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Tales from the Maracuyá Part Three "On the Road to the Cofradia" By Teresa A. Kendrick

By the end of June, the villages around the Lake were cool and green and deserted, the time of year everyone waited for. Influenced by tourism, we knew that visitors would begin returning in November and stay until taxes were due again in April.

I planned two trips, one west to the Pacific coast and the other north to a lake in the state of Nayarit. As I packed for my trip north I shuttled back and forth to my car between email sessions on my computer. A book of mine was selling well on the Internet and correspondence was heavier than usual. By mid-morning my emails were answered and my car packed and ready to go. I stood back from the big sedan I’d bought from an American friend and wished for the Bronco II I’d originally brought to Mexico. It was my idea of a perfect vehicle. It rode high, made tight turns and was narrow enough to navigate cramped village lanes and overgrown trails. Its dramatic demise became legend after friends saw photos of it burning to the tires at the Guadalajara airport. Its ruin taught me an important lesson: negotiation is an essential art in Mexico.

A less than robust combi overtook us on the ramp to the airport that morning as my friend Tony and I approached Miguel Hidalgo International. The driver of the combi and his passenger, both ranch workers, passed waving their caps and yelling greetings. Remarking on the extreme affability of the working man in Mexico, my friend and I smiled and waved back. When a whoosh sounded from under the passenger seat and a black streak of smoke streamed in the window, we were suddenly educated about our popularity on the roadway. FIRE! I pulled the car into a turning lane and we bolted—myself, the unfortunate Tony, and my dog, Atticus. A businessman in the car behind us ran up pulling the pin on a portable extinguisher and sprayed the flames shooting out from under the wheels. Just as we yanked the luggage the battery exploded beneath the hood. As the battery blew, fire trucks began arriving. Ten minutes later damage control aircraft trucks arrived and covered the Bronco in a blanket of hissing foam. The businessman drove Tony to his gate and I stood disbelieving, hysterical with laughter as I watched myself in one of strangest movies I could have imagined. I thought, more than once, that this doesn’t really happen to people, does it? Hours later when I made my formal report to the Federales de Caminos, the Highway Patrol, I suddenly remembered that my premium check had cleared just four days earlier. In the same breath I worried to my friend who drove me that my tourist policy might not pay off and I wondered what good would come out of a bizarre event like this. We’d both lived long enough to know that good things can come out of disasters as long as you didn’t go looking for the panic button.

A week later my doorbell rang and a woman stood outside. She held in her hand an envelope of photographs she’d taken of my burning Bronco. The story of how she’d arrived at the airport from Texas and stood waiting, camera around her neck, for her son to collect her wasn’t unusual. But when she described how she’d been compelled to track me down from Guadalajara, I was astonished to find myself in the middle of several extraordinary events. Her son had read my name in Guadalajara’s English newspaper, the Colony Reporter, and called the publisher who supplied my phone number. Not able to reach me by phone, she’d simply driven the hour’s journey from the city to look for me. She’d stopped a woman who knew me who told her where I lived. She’d driven the three blocks to my house and rang the bell.

Two days after meeting my benefactress I rode the village bus to Chapala. I paid my 4 pesos to the driver and sat next to a girl in Catholic school plaid on her way home from classes. I gripped the packet of photos in my hand and practiced the speech I was going to make. "I’m very sorry to tell you this, but something was wrong with the repairs you made on my car." "I’d like to have my money back." I’d laboriously worked out the speech on a blue-lined notepad at my kitchen table using the minimum of Spanish I could manage. It had taken me longer to decide how to handle my confrontation with garage’s owner.

I reviewed the facts in my mind. I’d contracted the garage to pull the engine to replace the gaskets. After collecting the car I’d smelled fumes under the hood and saw that gas was pooling around the fuel injectors. I’d taken it back to the mechanic who told me he’d put rubber rings around the injectors that weren’t exactly the correct size but that they’d serve. I’d driven it home and taken it back again when I found the smell of gas behind the dashboard overwhelming. He’d checked again, fiddled with the rubber rings and pronounced it fit to drive. I drove away with a funny feeling in my chest not believing his assurances but cornered by them, too.

