Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation

by Santos, John Phillip

  La Ruta was traced in a Day-Glo turquoise line against verdant green, emerging from Veracruz on the gulf, winding its way up into the coffee bush mountains of Jalapa, descending then in a reticulated pattern, all plains and valleys, crisscrossing the new highway toward Cholula, then over the volcano Popocatépetl, through Coyoacán, arriving, finally, in the mesh of pavement and buildings at the center of Mexico City.

  The rented Volkswagen Bug clattered with the throttle all the way open, revving in a high-pitched whine down the empty Orizaba superhighway to Veracruz. Mexico’s toll highways are ghost tracks, with many Mexicans unable or unwilling to pay the high tolls, leaving the brightly lit three-lane roads devoid of pilgrims, especially at night. It had taken hours to leave Mexico City, the traffic congealed for miles through the poor precinct of the city known as Nezahaualcoyotl, where the fumes of burning garbage heaps leave a permanent acrid haze over the district. Then, from Puebla on, an unimpeded trail, where I was passed only occasionally by swift and thundering eighteen wheelers, bearing painted slogans like, “IN THE HANDS OF LORD JESUS CHRIST,” and “VIRGENCITA, DO NOT ABANDON ME!” Where the road ends in Orizaba, a vast industrial plant looms on the horizon, sending pillars of flame up into the bruise-colored night sky, illuminating a city of gangways, storage tanks, plants, and power stations.

  From there to Veracruz it was a dark, two-lane blacktop, where I had to grip the wheel of the Bug to keep from being flipped off the road in the gusting wake of a passing truck. On both sides, farmers were burning their fields after harvest, and the waist-high flames from far off silhouetted legions of cows and goats crowded along the road, making the drive at times perilous and slow. After a meal of red snapper at the Gran Café de la Parroquia, I slept in a room over the plaza, the shutters open to a group of musicians, guitars, mandolins, violins, and bass, playing the doleful, tango-esque musica Jarocha of the city, made famous by the great Veracruz composer Agustín Lara. The singer’s pleas for mercy from his scornful lover rang across the plazas, the violins striking small notes as faint as meteor light.

  The next day, setting out alone on La Ruta, the journey began in the village known as La Antigua, where Cortés was said to have moored his ships to a pair of fat-trunked ceiba trees that still stand on the banks of the river inlet that cuts through contemporary Antigua. The commemorative signs marking the two bedraggled, low-hanging trees are rusted over and defaced, their legends barely legible now, except for “FUCK CORTÉS.”

  Cortés’s original garrison in Antigua is a ruin, the fallen walls grown over with thick, densely woven trunks and vines. Inside, a group of campesinos had built an adobe shack, surrounded by banana trees, their pigs and chickens unloosed through the part of the quarters one map showed to have been the private lodgings of Cortés himself. Nearby is the little chapel, barely bigger than a shed, built by Cortés’s men as a sanctuary in which the first Mass was offered on the Mexican mainland, and the Spanish Requierimiento was read three times aloud, claiming legal domain for King Carlos V over all of those lands forevermore. If the taproot of the Indian world was lost in time, this modest, still meticulously kept chapel was the beginning of what would become Mexico, part Indio, part Español. Cortés had children with Indian women, among them, Malintzín, the Totonaca Indian slave whom the Mayans had presented to Cortés as a gift. She had learned Mayan, and her original language had been Nahuatl, the language of the Azteca empire. Along with a Spaniard who had been shipwrecked and learned Mayan, they formed the translation chain of the conquista: Malintzín interpreting Nahuatl into Mayan, and the Spanish officer translating Mayan into Spanish. From the very beginning, Spanish and Indian languages were threaded through Cortés and his army like invisible filaments, binding Indio and Español inextricably together.

  Along La Ruta, I went to the village of San Miguel Tzinacapan, high in the mountains of northeastern Puebla, one of the places where the Volador tradition has been maintained unbroken since the time before the conquest. Cortés’s army passed near here on their way inland first to Cholula, then onward to Tenochtitlán. Today, you turn onto a winding mountain road that takes you through the Spanish-sounding villages of Grijalba, Oriental, and Zaragoza. Tzinacapan is literally at the end of the road. It is a small, close-knit village of Nahua people, descendants of the Aztecs, who still speak Nahuatl, though they prefer to call it “Mexicano.” Up in the mountains of Puebla, the conquest was never completed. The statue of San Miguel the Indians worship so vigorously in a torrent of song and dance is a stand-in for the warrior god of their Nahua antepasados, Huitzilopochtli, the god who led the Aztecas on their epic exodus into Mexico from Aztlán in the north.

