Lightspeed Magazine Issue 21
Page 17
“Ah.”
“But I’ve never actually seen one of the dances.”
“They do an unusual one here,” she said as he drove down a street of high, ragged, mud-colored walls, patched and plastered, that looked a thousand years old. “Lord of the Animals, it’s called. Died out everywhere else. Pre-Hispanic shamanistic rite, invoking protective deities, fertility spirits.”
“Guzmán told me a little about it. Not much. Are you an anthropologist?”
“Strictly amateur. Turn left here.” There was a little street, an open wrought-iron gateway, a driveway of large white gravel. Set back a considerable distance was a squat, dispiriting hovel of a hotel, one story, roof of chipped red tiles in which weeds were growing. Not even the ubiquitous bougainvillea and the great clay urns overflowing with dazzling geraniums diminished its ugliness. Cucaracha Hilton indeed, Halperin thought dourly. She said, “This is the place. You can park on the side.”
The parking lot was empty. “Are you and I the only guests?” he asked.
“So it seems.”
“Guzmán was supposed to be here. Smooth-looking man, bald shiny head, dresses like a financier.”
“I haven’t seen him,” she said. “Maybe his car broke down.”
They got out, and a slouching fourteen-year-old mozo came to get Halperin’s luggage. He indicated his single bag and followed Ellen into the hotel. She moved in a sleek, graceful way that kindled in him the idea that she and he might get something going in this forlorn place. But as soon as the notion arose, he felt it fizzling: she was friendly, she was good-looking, but she radiated an offputting vibe, a noli-me-tangere sort of thing, that was unmistakable and made any approach from him inappropriate. Too bad. Halperin liked the company of women and fell easily and uncomplicatedly into liaisons with them wherever he traveled, but this one puzzled him. Was she a lesbian? Usually he could tell, but he had no reading on her except that she meant him to keep his distance. At least for the time being.
The hotel was grim, a string of lopsided rooms arranged around a weedy courtyard that served as a sort of lobby. Some hens and a rooster were marching about, and a startling green iguana, enormous, like a miniature dinosaur, was sleeping on a branch of a huge yellow-flowered hibiscus just to the left of the entrance. Everything was falling apart in the usual haphazard tropical way. Nobody seemed to be in charge. The mozo put Halperin’s suitcase down in front of a room on the far side of the courtyard and went away without a word. “You’ve got the one next to mine,” Ellen said. “That’s the dining room over there and the cantina next to it. There’s a shower out in back and a latrine a little further into the jungle.”
“Wonderful.”
“The food isn’t bad. You know enough to watch out for the water. There are bugs but no mosquitoes.”
“How long have you been here?” Halperin asked.
“Centuries,” she said. “I’ll see you in an hour and we’ll have dinner, okay?”
His room was a whitewashed irregular box, smelling faintly of disinfectant, that contained a lumpy narrow bed, a sink, a massive mahogany chest of drawers that could have come over with the Spaniards, and an ornate candlestick. The slatted door did not lock and the tile-rimmed window that gave him an unsettling view of thick jungle close outside was without glass, an open hole in the wall. But there was a breathtaking mask mounted above the bed, an armadillo-faced man with a great gaping mouth, and next to the chest of drawers was a weatherbeaten but extraordinary helmet mask, a long-nosed man with an owl for one ear and a coyote for another, and over the bed was a double mask, owl and pig, that was finer than anything he had seen in any museum. Halperin felt such a rush of possessive zeal that he began to sweat. The sour acrid scent of it filled the room. Could he buy these masks? From whom? The dull-eyed mozo? He had done all his collecting through galleries; he had no idea how to go about acquiring masks from natives. He remembered Guzmán’s warning about not trying to buy from them. But these masks must no longer be sacred if they were mere hotel decorations. Suppose, he thought, I just take that owl-pig when I check out, and leave three thousand pesos on the sink. That must be a fortune here. Five thousand, maybe. Could they find me? Would there be trouble when I was leaving the country? Probably. He put the idea out of his mind. He was a collector, not a thief. But these masks were gorgeous.
