When the road to Tepoztlán dipped down on the mountains’ far side on the road to Cuernavaca, the rain stopped and I arrived at a colonial town in a valley shadowed by sheer hillsides and karsts covered with cream-flowered shaving brush trees. It was midday and the peaks were submerged in operatic mists. I walked by myself into the town center with my shoulder bag, the streets surrounded by gardens with dark volcanic walls and the sound of human voices dominant. Once again, they were speaking Nahua. I found the posada, where they had a room for me. It was an old villa with liver-colored walls and rooms set around a ground-floor terrace; the owner was a woman of opulent dimensions and the dark-green eyes of Iberia. Casually, I asked about the Carnival and about the other guests. Was it a famous Carnival and so was the hotel full?
It was, she admitted, but only for the Carnival days. Everyone was headed to Yaupetec in the afternoons. Would I care to book my group taxi now?
“I am waiting for a friend to arrive from the capital. Perhaps you could check to see if she has arrived yet. Mrs. Linder.”
She looked through the book without much haste and didn’t see the name.
“Does she go by another name?”
I tried Dolores, Araya, and the two combined. Nothing.
“I see. She’s a woman of about thirty—”
And I described her.
“Unfortunately the guests don’t describe themselves before they arrive. Maybe she’s coming down with a married man and doesn’t want it to be known. Or are you the married man?”
“A ring has never darkened my finger,” I lied.
“I’m sure it’s not true. Such a handsome man all the same—”
For a moment old quicksilver dashed through the veins, but almost as soon as it did it came to a halt again. A sudden wind whipping through a ruin, ruffling the dust.
“But meanwhile,” she went on, “I can let you know when someone like that arrives. Would you like me to do that discreetly?”
“You read my mind!”
“You don’t run a hotel for twenty years without being a mind reader.”
“It must be the least of your talents.”
I went up to the room and lay in a bed with draped mosquito nets. The time has passed, I thought, and all that’s left is empty plates. But couldn’t the last days also be the time of Carnivals? Carnivals were where old men could shine a little behind their masks and pretend that their vital spirits still worked. By nightfall, fires had started up in the wide cement square in front of the church, and I went out in my crumpled panama to take a stroll. Zapatista protesters were standing around their bonfires, and the walls were covered with their red graffiti. Traidores fuera! But who were the traitors? High on the sierra above the town the white pyramid of the ancestors could still be seen. The seat of the pulque god “two-rabbit” Tepoztecatl, god of alcohol and drunkenness. It was a fine divinity to have looking down on me as I sat down in the square and enjoyed the protests with a cactus ice cream. It occurred to me that the revolution had finally begun after all those years. Maybe I had been waiting for it all my life. A revolution, a Carnival, whatever it might be called when all the fireworks go off and the dancing begins. A disorder of the heart that makes the coda the highlight of the song. I had already decided that after the following day, tonight was my last night. Tomorrow I would finally pack my bags and go home. I would head back to La Misión with a mind ready for fishing and naps. And tequila. I went into a cantina by the square, a hellhole filled with farmers whose eyes had already wandered off into another world. There would be no song left to sing after midnight.
They say you are never old in your dreams. You stay young and dressed as you were when you were thirty, the high noon of your appeal. At night they all come back, the clients I once had in their magnificent houses just as they were in 1940 or 1952. The whiskey flows, the banter is sharp and sexually compressed, and sunlight pours over majestic lawns and driveways. They have no idea who I am and they care even less. For them I am garbage, a paid executioner. But the women among them feel their insides move. It’s the way of animals and drunks; at high noon everything looks beautiful and new.
Past midnight, I could hardly stand and a boy from one of the cantinas escorted me home. We sang a song together on the way and he told me that I wasn’t the drunkest drunk he had come across that week. He took me up to my room and left me dark of mind on the bed. I lay there all night in my clothes and dreamt that I was searching for my own tomb in a refugee camp in a forest. The tombs were made of wood and shaped like sleds, their outsides painted brightly. Briefly I woke and thought I heard gunshots from the town—either that or the Zapatistas had contented themselves with firecrackers. I couldn’t remember where I had been the evening before or what I had done. Cactus ice cream, I thought, and that was all I thought. It rained all night. The ghosts came into the garden and spoke in half a dozen languages. Topsy Perlstein came speaking Nahua and dancing the cancan. Far out in the darkness nightclubs from the past blared their horns and for a while I could hear the sounds of Coney Island rides.
In the morning the owner made me breakfast on the terrace. She told me that late in the night someone of Dolores’s description had arrived at the hotel and taken a room on the ground floor, but that she had left early for Yautepec. I asked what the name had been.
“Zinn.”
“That’s quite a name,” I said.
“She can have whatever name she likes. It’s a free country.”
It was still raining, but lightly now. Thunder simmered on the horizon. On the slopes near the hotel stood strange desiccated trees with dark-red coin-size seedpods hanging from the branches while izote flowers had burst into life as if overnight. The poetry of the earth is never dead.
