The Burial of Old Bill

In our company was a soldier called Botello, who seemed a very decent man and knew Latin and had been in Rome.  Some said that he had a familiar spirit, others called him an astrologer.  Now, four days before, this Botello had claimed to have learnt, by casting lots or by astrology, that if we did not leave Mexico on that particular night, but delayed our departure, not one of us would escape with his life.

--Bernal Diaz del Castillo

From a History of the Conquest of the Valley of Mexico

The flight across Tacuba causeway and La Noche Triste

Old Bill had propped himself up in one corner of the small cantina, he was stiff but he didn’t smell.  His right hand still rested on the edge of the bar, an empty bottle not far from his fingers and a jarita half full of pulque occupied another corner of the makeshift thick rough wooden slabs passing for a bar top.  Other glassware and crockery stood upended and empty or upright with a virtuous residue of sticky fermented pulque, corn leaves and red Chili flakes glued to their sides or lost in its left over foam.  The disinterested bartender, Botello del Jicarero, ignored him concerned with the dominoes game he was playing with Tepoz and Ometo, his regular customers, and eating the botanas or antojitos from green and blue plastic ware.  The four of them crowded the room where the only light came through the open door way framed with concrete block and leftover adobe, or from tall uncovered and illegal windows empty of panes.  The wooden door resembled a corral gate and allowed the same amount of light to enter closed as open.  A small charcoal brazier kept them warm.

The poorly lit interior revealed a set of calendars pinned to the wall one with a large brilliant illustration of Mexico’s patron saint and another smaller one advertising beer and bullfights with a scantily dressed buxom model smiling invitingly and revealing from its edge.  A small wooden cross, hung with the sacrifice, between them.  Cheap black and red replicas of native legends strung above them soiled from age and smoke, featuring half moon bones hanging from their nostrils.  Glyphs from an ancient codex provided more color pasted along its corners and a design of 400 rabbits in various forms of inebriate celebration poked from beneath them squirming across the entire wall.

Staring fixed and cockeyed, Old Bill gave the appearance of a smirking liaison with the bullfight model.  The lower lid of his right eye drooped perilously low on his cheek exposing a rheumy light gray where there should have been a bright blood shot red, wildly surrounding the pupil and retina.  Leering at the model while the left upper lid closed half of his eye giving the squinting impression of a slow and lazy wink below crooked and shaggy eyebrows, he forced his presence upon her.  His mouth parted in a lopsided smile frozen tipsily upward at one corner.  Head thrown back against the wall tilting slightly to the right, chin nearly touching his shoulder silently reminiscing or cajoling the calendar into the realm of action.

Paralyzed by indecision Old Bill luxuriated in their visual charm caught amidst peace and volition. The silent suffering of a rebellious sycophant whose conscience was torn like the cloth of the bullfighter on the horns of the angry beast. His personal dilemma pierced on separate horns irreconcilable, liberty or equality.  He offered the adoration of revolution. What was their offering?

All the cantinas occupants ignored the communication.  It was not even a real cantina at least not in the sense applied in larger more populated places.  It was not an official pulqueria.  It was not even close to the pulquerias of Mexico City, where those wishing to quench their thirst with the native brew could have it cured with fruit or melon juice, cheap and generally cut or watered down.  Places a tourist could rarely go and survive with out some kindly companion.  In this pulqueria, at least the pulque was fresh and full strength if not flavored because produce here was much too precious to waste on flavor.

Tlacuache the opossum skittered sideways and drunkenly across the hard floor stumbling over the discarded culture, an old sock stuffed with human feces, a testimony to the powers of Aguave and addiction. Tlacuache had spent the night sampling the fermented brew of the tinakal that produced the thin milky beverage they consumed in the adjoining pulqueria. Small wooden barrels and plastic containers of varying sizes and colors lined one wall ready for the product now working in the crudely made leather fermentation vats. Heavy locked double doors guarded the outer entrance where in the early hours when light barely tinged the sky the Tlachiqueros or harvesters brought in the maguey juice, the aguamiel, in barrels tied to the backs of their mules. Acocotes or long necked gourds were scattered inconsolably in different corners and pitchers called apilotes were stuck at various edges of the fermenting vats.

The beauty of pulque was the ease and quickness with which the aguamiel could be converted to intoxicating drink; its sorrow was that it spoiled rapidly many times faster than it could be delivered or consumed. It was not unlike the throes of lovemaking Old Bill imagined.

“Double six,” intoned Botello the first to play.

“La Mula,” responded Tepoz. Idly studying his pieces, counting the sixes in his hand, gauging where the rest might be, grinning at his opponents.  Ometo stared stoically at his hand inviting comment from silence.  Smiling peacefully at Old Bill, offering him one of the small plastic bowls and ignoring the lack of acknowledgement, glancing at the calendar’s unturned leaves, he turned to their game.

 Tucked away in high hardscrabble Tlaxco Sierra in the Sierra Oriental of the Sierra Madre mountain range hours from the capital, the village containing the cantina was hardly a village.  A “Rancho” some called it, miles down an occasionally re-graveled narrow rutted road from the nearest paved highway or electrified pueblo.  Its postal station took the name of the largest ranch close to the ramshackle structures of melted adobe, concrete block, unpainted wood and thatch roofed homes, separated by crude corrals of thick but crooked or semi straight tree limbs.  The local residents identified it by its most prominent physical feature a highly visible crag that dominated their ability to project themselves upon the nation.  The crag and the product of their tinakals assured them hubris, the only remnant of their lost antiquity as permeable as the crumbling clay of their vanishing architecture.  It secured them the past’s protection from the Flowery Wars of the Valley of Mexico.

