, then boarded, and as I did so, I asked the driver my well worn question about the coastal road.

"¿Para Lázaro? Sí. Una vereda." He told me most of it was a jeep-trail. Pickup trucks got through.

"¿De veras?" I gasped, and swung around to look out the door. MacClayne was still there, raising his hand to wave a last good-bye.

"MACCLAYNE!" I called out to him in a voice loud enough to be heard over the din of the crowd, "THERE IS A ROAD TO LÁZARO!"

"HOLD ON!" he shouted back, "I'M COMING!"

continued in Chapter 28

chapter 19

2008-11-18T14:00:00.001-08:00

Morning came and I woke up shivering, even though I was under three blankets. MacClayne was stirring in his bed, and Cuauhtémoc was strutting about, ready to start the day. At last I got up, wrapped myself in one of the blankets and moved my arms to get the circulation going as I went to open the door.

A world of white met us. I stood in the entrance, watching as Cuauhtémoc stepped into the courtyard to investigate. He pecked and scratched at the strange fluffy, white substance, took a few more steps, then pecked and scratched again, discovering that it was the same everywhere. "Remarkable!" he seemed to be saying each time he lifted his head to reflect on the situation. "Quite remarkable!"

I wished Chayo were here so I could throw a snowball at her, though it would have been hard to scrape together enough to manufacture one, considering that the snow was hardly more than a centimeter deep. In the room behind me, MacClayne had gotten up and was putting on his shoes, which must've still been damp from wading across the street the evening before. "Do you think we can travel in this?" he remarked as he came to look.

Why not? I thought. In spite of the snow, Cuauhtémoc was stepping about with relative ease. The air was clear and the sun was shining. It was the nicest day I'd seen in weeks, and presumably the buses would be running as usual.

The bird was soon back looking for his breakfast, and I gave him the remainder of the tortillas. While he ate, we got ready to go. I sucked in my breath and shivered as I put on my damp trousers, then my damp shirt and finally my damp jacket which hadn't dried much since the soaking of the night before. It was like wearing a wetsuit; hopefully my clothes would dry out as I wore them. I thought longingly of my childhood in Minnesota where rooms were heated and you always had something dry to wear.

Then I realized that I hadn't bothered to bring any of my maps, not realizing that we'd be traveling this far afield. Although maps of this region weren't terribly good at showing where all the back roads went, they at least gave an idea. Well, we'd just have to ask. The landlady seemed well informed.

I told her we were looking for the road which led down the mountainside to Apatzingán.

She shook her head, "Go back to Uruapan. Take the bus from there."

"There's no other road out of here?" I asked.

"No. Only the trail to Apo."

"Apo?"

"From here it's a five hour walk," she said. "Sometimes a pickup goes through, and you might get a ride.

"There's no bus?"

She wagged her finger, a gesture which in México means no.

"Which direction is Apo?" I wished I had my map.

"You go north."

Apatzingán, of course, lay to the south.

I translated for MacClayne, who had understood some but not all of the dialogue. "Perhaps we could find someone else to ask," he suggested. "A second opinion."

We decided to go have breakfast; we could ask directions at the restaurant. There had to be a road.

"Maybe we could leave the rooster here in the room while we eat?" MacClayne said. "Things might be simpler that way."

"Cuauhtémoc," I said. "Do you mind?" The look in his eye told me that he did mind. No, things wouldn't be simpler that way; I could see that. So I took him with.

The snow had mostly receded from the plaza, leaving only scattered patches behind, and the cobblestone street we'd waded across the night before was drying under the morning sun. The air was almost warm and the sky was almost clear. Mount Tancítaro was still hidden in clouds.

The restaurant on the corner wasn't open, but we found a nearby market where food was served. And there was not only food. Vendors sold everything from oranges to blankets to pots and pans. It was a miniature of the covered market in Uruapan which consisted of booths and stalls under a corrugated metal roof. It was probably the only concrete structure in the village.

"Not very aesthetic, but practical," MacClayne said. "I remember markets like this in Veracruz."

"Were you in the merchant marine then?"

"No, I was out of the merchant marine by then. It was after I came to America, some time in the mid-1950's."

The market was nearly empty, probably because of the weather. The air was so chilly our breath turned to vapor, but there was the delicious smell of food, and my damp clothes didn't feel so cold now. We sat down at a small booth and I asked the lady what she had to offer.

"Carne de res, y carne de puerco," she said.

It was what we'd had the evening before, and again, MacClayne had one and I had the other. This time I had the beef and he had the pork. As was the custom, these were served with beans, rice and tortillas. From time to time I shared a tiny morsel with Cuauhtémoc; he liked the beans.

"What weather!" the lady remarked after serving us the food.

"Does it often snow here in the village?" I said.

"Not at this time of year."

We chatted with her while we ate. She asked us about the bird, and where we were from, the usual stuff. Finally I asked about the road to Apatzingán.

"Go to Uruapan, take a bus from there," she said.

"Isn't there a road or trail going down the mountainside?"

She stopped to think, and then asked the vendor of a nearby stall that happened to be open. That person expressed belief that such a trail existed, but didn't know where to find it. Word went around, but nobody knew for certain.

Customers were trickling in. After eating we decided to have coffee and wait a while. Somebody who knew the way might turn up.

"It's strange that these people have lived here all their lives and don't know the roads," MacClayne remarked.

"That's the way it is," I said, "People know the way to the nearest large town or city, but they don't know the back roads of their own region. Nobody goes into the hinterland. Almost nobody, I should say. Chayo is different. She's been everywhere and knows these mountains well."

"It would be helpful if she could show up now," MacClayne said. "To give us directions."

"Yes," I said, and sighed. Without Chayo I felt a bit lost. Maybe this was one of the reasons why I needed to make this journey without her, to learn to find my own way in this new world.

Cuauhtémoc hopped onto my lap, reassuring me with his presence.

MacClayne took a long, slow sip of coffee, then reflected for a moment. "Apatzingán is a fairly large town, isn't it?" he said. "Don't people go there?"

"These are mountain people and, when they go to town, they go to Uruapan," I said. "The mountain is one world. The valley below is another."

Indeed, everything around us did seem to be split up into separate worlds, not only the mountain and valley, but even the languages we spoke: English, the private language between MacClayne and me, and Spanish, the public language which MacClayne was generally left out of unless I translated it for him.

Just then the lady told me that there was a customer who knew a road which went downhill to Apatzingán. He was a large, robust man and had the self-assured look of a professional, perhaps an engineer. The lady introduced us to him.

Yes, a route did exist, and he'd occasionally taken it himself. But it wasn't a road, it was a horse trail, inaccessible to vehicles. We'd have to walk. "If you start now, you might get to Apatzingán by evening," he said. "But in this weather--no, it's not a good idea. You could easily get lost. If you don't want to return to Uruapan, then take the trail to Apo, it's much easier and you might get a ride."

I translated for MacClayne and suggested that in spite of the difficulties, we should take the way which went directly down the mountainside. That was why we'd come to Tancítaro, to take that trail. But he shook his head and asked, "Did Chayo recommend that route for us?"

"She mentioned it, but she didn't tell me where to find it."

"When?"

"Recently, some time during the last month or so."

"Not in the depot when she met us there?"

"No."

"She didn't specifically instruct you to take that trail?"

"I never said she did."

"Well that's what I'm asking, and you made it sound like she had."

"I only meant to say that she'd told me of a trail going directly down the mountainside. So I think that would be the way to go."

For some moments we sat there in a tense silence, which was finally broken by MacClayne. "What other road is there?"

"The trail to Apo."

"Another isolated village?"

"Apparently," I said. I kept wishing I had my map.

"So what happens when we get there?"

"Then we can get a bus to Los Reyes, and from Los Reyes--"

"Los Reyes is down in the Valley of Infiernillo?"

"No. It's the other way," I said.

"So we begin with a five hour walk. Go north to get south, and get deeper into these mountains? Is this how you plan things?" MacClayne's voice was becoming somewhat raspy, the way it was when he was impatient.

"We're in the back woods of Michoacán, and this is how the road system works around here."

MacClayne glanced up at the bare concrete restaurant wall and sighed, apparently disappointed, frustrated and perhaps even angry. I wondered if he felt misled, that I'd done him a disservice by getting us into this apparently dead-end situation.

I took another swallow of my coffee, pondered a moment, then said, "We're in quest of a fabled city, so we can't expect the going to be easy. If the roads don't go where we want them to go, that's perhaps the way things are supposed to be."

"We're Holy Grailers," he said. I wasn't sure if it was a question or a groan.

"I should hope so," I replied.

A long silence ensued, punctuated only by the sounds of the market around us. MacClayne stared at the remains in his cup, perhaps looking for an omen. "Then let us set out," he said at last, returning to his previous good humor. "We must not delay in our quest for the chalice."

I was glad to see him getting back into the spirit of things.

We finished off our coffee. Over to one side of us was a booth where they sold oranges, and nearby was one where they had oats which would serve as bird food. We stocked up for the journey ahead and then stepped out onto the bright sunlit street. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust.

Snow had left the village and was retreating up the mountainside, which was by now free of clouds. We walked to the middle of the plaza for a better view, and saw the green forest rise upwards to where it turned white, then narrowed to a pointed pinnacle.

From Uruapan I'd seen the mountain as a long, extended ridge, but this village was at the end of that ridge, so from here it had the appearance of a peak. It was like looking at a long, sloped roof from a new angle. I wished Chayo were here to see it with me.

We got our things from the room and set out.

The road to Apo was a pair of tire tracks going off into the forest. At first the trail was fairly straight, but it soon began to make hairpin curves, doubling back on itself as it clung to the edge of one steep ravine after another which cut deep into the mountainside and exposed outcrops of ancient lava flows. The thick woods prevented us from seeing what lay to either side of us, but we could look upwards through the treetops and catch glimpses of the snow-covered slopes above.

There were water puddles here and there, but not a lot of mud. Though I couldn't imagine anyone driving a vehicle on this trail, it was easy enough to walk on, and walking kept us warm.

We weren't carrying much. My backpack was just big enough to hold three books, some oranges, a small sack of oats for Cuauhtémoc and his blanket. MacClayne carried a bag of similar size slung over his shoulder in which he had a few personal items, a book or two, and perhaps a change of socks.

Cuauhtémoc scurried along on his short little legs, doing his best to keep up. Back on the malpaís where we'd had to fight our way through underbrush, the bird had gotten around much better than me, but here on this open trail he was at something of a disadvantage. When he fell behind he took to his wings, flew over our heads and landed on the trail up ahead. Then he turned around and stood there looking at us. "Slow pokes!" he seemed to say. As we approached he hopped on my arm and let me carry him.

From time to time the pine forest closed in so tightly on both sides that I felt as if we were winding our way through a tunnel. I glanced at my watch and found that we'd been hiking for over an hour, but the surroundings were so pleasant that it didn't feel that long.

