by Héctor Tobar
Mexico slowly brought Spanish to his tongue. Huevos tibios: hard-boiled eggs. ¿Con salsa? ¿Con salsita? It doesn’t mean little salsa, but more like, With salsa, dear? A language full of little endearments like that. At the bus station he had a passable conversation with a Chinese Mexican guy named Félix Chuang.
“Estoy viajando a Panamá,” Joe said. “Después a Sudamérica. A Tierra del Fuego.”
“Un viaje réquete largo,” Félix said, and Joe loved the sound of that word. Re-que-te, which through a kind of linguistic osmosis he understood to mean “heck of,” as in “That’s a heck of a long trip.”
“El sol quema,” Joe said, pointing to his peeling arms. Réquete quema. ¿Cuántas horas a Mérida? By the time I get to Chile, I’ll be speaking like a native, seducing the señoritas with my fluent Castilian. ¡Qué bonito su pelo! With your looks, Sanderson, and Spanish on the tip of your tongue, the sky is the limit.1
He sat next to Félix on a third-class bus following the Atlantic Coast of Mexico, rolling into Veracruz and into the oil fields and the Olmec country to the south. The bus stopped in a town with the unpronounceable name of Coatzacoalcos. Looking out the window, he saw a street half-flooded from a recent rainstorm, and a row of cement storefronts, and a woman standing before a cart stacked with fried cakes wrapped in paper, a boy sitting next to her on the curb. The woman looked twenty and forty at the same time, and had the elegant thinness that is born of perpetual motion and labor, although at this moment she was standing perfectly still, while at her feet her son was gathering pieces of discarded paper and folding them into boats and launching them across the black puddle before him. The boy had a fleet floating on the water, and his mother looked down just as a car drove by and made a wave in the puddle; the boats rose and fell, and the boy squeal-laughed at the miniature maritime scene he’d created.
An entire novel was unfolding in the frame of his window. I know what that boy is thinking: When is Mom gonna be done working? The mother looks down and turns up her lips. An entire novel that I’ll never know or write. The bus set off and Joe saw shoebox storefronts with hand-painted signs, and more faces, and he thought of all the interlinked stories in this street and city. He felt like a man walking into a forest where the stories were like spiderwebs strung between the trees: invisible filaments of narrative were sticking to him, but he could never hold them and know the full beauty of their structure, of their spider-spun art. The bus rolled into the countryside, into a landscape of yucca plants and swamps. More Mexico,
más Mexico, más, más, más mysterious Mexico. México misterioso: the Indians, the Spaniards, the Chinese, oil derricks and walls covered with the oxymorons of government graffiti. Long Live the Institutional Revolutionary Party!
“No comprendo México,” Joe said to Félix.
Félix laughed and said, “Rulfo,” and he opened his suitcase and reached inside and produced a thin book. El llano en llamas. By a writer named Juan Rulfo, and Joe understood that Félix thought this book explained Mexico. Joe opened it, and of course the whole thing was in Spanish. With his dictionary Joe managed to understand the first sentence.
I am sitting next to the sewer, waiting for the frogs to come out.
Over the course of the next hour on the bus, Joe and his dictionary and his embryonic Spanish brain decoded a few more sentences, and Joe gathered that the narrator of the story was a boy who had been sent by his godmother to kill the frogs because their croaking was keeping her awake at night. Intriguing.
Joe returned the book when they reached Cozumel and his new friend got off the bus. “Gracias, Félix.” Joe was proud of himself for talking to Félix and reading a paragraph of his book. Really starting to get good at the whole Spanish thing. A short while later he reached a territory where his Spanish was useless, because the people there spoke the Queen’s English.
