Mexican Days
By Tony Cohan

This excerpt is adapted from Mexican Days: Journeys Into the Heart of Mexico, to be published in May 2006 by Broadway/Random House. 


I found my old friend Lauren sitting on a bench in front of the Parroquia, wrapped in a shawl. The holiday season was gearing up in earnest, with twelve days of posadas and pastorelas to be got through before Christmas day, then further festivities until Three Kings Day, January sixth. No holiday goes unremarked or uncelebrated in San Miguel, and workmen were already stringing Christmas lights in the jardín's laurel trees, fencing off and laying hay in the little manger below the pavilion that would house the Madonna-and-child crêche, the little live lambs and calves. In the portales, a mariachi troupe was serenading an image of that other beloved virgin, the indigenous Guadalupe, mother of all Mexico, whose birthday was that very day, the twelfth of December. 

As I sat down beside Lauren, a great clanging erupted from the Parroquia bell tower. Members of a large Saturday wedding party emerged from the church and spilled into the plaza, the priest parting the guests like water to bless the honeymoon car. A blinkered dray horse stood indifferently nearby, two girls in playeras, teeshirts, selling ice cream from metal tubs off the hay wagon in back. Roaming balloon sellers punctuated the view of a bullfight poster announcing the next afternoon's attractions among them La Güerita, a blonde lady sensation from Texas who had been gored the Sunday before in Mexico City "in the groin area," according to this morning's El Sol del Bajío. 

When a rock band began to unhouse its instruments on a riser beneath the clocktower, threatening to push the alegría beyond the endurable, I said to Lauren, "So where shall we eat?" 

"The Ambos Mundos," she answered quickly. 

An interesting choice. Each of us had begun our very different San Miguel lives there.


After a long dinner, rich with conversation-and Lauren's surprising revelation that, after many years here, she was moving away-we walked back outside. Without really deciding it, we turned away from the entrance and walked deeper into the grounds of the Ambos Mundos. The night had warmed a little. A half moon hung over the huge orange tree in the courtyard. Passing a pair of parrots in their cages, Lauren said, "I know parrots live a long time, but these can't be the same ones that were here when we used to live here."

We passed Lauren's old room, one of the few with a fireplace, as I remembered. 

"Recuerdos," Lauren said, sighing.

Seeing a light on behind its curtain, an image arose of the man who had moved in after Lauren left. 

A heavy summer rain had settled in that year. I recalled the flare of a match, the orange tip of a cigarette, the silhouette of another storm-stranded boarder hovering in the gloom in front of his door. Reverend Billy, as he called himself, was a large, bespectacled man, some manner of defrocked evangelical who had harvested souls in Asia, Africa and Latin America, then become ensnared in his own nets-a messy descent entailing women, unsavory politics, and that unholy cocktail, amphetamines and drink. 

He appeared to be a military intelligence floater of some lower rank as well, with roots going back to the Bay of Pigs debacle-though the shiny-eyed, unctuous preacher liked to describe himself as simply a widower enjoying cheap lodgings and the local AA chapter in San Miguel. He'd look at you sideways to see if you believed him, not really caring if you did. 

His clandestine style did border on the comic: "Say, what do the civilians call the currency around here?" Reverend Billy didn't kill a cockroach, he "terminated" it.

Before leaving his room he "deactivated" his light switch. He ate "rations" at "twenty hundred hours," not dinner at eight like the rest of us. 

Reverend Billy was a source of considerable amusement and speculation around the Ambos Mundos. But I remember once coming up behind him in the mercado and tapping his shoulder. He'd spun around, karate hands up, ready to "take me out," as he'd put it. It had scared the hell out of me. 

My room was across the courtyard from his, and sometimes I used to watch Reverend Billy standing under the eaves in the rain, looking off into the ghostly dripping jacarandas, drawing on his smoke, and I'd wonder what the old fisher of souls was thinking. 


Then one weekend Reverend Billy fell off the wagon. For days he lay around his room at the Ambos Mundos in his undershirt, drinking boilermakers. He said he was going south to "visit the ruins at Tikal" when the weather let up. As if he cared about archaeology. My guess was he'd been reactivated and was about to go kick up some unrepentant dust in Managua or maybe Salvador, for the Contra wars were still in progress. Passing his room on the way to my own, I'd see him through the slightly parted curtain, lying on the bed with his drink and his Camels, conducting some tortured colloquium with the air. I wanted to think what was bothering him was a belated encounter with that very conscience from which he had become estranged somewhere along the way, though this seemed overly hopeful.

The last time I saw Reverend Billy, I was hurrying back to my room in the rain when he emerged out of the gloom and grabbed my arm. I could smell the rum and sweat on him. He fixed his oily regard upon me and said, "Sinners all, young man. Here but to serve His inscrutable ends." Licking his lips, he said, "God Bless, God Bless." Then flicking his Camel into the rain, he pulled his slicker up around him like a shroud and stumbled off across the courtyard.

The next morning, the rain had let up. A bright, blasting sun dried the courtyard cobbles as I watched. I saw a bucket and mop outside Reverend Billy's room. Irma, one of the girls who cleaned at the hotel, was inside, clearing out the stinking strew of empty bottles and crumpled Camel packs. Reverend Billy was gone. 

Now passing the room that had been his, and Lauren's before him, I found myself wondering where Reverend Billy was today-Kabul? Mosul? Baghdad?-mucking things up as he surely had in Phnom Penh, Santiago, Managua. 

Lauren and I, following a gravel path past a row of rooms that had once been stables, came to the scrambled, untended rear garden, hung with hotel washing. The long swimming pool, barely lit from a nearby room, was still cracked, still empty. 

"We used to call that pool 'The Mosquito Farm,'" Lauren said. "There was a guy who'd always sit here sunning himself behind dark glasses. He developed a rather obsessive interest in me." 

"Mad Julian?"

"Oh, God. He's why I moved out."

"I think he was repatriated in the end. Back to St. Louis or somewhere."

A chain of firecrackers erupted somewhere up on the mountain. We turned and looked up. A flower-spray of colored sparks burst in the sky. Then a globo, one of those multicolored, candle-lit paper balloons Mexicans love to loft towards the heavens, floated into view. It bisected the tip of the Parroquia, crossed the moon, then sank into the hillside somewhere. 

"Such a fucking pretty town," Lauren said.