On the Plain of Snakes

by Paul Theroux

  “Muchas gracias, Comandante,” I said, and continued in Spanish. “Brothers, sisters, compañeros, compañeras—Zapatista friends—thank you for your friendly welcome. I am speaking in your idiom, but it must be obvious to you that I am a poor speaker. I’m sorry to say that I speak Spanish like a child. On the other hand, I speak English like a normal gabacho. I think I write English like a sensible person, but here’s the paradox. I dream like a genius!” This was a version of something Nabokov once said about himself, and it seemed to resonate, eliciting a little laughter.

  “To you, I am sure I seem like just another gringo. But in fact I am also part indigenous—the proudest part of my secret being. My paternal grandmother was a Menominee, a nation of people who lived in what is now Wisconsin, a people who lived in that region for six thousand years. This knowledge helps me understand your struggle a little better, because the indigenous people of the United States have been massacred and cheated and pushed to the margins ever since the first colonizers arrived on the continent. I share your defiance, and for this I am happy to be among you.”

  I slid aside the papers on which I’d written this, and resumed in English, stopping after every few sentences for Alejandro to translate.

  Many years ago, I said, wishing to discover more about the world, I’d become a teacher in Africa, in a remote school. At that time, many African countries were in revolt, rejecting colonialism and becoming independent. I was just a schoolteacher in the bush, learning the language. At the same time, Che Guevara had arrived to launch an offensive in the Congo against Katanga separatists. The record of his experience he put in his book Congo Diary, which he called “the history of a failure.”

  His insurgency was a failure, I said, because he did not spend much time in the Congo, he had a slender grasp of Swahili, and he did not understand the innate caution that prevailed among people in an African village. Che wrote of how the Cubans felt superior, “like people who had come to give advice.” He had found himself not among revolutionaries, but among conservative-thinking, or at least cautious, subsistence farmers and fishermen. Even the young African combatants who had been trained as guerrillas in Maoist China were reluctant to fight on their arrival in Che’s camp. They had been away, they were homesick, and they wanted to go back to their villages, eat their traditional food, and see their families. Che was baffled by their sentimental nostalgia for village life and their lack of revolutionary zeal, as he wrote in his dispirited book, an essential guide to avoiding mistakes in a country not your own.

  The Zapatistas had spent ten years in the jungle, I went on, not fighting but making friends, trying to understand the grievances of the indigenous people, and by degrees creating an army of rebels. The Zapatistas’ patience, their humanity, and their resolve, I felt, were their most admirable qualities.

  I then talked about my Mexico trip, how I’d driven from my home in Massachusetts, how the road I’d set out on had led me here to Nueva Maravilla—we were at two ends of the same road. I’d also traveled the length of the border, looking closely at both sides: the fields on the US side where Mexican migrants worked for low wages, the factories on the Mexican side where Mexicans from the poorer parts of Mexico were employed, also poorly paid. This was the blighting effect of NAFTA, which boasted of raising people’s standard of living while at the same time exploiting them.

  “I have seen this with my own eyes,” I said. “For the quarter million people living in one colonia in Ciudad Juárez, working in the factories and living in the slums, there is only one high school. But for about fifty families in Oventic, there are two schools. Oventic is a great model for educating and enlightening a community, a peaceful place as well as a dynamic one, with a human scale, beautiful and productive and most of all self-sufficient.”

  I finished by saying how vulnerable Mexicans seemed to me, how unprotected, and how impressed I was by their bravery, and the ways in which they sustained themselves through work and family, without much help from the government.

  Slightly numb from giving this little testimonial, I turned to the Comandante and thanked him again for allowing me to share these experiences of traveling through Mexico.

  In the informal style that characterized the Conversatorio, he said (Alejandro translating for me), “We appreciate your being here. It is very important for us to think that we are not alone—that we have friends not only in Mexico, but also in other countries. I don’t hold your being an American against you. We want friends of all races, from all countries . . .”

