by M. G. Harris
I study my map and groan loudly. Catemaco turns out to be a big detour on the way to nowhere.
For some reason the frustration hits me massively hard. On my own, I can’t do anything right. What am I thinking? How can I possibly live up to all these people’s expectations?
I can’t hold back the tears. I put my hand across my face to try to hide them, but it’s no use. I stumble off the bus, sniffling like a little kid.
The bus driver locks the ignition, staring at me. “Hey, kid, don’t take it so hard! I just need to park the bus for the night, I’m not mad at you. . .”
I shake my head, wiping my nose. “No . . . it’s just that I really needed to get to Jalapa.”
“Well, Catemaco’s nice too. Why not take a rest? You look like you could use it. Buy a charm or a cure. Swim in the lake, visit the waterfall. It’s really beautiful.”
I take a look around. Catemaco feels unlike anywhere I’ve ever been in Mexico. There’s a claustrophobic feel to the town, on the banks of a mysterious sea that goes nowhere, hemmed in by an intense mist. The lake and town are surrounded by thick jungle, and you know about it from the constant din of birds, insects and the occasional screech of howler monkeys.
The bus driver follows me to the gift-stand near to the bus stop, where a huge display of postcards catches my eye. It stops me in my tracks, dries my tears in an instant.
Again and again, I see images of statues, a Buddha-like stone figure; old boats moored on water; the lake in the morning, blanketed with mist.
There’s something very, very familiar about them. Is it possible that I’ve been here before. . .with my parents? I begin to feel disoriented.
In a complete daze, I stumble down to the lakeside, where a deep ochre sunset silhouettes the low volcanoes and cliff edges around the lake. Mist rolls slowly towards the town, enveloping tiny islands that are just visible within the swirling fog. There’s a mystical feel to the place.
Out of the corner of my eye, I notice that the bus driver is still behind me. I try to avoid his eye. What’s wrong with the guy? Can’t he leave me be?
In the distance I see something else that jolts my memory. A light-blue-painted boat carries a load of passengers under a canopy, towards a twin pair of straw huts. The huts seem to be suspended in the middle of the lake until I notice; a trick of the early evening light hides a long pier. But something doesn’t look quite right. I hurry to the edge of the pier. When I look straight down the pier, see the two huts framed symmetrically on either side, the image looks right.
Finally it makes sense. I’ve seen these places, these images – in a dream. It’s the scene of my grandfather’s death.
The bus driver is right next to me now, by the water’s edge. He stares at me, long and hard. “Something wrong, friend? Maybe I can help you out? A little charm, a cure for what ails you? I’m as good as any of the brujos you’ll meet down on the Malecon, you know.”
Confused, I turn to him. “What are you on about?”
“Well, don’t get mad, but ever since you got off the bus, you look like you’ve seen a ghost.” He grins. “In Catemaco, that means you probably have.”
“What. . .?”
He folds his arms. “Come on, pal. Maybe I can help?”
“I’ve seen this place before,” I mutter, half to myself. “In a dream.”
“A dream, you say? What good luck – Catemaco is the perfect place to explain your dreams!”
“Catemaco? I’ve never heard of it.”
He laughs, incredulous. “Come on now. You’ve never heard of the brujos of Catemaco?”
I stare at him. Brujos? He’s talking about witches?
“I’ve never heard of it,” I repeat, with a straight face.
Suddenly he stops laughing. “Your being here is no accident, friend. You’ve been led here by the spirits. They must know about your dream.”
“Sounds like crazy talk to me.”
He looks insulted. “Hey – don’t be saying things like that. You’ll offend the spirits!”
I start to back away from him. The guy is beginning to unnerve me.
“The spirits have led you here, pal,” he says, chasing after me. “There must be a reason. Why don’t you tell me your dream? Maybe I can help you out?”
I look at him. “You’re a bus driver. What do you know about dreams?”
“I was born and raised here. The witchcraft, it’s in my blood. But you know how it is. The town is full of charlatans, con artists trying to cash in on the fame of the brujos. They’re bad for trade, push the prices down. Driving my bus – it pays better.”
