Llama for Lunch (8 page)

To take my mind of my imminent asphyxiation I stared at the purple – yes, purple – gloves of the perpetrators of this crime. I could see Edna Everidge wearing those gloves – they matched the mauve walls nicely. The rest of the gear my tormentors wore looked like they were ready for a trip to the moon – they were totally encapsulated in space suits. I, on the other hand, was utterly unprotected from them.

The nastiest cruelty was saved for last. The bill for the repair of one filling was two hundred and twenty dollars.

From the hospital I took one bus down the hill and another to the ‘estacion tren’ – gee I was proud of myself. Still hoping to find the train I had read about for my return to the States I had asked a young man at the tourist bureau in the piazza about it. He had said that there was a train but that it was unreliable. I found a very fine train station, but except for a small freight office at one end, it was an empty echoing shell. The attendant managed to convey to me that there was no passenger train, only cargo ones. I waited for the bus to have its wash and bought a Coke in a lean-to of a cantina for three pesos as opposed to the ten they cost in town. Cantinas are bars/cafes that are for men only in Mexico so I didn’t linger. Then I moseyed on to the long distance bus station where I discovered that there was a bus that goes all the way across the border and on to San Antonio in Texas. The ticket seller told me that the trip takes thirty hours.

I bought a ticket for this bus – which left in two days time – using only Spanish. Every day I had been doing my lessons on the tape recorder and now they were paying off. But Spanish was a puzzlement at times. They don’t pronounce ‘h’, so why do they have it at all? Get rid of it altogether, I say. Then they pronounce ‘h’ for ‘j’. I give up. As my vocabulary improved I realised that I had been calling churches
ciesa
– cheese. And one day, after she had been missing for a while, I tried to ask the girl at reception if she’d had the day off. She looked at me as if I was a bit odd. No wonder. I later found that, in my lovely Spanish, I had asked her if she’d had a wash yesterday.

In the bus back to the hotel an old, dark-skinned Indian woman sat down next to me. She crossed herself at every church and there were a lot of churches in this town. If I hadn’t known what she was doing I might have thought she had St Vitus Dance. I wondered why such a poor country spent so much money on churches. Mexican Christianity is a religion of earthy reality incorporating many old pagan beliefs, such as placing eagle feathers on statues of Christ in holy week. This is a means of communicating with the sun god: the eagle ascends closest to heaven.

When I had been at my hotel for nearly a week, I had risen so far in the management’s estimation that I received a bath mat. Having qualified as fit to be entrusted with this precious article I wondered what I’d get the next week if I passed inspection again. Unfortunately I didn’t find out, as I left after ten days.

At the tourist bureau in the town square I confessed my worries about my lack of the necessary permit to be in Mexico. I had read in the guide book that I needed a tourist card to get out again and that I should have obtained one of these when I crossed the border.

The girl in the office said, ‘I’ll take you to see someone.’

I thought, Oh Lord, here we go, down to the police station, but instead she took me upstairs where I spoke with the most beautiful woman. She could have been any age, but was probably between thirty and forty, and had sleek black hair that was combed straight back into a large bun from a lovely oval face with honeyed skin and regular features. She wore a pant suit of fine beige wool – they make very fine wool in this district – with a top like a loose buttonless jumper over slacks, and her shoulders were draped with a pretty red and blue paisley shawl. This exquisite woman was so kind to me. In her faultless English she said, ‘Of course you realise that you are an illegal immigrant!’ Having heard how border officials feel about us illegals – very recently two of these unfortunates had died due to their brutality – I was thrilled to find that I was now in the same category. I would not only be trying to enter the USA illicitly, but also exit Mexico unlawfully. I asked her what they would do to me. She replied, ‘You can get another card from the police but they will fine you.’

‘What if I get to the border?’

‘You may get across without problems or you may be fined.’

She rang someone. Terrific. Now they will probably have a dragnet out for me. At first she was going to send me to the police, but then she rang someone else and after a long conversation she said, ‘You can try going back the way you came and maybe no one will notice. But if they do then you will be fined.’ Giving me her card she said, ‘If you have any problems ring me.’

It wasn’t the fine I was worried about, but the stories I had heard of people being put in gaol and having to sell their houses to get out. I decided that the less said the better – I wasn’t confessing to any Mexican policeman that I was an illegal. I’m a gambler. If it ain’t broke don’t fix it, is my motto. I had enough to worry about. Highwaymen, bandits and all those crosses on the side of the road were quite sufficient.

While at the tourist bureau I thought I’d check out the stories I’d heard about robbers and buses. I asked the young man in the office if it was true that banditos sometimes held up the bus I was taking to the north. ‘Oh, yes.’ He couldn’t agree with me more, but he didn’t know how often. He phoned a friend, but neither of them could give me an answer, so I decided just to take my chances. He did offer to come to the bus station with me to ask there. This was most obliging of him, but I declined. He then wanted to ask at the police station but I declined this even more emphatically. I was an illegal immigrant.

As the dentist had taken every cracker I had, it was now necessary to repair again to the bank. The cash distribution system was quite cute. A small room with a glass surround covered by grilles protruded from the side of the building and you entered it and locked yourself in. To my dismay the machine refused to give me any money on my Visa card. Already paranoid about being an illegal immigrant, now I had to contend with being a penniless one. That would make me a vagrant as well. I was much relieved when the next morning the machine condescended to give me some money. It even asked me if I preferred pesos or dollars.

On my last day, as I passed the police station I thought I might ask them about the chances of my bus being held up by bandits. But smack in the middle of the entrance, where you almost had to touch him to go past on the tiny footpath, was a fellow with a huge submachine gun. That put me right off and I kept on walking.

