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He woke in the dark approaches to Guadalajara, at some ungodly hour before dawn. Will the Sun ever return from its passage through the bowels of Earth Monster? The bus jerks into the station, stops. Jose Cruz appears at the door, "Por favor only take a few minutes here because we are still late...."
Still making up time from the desert breakdown night before last.
Daniel stands up. No rush to get off. Empty seats sit shrouded in silence. Only six passengers in all that huge, rumbling bus. Well. At least the toilet in back ain't going to stink bad!
Bus station seems small for such a big city as Guadalajara. Sometime later, reading Lonely Planet, Daniel will learn he saw only one of many modules that make up big Guad station. Clean, tiled toilets are quiet this late/early. Urine splashes noisily into the minditorio.
And then they shall hit the road again, and this writer soon sleep through the last hours of la madrugada, that darkness before dawn.
In the morning sun, some eighty/ninety kilometers before Queretaro, we stop for a meal. I sit with the drivers, Jose and Pancho, for a few minutes, by the sufference of the waiters who permit me to stay in the special seating section. Television -- always a TV -- babbles on and on about the Pope paralyzing traffic in Mexico City, on his way to the airport -- he's leaving town today and I'm worried about getting a ticket out of Mexico this afternoon. We make a couple of your usual protestant comments, and I get off a joke, with Pancho's grammatical correction -- Mejor las papas francesas que un papa romano. Now I'm really hungry for french fries....
Look up, spot pastor Jose Lopez out in the regular section with his traveling companion, a silent, smiling woman. Jose gives me a look like -- what are you up to now, Daniel el travieso? I smile back. Decide to go out and sit with them. Finish my eggs. Excuse myself from the company of the drivers. Take my little plate of fruit over to the pastor's table.
He laughs at me, "We were thinking you thought we weren't good enough for you, Daniel," and I treasure the sounds of his participial clause and subjunctive tense. When will I ever learn to get off a phrase so naturally in Spanish? Ai.
I sit, answering, "No, no, es que... I want to sit with everybody."
"Sit up front with us, Daniel...."
Four of you ride in the front windshield, all the way into Mexico City, four hours driving from breakfast. Pancho insists on standing by the outer door. They tell you take the fold-down seat. Pastor Jose sits on a cushion before the passenger cabin door, and Jose Cruz takes the driver's seat.
Mexico unfolds before you, 100, 200, 300 kilometers. First, down the long, straight superhighway across the flat bajio from Guanajuato state into Queretaro. Endless agricultural lands with hints of industry. In the distance, hills, even some mountains. But around you, everything close is flat, flat, flat, until you finally reach the city of Queretaro -- no stopping there -- and then the hills come close, lift up the tollway over rolling slopes above the old downtown, past the modern stadium, and into a network of canyons east of the city. Then, more flat land, and then, more hills as the doubled highway loops and rolls around half-forested slopes, up narrow canyons, into the state of Mexico.
As the whole panorama unrolls like some vision of travel, you four protestants swap miracle stories and Christian testimony. Que raro! Como los cuatro caballeros del autobus esperando un apocalipsis -- like four horsemen of the bus, waiting for apocalypse, "Watch, then, and wait...."
Pancho tells the tale of how he came to be converted.
"I used to drink all the time, all day and all night, neglecting my family and wife and children to run to the cantinas and drink and drink and drink. All this while I was driving busses too! One night in Tijuana, after I had just finished driving from Mexico City, I did not even go to sleep but spent all night in the bars and came to drive the bus next morning completely drunk, unshaven for three days, dirty, no bath, wearing the same filthy clothes from before the trip up, and... I suddenly began to see what a wreck my life was becomming. Lord, I finally said, if you will help me stop drinking and live a good life, I will try to remember to praise you and care for the things you have put into my life, my own family, my wife, my children. And He took me, turned me around, and set me on the good road..." he laughs, "my wife, when I told her, she shook her head, and laughed. I said come with me to the church. She said, Pancho, I cannot believe this! Why not? -- I asked her. Because you are always drunk, you neglect the family, you spend all your money and time in the cantinas. Yes, I said, I did. All that is true. But no more. No more. Well then, she said, I salute you."
A match flares in the cabin. He lights a cigarette. "But I still smoke these..." and offers one to you, then to his brother driver.
Pastor Jose, the fourth man, and only non-smoker, shakes his head. "Yes, it is good to turn away from the path of darkness, but you know it is written that the body should be a temple and kept clean, and to smoke..." he sighs, "even though, I must confess, the Bible doesn't say anything directly about tobacco...."
You decide to let slip your liberal text-analysis. "It doesn't say anything about tobacco because when the Bible was written, centuries ago, tobacco only existed in the Americas."
Silence. "But still," you add, "es un adiccion."
Three of you nod. Puff.
Pastor Jose shakes his head, reflects, then begins a new story: "You know there have been problems in my state of Oaxaca... local people struggling to stay free from the system of narcotrafico, refusing to grow marijuana or help the traficantes move their cargo north. One village mayor -- a good, believing Christian -- had so well organized his people that no one was participating in the corruption, all were standing together, and the druglords sent assassins to kill him, to make an example of him. They waited for him in an empty valley between the city and his town, planning to shoot him as he was crossing a stream, when he came out into the open, on the rocks. But then they saw he was surrounded by soldiers, an escort of silent soldiers, before him, behind him, beside him, and they were afraid to shoot at him, and he just kept on walking, across the stream and back up into the hills. Later, when this story spread from the assassins, someone asked the mayor, how was it you were in the company of all those soldiers? And he said, what soldiers? There was no one. I was alone."
