Last Train from Cuernavaca (5 page)

The clamor sent Grace hurrying through the Colonial's front gate. She found at least twenty-five burros gathered outside, along with most of the hotel's guests and staff. If Grace had tried to tell people back in London how much noise even one burro could make, they wouldn't have believed her. A Klaxon horn stuck in holiday traffic at Marble Arch had nothing on a burro expressing an opinion.

Grace wasn't surprised to find Federico Martín in the middle of the uproar. He held an army bugle under his right arm and a megaphone in his left hand. With the megaphone he directed the Colonial's two gardeners in decorating the saddled burros with bright garlands and tassels.

“Captain Martín, what's going on here?”

“A
burrada,
Mrs. Knight.”

“I don't much fancy the sound of that.”

Frau Hoffman, the wife of Cuernavaca's German brewer, tugged on Captain Martín's sleeve and shouted to him in her own language. He answered her in kind. Grace wondered how many languages Captain Martín spoke, but the matter of the burros took precedence.

Rico shouted into the megaphone. “The riders will race three laps around the plaza.”

Now it was Grace's turn to pull on his sleeve. “What riders?”

He flashed her his ingenuous, barn-on-fire of a smile. “Your guests.”

“Someone could fall off and be trampled.” Grace planted her fists on her hips and stamped her foot. “I forbid it.” But one of those guests was tugging on Rico's other sleeve and he didn't hear Grace.

The ladies wore long dresses of billowy lawn and big hats piled with silk flowers. The men sported serge suits and canvas hunting jackets, starched linen collars, and headgear that ran from bowlers to yachting caps.

Laughing and chattering in a variety of languages, the guests chose their mounts. The men selected burros at the back of the herd to give the women an advantage. Members of the Colonial's staff helped them all clamber aboard, then handed the women the reins and their parasols.

Rico shouted into the megaphone again. “No one may spur his or her burro faster then a walk. Anyone breaking into a trot will be disqualified. Remember, ladies and gentlemen, three laps around the zócalo. The winner will be able to put all food and drink at the Colonial on my bill for the rest of the weekend.”

By now a crowd of passersby had gathered to watch. More people ran from every direction. Grace realized the affair was out of her control.

Rico strode across the street and climbed the stairs to the bandstand's stage. He put the bugle to his lips and blew “Call to the Post.” He played it quite well, actually, clear and crisp and on key.

He replaced the bugle with the megaphone and shouted, “They're off!”

If Grace hadn't been so mortified she would have laughed at the spectacle. Everyone else did. The plaza had never witnessed so much hilarity.

Juan stood next to Grace while he waited for the mule-drawn trolley to rattle past on its tracks set in the cobblestone street. After it had gone by, with it passengers leaning out to watch the race, Juan winked at Grace.

“
Diez y siete
calls this the Mexican Ass-cot,
Mamacita.
”

“Who's
Diez y siete
?”

“Rico.”

Grace was about to ask Juan why he called Captain Martín “Seventeen,” but the the riders came past in a clamor of brays and shouts and laughter. When they had completed their high-spirited second lap, Juan stretched a red ribbon across the street from a lamppost to a palm tree. He tied it with a slipknot to serve as a finish line.

Grace turned on her heel and stalked back inside. She didn't want to get Captain Martín into trouble with his superiors, but she really would have to speak to Colonel Rubio about him. With pranks like this, the man would ruin the Colonial's reputation for dignity and decorum.

As Grace headed for the upstairs balcony to watch the finish, Lyda hailed her from the front desk. She waved a fistful of yellow paper.

“Gracie, we're almost full and still we're getting telegrams from Em Cee.” Mexico City had too many syllables for Lyda, so Em Cee it always was. “A station cab is on its way from the train with a load of customers. They should just about top us off.”

“Top us off?”

“Fill us up.” Lyda grinned. “I would say your dashing captain is good for business.”

“He is not my captain.”

Grace walked away and did not hear Lyda mutter, “Oh yes, he is.”

