Adam jumped into the back.
“Are we headed there now?”
“Hardly, it’s a ten hour drive. I’ll take you Saturday. I’ve booked you a room at the Hilton Reforma for tonight. They’ll just need your credit card.”
She went back to texting.
Welcome to Mexico.
* * *
José drove as if he was trying to make up ground in a demolition derby. Traffic was backed up all the way into the city. If anyone flashed their indicator, he sped up, jammed his fist on the horn and went bumper to bumper with the car in front to stop them changing lanes. He squeezed into every gap he could.
Jamie finally looked up from her cell phone. “Traffic can get a bit heavy this time of day.”
Adam sat white-lipped in the back seat and said nothing. He didn’t expect to be treated like the Pope, but he had hoped for more hospitality than this. He was giving six months of his life for nothing, and now they were booking hotels he had to pay for. The girl was insufferable. He hoped she hadn’t gotten her manners from her father.
But what really unsettled him was how much she looked like Elena; from the colour of her hair, the way she wore it, to her choice of perfume. He had come here to try and get Elena out of his head and the first thing life had done was put him in a car with a blonde who looked just like her. She even had the same figure, slim and long-legged.
He touched the button beside him and the window slid down. They were on Paseo Reforma: a long tree-lined avenue punctuated with traffic circles and glorieta. Angels, Aztecs and conquistadores rose like ghosts from the smog. There were Starbucks and Consulates. The air smelled like fried diesel oil.
He stared at Dutch tourists in harem pants and backpacks, shoeblacks buffing the shoes of suited businessmen, at secretaries hurrying to and from their offices in the Zona Rosa.
He had calmed down enough to try to break the ice again. “Do you work for the clinic?” hesaid.
“Do I look like I work for the clinic?”
“Not really.”
“Well there you are. I’m an IT consultant. I help out my father when I can, but I don’t have the milk of human kindness in me like he does.”
“Really? I didn’t pick up on that.”
She turned and gave him a chill smile. She was going to drive him to Santa Marta tomorrow? Ten hours in a car with this woman? It was going to be a long trip.
“Have you been to Mexico before?”
“No.”
“What made you take on my father’s little project? It’s hard work.”
“Being an ER physician isn’t exactly a cakewalk.”
“But at least you get paid.” Her phone trilled. Another message, busy girl. She glanced at it and said. “He told me you that you had some problems in Boston.”
“It’s personal,” he said.
They had stopped at lights. A ragged swarm rushed from the sidewalks and the median, waving loose cigarettes, phone cards, newspapers. A clown holding a detergent gun filled with soapy water approached their car and José frantically waved him away. He sprayed the windshield anyway and wiped it with a small cloth and a rubber scraper.
Jamie wound down her window and held out some coins.
“Why did you do that?” he said. “The windscreen was clean.”
“He’s just trying to make a living,” she said.
A few minutes later José pulled into the driveway of the Hilton, she walked Adam inside and spoke to the clerk behind the reception desk in Spanish. He found Adam’s reservation on the computer and handed him a registration card.
He was a little surprised to see her still waiting for him after he finished checking in. “If you go out, watch out for beggars, some of them can be a little aggressive. And keep your wits about you. A friend of mine had her laptop snatched out of her arms around here, and it wasn’t even dark. If you go into the Zona Rosa at night you’ll have touts trying to pull you into their strip clubs. It’s up to you whether you go with them, but they’ll rip you off for drinks.”
“Any other advice?”
“Stay away from witches.”
“Witches?”
“You’ll see them. Think about it; if they have to work on the street, how good can they be?”
“There are good witches?”
She peered at him over the top of her Ray-Bans as if he had just made a joke in poor taste.
He thought she might want to make up for her earlier rudeness and invite him for dinner or a drink later, but instead she pointed out the elevators and held out her hand. “I’ll drive you up to Santa Marta on Saturday. I’ll call you tomorrow night to arrange a time to pick you up.”
“I don’t suppose you’re free for dinner?”
“I have a date,” she said and was gone. Some men standing in the foyer followed her with their eyes. He smiled. If only you knew, he thought, and went up to his room.
Chapter 21
After he had showered and changed he decided to go for a walk, wandered into the back streets behind the metro. The sidewalks were crammed with people selling watchbands and pirated videos. An old man with stooped shoulders was peddling the ubiquitous chiclesde a peso. There were old magazines piled on the blankets, stiff from rain and sun.
He saw a woman standing in the bushes sitting on a folding chair. She wore blue jeans and a faded pink t-shirt, her hair tied in pigtails on either side of her face. There was an ash-smeared skull on the grass beside her with a lit cigarette in its mouth.
An old Mexican woman approached her and she stood there while the younger woman waved a smudge stick around her and started chanting in a language that didn’t sound anything like the schoolboy Spanish that Adam knew.
He wondered if she was one of the witches Jamie had warned him about.
It was getting on towards evening and he was hungry. He decided he was not in the mood for the tender delights of the Zona Rosa so he went back to his hotel and had dinner sent up to his room.
