by Lewis Shiner
“Wow,” Cole said.
Montoya had turned around in the front seat to gauge his reaction. «Beautiful, ¿no?»
Cole could only nod.
Before they got to the bottom of the hill, Octavio took them into another tunnel, lined with masonry and crowned with stone arches. The passageway was barely wider than the one-lane road and lit by intermittent floodlights. Other tunnels intersected theirs, and occasional flights of stairs led up to daylight.
«The legend is that these tunnels were part of the silver mines,» Montoya said, «but the truth is they were built to control flooding. They have dams for the water now, so they can use the tunnels to keep cars off the surface streets. That’s the city center above us.»
They started to climb again. When they came out into daylight they were halfway up a hillside on a narrow street built out of closely set stone blocks. White stucco houses on either side, three stories high. Pocket size palm trees and brilliant red flowers tucked into crevices and balconies.
Five minutes later they pulled into a narrow driveway. Cole carried his suitcase up stone steps, moving from shadow to light and from heat to coolness and back again. The steps ended in a patio and fountain covered in glazed tiles of red and yellow and green. Louvered doors opened into a cool, dark living room filled with low bamboo furniture and Indian blankets on the tile floor. Alex’s uncle and grandparents waited there, the grandfather thin and leaning on a cane, the woman heavier and evoking another era with her elaborately curled hair. The uncle was heavier still, his thinning hair worn long in the back. In the flurry of abrazos and kisses, Cole was introduced and told that their house was his.
Alex led him down a set of tiled stairs to a suite of guest rooms, each with French doors that faced a central sitting room with a tv, a wet bar, and a leather sofa and chairs. He and Alex shared a room with two twin beds, one of which was covered with five acoustic guitars. «That one’s yours,» Alex said.
Cole turned in confusion. The others had followed them down and now were smiling at him. «A musician should choose his own instrument,» Al Montoya said. «Play each of these and see if one of them suits you. If not, there are others.»
Alex said, «My uncle Jesús makes guitars. He’s very famous—he made guitars for Pedro Infante. He made the guitar I have at home. We wanted you to have one for your birthday.»
Cole was paralyzed by conflicting emotions. It was the electric guitar, not the acoustic, that he truly loved. On the other hand, it was the most expensive and thoughtful present anyone had ever given him. He didn’t know how to react to generosity, except to wonder if he deserved it.
«I think we stunned him,» Linda Montoya said.
«Feliz cumpleaños, m’ijo,» Al Montoya said.
Then the grandfather began to sing, «Estas son las mañanitas…» and the others all joined him in the traditional Mexican birthday song. This is the morning song King David sang, we sing it to you on your birthday.
Being the center of attention when he was on stage playing and singing was one thing. To simply stand there while all these people sang to him was monumentally uncomfortable. He was in a country more foreign than Mexico, caught up in a transaction whose currency he didn’t understand.
They all hugged him, Susan last of all, who kissed his cheek and whispered “Happy Birthday” in English, then pushed him toward the stairs. «He can pick out a guitar later. Right now we need to eat.»
*
Despite the hard sell he’d given Cole, Alex’s feelings toward Guanajuato had been mixed for years now. If your whole life was in Dallas, leaving town for two weeks put that life on hold. He felt that way every year until he got on the plane, when he remembered all over again what a relief it was to stop pushing—pushing the band, pushing at school, pushing to get somewhere with the girls he dated—and just let things happen.
Secret Agent Double-O Cole was thoroughly flipped out by the family’s birthday surprise. He wanted so badly to belong, and then didn’t know what to do when somebody gave him the chance. Sooner or later they would break him down.
In the meantime there was food. Guadalupe had made enchiladas mineras, miner’s enchiladas, the signature Guanajuato dish, fried tortillas layered with potatoes, carrots, white cheese, and a mild red sauce. On the side she’d laid out black beans, guacamole, spaghetti, platters of ham and boiled shrimp, corn tortillas and sliced bread, and of course Bohemia all around.
