Becoming Ray Bradbury

20. Life and Death in Mexico

| 119| 5 20 Life and Death in Mexico ThelogisticsofthetripwouldbecomplicatedbyBradbury’s abiding fear of automobiles—the multiple-fatality accident he had witnessed shortly after moving to Los Angeles in 1934 remained a recurring nightmare, even though he had managed to release some of the effects by writing “The Crowd.” More recently, his fear of long-distance auto travel led him to back out of a family vacation to Arizona at the very last minute.1 Nevertheless, the Mexico trip soon proved to be a watershed moment in his career—it would provide material for some of his best fiction of the late 1940s and early 1950s, and it would radiate on down the decades into The Halloween Tree and beyond; but the trip would also prove to be one of the most challenging and traumatizing personal experiences of his life. During the last week of September 1945 Bradbury set out as map-reader and companion in Beach’s late-1930s V-8 Ford sedan, heading east all the way across southern Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas to the border crossing at Laredo. They proceeded into Mexico through a great swarm of locusts that seemed to underscore the completely alien nature of the adventure in Bradbury’s mind. But this highway offered the only direct passage to Monterrey, Lenares, and the citadel towns of Mante and Valles. In these towns the two men discovered the buying power of their dollars and were able to stay in excellent hotels. Their route continued south between the Gulf of Mexico and the eastern slope of the Sierra Madre Oriental, where they began to purchase the masks that Beach had come to find. For Bradbury, the change in terrain was striking. “When you cross Texas in the heat, everything is silver and yellow and white. It’s nothing. And then you get to the Mexican border, and you begin arriving in jungles and everything turns green. And then you pass those little towns and hit an orange wall, a yellow wall, a blue wall, a red wall . . . all the colors of the rainbow begin to hit you from the walls and the buildings. So color becomes part of your life, color enters your imagination.”2 Beach and Bradbury proceeded through Tamazunchale and on up to the central plateau of Mexico. The strangeness never ceased to amaze them both: “We saw a spider so big we actually got out of the car to examine it. It was bigger than one of my hands, and quite furry.”3 By October 9th they had reached Zimapan, i-xvi_1-328_Elle.indd 119 6/27/11 2:51 PM 120 | the fear of death is death where Bradbury began to compose a few mood pieces on his typewriter. His subjects were studies in contrast, as he would recall more than sixty years later: One night, walking through the streets of Zimapan, this woman came around the corner, and she was carrying over her shoulders two pans of charcoals. The two brains of charcoal were whirling rain in the wind—fireflies from the charcoal. So I put that in The Halloween Tree. I always remembered it. And in that very same quarter of Zimapan, I looked in the front of someone’s house, and there’s a beautiful lady, a young girl, sitting at a blue piano playing Beethoven. We stood outside the house looking at her with her long dark hair, and she’s playing on a piano that’s blue. These things stay with you forever. It’s amazing.4 A two-page typescript survives, dated the night of their arrival in Zimapan, and it includes Bradbury’s description of the woman balancing those very same braziers of charcoal, “breathing red, like pink brains glowing and thinking, balanced on gliding carriers, passing.” But even as he recorded these beautiful snapshots of life, he was already beginning to discover the abject poverty all around him, and he could sense the low regard for life implicit in such an environment. Bradbury felt at home with the children of México D’Afuera in Los Angeles, but he never found the same comfort in the land of their fathers. Mexico was, at times, a dangerous place, and his own latent fears of death moved a notch closer to the surface of his mind. The two travelers soon reached Mexico City, and for the next eighteen days they would remain there, exploring the urban culture and taking short day trips and overnight excursions through...