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Nacho: A Special Friend

I knew that my friend Nacho's health was failing rapidly, but I'd hadn't had word of him since, completely blind, he left Punta Allen in the Yucatan to be taken care of by his family in Valladolid.  I found out just this week that he died at his brother's home in August.  I still have the CD I'd promised him of music he'd either been missing or had become intrigued with, hoping to present it to him this winter: Omar Sosa, Chabuca Granda, Irakere, Astor Piazzolla.  His musical refinements matched his gustatory sophistication.  Following is a reminiscence written shortly after a visit.

Nacho: A Special Friend

¿Cuánto vive el hombre, por fin?

¿Vive mil años o uno sólo?

¿Vive una semana o varios siglos?

¿Por cuánto tiempo muere el hombre?

¿Que quiere decir para siempre? 

Pablo Neruda

In 1994, I came down to Punta Allen, a fishing village of 500 people on the Yucatan peninsula, 56 kilometers from the paved road.  I stayed in a guest house for sport fishermen owned by an American woman and her Mexican partner, helping to compile a book on Mayan cuisine.  I worked with their 2 cooks, but grew especially close to one, Nacho.

I’d get up at dawn each morning, make myself comfy at a table outside my room, and allow the graceful sway of the sea to inspire the first entries in my journal.  At six, Nacho would appear with 2 cups of coffee in hand. (He’s Nacho Jueves—“Thursday”—to his close friends, was Ignacio Creoglio to his parents.)  He’d sit and we’d chat, trading stories before he’d have to get the kitchen going.  His tales riveted me, about life on the high seas working on banana and other merchant boats, his fishing adventures and early years hunting jaguars, safe-guarding flamingos, his nights in the cantinas, his recipes, the foods he loved to cook.  My stories were mundane I thought, of life in New York and my travels, but Nacho, who’s never touched foreign shores, was ever-hungry to hear of far-away places.  

After about an hour he’d excuse himself to return some minutes later, having prepared breakfast for me, a pleasure, he’d protest against my protests.  He indulged me with chaya, a Mayan staple, not unlike spinach, cooked with eggs, home made tortillas and a piquant, distinguished pico de gallo—a relish of chiles, tomato, onion and lime.

I am back in Punta Allen. My trips are infrequent, but, in a way it feels like home.  The town has grown; there are a few small and unobtrusive guest houses along the shore, the baker sends a cart out nightly peddling the town’s first locally produced sweets, and there’s a recycling program encouraged by the townspeople.  I’ve been meeting more foreigners.  But these changes in no way reflect the crassness, commercialism and deculturization that’s hegemonized the northern Yucatan coast.  I’m glad to be back.

I’m visiting Nacho these mornings at about 7 in “Nacho’s kitchen” outside behind the guest house’s main kitchen which is now run by a local man, José. There’s a salted barracuda hanging from the beam of a zinc overhang; a couple of  white plastic chairs with the “Superior” logo on the back (Superior is one of the favored brews around here); an old cooler with various items: an empty bottle, a box of matches, cigarettes, a used cup; a still-frosty 6-pack of beer; and two coconut husks on the ground, smouldering, to keep away the chaquistas (biting gnats) that are fierce most mornings.  Nacho had to relinquish his formal kitchen duties due to failing eyesight, his proclivity for beer, and his fiercely guarded “autonomy”.

Nacho’s been reminiscing mostly about food this trip, perhaps because his domain has shrunk.  But, he’s also been reflecting on his other life as a fisherman: “Fishing, it is my passion.  It’s precioso.  And it’s salvaje—wild/fierce.  It’s all about dominating the elements.  And it gives you autonomy.  I’ve always had to be autonomous.  All my life.”  Nacho especially loves to fish, alone, at night.

Nacho uses two home-made stoves.  One is fashioned out of a rusted tire rim set on a metal tray and hooked up to a natural gas tank.  The other lays on the ground just beyond; it’s for wood fires and is an old, heavy steel lobster trap a little more than a foot high and about 4 feet around.  Proud of this cooker, Nacho ticks off the names of about 5 different woods he likes to cook over, each one with a distinctive aroma suited best for individual foods.

