Mexico

by James A. Michener

  We were prevented from joining the toast by the nervous intrusion of a waiter who hurried to our table whispering breathlessly: “Gentlemen, I’m mortified, but the matador Juan Gómez and his party are coming down, and by right they ought to occupy this table.”

  “Naturally.” Don Eduardo nodded, although by any kind of seniority he was entitled to it. But he appreciated the restaurant’s difficulty should one matador enjoy a better table than his adversary. Consequently we rose and moved to a smaller table, and we were sitting there when Gómez, Cigarro and the singer Lucha González appeared. To my surprise, she did not stop at the table but with a brief nod toward the Leals passed them and went alone to the café-bar, where she was greeted by the manager. In a moment she was singing. Now that her matador was winning contracts that paid three or four thousand dollars a fight, she was no longer responsible for the support of her entourage, but peasant wisdom was strong in Lucha González and she knew that in the life of a matador disaster was always close at hand. Tonight Juan Gómez had money; next week he might be dead; so she would capitalize on his transitory fame and earn as much money for herself as possible. Gazing across the public square between numbers, she was probably thinking, If I earn enough, perhaps I’ll get to Spain whether my matador gets there or not.

  And so we sat in the late hours before the first bullfight of the Festival of Ixmiq-61. Don Eduardo Palafox, inheritor of so much that characterized the best in Toledo—the cathedral, the arches, the governor’s palace and the bull ranch—sat like any breeder assuring himself that his bulls were bound to be good. Doña Carmen Mier y Palafox occupied a rear table, supervising her waiters. At their table the Leals basked in the adulation of the crowd and pretended not to know that sitting close at hand were Cigarro and Juan Gómez, whose attention was focused on the singer in the nearby café.

  From the opposite side of the public square came the golden notes of the five barefoot mariachis and their sad-eyed soloist with his trumpet borrowed from the angels, and as they approached the soaring trumpet obliterated all other impressions of the night—and all thoughts of the possibility of death for the next day.

  Guadalajara, Guadalajara!

  You taste like rain-soaked earth

  And distant little springs.…

  O, unforgettable little springs,

  Unforgettable like that afternoon

  When rain from the hill

  Kept us from going to Tlaquepaque.…

  The trumpeter played a coda that would have melted any Mexican heart that heard it, and I wondered what had happened on that day long ago when sudden rain prevented someone from having a picnic at Tlaquepaque.

  The mariachis passed, and from the café we could hear the rough voice of Lucha González improvising flamenco songs and clicking her heels. As the various sounds blended with the hum of conversation at the tables I found myself staring at the benign statue of the long-forgotten Altomec Indian Ixmiq, whose stony smile was eternal and granted us benediction.

  5

  INDIAN ANCESTORS: THE BUILDERS

  Toward midnight, while there was still noisy activity in the plaza, the Widow Palafox came to my table, tapped me on the arm and whispered, “Your package of manuscript reached the airport and will be in New York at just about this time. You owe the messenger but we paid and will put it on your bill.”

  She led me through the ancient doorway and onto a small patio that I had loved as a child. There was the stone fountain on which I had played and the mass of brightly colored flowers that had always bloomed in such profusion. We climbed a series of stone steps to the second floor of the hotel, where a broad cloister ran completely around the upper section of the patio, into which it dropped tendrils of flowering plants. The heart of the hotel had always been this quiet patio of weathered stone, echoing cloister and abundant flowers.

  The widow took me along the cloister until she reached a door on the plaza side, and pushing this open she led me into a room famous in the history of Mexico. It was no ordinary room: its sides were extremely irregular, since they had to follow the wandering walls of the hotel front, and its haphazardly placed windows had always looked down upon the cathedral and for the last century upon the statue of Ixmiq as well.

  When the widow moved the door, a faint creaking that dated back to 1575, when the structure was built, told me that I was home, for it was in this room that my mother and I had hidden in 1918 during the second sacking of Toledo, when to continue living at the Mineral was impossible. It was from the largest of the windows that at the age of nine I had looked down on the rapists and the firing squads. I remember standing there and announcing matter-of-factly to my mother: “They’re going to shoot some more.” She had hurried over and when she saw who the victims were to be—the seven good people from the very building in which we had found refuge—she had screamed, “Oh God! No!” One of General Gurza’s men who commanded the firing squad turned momentarily from his duties and pumped a couple of revolver bullets at us, which had missed the window but splattered the surrounding stones, where the chips they tore away left shallow pockmarks that were still visible in the light from the terrace below.

  “I was standing here when the executions took place,” I remarked to the widow.

  “They were crazy days,” she mumbled.

  “After the captain shot at us, my mother hid on the floor but I crept back and peeked out to watch the squad do its work.”

  “That hole in the wall,” the widow explained, pointing to a prepared space over the bed, “is for a plaque that one of the historical societies is going to put here.”

  “Let’s make it a little larger and add, ‘Norman Clay slept here, too.’ ”

  “May your sleep be good,” the widow said, closing the squeaking door.

  The room held such vivid memories that it even evoked the history of my powerful Indian ancestors.

