The boy with the violin extended the song for us, played it with a huge lustful energy, nodded slightly when I dropped a bill in his musical case. The elderly man saluted me with a bow as I went away, swooping his hat across his knees, and his wife smiled.
The town was bigger than I had imagined. I wandered for days, through bars and cafés, bills coming crisply from my pockets, ordered up shots of tequila, tried to picture myself here forty years before, in a stetson and boots. But the simple truth of it was that I was leaning drunkenly against a bar counter, wearing a gold earring, red Doc Martens and a baseball hat turned backwards, in a town where I could hardly even understand what people were saying. It was only with enough tequila in my system that I could make sense of the stories my parents had told me, their endless incantation of memories. I sat in a bar chair, looked at a photo album I had brought with me, let my mind wander. Somewhere ‘Las Golondrinas’ had been sung. Outside was the hitching post where her image had been impaled — but there were no posts along by the courthouse any more. Earlier I had seen a row of grasshoppers impaled by shrikes on a length of barbed wire. The butcher-birds had been neat in their execution, the grasshoppers equidistant on the barbs, a strange wind blowing over them, one of Mam’s coloured gales. I stood and saluted the desert. Further out were the places where the coyotes had perhaps sung.
I ambled with my head down, a foreign language swirling in calypsos all around me. Would she suddenly appear? Would she come down the street? Would someone recognise her in me? A smell of food hung on the air. I breathed it down, took it to my lungs. Salsa. A thick salsa smell. She had made that when she exiled herself in our Mayo kitchen, hunched over the stove.
Breezing into the poolhall, I heard the clinking of ivory balls fade as if the last few notes of a seedy hymn were sounding out. An ancient man with very strange lips stood in the corner of the hall, drinking a Coca-Cola. I wondered if it was José with the Sewn Lips. I tried to say something in Spanish, but he just guffawed loudly, propped his underarm on his pool cue, using it as a crutch, whistled to his friends, pointed at me. Blue smoke was making spiral galaxies over the pool tables. Someone spat. I turned and walked out, while a man in a red baseball hat came towards me, proffering an empty pool tray, as if I might leave my eyeballs there for them to shoot around. On the street a boy was selling bits of useless copper and strange-shaped rocks. He weighed them on a brass balance. I bought some obsidian, left it in the ashtray in my hotel room, lay on my bed, drew the curtains, put my hands behind my head, watched the fan as it whirled, fell asleep.
I woke up, hungover, mosquitoes delighted around me.
My shoes developed a tiny tear in the rim near my little toe. In my hotel room I glued them together. I took a long sniff at the tube of glue, brought it down deep into my chest, tried to get high — felt stupid and juvenile — threw the tube away, took a very cold shower, squatted down, let the water wail on my back, thought of fire trucks along the roads of another town a long way away.
In the town library, records were stacked in boxes. I couldn’t understand them — the young woman behind the counter didn’t have time to help. She was handsome in an academic way, cropped hair, her blouse too big, small gold-rimmed spectacles. I wanted to ask her out, but swallowed my words. I saw her a few days later in the foyer of the hotel. She was sitting in an armchair, sipping on a drink, a large stick of celery mashing against her upper lip. She gave me a curt wave, turned away. I passed through the foyer, my daypack swinging off my shoulder. The warmth outside came in a blast. It was another man’s ordinary question that assaulted me: What am I doing here?
I walked on, chatting to myself.
Back in the park the two men were still playing chess. They remembered my parents. ‘He was crazy,’ they said to me in Spanish, ‘big and crazy, always with cameras. She was crazy, too, not as crazy as him.’ They said the house had lain empty for years after Mam and my father left. Nobody lived there until the Italian moved in with his clinic. The men stuffed the chess pieces in their pockets, walked with me to a graveyard. They pointed towards a wooden cross at the southern edge of the cemetery. I thanked them, and one of the men took my cheek between his thumb and forefinger and twisted until it almost hurt. ‘You are young,’ he said, ‘very young.’ He winked at me and opened a pouch that hung around his neck, took out a tooth. He said something about carrying the mouths of the dead around on his chest. I asked him to explain, but he just shook his head. I watched the men as they disappeared down the road, bent into their days, their games, their repetitions.
My grandmother’s cross was white and simple. It stood to the side of a thousand others. The black lettering of her name had faded. I got on my knees and introduced myself to her.
‘Hi, I’m Conor. The sun came up in the west.’
There were bedbugs in the hotel, and a string of bites, like red pearls, ran down my legs. For days and days I trudged around, the glue holding strong on my shoes. I hung out for an afternoon at an abandoned cinema, sat against the wall under a faded Kung Fu poster, under a black arch. I imagined films coming in tin cans, off the back of a filthy truck, boys in shorts waiting around, glorious under a hot sun, slicing the thick air with kicks and sideways arm-chops. A woman came and gave me a bottle of water. She had long skeletal hands: ‘Has de tener sed; toma.’ Here, you look thirsty. Her eyes were incandescent — did she know something? I tried to talk to her but she simply shrugged, a little perplexed, a little amused at my attempts at the language.
A bell sounded on the hour. A man in an ice-cream van was singing. It was time to go. That’s what he was singing: It is time to go. I heard it clearly: It is time for you to go, there’s nothing here.
In the room I tried to sleep after lighting a mosquito coil. The smoke drifted up to the fan, the ash in a gyre to the centre of the coil. Music vaulted up from the street. It was the ice-cream man singing again: It is way past the time for you to go.
I took one last look, waited for a face to appear around a corner, grey hair, arched eyebrows, flecked eyes. All I found was the boy with the violin, but he sounded strangely strangled that day and hardly sang at all. Only a few pesos in his violin case. He shrugged his shoulders when I dropped some more money in and hurried away. Miguel came with me to the bus station on a Friday morning when thermometers in gardens were edging their way dangerously upwards.
‘Good luck,’ he said.
He shook my hand lightly. Great damp ovals rolled from the underarm of his shirt. When the bus left, the driver whistled a tune, the same tune, all the way to Monterrey, as if a gramophone needle was stuck in his lavish Adam’s apple. We changed drivers and plunged south towards Mexico City. After a while I sat in the middle of the bus, where the impact from the ruts in the road was gentler. The windows were fully open, a yawn that let the created wind through. We rattled along in darkness, through the desert, and small towns on the edge of spectacular canyons, and into vast city suburbs. I caught a glimpse of a circus setting up its tents, a girl riding around on a unicycle, feathers leaping from her hair, her breasts spilling out from a tank top. I wanted to reach for her, touch her, see if she was real, but the bus hammered on.
At the station in Mexico City I walked with my head down — the floor was spidered with moving sandals. I had noticed them before, young foreigners in plastic Teva sandals, their Lonely Planets hugged to their chests, enviously eyeing the size of backpacks that others were carrying. I walked out into the city, a leapfrog of skyscrapers, smog, granite-grey sky, white pigeons pecking under archways. I wandered in a daze, still waiting for Mam to pop her head around some corner, hail me with a wave. My flight to San Francisco wouldn’t leave until the next day, but I knew it was a brutishly stupid notion anyway, this searching for her. On a crowded street I saw a newspaper being trampled underfoot, and I suddenly remembered it was my birthday, my twentieth. I bought a bottle of tequila and sat in the corner of the airport, sipping furtively. Sounds rang out. Buzzers, intercoms, machines. It struck me then that I knew the sound of airport metal detectors better than the shrill call of coyotes I had heard so much about from my parents.