Nacho’s getting on in years.  He’s grown hoary, with a full, tufty white beard covering his face but for his now-filmy grey eyes.  His hair is still chestnut brown, usually espied straggling under a baseball cap.   He’s small and wiry.  I’ve yet to see him in long pants, would hardly know him were he to hide his ostrich-like brown legs. His family was Mayan, Italian, and from the Canary Islands, going back 4 or 5 generations.   He vaunts his piebald patrimony, but is most proud of his Mayan roots, that pride a legacy of the Yucatan.

There’s something consistently modest about Nacho’s presence that’s occasioned not so much by his stature as by his sensitivity not to intrude upon others and his taking life, its exaltations and laments, in stride.  At the same time, his spirit is undaunted and infecting, his knowledge vast, his generosity humbling, his wit subtle yet trenchant, his eruptions sobering when he’s been drinking.  To me, he has never blasphemed, never uttered an off-color remark. 

Nacho’s step has slowed as his eyes have failed, but he’s always about town, either on foot or the preferred mode of transport in this unpaved pueblito: inverse tricycles with a platform in front between the wheels for packages and kids.  (Nacho was nicknamed Jueves because, in his younger days as chef at a restaurant on Cozumel, he’d be seen whizzing around the island on his bicycle every Thursday, his day off.) 

He’ll come out front to sit from time to time while I make small talk with various itinerants come to Punta Allen for the day.  When he sits, he likes to splay his fingers, then, open like a Cat’s Cradle, have them find each other left hand to right, giving quiet emphasis to his remarks.  From time to time, he’ll push back in his chair and give a little hop as he speaks. 

At one point, we were asked how we knew each other.  I explained and then cast an aside: “You know, Nacho, I was afraid that, after eight years, you wouldn’t remember me.”  Nacho’s rejoinder was to the point:  “I knew you’d never forget me.” 

We sat with a patrician couple from Argentina the other day.  After riffing on Mayan cuisine, local plant and wild life, and Cuban music, Nacho excused himself to climb a tree and pick a coconut.  While he was gone, they commented on his encyclopedic mind.  Upon his return, they asked what his official position was at Cuzan Guest House.  “Soy el garbage man,” he replied, twinkling.

Though he’s always around to help, and can and will do just about anything, he describes his official status proudly as coconut-keeper.  He’s been taking me around the property, showing me the several varieties of coconut.  His favorite is ‘malayo’,  named for Malaya and its presumed Asian Pacific origin.  We’ve ploughed through endless mounds of orbs awaiting his attention, dull, brown and shriveling like elephant’s skin, fallen during Nacho’s 15-month absence from Punta Allen.  He’d been in prison in Merida on a drug charge.  He found a small bag of marijuana on the beach one morning, dropped by Colombians being pursued by Mexican authorities, then gave or sold most of it to a local youth.  The kid was busted and fingered Nacho. Nacho’s sentence should have run 5 years, but the townspeople took up a collection and hired a sharp lawyer who got him released this past September.

“How do you feel about being in jail?” I asked.  “It was a stupidity, nothing more,” he answered.  “It’s the government’s war [on drugs], but it’s their business, too.  But being in jail wasn’t so bad.  It gave me time to read and think.”  School, for Nacho, had been a worse prison, “being locked up in there for all those hours during the day, and then locked up at night doing homework.”  He dropped out at 12, never making it past the third grade.  But, he’d entered school already reading and writing and with a wealth of knowledge, having been tutored at home by his mother.

Most rewarding was our hunt amongst the pile-ups for a special coconut.  He wouldn’t tell me what he was looking for until he found it.   It looked like an ordinary shell with a young sprout  broken through.  After unhusking it on an axhead planted in a block of wood, he showed me the nut and its customary three “eyes”.  “You see this eye?”  It was clearly tumid.  “When one bulges like that, there’s a manzana inside.”  Using the dull edge of a machete blade, he whacked open the coconut, its rich water spilling everywhere to reveal, nestled into the maturing pulp, a creamy white cloud of sponge, flavored like condensed coconut water, ever so slightly fermented, and perfumed by the sea.  Exquisite.

I’m leaving later today.  Nacho’s given me two keepsakes, the first, a yellowed, sea-wrinkled copy of Isabel Allende’s “La Casa de los Espiritus”—from which this article’s inscription comes--and the other, a wood “sculpture” he found fallen from a dead tree.  Its form is ambiguous.  I see a fish holding its head high, struggling to see what lies beyond its realm of the sea.