He comes closer and lays a hand on my shoulder. “I’m not messing you around here. Tell me your dream.”
I hesitate. “You want money?”
He blushes and shrugs. “Well, sure, boss. But only when you’re satisfied with the result.”
“How much?”
“Five hundred.”
I gasp. “You’re crazy.”
“Dreams are about destiny. And destiny costs.”
I hesitate again. Five hundred pesos – that’s almost forty quid!
“You don’t like what you hear, you don’t pay.”
I sigh. What could it hurt? In a way, I’m itching to tell someone.
In the fading sunlight, under tall palms whose fronds rustle in the cooling air, I tell this brujo who moonlights as a bus driver about my dream. He listens without saying a single word, his face blank. When I’m done, I throw him an expectant look.
He’s quiet for a very long time, staring past me, into the lake.
“Well, you got me,” he says. “Could mean anything.”
“What. . .? But you said. . .?”
The bus driver takes a few steps away. He shrugs. “What can I say? I was wrong. I don’t have a thing to say to you. Sorry for wasting your time. OK?”
And with that, he just walks away, leaving me even more puzzled and confused than before.
The unbearable heat of the day has dropped off. There’s a sudden chill. It feels as though a storm might be coming. In the last half hour, the sky has filled with heavy grey clouds. With a sigh, I start walking down the pier, looking for somewhere to stay the night.
Hotel Los Balcones is just a little further along. The rooms are arranged in a modern, long, two-storey building around landscaped gardens. Deep balconies filled with flowers separate the layers. One look is enough to tell me that it’s the fanciest joint in town. I wonder how I’m going to persuade them to let a thirteen-year-old boy check in all alone.
I only know I need to sleep. To call Ek Naab, then maybe the museum.
But talking to that bus driver has unsettled me. Catemaco is where my grandfather died. That’s what the dream is telling me, it has to be. Why did the bus driver go cold on me?
I find I can’t focus on finding the Ix Codex any more. The threads of my life have become wrapped around me in a messy tangle. I feel their blood run hot inside me; my grandfather’s and my dad’s. I sense the call of a destiny I can’t and don’t want to understand.
In the end, it isn’t too hard to persuade someone to give me a room at Hotel Balcones. “You here with your parents?” the receptionist asks, obviously suspicious. “Of course,” I reply, all innocence.
“Where are they?”
“They’re taking a boat ride. They wanted to be alone. You know, romantic. So they sent me to check in by myself.”
She’s immediately sympathetic. “How selfish of them! You poor lad! I’ll give them a good ticking off when they get here.”
The receptionist gives me a first-floor room with a lakeside view. The sudden change in weather hasn’t taken the people of Catemaco by surprise – a tropical storm is picking up in the Gulf of Mexico. I ask her how bad it gets, this far from the coast. “We’ll survive,” she tells me with a friendly grin. “But by the end of the night it’s going to rain, and how!”
In the room, I hunt for a hairdryer and turn it on, blowing warm air over both of m
y useless mobile phones. I take my time, being careful not to let the metal heat up too much, forcing myself to be patient, turning the phones over periodically. And finally, the moment of truth: I hit the power switches.
Both phones power up. I’m ecstatic, breathless with the excitement of sudden hope. It strikes me that Catemaco is an even better place for the Mayans to pick me up. Plenty of cover in the countryside nearby for a Muwan to land.
My British mobile phone lights up for a few seconds and then bleeps with the flat-battery signal. The Ek Naab phone remains lit. The problem is, there’s no signal. Not a single bar.
I step out on to my balcony. There’s no improvement. I walk up and down the entire corridor, holding the phone out to try to reach a phantom signal. Zero.
I notice that the lakeside lights are already burning. Boats too have turned on the rows of white lights around their canopies. Night is drawing in, but there’s no sign that I’ll be able to phone for help anytime soon.
