The Mexican Year

This tiny huddle of unpainted wooden shacks has a name, but I can’t pronounce it. Tlacoteotalpan or something like that. The Nahuatl syllables come out all wrong when I try to mimic them. The pueblo nestles into the horseshoe bend of a lazy river, its surface roiled by the neverending rain. Overhead is the leaky umbrella of a high canopy of trees. Water pours down in isolated torrents, and the road — just a dirt track, really — is still an impassible flow of mud dotted with puddles. Impassible to vehicles, anyway. I squelch along in my Nikes and jeans that are slimy from the knees down.

Like all the villages in this part of the jungle, Tlacoteotalpan is Nahuatl-speaking and way too small to have an inn. The moneypouch dangling from my neck is almost empty, so instead I barter in pantomime with an amiable gap-toothed wife. Together we root through my backpack, trying to find something to trade in exchange for food and lodging in her shack. Not the laptop with the PROPERTY OF UCLA security sticker, wrapped in thick layers of banana leaves. Not the antique Polaroid camera and its film, zipped in a plastic bag. Not this notebook, or my favorite purple swirly pen. Finally there’s nothing left but my bra, which I shed hours ago in the wet heat. The scrap of underwear passes between us like an unwanted thing. She’s probably a D cup, and I don’t have any boobs at all. Neither of us has any use for it.

Unable to make conversation with anyone and unwilling to wade back into the mud, I sit in the shack’s doorway and watch chickens scamper around. They cluck noisily, pecking at ants and bugs that are apparently being knocked off trees by the rain. Naked little kids are trying to feed grass shoots to piglets. Through open windows I can see their moms hanging up laundry on lines strung indoors.

Darkness is crashing down when the husband returns from the river, where he’s been netting. Two gangly boys — their sons, I slowly realize — help him carry in several slimy-looking fish with foggy eyes. The fish are laid on the plank floor of the kitchen, where they occasionally gulp. The wife squats to descale and fillet them with a knife rusting at the hilt. Meanwhile the husband and sons banter. Once it’s apparent that I can’t speak Nahuatl and they don’t speak Spanish, my presence is barely acknowledged.

The fish are mouthwateringly delicious when baked with pineapple. I’m embarrassed to find myself competing with the boys for second helpings of the fish and rice. But that doesn’t stop me from gorging myself. I’m eating for two now, and this is the first meal I’ve had all day.

In the morning I awake before dawn, shivering despite the heat, my t-shirt and jeans plastered to my skinny limbs. I tiptoe past curtained doorways with snoring figures, the wife and her husband in one room, the sons in another. Squishing through the mud toward the outhouse, my Nikes are sucked right off my feet. I complain tiredly in Farsi and retrieve them from the muck. Puddles still quiver with the impact of raindrops, but it’s only sprinkling now. Through a gap in the ghostly clouds I can see the sky, velvety and lustrous with stars.

In the outhouse I pull down my jeans and hiphuggers and settle myself on the well-worn wood. Great. Diarrhea again. Last night’s fish and rice went right through me. I slump into a comfortable position and breathe through my mouth, trying to ignore the stench. Tickling sensations dance across my buttcheeks. Cockroaches are welling out of the latrine and across my butt and down my muddy pantslegs. Normally I’d freak out, but I’m just too exhausted to care. I drift in and out of a twitchy shallow sleep. Every once in a while I hear a door rattle or a bird scream, but the sounds barely rouse me.

Eventually I emerge into morning, squinting against the harsh low glare of the sun, a flaming vermilion orb climbing over the forest canopy. My toes tickle in the mud. But I discover that my body is a leaden thing, too heavy to drag all the way back to the shack. I sit down on a convenient stump instead.

Rubbing my eyes into focus, I stare at a different part of the village, one hidden from my limited doorway view yesterday. Corn grows in plots that have been clearcut, then burned. Several burros stand in a crude corral, chewing grass. A homemade swing hangs from a tall gumtree. The details are banal and fascinating at the same time, and I try to memorize them, hoping I’ll never be back.

Someone is calling in Nahuatl. I turn around gingerly on my stump, trying to avoid splinters. The younger son is wading towards me, all smiles for the gringa, and carrying something in an open palm. A thick slice of fresh bread slathered with something green. Avocado, probably. Up close the aroma is so enticing my jaw aches. Then a reflex goes wrong inside me, and I retch long and emptily into the mud between my bare feet.