 

Captain Martín's ability to organize frivolity was impressive but infuriating since he never bothered to clear his escapades with Grace. She would learn of it as guests set off in victoria cabs for the horse races and shooting matches he arranged at the army barracks near the rail station. She would have thought he was trying to annoy her, except that he hardly seemed aware of her existence.

In the evenings Grace always knew when Rico was in the cantina because of the laughter and song spilling out. She avoided the bar when Rico was there, but Lyda didn't. She reported that Rico must have seen the newsreels shown before the films at Cuernavaca's posh new theater. He did passable impressions of Theodore Roosevelt, Austria's arch-duke Ferdinand, and David Lloyd George, the British chancellor of the exchequer.

Lyda said her favorite was Rico's version of the late Queen Victoria eating taffy. Lyda didn't know where Rico might have seen film of her majesty, but Grace wouldn't have been surprised if he had had an audience with her. By this point, Grace wouldn't have been surprised to learn that Rico had actually shared taffy with the former queen of England.

That first night's hand-kissing episode had given Grace the impression Captain Martín was interested in her. Now a polite bow and a “Good day” were all she could expect from him. She told herself she didn't care, but she found reasons to stay downstairs later than she used to, on the chance she might see him.

One evening a trumpet playing “Tiger Rag” drew her to the cantina's doorway as if reeling in a fish on a line. Grace saw that Rico was the source of it. She added musician to the list of his accomplishments, and that was a title she did not grant frivolously.

He wore oxford shoes, gray flannel trousers, and a white linen shirt with a soft collar open at the neck. He sat atop the far end of the long mahogany bar with his lanky legs dangling. When he finished “Tiger Rag” he moved smoothly into “Ostrich Walk.” He had everyone's rapt attention, yet he played as if he were alone.

In the fog of tobacco smoke, the dim electric light in the ceiling cast a diffuse glow around him. Grace felt a tingling in her fingers, as though from electricity. She backed out of the doorway, hoping he hadn't noticed her. The music trailed her up the stairs to her rooms.

“Tiger Rag” and “Ostrich Walk” were both jolly tunes. Grace wondered why they resonated with such melancholy when Captain Martín played them. The thought she might have something to do with his melancholy didn't occur to her.

 

Grace's home in the Colonial was a small, second-floor suite at the southeast end of the hotel. Her narrow balcony faced the zócalo, as the small plaza was called, with its small bandstand.

She often had trouble sleeping. So it was tonight with “Tiger Rag” echoing in her head, along with the memory of that tingling sensation. Electricity was a mystery to her and she wondered if it were leaking out somewhere in the cantina.

She put on a silk kimono the color of old ivory and went to the balcony. With her hands on the railing, she looked out over the tile roofs of the city sleeping in the moonlight. If she held on to the railing and leaned out she could see the shimmering snowcap of the volcano Popocatepetl. She had to lean far out, though, to look around the plaster gargoyle that shared the corner of the building with her. She had named the creature L.G., after Sir David Lloyd George. Years ago Grace had heard Sir David give one of his firebrand speeches in Hyde Park. The gargoyle, with its out-thrust jaw and pugnacious scowl, did resemble him.

The hour was late. The cantina must be closed. So why did she hear music playing? It grew louder as five musicians crossed the zócalo, passing through the moon shadow thrown by the bandstand. With guitars, guitaron, mandolin, and trumpet they played the rebels' anthem, “Valentina,” with the trumpet carrying the melody. The song stirred the hair on the nape of Grace's neck.

She had stood on this balcony a year and a half ago, and watched the rebels' triumphant parade around the plaza with their women trailing behind them. Zapata's peasants had defeated the government's troops, but they could hardly be called an army. They wore rags and rode gaunt horses with primitive wooden saddles. Draped with bandoleers, and armed with knives, machetes, pistols, and rifles they looked like a convocation of bandits. “Valentina” was the song they sang.

 

If they're going to kill me tomorrow,

Let them kill me right away.

 

They had been so proud that day, Davids to the Mexican Army's Goliath.

