Now The Bus to Veracruz is a prose piece from the new book
coming out in November.
I don't know how to categorize it.
It's a prose piece.
It was published in the Antioch Review
and they sent me the contract.
It said short story on it.
But I know it isn't a short story.
I know that much.
But I took the money, anyway.
It's just a prose piece, and I don't
think you can categorize it any further than that.
In Mexico, the most macho thing next to a bullfighter
is the bus driver.
And each takes great care of his own bus,
whether it's a city bus or cross-country bus.
And they fix them all up on the inside.
They put all their stuff in the front
and then bright lights and velvet and gold braid.
And they're really incredible.
And the drivers are very jealous of their own buses
and very macho.
I was once in a bus wreck.
Two city buses in Merida in Yucatan collided at high speed,
and I was on one of them.
And instead of checking to see if anybody was hurt,
the two bus drivers got out in the middle of the street
and began to beat the hell out of each other.
And this was considered standard procedure, very much.
In Guadalajara, there was bus drivers
who, especially at night during the late runs when
only men were on the bus, would not stop to let you off.
And how macho you were was judged the speed
at which you could jump off.
And if you could jump off at 5 miles an hour,
you were a sissy.
If you could jump off at 15 miles an hour, you were macho.
And I once jumped off at 15 miles an hour
and went tail over teakettle in a mud puddle
and destroyed my clothes and everything, but when I got up,
they were cheering as the bus went down the road.
So I knew I'd made it.
But there is in this piece a description
of a bus, which may seem rather fanciful
but really it's not too awfully fanciful.
The Bus to Veracruz.
The mail is slow here; if I died,
I wouldn't find out about it for a long time.
Perhaps I'm dead already.
At any rate, I am living in the wrong tense
of a foreign language.
And have almost no verbs and only a few nouns
to prove I exist.
When I need a word, I fumble among the nouns and find one.
But so many are similar in size and color.
I'm apt to come up with Caballo instead of Caballero or Carne
instead of Casa.
When that happens, I become confused and drop the words.
They roll across the tile floor in all directions.
Then I get down on my hands and knees
and crawl through a forest of legs, reaching under tables
and chairs to retrieve them.
But I am no longer embarrassed about crawling around
on the floor in public places, I've
come to realize that I am invisible most of the time,
and have been since I crossed the border.
All the floors are tiled.
All the tiles are mottled with the same disquieting pattern
in one of three muddy colors, shades of yellow, purple,
or green.
They make me think of dried vomit, desiccated liver,
and scum on a pond.
The floor of my room is dried vomit with a border
of scum on a pond.
And like most of the floors, it has several tiles missing,
which is a great blessing to me.
These lacunae are oases in the desert
where I can rest my eyes.
The nausea from which I suffer so much of the time
is not caused by the food or water but by the flaws.
I know this because when I sit in the town square, which
is covered with concrete of no particular color, the nausea
subsides.
The town is small, although larger
than it would seem to a visitor if there
were any visitors, and remote.
It has no landing field for even small planes
and the nearest railroad is almost 100 kilometers
to the east.
The only bus goes to Veracruz.
Often, I stop at the bus terminal to ask about the bus
to Veracruz.
The floor of the bus terminal is scum
on a pond with a border of desiccated liver
but there are many tiles missing.
The terminal is always deserted, except for Rafael and Estaban,
sometimes sitting on a bench inside,
sometimes lounging just outside the door.
They are young, barefoot, and incredibly handsome.
I buy them Cocas from the machine
and we have learned to communicate in our fashion.
When I am with them, I am glad to be invisible, glad that they
never look directly at me.
I could not bear the soft velvet and vulnerability
of those magnificent eyes.
When does the bus leave for Veracruz?
I ask them.
I have practiced this many times and I'm
sure I have the right tense.
But the words rise to the ceiling, burst and fall
as confetti around us.
A few pieces catch in their dark hair
and reflect the light like jewels.
Rafael rubs his foot on the floor;
Estaban stares out the filthy window.
Are they sad, I wonder, because they
believe there is no bus to Veracruz
or because they don't know when it leaves?
Is there a bus to Veracruz?
Suddenly, they are happy.
Their hands fly like vivacious birds.
Si hay, por supuesto, señor.
Es verdad.
They believe truly in the bus to Veracruz.
Again, I ask them when it leaves: silence and sadness.
Rafael studies one of the tiles on the floor
as if it contains the answer, Estaban
turns back to the window.
I buy them Cocas from the machine and go away.
Once a week, I stop at the post office
to get my mail from the ancient woman in the metal cage.
And each week I receive one letter.
Actually, the letters are not mine.
And the ancient woman has probably
known this for a long time.
But we never speak of it.
And she continues to hand me the letters,
smiling and nodding in her coquettish way,
eager to please me.
Her hair is braided with colored ribbons,
and her large silver earrings jingle
when she bobs her head, which she does with the greatest
enthusiasm when I appear.