The next day after the fire I’d ridden out to the yard where they’d towed my Bronco. The inside of the car no longer existed. The dash was completely melted, revealing what was left of the engine. The seats, headliner, armrests and floor carpets had vanished, completely incinerated.
"Buenas tardes." I smiled and dipped my head slightly to a young woman behind the desk at the garage.
"Buenas tardes."
"May I please be permitted to speak with the owner?"
"Yes, ma’am, this is he," and she indicated a slender man in his late ‘60’s standing next to a rack of tires.
"May we visit for a moment," I asked, and I pulled out the photographs, spreading them on the desk in front of us. I hesitated and then began, "I’m very sorry but the repairs…"
The expression on his face told me what I’d suspected. To return the $450 US dollars I’d given him for repairs was going to be a hardship. He’d have to pay for the parts out of his own pocket, dock his mechanic’s wages and be forced to fire an employee. He wanted to refuse but in the last year several foreigners had been able to recover money from questionable business dealings through a consumer agency in Chapala. A blessing for the legitimately swindled, a man with a good reputation and a substandard employee could take a beating if the aggrieved party wanted to pursue it. He launched a polite attack.
"Yes, I know that he was the only person to work on your car, but we can’t know for sure what started the fire."
I countered. "Yes, that’s true, we can’t know for sure because it burned so badly, but no one else has worked on this car for months, and then I had to bring it back, two times. Your man said it was okay, but look, please look at the photos. I’m sorry, but I really need my money back."
He was defeated but proud. He emptied his cash box, wrote me a check for the balance and wished me well as I left the shop. Even though we were on opposite sides of the fence, he’d behaved with dignity and I’d liked that.

Several years later I became his customer again, telling people, "Well, yes, that’s the shop that blew up my Bronco, but the owner is an honorable man. I’d recommend him." The first time I said it, I thought, ‘God, what an absurd thing to say’ and later came to understand that both things could exist together and be equally true.

I meditated on the story of my blackened Bronco as I battled the traffic along the periferico, the ring road around Guadalajara. In seven years the once new road was now becoming increasingly lethal. Trucks boomed by in the narrow lanes, and what had been open road was now punctuated with stoplights to slow the movement of traffic. The ring road had been sucked into the unsavory squalor of the "ugly Guadalajara". Dirty from exhaust and the powdery tuff that blew from the ground, the traffic barriers collected blown trash and more than their share of dead animals who’d ventured across and been trapped by the traffic. Stretches of the highway were divided by medians that allowed drivers to turn around through openings called retornos. The flow of traffic was so heavy that drivers three and four abreast would stack up in the retornos waiting for a break in traffic. Horrific accidents occurred as impatient drivers pulled out into the stream of fast moving trucks. I witnessed one of the worst. A man driving an ancient blue sedan pulled in front of an SUV driven by a well-known soccer player on his way to the airport. The soccer player was late and driving well above the speed limit. The old sedan creaked out from its slot in the retorno and was literally cut in half, bisected by the SUV as it rammed the vehicle. I saw both pieces of the old car lying across the road. It had carried six members of a single family and all had died. The next day friends had seen their caskets, some large and some small, laid out on the plaza in Cajititlán as the rest of the family began their nine days of mourning.

At the north end of the periferico the sign announcing the toll road to Tepic, the main city in Nayarit, loomed overhead. Finally, I was on my way to one of my favorite places, la laguna de Santa Maria del Oro. The road stretched out and I leaned back, relieved to have it to myself. I settled back with the music loud and my foot on the pedal. I felt peaceful watching rows of blue maguey rush past my window.

About two hours later I passed through one of the strangest sections of the highway, the Ceboruco lava field. Jalisco and Nayarit, along with the western part of Mexico, comprised a portion of the Pacific Ring of Fire. The famous Mt. Tequila and other spent volcanoes were evidence of the area’s volcanic past, but none was more dramatic to me than Ceboruco. I could see its blunted cone on my left as I passed through the area that marked the end of its lava flow. Both sides of the road were completely covered with reddish rocks that converted the landscape into a day trip to the moon. I marveled at its stark and alien beauty for miles.

