On the Plain of Snakes

by Paul Theroux

  She is “ghastly but unique,” in the summing up of the narrator of Juan Villoro’s story “Amigos Mexicanos,” in which the nosy American journalist Katzenberg is searching for meaningful Mexicanisms. “Katzenberg didn’t understand that [Kahlo’s] famous traditional dresses were now only to be found on the second floor of the Museo de Antropología, or worn on godforsaken ranches where they were never as luxurious or finely embroidered.”

  For the traveler contemplating Mexico, Frida is a detour and a distraction. It was her genius as an artist, and her neurotic narcissism, to turn her whole self into art—her love, her suffering, her accident-prone life—and in the process make herself an icon, for the Mexican tradition is full of icons, especially of madonnas. It did not hurt her career that the forty-three-year-old Diego Rivera dumped his wife and married the teenage Frida (she was nineteen). And Diego was not just any old bridegroom. “This 300 pounds of gesticulating, brush-waving, manifesto-writing flesh,” as Rebecca West describes him in her posthumous Survivors in Mexico, “who looked like Mao Tse-tung but was an amalgam of Pantagruel and Barnum and Baron Munchhausen.” Frida loved him as a wife, as a daughter, as a protégée, as a mother. But Frida as a mutilated, mustached, and unibrowed madonna was perhaps more admired in Europe and the United States than in Mexico itself.

  Trotsky’s house, not far away, near a busy road, was less a house than a shrine to its former occupant, who’s buried there. His skull had been smashed in 1940 by a Stalinist assassin, the weapon a piolet, a mountaineer’s ice ax. The murderer, Ramón Mercader, was made a Hero of the Soviet Union after his release from twenty years in a Mexican prison. “Depressing,” Julieta said. “And the building is modernized so badly.” Then we went to the Coyoacán market and walked among taco stalls, crates of mangoes, carcasses of animals, dead-eyed fish gleaming on marble slabs, chiles hung like firecrackers, and trays of toasted grasshoppers.

  “What did I tell you—Mexico City is surreal,” Rudi said, back at the Hotel La Casona, when I described my day.

  “A good day,” I said, my first as a teacher in Mexico City.

  The succeeding days were as full, and as friendly. The recent earthquake had damaged many buildings in the Roma district, where our class met. More surrealism: houses cracked in half, tenements with slumping floors, gaping windows, the rubble of shattered concrete blocks where a building had once stood—and next door, an apartment house untouched by the temblor. In many elegant plazas displaced families were living in tents.

  “Here is a strange story,” Guadalupe said in class one day. “There’s an ancient site, Atzompa, in Oaxaca where some archeologists found the tomb of an important man, a governor. They identified him because his name had been inscribed there—Ocho Temblor.”

  “Eight Quake,” a name indicating his power.

  “In this tomb they found a jar,” Guadalupe said, “and in the jar many bones and broken clay shards that seemed to be the pieces of an animal. When they began to assemble the clay pieces, they saw that they were making a crocodile. They put the thing together, finishing on a certain day—September seventh. The moment the croc was whole, the earthquake occurred. The epicenter was at Atzompa.”

  Héctor was dubious. It seemed too neat, he said. Anyway, what struck him was that there was little news about Oaxaca’s earthquake—poor villages flattened, humble houses destroyed, and over a hundred people killed. But twelve days later, when Mexico City was shaken by an earthquake—probably the same tectonic plates shifting under the Sierra Madre’s fault line—there had been a great outcry, because it involved wealthy people and expensive houses.

  “You mentioned Mexico stereotypes,” Héctor said. “I agree. There are many. For this reason, when we had a cultural event in the embassies where I worked, I refused to show a Frida image or a skeleton. I am against them as symbols of national culture. Such images created a stereotype. I wanted to show contemporary culture. What about women essayists? What about modern musicians? We are a strong civilization on the cultural side, greater than the stereotypes.”

  We debated this. Some agreed. Some said that Frida’s portraits were powerful icons. And one day, to prove that some people resisted the malgobierno, we walked to the Reforma, where in front of the attorney general’s office a permanent protest was installed. Dozens of people were camped out—the relatives of the forty-three students who had been murdered in Ayotzinapa, flapping tents, oversized signs and banners, blaring loudspeakers, and defiance. This had been going on, so far, for 1,100 days.

