Take No Names, page 9
The world wouldn’t miss me. And the feeling is mutual.
The bus trundles out of the city, huffs onto the toll road to Mexicali, and gathers speed in the direction of the rising sun. We climb hairpin turns into the craggy, tan mountains, and then we descend again, coasting down vertiginous switchbacks, a cycle that repeats itself throughout the next two days as the bus traverses the arid center of the country.
The driver disgorges us to stretch our legs at bare-bones stations in Caborca, in Santa Rosalía, in Torreón. Dried out by heat and altitude, we piss bright yellow in men’s room troughs, wolf down tacos de canasta sold roadside by grandmas in rebozos. Our bodies are mending, our minds acclimatizing to a new reality in which this land is home. And my Spanish skills are tuning up, thanks to the marathon of shrilly dubbed Malcolm in the Middle episodes playing on the bus’s drop-down screens.
Mostly, we eat and sleep to languid excess. Recovering, preparing. Focusing our minds on the yet-obscure hinge of our fates. Cerrada 5 de Mayo 17. 伊莎贝尔—yīshābèi’ěr. Isabel.
14
Early on our third morning in Mexico, we coast down a valley freeway into a mile-high basin of twenty million people as the hot light of a new day seeps across the eastern sky. The endless city yaws away from the bus windows: an ocean of smallish, blocky buildings. Many glow with colorful paint, many more hunker dingy white. The hilly outer neighborhoods are pocked with rugged street trees, webbed by tangled networks of power lines, shrouded in a gray haze of particulate matter.
Like Los Angeles, Mexico City is neither tall nor dense, and the bus crawls through the great range of the place like a blind beetle on an epic rug. But unlike Angelenos, the people here use their roads for more than driving cars. Street life comes into resolution as the bus descends from the freeway into the neighborhood of Magdalena de las Salinas. Breakfast stalls offering tortas and tamales occupy every corner. Men, women, and children wash cars as they wait at red lights, or do magic tricks, or juggle, or eat fire. They dash from car to car, collecting five-peso coins from outstretched hands before the signal goes green. If I could open the bus window, I could buy breakfast, or a tabloid, or a dozen roses, or a kaleidoscope, but nothing I saw inside of it would match the vivacity of the streets of el Distrito Federal.
We snag a taxi from the line of pink-and-white Hyundais in front of the station, and I ask the driver to find us a hotel in el Centro Histórico that accepts cash. The buildings grow older and the streets narrow as we approach downtown. We’re one car back from the stoplight to cross Avenida Paseo de La Reforma, the skyscraper-lined central boulevard, when a big white pickup comes roaring through the intersection from the left and screeches to a halt in the crosswalk.
“Hijos de puta,” mutters the cabdriver. He presses his wrist against his receding hairline, then cuts the engine.
Four men with assault rifles stand in the bed of the truck, holding on to a rack of black steel bars. They’re dressed in gray-checked flannel shirts, with black cowboy hats on their heads and red bandannas covering their faces. My eyes go wide as they sling the rifles off their shoulders and take up positions like a military platoon, pointing their guns back and forth on a swivel, one facing each direction.
“Uhhhh,” says Mark.
“Lo siento, muchachos,” says the driver. “Tenemos que esperar aquí un ratito.”
“¿Qué está pasando?” I crane my neck to see around the car in front of us. The traffic is draining out of La Reforma, and there’s another truck in the opposite crosswalk, blocking cars on the other side.
“Hay una manifestación. Tenemos una casi todos los días.”
“¿Manifestación de qué?”
“Pues, contra el Chinopuerto.”
Mark elbows me in the upper arm.
“There’s a protest,” I explain. “Against the airport.”
“Awesome,” he says, shifting in his seat. “Can you tell them that I haven’t crapped in three days?”
Heralded by a cacophony of car horns, the front line of protesters appears in the street. La Reforma is some eight lanes across, with wide sidewalks and a tree-lined median, and the great breadth of the boulevard quickly fills with hollering, fist-pumping pedestrians. There are students in thick-rimmed glasses and green canvas jackets, paunchy yuppies with children balanced on their shoulders, and plenty of working uniforms: gray coveralls, blue blazers, aquamarine scrubs. I can’t understand the chants amid all the honking horns, but I glimpse some of the homemade signs as they pass:
#NOCHINOPUERTO
NUESTRO PAÍS, NUESTRO TRABAJADORES
CHINA NO ES BIENVENIDO
¡CHINOS VÁYANSE Y NO VUELVAN!
