Aztec Espresso

Excerpt: Espresso Azteca – Rough Draft (Parte Sies y Siete)

         

VI.

          Lively, robust earthen aromas wafted from the steaming cup in his hand, like a devilish gossamer of espectra dancing the lascivious Juana la Cubana about his nostrils, fogging the lenses of his Armani glasses. Taking a sip, Thad savored the lingering laval acidity and smooth, smokey Terran flavors of the Amatitlan roast he'd purchased from the street vendor.
          "MDioses, mViejo amiga..." Thad breathed, scarcely a whisper damned to the resounding purgatory of backfiring mufflers, blaring horns, barking dogs, and colorful disembodied curses Espal that, while nothing more than faint annoyances spat from the daily clusterfuck of Moneda Street's "Urban Canyon" a block south and the remnants of Replica de Guatemala Street to the north, detoured many a tourist from truly appreciating the Plaza Miguel Gamio. If the more persistent and tenacious street vendors or the junk vendors failed in doing so first, the former calling out for "Ten varos! Ten pesos mire! Todo le vale twenty-five pesos!" the latter "estufas, lavadoras, microndas..." or any old metal you might be interested in selling, their solicitations a chaotic banshee-like roar that was amazing, annoying, and still just as terrifying as the first time Thad had been privy to it.
          Mexico was a loud country, Thad knew. And Mexico City was its loudest, drunkest son, singing love songs and mourning the loss of its identity outside the window at all hours.
          "It has been too long..."
          "Are you..." All chic and cool, as was the Vaqueras' Mexica way (the quintessential cultured and refined Jekyll to the rugged, country-bumpkin Hyde of American cowgirls), Novella leaned against the plaza's northern railing sipping her iced mocha latte. Arms casually propped upon the tube steel balustrade that served as one of three lines separating the land of the living from the land of the dead, her fine waist-length hair cascaded like waves of liquid obsidian from beneath a stylish felt Shane Raffia Vaquera hat. Over the silken bronze-brown slope of her bare shoulder a gold Ministry of Culture plaque declared in black Spanish font, that the spectral rubble lurking in the haze and shadows behind her once served as a Carniceria, and in Nahuatl a Nacamacayan, or Butcher's Shop.
          Despite his celebrity - or his overinflated ego because of such - or chivalric duty towards Novella, Thad was only just a man; his lungs breathed the same air as the next man's, his blood ran just as red when spilled from his veins. And as such, he was subject to those same carnal desires that seemed to define those lesser, more primitive of men than he.
         Times such as now when not only his eyes, but the rigid "AH-TEN-TION!" of other organs was commanded as well.
          Novella's was a rare nativa Mexicana beauty that had not been tainted by European blood. A beauty borne of legends that decreed had been the catalyst between warring tribes, elicited the rage of angels and won the mercy of demons, engorged the throbbing members of bloodthirsty and flesh hungry gods, and proved the bane of many great men.
          A few strands braided and decorated with colorful gold beads and turquoise stones, her fine waist-length hair flowed in a wave of vitreous obsidian from beneath a stylish brown Shane Rafia Vaquera hat; it's band was a combination of polished jade discs with an obsidian Aztec Double Headed Serpent, the brand of her family's Ranch that he knew she held very close to her heart, set inside the larger center front disc,. Her hair was so black that, while it reflected the sunlight with all the shimmering luster of obsidian, it swallowed the light at the same time, as if the sun could become lost - perhaps extinguished - within its depths. Rolling into a perfectly buttoned hook that boasted her Nahua blood, her nose was a soft, narrow slope that today's society deemed "celestial" and paid a small fortune to have molded out of melted down Barbie Doll hearts. The high arcs of her cheekbones cradled a heavily defined cupid's bow pout that Thad had always found as sensual and inviting as dew-wet rose petals. Her complexion was the deep burnt sienna of a bottle of Ochtli, her hourglass figure just as sensual and intoxicating as any nectar to be found within: a tiny leather corset cradled and lifted her ample breasts, while tight, high-waist dark blue jeans hugged the curves of her hips, the intricately detailed steel-toed tips of her white and black Ostrich Tecovas boots glinting in the late morning haze like the fangs of a serpent ready to strike.
         Novella was that woman who straight men wanted to fuck, gay men want to befriend, married men fantasized about as they jerked-off on the shitter while their wives lie in bed dry and untouched, and women want to be her. Those who don't immediately hate her out of sheer jealousy. And some of them probably want to fuck her as well.
          While Thad could appreciate her physical allure - what man with a healthy sex drive in his right mind couldn't - he was not among those ranks of savages who thought only with their dicks; he knew that her physical beauty was rivaled only by the depth of her heart, the breadth of her compassion, the reach of her mercy.
          "...hablando con tu caf" she asked, struggling to stifle a giggle. Haloed in long thick lashes, her big obsidian eyes as pitch and vitreous as her hair, shimmering with quicksilver glimpses of her soul, a spectral fluttering of her very essence, the thin obsidian arches of her eyebrows raised in emphasis beneath the brim of her hat.
          Thad did not have a good answer for her question.
          Whether he was serenading his cafor reveling in the vista that lingered just beyond the morning haze like a phantasm lurking in the mist, reviling their company of shadows that had yet to slither back into their realm of eternal night despite it being ten-thirty AM (a simple matter of equatorial proximity he had always mused; this time of year Tezcatlipoca lay his pall of night over the land earlier and Tonatiuh opened his molten pewter-yellow eye later this close to the equator, making it seem that the heart of the Mexica lands moved at a much slower pace than the rest of the world), or succumbing to Novella's succubae's allure, he could not say.
          Perhaps it was some bastard offspring given nascence in the blood, sweat, and tears of that fucked-up orgy.