  More restaurants, lunchtime seminars, and more outings—to the Bellas Artes Museum, and at the Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso—its interior bright with indignant murals by Orozco, Rivera, and others—the exhibit “Che Guevara in Africa.” This was a chronicle in photographs and texts of Che’s attempt to create a popular rebellion in the Congo in 1965. His Congo Diary is a powerful account of an idealistic man’s campaign to bring change to Africa, at a time when I was a schoolteacher in the African bush. He was at the edge of Katanga in the Congo; I was in Malawi about six hundred miles away. I could easily relate to his book, which begins, “This is the story of a failure,” and ends, “I won’t forget the defeat, nor its precious teachings.”

  Héctor supervised our visit to the National Museum of Anthropology, a building of startling modernity. The guide explained the tableaux of peasant folk in adobe huts, surrounded by quaint handicrafts and simple utensils, tending clay pots on wood fires. There were a dozen or so exhibits: here Las Pachitas, there the Zapotecs, the Mixtecs, the Nawatlaka, each with their distinctive skirts or blouses or headgear, their weaving, their needlework, the beadwork of the Huicholes, the embroidered fabric of the Otomi, and examples of their sixty-two languages and three hundred dialects.

  “How they used to live?” I asked.

  “How they live now,” the guide said.

  The Otomi in Tequisquiapan in Querétaro, the Totonac in Veracruz, the Mixtec people in the hills and valleys of Mixteca Alta—and more: all still existed, though perhaps not in the idealized portraiture of the anthropological museum. They were the poorest of the Mexican peoples.

  “They are the people who try to cross the border,” Diego said. “Many of them want to migrate to the United States.”

  The memory of María, the mother of three, saying grace over her meal in Nogales, came to mind, her posture and her solemn Zapotec face like the living image of the weeping mother La Llorona; the woman who had become lost in the Arizona desert, been arrested, roughed up, and deported; who in her bravery and desperation had inspired me to travel farther into Mexico—indeed, my mission from the beginning, after meeting her, was to travel to her region, Mixteca Alta in Oaxaca, and look at the conditions that impelled the local people to make the risky border crossing.

  “But you have indigenous people, too,” Héctor said, sidling up to me. “And just as poor.”

  I told him what the Tohono O’odham woman in Gila Bend had said to me, how the O’odham Nation was divided by the border, half the people in Arizona, the rest in the Sonoran Desert in Mexico, where they live a more traditional life; how she was proud, and fluent in her language, and, “There is no O’odham word for wall.” It had become something of a rallying cry for her nation.

  Meanwhile, el taller, two hours in the morning, a discussion over lunch, always an outing and often dinner: full days with two dozen students who had become my friends. I had not taught in a classroom for more than forty years, and rediscovered the pleasure of the back-and-forth with intelligent, engaged students. I was eager to meet them each day, I enjoyed their company, and I was grateful for their companionship.

  “Time to write something,” I said one morning, and gave them a list of topics—ambiguous, challenging their imagination: “The Real Thing,” “The Stranger,” “In the Mexican Labyrinth,” “The Masks of Mexico,” and more.

  The stories they submitted were all different, with many common themes: identity, misunderstanding, risk, solitude, confusion, often in the
long shadow of the United States. They were fluent, confident, some experimental in style, all of them arresting. All argued against stereotypes, many depicted the private lives of individuals, in some cases extraordinary people, or unusual scenes. Death was featured often, along with awkwardness, loneliness, lost love, violence, insult, and the satisfactions and inconveniences of being Mexican.

  Many of the students in the taller were writers of considerable skill and accomplishment, widely published in Mexico. But only one of them had a reputation—well deserved—in North America and Europe. This was Guadalupe Nettel. Three of her books had been translated into English: a memoir, The Body Where I Was Born, about confronting the possibility of blindness; a novel of inconvenient love affairs, After the Winter; and a collection of short stories, Natural Histories. In a story in Natural Histories, a Mexican scientist, who teaches in the US and Europe, “would often say that people only gain recognition in Mexico when they make a successful career for themselves abroad.” This had been the case for her: having won prizes and been translated into English and French, Guadalupe became known in Mexico. It’s true of writers in many other countries, who, for self-esteem as well as to make a living, need the authority of foreign approval.

  The condition of being a stranger, an experience of solitude and loneliness, figured in the most successful stories. The stranger in Julieta García González’s story was a man in a restaurant. The narrator, a lonely woman, walks into the place, sees this handsome young man, and says, “Hello, babe! How are you? I missed you!” The man is stunned and embarrassed, but invites the woman to sit with him. The woman asks for a drink of wine. She is comforted by his presence, his odor. “That meant he could also smell me: the traces of unhappiness . . . that he could somehow perceive the six months I was trying to leave behind.”