I could not estimate how old she is.
Perhaps even she has forgotten.
But she must have been a great beauty at one time.
Now she sits all day in the metal cage in the post
office, a friendly apparition whose bright red lipstick is
all the more startling because she has no teeth.
The first time I entered the post office,
it was merely on an impulse to please her.
I was expecting no mail, since no one knew who I was.
But each time I passed, I had seen her
through the window, seated in her a metal
cage with no customers to break the monotony.
She always smiled and nodded at me through the window,
eager for any diversion.
Finally, one day, I went in on the pretext
of calling for my mail, although I knew there would be none.
To avoid the confusion which my accent always causes,
I wrote my name on a slip of paper and presented it to her.
Her tiny hands darted among the pigeon holes
and to my astonishment, she presented me
with a letter, which was addressed to me
and care of general delivery.
She was so delighted with her success
that I simply took the letter and went away
unwilling to disillusion her.
As soon as I opened the letter, the mystery was solved.
My name is fairly common; the letter
was intended for someone else with the same name.
It was written on blue paper in flawless Palmer method script,
and signed by a woman.
It was undated, and there was no return address.
But it was in English, and I read it shamelessly.
Savoring each phrase, I rationalized
by convincing myself that the mail was
so slow the man to whom the letter had been written
was probably already dead and could not object to my reading
his mail.
But I knew before I finish the letter
that I would return to the post office
later on the chance there might be others.
She loved him, she thought he was still alive.
Since then, I have received one letter each week
to the enormous delight of my ancient friend in the post
office.
I take the letters home and steam them open,
careful not to leave marks on the delicate paper.
They are always from the same woman.
And I feel by now that I know her.
Sometimes I dream about her, as if she were someone
I knew in the past.
She is blonde and slender, no longer young but far from old.
I can see her long graceful fingers
holding the pen as she writes.
And sometimes she reaches up to brush a strand of hair
away from her face.
Even that slight gesture has the eloquence of a blessing.
When I have read each letter until I can remember
it word for word, I reseal it.
Then after dark, I take it back to the post office
by a circuitous route, avoiding anyone who might
be on the street at that hour.
The post office is always open, but the metal cage
is closed ans the ancient one is gone for the night.
I drop the letter into the dead letter box and hurry away.
At first, I had no curiosity about what
happened to the letters after they left my hands,
then I began to wonder if they were destroyed or sent
to some central office where in an attempt to locate the sender
and return them, someone might discover
that they had been opened.
Still later, the idea that some nameless official
in a distant city might be reading them
became almost unbearable to me.
It was more and more difficult to remember
that they were not my letters.
I could not bear to think of anyone else reading
her words, sensing her hesitations and tenderness.
At last, I decided to find out.
It took months of work.
But with practice, I became clever at concealing myself
in shadowy doorways and watching.
I have learned that once a week, a nondescript man carrying
a canvas bag enters the post office through the back door,
just as the ancient woman is closing her metal
cage for the night.
She empties the contents of the dead letter box
into his canvas bag and he leaves by the door he came in.
The man then begins a devious journey which
continues long into the night.
Many nights, I have lost him, and have had to begin again
the following week.
He doubles back through alleys and down obscure streets.
Several times, he enters deserted buildings by one door
and emerges from another.
He crosses the cemetery and goes through the cathedral.
But finally, he arrives at his destination, the bus terminal.
And they're concealed behind huge doors
which can be raised to the ceiling as the bus to Veracruz.
The man places his canvas bag in the luggage compartment,
slams the metal cover with a great echoing clang,
and goes away.
And later, at some unspecified hour, the bus to Veracruz
rolls silently out of the terminal,
a luxury liner leaving port with all its windows blazing.
It has three yellow lights above the windshield
and three gold stars along each side.
The seats are red velvet and there are gold tassels
between the windows.
The dashboard is draped with brocade
in the richest shades of yellow, purple, and green.
And on this altar is a statue of the Virgin, blonde
and shimmering.
Her slender fingers are extended to bless all those who
ride the bus to Veracruz.
But the only passenger is an ancient woman
with silver earrings who sits by the window nodding and smiling
to the empty seats around her.
There are two drivers who take turns during the long journey.
They are young and incredibly handsome,
with eyes as soft as the wings of certain luminous
brown models.
The bus moves through sleeping streets without making a sound.
When it gets to the highway, it turns toward Veracruz
and gathers speed.
Then nothing can stop it.
Not the, rain or the washed out bridges,
nor the sharp mountain curves, nor the people who stand
by the road to flag it down.
I believe in the bus to Veracruz.
And someday, when I am too tired to struggle any longer
with the verbs and nouns, when the ugliness
and tedium of this place overcome me, I will be on it.
I will board the bus with my ticket in my hand.
The doors of the terminal will rise to the ceiling,
and we will move out to the darkness,
gathering speed like a great island of light.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]