The Black Witch of Mexico (25 page)

Two men in cowboy hats looked up as they walked in. Their eyes did not leave Jamie. He half expected to see their saliva pool on the table.

They asked the barman about the Crow. He said he had never heard of such a person. They asked about witches. “We don’t have witches in Catemaco,” he said.

They walked outside. Across the road he saw a sign:
Maestro en ciencias ocultas:
Master of the dark arts.

“Must have lost something in translation,” he said.

* * *

The town had been built on the rim of a vast lake. There were shacks of scavenged tin and flimsy wood. They passed the empty
lanchas
, just back from taking tourists out to Monkey Island. There were mountain peaks shrouded in grey mist on the far side.

“The legend is that the devil’s cave is over there somewhere,” she said. “They say it leads from our world to the world of the dead.”

They walked along the boardwalk. Adam heard the bubbling of the herons in the branches overhead. Their hands brushed. In other circumstances it might have felt natural to hold her hand. He wanted to touch her very badly.

She moved a little away from him, out of arm’s reach.

The sun was getting low in the sky and the air grew still.

“We should go back to the car now,” she said.

Chapter 68

Jamie didn’t want to stay in Catemaco so they found a hotel in the next town, Santiago Tutxlas.

They ate dinner in the Zocalo. The rainforest hills crowded in at the gathering dusk, parrots fussed in the jacaranda trees, the colonial towers of the town hall turned rose pink. Time stood still here; the hands on the town hall clock were stuck at a quarter to three.

They ordered enchiladas and washed them down with beer. The food was bad and the beer was warm. He pushed away his plate--he wasn’t that hungry anyway—and watched a march of ants on the table. You couldn’t get away from the jungle in this damned place.

“This is Olmec country,” she said. “They were one of the most ancient civilizations of all the Americas.”

“Your father showed me one of their pyramids near Santa Marta.”

“They say this was like a Garden of Eden once, the Olmec version of it anyway. Can you feel it? There is a strange energy here. Maybe it’s just the old volcanoes rumbling under the ground.”

Men in white cowboy hats sat on benches around the park, smoking and talking. Adam saw two of them staring at her, their thumbs in their belts. They were jealous of him, he realized. Their naked lust made them look brute and ugly.
That was how I must have looked when I went to see the Crow
, he thought, no surprise then that it was so easy for him to read people.

No magic in that.

“I appreciate you helping me,” he said. “I’ll pay your expenses.”

“You’d better.”

“I feel relieved having someone with me who knows their way around this country.”

“I told you, my father asked me to do this. He was worried about you. He thinks you’ll get into trouble. He feels responsible.”

“But you didn’t have to do it.”

“Perhaps I think you’ll get into trouble too.”

“Well, I’m glad we get to spend some time together.”

She raised her eyebrows. “Are you flirting with me? Or was that another one of your moments? Perhaps you thought I was El-en-a.”

Adam sighed. What made him think she would ever forget about that?

“Thanks anyway.”

“I’m doing it for my father. I don’t like you that much.”

He called for the
cuenta
. He thought she would say goodnight and go up to her room, but instead she said: “Let’s take a walk in the park.”

It was a hot night and the air was thick, supercharged with heat and mist. The smell of wet earth and mangoes hung over the town, spiced with frying oil from the old woman selling tacos from a stand on the other side of the plaza.

They stopped at a huge Olmec head that had been set down a century ago in the middle of the square. It was roofed off against the rain. A pick-up went by, the radio thumping out mariachi music so loud he half expected the statue to jerk awake. He supposed the old fellow had been resting here patiently with his eyes closed to man’s vanities for a very long time. He must be used to it.

“This is a very old land,” she said. “We know about primal things; lust and death and spirits.” She fingered the amulet at his throat. “I’m glad you decided to wear this.”

“I just don’t get the point of it.”

“Do you get the point of wearing latex gloves in your emergency room? You protect yourself from the bad blood you can see. This is for the bad blood you can’t see, all the things a brave, rational
gringo
doesn’t believe in.” She took her hand away but left her fingers resting lightly on his chest. “What will you do afterwards? When this is done?”

“I just want to get my life back to normal.”

“What was normal for you?”

“I have a good life. I make a lot of money, I have an apartment in a privileged part of the city, I drive a BMW. I have good friends, I go skiing in the winter and...”

“It sounds like a Coca Cola commercial. If it was so good, why did you go to the Crow?”

“A moment’s madness.”

“And now you want to chase this madness out of your life and try to forget that once you felt the blood course through your veins.”

“I thought you said I was stupid to do what I did.”

“It was stupid, yes, and it was wrong. But it wasn’t wrong to be crazy over someone. What kind of man do you want to be? Do you want to be a passionate man who feels his life or someone who does everything by calculation?”

“There’s nothing wrong with calculation. If I’d thought this through I wouldn’t be chasing all over Mexico after some man who claims to be in league with the devil.”

“It’s just that your normal life seems so bloodless to me.”

“Is that so? Look where being passionate and reckless has got me.”

“Yes, it’s gotten you to wake up. It’s made you feel again, disrupted your complacent little life and made you human. It’s scared you so now you want to go back to sleep. What’s the saying? You want to throw the baby out with the kitchen sink.”

