On the Plain of Snakes

by Paul Theroux

  “This man over there,” Juan said of an elderly Mexican man wearing a beret. “That is Pablo González Casanova, a sociologist and radical reformer. He was president of the National University of Mexico in the 1970s. But he was too radical for them. And he’s still radical. How old do you think he is?”

  “No idea.”

  “He’s ninety-six,” Juan whispered. “An hombre de juicio. Just like you, querido amigo.”

  Nothing happened for about twenty minutes, during which the talking in the auditorium produced a dull, engine-like howl you hear in most theaters before the curtain rises.

  Then, in an instant, there was a squeezing of the air, a hush, then silence.

  It was hard to imagine a great hall of chattering people suddenly ceasing—and intensifying the hush was a concentration of everyone’s attention on the right-hand side of the stage, where five masked men had mounted the stairs and were taking seats.

  Four of the masked men were hardly five feet tall in their boots, gnome-like in thick black jackets, a few with peasants’ black wide-brimmed hats jammed on their heads, the others with brimmed or beaked camouflage headgear—bush hats. The fifth man was stout and much taller than the others, also dressed in black. What I took to be an armband was a torn sleeve around his biceps, his red shirt showing through. His brown cloth cap, a red star sewn to the front, was sensationally crushed and faded. Only his eyes showed in his mask, which was not the “ski mask” I had expected, but the sort of hood I associated with executioners in wicked folktales—the beefy masked man holding a cleaver-like ax. But this man held a notebook. Inserted in his mask at the level of his mouth was a briar pipe. His arms were heavy with his black sleeves, his back and shoulders were thick, and he was half turned away, talking with his men, who looked even smaller in their chairs, their arms folded across their chests, listening intently. This big man was Subcomandante Marcos.

  It was not the man but the mask that silenced the big hall. “Everything behind the mask is mysterious,” Elias Canetti writes in Crowds and Power. “When the mask is taken seriously . . . no one must know what lies behind it. A mask expresses much, but hides even more. Above all it separates. Charged with a menace, which must not be precisely known—one element of which, indeed, is the fact that it cannot be known—it comes close to the spectator, but remains clearly separated from him. It threatens him with the secret dammed up behind it.”

  In the dead silence the whole room seemed to be holding its breath. There was no applause, not a murmur. Marcos seated himself and opened and flattened the notebook. There was apprehension, as when a whale surfaces and rises—as in Moby-Dick, where Melville speaks of the lovely tail and body of the whale and, “Thou shalt see my back parts, my tail, he seems to say, but my face shall not be seen. But I cannot completely make out his back parts; and hint what he will about his face, I say again he has no face.”

  “Compañeros y compañeras, brothers and sisters,” he began, speaking out of his mask. “Welcome to our Conversatorio.” And he glanced at Juan Villoro and welcomed him with an unusual legal term, as “mi hermano bajo protesta”—my undercover brother.

  He spoke easily, not reading but as though in conversation, using an informal chatting shorthand, saying compas instead of compañeros. But this was so sudden—his bursting on the stage—his physical presence overwhelmed his words. We were not listening at first; we were watching. And this, I realized, was the aura of a charismatic figure with a rich history. The dazzle of one’s first encounter—mine, at any rate—was deafening.

  “Let me introduce Marichuy,” he said, “our sister, our healer from Tuxpan,” and as he spoke, praising her, the impassive middle-aged woman in her embroidered blouse sat with her hands folded, staring at us.

  Still seated, Marichuy began to speak of her bid to be president of Mexico—her struggle to obtain signatures, how the system worked against her. I was lost in the details of this, but it seemed a certain computer program or a specific phone was necessary in order for someone to register a signature online. I also thought how most of the telephone accounts in Mexico were the property of one man, Carlos Slim, who owned the monopoly Telmex. Marichuy said she had gotten 300,000 signatures.

  “Not enough,” said Marcos, interrupting, not ranting but speaking reasonably, “and you know why? Because the system is rigged.”

