The Alternative Gift Shop

As I left the site, I waved to the man at the ticket booth who was still sitting under the tree. I chuckled to myself at the stress free job he seemed to have. But as I drew level with a nearby hut – a small gift shop- a coach of school children pulled up by the tree, ruining his siesta, and probably increasing by a factor of ten the new entrants to have signed the visitor’s book in the last week.

Outside the gift shop, wafting in the breeze, hung copies of sepia photos of silver being transported away from the nearby mines at the end of the nineteenth century. I was interested in looking for other prints that portrayed Zacatecas from this era and so went inside.

In one corner, placed on a table was a box containing the photos. I started to leaf through them and arrived at one of Emiliano Zapata –  a Mexican revolutionary hero who fought for the proposed redistribution of hacienda lands to the poverty-stricken Native Americans – I was on the verge of retrieving this, when a shout went up from the owner who was sat behind a glass counter on the other side of the shop.

 ‘Hey no! Step back quickly. Please.’

He moved swiftly, grabbed my shoulders and pulled me away from the corner table. ‘Please quick! Away from here!’

For a moment I thought that the he was trying to drag me back, because I was in danger of knocking over a priceless marble model of the fort, or something like that, with my shoulder bag.

This, as it turned out, would have been the least of my worries. Perhaps the strange whirring noise that I heard, as I strode towards that corner table, should have given me a clue that this was no ordinary souvenir shop. As I was being pulled back, the owner with his other hand held out a long stick, lent around to behind the table and started prodding the ground. The whirring sound now changed to a hiss.

If the fuss was just about the imminent knocking over of a marble model, then my immediate movements would have occurred in a somewhat gingerly manner, looking over both shoulders and reversing with care. But no, the hissing noise, as you may now have guessed, ensured that I reversed with haste, time for a sharp exit and all that. The owner stepped back, holding up his stick. Coiled around the top end and flopping madly about was a snake. I watched from the open doorway, as he  went back around the counter, lifted its lid and slung the snake inside.

‘Ok, it’s safe you can look at the photos now,‘ he said.

‘Has this just come in from the outside?’ I asked.

‘No, she is one of my pet snakes. I just let her out for a walk. You took us both by surprise when you suddenly appeared.’

‘One of your snakes?’ I asked. ‘Why, how many do you have?’

‘I have four more here.’ He pointed to the glass counter, into which the snake had just been unceremoniously dumped. He continued, ‘And then I have fifteen more at home. It is my hobby.’

‘And so what is the snake that was on the floor called?’

‘She is called rattle snake.’

‘So you live with nineteen snakes then?’

‘Nineteen snakes and the wife,’ he corrected me.

I wondered how much of his attention the wife got, when there were nineteen other residents competing for his affection.

I chose a photo, placed it on the glass counter top, inches above the snakes. I pointed to one of the reptiles. ‘So how much for this snake?’ I asked.

‘No, no. They are not for sale.’ he said.

I walked the two miles back along the track, to the dual carriageway. On either side of this dusty trail was overgrown grass. On the way to La Quemada, the warbling, clicking and rustling sounds just seemed like background noise. I did not pay it any attention. But now, I stuck to the middle of the track. It might give me an extra second’s notice to react if anything long and slimy slipped out from the rushes.