who fidgeted or importuned at the counter. I saw only one exception, a man in a business suit, carrying a tooled leather briefcase, who made his way to the counter waving his passport and talking so rapidly I couldn’t make out the words. His manner connoted dire emergency, important business, heavy consequences if he were delayed even a minute. An officer got up and placed his passport on the top of the pile.
I seemed to be the only person in my part of the mob who hated the man. After all, that was the way I dressed back in San Francisco, while here, at the bottom of Mexico, in Levi’s and my michoacano hat, I was just another tourist, a boredom to officials.
My passport finally passed across the counter, I ran out to move the truck into the shade. “All finished?” Margot asked.
“Not hardly; I’ve just begun. You’ll have to come in and sign the tourist card. But stay out here until—God, what time is it?”
“Eleven.”
“Jesus. We’ll probably have to do it again on the other side. Wait fifteen minutes: it’s suffocating in there.”
I wormed my way back to the counter and watched the progress of the passports, as if my scowl would make the pile disappear faster. As Margot and the kids walked in the officer came to the counter and began distributing the stamped and signed passports. No ceremony attended signing the tourist cards, beyond asking how much we’d spent in Mexico. I don’t know what I’d hoped for: some little expression of regret at our leaving.
Retreating through the crowd I noticed for the first time those travelers who were going nowhere, who sat on benches in the middle of the room as if they had paid pew rent on them, eating, feeding children, asleep. I looked at Margot and held up crossed fingers, praying no one found anything wrong with our documents.
In the office of the Aduana, on the opposite side of the station, the crush was not so great. There was a great deal of scurrying out with peones and coming back with luggage to be checked, but they weren’t interested in our luggage. They were interested whether the radio was still in the truck, and the two spare tires. I thrust the gun permits into the aduanero’s hand and the man looked at me as if to say, ‘if you’re stupid enough to bring up guns, I guess I’ll have to go out and inspect them.’
It wasn’t so bad, I decided. They need a management consult—like me—but this way more people get jobs. I told Margot I could have gone through without mentioning guns. “In fact, I could have gone all the way through Mexico without mentioning guns.”
“And we could have been searched, like those people in Mazatlán.”
“Yes, but they were asking for it, camping on the hippy beach. But it wasn’t guns the cops were looking for.”
A hundred yards ahead lay Puente Talisman, a truss bridge with a hump in the middle. On the bridge I had to stop and pay a toll. An eye on the cars snaking up the hill beyond the bridge, I paid no attention to my change until I got outside again.
“He cheated me,” I told Margot.
“Much?”
“A quetzal’s supposed to be worth a dollar, so he beat me out of two pesos.”
“We’ll live,” Margot said. “Besides, it’ll take more than two pesos worth of time to argue him out of it.”
And she was right. In addition to cars there were busses in line, bus drivers passing along the windows collecting passports. “Triple A said it could take from forty-five minutes to several hours. We’re on the high end of that scale for sure.”
During the hour I spent at the lower station I found a guy dispensing orange sodas from a giant wheeled ice chest. That’s all he had, orange. I bought four, for four quetzals. During the time our passports were processed the shadow of the tree I’d stopped under shrank beneath its branches as the sun passed its zenith. Margot and the kids were perspiring until their hair stuck to their temples.
“Pretty bad?” Margot asked.
“Worse than the other side. No one speaks English. I don’t blame them. There’s only a couple of other folks from the US in there. But God, it’s a grind. Everyone has his hand out. I’ve registered the truck twice; probably have to do it again up there.”
“What’s up there?”
“The big aduana. We have to see the big aduana for some reason. But it can’t be worse than here. There was a guy in there with his mother and mother-in-law; they’d bought out every tourist shop in Mexico. The aduana made him haul it all in—six bags on the roof, to boot.”
“What’s left besides the aduana?”
“Soon as I pick up the passports I go see the Salubridad Pública. You know, they’re fleecing me. Every station, someone’s got his hand out. One guy hid his change—I saw him do it—and then had the gall to tell me he couldn’t break a twenty peso note.”