VII.

          Propped against the decorative wrought-iron railing that cordoned the open-air 3D diorama of Tenochtitlan behind him - how many times over the years had he gazed out over the image of a culture that had made Caesar's Rome to pale in contrast of technological, medicinal, scientific, mathematical, and astrological advancement, and not felt the weight of an unbearable sadness - a charmingly crooked Southern-Boy smile struck Thad's face, eliciting otherwise unseen dimples out hiding. Though the fact that he loathed his smile was public knowledge- it was just too damned Caucasian for his chiseled indigenous physiognomy, it was, other than his work, the one side of his public (and private, he sometimes considered) persona that was genuinely Thad.
          That one facet he hadn't lost somewhere along the way, considering it were possible to lose something that he never possessed to begin with.
          Taking a cheating glance at the CafEstrella cup Novella held and shaking his head with a mock frown to express his "disappointment" in her choice of Starbuck's Mexican doppelgger - Novella shrugging her shoulders, as if to ask "what?" - he turned. His eyes strayed, roaming over the Plaza Miguel Gamio with a romantic reverie. Nestled between the archaeological zone of the Templo Mayor and the tabernacle of the Metropolitan Cathedral, a year of sand had plummeted through Father Time's hourglass since last Thad's perpetually sad browns had gazed upon the unparalleled clime of cultural transcendence, where the living of a predominantly Catholic present co-existed with the espectro of a near-forgotten pagan past.
          Tonatiuh's pewter-yellow eye hung high over the eastern horizon, an orb of pagan rage burning against a drab, colorless, smog-asphyxiated firmament borne of Western Industry that had reaped ten years off the lives of the Old God's parishioners. From atop a harmonious melding of Renaissance, Baroque, and Neoclassic facades that was the Catedral Metropolitana de la Ciudad de Mico, Papal domes leered down over the blue slate and stone pavers of the Plaza Miguel Gamio from the west. Adorned with the melancholy images of saints and ornate crucifixes and winged warriors of the Christian's "nailed god" brandishing battle regalia and flaming swords, the omniscient eyes of Christendom kept a trepidatious watch over the unmarked graves of gods long thought dead, and upon whose throats the apex of Spanish Conquests' boot hill rested.
         It felt like a lifetime of sand had passed through the hourglass that Thad had first gazed upon the cathedral. Tonatiuh's molten eye had been relinquishing his dominion to the night, a seemingly eternal moment when the skyline beyond bleed in a vibrant glowing tapestry of crimsons and purples and oranges that only the gods - and perhaps a few select artists - could so masterfully paint, and those long shadows of dusk began to take the Plaza Miguel Gamio within their frigid embrace.
         It was an irony of Psalms 23:4 that had never been lost on Thad.
          Staggered two-and-three-story stucco storefronts and apartments dyed deep earthen tones and soft pastel hues defined the plazas Eastern border, the wispy espectro of sheer curtains flitting from an open apartment window here, a store doorway there, forming a backdrop for the local vendor front; engulfed in shadow, the vendors found some reprieve from Tonatiuh's scorching caress.
