NOTHING TO DECLARE

by Mary Morris

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Map

  Copyright

  Dedication

  The Desert

  THERE ARE ONLY TWO WAYS ...

  THE WOMAN WHO RAN THE ...

  A GIANT WHITE ROOSTER STOOD ...

  LUPE BEGAN TO COME TO ...

  In the Sierra

  IT WAS MY MOTHER WHO ...

  SAN MIGUEL DE ALLENDE IS ...

  I HAD BEEN IN SAN ...

  I WAS READY FOR DINNER ...

  SAN ANTONIO REACHES BACK TOWARD ...

  IN MY APARTMENT IN NEW ...

  ON SUNDAY I DECIDED TO ...

  LUPE HAD A WAY SHE ...

  I RAN INTO DEREK AT ...

  THE NEXT AFTERNOON ALEJANDRO DID ...

  ON SUNDAY ALEJANDRO AND I, ...

  The Jungle

  ON THE PLANE TO TUXTLA ...

  IN MY CHILDHOOD FANTASIES I ...

  WHEN I REACHED THE STABLE ...

  WHEN I RETURNED I FOUND ...

  NOBODY GOES TO PALENQUE IN ...

  CATCHING THE NIGHT TRAIN TO ...

  IN A FEW DAYS WE ...

  In the City

  LYING MIDWAY BETWEEN THE PACIFIC ...

  ALEJANDRO HAD GIVEN ME THE ...

  I HATED THE PLACE WHERE ...

  ONE NIGHT I WENT TO ...

  I DECIDED IT WAS TIME ...

  Return

  AS I APPROACH SAN MIGUEL, ...

  IN THE MORNING LUPE AND ...

  IT WAS THE SEASON OF ...

  LUPE'S HAND AND ARM DIDN'T ...

  The Highlands

  I STOOD AT TALISMAN BRIDGE ...

  At the Border

  ON THE ROAD TO GUATEMALA ...

  WOMEN WHO TRAVEL AS I ...

  The Land of the Dead

  AS I JOURNEY BACK FROM ...

  WHEN I RETURNED ALONE TO ...

  I HAD NEVER BEEN TO ...

  THE APARTMENT NEXT TO MINE ...

  LUPE CAME OVER ONE MORNING ...

  Along the Coast

  I GREW RESTLESS AGAIN AS ...

  THINKING THAT THERE MIGHT BE ...

  NICARAGUA HAS MORE ACTIVE VOLCANOES ...

  Flight

  IN DREAMS I AM AN ...

  THOUGH IT WAS TOO EARLY ...

  WHEN I WAS WELL ENOUGH ...

  I LANDED AT SANTA ELENA ...

  I WENT TO THE PYRAMIDS ...

  I NEEDED TO GO TO ...

  Copyright © 1988 by Mary Morris.

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book,

  write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Company, 2 Park Street,

  Boston, Massachusetts 02108.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Morris, Mary, date.

  Nothing to declare: memoirs of a woman traveling alone / Mary Morris.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-395-44637-6

  1. Mexico—Description and travel—1981– 2. Central America—

  Description and travel—1981– 3. Morris, Mary, date.

  —Journeys—Mexico. 4. Morris, Mary, date. —Journeys

  —Central America.

  I. Title.

  F1216.5. M67 1988

  917.2'0434—dc19 87-30673

  CIP

  An excerpt from this book first appeared in the New York Times.

  Copyright © 1987 by The New York Times Company.

  Reprinted by permission.

  Printed in the United States of America

  Q 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

  All of the names in this book have been changed except for those of

  Lupe and her children, to whom this book is dedicated.

  To Guadalupe Martinez Medina

  and the children of San Antonio

  The Desert

  THERE ARE ONLY TWO WAYS TO GET TO SAN Miguel. One is to drive north from Mexico City. The other is to drive south from Laredo. There is also a train but I only saw it once in the time I lived there, and it was two hours late. The road north from Mexico City is unremarkable—a superhighway to Laredo, lined with Pemex stations, auto part shops, tire retailers. It is also lined with many foreign factories, such as John Deere Tractors, Singer, Volkswagen, Pepsi, companies that find prices right and labor cheap south of the border.

