by Paul Theroux
I went back to the chilly guesthouse, found a hard chair in the disorder of the kitchen, sat under a fluorescent bulb at a table littered with sticky jars, and ate a burned quesadilla. Then wearily I groped to my cement cell and lay on a slumping mattress with filthy sheets, under a damp mildewed blanket, my head on a stained pillow, and slept like a baby.
El Señor de las Tres Caídas
I was woken in the dark of my cold and dirty cubicle by singing somewhere in town, unmistakably lilting and liturgical—a call to prayer, as it turned out. Sledge was already up, waiting by the front door. It was five-thirty on a dark morning on the Ixcatec plateau.
“The church opens at six,” he said. “But it closes an hour later.”
I yawned and said, “My room is awful.”
“That’s the best room in the place.”
“How so?”
“You have the one with the bathroom.”
That small, dank, stone closet, with the wet floor and the dripping pipe and the stinking hopper.
We walked to the church of Santa María in semidarkness. Hurrying, I became slightly breathless, affected by the village’s altitude, which was over six thousand feet. The streets were empty, not even a mule cart. A goat was browsing by the roadside.
“This village makes me think of Pedro Páramo,” Sledge said.
“I really wonder about that book,” I said.
At the top of a little hill at the end of the road stood the white church, a high wall around it, a tree in the churchyard, one of the few trees hereabouts. A little plaque at the gate was lettered Nunga, the Ixcateco word for church. Offices, stores, even the local jail, Ndachika, and the municipal public toilets—Dii for Men, C’a for Women—had such plaques near the entrance, giving the name in Ixcateco, or Xwja (Sh-wa), its proper name. But the language was on the verge of extinction.
As we approached the church, which was dedicated to the Virgin Mary, the front door swung open, a custodian dragging it with two hands. Another custodian stood near the door, toggling light switches. It was early enough that the interior was still being illuminated, and after a few minutes was brightly lit, the altars blazing, several chapels devoted to various virgins, another to Saint Michael. The church was newly painted; the light intensified the tang of fresh paint. Except for one man, kneeling in a rear pew, praying, the church was empty.
While Sledge examined the paintings, I sat in the front pew, trying to get a look at the object of veneration, the figure of the fallen Christ. It was lodged in a rectangular niche behind the altar, obscured by the tabernacle and a row of flickering electric candles.
The custodian who had opened the door was watching me.
I went to him and whispered, “I would like to go closer. May I?”
“Yes—this way,” he said, and gestured to a passageway that circled behind the altar.
As reverently as I could, because I was being severely observed by the custodians I took to be vergers, I shuffled along the tiles and up the stairs to the raised platform where the figure was displayed behind glass. It took me a little while to understand the attitude of the figure, its posture was so odd, a four-foot-long prone carving in a red brocade robe. My first impression was a mass of twisted cloth and the glint of gold objects. Numerous gold rings, chain bracelets, gilded filigree brooches, and medals had been pinned to the robe and to the tapestry behind the fallen Christ: not trinkets but votive offerings.
Christ lay on his stomach, half raised from the fulcrum of his hip joint, his body contorted, one bloody elbow a pivot, his agonized face twisted and uplifted, his eyes staring upward to the heavens. The eyes were the key feature, tormented, seeking help and strength, Christ arrested in a moment of crisis: the ninth station, the Lord of the Three Falls, under the weight of the cross, just before he is kicked by the Roman soldiers and rises again to continue to his crucifixion. The figure seemed to dramatize both suffering and hope. The gold tokens pinned to the robe I took to be offerings donated by pilgrims who had either received help or were seeking it.
The window was so small, the bloodstained figure filling it, and in such a tight space, that it could only be seen in close-up, by squeezing along the narrow passage and up the stairs and pressing your face against the glass to contemplate the tableau of torture.
Sledge had followed me, looking reflective, and like me fearful of not seeming properly pious.
The custodian-vergers stood near the altar as we descended, as though to gauge the extent of our piety.
“Muy impresionante,” Sledge said.
