Little Anaclaudia glared up at me over a plastic bag
filled with orange Fanta. While she took another vivid sip through a
clear straw, I eyed the pig’s head on a platter on the counter
behind her. I swear it winked at me, though it just could’ve been
the heat.
“Would you like something to eat?” I asked
Anaclaudia, winking back at the waxy, cone-shaped pig’s head, just
to be sure, “How about pig’s head, mi amor?”
“You’re a pig’s head,” she said, sipping her Fanta
and letting her eyes flicker over to the hard-packed lot behind me.
I turned to look as well, hoping to see our bus pulling in. The lot
was bigger than a football field and nearly buried under a wasteland
of trash, of thousands and thousands of plastic bags just like the
one Anaclaudia held in her hands. Faded multicolored buses spewing
diesel fumes crisscrossed the lot, jolting in and out of the deep
ruts that had been formed after the last big rain. Shock absorbers
squeaked, overworked engines complained overtime. Bare incandescent
bulbs were strung across the lot, pushing back the darkness.
“Take me to the town,” Anaclaudia said, dropping her
plastic bag at her feet and kicking it away, “Our bus will never
come.”
I shrugged, and followed her away from the terminal
de autobuses. We walked along the plank sidewalk skirting the lot,
past more pigs’ heads, past a thousand tiny figurines of the
Santísima Virgen María praying over bowls of chunky salsa cruda, and
past brown old men seated on barstools underneath fly-strips
speckled with flies. Eating pigs’ heads and salsa cruda, I guess.
I think I knew more or less what those pigs’ heads
were feeling, because my own head was cooked in the heat. I felt
like a big pot of menudo. We’d been stewing there in Juchitán for
the better part of a week and there was no reason to believe we’d
ever leave. Anaclaudia looked pretty well cooked too, though she was
doing better than I was – she looked more like a well-done carne
asada than a bowl of gut-stew. And she was making more sense than I
was; our bus would never come.
She was hardly big enough to climb over the enormous
pile of trash heaped up against the last putrid food stall. It was
twice as tall as she was, clumped with faded color, rotten, and
brittle and dusty. All this garbage had once held food. It reeked.
Flies buzzed, maggots wriggled. I went around, but she climbed over.
A mangy brown dog with leathery drooping tits, asleep at the top of
the pile, uncurled and stretched when Anaclaudia reached the summit,
and, steadily wagging its tail, tagged along.
“I hope we never get there,” Anaclaudia said,
leaping across a storm gutter as deep as it was wide. She only just
made it, and I had to think about it before I jumped. The mangy
bitch at Anaclaudia’s heels leapt without hesitating, and I was
impressed. Though her sagging front scraped against the concrete
when she landed on the other side, she kept right on Anaclaudia’s
heels, steady tail wagging.
I wondered what she had to be so pleased about, with
her nipples grazing the ground, but then I thought that maybe, just
maybe, it’s sometimes enough just to have someone to follow, someone
to think of as your own.
I smiled to myself and kept on Anaclaudia’s heels
too.
Away from the terminal de autobuses in the actual
streets of Juchitán, it was dead quiet after the turmoil of the
buses. I could hear the mongrel’s toenails click along the ground. I
was breathing heavily, and the unyielding fire-wind blew past my
ears. Anaclaudia made no sound as she skipped along.
It was just like her to move through the scene
without making noise, to slip out the back door and spend hours on
her own. It’s always been that way, even back when we had some
semblance of a family to speak of, before foster families.
Those were hot summers then, too, and this same kind
of wind blew, blistering everything in its path. The wind smelled in
those days like the muddy Arkansas River and the hot blood of a
just-slaughtered goat. Our tío Filiberto strung it up by its two
back legs and drained its blood into a bowl, nothing going to waste.
Later a dozen of us kids sat around a table set with liver, eyes,
heart, intestines, and kidneys, fighting for the most impressively
gross tidbits; but even then Anaclaudia stayed behind the house,
alone, in the shade of tío’s mulberry tree, or she wandered down to
the putrid bank of the slow-flowing Arkansas, leaving only
footprints for the rest of us to follow.
The path she took in Juchitán that day was bone dry,
so there were no footprints to follow. It was dark in the streets,
away from the bright light of the bare incandescent bulbs strung
across the bus plaza, and Anaclaudia was hard to follow. She slipped
away from me, and I was on my own for a little while. I don’t know
where she went then, with that mongrel bitch at her heels, or what
she thought about. Maybe she found a quiet place beneath a tree and
the mother dog curled up at her feet. Maybe she thought of our own
mother then. Maybe she just thought about nothing. I can’t say.
I sat down on the ground in front of a cinder block
altar to the Santísima Virgen María that had been tumbled together
on a street corner. In the orange light of the flame that grew as I
lit more and more candles, I wondered what I was going to do now
that I’d stuck us there.
The Santísima Virgen María smiled in the flickering
candlelight, her shadow like the great leather wings of bats,
beating against the crumbling back of her cinder block niche. This
escape to Mexico, such a good idea back in Colorado Springs, now
just made me want to laugh at myself, in the unrelenting dark wind.
The Santísima Virgen María, it seemed, laughed as well. Though it
could just have been the heat.
While I gazed at the Virgin’s smile, another memory
came to me all of a sudden, like a blast of cold air, extinguishing
all the candle flames I’d so carefully lit. It wasn’t a bad memory,
but it was a cold one. We had taken a wintry night trip to Río
Arriba to see the Virgin who had appeared miraculously on the side
of a church. It had taken forever to get there in tío’s blustery
ice-car and then we had stood for hours on the frozen ground, our
faces whipped by the blowing snow, gazing at the blank wall of the
church.
She was either unbearably hot or bitter cold, this
Virgin, basking in the orange light of flames, or cruelly blowing
out the flames we’d so carefully nurtured.
I struck another match, felt the fire-wind start up
again. There wasn’t much I could do any more; I wasn’t very good at
looking after us. It was time to head back. I didn’t know how I’d
tell Anaclaudia. I looked behind me, over my shoulder, towards the
terminal de autobuses, and heard the rumble of the diesel engines. I
thought of all the rubbish, the pigs’ heads, the masses of people
coming and going, and the crumbling bus that would take us back
north.
Anaclaudia appeared again out of the darkness, the
bitch at her heels. “Come on, let’s go,” she said, grabbing my hand
like a mother, and, taking the lead again, she led us deeper into
the dark streets of Juchitán, away from the bus terminal, away from
the waxy heads of pigs, away from the gaze of the Santísima Virgen
Maria.