  When I was about ten years old and living once more at the Mineral, my father who, as an engineer and a scientist, was interested in speculating on historical might-have-beens, said: “At breakfast when we were talking about the choices that men sometimes have to make, you told me: ‘It doesn’t matter.’ Well, making the proper choice can matter, Norman, and I want you to remember an excellent example of how a decision that must at the time have seemed of no consequence turned out to be vitally significant.” To demonstrate this, he reached for a stick with which he drew in the sand a Y, saying:

  “This will stand for a decision that had to be made about four thousand years ago by some people from eastern Asia, probably from Siberia, who crossed over the Bering Strait and hiked southward through Alaska and the western United States.” (In later years I often wondered how my father could have known about this migration of our Indian ancestors, because during his time the relics of this Siberian trek had not yet been uncovered in Alaska; perhaps he was merely guessing. Of course, on one point he was quite wrong; we now know that the migrations from Asia took place not four thousand years ago but more like twenty thousand or possibly forty.)

  “These Indians wandering south from Alaska came at last to San Diego,” my father explained, “and they held a council to discuss what to do next. Some said, ‘Let’s continue down the coastline, because we’ve been doing that for three hundred years and it’s familiar territory,’ but others argued, ‘Let’s leave the coastline and strike out inland.’ The upshot was that each group went its own way. No one could have foretold that one group had made a brilliant choice and that the other had chosen disaster.”

  I remember looking at the two arms of the Y and asking, “Which one did right?”

  “Visualize the map of California,” he said, “and think.”

  I tried to do this, but all I could remember was the map in my Mexican schoolbook, and it showed California merely as one of the lands stolen from Mexico by the United States, so I could not deduce the point my father was trying to make.

  “Was the arm pointing to the sea the good one?” I asked.

&
nbsp; “It led to California Baja,” my father said grimly, and I instantly recalled what I had learned about that brutal, barren peninsula of heat and waterless sand. “Centuries later, when the Spaniards explored that desolate land, they found that the Indians who had gone there had degenerated close to the animal level. They lived almost without what we call a culture—no houses, not even clothing. They had no decent food and almost no water, and although the ocean about them was full of fish, they had never learned how to catch them. They were as pathetic as human beings can be and still live.”

  My father continued: “The other Indians chose the arm leading inland, and ultimately they reached the rich and fertile lands and, later, gold. They built three of the greatest civilizations of ancient times—the Aztecs of Mexico, the Maya of Yucatán and Guatemala and the Incas of Peru.”

  We stood for some minutes in silence. Then my father concluded his lecture with a statement that haunts me still, forty years after it was uttered: “You say choice means nothing? Norman, if your Indian ancestors had gone west you might now be an idiot. Thank your stars they came down through Toledo, for with the courage and the intelligence you inherited from that crowd you can become anything you wish.”

  Since my father’s death scholars have concluded that the Indians who made the right choice reached the high valley of Toledo about twenty thousand years ago, but, as I said before, some argue it might have been as much as forty thousand years ago. At any rate, from a level thirty feet below the bottom of our pyramid, archaeologists have excavated charcoal remains that radium analysis puts at not less than five thousand years old, while along the edges of the prehistoric lake that once filled the entire valley others have dug up the skeletons of elephants killed by spears at least fifteen thousand years ago.

  I have spent many idle hours, on plane trips or when my eyes were too tired to read, trying to visualize these ancient Indians of the primitive period, and at times they have seemed very real to me. Fifteen thousand years before the birth of Christ they had developed some kind of civilization in the high valley. They chipped out rude spear points for hunting and carved dishes for serving food. We know little about them, but they must have feared the gods, worshiped the sun, and wondered about the accidents of birth and death. From the day of my first talks on this subject with my father I never forgot that where I lived at the Mineral, men had been living for thousands of years, and you could not say that of Richmond, Virginia or Princeton.

  Therefore, when in the early years of the seventh century a certain tribe of Indians gained control of the high valley, its members, some of whom we now know by name, seemed to me almost like close relatives, and when the story is told that sometime around the year 600 one of these men became leader of the tribe and began building the great pyramid, he becomes so real that he fairly shouts at me from the distant past, and the fact that the oral traditions of Toledo indicate that he was one of my ancestors gives me great pleasure.

  In the year 600 the high valley looked pretty much as it does today. The last volcano had erupted some four thousand years earlier; the fantastically old lake had finally dried up; and the mountains stood exactly as they do today. In the intervening years the great piles of rock have lost possibly an inch and a half in height, due to wind erosion, but probably no more.

  Far to the north, still living in caves along jungle rivers, hid the uncivilized tribes who were eventually to develop into the Altomecs and the Aztecs, but in these years they were of no consequence. To the south, living in splendid palaces decorated with silver, gold and jade, were the Mayas, whose gaudily dressed messengers sometimes reached the high valley to arrange treaties of commerce. In the valley itself my ancestors were well established, a tribe of slim, fairly tall, dark-skinned Indians who had no real name but who were known throughout central Mexico simply as the Builders, for they had the capacity to construct finer edifices than any other peoples in the area. They knew how to quarry huge blocks of rock and transport them for miles, and they could make bricks with which to build their lesser structures.