“They probably don’t pay them very much, Connie.”
Mexicans going south on vacation, Central Americans going home for the holidays, a few US citizens made up the milling crowd. As faces grew familiar they began to smile at each other and shake their heads at the confusion; I did too. It made it a little more bearable to be in it with others. Only at the health station was there order. The young man stamping international immunization records asked me how much he could make doing the same thing in the United States. I judged he was a nurse, and I quoted a ballpark figure.
“That’s why I want to go to the United States,” he said.
As I drove up the road to the station above, I passed cars still waiting in line. It was like running the mile in high school, passing other runners. A péon waved me over to the opposite side of the road, but I was beaten to the spot by a heavily laden pickup with New York license plates.
“Hey,” I yelled at the péon, “I was here first.”
The péon walked over to my window and said, “He will be but a little while.”
Then I saw why. Even at a distance I saw the currency peeking out of his passport. And it truly took only moments for him to be on his way.
“That’s evidently how to do it,” Margot said. “Anticipate the mordida. Give ‘em more graft than they bargained for.”
“We’ll still make it to Guatemala City by dark.”
She said, “Shall I fix you something to eat?” The girls were clearly showing signs of hunger.
“Let’s see how long the aduana is going to take.”
The road continued to curve as it climbed. At the top of the hill a policeman motioned us down a road to the right, that curved back and turned to dirt, running between warehouses and single story office buildings, until we were out on a plateau that dropped off steeply to the river, trees clinging to the edge. Here in the open space above the jungle there was no sense of crowding, and people moved more slowly. Along the wall at the edge of the plateau they lounged and ate, as if no one were leaving soon. Soldiers and police in several types of uniform passed between the buildings. One soldier with an automatic weapon guarded the door of what appeared to be a barracks.
I parked against the wall under one of the cliff-hanging trees, in view of the Río Suchiate valley, where we could see the bridge and the two border stations, shrunk now to a size not so imposing, and the blanket of bright green trees turning darker green beneath the clouds of the afternoon.
The man with the New York plate passed me as I got out. “Are you just driving through Guatemala?”
“On the way to Costa Rica.”
“Hire a guard to take you across. It’s faster.”
I said, “Just now I’ve got more time than money.” I’d read you could do this guard business, but with the kids and all there wasn’t room, and it cost more than two tanks of gas.
Inside the warehouse I stood behind the New Yorker, who contracted for a guard in excellent Spanish. Face to face, the official reminded me of a professional wrestler, broad, muscular but still handsome. Before I could state my intentions he handed me off to another official at a desk to his left, as if I were a shoeshine boy. On the wall between the two desks hung a sign in red crayon: do not give tips except for extraordinary services.
The next official, also broad and muscular, could have been a stand-in for Marshall Tito. He spoke English. I listened while the man told another traveler from the US, who’d forgot to do something important, he had to go back to the Guatemalan consulate in Tapachula. The man protested, a note of self-pity in his voice; the official apologized. Was this delay putting him in dire straits, or was the whining habitual? I was pleased I hadn’t forgot to do something important. I really needed to get to San José as quickly as possible. I had money waiting there, while money in hand was a quickly dwindling commodity. If my family were stranded a country removed from the US I’d whine, too. I lit the last of my cigarettes, a Delicado.
A handsome young man in green fatigues came in with the New Yorker and a sheaf of papers. The aduanero signed them and kept a copy. The New Yorker winked at me as he left with the guard.
The aduanero gave me a sticker for the truck and a registration slip for passage across the country. “And what were the other documents I got?” I asked. “They were the National Police and Migración. Two dollars and forty cents, please.” The printed receipt he gave me read: ‘Received for extraordinary services.’
Farther into the cavern of the warehouse wooden benches running at right angles to the back wall received the goods various persons presented for inspection. I went over and waited. No one approached me. I decided who got attention depended on who gave the biggest tip. Only I