There were helicopters
overhead, and that was part of it. There were tanks in the zócalo filled with
hard-hatted soldiers in fatigues, and that was part of it. The two men who
worked the front desk and kept the hotel clean were both twenty years old and
both named Francisco. We thought of them as "Los Dos Franciscos." My husband and
I, twenty-seven and twenty-six respectively, felt old in relation to them. One
of them was mestizo with an aquiline nose and lighter skin; the other had brown
skin and a wide nose. The Spanish-nosed Francisco had long, wild hair, and the
indigenous Francisco had a crew cut that was growing out. It would have felt
soft to touch.
We
were on our honeymoon. It was six months after the Zapatista uprising and we'd
managed to know nothing about it, though we knew more generally about trouble in
Mexico and Central America. Through my political science classes, at the
University of Texas, I'd been introduced to caudillo governments, civil wars,
CIA coups, banana republics and liberation theology. We'd been to Belize and
Guatemala, two years before, on a two-week vacation, our first as young lovers,
our first as full-time working people. Now, newly married, we were backpacking
for three months, riding old American school busses, swimming in bath-tub warm
oceans, attending Spanish language schools, fighting with each other, getting
sick and sunburned, and being swept up by landscapes that felt utterly foreign.
We walked around with a Lonely Planet phrase book, testing phrases, receiving
answers we didn't understand. People gave us directions using unfamiliar
gestures, pointing with their elbows or their lips, circling an index finger in
the air like a lasso. A la derecha. Directo. Right turns and straight paths
sounded the same. Our last bus, first class, had been boarded by campesinos,
bandanas covering their faces, who may or may not have been Zapatistas,
demanding cooperación—a few pesos from every passenger. They'd thrown a log in
front of the bus to stop it, a protest or Robin Hood tactic that continues to
this day. It was a first-class bus with a driver's assistant, a woman in an
immaculate skirt, blouse and blazer, who walked down the aisle, stopping at
every seat to collect our money. After she paid the masked leader, our bus was
waved on. At the moment the bus was stopped, we'd been watching, Disney's "The
Little Mermaid" on overhead monitors. Sebastian, the lobster, was singing, "Bajo
la mar." As we neared San Cristóbal, the husband of a Dutch couple we'd
befriended, also on honeymoon, took pictures, with the wide-angle lens of his
Nikon, of fox holes along the road. I couldn't believe his courage, his
stupidity.
Our
second and final night at the hotel, we bought a bottle of rum and shared it
with The Two Franciscos, talking with them as best we could in our limited
Spanish. I asked them how to say "chicken man," (I meant rooster), which had
them in stitches. Though little else on the main street, now a pedestrian
walkway, is the same, that hotel is still there some 30 years later. With our
grown daughter, we climbed the tile steps to our room and then up to the roof
where I stopped writing when Francisco One came up to hang the laundered sheets.
He pointed to the chopper overhead and told me, "Militár."