  Shortly after the year 600 a leader with a new kind of vision gained control of the tribe. He was Ixmiq, and today in Toledo a statue and a yearly festival honor his name. He had a tightly controlled personality that was ideal for exerting leadership, so for nearly fifty years he ruled unchallenged, and this gave him time to accomplish many important projects.

  Waiting for an auspicious day on the calendar, he announced to his council, “I have in mind to erect a holy place for our gods ten or twenty times larger than any we have attempted before.” Before his advisers could protest he added, “And we shall build it not here in the city but in a special area that shall hereafter be reserved for holy rites.”

  He forthwith led his elders from the rude palace, which then occupied the site of today’s cathedral, and took them in a northerly direction some distance from the city to where the pyramid now stands. Using piles of stones, he directed his men to lay out what seemed to them a gigantic square, but which was only about half the size of the pyramid as we now know it. His councilors protested that such a building was impossible to build, but Ixmiq insisted on its construction.

  His workmen spent two years scraping away the loose earth until they reached firm earth or solid rock. He then divided the tribe into several units, which were assigned particular duties, and appointed a captain for each. Some went to live at the quarries and remained there for thirty years, passing their entire lives chipping rock. Others were the transport teams, who, with constantly increasing skill, mastered the trick of moving twenty- and thirty-ton rocks into position. Most of the men worked at the pyramid itself, inching the great blocks into position and then filling in the central portion of the structure with basketfuls of rubble, so that year by year the structure rose more impressively, and always with a flat top that grew smaller as the pyramid grew in height. These were years of peace in the high valley, nearly six centuries going by without an arrow being shot against an enemy, so that it was not imprudent for Ixmiq to assign his people to widely scattered areas and to a task that utilized the efforts of the entire community.

  When the huge pile had reached the intended height, it was leveled off and its spacious flat top was laid in huge blocks that took six years to work into place. Then a beautiful wooden altar was constructed so that when a priest stood at it he faced east. Four gods shared the altar and their statues lined it, with their faces turned to the west. The most important was the god of rain, for he was responsible for the flowers and the grain. Next came the sun god, the goddess of earth and a mysterious god who represented flowers, poetry, music, statesmanship and the family, and was carved in the form of a serpent with a bird’s head and scales of flowers.

  The pyramid of Ixmiq was a monument to peace and in the fortieth year, when it neared completion, the ceremonies that consecrated it were testimonials to peace and to one of the gentlest societies that ever existed in Mexico, or indeed, anywhere else on the American continents. The dedication ceremonies, insofar as we can reconstruct them from old carvings, consisted of prayers, dancing, the offering of hundreds of thousands of flowers, and a gigantic feast that lasted for three days. It is notable that for the first four hundred and fifty years of this pyramid’s existence not a single human life was sacrificed on its altar, or lost in any other way, except for the occasional case later on when some drunken priest or reveler accidentally tumbled from its height and broke his neck.

  It was a pyramid of joy and beauty, a worthy monument to the benign gods and to the farsighted man who had built it. In City-of-the-Pyramid, as the area came to be called, irrigation projects brought water from the hills down to the flat land, where flowers and vegetables were grown in abundance. Honey was collected from bees kept among the flowers, and turkeys were raised both in enclosures and in large guarded fields. Fish were available in the rivers and were kept in ponds.

  The Builders dressed well in cloth made of cotton, hemp and feathers, while leaders like Ixmiq o
rnamented themselves with gold and silver carved with religious symbolism, which workmen also applied to some of the finest pottery ever made in the Americas. Many little statues have come down to us, representing one or another of the four major deities, and each seems to be a god whom a family could have cherished. When I was a boy we had in our home a clay figure of the earth goddess, and she was a delightful fat little woman smiling and making the land fruitful with her blessing. Whenever we looked at her we felt good, and I can think of no primitive gods that were gentler than those of Toledo. I know of few civilizations that came so close to providing an ideal life for their people.

  Carved hieroglyphics have been recovered outlining Ixmiq’s code of laws, and although it is likely that we are misreading some of them, it is not conceivable that we have misunderstood them all. In Toledo, in the year 650, a woman whose husband had died leaving her with children not yet old enough to work was given a share of the produce of land owned by families with grown sons. On the other hand, a woman who committed adultery once was publicly shamed; on the second offense she was killed. It was conspicuous in the law of Ixmiq that priests had nothing to do with the execution of criminals; this was carried out by civil officials. In fact, in the entire history of these six centuries there is no record of priests being other than the spiritual heads of the community. They lived intimately with the gods and advised the populace of decisions made in heaven.

  We have one old stone, dug out of the pyramid in the 1950s, which shows a dignified leader who might have been Ixmiq. He is depicted as a stocky man with a long, straight nose, high cheekbones, Oriental eyes and powerful arms. He wore a towering headdress, probably ornamented in gold and silver, that must have stood about two feet high and that had feathers and flowers streaming from it in profusion. He carried a scepter topped by an animal’s head, a ceremonial robe of cotton and feathers, and a bunch of flowers. He was naked to the waist, but wore a kind of sarong and sandals.