WELCOME TO BRITISH HONDURAS
British soldiers in long, loose-fitting khaki pants patrolled the streets with fixed bayonets and the slow, deliberate, feline strides of men expecting to be ambushed. In Belize City, Joe breathed the wet, smoky air that follows a tropical riot. Here and there, a looted building, the remnants of a half-hearted barricade of sticks and barrels. The British soldiers are a pasty-faced bunch of kids, and they look scared to death, Joe wrote home. He boarded a puttering old boat southward and arrived in the Guatemalan city of Puerto Barrios; here too he found troops on a war footing. A few days earlier a band of Marxist guerrillas had infiltrated the town and painted the graffito Patria o Muerte on the walls. Fatherland or Death, though Joe misunderstood it to read Patria de Muerte, Fatherland of Death, and he inserted this phrase in his next letter. Here I am, in the Fatherland of Death, and doesn’t that sound horror-movie scary. These were the same rebels who had taken up arms after the banana war that worried Milt all those years ago, but they were a small, hidden force, and Joe knew nothing about them. He traveled in a steam train southward and uphill, blasting a white mist into the groves of banana trees. At toy-size wooden train stations, old men in straw hats watched his train roll past. By the time he reached the capital, night had fallen.
The next morning, Joe emerged from a hotel near the main plaza of Guatemala City, stepping out into “the Land of Eternal Spring,” as the locals called it. The sky was, in fact, the richest and deepest blue he’d ever seen, as if Guatemala were the source from which all the blueness of the world’s skies was born. Mayan Indians walked about the city, many wearing sandals and ornate patterns of hornet-green and sunflower-yellow threads woven into their clothes, walking past the limeade stone of the National Palace, speaking in the odd constant clusters of their indigenous languages. He saw a black graffito that screamed, once again, Patria o Muerte, but the newspapers mentioned that all was calm since the army had lifted the state of siege a week earlier. I missed the major part of the riots in British Honduras by two days, Joe wrote home. Just like I missed the real action of ten thousand Mexican students rioting in ’58, the Festival rumble in Trinidad, and the Jamaican militia called out against the Rastas. Oh well, I guess I can’t be at all the revolutions. An idea took root in Joe’s bumming brain: Maybe one day he’d wander into “action,” events so dramatic and violent, that the publishable plot of a novel would present itself to him. Effortlessly. With Joe in a starring role, of course. A war, a revolution, an uprising, a coup. Something.
* * *
HE ENTERED A COUNTRY called El Salvador. Named after Jesus, the nation was, appropriately enough, at war with no one. In the town of Sonsonate he sat on a bench in the town square, and was surrounded by the courtship rituals of the town’s youth. Lean this way, look that way. Boys with their fingers in their belts, girls with ice cream cones, group giggles, one boy’s bold march across the concrete square toward one girl. Puppy love. They are here, in the center of their Salvadoran everything, and I’m just a visitor. I would march across the square for…? For Karen Thomas, if anyone.
He got a ride into a valley where the hillsides were covered with cornstalks and the trees speckled with vermilion coffee beans, and was deposited at a crossroads littered with piles of burning trash; a vortex of vultures circled overhead, gliding through the climbing pillars of sweet, sticky smoke. The vultures and their greasy wings transmitted a dark meaning he could not decipher. Avian augurs, summoned by unseen witches. A brand-new Chevrolet Impala passed, and the driver slowed down and stared at Joe. In El Salvador, the rich inhabited a smug bubble of comfort floating inside a universe of poverty, and the driver was perplexed by a blond man’s presence outside this bubble, standing next to a pile of smoldering garbage, no less. So he circled back and invited Joe to a bar in town; as they drank rum, he warned Joe how dangerous the roads of El Salvador were at night. Was all for continuing, but people in the town said that not only was the city itself unsafe, but the Pan-American Highway especially, Joe wrote home. Bandits, etc. The idea of being robbed didn’t faze Joe much: he was carrying a .22-caliber revolver in his backpack, a Smith and Wesson, havi
ng crossed four borders without a single customs inspector asking to see the contents of his U.S. Army–issue rucksack. He crossed four more with his gun undetected, and reached Panama.
The vessels passing through the Panama Canal seemed to offer the possibility of a cheap ride across one ocean or the other. Cruise ships and tankers floated past him in the canal’s bathtubs, following paths across the meridians of the world. None offered free passage, so he bought a ticket on a freighter headed to Colombia, and he arrived in the port city of Cartagena, and explored its old center, and saw sunflower-and-royal-blue colonial buildings and colonnades and ferns growing in the balconies. Parrots squawked inside the homes as he passed, the way dogs barked in Urbana neighborhoods when he strolled through. “¡Cua, cua, cua!” a parrot yelled. “¡Carajo!” He hitchhiked toward Bogotá, upward into thinner air, marveling at the serenity of Colombia and its serpentine highways. But the Colombians who rushed past Joe on the Pan-American Highway, where he stood with a raised thumb, saw a vision of a disturbing future. The rush of passing traffic lifted the loose strands of the gringo’s unbarbered blond hair, the frayed bottoms of his blue jeans. Here come the American hippies we’ve been hearing about, ready to share their addictions and excesses. Free love: unfettered, degenerate, and syphilitic.
