by Mary Morris
The past repeats itself. History builds layer upon layer. Mexico City is an archaeologist's dream and an urban planner's nightmare. If you try to dig a subway tunnel or excavate for a new building, you will come across the ruins of the Temple Major or of a monument to Quetzalcóatl. The Spaniards built their new city—their enormous colonial churches and houses of justice—directly on top of the Aztec temples and houses they destroyed.
What remains in Mexico today, four hundred years after its past was buried, is an incompatible mix of cultures—Spanish, French, United States, and indigenous Mesoamerican. The conquistadors, through genocide, cultural destruction, and miscegenation, managed to obliterate the great empires of North and South America: the Incas, the Mayas, the Aztecs, and the North American tribes. But in Mexico it is still all there—beneath the city the Spaniards built. The language, the culture, the artwork, the sense of time, the spiritual beliefs, the connections to earth and sky, remain beneath the structure of Western values and Christianity. It is all there.
ALEJANDRO HAD GIVEN ME THE KEYS TO HIS APARTMENT, saying I could stay with him in Mexico City when I returned. I had been looking forward to seeing him and did not feel in a hurry to return to San Miguel. When I arrived, I found his building, a nondescript apartment complex not far from the Paseo de la Reforma and the center of things, and let myself in. I stood for the first time in this ground-floor apartment, a dark one-bedroom whose two windows looked into an enclosed, lifeless courtyard. It was a Saturday and I was a day late. There was no note for me, no sign of when Alejandro would be back. I couldn't find much to eat in the icebox, which surprised me. When Alejandro visited me in San Miguel, he always made me some soup or rice and beans.
I examined the decor. Brocade furniture covered with sheets and plastic slipcovers, rococo lamps with scenes of maidens and nymphs, one horrible painting of a large-eyed woman with her hand pressed over her mouth. A yellow television and many books, a rather extensive library, in fact, which included Hemingway and Bellow, each volume wrapped in a carefully labeled brown paper cover. The library aside, I had no idea how I would be able to spend time here, but I decided to relax until Alejandro got home.
An hour later the door opened and a strange woman with a suitcase walked in. She was extremely fat and ugly with a large black mole on her cheek and a rather mean, unfriendly face. She looked at me oddly. I could see immediately that she knew who I was but had not expected to find me, and that she was clearly displeased with my presence. I said hello as politely as I could and introduced myself. She said she was Alejandro's stepmother. Then she turned on the yellow television and plunked herself down on the sofa in front of a Mexican soap opera.
I sat down beside her. Someone named Rosario stood at an ironing board, sobbing because her father was in a fight with her brother who hated her boyfriend who'd gotten her pregnant. The boyfriend had disappeared and foul play was suspected, and Rosario, who was about to have her baby, wanted to kill herself.
After a while Alejandro arrived and he looked more than surprised to see me. "Maria," he said, "what are you doing here?"
"I cabled to say I'd be back yesterday."
Alejandro shrugged. "Well, this is Mexico." My cable had never arrived.
Alejandro quickly perceived that the situation was not a good one, and soon the stepmother began crying, yelling, and packing up all of her things. She was throwing dishes into a box, grabbing her coffee pot. I went into the bedroom and tried to figure out what was going on, but she was speaking very quickly and shouting obscenities I did not understand.
After a while Alejandro came in. He explained to me that the woman he'd lived with for the past two and a half years, Angelita, was the stepmother's younger sister. He told me that Marta, the stepmother, came from a gigantic family of about a million children and that she was the ugliest and the fattest, that her rather beautiful younger sister had wanted to marry Alejandro, and that my presence in the apartment was causing a family crisis.
On weekends, Marta, who taught social studies, lived with Alejandro's father in San Luis Potosí, seven hours north of Mexico City. Three years before, Marta and Alejandro's father had left Mexico City, and Marta was still waiting for her school transfer. Her horrible life consisted of taking the bus every Sunday to Mexico City so she could teach and returning to San Luis Potosí every Thursday afternoon. It was, he told me, no life, and he let her stay with him and sleep on his couch.
