“Shit … that’s gotta be a blind,” Clamato said. “She wouldn’t be dumb enough to leave a labeled canister in the room where he could get it. He knows that too.”
There was one person in town who probably knew how to get to Felipe’s place in the mountains, but that person wasn’t a friend of Clamato’s (he’d go into that later) and probably wouldn’t tell him. I’d have better luck trying it on my own, as soon as I could walk.
After Clamato left, I found myself reflecting on all the bad things that had happened to my body in the current chapter of my life. Hot sake in the eyes, a beating by a lobsterman, incapacitating back spasm, and now this. Was someone trying to tell me something?
I decided I was on the right track. No pain, no gain, so they say. Each installment was worse. My balls had come to feel like bruised grapefruits, but the pain seemed somehow talismanic.
In the late afternoon, I got up and tried walking. It was bearable if I supported myself with my hand, unbearable if I just wore my boxer shorts. On a whim, I went into the little room where my sister’s things were laid out neatly on shelves.
Was there something here I could use? Leafing through a stack of filmy underclothes until, at the bottom, I came across two pairs of white cotton Carter’s briefs like the ones our mother used to buy for us. I held one up to check the size. They’d help get me into town, at least.
“I was expecting you,” the guitar player said. He was sitting on a low wall across the street from the Hotel California, holding his guitar, dark glasses reflecting the sunset. “You’re the brother, no?”
“I am. My name is Peter. Maybe you can help me. I’m looking for a friend of yours, Felipe Reyes.”
El Farolito was silent for a long time, then struck a chord. “Felipe Reyes. Did you know he wrote your sister a song?”
I shook my head, then remembered Clamato had told me the man was blind. “No, I—”
“Oh, yes. He asked me to sing it to her as a favor, because his own voice is so bad. I hadn’t sung a note for years, but he’s my closest companion and it was such a good song I tried one night outside her house. Well, I was nervous after so long and had too many drinks to relax myself. It was a desmadre … but I can try to sing it for you now, if you want to hear it.”
“Of course, I do.”
“At least I’m not drunk now. But forgive me. I am still very out of practice and my voice is rusty.”
El Farolito hummed and tuned his guitar, and people passing on the street stopped and stared. A little crowd started to collect. He struck another chord, played a run of notes, tilted his head back and began to sing in a plummy, Latin voice like Plácido Domingo.
Calla, calla, princesa
—dice el hada madrina—
En caballo con alas
hacía acá sé encamina,
En el cinto la espada
y en la mano el azor,
El feliz caballero
que te adora sin verte,
Y que llega de lejos,
vencedor de la Muerte,
A encenderte los labios
con su beso de amor.
By the time El Farolito had finished, it was early dusk. A star or two out, one dim streetlight on in front of the hotel, another way down at the end of the street where it turned south out of town. When he took his hands from the guitar and bowed his head, people in the now sizable crowd began to clap. A few men called out things like olé, bravo, and otra vez.
“What a miracle, Farolito,” another man said. “You’re singing and composing songs again! And by God what a song!”
“Thank you, my friend,” El Farolito said. “I’m happy to sing this song, but I didn’t compose it.”
“Who knows where from, but it came to my friend Felipe Reyes.” El Farolito laughed. “While he was eating in the Santa Fe restaurant.”
A short silence. “What did he say? What did he say?” one woman repeated. Finally, a man asked loudly, “What was Felipe eating in the Santa Fe?”
“I’m not sure,” El Farolito said. “But I think it must have been the pigeon pie.” And suddenly everyone was roaring with laughter.
After a while the crowd split up and wandered away, some of them staring at me and whispering: The brother, look, the brother.
“Do you want to join me for dinner?” I said to El Farolito. “I was just on my way to the Santa Fe.”
Someone had put a lot of money into the Santa Fe, beautifully refurbishing one of the brick nineteenth-century sugar baron residences that fronted on the square. The menu was impeccable, northern Italian dishes with fresh local ingredients. Even the margaritas were special, made with a local liqueur distilled from the damiana herb instead of the usual Triple Sec.
