Incident at Baja

–This one guy may be alive, said Wolfie.
–Let’s go. Let them be. Someone may be staking them out.
This was in Baja, south of the border. There were three of them. One was a woman. The bodies had started to decompose.
–This guy may be alive. I think I saw him breathe. I’m telling you.
The car had California plates. The man who might have moved looked dead dead good. He sat up motionless in the dusty car. The windows were all down. It looked like someone had taken a bottle of blood and spilled it all over the man. His pants were orange with it. The air had oxidized the blood. The sun dried it. Or something. Whatever you call it.
–Let’s go. Someone may be staking them out. Drug dealers. Federales. Anyone. Let’s go.
This was in Rosarito. Wolfie had ingested a hit and a half of lysergic acid diethylamide. He couldn’t be trusted in his judgment of the scene. The trio in the Caprice looked almost mummified. No chance anyone could have been alive. They were dried up by the sun and heat. It looked like they were executed, except for the driver. A large rock had been used to gauge his torso. There was evidence of a fire that may have been part of his torture. Shards of a burned sweater or shirt still clung to the man’s forearm. Despite, they looked quite peaceful, though. To me. I was young. I didn’t know much. They looked like what I thought the bodies in New Orleans above-ground mausoleums, left to be sun-dried, might have looked like. Made of leather. Fake, almost. Shriveled. There was a cloud of dust forming at the horizon.
–Let’s go.
At the front of it I saw a green VW beetle, racing toward us. A taxi.
–Let’s go, for Chrissakes.
Wolfie thought it was a giant toad. Someone was taking a taxi to the scene. The Zetas. Who. Osiel Cardenas Guillen. Being driven in a taxi. It was a ridiculous notion.
–Come on. Jesus.
We left and went south. At Santa Rosalía we took the ferry across to Quaymas, then went down to see a friend in Ciudad Obregon who had promised us cocktails and lobster with a view. Wolfie was amazed at the sight of mud huts on the side of the road. It reminded me of villages in my country. Wolfie bought an ounce from our friend, and I made out with a bottle of tequila from Nuestro Orgullo. The incident was not reported in the papers. We checked La Cronica and La Voz de la Frontera. There was nothing.

(Author’s Notes)

Señora De Las Iguanas

It’s a straight line across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, north to southeast.
(I still love Mexico.)
You go from Veracruz right down to Juchitan de Zacagoza.
You go in a yellow 1968 Volkswagen Beetle with a broken cassette player and a furry rabbit’s foot dangling from the rearview.
You go past adobe and mud huts and smoke an Indonesian black clove.
And another.
And another.
There is no illusion of time, just the Mexican countryside rolling at one hundred kilometers an hour.
You think: this is what it’s like in my own country, so you’re not shocked when you see outhouses, poverty, clotheslines.
I love Mexico.
Misery is somehow transcended here.
By what? By whom?
God?
In Juchitan you hit the Pacific Ocean where you catch the sun going into the water.
Coronita beer is five cents at the Salvador bar where a beautiful, brown, Mexican woman with a missing front tooth smiles and serves you even though you’re sixteen years old.
Juchitan is in Oaxaca province.
It’s an ancient, communal, matriarchal society.
It’s fiercely independent.
Everything that is run by women is beautiful.
Everything that is done by women is beautiful.
The goat’s dance precedes the slaughter, and even that is sadly prepossessing and resplendent.
You watch the blade slowly go into the flesh and don’t turn away.
Grandfather did it that way, too.
Only he needed help to hold down the swine.
And the animal’s cries were horrendous.
Do you remember that?
I told you about that; about how when I was a child, I’d run to the room at the back of the house and cover my ears and hum.
But the women even slaughter beautifully.
They give life so elegantly.
And take it back just the same.
You are in Juchitan to try to see through Graciela Iturbide’s eyes.
Only you cannot.
You can just recall her photographs.
And listen to the women of the town spin their tales: Long ago there were two hunchbacks. One was kind but the other was mean and spiteful. The two hunchbacks could not work in the village because everybody made fun of them; therefore they went into the hills to cut wood. That is, the kind one cut all the wood since the mean and spiteful one was very lazy and was always telling his companion:
–Ay!, how sick I am today. It is better if you go and cut the wood this week.
His partner, being kind-hearted, would go into the mountains and do all the work week after week…
That was Domingo Siete.
Well, part of it.
The woman who sat with me and told me that tale also used a needle to dig out a splinter from under my skin.
On my finger.
She sterilized it in the fire in her home.
She told other stories while she worked the needle into the flesh and somehow never drew blood.
El Principe Oso, Blanca Flor, El Conejito Verde.
And El Chupacabra.
Not the tale, but the drink.
Banana, orange juice, pineapple juice, guava juice, and rum.
Clemencia y José:
–Very long ago there lived a couple who had a daughter named Clemencia. The mother, who was a witch, did not like Clemencia because she said the girl was a fool who was always going to church…
A fool. Always going to church.
She tells you about Graciela Iturbide.
–She went back to your country to photograph Texas.
You say.
–That is not my country. I don’t have a country.
And then she laughs because she knows you’re just a child.
Speaking in child tongues.
Speaking child words.
She says.
–Mi hijo, everybody belongs somewhere. Even if in the end, it’s just in the earth.