Amigoland (28 page)

“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 municipal 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 Saturdays,” his brother said.

“It must have been for our anniversaries, when we still celebrated them. We would go to the Matamoros Café 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 passed 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. God 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.”

“Nobody 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 tortoiseshell 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.

T
he 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 reassemble 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, Señor Rosales,” the boy said, holding up the small piece of folded paper as proof. “I wrote it down myself.”

“For which Señor 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, passing 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 shore 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 tía, 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 tío.”

“Maybe you should have brought her with you.”

“I invited her, but she was already going to mass. No, it was better that way, for you to have more space.”

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

“My tía said that she had also heard stories like the one about your grandfather.”

“You see, everyone believes the story except for my little brother.”

“But that it happened in this place, El Rancho Capote?” Don Celestino asked.

“No, only that there used to be a ranchito by that name, but with time, more and more people left and then they changed the
name to El Rancho De La Paz. For that reason, we couldn’t find it.”

“And these people who left, did she say the Indians took them?”

“No, those ones, the gringos came and took.” The driver glanced into the rearview mirror. “You know, to go work on the other
side.”

The grove ended and the dirt road turned to caliche. They could feel the rocks and pebbles ricocheting off the rusted chassis,
at times hitting just below their feet. Don Fidencio placed both hands on the dashboard to keep from bumping against the door
every time the driver jerked the car this way or that way to avoid a pothole. He slowed down some when they came across a
large pen with a pair of sheepdogs keeping a vigilant watch over a flock of goats. Up the same road, a lone coyote trotted
out of the brush and across the way, ducking under a barbwire fence into a cleared field, and then pausing to look over its
shoulder at the old man in the passenger seat.

The road ended at the edge of a scorched field that stretched out as far as they could see. To the right a pair of tractor
tires formed arches on either side of the dirt road leading toward a dozen or so cinder-block houses. As soon as they crossed
into the ranchito, a small pack of dogs of various sizes and mixed breeds rushed toward the taxi. A mangy chow barked at Don
Fidencio’s door, causing him to reach for his aluminum cane until he realized the window was rolled halfway up.

At the first lot, a skinny woman was hanging her laundry across a clothesline to one side of the house. She stayed looking
at the idling taxi, a clothespin dangling from the corner of her mouth.

“Buenos días,” the driver called out.

The woman responded to his greeting with a half nod.

He waited to see if she would approach the car or at least call the dogs off, but she stayed put. The clothespin shifted slightly,
as if she might be gnawing on its end.

“What a good day to be washing clothes, no?” The driver pointed up at the clear sky. “There’s a good breeze. Already I can
see the sun will dry your clothes very fast, maybe not even half an hour.”