Preface to
Other Sides: A Journey With Maps
Greene started in San Antonio. He crossed the border at Nuevo Laredo and took the train down the center of the country, first to Monterrey, then San Luis Potosi and Mexico City, and then another train east to Orizaba and Vera Cruz. From Vera Cruz he took a boat south across the Gulf of Mexico to Frontera and Villahermosa in Tabasco, then a mail plane to Salto del Agua near Palenque, and finally a mule into San Cristobal in Chiapas, arriving there just in time for Semana Santa. On the way back he visited Puebla, and while waiting for passage home in Mexico City, he took short excursions west to Cuernavaca and Taxco.
I went to Palenque but not Salto de Agua, and the order in which I visited the towns and cities was very near but not exactly the same as Greene’s. Salto de Agua is not on a main highway, and I could find out nothing about accommodations. There had also been recent Zapatista trouble nearby, but I don’t like to think that would have stopped me if getting there had been easier. The problem was that I would have needed to take a local bus or hired a taxi, perhaps for a whole day, depending upon what I found once I got there. Forty years earlier I’d have hopped on a bus and taken my chances. In 2003 a taxi or hired car seemed a better idea, but I’d already done that in Tabasco and no longer felt that extravagant. It's not really cheap to hire a car for a day, even in Mexico. Later I learned that Allen Ginsberg had spent some time in Salto de Agua, which added to my regret that I missed it.
As to the differences in route, I had a friend with me part of the way, a Mexican who persuaded me to go to Cuernavaca and Taxco directly from Mexico City before heading back east to Vera Cruz. He has family in Taxco, and I saw no harm in the change. That made it more practical to also visit Puebla on the way down rather than on the way back. And finally, I had my brother with me from Villahermosa on, and we spent our last night in Oaxaca, and of course I took a bus back up to Laredo, right up the center of the country, not a boat to England from Vera Cruz.
First class buses in Mexico are excellent by any standard. Frequent, cheap, reliable and comfortable. As here passenger trains hardly exist anymore, and if they do you probably don’t want to take one unless it’s one of the tourist trains, as in the Copper Canyon. But my mode of transportation, if you accept the notion that a bus is close enough to a train in this instance, certainly as close as you're likely to get, was very similar to Greene’s. The exceptions to that, the major differences in how we travelled, are these: the boats between Vera Cruz and Villahermosa no longer run; there was no need to take a single engine plane from Villahermosa to Palenque; and I thought about but never seriously considered riding a mule from Palenque to San Cristobal. I spent a morning on a horse when we visited a village near San Cristobal, and judging from that experience, I shudder to think what a day or two on a mule would have done to me.
One final word on danger. I freely admit to avoiding mortal danger in the form of direct confrontations with Zapatistas and mules. I also avoided hardship and discomfort whenever possible, as did Greene. His point was not to punish himself without purpose or recklessly court physical danger. Nor was mine. As to the result, my experience and its rendering, it is now up to the reader to decide if I am able to shed a little light on my brand of authenticity by engaging sufficiently, with skill and courage, my own peculiar form of danger.
Bibliographical note: The quotations in italics before each chapter are taken from the paperback Penguin edition of The Lawless Roads, 1982 edition. That's true of all other quotations in the text of that work, and my work, in so far as it refers to Greene's book, is based entirely on numerous readings of that edition.
Other works cited (details of editions to follow): Octavio Paz, Norman Sherry, Jack Kerouac and others.
All photographs are either by Gregg Steele or me.
Prologue
Other Sides: A Journey With Maps
The news from Mexico now is all about drugs, especially the wars along the border, those closest to home. In the spring of 2003, even though it was already old news, the Zapatistas were still getting most of the attention, and there was then and is now the persistent issue of the hundreds of murdered and mutilated young women in the border towns, especially Juarez, about which Roberto Bolano wrote what I consider a masterpiece of fiction, 2040.
And those are just the headlines, the major events that seep across the border because news editors think we might find them relevant to our lives up here in the promised land, where most things, relatively speaking, work pretty well and reliably, and where, although we are not by any means at the top of the class in low rates of crime or violence, at least, as far as I know, no one has ever rolled the heads of their victims across a dance floor, nor do sheriffs and police chiefs count on being murdered a few days after taking office.
