The Moon

They told him that the deeper south and further from the coast he goes the closer he’d get to an authentic Mexico. The closer he’d get to a Mexican identity that goes beyond the stark and chain linked comparison with the United States that you find in the North and in the tourist destinations of the coasts. They also told him, don’t go to Mexico. It’s dangerous. You’ll be decapitated.

Victor didn’t quite know what advice would help him, so he ignored everything. He found a small town in the state of Jalisco called Cholula. His research went as far as examining buses in the Mexico City bus terminal and finding one with a hanging crucified Jesus on a CD that he found to be interesting. Little did he know that was to be the first of thousands of crucified CD’s he would see in Mexico.

Once he got off the bus, he found a small room to rent up a flight of stairs. He could easily afford the thirty-dollar rent with his grandfather’s monthly stipend, and though there was always the smell of burning tires wafting through the window, the room would suffice.
In the first day, he quickly learned a fact about Cholula that his research had overlooked. The heat. It was the hottest that Victor had ever been in his life. He didn’t think the human body could withstand such temperatures and sun like the temperature and sun in Cholula. Every corner of his body sweat and sweat hard, as if it were bleeding. They say Cholula is where the devil goes for winter holiday, but no one had told Victor this.

Victor thought about leaving, but the heat made him lazy. It was the heat that made him stay.
The small room he rented was all white. White washed walls, white tile floor and dirty white sheets. Only the flies and Victor himself added any color to the whiteness of his room, that and the dark smell of burning tires. The white kept it cooler, well it made him think it was cooler, like how mirrors make places seem bigger, the whiteness only made the intense heat of Cholula seem cooler.

They say that it was the heat of Cholula that had sweated all the sin out of Victor. He didn’t pray and he didn’t do anything especially saintly, in fact he didn’t do much of anything. All his sin had simply left him. It had been sweated out and Victor did nothing to replace it with cool fresh sin.
The little Victor did to fill his days was to collect glass, absentmindedly and with no real purpose. Glass from the street, discarded, rounded shreds of coke bottles and mason jars, but mostly beer bottles, chelas and kaguamas. He stayed away from the brown glass, he didn’t like it very much, but the green, the turquoise and the clear he would extend the effort to reach into the hot dirt of Cholula and pick it up. At first, his collection blanketed the small table in his room and then it spilled over onto the floor of his room and piled in a corner.

He grew a mustache. He walked into the dozen or so cool, neoned churches around his apartment and made a point not to pray. He watched the neighbor women from his window yell at turkeys and do the laundry. He did nothing too rigorous, because of the heat.

One night Victor slept with a woman. He wasn’t quite sure how he managed that. She was the same age as Victor, but she seemed older and better than Victor, so he called her a Woman. She amazed Victor. When she slept on her side the curve of her hip was so round and spilled so dramatically into her waist he didn’t think that women were actually made like that. And even when she slept, her long dark hair spilled across the bed. It was like mud, thought Victor, the most beautiful mud he had ever seen.

When the Woman first came over, she came on the premise that she wanted to see the glass collection that Victor spoke quietly about in the loud bar. Her limited English and her beauty had suggested to Victor that she would have nothing to do with him. But as the story goes, she would.

Victor was surprised when she sat on his bed. There wasn’t any other place to sit in the white room, but all the same it surprised him to see her sitting there in the moonlight. It was the first time Victor had ever felt cool in Cholula. It was like this Woman quietly told the sun to go home. Didn’t ask him, but just quietly allowed him to leave, “Now you can go”, she must have cooed. It was Victor’s first real night in Cholula.

The Woman stayed the entire next day twisting the bed sheet and arranging the glass. She stayed there almost every night. The Woman was making Victor human again. He began to actually do things. He began to read, go out with the Woman and her friends and listen to the Woman speak Spanish. He began to understand which sounds were verbs and nouns and he began to identify his Spanish words with actual objects and concepts, not just English words.
He found some glue and started fixing the glass shards to the walls. He quickly found a pattern in the glass on his walls and he began to expand it. He saw a wave and fish and he began to make an ocean on his walls. His room became cooler and cooler. He bought an extra sheet for them to use at night, it was getting that much cooler.

The Woman was getting more and more beautiful the more he knew her. At first, it was the curve of her hips and her tits, but now it was the line in her cheek when she smiled and the mole behind her left ear that Victor loved. When they were sweating in plastic bar chairs or walking to the market, he would want the world to stop so he could feel, kiss the lines of her smile, the bump of her mole. But he never did. Instead, he would walk a step behind to keep an eye on her. Make sure she wasn’t going to float away, sway away in some non existent Cholula breeze.
A few weeks went by and Victor noticed how much colder it was getting. In the mornings, his toes would be cold, he would have to fold his arms around his core and wear a sweater the Woman bought for him that looked like a dishrag.

The mosaic was growing bigger and bigger. It spilled up onto the ceiling and the Woman said that once he finished he should start another one outside on the stucco wall of his apartment. She led him outside and spread her arms out wide against the cool white wall. “Here,” she said. As he stood behind her, Victor breathed in a smell he had never before. It was like lemons and bread and hibiscus all together. And the Woman, like a simple lizard cooling on the wall was lemons. She was bread and she was the hibiscus. Victor, in his dishrag, stood in the Cholula sun cool and in love.

It was the next day, or maybe the day after when he finished his mosaic and a shiver ran down his spine. He was placing and gluing glass shards thinking of the Woman and how he would show her what he had finished, with her help. He could imagine her cool, brown arms in his and her smile, the little lines in her face. And then a shiver ran through him. The shiver. He never showed her the finished mosaic.

That afternoon, without really knowing why, he got on the same bus with the crucified CD and left Cholula. The road out of town was bumpy and made of dirt and with his insides already squirmy, once he got to Mexico City he vomited in a gutter. He proceeded to buy an expensive plane ticket and went back to where he came from, either Chicago or Toronto. It didn’t matter. Maybe it was even New York. There it was colder, the heat wouldn’t be able to chill him. There, they told him, the cold couldn’t make him human, and in the end, that’s what he wanted.