  Then, more rapidly—faster than I could take notes—he talked about isolation, the seclusion of living deep in the mountains of southeastern Mexico, in the jungle where it usually rained. Because of that isolation, the Zapatistas needed friends from all over. He indicated me, the filmmakers, Juan Villoro, and the philosopher Pablo Casanova, whom he complimented on his great age and his passion.

  “Compa Escritor,” he went on, speaking directly to me but more slowly, “we’re glad you’re here. But even more, we want you to return. I appreciate what this compa said about Oventic—how it is a model, with good schools and a clinic and gardens. That’s why it’s important that the compa returns.” And, his voice rising to a slight peroration, “We want to be a movement with no borders!”

  This was cheered by the audience. He waited for the noise to subside, playing with his pipe.

  “Compa Escritor—come back,” he said. “Many people travel here with revolutionary intentions, and then what happens? They become courtesans of politics, conservative in their thinking. Come back, compa, come back. We want you to keep having a relationship with us. We don’t want to be merely an anecdote in your recollection of being here.”

  He then opened a folder, took out a sheaf of papers, and read a short, episodic story he’d written about the experiences of a rabbit traveling among other animals.

  Although Alejandro was ably translating, I was distracted by the Comandante’s proscription about not wanting to be merely an anecdote, because it is in the nature of travel to collect and value telling anecdotes. Yet this experience was something else, a clarification of much that I had seen in my traveling life, an elaboration of the challenges of poverty and development, the curse of bad government and predatory corporations, the struggle of people living on the plain of snakes who wish to choose their own destiny.

  Being welcomed in this way by the Zapatistas—embraced, accepted, listened to—I felt I had been admitted to a band of brothers and sisters who had resisted all that was negative and destructive in Mexican life. They had built their movement upon everything that was humane and enduring in the traditions of these indigenous people, the world’s aristocrats. It was not a back-to-nature movement or a violent upheaval but a reminder of what Mexico needed: an example to the whole country, and the world, of the power of resistance and the assertion of human rights.

  As impressed as I was to meet the Comandante (El Sup, as he is sometimes known), I was just as reassured to make the acquaintance of Pablo González Casanova, the sociologist and historian. Juan Villoro had mentioned that Casanova was “too radical” for UNAM, Mexico’s national university, and had resigned. I asked Casanova about this, and he went into more detail. He’d been the director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Research in Sciences and Humanities at UNAM. When, in 2000, a detachment of federal police stormed onto the campus to arrest students who were striking, he strenuously objected, condemned the police action, and resigned his post. He had written many books, including one considered a classic, Democracy in Mexico, described by a Mexican critic as “a pioneer in the research on democratic processes in Mexico, constituting the first systematic study on the structure of power, based on empirical research and animated by a critical theory.”

  Casanova was genial, approachable in conversation yet silent, and attentive at the meeting—held in high regard by the Zapatistas for his lifelong defense of indigenous people. He was not by nature a bivouacker in the jungle, yet he made no fuss a
bout traveling from Mexico City to Chiapas to spend days in an obscure location, in a hard chair, listening to speeches and debates and watching films. Seated near him, I could see he was nearly always nodding in appreciation, his face blazing with intelligence, fully engaged, an activist, an optimist, a visionary, and still radical at ninety-six—a great example to me.

  Marcos stood and asked Casanova to please join him in standing. The old man smiled and doffed his cap, rose from his chair and stood soldierly straight.

  “For your work, your support, and your guidance,” Marcos said, “I appoint you to the rank of comandante [in the EZLN].”

  Hearing this, all the Zapatistas on the stage and in the audience stood and saluted him, their eyes shining in the slits of their black masks, and Casanova saluted back in acknowledgment.

  This demonstration of respect and admiration thrilled me, and gave me the gift of hope that I might have twenty more years. I felt this widely read man must have known in his old age the lines of T. S. Eliot in “East Coker” (“Old men ought to be explorers”) or the epiphany Czesław Miłosz had described in “Late Ripeness”:

  Not soon, as late as the approach of my ninetieth year

  I felt a door opening in me and I entered

  the clarity of early morning.

