Espresso Azteca

DOS PARTE
(Part Two)
ESPRESSO AZTECA
(Aztec Espresso)

I.

         Creaky, high-pitched notes that called to Thad’s mind eerie circus music began their lonely calliope behind him, drawing his attention; a tinkling, repetitive grating that had made Manuel Payno, Dickens’ across the pond and south of the border doppelganger, complain that he couldn’t write for thirty minutes without being interrupted by the excruciating noises of organs on the street below.

         The black sheep of Mexican street music, an Organilla cranked away on her vintage organ. Bearing the pleasant plumpness of a nanny, her short arms struggled to balance her portly form and hold the heavy instrument, brass cylinders exposed like an automaton’s viscera and polished to a dull gleam, its weathered oak body trimmed in faded black and gold. Perspiration darkened her beige uniform as her partner worked the area around her, the dark maw of an upturned hat hungry for pesos extended before her as if it were the one crying “Monedas, monedas,” to the small throngs of people - locals and tourists alike who milled about the plaza in late morning commutes and Lampoon’s-style revelry, sipping water or coffee, snapping selfies and bartering with vendors.

         In the distance, where the Seminaro circumnavigated the northeast corner of the Zocalo, an uncovered Army transport loaded with armed troops, rounded the square. Considering that, like the District of Colombia in America, Mexico City’s Historic District was a Federal area and held a far larger and far more incorruptible police force than anywhere else in the country, it was a sight one did not commonly witness in the Heart of the Mexica lands. Mexico City, in recent years, had become a safe haven, with many from the surrounding states relocating their families and businesses to the Federal District to escape the growing cartel violence in the countryside.

         “¿A la dama también le gustaría un café, señor Thad?” the street barista asked, nodding towards Novella. A profound fire of life burned deep within his onyx eyes as he smiled. A man who looked fifteen years older than his meager fifty-something, pits ringed in sweat, his white button-down shirt and bright red apron glowed in contrast to his leathery umber skin and a bay of the same hue was shoaled atop his head by short salt-and-pepper hair.

         “Her?” Thad asked coyly with a slight tilt of his head to his right where Novella stood, the hint of a laugh teasing his words. “Oh no. She is a traitor, my friend.” He nodded at the Estrella Café cup Paola held. “Ella no sabe lo que es el verdadero caf-”

         - something suddenly collided with his shoulder, knocking him
a step to his left -

         “-the fuck?” he laughed, steeling his footing; a quizzical look swathed the chiseled features of his face as he realized the impact from Novellla’s slap to his shoulder held more force than he’d imagined it would.

         “Mentalidad americana.” She said with a toying scorn.

         They all laughed.

         “She is a feisty one, Señor Thad. Ella mi gusta.”

         “You have no idea, mi viejo amigo,” he smiled at Novella. “Keeps my dumb ass in line by not giving me time to act a shit like I used to, you know?”

II.

         Whether by accident or those decrees passed at a wave of Tezcatlipoca’s smokey hand, he’d met Novella during his first visit to Mexico in 2007. A hazy, yet beautiful Friday morning, he remembered, when he’d met with Monica Kassoth, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of U.S.-Mexico Borderlands History at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana (UAM). Mexico’s premiere university, UAM was a hub of architectural awe, educational research, cultural activity and inclusivity that he could only compare to how he’d always imagined that of Oxford to be. Fueled only by a faded, cryptic pencil scrawl on his original birth certificate, a reoccurring nightmare, and impulsive action borne of a sudden and unrelenting need to know who he was and where he came from, it was a personal and blatantly selfish matter. Concealed behind the guise of academic research for his work – but another Top-Shelf relationship he’d formed under the premise of a lie - Thad had picked her brain on cultural and tribal interactions between the Uto-Aztecan tribes of Mexico and the American southwest and the Iroquoian tribes of the American southeast. And more importantly if such interactions had even existed.

         Following the highly educational meeting he’d taken a taxi north where he’d aimlessly roamed the Centro Histórico and Zocalo with childlike wonder, and a deeper, colder feeling that lurked somewhere between rage and hate, a connection he could not quite explain were he asked to.

         Cinco anos, he reflected.

