Another bedraggled clutch of passengers came onto the coach, shuffling along the aisle towards those seats still unoccupied. Murmuring and muttering amongst themselves, their voices settled to a comfortable drone against the grumble of the engine and a tinny radio half-tuned to a ranchera station.
Cheek and brow pressed to the window, Primo gazed at puddles of rainwater by the road side, each streaked with reflections of the stores and kiosks behind. This was Río Frío de Juárez, not much of a town, and a strange place to live up here in the mountains and fog. It was somewhere you only passed through unless you were born here - a forgotten chunk of city snagged on this lonely stretch of highway like lamb's wool on barbed wire.
He drew back to see himself in the glass: dark glossy hair, sad narrow eyes, and rumours of a thistledown moustache - those mestizo genes still doing their best to save him from the smooth lipped native side of the family. He was tired, and he looked it, but with his best pale cream guayabera and freshly ironed jeans, at least he had dressed nice. Ultima might be crazy, but he still wanted to make a good impression.
There was a rasp of air sucked between front teeth, and Primo's eyes met those of an old woman scowling from beneath a broad-brimmed hat. She clutched at her fading serape as though expecting to be robbed and shifted herself into the seat behind, her steam engine breaths labouring beyond ordinary asthma. A hydraulic hiss scored the closing of the door up front, and they were off. Primo set his face back against the window to stare out at this solitary town kilometres from anywhere. Drenched figures swept back and forth along the broken paving buying cheap clothes, tinned food, and muddy vegetables from a row of open-fronted stores. The wheezing from the seat behind had settled into the steady rhythm of someone vacuuming a stair carpet, interspersed with speech as the woman struck up a halting conversation with another passenger. Mountain air was too thin and too wet with clouds, she gradually explained, and her lungs would benefit from a lower, dryer altitude; but she had lived in Río Frío all her life, and Our Lady had once appeared to her cousin in the hills at the back of the town. Her hope was that she too might one day experience the Blessed Virgin and be cured by divine grace.
Primo attuned his ears to the insect buzz of music, hoping to drive the conversation into the background as he stared out at rolling fields, the distant wall of conifers and the mountain slopes beyond. Shiny cars flashed by in a hiss of spray, Japanese and American models taking business types to close deals or verify quotas in Puebla. These were the children of wealthy ghettos like those out towards Toluca, their lives a series of highways between islands of razor wire and closed circuit TV. They lived in a different country.
He looked at his watch. Half an hour had gone since he picked up the coach at San Marcos Huixtoco. Another ninety minutes to go and he would be in Cholula around midday. He closed his eyes and let the ship-at-sea creak of wheezing chatter soothe him to sleep.
***
'Chocolates! Chicles! Refrescos! Only ten pesos!'
Primo woke with a start. A middle-aged man in a faded purple shirt was waddling down the aisle, looking around for a response to his sing-song mantra. The woman in the seat behind was gabbling away like a happy turkey as other passengers crowded around her and crossed themselves. The coach had turned into a circus, prattling voices but no engine noise.
Shaking his head, he caught a rush of momentary horror as he noticed the world beyond the window and realisation dawned. He leapt from the seat, snatched down his bag from the overhead compartment and squeezed past the bulk of the gum seller.
'Wait! I need to get out!'
The driver was engrossed in a newspaper and didn't even look up. Primo bundled down the steps onto the pavement, then staggered back from the coach trying to disentangle his bearings from the hoot and growl of traffic. The snow cloaked peak of Popacateptl dominated the horizon even at this great distance, a mountain made of sky looming above the town in the absence of a guiding star. Now orientated, Primo set off down a small street of low stucco buildings in bright primary colours beneath spider webs of telegraph wire. The heat of the day was rising and it was slow progress, stepping from the pavement to avoid people spilling out of doorways; dodging back in each time a pickup rumbled past; halting at the corner as a sun-dried tradesman creaked by pushing a barrow of plastic water containers.
Through the town square and on he trudged, passing the old Cholula pyramid with its icing sugar church on top. He could never remember if it was some deliberate Christian colonisation of the past, or if it had been so overgrown that the Spanish had mistaken it for a hill and built up there without realising.
After nearly an hour of smaller and hotter streets depopulated by the midday sun, he came to the house, just one storey at the end of a block, lime green stucco and a roof of red tiles with flat, open countryside beyond. He stepped up to the door and made to knock just as it was opened by his grandmother. Ultima seemed smaller and wider than when he last saw her, but that could have been his memory playing tricks - it had been at least a year. Her face was formed entirely from lines, a wide downward curve for a mouth, slivers of twinkling darkness for eyes, all bound together with furrows and wrinkles.
'Primo. I am very pleased to see you.' She somehow managed to make it sound like a threat, but nevertheless stepped aside and bid him enter, one hand clasping at her serape.
'Doña Ultima. I am very glad to be here.' He smiled and kissed her soft leather cheek.
She grunted and shooed him inside so that she could close the door. 'You know where everything is. I want you to make yourself at home, within reason.'
He went through to the kitchen at the back of the house. The room was dark with clutter, pots and pans hanging everywhere, jars of maize and herbs, an old wood burning stove to one side and a large table at the centre. The rear wall was open, shutters folded back on either side to afford a view of the garden and the distant mountain. An ornate ironwork table was set outside beneath the awning, with two chairs waiting.
