The piñata stall in the market was right next to the chumile lady. We had watched her at work with horrified appreciation of her trade. Chumiles were flat green insects about the size of a fingernail that looked very much like wood lice. They were gathered alive in the forest, then displayed in the market in an enamel washbasin. They would climb about on top of each other until a customer appeared. Then the chumile lady would fashion a cone out of paper, and with her bare hand would scoop the cone full of the bugs. (We discovered later that they would be mashed in a liquidador, a local carved-lava version of mortar and pestle, to make the essential part of a very popular sauce—that we never had the courage to taste.) When the cone was full and sealed, the saleswoman would brush back into the basin the insects that had escaped becoming sauce by crawling up her bare arm. She would brush them off just as far as the elbow, though. Any higher than that she popped into her mouth, a tasty treat.…
We bought our piñata, took it home, and unwrapped it proudly. Our maid was there, babysitting a small relative as well as Todd, and greatly admired it. As I held it up, a chumille bug crawled out of its interior. The maid squealed with pleasure, picked it off—and popped it into the baby’s mouth. Wasn’t it the Romans who said de gustibus non disputandum est?
I was happy in Cuautla since the work was going well. Joan was happy because life was going well. We had been living in Mexico almost a year now and had settled in nicely. I was selling short stories, and the occasional men’s adventure, so we had more than enough money to live on. And I was about a quarter of the way through the first draft of the novel. I tried not to work more than six days a week so we could take Sunday off.
Upon rereading this I realize that a bit of explanation is in order since most people don’t work on Sunday. Writers are a case apart; their writing schedules are exotic and individualistic. Every author is different. Jim Ballard always worked a five-day week when his children were small, so he could have the weekends with them. Bob Silverberg, in the years when he was producing voluminous amounts of copy, only worked a four-day week. On Friday he would rest—and deliver the week’s stories to editors and pick up assignments for the next week. Another writer friend was always late for deadline, suffered dreadfully over his tardiness, then would eventually write the promised story in a twenty-four- or thirty-six-hour sitting. As for myself, I very quickly discovered, after my second or third novel, that if I broke off work, even for a day, I had trouble getting back into the book. So my routine became very simple. I would work every day, sometimes for a month or two, until the first draft was finished. This was hard on the family, I know. But as Joan said, writers eat people. Meaning simply that writing comes first, always, and friends and family must learn to put up with it. If they don’t, then, sadly, they become ex-friends and in many cases ex-family.
But in Mexico I was still a beginner at the freelance writer’s life, and still working out what I wanted to do and how to go about it. So I settled for a five- or six-day week and took Sunday off with the family. We explored the surrounding countryside in our little car and found the perfect picnic spot above us on the slopes of Popo. Gigantic pine trees covered the hillside, their needles so thick on the ground that nothing else could grow there. Under the trees there was just a ground covering of pine needles and no undergrowth at all. It was cool and silent in the pine forest, with the branches forming a giant green cathedral above our heads, the pine needles a soft carpet on the ground below.
We were enjoying our picnic one Sunday when we heard a sound like distant falling rain, a growing rustle between the trees. But the sky was blue, as always, so it could not be rain. Then, between the tree trunks, a herd of goats appeared. The goatherd, a man in his sixties at least, though possibly older, stopped to greet us in a civil and most formal way. We discussed the crops and the weather until I offered him a drink of tequila. He squatted on his heels and accepted with pleasure, downing a large water glass of the potent spirit. After a few minutes he closed his eyes and fell sound asleep, head lowered, perfectly in balance. The goats milled about until, about ten minutes later, he awoke again. Stood and said his good-byes and led his charges off among the thick trunks of the pines. We were a long way from Manhattan.
After the picnic we always stopped on the way home at the Wienervald. This was an Austrian restaurant on the road to Amecameca owned, of course, by a refugee Viennese, complete with lederhosen and sturdy paunch. He butchered his own pigs and made his own sausage that he first smoked in the giant fireplace then hung from the rafters to season.
They were hard as leather—and the most delicious that we have ever tasted, and we much favored them. We drove back through Cuautla many years later and found the Wienervald closed and silent. We have found that it is the truth, all too often, that you cannot go home again.
In these pretelevision days we tended to read a lot in the evenings. The lights were good, the chairs comfortable—but something disturbed me very much about our garage-living room. This was the large unbroken wall. It was painted a pale, sick pink, a good 160 square feet of it. We could have hung pictures on it, though I didn’t think much of the idea of driving nails into plaster in rented premises. Joan enjoyed the bareness just about as much as I did. “All that plaster. If we can’t hang pictures on it we should get Michelangelo to do a Sistine Chapel mural on it.”
The seed was planted. Why shouldn’t we have a mural? I looked at that great expanse of pink plaster, and my artistic ambitions, long dormant, stirred in my bosom again. In the market they sold little bundles of charcoal twigs that were used to start the cooking fires with. I bought some and tried them on the wall. They were as good as, or better than, the charcoal I had used as an art student when drawing the antique.
