The Jaguar's Children

by John Vaillant

  For many nights after he found the jade Jaguar Man, Abuelo saw the shadow of the professor in his tent, bent over in the lamplight like he was studying something. Abuelo had an idea what it was and one night he crept up to the tent where there was a hole for looking through. The professor was there in his folding canvas chair and in his hand was the Jaguar Man. But the professor wasn’t studying it. No, his eyes were closed and tears were streaming down his face. Abuelo said when he saw that, he turned away quickly and was ashamed as if he had surprised his parents in their nakedness. He went back to the tree where he’d been sitting, pulled his serape around him and wondered to himself what was in that piece of jade to make such an important man from so far away so sad. The Jaguar Man was a very old and powerful thing—so old and powerful that the professor took it with him back to New York.

  In the end, Abuelo got to hold the Jaguar Man for only a few moments because the professor cleaned it himself and kept it in a special place. But he could never get it out of his mind. It was the first time he ever came close to that kind of power in a man-made thing. When my abuelo found it, he could barely write his name, but pulling the Jaguar Man from the earth like that—with his own hands, and being the first man to touch it in who knows how many lifetimes—there was something wonderful to him in this, in holding a thing so ancient and fine that carried so much inside it. He said that for a moment he was raised up out of himself like in the stories and was able to see across the mountains. I don’t think he knew what he was seeing exactly, but he hoped I would and this is why he told me of it. Last November, when Abuelo was near to dying, he said to me, “M’hijo, if you ever go back to el Norte, go to the museum in Nueva York. Find that thing. Hold it if you can.”

  The professor was a gringo and a scholar, but most of the people he talked about were Mexicanos and artists, people like Rufino Tamayo, Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. He told Abuelo that Rivera was one of the bravest men he knew because he was not afraid to shout when other men would only whisper. With his great murals he looked Henry Ford and Nelson Rockefeller in the eyes and told them the truth about themselves. And they paid him to do it. Abuelo never saw those murals and he didn’t agree. He said Diego Rivera was too rich to be a man of the people and too fat to be a real Communist. He called him un rábano—a radish—red on the outside but white on the inside. Abuelo told me that the professor and Rivera would smoke together sometimes, and not only cigars. It is something, no? The great Diego Rivera got that güero high.

  This is a world Abuelo never saw himself because no campesino did, but it was interesting for him and in the evenings he would sometimes bring the professor some yerba rolled in a corn husk, or mezcal in a gourd. The professor would talk then, and he told my abuelo many stories from his life. I think he must have been lonely out there so far from home, and why not? What kind of man would do such a thing—leave his home and family to dig in the hard dirt of a foreign land?

  It is a trick question. The answer is Mexicanos. All the time. By the millions, but not back then.

  At the start of their third season in Latuxí, the professor was still talking about the Jaguar Man. “It was an obsession for him,” said Abuelo. “There was something about it that troubled him, and one night the professor said to me, ‘I’ve asked everyone at all the museums, and no one has seen anything like it—not from here or anywhere else in Mexico. Tamayo wants to buy it from me.’

  “That time,” said Abuelo, “we were leaning against a big avocado tree on the edge of the clearing, smoking and watching the stars. ‘It’s so small,’ I said to him. ‘It could have been carried from far away, from anywhere.’

  “‘You think it was a gift?’ said the professor. ‘I had a dream about it, you know.’

  “I rolled some more yerba on an old metate and passed it to the professor who lit it with his silver lighter. ‘I didn’t see it exactly,’ said the professor. ‘I felt it—the texture, as if my fingers were dreaming.’

  “‘Sometimes ten eyes are better than two,’ I said.

  “The professor laughed at this. ‘You think I was carving it in my dream?’

  “‘No one knows it as well as him who made it.’

  “‘I am sure there are other memories at work besides the memory of man,’ he said. ‘I am sure there is memory in the earth, the stones, the clay. This is what I am trying to recover. And those trees with their roots deep inside the temple—what do they know? What are they seeing? If a jaguar could talk, what would it say?’

  “‘There are plants,’ I said to him, ‘mushrooms and herbs that can help you to see these things, to understand this language. They can even speak to you themselves. I have been told the mushroom can find lost things and answer questions that have no answers otherwise.’

  “Of course the professor wanted to know more, because he wanted to know everything. He was a man greedy for knowledge. ‘What are they called?’ he asked.

  “‘Teonanacatl,’ I said. ‘Flesh of the gods.’”

  Abuelo laughed. “You should have seen that gringo going for his notebook.

  “‘There are many names for them,’ I told the professor. ‘In the rainy season they grow all over the place, especially in cowshit.’

  “‘How can I get some?’ he asked.

  “‘I do not eat them myself,’ I said. ‘It’s not in our tradition. But I know you can’t use them just anytime, like yerba or aguardiente. They are a sacrament, for seeing and healing and cleansing. There is a ceremony for it.’

  “‘Who leads the ceremony?’

  “‘A curandera,’ I said. ‘One who is called to it. But you will not find such a one in Latuxí or in my pueblo. For this you must go into la Mazateca—three days walking to the northeast.’

  “‘I don’t have time for that,’ he said. ‘Can you bring me some?’

