The Last Supper: And Other Stories

by Howard Fast

  “Neither do I,” said Serente. “The man has been a patient of mine, and it never occured to me.”

  His wife said, “Things occur to writers that would never occur to you. That is why they are writers. But really we must come to dinner. It’s an interesting dinner, but it will spoil if it waits too long.”

  More than that, it was a very good dinner, a wonderful dinner, with hot tortillas, veal with mole over it, that ancient, incredible chocolate sauce that the Aztecs perfected a thousand years ago, frijoles, hot and whole in their own sauce, arroz, the good Mexican rice, with chicken and shrimps to go with it, and calavo, mashed with onions and garlic, fresh tomatoes and cucumbers, and cold Mexican beer, which is as good as any beer in the world and better than most.

  The talk at dinner turned to other things—with a sense of relief to my wife and myself—and they talked of Mexican art and the struggle in Chile, the incredible endless struggle, so consistent, so unabating, and then the difference between Mexican dances and Spanish dances, and why so many Spaniards in Mexico—the anti-Republican Spaniards—owned grocery stores, and how the super-highway between Mexico City and Cuernavaca had been built by peons who were paid six pesos a day, and what a hollow mockery the magnificent statue of the workers at the Mexican end of the highway was—although Gomez objected to this as an entire characterization and pointed out what was implicit in the sculpture, that these were new gods the people were raising, even in their misery, the image of the workers, not of a saint. Then the exile spoke of University City, and the wonders in mosaic that Diego Rivera had wrought there, and the Chilean asked whether is was not true that because the new university had been built so far from the city, the students lacked bus fare to get there? It was true, Gomez admitted, admitting that Mexico had the most magnificent university and possibly the poorest—in pesos—student body in the whole world. Then the talk turned to Guatamala, so recently betrayed and raped, and how instead of the earth-shaking moan of anguish and hatred arising from Mexico, only a few tears had fallen. But more tears than one might have expected, Serente said, recalling an Indian woman in his office weeping uncontrollably for what had been done to the good place of the south, and his wife told of the Guatamalan flag that Rivera had painted upon the gates of his house, proudly and defiantly and pathetically, for the whole world to see.

  So the evening went, a good evening, with warm people and good talk and good food. Republican Spain lived a moment and so did the Republic of Guatamala, and others lifted the fallen standards out of the dust and held them, and so memories and hopes were mingled. None of these were people who lived by the secure retreat of talk and speculation; all of them had ventured their bodies and souls in what they believed, and they knew the winnings and the losses in the life they lived. And finally it was over and time to go, the moon high in the sky which the brief evening rain had washed so clean and pure, and we began to say our good-byes. Dr. Serente offered to drive us home, but Gomez who was staying with an uncle who lived near our hotel, said he thought he would like to walk home because the night was so fine, and we decided to walk with him. We said little as we walked through the darkened streets, for when an evening such as this is finished, it is hard to pick up new threads, and as a matter of fact the silence was restful and comfortable. Because it was the shortest direct way, we turned into Dwight W. Morrow street after we had crossed the empty plaza, and in the last block before we reached Morales, we saw a man standing under the street light.

  “Look,” my wife said, no more than the single word, but we knew what she meant, He was a telephone cable repair man, out on a late call, and he had just climbed down from the cable pole. The light lit him and magnified him as he stood there, legs spread, arms akimbo, a coil of wire over one shoulder, a climbing rope slung over the other, his tools in his leather belt and his feet in heavy leather climbing boots. He stood there like a rock, his whole muscular body and his fine chiseled Indian face of one piece and part, his cotton shirt open at the neck, his lips parted in the slight smile of recognition that honest folk have for one another so late, at night. Gomez greeted him softly and with dignity, and he in turn returned the greeting with the same calm dignity. There was no comment made, and Gomez needed to make none. We said goodnight to Gomez, and we went home …

