When it became too hot — which was all the time — I went back to find Laura on her bed, shivering and sweating, her ears plugged with cotton wool to keep the drilling at bay. People often fall ill in Mexico, I thought to myself, you expect to fall ill in Mexico, you go to Mexico to get ill. Lawrence became incredibly ill in Mexico (‘malaria — with grippe — and typhoid’) and now Laura was incredibly ill. I wasn’t ill but I felt strange: disoriented, exhausted. It was too hot and I was not used to smoking such strong grass. I had nothing to read except The Plumed Serpent: an interesting case of the site-specific book which you bring to read because it is set in the place you are visiting but which you cannot bear to read. There are people who can read anything to pass the time, and our situation should have forced me to read The Plumed Serpent but I simply could not bear to. I preferred to stare into space. Laura lay on her bed. The French guy whose girlfriend had almost drowned told us there was a good doctor in Oaxaca, and we decided to take a bus there, to ‘beastly Oaxaca’ as Lawrence called it, not because we had any particular desire to seek medical assistance — the difference between being ill and being in robust health was becoming increasingly hazy — but because we felt the need to do something, to assert ourselves, to prove that we still had the capacity to act, to play a part.
Laura was too weak even to pack and so, grumbling and muttering under my breath, I got all our stuff together. I wrapped up the grass and stored it in my glasses case and then, still muttering and grumbling, lugged our bags to the bus station. It felt good to be on the move even though it felt terrible to be on the bus again. We had spent too long on buses and it is possible that although it was the tuna steaks that did for Laura it was the interminable bus journeys that softened her up, weakened her resistance to the point where a mere tuna steak was enough to finish her off. We had made terrible mistakes. The whole of our Mexico trip, it seems to me now, looking back, was a terrible mistake. We crossed the border at Tijuana which was a mistake: we should have flown to Oaxaca direct instead of crossing the border at Tijuana and then taking a bus right down Baja California where there was nothing to see for hundreds and hundreds of miles. Even if we had crossed the border at Tijuana instead of flying to Oaxaca, even if we had made that mistake, we should have caught a train in Tijuana or taken a bus down to Los Mochis not, as we did, compounding our mistake by travelling all the way down Baja California where there is nothing to see for hundreds and hundreds of miles. Never reinforce failure: that is the first rule of military strategy. But we kept reinforcing our failure, kept taking buses that nudged us towards Oaxaca, rather than cutting our losses and flying straight there. We caught a ferry at La Paz, a vile ferry that left us so exhausted that when we arrived at Mazatlán we were too tired to think and got straight on a bus to Guadalajara. We kept pressing on, taking more and more buses, getting more and more exhausted. The longer we spent on buses, the less significant each additional instalment of the journey by bus seemed. How long would the bus take from Guadalajara to Mexico City? Eight hours? Eight hours was nothing. Two tickets please. And so it went on until it seemed that all our experience of Mexico would amount to was peering out of bus windows. One says Mexico, one means a bus. Finally we could take it no more. We arrived in Mexico City, took a bus to the airport and got on the first plane to Puerto Escondido.
Originally the idea had been to go to Oaxaca, to seek out Lawrence-related places, and then spend a week chilling in one of the Puertos — Escondido or Angel — before heading up to New Mexico, to Taos, to resume our Lawrence research. Instead, after weeks on buses, we flew straight to Puerto Escondido which we then left, on a bus, to go to Oaxaca, where we should have flown in the first place.
Just outside Escondido the bus slowed at an army checkpoint. Teenage soldiers had pulled over another coach and hauled everyone out, were going through everything, looking for arms and drugs. It was impossible to think of a more foolish place to keep drugs than in a metal spectacles case which would clatter and flash if thrown out of the window. Always keep drugs in your underpants: that is one of my mottoes in life. Better safe than sorry, that is another. A soldier peered in through the window and waved us on.
The road became a knot tying and untying itself. The bus twisted around curves, looming over the edge of ravines at the bottom of which could be seen the charred wrecks of many other buses. One says Mexico, one means yet another bus in Mexico, swathing round bends.
On the outskirts of Oaxaca we slowed at another checkpoint. Stopped. A soldier boarded the bus which fell immediately silent. Walked down the aisle, letting the fear spread out in front of him like sweat patches on a shirt. ‘This is it,’ I kept saying to myself, over and over, ‘this is it.’ I felt resigned. There was nothing I could do. I was close to that moment of total liberation which — or so I had read — comes with arrest, when you abandon all claim to being an active participant in your own destiny. For this reason I looked completely calm. The boy-soldier said something mildly threatening to a woman just a few seats ahead of me. Walked on. Then, carbine still pointed to the floor, he raised his eyes, looked at me. Stood there and waited. I looked back at him. He was clean-shaven, possibly had not even begun to shave. His fatigues were damp beneath his arms.
‘Pasaporte, por favor,’ he said. To get at my passport I had to stand up which was difficult to do without banging my head on the luggage rack — so I stood up very quickly, as if eager to obey, and smashed my head on the sag of cases — not hard enough to hurt myself, just to look ridiculous — and crumpled lankily back into my seat. The woman next to me laughed. The soldier laughed. I rubbed my head, not making a meal of it. Stood up more gently. Handed him the passport which he looked at kindly.
‘Cuidado,’ he said, handing back the passport and pointing to the luggage rack. ‘Careful.’
‘Sí,’ I said, not smiling. ‘Gracias.’ The soldier walked back down the aisle, said something to the driver who said something back and they both laughed. Then he got off the bus and waved us on. As the bus rumbled into motion again I had half a mind to open my spectacles case and give the boy-soldier a flash of its fragrant, delirium-inducing contents.
I look back on this as one of the two or three incidents which prove how far I have come in the quest for wisdom. I rank it alongside the time in France when I was on the brink of buying a shirt which was only just big enough, which the assistant assured me would not shrink, but which I knew would shrink (less wisely, I bought it anyway). The episode on the bus confirmed what I had long suspected: the massive advantages of appearing ridiculous. Only those with dignity can ever lose it. Whereas I, ever since that moment on the bus, have behaved with no dignity whatsoever. I can walk down a street in my best clothes and fall flat on my face with no appreciable loss of dignity because I am someone who is, in some sense, already flat on his face, already devoid of dignity.