He unpacked and found his way outside to the shower—a cubicle of braided ropes, a creaking pipe, yellowish tepid water—and then he put on clean clothes and knocked at Ellen’s door. She was ready for dinner. “How do you like your room?” she asked.
“The masks make up for any little shortcomings. Do they have them in every room?”
“They have them all over,” she said.
He peered past her shoulder into her room, which was oddly bare, no luggage or discarded clothes lying around, and saw two masks on the wall, not as fine as his but fine enough. But she did not invite him to take a close look, and closed the door behind her. She led him to the dining room. Night had fallen some time ago, and the jungle was alive with sounds, chirpings and rachetings and low thunking booms and something that sounded the way the laughter of a jaguar might sound. The dining room, oblong and lit by candles, had three tables and more masks on the wall, a devil face with a lizard for a nose, a crudely carved mermaid, and a garish tiger-hunter mask. He wandered around studying them in awe, and said to her, “These aren’t local. They’ve been collected from all over Guerrero.”
“Maybe your friend Guzmán sold them to the owner,” she suggested. “Do you own many?”
“Dozens. I could bore you with them for hours. Do you know San Francisco at all? I’ve got a big old three-story Victorian in Noe Valley and there are masks in every room. I’ve collected all sorts of primitive art, but once I discovered Mexican masks they pushed everything else aside, even the Northwest Indian stuff. You collect too, don’t you?”
“Not really. I’m not an acquirer. Of things, at any rate. I travel, I look, I learn, I move on. What do you do when you aren’t collecting things?”
“Real estate,” he said. “I buy and sell houses. And you?”
“Nothing worth talking about,” she said.
The mozo appeared, silently set their table, brought them, unbidden, a bottle of red wine. Then a tureen of albóndigas soup, and afterward tortillas, tacos, a decent turkey molé. Without a word, without a change of expression.
“Is that kid the whole staff?” Halperin asked.
“His sister is the chambermaid. I guess his mother is the cook. The patrón is Filiberto, the father, but he’s busy getting the fiesta set up. He’s one of the important dancers. You’ll meet him. Shall we get more wine?”
“I’ve had plenty,” he said.
They went for a stroll after dinner, skirting the jungle’s edge and wandering through a dilapidated residential area. He heard music and handclapping coming from the plaza but felt too tired to see what was happening there. In the darkness of the tropical night he might easily have reached for Ellen and drawn her against him, but he was too tired for that, too, and she was still managing to be amiable, courteous, but distant. She was a mystery to him. Moneyed, obviously. Divorced, widowed young, gay, what? He did not precisely mistrust her, but nothing about her seemed quite to connect with anything else.
About nine-thirty he went back to his room, toppled down on the ghastly bed, and dropped at once into a deep sleep that carried him well past dawn. When he woke, the hotel was deserted except for the boy. “Cómo se llama?” Halperin asked, and got an odd smouldering look, probably for mocking a mere mozo by employing the formal construction. “Elustesio,” the boy muttered. Had Elustesio seen the Norteamericano señorita? Elustesio hadn’t seen anyone. He brought Halperin some fruit and cold tortillas for breakfast and disappeared. Afterward Halperin set out on a slow stroll into town.
Though it was early, the plaza and surrounding marketplace were already crowded. Again Halperin got the visiting-Martian treatment from the townsfolk—fishy star
es, surreptitious whispers, the occasional shy and tentative grin. He did not see Ellen. Alone among these people once more, he felt awkward, intrusive, vulnerable; yet he preferred that, he realized, to the curiously unsettling companionship of the Florida woman.
The shops now seemed to be stocking little except Day of the Dead merchandise, charming and playful artifacts that Halperin found irresistible. He had long been attracted to the imagery of brave defiance of death that this Mexican version of Halloween, so powerful in the inner life of the country, called forth. Halperin bought a yellow papier-mâché skull with brilliant flower-eyes and huge teeth, an elegant little guitar-playing skeleton and a bag of grisly, morbid marzipan candies. He stared at the loaves of bread decorated with skulls and saints in a bakery window. He smiled at a row of sugar coffins with nimble skeletons clambering out of them. There was some extraordinary lacquer work on sale too, trays and gourds decorated with gleaming red-and-black patterns. By mid-morning he had bought so much that carrying it was a problem, and he returned to the hotel to drop off his purchases.
