Still the Same Man (3 page)

By the time he got back to the hotel, the buses had already been gone for hours. He entered the lobby carrying the golf clubs. The manager stopped him, clearly alarmed by his appearance and late arrival. Joanes calmed him down, assuring him that he was fine and promising he wouldn’t be staying to see the hurricane. Even so, he had to sign a disclaimer to the effect that he had declined to leave the hotel with his fellow guests.

His wife had gotten everything in order. The family’s luggage had been wrapped in the plastic bags provided by the hotel and placed on the highest shelves in the closet. She’d left his clothes for the following day on the bed. Despite his exhaustion, Joanes couldn’t help smiling at the little row of things neatly laid out—a change of underwear, a rain jacket, his passport, a road map, a small first-aid kit, a note giving the address and telephone number of the evacuation hotel, and a backpack to keep it all in.

He dropped the golf clubs in a corner of the room and took a long shower. Afterward, he took one of the suitcases from the closet, removed the sticky tape on its bag, and pulled out some clean clothes.

He ate dinner in the hotel restaurant. A sour-faced waiter in plain clothes served him. Save for Joanes, the place was empty, and with the best part of the furniture stowed away, it was pretty depressing.

He was back in his room, working on his laptop, when the landline rang.

“How are you?” his wife asked.

Joanes threw himself onto the bed to talk. The TV was muted and tuned to a news channel.

“I’m fine. What about you guys?”

“Fine,” she answered wearily.

“Sure?”

“I’m fine now that I’ve finally gotten a moment to myself. The others are eating downstairs. They’ve given us a spot on the fourth canteen shift.”

“You’re not eating?”

“I’d rather talk to you. Tell me what happened.”

He told her about hitting the chimpanzee.

“What was a chimpanzee doing on the highway?”

“I don’t know.”

He told her how he’d looked for the dying animal in the undergrowth, and how he’s stayed with it until it died, and how afterward he’d felt the need to bury it. He didn’t tell her he’d cried.

“That’s why you didn’t get back in time?”

“That’s why, yeah.”

“Nothing else has happened?”

“No, nothing.”

He didn’t see the point, for now, in telling her about the problems with the contract.

She sighed.

“You think I was wrong.”

“What?”

“Spending all that time burying it. Burying her, I should say. She was a female.”

“I don’t know. I suppose it was the right thing to do. But I hope you’ll come soon.”

“Of course I will. You guys are OK, right? You’re with your dad.”

“Yes. And my stepmom. I’m going to share a room with my stepmom. You’ve got to see the nightie she’s brought. I’ve seen windows less transparent.”

Joanes laughed.

“The later it gets, the more I want to get there.”

After a pause she said, “All of this is so weird. The hurricane, the monkey on the highway . . .”

He agreed with her.

“What’s the place like?”

She gave a snort. Both the evacuation hotel and the town itself were in absolute chaos. More and more relocated tourists kept showing up, and Mexican people, too. There wasn’t a single bed left in all of Valladolid. In complete contrast to what they’d seen in Cancún, the hotels hadn’t prepared at all for the hurricane. They all trusted that where they were, it wouldn’t do any more harm than a regular storm. The hoteliers were making the most of the situation. Those without a reservation were willing to pay any amount for a room; the hoteliers pocketed the money and put them in the spaces reserved for evacuees. As a result, the tourists coming from the coast wound up sleeping on mats in the common areas.

Joanes heard his wife yawn.

“You should go and eat something and rest. I’ll see you in the morning.”

“In the morning,” she repeated. “Please be careful.”

“Don’t worry.”

“I love you.”

“Me too.”

“Sure?”

“Of course I’m sure.”

The silence in the room was unbearable after they hung up. Joanes looked for the remote control and turned up the volume on the TV.

A minute later he muted it again.

He went on working for a few hours. Afterward, he jotted down the changes he’d have to make to his offer in a little notebook. Before going to bed, he put the notebook in the backpack he’d take with him the following day.

He was up and about before sunrise. He put the suitcase he’d opened back up in the closet and sealed the doors with tape. He made sure he had everything his wife had left out for him, as well as water and food for the journey.

