“How much farther is it?” asked the younger one. His name was Chucho and he had never been to Mexico City before.
“Just a little ways now,” said the older man. His name was Lupe and in his village he was considered widely traveled because he had been to the city several times before. “Just over the next hill. We will be there well before dark.”
So they walked on, some fifteen miles farther. Their feet had almost worn through their ancient sandals, and their bodies were nearly bent in two under the load of melons they bore upon their backs. The melons were carried in enormous baskets lashed with thick ropes that looped around the belly of the baskets and then across a patch of sweat-stained leather on their foreheads.
Like other beasts of burden, they had fallen into a slow but rhythmic pace. By the time the sun was directly above them they had begun to grow weary, but after stopping by the side of the road to eat the tortillas and cold beans their women had prepared for them in the village that morning, they had felt stronger. When they were less than ten miles from the capital, they quickened their pace a little so as to reach the city before dark. They were weary no longer. They were beyond weariness. Instead they moved in a kind of sleepwalking monotony, neither talking nor thinking.
It was not until they reached the ridge and looked down into the valley where the city awaited them that they became men again.
“Por Dios!” said Chucho. Through his mind passed many other words but he was not able to say the things he thought about the incredible geometric design of streets and buildings that stretched for miles below him.
“Wait until you are in it,” said Lupe, smiling with the pride that seasoned tourists always take in guiding first-timers. “Wait until you see the long cars that roll along without horses to pull them. And the mountains of steel and glass they have built themselves to live in.”
The road was downhill now and their worn-sandaled feet followed each other in more rapid succession. In less than two hours they were in the city. The streets were crowded with people who all seemed to be wearing twice as many clothes as they needed and who rushed along in a terrible hurry as if all of them had just been told that their mothers were dying.
The buildings were so high that Chucho, with the melons preventing him from standing straight, could not lift his eyes to see the tops of them. Ahead of him was a new one half completed, a towering skeleton of steel that rose twenty stories into the sky.
“And people are going to live in that?” said Chucho. “How do they manage to climb up into their homes?”
“I don’t know,” said Lupe. “That is something I have often wondered at. Maybe with a rope.”
Though they had penetrated far into the city they did not stop to rest and set their loads down so they could straighten up for a moment. Perhaps they feared lest such weakness would lead them to abandon their bodies to exhaustion and they would fall unconscious on the pavement. Or, more likely, it did not enter their heads to stop until they reached their destination. So they kept on until they reached the mercado público. Chucho had seen the open market in Cuernavaca that stretched through half a dozen narrow streets, but this market was like a great city in itself. Hundreds of farmers from Amecameca and Toluca and Texcoco were lying asleep in back of their stands with their wives and half a dozen children, waiting for their customers to come in the morning.
Chucho and Lupe found a place to set down their loads, lay their heads among the melons, pulled their straw hats over their eyes and snored until the first rays of the sun woke them in the morning.
In the sunlight the place swarmed with children, flies and people of the city who had come to buy. Lupe and Chucho squatted all day in back of their melons, laughing to one another at the funny way the people of the city looked and talked. Their own speech, the Nahuatal language of the Aztecs that had come down to them through the years, tinkled along like the flow of a brook. They had heard Spanish spoken before, but they could not understand it. It sounded to them as if it were being spoken by someone who was very nervous and always stuttering.
The sun was just beginning to slip behind the man-made mountains when Chucho and Lupe sold their last melon. In the little pouch around Lupe’s neck was more money than he had ever seen at one time in his life, forty-four hundred and two pesos and seventy centavos. In the pouch was also a strange shiny coin that neither Chucho nor Lupe had ever seen before. It had been given to them by a fat man with a very red face although he had not wanted to buy the melons which Chucho and Lupe had offered him.
“I just wanna get a picture of ya if you’ll just hold still a second,” he had said in a language which was neither as musical as Nahuatal nor as soft as Spanish.
A sophisticated Indian from Xochimilco in the next booth who spoke Spanish with a Nahuatal accent and was so worldly that he could cry out at the gringos, “Hey, Meester, ’allo, meester,” explained the strange coin to Chucho and Lupe.
“The gods are smiling at you today,” he said. “They have given you a gringo tostón.”
“What is it worth in real money?” asked Lupe.
“In our money, at least cien pesos. Maybe more.”
Lupe looked at the coin slyly. According to their custom, the forty-four hundred and two pesos were to be shared among the farmers in the village who had planted and harvested the melons together. But the gringo who had pointed his little black box with the bulging glass eye at them had not photographed all the villagers together. Chucho and Lupe alone had taken the risk in case the foreigner’s little box had turned out to be a deadly weapon. So by every right the gringo tostón was theirs and theirs alone.