El Farolito and I were seated outside in the courtyard, our table hidden by exotic plants. I ordered a round of margaritas, and after they were half gone the blind man reached out his hand in my direction. The hand was large, dry, and soft.
“Con permiso.” Touching my face. “I just need to understand who I’m talking to, you know?”
A waiter arrived, and El Farolito ordered the pizza. When I ordered the pigeon pie, he smiled sadly. “It was only a joke,” he said. “I don’t really know how that song came to Felipe. He didn’t tell me. He just came to me one day, took me down into the huerta, and sang it for me, and begged me to sing it to your sister. If only she could have heard it.”
“Well.” I suddenly felt chilly. “I’m sure some day she will.”
“I’m sure some day she will,” he repeated. “Calm yourself, calm yourself, princess, says her fairy godmother. On a winged horse, with a sword on his belt and a hawk on his wrist, comes that joyful horseman—he who adores you without seeing you and who journeys from afar, the conqueror of Death, to set your lips afire with his kiss of love. My God, how did that come to him?” He carefully finished off the last of his second margarita. “Will you tell me about your family?”
“Well, there’s just my sister and me. Our parents are both dead, and we have no close relatives. We grew up in, ah, Philadelphia. Do you know it?” I had a vision of El Farolito sitting on a bench in Rittenhouse Square, where many of my parents’ friends lived, playing his guitar and singing Felipe Reyes’s song.
“I’ve heard of it. It’s where they signed the Declaration of Independence, isn’t it? So your ancestors were revolutionaries? Founding fathers of the republic?”
“More or less.”
“They fought for their freedom and then they got rich, no? Isn’t that the American way?”
“Not so rich.”
“Rich enough for a Mercedes, anyway.”
“A very old Mercedes. Which is now broken down.”
“And which your sister decided to drive to Mexico. What did she hope to find here? Or was she just tired of Philadelphia?”
“To tell you the truth, I don’t know. Maybe she’ll tell me, now that I’m here. If I can find her.”
The Italian chef himself brought out the dishes. The pigeon pie was five inches in diameter with a light flaky crust over the casserole, so tangy, rich, and delicious I couldn’t believe it.
“We usa little chile de campo, give some bite. Nize, ah?”
“It’s magical.”
“The pigeon from inna mountains. Very beeg. Gotta red feet.” He kissed the tips of his fingers.
We ate hungrily without talk, washing our meals down with a bottle of Santo Tomás vino tinto. “Listen,” the blind guitarist said finally when the food was gone. “At this very moment your sister is with my friend Felipe. But not the way you might think.”
I didn’t say anything.
“I swear to you on my mother’s grave that he honors and respects your sister more than anything in the world.”
“Well, I’m happy to hear that.” The chill again.
, señor.”
“Really? Can you tell me what that is?”
“Why, perfect love, señor.”
His face was expressionless, just his mouth moving. His glasses watched inscrutably. His hands rested on the table on either side of his empty plate.
“Where is she, then?” I asked, feeling chillier than ever. “Can you please tell me how to find her?” I took hold of El Farolito’s right hand with both of mine.
That Bird Will Eat You
Clamato stopped the Land Cruiser at the top of the rise and set the handbrake. A huge blue misty valley opened between us and the sierra—you could see the rough track curving around outcroppings and into gullies on its way down. Dry bouldered riverbeds at the bottom led up into the canyons of the sierra on the other side, and tiny dots of vultures moved slowly over the gray-green trees and bushes. Now you could see the vegetation change about two-thirds of the way up the range, darkening to forest. The bare granite had a salt-and-pepper look. Twenty years earlier they had tried to build a road across the range, Clamato said, but never got through.
Back the way we’d come, the desert rolled down to the ocean in a long straight slope broken by rounded cactus-covered hills. The slatey Pacific in the far distance was mottled with cloud shadows the color of gun metal.
