don’t believe this!”
“Look, if you die, I promise I’ll bring your parents out here so they can see where it happened.”
Just then, we rounded a corner and saw Santo Domingo Albarradas tumbling down the steep mountainside beneath us. A thick white mist, which almost completely concealed the deep valley below, was fingering up into the towering peaks above us, and it seemed as if we must have been significantly higher than we actually were. Indeed, Ron’s bottle label said the “pueblo elevation is 8,500 ft.” However, according to Google Earth it sits at around five thousand feet. He downshifted as we descended the muddy track into the community, slowly passing a whitewashed mission church decorated with flowers and streamers. A brass band was playing in front, and noisy fireworks were being set off in all directions. Ron had perfectly timed our arrival to coincide with the start of the Zapotec village’s annual fiesta. It was an impressive sleight of hand, but all I could think of was death.
“This is straight out of Under the Volcano,” I moaned. “I’m gonna die here!”
“Then maybe I can have you buried by the church,” he joked.
Ron navigated the truck down a steep, winding street and through the village, past fluttering chickens and tethered burros, finally pulling up next to a nondescript one-story adobe. It belonged to Espiridion Morales Luis, who, with his son, Juan, made the mezcal I had tasted in Santa Fe. Espiridion was away performing one of his civic duties for the Zapotec municipio. But Juan came out to greet us, cheerfully ushering us into the family kitchen—a cozy, rustic room with chicks sprinting across its hard-packed dirt floor. His mother was cooking tortillas on a comal, a basic wood-fired griddle. She served us each a bowl of hot chocolate, while Ron explained to our hosts that I thought I was having a heart attack. Juan quickly produced an unmarked bottle of mezcal that he and his father had distilled in their fábrica.
“¡Sólo necesitas un poco de medicina!” (You just need a little medicine!) Juan poured me a glass.
I took a sip, Juan’s eyes carefully measuring my reaction as the family mezcal calmed my nerves and delivered the familiar clearheaded high I had discovered when I first drank it in Santa Fe. After a few more sips, my chest pains vanished and the tingling in my left arm began to recede. I was cured!
Meanwhile, Ron presented the maestro mezcalero with an official certificate from the San Francisco World Spirits Competition, an annual tasting event where the Luis mezcal had been awarded the platinum prize—the highest honor presented. But the realm of First World arbiters seemed distant. Juan politely accepted the framed document, then set it aside and poured us another round.
A visit to their fábrica—reachable by a treacherous, muddy path down the mountainside—was out of the question because too much rain had fallen. But we could hear music and cheering from the village plaza nearby, so we wandered over to see what was happening. On a basketball court set between government buildings, competing teams from rival villages were duking it out for a grand prize. A brass band serenaded the players from the second story of the town hall, while hundreds of onlookers followed the game with rapt attention.
As I listened to the upbeat polka-infused music, watched the kids play hoops, and gazed into the misty valley plunging below, I realized that this wasn’t at all how I had expected Santo Domingo Albarradas to be. It wasn’t the romanticized village Howard visits in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre; nor was it a fantasy Wonderland populated by smoking caterpillars and grinning cats; and it wasn’t as colorful as the picture on Del Maguey’s bottle label. It was just what it was, and I knew I had to come back for more.
Agave angustifolia
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.