When he reached the equator a square sign announced with simplicity and understatement: LINEA EQUINOCCIAL, LAT. 0° 0. Made friends with a beautiful little “Brigitte Bardot” singer (radio, TV, nightclubs) and her “friend,” a professional wrestler (“El Incognito,” wears a hood like an executioner’s!), Joe wrote from Guayaquil, Ecuador. The singer cuts wonderful hair and makes a good cup of coffee and her friend is going to see if he can get me a few bouts with other mat-rats. Huh? What say? I see the headline: “Young Novelist Wrestles His Way Around World.” From the looks of the local fighters I’ll need brass knuckles and a pogo stick to win, however.2
The singer and the wrestler told him to stay and drink in more of Ecuador, but he felt the pull of the south, and he moved quickly to depart for his next country, only to discover after some consultations with the locals that he had failed to obtain the proper visa before walking across the border from Colombia. Entered Ecuador illegally (so I found out today), he wrote home. But I met a fellow at a travel agency who promised to fix things up … He’s likewise going to write me the phony plane ticket I need to walk into Peru. These were the machinations to which good bums had to resort, because the laws of the world were not written for Illinois hitchhikers to drift across borders willy-nilly. He told his mother to write to him care of the United States Embassy in Santiago, Chile.
* * *
IN URBANA, Joe’s letter arrived in the mailbox on a Friday afternoon, for his mother to find when she got home from work. Another country. Ecuador, with a spacecraft hovering in the stamp over said country. She didn’t want to open it immediately. Will I ever lose this sense of worry? She lingered at the door; the air was summer heavy. Mist clouds floated over the city, and an air conditioner hummed somewhere. Ecuador, he’s reached South America. Virginia stepped inside, retrieved her letter opener and removed Joe’s written pages. Dear Mom and Calhoun, he says. Nice he mentions Calhoun. He’s fine, eating well. Another pretty woman, a Brigitte Bardot this time. Another one! Like moths to light with him now. Where does he get this from? Not from his father. No Romeos in Kansas or Oklahoma. None. They call it charm. He could charm the pants, no the skirt … This is a skill, a quality. He means no harm, he means to care, but they don’t know, these girls. Wants me to remind Steve to send five hundred dollars to Santiago.
The words entered … illegally caused Virginia passing concern, though it seemed like the sort of problem her son routinely talked his way out of. If he kept moving he would stay out of trouble; it was the idea that he would join up with assorted agitators and prostitutes again that worried her the most. The following afternoon, a Saturday, she and Calhoun had the widow Annabel Ebert over for lunch. Calhoun cooked a meal for them on the grill. Annabel said her son, Roger, was in Chicago, starting a new job at the Sun-Times for the newspaper’s Sunday magazine. Roger had written some book reviews for the Daily News, and Annabel clipped them from the newspaper with pride. From success to success. Roger is a professional writer, my Joe wants to be a writer. Roger has the discipline to finish things and see them through, and he was wise enough, in Virginia’s estimation, to conquer small things first, starting with a story for his high school newspaper; unlike her son, who took on the biggest thing you could think of all at once, a novel, and had failed. Predictably. Again and again.
“I’m so excited for Roger, living in Chicago,” Virginia said.
“I miss him. You’re so lucky Steve is here.”
“I am. And Joe: well, he’s being Joe,” Virginia said.
“Where is he now?”
Virginia explained that Joe was headed to the tip of South America. He’d been to about twenty countries so far, by Virginia’s count.
“He has a visa to go to Japan,” Virginia said. “He says he’s going to go all the way around the world.”
“Wow, that’s something,” Annabel said. “That’s really something.”
That night, Virginia took the letters from the shoebox where she kept them and looked at their stamps, the names of countries, the symbols of their currencies, their smudgy postmarks. Really something. She ordered them by the dates Joe had sent them. The first one from Tampico. The second one from Guatemala City. She numbered them. A week later, when the next one came, from Lima, Peru, she wrote a five in a circle on the envelope.
