On the Plain of Snakes

by Paul Theroux

  Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate is essentially a romantic novel, written with chatty familiarity, blending the occurrences of everyday life—and many recipes—with casual fantasy. The food, the gourmandizing, the specific ingredients in the novel, give it life. What other novel dares to elaborate the making of a dish like champandongo, a sort of layered Latin lasagna. Yet I often have the feeling Esquivel is winking at the reader as she writes, an occasional cuteness that overwhelms her related novel, Swift as Desire. Here, a belated revelation of the clairvoyant Júbilo turns out to be a shaggy dog story. Still, Esquivel has a heightened intensity of observation that seems to me a gift of Mexican women writers, perhaps because as women and nurturers they are forced so often to wait, studying their condition, being patient, existing in suspense. But that patience provokes in them an active inner life and intense emotion; it is a patience that men lack, demanding that you see, rather than persuading you, as Esquivel does, with detail:

  “She stopped grinding, straightened up, and proudly lifted her chest so Pedro could see it better. His scrutiny changed their relationship forever. After that penetrating look that saw through clothes, nothing would ever be the same. Tita saw through her own flesh how fire transformed the elements, how a lump of corn flour is changed into a tortilla, how a soul that hasn’t been warmed by the fire of love is lifeless, like a useless ball of corn flour. In a few moments’ time, Pedro had transformed Tita’s breasts from chaste to experienced flesh, without even touching them.”

  Or: “Instead of eating, she would stare at her hands for hours on end. She would regard them like a baby, marveling that they belonged to her. She could move them however she pleased, yet she didn’t know what to do with them, other than knitting. She had never taken time to stop and think about these things.”

  I had struggled with Carlos Fuentes. He is regarded in the United States as the best-known and perhaps greatest Mexican writer; he lived and taught in the US and made many famous friends—writers and celebrities. A determined partygoer, with homes in London and Paris, as well as an atelier in Mexico City, Fuentes had an undeniable cosmopolitan panache: he was, after all, Mexico’s ambassador to France for a time, and he had the savoir faire to carry out his diplomatic duties. (Not many writers become diplomats, though Washington Irving was our chargé d’affaires in London, and Nathaniel Hawthorne was made American consul in Liverpool as a reward for writing a sycophantic book about President Franklin Pierce.) Fuentes was prolific in many different genres, but seemed to me flawed. His border fictions in The Crystal Frontier are fanciful and unrealized, and his novel Diana, based on his humiliating affair with the actress Jean Seberg, is mawkish and confused, and revealed him as a ludicrous lover, spurned by a psychotic gringa who was two-timing him (so he says) with a Black Panther.

  The Death of Artemio Cruz, said to be his masterpiece, seemed to me a dense and overwritten Mexican version of Citizen Kane (but without any of the film’s bitter humor), a corporate monster fantasizing on his deathbed, often in the future tense, about his enemies. I attempted Terra Nostra, which seemed even worse and, I decided, unreadable. It seemed I was not wrong. Fuentes publicly boasted of this eight-hundred-page novel: “I never think about the reader. Not at all. Terra Nostra is not made for readers . . . When I wrote it I was absolutely certain that nobody would read it, and in fact I wrote it with that in mind . . . I gave myself the luxury of writing a book without readers.”

  His novella about enduring love, Aura, is one of his contributions to Mexican magical realism, though it is in part a pastiche of Henry James’s The Aspern Papers. Fuentes’s essays and pithier observations on Mexican life rang true to me, but I often felt that perhaps the problem was my confusion, not Fuentes’s bombast and opacity, until I read an essay in the New Republic about the man and his work by the Mexican historian, biographer, and literary critic Enrique Krauze.

