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Drunk under Lowry's Volcanoes - Mexico
by Julian Woolhouse | Date >
2006-09-23 | Country : Mexico | City : Amecameca
| Area : |
| AMECAMECA
As Lowry overcame his shyness and began to talk, Markson was astonished by the way his conversation moved, the strange verbal connections he made, the puns and allusions.'He could start to tell a story.....and there would be so many digressions, interruptions, jokes, so many turnings, circlings back as it were - well he himself called it contrapuntal thought.
(Quoted by Gordon Bowker in ‘Pursued by Furies’ – A Life of Malcolm Lowry)
“Frankly I think I have no gift for writing. I started by being a plagiarist, then I became a drunkard. Then I became a hard worker, as one might say, a novelist. Now I am a drunkard again. But what I always wanted to be, was a poet”.
(Quoted by Gordon Bowker in ‘Pursued by Furies’ – A Life of Malcolm Lowry)
Amecameca - Under the Volcanoes
The sky is as an inky, squid discharge, riven at intervals by evil javelins of bolt lightning, tearing the shroud of night asunder.
(It must have been much like this at Golgotha (LL f. Gk f. Heb. gulgoleth skull) at three o'clock on that particular afternoon; but at that time churches did not have clocks, nor did they eat honey for tea.) (Rupert Chawner Brooke)
The heavens full-charged with Jovian electro-ecstatic madness. Voltage crackles across the interstitial void. Black and wild, the firmament jagged with fear.
And an indissoluble sense of loneliness.
Somewhere behind us, she reclines, becouched upon the uplands, her anatomical details spelled out in somber, magic Spanish; from hair to feet, via the head, ear, neck, breast, belly and knees: la caballera, la cabeza, la oreja, el cuello, el pecho, la barriga, las rodillas, los pies. (Pies in the sky).
(But for today we have no need of sombreros; nor sombriety; nor Ernest humming bird why understanding of sol y sombre).
She is there, but we have not yet seen her. Ixtaccihuatl, “The Sleeping Woman”.
The illumined cross of electrified bulbs on the apex of the town church torches feebly against the towering venom of splenetic umbrage; as the rain falls gently. A primal slit in the colossal nephostratum opens far to the west, and for a fleeting moment explodes a chink, through which floods the extruded halcyon blue of forever.
Below, in the plaza, the fair fierily becomes the inferno; the Ferris wheel verticalises Dante's dancing circles. And one cannot but think of Beatrice.
And Virgil. And the clouds that loured over Malcolm’s Lancashire house.
And so one funnels away another gobshiteful - for Brendan begorrah B, quare fellow that he was - more of Corona, chased well down with aguardiente - which, for the unacquainted, is a brew that is best described as fortified meths (at a fraction of the price). Whilst contemplating the splendour of God's Voltaic display.
Of the Power.
And the Glory.
For a little to the east of the recumbent, unsmouldering lady, is.
The Volcano. With a very capital 'T'.
Malcolm's volcano; though it needs no literary critical faculty to realise that Popo was but a metaphor for his own igneous soul metamorphic.
And not a little sentimental sedimentary.
Here in Amecameca; under the volcanoes.
(Drunks tend to repeat things repetitively).
We are a rum threesome. Norm, an almost greybeard loon; Meg, of weak leg, (who seldom touches a drop); and this narrator, an Ancient Mariner at sea on a ship of grog, more or less unanchored.
On the roof of the only hotel to speak of. (If only there had been an unspeakable place, I would have been able to tell you all about it). Swilling ale to kill the time, waiting, for even a snatched view of the twin peaks, Popo and Ixta.........
[The Aztec name Popocatepetl translates as “The Smoking Mountain”. According to legend, Popocatepetl, a warrior, was enamored of Ixtaccihuatl (“The Sleeping Woman”), daughter of the emperor. When Popocatepetl was returning from victory in war to claim his beloved, his rivals sent word that he had been killed , and Ixtaccihuatl died of grief. Popocatepetl then built the great mountains that lie southeast of Tenochtitlan; on one he placed her body, and on the other he stands holding her funeral torch].
