Days of Wine and Roses, and Vasectomies

I and wife and child arrived in Mexico City that Thanksgiving afternoon in 1999, to pass an extended weekend with our other child April, who had been working in Puebla and the remote village of Tlancualpicán since that August. Saturday was our second full day there, and we arranged to take a day-long guided tour of the cities of Cuernavaca and Taxco. We were to be gone about 11 hours, and we plus a young couple from New Jersey and the guide/driver were to be the only occupants of the tour company’s shiny and unspoiled 12-passenger van, which glided to a stop in front of our hotel at precisely 9 a.m. to pick us up.

Now if you have traveled at all in Mexico, you know that there are risks to your personal safety, chiefly in the form of renegade and unlicensed taxi drivers who may perform a robbery on you at best, and a murder at worst. Visitors are warned by the State Department in the strongest possible terms never to just hail a taxi on the street—you must use sitio taxis that are controlled directly by your hotel, if your hotel is a good one. Pickpockets and purse-snatchers are also supposedly in abundance, so we elected to take a reasonable amount of spending money and some credit cards with us and to secure the rest of our pesos and travelers’ checks in a safe-deposit box at the hotel.

Our guide for the day was Edmundo, a 55-year-old man who spoke near-perfect English, who conducted himself with Castilian courtliness, and who claimed 30 years’ experience in the tour biz. He asked us to call him “Mundo,” and we loaded up and set off cautiously down the Avenida de la Reforma in the light weekend traffic, heading for what passes for an interstate highway down there.

This interstate took us to Cuernavaca, where I had spent some time as a youth, and then on toward Taxco, a silver-mining town some 100 miles from Mexico City. We stopped for lunch at a traditional place outside Taxco, and it was there that, we now think, Mundo had his first bottle of cerveza. All was seemingly well as we climbed the mountain Taxco is built on, and there was ample opportunity to reflect that that road was not one that one would care to drive on at night, given the state of the Mexican civil infrastructure. We arrived at the town square of Taxco about 3 in the afternoon, and it then began to get weird. The valet-parking attendants at the square took the van away someplace, as there is no place to park in the downtown area, and Mundo conducted us into Taxco’s bizarrely lavish and somewhat creepy cathedral. There he turned us over to Lilo, a local guide, who brusquely ordered us to sit down in the first couple of pews in one of the naves. But Lilo meant us no harm: his English was a disconcerting mix of perfectly-inflected Californian and an impenetrable mestizo patois—listening to him describe, among other things, the painting of the Circumcision of Christ was rather like listening to a low-wattage public radio station having transmission problems during Pledge Week. Mundo himself was having no problem understanding the fellow, and was now leaning against a pillar and starting to doze.

Once out of the cathedral, we agreed to meet on the front steps in two hours, at 6 p.m. We then dispersed to do the usual tourist-shopping thing. There are hundreds of hole-in-the-wall silver, handcrafts, and foodstuffs shops in the streets surrounding the town square, built right to the edge of the pavement—to cross to a shop on the other side, one stands in the doorway to let traffic pass, before darting across to another doorway. The streets themselves are two-way and at most 15 feet wide, and many are built on 30-degree slopes. A common sight is a taxi hurtling backwards down a hill to let downward traffic out—”down” seems to have right of way there.

At 6 we American tourists were back in front of the cathedral, purchases clutched to our sides, ready for a long and uneventful ride back to the city and our hotel. Mundo was not there yet, but that was not so unusual—appointment times are a bit elastic down there, as you know. By 6:30 he had still not arrived, it was getting dark, and the vagrants and peddlers were starting to abandon the square. The others in our party were unconcerned and enjoying the evening, but I stood grimly apart, watching the traffic for the approach of Mundo in the blue Dodge van. This is why I hate travelling, I remarked to myself at one point, because of crap like this.

Mundo had not arrived by 7, and everyone in our party had become as uptight as I was, as it was now fully dark, and the population of the square had changed over to rowdy locals and joyriding tourists. We now had to consider what options we had, if Mundo never showed. There were a few hotels within walking distance, but all of them appeared very busy and some did not look safe. Worse, we were low on cash, as most of it was still back in Mexico City, and we had learned that credit cards do not always work out there, regardless of the state of one’s credit. Taxis were everywhere, but there appeared to be few of the sitio cabs we had been relying on so far, and I felt a delicacy about asking some lunatic driver, even an honest one, to drive us across those mountains all the way home.