Go away, Chinese, and don’t come back.
I ask the driver about the guys in the white truck.
He glances back at me with his head tipped to the side. “¿No ha oído hablar de la Nueva Generación de Almas Prehispánicas?”—You haven’t heard of the New Generation of pre-Hispanic Souls? That’s what they call themselves, he explains. —NGAP. They claim to be a patriot organization, but they’re narco-traffickers, that’s all they are.
—A cartel?
—More like a figurehead for cartels. They take money from the syndicates and spend it in the capital to influence people. And politicians.
—Like a trade association, I say.
The driver smiles sardonically. “Más o menos,” he says—More or less.
I translate into English for Mark without taking my eyes off the men brandishing their rifles in the truck bed.
“What about these dudes?” Mark says, a lively smile on his lips as he tips his chin at the group of a few hundred men bringing up the rear of the protest. Most of them are wearing nothing but wide-brimmed straw hats on their heads and printout photos of someone’s face covering their crotches. They sing loudly, raised voices bellowing forth from the round O’s of their lips, and dance to the music of handheld boom boxes.
“What cool gang are they?” Mark asks. “And can I join?”
I interpret his question to the taxista.
“Es el Movimiento de los Cuatrocientos Pueblos,” he explains: the Movement of the Four Hundred Villages, a die-hard group from Veracruz that formed thirty years ago when their feckless governor, Dante Delgado, appropriated their lands and sold it to developers right out from under their homes.
Ever since, they’ve been disrupting traffic on La Reforma with a photo of Delgado taped over their dicks, dancing and chanting and repeating their demands to have their lands restored to them. Their complaints have never been addressed, and Delgado was appointed ambassador to Italy. But they still don’t return home because their homes are gone.
“Nada cambia nunca,” the taxista sighs—Nothing ever changes.
I ask him what they’ve got against the airport.
The driver shrugs. “Son como manifestantes vocacionales”—They’re vocational protesters now.
The honking of the horns dies off as the last few naked men straggle across the intersection. The gunmen sling their rifles back over their shoulders and grab hold of the steel bars. The white truck pulls into the road, tracing S-curves across the boulevard behind the massive crowd.
“Ask him what he thinks of the airport,” Mark suggests once we’ve started moving again.
The driver nods to himself for a moment before answering. “Es una monstruosidad, ¿me entiendes? Como signo del Apocalipsis.”
Mark rolls his eyes. “Seems a little dramatic,” he says, “coming from the guy who just said that nothing ever changes.”
The driver pulls up in front of a baroque colonial building of gray stone: Hotel el Paraíso. He catches Mark’s eye in the rearview and responds in English.
“I suppose I could say, ‘Nothing ever improves.’”
Then he opens his door and steps out to unload our bags from the trunk.
The hotel is immaculate and snug, all stone tiles and worn wood. At reception, we pay cash for two nights. Then we take the loose-jointed elevator up to our third-floor double, where Mark promptly locks himself in the bathroom.
I fish his laptop out of his duffel, clear the top of the narrow desk, and get to work on Song Fei’s notebook. The anti-airport protest along La Reforma made me realize that Mark was right about the peril in our plan. It doesn’t feel like the best time to be a Chinese person in Mexico City, let alone one trying to sell a gemstone from Myanmar, another country wriggling under China’s thumb.
We need to know more about what we’re getting into.
A quick internet search reveals that there’s no jeweler anywhere on the alley named Cerrada 5 de Mayo. The street view of No. 17 shows a squat stone building sandwiched between two taller ones, with an arched red door and a worn wooden sign: PULQUERÍA LOS TRES PIRATAS.
A bar. Great. Could we find the buyer there? Would we need some kind of password? Is “Isabel” enough?
I flip forward to the Tang dynasty poem, make a list of all the incorrect radicals that Song Fei used in the first stanza:
田土火手水
臣人血木又
Tián tǔ huǒ shǒu shuǐ.
