The House on Carnaval Street

by Deborah Rodriguez

  “But you must have been just a kid!”

  “I was. And abortion was illegal in the States back then. I remember coming through town in a taxi in the middle of the night. The Golden Zone didn’t even exist yet. I think the Playa Mazatlán was probably the only hotel out that way at that time. We came to Centro. And I know the doctor’s house was somewhere in our neighborhood, right around Casa de Leyendas.”

  “Are you kidding me?”

  “I told you it was a strange story. It was a beautiful home. I can still remember the inside. If I walked into it this day, I would know it right away.”

  “I can’t believe that happened right there.”

  “I’m sure it was within walking distance of Macaws. I have a feeling it’s one of those little houses right around the corner from us.”

  “Oh, Sharon, I’m so sorry.” It killed me to envision a frightened, teenage Sharon being forced into such an ordeal.

  She shrugged her shoulders. “I survived. But isn’t it an amazing coincidence?”

  How lonely she must have felt, I thought, in a totally foreign place, vulnerable, in the hands of a stranger. I doubted I’d ever be able to return to the scene of that sort of horror. To me, the odds of Sharon choosing to live right there, out of the blue, seemed pretty slim. Coincidence, or not? What is it that really drives us to make the decisions we do? I wondered, and not for the first time.

  It was just after Sharon took over the wheel again that things started to get a little dicey. First she insisted on giving what little food we had left in the car to a skinny dog at the gas station. Granted, it was just a bag of Cheetos, but still. At least she left me with a box of Red Hots, and she respected the line I drew when it came to our water supply. Then, before we had even traveled a mile, we were pulled over by two guys in military uniform. I grabbed my bra, hoping to God these men were the real deal. Sharon pulled over and rolled down her window.

  “Dónde está la hierba?” growled the taller one.

  Sharon looked at me. I shrugged my shoulders. She turned back to the officer.

  “Dónde está la hierba?” he repeated.

  “Lo siento, mi español es muy malo. Por favor, habla despacio.” Sorry, my Spanish is very bad, please speak slowly. Sharon seemed to have that line down.

  “Dónde está la hierba?” he said again, this time very slowly.

  “Deb, I know that word. I use that word. I think it’s the word I use to tell Pedro to pull the weeds. Why would he be telling me to pull the weeds?”

  I leaned over Sharon’s lap and yelled out her window. “We have no fruit!”

  “Fruit? I don’t think it means fruit, Deb.”

  “I know. But it has worked for me before. No fruit!”

  The officer waved us through with a big sigh.

  “Grass! I just remembered. It does mean weed, Deb. They’re looking for drugs. Ha!”

  “Well, that doesn’t seem like the smartest way to find them. Oh, the pot? Here it is, Officer. Is this what you’re looking for? Sheesh.”

  The next incident was even more confusing. Now it was a pair of cops pulling us over. This time I rolled down my window. We seriously had no idea what they were saying, but I did think I heard the word for coffee somewhere. I turned from the one cop to his partner, who simply nodded his head in agreement.

  “Café?” I asked, thinking that perhaps I had been hearing things.

  The officer nodded yes. Coffee? I thought. Why would they want coffee, and why on earth would they think I’d be traveling with an extra cup? My eyes went to the cup holder, where I spied a can of Red Bull. I gamely offered it through the open window. The cop rolled his eyes, and once again we were waved through. It wasn’t until we returned that Cesar, the bartender at Macaws, explained. “The police asked you for coffee?”

  “Yes! Wasn’t that weird?” Sharon asked. “We offered them Red Bull, but I guess they really wanted that coffee.”

  Cesar laughed. “No, it’s not that. When a cop says can you give me a little something for coffee, it’s their polite way of asking for some money. You know, a bribe.”

  We were very close to making it to Pátzcuaro when, unfortunately, we took a wrong turn. I was driving again and had put Sharon in charge of the GPS.

  “Just enter Pátzcuaro,” I told her, GPS pro that I was.

  “P-A-T . . . oh shit. I pressed the wrong button.” Sharon dug in her purse, searching for her glasses.