Which does not mean that we have to live in an ivory tower on this side of the border. Unlike Mexico the USA is an extremely practical country, even in its arts and letters. Everything must be useful to be of value. We even think of pleasure as useful, which usually means that art, if it is to have any value at all, must have some political relevance. There’s a recognition that art has its place, but it’s a relatively humble one, even for works that fit the political criterion. Everyone knows that, it's not controversial, but I want to make it clear that I’m an extreme contrarian to that way of looking at things. For example, I don’t think the currency or the extreme horror of the Juarez murders has any bearing on the value of or my interest in Bolano’s masterpiece. In fact I’m tempted to say that I prefer The Savage Detectives, if for no other reason than that it’s all about poets and their place in the world. The best part I thought was that Bolano took for granted the value of poets and how they lived, regardless of how good or bad, famous or obscure. The poetic life is the subject of that novel, and as such it becomes a long and elegant manifesto of his famous remark at an awards presentation that writing is a dangerous occupation. Each section of the novel suggests that there are many types of danger for writers, not just political, more than you could ever shake a stick at, and it is the job of each writer to find his own and then work its ore for all it’s worth, as his talent allows.
Greene's main concern as a Catholic convert, his trip at least partly financed by the church, was godless socialism. The battle between church and state was by far the main headline in Mexico at the time, and conditions were most extreme in the state of Tabasco where all the churches were closed, many were burned, and the clergy had a choice between exile or execution, the basic plot device of The Power and the Glory. Clearly then Greene had a topical political agenda, as he makes clear from the start, and in Tabasco he felt the need to keep his real purpose for being there a secret from the authorities. He was in danger, or at least assumed he was, and as we know, he often stuck his neck out in crisis countries, if not for what he wrote, then for just being there in the first place. Greene was always political, but what interests me is how he countered the socialist argument in Mexico. Later in life he called himself an “agnostic Catholic,” but when he visited Mexico in the spring of 1938 he was a devout convert. At the time, and he says this explicitly in the text, he believed that there could be no authenticity without God, which can be seen as a corollary to St. Augustine’s dictum, to paraphrase, that what is not in the City of God is in the City of Satan, or to put a less arch moral spin on it, not worth our time. No meaning. No reason to live. Evil in the sense of despair, of wanting to die, a topic that remains current, and probably always will, even as specific battles between church and state come and go. What is the meaning of life without God? Can there be one? Greene saw that eternal question clearly and devotes considerable time to it in his text.
I’ve always been interested in authenticity. At its most simple, the topic can be about no more than how a pie baked from scratch at home is more authentic than a frozen pie from the supermarket. Even that though is not really simple. What we mean is that the homemade pie is the ideal, what a pie ought to be, but that may get us into an endless controversy about the ideal. What kind of flour? Oil or Crisco? What kind of apples or pecans or blueberries, etc, and can they be bought at a store or should they be hand-picked? How crispy should the crust be? I could go on forever, but you get the idea.
The next step, and one way to end the controversy, is to identify the source. My mother, let’s say. If we can say, “This pie tastes exactly like my mother’s,” and if everyone who should know agrees, the case is closed. We have an authentic pie.
Unless, that is, we think too much about Henry James. Just as appearances can deceive, so might the taste of food. Leaving aside at least for now a change in perception over time, young and old palates, there might be clever substitutes for making a pie taste like Mom’s. It would still be a fake, of course. A very good one let's say, maybe even so perfect that not even the most discerning palate could tell, but it wouldn’t be authentic. It would be just like authentic, and in the food world as opposed to the art world (or gold coins or horses) that might be good enough for most people. Recipes, like art, may be immortal, but the food itself isn’t. We can always try again later.
But Greene in The Lawless Roads has no interest in authenticity of the secular type, not in food and not in art, except when he looks down his nose at both the guidebook tourists and the expatriates he calls “hopeless romantics.” In his view the tourists who stick to the guidebooks isolate themselves from wherever they visit, ugly reality in particular, and the expatriates are hopeless, and just as bad, because they value above all else whatever pleasure they take from experiencing the country, ugly or not, only for the sake of the experience itself. In either case God is not a factor, except perhaps as a curiosity, yet another exotic artifact for study, which makes the "hopeless romantic" nothing more than a complex form of tourist.