He picked up his cell phone and sat on the bed in the dark, stared at the lights of Chapultepec castle and the luxury hotels along the Reforma. He felt curiously abandoned, high in this glass and concrete eyrie, alone in a strange country with witches down in the street.
On impulse he tapped her number on his speed dial then immediately cancelled the call and threw the phone aside before he could change his mind and make a fool of himself. What the hell was he thinking?
He lay back with his eyes closed and wondered if she was making love to some other man right now. He wondered what he looked like, how they had met.
He ate his cheeseburger watching the sports channel then tried to get some sleep. But it was impossible. Finally he gave up and turned on the bedside light, picked up the book he had bought at the airport bookshop in Boston: Love is the Drug.
It was written by some Californian self-help guru he had seen on a morning show. He skimmed the pages, impatient for the guy to get to his point. There was nothing he didn’t already know and agree with; in any kind of rational love, passion and pleasure were not paramount, people who stayed together had common interests, goals and needs; a healthy relationship was grounded on years of commitment and struggle in which the needs of the other become as important as the needs of the self.
It’s what he thought, too, and that was why he had tried to avoid it.
The book said that romance and passion could not last. Yes, you’re preaching to the choir, pal. How can it? That was why he never wanted to get tied down to one woman. This was what Elena was saying, too, this was why she wanted to marry someone else.
So, Mister Love is the Drug, how the hell did this happen to me?
This over-tanned airhead was basically telling him to be the guy he was before he met her. “Yeah, well that’s what I want, too,” he said and tossed the book across the room. He reached for the remote and turned on the TV. He found an old black and white movie with Asian actors and Spanish subtitles, a horror story about a man who changes into an insect. It made m
ore sense to him than the damned book. He watched that.
He woke with the TV still on. He went to the bathroom and found a cockroach on the floor, right there on the spotless marble, frozen in the harsh white light. It was huge and black, its long feelers sniffing the air.
He killed it with Love is the Drug. Its guts were smeared over the author’s photograph on the back cover and he tossed it in the trash.
He couldn’t imagine how a bug that size had gotten in here. Maybe it was a shape shifter, like in the movie, and had flown in like a witch.
Chapter 22
Jamie rang him the next morning at seven. He woke from a black sleep, felt as if he’d been drugged. It must have been past four when he finally got to sleep. He hadn’t expected to hear from her, not after her welcome the day before. “Qué onda, güey?”
What’s up, dude?
“How soon can you be ready?” she said.
“I ... I don’t know ... what time is it? ... I haven’t had breakfast yet.”
“I’ll pick you up in the foyer at eight.”
“Where are we going?” hesaid, but she had already hung up.
* * *
“I’m sorry if I was little brusque yesterday,” she said. “I had things on my mind.”
“It’s okay,” he said, though he didn’t mean it.
She manoeuvred her SUV into a parking spot on the Calle Republica de Cuba and told him they were going to the Zocalo, the main square. “Do you know the Dia de Los Muertos, the Day of the Dead?” she asked him as they walked. “It’s our major celebration here in Mexico.”
“I’ve heard of it.”
“In America we have Halloween, but here we take it much more seriously. I’ll take you to the witches” market later and you can see for yourself. First let’s get a cup of coffee.”
The Zocalo was the very heart of the city; there was a flagpole with the largest flag he had ever seen. Jamie said there was a ceremony every morning and evening to raise it and lower it, and an entire platoon of soldiers marched out of the gates of the Palacio to do it.
She showed him how the Catedral was slowly breaking in half, subsidence sending the eastern wing sinking into the ruins of the ancient Templo Mayor beneath it. Twenty thousand people had been sacrificed in one day on this very spot, she said, back in the days of the Aztecs.
Drumbeats echoed around the square, a modern day warrior in a jaguar costume was performing for the tourists outside the museum.
They passed a jewellery shop. Inside on the counter there was a grinning silver skull wearing a soldier’s helmet. It had a long cigar clamped between its teeth and its gaping jaws were filled with banknotes.
“It’s for good luck,” she said.
There was so much that was strange, he felt like one of those puppets that could turn its head around in a complete circle. He rubbernecked at the bright orange vendors’ carts laden with candy and cigarettes, the green Volkswagen taxis, the lottery ticket vendors wandering up and down the cloistered street.
He had never felt so alien. He was over six feet tall, taller than most of the Mexicans on the sidewalk. He felt naked.
She took him into the Catedral. A woman knelt in front of the Madonna, her arms outstretched, pulling the little clouds of incense towards her with her hands while her daughter knelt beside her, texting on her cell phone.
“The Spanish built this on the site of the old Aztec pyramid temple. There was an altar right at the very top,” she said, looking up into the dome. “They used to take prisoners up there and rip out their hearts with an obsidian knife and then throw it on a brazier of coals while they were still alive.”
“In America we call it ‘divorce.’”
She smiled for the first time. “Let’s have a coffee.”
