Read an Excerpt

Chapter One
 
Announcing the Cuernavaca Summer Workshop: A limited number of painting students will be accepted for the Workshop for the months of July and August. Instruction in painting by renowned artists Gambel Torrigan and Agnes Partridge Keeley. Fee of $500 includes de luxe housing in beautiful small hotel, gourmet food, expert instruction, and a chance to summer in the beautiful city of eternal springtime. Write Miles Drummond, Apartado #300, Cuernavaca, Morelos, Mexico, for details and application blank.
 
On a bright morning on the twenty-second day of June, Miles Drummond walked five brisk blocks from his tiny bachelor house to the Cuernavaca Post Office. He was a spry, small-boned man in his fifties wearing sandals, weathered khaki trousers freshly pressed, a green rayon sports shirt. He carried a leather zipper case fat with documents. He had too much iron-gray hair, curly and carefully tended. Behind the bright glint of the Mexican sun on octagonal rimless glasses, his was a clerical face, rather pinched, myopic, with a look of chronic apprehension.
 
He stepped from the sunlight into the dusty confusion of the small post office, reaching for his box key as he nimbly skirted the outstretched hand of the elderly beggarwoman who partially blocked the doorway. He was tempted to continue at his headlong pace toward the boxes, but he was conscious of a feeling of breathlessness and an impression that his heart sat too high in his chest, tapping impatiently against his collarbone. He made himself saunter to Box 300. Through the dirty glass, beyond the peeling gilt of the number, he could see that he had mail. At his third stab the key went in and he opened the door and took out three letters. He took a deep breath, exhaled slowly, and took the mail over to a vacant place at one of the high, slanting counters by the windows.
 
The top letter was from his sister. He set Martha’s letter aside. She was ten years older than he, lived meagerly in a co-operative rest home outside Philadelphia, and wrote him once a week. He wrote her once a month. He had not seen her since he had moved to Mexico on a rentista status fifteen years ago.
 
The second letter was on heavy bond paper, letterhead paper, and apparently typed on an electric machine. Jenningson and Kemp, Architects. Mr. John Kemp wrote that he was enclosing his check for four hundred and fifty dollars to cover the balance of the fee for the Summer Workshop, and that he would fly from New Orleans to Mexico City on Eastern Airlines, arriving at noon on June thirtieth.
 
The check was on salmon-colored paper and had been written on a check-writer. Miles Drummond folded it and put it in his wallet. The last letter was from an Agnes Archibald in Denver. She had sent her fifty-dollar registration fee back in February, the first money to come in. She had carried on an exhausting correspondence with Drummond demanding all manner of nonpertinent information, and had at last decided not to attend the Workshop. The current letter was in answer to Miles Drummond’s letter explaining that it had been clearly stated in the literature that the registration fee could not be returned. In the current letter she again demanded her fifty dollars, and made dark threats about people who used the mails to defraud.
 
Drummond unzipped the case and looked for his master list. He thumbed through all the papers and could not find it. He emptied the case completely, thoroughly alarmed as he thought of the confusion that would ensue had he lost the master list. He had mislaid just enough of the correspondence so that it would be difficult if not impossible to construct a new master list. When he was close to despair he found it, folded twice and hidden inside the list of food requirements.
 
He unfolded the master list of the fifty-three persons who had responded to the advertisement for the Cuernavaca Summer Workshop. He took out his pen, ran it down the list until he came to Kemp, John A. After the name he wrote, “Pd. Arr June 30, noon, Eastern, Mexico.”
 
He put all the papers back into the case, along with the three letters he had received, and headed for the Banco Nacional de México, Cuernavaca Branch, on the corner of Calle Dwight Morrow. He walked by the new government building and through the small north zócalo and past the Bella Vista. Once he was in the bank he had to take everything out of the zipper case again in order to find his deposit book.
 
One of the pretty little girls behind the counter entered the check in Drummond’s peso account. Five thousand six hundred and twenty-five more pesos. It made him feel pleasantly flushed and slightly dizzy to look at the new grand total. Nearly seventy-five thousand pesos. It seemed unreal to him that he could have acquired this much money merely through the writing of various letters. It seemed unfair, somehow, that in ten days the Workshop would begin and he would have to run it, and a lot of this money would have to be paid out. He could not begin to visualize what the summer would be like. He knew only that he dreaded it. And dreaded it more now that Gloria seemed to be losing interest so rapidly.
 
He walked four blocks from the bank to the establishment of the mechanic who was trying to restore to a state of relative health the Volkswagen bus which Drummond had acquired for the summer through a very complicated deal. The first owner was not known. The second owner had been a man who dreamed of establishing a great new bus business. He had begun with the Volkswagen, building a huge luggage rack on top, and driving it himself on a punishing run between Cuernavaca and Cuautla. It had been Número Uno of the Consolidated New World Transport Company. After untold miles and great endurance of goats, rockslides, and passengers saturated with pulque, the embittered owner-driver had lettered a name on it. Estoy Perdido. I am lost. And soon after that he went out of business. When it was known that Miles Drummond wanted the use of such a vehicle without actually owning it, his cook-houseman, Felipe Cedro, came up with a deal involving Estoy Perdido. The new proprietor of the broken bus was willing to rent it to Miles Drummond for x pesos for the summer, provided Drummond had the bus completely repaired in the shop of Antonio Vasques, a cousin of the new owner’s wife. One half the cost of repairs would be deducted from the rental. Furthermore, Señor Drummond would agree to employ, as driver of said vehicle, one Fidelio Melocotonero, the novio of the new owner’s daughter, at a salary of two hundred pesos a month, or sixteen dollars American. As Drummond did not own and could not drive a car, and because the home of the Cuernavaca Summer Workshop would be in the structure four miles north of town, the old building last known as the Hotel Hutchinson, Drummond agreed to the arrangement, knowing, from past experience, that Felipe Cedro was somehow making some money from the arrangement.
 
Estoy Perdido was wedged into a corner of the small shop, resplendent in a coat of new, very red paint. On the side was painted The Cuernavaca Summer Workshop under a representation of a brush and palette, spotted liberally with raw pigment.
 
Antonio came bustling up to Drummond to say proudly that the very good used tires had arrived and had been installed. He patted the big VW emblem on the front of the bus and said that it had indeed been a very weary creature, but it was now responding to the understanding care that only Antonio Vasques could give to such a defeated object. Miles inquired as to what remained to be done. After fifteen years in Mexico his Spanish was very fast, very fluent, and almost entirely devoid of verbs. He managed to make the present tense do for all situations, and tried to overlook the confusions that were sometimes caused by this linguistic hiatus. Antonio advised him that after some woeful deficiency in the electricidad had been corrected, it would remain only to reweld a torsion bar and it would be ready to fly.
 
That particular word made Drummond uneasy. He looked into the bus. Fidelio Melocotonero was, as usual, asleep on the floor of the bus on a grubby serape. Ever since the arrangement had been made, Fidelio did not permit himself to get far from the bus. He was a heavy-faced, sleepy-looking young man who wore the ducktail hairdo, jeans and T-shirt of the American cinema. On two previous visits to the garage Drummond had found Fidelio hunched over the wheel wearing a snarling expression and making roaring noises. Yet he had been assured that Fidelio was of the very top excellence as a driver.
 
“The day after tomorrow then it is ready?” Drummond asked.
 
Antonio shrugged. “It is entirely possible.”
 
“One of my professors, a very important man, arrives by air on Sunday in Mexico and it is important the bus goes and gets him. On Sunday.”
 
Antonio patted the bus. “Without fail, Señor Drummond, this bus will go and get this important man and return him here in speed and great comfort.”