          Cordoned by decorative wrought-iron fencing, gorgeous xeriscapes - giant wild blue agave whose skin had always brought to Thad's mind that of a shark's, the stretching fingers of organ-pipe cacti reaching up to the heavens as if pleading with the old gods for salvation from the steel-and-concrete urban sprawl that plagued a land they no longer knew, rows of sleek sentinel Mexican Fencepost cacti, accoutered with boulders and various other plant species - stood centered along the plaza, served as posts for those less-punctual vendors; a flotsam and jettison of hand-woven quilts and carts adorned with a menagerie of trinkets - papier Mache sugar skulls, handmade jewelry, Mexican flags, replica Aztec Calendars cast in bas-relief, and a colorful sea of flowers - aimed to capitalize off the late-morning waves of western tourism that had begun to ebb and flow along the plaza as the morning progressed.  
          Taking their posts along the plaza's central benches, Concheros donned their colorful traditional Aztec regalia, preparing for their morning honoring of the gods through dance while small tourist groups - huddled menageries of pale complexions, tacky tropical print shirts, and hovering smartphones capturing video and photos - meandered here and there.
          He watched as two late arrivals, El Panadero, Bakery Vendors, rolled in across the plaza, weaving through strolling locals and tourist group stragglers on tricycles that creaked and moaned in agony under their fresh baked burdens and coffee carafes. One, an overweight middle-aged Mexicano, took to casually setting up their goods while the younger and lither other immediately joined in the discordance with a horn, calling customers to "Bolilos! Conchas! Pan reci horneado!"
          But something was off.
          Absent minutes ago - when they had exited the Plaza de la Constitucion via the famous Semanario onto the cool slate of the Plaza Miguel Gamio - he noted a cool, damp, if not oppressive vacuity - like those eerie, dense calms that weighed the atmosphere down before a storm - lingered in the morning air.
         Not that it was strange in a meteorological respect, he knew.
          Nestled at just under eight thousand feet above sea level, among the high desert plateaus of the Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt, weather in the Valley of Mexico could prove as bi-polar as that of Mother Nature during the throes of her menopause in the American Midwest. One moment dusty routs of windswept grit might sandblast your skin or Sol's molten eye might melt the tattoos right off your flesh as if they were butter. Within the next, torrential rains could drown entire neighborhoods in a deluge to make that of Noah's seem as trivial as a cherub's morning hangover piss or Tititli's icy tongue might lash down from his throne atop Citalaltepetl's snow-capped Pico de los Mahuizmicqui to lap at the marrow in your bones.
         "Thad...? Hola..."
         Strange or not, it left his brown-red flesh feeling clammy and a hollowness within his gut that he could not name. And he couldn't help but feel that something was terribly wrong.
         "...are you here on earth..."
         Not like it was going to storm. There was more urgency to it, the violent gnawing and gnashing of something primal that needed release.
          Like it needed to storm.
          And then everything would be all right.