That helpful lard-ass back in Guanajuato wasn’t shitting me — the Manzanares Mesa is filled with a whole lot of nothing much. I’m glazed with boredom, staring out the windshield at a vista of altiplano scrubland. The road is an ugly gravel slash through the agave and brittlebush. It follows an intermittent chain of runty hills, a geological fault line riven with natural springs, the only reliable source of water in this near-desert. Every once in a while a ranch appears, a cluster of whitewashed mud-brick buildings with corrugated aluminum roofs that glint in the sun. They always look vibrant until you get up close, when the whitewash is revealed to be graying and roofs are caving in and open doorways gape into ruin. Their barbed wire corrals are empty, fencing in brown grass. If there’s a windmill, it’s still as a picture.

Eventually a small town appears on the horizon. I can see Quonset huts from this distance, each one a telltale bubble of reflective glare. Between them is the heatwave shimmer of pavement. The pueblo draws closer with excruciating slowness, even though I’m driving as fast as I dare — not very, since my truck is threatening to rattle apart on this washboard of a road. I notice the vista compressing a little, top and bottom. My eyelids are sagging from a bad case of highway hypnosis. I drink more coffee, crank the music louder. What the hell am I listening to, anyway? Some French neo-rap group, I guess.

Hard to believe that’s only Tanquian up ahead. After Tanquian — the so-called “Gateway to the Manzanares Mesa” — there are still three more pueblos and god knows how many more hours before I finally get to Ahorcada, where Nooshin has blown like a tumbleweed.

“Nooshin,” I whisper plaintively. The word is a razor blade in my mouth.

I imagine her emitting some possibility of forgiveness — for that greedy impregnating interlude in the shower, for dragging her deeper into Mexico, for staring mutely at her instead of promising “I’ll never leave you”. Her embrace will be soft and fierce, and I’ll say all the right things, and we’ll laugh about this awkward distance years from now. She won’t become a world I gained and lost.

Tanquian is the only crossroads on the Manzanares Mesa, an intersection of ruts in the middle of bumfuck nowhere. There isn’t much to the town. Mud-brick shacks crowd together, including one hung with a crucifix — the local church, I presume — and another ringed with plastic playground equipment, which is probably the only school on the mesa. A newly-painted Pemex station sits in a lake of asphalt. Quonset huts are lined up with doors open, totally empty.

I pull into the Pemex station and tank up my truck, watching the old-fashioned pump spin. Shadows turn lazily on the asphalt around me. Their outlines are the shape of vultures, circling high in the cobalt sky. The dials slow, then stop.

The interior of the Pemex station could use a new paintjob too. The walls are mottled and peeling, and scratched by racks of expired foodstuffs. Insect carcasses accumulate on strips of flypaper that hang from the ceiling. A fan beats the tired air.

The attendant is an old used-up scarecrow of a man dressed in layered sweaters. His attention is fixed on a portable black-and-white TV behind the counter. A Mexican talking head is interspersed with file footage of the aftermath of a gun battle. Shotgun blasts and bullet holes have shredded the interior of a small house, peppering walls and tearing up furniture. Sheet-covered bodies are scattered around like laundry in a tornado. In a hallway are bodies that fit under towels. Children caught in the crossfire.

“Another narcotraficante shootout, huh?” I say in Spanish, settling my elbows on the counter.

“They gunned down a policeman and his entire family. 11 lives snuffed out, and for what? Even the Colombians don’t kill a man’s family. And during Semana Santa, the holiest week of the year. Right before Easter! What kind of animals are we becoming in this country?” The attendant’s voice is an emphysema croak. Then he turns my direction and his rheumy eyes widen. “Hey. You’re an American.”

“Yep,” I say, reaching into a cargo pants pocket for my wallet. “Pump #2. 335 pesos.” I count out the multicolored bills.

“You need change?”

“Nope.”

“Then just leave it on the counter,” he tells me, and raises a gnarled hand in demonstration. “I’m useless because of the goddamn arthritis. Reuben? Reuben!”

A teenage mechanic bangs in from the back garage, smoking and sweat-plastered and wiping greasy hands on his sweatshirt. He scoops up the money and punches open the cash register. “What’s the score?” the kid half-asks, half-complains in between drags on his cigarette.

