The Jaguar's Children

by John Vaillant

  Even with that voice in my ear I wanted to stay. Back then, I could silence it if I got far enough away—in class, in the Sierra with Abuelo, at the Milenio Cross up the hill from our house in el centro. You can see this cross from everywhere and some believe it is a good place for a sacrifice because that hill is shaped like a pyramid and the view is incredible, like you are an eagle flying over everything. Down below is the great Valley of Oaxaca, and in the summer you can watch the storms coming in from the ancient places—Yagul, Dainzú, Mitla—moving across the land like dark curtains, sometimes two or three at once from different directions, and if you want, you can imagine it is you calling them in.

  The last time I went up there was in August. I was with Sofía and a couple of friends from the university, and we had three liters of Negra and a bag of chicharrones. That day, we found a dead turkey and the head of a goat lying at the foot of the cross in a circle of candles all burned down. Sofía didn’t like this and we sat away from them on a rock, but they weren’t smelling yet so Carlo and Dani sat next to them on the cement which was better for the bottles and no ants biting. I don’t know if the pope would be so happy to know that indios are sacrificing animals and drinking beer under the biggest cross outside of D.F., but maybe if he came here and sat for a while he would understand. The hill comes to a sharp point up there and the air was blowing around us in a circle. Far above was a hawk turning the same way as the wind like he was the one making it blow. The flowers up there were finished already, but for some reason this little turning wind was filled with butterflies flying around and around us. Sitting there with Sofía and the view with the beer still cold and all those butterflies I was thinking I never want to leave. Dani, with a liter of beer in him, took out his big graffiti marker and tagged a rock with “CHPT”—Chingón Para Todo. This motherfucker’s ready for anything.

  On that day I was feeling the same way.

  Then the strike came and for months it was like a small war here. I went with the others to the barricades, but after Paquito and that cameraman were killed and all those others taken, tortured or disappeared, I lost my heart for the protests, not only from fear but because that anger—it is a kind of poison, you know, and it stays in the body. What did I learn from the strike? Nothing but how fast I can run and that Coke is good for washing tear gas from your eyes. This is why, just before el Día de los Muertos and all the soldiers coming with the armored cars, I left the city and went back to the pueblo to be with Abuelo. By then he was close to dying and it was a kind of silent bargain we made—I took care of his body and he did the same to my soul, telling me of all the changes he saw and how he made it through.

  He also reminded me of something Mexicanos are being taught to forget, and that is how to live without money. One day, he said to me, “M’hijo, everyone knows life for the Zapoteco is hard, but we are lucky too and we are forgetting this. Who else can grow all their food—sweets and spices, herbs and medicines, corn and beans and squash, even oil for the hair—on one hectare on the side of a mountain? Everything you need is right here—the sun, the seed, the forest, the water. If you can read and grow your own food then your mind will be free, your stomach will be full, and you can survive no matter how the wind is blowing.”

  I could not help thinking of my father and how for him the milpa has become a kind of enemy, those rows of corn a wall between him and what he wants for himself and for us. For so many years I thought Papá’s anger—with Abuelo, with his life—was from being deported. It wasn’t until I went to stay with him that last time that Abuelo told me about Zeferina and the Jaguar Man.

  17

  Fri Apr 6—21:46

  Hoping and waiting, waiting and hoping. In here it is all the same. If not for the pipe and these things from César and my abuelo, I would be no different than the others—dying already from thirst and despair. They say hope dies last, but I think it is the story. This is why I must tell it now—to hear Abuelo’s voice again. And so César can finally know me, and you also.

  My Abuela Zeferina was not born in our pueblo but higher in the mountains, in Latuxí, a pueblo that had no road. A long time ago, in the 1930s, when he was a little older than I am now, my abuelo got a job up there as a laborer for an archaeologist from New York, from a big museum. I will tell you what happened just as my abuelo told it to me. It is easier to remember that way, and it helps me now to imagine sitting in his house with the candles and a bottle of pulque.