“It won’t hurt the wall—and it can always be washed off,” I said. I made a quick sketch of a cactus on the plaster, blurred it, and wiped it off with a cloth. “What will you draw?” Joan asked. “Something local, historical, and very Mexican.” We had recently visited the Paso del Cortez high up on the flanks of Popo. The route that stout Cortez had taken after he had landed at Vera Cruz. He and his handful of soldiers had crossed through the mountains on this path, on his way to the invasion of the valley of Mexico. A very suitable topic for this area: I went to work with enthusiasm. If the mural was more comic book than classical art, why then my years of laboring in the comic factories were certainly to blame. But Mexican art is colorful and realistic in part, sometimes even garish and bigger than life to Northern eyes. Why not?
Why not indeed! With manic dedication I drew in the mountains and jungles, jaguars and Indians lurking in the background. While Cortez, helmeted and armored, his sword waving, led his followers on to victory. Over the mountains and through the pass that would one day be named after him. I just had his figure roughed in, a sketched outline, when we had a visit by Carlos Mendoza. At that time he was a well-known and popular Mexican actor, who was in Cuautla shooting a film. We invited him in for a drink and his eyes blazed with Latin pleasure when he saw the mural. He tore off his shirt and insisted on the spot that he pose for the figure of Cortez. He did, and I drew him in, adding the sword and helmet later. He was a very pleasant man and while the film was being shot would stop by often to admire my creation. I enjoyed doing it.
I little knew how well I had wrought until Jorgé, the hotel’s manager, joined us for a drink one evening and saw my mural. Not only did he not mind my defacing the wall, but appeared to take great pride in what I thought was a garish piece of artwork. I went back to work on the novel and was surprised when, some days later, he knocked on our door. He had brought the chief of police with him. What crime had I committed? But, no, he just wanted my permission to show the chief my mural. I let them in and turned on the lights. The policeman pursed his lips and nodded approvingly at my garage-long piece of art. Shook my hand and thanked me before he left. For the rest of our stay in Cuautla, Jorgé brought many friends, and local notables, including the mayor, to see my mural. Artist
ic fame at last!
Though we visited Cuautla many years later we forgot to see if the Motel Camerones still existed, to find out if the mural was still there. I like to think that it is.
Meanwhile I was working quite hard, grinding out stories and the occasional men’s adventures, to keep us eating, and getting in more work on the novel. The months slipped by. I went to the post office every day to pick up our mail and of course to send out my completed articles, a complicated process. Since the international postage on a manuscript being sent to New York was more than the weekly salary of a postal worker, one did not simply drop a stamped envelope into the mailbox. It would understandably have instantly vanished. So I stood in line and took the envelope to the window, where I had it weighed. Then I stood and watched as the clerk fixed the stamps in place—and carefully canceled every one. Then I paid. It was not humiliating at all but a very practical ceremony.
One day on the way back from the post office, I passed a stranger who appeared to be having trouble with his car. He had stopped in front of the local automobile mechanic’s establishment and was explaining his troubles. The only problem, I realized as I passed close by, was that he was describing his mechanical difficulties in French. A traveler in need, far from home. I had to help, but at that time my French was nonexistent. But perhaps he spoke English? It was worth a try. He was a tall man with a sparkling smile that lit up when I talked to him. “Of course! Your help would be greatly appreciated.”
The problem was a minor one; my Spanish, by this time, and knowledge of car mechanics, were well up to sorting it out. While the repairs were being made, we talked, and I found out that we had very much in common. He was a Dane, named Preben Zahle. An artist of some renown in his home country, as well as being art director of Tidens Kvinder, Today’s Women, an important magazine in Denmark. He was visiting Mexico with his wife on an American art scholarship. I took them back to our living room–garage for drinks while the repairs were being done and we hit it off at once. Joan instantly invited them to dinner, and the next day they rented the apartment next door. They only stayed a week, but we had a good deal of fun together. When the Zahles returned to Denmark we corresponded for a bit. Preben talked to the other editors on the magazine and convinced them that Joan and I should write some travel and cooking articles for them. We did, and it was very nice, and Danish kroner turned into Mexican pesos just as easily as dollars did.
We did not realize it at the time, but this chance meeting was going to have a most profound effect on our lives.
Mexico was very good for us and I don’t know how long we would have stayed there if Todd had not taken ill. And it wasn’t your usual childhood illness. Dr. Ugalde diagnosed it without a blood test, just by putting his hand on the baby’s forehead to take his temperature, then feeling his swollen spleen. “Paludismo,” he said with authority: malaria. It was endemic in Mexico in the ’50s and he had seen far too many cases of it. At this time malaria was very easy to cure with the drug Plaquenil. This was well before the mutated and deadly varieties came into existence, the ones that plague us today. Todd was medicated and completely cured, he still is, but his parents were understandingly very frightened at the time. Had our parents indeed been right? Were we exposing their grandson to scores of deadly diseases? Right or wrong, we had had a good scare, followed by intense feelings of guilt. The bright sheen was off Mexico and our Wanderjahre was just about up. We made plans for our return and got the letters off. Needless to say our parents were overjoyed. We were of two minds—but the decision had been made. It was time to pack up, to say good-bye to our Mexican friends, and point the sturdy Anglia north, back to the land of our birth.