“I’ll tell you what we’ll do, compañero,” said Lupe, placing a conspiratorial arm around Chucho’s shoulder and feeling a little drunk already with the power of the strange coin in his hand. “We will take this coin and place it on the bar of the nearest cantina. It has been a fine day and we have sold all our melons and now we will celebrate our good fortune. Then we will get a good night’s sleep on a bench in the park and start back to our village in the morning.”
The cantina was small and dark and crowded and reeked with the smell of stale clothing, bad breath and beverages whose odors were as strong as their effects. In the middle of the room the jukebox was playing a ranchero song at the top of its mechanical lungs. Half of the customers were helping the record along by singing in voices more voluminous than harmonious. The rest of the clientele was discussing serious matters in voices that had to be raised to ear-splitting shouts to be heard above the din. The name of the cantina was La Puerta del Sol, the gateway to the sun, and Lupe and Chucho were very happy to be there.
Near them at the bar was a heavy-set, ox-faced fellow who wore with considerable pride if not with any particular grace the uniform of the policía of Mexico City. His name was Rodolfo Gonzales and he was already on his third double tequila añejo. Officer Gonzales, an honest and conscientious defender of the law, nine times out of ten, was trying to drown his conscience. The day before, while he was on his beat directing traffic, he had apprehended a norteamericano driving a Mexican car without a license. The fine for this, Rodolfo had pointed out, was five hundred pesos. But the americano did not have that many pesos. He only had two hundred. And he was in such a hurry that he did not have time to accompany Rodolfo to the police station as Rodolfo requested. Would the officer be kind enough to take the two hundred and deposit it in the police station for him? the gringo had asked. After some persuasion, Officer Gonzales had agreed. And now a terrible thing had happened. Officer Gonzales had slipped the bills into his pocket and forgotten all about them. Now it was too late to rectify this lapse of memory and so there seemed nothing for him to do but invest the pesos in the kind of peace and forgetfulness that may be found at the bottom of a glass of tequila añejo.
This was not the only thing that occupied the mind of Officer Gonzales. Although it did not show in his face, the twin rats of ambition and envy were gnawing in his brain. Only that day his friend Armando García had been promoted from the rank of ordinary policeman to that of sargento. And all because Armando had caught two Arabs in a bar who turned out to be members of a terrorist ring. Rodolfo had joined the force several years before Armando and it hardly seemed just for him to go on wasting his talents directing traffic while his friend Armando was promoted above him. He consoled himself with another tequila. He did not like to flatter himself but he was a much more capable protector of the peace than his friend Armando García. If only an opportunity like Armando’s would fall into his hands!
Further down the bar Chucho’s and Lupe’s gringo tostón had dwindled to a fifth its original value. The other four-fifths had been changed into a currency more easily negotiable if one were negotiating as Chucho and Lupe were, with a glass in one hand and a slice of limón in the other. Lupe and Chucho were not drunk. If they were leaning on one another at a rather precarious angle it was simply an expression of the deep camaraderie that one Indian feels for another after accompanying him on a journey of many miles and sharing with him the sense of accomplishment one gets from selling all his melons at city prices.
They were discussing at this moment a subject of considerable importance, an issue, in fact, that was beginning to divide their entire village. Was it true that Angel Chavez had had his way with the supposedly virtuous Elena Cruz?
“Of course it is true,” Chucho insisted. “Only a fool would doubt it. In another eight months Elena Cruz will be fat as a sow before slaughter, you wait and see.”
“But what makes you so sure?” said Lupe, who was far more indignant about this case than he usually was about such things, perhaps because it was public knowledge in the village that Lupe could never take his eyes off Elena, and that she had slapped his face when he pinched her a little too intimately during the last fiesta. “I suppose you were there when it happened? I suppose you saw it with your own eyes?”
“No, I did not see it with my own eyes,” Chucho admitted. “But it was described to me by Pablo Rojas who got it from Juan Montoya who heard it from Jesus Tavarez whose aunt Josefina does claim to have seen it with her own eyes.”
Officer Gonzales did not let Chucho and Lupe know that he was observing them, for that is not the way a smart detective works, but he was edging toward them along the bar. He was unable to speak Arabic but at least he was clever enough to try and catch a word here or there. And he was quite sure he had heard these two foreigners mention something about Salina Cruz. Salina Cruz was a little port on the west coast and he had been saying to his friend Armando García just the other day, “If those Arabs try to blow up an Israeli freighter, it will be either Mazatlán or Salina Cruz.”
