COYOTE MORNING IN THE BLUE AGAVE copyright and digital manipulation by Michael Forbus Tequila by Alvaro Mutis for María and Juan Palomar Tequila is a clean flame that clambers up the walls and shoots over tiled roofs, relief to despair. Tequila isnt for sailors because it blurs the navigational instruments and dismisses the winds tacit orders. But tequila, on the other hand, enraptures those returning by train and those driving the train, because it stays faithful and blind in its loyalty to the rails parallel delirium and to hurried greetings in the stations where the train pauses to testify to its inscrutable destination, errant, subject to the inevitable laws. There are trees under whose shadow it is wonderful to drink it with the parsimony of those who preach in wind and other trees where tequila cant stand the shade that dims its powers and in whose branches it stirs up a flower blue as the warnings on bottles of poison. When tequila waves its fringed, serrated flag, the battle halts and armies return the order they intended to impose. Often two squires accompany it: salt and lime. But it is always ready to start the conversation without any more help than its lustrous clarity. From the start, tequila doesnt recognize borders. But there are propitious climates just as certain hours suggest it, knowing full well: to fix the time when night arrives at its stores, in the splendor of an afternoon without obligations, in the highest pitch of doubt and hesitation. It is then when tequila offers us its consoling lesson, its infallible joy, its unreserved indulgence. Also, there are foods that call for its presence: those springing from the ground from which it, too, was born. Inconceivable if they didnt bond with millenary certainty. To break that pact would be a grave breach with dogma prescribed to allay the rough job of living. If gin smiles like a dead girl, tequila spies on us with the green eyes of a prudent sentry. Tequila has no history, no anecdote confirming its birth. It is so from the beginning because it is the gift of the gods and, usually, when they promise something they arent telling tales. That is the office of mortals, children of panic and habit. Such is tequila and so it will be keeping us company all the way to the silence from which no one returns. Praise be, then, until the end of our days and praise the daily effort toward denying that end. Translated from the Spanish by Forrest Gander