  “Hit the back button.”

  “P-A . . .”

  “No! Just hit it once. Don’t start all the way over.”

  “Okay! Relax! A-R-O. Now it says country.”

  “So spell it.” I could feel my heart rate increasing with every wrong mile we drove. The roads were becoming narrower and windier and bumpier by the minute. “What does it say? Can we get there this way?”

  “It keeps coming up with Canada.”

  “Canada? Just type in country.”

  “I am! And I’m telling you, it keeps saying Canada.”

  Sharon was punching the glass GPS screen so hard I thought it was going to shatter.

  “It’s a touch screen, Sharon! Stop hitting it.”

  “Stop yelling at me!”

  “I’m not yelling!” I yelled. “You’re getting us more and more lost by the minute.”

  “Calm down, Deb. You’re stressing me out.”

  “I’m stressing you out? You’re stressing me out!” I pulled over onto a narrow turnout, leaving barely enough room for a donkey to pass. The steep hillside below was littered with tires and rusted car parts. “I can’t drive like this!” I yelled, turning to look Sharon in the face.

  Sharon crossed her arms. “Well, I can’t ride like this.”

  “Really? Really, Sharon? Is this the way this weekend’s gonna go?”

  “Yeah, I guess it is!”

  “Really? Well, then, I’m going home.” I started to unlock the door.

  “Ha! Go ahead. Let me just type in country and see if it will help you get there. C . . .”

  “Sharon, Mexico starts with an M.”

  As our laughter rocked my little car, I realized, with delight, that we’d had our first fight. Sharon and I were now officially best friends.

  The minute we pulled into the town of Pátzcuaro, my head began to whirl. At first I chalked up my wooziness to the long drive or the altitude or my empty stomach, or maybe even the sensory overload from the little shops lining the streets, windows filled with handwoven sweaters and blankets and hats and hand-carved furniture and so much folk art I couldn’t even digest it all. But I had a feeling that this might be something different.

  “Wow,” was all I could manage when we first walked through the doorway of the B&B. Casa Encantada was as enchanted as its name implied. It felt as though we had entered a special secret world. The sun-dappled court­yard was lush with exotic flowers and plants, calmed by the sound of water cascading down the tiered fountain with a refreshing splash. On our left, a covered dining area was lined with heavy wooden tables and chairs, every inch of wall space crammed with tapestries and candelabras and pots and plates from all over the world. Cynthia, one of the owners, suddenly burst out from behind the office door, two little Yorkies following closely at the heels of her black boots. “Greetings! Long drive, eh?” With her spiky silver-blond hair, twinkly eyes, and tiny, athletic build, Cynthia reminded me of some sort of badass sprite. There was something about her that seemed to immediately draw me to her, though for the life of me I couldn’t explain what it was.

  Sharon and I were shown to our rooms, which were just as impressive as the courtyard: huge arched fireplaces built from stone, beamed ceilings so high a giant wouldn’t have to stoop, and wide beds so inviting that I was tempted to snuggle right in. Instead, I unpacked a little and joined Sharon and Cynthia on the patio for a glass of wine.

&
nbsp; “It’s so beautiful here it’s giving me goose bumps.” Indeed, the hair on my arms was standing straight up.

  Cynthia nodded. “This house is truly magical, as is all of Pátzcuaro.”

  “You must really love it here,” Sharon said, craning her neck to take note of the details.

  Cynthia smiled. “In the old days they said that people like us, those who can feel the power of this town, have drunk from the lake. Which meant that somehow we’ve been bewitched, and can’t leave. Sort of like drinking the Kool-Aid, eh?”

  “Who would ever want to leave a place like this?” I asked.

  “Exactly.” Cynthia ran her hand across the top of her cropped head.

  “Just how old is this house, anyway?”

  “Old. The oldest stone that we excavated was marked from 1784. You can see it over in the back patio. And that’s considered young in comparison to the other buildings on the plaza. Before that, the land was used as an orchard for the Sisters of Catherine of Siena.”

  “And how long have you had it?”