  A day or so later, my wife, not willing to let the matter rest as it was, went to see Serente and begged him to take money from us to go through with the operation on the little girl; but as in my own case, he was able to convince her that it was impossible. He pointed out to her that he did not even know where these people lived; he had no address for them; they had a few acres of land, somewhere out in the hills; and unless they came to his office again, he could not reach them. Better than I was able to, he pointed out the overwhelming difficulties in what had seemed to us to be a very simple matter. He also stressed that there was no proof at all that the operation would be successful. “You offer charity,” he said to her. “You do it because you are kind and good. But I think you know what charity is. Charity is like facing a thousand hungry people with a crumb of food. You will think I am cruel to say it, but the bad thing about charity is that it pours water on anger. There is no hope for this land but anger—terrible, terrible anger.”

  To us, our frustration was a lash on pity and sentimentality. In Mexico, where the great god of dollar can buy twelve and a half pesos, the poorest American tourist is overcome with delusions of grandeur until the moment when he looks at himself. It is true that many never look at themselves, but some do—and for those there is at least a flash of insight in which they see themselves as others see them.…

  About ten days more passed before we saw Serente again. His practice was an uneven one. If somewhere in the hills there was a sudden sweep of dysentery, of virus or of one of many other diseases, a flood of patients would overwhelm his office. The poor Mexicans knew he was Spanish—and Spaniards are not liked by Mexicans, whose memory is a long one—but they also knew that he never turned patients away, and there was many another doctor who would not look at a patient unless the pesos laid on his palm first, so his practice slackened only rarely. But then, one day, he turned up at our apartment at about two o’clock, haggard with the pressure, of work, and said to me,

  “Either I get away for a few hours, or I go out of my mind. What do you have for this afternoon?”

  “Like all afternoons here, I work hard at resting.”

  “Oh. Why can’t I be a tourist?”

  “You don’t have the personality for it. Where do you want to go?”

  “To a strange, wonderful place called Xocalco, an ancient city on top of a mountain. It is about thirty kilometers from here, and it will do us good to spend an hour there. It is very restful. Will your wife release you?”

  “I think so. But I’m told I’m a sick man, so I wonder about climbing mountains.”

  “This one, we can climb most of the way in my car. It will do you good, believe me as a doctor.” My wife agreed with him, and in a little while, Sexente and I were in his car, speeding through the green, gleaming rice fields and then climbing into the great wall of mountains that lies south and west of Cuernavaca. Then we turned off the main highway onto a small side road through a broad, beautiful, but strangely uninhabited valley. Even the grass huts and little patch fields of the peasants were missing here, nor was there a burro to be seen munching the grass or a bullock pulling a wooden plow against the horizon. We drove on until Serente pointed to a hulking purple mass. “There it is,” he said, and I commented that it was very high and that it hardly seemed possible that a car could climb it. “Perhaps, but the old Mexicans built a stone roadway up to the place, and much of it still remains and the rest is dirt fill. They were mighty workers in stone, and a very great people, and their works dwarf the antiquities that we Europeans admire so. Mexicans are very proud, and one of the reasons is that they have not forgotten the old times.”

  “Others have.”

  “Yes, others have.”
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br />   Serente was an excellent driver. We turned off the road onto what seemed to be only a dirt cow track, but after we had crossed several fields, it emerged as a fairly good dirt road. It wound up the side of the mountain, with ancient stonework buttressing the hillside above, it as well as the road below, and it went on and on, in endless curves and convolutions, and as it mounted, the hills around us rolled back and the whole broad vista of the valley below spread out before us. Finally, we came to a place where the car could go no further, and Serente parked in a small clearing, and from there we went on by foot over the four or five hundred feet that remained to the summit.

  From Serente’s description, I had anticipated an unusual sight, but my thinking was shaped by the other ruins I had seen near Mexico City and in the, South. Those ruins represented years of archeological work, and this place had hardly been touched—only a single pyramid excavated—yet in its vastness, in the grand purpose of the concept that had made it, in the immensity of its ruins, it dwarfed anything I had seen before. It took my breath away. It left me awe-stricken and speechless, and full of a sense of the awfulness of time.

