Domingo 23 Diciembre
Mañana en la mañana
“Me - coffee. You - money.”
Oh, yesterday. Maybe I’m lucky to be well and writing now, but even if so, I still feel like pure dogshit off the back of how the day played out. It’s like I’m still hitting the same walls that bruised the sense out of me 5000 miles away. The world ended and I missed it, but I hope that somehow I’ve learned something useful to deal with the new one.
It started well. I rose at madrugada, after a cue from Chang. He’d said that he was too ill to climb la Malinche with Victor the walking guide, but that I could meet him to go. No sign of Victor, so I set off instead to the next hill in view, prepared well with Mariana’s walking boots and wind-resistant jacket. The morning of blithe adventure takes in fields, goats, and a derelict hacienda, with a basement tunnel, and fantasies of finding a casket of Spanish gold beneath the wilderness. There’s also the discovery that Mariana was keeping M$4100 in cash in the jacket pocket - the treasure was right under my nose all along, but it wasn’t mine in the first place. The journey continues, traversing ravines that cry out for the rain to return.
Sweat pouring off me by the time I’m climbing the hill, I jump a fence to the secluded top and spend the afternoon sunbathing on my little mesa… but on the return journey la Malinche appears a lot closer. I send texts to reassure Mariana & Javier that I know where I’m going, but with la Malinche bearing down upon me, and ravines to traverse, I stray off course far enough that I’ve missed Casa Malinche, the neighbouring town, and the road to the highway completely. By dusk, I’m heading to a police inspection station on the highway. The traffic cop comes out and I start hacking out a conversation with him, between my pidgin Spanish and his non-existent English, and he’s got plenty of questions about the hacienda and what I’m doing there, but thankfully I’m too ignorant with the language to tell him much. When I mention getting a taxi to the hacienda, he says it’ll take 3 hours (lie) and that’s when I conceded to call Mariana. She arrives with Marianita 30 minutes later, and I sit silently in the back of the car while a casual interrogation plays out between her and the traffic cop. I can tell he’s getting details off her, and that she’s dealing with him tersely. I apologise on the drive back and then she gives me a roasting, about how the police aren’t the same as in my country, and how crooked they are. She hopes that cop was one of the nice ones, unlike the ones who got away with robbing her brother-in-law’s house a month ago. I hope that the M$20 mordida the traffic cop squeezed out of me before she came was enough to placate him, and keep fresh avarice from descending upon Casa Malinche. He was quite blunt about it, but I never let on that I had 4100 of Mariana’s smackeroos on me, and he thankfully had no pretext or inclination to search me.
I felt rotten when returning, on top of being physically spent, so I retired to an epic sulk / sleep. Plenty more to write about my journey, but I still stink and there are perros, perritos and pollos to feed.
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