  In this essay, Krauze declares his responsibility by quoting Albert Camus: “To see nuances and understand, not to dogmatize and confuse.” But then he flicks open his navaja—the lethal Mexican fighting knife—and leaps for the jugular. He calls Fuentes a fraud, a poseur, a “Guerrilla Dandy” (“For the Guerrilla Dandy, there is no frontier between reality and fiction”), someone suffering an identity crisis, out of touch with Mexican life, and overeager to win readers in America with his falsifications. “His work simplifies the country; his view is frivolous, unrealistic, and, all too often, false.” False and unpersuasive, because he spends so little time in Mexico and hobnobs with the A-listers in European and American big cities.

  “In 1950 Mexico City was in the process of taking on the physiognomy of other modern capitals where Fuentes had been,” Krauze writes. “He did not see the need, therefore, to go deeper into the countryside, where the reality of Mexico was more profound. His exploration of the city, although superficial, was incessant and orgiastic. Like a bedazzled and perplexed tourist, he lived the city of leisure, the nocturnal city, the show-biz city.”

  To me, Fuentes’s obsession with grandiosity seems harmless, naïve, and somewhat lovable. In “Spoils,” a story in The Crystal Frontier, the main character, Dionisio, a chef studying in the US, conjectures, “How many Mexicans spoke decent English? Dionisio knew of only two, Jorge Castañeda and Carlos Fuentes.” Another story is dedicated to Castañeda.

  I wrote a long, jeering review in the New York Times of his Diana—the Jean Seberg fiasco of unrequited ardor—when it came out in 1995, and decided it was merely childish. I began in this way: “Sexual postures can look so funny and vulnerable that the very notion of the distinguished author of this inch-from-the-truth novel, Carlos Fuentes . . . engaged in buccal coition with an American actress in a hotel in Mexico City is irresistible to the point where it is almost possible to overlook the book’s excesses and delusions. That Diana: The Goddess Who Hunts Alone also seems a seedy form of self-parody is one of the crueler wounds the author inflicts on himself, but this is a risk you run when you embark on autobiographical fiction. Another issue is the question of tone: are you boasting or complaining? Yet another is pomposity: ‘I began to be haunted by the idea that Diana was a work of art that had to be destroyed to be possessed.’ (Trust a philanderer to have a fancy prose style.)” And so on for another nine hundred words, to “an entirely humorless and strangely sclerotic novel.”

  But Fuentes’s refusal to go deeper into “the countryside, where the reality of Mexico was more profound” (as Krauze wrote) was one of the objections I had to so much of Mexican fiction. Fuentes saw himself as the Mexican Balzac, yet “he never came to know the country that would be the central theme of his work. He thought he could resolve the deafness of his origins by turning it inside out: history, society, the life of the city, would be assimilated to the raging tumult of its voices. Balzac’s characters still survive in the literary and popular memory of Europe. Nobody in Mexico remembers the characters of Fuentes.” Resembling one of his villains, Fuentes is “a macho, a stud, an Artemio Cruz who treats words like whores.” Krauze concludes, “Carlos Fuentes . . . has created only one extraordinary character: Carlos Fuentes.”

  That crack seems intended as abuse, but the more you know about Fuentes, the more tempting the idea that Fuentes’s life was vast and rich, his circle of friends luminous and accomplished, and his family life fractured and tragic—his youthful adored son and daughter apparent suicides, six years apart. Asked about them, Fuentes’s reply was stoical: “Ellos me acompañan cuando escribo” (They accompany me when I write). A full biography of Fuentes has not been written, but it would be, as Krauze unconsciously suggests, an extraordinary account of a man in the throes of the last infirmity of a noble mind.

  Fuentes, who seems to have loved the limelight and charming his interviewers, inspired this besotted observation from a New York Times reporter in 1982: “Mr. Fuentes flashes a matinee idol smile. He has dark good looks and the easy grace of one descended from a solid line of bankers, merchants, and landed gentry. The son of a dipl
omat, he grew up in Washington . . . He is an aristocrat in style, a revolutionary in thought.”

  Providing ammo to his enemies, Fuentes confided in this interview (meant to promote his play Orchids in the Moonlight, which was being produced in Cambridge, Massachusetts), “My work is probably becoming less and less Mexican . . . I’ve lived outside my country for a long time. Maybe I’ve paid my nationalistic dues by now.”

