The Children Of Eve

The antique store owned by Antonio Elizalde and inherited, like his name, from his father, stood on Calle Del Beso, close to the intersection of Avenida San Luis, in the Mexican village of Santa Ana Tlachiahualpa. The store didn't look like much from the outside, its windows dusty, its frontage dilapidated, and its displays of furniture, paintings, and craquelure plates seemingly untroubled for years by the interest of customers. Its opening hours, in common with its owner, were eccentric and unpredictable, despite Elizalde residing on the floor above. Those opening hours had once been posted on a handwritten piece of card jammed in the left-hand corner of the window, but years of sunlight had faded them to illegibility, if they had ever been anything more than aspirational. 

Elizalde, in his late sixties, was a single man and likely to remain so. Cadaverously thin, his complexion yellow, and his dress sense favoring gray flannel pants, mutedly striped shirts, and shabby cardigans, irrespective of the temperature or time of year, he attracted few admiring looks from even tthe most desperate of the town's widows and spinsters. His universe appeared to be a small one, even by the standards of that place. It was bounded by his place of business, the Iglesia de Santa Maria, the Abarrotes Polo convenience store, and the Zitala restaurant and bar, in the latter of which he would smoke Marlboro cigarettes (until the ban on smoking in public places forced him, like so many others, to indulge his vice in secret, like a criminal) and drink no more than two palomas a night. Twice yearly, he left the village to embark on buying trips, vanishing without fanfare and returning similarly unannounced. He was once spotted at Mexico City International Airport by an elderly local woman returning from a trip to visit her grandchildren in El Norte, who was so shocked to encounter Elizalde outside his natural environment that she had to sit for a moment to recover herself.  Elizalde had simply raised his hat to her and proceeded to his gate, passport in hand, quietly amused at the effect he had created. 

Elizalde was not unsociable, but his sociability was almost as limited as his orbit, rarely extending beyond polite comments on the weather, football, or the failings of politicians, both national and local. Nobody resented Elizalde for his reserve because he was courteous and paid his bills on time, both qualities rare in society than one might wish. He was understood to have money — he would otherwise have been a poor advertisement for his trade — but not so much as to make him a target for theft or extortion. His business might have been more successful had he advertised his wares on the internet or found premises closer to Mexico City, but on those occasions when he could be drawn on the matter, he declared the internet to be too noisy — demasiado ruidoso, whatever that meant — and Mexico City to be louder still. And who could fault him for this? That he preferred to keep Santa Ana Tlachiahualpa as his base and let the norteamericanos, chinos, and europeos come to him if they wished to buy — because come to him they did, if not in any great numbers, and always by prior arrangement — was something to be celebrated, not condemned. 

Elizalde's clients would often be accompanied by the local guides who had led them to his door, although some buyers arrived from Mexico City with their own drivers, experts who made no effort to hide the guns tthey wore. The buyers had nothing to fear from Elizalde, who was an honest, if costly, broker, but Mexico suffered from a surfeit of bad publicity, even if foreign visitors were at greater risk of being kidnapped in New Zealand or Canada than Nuevo Leon or Chiapas. As for being shot, well, that was a different matter, although the Bahamas were more dangerous than Baja when it came to stray gunfire, and nobody really wanted to see turistas hit by bullets. It attracted too much attention, and anyway, the cholos preferred to prey on their own people, pendejos that they were. 

So moneyed men and women would enter Elizalde's cool, dark store, where they would be offered bottled water, soda, a beer, even whisky or tequila if they preferred. Tea and coffee were also available, but most opted for something cooler after the journey. On rare occasions, Elizalde's hospitality would be declined outright, not even an aborita or a después de un poco más tiempo, por favor, a breach of etiquette that would, in the event of a sale, result in the customer receiving a smaller discount than might otherwise have been available. After such visits, assuming they were mutually satisfactory, Elizalde would buy a round of drinks at Zitala that evening, where his neighbors would toast his good health and fortune. 

Unspoken — by Elizalde and the community in general, even if the metiches inevitably whispered among themselves — was the precise nature of what he was selling, because offloading junk paintings and scuffed art deco furniture salvaged from the more distressed residences of Coyoacán would not be sufficient to support Elizalde's modest existence, even allowing for the fact that he owned the building in which he lived and worked. Also, while his loyalty to the village was admirable, might his decision to remain there not also have been linked to its proximity to the ancient city of Teotihuacan? The great archaeological site covered more than thirty square miles, its massive pyramids, its Avenue of the Dead, and its history of human sacrifice attracting more than four million tourists a year, some of them eager to return home with more than photographs of ruins or replica figurines of the Old God, the Fat God, and the Flayed God.