THE RETURN

(Excerpted from the travel memoir On Mexican Time)

June. We’ve astonished ourselves. We’ve sold our house in California, put our remaining things in storage, and returned to Mexico.

“Qué milagro, Rafael says pensively, watching us stumble back through the Ambos Mundos entry, bags in tow. He must see this regularly, I think: refugees from personal Arctics, faces plastered with tired grins. When he asks how long we’ll be staying, it’s my turn to shrug.

Rafael has a second-story unit in back with a kitchen he rents by the month: a white stucco rectangle lodged against the massive stone walls of the military barracks next door. A narrow stairway leads up to a small room with red tile floors, brick ceiling, double bed, and rudimentary kitchenette: motel fridge, two-burner stove, sink. Arched windows offer a northern view over the curved tile roofs of the old stable rooms where we’d stayed in January. The gash of cracked blue cement that was once a swimming pool is still empty of all but weeds and a little rainwater (hatching ground for mosquito  larvae, we quickly discover). The washing area, with its daily flap of drying sheets and pillowcases, ends at Rafael’s ice factory - a metal shed off the dusty parking lot that emits a shuddering industrial growl every twenty minutes. Below our room, a rusted metal table and chairs perch on a cement foundation slab. It’s cool there in the mornings among the twisted rebars, the sun still low behind the barracks, the pigeons burbling in their crevices in the wall: a good place to write.

Since January the hillsides have mutated from ocher to moss green, the gardens brightened with blooms. No jacket or shawls in the evening. Clouds gather after siesta, releasing violent, cooling squalls that tamp the dust, soak the ground; then they draw back like curtains to reveal long, modulated sunsets.

Dawn is announced from the bell tower of the nunnery, La Concepción, three buildings away: muted, velvety tocsins summoning sleepyheads to mass, escalating across the hour to a clangorous “Get your ass up!” A guidebook confidently explains the bells’ exacting patterns of religious and clock time - only they fail to obey. I try running these inscrutable tollings against my watch but this quickly breaks down. Something happens each quarter hour more or less, maybe. I remove my watch and put it back in my suitcase. We’re on Mexican time now.

***

The sky is silvery pale, the hotel still asleep. I slip into the jeans, light cotton shirt, and huaraches I’d worn last visit and have since kept in my suitcase like holy vestments. I close the door softly, tiptoe downstairs, and pad through the hotel precincts. Dewdrops quiver on the spiky tips of barrel cacti in the glimmering dawn. A pale green agave, bursting from its pot, snags my pant leg. An iridescent green hummingbird probes the black stamen of a yellow hibiscus bloom. Ripe oranges cluster among the deep green leaves of a giant citrus tree in the courtyard.

“Hola!”

I wheel, my heart racing.

Pedro, the hotel parrot, chomps the metal bars of his cage with his beak. “Hola!” he shrieks again, his greeting waking up the world.

I pass the night watchman asleep on the lobby couch, gently let myself out, and fall in among the early-morning crowd trudging up Calle Insurgentes toward the market: peddlers lugging grain sacks and rope-tied cartons, blue-uniformed school kids, Indian women bearing baskets of food. Scruffy burros I’d seen hauling firewood up the steep lanes in winter now bear bags of soil to the town’s gardens. The summer air holds new fragrances: jasmine, tuberoses, citrus. Above the churches’ tiled domes, the sky deepens to blue.

On the corner of Hidalgo, a lean, weathered farmer in a sombrero thrusts three live, red-wattled chickens at me. A woman invites me to weigh myself on a bathroom scale for a peso. A grinning man wearing a baseball cap walks a bicycle past with fresh-woven grass petate mats strapped to it. A tiny ancient man passes by with stacked wooden cages full of warbling tropical birds on his back: canaries, mynahs, toucans. I pause at the entry to the canvas-roofed outdoor market, where a painted statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe looks beatifically down upon the kneeling peasant Juan Diego, who first saw her in a vision.

Elbowing my way among the fruit and vegetable stalls, it dawns upon me that I can shop for food. The hotel fridge has room for a tiny rack of provisions, and an ice tray that works when the electricity does. The stove burners light with matches as long as there’s gas in the patio tank, though the tiny oven, which just might accommodate one of the pigeons nesting in the wall behind us, doesn’t seem to work at all.