Guns fired into the night air seem to trigger the lightning that splinters from the hell hounded heavens above. Or is it the lightning that pumps the whooping pistols. Causes and effects swirl as the liquor slops close to the brim of the cauldron brain. I shriek with blitzkrieg laughter, stupendously happy at the lunacy of the all. Sniggering at the beauty of being.
Out of one’s mind.
Tiny.
In Mexalcoholico, mescalating amongst the ruins.
Meanwhile, “Over the town, in the dark tempestuous night, backwards revolved the luminous wheel”.
Caelum specto. I am the watcher of the skies.
“Sole watchman of the flying stars
……………
Forsake me not when my wild hours come;
……………
Make me from time to time the gift of the shoulder.
When all hurt nerves whine shut away the whiskey.
……………
Cross am I sometimes with my little daughter:
Fill her eyes with tears. Forgive me, Lord.
Unite my various soul,
Sole watchman of the wide & single stars”.
Omens and portents are all around us, if only we knew how to read them. We need to keep constant watch in case we succumb to paranoia, believing that the futures have been engineered by the pasts. Sufficient reason is not enough to explain.
Why my ice axe vanished.
Just one day before ten full years had elapsed.
[“And then one day you’ll find,
Ten years have got behind you……”].
As if one had been slain on the last day of the Trojan War. Rupert (Chawner) fell well early and was buried Skyros amongst the Greeks; yet Wilfred came within a temporal hair’s breadth of standing once more in Albion. As if Odysseus’s ship had foundered within sight of Ithaca. Fate is indeed weird, if only you put your faith in it.
Choice comes down to this.
Either
Nothing means anything
Or
Everything means something (or other).
What then did the disappeared ice axe mean?
The axe that had lived for exactly twenty years since it took me to the summit of the Aiguille d’Argentiere. It had been August the 5th. Which doth not signify nothing.
The axe that had saved my life just days later on the Aiguille du Chardonnet.
The axe that had taken me to the summit of Mont Blanc.
The axe that had been to the summit of the Eiger on August the 5th.
To the summit of the Breithorn on January 1st.
That had slept by my side on the night of August the 5th, (its tenth birthday), the very last night, in this life, of Francis Brooks. (Whose middle name was neither Rupert, nor Chawner).
Who perished on the Feast of the Transfiguration.
Who perished on the anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.
Who perished on the national day of Bolivia.
“Coincidences, yes, the sort of coincidences in his life of which there seemed no end. But were they, strictly speaking, coincidences? Were they something less, or more? A maze of complicated suffering and interrelated nonsense!”
The axe that had seen the sunrise over Everest; had visited the outlier summit of Mount Kenya; had hoped beneath Kilimanjaro; had frozen in deepest winter on the slopes of Mount Fuji; had been my sole solace on Aconcagua; and most recently my boon companion on the highest point of the Mountains of the Moon.
Had left my life.
As I rightly suspected.
Forever nevermore.
I deeply circumspected a case of Mexican banditry. (Research has shown that seven in every ten people asked to free associate a word with Mexico beginning with ‘ban..’ will say banditry. The next most likely choices were bandannas, bandoliers, bananas, bandicoots and bandstands).
On exiting customs, genius undeclared, we were confronted by customs. Of the local variety. Consisting of barter, bluster, braggadocio.
And.
Banditry of the utmost banditousness.
It was all of a most agreeable nature. Filthy, and by now fairly stinking, rich gringo meets indigent indigenous.
Taxi driver.
Who proposes a preposterous price, a tenth of which would be laughed out of the universe in any court. Virulent haggling ensues for a protracted period of ten seconds. We agree to pay half the ludicrousness, bundle into the vehicle, and we are off like a Fangio, [Fangio, Juan Manuel (1911- ), Argentine-born racing driver who won the world championship in 1954-7, (1957 being the year in which Malcolm Lowry and Nikos Kazantzakis died)], on the way to the bank. Laughing all the way. For fear of early arrival at the dark grave.
Wherein my friend is laid.
Arriving at our destination, we are sufficiently enough jolly at having exited the hair raising experience of Mexican chicanery on the roads, that we not only foot the bill of lading. We give the bandstand a 5-peso tip for the road.
