The Hot Country

29

I hooked my feet in the handles of my bag, pulled my hat down farther over my eyes, and I slept. Dreamlessly, I thought, for I woke with a start with nothing in my head but a feeling of movement and then I thought I was wrong, that this was a dream, for I lifted my head and turned to the window and in the pale first light of the day, across a ragged verge of grass and stones, across a wide, dark calle, was the low adobe sprawl of the Hostal Buen Viaje and I thought perhaps the other Gerhard — for I was Gerhard now to protect my own life — I thought perhaps the other Gerhard was still lying in a room off a courtyard behind that hotel facade, he lay there dreaming his own dream from which he would not wake, and then this vision was gone, it floated past and we were curving, curving, and now before my eyes — or perhaps before only my unconscious mind — was Avenida Guerrero and a familiar row of warehouse buildings, and flashing past was the very one in whose shadow, just out of sight, a knife was lifted to kill a boy and I fought for him. But these vanished now too. I blinked hard, and still the streets passed by, with the tile-roofed houses and the gray scattered tombs of the Cementerio General and the wide alameda at the south end of Independencia and the great wooden bowl of the bullfighting ring. These were recognizable but irrelevant to me, and I realized that I was not dreaming, that this was Vera Cruz flowing past me, and I settled back again, closed my eyes. But I was awake.

I opened my eyes. I removed my hat. We were running out of the trees of Vera Cruz and the city vanished, replaced by a stretch of marsh, the thin veneer of water among the rushes starting to lighten as the sun cracked the horizon behind us, with a scattering of slow-stalking blue herons looking black in this early light. And now the water vanished too and the sands took up, lifting into minor dunes, and our train slowed abruptly. I pressed the side of my face against the window to look forward. I saw branch tracks heading off south and switching tracks and now a siding and boxcars with uniformed men—Federales—sitting in the doors. Our own train was crying out beneath us, as we ground hard to a stop. The engine pitched low. I understood what would happen now. My hand went to Gerhard’s German passport, just to touch it, and I recognized the danger of that thought. I rethought it: I touched my own German passport, just to reassure myself it was there. Mine. I was Gerhard Vogel.

A low Spanish murmuring ruffled through the car and I looked at my nearby fellow first-class travelers. They all seemed to be Mexicans, well-dressed ones. Sitting next to me was an old man in a cream suit, a mestizo with a massive gray Porfirio Díaz mustache. In the seats in front of me were a middle-aged couple, he also in a suit, American-style serge, she wearing a bright blue rebozo draped over her head and shoulders. No possible Germans were nearby to find my speech suspicious. In spite of my taste for irony and the impulse to indulge in German double-talk, I decided my best course was to inject a clear undercurrent of an admittedly stage-German accent into a simplified Spanish and fake a lapse into the language of the Fatherland only if absolutely necessary.

Two Federales in proper regimental uniforms were beginning to work their way down the aisle, a conductor trailing them. The Federales were looking at each passenger intently, asking for papers from some, passing others by with only a single lingering glance, the conductor checking tickets of everyone in their wake. I couldn’t clearly see if there were other non-Mexicans farther up, but the two government soldiers did pause, once, and then again, and then once again, to check documents closely, and I turned my face to the window as if unconcerned. But as their voices came near, stopping a few rows in front of me to ask for a pasaporte, I thought now it would seem evasive to be looking away from them when they arrived. And if I could, I wanted to see who it was they would expect to be carrying an actual passport.

The Federales were several rows down and focused on the seats on the other side of the aisle. I moved my head very slightly to the right, not wanting to seem anxious, and I could see between the couple in front of me and barely through the two people in front of them and then my sight was mostly blocked by a black sombrero with silver trim. The soldiers were soon satisfied, and they moved this way. One was lagging behind a little, deferentially, and the senior man turned to this side of the aisle. He had a dark face, carefully twirled black mustaches, a sharp-scanning eye. I knew I shouldn’t be looking out the window but I shouldn’t be staring at him either. So I eased back in my seat, waited with a vaguely sleepy stare in front of me, as the soldiers moved closer.

Now I saw them in my periphery as they approached my row, and I looked up, slowly, as if this was all quite routine. And I knew I was thinking too much. What I’d learned about actors — even the hammiest of them — was that they worked out their self-consciousness in rehearsals. In performance, even the broadest, phoniest gestures were actually executed straight from the body. I was thinking too much, and now I was thinking too much about thinking too much, as I stared up at the officer who was clearly in charge. His mustaches were so black and the confluence of lines converging on the outer corners of his eyes were so deep that I wondered if he rinsed indigo and henna into his bigote grande like a fading leading man.

“Good morning,” he said to me in English, going straight to the top of his list of targets.

My head cocked slightly in brief incomprehension — which I was pleased to note had occurred by an actor’s reflex — though I also needed to stop noting my own performance, even when good, as that was the time when actors tended to muff their lines.

