The Jaguar's Children

by John Vaillant

  If I have just one more bar I know I can reach you. One more fucking bar and we are saved! ¡No es justo!

  ¡CHINGAOCHINGAOCHINGAOCHINGAOCHINGAO!

  5

  Thu Apr 5—18:47

  It’s getting cold again. I put my pants back on and look at César who is the same—like a dead man breathing. On the phone only one bar showing, and nothing from you. People are angry with me for talking so much—for shouting at nothing. I heard the baby-face man’s friend say he thinks I’m going crazy, but I’m not the only one and I can’t hear him now.

  Are you by any chance a Catholic? Do you have la velada—the vigil for the dead? There is always a certain odor in that room because death has its own smell, you know—close and wet and soursweet like strange meat, and you can’t hide it—not behind the food or the flowers or your own sweat. Not even behind all the shit and piss and puke in this truck because I’m smelling it now, AnniMac. We have a saint for the hopeless situations, but praying to her is not helping anyone in here. Oye, I need your help. I need something more than the dream of water and another bar for the phone. It is almost two days and there has been enough patience and praying in here for a convent, but who is answering us? Who is coming? Nobody. ¡Nadie! ¡Nunca!

  Estamos jodidos.

  Because I will tell you something about us, AnniMac. El catolicismo is the official religion of Mexico, but chingar is the official verb. Chingar is “to fuck,” y es un concepto complicado y muy importante para los Mexicanos. If you don’t believe me, ask Octavio Paz who is the expert on this—a real chingón of Mexican letters. There are so many forms of chingar because there are so many ways to do it, but of all the forms there are only two you must remember. One is the kind of chingar you do to someone else and the other is the kind someone else does to you—el Chingón y la Chingada, the Fucker and the Fucked. Papá y Mamá. El Chingón is the one with the power who does things to other people if they like it or not. He is the one who controls the money, gives the permission and orders the killing. It is the dream of every drug lord since he was a little boy, and the dream of Don Serafín also. It is Cortés and King Herod and the Godfather. And, if you ask Abraham, it is God.

  Here is a riddle from Octavio Paz—

  How does a chingón cure his friend’s headache?

  He shoots him in the head.

  There is a darkness, no? And not just in here. These days, of course, a woman can be a chingona too—like the famous luchadora La Diabólica or our own minister of agriculture who can buy you, sell you or have you killed. But more often in Mexico the women are chingadas like the rest of us—the ones getting fucked. And I must tell you, there is a lot of this going on in Mexico today.

  Of all the chingadas, man or woman, of course Jesus is the most famous—el Chingón de las Chingadas. Every nail, every hole from the thorn and the spear is a chingadera—a kind of fucking. Jesus is our mirror and so is Cuauhtémoc—Falling Eagle, who was brought down and tortured by Cortés. There is a saying we have here, a war cry—¡Viva Mexico! ¡Hijos de la chingada! Long live Mexico! Children of the fucked! And it goes very well with that crazy mestizo sound that only a Mexicano can make—that cry at the end of the verse or after a shot of mezcal—joy and sorrow and madness and murder all coming together and tearing apart in the same moment. Down here it is an honor, this cry, a sign of your toughness, of how many chingaderas you can take, how many wounds you can suffer and keep going—keep singing. Because in Mexico suffering is an art and there are many opportunities to practice. Maybe you know our great singer Vicente Fernández? He is a favorite of my father and an expert on this. “My veins want to burst,” he sings, “from the pain you cause inside me!” Now that is some kind of chingadera. That is how it is to suffer like a Mexicano. Have you ever had such a feeling in your veins?

  Maybe now you can understand why we have so many virgins and why we love them so much. Because we need someone in our lives who hasn’t been fucked and someone to watch over the rest of us who have. Because the vagina is the source of all of us and all of this. It is the wound that will not heal—and so is the border between us. If you don’t believe me, ask Octavio Paz or Vicente Fernández. Or look inside this truck.

  Thu Apr 5—19:15

  I am not so friendly with God these days, but I am praying too. All this time we believed the coyotes would come back. Because how can they just leave us? They are partly human too, yes? But no. The answer is no. They are only coyotes. Who knows what they told Lupo or Don Serafín, or if they really went to find a mechanic, but still we hope and wait. Such pretty pictures we make with our minds in here—maybe the mechanic will drive up in a little truck with a shiny red box of tools. “¡Hola, amigos! ¿Como están? So sorry to be late. It will only take a minute. ¿Prefieren Corona o Pepsi?”

  I will admit even I hold such a dream—and so together we hear the mechanic in every bird and passing jet. When the tank was cooling in the night, clicking and popping, we thought he was coming, and when the helicopter passed over this morning, we whispered, “It’s him. We’re saved!” But this is how it is when you have nothing and no power—you make the meaning you want from any little thing.

  Thu Apr 5—19:23

  This time now and in the morning are the only mercy for us. You cannot know until you are in here how much it takes to make these words. This is how people relax in the café, no? Talking, sending messages, but let me tell you—in here, where your head is pounding like with dengue, where the day is too hot to do anything but breathe and the night too cold to do anything but hold yourself—it is difficult.