You share many more such tales; how Pastor Jose used to spend all his money drinking and singing and playing his guitar all night long, until he gave himself, and his music, to God, and never drank again; or Pancho's tale of the young man who thought he had a lifetime to repent but was then ripped apart in a terrible bus accident; or another man who repented and then died in peace; and the woman whose cancer went into remission after many years of struggle; or the boy who has begun to walk again; and yes, my own little church in downtown San Diego, giving meals and free medical services to the poor and homeless....
You pop back into the passenger cabin, return with the last of your Ghirardeli chocolate squares. Pass them to each of your brothers. Mmmm, dark chocolate melting in your mouths....
Rumble down the superhighway into the megalopolis. Industrial suburbs, residential suburbs. Bourgeois hills with freeway outside of Satellite City look like South San Francisco. You say so. Pancho asks about traveling up to Napa Valley. His daughter lives there. For a few minutes, rolling slowly down the road, you talk about airports in Oakland and Sacramento.
The bus climbs into one last passage over a low hill and... "Now we are in Mexico City," Jose Cruz says.
The tollway drops onto the ground, transformed into a crowded boulevard. Dodging and weaving like a whale amidst sharks and sardines, Cruz manouvers his huge bus down the swarming street. "People drive crazy here," he remarks, bending into a left-turn lane, "you watch, someone will get right in front of us here."
Sure enough, a little blue Japanese flea cuts across your nose, edging out in front of the huge windshield where you'all sit.
"What did I tell you?"
The light changes, the flea beeps his horn and leaps across the opposing traffic. You trundle along behind, into the access road for Terminal Norte. Waving at people he recognizes, don Jose guides the bus into the embracing arms of the vast bus station, nuzzling your front end up against the sidewalk lip.
We are here! We are here! You whisper to yourself, ducking back into the passenger cabin to pick up your little day-pack and water bottle. Glance around the empty cabin. Four last holdouts on a long voyage from the frontier, climb down from the bus that has been your home for two days and two nights.
Get your large bag from the baggage space underneath. Quickly take out a pair of clean socks and underwear, fresh shirt. You will change in the bathroom.
Jose Cruz, hijo del Dios, amable cabellero, rey del camino, walks you to the ADO counter where you buy a ticket on the overnight bus to Palenque, leaving in three hours from the other terminal (there are four in this capital), Oriente -- TAPO. $384 (pesos).
"You know how to get there?"
"Si, por metro."
"Bueno. Entonces, nos vemos, Daniel."
"Vaya con Dios, Jose."
"Gracias. Igualmente."
Hands clasp in farewell.
14:44 pm. Waiting in the TAPO sala de ADO. Read. Write. Read some more. Think.
Bus trip will start at 16:00, and end some 14 hours later, shortly before dawn. The floor sweepers go back and forth across the tile floor. Every few minutes the booming announcer voices babbles something about a bus leaving for somewhere. A senora paints her nails. I dream of dead stones.
15:21. Who cares what time is, or was? I do. I will.
15:25. Go check in my equipaje. The bus with its big sign in front -- PALENQUE -- pulls in. Soon we will be boarding. Soon. As we leave Mexico City, my eyes will be pressed against the glass, gazing at everything. Abandoned railroad tracks, Metro construction, the grass strip beside the boulevard, trees painted white -- always those white-painted trees. Why? For the bugs, everyone says. Because it's tradition, I will think.
We will pick up speed and roll down the long, long calzada leading out of town, into the southeast, block after block after block until we rise up from the dry lakebed sprawl, around the ancient hills, past the stinking sewage outfall on that last canal, and into the open countryside.
In golden light of afternoon, as the video rolls A Time to Kill, the bus will climb up into the mountains. I shall eagerly seek my first glimpse of the mighty volcanoes, Iztacihuatl and Popocatepetl. Not until we reach the highest point of the crossing, in the pine and cedar forests, then the feet of Izta will reveal their white flanks, gleaming white snow under the yellow sky.
Then we will fall down the back side of the mountains, into the valley of Puebla. Popo will emerge from behind his princess, a faint puff of smoke and ash trembling above his triangular summit. I will glimpse the pyramid of Cholula, and the many hills around it. Under the mountain of La Malinche, we will slide through the northern suburbs of Puebla, and then, as the sun sets, pass into the night, with the volcanoes fading farther and farther behind us.
In the darkness, as I begin to sleep, the bus shall descend the divided highway that falls down from central highlands toward the tropical lowlands of the Gulf of Mexico, la tierra caliente. On the bottom, wrapped in mountain arms, Orizaba will pass by, a spangling of light with one weird arm flowing up onto a steep hillside. Stop for twenty minutes in Cordoba. Another two-peso restroom, another Mexican urinal -- un minditorio -- from the verb "mender," I think, meaning "to shake."
On the road again, I will fitfully sleep until we reach Villahermosa. Walk into the street outside the station, smell the air. Little all-night seafood shops. A few knots of men here and there, talking quietly in the late, late night. Lonely taxis prowling or parked. Now I shall be deep, deep into Mexico. This is the country where Cortes landed, where his men fought through the swamps to behind their conquest, where the first ambassadors from Moctezuma came, begging the Spaniards to accept a few rich gifts and then leave. Ah, no, said Cortes, we men of Castille have a sickness of the heart which only gold can cure....
Back inside the Villahermosa bus station, I will gaze up at the vast destination board above the ticket windows. Hundreds of names in little white letters march across the black expanse. Wonderful, mysterious names like Oaxaca, Campeche, Chetumal, Xpujil....
And then it will be time to go again. Rolling into the darkness, into the world that will already have turned into tomorrow (January 27).