Escape from Moscow

        Three different metro trains, two bus rides, a walk across a highway overpass and we were there—a concrete shoebox, the opposite extreme of the pre-fabricated cardboard-walled “Le Chateau” or “Wood Hollow” apartment complexes at home. Inside it wasn’t so bad. A small living room, tiny kitchen, bathroom with tub and shower, and one large bedroom. We shared the bath with a half-dozen Finnish engineering students. The apartment was heated but there wasn’t a thermostat and my body had to adjust to the average temperature of the average suburban resident of Moscow. The Finns were already there.

We spent our mornings taking long rides on the metro and waiting for Nikita to tell us that he had found tickets for us on the train from Moscow to Beijing. Most afternoons Tanya invited us to meet her downtown after she finished work. We walked with her along dark streets past empty shop windows. Even on the sidewalk the difference between Westerners and Muscovites was clear. My step was quick and goal-directed, intended to carry me from one well-heated building to the next in the shortest period of time. Tanya strolled, talking to Calem and pausing to ask questions, watching people, looking back—looking, looking, looking, as if it were a spring day.

“How did you know when you first saw us on the street,” Calem asked her, “that we weren’t Russian?”

“You were smiling,” she said.

Calem brushed a lock of hair from his forehead, beginning a display of the boyish charm that had gotten us into and out of shit across half of Eastern Europe. At a subway station near Moscow State University we descended briefly into the city’s bowels. In the underground there was no graffiti, no loud music, no rubbish, no fear. Communism had been revealed to be a failed ideology but a police state has some advantages, i.e. public order, and when we were there the Russians were just relearning disorder.

We crawled up the stairs to a street-level plaza where old ladies were serving dumplings from big steaming pots. Nearby, a row of shops arced around the edge of the street. We began to walk again, through snow and new ice, then we veered suddenly into an official neighborhood somewhere in the gloom leading to the Kremlin. Only with Tanya’s assistance were we able to avoid the hungry former bureaucrats prowling the sidewalks.

We were not sightseeing in the usual sense. But we did see a sight. We passed a low bridge and on the concrete landing along the banks of the river several men were undressing. “Isn’t that picturesque?” Tanya asked. More grotesque than picturesque was my feeling. The sight of bare-chested men swimming in a river turning to ice only strengthened my determination to get out of Russia. 

Sensing my shock and discomfort, Tanya led us away from the river, down a wide avenue where there was a street market, one of those first difficult post-socialist steps towards an open economy. Vendors were lined up for a block or more on both sides of the street, displaying Red Army watches and memorabilia, bootleg cassettes, cheap jeans, anything that might sell.

Looking at the long string of makeshift stalls, and the customers and sellers lined up like prisoners in the dim light, Tanya spit out, as if it were the most profane curse imaginable, “Speculators!”

“No, Tanya,” Calem said to her, “they’re businessmen.”

The first McDonalds in the new Russia had opened nearby and apparently it was the place to go. Tanya stopped at a public telephone and soon we were joined by one of her friends, a pretty plus-sized girl from St. Petersburg who had just returned from completing a computer course in England. Tanya’s friend had decided, like a great number of her fellow citizens, that Western Europe was where she needed to be. We waited in line outside McDonalds for an hour before being seated, as the conversation got personal.

Standing on the sidewalk in the cold, Tanya and her friend discussed in English, without much participation by me or Calem, the practice of phony marriages to foreigners in order to escape poor Russia.

“If he is handsome—” the girl from St. Pete said as she looked at Calem.

“He does not have to be handsome,” Tanya said, looking at me.

When we got inside we ate quickly and then Calem and the St. Petersburg babe went back to the counter for ice cream

It seemed like sacrilege to me—like those old men dodging ice floes in the river.

 

Nikita was small and beefy, a little too much in the shoulders and not quite enough in the neck. He had regular features and sandy brown hair and a habit of turning his head to the side and tilting his nose up in the air sideways in order to look at whoever he was talking too.

Tanya had met Nikki when he enrolled in an English class she was teaching, and because of the need to maintain a varied list of acquaintances in a shortage-plagued economy they became friends. She did not trust him. Tanya told us a story about giving Nikita one hundred precious dollars (a gift from her sister studying abroad) and asking him to buy her a leather jacket on a trip to Beijing, and Nikita returning with a piece of synthetic junk that couldn’t have cost more than a few rubles. But she kept his telephone number and that was the spirit in which he had been introduced to us—as a connection—someone who could find train tickets on the black market. So far he had been unsuccessful. Everybody wants to complain about good people who do bad but what about fundamentally flawed people, thugs like Nikita, who fail on illicit tasks? Does that makes them worse? That had been the nature of my argument with Calem earlier in the day, before we left the apartment.

We had already done everything possible to satisfy the local bureaucracy without having the tickets themselves. At the Chinese consulate one morning we were informed that a visa would take two days to obtain and that in order to get the visa we first had to show our train tickets to Beijing. But at the train station the clerk said that tickets were only sold on the day of departure. What we were being told was, basically, this: You can’t get the visa without a ticket, and you can’t buy the ticket until a few hours before the train leaves. In other words it’s not possible. You can't get there from here. Fill out this form in triplicate and remember to bring two passport-sized photographs of God.

We were in the former Soviet Union on transit visas and every morning we had more and more the feeling that we were over-staying our welcome. The police had already fined us seventy-five dollars each for not having registered with the authorities within twenty-four hours of our arrival on the train from Kiev. Next the Chinese consul had demanded a letter from the British consulate attesting that Calem was in “good standing” with his government. Then the Chinese asked the same thing of me. The following morning, a little tired of the bullshit, we just stayed in the apartment. In the afternoon Tanya was going to meet us again. As a reward for my dubious help the day before addressing a letter in German to the police chief of Vienna, a woman we’d met in the central post office had promised us tickets to the Bolshoi ballet at the official price of fifty rubles. Tanya acted like we’d won the lottery.