The crag provided them with their own selfish and pivotal romance from which they could secure solace from the harsh mountain wind and natures vagaries.  A point of personal and communal identity to nurture their collective ego as the small fields of beans, corn and potatoes provided the nutrients to sustain their existence.  The Maguey plants delineated their milpas, crude streets and deforested hillsides, its fermented juice provided stored calories and relief from heartache.  The aguamiel sucked from the plants was the last reference to a society melting like their remnant adobe walls beneath the unpredictable rain and the pressing force of modernity.  The pulquero brewing the agave juice, turning it to the native alcoholic beverage in his tinakal was the sole ancient artisan the villagers could claim.

Undaunted by the inhabitants concerns of identity Old Bill continued his romance of the model enticing her to memory’s life.  He bid her to ignore her increasingly useless mythologies, awaken to his realities and partake of his desires.  Her coquetry unceasingly beckoned him to action yet negated his abilities to respond.  Enthralled by the red luscious gleam of her lips and their pale reflection in her bright cheeks he wished for her words if he could not feel her caress.

Dominoes clattered on the worn table as the players mixed them for another game, glancing at him hoping to make a game of teams but resigning them to continuing their three some.  Competing players and calendars made separate manifestations in the obscure light one cajoling the other silently, calculating pleading.

She sustained her spell over him with the darkness in her eyes.  An obscure invitation hung between them caught in the serenity of her glance.  He confused seduction with salvation, twin lovers pinned to the wall.  The action of the bullfight could not divert him from the competition of her promise.  The shared intimacy of their communication kept history from encompassing them and the traitorous linage of survivors dwelling about them.  They were both impervious to the descendants of ritual victims, oblivious of the “Alianza” of Cortez and the conquest of the Valley of Mexico or sad nights in Tenochtitlan.

Old Bill stood pickled with mescal, tequila, beer and pulque.  An advocate of revolution in an age that had forgotten its romantic appeal, he preferred to subjugate his visions of utopia to the numbness of drink and the haunting touch of a woman.  The peace he sought was apparent in the invitation of her eyes.  Flies buzzed indolently between them and settled in the leftover liquid at the bottom of the emptied cups.  She did not blink and his rebellion did not impress her.  The odor of their desire became as sour as the tinakal next door where the pulque fermented in cowhides hung from wooden frames.  He had drunk to prove his manhood in many bars across North America but it had failed to enhance his manliness, his performance or extend his life.  The mythic dream never materialized and her lips were never as sweet as they were alluring.  He had wished to bring her a secular deliverance to accompany the invasion of the modern world.

 Fray Sahagun entered through the open door.  “Botello!” he cried, “Is that Him,” pointing at Old Bill in the corner of the pulqueria.

“Yes.”  He said turning surly and annoyed from his game, “who else.”  The priest stood arrogantly on the hard packed dirt floor with the village Alcalde or Cacique and temporary constable blocking the light of the door.  Behind them, a group of village women waited, whispering.  One elderly woman, a flower listener, approached the open window with a white plastic bucket.

“How long has he been here?” the priest demanded.

“Maybe, two days,” replied Botello with a noncommittal shrug, “Since Holy Monday.”

“And what has he been doing all this time,” now addressing all of them in his general authoritative manner.

“He wouldn’t play dominoes,” Murmured Tepoz.

 “Drinking, flirting with Adelita,” said Botello rising nodding at the calendars on the wall packed with gods.  He approached the window where the elderly flower listener waited with the plastic bucket.

Looking at the wall with the calendars the priest stiffened recognizing Botello’s insolence.  “Get him out of here,” he shouted pointing stiffly and dramatically as if his arm were a sacrificial obsidian axe, at Old Bill.

Tepoz and Ometo jumped up scattering the dominoes with their startled movement and with the aid of the Alcalde, wrestled Old Bill away from the wall out the door into the wind swept street, his only resistance the rigidity of his body and his mocking rictal smile.

With an apilote Botello filled the white plastic bucket with pulque from the tinakal and passed it back through the window to the elderly woman.  He took her money as they exchanged pleasantries while the men in the street struggled with Old Bill.  She smiled sweetly like the women in the calendars and joined the whisperers.

 The group wrapped Old Bill in the sheets and swaddling stitching them about him as best they could or as best as his form would allow.  He created an irregular bundle that they attempted to carry sedately up the street, Tepoz at one end Ometo at the other battling against the increasing slope of the uneven ground and Old Bill’s odd stiff shape gyrating between them trying to find gravities center.  The lloronas, whisperers, and flower listeners all followed the priest toward the panteon. The domino players grappled with his noncompliance, his irresolute refusal to enter an anonymous grave.

All began slowly up the steep hill, except Botello leaning in the doorway watching them.  The Alcalde turned and asked, “What was it then?”

Botello shrugged and replied, “Who knows, disillusion, a woman, a loss of faith. Perhaps in Mexico there is either too much magic or too many gods.”  He went back into the pulqueria, past the wall with the calendars tearing off pages to correct the months then realized the years were not the same and did not represent the present.

He shrugged again and entered the tinakal.