On the Plain of Snakes

by Paul Theroux

  “I was in Liège, Belgium,” he said, stroking his frizzy beard. He was as fluent in English as Valerie, and as young. “A friend and I nearly got in a fight with three xenophobic teenagers. One of them appeared to be of North African descent, and the other two might have been Eastern European. They came at us on a dark street in a bad neighborhood, late at night, and hurled a lighter at us. They then insulted us and demanded that we speak French. My friend and I had been speaking in Spanish, and this apparently sparked the whole confrontation. They yelled, Tu es en Belgique! Parle français! Parle français!”

  The class murmured at Diego’s sudden lapse into French.

  “This xenophobia was quite a surprise,” he went on. “I wondered if, many years before, their parents had been yelled at or harassed for not speaking the language. Perhaps these kids felt it was their turn to exact revenge on those who seemed even more like outsiders than themselves. Either way, it was sad. In the end, we walked away unscathed, but disheartened.”

  Valerie’s and Diego’s helpful candor and their ability to tell a story set the tone of the workshop. I blessed my luck that I would have a week or more with such wonderful students, and told them how—a traveler’s blessing—I felt I now had twenty-four friends.

  In the trunk of my car were thirty-odd books that I had brought from home, all of them Spanish translations of my own books: La Costa de los Mosquitos, En el Gallo de Hierro, Mi Otra Vida, El Tao del Viajero, Elefanta Suite, and other titles that had been accumulating in boxes in my basement. I took them to class the first day and gave them out to those who could answer my literary quiz.

  They looked a bit apprehensive. Students hate being conspicuously quizzed.

  My questions were at first all Mexico related: Who wrote Mexico City Blues? In what city did Under the Volcano take place? Name D. H. Lawrence’s Mexico novel. Give the titles of Graham Greene’s, Aldous Huxley’s, and Evelyn Waugh’s Mexico books. B. Traven wrote The Treasure of the Sierra Madre—what was his true nationality, and name another book by him set in Mexico. What gringo poet died leaving Mexico by ship? What American writer supposedly died in Chihuahua?

  They correctly answered all except the Waugh (Robbery Under Law) and the last two: Hart Crane and Ambrose Bierce. Having run out of Mexico questions, I asked them more general ones: What novel begins, “Call me Ishmael”? Who wrote the short story “The Lady with the Little Dog”? What novel begins, “Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather”? Which writer began a poem, “Whose woods these are, I think I know”?

  They missed the Chekhov short story, but they got the rest. I felt I was in good hands.

  Then Héctor Orestes Aguilar piped up, saying he had a question for me. “Sir, can you tell me which novel begins, ‘The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there,’ and who wrote this novel?”

  Putting the new teacher on the spot on the first day of class is an age-old tease, and a challenge, a form of veiled hostility, a student’s way of asserting power and entertaining his fellow students. One of the older students, formally dressed, wearing a blue necktie, Héctor had the look of a bureaucrat or an insurance salesman.

  I asked him, please, to repeat the question, which he did, with a greater air of pedantry than the first time.

  “That’s a hard one,” I said, and saw him smile with renewed confidence. “I wonder if anyone in the group knows the answer.”

  Héctor glanced around the room, defying anyone to reply. But in the general shaking of heads it seemed that no one knew, not even Villoro or Osorno.

  “Can you give us a hint, Héctor? Or any sort of clue?”

  “So you don’t know this?” Héctor said.

  “Estoy pensando,” I said, and put my fist to my head, a thinking gesture.

  Now the class began to squirm, because it seemed that Héctor had gone a bit too far, revealed himself as a wise guy, a sabelotodo, a listillo, or even worse, a pedante, amusing enough in an informal setting of guys yakking in a bar, but unwelcome in a classroom in an attempt to show up the new teacher.

  To create a more excruciating atmosphere of suspense and give Héctor an air of superiority, I made the most of my hesitation. I put on a ham actor’s pained expression. I clawed my hair. But realizing that I was overdoing it, that the students were embarrassed for the gringo, I spoke up.