  I had begun my trip to Mexico in a mood of dejection and self-pity, feeling shunned, overlooked, ignored, rejected—easily identifying with migrants and Mexicans, who knew that same feeling of being despised. I’d hoped the trip would be salutary, a cure for my sour mood, and so it proved. I was uplifted, smiling when I set off for home, my hand on my heart, promising to return. In my time in Mexico I’d published pieces in Mexican literary magazines, among them Letras Libres and the Revista de la Universidad de México, made many friends with Mexican writers, spoken at a number of literary and political events, and found a Mexican publisher, Almadía. One of the greatest thrills in travel is to know the satisfaction of arrival, and to find oneself among friends.

  I knew, always, that I would be a worker in the vineyard,

  as are all men and women living at the same time,

  whether they are aware of it or not.

  Or as the Mexican saying (dicho) had it: Arrieros somos y en el camino andamos—All of us are mule drivers, headed down the road.

  Part Five

  The Way Back

  To the Border: My Last Mordida

  I took the migrant route all the way north, except instead of riding on top of a rattling boxcar of the Beast, or in a clanking bus or a narco van, I was speeding in my own car, leaving San Cristóbal de las Casas. “I’m going to miss San Cristóbal,” a man says in Charles Portis’s Gringos. “This place is cool and pleasant the year round, a fat man’s dream.”

  The autopista was closed that day—I was waved back by a policeman—so I took the old winding road on the eastern slopes of the Sierra Madre del Sur, the narrow track that had been cleared by the Dominican friars from Oaxaca in their pursuit of converts, and the conquistadors in search of gold. The Comandante was not indulging in euphemism in speaking of the five hundred years of persecution of the indigenous people of Chiapas.

  When the conquistadors came this way as soldiers and tax collectors in 1524, looking for slave labor and gold, they fought to subdue the Tzotzils, who were startled and enraged by this intrusion of strangers. The Tzotzils called themselves Batsil winik’otik, the True People. This was their own land. So they responded by flinging rocks and shooting arrows, and they climbed to ridges like the ones on this road, and “mocked the Spanish, hurling small quantities of gold at them and inviting them to try and take the rest that they had within their walls.” But they were no match for Spanish-forged twelve-foot lances and pikes, broadswords and crossbows. In 1526, at the Battle of Tepetchia, many Tzotzils, facing defeat, jumped to their deaths from Sumidero Canyon into the Grijalva River rather than be taken alive and enslaved. The history of Chiapas is a litany of invasion, massacre, punitive missions, and extermination, at last defended and redeemed by the Zapatistas.

  The road hugged the high slopes, sometimes obscured in cloud, in sunny places allowing glimpses into lush valleys below, so deep they seemed like abysses. For many years this slow track was the main road to San Cristóbal, and was still known as the Carretera Internacional, because it leads to Guatemala and beyond; but the new, straighter autopista superseded it in 2006. The only town on this old winding road was Navenchauc, a community of low square houses, most of them made of rough unpainted cement blocks, lining mongrel-haunted lanes.

  From the cold six-thousand-foot heights of the Sierra Madre de Chiapas, the road twisted down four thousand feet through the forest to the heat of Tuxtla Gutiérrez, then dropped two thousand more on a straight road to the hot gusts of wind and dense humidity of the sea-level tropics, crossing from Chiapas into Oaxaca. There, at a roadblock, a policeman in a sweat-stained shirt, clawing the air, directed me off the road. He was an older man, weary-looking and yawning, scowling at my Massachusetts license plate, his manner, in the Mexican policeman way, peevish.

  “Is this your car?”

  “Yes. I have papers—my Vehicle Importation Permit, my insurance, my license,” I said, and began fossicking in the plump folders in my briefcase.

  Something in my manner, perhaps my reciting my documentation, my fussing, wearied him further. “You can go,” he said.

  I bypassed Juchitán this time, circumvented Tehuantepec, and entered the hills, climbing back into the sierra, sun-dried, dust-blown, and arid—the biscuit-brown, baked-looking mountains of upland Oaxaca.