“Muchos milagros?” I asked.
“Yes, many miracles,” one of the men said.
“For the pilgrims,” the other man said. “Not so much for the town.”
“What sort of miracles?”
“Wishes granted. Health restored. Ailments cured.”
And as the hour for viewing had almost expired, the custodians led us to the doorway of the church.
I had more questions: How long had the figure been in the church? Had it—as local people said—been found in a field? Could anyone verify that although many struggled, no one could lift it from where it lay abandoned until a man from Santa María had picked it up? Was the rumor true that it bled from some of its wounds and soaked its robe, and that occasionally the wounds healed?
“It came many years ago” was one answer. It was true that only a man from Santa María Ixcatlán could lift it. Yes, now and then the statue bled, and yes, when cracks were detected, the cracks healed. And the beard needed to be trimmed from time to time, because it was still growing.
It was not a statue, not a carving; El Señor de las Tres Caídas was a living thing, able to bleed, heal, weep, and grow hair. And this was why it commanded the utmost veneration, because it was alive. A living Christ lay on the altar of the church of the Virgin Mary in this remote village.
The most complete account of its origin was given by the American scholar Michael Hironymous in his 2007 dissertation, based on earlier research and his own interviews. The Texas scholar had lived in the village for extended periods in the late 1990s and quizzed the older locals. The statue had been found by a peasant in a field near Tilapa, in southern Puebla state, sometime in the 1840s. The peasant first believed it to be a wounded man, but seeing that it was a Christ figure, he tried to pick it up. In spite of his efforts he could not budge it. A priest was summoned, people from surrounding villages came to wonder at it, and perhaps to move it. Many tried. No one could shift it. The priest anointed it and blessed it. Then four men from distant Santa María Ixcatlán showed up and easily lifted it, seeming to prove that it belonged to them.
Carrying the figure along the banks of the Río Salado on their way home, they passed the corpses of some men who had been hanged. The proximity of the Christ figure miraculously brought the men back from the dead. The men carrying the figure fell three times on their way to the village—the places where they fell still marked by crosses. A further miracle of El Señor occurred nearer the village: “As he approached Ixcatlán, it is said that all the trees bowed and shed their leaves to carpet the path in his honor.”
For about 175 years, on the fourth Friday of Lent, the village had held a weeklong fiesta in honor of El Señor, with Masses and band concerts. This was when the pilgrims arrived, from distant places (“even from the United States”), some of them journeying on foot to mortify themselves. Pilgrims participated in the fiesta, paying for Masses or flowers, some of them carrying wooden crosses up and down the main street. The figure of El Señor was removed from its niche in that week and carried in a litter from street to street, with fireworks at night.
Though the church was dedicated to the Virgin Mary, it was El Señor who was the guiding presence in the village, and the fiesta was a chance for Santa María Ixcatlán to generate income, renting rooms to pilgrims and selling them food—the sort of food I ate in the village, baby goat stew, tripe soup, beans, eggs, salsa, avocados, tortillas, coffee, and mezcal.
But whenever the villagers spoke of the pilgrims, they did so with visible restraint and a grudging tone, letting drop the fact that the village could not really accommodate so many visitors at once; that in that week the pilgrims were everywhere, camped in fields, picnicking in the plaza, and sprawled at the roadsides; that when they finally went away, having said their prayers and worshiped El Señor, they left litter all over the place. This last detail was vividly recalled, more than the business of food selling, or the stalls of drinks, or the Masses, or the fireworks. It was the annoyance of having to clean up after the pilgrims departed.
“Basura”—and a deep sigh—“en todos lados.”
Trash—everywhere.
Artisanal Mezcal
The palenque of Alvarado Álvarez lay in a deep valley east of the village, on a steep gravel road. On the way I saw a small girl carrying a hat and a basket of maize. Sledge, driving his pickup truck, was going slowly on the bad road, so it was easy to stop and say hello. Now I saw that it was not a small girl but an old withered woman in a shawl, no more than four and a half feet tall. Smiling, she seemed friendly, eager to know where I was from and pleased when I complimented her on her newly made hat.