  There is often a lot of wind around el Día de los Muertos, from all the spirits coming back, and the night Abuelo told me was like this and cold. Even with the door closed there was a breeze moving through so our shadows danced around us and it felt like there were more people in that small house than just me and my abuelo. “Up in Latuxí,” he said, “there was a lot of old forest, wide oak and pine and some of the biggest avocado trees I’ve ever seen. You could feed a wedding party from one of them. Lots of orchids in the trees also, especially the little purple ones, and many, many birds. A campesino was up there clearing land for a new milpa, burning it off, and next to the clearing was a stand of trees growing on a hill. Ooni’ya, that campesino is pulling tree stumps with his oxen and he’s finding things in the roots—pottery, a clay figure of a dog and many square stones perfect for building. Nobody remembered that hill was a temple. He tried to sell these things at the market, but the mayordomo of Latuxí learned of it and stopped him. It was the mayordomo who took the dog and the pottery up north to the city in Puebla because there was more money there and he thought he could get a better price.

  “At that time, there were some archaeologists—gringos—working on a site in Puebla and one of them was called Professor Payne. When he heard about this dog and the square stones he came down to see that hill right away. He was a young man and I think he wanted his own excavation, he wanted to find a tomb filled with gold like Alfonso Caso did at Monte Albán. When I heard the rumor that a gringo was hiring obreros in Latuxí, I walked there, all day through the mountains, because I heard also that gringos paid in gold and silver. It was a hard time then and few of us in the pueblos had anything. If we couldn’t grow it or make it, we had to trade for it.

  “I met Professor Payne the next day under the stone arch in front of the village office. He was the first güero who ever spoke to me besides a padre. He even shook my hand. No don would ever do that with a campesino, especially an indio. If they said anything to you it was Come here! Go there! Do that! But the professor was different. When I took off my hat he told me it was hot and to keep it on. He had dark brown hair, a mustache like a brush and green eyes. His face and hands were dark from the sun. Except for a wide sombrero, he dressed norteño in a wool jacket and a necktie with a gold pin. ‘I’m looking for shovel men,’ he said. ‘Hard workers.’ When I told him I had walked fifty kilometers to be there, he hired me, along with eight others.

  “We were only simple men, not one of us could read, but the professor tried to explain his work. He told us he was studying la estratigrafía. It was by this method—by knowing how deep one thing was next to another—that he guessed how old they were because in those days there was no other way to know. He told us the pyramid was made by our ancestors—by Zapotecos, and that the things buried there were like lost words in a great story which was our story also. With our help, he said, he wanted to learn this story so he could tell it to everyone in Mexico and all over the world. Well, m’hijo, I can tell you we were not interested in stories, we were interested in money and this gringo was not offering as much as we had hoped. But the professor was a clever man—he hired girls to cook for us, pretty ones, and this together with the money was enough to keep most of the men coming back. But I stayed for other reasons.

  “The professor put us to work on the south side of the pyramid, digging out a careful square with strings and measuring sticks. Each side of the square was five meters and we went down into the ground in steps, slowly, layer by layer, first with a pick, then with a shovel and then wi
th a stick and a brush and a spoon. It took many weeks to do this and some of the men became impatient and quit. Others broke things, or stole them and were fired. I had never made a hole this way—with a straight wall where you could really see time passing layer by layer, and I was amazed that the professor could look at a broken piece of stone or clay and know by its color and texture which layer it had come from and how old it was.

  “Over time, the excavation came to look like a pyramid, only upside down. After one layer was excavated, we went down into the next and I was the one to break up this new dirt. It was an important job and the professor offered bonuses—for finding things, for not breaking them—and I was good at this. Using the shovel every day, it becomes a part of your body the same as a machete and you can feel things with it. You can tell the difference between dead wood and living, between stone and metal, clay and bone.

