Hold the Enlightenment

by Tim Cahill

  Rick’s book brought many buyers to Mata Ortiz, and, I believe, helped prices rise to current levels. The village is beginning to prosper. Today there are over three hundred potters making a living in Mata Ortiz. Bill Gilbert, a guest curator at the New Mexico Museum of Art, says that while the forms and designs utilized in the early part of the revival derived directly from the prehistoric Casas Grandes style, “aspects of what is taking place … appear more closely related to highly energized studios or movements in contemporary art.”

  This is what has been called the Miracle of Mata Ortiz.

  In Mata Ortiz, my brother generally stays with Macario and Nena Ortiz, who call him primo, cousin. Macario is one of the world-class potters in the village, a big, hearty man who stands well over six feet tall. He has built the only two-story house in the village and it is painted in colors I imagine a decorator would call “teal and blush.” Both Macario and Nena make intricately designed pots, though the interior of their home looks more like a Montana rancher’s home than that of internationally known artists.

  The kitchen cabinets are built in, there is a gas stove, and a woodstove for warmth and tortillas. A few nice works of art adorn the walls, but the major decorations are framed photos of various family members, a framed print of the Last Supper, and a bas-relief wooden sculpture of a nude young woman standing on her tiptoes and reaching up, as if to pick an apple. The woman has the type of body only seen on chrome mud flaps.

  We sat at the dining room table, eating chicken mole, with a family friend named Chilero. When he was a kid, Chilero had sold chiles on the street corners of Mata Ortiz, hence the name. These days, Chilero works for Macario, growing chiles and wrangling cows on one of Macario’s properties. I had the impression that Macario employed any number of neighbors and friends, and that he essentially supported several less fortunate families.

  “Did you know your brother is getting married?” Macario asked me.

  “Let’s talk about business,” Rick said.

  “Your brother should have children,” Macario said.

  “Children are a blessing,” Chilero pointed out.

  “I’m only here two weeks out of the month,” Rick countered. “How can I have children?”

  “The village will help,” Nena said.

  “Somebody wrote a book about that,” I said. And indeed, neighbor children were always running in and out of the Ortiz house.

  “There is a woman in Tucson who I’m serious about,” Rick said.

  Macario shrugged off the comment. “First, of course, you need to buy a house.”

  “Macario, I don’t have money for a house, or for a wife, or for children.”

  Macario knew how to fix that. Rick should just buy a lot of Macario Ortiz pots, sell them in the United States, bring the money back, and buy a house that—it just so happened—Macario owned and wanted to sell. A bottle of tequila was brought out, opened, and the cap thrown in the trash, as is the custom.

  And then, sometime later, we were knocking on the door of an adobe-brick house with apple and peach trees in the yard. The place had electricity, running water, a wood-fired hot-water heater, and a genuine sit-down toilet. Macario’s married son lived there. Macario wanted to build him a new house. But he needed to sell the old one first.

  A price was mentioned. It was too much. Rick didn’t have the money. That was all right with Macario. Rick could write a check for the whole amount, and then, when the check was good, Macario would cash it.

  “So,” Rick told me later, “I wrote him the check so we could finally stop talking about it. I can always change my mind later.”

  “I think you just bought a house,” I said.

  “Macario—you’ve got to know Macario—thinks I’ll be happy here. And I am happy here. In his mind, he does this stuff for my own good. He’s my best friend.”

  As far as I could see, the deal was supposed to go like this: My brother would give Macario a lot of money for his pots, which Rick would sell for a profit, that profit to be spent on a house Macario owned. As a homeowner, Rick would be in a position to marry someone and support her family. A family, I thought, probably presently being supported by Macario Ortiz.

  Then, of course, if my brother were to marry in Mata Ortiz, there would be a big fiesta, and Rick would have to buy some cows to slaughter for the wedding celebration. Macario, as it happened, has a nice herd of cattle.

  “But,” Rick told me, “I’m not getting married.”