A blue Toyota van was parked next to his car and Guzmán, looking just as dapper in khakis as he always did in his charcoal gray suits, was rearranging a mound of bundles in it. “Are you enjoying yourself?” he called to Halperin.
“Very much. I thought I’d find you in town when I got here yesterday.”
“I came and went again, to Tlacotepec, and I returned. I have bought good things for the gallery.” He nodded toward Halperin’s armload of toy skulls and skeletons. “I see you are buying too. Good. Mexico needs your help.”
“I’d rather buy one of the masks that’s hanging in my room,” Halperin said. “Have you seen it? Pig and owl, and carved like—”
“Patience. We will get masks for you. But think of this trip as an experience, not as a collecting expedition, and you will be happier. Acquisitions will happen of their own accord if you don’t try to force them, and if you enjoy the favor of amo tokinwan while you are here.”
Halperin was staring at some straw-wrapped wooden statuettes in the back of the van. “Amo tokinwan? Who’s that?”
“The Lords of the Animals,” said Guzmán. “The protectors of the village. Perhaps protectors is not quite the right word, for protectors are benevolent, and amo tokinwan often are not. Quite dangerous sometimes, indeed.”
Halperin could not decide how serious Guzmán was. “How so?”
“Sometimes at fiesta time they enter the village and mingle. They look like anyone else and attract no special attention, and they have a way of making the villagers think that they belong here. Can you imagine that, seeing a stranger and believing you have known him all your life? Beyond doubt they are magical.”
“And they are what? Guardians of the village?”
“In a sense. They bring the rain; they ward off the lightning; they guard the crops. But sometimes they do harm. No one can predict their whims. And so the dancing, to propitiate them. Beyond doubt they are magical. Beyond doubt they are something very other. Amo tokinwan.”
“What does that mean?” Halperin asked.
“In Nahuatl it means, ‘Not our brother,’ of different substance. Alien. Supernatural. I think I have met them, do you know? You stand in the plaza watching the dancers, and there is a little old woman at your elbow or a boy or a pregnant woman wearing a fine rebozo, and everything seems all right, but you get a little too close and you feel the chill coming from them, as though they are statues of ice. So you back away and try to think good thoughts.” Guzmán laughed. “Mexico! You think I am civilized because I have a Rolex on my wrist? Even I am not civilized, my friend. If you are wise you will not be too civilized while you are here, either. They are not our brother, and they do harm. I told you you will see the real Mexico here, eh?”
“I have a hard time believing in spirits,” Halperin said. “Good ones and evil ones alike.”
“These are both at once. But perhaps they will not bother you.” Guzmán slammed shut the door of the van. “In town they are getting ready to unlock the masks and dust them and arrange them for the fiesta. Would you like to be there when that is done? The mayordomo is my friend. He will admit you.”
“I’d like that very much. When?”
“After lunch.” Guzmán touched his hand lightly to Halperin’s wrist. “One word, first. Control your desire to collect. Where we go today is not a gallery.”