But when the time came to meet her, my feet wouldn’t move. The idea of walking along snowy streets with people trying to sell me ice cream, or even sitting through a performance of Swan Lake by the Bolshoi’s B-Team and knowing that the ballet’s stars had gone West for the winter, was too much. At some point in the evening Tanya would have to tell us that Nikita still hadn’t succeeded in finding train tickets, and she would feel bad because we would feel bad and we would feel worse, for her sake, and probably everybody would say a few more unkind words about Nikki. Then there’d be an hour wait outside in the snow to have dinner at McDonald’s. No way. Nyet. Nyet. Nyet. At least Calem was cool about it though. He must have guessed that my batteries were low. He agreed to go alone to meet Tanya.

Left by myself in the apartment my first stop was the bathroom, to soak in a tub of hot water and read. The apartment was half-warm and dead quiet. Calem had found a foreign language bookstore downtown and one of the books that he had chosen was about a German family’s experience during the Second World War. It was a paperback and the pages began to curl in my hands as the steam rose from the rusty water. The story was about the family’s good fortunes under the Nazis and the changes in family life as the Nazis were being defeated.

At the end of the war, at the end of the book, as the German army was in retreat on all fronts, there was a joke going around Berlin that optimists were learning English and pessimists were learning Russian.

The joke didn’t seem that funny to me.

The next morning we were invited to a meeting with a friend of Nikita’s. Nikki himself could not be there—and Tatiana came to translate. We took the metro and caught two buses and found ourselves in a pretty neighborhood where the streets were lined with ankle-deep snow. The apartment blocks were all alike one after another but they were well-maintained and painted a lighter shade of grey than any other building we had seen in Mother Russia.

As we searched for Nikita’s friend’s flat, Tanya seemed uncomfortable. She kept looking at me as if she expected to hear something critical. We needed, it seemed, a subject of polite conversation. My first try was the weather, then rock n’ roll. No luck.

Sex came next, then the weather again. She still didn’t bite.

“Cold enough for you?”

“Da-a-a-ah,” she said apprehensively.

“I guess we’ll have a white Christmas this year.”

“I beg your pardon?”

It soon became clear that she wasn’t looking at me or Calem at all. Her attention was directed over our shoulders, at the apartment blocks we were passing. Prompted by the sight of what had been the lifestyle of privileged Soviets, Tatiana made a confession. She said that her father had been a member of the Party. But she insisted that she was not.

Of course she was lying, but that was okay because we were friends. Hers seemed to me to be a particularly oriental kind of lie, told to spare the listener any discomfort. She was showing the Asian side of her character the guidebook told us that Russians try so hard to hide.

“My father—” she began to explain.

“Yes?”

“My daddy—”

“Yes, Tanya?”

“My sugar daddy—”

The possibility of further confession was interrupted by the discovery that we were lost. 

Tanya made a call at a public phone to get more precise directions and eventually we arrived at the back entrance of a building and climbed a few flights of stairs. She knocked on a padded door. The door opened and we were sucked into the living room of a flat where the floor was littered with musical instruments.

The apartment’s sole occupant was a big-bellied older man, with a shrewd, pale white, perfectly round face. His entire head was like a bowling ball with whiskers. He was wearing an open housecoat and open slippers and he looked comfortable in his cozy home, like a bear in his den. He looked like—if you had to guess—a bureaucrat and a womanizer.

He and Tanya talked a little, none of which she bothered to translate, until she told us the price: two hundred dollars per ticket, a figure that had already been agreed upon. Money changed hands. As we left with the tickets Tanya whispered that she thought Nikita and Nikita’s musical friend were taking a cut, splitting some of the money between themselves. Once again Calem explained to her the realities of capitalism, which was now the law of the land. Calem completely ignored the theoretical contributions of his countryman Adam Smith and the actions of “the invisible hand.” Instead he made it simple for Tanya. “Everybody takes a cut,” he said, “that’s how the system works.” 

Besides, two hundred dollars for a seven-day train trip seemed reasonable to Calem and me. 

We went back to the metro, the tickets deep in our pockets. There was still one errand to do. Our last stop before leaving Moscow was the consulate of the People’s Republic.

But the Chinese issued our visas without ever asking to see the tickets. The whole process had taken so long that the Chinese consul had lost interest too.

 

We said goodbye to Moscow at midnight.

At Yaroslavsky Station we waited an hour to be allowed to board the train. It was a kind of surrealistic scene. Calem bought ice cream and he stood on the platform in the falling snow, eating an eskimo pie and practicing putting with a golf club that he had brought with him all the way from home. (If you spend a lot of time around the British you get the idea that they cultivate eccentricity in a pretentious way. But if you spend a little more time with them you realize that they really are just out of their fucking minds.)

Most of the other passengers were Chinese who had come to Russia at their own expense on the oldest pilgrimage known to man, barter—exchange—to make a buck. In addition to bags of “souvenirs” they carried food, which turned out to be a wise precaution because we had been warned that the restaurant car would only be worth visiting after five or six days, when we arrived at the Manchurian border and the Chinese took over the cooking. 

There was all the expected confusion as a couple of hundred passengers carrying baggage and packages tried at the same time to board the train and find their compartments. There was the added urgency we had seen in all the socialist or formerly-socialist countries, where people believed that if they didn’t rush and if they didn’t push, there wouldn’t be anything left when they got to the head of the line. Nikita and Tatiana were not there to say goodbye—Nikita because he probably wouldn’t have come if invited, and Tanya because we told her to stay at home in her well-heated apartment. When we reached our compartment we were awed. The second-class sleeping cars were neat and clean, each bed supplied with stiff-fresh linen and thick blankets and an old pillow decorated with the emblem of the extinct Soviet railroads.

A young couple from Tianjin shared our compartment. He worked for a Coca Cola bottling plant but was apparently ambitious, and together he and his wife had paid the equivalent of one hundred dollars for a year-long multiple-entry Russian visa. This was their first trip abroad and they were returning to China loaded down with what seemed to me to be … junk. Odds and ends in plastic bags. Rolls of worthless rubles. A baby carriage, not very well constructed to begin with, already crippled by a broken axle before they boarded the train.

To travel five thousand miles to buy a baby carriage didn’t make much sense to me but the Chinese couple was confident that with one or two more trips they would make a big profit. Despite their satisfaction with business there was tension remaining after their stay in Moscow. At one point the wife called her husband a huai dan which means “bad egg” and is pretty insulting by Chinese standards.

Shame covered the husband’s face like a young girl’s blush.

