Hotel in Valle Nacional

When we pull into the town of Valle Nacional, a nothing-here-fortourists-but-the-birds town a sickeningly twisty six-hour drive from Oaxaca City, I recognize it right away. Not the town itself, but the kind of town we would come upon, my father at the wheel of the van, my half-sister and me half-waking as my mother lifted us from our nest in the back. The humidity, the sodium streetlights fuzzing on, the insects and the moths fluttering toward the light.

After the drive through the misty cloud forest, the air is very warm. We open the car windows. We’ve never been this far, in this direction, until now.

We come down Avenida Juarez. There’s always an Avenida Juarez.

The sign says, simply, “HOTEL,” as if it’s the only one in town. Likely, it is. “On YELP, it was three stars,” I say to my half-sister, and she says, “Yeah, from who? The lady at the fruit market next door?”

The stairs to the second floor are aslant, heavily duct-taped. Our room smells of disinfectant; there’s a worn bathmat outside the bathroom door, as if to announce, “the bathroom’s this way!” On each of the twin beds, a foil packet of shampoo, a thin folded towel, and on one bed, a roll of toilet paper. “Ha!” she says. “It’s on my bed.”

At the jalousie window, I part the polyester curtains, and watch the rosy evening descend over the backyards, crowded with date palms and thin fencing, imagining I can hear circus music from far off. The sounds from the bar downstairs float up into the air: laughter, and music, the sounds of Friday everywhere. I recognize it all, and in that moment, if I were to speak, I’m certain it would be in fluent Spanish.