There’s nothing for it but to try the phone further away from the hotel. So I go outside again, begin to stroll. On the busy part of the promenade, I notice that some tourists are negotiating with local men dressed in indigeno – Indian – garb. From the sounds of it, they’re discussing medical matters; back pains, frozen shoulders, tumours. I guess these are the brujos I’ve heard about.
A crowd of tourists has assembled to listen to a trio of musicians. They play guitar-like instruments and strike up the popular tune “La Bamba”, a jarocho song I’ve often heard my dad sing. I watch for a few seconds, check my mobile phone for a signal.
When I don’t detect one, I give up and turn back to the hotel. The sky’s looking really threatening now. At a hot food stall I buy a barbequed corn on the cob and munch it all the way back to the hotel.
By the time I reach my room, the rain has started. Heavy from the outset, within minutes it’s a spectacular downpour. Not the gentle type of rain we get in England; a proper soaking. The balcony floor floods with water and overflows. The next floor up does the same, because suddenly there’s a torrent of water coming down from the balcony above. Engulfed in sheets of rain, Catemaco seems even more isolated from the rest of the world.
In my bedroom, I pull aside the polyester bed cover and slide under the sheets. There doesn’t seem to be any point undressing – it’s already uncomfortably cool. Before long, I’m on the brink of sleep.
I find myself thinking back to something Camila said about the dream. The dream that she, my dad and I had all shared. She’d mentioned the Olmec Indians, how they know techniques to enter other people’s dreams. It all connects, she’d said. But how does it all connect? Is it really possible that my being here is no accident? Is there someone in Catemaco who knows what happened to my grandfather? Can it really be possible to enter the dream of someone you’ve never met, never seen?
The sound of the rain continues into my dreams. I dream that I’m in my bed, at home in Oxford. My mum is knocking on my door. Have I finished my homework? Have I done my revision? I’m trying to ignore her, but she turns the doorknob. I must have a new kind of lock because she can’t get in. She fiddles with the door. I have a little laugh to myself. She can’t get in. But then the door gives way and she does.
The next few moments are confused. My eyes open, and after a second or two I remember where I am. It’s dark, but I sense that someone else is in the room with me. I reach out for the bedside lamp when they grab my arms, pin them both behind me. I’m trying to leverage myself up with my legs when another hand grips my jaw, forces my mouth open. A warm, acrid liquid burns its way down my throat; I try to spit it out but the hand closes up my jaw, pinches my nose until I have to swallow. There’s alcohol in the drink, and a strong flavour of herbs. When it hits my stomach, I start to convulse. My entire body tries to reject the fluid, panic surging through me: I’m certain I’m being poisoned. I’m gagging, I taste stomach acid, but nothing quite comes out. When I open my mouth to protest, a hand clamps over my face, cutting off the scream.
They hold me down as the poison takes effect. Within minutes whatever they’ve given me hits my brain. There’s an explosion of sensation within, as though my head has been lit up from inside. I feel my muscles relax and the hands release me. There’s no need for restraint now – I can barely move. I try to speak but can’t. They pull me to my feet, support me with their shoulders and walk me out of the room. My vision seems blurry. I could swear that the room, corridor and the rest of the hotel rotates as we pass through.
They take me down some stairs and into the car park. I’m vaguely aware of being thrown into the back seat of a car and driven. Wherever we go, it is dark, the roads simple dirt tracks. Rain drums hard against the car. We stop amongst some trees and they carry me out. My legs don’t seem to work any more. I’m conscious but almost totally out of it.
I’m pushed through a door. I’m suddenly aware of a familiar smell, a musky perfume of deep notes, so strong that it triggers a memory – another wave of déjà vu. The room is filled with a thin film of smoke, the walls lined with what look like hundreds of bottles filled with coloured liquids. Dust-covered objects hang from the ceiling; rag dolls, bones, ribbons. Candles are everywhere, all different sizes. The walls are dotted with postcards showing images of saints. In the centre of the room there’s a circle of small candles set in glass tumblers; they look like the tumblers we use at school. In the middle of the circle is an old pine chair. They drag me to the chair, pull off my shirt, bind my legs and arms to the chair. I can’t protest; I can hardly make a sound.
