On the Plain of Snakes

by Paul Theroux

  “Laundry!” I said again, my voice rising, and walked quickly past them.

  The rich in Mexico are protected, their progress is eased in every phase of life, so they are allowed to have airs. The poor, in their mild way, struggle to maintain their dignity.

  And half the country lives in poverty. A recent survey concluded that 55.3 million Mexicans can be described as poor or destitute, this in a population of 127 million. The average Mexican worker earns slightly more than $15,000 a year. For them, suffering under political incompetence and the threat of crime, life is hard and bureaucracy stalls everyone; nothing is simple. Even the plainest aspects of life are a challenge—finding work, finding a place to live, finding a doctor, a school, a parking place.

  You’d think the unfairness, the scrimmaging in such competition, would create conflict. But my experience in Mexico, with certain exceptions, showed the opposite, an avoidance of confrontation and a sustaining refuge in the comforts of family life. The realization that everyone is in the same boat, under siege by bad government—the word malgobierno is a continuous sigh of frustration—tends to create the like-mindedness of sympathy helpful in making a community coherent. That families are intact, children are valued, and the elderly are respected helps to shore up the social framework and keeps Mexico ticking over, even in the worst of times. What I had learned on the border from the mothers intending to cross was not that they wished to make a new life in the States, but that they hoped, as a solution, to make enough money to keep their family together in Mexico.

  But hope and determination and a willingness to take risks are not enough to overcome the curse of bad government or the hostility of the everyday, the warding off of evil. Another feature of Mexican life is the seeking of mediation or protection in rituals. Not prayer alone, though everyone prays; but the ceremonial fiestas, dances, music, the dressing up, the making of offerings and altars of flowers and relics, the veneration of such figures as the suave, cowboy-looking ideal of the superior cabrón, or the truly frightening skeleton, Santa Muerte, whose main shrine in Mexico City I hoped to see. All this propitiatory magic, and the ancient remedy of appeal, the masquerade—in most of the world the wearing of masks is a way of making magic by creating a new self.

  The African masks at the Trocadero Museum of Ethnology in Paris caught the eye of young Pablo Picasso: “A smell of mold and neglect caught me by the throat. I was so depressed that I would have chosen to leave immediately,” he said. “But I forced myself to stay, to examine these masks, all these objects that people had created with a sacred, magical purpose, to serve as intermediaries between them and the unknown, hostile forces surrounding them, attempting in that way to overcome their fears by giving them color and form. And then I understood what painting really meant. It’s not an esthetic process; it’s a form of magic that interposes itself between us and the hostile universe, a means of seizing power by imposing a form on our terrors as well as on our desires. The day I understood that, I had found my path.”

  Masks in Mexico are nothing new. The exhibits in the well-stocked Museo Nacional de la Máscara, the Museum of the Mask, in San Luis Potosí, is proof that this land has relied on masquerade for millennia—the superbly crafted jade and turquoise Zapotec masks on view are more than two thousand years old, and similar ones are worn today at festivals.

  Skull masks are everywhere in Mexican fiestas, but so are bat masks, and I had wondered why. The museum had the answer. In the persistence of memory, the past informing the present, the bat mask, murciélago, is represented with its jaws open, its dark wings flared in a frozen beat, its claws hooked in the air. The bat was a presiding deity in Monte Albán thousands of years ago, and the bat lived in Xibalba, the Kingdom of Night and Darkness. Related to fertility, the bat was known in Zapotec as bigidiri zinnia—flesh butterfly (mariposa de carne)—and was a benign god. There are sixty-three species of bats in Mexico, ranging from the three-inch-long bug-eating free-tailed bat to the carnivorous spectral bat, with a three-foot wingspan, which feeds on reptiles, small mammals, and other bats.

  Needing to walk, and having tramped the narrow streets of the centro histórico, I decided to hike up to Cerro Potosí, the hill above the town, beyond Tangamanga Park. The guidebook recommended good shoes, water, and long pants against the agave lechuguilla—thorny agave. I started on a cool morning, setting out on the trail at 6,800 feet, and plodded upward about four miles to 8,000 feet. Beyond that I was slow and breathless, and discovered that lechuguilla (little lettuce) is a misnomer—it’s common name, shin-dagger, is more apt. Lying on a flat, sun-heated rock to get my breath, procrastinating, I soon abandoned my effort to get to the top of Cerro Potosí. But I was thrilled by what I saw below me and beyond, the stone mountains that stretched in all directions, the rough beauty of the rocky crags.