“I am going to the miller’s to grind this maize into flour,” she said. “I will pay with this hat.”
We continued on our way to the lip of the valley, in sight of the granite walls of Loma de los Muertos, the Hillock of the Dead, where I could see terraces, and meadows at the base of the valley. We walked down a long path to a terrace, to a mezcal operation that would have been easily recognized by a Mixteco living long ago, when mezcal was made the same way: by smashing the agave in a tub with a four-foot pestle (marso) and fermenting the bagasso in sacks sewn of uncured cowhide.
“This is the tradition here,” Alvarado said. “Not vats of wood or stone sinks.” The cowhide was slippery and so heavy with liquid, the swollen belly stretched and strained the lashed frame of its rack. “The other thing—when it ferments, it cures the skin. And you can taste the difference.”
Alvarado employed eight workers for the pounding of the agave piños and the distillation in clay pitchers (jarras) and pots (monteras), the funnel made of an agave spike. It was all done by hand using simple tools—machetes, pestle, pitchforks, animal skins.
“An old method,” I said.
“Two hundred years old,” he said. “I inherited this from my great-grandfather.”
I tasted some of the product. It was 46 percent alcohol, Alvarado said.
“See, it’s sweeter, not so aggressive as the usual kind.”
He made ten thousand liters a year, selling it directly to bars in Oaxaca for 250 pesos a liter, about $13.50. This was good money. A family of five in the village lived on an average of 700 pesos a month, about $37, which was, as I learned later, much less than a family of the same size in rural Kenya. The average monthly income for Mexico was ten times that, but this rural area was at the periphery of the economy, the poorest people in the country.
Slightly dazed after sampling the mezcal, we left the palenque and, Sledge still driving, made our way through the village. We went past the church and the small plaza, under the archway and up the slopes of agave and palms, to the windy plateau, surrounded by mountains: to the east El Mirador, to the north Gandudo, to the southeast Peña de Gavilán and Montón de Piedras, rugged descriptions of stone ridges and ravines.
The landscape seemed, on this return trip, even starker than before, slopes and fields of smooth, wind-scoured limestone, no soil at all except in the occasional acres that had been desperately planted with pine trees. The villages of Río Poblano and Río Blanco looked poorer than Santa María Ixcatlán, and now and then we saw people plodding along the road. Four of them we picked up. They climbed into the bed of the truck, because the back seat of the crew cab was filled with finished woven baskets that we had agreed to take to Oaxaca.
“This road doesn’t get easier,” Sledge said, driving slowly, dodging potholes.
We talked about what we had seen, the palm weavers, the pre-Lenten procession, the El Señor figure, the palenque. “We asked a lot of questions.” And he reminded me of the story he’d heard of the strangers who had come to just such a remote village and asked too many questions.
When we got to the paved road, and then the village of San Juan Bautista Coixtlahuaca, we parked, and the riders climbed out to thank us, and made a ritual gesture of offering to pay for the ride.
“Thank you, no money is necessary,” I said. “But can you answer some questions instead?”
One of them, an older woman, was Epifania Gutiérrez, about forty, perhaps younger.
“I live and work in Río Poblano,” she said. “I am a housewife, and I also work at home. I have six children. My work is making hats. I get seventy pesos for twelve hats. It takes eight days to make that many hats, but of course I don’t work all day at it.”
This came to just under $4 for eight days’ work.
“A person here buys them from me. Then I walk back to Río Poblano.”
Epifania’s oldest daughter, Angelina, was seventeen. She was accompanying her mother on this cloudy day on the plateau.
“What do you do, Angelina?”
“I help my mother.”
The younger of the two men was José Luis Figueroa. He had three children.
“I am a campesino,” he said, when I asked his work. “I have cows. When I have a need for money, I sell a cow.” A small cow could bring 450 pesos, about $25.
The older man was probably in his sixties. He wore a battered hat. He said he had six children, but they were married. He was a grandfather.
“What do you do?” I asked.