* * *
JOE’S BUS FOLLOWED sand dunes and the Pacific Coast for the final stretch into Lima. In the space between his eyes there was a compass, pointing south, as if he were a migrating bird obeying instinct. South was the only reason for his existence. Entering Lima, he saw wealthy white Limeños cruising in sexy Fords and Chevrolets, and the faces of the Inca carrying shovels and pushing carts, and he felt the anger and resentments between these opposing versions of Peruvian reality. In the center of Lima, he saw a stone-paved plaza, lemon-colored colonial buildings, a bronze conquistador, his equine mount. And in the rocky mountains that surrounded the city, he saw the concrete-and-brick Machu Picchus where the poor lived, and he sensed displacement, the retreat of rural villagers to an improvised city, as if fleeing a war, burning homes in the Andes. But there is no war, only the daily routine of work and family. Lima was endless, or rather, its boundaries were porous and undefined, and each time Joe traveled beyond its fringes to desert beaches and plains, the city came back to life again, as if Lima were a living thing sending out spores to conquer new patches of sandy soil. Finally, he escaped the metropolis, and hitchhiked toward Lake Titicaca, and when he reached its waters he found them surrounded by a rim of hills that were a bleached and powdery brown, white mountain peaks beaming majestically on the far horizon.
The buses here were cheap and he took another one into Bolivia. Road dust and shrublands and reed grasses the color of urine. Altiplano. High plain. Altitude, twelve thousand feet. He’d traveled from the center of North America to the center of South America, and now he entered a high-altitude dream where farm people lived in mud homes with mud-walled corrals to keep in sheep, goats and llamas, actual llamas, mystical creatures, long-necked and flapping their tongues. Women in woven shawls and long skirts and with thick calves, men with wool vests, children in their wake, scratching at the soil with sticks, making circles and ovals and squares. Their Altiplano faces began to melt in the darkness and the bus window now reflected Joe’s ungroomed mustache. Twenty-four years old. Prescription spectacles. The bus stopped at a crossroads with a lone light pole, an oasis of light in the desert dark, overlooking a cluster of travelers, a shack. The bus driver got off to stretch his legs, and Joe followed after him, stepping into the pool of light and a crackled road tarmac. Two dozen sets of eyes fell upon him.
The Aymara men and women who saw him were disturbed by the unexpected appear
ance of a European man in the middle of the night in the middle of the Altiplano, and by the way his pale skin and egg-blue eyes gleamed in the gray light. He was an alabaster apparition, an omen, and for several of the bus passengers he triggered memories of recent encounters with bad luck, the demons that haunted their lives on the shrublands and in the hilly city of La Paz. A rain-swollen river, a house-swallowing whirlwind, a traffic accident, a rampaging goat. The white ghost insists on traveling with us, among us, and hurry, hurry, bus, and get us to the city so that we can be free of him and his evil portent.3
* * *
SUPPOSEDLY, I’M WRITING A NOVEL. But what is an adventure written on paper compared to the four-dimensional, full-color experience of a journey on the road with the rising sun, two snowcapped volcanoes and llamas bolting across the tracks? Again, the strange animals, small-headed; they turned to look at Joe as he passed. Being a writer isn’t just what you live, the places you see, the adventures that unfold before your eyes; it’s the old soul you become, the road-bum knowledge that seeps into your brain with each kilometer. He could begin to see the central fact, the lesson of the road. The big world is tied together by asphalt, sea lanes and footpaths, and everywhere you go humans are puttering away for more or less the same reasons. For family. Toil, till, harvest, over Peruvian potato patches and Illinois corn. The train entered Chile and his exhausted eyes glimpsed the Pacific, blue and infinite, waiting for him with seashells and mermaids and sand to heat his tired toes. Ocean thoughts lulled him to sleep, and when he woke up he was in Arica. At the edge of Arica he stood on the asphalt of the Pan-American Highway again, and stuck out his thumb. A mint-green Buick slowed down and stopped, and a harried woman in a blue evening dress stepped out and opened the door, and took the back seat, while the driver, a man with a cigarette drooping from his lips, gestured for Joe to take the front. “Voy a Santiago,” Joe said.