He is mucho satisfied, gracias. We are not dead, gracias. Those not yet about to die salute thee. May fares fare thee well my Mexican amigo.
After establishing our trinity of selves in respective accommodations, we reconvene in the cavernous dining area of the one and only hotel in town. Noting a couple of things perhaps not entirely disconnected. The hotel is conspicuously empty. And it is absolutely pissing with plangent, plagal rain, cadencing in sodden cascades. Rivers of tears bleed down the windows. Weeping for my lost ice axe.
And a long lost friendship.
We realise that the books were not spreading disinformation. The weather is not a plot after all. We had been warned. Secor’s excellent guide has it thus:
“The rainy season in Mexico occurs during the summer months, and this makes hikes and climbs in the mountains unpleasant and, to a certain extent, hazardous. Avalanches have been known to occur during this period of wet weather and warm temperatures. Whiteouts are also prevalent during this period along with thunderstorms”.
Cricket is played in summers; leaves fall from deciduous trees in autumn; snowballs are flung in winter; things are cleaned in spring. Even a halfwit could add to this seasonal simpleton’s list. And although it is less than transparent to the average punter,
MEXICAN VOLCANOES ARE BEST CLIMBED IN WINTER.
Failing which spring or autumn may offer opportunity.
Tourism in Mexico is for the canny and cunning, who make their ways to Cancun to sink can and look for cun on the beach. (This text has been thoroughly 70% proofread).
Memory, as has been conclusively demonstrated, is state-dependent. Therefore, Norm and I decide to do a little retroactive research into the why-here-now hypothesis. By getting into the state that we were originally in when we hatched this unseasonal plot. It has become necessary to tequiliquidate ourselves. In order to get at the truth.
In vino veritas.
Meg is tired: of travel; of cyclic conversations; of not being in Paris; of the drivel and the drizzle; of being “on holiday” with two Peter Pans – hebephrene, schizophrenes in mental bandit banter; of being young and beautiful in the company of buffoons. [But we are not from Mars. A less bellicose pair of fellows you would be hard put to find. We are from Neptune, most at home when all at sea].
Meg withdraws. We thicken, cloistered together, a brace of Boschean madmen, desperately trepanning holes in our heads through which to funnel more fuel. Wrecking the hesperid hippocampus for the sake of hypothalamic satiety. We are on a drunk. Now we now know unclearly why we are here. It is genetic, totally and despicably hereditary. We are both infected by nomadness. A particularly virulent strain of which Franz K. diagnoses in his wallowing diary of miserinability to be happy:
“Uniformity. History.
When it looks as if you have made up your mind finally to stay at home for the evening, when you have put on your house jacket and sat down after supper with a light on the table to the piece of work or the game that usually precedes your going to bed, when the weather outside is unpleasant so that staying indoors seems natural, and when you have already been quietly sitting at the table for so long that departure must occasion not only paternal anger but surprise to everyone, when besides, the stairs are in darkness and the front door locked and in spite of all that you have started up in a sudden fit of restlessness, changed your jacket, abruptly dressed yourself for the street, explained that you must go out and with a few curt words of leave-taking actually gone out, banging the flat door , more or less hastily according to the degree of displeasure you have left behind you and so cut off the general discussion of your departure, and when you find yourself once more in the street with limbs swinging extra freely in answer to the unexpected liberty you have procured for them, when as a result of this decisive action you feel aroused within yourself all the potentialities of decisive action, when you recognize with more than usual significance that your strength is greater than your need to accomplish effortlessly the swiftest of changes, that left alone you grow in understanding and calm, and in the enjoyment of them – then for that evening you have so completely got away from your family that the most distant journey could not take you farther and you have lived through what is for Europe so extreme an experience of solitude that one can only call it Russian all this is still heightened if at such a late hour in the evening you look up a friend to see how he is getting on.”
We friends got on drink fiend in England several nights ago. Became intent on banditry. (In the little used argot peculiar to Norm, myself, and a strictly limited number of others initiates, the word ‘banditry’ signifies stupidity, recklessness, ill-advised escapades; it also has the secondary definition: being alive). Decided to go. On a wing and prayer.