When we said our good-byes we realized how many good friends, both Mexican and the few resident Americans, we had made here. And it was hard to say good-bye to Mexico as well. We drove north with very mixed emotions. This country had been very good to us. Every meal we stopped for was one more to remember. We were not going to get food like this in New York City.
Nor would we see many disastrous accidents there like the one we passed a few miles outside of San Luis Potosi. A one-vehicle accident on a straight stretch of road, the truck was an old one, the tires completely bald. There must have been a blowout; the truck swerved into the ditch and overturned. The driver had already been taken to the hospital—but what of his cargo? There had been a full load of live pigs in the stake body of the truck and a goodly number had been killed when it overturned. The survivors wandered among the corpses of their brethren, while the farmers from the nearby village took advantage of this gift from heaven. Since it was a hot day and no refrigeration was available the outcome was obvious. The pigs were butchered in the road, the pork carried away. The highway patrolmen looked on benevolently; they weren’t their pigs. I took some photographs for the record and we drove on.
Our trip back to the States coincided with the rainy season. Some of the storms were quite severe and floods covered the desert—and the highway. The Anglia stood so high on its large wheels that we had no difficulty driving on the flooded roads. We could not tell the road from desert, but helpful highway crews had marked the shoulder with lengths of wood stuck into the ground. Stay inside them and you were okay. One tanker truck had not done this and had skidded off the road and lay on its side in the flooded waters. I took photographs of this as well.
The border approached. We knew that we would miss Cuautla but we were excited about going back to the States. Outside of one brief trip to the border to renew our tourist visas, we had not seen that country for over a year. What would it be like? Unfriendly, for openers. We crossed the border and were a few miles into Texas when we were greeted by sirens and flashing lights and were pulled over by a Texas Ranger. “You know that you’re driving with illegal plates,” he drawled warmly as he wrote out the ticket. “They’re not illegal—just New York plates,” I protested. “Illegal there too,” he said as he handed me the ticket. “Last year’s plates. You have twenty-four hours to get Texas plates. County seat is just down the road.”
We had left the land of no fixed rules and had returned to the rule of law. (In Cuautla the chief of police drove a car with expired California plates. Who would question him?) And this was sure a good racket for the state of Texas. How many returning tourists did they grab every year? Eight dollars for registration and new license plates was a lot of money in those days. Only when I had bolted on the plates did I realize that this was a blessing in disguise—and a very cheap one at that.
“Do you know what has happened?” I cried aloud. “We have been washed whiter than white and can take our place in New York society again.” Joan frowned in puzzlement—then burst out laughing. “Of course—the tickets!” I can now admit, and hope that the statute of limitations has indeed run out, that in 1955 I was a scofflaw. New York City takes a very dim view of people who amass a pile of unpaid parking tickets, and I had amassed quite a few. Not on purpose, of course. When Joan was pregnant and expecting, I had parked the car outside our apartment house at night. Parking was allowed until eight A.M.—when it became a non-parking zone, with tickets and fines ready and waiting for the guilty lawbreaker. Only too often I had rushed down to move the car and found a ticket on the windshield. Once it was there at five minutes past eight; the traffic wardens started work a lot earlier than I did.
I don’t know how many tickets I had, but it was a good handful. I paid the really old ones when I could, since in those precomputer days they investigated by dates. The oldest tickets were tracked down first. This feeble ploy had worked well enough and the fateful knock on the door had never come. Nevertheless, it was with a feeling of great relief when we left New York for Mexico. Chortling with glee we had torn them up and thrown them out of the window when we had reached the New Jersey Turnpike. And now we were driving a Texas-registered car and our record was clean. There was another fringe benefit as well. In the brief time that we had been away, America had apparently changed. No longer were the fil
ling station attendants the usual surly and silent lot. Now they greeted us warmly and called, “You’all come again, hear?” as we drove happily away. Realization dawned slowly. When we had driven south we had been Yankees, and our license plates identified us as New York Yankees at that, the worst kind there is. We had been changed by our Texas license into honorary Southerners. Now, as we drove through the South, we were real live Texans in a funny car. The War Between the States was still fresh in Southern memory in 1957.
We returned to New York and a great wave of black depression washed over us. Everything was different—or was it we who had changed? After Mexico, Long Beach was terrible. We had to get out—but where to? Not Mexico again; although Todd’s malaria had been a simple one and was now completely cured, we were still frightened. No more tropics with an infant; once had been more than enough.
Harry Harrison! Harry Harrison! Page 11