by Mary Morris
"Alejandro makes beautiful things out of iron and brass," Carlos explained.
We didn't say much to each other that night but I told Alejandro where I lived. "Then I will come and have lunch with you tomorrow," he said. I was growing accustomed to Latin ways and told myself I would believe this when I saw it. Catherine gave me a signal—a glance at her watch and a nod of her head—indicating she felt it was in my better interests to leave, and we set out for home. When we had dinner together in town, she usually walked me to the hole in the wall, even though it was out of her way. She took my hand and we walked.
When we reached the hole, we both paused, amazed. It had been cemented closed and the top of it was now completely covered with bits of glass, Coca-Cola and Pepsi bottles, Seven-Up, shards of U.S. soda pop bottles, to keep the poor people away. I'd have to go the long way around every night.
Catherine said she'd walk with me and we continued to walk hand in hand. When we got to my place, I asked her if she wanted to stay the night. We went upstairs and I gave her a nightshirt. As we lay in bed, Catherine told me things about her family and her past which she said she had not told anyone before. Her parents, she said, had both been alcoholics, and she had no recollection of them ever being sober during the first seven years of her life. When she was ten, her father, whom she adored, ran off and was never heard from again. She grew up in a house with her mother and brother and sisters and assorted half- and step-brothers from her mother's next marriage and thirty cats. "I'm a survivor," Catherine said. "That's all there is to it."
"How do you do it? What makes you so strong?"
She rolled over onto her back and stared at the ceiling. "I keep moving," she said.
"But what if you want to stop?"
She sighed. "So far, I haven't."
She looked at me. "You seem tense. I'll give you a back rub." I rolled onto my stomach and she raised my nightshirt. It was the first time I had been touched since I had arrived and the first time in a long time that I had felt good about being touched. I have no memory of falling asleep.
THE NEXT AFTERNOON ALEJANDRO DID COME OVER and stayed for comida. I was feeling poorly, coughing and with a headache, and he offered to cook—something he said he loved to do. He made a delicious chicken molé dish with an avocado salad and chicken soup. Though I was not very hungry, Alejandro insisted I eat. "You need your strength," he said in a motherly way.
We talked into the evening. We sat by candlelight and he spoke in a Spanish that was incredibly clear and precise, and I understood every word. His face seemed especially dark and carved in the candlelight, like the stone faces I'd visit among Indian ruins. He told me about his life and his family. He had a beautiful mother whom his father had divorced. He said that his mother always "did the streets," meaning that she went out and found men.
He had not seen his mother in many years. She lived in Mexico City with his two sisters, with whom Alejandro did talk from time to time. As he spoke of his mother, his eyes darkened and his mouth tensed. I felt there was something he was not telling, but that night I did not ask many personal things.
Instead he spoke of one of his nephews, who was blind. He said that the blind nephew knew things no one else could know. For instance, he'd say to his sister, "Uncle Alejandro will come today," though he had no way of knowing that on that day Alejandro would visit him at school.
Besides his nephew, he loved his father and brother. His father was a welder, a man whose trade was making wrought iron, and he'd taught Alejandro everything he knew. Alejandro was very good at fixing things and showed me how to fix radios and electric appliances. He said he could make elaborate gates and lawn furniture, but I never saw any of those. His brother, Ruben, was a musician. Alejandro seemed to worship these two men, but he seemed to have little respect for the women in his life; it seemed obvious that his mother had somehow broken his heart.
He stayed in my spare room and in the morning when I woke, sick with the flu, he had hot tea with honey and some kind of hot cereal waiting for me. He said that if I was up to it, that afternoon Carlos would take us to Atotonílco, a small, nearby village with a very old and sacred church.
I told him I'd like to go, but my head hurt and I felt a terrible pressure in my ears. "I have an old cure for you," he said. He lit a cigarette and told me to lie down. I asked him what he was going to do and he told me he was going to put the cigarette in my ear. "You aren't serious, are you?" I asked, but he said he was.