The following morning I promised Godot that I would never dipsomaniacal again. He said that he would wait. In the first true secondments of consciousness, it disaster dawned that “we got so horrible drunkenness that night before, so perfectamente borracho”, that there might be a mighty penance to do before all the wires reconnected, and the gangling ganglion pain dissipated.
“My lips were wet, my throat was cold,
My garments all were dank.
Since I had drunken in my dreams,
And still my body drank.
I moved and could not feel my limbs:
I was so light – almost
I thought that I died in sleep,
And was a blessed ghost”.
Huevos y jamon,in silence.
Marmelada and tost, in silence.
Café con leche, in religious silence.
The rain relentlessly hosed down outside. Meg was shivering in jeans, sweaters and a coat. Norm and I were none too warm in spite of fleecy protection. The frosty negative jousting continued unabated. Meg had long since had her head in a book, oblivious to the schoolyard quintain going around the circular tables. Knights we were not; of chivalry there was none. Just the old bottle thing.
The weather was such that neither of us, unsober or otherwise unwise, would have contemplated going up the hill that day. It was incontestably a day to be governed by the pithy maxim, ‘When it is pissing, go on the piss’. So I bottled out.
“We are surely not venturing vertical on such an unaugust day as this”, quoth I.
Norm did not demur, and I forthwith commanded unto myself a large bottle of cerveza. To toast the health of Francis. Ten years to the day under the sod. Tits to the left of me, tuts to the right, I saddled up and rode determinedly into the valley of beer. They would come round to my way of not seeing things. Or not. Half an hour later we had a quorum. As I por favored replenishment, the Norm jumped off the bandwagon. Into the jorum, my sconce now lifted.
‘“A man, sly and deceptive, yet shy and ingenuous; a drunk of gargantuan proportions, yet a man who seems never to have let go an almost preternatural degree of self-awareness even when face down on the floor of a pub or cantina; a great liar (or, more charitably, inventor of autobiographical fictions), but – in his writing especially – one of the most painfully honest men who ever lived………”’
‘Thus Malcolm Lowry on Sigbjorn Wilderness, the main character of Dark as the Grave wherein my Friend is Laid. For Sigbjorn is Lowry - a writer unable to write; a middle-aged Lord Jim, inept and fearful – bound on a pilgrimage to rediscover the past. A past of downfall and failure that eventually turned him into a drunkard”.
Later that morning we lurked off in search of a backstreet artisan’s shop, where rumour – and the Lonely Planet guidebook – had it, we might be able to rent basic mountaineering equipment. Having pored over the Spanish phrasebook for a while in the dining area, and a more specific lexicon included in the climbing guide, I realised that it was going to be all down to me if we were going to go up. Miraculously, and on this point I jest not, my blithering creativity sufficed not only to secure the loan of an ice axe for a per diem fee, but additionally some canisters of propane gas that were compatible with my stove.
Already agreed that we would make a foray the following morning, come hell or heaven weather, our preparations complete, we had to decide what to eat. And drink.
Chorizo, tortillas and Dos Esquis.
More chorizo, more tortillas.
While the rain fell on the fairground in the plaza, the workmen outside the Hotel San Carlos rigged up a stage directly in front of the church. Preparatory to the opening night of the 12th annual Amecameca culture festival, (which turned out to be the local excuse for a weeklong binge). The all but empty Ferris wheel revolved outside the glass. Our glasses - “who art in heaven” – drained as of themselves.
Horizons merged.
Torts and ills fell by the swayside.
Una mas became dos Dos Esquis as Meg fell onto the wagon she had never been off. Norm and I were rapidly becoming usually abnormal.
Swilling chorizos, munching cervezas, until, as all things do in good time.
We became.
Horizontal.
As if Hiroshima had never happened.
50 years to the day the bomb had been dropped.
Huevos y jamon,in silence.
Marmelada and tost, in silence.
Café con leche, in religious silence.
During which I absorbed Secor’s seasoned advice:
“I have never encountered a bandit in Mexico. But this appears to be the number one fear of Americans visiting Mexico. The club de Exploraciones de Mexico offers the following rules “to maintain the security of the group”:
. Have no less than four people in the group.
. The group stays together, no exceptions.
. Carry your camera in your knapsack, and take it out only when you are using it.