  “I convinced my ex to turn it into a bed-and-breakfast about ten years ago.”

  “And you guys still run it together?” Sharon asked, no doubt trying to imagine how she and Glen would handle that sort of situation themselves.

  “We do.”

  “Wow. He must be a lot more civilized than any of my ­husbands were,” I said.

  Cynthia laughed. “She owned the house for ten years before we met. I’ve always operated the business, and she spends the bulk of her time doing her art.”

  “It must have been a ton of work renovating this place,” Sharon said.

  “Uh-huh. It was a trip. Funny story. When we first started doing work on the house, people would always be asking us if we’d found the gold yet.”

  “Gold?” I asked, imagining some sparkly, overflowing treasure chest.

  “Yep. Back when the house was built, there were no banks, and people buried their money in the ground or hid it in the walls. So these days, whenever a worker doesn’t show up for a job, or if construction is halted for a day, people say they must have found the gold. God forbid you’re a contractor who takes a sick day, eh?”

  “If these walls could talk, right?” I asked, draining my glass.

  “Oh yeah,” answered Cynthia. “There’s a lot more going on than meets the eye around here. Trust me. You’ll see. You’ll feel it.”

  “I think I might know what you’re saying, but right now I mostly feel hungry.” We hadn’t had a proper meal since we left Mazatlán.

  “You two must be famished!” Cynthia stood and whistled for her dogs. “Señorita! Max!” She took our empty glasses from the table. “Hey, I need to run some errands around town. If you head out with me I can point you in the right direction for a bite.”

  Later, as Sharon and I wandered around working off our sopa ta-rasca and carnitas, I couldn’t help but think about Cynthia and what she had said about Pátzcuaro. Walking up and down the cobblestone hills, past the low red and white adobe buildings stretching all the way down to the lake, the bizarre sensations I had experienced earlier in the day came back with a vengeance. Strolling through the Plaza Grande, I felt the hair on the back of my neck stand up. Passing under the arched doorway of the basilica made my face flush with heat. I couldn’t remember reacting to anything this way in a long time, if ever. This was a Debbie with a whole other something going on.

  Now, I am well aware that I possess a decent sense of intuition. I’ve always been able to get an instant read on places and people, though it seems I’m much more attuned when ­emotions, or marriages, aren’t at stake. And I used to be much better at it before I got to Afghanistan, where life was so ­chaotic that I sort of began to lose touch. In California I was just too broken inside to tap into anything. But here, in ­Pátzcuaro, I could feel a similar, yet broader, type of power flooding back, stronger than ever. I didn’t know how to explain it. It was as though I were Alice in Wonderland, right after she went through the looking glass. The only way I can describe it is that I could feel a force, not an evil one or a dark one, but one that was good and full of light, a light that was pulling me in and filling me up with an energy so pure that I couldn’t drink in enough of it. And it was there for me whether I wanted it or not.

  I was reluctant to mention any of this to Sharon. She seemed like such a practical, no-nonsense person in so many ways, and here I was going all Shirley MacLaine on her. But I couldn’t help myself. There was just too much going on inside not to acknowledge it out loud. And when I did, Sharon simply looked at me, lowered her lids, and nodded, a knowing smile crossing her face like a ray of warm sunshine.

  The next morning, after an intensely fitful night, I was interrupted mid-bite in the dining room by a ponytailed man with a guidebook tucked under his arm.

  “Encounter any ghosts last night?” he asked, as he slid his chair in between Sharon and me. I hate ponytails on men. And nothing was about to keep me from those fluffy, cheesy egg enchiladas.

  “Ghosts?” Sharon’s eyes widened as she pushed her bangs aside. I shot her a look.

  “Stop scaring my friends,” chimed in Cynthia, from the kitchen. But as soon as we were done eating, she graciously offered to satisfy Sharon’s curiosity with a tour.

  “In this room, there is an Indian chief, and also a woman, Pluma Blanca, who was a cook for the nuns who used to live in the house,” she told us as she unlocked one of the heavy wood doors circling the courtyard. “They’re happy spirits. We let them stay.”