Chén rén xuè mù yòu.
Field, earth, fire, hand, water. Surrender, man, blood, wood, repeat. Whatever this means, it doesn’t sound nice. I reconnect the hair clip to the laptop and enter the first letters of the romanizations of these radicals—tthsscrxmy—in the password field. Long shot. No dice. Incorrect Password.
Mark emerges from the bathroom, hair wet, a towel wrapped around his waist. He falls onto the bed with a wan smile on his face.
“That toilet’s gonna remember me,” he says.
I ignore him, move to the second stanza.
天高白王
立巾辶元
Tiān gāo bái wáng.
Lì jīn chuò yuán.
Sky, tall, white, king. Stand, cloth, go, first. Or eminent. Or dollar. 元 is a tricky one.
I double-click on the hair clip’s icon again and enter tgbwljcy.
Incorrect Password.
I flip back to the page with the address on 5 de Mayo. Sixty-five thousand dollars per carat. 买方—buyer. 砍—bargain. 假名—alias. 伊莎贝尔—Isabel.
I press a palm to my forehead and heave a sigh of frustration.
“Okay, okay.” Mark levers himself off the bed, walks over, and plants his hands on the edge of the desk, hunching forward to look at the notebook and the laptop screen. “What’s with all the agony?”
I tell him about the address, the poem, the hair clip. As he listens, his lips draw into a tight line across his face.
“You’ve gotta simplify, dude,” he says when I’m done explaining. “We’ve got one option: go to this Tres Piratas place, get a drink, scope the scene. Ask the bartenders if they know where one might unload a stone. Or if they know anyone named Isabel. Nothing so hectic about that. If we don’t get anywhere, we start hitting up sketchball jewelers mañana. All right?”
He rests a hand on my shoulder. His other hand is still braced against the desk, and I contemplate the mottled skin grafts on his forearm, the knots and whorls of hardened tissue, before looking away.
“All right,” I say.
“You’re overstraining that big ol’ brain. Bad for your ticker,” he says. “How about you scrub yourself for a solid minute and then we step outside and get our bearings? Locate that crypto ATM like you promised me, huh? C’mon.” He yanks my chair away from the desk. “Look lively.”
I shuffle into the bathroom to do as he says, knowing that he’s probably right about our options and definitely right about my blood pressure. And as Mark predicted, I feel less glum about our prospects once I’ve showered and donned fresh clothes.
I’m sweating again within moments of our emergence into the midday sun, but after sixteen months of Seattle’s constant moisture, I don’t mind the dry heat. The world looks brighter and sounds crisper in the thin air up here, more than a mile above sea level, and the streets pop with so much stimuli that my mind can’t stray into the future or crawl back toward the past.
We weave our way southeast through el Centro Histórico. The ornate buildings cast stark shadows over canopied street markets, surly organilleros cranking dissonant melodies out of ancient barrel organs, curanderos cleansing auras right there on the sidewalk with salt, lime, and chant. And then we pass between a ruined Aztec temple and a sinking baroque cathedral and arrive at DF’s central plaza, the Zócalo: a huge, flat square disrupting the cityscape with its sheer quantity of void.
The crypto ATM is located a few blocks south, behind a photo booth, at the back of a vintage store dripping with hipster charm. Mark browses the comic books while I withdraw enough pesos to repay him half of Arturo’s fee.
Twenty minutes after that, we’re sitting in plastic chairs at a long table set up in the middle of a sunny side street, washing down braised barbacoa tacos with a savory broth of onions, chickpeas, and cilantro. Mark watches raptly as a fellow customer disappears into a corner store, returns with a bottle of Modelo Especial, and garnishes it with a lime wedge from the tray of condiments in the middle of the table.
He hops up without a word. I check my watch: just past noon. He’s back with a six-pack within a minute.
“Five bits a pop.” He grins. “To Mexico.”
We tap the bottles together. The Lost and Found, the busted van, Jules and Sun, the airport protest—it all feels light-years away from this sunny table in the middle of the street. Despite Arturo’s cut, we’ve reached freedom with the lion’s share of our loot still in our pockets. Including the painite.
“What do you say we swing by Cerrada Cinco de Mayo on our walk back?” Mark says as he pops the tops off two more beers.