The path curved along the edge of a cliff. We rounded the bend when suddenly the trees opened up and we found ourselves gazing raptly at a magnificent pair of snow-capped volcanoes. Their steep slopes rose almost vertically; a small, lonely cloud clung to one of the peaks.

We stood there in dumb amazement. I was astonished to see volcanoes so tall and slender. "A pair of needles," I exclaimed. They dwarfed the tiny cinder cones around Uruapan, and must have been even higher than Mount Tancítaro.

The valley below spread out before us. That gave us a better notion on how very distant the volcanoes must have been. I would have guessed at least 70 kilometers. Paradoxically, some peculiar atmospheric condition must have brought the peaks up close and made it appear that we'd soon be climbing their slopes.

"I think I'll have an orange," said MacClayne.

"An orange break?" I said. "Sure."

We stood there, peeling oranges and admiring the view. Although the sky was clear, the valley floor was covered with a sea of fog. Only the rims of scattered cinder cones poked through. They were brown and treeless.

"So where would Apatzingán be?" MacClayne said, thinking aloud.

I shook my head and offered a piece of my orange to Cuauhtémoc, but the bird's attention was fixed on the misty scene below.

"Can that really be a desert down there?" said MacClayne.

"It apparently is. That's because it lies in a rain shadow."

"Which means?"

I pointed to the bluish silhouette of the distant coastal range which rose up on the south side of the valley. "The wind comes in from the Pacific Ocean and drops its moisture as it rises up over those mountains. That's where the rain falls, so the air is pretty dry when it reaches the valley."

"And that makes it a desert? It looks like something out of one of your Norse myths. What did you call that place?"

"La Tierra Caliente--the Hot Country," I said. "Some call it the Valley of Infiernillo."

"In the Norse myth, I meant."

"Niflheim--which means land of icy mist. It was said to be an extremely cold, desolate, miserable place. And it apparently lay at the bottom of a valley somewhere below Asgarð. There are accounts in the Edda of men who went there. It was a nine day horseback ride down through dark canyons."

"Nine days? That's quite a horseback ride."

"Yeah, but if you were to go there nowadays you'd probably find a bus service," I said.

"So where would the spring have been located?"

"The Spring of Urð? That would've been in Asgarð."

"Up in the mountains, then," MacClayne said. "So this is like a geographic setting from Norse mythology, and we're looking at it. Walking on it. Passing through it."

At the mention of Nieflheim, a chill seemed to rise from the valley below. Cuauhtémoc gave a low, mournful squawk. It was a sound I didn't realize his vocal chords were capable of producing.

"¿Estás bien?" I said. I hugged him gently and turned away from the valley, but he craned his neck around, unwilling to take his eyes away from it. He made the same sound again.

We moved on and were soon back in the forest. Cuauhtémoc seemed to be okay now. He hopped down to exercise his legs.

"Do you think the Vikings ever visited México?" MacClayne said after a while.

"Remotely possible, but extremely doubtful," I said. "They reached Nova Scotia, perhaps also Maine and Massachusetts, but not México."

"Maybe you're here to fulfill a destiny," he said. "To see this land and complete a project that Norsemen began a thousand years ago."

We came to a ravine crossed by two large logs, spaced the width of a vehicle axle apart.

"Can this be a bridge?" I said.

"What else it could be?"

"Can you imagine trying to drive a pickup across this?" I said.

"There's tire tracks on both sides, so vehicles must be using it."

We crossed with a bit of trepidation. It was only a few meters deep, but I still felt like a tight-rope walker.

The morning that had begun with snow on the ground was turning out very different. It was a good day and a good place to be walking. We talked as we went, daydreaming of how it might be fun to someday get a burro and spend a summer traveling around in these mountains, leisurely wandering from village to village.

With that and many other thoughts we passed the time as we walked, and couldn't have been too far from Apo when the forest behind us began to vibrate with the sound of an approaching vehicle. It was a pickup, and the driver offered us a ride.

Two elderly women rode with the driver, so we got on the flat-bed and rode standing up, hanging onto the roll bar. Cuauhtémoc perched beside me, using his wings for balance as we swayed from side to side and bounced along on the rough trail.

In less than ten minutes we reached the turnoff for Apo, where we got off, expressed our thanks, and chatted briefly with the driver. He was about the same age and build as don Pablo. He was taking his two elderly passengers to the village to visit the shrine of a virgin. One of them was ill and hoping for a miraculous cure.

"How did you cross that log bridge?" I asked him.

He grinned, and said, "In these mountains it's part of a day's drive."

We said our good-byes and, as it was getting on in the day, we felt we didn't have time to visit the village of Apo. We had hopes of reaching Apatzingán that afternoon and continued on foot. As we left the turnoff behind, the trail immediately widened out and became a road. It was still a horrible washboard surface, but it looked more traveled and our chances of catching a ride looked better.

Before long the needle-shaped mountains came into view again. The tiny cloud still clung to the peak of one as if it were pinned there. Maybe it was vapor trailing out from the volcano.

"Would that mean it's active?" MacClayne said.

"Probably. It must be scary to live under."

The slender cones appeared as close as ever, but we decided they must be a lot farther away than they appeared to be. They were due west of us and I had heard of a tall, twin-peaked volcano out in that area. But that was way over in Colima and Jalisco, perhaps a hundred and fifty kilometers away.

"What's that in miles?" MacClayne said.

"Almost a hundred."

Could we be looking at something so distant and be seeing it so clearly? MacClayne doubted it.

Above and immediately behind us were the snowy slopes of Mount Tancítaro. It too had once been a proud active volcano; its eroded remnants still dominated this region.

The fog had nearly disappeared from the valley below, revealing a dry, treeless landscape with eroded cinder cones. Still no sight of any large population center that could be Apatzingán.

We took another orange break. There was something about orange eating that went together with traveling like this. We didn't bother to carry water; oranges were handier. I again offered bits of mine to Cuauhtémoc, and this time he accepted them.

Moving on, we got a short ride in a truckload of sawdust and emerged covered with the stuff, with packs, bags, and pocketfuls of sawdust. But it didn't bother Cuauhtémoc; he just shook it off.

A short walk took us the rest of the way to a road junction with a very tiny hamlet consisting of only three or four habitations.

"Do you have any idea of where we might be?" MacClayne said.

"It should be Copertiro. The driver of the pickup said we could catch a bus in that place."

There was an asphalt road which went northward, up into the mountains and presumably to Los Reyes. The road began here, or, rather, it ended here. We would of course go south, and in that direction there was only an unpaved washboard surface.

No vehicles were in sight.

In front of one of the houses was a tiny roadside restaurant which apparently catered to truckers. It consisted of a crude table with a bench on either side, but lacked anything overhead to shelter customers from the sun and rain. The only person around was an elderly lady who was apparently the proprietress.

"¿Es Copertiro?" I asked.

"Sí."

I asked if there was a bus for Apatzingán.

"Ya viene," It's on its way here. she said, and told us it would take us to Buenavista. There we'd have to change buses.

I glanced at MacClayne, who gave a nod to indicate that he'd understood. "We seem to be at the right place," he said to me, then to the lady, "¿Hay café?"

The lady shook her head. She didn't have much else either, except for several crates of soft drinks. I had a cola and requested water for the bird. MacClayne didn't want anything. Hopefully, the bus would be here soon; if not, maybe we could hitch a ride on some other vehicle. Either way, we expected to be in Apatzingán by evening; it was now mid-afternoon.

MacClayne read one of his books, and I took out my journal. Cuauhtémoc scratched in the pebbles nearby.

The Needle Peaks weren't visible from here, but the long, snowy ridge of Tancítaro still towered above and behind us. This was the western side of it, the hidden slopes I'd never seen before. The ridge now lay between us and Uruapan, separating me from Chayo.

I sat there thinking of the night we'd spent together in Los Reyes, that town to the north of us, the place where the paved road went.

Walking had kept me comfortably warm, but as I sat there I began to cool off. My clothes were still slightly damp from the soaking of the evening before, and they began to take on the chill of the air around me.

An hour went by. No bus, and no other traffic either. The proprietress was the only visible inhabitant of the entire region. Everything around took on a desolate appearance; even the trees and grass were dry and brown, a prelude to the parched valley below. Only the empty road connected us with the rest of the world.

Cuauhtémoc hopped up to perch on a branch beside me, looking over my shoulder as I wrote. The cold didn't seem to bother him. Or MacClayne either, who sat reading in a silence broken only by the occasional turning of a page, making a faint rustling sound that echoed out into the emptiness.

Insects didn't chirp and birds didn't sing. At long last, the beginnings of a faint vibration resonated in the distance. An approaching vehicle? But it was more a feeling than a sound, something so subtle that I wasn't sure if I heard it or not. Cuauhtémoc raised his head. MacClayne lowered his book and looked up. I got up and stretched my arms and legs, but still didn't see anything. Minutes passed; eventually a tiny speck appeared on the road above us, It was a bus, winding its way down the mountainside from Los Reyes. Hopefully, it was the one that would take us down into the valley.

MacClayne waved to flag it down while I gathered up Cuauhtémoc and took a last look in the direction of the snow-capped ridge. The mountain was no longer to be seen; then I realized the sun was also gone. The sky had turned gray and hung low overhead.

"Is this our bus?" MacClayne asked.

It had come to a halt beside us and the door opened. The destination read: BUENAVISTA.

We got on. It was only a third full, and we found a seat near the front where we could see through the windshield as well as the side window. The bus began to move, and almost immediately came to the end of the smooth asphalt surface where there was a jarring crash. We were pounding our way down the washboard road towards the valley.

A huge rain drop splashed on the window beside us. It was followed by another, and within seconds it was raining fiercely.

Through the water-streaked panes I saw oak trees, or maybe they weren't oaks; anyway they were deciduous. The pines were gone, so we'd lost elevation and were entering another ecosystem. Before long, the deciduous trees themselves thinned out, and eventually there were only nopal cacti scattered here and there. Several cinder cones loomed in the canyon below and ahead of us.

I imagined that all of this would normally be a dry brown, but the storm had turned everything into a bluish gray.

Icy water trickled in around the loose, rattling window frames, and with each jarring bounce I got spattered in the face.

We came to a stretch where the steep hillsides receded, and the canyon broadened out to form a narrow plain where the road was flat and the water puddled up. We squished and splashed our way along, at times like an old-time paddle-wheeler chugging down a river of soupy mud.

"Can you picture this place ever being dry?" I said.

"It must be a dust bowl," he said. "Another Ecclefechan."

"Eccl--?"

"Ecclefechan. It's a town in Kirkcudbright, about thirty miles from Dundrennan." He paused to recall a refrain and shift gears to Broad Scots of the Border Country:

"Ecclefechan--where the craas flee erse-wise
tay keep the stoor oot o' their een."

"'Craas flee' would be 'crows fly'?" I said.

MacClayne grinned and nodded.

"And they're trying to keep the 'stoor' out of their eyes," I said. "What's stoor?"