  But it is worse to only wait.

  Thu Apr 5—19:37

  Hello, AnniMac. I stay as close as I can with César to keep us both warm. I am talking to him—everything I say to you. Who knows what he hears, but what else is there besides the comfort of words and heat? Because I think he must live, not only for himself but for what he carries.

  If you know César, you know already he is too smart to need a coyote, that something in his life must be broken for him to be in such a situation. Even a stranger can hear this in the way he talks—like he is making the words himself with a hammer and pieces of iron—and so many. How can such a young man be so sure of what he is saying? But he was always this way since we first met in school. Even this time, when he looked at me there is something about his eyes—I cannot hold them and must look away. It is not only because he is older, it is because his mind is stronger, his soul. I can feel it, like a powerful animal. I admit I am a bit angry about this because we are not so different, César and me, we come from the same place—from the same mountains named for Benito Juárez. It is in these steep forests that all of us began—speaking the same language, eating the same corn, working in the same high milpas. But Benito was a president, and César is a scientist, and I am a—what?

  It is this question that put me in the truck.

  In the pueblos, if you are a good student and the teacher or the padre notices you, maybe you go to secondary school. If you pay them a mordida your chances will be better and this is what my abuelo did for me. He had some artifacts he found when he was a young man, and he sold them so I could go to school. For this I was sent to Guelatao, the birthplace of Benito Juárez. The biggest difference from my home pueblo, besides the school and a bigger church, is the Internet café and more girls. These and the basketball court. Even if there’s no phone in the pueblo, even if there’s no priest and no road, there’s a basketball court, but the one in Guelatao is the first I saw with a roof on it. We have gods for corn and rain and clouds and lightning, and we have Jesus and Mary in all her manifestations, but Michael Jordan is our patron saint of basketballs. That picture of him leaping—it is painted on every backboard in the Sierra como un retablo, and we know it like the cross. Most of us boys worshiped at that altar every day, and some girls also. When I turned fifteen, my tío sent me a Bulls jacket from L.A., and I wore it all the time until it was stolen.

  But besides these things an
d the giant statue of Benito, Guelatao is only another pueblo. In the people’s yards there is still corn and beans and calla lilies growing, a couple guayaba and nispero trees, always some chickens and maybe a pair of oxen or an old Vocho. In the mountains all around is the same forest with the same orchids and bromeliads growing in the trees, and by the streams and roadsides the same butterflies in every color you can imagine—some with wings like silver coins and others clear as glass so you can see right through. It is here I met César Ramírez when I was fourteen years old.

  Everyone called him Cheche and the first time I saw him he was floating in the air. Even the kids with no English knew what hangtime was, but César was the only one of us who had any. The girls noticed this and some of them would come down to the court and watch, not only because he was handsome but because it is something different to see a person fly. I watched him too, and it was a couple of days before I was brave enough to play. César was eighteen then so already he was taking exams for the university. Many students go to the church to pray for this—to pray they will pass, and César did this also, but not in the church. He went outside town to a shrine for Juquila built into a cliff by the road where the roots of an old oak tree made a little cave. It is normal for students to leave offerings of money or Pepsi or mezcal along with a note and a candle, but César left his prayers to Juquila under a little pile of corn that was all the colors of the rainbow. Back then I thought he did it because he was so poor and had nothing else to offer, but I was wrong. He did it because corn is the center of everything in the Sierra, and he is its apostle.

  Everyone in Guelatao knows how César’s exam scores were the highest ever for our school and that he won scholarships to UABJO in Oaxaca and then UNAM in D.F. where he took a job in a big lab to study the corn. César is a bit famous in the Sierra now—not just because he is so smart, but because he made it in Mexico and that is hard for an indio to do.

  The school in Guelatao is small so everyone knows everyone, and César and me both studied English and liked to read so he would talk to me sometimes, even though I was four years younger. He said I was the only chico he knew who had heard of Charles Dickens or Roberto Bolaño, and I felt proud when he noticed me. César had the first copy of The Savage Detectives in Guelatao. He let me borrow it and I kept that book because what he had I wanted also. “We should move up to D.F.,” he said when he gave it to me, “because no one around here is getting conchita like those guys are.” He was laughing and I tried to laugh also, but it was hard because my voice was barely changed and I’d never had a girlfriend. Another time we talked about Borges—there was a teacher at the school who loved him and who read to all of us “The Writing of the God.” We were talking about it after and I said, “I think the priest is going crazy after all that time in the cell, and that’s why he thinks he can read the spots on the jaguar,” but César said, “No, it’s because all that time alone cleared his mind so he can understand the older language. The patterns on the jaguar, on the wings of the butterfly, in the kernels of the corn—those are pages from the original codex.”

  That’s how it is with César—if he pays attention to you, you remember the details, even when you don’t know what he’s talking about.

  I take some water now and put some drops in César’s mouth, but only a little because I must make it last.

