A Golden Legend

Chapter 8

Resigned, he closed the map once more and connected the car reverse gear. He returned about one hundred and fifty feet along the dusty road until he eventually reached the last intersection, where he had chosen the wrong course for the tenth time. The road, not much more than a path bordered by high vegetation, actually had crossed during a couple of hours a largely uninhabited area. Every now and then the profile of some miserable shack or some small cultivated field could be guessed surrounded by frond, but Marcelo, for safety reasons, hesitated to stop and ask questions there.

Marcelo Ferrand had left Buenos Aires a week ago heading to Cancun, to attend an annual meeting of his company, a consultancy business of U.S. origin, in whose Latin American area worked the young man. The meeting had ended the day before noon, after which Marcelo had been quick to put on a pair of jeans, sneakers and a worn jacket, had rented a Volkswagen, the cheapest model of the series in a second-tier Agency, and had thrown with a map to visit the States of Quintana Roo and Yucatan. He had already undergone Chichen Itza, and was now heading for other ruins to the interior of the peninsula. The maps were made more uncertain as he went away from the main routes, and he finally recognized in his inner self that he was lost. He was only in search of a town looking as it offered guarantees to stop, rest, and ask for guidance. He drove the vehicle for another extra hour, until he began to suffer the Sun heat inside the car cabin. He then stopped by the road, under some trees and removed from his backpack some food that had purchased before leaving Cancun, as well as a bottle of soda that once was cold; he found that, as it often happens in the tropics, he was more thirsty than hungry. After the frugal lunch he decided to rest a couple of hours, to allow the Sun to move a little by the firmament and relieve the heat. He sank in the driver's seat, cursing for having rented a car so narrow, but in long tours already had happened to him having to snooze threaded and had survived, although with some occasional lower back pain. He locked the doors of the car, opened a few inches each of the Windows, threw the hat over his eyes, so strong light will not unveil it and got ready for a snap. However, thoughts circulated by his mind without control and kept him awake for awhile. He felt a kind of deep satisfaction that seldom had had occasion to experience, to be wandering by natural environments, with a few days available before returning to the big city and his work.

Marcelo Gastón Ferrand was born twenty-eight years earlier in Pigüé, town in the Province of Buenos Aires, where his paternal grandparents had migrated from Aveyron, in France, who along with fellow countrymen had founded the town. As a boy he had had many opportunities to roam the vast prairies of the Province of Buenos Aires along with his father, agricultural engineer, as well as visiting their maternal grandparents in a rural settlement in the Province of La Pampa for prolonged periods, and  with whom he had even lived some years. Completed the secondary school, he had moved to the city of Buenos Aires to study at the University, where had graduated as a Licentiate in Computer Science. The possibilities for contact with nature were now limited to fifteen days of holidays, that should also include visiting his parents in Pigüé.

Any chance to wander without direction or time limits as in his childhood was then exploited to the maximum, and this was the case in which he was aboard his VW. Eventually, despite the pleasant thoughts, sleep overcame him.

He awakened hamstrung from acting and sweat, and after doing some energetic movements to keep blood circulating again, he poured water on his head and despite his inner resistance to continue driving, resignedly decided it was time to continue his journey, so the darkness could not find him in the middle of nowhere.

He drove a long way by the new route until to his relief; huts began to appear more and more frequently, predicting the emergence of a village or something greater.

Marcelo stopped his vehicle against a sort of ill-looking hotel located at the entrance of the village, with the purpose of buying some fresh drinks and to ask about the path to follow. One of the particularities of this trip was that he didn't have a route with precise destinations where to go, but that rather chose to ask at each stage on what were the sites where he could go as a next step.

Sitting in a kind of porch of the hotel, in order to capture the light breeze that ran at that time, he enjoyed the first beer since his departure from Cancun, while he watched the desolate spectacle of the village, with its modest houses of varied materials in irregular clusters, in which alternated buildings with small cultivated plots.

Calm, heat and light air forced squinting his eyes overcome by the drowsiness, when suddenly a sudden movement at the edge of his vision field caught his attention; it was coming from the sector where the path entered in the village in the opposite end to that which he had entered. He scowled, to filter the sunlight that came from that direction. Despite the glow he distinguished a human figure which moved haltingly toward the town. It thought that it was some drunkard heading back home after a spree, but the movements were different to those who were to be expected in this case. No one else was in the dusty street at that hour, so he rose moved by some solidarity feeling not exempt from suspicion. As he approached he could discern that it was a female figure of light texture. The woman, with obvious signs of exhaustion, stumbled upon a stone in the road and fell heavily to the ground. Marcelo ran toward the fallen body, and taking her by the shoulders turned her face up; he realized that she was semiconscious. He raised her easily in his arms and took her to the porch where he had been sitting, and deposited her in a chair; the woman breathed a sigh but gave no signals to recover her senses. At the time the hotel owner appeared. The man quickly took charge of the situation and without saying a word came into the room and reappeared carrying a jug of cold water. After a few moments also showed up a woman who Marcelo assumed was the bartender wife, with a wet towel that she immediately put on the faded woman's face, while they placed on her lips a glass of water. Lifetime inhabitants of these desolate landscapes, they undoubtedly had realized that the woman was with a principle of dehydration that had to be addressed immediately.