"This is what the witch doctors do," he told me. He inserted the filter end of the cigarette into my ear. From the corner of my eye, I could see little puffs of smoke coming from the cigarette that my ear was smoking. After a few moments, the ear popped and the pressure was relieved. He did the same thing to the other side. In an hour I was feeling better and ready to leave.
When we arrived at Atotonílco at around noon, pilgrims from all over Mexico were on their knees. Some, Alejandro said, had walked on their knees for miles, and their legs were bloody and raw. Many beat their breasts. Inside the church was a strange sight indeed. The very Indian-looking Mexicans in their tattered clothing, the men with sombreros pressed to their hearts, and the women with serapes wrapped around their heads, groveled and prayed, crawling up to a very white, Spanish, Goya-like Christ on the cross.
"You see," Alejandro said, "we pray to the white man's god. We have been conquered in this way. But behind the altar of this church," he whispered in a conspiratorial way, "where the Christ hangs, the men who built the church put their pagan, Indian gods. The gods of the Aztecs are hidden behind the cross. It is the secret of this church." Alejandro made the sign of the cross. "I have been taught to be a Christian," he said proudly, pointing to his Spanish friend, Carlos, "like him. But my heart is pure pagan."
We watched the pilgrims and afterward we walked to the house of a famous matador, Pepe Ortíz. His house, which was like a castle, had a beautiful waterfall. Then we walked into the campos, where we saw red birds, tanagers. Alejandro guided me by the arm as we walked. I could see that he was a gentle man with a good heart.
I had a friend once, an Indian mystic named Lalit, who told me that saints are not born, they are made. A person must work very hard to be good. As we walked the campos, a feeling came over me that came from deep inside. I could not pinpoint it, but I felt a great love within me. Not for a man or a woman, but for a way of being. A way of living I had not known before. The feeling seemed to come from this very place, from the ground we walked on.
That night I had a fever and Alejandro made me Aztec soup—a chicken broth with avocados and bits of fried tortilla. And again, as the night grew dark and the candles flickered, he did the talking. This time he told me about el topo, the mole. The story was a kind of parable, I think, about an animal that struggles in the darkness to get to the light, but when it reaches the light, it cannot see, because it has been living in darkness for so long. It has gone blind. "So, you see"—he folded his hand across mine—"you shouldn't look too long, or you may not even be able to see what it is you are looking for."
In the morning Lupe stopped by to ask me a favor. "May I ask you something?" she said, looking down and away. "It is Polio's birthday on Saturday and I am giving her a party." She noticed Alejandro standing in the living room and she hesitated, then went on. "Would you bring your camera and take pictures?" I introduced Alejandro to Lupe and asked if I could bring him with me. She said we would both be welcome.
On Saturday I loaded my camera. Alejandro and I went into town and bought Pollo a small dress, and at two o'clock I went to Lupe's. The place was swarming with children and animals and flies. The party was being held in the front room with the pictures of naked women. Lupe had decorated the room with streamers and everyone wore a hat. José Luis had a hat on. Even Pancha, the lamb, wore a hat. The pig kept running in and out as kids tried to put a hat on it. Chickens were everywhere Lupe served guacamole and a platter of fruit. There were at least twenty children and they all called José Luis
"Papa," which I assumed was a term of endearment for an older person. It was only later that I learned they were all his children from various women.
Pollo wore a little blue dress. She was an ugly child with a wonderful smile and a great personality before the camera. Later a cake was produced. A gigantic pink cake with candles all over it. "Lupe, did you make this cake in my oven?" I asked, impressed and wondering when she had managed.
She smiled and shook her head. "You were out of gas. I made it here on my stove."
I had no idea how she had made a cake on an open fire, but she had.
I asked Lupe if today was really Polio's birthday and Lupe said, "Oh, no, it was six months ago, but we are just celebrating it now." Lupe looked sheepishly at the ground and I looked down as well, my eyes following her gaze. She wore the same torn sandals she always wore and the children wore tattered shoes.
I understood that the twelve dollars she had borrowed had not been for shoes at all, but for this party for Polio, and Lupe had been ashamed to ask me for money for the party. I don't know if she knew I knew, because we never mentioned it again.