Primo set down his bag next to the refrigerator and noticed a rough stone idol seated to one side of the step overlooking the yard, a kneeling woman in native dress. The figure was just over knee height and still had faint tracks of red and blue paint running across its pitted surface. This was something new.
'It seems such a long time since I saw you last, Doña Ultima.'
'That's because it is such a long time.' She set a pan of water to boil on the stove and fetched a red enamel coffee pot from a cupboard.
'I thought I would—'
'I know why you are here, child. I will do what I can to help you.'
Primo grinned without quite knowing why. The Mexican Grandmother was a formidable creature, more like a feature of the land than of the people who lived upon it. The rest of the world should probably think itself lucky that the government was yet to discover the military potential of rural matriarchy.
His eyes fell back upon the stone idol. 'Do you know who it is?'
'You tell me, college boy. You're the expert.'
He felt blood running hot to his face. His mouth fell open but no words emerged.
Ultima chuckled, at last breaking into a smile. She batted a hand at him and began to gather mugs together. 'Relax. I'm pulling your ears. And yes, I know who it is. My chayote plant died and I had to dig it out of the ground. That's how I found Our Lady Chantico there.'
He went down for a closer look at the weathered features. The idol was clearly many hundreds of years old, perhaps fifteenth century or earlier. 'You think this is Chantico?'
Ultima shrugged. 'I would say so. She has the day-sign Nine Dog carved upon her back, and those little symbols across her skirt stand for fire.'
Primo peered behind the figure to read the glyphs raised upon its shoulders. The stone was basalt and had not aged well, but the dog symbol and its compliment of nine small dots were unmistakeable. A little below the day-sign was a crudely carved flower set within a cartouche. 'Chantico was a Goddess of Xochimilco, and I see the name of that town is also here. I wonder how she found her way to Cholula.'
'Maybe she caught an Estrella Roja coach just like you.' Ultima shrugged. It was clear that, despite her best efforts, she was finding it increasingly hard to conceal the pleasure of having her grandson visit. 'You should sit down. I have a great many cakes for you and you would be wise to make a start.'
He laughed and did as he was told, stepping outside into the garden and taking to one of the chairs. 'Chantico was the Goddess of the hearth, and also of volcanic fire. You are very lucky to have found that, Doña Ultima.'
'Well, you put a spade to soil around here and chances are you'll find something old, but yes, it was certainly lucky, even though I know you do not believe in such things.'
She brought out a mug of coffee and a plate of pastries, then creaked back into the kitchen, returning a moment later to sit with a bottle of Dos Equis. She fumbled in the pocket of her apron for an ivory handle bottle opener, popped the cap and took a swig.
Primo took a bite from a sweet sticky pastry and gazed out across the fields, long, thin strips of land divided as they had been since before the conquest. 'My mother is well. She sends her best regards.'
'I know. I speak to her on that telephone every other evening.' Ultima set her beer down and looked at him. 'Primo, what I am about to tell you may shock you.'
He regarded her with momentary unease. 'Okay.'
'You don't know everything.'
He readied himself for yet another random swerve in the conversation. 'I er...'
'You think the old ways are crazy, and yet here you are with your head full of the Mexico that once was. If you open your eyes you will see how the Mexico that once was is still all around. It never went away.'
'Sure.' Primo did his best to sound like he meant it. He didn't want an argument.
'The world is made of symbols. The things we see do not matter so much. It is what they mean that counts. If you can accept that, then you will understand as I do.'
'I am sure that is true.'
'You are very diplomatic.' She laughed and took another pull on her beer. 'Anyway, regardless of whether you believe me, I will help you.'
He took a sip of coffee and stared at the mesquite tree marking the boundary between his grandmother's garden and the fields beyond, wondering whether she really knew the reason for his visit, or if this was the usual curandera talk - vague implications of knowledge without actually saying anything. It was probable that she had already heard most of it from his mother, but there was nevertheless something that set her apart from most self-proclaimed healers: the suggestion that she couldn't care less whether you believed her or not.
Ultima yielded a modest yet unrepentant belch and gazed out across the land. 'I am sorry to say that a brujera has taken an unhealthy interest in you, although I do not yet know why.'
'Right.' Primo maintained his composure in spite of a direct hit to whichever part of him still responded to things going bump in the night.
'She is called Yaotl and she is an adversary. There are many foreigners in the underworld at the moment and it worries me.'
Yaotl was one of the names given to Tezcatlipoca, the Fate God. Primo, against his better judgement, was suddenly unable to shake the feeling of being out of his depth.
'I do not know if she did that to you,' - the old woman directed an illustrative glance towards the seat of his pants - 'but I know that she has chosen to involve herself in some way.'
'Doña Ultima, forgive me, but how is it that you can know any of this?'
She shrugged. 'When we dream, we travel to Tlalocan. I have seen you there, although I doubt you would remember.'
Primo glanced back to the kitchen and wondered if there was any more beer in the refrigerator, and whether his grandmother yet considered him old enough to take one. He decided against asking and turned his gaze back to the mesquite tree and the baking earth beyond. Something rustled amongst the leaves, a dark, still shape he had taken for a clot of mistletoe shifting its weight. As his eyes resolved patterns from the shade, he saw the small round face of a screech owl blinking back at him.
