Mexico in the 1950s had a rough and ancient look to it. And as I lied about my age in a tense effort to look older and get across the border, this hard-used, slightly adrift appearance surprised and pleased me. I stepped eagerly into the Republic for the first time just outside the desert town of Mexicali, carrying a Spanish phrase book and a cut-down duffle bag. From there, I slowly dropped down the map, visiting places whose names I hesitated to pronounce: Guaymas, Huatabampo, Topolobampo, Guamuchil.
After a desultory week on the beach at Mazatlán, I met a young Mexican who recklessly invited me to visit his home town of Palo Gordo in Michoacán. I didn’t have any idea of where Michoacán might be, but it sounded impressively far away. He was just coming back from working as a bracero — a polite term then used for “wetback” — in California. He had learned considerable English while working in the San Joaquin Valley, and my Spanish, which came mostly from the worn phrase book dictionary in my back pocket, was improving slowly. Since we were usually talking about girls and beer and how fast our money seemed to be disappearing, we had few problems getting along.
I think perhaps my new friend wanted to take me back to his tierra so his relatives could see the kind of people he’d had to put up with in California. I accepted his invitation because it seemed a fine way to learn Spanish and see a kind of Mexico I wasn’t seeing in Mazatlán. Also, I wanted to be a writer and had a vague idea that wandering around the back country of Mexico would be of help.
But by the time we got off the last bus, a broken-windowed Ford that kept boiling over, I’d begun to believe there were easier ways to learn both Spanish and how to write. It was late in the evening and we began looking around the fair-sized town, whose name I could neither pronounce nor spell, for a ride to Palo Gordo. Eulalio, my new friend, at last found somebody who was just setting off in the dusk with a woodened-wheeled two-mule cart of supplies for a farm near Palo Gordo. The man with the cart, Heriberto Ramírez, and his younger brother Serapio, were a bit drunk. In the bed of the cart was a scattering of repaired tools, harnesses, several machetes, a half bag of frijoles, and two new sombreros. I sat down on some harnesses, leaned back against the sack of beans and tried to go to sleep despite the bounce and jerk of the cart.
When I woke up, Heriberto and Serapio Ramírez were dancing in the dust beside the road with two women, and an Indian band of violins and guitars was playing under a full moon. Behind them I could see two or three thatched-roofed houses and several people dancing and standing around a big fire.
I sat up and wound my watch. It was almost midnight. Blinking, I stumbled out of the cart, put on one of the new sombreros and walked in a sleepy daze toward the fire. I couldn’t see Eulalio anywhere. As I came up to the fire, a dark-faced man squinted fiercely at me. “Is Eulalio Espinoza here?” I asked him. He shook his head and kept looking intently at me. In his hand, at his side, he held a long-bladed machete. I turned around and went back to where the Ramírez brothers were dancing in the road.
“Who? Oh, that joven. He took off right after we got here.”
“Took off?”
Heriberto and his buxom partner shuffled gaily in the dusty roadside, not looking at me.
“Where did he go?” I cried in a fine gringo panic. “Which way?” The two couples kept dancing. The musicians nodded to the dancers and played on. “Hey, I’m here all alone,” I said to no one. They all ignored me, possibly because it wasn’t all that true. There were maybe 15 to 20 people around me.
Finally one of the musicians took his violin off his shoulder to spit and picked up a Sidral bottle of white liquid. He drank slowly, calmly.
“Is this Palo Gordo?” I asked him.
He snorted, swallowed noisily and coughed.
“Is this Palo Gordo?” I asked again.
As he started to tuck his violin against his shoulder, I touched his arm, carefully.
“Perdóname,” I said, trying to make my voice as polite as possible. “But is this Palo Gordo?”
The musician spat again and shrugged. “Sabe?” He snuggled his chin against the rough-hewn violin box. “Who knows?”
I gestured vaguely to the dancers, to the fire. “But, I mean, if you don’t know, who does?” He merely blinked and began sawing at his fiddle.
Even though it was past midnight, now the darkness was hot and dusty. My tongue was coated with grit, I had a headache and felt dizzy. Sitting down beside the road, I tried to think. Nothing of consequence at all crowded into my weary, addled mind. I stared at the midnight party going on in the dust around me. Everyone was happy in this lost, moonlit nowhere.
I didn’t know whether to laugh, swear or cry. I badly needed to wash away the dirt of four days’ travel; I was thirsty; I needed something hot to eat; and I needed a proper bed to sleep in, to shake off the immense fatigue, the swaying, dry, cramped echo of traveling four days and four nights on bad buses. Evidently Eulalio had abandoned me. And these people wouldn’t even tell me where I was. Was this the raw material of the Great American Novel?
Standing, I swore, rubbed my face to try to wake up, and started on an oblique course toward the fire. As I passed the musicians, I reached down and picked up the fiddler’s Sidral bottle and took a quick swallow. The violin player merely nodded and watched me put the bottle back. Whatever was in the bottle made my eyes water and my nose run. No wonder people were dancing under the midnight moon. I gulped for breath and went on, skirting the fire carefully, on the lookout for that little man with the mustache and the machete. Unfortunately, just about everybody at the fire not dancing had a mustache and was carrying a machete, or worse, a pistol or rifle.
Over the flickering firelight, several of these men stared at me with heavy dark-eyed intensity. In spite of my fried tongue, I now wished I had taken a couple more swallows of that stuff in the fiddler’s bottle.