ON SUNDAY ALEJANDRO AND I, CATHERINE, AND A man she had been seeing named Roger, who wore open Hawaiian shirts and walked around singing "The House of the Rising Sun," went for a hike in the hills near the Taboada hot springs, about ten miles from San Miguel. The countryside was much like that of the hills near San Antonio, but here it was flatter, which made it less windy but hotter, and more deserted. We climbed and climbed across the empty, dry sierra. I walked with Catherine for a while. "Are you serious about this Mexican man?" she asked me.
"I like him," I said. "And he is very kind."
Catherine seemed to reflect as we walked. "It wouldn't be bad for you to be with someone who is essentially kind."
We wandered the hills on a dusty plateau and suddenly, in the middle of that desert devoid of any houses or buildings, we came upon an Olympic-size swimming pool filled with sparkling turquoise water. At first no one said a word. We assumed it was a mirage. But then we reached it. I bent over, touched the water, and established that it was real. Alejandro did not like to swim and Roger didn't have a suit, but Catherine and I stripped down to our bathing suits, dove in, and began swimming laps.
There is an anecdote about Mexico which perhaps I should tell here. André Breton, founder of the surrealist school in France and writer of Les Manifestes du Suriealisme, was invited to Mexico in the 1930s to teach Mexicans about surrealism. He wanted a table so he hired a carpenter and asked him to build it. Breton drew an architectural drawing of a table, diamond-shaped, foreshortened front legs, long back legs; and the carpenter took the drawing and made a table just like the one in the drawing—diamond-shaped, with short front legs and long back legs. When Breton saw the table, he said, "I have nothing to teach these people about surrealism." And he returned to France.
The reality of Mexico is really a dual reality. On the one hand there is the original indigenous culture—mystical, magical, communal, given to sacrifice and the worship of pagan gods. And then there is the reality of the conqueror—logical, precise, efficient. These two cultures exist literally one on top of the other. They account for what seems the utterly contradictory character of the Mexican. As Octavio Paz has described them, Mexicans are eternal adolescents, unable to find their true identity and hence unable to grow up into the adulthood that identity brings.
Whoever built that beautiful swimming pool in the middle of a desert with no houses in sight I'm sure did it for what he thought was a very pragmatic reason, but it eluded us at the time. That swimming pool, perfect and clean, was for me what that table was for Breton. A glimpse into the Mexican character that defies the logic of the Western mind.
We had swum about ten laps when a campesino appeared. "Excuse me," he said, "but you cannot swim in this pool. My patrón does not allow it."
"And who is your patrón?" we asked. We looked at this man in his brown baggy pants and sombrero, standing in the middle of the Mexican desert with no road, no house, nothing nearby, this man who had suddenly appeared out of nowhere, out of the dust and the cactuses and the afternoon sun.
"He is a señor who owns this land and this swimming pool." His arm swept across a vast, empty expanse of land.
"But where is his house?"
"He has not built his house yet. He cannot afford the house. He has only built the pool."
We looked around. There was not a foundation, not even a marker for the house. And we had no idea where the campesino had come from. We tried to bribe him to let us swim a few more laps, but he was adamant and clearly afraid that he would get into trouble. Reluctantly, Catherine and I pulled ourselves out of the pool, and we left.
The Jungle
ON THE PLANE TO TUXTLA GUTIÉRREZ, I SAT between a Cherokee Indian and a woman from California who was a nurse. The plane was a local, traveling via Veracruz and Minatitlán. We got into a conversation about pagan gods. The Cherokee told us that in Mexico many Indians still practice the ancient rites. He said that they act like Christians, but in their hearts they are all pagans. He himself worshiped the sun, the earth, and the stars; the sky was his church. The nurse asked if the stars were big or small. Incredulous, I said they were big. The Indian said they were there. They asked where I was going and I told them that I was meeting a friend in Chiapas. He told me to look for Lacandon Indians. "They practically live in the Stone Age," he said. "You'll know one if you see one."