  I had been driving through this mountainous landscape for a week and regarded it as simply another tumbled heap of the Sierra Madre Oriental. But that name was too pretty. Much of the sierra I had seen, southward from the border, could more accurately be termed wasteland—vast, dramatic, hard-edged, inhospitable, and in the words of Manuel José Othón, Potosí’s best-known poet, “wild desert,” “barren and immensely sad,” a place of “savage ravines,” “gigantic block upon gigantic block,” baked dry by “desolate and burning air.” And more—the “bitter and brackish plain,” the “dry dead ocean basin.”

  In the poem “Una Estepa del Nazas,” Othón describes the landscape of Nazas, which is a bit to the northwest, near Durango:

  In the gloomy bowl the monotonous river

  rolls, with never a rapid, never a gorge,

  and, low on the horizon, the setting sun

  reverberates, like a furnace mouth.

  And here in this grisaille that never is

  lit up by any color, here where the air

  scourges the scorched plant with fiery breath . . .

  In fits of romantic masochism, Othón rusticated himself to the arid communities of this region. But he was also a federal judge, and some of these lonely outposts were assigned to him. He made the best of his various places of exile, reporting in agonized poems the physical details of the hard world around him.

  I had never heard of this poet until, a day or so after my hike up Cerro Potosí, I visited his house on narrow Madero Street, behind the cathedral. There is not much to see in the dusty house, just some decomposing books, his tiny desk, his inkpot, his iron bed, his portrait photograph—bristling mustache, gentle eyes—and some framed, faded letters.

  The little pamphlet (5 pesos) about Othón mentioned how, as a judge, he was summoned from the elegance of San Luis Potosí, the state capital and center of culture, to the hinterland in the late nineteenth century—in small-town Cerritos, in the northeast; in Santa María del Río, stony mountains with steep sides and jagged summits, among dry basins and rocky arroyos. A tortured note of desperate fatalism runs through his poetry, as in remote landscapes he celebrates the savagery, the howling wilderness. It is as though, among all these rocks, by a leafless tree, he is dressed in rags, waiting for Godot.

  Look more closely into the shadowy literary history of Othón and you see that his poems were translated into English by Samuel Beckett. It was not his wasteland weariness that appealed to Beckett—though the wasteland predominates—but rather Beckett’s need for money. How this translation happened is an unusual story. Although Othón was celebrated in his town for his “Wild Idyll,” “Hymn to the Forest,” and “In the Desert,” this admiration was the national pride of many Mexican writers. But Othón remained obscure to the wider world.

  The obscurity was a bit like Beckett’s, who in 1950 was forty-four years old, unknown outside his small circle of friends, depressed, frustrated by publishers’ rejections, living in near penury in Paris, and writing about loss, misery, and death. Though some of his poems had appeared in small magazines, he had yet to publish any of his novels or plays. He had finished writing Waiting for Godot, but it had not b
een staged. He was open to any reasonable offers of work.

  A young Mexican student in Paris—the unknown and yet to be published Octavio Paz—approached Beckett with a proposal to translate one hundred poems by thirty-five Mexican writers. This would be financed, as a worthy cultural project, with funds from UNESCO. Beckett accepted. “The money was a godsend,” Beckett’s biographer Deirdre Bair writes, “but the chore was almost insurmountable.” What made it difficult was that Beckett did not know Spanish very well—awkward, in the circumstances, for a potential translator. But with the help of a dictionary and the assistance of a friend fluent in Spanish, he turned all the poems into English and, in his perseverance, made them his own.

  He was glad for the money, but the book was not published then. A year later, Godot was staged to great acclaim and Beckett became a literary celebrity. In 1958, at the age of fifty-two, Beckett had at last found the acceptance he had sought, and with his work now in demand, a university press seized the opportunity to use his name, and the Anthology of Mexican Poetry appeared.