Flanking the fire were thick-sided houses. Two of them had kerosene lamps or candles going, and from one came the sound of voices. From inside a woman laughed gaily and the voices rose like a friendly chorus.
Maybe there, I thought. Maybe in there I could find somebody who would tell me where I was. They might even know something about Eulalio Espinoza. Trying not to attract any attention, I drifted away from the fire. Slowly, and with what I hoped was great casualness, I sauntered toward the hut were people were laughing.
The doorway was very low. The edge of the palm roof hit me at the chest. I ducked and knocked lightly on the wattle door. No one paid any attention. I knocked harder and stuck my head inside. There were several people sitting on tiny low stools, there was a low clay stove where a very plump woman was making tortillas. Beside her sat a young man, who slipped warm tortillas off that clay comal, offering them to the others before dipping two at a time in a clay bowl.
I coughed loudly and knocked again, still harder, and called out, “Buenas noches.” Faces turned to look at me.
“Buenas noches,” said the woman slapping out tortillas. The young man beside her turned around with a grin – it was Eulalio Espinoza.
I jerked up when I saw him and hit my head on the slanting roof.
“Amigo,” he grinned. “Come on in. You’ve been sleeping. Have a tortilla, some frijoles. This is cena in the campo.” He dipped a double tortilla in a clay bowl of dark refried beans and handed it to me. “Eat.”
“Eulalio,” I said, kneeling on the hard dirt floor. “Where the hell have you been?” The tortillas and the beans smelled exactly, I was sure, as the tortillas in heaven do. I gulped one down, and the plumped cheeked woman laughed and said something I didn’t understand as Eulalio handed me another. “Help yourself.” He gestured to the comal over the fire, to the clay bowl of frijoles setting at the fire’s edge.
“Where have you been?” I asked with my mouth full of beans. “I’ve been looking all over hell for you.”
“Is that true? Pos, I’ve been right here, Waiting for you to wake up,” he laughed. “These gringos are true sleepy-heads,” he told his companions. Everyone looked at me and smiled.
The plump woman handed me a tiny stone bowl of green sauce. With a jerk of her head, she said something I didn’t understand at all.
“Have some salsa,” Eulalio told me. “Put it on the beans, like this.”
I followed directions and again my eyes began to water and my nose started to run. “Too much!” I gasped. I said it again, in Spanish, and sucked in a lot of air. Everyone laughed. The woman at the fire neatly flipped a hot corn pancake off the comal for me and patted my arm, saying very softly and distinctly, “poco a poco.”
I nodded and smiled. This was a lot better than the reception I’d gotten from those people with the machetes and guns at the fire outside.
“Where the hell are we, Eulalio?”
He reached down beside him and lifted up a bottle of clear liquid, shaking it to a froth. “Tomelo. Take some. Drink. It’ll make you sleep better.”
Everyone laughed at this.
I tipped the bottle carefully, taking tiny sips. After the salsa, it stung, but not as much as I expected. Still, my eyes watered a little.
“Whoohh,” I said. “Gracias.” I grinned politely to everyone. “Eulalio, where are we? Where is this place?”
“Have some more and pass it around,” Eulalio said gesturing to the bottle. The woman handed me another frijol-laden tortilla. I sipped at the bottle and passed it to the man of my left, who looked exactly like one of the fierce-eyed men at the fire, except this man smiled at me.
“Look, Eulalio, I asked those people out there what this place was and nobody would tell me. Don’t you know where we are, either?”
Eulalio laughed at this. He laughed so hard he almost tipped out of the tiny chair he was sitting on. Then he translated what I’d said for his friends and they all laughed too, glancing at me and giggling behind their hands. I’d seen embarrassed children do that, but never adults. I was confused.
“You see, amigo,” Eulalio explained slowly, smiling. “The folks around here don’t see many strangers. And they’ve practically never seen any gringos.” He grinned brightly and turned to one of the dark-eyed girls sitting near him. “Piña, have you ever seen a gringo before?” The girl giggled, put both hands over her mouth and shook her head. “See,” he said to me. Turning back to the girl, “Piña, this is a real gringo, I’m telling you true. The actual thing.” He poked me on the arm as if he was examining some kind of livestock. “What do you think, Piña, of these gringos? Would you like this type for a novio, a boyfriend?”
The girl’s face became rosy and she hid behind her hands. Everyone laughed. The plump woman said something in a half-scolding voice to Eulalio.
“Anyway,” Eulalio told me, “there’s no reason for strangers to come around here. The only strangers that do are usually criminals running away from the police, or they are oficiales looking to make some kind of trouble for everyone here. Either way, they are not wanted. And if you are both a stranger and a gringo, well then,” he rolled his eyes in mock astonishment, “that’s a real phenomenon. For some people it could even be a sign — a good sign or a bad sign.” He shrugged, digging out the last of the beans with another tortilla. “Either way, not something most people here look forward to.”
I wiped my hands carefully on the cuffs of my pants legs as I’d seen the other men in the hut do, and digested all this, staring at the dying fire.
“That’s very interesting, Eulalio,” I said, nodding only half understanding. “But what interests me even more,” I looked at my watch, “at two o’clock in the morning, is WHERE THE HELL ARE WE, ANYWAY?” I raised my voice in exasperation, frustration, anger, fatigue, gringo confusion. Whatever it was.
Everyone stared at me in surprise.
Eulalio shook his head at my rudeness. He took a sip from the clear bottle and snorted.
“Pos, this is Palo Gordo, hombre. Where else?”