By late afternoon I arrived at the exit to Santa Maria del Oro. I stopped, paid my 50 peso toll and began coiling down the serpentine road to la laguna. It was a tiny turquoise jewel of a volcanic lake, a kilometer and a half wide and, according to the locals, 90 meters deep. The miniature biosphere it created harbored more than 300 kinds of birds including the long-tailed blue jay, a beauty whose tail feathers reached more than two feet beneath him. I’d been introduced to the lake by my friend Lou, a old Mexico hand who’d come south in the sixties to paint. He had an artist’s eye for place and from the day he’d introduced me to it, I’d made the lake my own. For two months one year I’d lived there in a cottage rented to me by an Englishman. I’d walked the lake’s footpaths in the mornings and swum its waters in the afternoons. A day’s dip was a vigorous two and a half hour workout. I wore ocean-length flippers and carried a small float that allowed me to rest and look at the mountains as I kicked. In the middle of the lake I floated, turning in wide slow circles with my head back and my arms out, mesmerized by the sun and by the mysterious universe of water below me. In the mornings when I watched children ride to school in one of the native boats I thought how a child in Beruit might like to do that. Santa Maria was a jewel I held close and treasured.

The whine from my power steering interrupted my reverie and I noticed that I was approaching the road to the Cofradia, the place I considered the halfway mark on the descent to the lake. The sun was still high in the sky and its rays glinted off my windshield as I steered into the turn.

And then I saw him. A boy, about fourteen years old, was lying on the road beneath the Cofradia sign. I pushed the brake pedal hard, pulled over and switched off my engine. He’s just sleeping, I thought, as I approached him, and then suddenly I knew better. As I knelt over him I saw a thin line of spittle on his chin and noticed that his hands had been folded over his heart. Maybe he’s unconscious, I hoped, but the air around him had a strange and utterly vacuous quality to it.

I stared at him. He wore the elongated look of a boy who’d just endured a growth spurt; his hands and feet were bony and his neck was thin. He had an exquisite beauty mark near the cupid’s bow of his perfect mouth and a few silky hairs sprouted from his chin. When I leaned over him to touch his neck he smelled of sweat, dust, and crushed vanilla bean.

And then time did that funny thing it does sometimes in Mexico. It stretches and whirrs, dilating ordinary minutes into peculiar parcels of being. I looked around me and realized that we were completely and utterly alone.
A buzzing sensation began in my head as I turned the key in the ignition. I needed to tell someone in the village of Santa Maria that there was a dead boy on the road. As I pulled into town I searched the plaza with my eyes. It had the same vacuous quality I’d felt near the boy. I left my car in the middle of the street with its door open and stepped into the tiny shop that sold groceries. Flies worried the tomatoes heaped in bins and an old fan creaked loudly in the corner. I left and walked the half block to the video store where village kids spent most afternoons taunting one another. Except for a VCR that someone had placed on the counter, it too, was empty. I went out into the street and looked up and down without seeing a single person. I stood there and tried to imagine how this could possibly be.

After a moment I noticed a movement in the window of a shop across from me. I looked up and read the sign Hernan Martinez Fotografó. A photographer’s studio. I crossed the street, passed through the opened door and stood for a moment as my eyes adjusted to the gloom. A stooped man of about sixty was making adjustments to a door that lay across two sawhorses. A lamp and a large portrait camera stood on tripods facing the makeshift table.
"Perdón," I ventured. The man hesitated a long second before turning around.
"Perdón," I started again and then blurted, "There’s a dead boy on the road. Up by the road to the Cofradia. A dead boy…on the road, a dead boy…"
He looked at me then, taking in my shock and answering kindly, "Si Señorita, there is a dead boy on the road."
"He’s alone, I mean, shouldn’t we call someone? He’s by himself on the road…where is everyone…?" I finished lamely, gesturing in the direction of the street.
"They’ve gone to tell the patron," he said and I remembered that small villages designated its wealthier members as patrons who were notified of the town’s events in the absence of officials.

Then why hadn’t he gone, I wondered. And then it dawned on me. He was preparing to take the boy’s funeral portrait in the traditional way of the country people. I noticed a draping cloth lying on the floor by the table, a pair of polished shoes, and a worn black suit, carefully arranged on a hanger, hanging by a nail on the wall. Someone had gathered flowers.
He must have watched me assemble the pieces of the tableau in my mind; all that was missing now was the boy. He looked at me for a long moment and said in the most compassionate voice I’d ever heard, "Don’t worry, Señorita", he said. "An angel is passing today." And then he turned and went back to his work, leaving me to see myself out.

Tales from La Maracuyá
Part 3, "On the Road to the Cofradia"
© Teresa Kendrick August 2003
ajijic@chapalaguide.com
You can buy Teresa's book on Amazon.com
Mexico's Lake Chapala and Ajijic
The Insiders Guide to the Northshore for International Travelers


Part One here

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