  “They’re the first lines of The Go-Between, by L. P. Hartley, English writer,” I said, and seeing that Héctor was deflated, I went closer to where he was seated and asked, “Now please tell me, if you can, the names of other novels that L. P. Hartley wrote.”

  After this banter, I told them why I was traveling in Mexico: because the notion of ranging widely in a big country attracted me, and because in the United States, under the current presidential administration, Mexico and Mexicans had been reduced to stereotypes. One great reason to travel, I said, was to destroy the stereotypes.

  “By driving from my home, I hoped to show that we are close,” I said. “I get in my car and drive south, and in a week or so I’m over the border.” I let this sink in, and then said, “Friends, we’re on the same road.”

  Each day we would deal with a different subject, I said. Today would be about travel, about leaving home. And on successive days: memory, witness, reading, and writing. During the ten days they would write a short story. I would suggest some subjects. At the end of the workshop we would read and discuss them.

  And so I encouraged them to talk about travel, about the changes they felt in their mood and self-awareness in separating themselves from home. One by one they described this experience, the individuation so important to the creative process.

  “I have traveled in Ethiopia,” Diego Olavarría said. He had also spent time in Cuba and Honduras, and had reported on them. He was a slender, frizzy-bearded young man in his mid-twenties whose English was precise. He had studied in the United States, worked as a translator, and published a book on Ethiopia, El Paralelo Etíope, which I discovered later had been awarded a coveted literary prize in Mexico.

  Diego spoke about the discoveries in his African travel, about the poverty he’d seen. But he also said that if Oaxaca and Chiapas were sovereign nations, they would be among the poorest in the world.

  Others spoke up: Claudia Muzzi, of Italian ancestry, had traveled in Italy and indeed spoke Italian. But her most memorable experiences had been in the United States, specifically in Georgia. She planned to write about it later in the week.

  Héctor was not the bureaucrat I suspected him to be, but rather a former diplomat, linguist, and essayist. He had served for many years in the Mexican diplomatic service, as cultural attaché in embassies in Belgium, Austria, Slovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Croatia, and elsewhere. He spoke German and French, and had traveled widely in Europe. He urged us all to read L. P. Hartley.

  Luisa was an editor of a travel magazine who had visited many countries. Raúl was a broadcast journalist who had lived for years in El Centro, California, and reported on the border. Ernesto was a businessman and an aspiring poet. Emilio was a scientist who had camped in many countries, studying meteorology, and he was an artist, too, who’d exhibited his work in Europe. Yael Weiss was from a Mexican Jewish family and had had a memorable experience in Las Vegas, Nevada, which she would write about. Rosi Zorrilla was an art dealer and writer. Michael Sledge, the American, was writing a novel based on the life of Edward James, an English aristocrat (and perhaps illegitimate son of King Edward VII), a collector of surrealist paintings, and the creator of a mansion (La Pozas) and fabulous garden near Xilitla, in San Luis Potosí state. Guadalupe Nettel was a mother of two and, as I was to discover, a well-known writer—several of her books had been translated into English.

  Others were just as singular and well traveled and full of promise. I felt I was in good hands. We talked that first morning about leaving home in order to fulfill literary ambitions, the obstacles to becoming noticed or published, and—these days—the difficulties of tr
aveling to the United States. It used to be so simple, they said.

  Julieta, who had said she had begun to write about the behavior of dogs, and who spoke candidly about how she had been married twice, to the same man, after an interval of separation, said, “What would you like to do, and how can we help?”

  “One of my ambitions in Mexico City is to see the chapel of Santa Muerte,” I said. “I’ve heard it’s tucked away in a corner of the city and that it’s worth seeing. I’ve been to a Santa Muerte chapel in the north, but this is supposed to be where pilgrims go.”

  I had spoken with enthusiasm and eagerness, but when I finished, hoping for a response, none came. I filled the awkward silence by saying how I’d also seen images of Holy Death on the border, usually in the poorest huts and colonias.

  “Could be dangerous,” Diego said at last, and as a traveler in El Salvador and Ethiopia, he knew a thing or two about danger. “They might object to our visiting. They might prevent us. There could be trouble. I think we should talk to someone beforehand. Maybe later in the week.”