  They live mainly by farming, or working in the nearby town of Cuetzalán, which has an active tourist trade. The lands are densely overgrown highland forests, but close enough to the Gulf of Mexico to still see the palms and ferns of coastal jungle flora. Farming is a constant struggle against the fecund, irrepressible force of the wild, and harvests are always meager. I arrived during the annual celebrations of the feast day of the village’s patrón, San Miguel. Much of what little these people have they spend during these days of transcendent fiesta. The fiesta is a three-day-long ritual that, the residents say, is a necessary observance to guarantee the cycle of planting and harvest will repeat again.

  As the fiesta began, bands of musicians assembled in the stone-cobbled streets, and several corps of Voladores prepared to make their mesmerizing flights from a pole planted just meters away from the main church door in the middle of the village plaza. While they spin around the creaking pine trunk, from 120 feet up in the air, a delirium of dance and music explodes on the ground. Quetzalinos, with their brightly colored, giant crescent-shaped feather headdresses. Toreadores in mirror shades, dressed like charros, performed furious tapatio steps, punctuated with yelps. Mysterious Matachines in their sequined costumes and veiled sombreros, repeating a grave minuet. Drunken, menacing Santiagos with their wooden swords, commemorate Santiago Matamoros, the killer of Moors. And amidst all the others, the Miguelinos, swooping in waltz-time from left to right, dressed like their patron saint, in a golden conquistador’s helmet, a helot’s skirt and carapace, and a pair of dwarfish golden wings.

  Looking upward toward the sun, I listened to the thick hemp ropes stretching and disentwining. The upside-down flyers were playing flutes, arms crossed on their chests, striking birdlike poses, throwing sharp flitting glints of light from the mirrors that deck their red cone-shaped hats, casting their moving shadows across the dancing hordes. What could any of this have to do with me and my family, Norteños from the Coahuila desert?

  Later, back in my hotel room, in the nearby town of Cuetzalán, I felt listless and confused. Aimlessly, I switched the television channels past He-Man, Master of the Universe, a badly dubbed Humphrey Bogart movie, and ads for Walter Mercado, the Liberace-esque Puerto Rican astrologer’s psychic help line, proclaiming “You are present at the birth of a new Mexico!” A news bulletin reported that a twenty-two-year-old policeman in Mexico City had run amok in the city subway station called “La Raza.” Another symptom of “la crisis.” In a crowded train, he had pulled out his service revolver and fired eleven times, killing two instantly and wounding several others. He ran out into the station but was immediately captured by police. The bulletin included a long interview with the cop, despondent, roughed up, and bruised, and still standing in the spot where his mug shot had been taken.

  “I don’t know what happened,” he said morosely into the video camera. “I don’t remember anything at all.”

  Resolving to leave, I rose the next morning before dawn to visit the nearby ruins of an ancient ceremonial center called Yohualichan, “the house of night” in the Nahuatl tongue. Like Palenque and Monte Alban, these pyramids, small by comparison, are perched on the rim of an expansive valley, offering a broad panorama of the plain below, and, by night, a wide view of the dome of stars.

  The modern village of Yohualichan nestles the old ceremonia
l center like a wreath around the temple ruins. The main pyramid resembles the famous pyramid of the nichos at El Tajín, its exterior pock-marked by galleries of small inset niches that are believed to have been used to place idols in a specific arrangement corresponding to the day of the year and the elaborate calendrical cycles that were part of the way of life of the indigenous people who lived here. A great plaza with a meticulously tended lawn lay in the middle of the quadrangle of pyramids. The people who built ancient Yohualichan were probably Totonaca in origin, but they were later overrun and expelled by the Nahua people of the Mexica empire of Tenochtitlán. It is their descendants whom I had watched dance and fly the day before.