Clamato locked the hubs into four-wheel drive, and we started down. Each of the gullies had a mild washout, but one had almost destroyed a ten-foot section of the track, which fell away at a forty-five-degree angle over the edge into space. He tromped the accelerator and yodeled while the Land Cruiser crashed into the washout, slewed sideways for a second, and clawed its way out the other side. “Just like surfing, man. You gotta get around the sections.”
The valley floor was fragrant with manure, and the sound of cowbells echoed through the scrub and medium-sized trees. We crossed the bouldered drywash on a sandy patch, drove past an empty corral, and pulled up next to a black Toyota truck at a group of woven stick buildings on the hillside, connected by a palm-thatched ramada and surrounded by a stick fence. Piglets, chickens, and two huge tom turkeys moved lazily out of the way as we walked across the yard toward an old woman, watching without expression from beneath the ramada.
“Don Yeyo is inside with the gripa,” she said after Clamato made his explanations. “There have been some problems.”
Don Yeyo was longer than his cot. His hard brown feet protruded from beneath a many-hued blanket and looked capable of carrying him into the mountains without shoes. “Well, he took La Paloma.” Coughing and propping himself on an elbow. “I was too sick to stop him.”
Clamato squatted down beside the old man. “Who? Felipe?”
“No, no! It was that green-eyed cabrón. He took her because she knows the trail to Las Abejas.”
“Marco, you mean?”
“I don’t know his worthless name. That green-eyed mierda asked my wife if the horse knew the trail, and like an idiot she told him. Then he put a saddle on my poor little mare and rode away on her.”
“How long ago?”
“Not long. An hour, whatever.”
“Well, he’ll be back. He left his truck outside. That is his truck, isn’t it?”
“Yes, may the Devil fuck him up the ass.”
“Have you seen any other trucks?”
The old man shook his head. “Felipe and La Purísima came on a horse. Or rather, she came on a horse and he was leading it. Like Joseph.”
“La Purísima?”
“Well, she’s pregnant, isn’t she? Even I could see that. If you know Felipe like I do, you can be sure he thinks she’s the mother of God. Who is this gringa embarazada? Do you know? Why is that green-eyed chingadero following them? Why are you worthless gringos prowling around here like coyotes? What the fuck is going on, anyway?”
Clamato knew all the local Spanish idioms and jokes, and finally was able to calm the old man down. He explained that I had come all the way from New York to find my sister and take her home with me, and that the green-eyed man was the father of her child and wanted her too.
“Mother of God,” the old man whispered.
“Is there another horse we can use?”
“No. La Paloma was the only one, God damn his soul of shit.”
“Christ, that sucks.” Clamato looked more upset than I could have believed possible. “I was counting on that horse. I’ve got a bum knee—I just couldn’t make it up there on foot. It blows everything.”
What to do? There seemed to be only one option. “Can he tell me the route?” I asked.
“What did he say? What did he say?” the old woman asked.
Clamato translated. “You’re out of your mind,” he added in English to me. “You can’t go alone…. That bird will eat you alive. Let’s wait for him to come back down to his truck.”
“Well, does he have any water?” the old man asked.
I shook my head. “No water,” I said in Spanish.
“For God’s sake, get him some water,” the old man yelled at his wife. “You can put it in that old goatskin of mine.” He turned back to me. “Are you going to kill him, my friend?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, if you do, can you bring my little mare back to me?”
I nodded. “Of course.”
“Get him a fucking blanket so he doesn’t freeze to death up there,” he yelled, reaching down to the bare earth floor beside the cot and scratching some lines with his forefinger. “Look, my friend. The trail turns off here, about three kilometers along the river. Go up the ridge till you can see Paraíso down to the west. Then turn off here, toward the saddle. When you get over the saddle, turn here and follow the side of the mountain to the left. At the open place in the forest with the big rock, turn here. The trail goes down through the pine trees, and you will meet some pigs. They will be able to tell you how to go from there.” He was laughing. “Look. Be careful right here. That turn is very easy to miss. It’s right after the big madroño. You know what a madroño is, my friend? Do you have them in New York?”