The New Jersey couple, Joey and Anna-Karenna, then suggested that they find the valet-parking muchachos in the square to see if they could locate the van and, possibly, Mundo. They strode quickly away into the dark, leaving us four on the front steps of the church. By 7:30, they too had not returned, and we were starting to have a real respect for the situation—surely they could not have abandoned us as well!

Our plan now was to call the missionaries that April was staying with, 3 hours away in Puebla, to tell them they might have to dispatch a van to collect us, so April and I left to do that, leaving Mary and Erin now alone at the cathedral. We failed to raise anyone in Puebla, but by the time we got back to the church, Joey and Anna-Karenna had returned driving the van, with a smashed and incontinent Mundo in the back, along with another tour guide, the verbose but only slightly-tipsy Victor.

“Have no fear, Victor is here,” this fellow actually said to me, as I arrived back at the church. “I have driven tours for this company for many years, and it would be my pleasure to conduct you all and my unfortunate friend Edmundo back to la Ciudad de México. My name is Victor, and here is my business card, which I am afraid I must ask you to return, señor.”

“You’ll forgive me for asking this, Victor,” Mary said, “but have you been drinking tonight?”

“No, señora, I have not,” was the answer, but our noses told us otherwise. But since Joey had a one-day-old Mexican driver’s license, we figured that he would drive the van, Victor would navigate, I would manage Mundo, and we would thereby have an escape. While we were discussing this, we noticed that the besotted Mundo had now gotten behind the wheel and was buckling himself in. But Joey had the keys and was holding onto them like grim death, and Victor cajoled Mundo into the middle van bench. I got him buckled in back there, no mean feat against his confused resistance and while trying to keep myself out of the wet spots. Everyone else scrambled into a seat, we slammed the doors, and started out.

But it is not so easy to just drive a 12-person van and two drunks out of Taxco. We were soon headed, at Victor’s vigorous insistence, down a one-lane alley on a 30-degree slope. “OK, now, a la derecha, mí amigo,” he said at an intersection with another alley, but when Joey tried to swing the van around to the right there was a sickening crunch and a metallic clattering down low on the outside of the van. Joey tried to back up, but the tires spun as if on ice, and we were now wedged between two buildings, diagonally across the intersection.

Mundo had now begun to come out of his stupor, and attempted to get up front into the two obviously occupied bucket seats. I got him back into his own seat, and buckled him in again, as he began to consider his condition. “It have been. Fifteen. Fifteen. HONNRAD YEARSS!! Since I have had a drink,” he announced. “I feel much shame.”

“That’s OK, Mundo,” I assured him. “Why don’t you just sit back and take it easy for a while. Fifteen hundred years, huh?” Mundo was still so out of it that he was translating years into Uruguayan pesos.

Once clear of Taxco, we headed back up into the mountains, on the unlit, potholed, and guardrail-free road that hugged the sheer cliff-face and fell away on the right to a 500-foot drop to the valley floor. “Hey, Joey,” I said, “you’re going to have to do all the tour commentary now.”

“OK,” Joey replied, taking the challenge. “On yer left, you got yer basic palácio de Hernán Cortés, and on yer right, umm, well, you don’t wanna look to yer right!”

Mundo did not sleep, and in fact recognized when toll plazas were coming up, for at those points he would unbuckle himself yet again and go fumbling through a wad of receipts and Kleenex he had in his pocket. He did not notice when I plucked a 200-peso note out of that mess and passed it to Joey, which took care of most of the tolls. Traffic was light most of the way, although Victor did insist that we hang back whenever we happened upon the police. He did not want to give the federales any excuse to stop us, because, as he explained, “we are driving a damaged vehicle that is not licensed to any of us, and they will probably not accept an explanation from a drinking person. It could be very bad.”

We pulled up to the hotel well after 11 p.m., and Vip’s was closed, so we had to order in a pizza, which, by the way, was delivered exactly on time.