During the five days until we reached the frontier we passed cold gray Siberian towns that made Moscow look like Malibu. Frost was thick on the ground, and it was only the end of November. The train’s engine struggled forward through drifts of snow.

We were being pulled farther east, technically in the wrong direction, but nonetheless taking me home.

Beach of Love

 

There is a beach in southern Mexico where the whiteness of the sand can blind you and at night the moon hangs like a lamp above your bed. It is on the Pacific Coast, where the horizon is blue and as limitless as eternity itself and the waves can swallow you up without missing a beat. The prehistoric hills of the state of Oaxaca begin behind the last sand dune and stretch on until they join the major range of mountains between the coast and the state capital, also named Oaxaca. The bus trip between Puerto Angel, where the beach is, and the city of Oaxaca, where most people begin their journey to the coast, can be steamy or rainy, sometimes bitter cold, sometimes get-out-and-help-the-driver-push.

Puerto Angel is a pleasant fishing village of a few thousand souls. It’s easy to imagine that the Port of the Angel got its name from a nervous priest trying to counter the bad mojo of the nearby beach. The beach was christened Zipolite by the Indians who, long before Cortez landed in the Yucatán, made human sacrifices there. The name means Playa de la Muerte, or Beach of Death. But it is the ocean, more than anything else, that gives the name “Zipolite” meaning still.

“Once,” someone may mention in casual conversation on the beach, “seven people drowned here in one week.” Who knows if the story is true? The Mexicans who live here year-round are the only people who could keep an accurate count of such things. But to them—as they sell their beer and bananas and fried fish to the young Europeans and Americans on the beach—seven drowned gringos are not a much greater tragedy than one drowned gringo. The Mexicans on the beach are a hardy and skeptical people. They go into the water only to fish, and they carry crowbars to discourage stray sharks.

The Mexicans know how deceptive the water at Zipolite can be. Just when you think you know the currents, you’ll put your feet down for a rest and realize that you’re in over your head. You’ll raise your legs and start swimming in, a little more tired than you were a minute ago, and then the first big wave will hit and send you tumbling end over end underwater. Then another wave will hit, and you’ll begin to understand why the Indians named the beach what they did.

In all truly exotic places, the one extreme, danger, is balanced by another extreme—at Zipolite, by romance. The young visitors to this alternative vacation spot know the mile-long stretch of sand by a more popular name: the Beach of Love. You need only look at the women strolling by to know why.

The beach attracts a disproportionate number of French-speaking people (Quebecois, French, and Swiss) who travel Mexico for months at a time, in vans and cars, and camp on the sand or live in thatched-roof cabanas with Mexican families. Some of the European women work for their room and board, shuttling beer from the Mexicans’ refrigerators to the men on the sand. Some of the tourists, especially the French, believing in a liberal education for their children, rear their babies alongside the Mexican babies. The French women also set fashion on the beach, dressing for the evening in wet hair, dangling earrings, and oversized men’s shirts.

There are gravel-voiced Italian girls at Zipolite who know how to blow cigarette smoke straight up, away from the eyes of the men they talk to so intently. There are sleek American girls, tall and tan and glittering with bracelets, who look like models: hip, tough (an air that Europeans cannot achieve), looking for something, anything, excitement. They will never be this young and beautiful again, and they know it.

Some of the American women are products of the Eastern Establishment, Smith College graduates who chopped sugarcane in Castro’s Cuba, women whose every liberal bone trembles at the thought of being made love to by a South American or a Mexican. Granola Girls from Colorado and Central Texas, preoccupied with whole foods and the occult, come to Zapolite to consult the stars. In groups these women walk down the beach, moving like troupes of performers. They are all casually athletic and hard-hearted—a little cynical, as all beautiful, willful women are—and after two weeks in the sun at Zipolite their breasts resemble scoops of chocolate ice cream.

The opportunities for love at Zipolite are first-rate, especially for women, because the Latin men on the beach—Mexicans, Italians, South Americans—are much more prepared to pamper women and to be pampered by them than the average Western male is. The Latins believe that women want first, foremost, and above all to be made love to. And in such a setting!

When the sun rises, it is as if God has chosen you personally to view the best of His creation. If you get up early—most people find it impossible to sleep through the red sunrise—the sea looks like molten silver, and there may be wild horses playing on the sand or porpoises playing out near Pelican Rock or, farther out still, whales jumping, while thirty pelicans line up wingtip to wingtip to form an eerie V and silently glide southward along the shoreline to the next bay, where they meet the fishing fleet as it comes in with its morning catch.

At the end of the beach, below Casa de Gloria, the hotel that sits on top of the cliffs, there are shallows in the surf where lovers can lie on the sand and be washed by the tide, where a man and a woman can spread out in the water face to face, like a four-pointed human star, whispering and kissing.

But looking out over the water and commenting on the allure of this place, Alejandro of Mexico City (there are no last names at Zipolite), who has come all the way from school in France just to chase girls over the New Year’s holiday, put into words the fear that is in the back of every visitor’s mind. “Very beautiful,” he said, gesturing at Zipolite’s charms, “but you pay for what you get.”

Casa de Gloria is not a traditional hotel. There are no rooms, just cabanas with dirt floors. When Gloria has many guests, as is the case during “high season,” roughly from December to April, she may lead you to a palm-leaf lean-to, where you can sling a hammock and sleep in between trips to the beach. There is no running water at Gloria’s, and there are outdoor toilets only.

Gloria is a mystery, a woman of unrevealed origins, and she likes it that way. After eight years in the Oaxaca sun, Gloria is so dark that she could pass for a Mexican if she weren’t so robust, so clearly the product of Anglo civilization and culture. She is American, from California or the deep Southwest—that much is certain. But whatever else there is to learn about Gloria comes in bits and pieces, colored by the karma of the beach. For a radius of fifty miles, Gloria is the most gossiped-about person, especially among the Mexicans, some of whom are convinced that she is a witch.

She runs Casa de Gloria the way Humphrey Bogart ran Rick’s American Cafe in Casablanca. You might overhear her confide to someone at the counter in her restaurant, as she did recently, “I used to own a zodiac shop in L.A.” You might hear her talk about having been married at age fifteen. Or if she’s being especially sharing, she may tell you the story of the small altar in front of her restaurant. It’s an altar like those found everywhere in Mexico, with a place for a candle below a picture, except that the picture is not of Christ or the Virgin but of what appears to be a California sun-child—Gloria’s daughter, who died of malaria at Zipolite a few years ago. After her daughter’s death, Gloria closed down the hotel and returned to the States for a while. But she gives the impression that she could never leave for more than a few months, that she too will die here one day.