  His remarks—asides, really—were so offhand I could barely understand them. But his eyes, flashing in the slit of his mask, were expressive, active, readable, like those of a Muslim woman in a yashmak. “She is a healer, a traditional curandera,” he said at one point. “She healed her mother.” These were interjections. “She belongs to the town of Guadalajara—they recognize traditional healing.”

  To loud applause, Marichuy sat down, and Marcos called out, “Where’s Alicia? Alicia, please stand up.”

  A young woman sitting near me at the front stood, smiling shyly.

  “She is a great compa. They were going to put her in jail. But she fooled them. She is going to college instead.”

  As Alicia sat, Marcos resumed, talking about the system that had defeated Marichuy. And perhaps because he was masked, preventing him from showing any facial expressions, his gestures were expressive, his hands and arms chopping and slicing, pointing with his tobacco pipe, his tone cajoling, beseeching, sounding at times like someone bargaining.

  “They think we’re romantics,” he said, reading quotations from political journalists. “Zapatistas—romantics? Not at all. We represent the forgotten people, the heart of the country. Not so, Obrador. And here is an example of the schizophrenia of Mexican political power,” he went on, reading. “Here, Obrador says that Marichuy shouldn’t be a candidate—that she’d be a bad candidate. And later on, after Obrador is sure she doesn’t have enough signatures, when she is no longer a threat to him, he says how she would have been a true candidate of the people. Hypocrisy!”

  He spoke at length and fluently about women. “Women make the decisions, women are the backbone of our cause,” but, he said, “I don’t know what goes on among women behind closed doors. Maybe they get manicures and talk about Hegel’s dialectic!”

  The laughter in the hall encouraged him further, and he seemed to be enjoying himself, in full flow, a torrent of denunciations and asides. I found it so hard to concentrate I could not take notes.

  “Never mind the Right, never mind the conservatives,” he was saying. “We know what they’re going to say. But the voices of the Left were the strongest against Marichuy’s candidacy. We had no idea how many people would resist her—people who should have known better, who should have supported her. She’s indigenous and a hard worker and mother, they say. But they refuse to talk about her as a wife”—because her role as a diligent, indigenous mother was regarded by macho Mexicans as a hindrance, but being a strong wife amply qualified her. “Seeing Marichuy as a wife, young women no longer regard the family as an impediment to the struggle. Being a wife in a strong family would make any woman a better president.

  “What does she have to do to qualify for president—how do we change? What is enough?” he asked, his voice piercing the hall. “The forty-three students being killed were not enough. The women who have disappeared were not enough. We would need a hundred thousand people dead in the streets to have enough visibility, so that people would finally say, ‘Let her run. Let poor little [pobrecita] Marichuy run.’”

  He spoke of the dynamics between men and women. “Now I’m going to speak badly of women,” he said sarcastically, and went on to describe powerful, clear-thinking women whose fate in life is having to deal with egotistical, manipulative men. And with a sort of play-acting, he teased the youths in his movement.

  “Young Zapatistas—you know what they like?” He mumbled inaudibly into the microphone. “They like” mumble-mumble. “They really like” mumble-mumble. Finally, with reluctance, “They like—reggaeton. There, you made me say it!”

  Annoyed, as any sixty-one-year-old freedom fighter
would be, having liberated a Mexican state and then being forced to listen to the musical preferences of this freedom, a squashy combination of Jamaican reggae, Puerto Rican hip-hop, and the songs of Daddy Yankee (Ramón Luis Ayala), self-crowned King of Reggaeton, among them the hit “Despacito.”

  Marcos stood and called to the back of the auditorium, “Now I’d like to introduce our compañeras. Come here!”

  For the next ten minutes or more, a hundred women in knitted hood-like masks walked slowly down the narrow side aisle in single file. In contrast to their masks, they wore frilly, lacy blouses and woven wool skirts. All attention was on them, the strange beauty of so many masked women in a silent procession—masks, masks, masks. I thought of what José Donoso had written: “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.”

  Glancing back at the stage, crowded with masked women, I saw Marcos raising his arms in an “I give up!” gesture of helplessness and comic exasperation. With that, his men clustered about him and he swiftly vanished by a rear door, leaving his pipe on the table.