. Avoid attracting attention to yourself or the group.
. No alcoholic beverages are allowed
It may be comforting for uneasy people to note that most of the “professional thieves” (this includes mercenaries, pickpockets, assassins, bank robbers, and international jewel thieves) hang out in the big cities and resort towns of Mexico.
Thus my breakfast reading fodder nailed down the coffin lid on Hobson’s choice.
(The astute, acute, nonalcoholic reader should have begun to wonder what Meg was doing among this peculiar ménage a trois. Your wonder is not unreasonable; but everything happens perchance – for a reason).
Meg having never been higher than 125 metres in a non-flight life (and that in an elevator without supplementary oxygen), the original plan had been for her to stay in Tlamacas at the climbers’ hut. The Vincente Guerrero Lodge, which according to Secor promises, “Beds with blankets and sheets…flush toilets and hot showers for a nominal fee. Each bunk has its own locker………there is a cafeteria on the premises, as well as a bar and two lounges with fireplaces”.
Or alternatively, another smaller lodge where “the accommodations are rather Spartan, with bunk rooms and a somewhat dirty and sooty main room”.
Solid walls that would protect Meg from the aforementioned local thuggery. From one of these points, Norm and I would perform a derring-do ascent of Popo, the better-known of the two summits, largely unfamiliar to those unacquainted with global hills. (And flat tortillas).
At 5465 metres and 5,230 metres respectively, these are the fifth and seventh highest peaks in all of North America. Though not the tallest in Mexico. Some two hundred kilometers to the west is El Pico de Orizaba, which comes in at 5611 metres. (Incidentally, the missing peaks on the top seven continental list are, Mount McKinley in Alaska, (6195 metres), Mount Logan (5950 metres) and Mount St. Elias (5488 metres) in the Yukon, and somewhere else).
‘True’ mountaineers swear a singular lack of interest in height as the be all and end all. Yet while there is undoubtedly a strong hope of truth in this lie, there are few not bewitched by altitude. Having had a fairly disastrous half-season in the European Alps the previous summer – where nothing exceeds the 4,807 metre Mont Blanc, long since under the belts – Abnorman and I had set our dimming sights on a 5,000er (or two).
Thence, whence and hence Mexico.
These altitudes are not to be sniffed at (and not even easily breathed at), and the climbs though not technically particularly demanding, are hardly ideal for the novice. However, what was to be adequately scented by anyone with nostrils half open was sulphurousness. And not from spent matches, bad egg gas (hydrogen sulphide), or factory emissions (sulphur dioxide). Nor a personal release from the lower bowel, (vapourised shite). But from volcanoes, which are not all neither extinct or dormant. Popo had been fouling the air for some months past, yet this intelligence had not drifted across the Atlantic, our tale being set in the light ages before the dawn of the Internet. A time when it was far easier to get into a pickle, unspoiled by advance notification of its existence, trumpeted throughout cyberspace.
Not only was the mountain off limits to those without suicidal tendencies, the Guerrero hut had been hors de combat for several years, necessitating a rapid switch into lunatic fringe plan B. A triangular foray on to Ixta in inclement weather; tort ill-advised, but not flat out of the question.
We would all take a taxi up to the Paso de Cortes, at 3680 metres, the highest point on the road from Amecameca to Puebla, and then on a further eight kilometers along a little-frequented section to a car park at the La Joya roadhead. At which point one is already 4000 metres above sea level, higher than the summit of Mount Fuji, the world’s most photographed mountain; and a volcano which has been asleep for hundreds of years.
This we did. Without difficulty, since we were in a vehicle all the way.
Next we would “hike” the “four to six hours” to the Republica de Chile hut, which is, at 4750 metres, marginally lower than the summit of Mont Blanc. The belief that we could all do this was audacious; the fact that we actually attempted it was ludicrous. Although it had seemed eminently sensible at the time. The guidebook had made it sound like a doddle: “Rising above La Joya is a subsidiary peak of Ixtaccihuatl, La Amacuileatl (also known as Los Pies or “the feet”). From the parking area, a trail leads straight upwards toward a cliff. After a short distance it angles left, gradually gaining elevation until the saddle between “the knees” and “the feet”, the Portillo (Pass), is reached. From the Portillo, the trail stays on the eastern slope of the ridge, gradually climbing back onto the ridge before the hut is reached.