People carry their goods in bright-colored plaid plastic shopping bags, bolsas. Plaid doesn’t seem very Mexican to me, yet people find ways to blend things in, turn them Mexican: plastic buckets, cotton clothing, old cars. The plaid bolsas of thin woven mesh, which seem to fray but seldom break, are used to carry almost anything about: in January I’d seen a mechanic carrying a crankshaft in one, a butcher chicken parts in another. Open your bag, the market seller fills it for you. No check-out counter, no paper bags. The first time I saw our friends Mina and Pablo in the plaza, their bolsas bulging with provisions, it had signified residency.

I find a seller with an assortment of plaid ones on a nail hook and buy a red, green, and orange one for five pesos. Gripping its bright blue plastic handle, I swing it a few times. I’ve entered the life of the town.

“Mamey,” the woman says when I point into a cornucopia of strange fruits. “Pitahaya.” She offers me slices of each. I pick a couple of paisley-shaped orange mangoes, drop them in my bolsa. At a crowded vegetable stand, a woman splits a black, rough-skinned avocado with the turn of a knife and holds it up to me. “Parahoy?” I look at her blankly. Then the words float apart. “Para hoy?” “For today?” I nod. Yes, today. I have no life beyond today. She selects by feel of her thumb one for today, neither too hard nor too soft.

One avocado, two mangoes. Three tomatoes. What else? Coffee. We must have coffee for the room. And eggs. Six eggs are tied in a clear plastic bag and laid gently in my bolsa. Coffee is nowhere to be found. Milk. Where to get it? I’ve seen pickup trucks driving the streets in the early morning, honking in front of houses, ladling it from metal containers into the waiting pitchers of the women of the town. Here, among endless displays of fresh fruits, vegetables, flowers, colored beans and powders in baskets, utensils of every description and variety, toys, curative herbs, spices - even virginal white confirmation dresses - I find no coffee, no milk. 

In a shaded area behind the covered market, I pass Indian women with long braided hair, their wares at their feet or in aproned laps. I notice white disks on green palm fronds. Cheese? “Queso?” “Sí, señor.” Smiling, the girl hands me one on a wet green leaf. An old woman unwraps handmade blue tortillas from her lap, counts out a dozen, covers them with a sheet of brown paper, and hands them, still warm, up to me.

Morning light bathes the rooftops. My bolsa fills. Some vendors have nothing but a few quivering cups of gelatin to sell, a bit of embroidery, a lone carved pickax handle. Reason enough to come and sit all day? Maybe I miss the point. I think of a story by B. Traven, Canastitas en Serie. It tells of an Indian man who brings a few woven baskets to market. Approached by a rich American who wants to buy in volume to export, the seller turns him down. “Señor,” the basket maker tries to explain, “I weave these baskets in my manner, with songs and fragments of my heart woven into them.” It’s not about volume but participation.

In the States my aversion to supermarkets nears the pathological. Here in open air and natural light, moving among pyramids of tomatoes and avocados and onions, brushing hands with sellers, exchanging words, I feel alive, a participant. Cortéz’s chronicler Bernal Díaz spoke in awe of the sprawling, fecund Aztec markets, the sensory profusion, the merchandise from all corners of the Americas, the mixture of intimacy and spectacle. It’s here in this morning and I’m in it. To my bulging plaid bag somebody has added a sprig of cilantro, another a chamomile blossom I don’t remember buying.

In the main plaza, an elderly sweeper is dusting the stones with a twig broom. Early risers take shoeshines along the benches. Street curs sniff trash cans. The clock in the tower next to the parish church says nine, confirmed by a sudden burst of bells whanged by a boy visible in the tower. The food store next to the Presidencia, the town hall, is just opening. There I find milk in an unrefrigerated carton, a jar of powdered Nescafé, salsa picante in a bottle. It’s the best I can do. 

Back at the Ambos Mundos, Masako is emerging from the shower, a sign the gas heater, the calentador, is working, which means the stove might too. I hold up my multicolored bag swollen with provisions. “You bought a plaid bolsa!” she exclaims delightedly. 

We cut and prepare the vegetables and fruits, warm the tortillas over a sputtering burner flame. Outside at the metal table by the empty pool we eat our tacos, slurp weak Nescafé. Our first homemade meal in Mexico. 

“I saw so many different-colored corns in the market. One had this alarming black fungus bubbling out of its husk.”

“Huitlacoche,” she says. “It’s a summer delicacy.”

“Do you know how to make it?”

“No, but I’ll bet Rafael’s wife does.”

We laugh, mango juice running down our chins.