  …

  In honor of my visit, we drove my truck up into the Sierra Madres, to a place where the Piedras Verdes River intersects with the Arroyo Casa Blanca. The place looked a little like the canyonlands of Utah. Not that we were able to see it that first night.

  It took most of an afternoon to gather up all the people who wanted to come, and we didn’t get started on the four-hour drive through the mountains until after dark, which is how we came to camp on a sheet of ice beneath a frozen waterfall.

  Then Chilero stumbled out of the truck about three in the morning, screaming and cursing. When everyone was thoroughly awake, he began playing his guitar and singing. For hours.

  “Debemos matarlo,” I said. We must kill him.

  Just after dawn, we walked up the hill to a cave set high in the canyon wall. The Cave of the Pot was a Paquime habitation site about A.D. 1000. Set in the center of the cave was a large granary, perhaps twelve feet high, shaped rather like a child’s top or a pot. There was a series of low, tumble-down walls, with the distinctive T-shaped doors the Paquime culture favored.

  I sat near the granary, and looked out across the valley of the Piedras Verdes, thinking. During my stay in Mata Ortiz, I had watched Macario work. He sometimes put in sixteen-hour days, and several of his new pots echoed the shape of the granary in the Cave of the Pot.

  Rick and Macario were sitting beside me.

  “The thing is,” Rick told Macario, “my brother and I were raised Mormon.”

  It took a moment to digest the blatant lie, but then I saw where this was heading.

  “The Mormon religion,” I said, nodding in an imbecilic manner.

  “So,” Rick said, “I couldn’t really get married in the Catholic Church.”

  “But you don’t go to the temple,” Macario said.

  “I’m an agnostic Mormon.”

  “Jack Mormon,” I said.

  “That’s right,” Rick said. “Jack Mormon.”

  “Well, then, no, you couldn’t be married in the Catholic Church.”

  Macario seemed to dismiss the entire idea. He turned to study the granary. I imagined that he was planning a new variation on the shape. Some fine new pot. A museum-quality piece of work.

  “But isn’t it true,” my brother’s best friend asked him finally, “that Mormons can have several wives?”

  I was, it occurred to me, watching a truly great artist at work.

  Dirty Money

  It was a money-laundering scheme for rapacious dimwits and hoggish simpletons. There was $2 million in it, all told, and if I played my cards right, I’d walk out of Bamako, in the West African country of Mali, with a sizable chunk of that cash, bundled up in limp $20 and $50 and $100 bills.

  I don’t know how my potential benefactor picked me to share in the bonanza. I was working out, after a fashion, which is to say I was attempting to balance a rickety hotel lawn chair on a lumpy grass bank overlooking the Niger River. I was alone, and my flight home was to leave the next evening. The entire plan for the rest of the day consisted of watching the sunset. The orb in question seemed to be taking its time in this endeavor, and I was bored.

  “Ah,” a voice behind me said. “You speak English.”

  I turned to the man behind me. He was dressed in a kind of green jumpsuit with wide lapels, which he wore over a white silk shirt. The shirt was open to the sternum, and dangling from a gold chain around his neck he wore what appeared to be an enormous gold nugget. It was a style I’d describe as “street pimp, ’79.”

/>   “How do you know I speak English?”

  He pointed at the two-month-old issue of a weekly newsmagazine on my lap.

  “Newsweek,” he said. The man gestured a question at the lawn chair near mine.

  “Please,” I said.

  “I am tired of speaking in French,” my new friend announced, “and I am very bored.”

  “Where is the joy of life?” I asked in French, which pretty much depleted my vocabulary in that language.

  The man stared at me blankly and fingered the nugget at his chest. “I am a guest in this hotel,” he said abruptly.

  “Good restaurant,” I said.

  “They speak French.”

  “Yes.”

  “I am from Liberia. In Liberia, we speak English.” He extended a hand for me to shake in the gentle, palm-against-palm, African slide-away style. “My name is Fabrice.”

  I shook his hand and told him my name.

  “Tim,” Fabrice said, “we have a deal, you and I.”

  “What’s that?”