“How can you think about soccer at a time like this? The drug cartels are killing entire families now!” The old man turns to me and wags his chin deploringly. “The country is running with blood, and all this asshole cares about is soccer!”

Reuben acts like he didn’t hear the insult. He finishes separating the different peso denominations into their tray compartments — then slams the cash register shut, violently enough to make the attendant startle.

I brandish a polaroid of Nooshin, flashing it back and forth between them. “You guys see this American girl come through here a couple days ago?”

“Yesterday,” the old-timer croaks, staring at the TV. Pools of blood are neutered into spilled oil on its black-and-white screen. “She took a map.”

“One of these?” I ask, grabbing a trifold map of Mexico from a dusty rack. It’s superficial and outdated. Only the major highways and roads are depicted, and several new tollways and bypasses are missing. I put the map back. “Yesterday? You said you saw her yesterday?”

“Beg pardon?”

“You said you saw her — ”

“What?”

“He asked if you saw her yesterday!” Reuben interjects with an irritated face, his voice raised.

Now it’s the attendant’s turn to grimace in irritation. His eyes disappear into angry creases. “That’s what I already told him!” He swivels back to me. “She got off the bus to Guanajuato and waited for the other bus. The one that goes east into the Huasteca.”

“East into the Huasteca,” I echo dully.

“That’s what I said! But there was a big thunderstorm over the mountains. A trucker came through here earlier, said the road washed out.” His emphysema croak is distinctly jealous. If only the Manzanares Mesa got rain like that.

The kid is staring past my shoulder. “You got 4-wheel drive on that thing, right?” It takes me a moment to realize he’s talking about the Explorer. When I nod, he says, “You can probably make it.”

That speculation outrages the elderly attendant. “Don’t tell him that! If he wants to go into the Huasteca, he should detour around on paved roads, Highway 13 — ”

“Highway 113,” Reuben snarks, correcting him. “But with 4-wheel drive — ”

“4-wheel drive? I don’t care if he’s got 100-wheel drive! If there’s no road — ”

The door slam shuts behind me, silencing them in mid-argument. I escape into the hot angry day. My heart feels misplaced, either in my throat or sunk into an ankle. East into the Huasteca…

Back in the Explorer I stare at my road atlas of Mexico, a single question looping through my head — where the hell does Nooshin think she’s going? South and she’s back in Guanajuato with me. West is the direction of Tijuana and America. North is where she came from, the dead end trail that culminates in La Ceja. But she’s heading east, across a mostly-empty swath of map, aiming for the Gulf of Mexico.

And not the touristy part of the Gulf, like Cancun or Cozumel. The Huasteca is a tropical region of dirt-poor Mexican Indian villages. Keep going east and she’ll hit the selva — rainforest — that shadows the coastline in spinach green. Nooshin amidst malaria and poisonous snakes and a million different kinds of parasites. With only a mostly-empty backpack. Not much money. Alone.

Well, not exactly alone. My gaze wanders across the cab to the passenger seat, her usual station. A paperback lies in her place, glossy with newness. The English-language version of What To Expect When You’re Expecting. We purchased it from Amazon.com because they ship to Mexico, but the book arrived after our scene in the plaza of the Museo de las Momias, after she fled. Add a pregnancy to the very short list of things Nooshin is taking into the rainforest.

I feel like I’ve fallen into a hole in the map. This swath of Mexico is a blank nothingness of faded yellow that cuts across the states of Guanajuato, San Luis Potosi and Veracruz. No roads are indicated, no villages, nothing. Even the usual contour lines of the Sierra Madre Occidentals are missing. I’ve disappeared from the world known to cartographers.

Granted, the map isn’t very good. It’s a government freebie from the Pemex station back in Tanquian, a humble crossroads of quonset huts and mud-brick shacks that calls itself “la entrada al Mesa de Manzanares” — the gateway to Manzanares Mesa. That’s where I switched buses, arriving on a local headed back to Guanajuato, departing on another local that’s grinding eastward across mountain ridges. I don’t really know where I’m going. I just think it would be cool to experience the tropical rainforest and stroll the beachy fringe of the Gulf of Mexico. Better do it before my tummy swells into awkwardness. And before my money runs out.