After dinner, Tio Jesús came downstairs to talk guitars while everybody else took a siesta. They sat on the beds and Cole immediately picked up the plainest of the steel-string guitars. «Ah,» Jesús said, «La Pelirroja.» The Redhead. «That’s basically the same design as the Martin D-35, only with better materials. Red spruce top and braces instead of Sitka spruce. Brazilian rosewood for everything else.»
«The top doesn’t look red,» Cole said.
«That’s because I didn’t stain it, and I used clear varnish everywhere. That’s the true color of the wood you’re seeing.» He took the guitar and plucked a chord with all five fingers, then held out the guitar by the back of the neck so that Alex and Cole could hear the wood vibrate. «That’s one of the nicest sounding guitars I ever made, and I didn’t even put a lot of work into her. I got lucky with the wood.»
«Play something,» Alex said.
Jesús handed La Pelirroja to Cole and picked up a guitar that looked like a Mariachi outfit, black with pearl inlays. He started to play “Malagueña,” then stopped after half a verse. «This is not a concert,» he said. «Play!»
Alex grabbed the only nylon string guitar and he and Cole joined in. For over an hour they played rancheras, Beatles hits, standards like “Stardust,” Jesús faking the English when he sang, Alex and Cole doing what they could with the guitar parts.
Finally Jesús stood up. «Bueno, you like La Pelirroja?» You could see that Cole did. «I hope you choose her. She’s a guitar that should be played.»
«Thank you,» Cole said. «From my heart.»
«Come by my shop tomorrow, both of you. I’ll teach you some things, if you want. And now I have to go back to work, now that I’ve spoiled the siesta for everyone else.»
At dusk Alex and Cole walked down to the Jardín de la Unión in the center of the city. The plaza was triangular and shaded by Indian laurel trees whose branches had been pruned into continuous rectangular blocks. In the center of the triangle was a fountain and an elaborate wrought-iron bandstand. Restaurants, hotels, and shops made up two sides, and the third opened onto the baroque Catedral de San Diego, whose orange-brown walls and red domes you could see from most of the city.
They stood aside for a Posadas procession, where Joseph, played by a guy in a long robe, led a costumed Mary on a burro, followed by a crowd of angels and shepherds and giant plaster figures of Los Reyes, the three kings.
«They didn’t do this in Villahermosa?» Alex asked an amazed Cole.
«It was pretty half-assed. Nothing like this.»
The procession moved up the street, stopped at a house, and Joseph began to sing.
«It’s the whole ‘no room at the inn’ thing,» Alex explained. «You go around to various houses and get turned away. Come on.»
Alex led him under the trees and stopped outside the restaurant of the Hotel Posada Santa Fe, where a mariachi band in tan trajes with eagles on their jackets had surrounded one of the outdoor tables and was playing a sentimental ballad about Pancho Villa. The harmony was tight, the singing as powerful and irresistible as a hurricane, the instrumental solos passing from guitar to trumpet to violin. Birds in the laurel trees sang so loudly that they seemed part of the arrangement.
«Can we get a beer?» Cole asked.
«Sure. Anybody asks for your id, show them a dollar bill. Unless it’s a cop.»
«What do I do then?»
«I would recommend a five.»
If you owned a bar or restaurant in Mexico, you had an exclusive agreement with one cervecería or another. Out of family loyalty, Alex took him
to a Cuautémoc restaurant next door to the mariachis, where you could sit outside and still hear the music.
At least two other mariachi outfits wandered through the Friday night crowd of local couples, students from the University, indios selling jewelry and shawls, little kids running any kind of hustle they could scrape together, from shining shoes to tap dancing. Tourists from the US were scarce, nowhere near as bad as San Miguel down the road.
Two gringas passed by, a year or two older than Alex, lingering to watch the mariachis for a while, laughing and tugging at each other, pointedly ignoring him and Cole. No one, apparently, had warned them not to wear jeans. Every male they met would assume they were either selling it or giving it away. «Now there’s trouble waiting to happen.»
Cole said, «And I would love to be the trouble they find. In theory. I mean, I’m still in love with Janet and everything.»