  He asks, “How are you, honey?” and she is befuddled. They clink glasses. She says, “Did you miss me?” Her fantasy of approaching a stranger “as if we were friends.”

  The man plays the game, they talk, drink some more, then the man says, “Shall we go?” When they leave, the woman cautions him, “Don’t tell me your name.” The man says the same. He asks for a hug. A passionate embrace, but brief: he departs and does not look back. The woman’s arm burns where he had touched her, “like a rash. It lingered—and I liked it.”

  Another stranger, Claudia Muzzi, wrote of her visit to Newnan, Georgia, where she introduced herself as an editor, hoping to write a piece about the latest breast cancer treatments. In her tour of a “luxurious” cancer treatment center she notices the patients’ faces, “too ill to reflect the presence of an intruder, a sort of ailment tourist, a vulture.” After becoming lost and delayed in a walk, she returns and is treated offhandedly, as a stranger: “The staff had long surpassed their smiling hours”—the Mexican visitor rebuffed on her return.

  In Guadalupe Nettel’s “El Cuartito”—“The Small Room”—Mexican immigrants are strangers, interrogated on the US border. “Since childhood, I’ve spent so many hours in US customs queues that I know that the wait can be long and exhausting . . . Everything seemed deliberately designed to foment despair. It’s a lottery . . .” In the misery and delay, the thought: “The northern border is a wound that pains all Mexicans.” As for the indignity of the interrogation, “Every human being should experience it at least once, so as to know what others go through.”

  Not long after I read Guadalupe’s story, I read the works she’d written that had been translated into English: her memoir, The Body Where I Was Born, and her story collection, Natural Histories. The memoir was beautifully wrought, deeply personal, and affecting; the stories I found astonishing and original—of people existing adjacent to animals that weirdly and accurately reflected their lives: fish, cats, a snake, and in the last tale a fungus. What impressed me was the wide experience disclosed in the stories, of love and marriage (generally disastrous) and of travel (beautifully observed). And I was struck by how cosmopolitan Guadalupe and many of the others were, since Mexico City was connected to the world, perhaps more to the big world than to the hard-up hinterland.

  The gringo in a small village in Oaxaca in Michael Sledge’s story does not realize how alien he is until the July celebration of Lunes de Cerro, Monday on the Hill, when the whole town of five hundred families gathers to eat and drink together. The fiesta is raucous, men dressed as women, wearing wigs and masks. The men in drag pounce on the drunken men, spin them around, then move on. When the fiesta becomes rowdy, the narrator is grabbed by a masked woman and they dance pleasantly, but then the mask comes off. It is Felix, the narrator’s gardener, an intimate friend. “But the spell was broken. Now that he had shown himself, neither of us could continue dancing, and in fact were slightly embarrassed by the intimacy we suddenly found ourselves in.” They part awkwardly, as strangers.

  The foreign woman in Héctor Orestes Aguilar’s “The Gringa” was Mariana, a Polish refugee. “Tiny, plump, with big green eyes and very white skin,” she has arrived in Mexico to make a career as an artist and photographer. In her grand house she presides over salons. But then another stranger is glimpsed by the narrator, who remembers that as a small boy, during a party, “I saw B. Traven in the living room of Mariana’s main house. I mean I saw half of his body, everything I could see as a little boy, just his brown boots and his khaki pants. I will never forget that all the children there, including me, called him by his nickname, Skipper.”

  This is accurate. Traven’s widow spoke of how her reclusive husband fancied himself a ship’s captain and liked to be called Skipper.

  I could see that being a stranger was a fate many of these students of mine understood well. The stranger in Luisa Reyes Retana’s “Juana Lao” was a woman who, when her grandfather died, found some unopened letters addressed to an uncle who died twenty-seven years earlier, leading her to Cuba and a revelation of her uncle’s deep secret. In “Gringa,” Yael Weiss (writer, translator, and editor) described herself as being Mexican but not looking Mexican—like a gringa, freckled, pale, “a mixture of European, Asian, Native American, with both Jewish and Catholic ancestors.” Connecting with some black rappers in Las Vegas, and using “Mexican” as a way of blending in, “my Mexican identity was pigmenting me for the first time in my life. I started feeling ambiguous, treacherous, an intruder wearing a Mexican alibi.” And, “The new racism against Mexicans made me look brown.”