  If you are driving north from Mexico City, after about four hours you reach a turn. If you miss the turn, you can go straight back to America in about ten hours flat. But if you leave that main road and turn left, toward the west in the direction of San Miguel, as I did one summer in what seems now like a long time ago, you enter a different world. The kind of world you might read about in the works of Latin American writers such as Fuentes, Rulfo, García Márquez. Macondo could be out there.

  You come to the old Mexico, a lawless land. It is a landscape that could be ruled by bandits or serve as a backdrop for the classic Westerns, where all you expect the Mexicans to say is "hombre" and "amigo" and "sí, señor." It is a land with colors. Desert colors. Sand and sienna, red clay and cactus green, scattered yellow flowers. The sky runs all the ranges of purple and scarlet and orange. You can see dust storms or rain moving toward you. Rainbows are frequent. The solitude is dramatic.

  You come abruptly to the high desert, where people travel on the backs of burros and everything slows down. Cactuses are huge and resemble men in agony, twisted and wild; it is a trail of crucifixions.

  I have a friend named Brenda Reynolds who was living in Mexico City, and it was Brenda who drove me to San Miguel the first time. She was preparing to move back to the States just as I was arriving, but she offered to take me to San Miguel, spend a night, and help me get my bearings. Brenda was one of the people who suggested San Miguel when I told her I wanted to live away from the United States for a while. Brenda said it was a perfect place and that the weather was wonderful. I had heard other things about San Miguel as well. Americans who want to get away often go there. It is a place of exile.

  I had grown weary of life in New York and had some money from a grant, so I felt ready for a change. With a terrible feeling of isolation and a growing belief that America had become a foreign land, I headed south. I went in search of a place where the land and the people and the time in which they lived were somehow connected—where life would begin to make sense to me again.

  When I arrived in Mexico City, Brenda served me black zapotes. A black zapote is a fruit somewhat like a giant prune which, when mashed with sugar and lemon juice, with the skin and seeds removed (an incredibly arduous task), tastes like something they'd serve in heaven. There is no comparable way to describe this dish except to say that it was the first thing I tasted when I arrived at Brenda's house in Mexico and I thought then that I had come to paradise.

  This was before driving to San Miguel, before I traveled down that very dusty road with Brenda, laughing the whole way until we approached San Miguel. Then I grew serious, struck by the reality of the place to which I had come. As we twisted on those hairpin turns, a street sign appeared. It contained the silhouette of a full-bodied woman and beneath her the words curva peligrosa —dangerous curve.

  ***

  I never saw pictures of San Miguel before I moved there, but I went with a very clear sense of what everything should look like, a cross between New York and my hometown and the island of Crete—exciting, familiar, and foreign all at the same time.

  The Buddhists are right in their belief that expectation is one of the great sources of suffering. We try to direct the scripts in our heads and are miserable when we fail. We often wonder why things go better—parties, journeys, love—when we have no expectations. What I saw as we drove into San Miguel bore little relati
on to what I'd thought I'd find. A dusty town rose out of a hill, with a salmon-pink church spire and pale stucco buildings. Buses were everywhere, idling near the center of town, sending up exhaust that would make me choke whenever I walked past. Their drivers shouted the names of destinations unknown to me—Celaya, Guanajuato, Dolores. Tortilla ladies and avocado ladies sold sandwiches near the buses as blind beggars and naked children, broken-spirited donkeys and starving dogs, filled the streets.

  I was missing the fine points. Expectation does that to you. I missed the bougainvillea, the colonial buildings, the cobblestone streets. It is easy to miss all of that once the panic sets in. I only saw the dust and the donkeys and the strangers and a place that seemed so distant from anything I thought I could ever call home.

