Amigoland Part 18

"What you see here is for the harvest, so the crops will be good," the driver explained. "Every year for as long as I can remember, they have made the festival in the months of July and August."

They drove over a low-water crossing made of concrete and wide enough for only one vehicle to pa.s.s at a time. On either side of the flat crossing, stones that once lined the creek lay now like dead fish washed upon the sh.o.r.e. From there they climbed up the embankment and found a paved road leading toward a church and then a fountain that appeared as if it had been dry for several years.

"That was about when it happened," Don Fidencio said. "July or August, I remember now."

"What if I drive out to the country like we were going to the dam?" the driver asked, glancing at his fuel gauge. "Maybe then the name will also come to you."

For some time they traveled the same highway the bus had traveled earlier. On the road they pa.s.sed a peanut field budding with hunched-over workers. The rising sun cast these truncated shadows in the direction of the road and the pa.s.sing cars. A Ford car dealership gleamed brightly in the distance, followed by a larger farm-implement business displaying various tractors and combines. They reached a crossroads where a tall chain-link fence separated the edge of the road from two large factories, each with its own smokestack pumping grayish clouds into the sky.

"And those?" Socorro asked.

"In one, they make cereal for people to eat in the morning," the driver said, "and in the other one, they have a dairy - the two of them, the cereal and the milk, right next to each other." He pointed back and forth at them. "We only cared that they brought work."

"So they hired many people?"

"The ones who hadn't left already."

Don Fidencio gazed out at the cinder-block houses and small lots, hoping to see something that might stir his memory. One woman appeared to be washing clothes in a white bucket, but then pulled out a goatskin and wrung the discolored water back into the container. At the next house a shiny new truck with Michigan license plates was parked sideways in the front yard. Two men were setting fence posts and looked up when they heard the approaching car. They waved to the old man in the pa.s.senger seat, but it seemed more out of curiosity from seeing a taxi so far from town. He was beginning to think he might not ever remember the name of the ranchito, or maybe his grandfather had never actually mentioned it.

The driver coasted around a wide curve and brought them in the direct path of the sun. He pulled on the visor, but it came unhinged before he could put it back in its original spot. "And can I ask why you are looking for this ranchito?"

"We wanted to see where our grandfather was from," Don Fidencio said. "When he was only seven, the Indians came and stole him from his family, took him to the north."

"They used to tell stories like that when I was a young boy."

"After the Indians crossed the river, they left him there, and from then on he lived with another family over on that side. This was back about eighteen fifty, more or less."

"Right around the time when it became the other side."

The driver slowed down when they came upon a man riding in a cart. The wide brim of his straw hat cast a shadow across the hindquarters of the gray mule. When the driver reached the cart, he stopped along its right side, but then had to put the car into reverse when he realized the farmer had no intention of stopping.

"Excuse me," the driver inquired, craning his head out the window, "but would you know where we could find El Rancho..."

"Capote," Don Fidencio said.

"El Rancho Capote, sir. These people want to find El Rancho Capote." He was having trouble guiding the car backward in a straight line and not dropping off into the ditch or, on the other side, hitting the mule.

"El Capote?" the farmer repeated without looking down, as if the words had suddenly crossed his mind. He was an older man, with sunken cheeks and a dark mustache that angled out from the corners of his mouth. When he shifted his weight in the cart, his tan pants rode up his leg a bit and revealed ankle-high boots, only recently shined by the looks of them. A young boy sat next to him, dressed almost identically.

"Yes, El Capote."

"Never heard of that one." He shook his head and then so did the little boy.

"Then what about El Rancho Papote?" the driver asked, jerking the wheel to the right when the car hit a pothole.

"Even less." The mule swished its tail as if to agree with the farmer and the little boy. "Tell them they should look for something easier to find."

"These men and the young lady have come from the United States and are looking for the home of their grandfather - the men say that the Indians took their grandfather."

The farmer allowed his vision to drift away from the dirt road so he could peer into the taxi, the front and then the back, and then the front again.

"You say it was their grandfather who the Indians took?"

"He was a young boy when it happened, only seven," the driver explained.

But the farmer was leaning over at the time, listening to something the little boy was telling him. When he finished, the farmer sat back up and twitched the reins to make the mule go faster. "Why not take these people to the munic.i.p.al offices, where they know more and could help them?"

"Yes, I told them," the driver replied, "but today is also Sat.u.r.day."

"What they should have done was come a day earlier." The farmer was now looking only straight ahead. "Who would think to come on a day when people are supposed to be resting?"

The driver parked in the taxi zone and quickly stepped out of the car to unload the luggage, forgetting they had only a backpack and a plastic shopping bag. With little else to do, he came around and helped the old man out of the front seat and up the three marble steps leading to the front desk. Hotel Los Laureles came with the driver's highest recommendations. They would be near the center of town and just across the street from the munic.i.p.al offices, which they would want to visit first thing Monday morning.