My effort here may be considered a chronicle of my struggle with the value and morality of having always been in the "hopeless romantic" camp. Getting off the beaten track, seeing the seamy side, experiencing the culture through the people, rich and poor, has always been my added complexity, what set me apart from the guidebook tourist, and writing about the experience has always been my fallback justification for traveling in the first place. But even that is selfish, especially when the product is intended for the like-minded, an ambiguous goal at best since I am not a journalist or reformer or systematic seeker of knowledge.
Speaking of whom, those do-gooders and scholars, the ones with enviably clear and practical goals, where do they fit into this problem I'm proposing for myself, the issue of authenticity and my struggle with it? Why can't I just be one of them? There are many opportunities in those fields, even if most are volunteer, which is not a concern for me at the moment. Let me answer that on a personal level. I’m not a good team player, and I know I’d get infuriated by what I would see as, at best, well-intentioned meddling. I do recognize reform initiatives that seem worthwhile, mostly those confined to the basics such as good water. I also find the micro-loan programs intriguing and may yet get involved in some way with that. Beyond that, however, I become oddly reactionary. I say oddly because I’ve been an unapologetic liberal Democrat my whole life. Basically I think that governments through taxes have a duty to provide for the general welfare, a fair chance at a good life, which includes tough regulation of and either total support or generous subsidies to public health, transportation and education, whatever works best. Okay, all fine and good, but a streak of western individualism, a libertarian strain in my native Texan bones, won’t let me forget that what a good life is varies almost infinitely around the world. Indoor plumbing might for example be an absurd “improvement” in many cultures. Unnecessary. Unwanted. Unused.
Which brings us to where Greene and I have our most profound meeting of the minds. For both of us the real enemy is materialism in any form. Socialist or capitalist, doesn’t matter. In Greene’s Mexico socialism was the main threat; in mine it is capitalism, primarily imported from the USA. For Greene materialism of either kind undermined piety; for me it undermines authenticity, even though, as I’ve said, I now have deep reservations about the value I put on experience for its own sake, which for me has always been a search for secular authenticity.
My working answer to those troubling reservations is to focus on beauty in its broadest sense and make something more of it than I ever have before. Aesthetics, if you will. Art in the very broadest sense. I see now that I worship art in the same way Greene at the time worshiped God, although with a decidedly more protestant leaning, a more fluid and self-defined standard for what gives meaning and ensures immortality. In sum, art is God. It feels basic, the foundation, the source of all sources, a worthwhile thing in itself that I worship without shame, no matter how it treats me or others. The fountainhead of joy and misery, sickness and health, love and hate, life and death. And it can be found, if we know how to look, everywhere.
Not a wildly dangerous position to take you might think, lest we forget Bolano. Storm troopers won't be knocking on my door to confiscate my papers, beat the crap out of me and toss me in jail, at least not for this. More like weird maybe? Unpopular or unfashionable? Insignificant? Beside the point? Could be. Could be any or all of the above, but I don't think so. I’m now convinced that my devotion to art, the obsessed intensity of it, has always been the key to my danger as a writer, whether potential or realized, and therefore to why I’m here.
I think I’ve always thought that way, but what a relief it is to finally see it clearly and accept it without reservation. I took it for granted in my youth but was hardly even conscious of doing so, and then only when I had to fight the moralists and materialists, including many insufferable hard-line aesthetes, most notably those who infest universities like cockroaches. There are still many complications to resolve, always will be, nooks and crannies, highways and byways, deadends to explore. Creeds should always be flexible and words are slippery little devils, but I know for certain now that I’m looking for experiences that fulfill me in a way that I think--and deeply feel--come closest to how things ought to be, whatever they are, things that conform to an ideal of beauty that replaces without excluding God, romanticism and even political reform as the truly authentic.