         Five years had already passed since those smokey earthen hints of the Amatitlan Roast danced its sensual gavottes across the Plaza and seduced his olfactory. When he’d first stood there at Miguel’s vendor cart, not recalling walking across the plaza, and he’d seen an ad for the Fiesta Charro being held at the Lienzo Charro Constituyentes. Mexico’s premier equestrian event, unlike American cowboys and rodeos, who could but never would, accredit the Charro and Mexicano for its origins, it extended beyond horses and riders to vibrant traditional costumes, lively music, and food whose ambrosial scents teased the olfactory and made the mouth to salivate in a culinary lust to rival that of those poor souls damned to Dante’s revolting elemental mire of Hell’s Third Level. Novella had been performing in the Escaramuza charra, the only female event in the Charreria,

         Five years Thad’d known Novella and he couldn’t recall having ever witnessed her blush. He could conjure images of that mesmerizing sparkle in the liquid depths of her dark eyes when she was happy. Sure. He could summon innumerable instances of her radiant smile that lit up the world over a kind word spoken. Of course. But he’d never seen her blush. Not even in response to his most charming efforts to tilt at windmills, a Quixotic quality that effortlessly melted others yet held no sway over Paola’s underlying stoicism. And while he dared not chance a cheating glance to witness such an event – to do so would be to chance a kick to the dick right there in public he was certain - it was the heat of just that he felt radiating beside him and not Tonatiuh’s molten fingers stretching out over the staggered apartments and stores that cut the plaza’s hazy eastern skyline.

III.

         “How much do I owe you?” Thad asked, fishing his wallet out of his pocket.

         “Mmm…uno Amatitlan…por tu? Veinticinco pesos.”

         “Twenty-five pesos?” he turned and smiled at Novella, thick black eyebrows raising in emphasis. “Non-traitor discount.” She countered his verbal melee with the childish, nose-scrunching cuteness of sticking her tongue out at him. He laughed, dug though his wallet, and handed a 100 cien peso banknote drawn on the Banco de Mexico to the Street barista. “You’ve gone loco since last we saw each other, old man. Charge me the same as you would anyone else.”

         “Sí, señor.” He said with a complient nod of his balding head, digging into his apron pocket. “Déjame conseguir tu cambio".

         “Oh, no. Please. Keep the change.”

         “Gracias, Señor Thad.” That spark again ignited in his eyes. “Tomaré su café en breve.”

         “De nada y gracias, Miguel.” He cast an eye and nodded towards the Organillo and her partner – though it had been a few years since he’d last seen them, and while both had aged visibly from even a distance, there was no forgetting Josefina’s pleasant motherly smile. “Still at it I see…”

         Miguel looked at the ladies. Tourists stopped to buy ice cream from a heladero who signaled for them to wait with a raised finger before opening the lid to his hand-pushed cart and diving into the ice fog that oozed from its maw like the breath of a slumbering beast, only to emerge with a frozen foot-long tube filled with a white substance, proclaiming loudly in Spanish that “You must try this! It’s homemade – my specialty!” They each tipped the string quartet playing across from the Organillo as they strolled away across the Zocalo. Another group of tourists all wearing the same tacky tropical print button-downs and khaki cargo shorts stopped to admire a silver-painted street performer in a perfect state of suspended animation atop his crate. Stragglers perused and bartered over cheap knick-knacks to gift their grandchildren under the premise of spreading cultural diversity. None paid the Organillo heed.

         A wan smile stretched his thin lips and he nodded. “Si, Senor Thad. Todos los días, las pobres almas.”

IV.

         A day prior to his meet with Doctor Massoth he’d met Josefina and Gloria Morales. The two were sisters – a third sister had turned them on to the profession a decade prior to his meeting them – and had worked the streets outside the old post office in the Centro Histórico. He’d been aimlessly wondering the district, absorbing the sights and sounds and scents – past the slanting and sinking cathedral whose first stones the Spanish had lain in 1573, a boot hill thrust upon the throat of an entire culture; past the velvet-draped Bar La Opera, Mexico City’s most famous cantina, where Pancho Villa shot a bullet into the ceiling to calm some local ruffians who had disturbed his conversation with his compadres; past the Sanborn’s cafeteria, it’s homey exterior dressed in vibrant blue and white tile – when their horribly out of tune music had assailed his ears. He remembered stopping to watch their performance and being impressed how the sisters cranked their instrument steadily, with none of the harried, desperate air of their male counterparts.

         I’ve worked construction my entire adult life and I couldn’t do this all day. How - What keeps you going? Thad had asked the sisters in his then mediocre Spanish, horridly accented with that bastard melding of a Yankee twang and Southern drawl geographically restricted to those states that bordered the Mason-Dixon Line.

         We love it, Gloria had told him with a shrug of her shoulders and a shy, if not humble, smile, her face wide and friendly, as her fingers had tenderly run along the instrument’s exposed brass cylinders, meticulously polished to a dull gleam. This is what we do. It is part of us.

V.

         A tear glistened, welling in the corner of his sad browns but never fell (he silently hoped it was concealed by his glasses), and a cold, hallow sadness weighed on his chest seeing it was a fervor the years had stolen from them. There had been no greater influence that had pushed him to where he stood today than those two women and their humbled words five years earlier.

         “We have to admire and respect that.” He said as Miguel turned and began scooping dark coffee beans from a burlap bag into a small commercial grinder.