“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.
“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 tarasca 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 c
ome 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.
It was the artist José Guadalupe Posada who they say popularized the Catrina figure, with his etchings of high-society women and their desire to glom on to everything European. Back then, in the early 1900s, the Catrina was a symbol of revolution, a jab at the inner emptiness of the upper class. But in Mexico, images of women and death go way back to Aztec mythology, to Mictecacihuatl. Try saying that one out loud. Anyway, she was Queen of the Underworld, and her job was to watch over the bones of the dead. It wasn’t until after Christian beliefs got mixed up with Aztec traditions that Catrinas became symbols of the Day of the Dead, an expression of the Mexican willingness to laugh at death, and a reminder that everyone is equal, in the end.
In the little town of Capula, we hit pay dirt, a Catrina co-op, offering thousands of Catrinas from hundreds of artists. At first glance, they all looked alike to me, with their delicate bony fingers and gaping grins. But up close I could see that no two Catrinas were the same. They wore their wide-brimmed plumed hats, earrings, strings of pearls, aprons, and ruffles with the attitude of a woman strutting her one-of-a-kind designer outfit at an opening-night gala. Each parasol, every bright bouquet, every little purse, each handcrafted appliqué on every lavish gown had its own unique design. Even the poses they struck and the expressions on their skinless faces seemed to all be different. I shopped for hours.
The first Catrina I chose was dressed all in black, with one bony leg suggestively poking out from a slit that ran from heel to hip, her ribs exposed down to her waist by a wide, pink-edged neckline. And she had wings. Black wings. She seemed funny and naughty, sort of like the way old friends who knew me well saw me way back when.
The next one had an elegance about her that reminded me of my mom, an elegance that I always strived for yet never seemed to be able to achieve. Her strapless yellow gown cascaded down her skinny frame as if it were made from silk instead of clay. The matching hat perched atop a head held high by her long, graceful neck, like an ornate bloom on a reedy stem. She was perfect. No, I was more the naughty black angel type. But I added this one to my purchases anyway. One can dream, right?
The gun-toting Catrina spoke to me in a faint voice from a distant past. With two ammo belts crisscrossing her puffed-out skeletal chest, she was the rough-and-tumble girl with traces of her parents’ Arkansas blood pumping through her veins. She was the tough one who took no nonsense patrolling the prison yard, who survived living with a hot-tempered wannabe warlord, who will defend anyone, and who isn’t scared of anything.
Masked Catrina was the one who was afraid to let anybody see who she really was. Strong and confident on the outside, but inside not so much. Faking it until she was making it, as my mom always advised. Her sequined eye mask hung around her vertebrae at the ready, and though her black boa and leg garter suggested a masquerade party, I chose instead to stick with my own interpretation.
I fell in love with the Frida Catrina the moment I spotted her. Adorned with the long dark braids and the birds and flowers I recognized from some of Kahlo’s self-portraits, this one’s face was unmistakable in its determination to appear strong no matter how deep the hurt. I knew that face.
My final purchase was the butterfly Catrina. Not only was her deep blue gown sprinkled with a handful of the dainty orange and silver creatures, but she was, herself, a butterfly, with strong, broad wings fanning out from behind her back and two sparkly antennae sprouting from the top of her cranium. Her cocoon long gone, she was a Catrina who had proudly morphed into a beautiful being, the one who had always been there deep inside, just waiting for her chance to shine.
IT WAS THE NEXT DAY that everything came crashing down on me with a thud so loud you could have heard it all the way back in Kabul. We were in the mall in Morelia. I was trying on sunglasses at a kiosk, and when I turned around, Sharon was gone. Vanished. She had simply disappeared. The spot where she had been standing just one minute before was now an empty hole. I took off the glasses and scanned the area on all sides of the kiosk. No Sharon in sight. I dug out my phone and I dialed her cell. No answer. It didn’t even ring. She must have wandered into one of the stores, I thought. I also thought about what my mom had always told me: If you ever get lost, just stay where you are, and I will find you. So I stayed. But Sharon didn’t find me. I sat down on a bench and tried her phone again, only to get that message you get when someone is out of range or their phone has been turned off. I could feel my breath quickening. Keeping one eye on the area where I had last seen Sharon, I stepped into the doorway of the Liverpool department store to see if I could spot her inside. No dice. I wandered in a little farther, trying to convince myself that I’d sooner or later run into her over the sales racks or at the cosmetics counter. But my brain ju
st wouldn’t let me go there.
A normal person would use logic, as in she’s probably in the restroom, or she went to get a soda. But no, not me. My mind immediately went to me being stranded in a strange town where I didn’t know my way around and where I didn’t speak the language and where I didn’t know a soul. No matter that I was the one with the car keys and the GPS. In my mind, I was stranded. And Sharon? Where was she? Was she having an asthma attack somewhere? Kidnapped, held against her will at the back of the Mac store with a black bag over her head? Bound and gagged in a storage closet behind the escalators, her purse (with cell phone) on its way to Mexico City? Images from every terrible documentary I’d seen about human trafficking flashed through my brain. A terror had come flooding over me, as if I had witnessed the bloodiest of bloody sights right before my eyes. I was frozen, shaking, gasping for air, and sobbing like a five-year-old. I was completely, totally, utterly out of control, way beyond caring who was witnessing the spectacle of my breakdown or what they thought. Until, through my tears, I saw Sharon approaching with a cup of steaming coffee in her hand.
“Oh my God, Debbie! What happened? Are you okay?” Sharon quickly put the coffee down on a bench and rushed to my side.
“I have to go home. We need to go. Now.” My heart was racing.
“But what happened?”
I just shook my head. How could I explain?
“Just tell me if you’re hurt. Did someone die? Did you get a call or something?”
I willed myself to stop the tears, to no avail. For a moment I was tempted to make something up, some story about twisting my ankle or losing my wallet, anything to make it sound as if I had a real reason to be shaking and sobbing, anything to make it sound as if I weren’t crazy. I was mortified that this had happened in front of Sharon. I felt blindsided, never having dreamt that something as major as my breakdown in Yosemite would ever happen again. Especially in a mall!
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