  “‘Professor,’ I said, ‘it’s not safe to take them alone, not without a guide.’

  “‘Sit with me then, will you, Hilario? You can keep me safe.’

  “‘Maybe from what’s outside, but not from what’s inside. It is another country there and I can’t follow. Besides, it’s too dry for mushrooms now.’

  “But the professor was a stubborn man and early in the next September, after the rainy season, he sent me across the mountains into la Mazateca where they spoke no Zapotec and little Spanish. It took me a week, but I found a curandera who knew the right ones and she tried to give me some instructions in her language. On the night I returned, after all the obreros had gone to sleep, I set up a small three-legged quemador on the dirt floor of the professor’s tent and I lit some copal. The professor sat down with me in front of the quemador and he opened the curandera’s medicine bundle. It was made of bark paper tied with a vine and inside, wrapped in herbs and grass, were twelve fresh mushrooms with long thin stems and brown caps. This much I understood from the curandera and I told it to the professor—‘Before you eat these, you must know why you are doing it. It is dangerous to go to that place without a guide, but even more dangerous to go without a reason.’

  “‘I am going,’ he said, ‘to see who made the Jaguar Man.’

  “I was afraid for him, and I took his hand then. ‘Bueno,’ I said. ‘But you must promise to come back.’

  “The professor laughed at me and I did not like that, but he promised to come back. ‘You eat six at one time,’ I said. ‘The curandera was very clear about this, but maybe since you are new to it you should have only three.’

  “The professor smiled at me like I was some worrying old woman. ‘They are small,’ he said, ‘and look at me.’

  “The curandera had tried to tell me the right words to say, but I could not understand any of it except two words of Spanish, ‘holy children,’ so I said this and some words of my own in a prayer—

  These Holy Children are yours,

  given us by the Launching Woman who sends

  her people on the journey,

  by the Sky Woman who flies in every form,

  by th
e Water Woman who swims in light and darkness both,

  by the Reading Woman who knows all pages of the great book,

  and by the Landmark Woman who guides us home again.

  To you and to them we say, We are humble men

  who live by the law as we are able.

  Please receive this prayer and find us worthy

  of your sight and protection.

  “Then I sprinkled some yerba and tobacco on the burning copal until it flared and crackled, and I poured some mezcal so it sizzled and spat. ‘There,’ I said, ‘I hope it is enough.’

  “The professor ate the mushrooms then—first one, then two, and the last three together. He was a strong man who did not shrink from chiles or mezcal and the only way to tell how badly these mushrooms tasted behind his mustache was by the motion of his nose. He drank some water from a gourd and lit a cigarette, and we waited. After some time, he leaned back against the leg of his worktable and closed his eyes. ‘You are sure about these?’ he said. ‘The curandera was trustworthy?’

  “‘I asked in three pueblos and she was known and much respected in all of them.’

  “‘Nothing’s happening,’ said the professor.

  “‘I asked her how long it takes, but she would only make a circle from west to east.’

  “‘All night?’ The professor wasn’t happy about this.

  “‘I think that was for the journey,’ I said.

  “After three more cigarettes the professor was impatient. ‘Six isn’t enough. You people are so small and look at me.’

  “‘No,’ I said. ‘Please do as she says.’

  “The professor got up, went outside, came back and sat down again. ‘I don’t feel a damned thing,’ he said. ‘I’m not even lightheaded.’

  “And before I could stop him, he ate the other six. All at once he did this. Then, after another drink of water, he sat down cross-legged on the ground. He was reaching into his coat for his cigarettes when he stopped, doubled over and vomited between his shoes. When he came up again his eyes were big like a mono, and he looked about him as if he could see through the walls of the tent. He no longer recognized me or, I think, even himself. I went outside quickly and got a shovelful of dirt to cover his mess and then, through the copal smoke, I watched the professor seeing things I could not see. After some time, he began to lean so I helped him to lie down on his side and I put a folded blanket under his head. His eyes were still open, only staring now, and his mouth moved, but there were no words. The moon was setting when he closed his eyes, but I did not sleep.

  “It was still dark when he opened his eyes again. ‘Water,’ he said.

  “I helped him to sit up and gave him some water from the gourd. ‘I saw it,’ he said. ‘I saw it in the stone. I saw it being carved, and with every cut of the tool there was blood running.’”

  20

  Whenever he came from D.F., the professor brought new books for my abuelo to read—Don Quixote and Great Expectations, also The True History of the Conquest of New Spain by Bernal Díaz. They were in Spanish and Abuelo kept them always on a shelf in his house under the altarcito Abuela made for Juquila. It was from these books that Abuelo taught me to read after we were deported and my father left us in the pueblo. He tried to teach my father when he was young, but Papá could never do it, could never make the letters stay together in his mind. I have seen him try and his eyes are devils playing tricks, every word a shell game. To be like this and to live with a man like Abuelo who was reading all the time, and then to have a son like me who learns so easy and is so little like him—maybe you can imagine how it is for a proud man. In el centro, or far away in el Norte, he could stand it because no one at home would see anything but the money, but in the pueblo, in front of his own people, it was too much for him. One time Abuelo said to me, “These days, the Mexican man is a baby.” I didn’t understand what he meant until later.