After telling me this, Alejandro digressed and spoke to me about his mother. "You see, she was very beautiful," he explained. "And after her my father did not want to have to deal with a beautiful woman." He spoke wistfully, with great sadness in his voice.
I was not prepared for the presence of an angry stepmother on a sofa in front of a yellow TV so I offered to leave, but he said no. He went back to the living room and they talked for hours, it seemed, while I read the Popol Vuh, the Mayan book of creation. I contemplated the interconnection between time and reality. The theory of being—pantheism. I saw spirits in animals, in inanimate things. I knew that what I needed now in my life, more than anything, was a different relation to time. I needed to put myself on Indian time. Not where hours or minutes mattered, but where I would look at the bigger picture—life in relation to destiny.
I was depressed and unhappy to be back from my journey, and I thought about how I could be somewhere on a beach in the Caribbean rather than in these dreary rooms. I heard a little more shouting, then quiet. Finally Alejandro returned to the bedroom and said that it was all right. She would accept me and I could stay in the apartment with them.
Alejandro loved to do housework. He liked to get down on his knees and scrub the floor. He liked the feel of the rags and the soap, the swoosh of water, the slippery floor beneath him. After the floors he would go to market and spend the rest of the day making chiles rellenos, stuffing chili peppers with ground nuts and raisins, wrapping them in a fine egg-white batter.
In that dark, dingy apartment, in that tiny, miserable kitchen, he would do the wash. He'd put a washboard in the sink and wash by hand sheets, blue jeans, underwear (including mine), all his shirts. He'd hang them up on a line that ran through a small outdoor corridor leading to the apartment. And when they were dry, he'd iron. He'd spend hours gliding the iron across cloth, and anyone could see that this man loved the feel of warm iron pressing on cloth, the disappearance of wrinkles, the look of a folded pile of clothes.
On weekends I would sit in a chair nearby, reading and watching him. I had never seen any man, let alone one from his culture, so involved in domestic duties. "Why are you doing all of this?" I would ask.
"Someone has to," he'd say.
"Did your mother teach you?"
He'd wave his hand as if the mere mention of his mother were an anathema to him. "I learned out of necessity," he said. "And now I like it."
He never really wanted my help, though I always offered it. He wanted to cook, clean, wash, scrub, and iron. He knew how to make Aztec soups with avocado and squash blossoms, how to buy the freshest chicken. He spent hours cleaning shrimp. I'd say, "Should I make dinner tonight?" or "Do you want me to go to market?" And he'd reply, "No, let me take care of you." And I always did.
Alejandro wanted to take me to Teotihuacán, the Aztec ceremonial site on the great plain. "There are things you must know," he told me, "if you are to understand where you are." We took a bus for about an hour on that hot afternoon. As we rode, he pointed out to me the twin volcanoes, Popocatépetl and Ixtaccíhuatl. Of the latter he said, "You see, her shape is the body of a woman lying down. It is said that when her warrior died, she lay on the earth and died and that is what became of her."
Teotihuacán was the center built to Quetzalcóatl, a legendary figure in transition from man to god. A Toltec king named Quetzalcóatl may have existed, but in Toltec mythology and throughout the Mesoamerican world, Quetzalcóatl assumed a stature like that of the Buddha—man in the process of becoming divine.
The Aztecs, wh
o ruled this plain at the time of the conquest, worshiped two gods, each with his own set of priests. Huitzilopochtli, god of the sun and war, did battle with Quetzalcóatl, god of culture and the west. It was here at Teotihuacán, beneath the volcanic lovers, that male and female principle struggled. It was here that the plumed serpent came to represent man attempting to rise to something divine while his aggression and ego pull him down.
At the top of the Pyramid of the Sun, Alejandro pounded on his chest. "I am an Aztec," he said, "ciento poi ciento. One hundred percent. Everything I am comes from here, from this place. The history of my people has been a history of conquest, of intervention, of a struggle to survive. We have been destroyed, our race defiled." He stared straight ahead as he talked. The wind blew his hair back. His sharply formed features grew more defined. His intensity rose. "You see all these tourists, all these visitors running around. Gringos mainly. No matter how hard we try, Mexico can never be Mexico. We had a revolution and got rid of the Spanish. Now we have the United States. No matter how hard we try, it will never be enough. We will always feel inferior. We will never do enough. We will never catch up. The U.S. is always there, making us feel we are not good enough."