"Dust," he said, and finished the translation: "The crows fly ass-backwards to keep the dust out of their eyes."

"Dust, you say. I should've guessed. The Norwegian word is støv." There were a lot of Scandinavian words in Lowland Scots--"bra," meaning good, "foo" meaning drunk and "flit" meaning move were a few I'd come across in MacClayne's stories and poems.

The bus squished on.

"¡Que mierda!" It was a woman's voice, slightly slurred, and came from the seat behind us. I stole a quick glance. There were two of them sharing a bottle. I hoped Cuauhtémoc wouldn't smell it and demand a swig.

The windshield wipers oscillated back and forth, each swipe clearing water from the pane long enough to allow a brief and distorted glimpse down the road. Directly ahead was a treeless cinder cone which gradually grew in size as we approached.

Between it and us, in the near distance, I could make out an indistinct mottled mass that covered a wide area. As we drew closer, I could see that it was composed of individual creatures, which, as they came into focus, turned out to cattle blocking the road in front of us. We came to a halt as horsemen rode back and forth to divide them up and herd them to one side or the other to make way for us. The action was in slow motion as the animals slogged through the mud. The cattle were Brahmans, which I had been told were imported from India and cross-bred with European cattle to make them more resistant to the intense heat for which this region was famous.

At last we were moving again, nearing the cinder cone. We were slightly above it, so I could see into its hollow crater. Although I'd seen dozens of these small volcanoes, I was always curious to see one more, and I watched intently as the road curved around it. On the slopes there grew a few scattered nopal cacti, ubiquitous in this part of the world.

The volcano behind us, we were again pounding and crashing our way down a washboard surface. Hillsides were closing in from both sides as the canyon narrowed and deepened. There were especially loud crashes that shook the bus to its very chassis as the wheels fell into larger holes.

"Fuck! This shit sucks!" It was one of the women in the seat behind us, and for a moment I mused over how such a phrase might be translated into English. MacClayne glanced at me and grinned. Had he understood it? Then it hit me that the woman was expressing herself in English--not in Spanish.

In the next instant something flew past us, narrowly missing MacClayne's head. Cuauhtémoc let out a loud "Rhhhhhhh!" and then jumped from my lap and took off after it. It was a lady chicken and she reversed direction, half-flying, half-scurrying toward the back of the bus with Cuauhtémoc hot on her tail. The owner was also in the chase, running a poor third. I was fourth and last, slipping and sliding on the wet floor as I pursued Cuauhtémoc.

"¡Ariba la pollita!" shouted one of the drunken women.

"¡Ariba el gallito!" shouted the other.

The birds scurried under seats, then flew back over the tops of them. Back and forth they went, from one end of the bus to the other.

The chicken owner finally cornered his hen, and I grabbed for Cuauhtémoc. Just then the bus gave a lurch; the owner landed on a nearby passenger and I fell on top of the owner. The passenger cursed the owner and the owner cursed me, and I pretended I didn't understand Spanish.

"Cuauhtémoc!" I said, after finally apprehending him and hauling him back to our seat. "How could you do this to me?"

MacClayne was laughing.

The booze-guzzling women in the seat behind us were snickering and snorting. A moment later there was a loud rattle as one of them opened the window, shoving it upwards with all her might, sticking her head out into the wind and rain, vomiting into the storm.

My curiosity overcame me and I turned to look, and found myself staring into the face of one of the female drunks.

"What are you looking at?" she said in English, slurring her words and sitting almost immobile in her seat. She paused, then let out a torrent of four letter words that ended with: "Fucking assholes! Go to hell! You're on the road to hell anyway! You know that? You're on the road to hell!"

Having said that, she passed out and collapsed across the lap of her companion who peered at me through a drunken haze.

Cuauhtémoc hopped onto the backrest and gave their bottle a thirsty look.

"Let's move," I suggested as I grabbed hold of my bird.

We found some empty seats towards the rear of the bus. We couldn't see through the windshield from here; but the chances of getting puked on were less.

"I suppose people who die of drink also end up in Niflheim?" MacClayne said with a grin.

Across the aisle was another drinking party, this one more discreet. Three or four guys were quietly passing a bottle back and forth. A couple seats ahead of them sat the chicken owner with his hen. She raised her head over the backrest, spied Cuauhtémoc, and gave a conspiratorial cluck.

"Por favor, Cuauhtémoc," I pleaded, "Pórtate bien."

MacClayne eyed the booze as it went from hand to hand. Perhaps he was thinking nostalgically of his seagoing days when a sailor might smuggle a bottle aboard and pass it around in the forecastle.

At my instigation, we got up and moved again, this time to a seat over the rear wheels. It was the worst place on the bus. There was no leg room because of the wheel configuration, and we also got the full impact of every rock and pothole the wheel slammed into.

Rain beat on the roof and struck obliquely against the side window. We were heading into the full intensity of the storm. I looked out the window, but all I saw was water and darkness.

Suddenly, the road noise stopped, and we found ourselves cruising along smoothly on a paved surface. Within minutes the bus came to a stop. Everyone was getting off.

I slipped Cuauhtémoc's makeshift raincoat over his head as we waited for the crowd to clear. Eventually only the female drunks remained in their seat. One growled an indistinct phrase as we passed by on our way to the door.

"¿Buenavista?" I asked the driver.

"Sí. ¿A dónde van?"

"Apatzingán," I said.

He pointed up ahead, and told me that's where we'd find our bus.

Torrents of rain pelted down as we dashed to a sidewalk where we stood under the eaves of a nearby roof and then paused to look around. The bus had let us off on what appeared to be the town's main drag. That was unusual; normally passengers disembarked either at the plaza or at a depot.

The passengers who'd gotten off with us were also huddled under whatever would serve as shelter. As I peered through the sheets of rain I could barely see the other side of the street. According to the driver, the bus for Apatzingán should be here soon.

The two drunken women finally came stumbling out of the bus. Somehow they made it onto the street where they stood in the midst of the downpour, holding on to each other for support as they looked around.

"It's raining," observed one.

"Is it really?" responded her companion. The two deliberated for some moments longer, then wandered off through the downpour.

A bus drove up with a destination that read: APATZINGÁN. I'd gathered that the road from here on was excellent, so we could consider ourselves almost at our destination. People began to board.

I looked at MacClayne and he looked at me.

"What do you think?" said MacClayne.

For a long time I gazed at the bus. Finally I said, "Apatzingán should be entered in the morning, as the sun rises overhead. That is my vision of how it ought to be."

continued in Chapter 20

chapter 18

2008-11-18T14:00:00.000-08:00

The waiting room was filling up with passengers. When you bought a bus ticket to a remote village like Tancítaro, you wanted to plan ahead and get one with an assigned seat number on it. Otherwise, you might have to stand. Our tickets had no seat numbers.

As departure time neared, people began to mill around and talk nervously. Then I remembered the report of storm damage to the road. Had it been washed out? I'd forgotten to ask about that. We might not be leaving at all.

I went back to the ticket window. Others were asking the same question, and the reply was: "We don't know yet."

MacClayne looked up from Sunny Days in the Tropics. "What's happening?" he said.

"There's a rumor that the road is out."

"So what does that mean? That the bus won't go?"

"We'll have to wait and see," I said, and tried to think of alternatives. Go back to the boardinghouse and wait for a better day? No. Having set out, we couldn't turn back so casually.

More passengers entered, one with several lady chickens which attracted Cuauhtémoc's attention; he shamelessly made an uncouth, cocky sound, something like, "Rhhhhhhhhhhh!"

"That is extremely improper!" I scolded him, and started to take him off his perch to set him where he couldn't stare at the objects of his desire. Only a moment before, his countenance had expressed spirituality, now it was lust. He clung to the backrest with his talons, not willing to let go.

MacClayne watched and grinned momentarily. Nobody else was looking at the chickens. The people around us were speaking in low tones, presumably worried that the bus might not leave.

"What do you think our chances are?" MacClayne asked, looking around a bit apprehensively at the obvious concern of our would-be fellow passengers.

"About the bus leaving?" I said. MacClayne nodded.

"Hard to tell," I said. Then the loudspeaker blared out something in a squawky tone that I didn't catch. The driver opened the door and began accepting tickets.

"Looks like our fears were a false alarm," MacClayne said, looking relieved. We both began laughing, not at anything in particular, maybe just to relieve the tension. Others were laughing too.

But when I finally handed our tickets to the driver, he told me he might not be going all the way to Tancítaro. We boarded anyway, and I told MacClayne, "We're only certain of getting as far as San Juan. That's about 15 kilometers from here."

"How much farther is it from there to Tancítaro?"

"Another 40 kilometers," I said. "I suggest we just go and see how things work out." I could see MacClayne starting to frown, and so I added, "A quest for the Holy Grail was never a sure thing."

His frown changed to a chuckle. "I suppose uncertainty is part of our quest."

We exchanged more comments on the sufferings and hardships to be endured by true chevaliers on their way to the fabled and forbidden city. As we'd expected, we found ourselves standing on this bus, and MacClayne quipped, "It appears that they don't reserve seats for Holy Grailers."

"You have to get tickets hours, or even a day, ahead of time, if you want one with an assigned seat number," I told him.

We were not only standing, we were packed in like sardines for what would be at least a three-hour ride--assuming we could get through.

Our bus drove first to the town plaza where even more passengers were picked up and squeezed in, and then we turned south onto the familiar street down which I'd walked Chayo home every evening. We crossed the bridge over the Cupatitzio, passed Chayo's house, and then the malpaís.

"This is the legendary Thirsty Mountain, the one that drank the river dry," I said, speaking loudly enough for him to hear me over the din. MacClayne attempted to catch a glimpse of it as we sped by.

We passed the cinder cone known as Mount Jicalán, then the village of Jucutacato.

"The local OK Corral?" he asked with a grin when I told him where we were. These were the things and places we'd originally planned to take our time and spend as much as a week visiting. Now, as we rode along I made an effort to point out what I could, but it was hard to see because we had to bend over to window level and peer between the heads of other passengers.

Cuauhtémoc sat on my arm and craned his neck to look around, probably wondering where the lady chickens were.

"San Juan is where refugees from the Paricutín eruption settled after their village was covered with lava," I said. "We'll be there soon."

The road curved back and forth, but it was blacktopped and our ride was smooth.

"We're on a good road," MacClayne said.

"Not for much longer," I warned him.

San Juan was a new and fairly large village with broad streets and few, if any, buildings of adobe. Most houses were concrete. There were also two or three windowless plank houses with steep roofs, the kind seen in Indian villages. I tried to remember what Chayo had said they were called. Were they troje style?

The driver got out, presumably to ask about road conditions. Less than two minutes later he was back. "¡Vamonos!"

So we were off for Tancítaro, hopefully. Two or three women were shouting back and forth across Cuauhtémoc and me, wondering if the bus would really be able to make it all the way.