There was a bar in the street behind the Catedral. They sat outside on the cobblestone plaza.
This was a different woman than the one who had come to meet him at the airport the previous afternoon. She was relaxed and charming. Perhaps her date had gone well.
He looked across the square. There were police and security guards everywhere and they all carried guns. In Mexico you were either rich and afraid or poor and desperate. There didn’t seem to be much in between.
“How was your date?” he said.
“What date?”
“Yesterday I asked you if you would have dinner with me, and you said you had a date.”
“Did I?”
“Yes, you did.”
“Well who knows why I said that. I stayed home and watched television.”
“Jesus.”
“What?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
A hurdy-gurdy player in a moth-eaten uniform was busking for passers-by; a row of unemployed sat by the railings, hoping for someone to pick them out and give them a day’s work; a woman dressed as an Aztec moved among the tables trying to sell trinkets while a skinny cat fussed at his feet mewling for scraps. Everywhere there were people hungry for a few pesos, looking for a little luck.
“So what’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?”
“I was born here. I’ve only been to the US to study. I did business at UCLA.”
“Your father never went back?”
“He came down here for a year’s missionary work thirty years ago and that’s how he met my mother. They were both idealists from rich families who had no use for money. He loves it here.”
“And you?”
“I’m not an idealist. I’d like to be as rich as my grandparents one day.”
“You want everything they threw away.”
She nodded.
“So that’s why you went into business?”
“I would make a lousy missionary. My father doesn’t mind finding snails in his bed and frogs in the shower. I’m not that kind of girl. I like a shoe rack two feet long and excellent mobile coverage.”
“You never thought of going back to the US?”
“I may not look it, but I’m Mexican. My Dad’s the same. After all these years hating gringos, I couldn’t become one.”
He saw another of the witches at work under the trees, chanting and waving a smudge stick around her client’s body. He frowned and shook his head.
“You don’t have time for witchcraft, for brujerla, Adam?”
“I’m a doctor. I believe in medicine.”
“And you think that is all is nonsense?”
“Of course. Don’t you?”
She just shrugged her shoulders.
“Your father’s a Baptist minister. What does he think about it at all?”
“He understands that there are different religions here,” she said, as if that was all the answer he needed.
“And your mother?”
“She died when I was sixteen.”
“I’m sorry.”
“But that wasn’t your question. You were wondering what religion she was?”
He nodded.
“She was a good Catholic. All Mexican are good Catholics.”
“What about her?” he said, nodding towards the witch.
“She is probably a good Catholic, too.”
“I don’t get it.”
“To believe in something, you don’t have to believe in everything. If someone asks me what I am, I will say I am a Baptist because I love what my father does, and how he lives his life. I don’t have to believe everything he believes. Did you believe everything your father believed?”
Adam thought about it. “Pretty much,” he said.
“Well there’s your problem.”
“I didn’t realize I had a problem.”
“Realizing we have problems is the first step.”
“First step to what?”
“The first step to fixing them. What was your father like?”
“He was head of orthopaedics at Massachusetts General.”
“But what was he like?”
“I just told you, he was rich, respected and sensible. A little reserved I g
uess.”
It seemed that she was waiting for more.
“What was he like? Okay, it’s like this: when I was about seven or eight years old I took him a story I’d written, it was about Batman and Santa Claus having a battle with some monsters that wanted to invade the earth. I gave it to him to read. And when he gave it back he’d graded it. I got a B-.”
He waited for her to laugh.
“That’s sad.”
“It’s funny.”
“I don’t get the joke,” she said and finished her coffee. She picked up her bag. “Let’s go to the witches’ market,” she said.
“Witches’ market?”
“It’s a market. With witches. What’s the matter? Don’t you want to go?”
“Is it real?”
“Of course. You are coming, aren’t you? It’s just a ten minute walk.”
“Sure. Why not? I’d love to see a real witch. Will they cast a spell on me?”
“Only if you ask them to,” she said. She didn’t smile.
Chapter 23
The Mercado de Sonora.
It seemed surreal. Surely no one believed in witches any more, not in places where there were cars and Coca Cola hoardings and ATM machines. Witches were characters from the Middle Ages or Shakespeare.
But all the accoutrements of black magic were here, laid out like fruit at the food market on Charles Street in Beacon Hill. There was grease-green candles, mysterious oils, little packets of herbs and powders promising la buena suerte, or health or success or love. Jesus hung on a cross above a green frog holding a sign that said: Bienvenidos. Welcome.
Another sign on a wall above one of the shops announced: Consejero en ciencias ocultas.
“Is that what I think it is?”
She nodded. “There’s your first witch,” she said.
The witch wore an open-necked shirt and a flat cap and he was smoking a cigarette. He looked like a cab driver.
Adam read down the list of complaints the witch claimed he could cure; “Take away illnesses, bring back lost lovers, deliver good luck in business, remove spells, jinxes, sexual impotence.”
The Black Witch of Mexico Page 6