“You can’t miss it,” Clamato said. “The branches are all red and snaky, and they’re shedding their skin. They make one hell of a cocktail out of the fruit.”
“Thanks,” I told him. Back to Don Yeyo. “How long will it take to get up there?”
“It depends on how fast you go, my friend.” He coughed and cleared his throat. “I can make the whole trip in three hours. Oye, mujer! Get him some venison machaca and tortillas. And my fucking mochila to carry his things in.”
The Trail
The trail ran alongside a mostly dry riverbed set with small pools of standing water. Huge wild fig trees snaked their way down the canyon sides, forking around boulders, doubling back, and rejoining themselves like something out of Dalí, their bark a smooth vanilla, their leaves big green ovals the size of footballs, leaving shadows moving on shadows in a light breeze fifty feet up in the clerestory.
I passed a large bush or small tree covered with white flowers. Each flower was alive with multicolored butterflies: white, yellow, black with red and white stripes, blue and black, orange and black. They were in the air around the flowers in a thick, fluttering cloud.
The pools in the riverbed grew and became connected and finally formed a small river: grassy banks, cattails, a few giant cottonwoods and tall, thin, straight palms. Small fish hung in the clear water, water striders indented the surface. Kingfishers flitted up and downstream, two wing beats and a dive. Big yellow and black orioles hopped and preened in the willows, a small flock of ducks arrowed up the canyon, but the big, red-footed, delicious pigeons the Italian chef had raved about were nowhere to be seen.
Farther along, the river ran through deep cuts in the rock interspersed with big deep pools, when I could see it. The trail hung high on the canyonside above the river or doglegged away in switchbacks through a dry thorny forest hung with yellow, red, blue, and purple flowers and pulsing with white-winged doves.
The configuration was very like
the secret place Claire had taken me to, and when I finally emerged on a plateau of rock enclosing a large pool with a small waterfall at one end, I took it as a sign.
No, it was all too perfect, a mirage. A vision of life beyond.
In an hour or so, I could be food for the buzzards. Couldn’t I? To be a gringo in Mexico; that is euthanasia. Ambrose Bierce wrote that before he disappeared.
I needed to concentrate on something practical: the dull pain in my balls that persisted as I slowly put one foot in front of the other, the thought of Claire’s gray eyes, her laughter on hearing I’m flat on my fucking back. Meanwhile the world is coming to an end.
A few hundred yards past the pool, as Don Yeyo had diagrammed, I turned off on an almost invisible trail zigzagging up the steep side of the canyon, full of loose rocks that twisted and rolled underfoot. Where the trail curved around outcroppings, the view was all the way out into the Pacific. In some of the gullies, running water had hollowed it into a six-foot-deep trough. In places there were grassy banks set with wildflowers, in others the thorny scrub closed in so you could barely see the sky. I climbed in stops and starts, sweating, panting, seeing bright spots move through the thin air in front of me and wondering if I was about to crumple from a heart attack.
Every once in a while I’d see a footprint. There were two sets: one made by hiking boots, the other a tire tread of huaraches. No sign of a third track. Marco must be riding (there were plenty of hoof-marks), although it was impossible to imagine that any horse could carry a rider up here.
Not far away, a bird that looked like a very colorful robin preened and perked on a large plant with a thick, woody trunk that divided about seven feet up, then exploded in two big cascades of thin, long leaves like arboreal fireworks. Beyond lay nothing but thousands of feet of blue, empty air. The scary drumbeat of my heart.
As I toiled up a forty-five-degree ridge toward a saddle in the high escarpment, the scrub slowly turned to pine, oak, and dark red, snaky madroño, which Clamato had perfectly described, all twisted in strange shapes. Approaching the saddle, I was in light green forest. Spanish moss began to hang from the tree branches and brilliant red and green lichens appeared on the rocks. Ferns brushed against my legs, flocks of white-winged doves whistled through the trees, and a small kestrel jagged past, setting up a twittering from invisible warblers hidden in the moss.