Many people had gotten off in San Juan, but not enough to empty any seats, so we were still standing. The pavement ended abruptly as we exited the village, and we were now on a horrible, unpaved, washboard mountain road. Forty kilometers of it lay ahead.

With fewer passengers, there were fewer heads and shoulders obscuring the view as I bent over to window level to look out. What I saw was pine forest. And mist.

Rain drops streaked the window panes from time to time. It had rained on us when we walked to the depot, and apparently stopped only so that it could threaten to start again.

The bus wove back and forth, often up hill in low gear. The engine droned on while we bounced along, enduring the punishment of the horrible road which made the bus rattle as though it were about to fall apart. It hammered at our ear drums and nearly shook the flesh off our bones. Cuauhtémoc grew heavy on my arm, and I perched him on my shoulder where he hung on with his talons and extended his wings as best he could in the narrow space to keep his balance.

As we gained elevation, the trees got thicker, the underbrush denser, and the branches more festooned with vines. Mist became fog, and eventually spruce began replacing pine. The fog forest, it was called. We were ascending the elevated slopes which I had so often gazed at from Uruapan; even on sunny days they were sometimes hidden by clouds.

Our bus eased by several minor mudslides which had dumped dirt and rocks onto the road. We finally came to one that completely blocked our way.

Everyone got out. Some grabbed shovels, others pushed or carried boulders. MacClayne and I joined a group who were dragging a tree trunk to one side. With everybody working it didn't take long. Then I glanced around. Where was Cuauhtémoc? He'd been at my side only moments before, watching us clear the road. Then suddenly I knew where he must've gone, and I ran to the bus. I climbed aboard, and there he was. My wayward bird!

He gave me a look of casual innocence, as if to say, "Are you back so soon?" Near him was one of the lady chickens, straightening out her ruffled feathers.

"¡Sinvergüenza!" I scolded Cuauhtémoc in a voice that was low but sharp, then glanced around, hoping MacClayne hadn't seen or heard any of this. Fortunately he was still outside.

The road had been cleared and the other passengers were reboarding; we were soon on our way again, but with a triumphal sense of camaraderie after having pitched in together to clear the road. Someone opened a bottle of tequila and passed it around. It came my way and I pretended to take a swig without actually swallowing any. Cuauhtémoc nudged me with his beak. "No," I told him firmly. Then I saw it handed to MacClayne. He'd promised not to drink on this trip, and I held my breath as he lifted it up and cheerfully declared, "¡Salud!" Then without taking any, passed it on.

From time to time the bus stopped at tiny hamlets of four or five small huts and a few people got off at each one; it began to look like I might eventually get a seat. Here and there was a clearing with a corn field or two. Then the forest closed in again. So did the fog.

Passengers were suddenly crossing themselves in the manner that Catholics so often do. I glanced around. We were passing a small roadside shrine, rather like one you might imagine seeing in Japan or in Tibet. The shrine could have been Shinto, Buddhist or even Bön. Of course it was Catholic. México is a Catholic country, but in these mountains you could easily forget which continent you were on, which world you were in.

All at once, sunlight was flooding in through the windows, and it made me realize how gray and dim everything around us had been till now. I bent over and looked out. The sky was clear and the fog was gone from around us. We were driving along the edge of a cliff, and I saw the valley far, far below.

This was my first brief look at the Valley of Infiernillo, a flat, barren landscape broken only by river gullies and treeless cinder cones stretching off into the distance, ending in faraway bluish mountains. I shuddered involuntarily. It was a glimpse into the abyss, the uncomfortably familiar nightmare world that had been haunting my dreams. I could almost hear the guard woman at the river, saying "Hvi riðer thu her a Helveg?"

Somewhere down there lay Apatzingán, though it wasn't to be seen right now. It was probably concealed by a fold in the mountain. As quickly as we'd emerged into the blinding sunlight, we dove back again into the forest, darker each time than before.

More fog, and sometimes less fog. Underbrush and vines. Spruce, and some pine. The continual pounding and hammering and rattling of the bus on the washboard road. Occasional rain drops on the window.

There were more scattered clearings and dwellings where more people got off. The fellow with the lady chickens left the bus at one of these. Cuauhtémoc watched them until they disappeared into the mist.

Eventually I got a seat next to a fellow with a small pig. He lived on a ranchito a bit this side of Tancítaro, he told me. But the constant banging and rattling on the washboard road made conversation impossible to sustain. Cuauhtémoc hopped down on the floor to exchange greetings with the piglet. The little animal gave a squeak and the bird responded with a cluck, then returned to sit in my lap.

MacClayne was by now sitting diagonally across from me, next to one of the fellows who'd helped push the tree off the road. They were making an attempt at conversation. The tequila bottle was still going around; MacClayne lifted it up as before with a hearty "¡Salud!" and passed it on.

I took out my journal and noted down the things I saw along the way, writing in a much-worse-than-usual version of my unreadable handwriting. A radio was playing, and at times it overpowered the road din. I caught bits of a song by Javier Solis.

Occasionally I leaned over to say something to MacClayne. He shook his head, couldn't hear. I'd tell him later.

Eventually, after we'd been bounced around for over three hours, the forest opened up into a world of corn fields. The land was relatively flat, rolling. We passed a couple of volcanic cinder cones, and a few kilometers later there were houses. We were in a fairly substantial village. Could this be Tancítaro? It had to be.

The bus let us off in the plaza, an open space surrounded by an elegant arcade of tall galleries and well-built adobe buildings which might have dated back to the turn of the century. A cloud of cold mist hit us as we stepped off the bus, and Cuauhtémoc shuddered. He hopped to the ground and fluttered his wings, trying to shake off the damp chill.

"Chayo loves this place," I told MacClayne, "She talks about it often. She's always wanted to live in a small mountain village like this."

"Idyllic. Yes. But the isolation would soon become intolerable."

"Maybe that's why she only talks about it," I said.

MacClayne smiled, then suggested that the first thing we ought to do was find a hotel--hopefully there would be one. It was about five o'clock. A couple hours of daylight were left, but it already felt like dusk. Actually, the whole day had felt like dusk.

We asked around, and were directed to an establishment which was between some shops in the arcade. Like the other buildings along the plaza, it was an adobe structure with thick walls, tall doors and tall ceilings. A middle-aged lady appeared.

"¿Hay recamara?" I asked.

She led us to a narrow courtyard with a single row of rooms. The one she showed us had the usual thick, whitewashed walls, and high ceiling. It was plain, but tasteful and dignified. I'd seen many adobe buildings by now, but I never tired of them.

Separate from this was the hotel washroom, equipped with a very tiny hot water heater for the shower. It burned wood scraps from a nearby sawmill and the landlady told us it could be heated on request. I'd never seen one of these before but it looked quite modern for this region. It was one of those ingenious devices that utilized limited resources to the maximum. This water heater and the bare electric light bulbs were about all there was in this place to remind us that this was the last quarter of the 20th century.

MacClayne glanced around and said, "Did you ask her how much it will cost?"

The price turned out to be sixty pesos a night for the two of us, the equivalent of three US dollars. I paid for both of us; MacClayne would reimburse me afterwards. We'd decided to do it that way because it was simpler.

"¿Es gallo de combate?" The landlady looked admiringly at Cuauhtémoc.

"Jubilado," I said, telling her he was retired.

"¿Su mascota?"

"Mi amigito." I stroked his feathers, and asked, "Has there been any snow?"

"Higher up on the mountain," she said. "Not here in the village."

"Some weather, isn't it?"

"I've never seen it like this before," she said, "and I've lived here all my life! This is the dry season. Usually it's warm at this time of year." The lady might have been around fifty, so she had certainly seen a lot of weather in this village.

We chatted briefly about the village. She told me how it got its name.

"Tancítaro means the place where tribute is paid. Emperor Caltzontzin himself came here to receive it," she said, then she went to look for blankets.

While we waited I translated for MacClayne and added a few comments of my own. "Can you picture that?" I said. "The boss of the Tarascan empire trudged all the way up here to collect taxes."

"When was that?" MacClayne asked.

"Some time before the Spanish Conquest. Five centuries ago."

"He was probably the last celebrity to visit this village."

"Except for us," I said. "But I wonder if he really came in person. There couldn't have been much to collect in a small place like this."

"Probably sent an underling, maybe a second lieutenant who had gotten himself on the shit list," MacClayne said.

Cuauhtémoc was strutting about on the floor, impatient to get out and see the town. The landlady soon returned with blankets, and I asked her what there might be of interest to see around here. She mentioned several things, including a 'pedregal'. "It's two blocks from the plaza. You'll see it from there," she said. I wasn't too clear on what she meant, except that it was probably something made of rock.

We left our things in the room and went out to the arcade. Cuauhtémoc took to his wings and flew past us into the plaza. Then he waited for us to catch up.

The sky was dark as ever, but it wasn't raining. To the north, the forested slopes disappeared into the clouds. Up there somewhere was the snow-capped peak. I wished I could see it.

"The twilight zone," MacClayne remarked.

"Yeah, we're at the edge of the world," I said.

"And below us lies Apatzingán."

"Right. It's off the edge."

Cuauhtémoc strutted along beside us.

"So what was that thing the lady was telling us about?" he said.

"Something made of stone, apparently," I said. "She called it a pedregal."

"The ruins of a pre-Hispanic pyramid?"

"Maybe. This was an urban settlement going back to pre-conquest times, and it probably had some status."

A short walk took us there, and instead of being the ruins of an ancient edifice, it turned out to be a lava flow which looked surprisingly new and fresh. Hardly any trees or vegetation had taken root in it.

"Quite a pile of rock!" MacClayne said. "I presume it's lava?"

"Yes, and I can't believe how recent it looks," I said. "In this whole region there've been only two recorded volcanic eruptions since the Spanish Conquest--Paricutín in 1943, and Jorullo back in 1759. There's also the Thirsty Mountain event which appears to have gone unnoticed except for that legend. And now here's a fourth."

"How recent do you think it might be?--or is it possible to say from looking at it?"

"It's guesswork," I said. "But when I see a barren pile of rock in the midst of this verdant landscape where grass and trees are growing everywhere else, I've got to conclude that it hasn't been here awfully long. It's certainly a lot newer than the malpaís which is covered with trees and brush. It could be less than a century old."

I chipped off a piece of the lava to inspect a fresh surface. The rock was almost black, and sparkled with tiny crystals of feldspar. It was basaltic andesite, the same material I'd seen everywhere on the Meseta Volcánica.

A drizzle began, and we decided to head back to town before we got caught in a shower. I could come back some other time and visit this on my own.

"Mount Tancítaro used to be the one and only volcano in this region," I said, glancing off in the direction where the clouds were hiding it. "That was maybe a hundred thousand years ago and it must have been a fantastically tall mountain."

"How much higher do you think it was?"

"Maybe a third taller," I said. "Just imagine it back when it was an active volcano. But it's still the highest peak in Michoacán. It's about 3845 meters."