  That night Brenda and I checked into a hotel where I drifted into despair. I had no idea how I was going to live in this place. I couldn't believe that I'd packed myself up and moved to a strange country where I barely spoke the language and didn't know a soul. My purpose seemed vague, and walking those streets for the first time, I told myself that I should just get back in the car and go home. We had dinner and strolled, hardly speaking. I was quiet, withdrawn, and Brenda, who has always respected my privacy, did not pry. Perhaps she suspected that something had happened to me before I left, but she did not ask and I didn't say.

  In the morning we went to a hot spring nearby called Taboada, a place I would frequent on Sundays because the hotel there served a wonderful brunch. The Mexicans frolicked with their families, often fat, happy, splashing out of control, and I longed to be that carefree again. Afterward we drove back to the hotel and Brenda was ready to go. Like a scoutmaster sending a boy out on a survival training course, she left me with a Spanish-English dictionary, a few extra pens, and the name of the woman who ran the Blue Door Bakery, who supposedly had rooms to rent.

  I was on my own. I had no idea what to do with myself. It grew dark early and I wasn't ready for bed. Instead I went out for a walk. The streets were dark and cobbled and smelled of garbage. I didn't know my way as I wandered through the back alleys and narrow roads. I passed restaurants with crowded tables and lighted rooms where families stared into the blue light of miniature TVs. Old women, grasping babies, sat telling stories and laughing on doorsteps. I searched for a movie house, a coffee shop with guitar music, but all I found were dozens of bars filled with men, and I wasn't ready to go into one alone.

  I walked to the center of town, to a square lined with benches and trees, which in most parts of Mexico is called the zocalo, but in San Miguel is called the jardín, where an odd procession passed in front of me. A circle of girls walked in the clockwise direction around the perimeters of the jardín, perhaps half the distance of a square city block. There were at least a hundred of them. And encircling them, moving counterclockwise, was a group of young men. Hesitating, I cut through their circle and sat down on a bench, where I watched as the single men and women of the town encircled each other on and on into the darkness in this ritualized form of courtship—called the promenade—which would occur every night at the hour when the birds came home to rest in the trees of the jardín.

  They flirted and giggled and pretended to ignore one another, but as darkness fell, some wandered off, boy leading girl away to a more secluded spot in a darkened street, an alleyway. I imagined them whispering each other's names and thought of how far I was from someone who might whisper mine.

  The church bells rang. From the steeple clock that seemed to rule over this town and mark the monotony of the days, I saw that it was only nine o'clock. I still had much of the evening ahead of me and no place to go. Then I noticed the people entering church. Toothless old men and corpulent women with babies wrapped in shawls shuffled in. Girls in miniskirts with white blouses held the hands of boys in green or cranberry polyester pants; others in blue jeans, black hair slicked back, lingered in the alcoves.

  In this town of shrieking birds and promenading lovers, I could think of nothing else to do, so I went to church. I walked hesitantly into the large Gothic stone building and down an aisle toward the apse. Slipping into a pew off to the side, I sat beside a campesino family, the woman with a child suckling at her exposed breast, the children in freshly ironed shirts, the father, in a sombrero, keeping a toddler from running away.

  I sat down with a blind man and with wide-eyed children, with the toothless, the ancients, the impoverished, the illegitimate mothers, the crippled, the drunk, the miserable, the lost. I prayed with the beggar who had no hands and with the woman whose eyes were empty sockets. I prayed with the contrite and the forlorn, with los desdichados—the unlucky, the misfortunate. I prayed until the tears came down my face and I was crying in that church on that Sunday night, my first night alone in Mexico, praying that the reason for this journey would be made clear to me, oblivious of the Mexicans who watched with troubled eyes, moved by my inexplicable grief.

  THE WOMAN WHO RAN THE BLUE DOOR BAKERY did have rooms to rent and at dusk the next day she took me to see them. We drove down the hill away from the center of town. We left the cobbled streets with bougainvillea vines and turned up a dirt road lined with mud huts, garbage, diseased animals, children in tattered rags. When I asked where we were going, she replied, "San Antonio." And that was all.