"Don't forget I am a norteamericana," I said. I had learned to make that distinction south of the border, for all Latins call themselves Americans.
"Yes, you are a norteamericana. I suppose I will never be good enough for you, will I?"
I wasn't sure what to think of this, and I was afraid to ask. "Don't be ridiculous," I replied. "You are already good enough for me."
He sighed. "That's not what I mean." He grew sullen and morose and after a while wanted to leave.
I HATED THE PLACE WHERE HE LIVED. I COULD NOT help it, but it was a dungeon to me and I was a prisoner there. I tried to like it. I bought flowers and baskets of fruit. I tried to brighten it with small pictures purchased from street merchants. But we were living in a practically windowless apartment in a city in which I knew almost no one but Alejandro.
Every day when Alejandro went to work, I was left alone. I'd sit on the double bed, in a T-shirt and shorts, and immerse myself in death. I read everything I could about Mexico. Malcolm Lowry, D. H. Lawrence's The Plumed Serpent, Octavio Paz, Juan Rulfo, Mayan books on death imagery, explanations about Day of the Dead. You could not know Mexico, it seemed to me, without knowing death. Some days I'd work at the Benjamin Franklin Library or I'd go to the National Museum of Anthropology. But mainly I stayed in. I stayed in and read what I felt I needed to know.
In the evenings we went out. "It's not good for you to stay inside like this," he insisted, and he would make plans for us to have dinner with his brother, Ruben, and his wife, a truly awful woman whom Ruben had gotten pregnant. Ruben stayed with Margarita only because of their daughter, Alicia. Alicia was three and she had a burn scar that ran from her neck down her torso. Margarita had left her near the stove one day with a pot of boiling water. Only a miracle had saved her face from a terrible burn. Ruben hated Margarita with a passion equal only to that with which he loved his daughter. He adored this child and I could tell how much it pained him every time she was undressed and he could see her scar.
Some evenings we went to the club where Ruben played alto sax. He was a very attractive person and it always made me sad to see the terrible things that had befallen him. Whenever Alejandro and I spent the evening with him, we came home depressed.
Other evenings we went out with Carlos, the person Alejandro had been with the night I met him. Carlos and Alejandro, it turned out, were partners in a clothing store, and they often had business to discuss. Carlos was jovial and liked to go drinking, and sometimes all three of us would go to Ruben's club. When we did this, Alejandro would get a little drunk and dance. His friends called him Alejandro Travolta. When the music started, he couldn't sit still. He'd grab me by the hand and pull me to the floor. He knew just how to spin and guide me along. On the dance floor he knew when to clasp me to him and when to let go. Once he got going, he could dance until dawn.
ONE NIGHT I WENT TO A PUBLIC PHONE AND CALLED a woman I'd met in a gallery. We had spoken briefly and she'd suggested I give her a call sometime. I phoned Mrs. Delano, and we agreed to meet at a café where there was a small exhibit of her paintings. Then she would take us to her house for dinner. I asked if I could bring Alejandro along and she said, "By all means." But when we met at the café, it became clear to me within moments that she was uncomfortable.
We ordered tea and tried to admire her paintings which hung on the wall of the café. Mrs. Delano, who had survived the concentration camps in Germany, was a painter of fairly poor paintings depicting Jewish life throughout the ages. I found them without imagination or interest to me, though it was clear that Mrs. Delano thought of herself as the female Chagall.
As she showed us her work, it seemed she could not look Alejandro in the eye. Indeed she acted as if he were not there at all. She also kept running back and forth to the telephone. When we sat down to our tea, she began to tell us how her cook had suddenly taken ill and we could not go to her home for dinner. Instead she said she'd take us nearby for a sandwich.