The beach directly below Casa de Gloria has been set aside by custom as a nude-bathing area. The Mexican matrons who control the rest of Playa de la Muerte view nude bathers with the grim disapproval of Grand Inquisitors. Gloria herself is no libertine. At her hotel, clothes must be worn, and sometimes, when she has just warned someone wandering up from the beach to put his clothes back on, Gloria gives another impression—that no matter what she may have believed more than a decade ago, when she first drifted to Mexico burned out from the sixties, she no longer advocates free love. “You wouldn’t believe the things I’ve seen,” she says with some horror. “a couple comes here, and in a few days he’s sleeping with somebody else. Then she’s sleeping with somebody else. Then she splits for the Yucatán with somebody completely new and leaves the kids here.”

Everybody stays at Gloria’s: post-commune, pre-computer travelers who roam the Western Hemisphere like gypsies, bringing along children and a car, looking for positive vibrations and natural surroundings; oil heiresses and French grandmothers who arrive in taxis from Acapulco or Puerto Escondido, 35 miles up the coast, and walk the beach at Zipolite just as naked as the day they were born; people who for one reason or another are on the run from their old lives. The thing that most of these people have in common, and the thing that is mildly unnerving to the unbeliever, is that they came to Oaxaca because their astrological charts told them to. Make no mistake, though. For all of Zipolite’s spiritual attractions, the highest priority of the tourists here is to get a good tan.

One February, on this strange beach with its strange aura and alternative values, a minor morality tale was played out. The afternoon the trouble began, Gloria sat in the dark in her house, talking to her adopted son, Juan. She was trying to explain to Juan why his fiancée had just run off to the mountains. Nineteen-year-old Juan was to have married fifteen-year-old Lucy, a waitress in Gloria’s restaurant. Things had begun innocently enough that morning when Gloria took a complaint from one of the guests about Lucy’s manner. Nothing new about that—Lucy, a pretty, jaded girl, worked ten-hour days in a hot kitchen and didn’t think much of the frivolous foreigners she served. Gloria passed the complaint on to Lucy’s mother, Josepha, who also managed the restaurant, and that’s where the argument started. Gloria told Josepha, “This isn’t the first time I’ve heard that about your daughter.” “Your daughter”—Gloria used the phrase over and over again, talking to Josepha. Maybe it was the heat, maybe it was the yellow moon that had looked like Satan’s eye a few days before, maybe it was just tension related to the impending union of these two families, but whatever the reason, Josepha flew off the handle and started throwing dishes. By the time the crockery was swept away, Josepha had departed for her village in the mountains, taking Lucy with her and vowing never to return.

Gloria explained to Juan what had happened, without ever really apologizing, not even for her poor choice of words with Josepha. Standing there in Gloria’s house at dusk, the wind off the Pacific blowing through the windows at his back and causing all manner of chimes and amulets hanging from the walls and furniture to jangle softly, Juan listened attentively, ignoring Gloria’s husband, Carlos, who was moving restlessly around the room.

Finally, as Juan stepped outside into the night and started down the trail to the hotel, Gloria called him back. “Forget everything here,” Gloria counseled him in Spanish. “Forget me and Josepha. If you love Lucy, go after her and find her and don’t look back.” Juan stared at Gloria for a long second. Without saying anything, he disappeared down the trail.

The next morning, just after sunrise, Gloria’s guests were awakened by a bloodcurdling scream, followed by the sound of crashing dishes. The guests who were already up and ordering coffee in the restaurant said the scene resembled an act from some steamy play, with fiery Carlos, who is 26, telling Gloria, who is 38, “You took the best years of my life!”

The argument had heated up, and Gloria had screamed as if she had been stabbed through the heart. Then Carlos started throwing dishes. He and Gloria had just celebrated their first wedding anniversary (Carlos is Gloria’s third husband), and they were supposed to go away to Oaxaca for a few days’ celebration. But when Carlos left that morning, he left alone, stomping down the beach. Within hours Gloria had packed a bag and gone after him, leaving one of the restaurant employees, Starlight—a delicate Belgian woman and a veteran of every quiche joint and Perrier palace on the Granola Trail between Colorado and California—in charge.

Suddenly almost the entire staff of the hotel was gone, yet 25 guests remained. Drastic measures were called for if Casa de Gloria was not to fall into the sea. In Gloria’s absence, therefore, Casa de Gloria came to be ruled by a Council of Five, headed by Starlight and including four guests, none of whom had even been in Mexico three months earlier. The council took control of everything from the hotel’s purse strings to its menu.

The four governing guests were Barbara, an advocate of every liberal American cause since Selma and a particularly close friend of Gloria’s (they both had lovers younger than themselves); Peter, from rural Sweden, a real gentle man, who had met Barbara on a commune in the Midwest; Wolfgang, from Stuttgart, a young man with an earthy sense of humor (it was he who first suggested that the International Diarrhea Championship be held at Zipolite); and Wolfgang’s beautiful girlfriend, Diana, an artist.

Gloria’s instructions were that the hotel was to be run the way it had always been run—on instinct, making enough money to meet expenses and a little more. She had made it clear that she would be happy if the hotel was still standing when she returned. So, in the absence of the demands of grinding capitalism, the hotel managers, that is, the Council of Five, chose an alternative business goal: maximizing time on the beach. Gloria had kept the restaurant open from eight in the morning until ten at night, but the Council of Five changed the closing time to nine and added a siesta from two till four in the afternoon.