  This story reminded me of the different faces in the class: a few like gringos, some dark, some Indian, some Spanish, Italian, Eastern European—all sorts. There is no Mexican face.

  Feeling overlooked and disregarded made these writers hyperalert: Rosi Zorrilla in Cuba untangling a misunderstanding, Miriam in a restaurant observing a gringo diner complaining. Maria Pellicer, at the Las Vegas airport, describes a woman just off a plane from England, who falls down drunk in the immigration line and is treated with kindness by the police. Valerie in her apartment recording a sudden hovering helicopter, “like an enormous spider contemplating its prey,” that is targeting some Somali terrorists, holed up with explosives in the next-door flophouse. Mexico City, a world of strangers.

  At its best, teaching is also an experience of learning from your students. In Adán Ramírez Serret’s disquisition on foreign writers, I learned about Jorge Cuesta, who had hosted Aldous Huxley and argued with Octavio Paz. Curious about Cuesta, I looked him up. He was a scientist as well as writer and editor. He married Diego Rivera’s ex-wife, started a magazine, went mad, castrated himself, and, hospitalized, hanged himself, at the age of thirty-eight.

  I knew the name of José Donoso, a Chilean writer who had lived in Mexico and the US, but Abril Castillo’s “Masks” enlarged my understanding. This was a suspenseful account of reading Pilar Donoso’s book about her father, José. On her father’s death, Pilar spent seven years reading his many diaries, in which she found that he belittled her, that he was a bullying egotist, that (though married) he was a closeted homosexual who recorded how he physicall
y assaulted his wife. In one of José’s notebooks an idea is elaborated: the daughter of a famous writer embarks on his biography and, on finishing it, kills herself. Pilar wrote a memoir of her father, Correr el Tupido Velo (Draw a Thick Veil), and two years after finishing it, at the age of forty-four, killed herself. I did not know about this (so-far-untranslated) book, in which another José Donoso diary entry is quoted: “Behind the face of the mask there is never a face. There is always another mask. The masks are you, and the mask below the mask is also you . . . All different masks serve a purpose, you use them because they help you to live . . . You have to defend yourself.”

  I was stimulated and enlightened by the students, the care they took in their stories—most of them in English—and was grateful for their good will, generosity, and good humor. I had forgotten how, with great students, you learned so much. And how in a short time I had made twenty-four friends.

  They were a traveler’s fondest dream—hospitable, informative, and eager to please.

  The Shrine of Santa Muerte

  “What about Santa Muerte?” I asked the group one day. “Our visit to La Capilla?”

  That provoked a silence, then someone said there were many such Holy Death chapels, and Diego said, “We should make a phone call,” and “I don’t think they welcome outsiders.” Then began a huddled discussion of the risks of such a visit.

  Apparently there were many. Though a Santa Muerte chapel in Orizaba, Veracruz, was celebrating its tenth anniversary, and another chapel was to be built in the south of the city, a Santa Muerte shrine in Pachuca had recently been destroyed by the local authorities, enraging the worshipers. The government had targeted some shrines that were associated with drug cartels. As the cult had grown in popularity, so government disapproval had increased.

  Holy Death in her medieval monk’s robe, her yellow skull grinning in the shadow of her loose hood, gripping her wicked scythe in skinny finger bones, was, among other roles, a narco saint. Although the worship of the Bony One (La Huesuda) dates back to pre-Hispanic Mexico, in the seventeenth century the skeletal figure of Saint Death, “vice-regal” and crowned, was carried in Holy Week processions in Oaxaca, “to demonstrate the triumph of death over the Son of God” (I was to see ancient enthroned skeletons in churches in rural Oaxaca). The Santa Muerte cult, in its florid, more macabre form, is more recent, and the present day has seen a great resurgence of followers, especially among criminals. An elaborate Santa Muerte shrine (offerings of fruit, mescal, and money) had been found in 2002 in the house of a Gulf cartel boss, Gilberto García Mena (El June), according to Diego Osorno in his account of cartel violence, The War of the Zetas. Mena’s house was in Guardados de Abajo, a Mexican village that was visible from the riverbank near Roma, Texas, near the border town of Ciudad Alemán. Another connection between the skeletal saint and the drug cartels was the chain of altars stretching for 150 miles along the Ribereña—the south bank of the river—parallel to the border, dozens of shrines dedicated to Holy Death, placed there by the narcos for protection.