Harriet Doerr Read Online Free

this person told us. “Your mozo will be drinking it up for the next two months.”
    But at five o’clock in the morning, Camilo was there, sweeping the sidewalk, sober. He carried out suitcases. He gave us his key to the house. We said, “Adiós,” and shook his hand. When we looked back from the corner, he was waving.
    If it is possible to remember too much, then in the case of Mexico, I do. Images spill over and threaten to become lost. But I know that I am better nourished now by images and echoes than I ever was by bread and wine.
    Consider, then, my morning drive home from the American High School on my day for the car pool. Entering the district of Tacubaya, almost adjacent to the school, I would find myself in a slum and, driving through it, would often see three small torn boys waiting for a second-class bus. These were children who worked for coins at the supermarket where I shopped. Pushing and shoving their rivals, they crowded outside the automatic doors, waved their arms, and called out, “Me!”
    “Yo! Yo! Yo!” the children shouted, leaning singly or in twos or threes into the customer’s path. They fastened their urgent, sometimes infected, eyes on a prospect and called, “Señora! Yo!”
    When I recognized these children on the street corner in Tacubaya, I sometimes offered them a ride to the market, and four or five of them would push their way in. Benjamin, who was eight years old and often helped me, was usually among them.
    As soon as we started off, Benjamin asked me to turn on the radio. All leaned forward from their seats to listen to mariachi music and to the commercials that intervened.
    One of these, much repeated on the airways and on marketplace loudspeakers, advertised laundry soap. A woman’s voice would sing to us about the qualities of this soap. She would sing of its softness and its purity. It is like the white snow, she would sing, and my passengers would raise their voices too.
    And now, with the car’s windows closed against the cold, the smell of the children’s unwashed bodies mingled with their choir-boy voices lifted in praise of something they saw rarely and at a distance, on the tops of volcanos, snow.
    When I write about Mexico, I transfer myself there wholly. I trip over its broken sidewalks, stop for freesias at its flower stalls, wave down its taxis. If there is time, I may still write about my Spanish lessons in a cold formal sala, where my teacher and I sat on stiff gilt chairs, with a tiny electric heater at our feet.
    “I grew up on an hacienda,” my teacher said. “I had a horse named Betty. I watched the revolutionaries ride her away.”
    I may write about my rides on the thirty- centavo bus to the center of the city, where I got off at the corner of Madero and San Juan de Letrán. “If you want to see marijuana,” people said, “it is growing among the weeds next to the sidewalk the entire length of San Juan de Letrán.”
    I may write about a picnic lunch on the island of Janitzio in the middle of Lake Pátzcuaro. We climbed on cobblestones up the steep hill and followed a lane high above the lake’s edge to the house of an absent friend.
    “Go in,” he had said. “See the view. Old Juana, who looks after the house, will bring you a refresco.”
    When we rang at the iron gate in the wall, we had a few seconds to look straight down at the named and unnamed shades of blue shifting on the water.
    The gate creaked, and there was old Juana, barefoot and braided, clearly the product of centuries of unviolated Tarascan forebears. She showed us to a terraced table, brought beer, brushed away a fly, and watched us as we ate. The garden was edged on one side by the view of the lake, on the other by the abrupt slope behind. When we had peeled and eaten our orange and banana, we walked away from the lake, in case we had missed hillside flowers.
    Then, with Juana at our side, we discovered, behind a high clump of calla lilies, a low grotto, lined with rocks, its