He smiled. “Bathwater. Baby out with the bathwater.”

“So what’s going to happen when you go back to Boston?”

“I could lose everything. I will probably lose my job and my reputation. I don’t know if any hospital in Boston will employ me when they hear that Bill has had to fire me. It may sound - what was the word, ‘bloodless?” - to you, but I had everything I needed. I knew who I was and where I was going.”

“If you really knew who you were this couldn’t have happened.”

He supposed she was right about that. He hadn’t seen this coming, this was a part of himself he had not seen or even suspected before.

“You want to be in control of everything,” she said, ‘but you’re not. You’re a doctor--you should know that. You see it every day, people get sick, they have an accident or someone they love gets hurt or dies. What good is the nice apartment and fancy car then?”

“What about you? Have you ever lost control?”

“Of course. You think I wanted to get a divorce?”

“How long were you married?”

“Not long. He had these friends in Mexico City, bad people, crazy people, I was always telling him to get away from them. He was always going away on business trips, he said it was some film deal in Los Angeles, I found out he was actually going to Colombia. You can imagine what he was doing there, right? I threw him out.”

“Did he come back?”

“He always came back when he needed money. Then I found out about his other women and I told him I wanted a divorce. One day he came back and beat me up. Then he made a lot of money, probably selling coke, spent it all on a dick lawyer to try and get half my apartment. It’s Mexico, so he’ll probably win.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Does it make you feel better to know you aren’t the only one who does stupid things for love.”

“Not really.”

“You know one night, we were in bed making love and his cell rang. He rolled away from me and picked it up, like his phone is more important, like it must be something urgent. I heard him talking to some woman, there was all this whispering, then he got up and went in the bathroom to finish the call. When he came back he wanted to carry on making love to me. That was the kind of man he was.”

“But you stayed with him?”

“I thought I could change him. That’s the trap, right, thinking I was going to be the one who would make a good man out of him. Sounds stupid, right?

“I’m the King of Stupid, Jamie, so it doesn’t sound dumb to me. Maybe once I would have thought that, but not anymore.”

“Sometimes, something happens and your life is never the same. So what do you do? You can go on blaming yourself and saying you won’t let anyone make you stupid again or you can see the good things about it. You can see that they woke you up and you learned something. You don’t go back, you go forward. You get a taste of what you can be, if you find the right man, or the right woman. That’s what I think. He was the first man I was madly in love with. One day I want to be mad again. But next time I won’t fall in love with a man who talks to another woman while his hands are on me.”

“Or who shouts another woman’s name when he kisses you.”

“You see? You’re learning.”

Chapter 69

He escorted her up to her room, for a moment the invitation was there in her eyes and he stepped towards her. She smiled and stepped back. “I’ll see you in the morning. We’ll find him tomorrow, I’m sure of it.”

“Thanks for your help,” was all he could think of to say.

“D
e nada
,” she said and went into her room and he heard the door lock behind her.

He went back to his room, ran the shower, stood under it for a long time, trying to get clean. He never felt clean these days.

He opened his eyes and saw a cockroach high on the wall, its feelers testing the air. He found one of his shoes on the bathroom floor and threw it at it. He missed but it scampered away, startled, and hid in some crevice in the tiles, but he felt as if it was still watching him.

Fuck, now he had shampoo in his eyes. He fumbled for a towel, nearly slipped on a wet tiles, hit his elbow on the sink.

He yelled aloud in frustration. He’d had enough.

By tomorrow maybe this would all be over, he’d pay his twenty bucks for a new spell and go back to Boston.

And then what? Well, he would learn from this, just as Jamie said.

He would go forward, not back.

But first he had to find the Crow.

Chapter 70

The El Carmen church stood next to the municipal palace in the main plaza. Children ran around the gardens with balloons; in that moment it seemed the least likely place in the world to find a witch. There were even stalls selling candy and
refrescos
.

A funeral procession passed. The mourners carried armfuls of carnations, lilies and roses and everyone in the square stopped and stared, even the children; the lovers on the park benches let go of each other’s hands, the old men stubbed out their cigarettes with their boots.

The procession disappeared inside the church, and when they were gone the old men lit fresh cigars, the lovers kissed, the children started chasing each other again.

Life went on.

A tourist walked past with a camera around his neck and a t-shirt that said:
“catemaco, Tierra de los Brujos’
with a cartoon picture of a witch on a broomstick.

He pointed it out to her. “Like they say, it’s all a big joke, until someone gets hurt.”

He asked the
camarero
if he knew a
brujo
called
El Cuervo
- the Crow.

“The Crow? There are dozens of witches called the Crow,” he said, and walked away.

“Perhaps he’s not here,” he said to her after they had finished their coffees and he had paid the
cuenta.
“Perhaps he was here and moved on. We only have Doña Dolores’s word for it that he’s here.”

“No, if she said he’s here, he’s here.”

“In San Marta everyone knew about him.”

“They know about him here as well, but I’m guessing they’re scared of him. They don’t want to be the ones to send a couple of
gringos
after him. Perhaps they think we’re journalists or police or something.”