Sargento Armando García. Well, if these two little fellows turned out to be what he thought they were, he might get his promotion too. He ordered another drink and rolled the title around on his tongue. Sargento Rodolfo Gonzales. It sounded pretty good. “Have another drink, Sargento?” he said to himself. “Thank you, don’t mind if I do. It’s nice to have a chance to talk with you fellows with no stripes on your sleeves. Keeps me in touch with what the rank-and-file are thinking.”
He bit into another limón to cool the flames of the tequila that leaped in his chest. And once I’m a sargento, what’s to stop me from becoming a lieutenant? Just get in with the right people and do my job well.
He bit into another lemon. Teniente Rodolfo Gonzales. That would give Sargento Armando García something to worry about. “Well, García, I’ve been going over your record. I’m frank to tell you I’m disappointed in you. Being a sargento doesn’t give you the right to loaf, you know. And I’ve been hearing things about mordita. As your old friend, but now your superior officer, I’m giving you a little warning to watch your step.”
He had another drink and edged closer to his suspects. He couldn’t understand a thing they were saying but they were still talking about Salina Cruz.
“I don’t care what she told you when you tried to pinch her at the fiesta,” Chucho was saying. “Elena Cruz is not the innocent little flower she pretends to be.”
“If you’re saying I’m not as good a man as Angel Chavez,” said Lupe, who was tottering precariously between conviviality and belligerence, “come out and say it to my face so we know where we stand.”
And once I’m a captain, Officer Gonzales was thinking as he stared into his empty glass, what is to prevent me from becoming Chief of Police? All I need to do is build up a following, promise to make the sergeants lieutenants and the lieutenants captains …
The bartender filled his glass again. Rodolfo picked it up and smiled. Among the notables at the president’s palace for the Grito last night was Mexico’s popular chief of police Gonzales …
“I am not saying that you are not as much of a man as Angel Chavez,” Chucho said tactfully, if somewhat inarticulately. “I am merely saying that you were more inclined to respect Elena Cruz’s maidenhood than certain others I could mention.”
And once I am chief of police, thought Officer Gonzales as he put his glass down, then I am somebody. My hat is in the ring. I might run for governor. Or even presidente. After all, look at Cardenas and Camacho. They were just poor Indians who did not have even as much of a start as I have.
Officer—Sergeant—Lieutenant—Captain—Chief-of-Police—Governor—President Gonzales had one more drink, straightened his uniform and staggered up to Chucho and Lupe with the dignity the moment demanded of him.
“In the name of the Republic of Mexico, I hereby place you under arrest,” he said. Then with Chucho in one hand and Lupe in the other he marched them out of the Puerta del Sol.
That night Chucho and Lupe found themselves cooped up in a small damp cell in the city jail.
“I wonder what we have done to be treated like this?” said Chucho.
“Perhaps there is some law against speaking Nahuatal in the city of Mexico,” suggested Lupe, who knew more about the ways of the world than his younger friend.
That night three unfriendly guards, two in uniform and one skinny fellow with a skinny moustache and a skinny civilian suit came to Chucho’s and Lupe’s cell. The one in street clothes asked them if they were Arab terrorists. When the two melon-sellers shook their heads, because they did not understand the question, the skinny one nodded to the two burly uniforms, who began beating them, unemotionally, as if they were beating stubborn burros. Lupe and Chucho were too confused to cry out. They accepted the physical abuse just as the burros do—as part of the timeless process of life and death that begins with pain and ends in pain.
Finally, when the thin one and his two hard-bellied assistants could not beat a satisfactory answer out of Lupe and Chucho, they gave up in disgust and slammed the metal door behind them. Chucho and Lupe attended each other’s cuts and bruises as best they could. Lupe had lost one of his front teeth. He didn’t have too many to begin with, and it had been one of his favorites. Chucho found it for him on the stone floor of the cell, wiped the blood off it and handed it back to his companion. “Perhaps the bruja can put it back for you,” Chucho tried to console him.
“If we ever get home,” Lupe said. “If we ever get out of this crazy house.”
“Is it possible that we are not allowed to sell our melons in the city without permission?” Chucho asked. His head was aching and a purple lump was swelling over his left eye where the biggest of the two uniforms had hit him and then hit him again with his huge right fist.
Lupe nodded, with his hand over his hurt mouth. “In the city, anything is possible. In our village we live by the old laws. We do not have to write them down. Everybody knows them. But the city is full of people who are strangers to each other, so they can keep changing the laws as they please.”
Young Chucho’s head was pounding in confusion. “Tonight let us pray to our Lord Tepotzteco that they make a new law that will let us go home.”
