Vallarta vignettes

1. A sidewalk taco stand. It’s dark. Seven-thirty or so.
A girl, ten or eleven, walks up.

Girl: Tiene ceso?
Cook: Sí.
Girl: Dame uno de ceso and uno de cabeza, por favor.

And she waits, standing straight, looking ahead, holding her money against her chest in one hand. Then she goes off boldly into the future, fueled by brains and head.

2. A dog show. Early afternoon.

It’s at the library.

Adam: A dog show at the library?
Me: I guess there are, like, grounds.

I see a big sign, “Aprende a Bailar Salsa.” There are dogs everywhere, a cacophony, the announcer shouting, “Es un dahks hund. En español, una salchicha.” Then, solemnly, “Es un hembre.” Funny how you can say “female” as a masculine noun. Tallulah is applauding, running around petting dogs. Tiny dogs and dogs with oversized skulls and strange callouses.

We enter a tent containing fowl in cages. Guinea fowl with heads like knobs, a first-grader’s art project atop narrow bodies covered in feathered pointillism. Quail, pigeons, and miniature roosters. Kids are in there at eye level with them.

A woman asks me something like, Are these being judged too or are they just here?
I say something like, I have no idea.

Adam starts sneezing and Tallulah gets overexcited. Down! Down! A puppy! A puppy! she cries.

We leave and end up at Wal-Mart.

Do you have pomegranates? I ask a worker. Because they have them at the Mega this week.

Oh no, he says, shaking his head. They’re not in season.

Where did this guy come from? He needs to talk to the management about scaling back the global economy.

We board the bus and head home.

3. Near the bathroom in the yacht club is a small book exchange. Among the disintegrating paperbacks is a large leather-bound volume. The book sitting next to it is Jayne Ann Krentz’s The Family Way, or Janet Evanovich, Hard Eight, or something called Moviola, that supposedly Gore Vidal liked.

This book is The Law of Procedure, Jones’ Forms, Third Edition. It looks boring, surpassingly boring. I pick it up. The leather is soft, almost delicate. Chicago, E.B. Myers and Co., 1872, I read, lifting the cover. It’s about civil procedure in Illinois courts in the later nineteenth century, something probably no one, no student of law, no aficionado of antiquarian books, wants or needs to know anymore. It's bound in the skin of a cow brought to the Chicago stockyards from Wyoming or Nebraska, slaughtered by an immigrant with deep cuts on his hands, covered with the muck of death. Flayed maybe on a spring day when the snow was just starting to melt. It’s printed on paper made from towering pine, or fir, men pausing with their saws as the trees creak and begin to fall.

Invasive species

Careyes

December 9
After a full day of sailing and a night rocking on the hook, we hauled ourselves up on the beach amphibiously, ready for breakfast. Our cruising guide mentioned that the restaurant under the palapa had been founded by a Frenchwoman, conjuring images of pain au chocolat and café au lait served in bowls that fit perfectly in your cool morning hands. But at that moment it was closed. As we stood wondering, another couple walked onto the sand carrying blankets. They looked local and I strode over. The woman told me that the restaurant wouldn’t be open til lunch, but recommended the hotel across the way. While we chatted I started thinking to myself that she looked familiar. In fact, she looked exactly like Alice Walker. I didn’t remember what she’d said her name was. I didn’t even remember her telling me her name, though she must have because I remembered telling her mine. Why do I always remember saying my own name and not hearing other people’s? I went ahead and asked: what did you say your name was? Alice, she replied. Because you look exactly like Alice Walker, I said, in what I hoped was a non-invasive, relaxed kind of way. Well, she said, I am. She didn’t seem to want to get into the whole thing, and we had a nice conversation about boats and turtles and she told us that one of her names was Tallulah, which she knew to mean "basketweaver." We went and had a delicious breakfast at the hotel, and when we came back she was gone.

December 10
This afternoon the basketweaver refused to nap, preferring instead to help the groundskeeper pick alien grasses. She’s wondering what you’re doing, I said, as T grabbed a chunk of lawn and ran over to him. Oh, there is a plague, he told us, holding up a handful of leafy runners. I have to pick all these little grasses out of the lawn. In a serious tone he related that some people who'd stayed in the third casita there went out to the polo grounds, and their shoes picked up seeds that had been brought by the horses, who you know go wandering around out in the pasture god knows where. And now, he said, they might have to replace it all--this whole expanse of perfectly clipped, indistinguishable green.

I celebrate myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
I loafe and invite my soul
I lean and loafe at my ease...observing a spear of summer
grass.
You sea! I resign myself to you also....I guess what you mean,
I behold from the beach your crooked inviting fingers,
I believe you refuse to go back without feeling of me;


We must have a turn together....I undress....hurry me out of sight of the land,

Cushion me soft....rock me in billowy drowse,
Dash me with amorous wet....

