down at the next town. It was a good thing, he said, to sit up at the back as he did, just as it was better when you flew anywhere to get as close as you could to the tail of the plane.
The bus driver was the first Mexican I spoke to on this journey, and like so many of his countrymen in subsequent random encounters, he immediately took charge of my welfare. The bus rampaged on through the long hot day, and then into a haggard nightscape of cactus and flint. The dreaming, hollow-eyed villages came and went, and lean men going home asleep on their horses awoke to kick them into desperate life and charge for the verge at the hideous outcry of our siren. We stopped at dreadful hours at woebegone staging points when passengers got down and staggered away carrying their fatigue like some three-dimensional burden as they went in search of food.
In these hallucinatory moments I foraged under the umbrella of my friend’s protection. The dishes on offer at these places were strongly regional in character: pork cooked in chocolate, or tacos of meat in a maize-pancake sandwich. At one stopping point a man succeeded in selling a number of hydrogen-filled balloons to passengers who were too dazed to realize what they were buying. At another a cartomancer, crying, ‘It isn’t the betrayal so much as the doubt that kills’, promised to tell males of the party whether or not their wives were being unfaithful in their absence. Occasionally there were pleasures on offer, other than the satisfaction of hunger, for those who were prepared to cram them into these few bleak moments in the dead of night. ‘Travellers waited upon with speed and formality ’, said a notice displayed in one stark pull-in. But however speedy and formal the young ladies lurking rather hopelessly in the background might have been, the iron schedules of bus travel slammed the door on such adventures. ‘Ten minutes,’ the conductor had warned, ‘and not a second more.’ And in precisely ten minutes we were under way again.
At each major town faces changed as we lost fellow travellers who were by now old friends, and took on a fresh influx of strangers eager for membership of our temporary family. For a while we were on a sort of Canterbury pilgrimage by high-speed bus when eleven fat men from the Middle Ages got in, all of them called Francisco and all of them on their way to a prestigious shrine of the saint by that name. They rolled about the bus fizzing with excitement and forcing bottles of Montezuma beer on the other passengers, and when they settled, like true pilgrims, it was to tell stories endlessly. Their huge posteriors spread over a seat and a half wherever they sat, and a thin doctor, also a Francisco, who was travelling with them and hoped to get them all back alive, said: ‘You may think these men are fat, but actually they’re starving to death. All they ever eat is rice and beans. If you stuck a pin in them, they’d deflate.’ It was twenty miles from the bus stop to the shrine, he said, and the intention was to walk the last seven miles barefoot. ‘It could cut the soles of their feet about a bit,’ the doctor said, ‘but otherwise if they survive could do wonders for their general health.’
We dropped our pilgrims off in a mist-veiled morning full of cactus and circling buzzards a few miles before Tepic, and here we took on a Huichol Indian decked with feathers and beads and carrying a bow and a sheaf of arrows in a dry-cleaner’s plastic cover. Eagles’ pinions sprouted from the rim of his flat straw hat, and his tunic and pantaloons were densely embroidered with deer, pelicans and heraldic cats. He sat in noble isolation from the rest of us, moving only once to fill a paper cup with water from a tap at the back, then having rummaged for a while in his splendidly ornamented satchel, he found an Alka Seltzer, unwrapped it, dropped it into the water, and gulped down the result.
He got off at Tepic, capital of the Wild-Western,
The bus driver was the first Mexican I spoke to on this journey, and like so many of his countrymen in subsequent random encounters, he immediately took charge of my welfare. The bus rampaged on through the long hot day, and then into a haggard nightscape of cactus and flint. The dreaming, hollow-eyed villages came and went, and lean men going home asleep on their horses awoke to kick them into desperate life and charge for the verge at the hideous outcry of our siren. We stopped at dreadful hours at woebegone staging points when passengers got down and staggered away carrying their fatigue like some three-dimensional burden as they went in search of food.
In these hallucinatory moments I foraged under the umbrella of my friend’s protection. The dishes on offer at these places were strongly regional in character: pork cooked in chocolate, or tacos of meat in a maize-pancake sandwich. At one stopping point a man succeeded in selling a number of hydrogen-filled balloons to passengers who were too dazed to realize what they were buying. At another a cartomancer, crying, ‘It isn’t the betrayal so much as the doubt that kills’, promised to tell males of the party whether or not their wives were being unfaithful in their absence. Occasionally there were pleasures on offer, other than the satisfaction of hunger, for those who were prepared to cram them into these few bleak moments in the dead of night. ‘Travellers waited upon with speed and formality ’, said a notice displayed in one stark pull-in. But however speedy and formal the young ladies lurking rather hopelessly in the background might have been, the iron schedules of bus travel slammed the door on such adventures. ‘Ten minutes,’ the conductor had warned, ‘and not a second more.’ And in precisely ten minutes we were under way again.
At each major town faces changed as we lost fellow travellers who were by now old friends, and took on a fresh influx of strangers eager for membership of our temporary family. For a while we were on a sort of Canterbury pilgrimage by high-speed bus when eleven fat men from the Middle Ages got in, all of them called Francisco and all of them on their way to a prestigious shrine of the saint by that name. They rolled about the bus fizzing with excitement and forcing bottles of Montezuma beer on the other passengers, and when they settled, like true pilgrims, it was to tell stories endlessly. Their huge posteriors spread over a seat and a half wherever they sat, and a thin doctor, also a Francisco, who was travelling with them and hoped to get them all back alive, said: ‘You may think these men are fat, but actually they’re starving to death. All they ever eat is rice and beans. If you stuck a pin in them, they’d deflate.’ It was twenty miles from the bus stop to the shrine, he said, and the intention was to walk the last seven miles barefoot. ‘It could cut the soles of their feet about a bit,’ the doctor said, ‘but otherwise if they survive could do wonders for their general health.’
We dropped our pilgrims off in a mist-veiled morning full of cactus and circling buzzards a few miles before Tepic, and here we took on a Huichol Indian decked with feathers and beads and carrying a bow and a sheaf of arrows in a dry-cleaner’s plastic cover. Eagles’ pinions sprouted from the rim of his flat straw hat, and his tunic and pantaloons were densely embroidered with deer, pelicans and heraldic cats. He sat in noble isolation from the rest of us, moving only once to fill a paper cup with water from a tap at the back, then having rummaged for a while in his splendidly ornamented satchel, he found an Alka Seltzer, unwrapped it, dropped it into the water, and gulped down the result.
He got off at Tepic, capital of the Wild-Western,
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