“You want to check this place out after three rounds?”
He eyes the last two unopened Modelos.
“Maybe we take those to go,” he says. “C’mon, let’s do it. We can’t rent a tandem bicycle or hit a museum right now with this question mark hovering over our heads. And if we go back to the hotel, you’re just going to crawl around on the ceiling.”
“Fine. I don’t see why not.” I lean back, cross an ankle over a knee. “What’ll you do? If we can sell the stone.”
He looks at the bottle. “Think they sell these by the truck?”
“Would you run a security firm down here?”
He gives me an irritated look. “We’ve been in town, what, two hours?”
“Just curious.” I take a sip, watching him over the top of the bottle.
“I don’t know about security.” He frowns at a couple of lavender blossoms fluttering onto the checked tablecloth from a nearby jacaranda tree. “I’m sick of scrounging for gig work all the time. Passive income, that’s how you do it. Maybe I could own a shop. Like that place with the crypto ATM. Or”—he snaps his fingers and punches his palm—“an arcade! All old machines. None of those newfangled five-dimensional games that you can’t pee straight after playing.”
A dreamy smile drifts across his lips. “Pinball, air hockey, and Pac-Man. I’d curate a heck of a tap list. People knock back a couple of cold ones while playing the games they grew up with. Except I’d turn off all the sounds and pipe tunes through the place on audiophile speakers. Classic rock till eleven, Motown till close.”
Each “I” smacks me like a pellet from Jerry’s air gun. Mark sits there enjoying his beer in the sun, making his plans for his future in Mexico without me, and all I can think is, Fine by me, jackass. I could use a fresh start. I fell into your thrall for a minute, just like I fell into Sun’s. But I’ll be better off on my own. Counting on nobody and taking care of myself.
“Sounds great,” I say. “Fun and games.”
“Yeah, well.” He downs the rest of his Modelo and sets the bottle onto the table. “Let’s go get this money before we talk any more about spending it.”
The sun feels much hotter as we walk north along Calle Simón Bolívar, a narrow one-way lined with stores selling musical instruments. Music Depot. Cosmic Music. Karma Music. Blankets spread with patterned textiles and handbags crowd the sidewalks, the stoic vendors mostly indigenous women from the southern states, shy-eyed children tucked into their bright cotton skirts. Mark weaves through the foot traffic, striding ahead of me, then stopping abruptly to give his pocket change to a paraplegic girl playing a dirge on her accordion.
A right and a left later, we find ourselves on the pedestrianized alley of Cerrada 5 de Mayo. The walls of the tall buildings on either side are covered in murals and graffiti. More tables shaded by canopies line the cobblestone street. Cocina Rosita, Café del Jardín. And of course, because we’re still on planet Earth, a Chinese buffet. Restaurant Kamling has four red lanterns out front, each painted with the characters 吉祥. Jíxiáng—good fortune. But even though it’s lunch hour, the big metal shutter is closed.
Directly across from Restaurant Kamling, the arched red door of Los Tres Piratas is open a few inches. Mark and I exchange a glance. He gives the door a push with his palm, and it swings open, disgorging a rush of cool, musty air. Revealing an uneven staircase that descends into an interior so dimly lit that I can barely see inside.
Mark steps in, and I follow behind.
15
The pulquería is little more than a semi-basement den, divided into alcoves by columns and low archways. The furniture is mismatched, but all of it looks sticky. A trough urinal occupies one corner, half hidden by a sheet tacked to the ceiling. Incongruous art covers the walls: a bright diorama of the Virgin of Guadalupe; a sepia photograph of masked revolutionaries arrayed in some dusty pueblo plaza; a cubist mural of a faceless woman, curvaceous and nude in a psychedelic palette, facing away.
All of the denizens are men. Two of the three are playing dominoes in the near corner. They’re dressed in matching gray-checked flannel shirts. They manage to clock our entrance by rotating their eyeballs without moving their necks.
The other drinker, an elderly man in a felt kettle cap and a Servicio de Transportes uniform, stares toward the only window, which offers a view of shoes clopping along the alleyway outside. He doesn’t seem to notice us. It looks like he hasn’t noticed anything in weeks.