My limbs may be frozen, I may have lost the power of speech, but all my other senses are heightened beyond anything I’ve ever known. Sounds echo loudly, reverberate inside my head. I hear whispers from people I can’t see, a low thrum of music. I’m begging them to release me but I can’t form the words.
When they’ve tied me and stripped me to the waist, they begin to smear my back and shoulders with some kind of foul-smelling ointment. I flinch from their hands at first. For a second, they stop.
“No pasa nada,” a voice says, almost soothing. “It’s nothing bad.”
It’s thick and greasy, like goose fat. Then, very gently, a hand lifts my head up by the chin and paints two stripes of something on to my face. All the while, the whispers and low beat of a drum fill me with dread.
I don’t even know what I’m afraid of. Torture? Violence? They haven’t hurt me so far, but they’ve drugged me, forced me to come to this place, to be part of this ceremony. The fear feels more primitive. As if I were close to something malevolent, something that just intends to use me for its own ends.
The whispers become a slow chant. From the shadows beyond, an old man emerges, dressed in white robes. A brujo. I know instinctively that this is not one of those street charlatans. This is the real thing.
His eyes are wide, seeming to roll around in his head. He sips from a glass of blue liquid, which he gargles, then spits into my face. The chanting gets louder. I gasp. My eyes sting from the burning juice. Now I really can’t see. But I sense him approach. He begins to shout at me, moving all around the circle, yelling and barking out strange words in a language I don’t understand. The sounds mingle with the incessant drone of the rain on the roof.
For the first time I have some inkling of what may be taking place. This is a purification ceremony – a casting out of evil spirits. I don’t believe in evil spirits – never have – and yet between the candles and the chanting and the ointment, I feel wretched, dizzy and scared. There’s something evil in this room, that’s for sure.
Could there be something evil inside me?
The white-robed brujo finishes his shouting. He stands in front of me, speaks very loudly and clearly.
“Close your eyes, boy. See me with your inner eye.”
For some reason, I obey without hesitation. It’s like I’m programmed. I screw my eyes closed. I see nothing.
“Concentrate,” he tells me. “Search deep within. It
will come.”
Then, amazingly, an image starts to form behind my eyes. It’s the white-robed brujo. I see him clearly; clearer than if I were to open my eyes. In my mind, he’s standing in a room with a thatched roof. If I concentrate hard, I can almost screen out the sounds of rain, chanting and drums. It’s the room from my dream, but the vision has none of the qualities of a dream. It’s harsh, stark and violent in its accuracy.
Amazed, I blurt out, “This is my dream!”
“Empty your mind of everything,” the brujo tells me. “Let the image within consume you. Enter it. Become one with it.”
I concentrate on the sound of the waves, feeling a sensation of disconnection. It’s as though my consciousness slowly separates from my body, leaves it and hovers somewhere above. I’m slowly materializing in the hut. There’s water all around us. We’re surrounded by a wide range of bottles, candles and images of saints.
I watch as the brujo sits in his chair, meditating. The door swings open. A man dressed in a tattered navy jumpsuit tumbles inside. He falls to the floor. His backpack slides around, falling next to him. I see enough of his face to recognize my grandfather. In the dream I’d never noticed his clothes. But now it’s clear. For the first time I see that he’s dressed in the same flying uniform I’ve seen Benicio wear.
“Help me.”
The brujo leaps to his feet. The next thing I’m aware of is the brujo feeding my grandfather a potion. There’s a bout of appalling coughing, and then my grandfather seems to regain control.
“It is asthma, damn you, asthma. Haven’t you got something for that?”
The choking begins once again. He collapses, coughing. The brujo rushes to his bottles, mixes another potion. My grandfather can barely raise his head. The brujo tips the bottle to my grandfather’s mouth. He tastes it, protesting between splutters, “Not alcohol, you imbecile. What kind of doctor are you?”
“A medic of the spirits,” says the brujo. “I fear your demons are too powerful.”