  We had emerged on the top of a long, rolling plateau, and for a mile of its length in front of us, and half a mile behind us, an enormous dead stone city lay, dead and clothed all over with verdure, but with here and there an outcropping of stone, a ledge, a wall, a sill; and under the green cloak, the shapes remained, mighty buildings, tall pyramids, sunken courts, giant columns with only the base left, formal gardens where brightly dressed people had once walked, and fountains which had once picked the Mexican sunlight into all of its bright colors. We walked through its lonely emptiness, interlopers in time, and examined the single pyramid that had been uncovered. It was strange, different from any pyramid I had ever seen before, but precise and handsome in its workmanship. I asked Serente whether he knew what manner of people had once lived in this city. “They don’t know yet,” he replied, “but whatever they called themselves, we know that they were the same people as the peasants who live in the neighborhood now. The people who are fastened to the earth never change. They endure everything and survive everything—” But did they, I wondered? Serente had told me that at one time, it was estimated, ten thousand people lived in this city on a mountaintop, and how many tens of thousands had lived in the valley below to grow the food to feed these? But now the valley was silent and empty. I asked Serente.

  “It is not empty. A few people still live, there. They are the remnant of agony. I saw the agony of Spain myself, and I was a part of it, but the agony of Mexico is something else. All that is hideous and monstrous on this earth has bled Mexico. She has been raped, not thrice, but a hundred times, raped, bled and betrayed. Church and North America taught her lessons and still teach her, and her own rich suck the half empty veins of her body, and this has been for four hundred years. What other people could live through that and remain so strong and proud and brave? Possibly at one time, a hundred thousand people lived in that valley below, and someday a hundred thousand people will live there again. Now only a handful are left. But they have not gone—no, they have not gone. Their children will plow the land, and the land will bloom.”

  We walked down the slope of the plateau to a ceremonial ballpark, looking up at the stands where the dukes and knights of the old Indian civilization had sat, and our thoughts filled in the panorama of bright color, of painted walls and painted gods, of banners flying and gold glittering. A little Indian boy joined us there, his flock of goats scattered behind him, munching among the ruins. “If the senores desire,” he said, “I will show you where the priests lived.” We said yes and gave him a peso, and his beautiful dark face lit momentarily with a smile of appreciation, and then he and his goats led us down a winding path to a broad ledge where a long row of houses had been partly excavated. They were, invisible from above. “Who told you they are the houses of priests?” Serente asked him, and he replied, “When the curator comes from Mexico City, he instructs me carefully. He tells me that my own people built these houses, and that I must remember all I can, for some day we will rebuild them. When I am older, I will go to the university and study such things and be an archaeologist myself. See, already I think about it. Look on that hillside there.” He pointed to a mountainside, toward the end of the plateau. “Do you see the even space between the trees—like a storm cut a swathe there? Well, I have decided that no trees grow there because a stone road lies beneath the grass, and even the curator did not know that until I pointed it out to him. Next week he will make what we call a sinking there. Do you know what a sinking is?” We said we did, and we followed him to other places and listened to more, of his chattering and his uncanny childish wisdom. When we said goodbye to him, he bowed formally with that courtly grace which so many Mexicans have and which no Mexican needs to be taught, and as a host, he invited us to come again and to bring our friends. “Because people do not know what lies on this mountaintop. You must tell them.”

  We returned to the car in silence, and in silence we drove down the mountain to the road below. Only when we were well on our way back did I ask Serente,

  “Is there any news of the little girl?”

  “She died two days ago,” Serente said evenly. “Yesterday, I went to the church where her body lay.” I learned afterwards that he had provided the money for the funeral, but he said nothing about that. “She was a beautiful child,” Serente continued. “I wanted to weep. I am afraid I am becoming sentimental, like a North American, and with a few exceptions, I hate North Americans as much as I hate sentimentality. You are one of the exceptions, my friend, and I am sure you have learned to forgive me the things I say. Anyway, it will comfort you a little to know that in my opinion, she could not have been saved.”