*****
I had no such clear goal or vision when I began my trip in 2003. I just love Mexico and Greene, so it seemed like a good idea to re-trace his steps 65 years later. I had a few self-imposed rules and guidelines, but mostly I would let the cards fall wherever. I did know he was more of a moralist than me, but that’s still a philosophical point. What I want to do now is explain a few similarities and differences in our physical routes.And those are just the headlines, the major events that seep across the border because news editors think we might find them relevant to our lives up here in the promised land, where most things, relatively speaking, work pretty well and reliably, and where, although we are not by any means at the top of the class in low rates of crime or violence, at least, as far as I know, no one has ever rolled the heads of their victims across a dance floor, nor do sheriffs and police chiefs count on being murdered a few days after taking office.
Which does not mean that we have to live in an ivory tower on this side of the border. Unlike Mexico the USA is an extremely practical country, even in its arts and letters. Everything must be useful to be of value. We even think of pleasure as useful, which usually means that art, if it is to have any value at all, must have some political relevance. There’s a recognition that art has its place, but it’s a relatively humble one, even for works that fit the political criterion. Everyone knows that, it's not controversial, but I want to make it clear that I’m an extreme contrarian to that way of looking at things. For example, I don’t think the currency or the extreme horror of the Juarez murders has any bearing on the value of or my interest in Bolano’s masterpiece. In fact I’m tempted to say that I prefer The Savage Detectives, if for no other reason than that it’s all about poets and their place in the world. The best part I thought was that Bolano took for granted the value of poets and how they lived, regardless of how good or bad, famous or obscure. The poetic life is the subject of that novel, and as such it becomes a long and elegant manifesto of his famous remark at an awards presentation that writing is a dangerous occupation. Each section of the novel suggests that there are many types of danger for writers, not just political, more than you could ever shake a stick at, and it is the job of each writer to find his own and then work its ore for all it’s worth, as his talent allows.
Greene's main concern as a Catholic convert, his trip at least partly financed by the church, was godless socialism. The battle between church and state was by far the main headline in Mexico at the time, and conditions were most extreme in the state of Tabasco where all the churches were closed, many were burned, and the clergy had a choice between exile or execution, the basic plot device of The Power and the Glory. Clearly then Greene had a topical political agenda, as he makes clear from the start, and in Tabasco he felt the need to keep his real purpose for being there a secret from the authorities. He was in danger, or at least assumed he was, and as we know, he often stuck his neck out in crisis countries, if not for what he wrote, then for just being there in the first place. Greene was always political, but what interests me is how he countered the socialist argument in Mexico. Later in life he called himself an “agnostic Catholic,” but when he visited Mexico in the spring of 1938 he was a devout convert. At the time, and he says this explicitly in the text, he believed that there could be no authenticity without God, which can be seen as a corollary to St. Augustine’s dictum, to paraphrase, that what is not in the City of God is in the City of Satan, or to put a less arch moral spin on it, not worth our time. No meaning. No reason to live. Evil in the sense of despair, of wanting to die, a topic that remains current, and probably always will, even as specific battles between church and state come and go. What is the meaning of life without God? Can there be one? Greene saw that eternal question clearly and devotes considerable time to it in his text.
I’ve always been interested in authenticity. At its most simple, the topic can be about no more than how a pie baked from scratch at home is more authentic than a frozen pie from the supermarket. Even that though is not really simple. What we mean is that the homemade pie is the ideal, what a pie ought to be, but that may get us into an endless controversy about the ideal. What kind of flour? Oil or Crisco? What kind of apples or pecans or blueberries, etc, and can they be bought at a store or should they be hand-picked? How crispy should the crust be? I could go on forever, but you get the idea.
The next step, and one way to end the controversy, is to identify the source. My mother, let’s say. If we can say, “This pie tastes exactly like my mother’s,” and if everyone who should know agrees, the case is closed. We have an authentic pie.
Unless, that is, we think too much about Henry James. Just as appearances can deceive, so might the taste of food. Leaving aside at least for now a change in perception over time, young and old palates, there might be clever substitutes for making a pie taste like Mom’s. It would still be a fake, of course. A very good one let's say, maybe even so perfect that not even the most discerning palate could tell, but it wouldn’t be authentic. It would be just like authentic, and in the food world as opposed to the art world (or gold coins or horses) that might be good enough for most people. Recipes, like art, may be immortal, but the food itself isn’t. We can always try again later.