  In that summer before the American war with Japan, the professor wrote to Abuelo telling of his plans and asking him to come a week early to help organize the obreros and set up the camp. He said also that there was a new cook coming from Latuxí and he would bring her to the camp himself. The cooking was always done at a stone fireplace under a palapa made of sticks and petates, but in his letter the professor asked Abuelo to build a new cocina from adobe and bamboo with a pine needle roof. “Make it nice for her,” he said.

  Abuelo built the cocina and when the professor arrived at the camp with the new cook, he understood why. Her name was Zeferina and she was pretty—Zapoteca, por supuesto. But she wasn’t just another campesina. There was something about this girl, the way she looked and held herself—como una princesa. “She looked like a painting I saw in one of the professor’s magazines,” Abuelo told me. “Those big eyes turned almost like a cat’s, the mouth a bit crooked, but full in a way that only makes you want to open it. Understand? To taste the juice inside.” Abuelo was ninety-six years old telling me these things, but still he liked to smoke and drink a little and he offered these to me also. I’m telling you, with your mind buzzing from all that, it was something for a young man to hear.

  Professor Payne was married with some little children up in el Norte, but Abuelo knew it only from a picture on the professor’s worktable. The professor never spoke of them and he always came to Latuxí alone. Often he made drawings of the artifacts they found and he taught Abuelo to do this also, but in that last season the professor was making more drawings of Zeferina than of artifacts. They would do this in the afternoon during the siesta, and sometimes they didn’t come out of his tent for a long time. “One evening,” said Abuelo, “when I was in the tent helping the professor to clean some things we found that day, I saw one of those drawings behind the worktable. The professor was a good artist and many times at night, and even in the day when I was working, I would think about that picture.”

  Of course Zeferina did not spend the night with the professor, ever. Always she walked back to her parents in the pueblo before sunset, coming back early in the morning to start the fire and cook for the men. It was a long walk from Latuxí, and one morning Abuelo surprised Zeferina by making the fire himself and the coffee too. “I will do this every morning,” he said to her, “and then you can sleep longer.”

  She refused this and said the professor was paying her to do the cooking, but Abuelo didn’t listen and kept getting up early to make the fire and the coffee, and when he did this he thought about the things he was touching that she would touch later and at least it was something. One morning, after maybe ten days, Zeferina came late, but everything was ready so all she needed to do was pat out the cornmeal for the tortillas and fry the eggs. Even the beans were warming in the shoe pot, buried in the ground by the fire. “So, you accept my offer?” said Abuelo, and that was the first time she looked him in the eye—and smiled—both at the same time. Always after that she came a bit later.

  “Ooni’ya, I was her prisoner then!” Abuelo told me. “I decided I must marry that girl. You know, m’hijo, I was married one time already, but there were problems and it was hard to have the child. We saw the curandera and finally she was with the child, but when it came time for the baby I lost them both. I was there in the house with the curandera and my tía helping when this happened and it was terrible—there was blood enough for three. After that, I had no heart to be with a woman again.

  “Zeferina was the first one who reminded me what that feeling is, that wanting. But it caused problems for me—it was harder to look the professor in the eye. Something about him was changing also, no longer would he talk with me in the evenings as he had before. And it wasn’t just me and the professor noticing Zeferina, it was every man in camp, even the professor’s students. The obreros were not allowed near the cocina or the professor’s tent, but even from the excavation you could see her walking, bending over, and I must tell you it was something how she moved. Even when she wasn’t there that girl was vibrating in the air como una chicharra. It was the first time in
five years of knowing the professor that I counted the days until he was gone. But how could I know then what was going to happen?

  “I don’t know if it was because of Zeferina or other troubles in his mind, but the professor spent more and more time in his tent and left me in charge of the digging. Of all the men, I had been there the longest and I was the only one who could read, or draw the artifacts as they truly looked. In November, after we all came back from celebrating el Día de los Muertos, the professor made me a kind of jefe and now it was me telling the other men where and how to dig, making sure they were doing it correctly and not stealing anything. I was proud the professor trusted me this way, and of course I was glad for the extra money. He paid me in gold that year—forty American dollars. I will never forget the beautiful weight of those coins.

  “Never again,” said Abuelo, “did we find anything as fine as the Jaguar Man. But the professor could not forget that one—he even wrote about it for a magazine. He showed this to me, and seeing those photographs was like seeing an old friend. I studied them carefully and I also studied the words, but the name of him who found it was not there. It was in that last season that the professor told me he was going to write a book about the Jaguar Man because now, after years of studying, he believed he knew who had made it, and it wasn’t a Zapotec. He believed it was Olmec. The Olmec came before us, from the Gulf coast of Veracruz, but no one in the Sierra remembers those people. They were great artists like us and it was them who made the clay statues with babies’ faces and those giant stone heads in the jungle, but it wasn’t until we found the Jaguar Man and the professor studied him that anyone understood that all of these things were made by the same people, or even who those people were. Back then the Olmec didn’t even have a name. It was Professor Payne who made the connection, and he made it through the Jaguar Man.