The masks of San Simón were kept in a locked storeroom of the municipal building. Unlocking them turned out to be a solemn and formal occasion. All the town’s officials were there, Guzmán whispered: the alcalde, the five alguaciles, the regidores, and Don Luis Gutierrez, the mayordomo, an immense mustachioed man whose responsibility it was to maintain the masks from year to year, to rehearse the dancers and to stage the fiesta. There was much bowing and embracing. Most of the conversation was in Nahuatl, which Halperin did not understand at all, and he was able to follow very little of the quick, idiosyncratic Spanish they spoke either, though he heard Guzmán introduce him as an important Norteamericano scholar and tried thereafter to look important and scholarly. Don Luis produced an enormous old-fashioned key, thrust it with a flourish into the door and led the way down a narrow, musty corridor to a large white-walled storeroom with a ceiling of heavy black beams. Masks were stacked everywhere, on the floor, on shelves, in cupboards. The place was a museum. Halperin, who could claim a certain legitimate scholarly expertise by now in this field, recognized many of the masks as elements in familiar dances of the region, the ghastly faces of the Diablo Macho Dance, the heavy-bearded elongated Dance of the Moors and Christians masks, the ferocious cat-faces of the Tigre Dance. But there were many that were new and astounding to him, the Bat Dance masks, terrifying bat-winged heads that all were minglings of bat characters and other animals, bat-fish, bat-coyote, bat-owl, bat-squirrel, and some that were unidentifiable except for the weird outspread rubbery wings, bats hybridized with creatures of another world, perhaps. One by one the masks were lifted, blown clean of dust, admired, passed around, though not to Halperin. He trembled with amazement at the power and beauty of these bizarre wooden effigies. Don Luis drew a bottle of mescal from a niche and handed it to the alcalde, who took a swig and passed it on; the bottle came in time to Halperin, and without a thought for the caterpillar coiled in the bottom of the bottle he gulped the fiery liquor. Things were less formal now. The high officials of the town were laughing, shuffling about in clumsy little dance steps, picking up gourd rattles from the shelves and shaking them. They called out in Nahuatl, all of it lost on Halperin, though the words amo tokinwan at one point suddenly stood out in an unintelligible sentence, and someone shook rattles with curious vehemence. Halperin stared at the masks but did not dare go close to them or try to touch them. This is not a gallery, he reminded himself. Even when things got so uninhibited that Don Luis and a couple of the others put masks on and began to lurch about the room in a weird lumbering polka, Halperin remained tense and controlled. The mescal bottle came to him again. He drank, and this time his discipline eased; he allowed himself to pick up a wondrous bat mask, phallic and with great staring eyes. The carving was far finer than on the superb one he had seen at Guzmán’s gallery. He ran his fingers lovingly over the gleaming wood, the delicately outlined ribbed wings. Guzmán said, “In some villages the Bat Dance was a Christmas dance, the animals paying homage to little Jesus. But here it is a fertility rite, and therefore the bat is phallic. You would like that mask, no?” He grinned broadly. “So would I, my friend. But it will never leave San Simón.”
Just as the ceremony appeared to be getting rowdy, it came to an end: the laughter ceased, the mescal bottle went back to its niche, the officials grew solemn again and started to file out. Halperin, in schoolboy Spanish, thanked Don Luis for permitting him to attend, thanked the alcalde, thanked the alguaciles and the regidores. He felt flushed and excited as he left the building. The cache of masks mercilessly stirred his acquisitive lust. That they were unattainab
le made them all the more desirable, of course. It was as though the storeroom were a gallery in which the smallest trifle cost a million dollars.
Halperin caught sight of Ellen Chambers on the far side of the plaza, sitting outside a small café. He waved to her and she acknowledged it with a smile.
Guzmán said, “Your traveling companion?”
“No. She’s a tourist down from Taxco. I met her yesterday.”
“I did not know any other Americans were here for the fiesta. It surprises me.” He was frowning. “Sometimes they come, but very rarely. I thought you would be the only extranjero here this year.”
“It’s all right,” said Halperin. “We gringos get lonely for our own sort sometimes. Come on over and I’ll introduce you.”
Guzmán shook his head. “Another time. I have business to attend to. Commend me to your charming friend and offer my regrets.”
He walked away. Halperin shrugged and crossed the plaza to Ellen, who beckoned him to the seat opposite her. He signaled the waiter. “Two margaritas,” he said.
She smiled. “Thank you, no.”
“All right. One.”
“Have you been busy today?” she asked.
“Seeing masks. I salivate for some of the things they have in this town. I find myself actually thinking of stealing some if they won’t sell to me. That’s shocking. I’ve never stolen anything in my life. I’ve always paid my own way.”
“This would be a bad place to begin, then.”
“I know that. They’d put the curse of the mummy on me, or the black hand, or God knows what. The sign of Moctezuma. I’m not serious about stealing masks. But I do want them. Some of them.”
“I can understand that,” she said. “But I’m less interested in the masks than in what they represent. The magic character, the transformative power. When they put the masks on, they become the otherworldly beings they represent. That fascinates me. That the mask dissolves the boundary between our world and theirs.”