The issue debated the most, however, was who would sleep in Gloria’s house. No one wanted to, although everyone was embarrassed to say why. They all thought the place was spooky. Gloria’s house had been built by a Texan named Robert, a genius, apparently—it was said that he had spent only $800 to create one of the most beautiful seaside homes in the world. The house was eight-sided, made of thick bamboo, with rough tile floors, and it sat on a cliff a few hundred feet above the Pacific. Surrounding the house was a corral, where Carlos kept a horse, and a sign above the corral—a sign like those you see over ranch gates in Texas—read “NIRVANA” in block letters. Inside the house, among other furnishings, was a chair made entirely of whalebone. What revealed the most about Gloria’s character and interests was the rows of books in her bookcases. A quick look at those books made it easy to see why the local campesinos thought Gloria had gone beyond the bounds of standard Judeo-Christian morality: Bhagavad Gita, The Tahitian Book of the Dead, Jesus the Son of Man, by Kahlil Gibran, A Separate Reality: Further Conversations with Don Juan, and No One Here Gets Out Alive, the biography of the late Jim Morrison.

The last thing Gloria said before leaving was that George—a handyman and, as he frequently boasted, a native Texan—had no authority in the kitchen. George fancied himself the best cook at Casa de Gloria (there was some evidence to back him up), and he ignored Gloria’s instructions. In the days that followed, Starlight, more an ethereal than a real being, found herself intimidated by George’s tough talk.

George was from East Texas, somewhere. He was vague about how he first arrived in Oaxaca (and it didn’t seem tactful to ask), but he did say that he had been at Gloria’s “a year, this time.” He was apparently either on the cure or waiting out some storm in Texas.

George was definitely preparing to sit out World War III, which he believed imminent. Every night before dozing off, he listened to Voice of America on the shortwave, and in his semiconscious state he heard the political commentator talking about Soviet intransigence and Cuban adventurism (half of the broadcasts were devoted to attacks on communism). With the Voice of America and old copies of Newsweek as his only sources of information, George thought that Armageddon was just around the corner. No one had the heart to tell him that the wind could carry the radiation as far as Oaxaca, easy, and that if he really wanted to escape the bomb, he needed to keep going south another few thousand miles or so.

George considered certain social graces mere frills to the business of LIFE. More than once he walked into the kitchen when Starlight or someone else was slaving over a big pot of vegetarian chili, took a taste, and pronounced, “This is slop! Who do you think’s gonna eat this?” Not all the guests spoke English, but there was no missing George’s meaning on such occasions. His comments, and sometimes the food itself, had an adverse effect on the restaurant’s trade. A few guests deserted Gloria’s restaurant to eat at the casas on the beach. And sometimes Starlight retreated from the kitchen entirely, leaving everything in George’s hands.

Still, the hotel was surprisingly well run. Sure, there were minor problems—guests came, guests went, as at any other inn—but only once did any guests leave because they did not like the accommodations. They were three older American women who arrived out of the blue one day; they must have taken a wrong turn leaving Acapulco, and they looked as if they belonged to a tour group from Fort Worth. They were genuinely shocked by what they ate and what they saw at Zipolite.

What they saw was the beginnings of the decline of Western civilization—decadence, marijuana, Oaxaca gold going for $20 a half pound, people who had lost their dreams because every night they went to bed stoned. But as the American ladies might have learned, had they stayed, being unable to dream at Zipolite is really for the best. There is so much unreality at the beach that nobody ever misses his dreams.

Zipolite is patrolled by Mexican marines from the naval base in Puerto Angel. The marines do double duty as the local police, and when they patrol the beach (usually once every other day), they look for marijuana smokers and nude bathers. Hiding behind rocks, carrying rifles bigger than themselves, the marines will watch for a while—if the bathers are women—before telling them to put their clothes back on. It is a tribute to Gloria’s influence on local politics that the marines are forbidden to set foot on her property, although they can search the Mexican-owned casas on the beach at will.

The day after Gloria and Carlos departed, however, the marines came to the beach three times, and they returned every day, repeatedly and without warning. The stepped-up visits created a paranoia at Casa de Gloria, and it only worsened with reports (which turned out to be true) that the army had begun conducting surprise searches at the crossroads outside Puerto Angel. All of this official activity led the members of the Council of Five to believe that the hotel was due for a raid or trouble of some sort from the authorities. They began to think that without Gloria or Carlos on the premises, the hotel was vulnerable. Starlight didn’t speak Spanish, and none of the five had working papers. They knew that if the authorities ever came to the hotel, they would probably shut it down. After all, for those few days Casa de Gloria was the weirdest social phenomenon in the state of Oaxaca, in a country where such things are noticed.

To her credit, Gloria doesn’t allow liquor or drugs on her property. But while she was gone, the rules were bent. There were times late at night when, had the marines ventured up from the beach, they would have found almost everyone stoned or in the restaurant pigging out.

But on the tenth day after Gloria’s departure the spell was broken. Peter went into Puerto Angel to shop for the restaurant, and a taxi driver told him that the military checks and patrols were part of the search for a dozen guerrillas who had escaped from the state police up the road in Pochutla. Peter didn’t know Oaxaca even had guerrillas, but it was good news nonetheless.

That afternoon, as Peter emerged from the market, he heard something even better. He ran into an American woman, an artist living in Puerto Angel, and as they exchanged pleasantries, she said, “You mean Gloria’s not back?”

“What?” Peter said.

“I had an opening for my work in Oaxaca two days ago,” she said, “and I ran into Gloria and Carlos. They were back together. Juan and Lucy were with them too, and Juan said that he’d found a ring. They said they were going to Mexico City for a day to visit Carlos’ family, but they were supposed to be back yesterday.” The wedding ceremony, she added, would be held on the beach below Casa de Gloria, followed by a celebration that would wake the dead.

Within hours of receiving the news, the Council of Five began to disband. Since Gloria was returning, everyone went on with the plans that had been postponed by her departure.

Amid tears of farewell Barbara and Peter left for the Yucatán, a first step on their way to West Virginia, where they would build a house and start their married life. Wolfgang and Diana left for Nuevo Laredo, to go from there to visit a friend in Austin before flying home to Germany. And Starlight, leaving a new crew in the kitchen—all of them guests of the hotel—was headed for Guatemala as soon as Gloria arrived.

In many ways Barbara was the most perceptive member of the Council of Five, and the night before she and Peter departed, she commented that Casa de Gloria seemed to have a life of its own. She suggested that maybe it wasn’t the first time that Gloria had taken off and left her hotel in the hands of the guests. Seventy cents a day plus meals is too low a price to pay for paradise, Barbara said. Guests who spend a long time at Casa de Gloria end up making another contribution to the upkeep of the hotel. And because they do, Barbara said, they will remember their vacation at Puerto Angel for the rest of their lives. If Gloria is a witch, that is her magic.