  “Ooni’ya, about three months into that first season, I hit something deep in the dirt there and it didn’t feel like any of those things. It was softer than stone but harder than clay so I put the shovel down and dug it out with my fingers and a stick. I had never held jade before, never seen anything like it—smooth as a tooth and green as a tomatillo. It was a jaguar, sitting. Its face was half cat and half man and it was wearing a crown. The figure was about the size of my hand and its weight was strange, like it was too heavy for itself.

  “Most of the things we found were broken because time is hard on everything, but the Jaguar Man was perfecto—como un milagro. Not a chip, not a crack. It was a treasure without price, but how could I know? And where would I sell such a thing anyway? Besides, I liked the professor—he was a kind man, kinder than most, with many jokes and good Spanish. He even had a few words of Zapotec. I didn’t know what this thing was, but I knew it would make him happy so I took it to him in his tent where he was smoking a cigarette and working. The tent was open and he said ‘Hola’ when I came in but did not look up. When I put the Jaguar Man on his worktable next to his papers he didn’t say anything at first—he just stared at it with his mouth open. When he looked at me his eyes were so big I thought he might faint. Finally, he picked up the Jaguar Man with both hands and said to it very quietly, ‘My god.’ He looked at me again and then down at the Jaguar Man. He closed his hands over it, took a big breath and opened them. I think he was afraid it would disappear. ‘Oh my god,’ he said.

  “It was like that gringo was holding the bones of Jesus Himself.”

  Abuelo showed me the professor’s face with his mouth hanging open like a door. He said it is the same face he would make if the pope showed up at his house with a cántaro of mezcal. But then my abuelo got a surprise too. The professor stood up and hugged him—like a brother. This is an unusual thing for a jefe to do and it was only then that Abuelo began to understand what he had found. He said the effect on the professor was not the same as gold, and he knew what he was talking about. Gold makes a man mean and greedy, like coca or bad mezcal. This was something more like the first time you touch the skin of someone you might someday love. That is how the professor was holding this little Jaguar Man, how he was looking at it and stroking it with his fingers—like recognizing someone you’ve never seen before.

  “In the professor’s mind,” said Abuelo, “the Jaguar Man was a key to something, to a door he didn’t know was there. When I asked him how old it was, he said, ‘Older than Jesus. Maybe much older.’”

  “At night by the excavation it was dark as a cave,” Abuelo said. “The forest was deep and the clearing was narrow so looking up out of it made the sky look small and far away. When the night birds flew they moved across it only as a separate blackness against the stars and it was hard to tell how close or far they really were. This and the pyramid so near gave all of us an uncomfortable feeling and some of the men walked back to Latuxí every evening because they were afraid to sleep out there. The rest of us slept on grass petates, close together in one large tent, and next to us was a smaller tent with some of the professor’s students. Professor Payne had his own tent and slept away from us along with the best pieces from the excavation.

  “You know, Héctor, that I am at home in the night and sometimes it is impossible for me to stay still in the blanket. On such nights I would walk out of the camp and up into the forest growing over the pyramid, just to watch and listen. I saw things there glowing blue and green in the trees, maybe worms or fungus, maybe something else, and I heard sounds I never heard in the day—insects walking, roots pushing through the ground, bats calling loud as birds. Even the smells came differently—more like voices than smells. Most campesinos don’t like to be in the forest at night because there are spirits and maybe that’s what I was hearing. The night is a different country with a different language, but I feel I understand it.

  “It was on the pyramid one night that I learned we were in the territory of a jaguar. I didn’t see him, but I smelled him, and I understood who it was. He was marking the trees up there—all around the camp. I followed his scent and I made my own marks to let him know he was not the only one around. Not long after that I saw his track by the stream below the clearing—a single print. I looked around to see if anyone was watching and then I stepped into it, covered that track with my own, and my foot fit right inside there—the ball and the toes. I had a feeling then I can’t explain—coming out of the ground, coming right up through me. All over my skin was prickling, my hair standing off my head. I never told the professor, never told anyone what I saw there. Someone would have shot him.

