Forrest Gander - The Trace

Perdón, but where, Dale asked, could they find La Hacienda de los Muertos?

The man pointed the way with a chile-dusted grasshopper between his fingers. It was up the very street they were on. Derecho, derecho, todo derecho.

When he turned, Dale saw Hoa, with a bottle of Coke in each hand, bending toward a shelf of obscure items in the corner.

“Y los servicios? Dale asked.

The man looked at him uncomprehending.

“Los baños?”

From his shadowy perch, the dueño made a circle motion with the tweaked grasshopper.

Dale walked outside and around the side of the building to a rusty orange door. He opened it, and daylight surged onto a grimy bathroom floor trembling with hundreds and hundreds of daddy longlegs. None of them scurried away. It was as though there were some kind of electric current coming up through the floor and locking them in place. They quivered there en masse, like the entranced members of a horrific cult. Was it part of a mating ritual? Dale shivered reflexively and quickly closed the door. He hurried back inside to find Hoa. She was selecting snacks from one of the racks along the dark wall.

“What’s he eating,” she asked in an undertone as Dale stepped close.

“Chapulines,” he said. The dueño stuck his hand into the plastic bag. “Grasshoppers with chile and lime.”

As Hoa was working out the pesos with the dueño, Dale paused outside the doorway. He stuck his head back in and called, “No hay luz adentro?” It was half comment, half question. The store’s only light fell in through the open doorway.

“Hay plena luz afuera,” the old man responded solemnly.

Dale turned and looked into the street. Yep, he said to himself, there’s plenty of light out here.

Outside the tienda, they stood with their open Cokes and an airy bag of picositos that Hoa had immediately torn open. She wondered if they could walk around Icamole for a bit, but Dale said it would be too hot and dusty. There was a little mining museum they could check out after La Hacienda de los Muertos, but they were still going to need to drive back to Monclova to find a place to stay the night.

She asked how he was going to discover anything about Ambrose Bierce if all their stops were scripted, if all they did was step out of the car and get back in. She didn’t think she would last through another all-day drive. Dale could see the wave of frustration hit her, and he too was feeling a revulsion for the rental car.

“Look.” He tried to be encouraging. “Why don’t you drive us out to La Hacienda de los Muertos and we can walk around there.”

“How come it’s called de los muertos? ” They were talking as they crossed in front of the broiling hood of the car, switching places.

“So Mexican,” Dale said with a big grin inside the car, buckling up. “It’s just the site of the old mine. Where everyone lived when Bierce showed up here. If Bierce showed up. We’ll see anything he might have seen. It’s supposed to be beautiful, what I’ve read.”

She drove for the first time on their journey. In the passenger seat, Dale was all the more conscious of the sound of the car on the road, the munch of tires on dirt, although dirt, Dale thought, would be a euphemism. It was packed dust strewn with fragments of rock. In some sections, the road was a puce color and pebbly, and he knew they were going over volcanic strata. The form-marks on many of the outer walls had weathered to look like ripples in sand. Some of the structures were nothing more than heaps of mud. They passed two newer buildings on either side of the street, one painted in earth tones and the other pink with blue trim, but even they seemed mysteriously empty, their doors and windows mortared up. Absolutely no one was on the road.

“They probably lost population to Mina and Garcia until they didn’t have enough kids going to school here to support a teacher. Then the rest bailed. But I’m sure there are still people living here, and in caves up there.”

In her peripheral vision, she caught Dale pointing with his eyes toward the serrated mountain on her left.

“It’s riddled with caves. Natural ones and ones made by miners. That’s where a lot of them used to live, anyway.” He peered out the side window now at a fenced adobe pen with a donkey inside it.

“Grutas de Garcia are near here. Gorgeous caves. When Bierce came to Icamole, this place was booming. There would have been more than a thousand people running around here. Mining.”

The bag of picositos was in Hoa’s lap and she used one hand to drive and one to eat the pepper-sprinkled nuts.

“What were they mining, gold?”

“That’s my bottle,” he said as she picked up his Coke. “No, silver. And later, when the silver played out, zinc.”

Behind the wheel, she felt like she had, at last, something to do. A mission. She was sitting up in her seat and more awake than she had been for most of the last two days. Dale noticed the change. He thought she would get a kick out of the old mining hacienda that some people called La Hacienda del Diablo.

They came at it head on. The road petered out to nothing more than tire tracks across the alkali plain. In front of them, between scrums of creosote bushes, they could see white buildings — some joined and others set off — all silhouetted against the dark mountains. The tallest and most central was obviously the church, and they drove across the hard sand right up to its front door. The closer they got, the clearer it became to them that the buildings were ruins, and only the limestone facade of the church was intact, original. The church’s sides had been rebuilt, probably recently. There was a dark wooden cross above the front door and another cross, an iron one, at the peak of the bell tower. But nothing behind the bell tower’s facade, Dale could see that. And little was left of the adjacent convent, but for pocked and wind-scarred mud bricks and swabs of adobe plaster. The outlying buildings were in worse shape. Some were just broken walls. To Hoa, they looked like clay shapes molded by a child, with crude gaping doors, notched half walls, and collapsed corners. Like things Declan made as a little boy in her studio.

“This is what I’m talking about,” Dale said, his eyes lighting up.

“It’s like a cross between Stonehenge and Corbusier,” she answered.

“Keep the doors open.”

Hoa put the car in park, leaving the keys in the ignition, and they bailed out in front of the church. She thought there might be a breeze in this big open space — this vast plain ringed by mountains glowering with late afternoon — but as she approached the church, she felt none whatsoever.

Without breaking stride, Dale agreed to Hoa’s suggestion that they put off seeing the church until last. He followed her around the jumble of outlying walls and hovels. She could be boss for a while, no problem.

Each of them was thinking about the sounds and lives of the people who had once lived here. It was easy for Hoa to imagine them: the streets clamorous with men in hats ignoring or greeting each other, their low voices bouncing from and absorbed by these very adobe walls. A library of irretrievable sound waves. As a potter, she liked that. The thought that infinitesimal traces of human lives were caught in stone and clay. She’d been thrilled when she first heard about archeologists using lasers to try to play back ambient sounds impressed as sonic bands in vases, when potters, thousands of years ago, used cockle shells or pointed sticks to shape the wet, turning clay. Just like wax records. The humming of the pottery wheel, children’s laughter, a dog barking. A moment’s sound waves injected into clay grooves and locked there as the potter worked. Even if the science wasn’t good enough to reproduce the sounds convincingly, she thought it should be possible.