From Juan-Carlos Salazár

I thought I should let you know a couple of things. First, now you can contact me directly at cantinatales@hotmail.com. I’ve never been involved with electronic mails before, so I’m very excited about this. Of course, I can answer specific questions only selectively, for it might not yet be time to release some of what you might ask, and of course, some of the stories that we know are coming might not have been written in the stones yet. So on that account, at least, please be patient if my immediate responses are perhaps less informative or forthcoming than you might have hoped.

The other thing I wanted to tell you has to do with that very topic, in a way. Many of the stories have already been told and recorded. Those you can find in Stories from the Cantina (five stories), “Maldito & Tomás,” “Carmen, Whose Face Was Cracked” and “The Cycle of Ramon.”

Still to come are a story about “The Old Man & the Witch” and at least one more tale (possibly two) concerning Maldito and Tomás. There will also be at least one more story about the lovely Carmen (She is such a beautiful woman!), one titled “A Fish, a Woman, & an Omen,” one titled “Ila and the Train,” and one about “The Soldier,” a regular in the cantina who holds court at his own table back in the corner. Then there will be one about “The Street Fair,” one called “The Third Hymn,” and one about a poor unfortunate named Rigoberto. There will also be a couple of spin-off stories that take place south of Agua Rocosa, outside the realm of magic but involving at least one character from the Maldito/Agua Rocosa saga, called “The Trip South” and “The Hitter.” Unfortunately, those will more closely involve my friend, Harvey Stanbrough, albeit in an alter-ego.

(I must digress here for a moment to tell you, in strictest confidence of our new friendship, of course, I worry about him sometimes. This thing he believes he must do, the thing for which he will travel south… I’ve told him perhaps he should speak with the priest about this task, but he will have none of it. He said to me, “What is said in the church, like the church itself, are whitewashed.” But the conversations he and I share, he said, “are like the cantina in which we share them: rough hewn and honest.” What can I do but agree? No matter. Please excuse the digression. If you know my friend well, you will understand when I say if you look up obstinado—I think you say stubborn—in the dictionary, his picture should be listed there.)

Anyway, thanks for stopping by again. I look forward to spinning a few small tales for you from time to time here in my virtual cantina, my new friends. Now I must leave to restock the actual cantina in Agua Rocosa. I’ll be gone for a few days, but when I get back (perhaps I’ll wear a cleaner apron and even a bar towel that isn’t quite as stained), I’ll bring a story or two with me.

I remember that I met our mutual friend, Harvey Stanbrough, in the cantina one hot August afternoon when he was traveling south on the small bus line operated by the Silva brothers, Fernando and Francisco. One of first stories he probably heard me tell was the story I call “The Wind and the Rain and the Birds and the Boarding House.”

I remember everyone was clamoring that day to hear the story about the Man of Mud, a man who, having never been seen in these parts before, suddenly rose up from the mud plain just to the north of town. Others consider him only a legend, but not me, my friends, for I witnessed his birth first hand, albeit when I was very young and my vision was occasionally clouded with imagination. Anyway, I did not tell the story I call “The Man of Mud” on that particular day, for stories must emerge in their own time. So on that day, I told a story about a practically endless rain.

One otherwise beautiful morning, an overpowering sense of grief washed in over the land from the sea one day. The skies, angered at having witnessed the involuntary influx of such sorrow, turned grey and then brown and then very dark. Massive clouds grumbled among themselves as if debating whether to scrub the whole area and be done with it or, perhaps, to withhold the replenishment of water from the sea itself. The sun, embarrassed with its inability to push the sadness away and suddenly caught up in its own ego, crossed its arms and pretended it was in charge, refusing to break the clouds’ blockade from one day to the next as if that’s what it truly wanted. We never saw even the bright glimmer of an attempt on its part, for any attempt that failed would prove it was not up to the task.

And the wind… ah, the wind, which had traced the same route since the beginning of time—rushing from the sea to the mountains in the morning and from the mountains back to the sea in the evening—for the first time in eternity seemed confused about which direction to go, perhaps because there was so little difference between morning and evening, and even between day and night. The wind loitered timidly among the rocks and trees, afraid to rush off confidently in one direction for fear it might plunge off the earth and be lost. Scraping around among the rocks and trees, all of whom were also variously sad or angry or, at the least, wondering what was going on, it manufactured a sorrowful sound, as if it feared being trapped among those rocks and trees forever. And some of it was trapped there even when that dreadful week ended. To this day, when you walk among the rocks and trees on the lower slopes of the mountains above the village, you will hear remnants of that frightened windsong.

And then, on the evening of the first day, accompanied by lightning bolts that seemed to split the very heavens and thunder that would send even the most vicious dogs into hiding, the black, roiling skies released a torrent of rain, but a very unusual torrent. It was composed of the massive raindrops that you see in a sudden, short-lived downpour, the sort that occurs when a gigantic container that has the appearance of a cloud but carries far more liquid than any cloud could carry, bursts and drops the entire load all at once and all in one place. You know the kind of downpour I mean, my friends: it lasts all of a half-hour and is soaked immediately into the thirsty earth. Like the raindrops in that kind of downpour, the smaller of these raindrops were an inch across and most were much larger. They began all at once—again, as in the kind of downpour with which we’re all familiar—but they kept coming and coming and coming for the whole week. And instead of falling all in one place, they fell everywhere.