"Here I am bringing you these travelers from the United States," the driver announced with a wink. The clerk had been sleeping in an overstuffed recliner behind the counter and was now using his fingers to comb his hair back into place.

He pushed a clipboard and registration form across the counter. "Your information, please," the clerk said, pausing halfway through so he could yawn.

The hotel lobby was attached to a women's shoe store, which shined brightly through the adjoining entrance. A little boy sat on a purple sofa in the lobby, watching cartoons on a wide-screen television. His younger brother rode a Big Wheel around and around the sofa, changing his direction only when his mother yelled at him from the doorway of the shoe store.

This time Don Celestino made sure the two rooms he reserved were on the ground floor, next to each other. He paid the fare and added an extra twenty pesos for the man's efforts.

"Then I will leave so you can rest," the driver said once they were checked in. "If you need anything else, you can find me around the corner at the taxi stand. Just ask them for Isidro."

After resting from their bus ride and misadventure through the countryside, they headed out to a restaurant the taxi driver had recommended. Socorro walked between the two brothers, holding on to each one by the arm and slowing down enough for Don Fidencio. Along the way they crossed in front of the munic.i.p.al offices and only glanced toward the darkened windows. A security guard leaned back with his foot against one of the columns outside the two-story redbrick building. He was smoking a cigarette and chatting with a young woman who had stopped as she was walking by with her groceries in hand.

A pair of splayed goats roasted over an open fire in the front window of the restaurant. The hostess showed the lady and two gentlemen to a table in the center of the empty dining room. After having seen the open fire, they decided to share a large order of cabrito, which the waiter later brought out on a hibachi that he set up on a metal stand. Other than a light breakfast and what they had snacked on during the bus ride, this would be their first actual meal of the day.

"Please," the old man answered when Socorro asked if she could serve him. "I don't know how long it has been since I had cabrito. Sometimes me and Petra would go across to the other side to eat."

"I remember you used to go on Sat.u.r.days," his brother said.

"It must have been for our anniversaries, when we still celebrated them. We would go to the Matamoros Cafe because she liked a group that played there. Not that I really liked to dance so much, but you know how it is. That was the last time we went together, when we were still married, before she died on me."

"How long were you married before she pa.s.sed away?" Socorro asked.

"First she left, then she died years later, but for me she died the day she took her valises from the front door and left. Like that, I thought of her."

"It must have been hard, no?"

Don Fidencio continued chewing the meat until he could swallow. "Maybe it was," he said. "But to tell you the truth, her leaving is one of those things I don't remember so good anymore. Not that I would want to, but that's how it is. G.o.d doesn't give me the choice of what I can remember and what to forget. In that way I was lucky, to not remember the things I could never change."

Socorro waited for him to finish eating.

"And of what you can remember, what would you change?"

"Nothing," Don Fidencio said, and set down his fork.

"Not one thing?"

"Only that I wouldn't be here, still alive and giving people trouble."

"n.o.body here thinks that way," his brother said.

"And later, when we have to go back across and I have nowhere else to go, you still think I won't be giving people trouble?"

"Maybe when we get back, your daughter will change her mind and take you home," Socorro said.

The old man turned and looked at his brother.

"You never know," Don Celestino said, and shrugged.

But he did know, and so did the girl, and, of course, so did Don Fidencio.

It was still early in the evening, not yet dark, and people were just beginning to arrive in the jardin. An informal group of musicians carried their instruments up the steps of the gazebo. The French-horn player still had on a shirt with grease stains just below his name patch. One of the two female violinists held a toddler on her lap as she opened her case with the other hand.

Don Fidencio sat on one of the metal benches that was close enough for him to watch the musicians. Pigeons of all shapes and colors waddled dangerously close to his feet. They were lucky he had his hands full at the moment. His brother had bought him the ice cream earlier, just before he and the girl went for a stroll. The old man was taking great care in how he placed his warm tongue up against the frozen treat for a second and then slowly drew it back into his mouth. He didn't know what his brother was thinking to bring the ice cream to him in a cone, when he should have asked for it in a paper cup. And not just a cone, but a cone the size of one of his shoes. Most of the ice cream sat inside the cone, but it was the top scoop that teetered about whenever he licked a bit too eagerly, which was the only way he had ever known to eat ice cream.