  “We will speak English tonight, and we will not be bored.”

  The prospect of some conversation had its merits.

  “Yes,” I agreed. “We will speak English.”

  “Speaking English,” Fabrice said. “It is good.”

  We sat together in mutual contemplation of the inherent excellence of the English language. Neither of us had anything to say.

  “Uh, is the fighting over in Liberia?” I asked.

  “Oh, yes.” Fabrice brightened up a bit. Now we were speaking English.

  “Whom did you support?”

  “I fought with Charles Taylor.”

  Taylor had headed up one of the guerrilla groups that opposed former president Samuel Doe. Taylor’s troops had fought in the back country. Another guerrilla faction, centered near the capital of Monrovia and led by a man named Prince Johnson, had arranged to meet Doe under the supervision of a West African peacekeeping force. Instead the group overwhelmed the peacekeepers, kidnapped Doe, and tortured and executed him. The initial stages of the process were recorded for posterity on videotape—Doe bleeding from the places where his ears had been—and were played on television. This was in 1990. There has been bloody factional fighting since.

  “They say,” I observed, “that Charles Taylor was once in jail in the United States.”

  “Ha!” Fabrice was having none of it. “How did he escape jail? He says he bribed a guard with thirty thousand dollars. In the United States. Do you believe that?”

  “I guess not.”

  “Here,” he said, reaching inside his jacket. “Here is my passport.”

  I looked at the document. It seemed to be a genuine Liberian passport. There was a picture of Fabrice, and underneath it was his signature: Fabrice Clark. He was one of those people who like a wide-nibbed pen, almost like a crayon, and he formed his signature one laborious letter at a time, as if printing. Fabrice was twenty-nine years old and lived in Monrovia.

  “So,” he said, “you see I am who I say I am.”

  “I never doubted it.”

  “I am a businessman.”

  “How’s business?”

  Fabrice stared off across the Niger, where the sun was just beginning to set and the sky was gaudy. “I have,” Fabrice said in a confiding tone, “a liquidity problem.”

  I often travel alone and most often in developing countries. In these places it is generally wise to get to the capital city some days before your flight home. Things can happen.

  And it is in the capitals of such places that expat Brits and Americans and Australians—all manner of people not native to the country—sit drinking in bars and dreaming of how they might play on government stupidity or individual greed and end up flying out with a satchel of cash in hand.

  On occasion, in these joints, some friendly, slightly seedy type will throw an arm over my shoulder and let me in on his latest fast deal. It makes me wonder: Does this stuff happen to everyone who travels alone? Or am I just lucky?

  Why did the American expats in Belize, for instance, think I’d want to get involved in their scheme to poison fish on the reefs and sell the surviving but seriously ill tropicals to pet stores across the United States?

  Or: Why on earth would I want to get involved in a scheme to steal Balinese house dogs? Distinctive animals, the guy said. Damn things would go for a fortune in the States. We’d sell them through Dog World magazine. Call ’em Balinese Hindu hounds, something like that. Besides, you see the way people treat them. Where are they going to have a better life?

  And it really wouldn’t cost me that much to get in on the ground floor.

  I listen to each pitch with sheer astonishment. I collect them. And okay, maybe someday I’ll be the guy flying out of Siberia with a suitcase full of money. It could happen. But chatting with Fabrice, I perceived that he thought of me as a mark, either stupid or greedy. I wondered which.

  “Everyone,” I informed Fabrice, “has a liquidity problem.”

  Fabrice, for his part, glanced about in the manner of a man selling genuine Rolex watches on the street corner. He reached inside his jacket and produced a letter. The thing had been typed on thick white paper that was now a dingy gray, as if it had been dunked in water or stored in a very humid, tropical climate.

  It seemed about as official as any letter in Liberia could possibly be. There was an embossed Liberian flag on the upper left-hand corner and an embossed American flag on the right. On the left side of the paper was a large Firestone logo. The rubber company had been one of the largest foreign corporations in Liberia before the recent troubles. Offsetting the Firestone logo was the seal of the U.S. Treasury.