  Thu Apr 5—20:11

  I am so tired, but it is not possible to sleep. The tank is cold now and the bottom is wet with everything so you must sit or lie on your shoes, your bag, whatever you have, but how long can you do that? You have to move, but where do you move when everyone else is right there? Once, my friend’s brother hid under a car seat for three days with only water and tortillas. It was a Mitsubishi Pajero and they didn’t let him out until Virginia because they said that even far from the border the police will see a car of Mexicanos and stop you for nothing. He couldn’t walk for two days after, but then he got a job killing chickens. You can live with the pain, he said, but you can’t live without the money. I think about that and how he never complained. Also it is Lent. We are giving up a lot in here already, but I will try to give up complaining also. The anger will be harder.

  Do you know how many Oaxaqueños do this—go up to el Norte to work and to live? I have read in the newspaper one out of three. So Oaxaca, you can say, is bleeding men. All over your country. There are Zapotec barrios in L.A. where my mother’s brother lives. Mixtec too. Strange things happen to us up there. A friend of mine from secondary school called Blanquito for his pale skin was gone four years—three months picking apples and the rest in a jail outside Spokane for la mota. He swears he only smoked and didn’t sell, but they put him in there anyway. Now he’s back in Oaxaca teaching English because he had so much time in the jail to practice.

  I understand there are some in your country who hate Mexicanos and even try to kill them. There are vigilantes and your Minutemen hunting us on the border. My tío told me that besides some indios there is no one else in el Norte except immigrants—es puro migrante. So how do they decide who to hunt? But maybe it is like in Mexico—the more white you are, the more rich and free, the less you are hated or need to hate yourself. And the longer you will live.

  Before NAFTA it was not so hard to get into your country and many of us did it—a few months up there working and then home again every year in time for the village fiesta. When I was young, my tío worked like this on a ranch in Arizona. It was next to a big military base and he told me about the planes they have there, especially the one called el Cerdo—the Pig—a jet with cannons on it that is so crazy fast that all the noise—guns, jets, exploding—comes only after the plane is gone. So the sound is roaring by itself like thunder in the empty sky, and you are dead before you know it. He said not even God can save you from such a thing. There were bombers too and some of them are as big as the cathedral in el centro, but those didn’t worry him so much. You can see them coming, he said, you still have time to pray.

  One time, my tío came back to the pueblo for our fiesta and when a vulture flew over he said, “Look! There goes the Mexican Air Force.” He was smiling like it was funny. Before that day I never thought much about the Mexican Air Force, but that vulture with its tattered wings and shaking flight—that is how my tío saw himself, saw all of us, after working in el Norte. Along with the used Ford Bronco, Air Jordans almost new and the Sony CD player, this joke is what he brought home with him. This and the feeling that he was a halfman among princes and magicians. I asked him one time if the Pig is used to hunt mojados on the border, and he said maybe. I don’t always know when he is joking, but he told me back then never try to cross. Too dangerous, he said, and someone has to look after Abuelita Clara who is the mother of my mother. My tío is her only living son and when he stopped coming home it made the sadness from her husband even bigger.

  6

  Thu Apr 5—20:33

  It is a strange thing—how one day you can be praying no one will find you but on the next you are praying anyone will, and I can tell you it doesn’t take long in the dark to stop caring about the money. All we want now is water and light. Like plants. And soon—tomorrow—I think it will be water only—like the algae on these walls. You see then what a decoration our life is, una ilusión—the money, the clothes, the talking, the gods. It is all just a thin layer of paint—gone in a few hours. It is the same that makes a truck red or blue or brown, but underneath is only metal coming from the mountain. In the end, this truck is just a rock driving around pretending for a little while to be a truck. And here we are in the desert, AnniMac, breaking down.

  Thu Apr 5—20:39

  All this time I believed César will wake up because how can this be his fate—to stand up at the wrong moment? In school, you could not stop him. He was always thinking and moving faster than the rest of us and when he left I didn’t see him again until last week—seven years, más o menos. At home we talk a lot about Fate and God’s Will because not a lot of people believe in coin
cidence. Maybe in el Norte you have a name for it when you come out of the Club KittiLoco drunk with no girl and no money for a taxi but one stops in front of you and you get in anyway just because it’s there. Maybe you got a name for it also when the driver says, Where to? And you say, Mártires de Río Blanco. And he says, OK if I go up Suárez? Chapultepec is torn up at Venus.

  Well, it’s two in the morning after three mezcals and so many beers and what do you care about lost battles or other planets or black holes in the street? But there’s something familiar about the taxista’s voice and you look in the mirror and even through the glasses you notice his eyes because they are looking right back at you and in that moment there is a connection, a knowing, and you’re thinking, I’ve seen this guy before.

  That’s when I say, “Cheche?”

  His eyes get big and he looks away. So I lean forward over the seat. He’s wearing a beard and mustache, but this is like putting a coffee sack on a beautiful girl—some things you can’t hide. I’m sure it’s César under there and I’m drunk and I say, “¡Vato! What you doing back here? Driving a taxi?”

  “You got the wrong guy.”

  “The fuck I do! I know you, man. You’re Cheche Ramírez—from Guelatao. ¡Qué paso!”

  He pulls over hard and stops, and turns around fast and says to my face, “Listen. You think it’s me, but it’s not. You know what I’m saying? You did not see me here, and you don’t tell anyone. If you do, I’m fucked. And so are you.”