  It was a glorious clear morning, and the sounds of tinny radios and morning pans clanging in the little village nearby reverberated between the pyramids. I wondered just what the dances were really about. From what beginnings had they evolved? And what memory were they meant to preserve? Those temple ruins, like so many others across Mexico, testify to a people with an extraordinary sense of their own place in the vast panorama of the cosmos. They built their pyramids, their villages, their cities, in precise orientation to the heavens, as if they sought to yoke heaven and earth in one unbroken chain between the world of men and the world of nature. Much of that world was destroyed in the conquest, but ruins such as these were still living repositories of knowledge, markers left in time for all time to come.

  A woman and what appeared to be a group of students listening attentively to her milled about in the plaza center. Sitting atop one of the pyramids, I watched when, with a shriek from the woman, the group of students set out running in one corps along the perimeter of the plaza, kicking up their legs wildly behind them as they ran. The woman then walked toward me with a lithe stride and began climbing the pyramid’s steep steps with an alacrity that made her seem very young. When she arrived at the pinnacle where I was sitting, I was taken aback to see she was actually an older woman, maybe well into her sixties, her short-cropped hair completely gray. She approached, dressed in a simple paisley smock and wearing Adidas sneakers with ankle socks. Her brown face was soulful yet stern, and I thought she might by angry until she smiled, showing one gold front tooth, reaching out to me with both of her hands as if she were greeting an old friend.

  “¿Estabas mantralizado?” she asked, almost shouting.

  I wasn’t sure what she had said to me. “¿Perdón?” I answered.

  “You were chanting,” she said in English, taking my hands in hers as I stood up. I had been chanting some Hindu mantras hours earlier, as the sun was coming up, but there was no one around the pyramids at that hour. “I was,” I replied nervously. “Do . . . you chant?”

  “I am Rosaura. I teach anthropology at the university in Puebla, and I am a spiritual teacher. Those are my students,” she said perfunctorily, pointing to the plaza below. Her students were still making their circuits, still maintaining their exaggerated goofy gaits, which, at that moment, made me laugh. Rosaura nodded, laughing along with me. “Yes, it is funny, but it makes you very strong,” she said, holding up her firm biceps to show me, and pointing to her legs as she performed the motion, bouncing both of her knees in the air as in a Shaker dance.

  “What do you teach?” I asked.

  “I’m an expert on the Teotihuacán culture. That’s what I teach in the university. But I teach them the old beliefs, the old Mexican beliefs. I am Mestiza, but I grew up here,” she said, motioning toward the village. “There were many here who knew the old beliefs, Totonaca, Nahua, Maya, and they taught me. They would’ve been happy to hear you singing here today.”

  I told her I was from Texas and about my fascination with the Volador ritual and asked if she knew anything about where it had come from, or how it had originated. As I spoke, she smiled and nodded at every detail, her eyes anticipating each word. “The Voladores came from over there,” she said, looking off to the east, where the gulf was faintly visible in the far distance, a wire-thin glint on the horizon.

  “But you understand, they’ve been here a very long time. Way before all the others, all the rest of us. They taught all the newcomers to do the dance, which is a compromiso between us and the gods and goddesses.”

  “Los dioses y diosas antiguos,” she repeated in Spanish. “But you must know much more about it than me. It’s good you come here to see the Voladores! All of Mexico’s children will come back, you’ll see.” Rosaura took one long breath as if to end the conversation and said, “Let me give you a blessing, an old blessing.”

  She held my arms at my side, and pulled my shoulders up to make me stand straight. I saw several of her students peering up at us as they ran along the far side of the plaza. Then, Rosaura began rapidly whispering, her eyes closed, placing a droplet of her spittle on her index finger and rubbing it first on my forehead and then my sternum. She pulled at my belt buckle and lightly spat into my pants, and then rubbed more spittle onto my boots. As she stood, she bowed to the four directions, and said finally, in Spanish, “and when you leave, leave some offering here, something that means something to you. Buen camino, hijito.”