But Greene in The Lawless Roads has no interest in authenticity of the secular type, not in food and not in art, except when he looks down his nose at both the guidebook tourists and the expatriates he calls “hopeless romantics.” In his view the tourists who stick to the guidebooks isolate themselves from wherever they visit, ugly reality in particular, and the expatriates are hopeless, and just as bad, because they value above all else whatever pleasure they take from experiencing the country, ugly or not, only for the sake of the experience itself. In either case God is not a factor, except perhaps as a curiosity, yet another exotic artifact for study, which makes the "hopeless romantic" nothing more than a complex form of tourist.
My effort here may be considered a chronicle of my struggle with the value and morality of having always been in the "hopeless romantic" camp. Getting off the beaten track, seeing the seamy side, experiencing the culture through the people, rich and poor, has always been my added complexity, what set me apart from the guidebook tourist, and writing about the experience has always been my fallback justification for traveling in the first place. But even that is selfish, especially when the product is intended for the like-minded, an ambiguous goal at best since I am not a journalist or reformer or systematic seeker of knowledge.
Speaking of whom, those do-gooders and scholars, the ones with enviably clear and practical goals, where do they fit into this problem I'm proposing for myself, the issue of authenticity and my struggle with it? Why can't I just be one of them? There are many opportunities in those fields, even if most are volunteer, which is not a concern for me at the moment. Let me answer that on a personal level. I’m not a good team player, and I know I’d get infuriated by what I would see as, at best, well-intentioned meddling. I do recognize reform initiatives that seem worthwhile, mostly those confined to the basics such as good water. I also find the micro-loan programs intriguing and may yet get involved in some way with that. Beyond that, however, I become oddly reactionary. I say oddly because I’ve been an unapologetic liberal Democrat my whole life. Basically I think that governments through taxes have a duty to provide for the general welfare, a fair chance at a good life, which includes tough regulation of and either total support or generous subsidies to public health, transportation and education, whatever works best. Okay, all fine and good, but a streak of western individualism, a libertarian strain in my native Texan bones, won’t let me forget that what a good life is varies almost infinitely around the world. Indoor plumbing might for example be an absurd “improvement” in many cultures. Unnecessary. Unwanted. Unused.
Which brings us to where Greene and I have our most profound meeting of the minds. For both of us the real enemy is materialism in any form. Socialist or capitalist, doesn’t matter. In Greene’s Mexico socialism was the main threat; in mine it is capitalism, primarily imported from the USA. For Greene materialism of either kind undermined piety; for me it undermines authenticity, even though, as I’ve said, I now have deep reservations about the value I put on experience for its own sake, which for me has always been a search for secular authenticity.
My working answer to those troubling reservations is to focus on beauty in its broadest sense and make something more of it than I ever have before. Aesthetics, if you will. Art in the very broadest sense. I see now that I worship art in the same way Greene at the time worshiped God, although with a decidedly more protestant leaning, a more fluid and self-defined standard for what gives meaning and ensures immortality. In sum, art is God. It feels basic, the foundation, the source of all sources, a worthwhile thing in itself that I worship without shame, no matter how it treats me or others. The fountainhead of joy and misery, sickness and health, love and hate, life and death. And it can be found, if we know how to look, everywhere.
Not a wildly dangerous position to take you might think, lest we forget Bolano. Storm troopers won't be knocking on my door to confiscate my papers, beat the crap out of me and toss me in jail, at least not for this. More like weird maybe? Unpopular or unfashionable? Insignificant? Beside the point? Could be. Could be any or all of the above, but I don't think so. I’m now convinced that my devotion to art, the obsessed intensity of it, has always been the key to my danger as a writer, whether potential or realized, and therefore to why I’m here.
I think I’ve always thought that way, but what a relief it is to finally see it clearly and accept it without reservation. I took it for granted in my youth but was hardly even conscious of doing so, and then only when I had to fight the moralists and materialists, including many insufferable hard-line aesthetes, most notably those who infest universities like cockroaches. There are still many complications to resolve, always will be, nooks and crannies, highways and byways, deadends to explore. Creeds should always be flexible and words are slippery little devils, but I know for certain now that I’m looking for experiences that fulfill me in a way that I think--and deeply feel--come closest to how things ought to be, whatever they are, things that conform to an ideal of beauty that replaces without excluding God, romanticism and even political reform as the truly authentic.