I’m despairingly familiar with converted schoolbuses, the cheapest transportation in this part of Mexico. They’re obsolete rusting castoffs from school districts in America, identifiable by the graffiti carved into their fiberglass side panels — “Class of 87″ and “Joe + Kristi” and “Iron Maiden Rulz”. Their Mexican owners bolt luggage racks onto their roofs and repaint them in vibrant rainbow colors and give them weird names, like Triste y Abandonado — Sad and Abandoned — and El Pollo Loco — The Crazy Chicken. Torn vinyl seats are reupholstered with duct tape, and any busted springs protruding are just ripped out. Then they’re put into service on these single-lane dirt roads, bouncing violently and making a horrible racket and spewing a dirty black fog of diesel smoke.

Outside the bus windows a ruggedly beautiful world is lurching into view. The flat earth-toned scrub of the Manzanares Mesa is gone, replaced by a hilly riot of greenery — bottle palms, the woody vines known as ojite, cedars spreading their canopies in the muggy air. We stop in picturesque Indian villages. Men loiter in campesino outfits of straw hats, white long-sleeved shirts and pants with huarache sandals. Elderly women in traditional hand-embroidered huipiles sweep the dirt streets, while chickens and dogs wander past their ankles. Conversations are filled with a mixture of Spanish and a language I’ve never heard before, probably Nahautl, the mother tongue of the Nahua Indians.

I’m still angry about my unplanned stay in Ahorcado, where the stupid bus driver left me behind during a break. So I don’t get off the bus when we stop. Instead I just gaze out the window, carefully draping my bangs over the right side of my face. But my crooked wandering eye comes in handy when an inebriated Indian climbs aboard and crowds into my seat, all groping hands. A toss of my hair to reveal the Evil Eye and he stumbles away in horror.

Thunderheads are boiling into a sky that’s the color of Nick’s icy blue eyes. Lines of palm-covered hills rise out of a pooling fog. The humidity becomes cloying, then almost unbearable. There’s so much water vapor in the air it feels as if I could drown. I pray for rain — for relief — but there isn’t any, just an elongation of sweat and panting. The bus grinds on.

Then all the world seems to thicken and blur. Fog is swirling into the darkening sky, whipped by a sudden cool wind. Thunder rumbles closer. A jagged bolt of lightening arcs overhead, followed by an ear-splitting craaaaaaackle-BOOM!!! Small children on the bus erupt in wails, and their tears seem to provoke the sky. A few raindrops dot the windshield, then more, then a lashing torrent.

Passengers struggle at the twin lines of windows, trying to work mechanisms that are old and rusty and clogged with dust. Only a couple windows actually close. The rest remain stubbornly open, letting in sheets of rain that pour down the roof. My window refuses to budge and within minutes I’m drenched, a soggy backpack in my lap.

A drowned-looking rooster escapes its owner and begins jumping from seatback to seatback, squawking and flapping and pecking. When it lands in front of me I raise my backpack defensively, terrified the crazy bird will peck my eyes out. Suddenly the bus lurches and we’re both thrown violently against the side. I bang my temple hard and elbow harder. The rooster disappears out the window in a blizzard of wet feathers.

Around us the torrential downpour is turning the single-lane dirt road into a river of mud. The steady straight-ahead grinding of the bus becomes increasingly erratic, punctuated by fishtailing and enormous pothole splashes. Sometimes the bus driver curses louder than the thundercracks. The wind is blowing so hard that branches are reaching through the open windows and trees are caving away. I notice the Indian woman sitting across from me is bracing herself with one hand and fingering her rosary with the other. Something in her calmness makes me panic. Suddenly my life — my dumb pointless life — is flashing before my eyes, a slideshow of memories that I won’t miss…until I get to Nick, and omigod, I don’t want it to end this way, buried in a mudslide or crushed underneath fallen trees, not when I’m pregnant with his child, not when I’m so in love with him.

The narcotraffickers have a saying: “You can’t hide in Mexico, you can only be hidden.” That’s because Mexico isn’t a country, it’s a multitude of small towns and extended families. Blood is thicker than water, villages never forget their own, and gossip — not futbol — is the national pastime. Towns and families must agree to stop talking about the fugitive, or their inevitable gossip will give him away. The same rule applies to foreigners too, especially somebody like Nooshin. To Mexicans she’s a circus freak without a circus. No matter where she goes, she attracts scrutiny and wags tongues. And thank god.

