Teasing Mayahuel.

I was the lone customer in the bar, the sound of the rain that had driven me in still pounding at the door. The walls of the Bar Reforma were covered in the paraphernalia of a life spent gathering Coke and Pepsi advertising, beer posters, Marilyn Monroe and Pancho Villa posters, posters promoting tours to Grecia, and still more Marilyn Monroe posters. From the ceiling hung an array of plastic hibiscus flowers in every color, oddly faded in the fluorescent light. The rain kept up at the door as the sound of passing cars and trucks whizzed and splashed by.
“Hola, buenas tardes.”
The bartender paused in his cleaning ashtrays to acknowledge me. I order a glass of mexcal, Milagro de San Diego. The object of my search, of my fruitless journey to Atlixco, to my getting soaked and to my eventual return to the only bar I knew carried it. The bartender and I talked with my stilted Spanish, he correcting my bad pronunciation of every Nahuatl town name I tried to spit out. “No one I know sells it here.” “Sorry, but we get it directly from the producer.” “This is the last bottle we have, or I’d sell you one.”
“Quien sabes?” Who knows. He’s right, who knows.

With the pace of the world, with the fact that I can hop on a computer and call my family anytime, it seemed such an anomaly that I couldn’t find a bottle of Milagro de San Diego anywhere in Mexico. With the globalization of everything, it seemed odd to have every liquor store owner look at me with such an uncomprehending look, with a “what the hell is this gringo talking about” written on their face. Still, nothing worked and nobody had it. Eventually, I chased the company down on the internet, trolling Google until I finally cross referenced it to a small town about an hour from Cholula, site of the Bar Reforma and where I was staying. On Google Earth it was easy, a short 30km bus ride to Atlixco, then out to Tochimiltzingo. Easy.

The bartender leaves me with orange slices and chili-salt along with a small bowl of peanuts. He moves off to continue cleaning ashtrays. The owner of the bar, obviously the father of the current bartender sits behind me at a table writing letters long hand with a black marker on lined paper. We sit in utter silence. The rain falls outside. The mexcal is smooth, so unlike any other mexcal I’ve had. It finishes with nutty overtones, the scent of smoke, not the raw burst of most mexcals, but delicate. I am alone in a bar in Mexico staring at the bottle of mexcal I cannot have and cannot find.

Part of me wanted desperately to see the farm, the neat rows of agave lined out with the stacked stone walls, to see the fields in some recognizable pattern of pastoral perfection. Part of me was calculating in wanting to talk with the farmers, the distillers, to know their secrets and then divulge them to an audience, so that in my own greed to keep on traveling through Mexico I could share this beautiful mexcal. But when I got on the bus finally in Puebla, after already sitting on a bus for an hour to go from Cholula to Puebla, then rode another hour to Atlixco, my prospects were dimming with the sunlight. As we dropped into Atlixco, the reality of 80,000 people, of an unknown city began dawning.

Why do we get attached to things, memories, or mexcals? They linger on and give some measure of meaning, but they also serve as touchstones, points in time when we experienced life to some greater degree. To a degree outside the bounds of normality, outside of our habits, the usual measure of days. I took another sip, savoring its burning warmth and the twitch that went right to my head. I smiled at the pleasure of Mayahuel, the goddess of the Maguey, the mexcal.

It is unquestionably odd to step off a bus in a totally foreign town, totally alone: the odd sensation of being a lone gringo. Atlixco is a busy, dirty town with narrow streets and crowded narrow sidewalks. I emerged from central bus station, quickly assessing my location by memorizing the cross streets: Independencia and Avila Camacho. I turn and walk quickly up Independencia toward the zocalo in the distance. There is an unnerving amount of police, especially as a loaded truck of police is followed down the street by a Humvee filled with army soldiers, replete with machine gun on top. I look away into a store filled with plastic crap, it interests me all of a sudden. The low rumble of the diesel engine passes on, I walk toward the zocalo.

Try awkward: sitting in a bar in Mexico alone. No one will talk to you, especially once you whip out the pen to write. I finish the short glass as the bartender puts on soft piano music that collides with the rain. The bass of an errant vehicle rattles the bar. I am alone and staring at my empty glass. I ask for another glass but the bartender laughs. He pours me a third of a glass. I have finished the bottle. He leaves me the bottle to study what might have been.

School as just let out in Atlixco and I am moving back and forth among the swarms of kids in the array of school uniforms. I step to the edge of the zocalo and pause, there are several more soldiers, these ones now recruiters. The banners extol service to La Patria, the fatherland. No one is anywhere near the tent except the army. Near the soldiers is another gaggle of police dressed in their black fatigues. Their automatic weapons always creep me out. I cross the street and walk on into the square and don’t stop until I have found a seat, so discomfiting is it to have all eyes on the güero. From my seat in the zocalo, I get my bearings before starting out to find a collectivo (small bus) that might take me to Tochimiltzingo.

I turn the bottle in my hands, happy even to examine it. It seems utterly silly to have come to covet a bottle of something. United Agave Producers of Tochimiltzingo. More than 200 years of tradition, this is a completely organic mexcal. It is glass and a pretty label, just like all of the twenty or thirty other brands of mescal or tequila on the glass shelves. But like the ancient cash register that dominates the center of the bar, stuck on 9 pesos 40 centavos, it is from another age. An age when you couldn’t order it on-line or find it in every store, or any store for that matter. Pride in artesianal production.

Each of the four directions I went from the zocalo proved fruitless. There were small combis (even smaller buses) and even a few collectivos, but nothing to Tochimiltzingo. I was stuck in Atlixco. I began to go in and out of every liquor store, asking for Milagro de San Diego. In every store my ability ask got better and the story elaborated. Still, no one had heard of it. I began to loop back around toward the bus station. Looking, looking, into one store, sent to another, sent back. Then on to the next, the next. No one had heard of the brand, the makers and yet there fifteen kilometers away it was, unknown.

I finish the last sip, cluttered amid the remnants of peanut flavor. The bar mirrors and neon and lights are reflected in the last sip. All the moments of my day distilled down to this multi-layered reality, all the pieces the feelings, memories, ideas, here. Now. Message in a Bottle comes on the stereo. I laugh as I pack up my bags, the rain now stopped. “I hope that someone gets my message in a bottle.” Mayahuel toys with me, teasing.