"Why did it cease its volcanic activity?"

"I don't know. That's something I've been puzzling over. All I can say is that for some reason it stopped erupting and started eroding down. That's when all the little cinder cones started popping up."

"A bit like when you cut down a redwood tree and a bunch of little saplings start springing up in a circle around it," MacClayne said.

"Yeah, like that," I said, admiring his metaphor. MacClayne had a way with words.

We'd come to the church at the far side of the plaza. The building was made of stone, and was fairly typical of churches throughout México, but larger and more elegant than one might expect to see in a remote village. It was a masterpiece of architecture, almost a cathedral.

"Poor villages with hardly anything else sometimes have expensive churches," I said.

MacClayne shook his head. "That's why they're poor."

"Maybe, but it's probably quite old and no strain on the current economy. I'd guess it's probably older than the lava flow."

The entrance door was open. Nobody seemed to be around.

"Don't you dare shit in here," I admonished Cuauhtémoc as we walked in, "You'll burn in hell if you do." Just to be sure, I lifted him up and carried him in the crook of my arm

The interior was even more impressive than the outside, with magnificent baroque furnishings and decoration, all except for one horrible blemish--from the ceiling hung an uncovered light bulb suspended by a bare electric wire, as in some back-yard shed.

MacClayne smiled sympathetically. "That's México."

We stepped outside into the oncoming drizzle. In spite of the precipitation, the air was getting colder as we strolled around town. At one end we passed a small sawmill, but the lumber was apparently sold elsewhere; all the houses in this village were adobe. The very elegant ones with traditionally tall doors and high ceilings were concentrated mostly around the plaza; those along the outer streets were much smaller and had lower doors and ceilings, but they too had their charm. Eventually we turned back towards the hotel.

Suddenly it was dark, and MacClayne remarked on how quickly night had fallen.

"That's the way it is here in the tropics," I said. "Day one minute, night the next."

The drizzle had become a slow but chilling rain. We weren't hungry yet, but on our way back to the hotel we kept our eye out for a restaurant that we could come back to later in the evening. There was one on a corner of the plaza that looked okay. I stepped in and found that it would be open all evening.

When we got back to our hotel room I realized that Cuauhtémoc was soaked to the skin. He was one wet chicken, and I looked around for a towel to dry him off. There were only two, one for me and one for MacClayne, so I used mine. Then I wrapped the bird in his small blanket which I'd brought with. Then I remembered that the poor bird hadn't eaten, and I'd forgotten to bring any grain. Where in Tancítaro could I get oats or corn or barley? I guessed that any kind of grain would be okay.

"You wait here," I said to the bird, but of course he insisted on accompanying me out the door and to the arcade where I began asking in one shop after another. It was raining quite heavily now, and I was glad that several stores and shops were under this section of the broad roof of the arcade. I soon learned of a place where animal feed, including grains was sold. However, it was around the corner and down the street, and to get there I'd have to walk through the rain and get soaking wet. But then I saw that the shop I was in had corn tortillas. I looked at my bird, wondering if he'd settle for tortillas. Yes, he would, I decided. He'd love to dine on tortillas this evening.

So back in our room, after Cuauhtémoc had finished his meal of tortillas, which to my relief he ate without complaint, I again wrapped him up in his bird blanket and fastened it with a safety pin. He looked cozy and content, sitting there on the seat of the chair next to me, with just his neck and head protruding from the blanket. I thought again of Chayo, and how the bird would never have accepted this blanket in the first place if it hadn't been her present to him.

MacClayne had lain down on his bed to take a nap and was already snoring faintly. Cuauhtémoc had also closed his eyes. I could hear the rain on the roof; it sounded intense. The air felt colder.

I put a blanket over my shoulders and sat down with my journal, glancing over what I'd written earlier of the day's events, then I started a new paragraph: Our meal at Antojitos and our subsequent visit to the Stone Gardens. Had MacClayne seen that white bird? I kept wondering about that. I wrote on for some time.

Eventually, MacClayne woke up, yawned, stretched and asked me if I were hungry. "Yes I am," I said, and we got ready to go out to eat. I replaced Cuauhtémoc's blanket with a make-shift raincoat consisting of a plastic bag with a hole for his head to stick out.

"You ready?" MacClayne asked. He was looking at the bird.

"We are. Let's go."

The rain was by now a heavy downpour. Exiting the hotel, we walked under the broad arcade until we reached the corner. Our restaurant was across the street.

"Just look at that river!" MacClayne said, and stepped back from the curb. The street was flowing with dark, muddy water, reflecting the twisting image of a street lamp.

We stood on the high curb, protected from above by the arcade roof, and looked for a place to cross. With Cuauhtémoc on my arm, we found a place where the water took a narrow channel which we stepped over with ease. Without much difficulty we reached the other side, and paused under the long protective eaves of the restaurant. There we shook off the water; even those few seconds under the downpour had gotten us wet. Only Cuauhtémoc was dry; I took off his raincoat, and we made our entry into the restaurant.

It wasn't too crowded, and we found seats at a small wooden table. Cuauhtémoc stepped off my arm to perch on the backrest of a chair, and I laid a napkin on the floor below him, just in case. Like the other buildings in this area, this was of adobe, probably dating from before the Revolution. MacClayne admired the simple elegance of the room with its massive rose-colored walls and high ceiling.

"This could be the setting of a Western movie," MacClayne said, still wiping water from his face and hair.

"A scene where the desperados pause for a meal and a drink as they head south with the loot."

"Not desperados," he corrected me. "Heroes searching for the lost city of El Dorado."

"Okay," I said. "And the bird, can he be in this movie?"

"Better ask him if he'd want to be part of it."

Cuauhtémoc turned to MacClayne and clucked. MacClayne gazed back at the bird and said, "I almost get the feeling that that damned rooster understood what I just said."

"A number of people have made similar observations, and at times I wonder about it myself."

A teen-age waitress appeared beside our table, smiling shyly, perhaps wondering if we spoke Spanish. It was probably unusual to see foreigners in this establishment.

"¿Qué hay de comer?" I asked.

"Carne de res, y carne de puerco," she replied.

"Beef or pork," I translated for MacClayne; the beef was twenty five pesos and the pork was twenty--about one US dollar.

"I'll have one and you have the other," he said. "How's that?"

While we waited for the food, we munched on corn chips. I broke off pieces of mine to share with Cuauhtémoc. Although he'd already eaten, he still seemed to be hungry. On the wall beside us was a portrait of a man in an early 19th century military uniform and a bandana tied around his head. MacClayne wondered who he might be.

"That's General Morelos," I said. "He was a leader in the War for Independence, and he's the one who presided over the writing of the first Mexican constitution, which happened, coincidentally, in Apatzingán. That was in 1814. Morelos was originally from this state of Michoacán, and he started out as a muleteer. He spent a good many of his early years driving teams of pack mules up and down the back roads of Michoacán, across the Valley of Infiernillo."

"That was before he became a military officer?"

"Morelos never was trained as a professional military man, but he was quite good at it." I went on to say a bit more about him.

"What eventually became of this Morelos?"

"The bad guys put him up against a wall and shot him."

"The Spaniards?"

"It's often phrased in those terms, but it wasn't at all that simple. The worst of them were actually Mexican landowners, men like General Iturbide who eventually took over and proclaimed himself emperor."

Our meals came; both the beef and the pork were served with beans and corn tortillas. I asked the waitress about the pedregal. She knew that it was from a volcanic eruption, but not when it had occurred.

While we ate, the waitress brought beer to three or four fellows at a table near us. At the sound of cans popping open and liquid pouring into glasses, Cuauhtémoc perked up his head. I offered him some choice bits from my plate, but he'd lost interest in food.

"Shall we have coffee?" MacClayne suggested as we finished our meal.

Rain hammered at the roof and poured down loudly outside; no doubt more snow was falling on the mountain above. It felt good to be sitting there nice and dry, hearing the rain. MacClayne recalled adventures from his seafaring days, just after the war:

". . . To be young is the good time, the best time, perhaps the only time. I had recently finished five long interminable and often unendurable years in the Royal Marines. The enemy had been destroyed and forced into unconditional surrender and so there I was, returning to a world at peace, or so we were told.

"I suffered through the job routine; builder's laborer, factory worker, worked on the railway, navvying, house-painter and shipped out too. Going to sea was a terrible disappointment, although I was and still am consumed with a wild and romantic dream of the sea, of the movement of waves and the pull of sail, raising the anchor by hand . . .

"I remember once I was shipping out from the old country and I had missed a ship and was on the beach in Las Palmas in the Canary Islands. A lovely group of islands. Beautiful beaches, marvelous climate, and I truly had the time of my life because I was young then.

"I had finally managed to escape that dank, damp, dreary, gloomy and grey British climate and emerge at last into the sun. It was like a second birth. I emerged into a world flooded with sunlight and it was love at first sight."

A nostalgic smile came over MacClayne's face as he spoke, and his voice blended pleasantly with the storm. His story was from the late 1940's, shortly after the War, still some years before I was born. As a British seaman he was required to complete the voyage he was on. But MacClayne was a free spirit. He jumped ship.

"I needed no coaxing, no convincing . . . I saw the sun, I fell in love and that particular love has never left me. Gone, forever I hoped, those sodden thistled Scottish highlands and moorland. Grey Glasgow and Gloomy Edinburgh with their rain-washed mackintosh-muffled streets and refrigerated bedrooms with goose-pimpled wallpaper falling away from the walls because of the damp. I was as exultant as a bird trying his wings; swooping, diving, soaring, holding his flight."

The party at the table near us were downing their beers, and Cuauhtémoc nudged me with his beak. I knew what he wanted, but I ignored him, hoping that if I didn't pay any attention he might forget about it. I went back to listening to MacClayne's story.

"There were three of us: an Englishman who was also a seaman from my ship, and a Welshman who'd been on the island for some time. We lived in a makeshift tent made of poles and canvas that the Welshman had inherited from some predecessor.

"When a merchant ship docked we would go aboard and eat. The seamen are great and why should they not be? After all they are our brothers. Sometimes we even raised money for the wine."

Cuauhtémoc nudged me again. I continued to ignore him.

"We also became friends with some local fishermen. Any fish left over from their catch they would give to us. Despite something of a language barrier we got to know them very well. They must have figured we were a wee bit different and probably realized that our aim and purpose in life was not to wear a suit and collar and tie and work in a bank or laboratory and certainly not a factory. We were not particularly inclined to industry of any kind. We were children of working class parents and none of our fathers had any great praise for hard work except to keep the wolf from the door. School was over at fourteen, and if you had asked us about our education I am sure we would have told you we did not even miss it.

"Ah it was a great life all right, a great life!

"We literally lived on fish. Clams for breakfast with a banana. Fish for dinner. Many a time there would be a big fish on the plate and nothing else. No salad, no baked Idaho, no tartar sauce or melted butter garnish, no sprig of parsley and certainly no silver fish knives. We had fried fish, boiled fish, fish cooked in a home-made steamer, grilled fish, fish cooked on a spit over a flame, fish in a chowder. I ate so much fish my stomach used to rise and fall with the tide. . . ."