  “That jaguar showed himself to me only one time, at the end of our second season. It was by the stream in the late afternoon when I was washing. There was a wide place below a small waterfall where the water was deep enough to swim, and I was in there floating on my back, looking up through the trees which blocked out the sky so all was in green shadow. To the side of me, in the shallows, were hundreds of bololos—tadpoles—the size of rosary beads with eyes the color of blood. I had tried to catch some, but they were fast and I was hot and tired from working. Ooni’ya, I was floating in the water with my feet against two rocks, to hold myself in the current, when I heard a sound separate from the waterfall. I thought it was one of the men coming to bathe and I looked over, but where I expected to see a man, there was a jaguar. It was the first time—the only time in my life I have seen one, and it was a shock for me, the size of him. He was five meters away, but even so close it was hard to know where the forest ended and the jaguar began. He was not so much a separate thing as he was—how can I say it—una perturbación, like ripples in water. His spots could be leaves and the spaces between them at the same time, the line of his back a branch or its shadow. All but his eyes—they could be only one thing.

  “And there I am, naked in the water. My throat, my stomach, my privates—everything was exposed to him, but what could I do? One jump and he would have me like a calf. So I stayed where I was and watched him from the corner of my eye, trying not to move, not even to blink or breathe. But I could not stop my heart and you should have heard it then, beating under the water. I had thrown my clothes across a bush and the jaguar was sniffing at them, especially my pants. For some reason these were interesting to him. He was so close I could hear his breath, hear him smelling, even through the water. I wondered what was in my pants that could be so interesting, and then I understood. He was recognizing me—here was the one who had been marking in his territory. I wondered if he would be angry and what he would do. Ooni’ya, I found out.

  “As soon as he finished examining my pants he turned around and sprayed them. It was almost funny until he looked at me. At that moment the water turned ice cold and my body was covered in turkey skin. It was his eyes that did it, they closed that distance between us to nothing. They were green like jade—like the Jaguar Man, and his pupils were round and black as bololos. He sat down at the water’s edge and studied me floating there and his tail was twitching. It was thick and strong and when it hit the ground it made the sound o
f a heavy step. I wanted to look away—to get up and run, but how could I?

  “Then something in the water caught his attention. I could see his round ears come forward and his head turning quickly from side to side, following it. He lifted a paw over the water and it was moving too, together with his eyes, tracking this thing until he brought it down with a splash. Then again with both paws and he was jumping in the shallows there, this way and that. He was chasing the bololos. After that I wasn’t afraid anymore, only amazed that we were there together, noticing the same things.”

  In the evenings, my abuelo worked in the professor’s tent, cleaning the things they found in the day. Many men were careless and some were stealing so they were not allowed in there, but Abuelo was careful and curious so he was. Sometime after that big find, Abuelo said to Professor Payne, “That face—the one on the Jaguar Man—he looks like someone I know.”

  The professor did not ignore him or laugh. He wanted to know who that man was—who his people were and where they came from. “It is not the man I know,” said Abuelo, “but the jaguar.”

  The professor held up the Jaguar Man and compared it to the face of Abuelo. “I think he looks like you,” he said. Both men were laughing, but at different jokes. Then the professor asked my abuelo a funny question—“For such a thing to exist, must the man eat the jaguar or must the jaguar eat the man?”

  Now, AnniMac, we are Zapotecs and we share the jaguar with many others around here—Mixtec, Mazatec, Aztec, Maya. Jaguar is our ancestor and my abuelo had to explain something that is obvious to most people. “Professor,” he said, “the Jaguar Man is not made from eating. He is made from copulating. Like all of us.”

  Then Abuelo told the professor how he came to know this, and he told it to him the same way he used to tell it to me.