Her switch from hospitality to detachment was startling and finally I asked her, "Is anything wrong? I mean, is something bothering you?" She paused and then told us what was on her mind. She told Alejandro that he should leave me, that he had to think about what my parents would say. I told her that Alejandro and I were friends and that my mother would be pleased for me to have friends of different cultures.
Later when I went into the bathroom, Mrs. Delano followed me. She said, "You are making a mistake. I have friends who are Mexicans as well, but they are fair, not dark." Fair, she told me, like us. Alejandro, she said, was of a very humble background. I told her I knew that. It was, in part, what I liked about him.
But she went on. "I was going to have you both to dinner but my father would have hit the ceiling if I'd brought a pure Mexican home. He would not have allowed it." I could see I had miscalculated this woman and I was more than willing to leave, but Mrs. Delano had other things to say about Mexicans. She told me that all the beggars in the city were really gypsies and thieves who didn't work because they were lazy. She said there was plenty of work to be had, but Mexicans wanted to do nothing all day. It was important to distinguish the different kinds of Mexicans, she said. "The ones of European origin, they are a different breed."
Later when she drove us back to the Zona Rosa, she wore her gloves. "I keep my gloves on," she said, "so that no one can steal the rings off my fingers when I stop at stoplights."
When we got back to the apartment, Alejandro was furious. "So," he said, "is this what your race is like?" referring to my Jewish background.
"You sound as racist as she does."
"What else did she say to you?" he asked me. "What did she say when she followed you into the bathroom?"
"She's a stupid person," I said, "forget it." But he wouldn't relent so finally I told him. "Look," I said, "I don't feel the way she does. I wouldn't be here if I did, so let's drop it."
He left the apartment in a huff and brought back a six-pack of beer. He sat down in front of the yellow television, something I'd never seen him do. After a while he said, "Is that why you won't marry me, Maria, because I'm dark?"
"Marry you? Alejandro, I really care for you, but marriage has never been an issue..."
"For you maybe, but what about for me?" He spent the rest of the night sulking. "What am I supposed to do when you're gone?" he asked. When he went to get his fifth beer, I tried to take it out of his hand, but he walked away. "I don't want to hurt you," I called. He shook his head. He said it was already too late.
The next day as Alejandro was leaving for work, he said, "If you want to go to San Miguel, if you'd be happier there, then you should go."
We hadn't really discussed San Miguel. It is odd how you can miss a place, how it can gnaw at you somewhere in the back of your mind, and yet you aren't really aware o
f it. But now, as he said this, I realized how much I wanted to be there. How much I missed Lupe and the children, and I wondered how it was that I could have stayed away so long. "I'll think about it."
"I won't be angry," he said. "If that's best for you, you should go."
After he left I sat on the bed, thinking about what I wanted to do. At that moment I wanted a friend in Mexico City, someone to talk to. I thought I should take a walk and think things through. Instead, I sat and sat. I sat on the bed, thinking, until the bed began to move. The mattress pitched and rolled and I held on as if I were in a white-water raft. The room shifted. Lamps swayed and the furniture rearranged itself. I did not know what to do, so I ran from the house. I didn't think about anything except leaving. Outside the ground still shifted, the buildings rocked. And then it stopped. Around me people were staring. Some laughed, wiping their brows. When it was over, I realized I was wearing almost nothing. I went back inside.
I DECIDED IT WAS TIME FOR ME TO GO TO SAN Miguel. We went out for a movie and dinner and I told him over dinner that I planned to leave the next day. He said he thought it was a good idea. We were walking home at about one in the morning, both feeling very subdued, when suddenly we heard the screech of brakes, the shattering of glass across Paseo de la Reforma, and when we looked up, we saw that several cars had crashed into one another.
I didn't want to investigate, but Alejandro said, "Perhaps there is something we can do." When we got to the scene of the accident, two women lay sprawled on the ground, one of them crying. "You go," I told him. "I'll stay here." Alejandro made his way through the crowd and a few moments later he came back. Grabbing me by the arm, he pulled me toward the women. "They are North American. They don't speak any Spanish. You have to help."