  Krauze and others seized on such pomposities. His attack was merciless, and his urban sniping was cruel—good fun for the spectator, painful for Fuentes. But since Octavio Paz was the owner of Krauze’s magazine, Vuelta, it is perhaps understandable that Krauze was twisting the knife to please his patron, Fuentes’s rival. Once a Mexican intellectual has done violence to another Mexican intellectual, nothing remains of the carnage to anatomize. They are like cartel assassins in this respect.

  Fuentes was faulted for spending so little time in Mexico, for teaching in American universities, for living and writing in Paris. But this travel and foreign residence is a characteristic of many other Mexican writers. The links with Spain are age-old. A great number of the male writers besides Fuentes and Paz have been diplomats, the foreign service a form of liberation for Mexican intellectuals. Paz in Paris was a friend of Samuel Beckett, Fuentes in Paris was a friend of Malraux and Mitterrand, and in New York of William Styron. But the younger writers are the true cosmopolitans, taking advantage of the way the world has contracted, beginning as exchange students, backpackers, and tourists, chasing experience. It seemed remarkable to me how widely and well Mexican writers travel. All but one of the writers in the taller I conducted in Mexico City had been to the US, and most of them had been to Europe.

  As I had noticed in my taller, what impressed me in Guadalupe Nettel’s Natural Histories was the wide experience expressed 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.

  Mexican writers are infatuated with Mexico City, but you can’t blame them: it is like a separate country where every chilango’s back is turned to the countryside. So it seemed that my students and my friends were dealing with the new realities, and were often looking at their big city or beyond Mexico. But this also meant that the Mexico I was seeing was underrepresented in Mexican fiction, so I put the books aside, got into my car, and drove down the road again.

  The Inframundo

  In Santa María Ixcatlán, and earlier in San Dionisio Ocotepec—where I had spent time with the mourners at their feast and with the mezcalero Crispin—I’d felt I’d driven slowly down a back road into a village so small and unregarded it was like being in the underworld, the inframundo of Mexican traditional belief. Of course that is fanciful: the villages were on the map, they were productive in their way, with cottage industries like weaving or sandal making, and all of them celebrated the holidays, venerated the dead, were lavish with their weddings and funerals, and engaged in masquerades.

  But it is easy in Mexico to leave the main road, take a side road, turn into a narrow track, and wind up in the past, and the past often seems like an underworld. What troubles the poor villager in Mexico (and in Africa and elsewhere) is what troubled the villagers of the distant past: the difficulty of finding firewood for cooking, or grazing land for the goats, or transport to the market, or the scarcity of water, or the maddening entanglement of debt. Of course, most people know the burden of debt, but what makes the indebted Mexican villager exceptional are the tiny amounts involved in what is a matter of life and death.

  I drove to the village of Santa Cruz Papalutla, not far from San Jerónimo, and in a sequence of narrowing roads found myself in another underworld. Here the activity was bamboo weaving—bamboo grew wild in canebrakes; it was harvested, dried, and split, then made into baskets. Santa Cruz was also the past, a village of horses and carts, a man pushing a mule-drawn plow into the dry ground, opening a furrow, breaking clods of earth in a field he’d soon plant with garlic, the other income-producing activity in the village. And boys in some horse-drawn carts rode them, flicking whips, standing like charioteers.

  In a family compound on a back lane, watched over by three elderly women, I asked to see Magdalena, to whom I’d had a formal introduction. A young woman who introduced herself as Mónica said, “She is my mother. She will be back soon.”

  We talked awhile near the weaving table—strands and strips of cane, partly finished baskets, and the clutter of drying bamboo. One of Mónica’s three small children kicked a ball against a rain barrel. The old women, in the shady corner of the open yard, only appeared to be sitting in judgment; in fact, they were fascinated by the gringo who had just blundered into the compound and tripped against the sleeping dog.

  “My husband was in the US for seven years,” Mónica said. “He was feeling insecure there, and at the same time his father was sick. So five years ago he came back.”