This we did not all do.
The first hour of the hike passed off well enough with Meg, in her ancient plimsoles and tight-fitting jeans, keeping willfully up with the men from Mars, who were cruising, suitably shod and unencumbered by denim. There ensued a relatively easy, cross country section, set at a very gentle angle. The heavens were heavily overcast, and Popo was nowhere in sight, but it seemed we should make the hut comfortably enough before night, it then being only two in the afternoon.
We were three, not four or more, but having left the alcoholic poisons cupboard below, we had thus far only infringed one of Secor’s cardinal rules. (We had cunningly managed to avoid drawing unwarranted attention by contriving to be utterly alone on the hill, and unless the taxi driver was in league with the local cutthroats, the likelihood of ambush on the slopes was hopefully minimal). It is said that the Englishman ever has one eye on the sky, watchful for the cumulating nimbus, or serious cirrhosis troublings. Let them say! Let them say what they dislike! Which is not to say that they will always be wrong.
“…………can it be that I affect the elements………”.
The sluice gates opened and the greasy incline we were delicately negotiating became within minutes a treacherous mudslide.
Halfway up the long slide I realised that Norm had vanished – (a euphemism for buggered off) - into the descending mists above, and Meg was still barely started on the Sisyphean ascent. Now wailing sotto voce and bemoaning ever having associated with ‘mad dogs and Englishmen’, out in the midday thunder. Like the grand old duke of York, I was “neither up nor down”, wondering vaguely. Shouting upwards to Norm brought no response, the now rising wind carrying my bleating voice off into the freezing downpour. Meg was entering the first stage of terminal hysteria, and her spilling tears were not making the path any drier. I exhorted her to shape up with a fulsome catalogue of economies on truth, but it was becoming increasingly apparent that her chances of making the hut were rapidly slipping away. The instinctive calculus of vertical concern kicked in. Now that Norm had stormed off ahead, it was not merely chivalrous but rather imperative that I not abandon Meg, who was already well out of her depths on the heights. For a while, I felt that our best course was to struggle on up since Norm had the fuel and gas stove, but nothing to cook. (As well as a rope to attach to no one). I had the food – but nothing to cook it with, and my tent, carried for precautionary purposes. Since, ever since Francis had perished at 2,800 metres in the Alps, I had internalized death’s scything swiftness.
Not far from the bottom of the slope, I had noted a flattish platform adjacent to a wall of rock affording some shelter against the elements. A night without food seemed small penance compared with the prospect of an‘epic’ - climbing parlance for a horribly elongated period of pleasure that does not prove fatal. Down it had to be. Getting back to the tent spot took less time than I had expected, and Meg’s spirits recovered somewhat. Which left me wondering whether we should have pressed on up. The tent was barely erected than a deluge of hail erupted. Having hollered my head off on the hill; discovered that the camera was not in my knapsack, being safely sleeping in the San Carlos; and that two stray cans of beer had slithered into my baggage, we had now disobeyed all of Secor’s five injunctions. Meg shivered off into a fitful sleep, while I celebrated with an icy beverage and a cramped read of.
Dark as the Grave wherein my Friend is Laid.
Before coiling up mortally cold, (since Meg had my sleeping pit (good to 35 below)), and shuffling off into a fitful slumber. Warmed only by the muffled flatus swirling about within my thermal underswear.
The green walls of the tent lightened perceptibly, indicating at first nothing more than a fresh day, but as the world slowly span, came the realization that not only had the light returned. So too had the sun.
Tumbling through the double-necked entrance, I was dazzled by the spectacular. Popocatepetl, one of the world’s most prefect volcanoes, blanketed in fresh snow, erupting onto the rods and cones of the retinal screen.
The beauty was indeed of such sufficience, that I had permitted me to piss myself. Joyously spraying the morn’s first libation on the frost-rimed ground, (having taken the road less-travelled), I laughed full loud, as if the dreaming knight’s mare had been but phantom unsteadiness. It was, surveying the lands and airs, indeed, unsteeded, a very magical moment. To be. Instead of dead.
