Adelantero, An Adventure

As written on Monday, 11 August, 2008 over a cup of Capuccino in Tapachula, Mexico.

Today, the fates have worked against me in their small way.  Only some small number of miles from the Guatemalan border lies a city by the name of Tapachula. It´s a fair sized city, as Mexican cities go, and I pedalled into town with every intention of collecting some wired money and heading out as soon as possible.  After all, the excitement of crossing a border is considerable and there´s no sense in delaying it. It should also be noted that there are only a few advantages of being in a city.  These include the ease of internet access, coffee shops, and abundant food.  All of these luxuries can be had quickly enough, as they were today, and then a city may be left behind in peace.

I bought some food and set off through the city, minding pot holes and puddles, looking for a Western Union agent.  It wasn´t long before I spotted the vast yellow monolith down a side street showing me where I might find an Elektra store.   Elektra is the local answer to the question of where one can buy most electronics and a motorcycle in one shopping trip. It is also a convenient location to collect money wired from abroad.

Inside the Elektra I found a cramped sales floor filled with televisions, motorcycles, and washing machines. Along the back wall were a series of cubicles and teller´s windows.  I stepped toward a free window and began the process of collecting money.  As it would turn out, all was not well, and a small discrepancy made phone calls and consultations necessary on the other side of the protective banker´s glass.

I leaned on a washing machine and watched women´s weight lifting and men’s single sculls on the fifteen televisions against the other wall.

By and by, a man sitting comfortably by a sales desk hailed me.  In heavily accented English he asked me if I was Mexican.  Naturally, I told him I was not, and indeed an American.  The largely one-sided conversation that followed was full of strange details about this curious man´s life that I will try to recount to you.

Seated in his plastic chair in an old t-shirt and pair of weathered slacks he asked me first if I was in the area to buy cocaine and marijuana.  “No, no,” I told him, “I´m just travelling through.”  I looked myself over.  In my salt-stained cycling jersey and shorts, with my bandana, sunglasses, and one and a half months of beard, did I look so much like a drug trafficker?

“Just travelling?” he asked.  “So you´re just going to get some money then off you go again?”  We had shifted to Spanish by now, as my command of the language was better than his english which he said he had learned by teaching his kids from a book written in both languages with stories in is such as one “about one woman with loads of kids who lived in some sort of old shoe.”  I said yes and recounted briefly the theft of my wallet.  “And they won´t give you the money?” I had been waiting for the bank staff to clear up my difficulties for twenty minutes now, and recounted briefly my Western Union woes.

“No drugs at all for you?”

“No,” I said, shaking my head a little.

“I used to drink,” he told me in a serious sort of way, and for the second time in a month I heard the tale of an alcoholic who´d turned around.  “1978.”  He pronounced each syllable with deep meaning.  “Thirty years ago exactly, and not a drop since then.  It was because of my wife, you see.  I hit her, and that night I promised her I would never drink again.  I drank all sorts of things: tequila, whiskey, brandy, but I haven´t touched any of it in thirty years. 

“I hit my wife, like this.”  Here he began hitting his own face lightly.  “And cut her here,” he indicated a line across his forehead, “when I hit her with my foot. They took me away but I didn´t go to prison.  My friend was with the police , and he told me ´I won´t send you to prison but what you´re going to do is go home and tell your wife you´ll never drink again.”  I thought to myself that being far outside of justice, this was also an interesting look at the idea of Machismo in Mexico, but held my tongue.  “I did,” he went on.  “Never again, I told her. It was a test of will power.”

As quickly as the subject arose, it was gone.  “Where are you from?  I mean, which state?”

“Wisconsin,” I told him.  “In the north, near Canada.”  I had taken to telling people I was from New Mexico, as somehow it is difficult to communicate to people that while I´m travelling from New Mexico, I am from Wisconsin originally.

“Ah,” he said, “I have to kids right across the border from Chihuahua.  One´s a lawyer (he said a lawyer of rights, licenciado en derecho, but I´m uncertain how this translates) and the other is the kind of lawyer who puts people away.  They tried to get me to come to the states with them, but I wouldn´t go. They got me papers, a passport, a visa, but nothing would take me away from Mexico, I said to them.  ´I love you,´I said, ´but I´m staying here.´”  I smiled at this.  I had heard many stories of people whose children or other family members had gone to the US, even some who´d gone and come back to Mexico, but this was a new take on the issue.

“I´m a mechanic of building machinery,” he told me, shifting topics again.  “I´m the master of a building firm; I have twenty-seven men working under me.  Some of them do cocaine and marijuana.  They ligh up a joint and as soon as it´s done, out comes another.” He mimed taking a cigarette out of his breast pocket lighting it, then repeated it several times. “And the others,” he pretended to snort cocaine from the sales desk.  “I tell them, ´you can go and die, but not me.´ And one of them did.  From the cocaine, I saw it- blood and black coming out of everywhere,”  I grimaced as his hands showed me mortal secretions flowing from his nose and eyes.  “It´s terrible stuff.

“But what about your money? Aren´t they going to give it to you?” I looked over at the window.

“I hope so, let me check.”  I moved off, to be told it needed to be fixed stateside.  It had begun to drizzle, and it looked like a long night was ahead of me once again.