  “Does he miss the work?”

  “A bit. Most people come back from the States and find the work here in the fields too arduous and poorly paid.”

  I thought of the man I had just seen in the field struggling along a furrow with his old-fashioned plow blade, smacking his mule with a long switch.

  “They usually want to go back to the States,” Mónica said.

  “Have you been there?”

  “To the border, Nuevo Laredo,” she said. “I worked six months with a family, looking after two children. I came back because I was separated from my family. And the pay was not much. I earned 1,500 pesos [$83] a month in Nuevo Laredo. Here, for the same work, I would get 1,000 [$55].”

  Mónica excused herself to go and calm her small son, who was kicking a ball and perhaps upsetting the three old women.

  Soon Magdalena arrived—she’d been to the market—and, thinking I’d come to buy a basket, she showed me some in various sizes and described how she’d designed them. She had three children, the eldest thirty-six, the youngest twenty-six. Mónica was thirty-two, and Magdalena herself was fifty-two, so she’d had her first child at the age of sixteen—not so unusual in the underworld of Mexico.

  The baskets were beautifully made, the sunlight dazzling the simple objects in the compound, but I sensed a melancholy in Magdalena, the slow solemn way she handled the baskets, her head tipped to the side, her sad eyes, a grimness at her mouth, the way she sighed when she got up to look for another basket, a heaviness in demeanor.

  She was deeply in debt, though it took a while for me to get to that delicate subject.

  “I’d like to go to Texas,” she said. “I have a friend in Laredo. I’d find work there easily. I get along with everyone. They call me Aunt. I’d cook for a family. They’d pay me 3,500 pesos [$195] a month.” She fell silent. “My main reason is the economy here.”

  “How long would you stay there?”

  “No more than eight months, because I have responsibilities here.” She glanced at the three old women—her mother, her aunts, perhaps. “But I want to do it with an official permit. I don’t want to cross illegally.”

  “How do you get a permit?”

  “I went to the government office here. They help migrants with temporary work permits.” She went slack and heavy and sad again. “You see, I had to borrow 70,000 pesos because of my husband’s illness. It was kidney stones. He had so many they had to operate.”

  “That’s a lot of money,” I said. It was almost $4,000.

  “I’m broke now. I owe money. And there’s the interest on the loan,” she said. “While I wait for the permit, I am making baskets and weaving.”

  “How did you learn to weave?” I asked, wishing to lighten the conversation.

  “My parents taught me how to weave cane,” she said, and became sorrowful again. “No one is interested anymore. My children don’t do it. Look at this basket.” It was about a foot in diameter, w
ith a handle, a small wastebasket, perhaps. “This takes two days to make, sometimes two and a half. I sell it for 220 pesos. That’s 100 pesos a day”—$5.50. “So I supplement my income by cooking for people in town. But there’s a lot of competition for cooks.”

  “How do you repay the loan?”

  “Monthly. I pay 2,200 every month for the loan. Sixty is the principal and the rest is interest.”

  It was a bank loan, at a high rate of interest. It seemed to me impossible that Magdalena would ever clear the debt, since so much was needed for the interest.

  “What happens if you don’t have the money?”

  “If you don’t pay, they send lawyers. They take things from you.”

  “What sorts of things?”

  “They take your refrigerator. They take appliances. They make a public spectacle. It is terrible. I would lose status. No one would trust me again.”

  While we talked, another old woman joined the three in the shady corner, and two other women—younger, whom I took to be Magdalena’s other daughters—came from inside the house, the six of them watching Magdalena and me. They had the anxious air of dependents, people needing to be looked after; and of course somewhere in the house was Magdalena’s husband, convalescing from his surgery.

  In a low voice Magdalena said, “I can’t tell my family I want to go.”

  “This is a beautiful basket,” I said, picking up the small one with the handle. “How much?”

  “Whatever you wish to give.”

  I gave her $40, which was four times what she’d said it was worth earlier. She crushed the money in her hand, enclosing it in her fist, and looked burdened.