Falling for the French Girl 2

Joel was almost as happy as Alfonzo had been, but its not as if my options were infinite. We walked down another jungle path to meet his wife, Yolanda, and their two shoeless children. We ate a tortilla con huevos and bread, and washed it down with agua and café guerrero. I thanked them and tried to sleep on their spare mattress. At first I thought it was the lightning through the thatched hut, and then the rain. But it was actually the rats, the fleas in the mattress, and Joel, meandering in and out all night. I did dream at one point- of fresh salads and white women, and the description of Puerto Escondido in my South American Handbook. Or maybe I just dreamt that I dreamt it.
Onions and café guerrero woke me. And I thanked them again.
Back on the highway, I was getting short little camionetta rides to nowhere. I had a fruitful encounter with a lime tree. Where I was standing, literacy didn’t count for much, and people’s reactions could be unpredictable. I was standing on the road outside some sweltering humid Hicksville, when a young girl no older than ten asked me why I didn’t take the bus.
I wasn’t paying her much attention. And I lied.
“No tengo pesos.” I said in a haze.
Within ten minutes, she had collected enough pesos from most of the townsfolk, and flagged the bus.
It was full of campesinos, with beautiful cotton shirts and pants, sombreros, machetes and sandals. A troupe of black musicians sat in the back.
I had stopped perspiring, my urine was orange, and the cold I got in Mexico City was doing a hat dance in my sinuses. Another drunk had fallen asleep on my shoulder. But there was a small breeze on my face through the window, the bus driver was friendly, the sign above him said ‘Pto. Escondido,’ and I had just had a number of my remaining clichés shattered by a ten year-old Costa Chica chica. When Bernal Diaz de Castillo was asked his reasons for joining Cortes during his conquest of Mexico, he listed three: ‘To serve God and the King of Spain, to give light to those who were in darkness, and to find gold.’ He got the first and third one right. As for me, I was just humbled.