Fault Lines - John Knoop

German-Mexican named Senor Rowald. On Sunday we’re riding south with him and his group of
avid BMW loyalists on their monthly outing to Puebla. He wears leather pants and his R-60 has
bronze straight pipes that sound great. As good as glass packs on a V-8.
The highway south of Arriaga, in Chiapas, is still being built. All traffic headed for
Guatemala has to be transported to the border town of Tapachula by rail. The freight agent in
Tonala wears a soiled Panama hat and a heavily sweat-stained white shirt with smears of food
and wine from collar to belt. His face is drawn into a bitter cringe and his glass left eye rolls and
dances in its socket behind a milky cloud of mucus. Naren asks him when the next train is leaving
for Tapachula and how much it will cost us to get on it with the cycle. The man says he will put us
on the shipment he’s making up to leave at five that afternoon if we give him twenty dollars.
Naren gives him a quizzical look and asks how the rate is computed. The man looks at us with
seething anger for a couple of minutes in silence. Then he tells us in a voice silky with hate that it
is eight pesos for the first hundred kilos and a peso for each additional kilo. This amounts to
about two U.S. dollars. Naren asks what time we should be there to load and he says 3:00. When
we return at 3:00 the office is locked. After waiting around and then asking some boys if they
know where he is, we find the man at a café on the main square, staring intently at a bottle of
cheap wine. When Naren asks when we are to load he gives us an ugly, triumphant smile and
says the shipment is not leaving that day. I wonder what embittered this man so much. It’s clear
that he tried to cheat us because we are foreigners, but there is more to it than that. He is angry
with everyone and everything.
We ride north to a river we crossed on the way in. There are large smooth boulders with
fast cold water from the purple mountains to the east. Next to the river are cottonwoods and a
knee-high carpet of grass. We take off our clothes and lay in the current. It tugs at our bodies,
brushing fine grains of sand lightly against our skin. We sleep there and next morning we hoist
the cycle into a baggage car after paying thirteen pesos, allowing us to take the train ride over
the border to Tapachula where the road begins again.
El Cerrito
I can see that transcribing all these journal entries is going to be a major effort. But
I’m happy with the main entries and surprised by how much is worth keeping. Maybe it’s
a chance to go deeper and produce something more revealing than any of my films or the
things I’ve written. I’m glad I finally broke down and bought a 23 inch cinema display
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