  But there is a singular connection between Samuel Beckett, “the grammarian of solitude,” sunk in his comical Irish gloom, hiding in a tiny apartment in Paris, and the condition of Manuel Othón, the late-nineteenth-century Mexican recluse, brooding in the parched wasteland in the middle of Mexico. Seemingly at a loss for words around 1900, Othón, in a despairing poem, wrote the Beckett-like line “the desert, the desert and the desert.”

  First Communion in San Diego de la Unión

  In places, the desert of broken stones and stinging dust in Potosí state, which extends into the state of Guanajuato, is relieved by the dramatic heights of the Sierra Madre, the wasteland flanked by magnificent mountains of sharp, shining granite peaks, some like shattered knives and others like fractured black bones, or marked with odd, inky splashes of obsidian. I had reclaimed my car from the hotel parking lot and set off in the morning from San Luis Potosí, and at Santa María del Río, where the good road ended, I was traveling south in sunshine, euphoric again, on the open road.

  It was Saturday, market day, so I turned southwest onto side roads and came to the huddled town of San Diego de la Unión. After the big city of Potosí, I was attracted by its smallness, surrounded by the deep green meadows of Guanajuato state. I stopped simply to look around, in the idle curiosity that is available to any person with a car in Mexico and no particular place to go.

  The image that dominated—a dazzling sight—on the main street of the town was that of small girls, nine or ten years old, dressed in shimmering white dresses with veils of white lace, their black hair neatly coiffed, some wearing white gloves, their faces whitened with powder, too, mascara on their dark eyes, their lips reddened—little brides in full makeup tripping down the cobblestone lanes. They were hovered over by adoring attendants, older women—mothers and aunts—and big sisters, serving as chaperones in humble street clothes, made humbler in their proximity to the exquisite princesses.

  Fascinated, I followed them, and chatting on the way with admiring onlookers, I learned that the girls were headed to their First Communion at the twin-spired church in the center, the Parroquia de San Diego de Alcalá, named for the patron saint of the town.

  It was a poor town—the meagerly stocked market was proof of that. The houses were plain, the side roads in bad repair; I imagined the place was hardly visited by outsiders. Mexican tourists flocked to San Luis Potosí for the lights, the plazas, and the restaurants, but there was not much in San Diego to detain a visitor.

  I had been reminded in Potosí of Pritchett’s insight, “The past of a place survives in its poor.” Here was the strongest evidence of it: the finery of First Communion day, the persistence of the tradition of dressing the young girls in the white of purity and in a Saturday procession, the numbers growing as it passed through town, arriving at the parish church in a joyous parade, the girls, perhaps for the first time in their lives, elegantly dressed, the center of attention.

  I waited until they had all filed into the church, the communicants, the families, the gawking townspeople—and these last included farmers, mechanics in blue overalls, and stallholders, some of them from the carnicería, their aprons gathered and bunched in their hands, the white cloth reddened with blood spatter from the slabs of cow meat, pigs’ heads, and pigs’ trotters they had knifed apart that morning.

  I took a pew at the back and listened to the wheezing organ and the hymns sung with gusto by the people standing and swaying. When the parishioners were seated, the priest leaned from the carved pulpit and delivered a homily about innocence and purity, and he called upon the girls to come forward, which they did, on skinny legs and in white silken dresses. As they shyly tottered forward, the priest spoke about this special day, “a new day in your life.”

  “A special day,” he added, mentioning the saint whose feast day this was, San Judas—not the betrayer, but Saint Jude Thaddeus, the patron saint of lost causes, last resorts, long shots, and dead ends, and perhaps because of the hope his image offers to desperate people, a popular saint in Mexican hagiology—the Saint Jude chapel in Potosí was plastered with scribbled appeals, and offerings, and flaming racks of votive candles. Saint Jude is the second-most-popular saint in Mexico. The most venerated one is Our Lady of Guadalupe, who appeared in 1531 at Tepeyac (a hill near Mexico City) to the Aztec peasant Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin. The Virgin, speaking in his own language, Nahuatl, commanded him to build the much-visited shrine in her honor, which stands today. (But both of these saints have heavy competition in popularity from Santa Muerte, the robed skeleton whose bony image and lipless grin is everywhere.)

  One by one the girls in white tiptoed to the altar rail and knelt to receive the host, their veils trembling as they tilted their heads back like choristers and put out their tongues.