I can repay you. (Whitman, "Song of Myself," 1855)

The worst book in the world

Before we left the U.S., I shopped for books in thrift stores. I began to see myself as a kind of anthropologist gleaning insights into the reading habits of different communities. At the Goodwill in Tucson among the well-worn Jonathan Kellerman and James Patterson paperbacks I found what the back cover claimed to be the definitive English translation of Anna Karenina. In Santa Barbara I found Dancing Wu-Li Masters and a copy of Stephen King’s The Green Mile in French.

But I quickly realized that I was not going to spend all my time reading in foreign languages and enjoying classics I’d neglected. I was going to indulge my unseemly passion for crime. I found Murder at San Simeon in San Diego (along with a World War II pea coat that fit perfectly), and I couldn’t resist the pop culture appeal of a “novel of suspense” (co)written by Patty Hearst about a murder supposedly hushed up by her own grandfather. We had recently anchored off the pier depicted by the book designer at the bottom of the dust jacket. I was intrigued by the concept of a Biddle and a Hearst writing historical “fiction” about a world they presumably knew intimately. But this was the worst book I have ever read.

I turned to the Oxford Book of American Detective Stories, which includes Anna Katherine Green's "Missing: Page Thirteen" (1915), featuring a “fairy-like” young detective named Violet Strange who solves her case by crawling through hidden passageways wearing a ballgown, and the work of Clinton H. Stagg, whose hero is completely blind. It chronicles the rise of the hardboiled style, including a 1943 story by Robert Leslie Bellem called “Homicide Highball" that contains the line, “He must crave somebody cooled for this kind of geetus.”

Later, in marinas and the offices of hotels that we didn’t even stay in, I parsed the reading habits of gringo ex-pats. At the book exchange in the Ensenada marina, I found a whole new subgenre: romances featuring pregnant women and women with infants. These horrified me. I was forced to pick up a Patricia Cornwell thriller about maggots instead.

Here in Barra, abandoned books show up at Beer Bob’s Book Exchange, located a couple of blocks away in a converted garage. I browse alone in the overheated stillness. The books are covered in dust. The tastes of those who donate run to trashy romances, trashy thrillers, occasionally a decent work of modern fiction, and a lot of novels in German. Lately I’ve begun to keep a journal of the books I’m reading, and its intended result, in the short term, is simply shame. Gradually I am weaning myself from the rush of satisfaction that comes when someone else solves the problem. One day soon, maybe I’ll end my addiction to what they call closure. Maybe I won’t be waiting for a revelation.


[A few interesting books fortuitously found here and there: mysteries by Henning Mankell (set in Sweden—so stark and spare, and they’re always eating pizza. Could it be the pizza with tuna, bananas, mustard and mayonnaise that Adam and his dad discovered in Kungsviken?); The Last American Man (Elizabeth Gilbert’s chronicle of a man who lived in a tepee and killed his own food in late 20th-century North Carolina—aka “Davy Fucking Crockett”); Son of the Morning Star (Evan S. Connell poetically uncovers everything there is to know about Custer and his Last Stand); Random Family (Adrian LeBlanc’s gripping work of journalism about a Puerto Rican family from the Bronx), On Beauty (diverting Zadie Smith book about multiculturalism in the academy, sort of outdated and frustrating but absorbing), We Were the Mulvaneys (Joyce Carol Oates’ family saga set mostly in western New York—much better I think than The Corrections, which, National Book Award aside, was annoying, the author’s prose wasted on his characters); and, a recent find at Beer Bob’s, one of my favorites, The Day of the Locust (Nathanael West’s brilliant take on Hollywood in the 1930s).]

Leaving Puerto Vallarta

Wind is everything. When it dies, we become morose. I sit at the tiller, thinking back over my life. “Literature” incites nausea, so I read detective novels and sometimes a really stupid one. Adam does the same thing and later we discuss them. I’ve begun eating rhythmically. Turtles pass by with seagulls riding on their backs. In two days we go thirty miles, arriving in the village of Tehuamixtle, where it would not seem strange to see Tennessee Williams and John Huston with their shirt sleeves rolled up, khaki pants belted at the waist, to hear men talking like they do in movies made in the fifties, sitting under the shade of the restaurant that serves cocktels de camarón in thick glass goblets and shredded marlin on fried tortillas. We walk up the dirt road out of town. A man grills his dinner on the rim of a tire, chickens pecking in the gravel below the porch. The cactus look fresh and green amid the dry brush before the rain begins, and a lost goat bleats somewhere on the hillside.