“Guten Morgen,” I said, not really capable of going very far past that if this man happened to know any German. His uniform was far too correct for the conscript Federales Maass had been able to gather to fight for him. He even had pips on his shoulder that I could read: a captain. A real soldier. Not an inflated rurale. Not a field captain elevated in battle from corporal with all the officers around him shredded by bullets and shrapnel. These onyx-stone black eyes had a legitimate Kapitän behind them, lately arrived from the capital and tasked with finding guys like me. He could even have known some real German. That was the great risk of this moment.

A beat of silence passed between us. Even a German would have reasonably understood the words “Good morning” in English. “Buenos días,” I replied, offering this to the officer as our common language, but pushing the pronunciation to the back of my throat, tightening my cheeks, applying my mimic’s mouth for German to my fluency in Spanish.

He looked at me for another silent moment, and I could feel him hanging on the edge of belief, still not convinced, but not unconvinced either, as he did not move his eyes from mine for even the briefest moment. I waited, fearing actual, knowledgeable German from him. The Germans had a major presence in Mexico City. This was a smart man. But instead, he said, “Pasaporte.”

I pulled my new self from my inner coat pocket without even glancing at it, and I handed it to him, holding my eyes steadily on his. He broke off. He opened my passport to the picture page, as I put my ticket in the conductor’s outstretched hand without a word, without shifting my gaze from the captain, who looked at my image. He lifted his eyes to me directly and then lowered them back to the page. He looked at me in the flesh once again. I very casually took off my hat to reproduce the picture.

I saw his eyes move to the facing page, which had some descriptive information. “You’ve lost some weight,” he said, without looking up. We were speaking Spanish now. That much, at least, seemed to have been established.

I said, “If you would control the rats and the flies and. .” I paused as if looking for a word. And then, quite heavily guttural and loud, I finished my thought: “. . die Scheisse in your streets, I would not catch the dysentery and lose my weight.”

The captain lifted his eyes to me. Slowly. It was meant to be faintly ominous. But the look was also clearly defensive, prideful, a challenge to my criticism of Mexican sanitation. A rebuke. Good.

I rubbed it in. “We are meticulous about these things in my country,” I said.

He took my ticket from the conductor and gave it a very quick glance. “And why are you going to Mexico City?” he said. This was a cheap little trick, and he no doubt knew it, because the smolder in his eyes was no longer suspicion. It had become a look that said: You arrogant German jackass.

“I am not going to Mexico City,” I said. “I am going on to Torreón.”

“And what takes you to Torreón?”

“I am going to wait there with my uncle the banker,” I said, starting to raise my voice, “until fine Mexican soldiers like you, Kapitän, can figure out how to throw the invading American Schweinehunde out of your country.” I was nearly shouting now.

And the captain’s eyes shifted away. He conceded the skirmish, as the train car filled with the responsive cries of “Viva Mexico!” and “Mueran los gringos!” and even a soft “Olé!” from the man with the Díaz mustache sitting next to me.

The captain shut my passport and handed it back to me with my ticket. “Our country has many enemies to fight,” he said.

“None of them are German,” I said. I regretted it at once. I was afraid I was pushing my fake attitudes too far when I’d already said enough. But the bigger regret was still brewing in me, as the captain managed an almost respectful nod of the head. He turned away and led his subordinate and the conductor out of first class and into the second-class car behind us.

When he was gone, the real regret played like a brass band inside my head, made even worse by the admiring looks I was still getting from a dozen Mexican faces wrenched around in my direction. The faces turned away one by one and I was left with that band doing a rendition of “It’s a Grand Old Flag” with all the trumpets and trombones and tubas and one sad alto horn variously playing flats and sharps. A cacophony of Cohan mocking my betrayal of my country in a sordid little play in a first-class car outside Vera Cruz, Mexico. Those Americans I’d publicly called invading Schweinehunde were my pals and drinking buddies and fellow baseball fans and hot dog lovers, and they were lovers of free speech and the free press and freedom of religion, and for them and for me, everybody was welcome and nobody was turned away and anyone had the chance to make himself a millionaire or a doctor or a general or even maybe President of the United States, and anyone could be my pal and my drinking buddy and a Cubs fan no matter where he came from, and damn if I don’t know we fail at all that now and then, and sometimes we fail badly and maybe way too often, but that’s what we believe, and no man has walked the face of the earth who didn’t sometimes fail to live up to what he believes, but we do believe it, we do really believe all that, and now I’d cried out insults to my country in a foreign public place and inflamed hatred for my country in a train car full of people who didn’t truly understand us.

I turned my face to the upswoop of a sand dune out toward the horizon, and right in front of me a wide-winged, ugly-mugged, shit-eating zopilote floated past, and as far as I was concerned at the moment, he could come land on my chest and eat out my traitorous heart if he wanted to, and I wouldn’t even push him away.

But this passed. Pretty quick, though that didn’t mean I was insincere in my guilt. But I figured I’d just played Iago for one performance to a small house in Vera Cruz. And for bigger stakes than applause. I saved my own life, or at least my freedom. And I saved my chance to figure out where this German agent a couple of cars up ahead might be going and what he might be doing that could pose a possible danger to the country I love.