Alex had no such qualms. Being in a band gave you opportunities, but so far he had failed to take any of them to the finish line. The ones who seemed willing hadn’t held his interest, and the interesting ones had needed more cultivation than he had time or patience for. He’d sworn he would take advantage of any opportunity that might present itself in Guanajuato, where he wouldn’t have to deal with consequences.
The waiter, who must have been in his sixties, responded to Cole’s hand signal with two more bottles of beer. «This is the life, no?» Cole said. «I’m having trouble remembering why I want to go back to Dallas.»
Thinking about women had left Alex discontented. He leaned forward, switched to English, and pitched his voice low. “What you see here is the cream that’s floated to the tippy-top. This is pretty much as good as it gets, for rich people like my father, and all these students whose parents are rich like mine, and the lucky shop owners who get to make money off of us. Everything floats to the top here. Elections are a joke—el pri has won every election since 1928 by at least two to one. Did you know that they’re technically part of the Socialist International? Even though Diaz Ordaz is busting unions, robbing the poor, sending armed police after anybody who complains. The whole system runs on bribery. La mordida is the single biggest expense on my father’s budget for the Monterrey office. Whatever you’re born as here, that’s what you stay. If you’re a farmer, there’s nowhere else for you to go. If you’re rich, your kids will be rich and so will their kids. And there’s machine guns and helicopters and tanks to make sure it stays that way.”
Cole looked down at his beer.
“Sorry,” Alex said. “It’s just… I love this country, but I wouldn’t want to live here, not with the way things are.”
“You surprised me, that’s all. I didn’t know you were so political.”
“With Vietnam hanging over my head? How could I not be? All those Dylan songs, you think I didn’t listen to the words?”
“I don’t know. We’ve never talked about it.”
“Maybe we should. You’re what, apolitical?”
“I’m against the war. I’m for civil rights. But socialism? The government taking over the banks and the railroads and all that? That’s going a little far for me.”
“Cardenas did that here in the thirties. He saved the country. Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, they were both communists. John Steinbeck, that you like so much, he was a sympathizer.”
You could see Cole pull back into himself, the way he did when he felt threatened.
“Look, man,” Alex said, “I’m not criticizing you. All I’m saying is, the US is not that different than Mexico in some ways. Johnson’s not going to give up the war. People like my father are not going to change voluntarily.”
“What’s so bad about your father?”
“I’m not saying he’s not a good man. But he’s invested in the system. Like I said, he delivers big envelopes of cash to los priistas, and he makes big political contributions in Texas. He fought to keep the union out of his factories and he’s got money stashed in overseas accounts. You know how much he loves poker, and business is the same thing to him. He plays the game, you know? And he plays to win.”
“When you take over, you’ll change all that.”
“Not happening, man. That life is not for me.”
“For real? When did you decide that?”
“A while ago. It’s going to break his heart.”
“He’ll get over it. He wants you to be happy. You can come be a star with me.”
“Maybe,” Alex said. “I don’t know if I want it bad enough.”
“That’s okay,” Cole said. “I want it enough for both of us.”
*
Cole woke up hungry at seven am and Guadalupe, the cook, insisted on fixing him whatever he wanted. That turned out to be three fried eggs smothered in a hot tomatillo sauce, with black beans and tortillas on the side.
«Not too spicy?» Guadalupe asked. Cole shook his head and she smiled. «Bueno. Hotter tomorrow.»
Alex took him to see the Pípila statue that looked down from a hilltop on the south side of the city. El Pípila was the local hero from the 1810 Revolution, a miner who strapped a slab of rock to his back to deflect bullets while he set fire to the Alhóndiga de Granaditas, the giant castle of a grain warehouse where the Spanish had made their last stand.
The altitude, some 6,000 feet higher than Dallas, got to Cole after the climb and he had to sit to rest his burning lungs. El Pípila towered over him, massively muscled, holding a torch in one hand. Deco-style letters on the base said, «Aún hay otras Alhóndigas por incendiar,» there are still more Alhóndigas to burn. The kind of threat that Alex would appreciate.
