After we waited two weeks for the various truckers and still nothing happened, Don Esteban suggested that we hire one Mayorga, a professional guide, to post himself at the main filling station on the highway to Mexico City and waylay an empty truck going in our direction. To Lord Freddy, who had been on safari in Africa, the idea of a professional guide for an eighteen-hour trip seemed slightly fantastic, but en fin that is what we had to do.
So it happened one morning before breakfast that Señor Mayorga came storming in, all proud grins. He had accomplished the impossible. A truck waited at the door. Before we could catch our breath, two bandits in pink shirts were snatching chairs, tables, pots, and pans and hurling them onto a truck that looked loaded to capacity already. After two hours of a tornado-like performance, when the last items, including the squirrel cage, had been tied on the truck with strings, rope, and bits of wire, the bandits and Mayorga dashingly mounted the truck and roared away. Not, however, before Mayorga had given us long and voluble instructions as to his plans for accomplishing this momentous voyage and where to meet him in Pachuca, the city where our goods and chattels would have to be transferred to Zacualtipán. Lord Freddy and I would proceed by bus with the dog and the cat. Freddy looked slightly frayed as we finally turned back to the empty house. He murmured, “Safari was never like this.”
Our leave-taking of Maria de Jesús and Napoleon was painful. The little brown boy struggled manfully to keep back his tears but Maria wept openly, promising that as soon as she could make arrangements to dispose of her house, she would be with us in Zacualtipán.
It was late at night by the time we reached the chilly mountain city of Pachuca where there was no sign of either Señor Mayorga or our household goods. It wasn’t until two days later that he appeared before the Hotel de los Baños with an even more dilapidated truck than we had last seen packed with our goods, and with a long and harrowing tale of how the original one had broken down and everything had to be transferred. The pet squirrels looked harassed and frightened, but he assured us that they had been well cared for. But now the great problem of further transportation to Zacualtipán had to be solved. Two more days passed before he found a lame Spanish gentleman with a truck who would consider taking us.
But finally on a bright, fine morning Lord Freddy, the puppy, the unhappy Siamese cat in a traveling box, Mayorga, the Spanish gentleman, his three assistants, and I mounted the truck for the trip of about seventy-five kilometers to Zacualtipán. The truck was an open one, and Mayorga had thoughtfully tied two of our big cedar armchairs in the rear, which gave Lord Freddy and me a wonderful vantage point to see the fantastically wild and beautiful mountain country through which we roared with a great show of energy but not much speed. Fields were pink with wild cosmos; a lonely volcano reared its snow-crowned head in the distance.
About noon, two tires went flat in a picturesque village where we lunched on thick soup and enchiladas, and spent the afternoon watching small boys climb enormous avocado trees to harvest the fruit with long poles to which were fastened small bags. Again at dusk we crept on over increasingly lonely, precipitous roads cut like shelves into the mountains.
Dawn over the wild mountains was beautiful, if chilly. During the morning there couldn’t have been more than half a dozen stops for minor repairs. We munched dry rolls and tried to be philosophical about the long-drawn-out journey. Lord Freddy remarked thoughtfully that in normal times it took less time to cross from London to New York than our eighteen-hour Mexican trip was taking.
About midafternoon the truck was groaning up an unusually steep slope through as wild and desolate country as I had ever seen. Lord Freddy from his armchair murmured, “Magnificent—it’s something like Africa…” when the truck gave a sudden spurt of speed on the steep grade and the ropes which held Freddy’s chair gave way. The chair plummeted back like a roller coaster carriage, turned over completely in midair, and Lord Freddy landed on his head in the middle of the rocky road far in the wake of the truck.
I screamed frantically for Mayorga, the Spaniard, and his three assistants, who had retired for a nap under the canvas which covered our goods. Finally the car ground to a stop and we ran back to where Lord Freddy sat dazedly in the road. How he’d managed to keep his white sun helmet on during his remarkable aerial feat, I don’t know, but in one place it was growing redder and redder from a nasty scalp wound. We later agreed that it had probably saved him from concussion, but I still don’t understand why he didn’t break his neck.
Fortunately by this time we were only a few kilometers from the village of Zacualtipán, and as we entered the region known as La Tierra Bendita, that strange pocket of Mexico which is at once both tropical and temperate, even Lord Freddy forgot his discomfort to wonder at the beauty of the rolling, forest-covered hills, which were in sharp contrast to the barren, forbidding, cactus-covered land we had traversed in the past two days.
We rolled into the Plaza just as the setting sun painted the sky behind the crumbling sixteenth-century cathedral in flaming red and orange. The truck took us straight into the one hostelry in the village, which might as well have been in an old Spanish town in Mexico, for the ground floor was still the stable and, more recently, garage. Even Freddy managed a delighted grin as the first sight to greet us when we stiffly climbed out was an extremely contented small burro daintily munching artichokes from a wheelbarrow load.
The hotel itself was not prepossessing, but its proprietor, as is usual with Mexican innkeepers, was courtesy itself. When I explained that we had come to make our home in the village and that my cousin had met with an accident, he immediately sent for the doctor who came with unexpected promptness. Dr. Augustin Hernandez Coronado was as dynamic a little man as I had seen in all Mexico. He must have been for the greater part Indian, for his skin was deep bronze and his shiny hair black and thick. He chatted in rapid Spanish as he expertly cleaned the wound, covered it with sulfa powder, and bandaged Freddy’s head. It was excellent, he said, that we had come to Zacualtipán to stay since the village was so isolated that very few foreigners ever visited it, much less came there to live. He sighed and regretted that he spoke no English, that not a soul in the town spoke English. When he closed his bag, Lord Freddy opened his wallet and glanced inquiringly at the doctor who shook his head in refusal. After he left, Freddy said, “What a charming gesture! What can we do in return?”
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