Our coffees arrived, and Cuauhtémoc glared at me with a where's-my-drink look on his face. I offered him a bit of corn chip, but he pushed it away and nudged me again. He wasn't in a mood to be ignored. It was time to take him back to the hotel, but I was enjoying MacClayne's story and I didn't want to interrupt. There was only one way to appease this bird and keep him quiet.

I glanced around, feeling an irrational need to assure myself that Chayo wasn't watching, then I cleared my throat and said to MacClayne, "Do you mind if I order a beer?" Because of MacClayne's eternal struggle with alcohol, I felt it proper to ask his permission.

"Go ahead, feel free," he said.

"Una cerveza," I said to the waitress.

"I didn't know you drank beer," he said as the woman left.

"I don't."

"Didn't you just order one? Not that it's any of my business. I have no objection. I'm only curious."

I cleared my throat again and tried to think of something to say. My mind was blank.

The waitress returned with the beer and a glass into which I poured some and set it in front of the bird. He eagerly dipped his beak into the brew.

MacClayne just stared. No expression on his face. The waitress stood there, eyes glued to the bird. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see that people at other tables had turned to look. I heard tittering. Even the cook came out of the kitchen to watch. But the bird himself was not the least bit self-conscious. He just went on plunging his beak into the glass and lifting his head up to swallow.

The room had fallen silent. Eating and drinking and talking had ceased. There was just the sound of the rain. And the penetrating silent looks of the entire establishment. I was beginning to understand what people go through when a close friend or family member is addicted to drink.

The bird was nudging me again. I poured more beer into his glass. What else could I do?

Then I remembered our conversation. MacClayne's adventure. A moment before I'd found it very amusing and entertaining. Now, I just wanted to be talking about something other than my bird's drinking. "You were telling about the Canary Islands," I said, trying my best to sound nonchalant.

MacClayne nodded, took a sip of his coffee and paused to think. "Och yes, were was I?"

"There were three of you, living in a tent," I said.

"Yes, we lived on the beach.," he said. "Norman, our Welsh comrade, was drinking heavily and was in the D.T.'s a good deal of the time. In his worse periods he would rant on and on about the terrible creatures planning to encircle him. He described them as a mixture of huge red-and-black feathered spiders with luminous eyes and sharp-clawed, swarming octopi with the flesh-devouring teeth of piranha fish."

Cuauhtémoc, as though intrigued by the description, paused to listen. Soon he was again dipping his beak. I surreptitiously glanced around. Thank god! The waitress was elsewhere, and people at other tables were back to their own affairs.

"One evening a fisherman gave us a lobster. When we returned to camp with it, we found Norman staring wild-eyed into space and howling like a dog. We gave him a big swallow of wine and he lay down and almost instantly fell asleep. For a laugh we laid the lobster on his bare chest, and then wandered along the beach to lie around and take our ease, when we heard a terrible scream.

"In the moonlight we saw the Welshman streaking across the sands like a wild man, leaping and flailing the air with his arms and throwing his knees high. He raced past without even seeing us. Every few steps he leaped into the air like a hurdler or a male ballet dancer, throwing his front foot horizontal to the ground and making you think he might sprout wings, hold his flight and sail away into the horizon. We finally brought him down with a rugby tackle and had to sit on him to keep him quiet. The sweat was lashing out of him and he was still clutching the lobster. Gradually he calmed down enough to talk but even then it was with the voice of a man who had narrowly escaped death, 'I kept telling you bastards about those monsters I was seeing. Well you'll have to believe me now for I've caught one.'"

Cuauhtémoc hiccuped.

"He was in such a state of agitation we had to hold the jug to his mouth and after a few gurgles he quieted down."

Cuauhtémoc hiccuped again. Poor bird, he was pickled. MacClayne seemed not to notice, and he made no comment on the alcohol that had just been consumed at our table. But when you're traveling with two alcoholics, and one gets to drink and the other doesn't, there's bound to be tension. Sooner or later.

"Shall we head back to the hotel?" he said. That was all he said, and I was grateful.

We finished off our coffee. I quietly lifted Cuauhtémoc off the chair, and went to pay our bill. The fat lady who operated the cash register gave us a weird look, but she didn't make any comment. Just the same, she somehow looked like a real gossip, and I could just guess that my bird and I would be the talk of this place for the next week.

The rain was pouring down more fiercely than ever as we stepped out the door and stood under the eaves. I tried to put the bird's raincoat on, but he fought against it, and finally I gave up. "Pobrecito," I said. "You've got to lay off the booze. It's bad for you." That was all I said, knowing that it had really been my fault for giving it to him, for taking such poor care of him.

"Now we have to cross that," MacClayne said, looking at the street which had become a river. The flooding had continued to grow while we'd been in the restaurant. Light from street lamps cut through the rain and danced on the water. For the moment, we stood high and dry on the curb which rose a good half meter above the street.

Suddenly I saw her! There, across the street, stood Chayo. She glared at me through the rain, clearly faulting me for the bird's condition. I gasped and closed my eyes, then looked again. No, it was just a pillar of the arcade. I sighed with relief, and looked down at the waterway between.

Slightly shaken, I rolled up my trouser-legs, took the bird in my arms, and looked for a place where MacClayne could follow me across. Someone had attempted to fashion a makeshift footbridge out of planks, but one of the timbers had been washed away. I stepped in and waded, hurrying to avoid being in the downpour a second longer than necessary. The water in the street was only ankle deep, but my jacket and even my shirt underneath got soaked with icy rain. I tried to shield Cuauhtémoc as best I could. He was still hiccuping.

MacClayne waded in to follow, shoes and all. He should've gotten himself a decent pair of boots. That's what I'd advised him to do in one of my letters. So why hadn't he? Scotch frugality was the reason! MacClayne had probably violated and defied all the other rules and accepted norms of Scotland, but frugality was the one tradition he held sacred.

So the water flooded into his shoes. But he took it well, not allowing it to dampen his spirits, and once back in our room he simply hung up his soggy footgear in hopes that it would be dry by morning.

Before dealing with my water-logged clothes, I attended to Cuauhtémoc. I carefully wiped the water off him with my towel. Then I draped a large blanket over the back of a chair, forming a small, cozy, tent-like shelter over the seat, where, after wrapping the bird in his small blanket, I placed him.

Having finished, I peeled off my wet shirt and trousers, wrapped a blanket around myself, then sat down and reached for my journal when MacClayne said, "Would you care to read something aloud together?"

"Sounds like a good thought," I said.

We decided that I'd read first, and I dug into my library which consisted of about three books. "Here's one on sedimentary petrology," I said teasingly. "It's great for reading aloud."

"What does it say?"

"That 70 % of the rocks at the earth's surface are sedimentary in origin," I said.

"That's very good to know," he replied with a smile. "What else do you have?"

I took out a small volume of Spanish poetry. "Can I read something in Spanish?" I said. "I think I have something appropriate, by Antonio Machado, Voy soñando caminos--I Go Along Dreaming Roads."

I read the poem in Spanish, then paraphrased it in English. MacClayne asked me to read it again in Spanish. Being a poet, he liked to hear the sound of things in their original language. When I finished he applauded. Cuauhtémoc gave no response; he was sleeping it off under the blanket. From time to time I checked to see if he were okay.

Then MacClayne took his turn, choosing a story from the collection he'd been reading earlier: Sunny Days in the Tropics.

I already had one blanket wrapped around my shoulders, but I added a second, and MacClayne began a tale that took place on a warm tropical evening somewhere in the South Seas. There wasn't much in the way of plot or action, but MacClayne read it so well that I could almost feel the warm, gentle breeze coming in the window, carrying the sounds of insects chirping in the balmy night.

I smiled longingly and let out a deep sigh which formed a small cloud of vapor in the frigid air. The whitewashed adobe walls reflected the cold back at me like the ice blocks of an igloo. I shivered and pulled the blankets tighter about me.

"Were the Canary Islands like that?" I asked when he finished the story.

"Beautiful beaches, marvelous climate. Indeed it was paradise," he said. "I'm sure we suffered our aches and pains; nevertheless it was what you might call a poor man's idyllic existence."

"It's gotten terribly cold in here," I said, rubbing my arms in an attempt to get my blood circulating. Then I stopped and listened for a moment. "I don't hear the rain any more."

"Maybe it's let up," MacClayne said.

I opened the door to look.

It was snowing. Large white flakes were floating down from the dark sky, and I shut the door to keep out what I could of the cold.

continued in Chapter 19

chapter 17

2008-11-18T13:00:00.007-08:00

If I had any dreams that night, they faded quickly from my mind as I awoke in the morning with a knock at my door. It was MacClayne, looking rested and ready for action. We'd both slept in; it was already mid morning. The world awaited us. Then I remembered that Chayo would be leaving the next day, but at least I'd get to see her again that evening before she left.

I rubbed my eyes and said to MacClayne, "What do you say we start off with coffee and some breakfast?" I was thinking of treating him at one of the more elegant cafés.

"How about that Chinese place?" he said.

"El Café Chino?"

"I'd like to see it."

I left Cuauhtémoc in my room, hoping the bird wouldn't mind, and set out with MacClayne.

The sky hung low and gray, but today that didn't bother MacClayne; his adventurous mood was infectious. We laughed and joked as we headed towards the plaza.

There's something about a dull, unimaginative hole-in-the-wall establishment like Café Chino that achieves personality through its total lack of personality. MacClayne was very impressed and conceded that it was everything he could've expected. We ordered coffee and exchanged accounts of legendary insipid eating places we'd known.

MacClayne recalled one on the east end of London, another in New York, and also one in the Falkland Islands. Being a world traveler, he'd been to some truly uninspiring places. He concluded by affirming that to find absolute banality, one must journey to the ends of the earth.

Our coffees arrived and we went on to review our plans for the next few days. The most important thing on our agenda was the excursion to Apatzingán, but we'd firmly decided during the months of our correspondence that one simply does not charge off to a fabled and forbidden city in a big hurry. This was to be like a Japanese tea ceremony, an experience where every move is made slowly and deliberately, and the actual drinking of the tea is almost incidental.

Our intentions were to spend the first few days touring Uruapan and its immediate environs. There was a lot that I wanted to show him in this ancient town of narrow streets and adobe houses, this land of volcanoes and lava flows, ranches and Indian villages. I'd put my lessons with don Javier on hold.

As we chatted I occasionally glanced at the backrest of the chair beside me. It felt empty without Cuauhtémoc perching there.

"The gunfight was in some nearby village, wasn't it?" MacClayne asked, apparently referring to something I had written to him in a letter.

"The gunfight?" I repeated, wondering which one he was talking about.

"The local OK Corral." He grinned.