  I watched her descend the pyramid in bounds, rejoining her students and ambling off toward the village. Yohualichan resumed its sentinel silence. It had been hard to take Rosaura’s blessing seriously, coming unexpectedly after her hurried discourses on Teotihuacán, ancient aerobics, and the Voladores. But as I sat on the pyramid alone, the places where she touched me were tingling, as if I had been touched by something very hot. Before leaving, I found a clearing behind one of the pyramids and buried my old Walkman in a shallow hole.

  I decided to stay on in San Miguel Tzinacapan for the last two days of the fiesta. The dances continued. The new sixteen-year-old Queen of the Corn was announced and crowned in a long ceremony. And all day, into late twilight when the deep crimson shadows spread out across the Puebla mountains, you could hear the long, whirling descent of the Voladores—the plaintive sound of their hemp ropes, pulled taut and spinning even tighter with the weight of the tethered dancers as they gradually approach the earth. As the moon rose, onlookers set off fireworks that illuminated the sky around them.

  I was invited to lunch at the simple house of Señor Rosales, the village mayordomo, or host, for that year of the fiesta. In exchange for the honor, he would foot the expense of several public feasts and generous supplies of pulque and beer. And there was a continuous feast taking place at his house. All of the dancers came to pay their respects to him, doing a small dance in the meeting room of his home, then placing an offering of honey, turkey, or liquor at the main altar. The group of the Voladores that I had watched that afternoon marched into the house and performed a circle dance with flurries of intricate steps, accompanying themselves with flutes and drums. Their pointed caps were tipped with a circular fan of colored foils. They wore white shirts with red sashes that had been elaborately beaded with floral designs. Their red velvet tights were beaded along the sides, and they ended in bell bottoms revealing the group’s matching Beatles boots. Finishing the little dance, the caporal of the group then placed a bottle of Yolixpa Fuerte, an herbal liqueur of the region, on the altar.

  Afterward, we sat together in the backyard at a long table set with two dozen places, all of us eating fresh tortillas and a spicy black turkey mole, made by Señora Rosales. I asked the caporal, named Florián, “What do you think about when you’re at the top of the pole, dancing and playing the flute and drum?”

  That afternoon, I had watched as Florián had made his dangerous dance on the pole’s top, leaning backward, his arms outstretched and waving from one side to the next. From the ground, he seemed to be speaking to a low-hanging cloud that was poised just above the pole.

  “I think about nothing,” Florián said, sipping on a Fanta orange soda.

  “Nothing?”

  “I just play and dance. And then it all happens at once, like a wind that comes and goes.”

  Cortés’s march across Mexico in 1519 left
a trail of devastation, death, and debris that the Mexican earth has absorbed by now. Setting out for the west from San Miguel, in Tlaxcala, you can see only sporadic rubble of the great wall that once protected the Indios from all intruders and would-be conquerors, including the great Mexica of Tenochtitlán. In Cholula, the last city the Spaniards encountered before entering the seat of the Mexica empire in the Valley of Mexico, stands a grand pyramid, perhaps the largest ever built by man, buried under soil by the Spaniards for centuries now. Looking like an ordinary tree-spotted hill nestled in a modern Mexican town, the hidden pyramid is crowned with a chapel at its summit that Cortés personally commissioned to symbolize the triumph of Christianity over the pagan worship he had found being practiced in Mexico.

  But what was buried once may not stay buried for all times. At the end of La Ruta de Cortés was the Azteca capital of Tenochtitlán, today’s Mexico City. At the center of Tenochtitlán stood the Templo Mayor, the main temple of the Mexica religion, with a shrine devoted to the worship and ritual obligations of the two gods, Huitzilopochtli and Tlalóc. From the peaks of this steep pyramid, the Mexica made their obligatory sacrifices, thereby perpetuating the cycle of the days that sustained all mankind, throwing the bodies of the sacrificial victims down the gore-stained steps after their hearts had been torn from the living victims.

  Once the Aztec empire had succumbed to the Spanish army, Cortés ordered that the Templo Mayor be sacked and destroyed, obliterating forever what he considered to be an abomination against God. It was known that many of the stones from the Templo had been used to construct the great cathedral that now stands in the middle of Mexico City, alongside the Zócalo, adjacent to the National Palace, the seat of government. For hundreds of years, it was believed that the remains of the Templo lay buried forever, beneath the stone foundation of that cathedral.