  I sat, comforted by the peacefulness of the occasion, buoyed by the smiles of pride on the faces of the relatives and friends, their pleasure in the old ritual, and in this poor town the beauty of the girls, dressed for the occasion.

  Then I slipped out and walked the main street of San Diego de la Unión, looking for a place to eat.

  A man squinting into the sun laughed when I asked him if there was a restaurant in town. Only antojitos, street food, he said, and not much of that; the nearest restaurants were in Dolores Hidalgo, a short distance away.

  More back roads and blowing wildflowers and then another small town, but this one of great historical importance and much visited (thus the restaurants), celebrated as the birthplace of Mexican independence. The local priest and committed guerrilla fighter Don Miguel Hidalgo rang the church bells on September 16, 1810. He summoned the townsfolk, whom he energized by repudiating the Spanish conquerors with his Grito de Dolores, his Cry of Dolores, raising an army with a powerful denunciation of malgobierno and oppression—the beginning of the Mexican independence movement, but far from the end of Mexicans denouncing corrupt government, a cry heard all over the country to this day.

  I dined on posole and grilled cactus leaves and returned to the road, heading for the nearby town of San Miguel de Allende.

  San Miguel de Allende: The Dark, the Light, and the Gringos

  Smooth sailing, sunny days, good roads, especially the country roads of Guanajuato—green pastures of browsing cows, old timber corrals and tile-roofed ranchitos, wildflowers, butterflies, and hawks drifting in the cloudless sky.

  This is Mexico by day. But it is a delusion for anyone who travels in the country to believe this to be the whole story. From the mutters and guarded warnings, I became aware—as anyone would in the sinister rustling of these whispers—that there is a substratum of criminality even in Mexico’s prosperous places, especially in the prosperous places, and it takes unexpected forms.

  San Miguel de Allende is fussily picturesque, tastefully restored in parts, well preserved in others, and beautifully maintained in the retention of its traditions, the refuge of artists and weekenders from Mexico City and throng
s of tourists both Mexican and foreign. In most respects the town is the apotheosis of highly colored Mexicana—a lovely plaza with trees, El Jardín, a baroque cathedral, many art galleries and souvenir shops, concerts most evenings, excellent restaurants, friendly bars, botanical gardens, and some four- and five-star hotels. All this and a salubrious city center, a town hospitable to eaters and drinkers and strollers and shoppers, as well as to thousands of retirees, most of them gringos.

  Built against the steep slopes of the Hill of Moctezuma—its altitude of six thousand feet can moderate the pace of many gasping upslope trudgers—San Miguel has been a destination for expatriates since the late 1930s, when an American artist, Stirling Dickinson, helped found an art school (and attracted other arty expatriates), and later the Peruvian artist Felipe Cossío del Pomar, sent into exile for his left-wing views, received government permission to open an art school in the town’s former convent. The muralist and revolutionary David Alfaro Siqueiros (one of Los Tres Grandes—Orozco and Rivera were the others) taught mural painting here at the Escuela de Bellas Artes in 1948. His mural in the nuns’ refectory in the convent is a bright patchwork of abstraction, even if incomplete: the story is that the temperamental artist abandoned it, and San Miguel, in a fit of rage. He and other visiting Mexican artists helped create a receptive mood of artistic congeniality in the town.

  “The gringos came in large numbers after the Second World War,” Lupita, the manager at my hotel, told me. Stirling Dickinson stimulated these arrivals. “They had the GI Bill and they liked the ambience here and the good weather.”

  It is still the haunt of potters and painters and pensioners. Thirteen thousand, or roughly 10 percent of the population, are expatriates, committed to living here and—rare for Mexico—the resident gringos, eager to give back, are engaged in any number of charitable projects. The philanthropy is a good idea, and is acknowledged by locals. But the dominant, or at least the most visible, presence is gringo. As foreigners, fairly well-off and living in a bubble, by its very nature privileged and parasitical like expat communities elsewhere in the world, they have a complex relationship with actual Mexicans, peasants generally, who are inevitably their menials. And also, like such places elsewhere, gringos are hyperalert to the servant problem, and the rattle of stories being swapped, the echo chamber that most expat communities become, places driven by gossip.