CLINTON ST. QUARTERLY WALT CURTIS Don’t Bamoa In the morning, we take a taxi directly to Raul's family home. With a surprised look on his face, he greets us, shakes hands, and introduces us to his family. They give us total hospitality. Soon I will feel like a member of the family. I play with Javier, the grandson. Strumming a nonexistent guitar, the boy wants to IVI y dad died from cancer, wasting away quite painfully and heroically. I had been closely involved with his dying. It was messy, depressing, and quite exhausting. It didn’t seem quite fair! I wanted to make sense of it and stretch my own life, its dimensions, outwardly. Also, my friendship with Raul was one of the sweetest and most tender things I had going for me. I really had loved him and wanted to see him in his village in Mexico. His love sustained me through a very trying time. His love gave me the courage to make the journey essentially alone. conditioning is stifling; it doesn't work. You are shut away from the ordinary people, and entombed with bourgeois types. Train fares are cheap by Amtrak standards. first-class! The air I caught the train in Mexicali. There are two railway lines which parallel each other. The rails are fixed, permanent. The train might derail, but a head-on collision is unlikely. You can walk around. The conductor sells beer and soda pop. The windows open in second-class. Steve, a friend from L.A., and myself arrived at Campomento Wilson, a small company town near the tracks. Ten thirty at night. There is no hotel, no taxi, no telephone. It’s too late to bother Raul or his family. A kindly lady and her son, after much discussion, allow us to sleep on the floor of an abandoned house. "Would we want to sleep at the jail?” they asked us helpfully. “ No thanks.” In the mysterious dark, we bed down listening to pigs grunting, roosters crowing. Z^fter the death of my father in S ep tem b e r of 1977, I went to Mexico to make a pilgrimage to the mummies of Guanajuato, and to visit a Mexican boy, Raul, whom I had met at the w ino g ro c e ry store where I work. He had told me about the family farm called la Abundan- cia, located near the railway station of Bamoa, a village about 700 miles south of the border. 12 Photo by Eric Edwards Layout and Illustration by Eric Edwards
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