"Oh, that." I grinned too, recalling that he'd written that he wanted to see the place. MacClayne was a fan of Western movies. "Yes, that was in Jucutacato, near the old ranch which had formerly belonged to Chayo's father. Some guy got his friends together and rode into town to settle a score with one of the villagers, and they shot it out, right there in the village square. A couple people were killed that day. The count depends on who you hear it from. Someone even told me it was around twenty, but that I doubt."

"Call it poetic license," said MacClayne.

I took a sip of my coffee. "Feuds have been going on here since time immemorial. Chayo told me they're part of the local tradition."

"Her father was shot, wasn't he. Was there any connection?"

"I don't think so, that OK Corral shootout was much earlier. When Chayo was little."

"But they eventually got the ranch away from him, didn't they?"

"That was a guy named Juan García," I said. "He's dead now, died a pretty bizarre death."

"He's the one who went crazy? Started seeing things, shot up the ranch house?"

"Yeah." I couldn't resist adding wryly, "Chayo got the credit for that."

"How?"

"Some people say she cast a spell on him."

"They do? You mean they think Chayo has supernatural powers?"

"It's just talk. You know how it is. The things people say." I shrugged my shoulders, took a sip of my coffee and glanced around the room, looking for some other topic. One of the few things I'd scrupulously avoided mentioning in my letters to MacClayne was anything to do with Chayo's apparent connection with paranormal stuff. That was because MacClayne was given to dismissing such things as superstition, and in the past had often heaped ridicule on any account of them. I hadn't intended to bring the topic up now either, it had just slipped out of my mouth. My big mouth.

MacClayne nodded pensively. "People do say and believe strange things, but at times it can leave you wondering. There was a woman back in Dundrennan, my home village. People said she had remarkable powers."

"What sort of powers?" I said. I was glad to have the subject of the paranormal shifted away from Chayo, and at the same time I was also curious to hear what MacClayne might have to say.

"I guess nowadays you'd call her an herbalist. She used to gather and sell herbs. And people also credited her with healing powers. There may've been some truth in it. Once when my brother was sick my parents called her and she came and laid her hands on him and he recovered. It may've been coincidence. I don't know."

It surprised me to hear him say anything so open-minded and sympathetic on that subject. But I knew that MacClayne could be argumentative. If I had suggested there was some reality to shamanism, he probably would've spent the next half hour debunking it.

"Are you getting hungry?" he said.

"Yes. We could have breakfast here. The food's not bad."

"What was that place you wrote about? You said it was built like something out of a Nordic myth."

"Antojitos."

"Yes, Antojitos. I remember now. Am I pronouncing it right?"

"You are."

"How about 'oor-wah-PAN'?" He incorrectly put the accent on the last syllable.

"It's 'oor-WAH-pan'," I corrected him. "Don't feel bad, I was here three days before I learned to say it right.

"I remember you writing about that." He tried it a couple times and eventually got it, though his Scottish accent made it charmingly unique. MacClayne spoke with a burr as rough as a Scottish thistle.

"You'd like to eat at Antojitos?" I said.

We set out for Antojitos, ambling down the arcade to the corner, crossing the street and pausing to look at the movie posters at a theater along the way, then we came to La Huatapera, the museum with the ancient, meter-thick adobe walls and stone fountain. It was open, and we took time to admire the displays of arts and crafts from centuries past.

"This is probably older than any building in the United States," I said. "And I think it was around the time they were building it that the Thirsty Mountain erupted."

"This is probably older than any building in the United States," I said. "And I think it was around the time they were building it that the Thirsty Mountain erupted."

"The Thirsty Mountain--that's the lava flow you've been studying, isn't it?"

"Yes, it's just down the road a couple of kilometers. We'll go there, maybe this afternoon."

"I'd like to see it," he said. "I think you were working on an article about it. Did you try sending it anywhere for publication?"

"I finished it. But I haven't sent it out yet."

"Wouldn't it be best to send it right away?" he said. "It sounds like a discovery that could be helpful to you in your geology career."

I bit my lip. "Before I try to publish I want to verify the original source of the legend," I said. I didn't tell him I was afraid that if it were published, Dr. Knudsen might hear about it and denounce me as a fraud. Although that possibility seemed remote, it nevertheless worried me to the extent that I hesitated to publish my find. I hadn't told MacClayne anything about the dubious nature of my degree, and I didn't care to go into it.

"Have you been able to find out any more about the source of the legend?"

"So far I've only seen it in a children's book."

"You don't think the author might have invented the story?"

"No. There are just too many precise details in it," I said. "He would've needed a background in geology to invent such a thing and describe it the way he did. Anyway, I'm hoping to find his original source."

"Where could he have gotten it?"

"Chayo has been helping me and she's looked for Indian storytellers who might know it, but so far without success. And we've also been hunting down various histories and memoirs from the 16th and 17th centuries. Most were written by Spanish friars. They're the most likely sources, but not easy to find. Most have been out of print for centuries."

"It sounds intriguing," MacClayne said. "I'm sure that while you're doing this search, even without finding it, you're learning a lot of the history of this region."

"I feel I am. I've even come across old references to Apatzingán. It was often called Cutzamala, a Náhuatl word meaning the same thing."

"Meaning the place of Apatzi. He's the god of death."

"Yes," I said. "Or at least that's how he's been classified. But to me that interpretation doesn't sound accurate, because the full translation of Apatzingán literally says it's the place where Apatzi was risen up."

"Risen up? From the dead, I presume?"

"That's the implication."

"So you don't think he was a grim reaper?"

"No, quite the opposite," I said. "Maybe more like a Tarascan version of Baldr."

No matter what topic we started out with, we soon wound up talking about Apatzingán.

We left the Huatapera and went to Antojitos, which was just around the corner. It was fairly empty; many of the stalls were closed and only a fraction of the usually bustling crowd was there, no doubt because of the unending inclement weather.

"So this is it?" MacClayne looked around admiringly, putting his hands on one of the massive wooden pillars. "You did not exaggerate. This would indeed have been worthy of Hrothgar and his warriors."

A whiff of cold mist hit us as we stood there; it took MacClayne back to nostalgic memories of the old country where it rained all the time. "There was a place like this not too far from Dundrennan, dating from the 12th century," he said.

"Do you like pozole?" I said, impatient to eat.

"What is it?"

"Soup, made of boiled pork and corn that looks like hominy."

MacClayne said he'd try some and we went to a stall where I ordered us each a bowl.

"How do you like it?" I asked him as we ate.

"Olaf, you are nothing less than a true connoisseur of gourmet delights, and when I become editor in chief of Diner's Abroad, I'll retain you at an excellent salary and send you forth to discover and report back the great culinary experiences of Latin America and the Orient as well."

It was MacClayne at his grandiloquent best. It was this kind of humor which made him a welcome guest in the places where he read his poetry.

"¿Su amigo es Norteamericano?" the lady vendor asked me. She knew me because I often came here with Chayo.

"Es de Escotia," I said.

"¿Yo?" MacClayne spoke up. "Sí, soy de Escotia."

"¿Le gustó el pozole?" she asked him.

"¡Muchísimo!" he assured her, scraping the last spoonful from his bowl with proverbial Scottish frugality.

Though MacClayne's Spanish was limited, I was repeatedly impressed at how well he handled what he did know.

As we got up to go, I glanced around for Cuauhtémoc, momentarily forgetting that he wasn't with me that morning.

Having started our tour of Uruapan on a very good note, we then set out for the Stone Gardens.

On the way we stopped at the boardinghouse to retrieve Cuauhtémoc. He greeted me with an unhappy squawk at having been locked in, and he'd also crapped in the middle of the floor rather than on the newspapers I'd laid out for the purpose. But I could clean that up later. The three of us set out for the Stone Gardens at the source of the Río Cupatitzio.

I had once found it hard to believe that a river of this size could simply flow out of the walls of this small canyon, and now MacClayne was as impressed as I had been.

We took our time, pausing often to admire the series of springs, the stonework, the fountains and bridges as we strolled up through the canyon. Eventually we came to the largest of the springs, which was at the head of the canyon. A large pond formed here. Wisps of fog hung low among the trees and over the water, enhancing the mystic quality.

"The Spring of Urð," I said.

"In all my travels I've seen nothing like this," he said. "I wouldn't have believed such a place even existed--except in the realm of myth and legend. But this region does indeed belong to the domain of folklore."

"For me it does," I said. "And, in a whimsical sense, it almost seems that the town itself was intentionally named after Urð."

We sat down on the ground, near the edge of the water.

"There are times when coincidence is almost too remarkable to be mere coincidence," he said. "How does the story of Urð go?"

"There's really no story about her," I said. "Only that she sits by the spring and carves out the runes which decide the lives men are to lead and the places their journeys will take them."

"Perhaps it was Urð who brought you to Uruapan," he said in his tongue-in-cheek way.

Chayo had suggested that too. Maybe I'd mentioned that to MacClayne in a letter--but I'd never written anything of how I'd gotten on the wrong bus and arrived in this town by accident. And I felt it best not to say it now either, lest he consider me less than competent. "Yes," I said, "it was Urð, and I shall always thank her for it."

These thoughts expressed, we lapsed into a comfortable silence, contemplating the pond, the trees, the grass and the black lava, each of us retreating into his own world of rock, water and mist.

Cuauhtémoc did likewise.

The sky was still overcast, and I'd been rubbing my arms all morning to keep warm. But, as I sat there gazing into the pond, I began to experience a pleasant misty feeling. Time stopped. It could have been for minutes, perhaps much longer.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a large white bird appear out of the mist, descend to the pool, and land in the middle. She swam to where Cuauhtémoc stood on the bank and touched beaks with him, exchanging a silent communication, bird to bird.

Then she turned and began swimming slowly away, but at the last instant turned and gazed briefly at MacClayne and me, giving a brief nod, as if of approval. Then she took to the air and disappeared into the mist.

"I remember a folk tale," MacClayne said, breaking the silence. "One they used to tell in the old country. Back in Scotland."

I continued to contemplate the faint ripples which still spread out across the surface of the pond, the only evidence of the white bird's fleeting visit.

"A man was crossing the mountains. There was hardly any trail for him to follow."

"Yes?" I said to let MacClayne know I was following his story. Cuauhtémoc had moved to a better position and turned his head to listen.

"This traveler was led by a white bird, to which he was attached by a long golden thread. His path took him along dangerous cliffs, through ravines and across rivers. There were storms. It rained and even snowed. Wild beasts stalked him, but he had no serious difficulty, due to his connection with the white bird."

MacClayne spoke slowly, gazing into the water. I hardly moved.

"But the golden thread broke. I don't remember how, but it did break. Maybe the traveler tarried too long in some place along the way. Anyway, he lost his connection with the white bird. Soon he was hopelessly lost and wandered in circles. This went on for many days and there appeared to be no chance of his coming out alive."

MacClayne paused.

I waited for him to go on, but he seemed to have come to the end of his story. The ripples in the pond were scarcely visible now. Then I realized he was looking at me.