  “How do you know? You’ve talked to them?” I obviously needed more coffee.

  “What’s the matter, Deb? You don’t believe in ghosts?”

  I had to laugh. “I don’t know. In Afghanistan, they blamed everything on the jinns.”

  “Afghanistan?” Cynthia raised her eyebrows and lowered her chin.

  “Yeah. I lived there for a while. A few years.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, really. So, anyway, jinns are supposed to be sort of like genies. Over there, they say that the jinns were responsible for winning wars in the old days. They’d make the enemy’s eyes see way more advancing warriors than were actually there, so that they’d retreat in fear of being outnumbered.”

  “Smart cookies,” Cynthia said.

  “And my girls, my students over there, they’d point to the jinns whenever a glass would break or a door would slam. Everything I thought was the wind, they thought was a jinn.”

  “Yours sounds like a story I want to hear, girl.”

  “Oh, Deb’s got a story, all right,” Sharon piped in.

  “Well, we don’t do jinns here in Mexico, but we do have what they call duendes, sort of like gnomes. I’ve never personally seen one. We did have a curandera come visit.”

  “A what?”

  “Curandera. A spirit cleanser. They clean the spirits from your house.”

  “They do that?” Though so far I had only felt good vibes from my house on Carnaval Street, I wondered if these people might be able to apply their skills to other parts of a person’s life.

  “They do. The curandera actually went into trances while she was here doing the cleansing, the limpia. She’s the one who told us the spirits were happy. And she isn’t the only one who has seen them. Some of our guests have encountered Pluma Blanca, always in a white nightgown, always calm. Men sometimes think it’s their wife getting up in the middle of the night, but then they turn over and see their wife still in bed.”

  Again I could feel those goose bumps start to crawl up my arms. What was up with that?

  “We plant roses for her,” Cynthia continued. “The curandera told us she’d like that. And then there’s the little boy, who we think arrived hurt and hungry, and was taken in by the nuns. We asked the curandera what would make him happy, and since he had been hungry, he wanted us to
feed people. We started holding fund-raising dinners for charity, to please his spirit wishes.”

  I must have shuddered out loud.

  “What’s the matter Deb? Am I creeping you out?”

  “I’m good!”

  “I warned you.” Cynthia laughed. “Strange things can happen, do happen, here in Pátzcuaro.”

  Catrina shopping was on Sharon’s agenda for that day. Her plan was to create a little boutique inside Casa de Leyendas, to take advantage of all the hoopla surrounding the Day of the Dead. Sharon, like everyone else with a business in Mazatlán, was searching for backup plans, as the tourist economy had barely started to recover from a swine flu outbreak when the sensation-hungry press turned its attention to the violence. Some claimed it was only a matter of time before the cruise ships took note, which would be a disaster for local businesses. So Sharon was stocking up.

  To me, the Catrina figures I first came across in Pátzcuaro seemed a little morbid. Skeletons all dressed up with nowhere to go. Skeleton dogs, skeleton cats, doctors and dentists and brides and grooms made of bones. We even saw a ceramic school bus filled with little skeleton children. But when we took off in a rattletrap truck with a hundred-year-old guide who never stopped talking, but who knew exactly where to look, the whole idea started to grow on me. Our first stop was in front of a trio of roadside shacks, so dark inside that I doubted there was even a lick of electricity. Once my eyes adjusted, I began to see that the Catrinas were actually quite beautiful. The only problem was that they had no heads. “Where are their heads?” I asked as the old shopkeeper tried to fit a tiny skull onto a giant Catrina torso.

  “Dónde están las cabezas?” our guide translated. Saturday, was the answer. The Catrinas would have their heads by ­Saturday. This being Mexico, we weren’t about to bank on which Saturday that might be, so we decided to move on to the next stop.

  Now I had to have a Catrina. When I thought about it, what was so creepy about bones anyway? We all had them inside us, albeit some buried under more padding than others. These dead women looked so poised, so joyful, so alive. As our guide explained in a long-winded speech, I began to understand the story behind the Catrinas.