The Plot to Steal the Alamo Flag

In February 1998, two Texas officials arrived in Mexico City on a confidential mission, carrying the qualified blessings of Governor George W. Bush. They were met in the Mexican capital by the chief of the narcotics affairs section of the U.S. Embassy, although their visit had nothing to do with interdiction or money-laundering, sniffing dogs or electrified fences.

The Texans, one of whom was the state librarian, had specific instructions from the U.S. Embassy about how to behave in Mexico City. They had been advised to demonstrate a sensitivity to the less-than-rosy view which Mexicans have of their historical relations with the United States, and especially with Texas. Included on their two-day itinerary, as outlined by the embassy liaison (parentheses included), was “the National Museum of History (a.k.a. Chapultepec Castle) where there is a small display on the ‘Texas Insurrection’ and the Mexican-American War, the Ninos Heroes Monument (dedicated to six cadets who died defending Chapultepec Castle from the U.S. Army in 1847) and the Museum of Foreign Interventions,” the last of which is devoted to invasions of Mexico by French, British, Austrian, Spanish and, of course, American troops.

“Visiting [the exhibits] shows that we are aware of Mexico’s enduring pain from this period of its history,” the Texans were advised by their embassy guide. “President Clinton, incidentally, laid a wreath at the Ninos Heroes Monument when he was here last May. Through all of this, we should hope to establish the necessary rapport to get a green light for….” The Texans’ effort to “understand” the tortured Mexican historical consciousness must have seemed particularly surprising to their hosts. Texans have spent most of the last two centuries not caring much what Mexicans think about anything. The reason for the new-found sensitivity was that the Mexicans had something the Texans wanted – wanted very badly.

In the fall of 1835, two companies of volunteer riflemen crossed Louisiana’s western border into what was then still, officially, Mexico. Called the New Orleans Greys because of their distinctive uniforms, the volunteers had come to fight for the rebellious Republic of Texas.

The arrival of reinforcements was so welcomed that the colonists of East Texas gave the Louisianans a special gift: a flag, made of blue silk, about the size of a bath towel, bordered by white fringe. The silk featured the likeness of an eagle, wings spread, and below the eagle the words, “First Company of Texan Volunteers from New Orleans.” The riflemen carried the flag to San Antonio and the Alamo mission where rebels were preparing to defend their position against the Mexican Army. The flag remained at the Alamo, and was captured and sent south as booty of war.

For almost a century – until 1934, when the flag was discovered by a Texas official in a drawer of the Mexican national archives – the Greys’ banner remained forgotten. But in the more than sixty years since the Texas Centennial (when Texans first officially became obsessed with their own history) the piece of faded silk has been the subject of pleadings and requests – and at least one private bounty, of $36,000, for its return by any means. A kind of ritual has developed for representatives of the Lone Star State, from Governor John Connally in the mid-Sixties onward, to ask the Mexican government for its return. During the Texas Sesquicentennial, for example, U.S. Senator Phil Gramm flew to Mexico City on a one-man mission, promising to return with the banner. The Mexican president refused to see him. An attempt was later made to attach a clause to the North American Free Trade Agreement, requiring Mexico to give back the flag as a condition of ratification. The Mexicans resisted. Over recent years, the Greys’ banner has seemed to grow again in importance to Mexico, in direct proportion to which its return is demanded by Texas. The plan was to take the flag on loan from the Mexicans for an exhibit and refuse to give it back. Governor Bush didn't think of the idea, he's not that smart, he just approved it. Even then, as he would later do in the White House, he viewed himself like an executive chairman, reviewing options presented to him and making the final call. There's a lot of deviousness in foreign affairs and W was apparently cool with it, even in Austin.

The State of Texas’ most recent strategy for repatriating the banner dates to a proposal made by a former U.S. Ambassador to Mexico, actor John Gavin. Tired of being asked to intercede with the government of Mexico to request its return, in 1982 Gavin suggested instead that Texas officials find something that the Mexicans wanted and trade. With Ambassador Gavin’s prompting, authorities in Austin searched the state’s archives. Among the “vast amount of property taken” which General Sam Houston reported capturing at the battle San Jacinto (when the Mexican Army was defeated and President Santa Anna captured) were three battle flags, belonging to the battalions of Toluca, Matamoros, and Guerrero. The three flags were apparently restored by the state of Texas. Details are scarce. Although none of the banners individually has the importance of the Alamo silk, together they became the foundation of the attempt for the Texans to get what they wanted.

The wheels of state government turn slowly. The effort to trade the three Mexican battalion flags for the Greys’ banner began in earnest almost a decade after Ambassador Gavin’s suggestion, with the quixotic intervention of Carlos Truan, state senator from Corpus Christi. “It all originated with a conversation I had with the consul of Mexico,” Truan later explained to selected colleagues in the Legislature. “We had worked on a couple of projects that resulted in a [good] relationship with Mexico and then in our discussion we just stumbled into the flags and he thought it was a good idea if we could have a display of the flags, not necessarily an exchange of flags, and unfortunately one thing led to another and people assumed, particularly in Mexico, that we wanted to take their flag back and bring it over here.” When the project was publicized, the reaction in Mexico was outrage. In the earliest grades Mexican schoolchildren are taught that their country’s destiny would have been far different if not for the intervention of Americans, starting with U.S. assistance to the treacherous Texans. The idea of returning the flag was, therefore, repugnant south of the Rio Grande.

But after Senator Truan’s misinterpreted suggestion, stateside support (including radio call-ins, and mass mailings to the Mexican government) began to grow in Texas for a swap. It was in this context – Texans trying to promote an exchange, and Mexicans feeling the pressure – that George W. Bush was inaugurated as Governor in 1995.

Caught up in the pomp and circumstance of his upset victory over a media-friendly incumbent, at first Governor Bush seemed bemused when reporters insisted on asking about the issue. “I think it is important,” the Governor-elect said doubtfully. “[But] it is going to require Texas and Mexican officials to have a cordial relationship before any flag swap or swap of artifacts takes place.” Just after his inauguration the new, Spanish-speaking Governor amplified his goodwill theme. “I believe that the best way to retrieve the Alamo flag is to have a cordial relationship,” he told the Dallas Morning News. “I believe that the best way to accommodate matters is to have a respectful relationship so that when and if the flag is returned … that it is done out of friendship as a gesture of goodwill.”