From the foot of the statue the view was spectacular, and Alex pointed out the landmarks. The red domes of the San Diego Cathedral, across from the Jardín de la Unión, were directly in front of them and almost straight down from where they stood. To the left were the orange walls of the Basílica de Nuestra Señora, and beyond that the pale blue serrated cliff of the Universidad de Guanajuato. To the right was a jumble of pastel colors, right angles, and the tiny black dots of windows.
After that they walked downtown, where Cole bought Christmas presents for the family. Silver earrings for Susan and Linda Montoya, a Mexican national fútbol team jersey for Al Montoya. For Alex, he found a recent songbook from the Trio Los Panchos in a used bookstore and managed to buy it without Alex seeing.
At noon they went to Jesús’s shop, and between customers they spent two hours on fingerpicking and finding ways for Cole to work around his missing fingertip.
The afternoon meal was carne asada, potatoes, soup, beans, rice, and tortillas, and afterward Cole used the siesta time as it was intended, sleeping deeply under the humming ceiling fans.
That evening, Alex’s father said, «Anybody want to look at some cards?» A poker game started up at the dining room table that included Cole and Alex, Alex’s father and grandfather, and Susan. They used old wooden chips, no buy-in, and the whole family played with a joy and intensity that had nothing to do with money. Cole had learned the game from his paternal grandfather, a professional carpenter with a foul mouth and a photographic memory of every card that had been folded, and he quickly saw that he was out of his league. Alex folded early on most hands, yet steadily built up his winnings. Susan played with a careless bravado that none of the others were able to read.
At 11 pm they all walked downtown, including Octavio and Guadalupe and Jesús and his wife, Leticia. They waited in the street outside the Catedral de San Diego along with hundreds of others, all dressed in their church clothes. Little girls in white dresses ran wild in the streets while their brothers tugged at their collars and laughed until their faces glowed red. Tonight the forbidden became mandatory and they would be up until dawn, first at Mass, then at a late supper, then opening presents.
Cole had never been to a Mass before. Alex had dismissed it as a lot of standing and sitting and kneeling, but once inside the church, Cole was awed. The room was barely wide enough for two eight-foot pews, long enough for 1
5 or 20 rows, and was lit by hundreds of candles. The ceiling over the nave had to be at least 40 feet high and the dome above the transept rose even higher, with a walkway and circular windows that glowed with light from the street. Everything was tiled and painted and sculpted and inlaid with wood in shades of pink and yellow and ivory and white. Elaborate chandeliers hung halfway to the floor, glittering in the candlelight. A statue of Jesus presided over the altar from within a columned structure of white marble.
Hundreds of people crowded in, standing in the aisles and at the back. The family had two pews reserved toward the front, and Cole ended up between Susan and Al Montoya. Susan looked like a Hollywood vision of a beautiful peasant girl in a white cotton eyelet blouse, a long black skirt, and a black lace shawl over her head.
Religion had little foothold in Cole’s family. His mother had grown up a low-church Episcopalian in rural Oklahoma, and his father, who possibly believed in some half-formed notion of God, was not interested enough to pursue the idea on Sunday mornings. When Cole was very young his mother had made intermittent attempts to take him to church, giving up after they moved to Villahermosa at the end of Cole’s second grade year. Some of the Mexican kids told him he was going to hell because of all the Sunday school he’d missed. Cole had been upset for a few days, then figured it was too late to do anything about it. By the time puberty arrived he was in mostly Mohammedan Suez, and God, Allah, and Yahweh looked the same to him as Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy.
And yet he felt something very like a divine presence in that cathedral in Guanajuato. The feeling only got stronger when an organ intro led them into an “Adeste Fideles” that was carried by three hundred voices with power enough to vibrate the granite floor. The priest and his retinue entered in a cloud of incense from a steaming metal censer, followed by a ritual exchange in Latin and a sermon in Spanish and then more singing. Though Cole didn’t know the hymn, the effect was much the same, the crescendos of the organ, the huge aggregate of ordinary voices, the choir floating above them in gut-wrenching harmony.