In Times of Fading Light

until at last another passenger comes to his aid and discovers that he passed his own seat way back in the bus.

The seat next to Alexander remains empty. However, another mode of torture sets in. As soon as the bus is on the road, the driver switches on the video system, and after a few minutes of advertising its own merits it starts showing a film in which the principal part is played by an outsized pink rabbit with a penetrating synthesized voice.

The drive is expected to take six hours. After the first hour, Alexander’s dislike of being pestered by this noise has grown to positive hatred: hatred chiefly of the bus driver, whom he holds responsible, but also of his fellow passengers, who ignore the film entirely and continue their conversations at double the previous volume, at least those of them who are not half approvingly, half drowsily nodding their heads as they stare at the screen, or who are, incredibly, asleep.

Alexander has had hardly any sleep. The earplugs he put under the untouched pillow that he then crumpled up had disappeared when he got back from Teotihuacan. The chambermaid must have taken them away when she changed the sheets. He looked in vain for their little yellow plastic cylindrical container on the bedside table, in the bathroom, finally even in the wastebasket—they had gone for good. With his nerves frayed by the yapping and howling of the two dogs on the roof, he got up early in the morning, and when the smooth-faced young Mexican at reception claimed to have no other room available he decided to leave at once. He breakfasted before the Swiss women appeared, packed his things, and, to the sound of loud music coming over the portable loudspeakers carried by CD sellers peddling their wares, went by Metro to the central bus station, known as TAPO, where he bought a ticket for the next bus to Veracruz.

Veracruz: he knows nothing about the city except that his grandmother must have arrived here on the ship from Europe. And he knows the story of the man who jumped into the harbor. He also thinks he recollects that Hernan Cortes landed at the same place, with two hundred men or slightly more, to conquer the land of the Mexica. But that is the sum total of his knowledge.

He could look it up in the Backpacker—if he still had the guidebook. But he doesn’t. He left it on the bedside table in his hotel room, on purpose.

After two hours on the road, the pink rabbit film comes to an end—and a new film begins. After a time Alexander gives up not looking at any of the four screens within his field of vision, and indeed aiming straight at him, and while he mentally puts together the Spanish sentences he will need in Veracruz to ask the bus company to refund part of his fare (at least the part that makes his a first-class seat—or does the first-class element actually consist of this inconsiderate bombardment, is that the “comfort” which accounts for the price difference?)—while he is arguing in his mind with a uniformed clerk, already aware that he will get nowhere, a scenario with ideas of its own is running its course on one of the four screens turned his way. It begins with a young soldier meeting a girl on a train; only a few minutes later, surprisingly, he is slipping on to her finger an engagement ring that he just happens to be carrying about in a box of chocolates. At almost the same moment a man appears behind some vines and shoots them both; he turns out to be the girl’s father. The rest of the film takes place in a vineyard, and deals with complicated family matters: the soldier loves the girl, her father disapproves, now and then chocolates are handed out to large numbers of uncles and aunts; we see what a merry event the vintage is, and when the plot calls for it, a wide-ranging landscape appears onscreen, or there is music intended to show what the protagonists are feeling at a given moment. Then the girl’s father accidentally sets fire to the grape vines, which surprisingly burn like napalm… and then the bus driver switches off the video and stops for a toilet break.

He gets a taxi from the Veracruz bus station. He doesn’t ask the taxi driver to take him to a hotel, but to be on the safe side asks for a street name that he found in the bus station on an ad for a hotel in the centro historico.

“Miguel Lerdo.”

“The Hotel Imperial?” asks the taxi driver.

“No,” says Alexander.

His manner is severe. He is prepared for anything. They drive down a broad avenue lined with palm trees until there is a traffic jam, and then the driver tries following a frantic zigzag course through the Old Town. Plain, three-story buildings, most of them pastel-colored, bleached by the sun. The place is teeming with pedestrians. It is hot and humid, and on their way down the narrow streets all kinds of smells waft in through the open window: cooking oil, sewage, scents from barbershops with their doors open, exhaust gases, freshly baked tortillas, and in one place—they have to wait because plastic sacks are being unloaded from a truck—it really does smell like the nitrate fertilizers in Granny’s conservatory.

Alexander pays, ostentatiously stows his wallet away, waits until the taxi driver is out of sight. Right beside the Imperial there is a smaller, more modest hotel. It costs two hundred pesos a night. He pays in advance for a week, and gets a second-floor room with a view of a pretty square containing a campanile and some palm trees, all surrounded by pastel-colored buildings in what Alexander thinks is the colonial style, perhaps because of the arcades with many cafes and bars nestling in their shadow. Then he fears that noise from the bars, and particularly from the hotel restaurant with its tables and chairs set out below his window, might keep him awake at night, and he asks the two girls at reception for a quieter, more remote room. They assure him unanimously, and with mathematical gravity, that the square is quiet by night, but Alexander insists on changing. Instead of the light, spacious room with a view of the square he is given a small one without a window, getting what little daylight comes in through a glass brick in a narrow slit, while its air comes from an air-conditioning unit. He is probably paying too much for this room, but his sleep matters to him more than an attractive view.

He eats in a restaurante familiar, whatever that means. The waiter, a young man of about twenty-five in a baby-blue polo shirt, puts his notepad down on the table so that Alexander himself can write down the number of the dish he wants to order, and then takes it to a counter where the order is deciphered by a busy young woman and passed on to two older women, who prepare dishes quickly and in public view. Alexander’s shrimp and herb salad is fresh and tastes wonderful, and in spite of the colorful PVC tablecloths, in spite of the white plastic chairs and the doors left wide open, even in spite of the neon lighting in the ceiling, switched on even in broad daylight, there is almost a comfortable feel about the restaurant, a warm and homely feeling, and maybe that is what makes Alexander pause for a moment, what briefly causes him difficulty in swallowing. Maybe it is the busy harmony behind the counter, where the two women, one middle-aged and one ancient, are now preparing his fish. Or the tiny gesture of the waiter who, after carefully carrying the shrimp salad across the room to him on a flat plate, and putting it down in front of him without dipping his thumb in the dressing, gives him an encouraging nod and places a hand, almost affectionately, on his shoulder.

Darkness falls suddenly, and more or less on the stroke of six. Alexander goes for another stroll to the brightly illuminated harbor promenade. Temperatures are bearable now, a breeze off the ocean meets his nostrils, but here, too, the air seems drenched in melancholy. Alexander keeps his breathing cautious and shallow, so as not to let too much of it into his body.

By the quay wall, where a group of heavily armed police officers are loafing around like a gang of youths, he turns and looks back at the city of Veracruz, seeing the side of it that is turned to the sea. Apart from the new multistory building on the quayside, it must have looked something like this to the Europeans arriving here. Night after night, on board their ship, they may well have gazed at the harbor promenade, far into the country that was the last hope for many of them. For years, so Alexander works out the prehistory of the story that his grandmother once told him—for years these people had been in flight, had escaped by the skin of their teeth from French internment camps and from the German troops advancing on Marseille, had obtained transit visas or extensions of residence permits in wearisome negotiations with civil servants, had waited for weeks or months, indigent as they were, in some bleak North African town until a ship arrived that would take them across the ocean as third-class passengers, and then, on arriving at the port of Veracruz, had been denied permission to land because not all the formalities had been cleared up, not all the permits had been given out. In this situation a passenger waiting there had lost his nerve, and one night he had jumped into the harbor, hoping to swim to Mexico. The man, said his grandmother, had disappeared into the water and never came up again. Soon the tips of black dorsal fins gently parting the water were moving in rhythmic circles above the place where the man went down.