"So when are we going?" he said.

"Going where?" I said.

"To Apatzingán. Isn't that what we've been planning?"

Suddenly I was shivering with cold and I began rubbing my arms and tried to stand up, but my legs had gone to sleep and a thousand needles were going through them.

MacClayne sat there, gazing into the pool again. Wasn't he cold?

I stopped rubbing my arms and legs just long enough to glance at my watch. One o'clock. It wasn't supposed to be one o'clock. An entire hour seemed unaccounted for, and I felt disoriented.

"When do you want to leave?" was all I could think to say.

"How about right now?"

His suggestion took me by surprise. I wanted to object that we'd made plans to first spend a week or so here in Uruapan. There were all those numerous places to visit. The malpaís, Volcán Paricutín, the village square of Jucutacato, and so much more. And besides, it was a bit late in the day to be starting out on something like this. But I was suddenly struck with an eerie feeling that we mustn't tarry and break the golden thread. That's what MacClayne seemed to have been saying, and maybe he was right.

"Then let's go." My own words felt strange to me, but perhaps it was the right thing to do. I vaguely wondered if MacClayne had also seen the white bird, or if I'd somehow invented it. Trying to sort this out only added to my confusion. I still felt slightly disoriented. I was shivering from the cold, but my legs began returning to normal and I stood up.

So did MacClayne, a bit stiffly but otherwise okay. Although he was fully twice my age, he didn't show it except for his gray hair. I wondered what color it had originally been.

Cuauhtémoc hopped onto my arm and we hurried back to the boardinghouse where I quickly tossed a few things in a small backpack. Since I wore sandals I didn't need socks; I took an extra T-shirt, a razor and toothbrush, a couple books to read, and Cuauhtémoc's small blanket. The spiral notebook in which I wrote my journal was nearly full, so I decided to leave it behind. Along the way I'd stop at a store to get another.

A minute later MacClayne emerged from his room with a small shoulder bag.

"You're taking the rooster with us?" he asked when he saw the bird on my arm.

"He goes everywhere with me."

Cuauhtémoc looked at MacClayne and crowed, as if to say, "Damn right I'm going with you guys!"

MacClayne eyed us both rather strangely for a moment, then said, "Well, let's get on the road."

"One other thing," I said. "I'd like to stop by and let Chayo know that we're leaving for Apatzingán."

On our way out I stepped into the dining room. Doña Josefina was there and I told her that we wouldn't be around for dinner that night.

"¿A dónde van?" she asked.

"Apatzingán." I added that we'd be gone for a day or two.

Doña Josefina stood there looking at me speechless for a moment. "Chayo is letting you go to Apatzingán?"

"Well, yes," I said. I was slightly taken aback at the way she worded it. "I talked it over with her."

"You did? So I guess it must be okay with her then."

"Is there some reason it wouldn't be?"

"No, no. It's nothing. Nothing. I just wish you a good trip, that's all."

"Is there something I should know?"

"It's for Chayo to tell you. If she chose not to say it, then it's not for me to intervene."

"I understand," I said, but I really didn't. Doña Josefina was being just as mysterious as Chayo had been.

"Please be careful," she said. "Chayo doesn't want to lose you. Pablo and I don't want to lose you either."

I was slightly disconcerted by her concern.

* * *
Doña Rosario's shop was closed for lunch. I went to the side entrance, and Chayo's cousin, Socorro, came to the door. She told me Chayo had just left, but hadn't said where she was going, or how long she'd be gone. She was probably making preparations for her trip to Chiapas.

MacClayne asked me if I'd like to wait for Chayo's return.

I thought for a moment, then said, "No, that would be like breaking the golden thread. We must leave at once." It was strange how quickly a fantasy could become a guiding principle.

So I wrote a note which I asked Socorro to pass on to her cousin. In it I briefly told Chayo about the white bird and that MacClayne and I were leaving for Apatzingán this afternoon. I ended it with, "Te quiero--Olaf."

Socorro was unusually quiet, and, as I handed her the note, I glimpsed a look of concern on her face. Not wishing to intrude upon her feelings, I pretended not to notice. "Take good care of Chayo and your aunt," I said as we left, and the girl forced a smile.

"She looked sad," MacClayne observed after we'd left the shop, and I nodded silently. I didn't want to have to explain a lot of things that I didn't understand very well myself.

We headed for the depot of the Galeana bus line, and arrived just as a bus was about to leave. Passengers were boarding, and we got in at the end of the line.

But, as we stood there, an empty, sinking feeling began to fill my stomach, and it intensified as the line shortened in front of us. Cuauhtémoc nudged me with his beak, trying to tell me something. Finally, when there were only a couple passengers left ahead of us, I turned to MacClayne and said, "This is not the way to Apatzingán."

"No?" He glanced up at the destination which was printed in large letters: APATZINGÁN.

"No, it's not," I said. "This bus would take us on a comfortable ride down a smooth, paved road. We'd be there in less than two hours."

"So what's wrong with that?"

"Our Apatzingán is a fabled city which can be reached only by a difficult journey of hardship, sacrifice, ... suffering," I said. "The town at the end of this easy ride would not be the legendary place we've been looking forward to."

Cuauhtémoc clucked in apparent assent, seconding what I'd said.

MacClayne looked at the bird, then at me. At last he said, "I was feeling something like that myself."

We stepped out of the line.

"There's got to be a more proper way," I said.

"Do you know of any?" MacClayne said uneasily.

In our correspondence we'd done an impressive amount of fantasizing, but precious little planning.

"We could go by way of Tancítaro," I said at last.

"Tancítaro? The snow-covered mountain?"

"It's a village on the slopes of that mountain. I've never been there, but from what Chayo has told me, there's a trail going down the mountainside from Tancítaro village to Apatzingán."

The last passengers had boarded the bus and the driver was starting the engine.

"How would we get there?"

"It's a three-hour ride up a washboard mountain road, one of those that jars your bones loose."

MacClayne nodded. "That sounds appropriate."

I glanced at Cuauhtémoc. His beak was firmly set and there was a determined look in his eye.

Several bus lines served this area and each had its own depot. The one we needed was six blocks away. It was sprinkling as we stepped out the door; then I remembered hearing that the road to Tancítaro village had been washed out by the rain. However, I wasn't absolutely sure about that and I didn't want to say anything to MacClayne and have him think I didn't know what I was doing. I'd ask when we got to the depot.

We trudged through the rain, finally arriving at the depot where we could catch a bus to Tancítaro. As we walked in through the entrance way, Cuauhtémoc suddenly jumped from my arms and flew across the waiting room. There, to my surprise, was Chayo, waiting for us.

The bird landed in her arms, and I rushed over to her. She put her arms around me as well, holding me tightly and laying her head on my shoulder. Cuauhtémoc was probably somewhere in the middle, getting squashed.

"¡Chayo! ¡Te quiero mucho!"

"Y yo a ti."

At last we stepped apart, and Cuauhtémoc wheezed for breath. "¡Pobrecito! You suffer a lot with us humans!" Chayo stroked his feathers and gave him a gentler hug.

Chayo, in her mysterious way, had somehow known that we were leaving for Apatzingán on this day and at this hour, and she'd even known that we'd be leaving from this depot. Even knowing Chayo as I did, I was truly amazed, and I told her so.

She smiled and said, "You credit me with more powers than I possess. I happened to be riding this way on a bus and saw the two of you heading up the street and I guessed that this depot was where you'd be going."

"You were right," I said. "We're leaving today for Apatzingán, by way of Tancítaro village." I was going to tell her about the white bird, MacClayne's folk tale and the golden thread, but then I remembered that I hadn't introduced MacClayne yet.

"Déjame presentar . . ." I began.

They exchanged the usual "Mucho gusto en conocerle," followed by a few lines of polite conversation. I was extremely curious to know their reactions to each other, but that would have to wait.

"Now I have to leave," she said, "but first let me have a moment with Cuauhtémoc." Still holding the bird in her arms, she went and sat down on one of the benches which was slightly apart from us, and began speaking to the bird. I couldn't hear what she was saying, but the bird was giving her his full attention.

To MacClayne, who was watching them, I said, "She nursed the bird back to health."

"Yes, I can see the rooster has a great affection for her. There are times when I think that birds and animals are endowed with feelings of gratitude," he said. "But what in the world can she be saying to the rooster?"

I was wondering that myself.

At last Chayo finished with the ceremony. Placing the bird in my arms, she said to him, "Cuídamelo bien a mi Olaf." Take good care of my Olaf for me.

Then she kissed me and, giving us a last-minute wave, hurried out the door.

I felt an irrational impulse to run out after her, and try one more time to find out what the big mystery was about Apatzingán. However, considering that we'd gone over all that the evening before, I knew it wouldn't've worked. "The answers you get may do you no good," she'd said, and on that I felt she was probably absolutely right.

We went to the window and got our tickets for the village of Tancítaro, then sat down to wait. It was still half an hour or so before the bus would leave.

"Chayo's very attractive," MacClayne said. "A Tarascan princess."

"That's certainly the way I see her," I said. "And I feel incredibly fortunate to have found her."

"I'm sure you are. And she's also fortunate to have found you."

I thanked MacClayne for his compliment. He had a way of saying nice things at times. Just as he had a way of saying extremely nasty things at other times.

"I'm glad I met her before we left," he said. "I assume she got your note telling her we were going to Apatzingán. But how do you think she knew we'd be coming to this particular depot? You didn't say anything about Tancítaro, did you?"

"No, I hadn't even thought of Tancítaro till afterwards. I was really surprised to see her here. She told me she happened to be riding by on a bus and saw us coming this way."

"A remarkable coincidence," he said.

Not wanting to explain that statistically improbable coincidences happened all the time around Chayo, I just said, "She's extremely intuitive."

"Yes, you were telling me earlier that people credit her with powers, and I can see why. When I saw her I got a sense of something like that about her. Something about her presence."

It surprised me to hear MacClayne, the quintessential scoffer and eternal skeptic, making these observations. I was even more amazed that he'd been able to pick up on that mystic sense about her, but I avoided saying more on that topic because I didn't want to sound overly credulous.

I thought it best to change the subject, and then I remembered that I needed a notebook and that there was a stationery shop just up the street. We still had plenty of time, so I excused myself, told MacClayne I'd be right back, and stepped out onto the street. Cuauhtémoc of course insisted on accompanying me. It wasn't raining at the moment, but looked like it could start at any time.

When I returned, MacClayne was reading a book. I looked to see the title--Sunny Days in the Tropics.

I sat down and opened my new spiral-bound notebook, and across the top of the first page I wrote, "To the future that awaits us like a blank page." But these pages weren't completely blank. They were ruled with lines to write on, places for words on the page, just as there were roads to take and places for things to happen in the journey ahead.

Cuauhtémoc was perched beside me on the backrest of the bench. He too seemed to be pondering the days ahead.

continued in Chapter 18