She was about thirty, with close-cut dark hair and bright, alert eyes, attractive, obviously American. He struggled to hide the sense of letdown her advent had created in him and said, “I’ve been trying to find the hotel.”
“Just off the plaza, three blocks behind the market. Let’s go to your car and I’ll ride over there with you.”
“I’m from San Francisco,” he said. “Tom Halperin.”
“That’s such a pretty city. I love San Francisco.”
“And you?”
“Miami,” she said. “Ellen Chambers.” She seemed to be measuring him with her eyes. He noticed that she was carrying a couple of Day of the Dead trinkets—a crudely carved wooden skeleton with big eyeglasses, and a rubber snake with a gleaming human skull of white plastic, like a cue-ball, for a head. As they reached his car she said, “You came here alone?”
Halperin nodded. “Did you?”
“Yes,” she said. “Come down from Taxco. How did you find this place?”
“Antiquities dealer in Acapulco told me about it. Antonio Guzmán López. I collect Mexican masks.”
“Ah.”
“But I’ve never actually seen one of the dances.”
“They do an unusual one here,” she said as he drove down a street of high, ragged, mud-colored walls, patched and plastered, that looked a thousand years old. “Lord of the Animals, it’s called. Died out everywhere else. Pre-Hispanic shamanistic rite, invoking protective deities, fertility spirits.”
“Guzmán told me a little about it. Not much. Are you an anthropologist?”
“Strictly amateur. Turn left here.” There was a little street, an open wrought-iron gateway, a driveway of large white gravel. Set back a considerable distance was a squat, dispiriting hovel of a hotel, one story, roof of chipped red tiles in which weeds were growing. Not even the ubiquitous bougainvillea and the great clay urns overflowing with dazzling geraniums diminished its ugliness. Cucaracha Hilton indeed, Halperin thought dourly. She said, “This is the place. You can park on the side.”
The parking lot was empty. “Are you and I the only guests?” he asked.
“So it seems.”
“Guzmán was supposed to be here. Smooth-looking man, bald shiny head, dresses like a financier.”
“I haven’t seen him,” she said. “Maybe his car broke down.”
They got out, and a slouching fourteen-year-old mozo came to get Halperin’s luggage. He indicated his single bag and followed Ellen into the hotel. She moved in a sleek, graceful way that kindled in him the idea that she and he might get something going in this forlorn place. But as soon as the notion arose, he felt it fizzling: she was friendly, she was good-looking, but she radiated an offputting vibe, a noli-me-tangere sort of thing, that was unmistakable and made any approach from him inappropriate. Too bad. Halperin liked the company of women and fell easily and uncomplicatedly into liaisons with them wherever he traveled, but this one puzzled him. Was she a lesbian? Usually he could tell, but he had no reading on her except that she meant him to keep his distance. At least for the time being.
The hotel was grim, a string of lopsided rooms arranged around a weedy courtyard that served as a sort of lobby. Some hens and a rooster were marching about, and a startling green iguana, enormous, like a miniature dinosaur, was sleeping on a branch of a huge yellow-flowered hibiscus just to the left of the entrance. Everything was falling apart in the usual haphazard tropical way. Nobody seemed to be in charge. The mozo put Halperin’s suitcase down in front of a room on the far side of the courtyard and went away without a word. “You’ve got the one next to mine,” Ellen said. “That’s the dining room over there and the cantina next to it. There’s a shower out in back and a latrine a little further into the jungle.”
“Wonderful.”
“The food isn’t bad. You know enough to watch out for the water. There are bugs but no mosquitoes.”
“How long have you been here?” Halperin asked.
“Centuries,” she said. “I’ll see you in an hour and we’ll have dinner, okay?”
His room was a whitewashed irregular box, smelling faintly of disinfectant, that contained a lumpy narrow bed, a sink, a massive mahogany chest of drawers that could have come over with the Spaniards, and an ornate candlestick. The slatted door did not lock and the tile-rimmed window that gave him an unsettling view of thick jungle close outside was without glass, an open hole to the wall. But there was a breathtaking mask mounted above the bed, an armadillo-faced man with a great gaping mouth, and next to the chest of drawers was a weatherbeaten but extraordinary helmet mask, a long-nosed man with an owl for one ear and a coyote for another, and over the bed was a double mask, owl and pig, that was finer than anything he had seen in any museum. Halperin felt such a rush of possessive zeal that he began to sweat. The sour acrid scent of it filled the room. Could he buy these masks? From whom? The dull-eyed mozo? He had done all his collecting through galleries; he had no idea how to go about acquiring masks from natives. He remembered Guzmán’s warning about not trying to buy from them. But these masks must no longer be sacred if they were mere hotel decorations. Suppose, he thought, I just take that owl-pig when I check out, and leave three thousand pesos on the sink. That must be a fortune here. Five thousand, maybe. Could they find me? Would there be trouble when I was leaving the country? Probably. He put the idea out of his mind. He was a collector, not a thief. But these masks were gorgeous.
He unpacked and found his way outside to the shower—a cubicle of braided ropes, a creaking pipe, yellowish tepid water—and then he put on clean clothes and knocked at Ellen’s door. She was ready for dinner. “How do you like your room?” she asked.
“The masks make up for any little shortcomings. Do they have them in every room?”
“They have them all over,” she said.
He peered past her shoulder into her room, which was oddly bare, no luggage or discarded clothes lying around, and saw two masks on the wall, not as fine as his but fine enough. But she did not invite him to take a close look, and closed the door behind her. She led him to the dining room. Night had fallen some time ago, and the jungle was alive with sounds, chirpings and rachetings and low thunking booms and something that sounded the way the laughter of a jaguar might sound. The dining room, oblong and lit by candles, had three tables and more masks on the wall, a devil face with a lizard for a nose, a crudely carved mermaid, and a garish tiger-hunter mask. He wandered around studying them in awe, and said to her, “These aren’t local. They’ve been collected from all over Guerrero.”
“Maybe your friend Guzmán sold them to the owner,” she suggested. “Do you own many?”
“Dozens. I could bore you with them for hours. Do you know San Francisco at all? I’ve got a big old three-story Victorian in Noe Valley and there are masks in every room. I’ve collected all sorts of primitive art, but once I discovered Mexican masks they pushed everything else aside, even the Northwest Indian stuff. You collect too, don’t you?”
“Not really. I’m not an acquirer. Of things, at any rate. I travel, I look, I learn, I move on. What do you do when you aren’t collecting things?”
“Real estate,” he said. “I buy and sell houses. And you?”
“Nothing worth talking about,” she said.
The mozo appeared, silently set their table, brought them, unbidden, a bottle of red wine. Then a tureen of albóndigas soup, and afterward tortillas, tacos, a decent turkey molé. Without a word, without a change of expression.
“Is that kid the whole staff?” Halperin asked.
“His sister is the chambermaid. I guess his mother is the cook. The patrón is Filiberto, the father, but he’s busy getting the fiesta set up. He’s one of the important dancers. You’ll meet him. Shall we get more wine?”