This is how the gossip game works:

An elderly and superstitious woman bumps into Nooshin in an empty plaza somewhere, interprets her as a bad omen, makes the sign of the cross, and scuttles away. Later she gabs about the encounter to a friend of hers, who mentions it to her son in Guanajuato, who happens to be dating a girl whose sister is a tour guide and received that bulletin about Nooshin’s disappearance. And that’s how I find out that “una gringa muy MUY alta y esta en los huesos y con el mal ojo” — a very VERY tall American girl who’s just skin-and-bones and has the Evil Eye — passed through Ahorcada.

“Ahorcada? Never heard of it.” I blink at the mismatched couple standing in the hotel room’s doorway. The son is wider than tall, a doughy-faced Indian who never met a meal he didn’t like. His girlfriend is frail and knock-kneed, with delicate mestiza features. They’re blinking back at me — and today’s growing collection of empty Tecate cans, kicked into a corner. In a gust of brewery-breath I ask them, “Where the hell is Ahorcada?”

“Thataway.” The son’s porcine face is even piggier in profile. He’s waving a flabby arm in the general direction of Canada. “Ahorcada is thataway.”

I grab my backpack and root around for a map. “Show me.”

“Not until we get the reward,” says his girlfriend. Her dark eyes are shining with dollar signs.

“Reward? What reward? There’s no reward!” I unfold the map and hold it out for their inspection. “Now please, show me.”

The son begins to reach out a hand, bulbous and rough like a seal’s flipper –

She slaps it away. “American money. 50 dollars. Right now.”

“Not a chance,” I tell her, and make grateful noises as I begin to shut the door. I can find Ahorcada on my own.

“Wait. Let me show you.” The son’s flipper-hand reaches out to the map again. His bratwurst-sized finger isn’t very good for pointing, but he indicates a gray dotted line that leads away from Guanajuato, then trails off into nowhere. “The second-to-last pueblo on this road,” he announces, tapping the map. “I grew up there.”

My eyes are roaming the map for any kind of detail — crossed picks that indicate a mine, plane silhouettes for an airport, blue lumps for a lake. But there’s nothing except that gray dotted line and its unnamed white circles, the map’s smallest population unit. 1,000 souls and less. “What’s in Ahorcada?” I finally ask.

“Stupid assholes like you!” his girlfriend bursts out. At first I think she’s referring to me, but she’s not. The eyes that were shining with dollar signs are shooting daggers at him. “We could’ve gotten money for this!”

“There’s nothing much in Ahorcada,” the son shrugs placidly, as if he’s deaf to his girlfriend. His fleshy shoulders keep jiggling after the shrug ends. “It’s up on the Manzanares Mesa. There’s a whole lot of nothing much up there.”

I surprise him by thrusting a couple $20 bills at them, which his girlfriend claws out of my hand. Then I begin folding the map with excited movements, my heart somersaulting in joy. Nooshin isn’t lost to me anymore. She’s synonymous with an foreboding destination — Ahorcada, which means “hanged woman” in Spanish — and I’m coming to get her.

Kneeling to stuff the map into my backpack, I’m struck by the weirdness of it. Why the hell was Nooshin going to Ahorcada? The answer is a big fat duh — she wasn’t. She took the first bus she found, a local one that just happened to be transiting nowhere.

A rotund shadow looms over me. “Are you her husband? Boyfriend? Something like that?”

I’ve already forgotten the son and his girlfriend are still standing in the doorway. I consider them warily, knowing that whatever I say will ripple across the map we’ve just been looking at. Gossip is the national pastime in Mexico, after all. “Husband, boyfriend, something like that,” I agree evasively.

The sensation is dull at first, a vague disembodied irritation that seeps into my dreamland of shadows. I try to push it away and sink back into darkness, but the sensation is insistent. It hovers at the periphery of consciousness, calling me to morning. I’m already surfacing through a sleep like tar when the sensation intensifies into acute discomfort. Something is pinching me.

My eyes snap open. The dawn sky is pinkish and opaque with haze, like cotton candy dissolving. The silhouette of a bird is circling overhead. Several of them, actually.