  “Have any of you been there?”

  No, in murmurs, around the room, like the rustle of leaves, the susurrus slowly dying away to a vibrant silence.

  “Do you know where it is—the church?”

  More murmurs, the students conferring, a shaking of heads: no one had a clue.

  “So this is something we have to do!” I said, and they laughed.

  “Let’s eat first,” Julieta said, and six of them took me to Coyoacán, to a restaurant called Los Danzantes, at the edge of the plaza of gardens, Jardín Centenario, a fountain splashing nearby, children playing, some strolling musicians plunking guitars.

  The first course was hierba santa—sacred leaf, a green aromatic leaf with soft, warm cheese.

  “Coyoacán was once a small village,” Julieta said.

  “It was part of the lake,” Guadalupe said.

  And then we were served tacos con chapulines—tacos with toasted grasshoppers.

  “Hernán Cortés lived here,” Adán said.

  With a Mexican sense of historic time, Adán cast his mind back five hundred years and imagined the conquistador in his hacienda at 57 Higuera Street, though there is no sign that he lived here with his mistress, Doña Marina, known as La Malinche.

  About twenty years ago a reporter knocked on the door of Cortés’s house and asked why a place that represented a defining moment in national history was not a museum. Cortés, after all, wrote his chronicles here. The owner of the house, Rina Lazo, a painter, said, “For Mexico to make this house a museum would be like the people of Hiroshima creating a monument for the man who dropped the atomic bomb.” And as for the mistress, La Malinche, the name was a form of abuse—to be a malinchista was to be a lover of foreigners, a traitor.

  Meanwhile, Adán was tugging my sleeve, saying, “And Frida Kahlo and Trotsky.”

  “We can walk to their houses later,” Rosi said. “Here’s your tortilla soup, Don Pablo. Have some wine.”

  And I thought: I am content. I have achieved that elusive objective in travel—a destination. I have arrived. I am happy, one of the hardest moods to describe.

  As I was finishing my soup, the fried plantains were served, then a plate of split-open cow bones, gelatinous gray matter trembling inside.

  “We call it tuétano,” Rosi said.

  “Cow marrow,” Raúl said.

  “None for me, but I can tell you these are femurs,” I said, poking the bones with the tines of my fork and realizing I was slightly drunk. “Notice this knob or head, which connects to the pelvic bone.” They laughed as another plate was slid onto the table. “Ah, more tacos.”

  “Patos,” Yael said. “Ducks.”

  Then tostadas with tuna tartare, cactus leaf, corn smut, more grasshoppers, pork belly (base de nopal, huitlacoche, chapulines, y chicharrón), and more.

  Raising her glass, Julieta, in a tipsy giggle, uttered something to the effect that we had “cogieron demasiado.”

  To the laughter—had I heard that right?

  She corrected herself: “Comieron demasiado!”

  That’s better: not “fucked too much” but “ate too much.” Coger versus comer. Coger is “to take” in Spain, but “to fuck” in Mexico.

  We talked about words. Rosi said, “Gilipollas is used in Spain, not here. When we want to say ‘asshole,’ we say pendejo or cabrón, but que cabrón can be praise, too.”

  “What kind of cabrón is Donald Trump?”

  At first they wouldn’t be drawn out, but it was now late in the afternoon, and we were sitting among the splashings and remnants of a long lunch, platters of tacos, ripped tortillas, some long bones of cow marrow, and lip-smeared wineglasses.

  “He does not like us at all,” Raúl said.

  Trump’s crude insults were well known, and they were so hurtful in their stinging bluntness that most Mexicans I’d asked about them just shrugged, regarding it as beneath them to comment. Of Mexican immigrants he had said, “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” And, “The Mexican legal system is corrupt, as is much of Mexico.” To the cheers of his supporters, he’d crowed, “Mexico is not our friend.”

  “Worse than a cabrón,” Rosi said. “And different.”

  “Give me a word,” I said.

  “Mamón,” she said. “Thinks he’s better than anyone.”

