—And then what happened?
—I don’t remember.
—Try, Father.
—It happened a long time ago.
—Were you in school, or were you sitting in a tree? What did you say when they first shouted, “Tarzán, Tarzán!” Did it make you cry?
—What questions you ask me, Lalita. How am I supposed to remember things like that?
—Are we almost there? Tikis asks from the seat that faces backward. —It’s taking too long.
—Too long! the Grandmother says. —These nice roads are here thanks to your grandfather’s hard labor. Before the highway commission built this very highway, it used to take three weeks to travel what we cross in only a few hours now. Imagine what it must’ve been like for us with the heat and the bugs and the being bumped about on burro. We suffered, believe me.
—I thought Grandfather was just a bookkeeper, Tikis says. Ito shoots him a dirty look, and Rafa sends him an elbow.
—He may have been a bookkeeper, the Grandmother says, —but he had to fight the dust and jungles and mosquitoes and dynamite blasts just as much as anyone who picked up a shovel. This was nothing but wilderness before the highway commission. People had to travel by boat, and by rail, and horse, and when the rains arrived, by burro or on the backs of Indians. They say the emperor of China once sent a gift to Hernán Cortés that was supposed to travel over this route. Two beautiful Chinese vases big enough for a man to hide inside. But the way they tell it, the Spanish viceroy had to send them back, all the way to the Chinese emperor across the sea, imagine. Because the mountain trails were so bad he couldn’t be sure the vases would survive the trip.
—Why didn’t he just say they broke, Grandmother, and keep them for himself instead of sending them back to China and hurting the emperor’s feelings?
—What nonsense you talk, child! How am I supposed to know?
On the side of the road, a dog making caca.
—Don’t look! the Grandmother shouts. —You’ll get a sty on your eyelid.
We pass towns with big mudholes in the streets and runaway pigs, and mountains a green-green-green that makes you want to cry. Everything smells like silver. As if it just rained. As if it wanted to.
In Taxco we have lunch in a restaurant open to the street. A dead man passes on the shoulders of a funeral procession just as we are shoveling big spoonfuls of green rice into our mouths.
The road to Acapulco is so winding, it’s better to look where you’ve been instead of where you are going. The hot wind smelly like an aquarium. We have to stop for Antonieta Araceli to drink Tehuacán mineral water because of a queasy stomach. Then we have to stop further on because all of us kids need to pee from drinking too many bottles of Lulú and Pato Pascual. Before we get to Acapulco we’re throwing up in several flavors. Tamarindo, tutti-frutti, lime, orange, strawberry.