  Compañero Escritor

  More Chiapaneca soup, more mezcal, a visit to the cathedral of San Cristóbal, a morning spent making notes for my talk, and then a whisper from Juan Villoro that the white van would be waiting, this time at a different location. Marichuy was at the appointed spot, the writer Cristina Rivera Garza and her husband, and some others. We slid into the van and headed anonymously down the cobbled streets, past the tourists and around the Parque Principal, going north, the barrios growing poorer with each mile.

  I talked a bit with Cristina Rivera Garza, a distinguished Mexican American author of many short stories and novels, including No One Will See Me Cry, a multilayered historical novel of sleuthing and identity, which I’d read in Mexico City. She told me she was living in Houston, but had taken a similar trip to mine along the border. Having been born in the border town of Matamoros, she confirmed my feeling that there was a frontera culture, with the added complexity of members of the same family (such as hers) living on both sides.

  “I’ve driven up and down the border,” I said. “I’ve crossed a lot of borders in my life, but never one like the Mexican border. The little bridges that cross from Texas. The simple stroll from Douglas to Agua Prieta. The doorway in the iron fence in Nogales—that’s like Alice going down the rabbit hole.”

  Cristina agreed, and in the jolting van told me of her experiences on the border. A reliable witness, she had once told an interviewer, “I am interested in borders, borders of all kinds, geopolitical borders and conceptual borders, borders of gender and genre, borders between life and death. I spend most of my time thinking of ways to cross such borders. How come we are allowed, even invited at times, to walk over some of them but are prevented from even approaching others?”

  Sentiments I agreed with. Soon the van was headed through the high gate of the UniTierra, to the Conversatorio, and I was summoned by Juan.

  “Compañero Manuel wants to talk with you,” Juan said, indicating a man sitting on a bench on the veranda of one of the low, tile-roofed buildings.

  He was an older man, probably sixty, in the plain dark clothes and combat cap of a Zapatista, but he was not masked. None of the men or women had new uniforms, but they wore old patched clothes with dignity and panache, and this being chilly Chiapas, they were all dressed warmly. Compañero Manuel greeted me with a hug and asked, “Are you ready, compañero?”

  “I’ve got a little talk prepared,” I said.

  “In Spanish or in English?”

  “I’m starting off in Spanish as an introduction, then will talk in English.”

  He called to a slender fellow in a vest. “This is Alejandro. He’ll translate for you.”

  I shook hands with Alejandro and asked, “Will the Comandante be there when I speak?”

  “We don’t know,” Compañero Manuel said, wrinkling his nose. “Maybe. Maybe not. We don’t know his movements.”

  The auditorium was full, as on the previous day, but when the program began, Comandante Marcos was not onstage, nor were any of his entourage. The opening session was devoted to documentaries made recently in Mexico.

  The first film was Tobias, written and directed by two young Mexican filmmakers, Francisca D’Acosta and Ramiro Pedraza. This portrait of a village boy with ambitions of traveling with his school basketball team to a tournament in Barcelona was about much more than basketball. The team’s first challenge is to raise the money to take the trip. This accomplished, Tobias, who has never left his village in the Isthmus, undergoes a cleansing by a curandero—the egg ceremony I’d seen in Chamula—and then solicits travel advice from the village elders. Tobias’s mother is as key a figure to his fulfilling his ambitions as the mothers in Hoop Dreams, a powerful American documentary it somewhat resembled.

  In all the preliminary basketball games, the boys are outmatched physically—they’re small and skinny village kids playing against taller urban athletes. But they shoot the ball accurately, and they are nimble enough to dribble around the other players. They make it to Barcelona, win one game, lose another, and are soon back in Mexico, grateful to be home, having had a glimpse of the world. A good-hearted film, Tobias is an intimate look at village life and beyond, through the eyes of a boy determined to excel in his sport and make his family proud. But it also showed the emphatic isolation of a poor Mexican village, and this seemed to recommend it to the approving Zapatistas.