The moment he stepped out of the room, a maid and two maintenance men hurtled in. It seemed as if they’d spent the night in the hallway, waiting for him to open the door. They began stripping the bed, removing electrical appliances, and transferring as much furniture as they could from the bedroom to the bathroom.

“Wait a minute, sir.”

The maid had come after him, carrying the golf clubs.

“What about these?”

Joanes shrugged.

“Do whatever you want with them.”

The hotel seemed totally different. Everything had been organized for the hurricane’s arrival. The furniture, lamps, and decorative pieces from the hallways and common areas had been removed. The insides of the windows and glass doors were taped from corner to corner with big crosses. In the courtyard, the trees had had their coconuts cut off and their branches strapped down with metal bands so that the wind wouldn’t rip them off.

Joanes handed in his laptop at reception and took a receipt in exchange.

“Good luck,” said the receptionist, by way of goodbye.

There wasn’t a cloud in the sky. Nothing in the air suggested that the day would be any less sunny and calm than the previous ones. And yet that impression stood in stark relief to the Cancún hotel strip, which looked like a ghost town. Most of the hotels had already relocated their guests.

After merging onto the highway for Valladolid, he realized that the local population had also prepared for the hurricane. The repair shops, car dealers, and spare part depots that flanked the highway outside of Cancún for several miles had their doors and windows boarded up and their signs taken down.

He soon found himself in an increasingly dense flow of vehicles, which, like him, were heading further into the peninsular for shelter. His car joined a motley caravan of passenger cars, buses, motorcycles, and construction and farming vehicles. He spotted pickups carrying various generations of the same family, most of whom were crammed into the back, shielded by awnings made of tube frames covered in plastic sheets or palm leaves. He saw a digger moving along with its bucket raised high and three kids sitting inside it surrounded by backpacks and bundles of clothes. He also saw busses evacuating tourists. He exchanged resigned looks with the passengers inside them.

The traffic slowed to a desperate crawl, not helped by various fender benders or by the two military checkpoints where soldiers with machine guns were halting vehicles and even ordering a few onto the shoulder. Once there, the passengers were forced to get out while a pair of Rottweilers sniffed the vehicle and rummaged around in the mountains of bags and suitcases that made up their luggage.

Try as he might not to, Joanes glanced every few minutes at the clock.

“Are you going to keep us here all day?” he asked aloud to himself after almost an hour spent blocked at the second checkpoint.

The previous afternoon, he’d gone to a store to buy food for the journey. Panic buying had laid the place to waste. In the canned food aisle, he’d found just a few dented cans. He’d grabbed a couple of the most presentable among them and a loaf of sliced bread. The bottles of water were rationed to two per customer.

He started in on his scant provisions out of sheer boredom.

The sky was still clear.

The highway here cut through thicker and taller vegetation than he’d seen on the coast. He found he was able to put his foot down a little along those stretches of road with more lanes, but even so, the average speed along the way was painfully slow.

He was driving along a straight stretch when, in the distance, he spied two people on the shoulder. One of the figures was standing watching the traffic. The other was sitting on something he couldn’t make out. It looked like they might be hitchhiking, and yet they weren’t making any effort to catch the attention of the passing vehicles; instead, they just stood there, unmoving. When he drove past them, he saw that it was a man and a woman; she was in a wheelchair. Joanes’s eyes met the man’s for a fraction of a second.

He continued on some twenty or thirty yards before slamming on the brakes. The car behind had no choice but to swerve violently to avoid crashing into him. The driver showed his irritation with a long honk of his horn. Joanes moved to the shoulder, where he sat stock-still, his hands on the wheel, staring into his rearview mirror at the two figures behind him.

The man, in fact an elderly gentleman, was now looking in the direction of the car. The woman, wearing a straw hat, hadn’t changed her stance at all, her body was hunched and her head bent.

But all of Joanes’s attention was fixed on him. On the elderly gentleman.

He was wearing slacks and a short-sleeved, white, button-down shirt. He’d put on a good number of pounds. What had once been a stout stomach was now a serious belly hanging over his belt. The man’s double chin was now a triple. And the large, square-framed, black-rimmed glasses reminiscent of old TV sets had now been replaced by a more modern pair. But his imperious air was the same as ever.