  The document had been written on a manual typewriter, and the enclosed portion of every e and every a was black. The letter was in English, and the first line said, “This safe contains $2 million.…”

  The sun now lay across the Niger in a long, undulating orange streak. In the gathering darkness, Fabrice said, “My father … this is my father’s gift.”

  As I tried to read the letter, Fabrice filled me in on the emotional mechanics of a country in revolution. His father had been a high official in the Samuel Doe government, in charge of finances. When it became clear that the Doe government could not survive its various challenges, his father had embezzled a sizable fortune, which was put into a safe and hidden where no one could find it.

  Family ties, Fabrice explained, were blood-thick, and even though Fabrice fought on the side of the rebels, his father had gotten word to him about the money and the place where it was hidden. When the fighting cooled down, Fabrice went to that place, found the safe, and opened it with the combination his father had given him. Now he was a very rich man.

  “So what’s your liquidity problem?” I asked.

  “Read the letter, please.”

  “It’s too dark.”

  “Then, Tim, please, come to my room.”

  He lived five doors down from me in the hotel, and our rooms were similar: an off-brand TV that got CNN International, a telephone, a long, narrow bed, a ceiling fan, a wooden table, and two monastic chairs.

  Fluorescent lights made the room seem bleak. The letter was written in ersatz legalese, with a lot of “wheretofores” in regard to parties of the first, second, and third part. It said, in essence, that if the two million American dollars in this safe should ever become discolored in the tropical heat and humidity where it was being kept, such money would become worthless if it was ever cleaned with a money-laundering compound not approved by the U.S. government.

  The letter was signed by “Floyd Benson,” who identified himself as the U.S. secretary of the treasury. Floyd used a wide-nibbed, crayonlike pen to sign his name, and he seemed to draw his signature one laborious letter at a time.

  I had several questions at this point.

  “So, uh, Fabrice. You’ve got the money, but I gather it’s discolored.”

  “Yes. Worthless.”

  “This let
ter doesn’t say which cleaning compounds are, in fact, approved by the U.S. government.”

  “There is only one. It is called TQ4.”

  “And, Fabrice, excuse me, but here’s where I’m having a lot of trouble. I mean, how did the secretary of the treasury know that your father was going to, uh, appropriate all this money? And why would he write him a letter? What does Floyd Benson care if some stolen money in Liberia rots away in a hidden safe?”

  “This,” Fabrice said reasonably, “is not the real letter.”

  “Because,” I said, “there was a treasury secretary named Lloyd Bentsen.”

  “The letter is not important,” Fabrice said. “When you see what I have to show you, then you’ll believe me.”

  Rooting around in a canvas duffel, Fabrice came up with an envelope, some cotton swabs, and a small bottle full of clear liquid. The envelope contained several brown sheets of flimsy paper the size of dollar bills. Fabrice put one on the table, poured a tiny amount of the clear liquid on a bit of cotton, and began swabbing one of the papers. In a matter of thirty seconds, he had cleaned one half of one side of what appeared to be a genuine U.S.

  $50 bill.

  “That,” I said, “is incredible.”

  “I told you: when you see it, you believe it.”

  “I believe it,” I said. “But what’s the problem here? You just go out, get some TQ4, and you’re a rich man.”

  “It’s my liquidity situation,” Fabrice said. “TQ4 is very expensive. I have no money to do this.”

  “What’s it cost?”

  “One liter is fifty thousand dollars, American.”

  “Oh,” I said. My expression told Fabrice that this was way out of my range. Still, I asked, “How much will a liter of TQ4 clean?”

  “Maybe half the money.”

  “A million dollars.”

  “Maybe more, maybe less. The money is in twenties, fifties, and hundreds. You can’t tell what they are. You might end up cleaning all twenties.”

  “Can you buy TQ4 in Bamako?”

  “Oh, yes. A man I know. But it is not legal.”

  “No,” I said. “I suppose not. But, Fabrice, what is the smallest amount of TQ4 you could buy? If you had the money.”