  She was a cold, calculating person whom I would simply call "the Señora" and who'd take only cash for rent. In the middle of these slums in the neighborhood called San Antonio, the Señora had built some town houses. One of them had been vacated recently, and she showed it to me. It had a living room, kitchen, and small patio on the ground floor. Two bedrooms upstairs. Upstairs the front of the town house had French doors and a small balcony, but the back wall had no windows. I should have suspected that someone was building a house on the other side, but I did not. The sound of construction would punctuate my days. A small, winding staircase went to the roof, where I'd read and do the wash in the afternoons. From the roof I could see the sierra—the pale lavender hills and the stretch of high desert, the cactus men and wildflowers.

  It was the only place I considered. "I'll take it," I said.

  I never would have moved to the neighborhood called San Antonio if I'd known better. For that part of town was different from the other parts. Very few Americans lived there. It was too far from the center of things. I would have to walk half an hour up a dusty hill to get to market. It was the poorest part; it was where the servants who served the wealthy lived and where others struggled just to get by. It was the dustiest, dirtiest place, where the Mexicans would call me "gringita" and my own mother, when she heard me describe it, would beg me to leave. I had no idea what I was doing when I moved into San Antonio. But I am grateful for the mistake I made.

  I had come to Mexico with two suitcases and an electric typewriter, and the next day I brought them by taxi to my town house, whose name I noticed as I dragged my belongings from the cab: the Departamentos Toros (bull apartments). I am a Taurus and as I stood beneath the sign with the name of the apartment, I thought this must be a good omen, to move into a place named after my astrological sign. I spent the day settling in. But as dusk came, I realized I knew no one, was about a mile from town, and had no food in the house.

  Climbing the winding stairs to the roof terrace, I saw the vast Mexican desert stretching before me, the sun setting in strips of brilliant scarlet across the horizon. The town with the pink steeple of the church seemed far away. I saw the birds—large, black, noisy birds—which every evening at dusk flew to the center of the town to stand guard over the promenade. And then, as I'd do many evenings after that, struck by the prospect of the evening alone, I followed them.

  I changed my clothes, put on a pair of walking shoes, and headed up the hill—a climb I'd never get used to. But I went to the place where the birds were going. It seems I have always followed the birds, or have wanted to follow them. The loud chirps, thousands of them, grew piercing as I approached the jardín.

  The birds were
bedding down for the night and the promenade was in process. I sat on a bench to watch. It is odd to sit in a place where you know absolutely no one. There was not a familiar face, not even the possibility of someone passing whom I might know. I was here a perfect stranger.

  After a while I got up and headed down a road. I paused in front of a bar lit in amber. Inside Mexican men drank and laughed. There were no Mexican women, but there were a few Americans, so I thought it would be all right. I went in and ordered a beer. I sat for perhaps half an hour, until it grew dark. People were all around me and I thought to myself how I should try to make conversation, but I found I could think of nothing to say. I was sure that someone would come up to me and say something like, "Been in town long?" or "So where'd you come from?" But no one did. I ordered another beer and nursed it slowly, realizing I did not want to go home. I watched the people around me. Mexicans laughing and talking with blond American women. Other Americans huddled in corners. One man, whom I'd later know as Harold, sat in his pajamas, which he wore when he went on a binge.

  I took it all in, and then, at about ten o'clock, I walked home. I descended the hill, toward the bus stop, until I reached the turnoff to San Antonio. At the turnoff is the dirt road, about a quarter mile long; it is walled on both sides. If you are attacked while walking down this road, you have no place to go.

  For the first time, I walked that quarter mile at night alone. Every shadow, every sound, made me turn. I behaved like a hunted thing. It is not easy to move through the world alone, and it is never easy for a woman. You must keep your wits about you. You mustn't get yourself into dark places you can't get out of. Keep money you can get to, an exit behind you, and some language at your fingertips. You should know how to strike a proud pose, curse like a sailor, kick like a mule, and scream out your brother's name, though he may be three thousand miles away. And you mustn't be a fool.

  Brace yourself for tremendous emptiness and great surprise. Anything can happen. The bad things that have occurred in my travels—and in my life in general—have happened because I wasn't prepared. At times I wonder that I am still alive.