The cooler weather had brought out the sons and daughters, fathers and mothers, grandfathers and grandmothers, and so on who filled the square and together strolled or sat on the benches. Don Celestino angled his hand up toward his chest and secured her hold on his arm as they walked along with the other couples. In front of them a ranchero clomped along with his woman at his side. She kept her arms crossed over her chest while he rested a firm hand on the shoulder closest to him, as if she might suddenly try to run off. Some of the other couples carried infants in their arms or in strollers. A few paces ahead of them, an elderly couple walked holding hands as the gentleman used a tortoisesh.e.l.l cane to make his way. His wife was wearing a stylish rebozo wrapped loosely around her neck. When they turned at the corner of the jardin, they stopped and she pointed at something across the street, then leaned over so she could repeat whatever it was she'd said, this time directly into his ear.

"Look," Socorro said, motioning in the same direction.

A large group of well-dressed people had gathered outside the church. Seven or eight mariachis were forming a half circle in order to serenade the bride and groom.

"Do you want to go see?" she asked, pulling a little closer to him.

"For what," Don Celestino said, "if they're all the same?"

"Not all of them. This one looks like it would be fun to watch." The bride and groom were taking their first dance in the courtyard as their guests clapped in rhythm to the music.

"We don't even know them."

"Other people are watching," she said. A small group, including the security guard from earlier, had gathered along the edges of the courtyard.

"Maybe they like to see weddings," he said. "Maybe they haven't seen one with music."

"And if someone invited you to one, you wouldn't go?"

"Maybe, it depends."

"What about for yourself, if you were to get married again someday?"

She had caught him off guard, and he had to think about how to answer her. "If I were to get married, then yes, I guess I would have to go."

"But not because you wanted to?"

"Then for what other reason?" he said. "It would have to be because I wanted to."

She looked at him for a moment, then turned her attention to the celebration across the street. The bride and groom were waving good-bye as they stepped into the back-seat of a black sedan adorned with a wreath of flowers across its hood.

"Why don't we just keep walking?" Don Celestino tugged on her hand, but she stayed where she was.

The sun had dipped below the cathedral tower, leaving most of the jardin in the emerging shadow. Don Fidencio reached over and pitched the bottom half of his cone into a trash can. All he wanted now was to go lie down in his room. If he could remember which direction the hotel was, he would head out by himself. The musicians were ready to start their performance, the last strums of the mariachis growing fainter. Only when the jardin lights flickered on was Don Fidencio able to make out his brother and the girl. They were standing a few feet apart, and she had turned her back to him. And around them drifted all the other couples, arm in arm, hand in hand.

35.

The next morning Socorro waited outside in the hall while Don Fidencio finished getting dressed and taking his medicines. A few minutes later he opened the door and asked her to please come rea.s.semble the cane; he had been looking at it before going to sleep and had managed to fold it but now couldn't make it extend all the way back to its original setting. A cane two feet tall would be of no use to him.

When they finally made it out of the room and down the hall, his brother was at the front desk, paying for one more night. A young boy, standing on a milk crate, was working the front desk for his father. He smiled when the old man ambled up to the counter.

"You have a message, Senor Rosales," the boy said, holding up the small piece of folded paper as proof. "I wrote it down myself."

"For which Senor Rosales?"

"The man told me it was for the one who couldn't remember where he came from."

Don Fidencio handed the boy the tip he was obviously waiting for and then opened the note.

I found what you were looking for.

-Isidro _______.

They traveled in the same direction as the previous day, pa.s.sing the furniture store and Pemex station, but once they had left the center of town, the driver veered onto a country road and a mile or so later crossed a wrought-iron bridge. Don Fidencio rolled down his window to get a better look at the low-flowing river. Two enormous Montezuma cypresses, their trunks flared at the base and ending in long horizontal roots, rose from the muddy sh.o.r.e on either side. Farther downstream a rope bridge hung high above the water, with a couple of slats missing and others dangling like loose teeth. The window had been down only a few seconds when Don Fidencio caught a whiff of the putrid water and hurried to roll it back up, but then stopped midway when they were across the bridge and he sensed something else lingering in the air. With his nose wedged in close to the top of the window, the old man took a couple of cautious sniffs before he allowed himself to breathe deeply.

"Oranges?"

"Over there." Isidro pointed to a grove that now bordered the dirt road. Young men leaned forward on rickety ladders that edged up to the trees. "When I was a boy, that was all they grew here."

"I used to have one in my backyard," Don Fidencio replied. "An orange one and a grapefruit tree, but the grapefruit went with the hurricane."

"Those are bad, the hurricanes," Isidro agreed. "What year was this?"

"In the year nineteen sixty-seven, that is one detail I never forget."

The driver was about to ask another question when Don Celestino leaned forward. "And you trust this woman's directions?"

"My tia, the only sister left from my mother's side of the family, was born not so far away from there and only moved closer to town when she married my tio."

"Maybe you should have brought her with you."

"I invited her, but she was already going to ma.s.s. No, it was better that way, for you to have more s.p.a.ce."

"We could have left my brother behind," Don Fidencio said. "He never believed the story anyway."