  “It doesn’t comfort me, and anyway, I think you are lying.”

  “Perhaps I am lying. What difference does it make? All children are beautiful, whether in Mexico or in North America. Here they die from dysentery and virus; your people destroy childhood in other ways, and now that you have this splendid toy of yours, your hydrogen bomb, you will be able to spread death among the Chinese children and the Russian children much more economically and profitably than among the Mexicans, where you only use such old fashioned tools as oppression, ignorance, and monopolies in anti-biotics.”

  “I have noticed that a number of Mexican companies make anti-biotics and keep the price as high as we do.”

  “True and deserving,” Serente sighed. “Some kind of a mood has come over me, and it is best if I just keep my mouth shut now. Anyway, I want to be back in my office before the rain.”

  The clouds were gathering as we entered Cuernavaca. Serente dropped me at the hotel, shook my hand warmly, and begged forgiveness. But no one could be, angry at him, and therefore no one ever had any need to forgive him. I went upstairs to our apartment and told my wife about the afternoon. The children were still playing in the garden, and she suggested that we go out onto the terrace, and smoke a cigarette, and then there would still be time before dinner for a drink in the restaurant downstairs. The terrace was a favorite place of ours at this time of the day, for during the rainy season, each evening presented a breathtaking and impressive spectacle. Most often, the clouds would begin to gather at about five o’clock, and from our terrace, one had a clear view of a mighty gorge in the mountains, down which a wild river ran. As the rain approached, this gorge would fill with dark green and purple clouds, and the clouds would appear to tumble down through the ravine, even as the river did. The whole vista then became unearthly, full of fright and grandeur, and shot through with wild beams of sunlight, so much like an El Greco, but so much more real and colorful.

  As this took place, I told my wife what Serente had said about the little girl, and she nodded silently and woefully. Then the rain started, and we, went down to the restaurant.

  The manager of the restaurant was a Spanish Republican, the head of the organization of Spanish Republicans in Cuernavaca, a
nd his warm greeting, his gentle smile, and his just as gentle salud, brought us back to reality. We invited him to join us, and we drank to life, to the consternation of the butcher Franco, and to the day when Madrid would be the tomb of fascism.

  Then we drank to Mexico—to Mexico, the mother, who shelters the oppressed, the driven, the hungry—not to poor, bleeding Mexico, but to Mexico angry with wrong, an old anger, an old and long memory.

  We went back to our apartment, and our children were there where they had fled from the rain, playing games of fear and defiance to the mighty peals of thunder, the savage arrows of lightning; and they saw our faces and asked what was wrong. We embraced them and held life in our arms, assuring them that nothing was wrong—only live and grow valiant and proud and strong!

  About a week later, walking on Guerrero, the narrow, crowded market street of Cuernavaca, the street with the savage and defiant name, we saw him again, riding on his little donkey. “There he is!” my wife said to me, and as if in answer to her words, he raised his head. Oh, how his face had changed! The repose was gone; the peace was gone; and now there was anger, bitterness—and with it a brooding portent of the future. We no longer saw Christ as one sees him in the thousand paintings and sculptures; we saw a Mexican peon, whose heart had filled to overflowing and had broken with the weight of sorrow, and we saw that strange, frightening Mexican anger that has amazed the world before and will amaze it again.

  Yet that, perhaps, was more truly the face of the man called Christ.

  The Power of Positive Thinking

  MRS. EGLESTON WAS AWAKENED BY HER HUSBAND’S voice, and as she listened, she realized that he was holding a conversation. The only trouble was that the other person her husband was speaking to was not there. At first, with a real sense of alarm, she felt that another person must be in her bedroom, but there was enough moonlight in the room to show her that aside from herself and her husband, each in his and her bed, the room was empty.