  Mamón is cocky. The literal meaning is unweaned, still suckling. But in colloquial Mexican Spanish it has a much broader meaning, implying conceited, idiot, scrounger, dickhead, mooch, jackass.

  “Estúpido,” she added. “Boolgar”—her pronunciation of vulgar.

  “Cínico,” Guadalupe said. “Mentiroso”—liar. “Engreído”—vain.

  “Tonto, perverso, payaso,” Julieta said. Stupid, perverse, clownish.

  “Astuto,” Yael said, not astute, but in the Mexican sense, cunning and tricky. “Decadente.”

  “Loco,” Raúl said. “His talk about building a big wall. He doesn’t know that Mexicans travel back and forth every day to work in the United States, or to buy things. When I lived in El Centro, California, I was a radio journalist and I covered the border. In my time, in 1990, a fifteen-year-old boy was climbing the fence, and when he got to the top, a Border Patrol agent shot him. He fell back onto the Mexico side and he died.”

  “I’d like to check on that,” I said. “Do you remember his name?”

  “Eduardo Zamora,” Raúl said. After twenty-seven years, the name was still fresh in his mind.

  When I looked into this case, I found many others: unarmed Mexicans shot to death while attempting to cross the border.

  “But half the voters in the States wanted Donald Trump,” I said.

  “Por qué?”

  I told them that based on my travels in the Deep South in the Obama years, I understood the Trump voters, and how rural America felt overlooked and disregarded by Washington politicians, who seemed out of touch and pompous and casually corrupt. Many Americans were bewildered by having to accommodate themselves to the resettlement of Syrian, Somali, and Afghan refugees—their care and feeding—when many local communities were hard-up. And why were they unemployed? Because their town’s manufacturing had been outsourced to China and India and Mexico. The larger proportion of American soldiers came from such communities, and they, and their parents, resented being instruments of regime change abroad. America seemed insecure, violent, and wayward; and President Obama appeared detached and indecisive. He had belittled the police, and his attorney general had called the police racists.

  Add to this the presumptuousness of Hillary Clinton, who was so certain of winning that she campaigned halfheartedly and did not understand voters’ anxieties. Trump saw into this anxiety and discontent, and promised to fix Washington and the border and put America first and stop fighting foreign wars and create jobs. There was a subtext of xenophobia, too, in many of his speeches. He played on the distrust of the Clintons and subtly dispa
raged the Republican Party. To the complex problems America faced he offered simplistic and persuasive answers. His message resonated, and as I had spent the previous two years driving on the back roads of middle America, listening to people, I was not surprised that he won.

  At that point, I changed the subject to the Mexican police. Most of this group had been stopped by policemen, and Rosi said, “It’s almost as if you’re more afraid of the police than anyone else.” Part of the reason for police shakedowns was that they earned so little, between $150 and $300 a month.

  “This is getting depressing,” Julieta said. “Let’s go to the Casa Azul.”

  The Blue House, in Coyoacán, a short walk from the restaurant, was where Frida Kahlo had been born, grew up, and lived with Diego Rivera. She had died there, too, in an upper room. Now a museum, it was filled with Frida’s startling paintings and also many of Diego’s, family photographs and paraphernalia, such as the corsets and leg braces that the wounded (thirty operations, including an amputated leg) Frida had worn. Out of the small, stifling rooms, the courtyard was a suburban jungle of tamed vines and trimmed trees, the whole house a work of art, a kind of habitable sculpture.

  “What do you think?” Rosi asked. She was the art dealer, always inquisitive.

  “Lovely—I could live here,” I said.

  But I thought: Frida’s house, her art, and her clothes, especially her china poblana peasant costume, were deeply personal expressions of a passionate self. I could not formulate this for Rosi, but I felt that for art, for writing, for anything creative to have value, it must be passionate and personal. Yet Frida was a special case.

  She had become one of Mexico’s exports, though in Mexico her style was recognized for being self-conscious and somewhat dated. Foreigners adored her, so she was promoted, with her image on T-shirts and refrigerator magnets, as well as a fairly expensive Frida Barbie doll. Her house and wild garden were widely advertised as attractions for the tourist buses.