  Around midafternoon I stopped to eat in La Reforma, a small town aslant on the mountainside, scattered on both sides of the road, one building signposted RESTAURANTE ROSA. It was a good-sized family house, the parlor furnished with two dining tables. No other diners today.

  “Welcome.” Three women greeted me, three generations: an old woman at a stove, her daughter busying herself sifting maize flour, the gawky granddaughter sprawled on a wooden chair—her long legs stretched out, her feet on the arm of another chair.

  “Where are you going?” the old woman asked.

  “The border,” I said. “To the United States.”

  “Take me with you!” she cried out, and gripped my arm.

  The others laughed at her, but it was an old woman’s impudence, forgivable and comic. Still, she held on to me with bony fingers.

  “What will you do there?”

  “I can cook. I can clean your house. I can look after you. Take me with you—take me away from here. I don’t care where you come from. I want to go there.” She let go of my arm to stand aside and put on a pleading face that was also intentionally clownish. “Please come back for me.”

  Her daughter by now had made me the quesadilla I’d asked for, and brought it on a plate with a cup of black coffee. The granddaughter was laughing softly, wagging her bare brown feet. She was languid and beautiful, with a long, sallow Modigliani face, sharp eyes, and slender fingers.

  “How old are you?” I asked, to change the subject.

  “Twelve.”

  Provoked by my question, the old woman’s daughter—the girl’s mother—approached me and sized me up. “How old are you, señor?”

  “Adivina.” Take a guess.

  She studied me, she did not speak, she cocked her head, pursed her lips, and pressed a finger to her cheek, in actressy reflection, liking the suspense she was creating.

  “Seventy-six,” she said. Tilting her head back, looking haughty, she was triumphant.

  “But I’m a cabrón,” I said, thumping my chest.

  They shrieked, because the word had a belittling meaning here, not “dude,” as I had meant, but “dickhead.”

  Later, passing the sign for the side road to San Dionisio, I remembered the mezcalero Crispin García earnestly whispering to me in Zapotec. I spent two days in San Jerónimo Tlacochahuaya. I stayed again at Ex-Hacienda Guadalupe, and knowing that I wouldn’t get another good meal f
or days, I had lunch alone in Oaxaca at the rooftop Casa Oaxaca. A young woman at the next table, in tight jeans, flashed a smile at me, and gathering her long black hair in her pretty hand, tossed it over her shoulder and turned, bending over, so that I could see the embroidered patch on her back pocket: Eat Pray Fuck.

  The next day, I left San Jerónimo at sunup and drove down the dirt road past the agave and garlic fields onto the main road and beyond Oaxaca city and Etla. There was no blockade today at siege-prone Nochixtlán, where the footbridge still bore the slogan of the last demonstration, JUSTICE AND RIGHTS FOR ALL PEOPLE, and the rusted, burned-out bus still lay where I had last seen it.

  The deep ravines of the Mixteca Alta, farther on, were the most dramatic, the emptiest, I’d seen in Mexico. High peaks rose to the southwest, and deep down, the river looked black from this height, and the valley lay in shadow. At a steep part of the road, I saw a small boy, no more than nine or ten, treading close to the curb, balancing a bundle of slender, eight-foot bamboo poles on his shoulder—no houses or side roads anywhere, the small, solitary figure with his awkward burden.

  The first time I’d driven near here, I’d had to detour into the countryside, slewing and skidding on goopy rain-sodden roads in slurries of mud, through a thunderstorm with three hitchhikers. But today I was speeding, going faster when the road flattened nearer Puebla. Next to the highway, always the signs of old Mexico, goatherds shuffling in the tall grass beyond the guardrails, the goats kicking up dust.

  Circling the outskirts of San Luis Potosí, I saw police cars on the verge, and my palms grew damp. Making sure I was not followed, I gunned the car into the desert, passing the familiar stands of palma china that seemed emblematic of the deserts in northern Mexico.