While I was preparing for the overnight bus ride out of Mexico, a marathon for a non-bus-lover, I started to feel squirmy in the tummy. This progressed to squirty. I was in trouble – just when I had to spend thirty hours on a bus. Nice. I cemented my internal workings with Lomotil – I hoped – and bought a bottle of tequila for sedation. It cost seven pesos, just one dollar forty cents. The nice shopkeeper put my Coke and other snacks in a plastic bag, but the tequila he wrapped in brown paper.

4 Tequila sunrise

On a lovely morning I ate my farewell Mexican breakfast of omelette, coffee, juice and toast under the vine-clad pergola of a nearby restaurant. Then I checked out of my room and took what I meant to be a short cut to a craft shop I had heard about – but you guessed it, it turned out to be another of my long cuts. I ended up on the edge of town, where I found a street market and an old bloke selling gem stones. They were most probably almost all cut glass but the opal was genuine. After some solid bargaining, I bought a pretty opal egg for fifteen dollars in order to rid myself of my remaining pesos.

Never having managed even a whiff of the craft shop, I returned to the hotel and stationed myself in the portico on a long polished wooden seat to read and watch the comings and goings until it was time to take a taxi to the bus station. As I disengaged from the taxi, three diminutive and exceedingly grimy urchins rushed up wanting to carry my bags. They were in no way big enough for this task but, as I still had some Mexican coins to unburden myself of, I let them ‘help’ me inside.

After a while I asked someone to watch my luggage while I patronised the wonderful green and pink loo, inside which I was accosted by a maiden in distress: a large-ish Mexican girl wearing a trendy outfit of black skin-tight pants topped by a vest. It didn’t take long to work out her problem. The zipper of her pants had seized up at the top and she had an urgent need to get it down. After struggling with the recalcitrant zipper for some time I told her, in pantomime, that it was hopeless. ‘Shall I cut it?’ I asked. ‘Yes yes yes!’ I cut as neatly as I could, then went back to my bag and returned with a large safety pin. The girl at the turnstile, a witness to the drama unfolding, refrained from charging me more coins to re-enter and, after some tugging and pulling, I secured my new friend back in her pants. She covered the damage with her jacket and went on her way relieved. Giving away a precious safety pin was my good deed for the day. They say a good nurse always has a safety pin and a pair of scissors and I never go anywhere without mine.

The next entertainment in the bus station was the entry of a pair of Americans. One was a very large, blind man sporting a big black leather hat and a black cape that made him look like an overweight Zorro. Attached to a female helper, he tapped along with a white cane. The helper was also very large, as well as far advanced in age. The blind man was about fifty; she could have been a hundred. If she was the helper then Lord help him.

I wondered what they might be doing on a bus in the middle of Mexico. The helper seemed to have no idea what was going on. She tried to get into the disabled persons’ toilet but it was locked. This threw her completely. So she went back to the desk and they showed her where to go. The regular toilet was next to the disabled one but she had failed to see it – and
he
was the blind one. She then made an attempt to get into the regular toilet but couldn’t work out what to do with the coin machine or the turnstile. The desk staff rescued her again. This pair of innocents abroad were obviously leaving Mexico, so I pondered what she had been doing all the time she had been there. Later she fronted the desk again and they tried to explain something else to her. She called the blind man to her aid and the poor fellow got up and tried to walk towards her voice, but went in the wrong direction, tripping over bags. She didn’t have the nous to go and get him.

Finally they sat down behind me and I was forced to listen to one of the most inane conversations I have ever heard.

‘You can have fruit if you can peel it.’

‘You are supposed to peel it?’

‘Yes you can have fruit if you peel it.’

‘Well we did peel the fruit.’

‘Yes you are supposed to peel the fruit.’

When they got on the bus she bumbled around and couldn’t find their seat numbers until I helped them. It was pathetic. I don’t know how they got home. Strangely I later came across two other blind people travelling on buses, a young black girl who was totally with it and an American man, with his dog.

The bus left San Miguel with only five people aboard. Great, I thought. But a couple of stops later it filled up. This bus was not the White Star line on which I had come to Mexico and that travelled pretty much direct. This bus stopped at every excuse – and each time the driver would say, ‘Five minutes,’ but it would be twenty or more. A woman who spoke a little English sat next to me and we stumbled through a conversation.

When night came I managed to sleep, thanks to my tequila. It was so awful I mixed it with a carton of chocolate milk to disguise the taste. My neighbour told me I had slept well and, having woken up with my mouth wide open and snoring, I had to agree.

Countless stops and starts later we arrived at Monterrey bus station in the early morning. I knew this place well from my time spent there before. Breakfast was a burrito, a hot edible full of ham and other goodies and very tasty. I was having a little gastro trouble but it wasn’t serious. Then we were heading for the border crossing which, due to my illegal status, I was dreading.

Crossing the border took three hours. We were stopped and inspected at several check points coming up to the border and once there we had to get off the bus outdoors under a tin roof and go through immigration procedures. This was where I needed my missing tourist card. Passengers with those highly delectable objects went quickly through a mobile baggage X-ray apparatus that was mounted on the back of a truck, and then got back in the bus. But I had to get in line with the Mexicans who needed entry permits for the USA. One at a time, passengers were allowed into the tiny air-conditioned hut that served as the office. There was only one official to process the long line and it was very hot waiting outside. Several times I tried to sneak one of the white entry cards that they all seemed to have and a pile of which sat in a box near the door, but each time I was defeated. It turned out that I had to have a green card anyway. We were there for ages and somehow I ended up last in the line.