And, “Whatever we have of Mexico’s – I understand that there are paintings or other flags – we’d be willing to make a swap,” Bush promised, suggesting an ignorance of the exact details.

George Bush’s conciliatory approach was circumvented by direct legislative action. During the new Governor’s first legislative session, state lawmakers granted authority to the state’s chief librarian (whose office includes responsibility for Texas’ archives) to negotiate with the Mexicans for the flag’s return. At the same time the U.S. Congress was also passing a resolution asking the Mexicans simply to give back the Greys’ banner. All this legislative activity seemed to irk the Governor, who favored personal diplomacy: “The truth of the matter is, if I could go and convince the right Mexican official to work a loan agreement for the flag, I suspect that would be a more efficient way to do so.” Still, in a private letter to State Librarian Robert S. Martin in October 1995, Governor Bush seemed to acquiesce to the Legislature’s plan. “There would be nothing more pleasing,” he wrote, “than for all of us to affect an exchange of things of history, whether it be on loan or forever.” In public Bush was going farther: “I hope I’m the Governor that is able to hold up the flag.”

Both tracks, diplomacy and arm-twisting, were rendered ineffective a few months later when the Mexicans announced that they had “lost” the artifact in question. Sylvia Moreno, a reporter for the Morning News, attempting by telephone to track down the flag’s exact whereabouts, was told at each Mexico City museum she called that no one had the Alamo silk. Mexican archivists indicated that the flag had been mislaid – or taken – by unknown hands. In Texas, this news was greeted not for what it was, a face-saving excuse, but as fact, and was widely ridiculed: the Mexicans had mislaid or allowed to be stolen, Texans believed, what Mexico had been refusing on principle to return for sixty years.

Progress came the following year, on two fronts. An Austin attorney, attending a “high-level” dinner party in Mexico City, reported back that Mexican officials were no longer claiming to have lost the Alamo flag and, in fact, that the Mexicans suddenly seemed receptive to the idea of a trade. About the same time an isolated Congressional inquiry arrived at the U.S. Embassy asking about progress in the search for the banner. “Such inquiries are normally assigned to the Embassy’s political section for action. I had no professional interest [in] the issue,” wrote Alan Smiley in a recent letter about the controversy. At the time, Smiley was the Embassy’s narcotics control officer, responsible for coordinating U.S. policy regarding drug interdiction efforts in Mexico. But Smiley happened to see the cable and took responsibility for the inquiry nonetheless. Smiley’s interest was actually quite personal. His great-great-great-great uncle, a Tennessee lawyer named Daniel Cloud, died defending the southeastern palisade, near the chapel of the Alamo, in 1836.

After consultations with Texas officials, including the librarian Robert Martin, and after learning all he could about the Alamo flag itself, Smiley developed a three-part plan to get the flag back by, well, less than direct means. “Phase One was to suggest [to the Mexicans] the formation of a bi-national team of textile restoration experts to restore not only the Alamo flag but [the] three Mexican Army battalion flags as well,” he said later, explaining his efforts on Texas’ behalf. “Phase Two, only to be presented to the GOM [Government of Mexico] after Phase One had been approved and restoration was well underway, was to have been a traveling exhibit of the four newly restored flags – first in Mexico, then in Texas. Phase Three was to have been the indefinite extension of the Texas exhibition of the flags, so the Alamo flag, in effect, remained in Texas forever. Both Phase Two and Three were tightly held secrets, not to be discussed with either our GOM counterparts or our Mexican operatives. We didn’t want the GOM to think there was anything more to this than scholarly interest in preserving all four flags before they all turned to dust.”

The effort to dupe the Mexicans began with limited success. As an embassy officer Alan Smiley had contacts throughout the Mexican bureaucracy and he was eventually able to locate the flag itself. It was being housed in the basement of the National Institute of Archaeology and History (INAH, as it is known by its Spanish acronym). One of Smiley’s “operatives” was even able to get in to see the flag and to assess its condition, which was not good. At the same time a plan of sorts was being developed about how best to approach the Mexican bureaucracy. Early on the decision was made to cut a wide detour around the foreign ministry, on the theory that the Mexican diplomatic service would not be helpful at the best of times: the foreign ministry was apparently under a new, American-bashing management. “Rosario Green, the new Secretary of Foreign Relations,” Smiley wrote to librarian Martin in early 1998, “is very nationalistic and at least a little ‘anti-gringo’ (although she has been very well-behaved so far). I may be proven wrong, but I see this project coming to a dead standstill when it hits SRE [the Secretariat of Foreign Relations] unless it already has a lot of forward momentum behind it.”

The decision was made, then, to restrict Texas’ approaches to officials of the Mexican national archives. Smiley found, however, that the response even at this level was not warm. A series of letters was written, composed at the Capitol in Austin and reviewed for Spanish grammar and Latin sensibilities by Smiley at the Embassy in Mexico City. The result was nada. The lack of response was particularly troubling, because Alan Smiley’s tour of duty in Mexico was coming to an end, and he would no longer be able to assist in regaining the flag that his famed ancestor had died for. As Smiley’s time in Mexico approached an end, the Embassy official wrote to Dr. Martin in Austin: “I will draft another letter to INAH for your review. We may want to say that you are perplexed for not having received a response to your offer, especially since you had understood that there was a definite interest in preserving these artifacts of the past. I would then suggest that we give INAH only about two more weeks to respond. If no answer is forthcoming at that time, I propose that I (or we) meet with the INAH director personally to find out how HE would like to see this issue advance. There is a tremendous risk in this latter approach. A visit from an Embassy official is very likely to get an all-or-nothing response; the door could close and stay closed for years to come.

“On the other hand, as it now appears that I’ll be concluding my tour in Mexico as early as the end of April, now may be the time to push the issue. Since we are no longer receiving Congressional inquiries on this issue and since you are unlikely to find another Embassy officer with as great a personal interest in these artifacts, support from the Embassy will probably dwindle significantly after my departure. For this reason, I think we should consider ‘going for broke’ if there is no response to your next letter.”

