19

The Fool-Swap

Lyda once said that the best place to think, sleep, or make whoopee was on a train. Then she had to explain to Grace what whoopee meant. Grace had never made whoopee on a train, but she was thinking about it.

The rhythmic clack of the iron wheels across the riveted joints in the rails provided a metronome for those thoughts. Maybe when the hotheads, soreheads, and knuckleheads in the capital sorted out their political differences, she and Federico could book a sleeping compartment on the night train to Veracruz and take in the sea air.

Even though she staged séances for her guests, Grace never claimed to have psychic abilities. But now she could not shake a nagging concern for the safety of President Madero and his wife. The memory of the look in General Huerta’s eyes as he stepped into the victoria cab and headed for Cuernavaca’s train station haunted her.

In spite of her uneasiness about the situation in the capital she felt guilty leaving Cuernavaca for even these few days. But if she were going to desert the Colonial, February was a good time. The flurry of Christmas pageants and 1913’s New Year’s celebrations had ended. Lyda, Socrates, María, and the rest of the staff could handle the hotel’s daily operation.

Grace used the need for supplies as an excuse to go to Mexico City, but Lyda knew the real reason. Grace wanted to see Federico Martín at Tres Marías. If Lyda knew that Rico had been spending the late-night hours in Grace’s room, she never let on.

Grace could have sent a telegram to tell Rico she was coming, but she knew that the telegraph machine sat on a table in the adjutant’s office. A major source of entertainment for Colonel Rubio and his staff was reading telegrams as they came in. Rico’s comrades-in-arms almost certainly would see any message before he did. Grace was acquainted with many of Rico’s comrades-in-arms so she paid a muleteer to deliver a letter instead.

Now she wished she had hitched a ride with the mules, and to hell with her fear of the beasts. The most wayward mule could move faster than this train. Was it her imagination, or had the clacking, creaking, swaying, and rattling become more alarming since the last time she rode it?

Mexicans never ceased to mystify Grace. They had blasted through mountains, spanned chasms, and cantilevered trackbeds out into very thin air to construct 19,000 miles of rails in unforgiving terrain. Maintaining their feat, however, seemed beyond them. She suspected their fatalistic attitude toward death had something to do with it. After all, what sort of people buy skulls made of spun sugar as treats for their children on All Souls’ Day?

To be fair, the engine had cause to slow down. The pass at Tres Marías was ten thousand feet in the air. The train had left the valley and had passed through the villages of bougainvillea-covered huts scattered among the foothills. Now it was chugging up a grade that, in Grace’s opinion, put it in dereliction of the law of gravity. This was the part of the journey she dreaded. The railbed made sharp switchback turns and as the air grew thinner, her queasiness turned to nausea.

She knew that fretting wouldn’t bring her to Rico any faster or make her feel better. The slant of the coach already had her tilted back. She laid her head against the threadbare velvet of the first-class seat and let her thoughts wander.

This little narrow-gauge train with its balloon-shaped smokestack reminded Grace of Annie’s favorite story in the Kindergarten Review magazine. “The Pony Engine” was about a small locomotive that set out to haul a long line of freight cars over a steep hill after the bigger engines refused. When asked to do something, Annie usually gave the Pony Engine’s reply. “I think I can.”

As this train strained to make it up the slope, Grace could hear the pistons chanting, “I think I can. I think I can. I think I can.”

Kind, rambunctious Annie. By the time Grace met Annie the child had few artifacts from her former life. She had brought along the Kindergarten Review magazine when her father took a job with the American Smelting and Refining Company in Sonora, Mexico. A few months later he ran off with, as Lyda put in, the part-time stenographer and full-time tart in the company’s main office. He hadn’t been heard from since. When anyone was tactless enough to ask if she had received word from him, Lyda said she had not, probably because hell did not have telegraph service.

Lyda and Annie had ended up in Cuernavaca, carried 1,200 miles on the fickle tide of choices and circumstances that arrange everyone’s fate. Lyda had walked into the Colonial fourteen months ago and asked Grace for a job. She was strong evidence for one of Grace’s favorite theories: some people must have been acquainted in a former life, because on first meeting they feel as if they always have known each other.

Grace pushed up the bottom half of the soot-smeared window and leaned out into the resin-scented breeze. She narrowed her eyes against flying ash and cinders, but the fresh air and the view were worth it. She noticed more stumps among the tall pines though, cut for firewood to keep the train running.

She saw Rico and Grullo waiting on an outcrop. She waved and he spurred the silver-gray stallion down the slope and alongside the tracks. The train labored along so slowly that Grullo easily kept pace. If any sight was more beautiful than Rico on that horse Grace couldn’t imagine it.

When the train chugged to a stop in the tiny stone station, Rico was waiting to help her down the steps. She said, “Excuse me,” turned away, and threw up on the rail. Evidence alleged that she hadn’t been the first to do that.

Rico had seen a lot of passengers do the same thing and he was prepared. He dampened his big linen handkerchief with the cold spring water in his canteen. He gave her the handkerchief and then the canteen to rinse the taste away. Finally he handed her a bottle of Coca-Cola, also chilled, probably in the same spring from which the water came. The makers of the beverage claimed it cured morphine addiction, dyspepsia, headaches, neurasthenia, and impotence. It should do to calm an unsettled stomach.

Juan waved from the far end of the small platform. “Hola, Mamacita.” Then he went back to flirting with the prettiest of the young women who sold food and trinkets to the train’s passengers.

While one worker lowered the spout on the water tank, others threw wood into the tender. Rico led Grace up a well-worn path to an overlook. Below them the valley spread out in a patchwork of fields, villages, sugar refineries, and haciendas. Cuernavaca’s roofs clustered in the middle of it with the two volcanoes standing watch.