The elderly man moved guardedly toward the car. Joanes got out.

“Hello,” he said.

“A compatriot!” responded the man with great satisfaction, holding out his hand.

As he took it, Joanes scrutinized his face, but there was nothing in it to suggest that the other man recognized him.

“Hello, professor.”

The old man’s smile immediately vanished.

“I don’t think you remember me. I was your student. At the School of Engineering.

He added his name and the year it had been.

The professor looked at him, creasing his forehead, and shook his head.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t remember you. But in any case, I’m incredibly pleased to see you.”

“What’s happened?”

The professor pursed his lips.

“We’ve been the victims of a mutiny,” he said, containing his rage. “We were on the bus, on our way to one of those shelters, when the other passengers ganged up against me and my wife, forcing us to get off. They threw us out. Kicked us to the curb and then just went on their way. We should be thankful they didn’t hurt us.”

Joanes shook his head, confused.

“But, why?”

“Intolerance, my friend. Because they gave in to the irritation produced by a minor inconvenience and let their nerves get the better of them. Because of her condition, my wife requires a little more space than other people. A hard, narrow, straight-backed seat is terribly tiring for her. This fact, in a bus with more passengers than seats and a faulty air-conditioning system, was enough to incite the uprising.”

“And there was no one to defend you? A hotel rep, the driver . . . ?”

The professor gave an emphatic shake of the head.

“Only the driver, but the last thing he wanted was to get involved. He obeyed those savages without so much as a word when they ordered him to stop. Just imagine the scene. They lifted my wife up in midair and set her on the curb! As if she were a piece of luggage!”

“Is that your wife over there?” Joanes asked, pointing to the woman in the wheelchair.

“Forgive me. I should have introduced you. My manners are melting in this heat.”

Joanes followed him to where his wife was sitting.

“Darling, you won’t believe the stroke of luck we’ve had!”

When her husband introduced her to Joanes, she simply looked at him meekly. She barely shifted the pained look on her face, as if smiling took an unbearable effort. Her eyebrows were plucked bald, and her dress—white, no belt or frills—looked like a hospital gown. When the professor added that Joanes had been a student of his, her response was, “In that case, I’m not sure we are so lucky.”

A trailer whizzed past, and she shut her eyes tight to protect them from the dust.

“Where was the bus supposed to be taking you?” asked Joanes.

“I don’t know,” answered the professor. “I heard someone say the name of the city, but . . .”

“I’m going to Valladolid.”

“That could be the place. I think it might have been, yes.”

“Would you like me to take you?”

The professor replied with an enormous smile and shook his hand again, now more firmly than before.

“You can’t imagine how grateful we’d be if you would. I didn’t dare ask you myself.”

“It’s not a problem. But we ought to get going. It’s already a little late.”

Joanes watched as the professor threw his travel bag over his shoulder and pushed his wife toward the car. The chair was motorized, but she needed help there along the rubbly shoulder.

The whole story about the mutiny on the bus seemed strange to Joanes. He found it hard to believe that the other passengers would have thrown them off the bus simply because of a space issue. Something else had gone on, surely. The professor must have provoked the others somehow, which, knowing him, wasn’t hard to imagine.

They settled the woman into the back seat and put the wheelchair in the trunk.

Joanes sat down at the wheel but didn’t turn on the engine right away. He wanted to fix that place firmly in his memory—that nasty stretch of Mexican highway, the roadside hawk perched and watching them from a signpost . . .

He had imagined this moment countless times since leaving college. In his fantasies, the professor always appeared in some desperate situation where he had no choice but to ask Joanes for help, recognizing, implicitly, that he’d made a terrible mistake in underestimating him as he had. And Joanes always helped him out, making a point of being sober and efficient. He’d make it clear that things were going great, that he ran a prosperous business, that he had an enviable family, and, ultimately, that the professor’s harmful influence hadn’t had the least effect on him.

“Is something wrong?” asked the professor.

“No, nothing,” answered Joanes, starting up the engine. “Everything’s in order.”