“I am a campesino.”
“How do you live?”
“I keep little goats”—chivitas.
“Do you eat them or sell them?”
“We eat them. We also sell them.”
He earned the same for a goat as José Luis Figueroa did for a small cow.
“I sell maybe six a year.”
“What is the name of this pueblo, señor?” I knew the name, but I thought I would ask, for a particular reason.
“It is San Juan Bautista Coixtlahuaca,” he said. “See, the old convent.”
The broken church was vast and hollowed out and unvisited, monumental in this tiny place, one large belfry, the entryway enclosing doors that were thirty feet high, with an inner courtyard and cloisters, similar in scale to the church in Yanhuitlán, which I’d visited on my way south and was not far from here.
“What is the meaning of ‘Coixtlahuaca’?”
“El llano de los serpientes.”
The plain of snakes.
Mexicans on Mexico
I wondered, as a writer and reader, but also as a traveler, do you learn anything of value about Mexican life by reading Mexican novels? Why spend all this time on back roads when you could stay home with your feet up, traveling in fiction, and discover Mexico that way?
In Santa María Ixcatlán, Sledge had said, “This village makes me think of Pedro Páramo.”
When Mexican writers are asked to name an important Mexican novel of the past sixty years or so, they usually suggest Pedro Páramo (1955) by Juan Rulfo, rather than, say, any of the thirty-six works of fiction by Carlos Fuentes, or the ten of Jorge Ibargüengoitia, or the sixteen of Martín Luis Guzmán. In other words, none of the big urban novels, but a small rural one of a far-off ghost town. Pedro Páramo is a story of futility, deception, decay, and death, which is not so surprising, since these are the enduring themes in Mexican writing, and it seemed to me that both in tradition and popular culture Mexicans were half in love with death, always playing with a human skull as though it was a doll—and it often is, a gaily painted grinning head, or a skeleton costumed as a doll, or a skull of smooth sculpted sugar, made for the fiesta.
“The Mexican . . . is familiar with death, jokes about it, caresses it, sleeps with it, celebrates it; it is one of his favorite toys and hi
s most steadfast love,” Octavio Paz writes in The Labyrinth of Solitude, with his customary hyperbole. Paz is the most acute of Mexican writers on Mexican life: any observation you might make about Mexico—life or society, identity or belief—has probably been said with greater eloquence in Paz’s Labyrinth or his poems. He goes on, “True, there is perhaps as much fear in his attitude as that of others, but at least death is not hidden away: he looks at it face to face, with impatience, disdain or irony. ‘If they are going to kill me tomorrow, let them kill me right away.’” And: “Our contempt for death is not at odds with the cult we have made of it. Death is present in our fiestas, our games, our loves and our thoughts. To die and kill are ideas that rarely leave us . . . Death revenges us against life, strips it of all its vanities and pretensions and converts it into what it really is: a few neat bones and a dreadful grimace.”
He might have added, Is it any wonder that Mexicans are so fatalistic about the drug gangs and beheadings?
Paz says “death,” not “dying.” Dying is another matter altogether, something to be avoided because it implies pain—an anguished, agonizing process, sometimes lengthy, not a sudden bitter end, but an often prolonged terminal condition. Yet death as a certainty and a promise is the eternal Mexican specter at the feast. Paz is Mexican in his commitment to pessimism: “The reason death cannot frighten us is that ‘life has cured us of fear.’”
Pedro Páramo, the novel of death, of ghosts, of apparitions, is set in Comala, a remote village in a barren landscape, which is a sort of inframundo, the underworld that parts of Mexico sometimes seem. As a traveler in rural towns and villages, I was fascinated by a novel with this setting. I ended up reading it half a dozen times, with growing bewilderment and diminishing pleasure. But the novel is regarded as a Mexican classic, and has been extravagantly praised by Jorge Luis Borges. Gabriel García Márquez said that reading it inspired him to conceive the form of One Hundred Years of Solitude, emboldening him in his excursions in juxtaposed realism and fantasy in his fictional Colombian town of Macondo.
