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“A Package from Spain”
© 2003 T. Adams
At 3 p.m. one Wednesday during the first week of July someone pulled the string on the brass bell outside Isabel's gate. I punched the 'save' key on my keyboard, walked across the terrace and followed the footpath to the gate.
"Quien es?" I called out.
A voice from across the wall answered, "Memo", the nickname for William.
"Memo?" I knew roughly eighteen "Memos."
"El Correo." Oh, Memo from the post office. I stepped through the knot of dogs that patrolled the garden and tentatively opened the door.
There stood the Ajijic postman holding a heavy, buff-colored envelope. It had been addressed by an angular, inky, and foreign hand. I searched my pocket, handed over a few pesos and offered Memo water. He declined and I looked at the empty basket on his bicycle and guessed he was anxious to get home. This part of his job required real stamina. Packages addressed to villagers usually towered over his postal scale before he loaded them onto his bike and carried them throughout the village. Isabel's house was a good two kilometer ride over cobblestones and rutted dirt roads. While buying stamps I'd seen packages with delivery instructions as vague as 'the adobe with the blue door by the tree in the arroyo'. He must have covered a lot of territory today. His hair was wet and the bottoms of his trousers were caked with mud.
I read the address on the package and saw that the sender had simply written Sra. Isabel Fuente, La Canacinta. I looked over at the oval plaque mounted on her garden wall that read 'La Quimera', and noticed for the first time since I'd lived there that the house had no number. I'd always fantasized about living in an unmarked house; a place where I could come and go like a stranger, unobserved and out of the reach of people I knew. There must be some flaw in my character, I worried, to want something so peculiar. But, the reason lay in the type of work I'd chosen. I needed seclusion and long open blocks of time. Too much of anything wore me out. With the envelope in my hand, I walked up and down the length of the wall and searched for a number beneath the greenery. I found a lizard, a briar of scarlet bougainvillea and a machete Beto had left wedged between two stones.
I carried the envelope back to the house and placed it on top of the piano, a place Isabel and I left messages for one another. The return address read Aviles, Asturias, Spain. "M. Fuente Perez" appeared above the address. So, I thought, Martin, the cousin with whom she'd shared the mystery of the thunderbolt had come out of his silence at last.
Just as I was walking out the door to my car the phone rang. Isabel was calling from Guadalajara to say she wouldn't be home until Friday, four days away. She'd spent the day buying airline tickets and making arrangements for a tour she was guiding in September. She'd be spending the weekend at her mother's home, she said, and would I call the iron man to check on the gates she'd ordered for the terrace? The first person in five years to pass the state tourism exam on the first try, she made her living guiding groups to unusual places in Mexico. She spoke English and French as well as she spoke Spanish, creating friendships that spanned Europe and the Americas. Distracted by making a note of the iron man’s cellphone number, I forgot to tell her about the package from Spain.
After hanging up I headed again toward my car. As I moved through the laundry I heard a yelling and slapping commotion coming from the gardener’s bodega. I looked closer and saw Beto through the latticework of the door, whacking flies with a cheap, short-handled fly swatter imported, no doubt, from China. Since the rains in June, we’d been battling flies and other insects who had vigorously initiated their life cycles by hatching in the moist ground. They now drove us crazy by bumping incessantly against our lighted bulbs at night, flying up our noses, and into our clothes and hair. Slow moving black flies bothered me the most, bedeviling me at the computer and landing on my glass as I tried to relax on the terrace at night. The dogs growled and snapped as mosquitoes whined past their ears and flew into their eyes. I’d slapped apart one swatter and had gone shopping for another. A wine glass, an earthenware pot, and a framed photograph of my sister had all fallen prey to my blows. I rationalized to friends who witnessed my sprees that ‘insects had broken some covenant with nature.’ It was high-handed baloney, of course, but I felt compelled to say something as I swung my swatter and hunted each invader with a ferocity I reserved only for the weeks after the rains.
As I peered through the bodega door I could hardly believe my eyes. The dull-witted, laconic boy we grownups knew had been transformed into one of the wildly popular superheroes all the kids worshipped in the comic books. Up flew his leg in a karate kick and down came the cheap swatter on his prey. I stepped away from the door and hunkered down by the gardening shelves and watched. Beto was a virtuoso. He slammed his victims with a precision that startled me and made me gasp with admiration. He had a backhanded, over-the-shoulder move that took my breath away. He swatted with one hand and caught others in mid-flight with the other. His casualties littered the floor of the bodega, speckling the blades of the push mower and bags of fertilizer. After every five moves or so he whacked again at their carcasses rendering a symphony of splats, whacks and highly convincing karate yells. He was completely unaware of my presence and more than anything, I wanted to keep it that way. I duckwalked backwards through the hedgerow, along the wall and then trudged, with my head low, the thirty meters to the gate. Away from the scrutiny of adults, Beto, the recalcitrant employee and obstinate son, was a heroic boy of promise.
That evening after Beto’s performance in the bodega I ventured out to a traveling tent show set up in Ajijic’s rodeo ring. The ring doubled as a soccer field, fairgrounds, music arena, and bullring. I’d waited until 10 p.m. knowing that the best entertainment always started well after nightfall. As I drove our lane my headlights flashed on the ejido lot that intersected the road. Fenced, with a tiny house, flatbed truck, milk cow, and rows of geraniums in cans, the lot belonged to Chuya. A stone’s throw from Isabel’s house, Chuya’s proximity was a major advantage of her employment. It came in handy when friends stopped to pick up keys, the dogs went missing, and unexpected callers needed to leave word of their visits. As my headlights swept the windows of Chuya’s house I saw her, with her hair down and her arms wrapped around her husband, dancing in the dark of her kitchen. In the space of a moment I saw Chuya as a woman and a wife, knowing in the second that I’d seen her that I’d always remember her closed eyes and serene smile as she rocked back and forth with her lover. Twice in one day, I’d been allowed into the lives of the people who worked within our walls. The orbit of my world skipped its groove and moved a little closer to theirs.
By the time I reached the rodeo ring, the traveling tent show was in full swing. A trailer parked crossways to the entrance served as the ticket booth. A woman holding a baby took my pesos and handed me three tickets to the show, one for each performance. It was a short walk from there to the tent. Inside, a stage had been erected in front of rows of benches set up for the audience. Two teenaged girls sold sweets, candied apples, and soft drinks along one side of the seating area. By the time I took my seat at the back, the room was two-thirds full. A comedy act of two singing cowboys had the crowd in stitches as they pratfalled their way through their routine. They were surprisingly good and I laughed out loud as they mugged their surprise at their sagging accordion and collapsible guitar. The next act surprised me, especially because of the number of children in the audience. Men, female impersonators actually, held microphones to their painted faces and lip synched popular tunes for the crowd. No one seemed to object in the least. In fact, the crowd whistled and catcalled during their performances with an enthusiasm that was as innocent as anything I’d ever witnessed. An elderly woman sitting on the bench next to me held her hand demurely in front of her mouth and laughed the raucous laugh of a sailor.
A twenty-minute break followed the female impersonation show. The lights remained dim in the tent while music blared over the speakers. The funny cowboy duo walked up and down the aisles hawking candied apples and joking with the crowd. I bought one and so did the woman next to me. We bit into our apples at the same moment, looked at each other and shrugged “Why not?”, then beamed each other with sticky grins.
Finally the show’s star attraction was announced. Señor Silva, the World’s Most Famous Hypnotist, proceeded to take the stage.
Read the complete article . . .
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