South of the Frontera; A Peace Corps Memoir

The boarding house was a beehive of university students and foreigners who had all lost their senses, like me. Even at six thirty in the morning, the second floor bathroom across the hall had a line of young men and women of all shapes, colors, sizes and flavors dressed in robes, old torn trousers and long nightshirts. They stood with towel, toothbrush and soap in hand, speaking in Spanish, English, French, German, Japanese, Dutch, Portuguese and God knows what else. Downstairs the high pitched voice of an eighty year old woman called out in each language, “Hurry up! I’m serving breakfast just once today!” An hour later, showered, beard trimmed, hair combed, teeth brushed, boots squeezed on and dressed in my new special tan corduroy cowboy jeans with matching waist length jacket, a new plaid cowboy shirt, a red bandana tied around my neck and of course, my beat-up straw cowboy hat, I set out to explore. Using the maps in Mexico on $5 a Day, I found Insurgentes, the longest boulevard in the world at that time. It included two lanes of motor vehicle traffic on each side of a concrete median with a dual set of rails for an old fashioned trolley. Bells clanged and oblong, worn metal wheels clanked. Passengers yelled. There was no destination because, well, this was my destination and anyplace was someplace. The sky was blue, the sun warm, air free and this city was crazy, baby. The electric coach swayed on its tracks down to the intersection with Baja California where I jumped off while it was still moving to run into a pharmacy. I searched aisles, trying to read the Spanish labels until finally my hand ran across a label marked with a familiar laxative. I grabbed the box, paid and immediately ate three pieces of the chocolate flavored medicine before running back to Insurgentes and boarding another trolley in the opposite direction. In a sweated frenzy I rode, ran and gawked for hours, never leaving a radius of one half mile but my God, there was more activity and strangeness packed into that zone than Scottsdale during rodeo. There were ancient movie marquees, machine gun toting guards in front of banks, lottery vendors carrying poster sized sheets with winning numbers and corner magazine stands with dozens of newspapers. There were restaurants with waiters dressed in black tuxedos and ties, gasoline stations with teams of men dressed in blue uniforms who swarmed over cars as they pulled in, attacking them with rags and soapy water and tire gauges. As soon as the car stopped, the hood was up and oil was checked, windows washed, tire air pressure checked and gasoline dispensed all at once. The sidewalks were one massive throng of well dressed people all walking fast, eating, reading, talking and the streets were filled with shiny cars whose horns blasted, some in tunes like “On Top of Old Smokey.” There signs and voices and the click of electric traffic lights changing while Indian women dressed in brightly colored hand embroidered shawls sold gum and candy from beautiful baskets. There was every kind of store imaginable and products that I had never seen before and there was music everywhere with roving minstrels on buses, street corners, in restaurants. It was the same with the smells of exotic food. It permeated every square inch. My box of laxative laced candy was half empty before noon. Once back at the pensión, Doña Julia (the owner) must have noticed that I probably looked confused, surprised and plumb wore-out because she told me to rest before lunch which was served Mexican style at mid-afternoon. Upstairs while lying on my cheap, hard bed under a fifteen feet high ceiling, my heart beat faster than a hummingbird in heat and my guts wrenched, twisted and began to make noise. At that moment, my new roommate walked in, Bert of Denver, Colorado. He was wide at the shoulders like someone who once played football linebacker but then took to beer drinking. His hair had begun to fall out as if he had been taking too many anabolic steroids and he wore black rimmed glasses. Not only that, he wore black trousers, a white shirt and a black tie as if he were a Mormon missionary. Whew! Get down, mad dog. Hey listen: from the moment he opened his mouth, any cowboy could tell that he was not all right. First, he spent one half hour telling me how he sold Mexican Christmas cards door to door and showed me samples explaining the three color printing process while I kept wondering, “What the hey?” What an audience he had. During his story, my stomach sounded like a coffee pot, percolating. He took the next half an hour to tell me about a beautiful Cuban woman he had tried to sell that same day who asked him right off why he hated himself. He thought he was in love so I asked to hear some of his lines in Spanish. Although he claimed to have been in Mexico for almost two years, he sounded like he’d been studying to be a half-wit. He said that his old man had floated him so many loans that he couldn’t ask again. Then he mentioned his car. He had left it in Colorado storage and now owed more than it was worth. That’s when he started to cry. When he started to weep, I escaped downstairs to the kitchen. It was still a bit early and the thin, white haired, almost blind Julia cooked. Her tiny kitchen was just large enough for an old fashioned iron wood stove, a refrigerator, sink and one tiny table pushed up against a wall. There were three chairs. A checkered oilcloth lay over the table and on the wall was a three dimensional image of the Last Supper and a four year old calendar. Each wall had shelves where Julia’s three Indian maids set red, blue, yellow and green metal glasses and many colors of plastic and chipped porcelain plates and bowls. Metal pans were stacked on the floor next to the stove. In the hallway, Julia had set three other tables. Boarders ate in shifts depending upon available seating. The room smelled of garlic not just because she cooked with it but because she also wore it, claiming to be a gypsy sometimes, a witch other times, and healthy all the time. I sat down alone because it was too early. At that moment Julia stirred a pot and ordered her maids with authority. Without turning to look at me, she called out something in French. In Spanish, I replied, “I don’t speak French.” She turned and squinted, then said something in German. I replied in Spanish, “I don’t speak German.” She giggled and told me in Spanish, “But you look German.” Then, she shook a large spoon at me and said in English, “You are early!” She ordered the maids in Spanish to prepare me a cup of coffee. She explained to me in English that she normally charged extra for coffee between meals but since I had answered in Spanish, it was free this time. While Julia cooked, we had a wonderful conversation in Spanish. She patiently corrected me with a smile as if it were fun. May God bless her. According to my travel book, Julia was of French descent and pronounced her last name Bah-stah-rd. When I asked about this, she laughed aloud, handed her spoon to a maid, held her hand out for me to grab and led me out into the sitting room where several longhaired college students and women dressed in faded blue jeans and nurse’s smocks sat on sofas, talking while waiting for lunch. On the wall opposite them, Julia pointed to a large framed very old sepia colored family photograph with a seated man dressed in a suit and tie, a handsome woman in a long dress standing behind him and children all around. Julia told me each of her children’s names, the dates of their births, of her marriage, the date her husband died and the fact that he was of foreign descent but not French. “You must have read that book,” she told me in English. “They all come now saying ‘Bah-stah-rd’ but it’s Bastard!” Then she laughed again and the students laughed too.