Yautepec was an hour away. It seemed to be lost among endless valleys, like a place that has been mislaid by generations of madmen, and getting there was like riding on a fairground machine, the road rising and dipping and turning the stomach. It will be the last place I’ll ever go, I kept thinking. But I’d go to get a last view of the eyes I liked so much. Yautepec would be the last destination in which to find a criminal. On a field just outside its center, a thirty-foot-high pole had been erected for the ritual of the flying dancers who, with whistles between their teeth, rotated around the poles on colored ropes. These voladores had already started, and so I got out there and watched the flyers whirling around the pole on their ropes while a fifth dancer sat on the pole and hit a small drum.
I walked through the town in my straw hat with a flower in its band, a bottle of tequila in hand, in the vast confusion of the chinelos, with the rain thundering down around me. The costumed brass bands and the men in brocaded hats shaped like inverted pyramids. I felt at home. Why shouldn’t I have felt at home, since when all is said and done I don’t have one? There are men with homes and men without them. The latter are the diviners and madmen. And now I was surrounded by hundreds of masks that imitated the long-nosed faces and curled beards of the conquerors of centuries ago, of the men who looked like me. A thousand replications of my own face. They gyrated by shuffling and jerking their shoulders so that the cascades of beads and fringes and false pearls shook up and down in a sexual motion and eventually I was dancing among them, holding my cane in one hand, abandoned and freed, and as uncool and uncalculating as my prior life had been cool and calculating. I watched as dogs dragged small clusters of intestines through the mud from the market nearby and boys with axes hauled blocks of ice through the rain. But soon the skies cleared; the afternoon was bathed in a returning heat and a soaring sun. In the covered market where the exhausted revelers recovered at the tables of cantinas and restaurants, they were butchering pigs. Day turned to night while I sat there and the Carnival became an episode from the distant past. I was alone at the end of the road and there would be no more labyrinths, and I was perfectly happy among strangers. I had always been amid strangers, anyway, moving among them with a few quips and never really arousing their respect.
As night came down I walked out to the canal or stream that ran past the market, its high banks covered with broken glass. People had passed out in the street and lay there looking up at the sky without any visible regrets. The street curved alongside the embankment and its surface was wet. I tapped my way along it until the noise had receded a bit. Eventually I sat on the embankment amid confetti that plastered the road along with crushed piñatas. I thought I could see a Ferris wheel in the distance, all the locals in Stetsons with their girls standing about in the radiance of its lights. If it didn’t exist it was all the same to me. Cries and music, girls being whisked around in the Ferris wheel chairs. The confetti looked like snow, the dogs with guts in their jaws like swift reptiles. I set my now-empty bottle of tequila down in the grass next to me.
Across the street there was a bar of some kind. The plastic tables spilled into the road and under the string of bulbs a single woman sat in costume, drinking a bottle of Fanta. She wore a purple robe with silver hems and her hat was covered with sequins and tassels. She looked like a functionary of the Persian Empire in the time of Khusrow. The mask she wore was bright pink, a man’s face with a gold beard and black-rimmed eyes. She looked over at me and I had the feeling that she was smiling at me. Just then I thought of the words that had been running through my head for years like mental waste but which now served a purpose. My men, like satyrs grazing on the lawns, shall with their goat feet dance the antic hay.
She raised the beard of the mask and slipped the whole thing upward over her head until her face came into the bar’s lights. It was Dolores, the sorrowful one, and it was true that she had spotted me sitting on the bank.
She lifted the bottle of Fanta and the smile was as brilliantly unexpected as it was familiar. I had no cup to lift in her direction, but I smiled back and for a moment it was as if nothing had happened over the previous days. She pulled her mask back down, walked out into the street, and turned into the market, where the crowd was dancing. For a moment I thought of following her, but I no longer knew what I would be following or why.
Instead, I went to the bar and got my last drop of Sauza.
“Who was that?” I asked the man serving.
He shrugged, in the way of men who tend counters.
“Some woman from the city. They always come to the Carnival. They’re attracted to the violence.”
But what was the violence?
It was a joke. But at the same time I saw what he meant. Guns went off in the dark, that crisp pop that you never mistake for firecrackers. A point of frenzy was being reached, and you could say about such things that they are also the point of greatest contentment. I wanted to ask him what I should do next at my age—walk out into the fields and dance with the rest of them? But his eyes told me what I needed to know and I agreed with the plan. I got up without paying—he didn’t even raise a hand—and wandered into the music and the detonating handguns. I wanted to waltz quietly with someone beautiful, but although I looked for her I couldn’t find her in the melee. Later, in any case, when I was sober, I tried to remember whether I had seen even her face somewhere before in an earlier time. Somewhere at the bottom of a well, in a cinema long ago where a film was playing that no one now remembers. There have been so many of those faces and I never got the opportunity to see them age. That was the greatest sorrow of all, I suppose. I shouldn’t have been in such a hurry.