On the rode to Zaachila; the penitent and the late...
The bus station for rides to Zaachila is not a bus station per say, but more a bus yard of feather weight dust and white rocks and the ever popular blue tarp for shade. It is exactly as you have imagined it. When I ask the attendant where to find my bus amongst the two, he jumps up and points which tells me that it must be leaving soon because nobody should embarass themselves to move so fast.
I walk to the designated bus, with Zaachila written in white shoe polish on the cracked windsheild and climb up the powdered steps. When I reach the top, I must second guess the advise I've been given for there is a man sitting in the driver's seat with the console cover beside him and every electrical circuit pulled out of the dash and resting on his lap. He is intensly cranking a screwdriver into it when he looks up to make eye contact with me.
'I'm sorry' I say, 'I am on the wrong bus.'
'No, what's up?' he asks.
'Oh...well, I'm looking for the bus to Zaachila.'
''THIS is the bus to Zaachila.' he says.
A woman with a magazine looks up from the first seat and nods.
'Well, do I need to pay?'
'No, just have a seat.'
Shortly after I pick out a seat a few rows back, the bus starts filling up with poor old farm natives like the ones I've seen in the communist protests here. The women in full skirts carry plastic market bags, and one man even wears a poncho like in the movies. Once we have pulled out of the station and are away from the city traveling beside the small hand planted crops, it finally occurs to me that I am alone. I am alone and in Mexico and far from my health insurance policy, my mother's milky scent, and anyone who could pick me out in a morgue. I take a deep breath distract myself with the smokey visions of weathered men with mules and carts carrying dry grass and soft round ladies with long braids that meet in the back.
The bus makes many stops and I keep asking if this is the stop to Zachilla, and the woman in the front seat keeps saying no until I have bothered her so much that she promises to tell me when it comes. She walks around and collects 40 pesos from all of us for the thirty minute ride. She slipps back into her seat and begins stacking the coins in her hands to count up the money.
When Zaachila comes, it couldn't be more obvious. The markets, the people, the bicycle taxis and horses...the most civilization we've seen in thirty minutes. I climb out and head for Eder's house along the cobble stoned path, past the junk shops the chocolate grinders, and the rooster yells.
He gives me the grand tour--his room with the bright white lightbulb and pictures of his family in New York, the dying old dog in the cool dirt and the hyper puppy bought to replace him, the goat in the back yard, the pig pen that his sister feeds so religiously, the outhouse and the secret hidden toilet paper stash, the make shift shower from a garden hose, and the three or four washing stations with big bowls of stagnant water. 'Why do you have three or four stations?' I ask him, and he says that the women have a washing machine, but it just collects dust in the corner because they like to do the laundry all at the same time and together but he doesn't know why.
Eder hates Zaachila after 8 years in New York and a month in Guadalajara and just 21 years of screaming hormones under his belt. He's a little embarassed at the simplicity of his life here, and I concur with him, that I'm having a lovely time visiting, but I don't think I could stay.
We go to sooth ourselves by buying painfully pure mescal at the corner store, and since we don't want a full bottle the woman behind the counter empties out a water bottle from the shelf and takes it to the back where she fills it half way up from a vat of gut twisting wonder. And my throat has stopped hurting for the first time in three weeks.
We step out of the shop and into a funeral procession that we decide to keep up with. I have an announcement to make that a decision has been reached, and I myself am enjoying this funeral procession too much. I that too wish die in Mexico. Eder says his grandfather dead 7 years is burried into the cemetary we're we're walking to. What did he die of I ask. Of course this mescal is what did him in.
The puebla's women rush ahead in front of the casket with arms full of flowers, anxious to arrive at the cemetary and put this man into the ground. But Eder and I walk with the men in the back. All of us are dressed for everyday and have plastic bottles filled half way up with mescal, and the men here in the back keep wanting me to take some of theirs, and if I don't take some of theirs then I should take some of their mixer or chaser or something. I'm sad too, because I can't understand a word of the stories they are telling about the man in the box no matter how close I get to eavesdrop. Eder distracts me to point out the tired widow ahead being held up on each side.
We arrive at the cemetary to a lively five peice band greeting us. The horns sound like that of a marching band, and the drum beat stops up all of the tears we had on the tips of our tounges. The band is silenced in mid tune and the sacerdote reads alound from a book beside a little girl with a bowl of incese. While the pallberrers begin the hard work of lowering the man into the ground with ropes, muscles, and steady hands, the rest of us are all leaning in and standing on top of dirt mounds and headstones and holding our breath.