There was no response, and the Texans began to pressure their Mexican counterparts for a face-to-face meeting. “Most of the appointments that I was able to set up,” according to Smiley, “were cancelled at the last moment due to any number of excuses.” But eventually the Mexicans were tied down to an exact date, in February 1998, and Martin, together with Carolyn Palmer, a prominent San Antonio Republican and a former museum administrator, who serves as chairwoman of the State of Texas’ board of historical archives, flew south. “We have pursued the matter very quietly, working with the Secretary of State’s office. We [had] conferred with the governor’s office, who encouraged us to pursue [the effort],” Martin said in later, unpublicized testimony before a committee of the Texas Senate. “We went down for two days in Mexico City. We met with the national archivists. We met with the deputy director of the Instituto Nacional [of Anthropology and History]. They were very gracious and very polite but the net bottom result was that I came away with the distinct message that they are completely uninterested in even discussing any trade or sale or repatriation or anything else.” Ms. Palmer was of the same opinion. “We got the idea,” she testified, “that they felt like they were taking quite good enough care of the flag and they intended to keep it.” Alan Smiley, more experienced in Mexican affairs and customs than either Martin or Ms. Palmer, described the Texans’ reception by Mexican officials as “rude by Latino standards
”

“Latin Americans in general, I have learned,” Smiley (who before joining the State Department was an Army intelligence officer serving south of the border) said later of his failed mission to highjack the flag, “are suspicious of conspiracies. Mexicans in particular are gravely suspicious of anything and everything the United States says or does, no matter how slight the perceived impact on the interests of Mexico.”

Smiley and his compatriots seemed unable to acknowledge that they were, indeed, “conspiring” to trick the Mexicans into surrendering the Alamo flag. The plan was simply to refuse to return the flag to the Mexicans when its came to Austin as part of the exchange. Dr. Martin, for his part, offered a unique view to the Texas Senate of the reasons for his failure – and at the same time demonstrated that face-saving was as important north of the Rio Grande as south: “In the entire history of the army of the Republic of Mexico,” the state librarian explained, “they have won four battles – the Alamo and Goliad were two of them – and [the flag] was a powerful symbol to them that on occasion they have beat the yanquis, and they’re not interested in giving it up.”

Despite their unwillingness to trade, the Mexicans did, however, make a proposal of their own to the visiting Texas officials. Instead of a traveling exhibit of the flags, the Mexicans suggested a presentation in the United States of the Latin viewpoint of the historical relationship between the U.S. and Mexico. Following his visit to Mexico City, Dr. Martin wrote to Luciana Cedillo Alvarez, a high-ranking cultural affairs officer in Mexico City, “I am preparing my report to officials here in Texas, and remain very hopeful that we may be able to proceed along the lines we discussed, with an exhibition presenting the Mexican viewpoint of the history of relations between our countries. It is extremely important that citizens of the United States, and of Texas in particular, become better informed on this important subject.”

Dr. Martin’s letter was, of course, a last grasp at the flag itself. Not long after reporting to Senate leaders, from whom he took a beating on an unrelated matter, Martin retired from state service and returned to academia. Eventually Alan Smiley took his new posting, this time to Honduras. The Alamo flag remained, and remains still, in Mexico City.

Recent historical evidence has not been kind to Alamo-era Texans, or Mexicans. Researchers have begun to accept as authentic the diary of Jose Enrique de la Peсa, a Mexican army staff officer who fought at the Alamo and who was later imprisoned for opposing the dictatorship of Santa Anna. De la Peсa’s mention of the seizure of the flag is brief but colorful: “Before the Sapper Battalion, advancing through a shower of bullets and volley of shrapnel, had a chance to reach the foot of the walls,” the Mexican soldier wrote, “half their officers had been wounded. Another one of these officers, young Torres, died within the fort at the very moment of taking a flag. He died at one blow without uttering a word….” De la Peсa’s diary confirms accounts of Mexican brutality, and also explodes the “to the last man” legend of the Alamo defenders – which is, even more than the flag, the great treasure of Texas’s heritage. Even though it's not true. Nonetheless the state has built an $80 million museum in downtown Austin (featuring films glorifying Texas history) for which the Alamo flag, “tainted” by surrender or not, would be a major attraction.

There are several theories circulating in Austin about the exact circumstances under which the Mexicans might actually return the flag. The first, of course, features the “Bush factor.” If George Bush is elected president, according to one hypothesis, the Mexicans might decide to give back the Alamo flag in order to ingratiate themselves with Washington. The problem with this hypothesis is that it’s not entirely clear how much the Mexicans want to please the powers-that-be in the United States. Another theory may be more probable. This scenario likens Texans’ attempts to recoup the flag to a seduction, in which a woman agrees to sleep with a man not because she desires him, but because she is exhausted from the pursuit. In a weak moment the Mexicans may simply get tired of saying no. This seems to be the theory that Texans are working under, and it might be successful given enough time.

The clock is ticking, however, on this particular approach. The colonists of East Texas did not sew a flag that was intended to last for centuries. The last report obtained by the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City describes the Alamo silk as being in a “very deteriorated” state (which in part explains Smiley et al.’s haste in trying to acquire it): “virtually all the fringe on the edges is gone, there is a large hole that has obliterated one of the eagle’s wings, and the flag has faded almost completely to white.” When the two Texas officials visited Mexico City they were shown records documenting scrupulous care but they were never allowed to see the flag itself, and its condition may be worsening with each year. (The care of the Mexican banners in Texas hands has been a little better. One, which was for a time on display at the San Jacinto Battleground Museum near Houston, underwent restoration. In fact the two others were also restored, per report, including the removal of 160-year-old blood stains, after the visit of the Texas officials to Mexico.)

Probably one day the remains of the Alamo flag will make the long trip back across the Rio Grande. But before an exchange can take place two changes in consciousness will have to take place: the Mexicans will have to come to terms with what they did, and failed to do, during their time as sovereigns north of the river. (They will, in short, have to get over the loss of their northern territories.) For their part the Texans may have to admit that the “Texas myth” is just that – a myth, designed to entertain the tourists, and to encourage school children. Of these two mental changes the Mexicans probably have the easier adjustment to make.