To my right, the sensation happens again. A very sharp and painful bite. “Ouch!” I cry, and instinctively try to pull away.

But I can’t. I’m lying half-buried in a shallow bed of sand, and wedged against my backpack.

Feathers whirl. There’s another bite to my right hand. I flap around in panic, tossing sand everywhere, screaming a little, convinced a river of vultures are descending from the sky to plunder my carcass.

But when I sit up, I discover my attacker is actually a tiny brown bird. A sparrow of some kind, or maybe a wren. It hops around the nearby underbrush in an excited flitter, whistling at me. Meanwhile bottlenose flies are buzzing around me in a reflective storm that shimmers…and settles on my right hand…and shimmers into motion again when I shake them off.

In a heartbeat my panic turns into curiosity. I spilled beer on that hand the other day, a foamy pop-topping explosion — thanks to that stupid jerk of a store owner, who surreptitiously shook up the Budweiser I bought before sliding it across the countertop to me. Having some fun with the gringa. Ha ha ha. I hang my hand in space and watch the flies coat it…and the bird hop closer, eyeing the flies. It was snatching breakfast off my right hand in big juicy pecks.

Eventually I struggle to my feet, leaking sand like a sieve. The stuff is thick in my hair, trickling into my ears, turning my clothes into sandpaper. Worse, my skin is beginning to disappear beneath a grime of dust and dried sweat. No wait, this is the worst — that horrible odor I’m smelling? It might be me.

I need a shower, and a laundromat to wash the only outfit I have, and a store where I can buy a change of clothes, and breakfast for this growling stomach, and a bus ticket out of here, and a destination worth going to, and and and…

My head becomes a whirlpool of thoughts, all of them sucked down the drain called Nick. Because it’s so wrong that I’m alone in this Mexican nowhere. I shouldn’t have fled from him like this, and he should’ve stopped me, and now everything is ruined with truth — he’ll leave me someday. Not because he doesn’t love me. He does. He even said it once. No, he’ll leave me because he loves me.

I used to think love was something Nick feared, something he ran quickly from, but now I know better. He’s not afraid of love, he’s afraid of falling for a girl who can’t measure up to his rarefied ideal. He wants everything I’m not — an intellectual equal, someone whose life is built around a career, a sophisticate who knows things about wine and politics and alternative lifestyles, a bedmate who looks like the girls in Saman’s hidden porno magazines. Nick doesn’t want to be trapped by me, because he knows his love won’t last. He can’t stay with a stupid boobless crooked-eye girl like me, not forever and ever. Someday he’ll leave me, and with a child.

Beneath this dirty t-shirt, the heart that beats only for him is breaking into pieces, into countless grains of sand, into an entire desert.

Oh stop it, Nooshin. What will crying do? Just make your face look even worse, probably. And get a grip, girl — your heart beats for the baby too! Not much of a motivating peptalk…until I’m struck with an odd thought. What would Nick do?

When I think of my situation that way, I almost laugh out loud. Nick wouldn’t be caught dead sleeping in the open. He would’ve ingratiated himself with a stranger in town, or just knocked on doors and boldly asked to spend the night. And if for some inexplicable reason he actually did spend the night outdoors like this, he’d impose on someone for their bathroom and clean himself up and get invited to breakfast. He might even talk them into letting him use their phone — or omigod, giving him a ride back to civilization.

To me, those are just possibilities sheafed together. To Nick, it would all be part of a plan. He always has a plan. A couple dozen of them, percolating in his Machiavellian head, and he picks the best one.

Well, today I’m going to have a plan. I’m going to stride Nick-like into this decrepit falling-apart town, and I’m going to knock on every door I encounter, and I’m going to hide my crooked eye and flaunt my functional Spanish, and I won’t give up until I’ve had a shower and a chance to rinse out my clothes and even a free breakfast!

An hour later I trudge back into the general store on the plaza, my backpack leaden, rivers of sweat carving through the grime on my skin. The owner is just as stoic and unblinking as ever, although his eyes narrow and his nostrils flare at my atrocious smell. Neither of greets the other with “buenos dias”.

“Give me a beer,” I sigh in Spanish, reclaiming the same wooden bench where I spent most of yesterday and the day before. “A Budweiser. And don’t shake it up this time.”