But the following night the skinny man in the skinny grey suit returned with the two brutes in uniform. Again the little plainclothesman urged Lupe and Chucho to confess the obvious, that they were Arab terrorists whose plans to sabotage an Israeli freighter had been overheard by Officer Gonzales. And when Lupe and Chucho shook their heads, not so much in denial as in inability to understand what these city devils were talking about, the beatings were even worse than the night before. Another tooth was gone from Lupe’s modest but precious collection, and after the angry trio slammed the iron door behind them, Chucho was so dizzy he could not stand up. He sat on the hard bunk holding his swollen head and praying to Lord Tepotzteco louder than he had ever prayed before.
“Lupe, maybe they are going to kill us,” Chucho moaned. “Maybe there is a new law in the city that they kill people from the mountains who come down to sell their melons in the public market of the capital.”
Feeling the bloody spaces where his teeth had been, Lupe said nothing because he did not want to admit how little he knew about the ways of the capitalinos and that he knew no more than Chucho did as to what was going to happen next.
On their third night in this damp and smelly jail, Lupe and Chucho expected another visit from the skinny grey suit and the two sloppy uniforms, but to their surprise nobody came except an old guard who brought them a bowl of watery tortilla soup. By this time they had stopped asking questions of each other. They were like burros who endured beatings and indignities each day as if that were what they were born for.
On the morning of the fourth day two guards who did not beat them, but only shoved them along, brought Chucho and Lupe to an office where a spruced-up and eager Officer Gonzales was waiting to bring his spy ring before the police court. There he delivered the speech that he had rehearsed before the mirror in his room, complete with dramatic gestures and repeated references to Father Hidalgo, Benito Juarez and the Great Revolution of 1910.
“But these look like nothing more than a couple of little Indians from the mountains,” said the judge, after allowing Gonzales to reach his eloquent peroration.
“That may be the way they are disguised, Your Honor,” said Officer Gonzales. “But they didn’t fool me for a minute. They were talking Arab and making plans to blow up a Jewish ship in Salina Cruz.”
The judge frowned, and asked the prosecutor if a representative of one of the Arab embassies could be called as a witness to clarify the situation. But one was not so easily available. While Lupe and Chucho prayed and simply existed in their small cell, the judge was told that none of the Arab entities in the capital, neither Egypt nor Saudi Arabia nor even Yemen and Kuwait would send anyone to intercede for or against Lupe and Chucho. Apparently they all reasoned that if indeed the Mexican authorities had apprehended a pair of Arab agents, it would be wiser for them not to get involved. And if they should prove not to be Arab agents, or even Arabs, then it was clearly none of their business.
At the end of the week, when Lupe and Chucho were sick, but literally sick of tepid tortilla soup, and beginning to wonder if the fates had sentenced them to life imprisonment in this terrible place, they were suddenly brought back to the court again. Since no Arab official would come forward, the judge had subpoenaed a refugee from Iran who was a lecturer on Moslem culture at the University of Mexico.
While Officer Gonzales waited expectantly, the bearded Arab professor appeared. When he gave Lupe and Chucho the traditional Islamic greeting, they stared at him blankly. When he proceeded to ask them a series of questions in Arabic, they stared at him in total confusion. “Where does he come from?” they asked each other. It sounded neither Spanish nor gringo. “Maybe he speaks Mayan or Zapotecan,” Lupe said. They had heard these languages from the south were very different from their own.
“Your Honor,” said the expert on Islam from the university, “I have no idea what they are saying, but most definitely they are not speaking Arabic.”
The judge gave Officer Gonzales a look and sent for an interpreter from the Instituto del Indios. The Indian interpreter questioned Lupe and Chucho in Mayan, Zapotecan, Tarascan, Mixtecan, and finally in Nahuatal.
“They are farmers from a village in the municipio of Tepotzlan,” the interpreter explained. “I am happy to say that in the remote mountain villages of Morelos, Nahuatal is still a living language.”
“Let them go free,” the judge announced. “And Officer Gonzales, you will stand trial for false arrest.”
When Chucho and Lupe reached their village that evening after their long climb home, they went immediately to the hut of Emilio Lopez, the mayordomo of their barrio, to report what had happened.
“We have sold all our melons, but alas we have nothing to show for it,” Lupe said. “When we asked for the money they took from us in the jail, we were told their records showed we had no pesos in our pockets when the policía brought us in. Alas, it is not safe for any of us to go down into the city of Mexico ever again. It seems they have declared war on us. As soon as they hear us talking our own language, they drag us off to jail, beat us and rob us.”
That same evening, after a five-minute trial, Officer Gonzales paced the dark and lonely streets of Villa Obregón, the quiet suburb to which he had been exiled. With the horselaugh of Sargento García still ringing in his ears, he was soberly meditating upon the evils of tequila and the injustice of the world.