Oh, there had been a carnival before, despite the mutterings of the Church. But it had been a sporadic, tumultuous affair, flaring up and cooling down. Its purpose and its organizers had been different. Now the carnival was modernized, molded by civic leaders who saw in it a chance to quietly insert useful post-revolutionary values into the community, amid all the glitter and dances. The newspapers said this was a festivity for “all social classes,” exalting the beauty of the women on display—models of Mexican femininity, filled with softness and quiet grace. A few years before prostitutes had been engaged in civil disobedience, protesting rental prices. Unions had been busy agitating workers, buzzing about bourgeoisie pigs. But Carnival smoothed out differences, brought people together, pleased the organizers. There was also, most important, money to be made.
Casiopea and Hun-Kamé arrived in Veracruz a day before Carnival. This meant the hotels were bursting at the seams and there was little chance of proper lodging to be had. After a few inquiries they managed to find a run-down guesthouse that would take them in.
“I have two rooms. I don’t see no wedding rings on your fingers, so I imagine that is what you need,” the owner of the guesthouse said with a frown. “If that is not the case, off you go. This is an honest home.”
“That will be fine. This is my brother,” Casiopea said. “We’ve come from Mérida to see the parade and do some shopping.”
Underneath the shadow of his hat and with the sun glaring so fiercely around them, it was difficult to discern Hun-Kamé’s features. This, along with the ease of Casiopea’s lying tongue, smoothed the old woman’s concerns.
“The door of my house closes at eleven. I don’t care if there are revelries outside, if you come by later, you’ll have to sleep on the street,” the woman told them, and they followed her to their rooms.
The rooms were more than modest, and the woman was overcharging, but Casiopea knew there was no point in complaining. She placed her suitcase by the bed and paused before a painting of the Virgin, which served as decoration upon the sterile walls. Ordinarily she would have made the sign of the cross upon coming in contact with such an image, but now she considered it futile to engage in genuflections in front of a deity, who, very likely, did not reside in her vicinity.
It also made it a lot easier to fly down the hallway and knock on Hun-Kamé’s door, bidding him to go out with her. There was a city to see, the Villa Rica de la Vera Cruz, the most important port in the country. Always beleaguered, poor Veracruz; when Sir Francis Drake had not been assailing it, the French looted it, and then the Americans seized it. It was tenacious, one must say that about Veracruz: it weathered Spanish conquistadors, British buccaneers, French soldiers, and American marines. Perhaps that was why its inhabitants were said to be so cool and collected, dressed in their guayaberas and laughing the night away to the music of the harp and the requinto. When war has knocked on one’s front door that many times, why should the minuscule daily ills matter?
They went for supper. There were many places offering elaborate seafood dishes near the arches of the downtown plaza, but Hun-Kamé avoided the larger restaurants. Too much noise there, too many people, and no tables to spare.The air smelled of salt and if you walked down the malecón you could glimpse the sea, but it wasn’t the Pacific Ocean from the postcard which she longed to gaze at. It seemed fun, though, this port. They said it resembled Havana, and there were frequent dances for the younger set at the Lonja Mercantil. Or else, sweethearts from middle-class families walked around and around the main plaza under the watchful eye of their older relatives: courtship still followed strenuous rules.
Since they were not courting and they had no nosy relatives to trail behind them, Casiopea and Hun-Kamé wandered around without direction, heading wherever they pleased. They took a side street and ended up sitting in a café, all whitewashed outside, like most buildings in the city, where the patrons smoked strong cigarettes and drank dark coffee, safe from the muggy heat that assailed the port.
The café offered a minimal menu. It was not the kind of place where one had a decent meal; instead it sold coffee with milk, poured from a kettle, and sweet breads. To summon the waitress, one clinked a spoon against the side of a glass and the glass would be refilled with coffee and steaming milk. The patrons could also avail themselves of a café de olla, sweetened with piloncillo.
Casiopea, imitating the other customers, clinked her glass and summoned a waiter this way, ordering bread and coffee for both of them, although, as usual, her companion was uninterested in their meal.
Hun-Kamé took off his hat and she noticed, for the first time, that he had acquired a black eye patch that contrasted with the whiteness of his clothes. Though white was not his color—she suspected he had elected to blend in with the other men in town who outfitted themselves in this fashion—he looked rather fine. He always did and yet the novelty of him never ceased.
Casiopea stirred her coffee while he ran a finger around the rim of his glass. The table they were sharing was so small that if she moved a tad forward she might bump her elbow with his or knock his glass to the floor. Others had come earlier and secured bigger tables, and now they were playing dominoes.
“How will we find the Mamlab? Where is he?” she asked.
“The Huastec people are cousins to the Mayans, and their gods are cousins of mine. The Mamlab are not one god, but several.”
“Loray spoke as though he was referring to one.”
“Oh, he is referring to one. The Mamlab live in the mountains, where they play music, drink, and make love to their frog wives. But some of them venture into town to partake in festivities and seduce enticing women. And the youngest, he is more insolent than the rest, and that cousin of mine has my ear.”
She knew of Chaac, who carried his stone axe and beat the clouds to release the rain. And there was the Aztec Tlaloc, with his heron-feather headdress, but the Mamlab she did not recall.
“And he, this god, he has a name, then?”
“The Mam is called Juan,” Hun-Kamé said laconically, sipping his coffee.
“Juan? What kind of name is that for a god?” she asked, dismayed to discover deities had names taken out of the Santoral. It hardly seemed creative, or appropriate.
“Sometimes he is Juan, sometimes he is Lord Thunder, sometimes not. Are you not Casiopea, Lady Tun, a Stone Maiden, and other permutations? And beyond these is there not some secret name in your heart, which you keep under lock and key?”
Casiopea’s father, he’d called her kuhkay—firefly—because the little bugs carried lights from the stars, and she was his little star. She wondered if he meant this, if this might be her long-lost name.
“Maybe,” she conceded.
“Of course. Everyone does.”