In love with the hills; up, up, and up to the hilt.
Reveling in unutterable free doom.
“Just too good to be true,
Can’t take my eyes off of you………”.
Then the vision was over, Ixta to the rear, wreathed as ever in spumante fog, and Popo, already streaked with the gathering clouds. Infinitesimally, the window had opened, up and about, up had gained foothold ascendancy. Till I saw the sign of the cross, nailed to the rock. On the wall behind the tent was affixed a brass plaque, testament to the death in bleak Spanish of an hombre past blasted in about these parts.
Within Meg was writhing in the throes of life, green to the gills, gulping down chunks of the thin air, delicatessenly scented with vapours, emitted relatively recent in geological time. Coughing and spluttering, she emerged from the cocoon, as yet unsure whether she had indeed survived the night. Entreating down. Down to the fleshpots, down to the pots of café con lechery, down to the ground beans of Satanical milled coffee. For Christ’s sake down from under the cross unseen. To the pleasant plaza and the whirling wheel. Away from the uplifted strata, down to the gems below, as not amongst alchemicals above.
A half dozen hours later, we – being Meg and I – were back in the San Carlos. Drowning in beer and caffeine, irrespective of the other; who staggered in after the afternoon was at an end, drenched through, but laughing like a drain. Since failure to climb the mountain had been relegated to the footnotes of history. The festival was now in full swung, and just a spit away across the plaza was a cutaway, mobile cantina. A wondrous thing but waiting to be explored. An outsized coach that had had one side folded up wholesale opened onto the square. The square itself already seethed with wandering drinkards and minstrels, chaunting angelic tunes unto themselves; oblivious of the fact that there was a twelve-man Andean pipe band tootling away on the stage.
An inviting ramp led gently into the bowels of the truck, where we soon fell into the company of three local locos, who plied us with cervezas and introduced us to the art of the ‘wheepee’. A Mexican bandit howl vocalized with all one’s pulmonary avail, apparently for no other reason than to celebrate the untrammeled frisson of screaming. To one’s heart incontinental drift. Foolishness overflowed all bounds, and Meg eventually retired in resigned disgust to her room. But Norm and the I were dead set on begetting perfectamente. Swilling away the smiling small hours with our new found companloons. Falling off the bus into deckchairs ranged in front of the long-deserted stage, cackling and being photographed with those more gone than us.
Before lurching off into a swing-doored saloon, straight into the set of a western. Fully-equipped with holstered gunslingers and Pancho Villa droopy moustaches. Several slugged slugs of tequila later we fell backwards over each other in our haste to escape.
Borracho into bed.
The morrow morn we hopped on a bus into Mexico City, our sole material aim being to reconfirm our air tickets back to Blighty. [Blighty n. (pl.–ies) sl. (used by soldiers, esp. during the First World War) England; home. {Anglo-Ind. corrupt. of Hind. Bilayati, wilayati foreign, European}].
Why could we not have done this in Amecameca? Because we couldn’t. Service at the hotel was subFawltyesque. The two senors who alternated sentry duty at the deserted reception desk, had gamely essayed to connect us to the Iberia office in the capital. Depending on which of our men was assisting, the response was ‘No anyone speak’ or ‘There is nobody’. My Spanish is, as has been previously remarked, preciously tantamount to nonexistence when sober, and on the side of angelspeak when in my cups; the mediums in our communicative efforts had eleven words of English between them. In addition to those already expressed, we had ‘Yes’, ‘Please’, ‘Thank you’ and ‘Pay’. (This is not a cheap shot, simply a fact………besides, how many frontier deskees in Goole have a dozen words of Spanish?). For whatever reason, the line was dead, defunct, excommunicado or permanently out to lunch. Hence our excursion into the seething maw of the most polluted city on the planet (and home of its largest bullring). Though not entirely Lonely, because my little amigito aguardiente had sneakily stowed away on the bus for the ride.
On the way in to the Zocalo – on the metro, a trio of pickpockets (all of pensionable age),working their corner, orchestrated events so far as to infiltrate. One of the equipment pockets on my olive green fatigues. Escaping with a dec |
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