Rico pointed to a mosaic of fields fanned out around the rambling terra-cotta tile roof of a house, and the chimneys of a sugar refinery.

“That’s my family’s hacienda. It’s called Las Delicias. The Delights.”

Grace was impressed. Las Delicias was bigger than any of the estates surrounding it. And its fields were still green. Rico had to be relieved by that. Grace was surprised by how much of the valley’s area was charred. The rumors about the Zapatistas’ depredations must be true.

Railroad workers weren’t noted for their speed or efficiency, but Grace was sure only a few minutes had passed before the train’s whistle blew.

“The fool-swap is about to leave,” said Rico.

“Fool-swap?”

“One of your English poets wrote, “‘You enterprised a railroad, you blasted the rocks away…and now every fool in Buxton can be in Bakewell in half an hour, and every fool in Bakewell can be in Buxton.’”

“It doesn’t rhyme.”

“Don’t blame me. I didn’t write it. But thanks to the railroad the chilangos, the fools, in the capital can easily reach Cuernavaca and vice versa.”

Grace had received hardly any formal education and the breadth of Rico’s astounded her. “How do you know about British writers?”

“A course in English literature.”

“At Harvard?”

“Yes.”

“How broad-minded of the Yanks to include us in their curriculum.”

“The Yanks have forgotten all about that tea party in Boston harbor.”

“We haven’t.” Grace smiled when she said it.

Rico handed her back up the steps to the first-class coach. She told him where she would be in hopes he could take leave and join her. He waved from the platform as the train pulled away.

The downhill leg of the journey was much faster, but more terrifying. Grace kept her eyes closed for most of it.

She was never prepared for the clamor at Mexico City’s rail station. Passengers hung out the windows and called to their friends. Porters yelled. Hotel touts burst into the car, each trying to out-shout the other. Police whistles shrilled and horns blared in the streets beyond.

Her late husband’s cousin, Calisto Mendoza, was waiting for her. He loaded her bags into his Nike roadster and headed out into the busy street as if his were the only car on it. As he wove in and out of traffic Grace gripped the door frame so tightly the blood drained from her knuckles. The number of vehicles seemed to have increased exponentially since her last visit, and every other one was a trolley or bus. Every inch of wall space not plastered with advertising posters was covered with admonitions not to post them.

No wonder the Capital’s residents, the chilangos, had a reputation for being high-strung and irritable. Grace felt grateful again for the mountain range that encircled Cuernavaca. No matter what that English poet wrote about the railroad making it easier for fools to travel, the mountains kept the chilangos from creating this sort of bedlam in her beloved City of Eternal Spring.

Calisto Mendoza drove past parks, monuments, and the magnificent opera house. Besides the big department store, El Centro Mercantil, there were German beer halls, English banks, Italian restaurants, French lingerie stores, and at least one Japanese curio shop. Once the car turned onto the tree-lined Paseo de la Reforma in the heart of the city Grace relaxed. The embassies and handsome homes that lined the boulevard had not changed. Nor had the Mendoza family’s three-story house that fronted on it.

The drab façade gave no hint of the elegance waiting on the other side of the twelve-foot-high, carved oak doors. Calisto honked as he approached them, and the doors swung open to reveal a tropical paradise. Parrots and toucans flew among flowering trees and exotic plants. Vines almost hid the moss-covered stone walls and wrought-iron balconies of the house itself.

Calisto eased the Nike into the roofed entryway, but he hit the brake halfway into the tree-shaded courtyard beyond. Grumbling about useless modern gadgets, he got out and moved a velocipede and at least a dozen roller skates scattered next to the Minerva touring car, which was painted bright red to match the Nike. Grace never did know how many people lived here, but from the number of skates she assumed more children had been added.

The family was waiting for her in the parlor where a cheerful fire burned in the corner hearth. Tears stung Grace’s eyes as her husband’s kin embraced her. She and Carlos had been married only two years, yet they treated her as if she had always been a member of their family.

Carlos had never said what positions his relatives held in Porfirio Díaz’s government, and Grace had not asked. In spite of the high regard that many of the Colonial’s foreign guests had for Díaz, Rico had educated her about the dark side of his regime. Grace liked the Mendozas. She did not want to learn anything about them that might affect her affection for them.

Calisto translated as his family tried to tell Grace everything that had happened in the past six months. She learned that the newcomers in the house were distant relatives from Morelos. Zapata’s indios brutos, they said, had burned their hacienda.

That night Grace shared a bed with the family’s aged aunt. The aunt snored, but Grace was so tired she heard only eight or ten of the honks and whiffles before she fell asleep. Grace intended to take Calisto’s wife, Rafaela, aside in the morning and tell her about Rico, but finding anyone alone in the Mendoza house was next to impossible.

For the next two days, a chauffeur drove the Minerva so Grace, Rafaela, and two female relatives could shop. When Grace finished buying the supplies she needed for the Colonial, they made the rounds of Rafaela’s favorite stores. She insisted that Grace have the latest in French undergarments. She held it up by a strap for Grace’s inspection. She said it was called a brassiere and she and the cousins offered suggestions while Grace tried to figure out where the hooks and laces went.

At dinner Saturday night, Calisto invited Grace to attend early Mass with the family at the cathedral on the city’s central plaza. After that they could rent boats in the floating gardens of Xochimilco, then attend the Sunday afternoon band concert in Chapultepec Park.

It sounded like a perfect way to spend the day. Grace looked forward to relaxing on Sunday. On Monday she could visit President and Mrs. Madero and set her mind at ease about their welfare.