As you might well imagine from their size as I’ve described them to you, there was very little space between those drops, and the skies were cleared of birds and bats and flying insects within moments after the rain began. The larger birds—say generally anything larger than a kestrel—that needed to get from one place to another simply walked, their wings held aloft in a kind of umbrella, no doubt wearing a visage of disgust that only a bird, with its fixed beak and those beady eyes, could express. The smaller birds—all manner of sparrows and wrens and even the smaller owls—found a place to hide and latched on for fear of being washed away. And the bats… well, we all know they stayed safe and dry in the upper reaches of wherever they were hanging when the rain began.

Oh, and lest I should forget the insects, which a friend and patron named Ernesto would not appreciate, there were no bugs anywhere: none flying in the air, none crawling or hopping along on the ground or in the trees, not even grasshoppers jumping on screen doors to annoy the people in their houses. If I had to make excuses for them, I would say they didn’t want to run the risk of encountering those angry, larger birds who were stomping around the village looking for something on which they could take out their frustration and their sore feet.

And so it went, the rain coming down in sheets, twenty-four hours a day without a single break for a solid week. In that week alone, the few trees we have in the village and the surrounding area grew an average of two feet, and those few folks who had the foresight to plant a few seeds saw the plants sprout, come to majority, produce vegetables and die off. I was only a child, but I would bet those people and those in their good graces ate very well for the next month or so.

Ahh, I see that some of you are snickering and grinning and shaking your heads. I know, my friends, I know… but as I told the disbelievers who heard this tale originally right there in the cantina, should you travel to the capital, you can check the records for yourself. Botanists and other agriculture types came from the university to study the phenomenon, and they took their recorded results back to the capital. In fact, many of them stayed right here in the village, but of course, that is another story.

Because you probably are not familiar with our village, you wouldn’t know that we have no hotels or motels, but we did have a small lodging house at one time on the north end of the village. It was the only all-wooden structure in the village for a very long time. When I first related this story to my patrons, none of them were old enough to remember the lodging house either, so I tell you now as I told them then.

The woman who ran the lodging house was very old even then, and as I’ve already mentioned, I was only a very young boy. Of course, I was old enough to know numbers and amounts, and I remember that she must have made very good money that week as all six rooms at her place were filled with all the scientists and other important people who came from the capital to study the phenomenon. In fact, I heard she put them three to a room, with two sleeping head to toe in the same bed and the third sleeping on a pallet on the floor.

Unfortunately, just as if it were our fault that we’d received an overabundance of rain, we had no rain at all during the whole next summer. In fact, the sun and wind actually seemed to deduct moisture from us, as if in restitution to whomever is in charge of rainfall. Each day was hotter and drier than the last, and one scalding afternoon that poor boarding house burst into flame. And do you know, because both the structure and the old woman inside had been leached so thoroughly of moisture, the whole thing burned to the ground and blew away in the wind just that quick. It was gone before the men could find a bucket or any water to carry in it.”

I sense again that a few of you are shaking your heads and possibly even laughing, and I understand—I really do—but I have proof, my friends, and I am willing to share that proof. Should you ever find occasion to travel to Agua Rocosa, come into the cantina… ah, but please come in the coolness of the morning. We will have a cerveza or two, and then I will walk with you to the former location of the lodging house. There, even if you get on your hands and knees with a glass that makes an ant look the size of a horse, you will see for yourself with your very own eyes that not so much as a trace of that boarding house remains. I will do that for you because you are my new friends and I want you to know you can trust me.

Adios for now, my friends.

This will be a guest post. Juan-Carlos Salazár, who will most often be posting on this site, is a little shy when he isn’t behind the bar in his cantina. It was difficult enough just talking him into sharing some of his stories on here. He’s used to sharing them across the bar as he serves his friends. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

I first visited the fictional village of Agua Rocosa a very long time ago while traveling south for an entirely different purpose. I happened in by chance, or so it seemed at the time, and was so taken by the quietude of it all that I decided to hang around for a few days. During the first few visits that time and the first few times after that, I simply sat at the bar and sipped my cerveza—my favorite at the time was Negra Modelo—and watched and listened, quietly observing, as the stocky man behind the bar interacted with his patrons. Whether long-time friends, acquaintances or complete strangers, he treated them all alike, which is to say openly. He seemed to harbor no secrets. Of course, if you’ve read the entry in The Cantina, you already know that isn’t exactly true, for I explained there that Juan-Carlos never told everything he knew. But that is not to say he was a secretive man. He was a kind of recorder who learned and retained knowledge so he could dispense it when it was time. And dispense it he did. Very well.

Over a period of a decade or so, and over the course of several visits—research, you understand—I became considerably more comfortable in the cantina and made a habit of stopping over for a few days during every trip south and then back north. A trip that had taken a week at the most before I discovered Juan-Carlos Salazár and his cantina took two and sometimes three weeks afterward. I regret not one moment of the time I spent there.

Of course I had a day job of sorts, and you will find out about it eventually (“When it is time, Gervasio, mi amigo,” Juan-Carlos would say), but as a kind of avocation I began to write down the stories that surrounded me in the cantina, in Agua Rocosa, and in the surrounding area. Some I heard (or overheard) directly from Juan-Carlos himself, some I overheard from other customers, and some I gleaned through watching the interaction of the Storyteller with his patrons and the interactions of his patrons with each other.

So here you go. You’ll be glad to know Juan-Carlos is not half as talkative as I am. Most of his posts in this venue will be tight little stories told as only Juan-Carlos can tell them. He is, after all, the Storyteller, and the Keeper of the Cantina… and other things.

Stay tuned.

Harvey (Gervasio)