But those singing now weren't an army. Some
señorita
will be waked from a sound sleep, Grace thought. And so will all her neighbors.

When the musicians set a course for the street under her balcony it became apparent that she would be that hapless
señorita.
Grace couldn't see their faces under their sombreros, but she knew with a certainty that Captain Martín was the one playing the trumpet.

She scurried off the balcony and stood with her back against the curtains framing the doorway. She pressed a hand over her heart to quiet the thumping, and pretended she wasn't here.

Then they began singing “Las Mañanitas.” Rico's tenor led the tight, but barely controlled harmony that always, in Mexico, sounded as if it were about to jump the tracks and go off across country on its own. Grace had never heard Zulus harmonize, or South Sea Islanders, but Mexicans made the English music she did know sound halfhearted at best.

Grace's husband Carlos had waked her with this song on her birthday each year she had known him. She peeked around the curtain at the position of the full moon. A little after midnight. Did Captain Martín know she was born on this day, now only a few minutes old itself? She had a feeling he did.

Maybe the song triggered the remorse. It was never far below her surface. “I'm sorry, Carlos,” she whispered. “I'm sorry I forsook your name.”

While sipping oolong in Grace's former tea shop five years ago, the governor of Morelos had talked her into buying this old ruin of a building. He had convinced her she could turn it into a hotel. He had also persuaded her to use her father's name, Knight, instead of Mendoza, her husband's name. It would be better for business, the governor said. Foreigners who came here as guests would have more confidence in Knight.

Grace felt she had forsaken her dead husband's name, and now she was tempted to betray his memory.

“
Querido
Carlitos, what should I do about Federico Martín?”

Outside, the musicians came to the verse that had reached into her soul when Carlos sang it. Rico's voice poised on a high note as if balanced on a precipice, then slid down the scale like a waterfall.

“Wake up,” the words said. “Wake up. A new day has dawned.”

Grace clung to the heavy damask curtains and sobbed.

After an eternity of verses, the singers finished and dispersed into the night. Grace wiped her eyes and blew her nose, but she knew she couldn't sleep. She left her room and padded barefoot to the second-floor gallery. She leaned her hips against the half wall, braced her hands on the top of it and looked down into the courtyard and garden. The moonlight pouring into it lit the open corridors of the first floor.

She walked downstairs to prowl her creation, as she often did late at night. She liked to recall what this building had looked like the first time she saw it, filled with half a century of rubble and trash. It had devoured all her inheritance, but she never tired of seeing what she had made of it. Some day it might even turn a profit.

She savored the gloss of the terra-cotta tiles under the soles of her bare feet. She admired the columns topped with the plaster-cast lilies she had designed. She ran her hand along the colorful wall mosaics and remembered the soft-spoken
indio
artisans who had painted them, fired them, and set them in place.

Only at this time of night would she find the back courtyard quiet. She walked among the big cement washtubs, the gardening tools. She felt the warmth from the coals in the braziers where her employees cooked meals that didn't include roast beef, green beans, or parsleyed potatoes. In doorways and nooks she glimpsed bodies asleep on reed mats with handwoven cotton blankets over them.

The local members of the Colonial's staff walked to work each morning, but about half of Grace's people lived in distant villages. They shared rooms facing the back courtyard and the rooms had beds, although the country folk preferred the mats they called
petates
.

Grace knew how many people she had hired, but she had no idea how many worked for her. The number fluctuated as members of her staff's families showed up to pitch in. In Mexico a job was a gift to be shared. Standing there, Grace thought her heart too small to contain the affection she felt for all of them. Without them she could not have made her dream real. She knew this elegant old building was only stone and mortar and wood, but late at night she would have sworn it had a spirit.

On her way back she stepped into an arched niche on the north side. The wall was thinner there and Grace put her ear against it. She liked to listen to the hum from the transformer in the wooden shed just on the other side. It supplied electricity to the streetlights around the plaza, and to the buildings, including the Colonial. The steady hum reassured her that all was well.