They stayed three nights in San Francisco and wandered the streets looking for free love and free drugs. The closest they came to free love was a come-on from a store detective with a five o’clock shadow and eye make-up in a Safeway; the closest they came to free drugs was the pot-thick air around the North Beach campfires. At San Diego they walked across the border into Tijuana where Gilbert got his picture taken holding an iguana. Their room at the Pensione Mondragon cost fifty cents and all night long dogs fought in the street. In the morning Cyril and Gilbert ate tortillas the texture of linoleum, red eggs, and peppered potatoes, all washed down with Fanta. Then they proceeded to explore the market with its bewildering variety of chili peppers and edible cacti, and various ornate madonnas, Cyril resolving that on the way back he’d buy a Virgin of Guadalupe for his mother, one encrusted in seashells and Christmas lights. By midday the streets smelled of pee and exhaust, and the very shadows seemed to cringe from the sun.
Along with churches and shops there were cantinas, and inevitably Gilbert led the way through a set of swinging doors to a table set with a shaker of cayenne and a plate of quartered oranges. Mescal and beer arrived. The drill was basic: shake cayenne onto orange, bang back mescal, bite orange, gulp beer. On their third round Cyril began to feel like a beached raft being refloated on an incoming tide. For the first time in days he was able to forget his misery and look around, and what he discovered was that no one in the cantina had any shoelaces, or rather that one man had them all. He was a fat man at his own table in the middle of the room, with a heap of laces before him, and he was now regarding the newcomers with interest. With a downward wave of his fingers he indicated that Cyril and Gilbert were to join him.
“Give to me your shoelace,” he said to Cyril.
“Why?”
“Give to me your shoelace.”
Cyril looked to Gilbert who, for once, had no advice. Anxious not to offend in a foreign country, Cyril took the lace from one of his Converse All Stars.
“You are strong?” enquired the Mexican.
“No stronger than anyone else, I guess.”
The fat man had heavy-lidded eyes and a smooth face and a long black moustache and black hair that hung straight down. “You can break your shoelace I give to you two dollar. I can break your shoelace you give to me two dollar. Is a new shoelace, yes?”
Cyril had got them recently. He nodded.
“Bueno. Try.”
It occurred to Cyril that either way he ended up with a broken shoelace, nonetheless he wound the end of the lace around each hand, took a breath and yanked. The lace held. The Mexican laughed the long low laugh of a man who knew his territory. He had beautiful white teeth, not one of them gold.
“Con permiso.” He took the shoelace, looped an end around each forefinger, held the lace up for Cyril and Gilbert to see, then popped it. He did this simply, easily, with a mere toss of his wrists. “Two dollar.”
Cyril paid and they rose to leave taking the broken halves of his lace, but the man said that it was now Gilbert’s turn. When Gilbert had tried, failed, and paid, it was Cyril’s turn to try again. “No, no, you win.”
The man was sad. “But you are in Rome. You must do as the Romans do. It is the rule. Do you not go by the rule? Everyone here has gone by the rule. You are too good for the rule?” Cyril looked around at the other drinkers who were watching with shy interest, their laceless shoes loose on their feet. The fat man wore white pants, a white shirt, and a red sash for a belt. And he was, Cyril noted, wearing sandals that required no laces.
When they departed, eight dollars poorer, shuffling their feet so as not to lose their shoes, it was evening and shadows filled the streets.
Five days later they reached Mexico City. The cars were foul but the people were gracious and the architecture grand. Cyril’s mother had urged him to go to the Basilica de Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe, on the hill where a Mexican Indian convert had seen a vision of the Virgin Mary. He and Gilbert dutifully took one of the VW Beetle taxis. The driver was unimpressed by Gilbert’s attempt to bond over the fact that they were both cab drivers, perhaps suspecting Gilbert of trying to get a reduced fare.
Cyril sat in a pew and watched worshippers approach the altar on their knees and thought of his childhood catechism classes where he learned of saints and martyrs who put stones in their shoes or crawled over gravel so as to share the agony of Christ. He remembered Father Krasniuk saying each of them had their own guardian angel. “He’s there to protect you,” he assured them. “You can’t see him, but he’s there.” Father K was young and brisk and smiled a lot and Cyril had liked him. A picture book in catechism class showed a man in a cauldron of boiling oil. There he stood, relaxed, leaning one elbow on the cauldron’s edge, chatting with an astonished Roman centurion. Another showed Daniel in the lions’ den, the lions as meek as kittens. “That’s faith,” said Father K, “that’s God. He protects His children, and we’re all His children.” He smiled broadly as he related this Truth. “Have faith. He’s looking out for us.”
But even at the age of nine Cyril had been doubtful, for if God and the guardian angels were looking out for us then why had they let Stalin come to power? Why had God and His helpers permitted the Holodomor during which millions of Ukrainians starved to death? He was about to ask about this when Frank Stepanik barfed, diverting everyone’s attention. Cyril went home and asked his mother but her answer was to grow teary and embrace him so tightly that Cyril very nearly suffocated, as if she was trying to squeeze the very question out of him for he was better off without it.
After the Basilica de Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe they went to Trotsky’s house and saw the desk where he was ice picked in the back of the head. Trotsky had come to Mexico to escape Stalin, but as Cyril’s mother had said—and said again—no one escaped Stalin. He recalled how, back in 1963, when the Free World was mourning the assassination of JFK, his mother wore the grim smile of the vindicated. The Russians may have withdrawn their missiles yet they’d countered with Lee Harvey Oswald, and only the naive could have expected anything less. And clearly the Americans were naive, out maneuvered by the serpent Stalin operating from beyond the grave via Kruschev who, she had no doubt, was in communion with the arch Soviet Satan by seance and every other Rasputin-like medium who had slithered up from the Moscow sewers.
They were staying in a hotel whose floors were slanted due to earthquake damage and whose ceiling fan squeaked like tormented mice. The one window was tall and narrow with slatted wooden shutters. It offered a view of construction cranes as well as battered billboards left over from the Olympic Games four years earlier. Cyril had brought a sketchbook but so far had been too depressed to open it. What he did was walk. He walked the streets from church to church and gallery to gallery, sometimes with and sometimes without Gilbert, trying not to brood over Connie, which was as impossible as turning his back to his own mind, though at least the sights, sounds, and smells of the strange city kept him half a step ahead of it as it taunted him like a spurned beggar.
One afternoon he wandered into an exhibition of Goya etchings and studied the peasants and witches and soldiers, moved by the squat and awkward figures. In a second-hand bookshop with a gritty stone floor and dark wood walls he found an old edition of Da Vinci’s drawings. Though the book was discoloured and musty with decay, Cyril bought it and took it back to the hotel room where he stared at the master’s drawings as if at a math problem. Such majestic confidence in the lines, each one a gesture of absolute command. Had he worked quickly or with patience? Had he hunched close to the paper or stood back? Had his hand done the work or his head? He stared as if to imprint individual lines into his mind so that he might reproduce them like lines of verse. Experimenting, Cyril found he could draw dynamic lines like whiplashes, stinging with energy, yet how to control them? When he went for control he lost verve and the lines were timid.