  Somos Lengua (We Are Language) was a movie about rap music in Mexico, made by forty-year-old Kyzza Terrazas. I found it a shocking film, not just for its language, as brutal in Mexican rap lingo as in American, but in its atmosphere of cruelty, the slums and tenements of Mexican cities, the mean streets of Guadalajara and Torreón and Escobedo, terrifying stories of arrests and brawls, the miseries and infernalities of poverty. The rappers were evangelical in their belief that their music was liberating, that it bestowed self-esteem and pride. “Rap is a way out of this terrible life,” one rapper asserts, with the repeated Zapatista message of “the power we get through words . . . to write so that death doesn’t have the last word.”

  It seemed so odd to be watching the Mexican rappers, foulmouthed and defiant, in the mode of American rap and hip-hop. I disliked the cacophonous music, I found the grunted lyrics excruciating, but Terrazas, concentrating on the lives of the rappers, the struggle and the day-to-day, made me care.

  When the lights came up, Comandante Marcos was seated onstage, some of his men in chairs behind him, two masked women at the table, and seeing him, the crowd in the auditorium became watchful and fell silent.

  At that point the Comandante beckoned to me, calling out, “Venga, Compañero Escritor!”

  I walked to the edge of the stage, where he met me at the top of the steps and gave me a hug, embracing me with peculiar force, and this shared energy eased me. I had been apprehensive—a stranger in Chiapas, a visible gringo among the Tzotzils and Tzeltales, an old man in street clothes and a Stetson among the masked Zapatistas. The hug calmed me in a way that went beyond helpful reassurance. A hug has been proven to produce a neurochemical called oxytocin, which flashes through your body, warming it and healing it, making the hugged one feel safe. The Comandante did not release me immediately, as I expected. He held me and said, “Welcome.”

  Perhaps I was projecting, dazzled to be meeting a man I regarded as a hero. In her incomplete but perceptive book Survivors in Mexico, published after her death, Rebecca West, reflecting on Trotsky in Coyoacán, writes, “The men who excite adoration, who are what is called natural leaders (which means really that people feel an unnatural readiness to follow them), are usually empty. Human beings need hollow containers in which they can place their fantasies and admire them, just as they need flower vases if they are to decorate their homes with
flowers.”

  Napoleon was one of these, she wrote, a man who exhibited “no outward signs of having any private thoughts or feelings that would give the slightest pleasure to any stranger.” But Leon Trotsky was exceptional, not an empty vessel, but “one of the great men within whom there was something resembling the inner vexations suffered by us lesser animals.” I felt the Comandante was another exception, not merely because he was a brilliant tactician and advocate for indigenous rights, but because he seemed to me a gifted writer who was able to convey the gusto of his inner life and the sinuous dialectics of his thinking. In the progress of the struggle—even masked and secluded in the jungle—in his prolific essays and updates, his parables and denunciations, he had grown from the masked rebel on horseback to a philosopher-leader, uneasy in exciting adoration and always deflecting such attention to the men and women in the Zapatista movement.

  I wasn’t projecting. I knew him, as I knew other writers, by his work. He was about my height, but bulky under his black jacket, with a strong grip. He introduced me to his compas, six of them today, whispering to me each man’s name. They were small, all of them heavily masked, their jackets zipped to their chin, hats pulled tight.

  Their hands were the hands of manual laborers, farmers, stonemasons, ditch diggers, lumberjacks, and plowmen, hands scaly and hard, stiff fingers, more like tree roots. They were not the hands of commissars or bureaucrats. They held on, gripping my soft writer’s hands with their crusty workers’ hands. Their strong handshakes made the men seem bigger somehow, their grip conveying power.

  These impressions were vivid because I was so self-conscious of being out of my element, quaking a little, nerving myself for what was to come.

  When we were seated at a long table on the stage, the Comandante addressed the audience, saying casually, “Thanks for showing us your films. I remember how in the 1980s we went from village to village in the jungle, showing movies with a small camera, and then later we used a TV set and a VHS. Kyzza came to us when he was young, and now here he is, showing us his film. What we’d like is a film about us sometime, and maybe these documentarians can do it.” Then he turned to me and said, “And now it is my pleasure to welcome Compa Paul—Compañero Escritor, our visitor from the United States.”