We flew over parts of Mexico I'd never seen before. The lush tropical vegetation of the coastal regions was suddenly interrupted by giant smokestacks, oil refineries, and industrial development. The landscapes changed. At Veracruz the Indian and the nurse got off the plane. Then we left the gulf and flew inland. At Minatitlán the houses were on stilts, the roofs thatched. A black, smoky sky clouded the tropical beauty.
I was about to enter the land of the Maya. Current theory of human migration tells us that the indigenous peoples of the Americas originated somewhere in central Asia, that they crossed the Bering Strait and swept down through the North American Pacific Coast, spreading out east across the Rocky Mountains and the Great Plains, and moving south through the land that would become Mexico, through Central America, and finally into South America. The great civilizations of this migration in Central and South America were the Aztecs in Mexico; the Maya in the area of present-day southern states of Mexico, including the Yucatán and Chiapas, and Guatemala; and the Incas in the Andes of Bolivia and Peru.
Separated by distance, history, and eventually language, these peoples developed differently. However, the indigenous peoples of the region known as Mesoamerica—the area that covers the northern Mexican deserts to the lowlands of Honduras and El Salvador, the Caribbean Sea to the Pacific Ocean—shared many traits absent in most other places of the world. These include hieroglyphic writing, a complex calendar, specialized, markets, a fairly homogeneous diet of maize, beans, and squash (which exists today), and a religion that featured self-sacrifice and mutilation as well as a pantheon of gods, including the rain god (Chac, to the Maya) and the renowned plumed serpent, Quetzalcóatl.
The great period of Mayan civilization, known as the classical period, was from A.D. 300 to 900. Its theocrats were generally believed to be a peaceful people who enjoyed science and the arts and who shunned warfare, unlike the Aztec rulers, who gained control of the valley of Mexico through conquest. The cities of the Maya, which traded with one another, formed a loose confederation.
In the tenth century the Mayan civilization was still at its peak. When its art and cities, its building and trade, were flourishing, it was abruptly ended by a mysterious event that no one has been able to determine. The Mayan hieroglyphics have never been completely deciphered. All we know is that a civilization that was at its height suddenly ceased.
The Maya of San Cristóbal came from a group called the Tzeltalans. They flourished in the central area of the Maya until about A.D. 400. Then they returned to the highland
s, to the area around San Cristóbal. The descendants of the group—the Tzotzil and the Tzeltal—live in the state of Chiapas following the patterns of Mayan life, relatively unchanged since ancient times.
I reached Tuxtla GutiÉrrez, a hot, industrial town in the lowlands of Chiapas, by late afternoon. The last bus for San Cristóbal, where I was to meet Catherine, was leaving and I raced to it. She had been traveling near Oaxaca with Roger for the past two weeks, but before she left San Miguel, we had agreed to rendezvous in San Cristóbal on August 8.
I didn't look as I jumped on, but I had flung myself into another world—a world of color and unexpected beauty and an ethereal quality of light. The bus was packed with Quiché Maya, the people of the southern highlands, who were all speaking Quiché, their native tongue. The women, with their sleek black hair and olive complexions, smiled at me. They wore brightly colored cloth with beads and ribbons in their hair and sashes around their waists. The men, in white poncho-like shirts, some with red trim, and small black or straw hats, were more somber, staring straight ahead.
Most of the Indians had come from small villages in the hills to buy goods in town, and they carried with them what they could—sacks of lentils and rice, chickens squawking, dangling upside down, their legs tied together. The Indians whispered to each other in Quiché and pointed at me. I was the only foreigner on the bus, and in my green army pants and an army shirt, some thought I was a soldier. Others just laughed, finding it amusing to see a gringa dressed in this fashion.
The bus was already crowded and I had to stand near the driver for most of the fifty miles up a winding mountain road. As the bus twisted and turned, I hung on tightly. We passed the Indians of Chiapas walking up the road, often with baskets of food or pitchers of water on their heads, each in a colorful costume. Every village has a different costume. I saw Mayans in pink ponchos and in yellow shirts. I stared out the bus window as we climbed in the late afternoon light.