*****
Greene started in San Antonio. He crossed the border at Nuevo Laredo and took the train down the center of the country, first to Monterrey, then San Luis Potosi and Mexico City, and then another train east to Orizaba and Vera Cruz. From Vera Cruz he took a boat south across the Gulf of Mexico to Frontera and Villahermosa in Tabasco, then a mail plane to Salto del Agua near Palenque, and finally a mule into San Cristobal in Chiapas, arriving there just in time for Semana Santa. On the way back he visited Puebla, and while waiting for passage home in Mexico City, he took short excursions west to Cuernavaca and Taxco.
I went to Palenque but not Salto de Agua, and the order in which I visited the towns and cities was very near but not exactly the same as Greene’s. Salto de Agua is not on a main highway, and I could find out nothing about accommodations. There had also been recent Zapatista trouble nearby, but I don’t like to think that would have stopped me if getting there had been easier. The problem was that I would have needed to take a local bus or hired a taxi, perhaps for a whole day, depending upon what I found once I got there. Forty years earlier I’d have hopped on a bus and taken my chances. In 2003 a taxi or hired car seemed a better idea, but I’d already done that in Tabasco and no longer felt that extravagant. It's not really cheap to hire a car for a day, even in Mexico. Later I learned that Allen Ginsberg had spent some time in Salto de Agua, which added to my regret that I missed it.
As to the differences in route, I had a friend with me part of the way, a Mexican who persuaded me to go to Cuernavaca and Taxco directly from Mexico City before heading back east to Vera Cruz. He has family in Taxco, and I saw no harm in the change. That made it more practical to also visit Puebla on the way down rather than on the way back. And finally, I had my brother with me from Villahermosa on, and we spent our last night in Oaxaca, and of course I took a bus back up to Laredo, right up the center of the country, not a boat to England from Vera Cruz.
First class buses in Mexico are excellent by any standard. Frequent, cheap, reliable and comfortable. As here passenger trains hardly exist anymore, and if they do you probably don’t want to take one unless it’s one of the tourist trains, as in the Copper Canyon. But my mode of transportation, if you accept the notion that a bus is close enough to a train in this instance, certainly as close as you're likely to get, was very similar to Greene’s. The exceptions to that, the major differences in how we travelled, are these: the boats between Vera Cruz and Villahermosa no longer run; there was no need to take a single engine plane from Villahermosa to Palenque; and I thought about but never seriously considered riding a mule from Palenque to San Cristobal. I spent a morning on a horse when we visited a village near San Cristobal, and judging from that experience, I shudder to think what a day or two on a mule would have done to me.
One final word on danger. I freely admit to avoiding mortal danger in the form of direct confrontations with Zapatistas and mules. I also avoided hardship and discomfort whenever possible, as did Greene. His point was not to punish himself without purpose or recklessly court physical danger. Nor was mine. As to the result, my experience and its rendering, it is now up to the reader to decide if I am able to shed a little light on my brand of authenticity by engaging sufficiently, with skill and courage, my own peculiar form of danger.
Bibliographical note: The quotations in italics before each chapter are taken from the paperback Penguin edition of The Lawless Roads, 1982 edition. That's true of all other quotations in the text of that work, and my work, in so far as it refers to Greene's book, is based entirely on numerous readings of that edition.
Other works cited (details of editions to follow): Octavio Paz, Norman Sherry, Jack Kerouac and others.
All photographs are either by Gregg Steele or me.
Prologue
. . . and why Mexico? Did I really expect to find there what I hadn’t found here?
The name has changed, but the small neon sign outside is altered, not replaced, as if to send this message: it’s really the same, amigo. Don’t let the new name bother you. The inside is exactly the same. The good lighting, the white tablecloths, the long standup bar with the brass foot rail, the plump old waiters in white coats and black bow ties, and you can still get frog legs and quail and what may be the best bolillos in the world. It’s just like the old days, back when you walked across the bridge and headed straight through the hot crowded streets for this air-conditioned oasis. Nothing could beat it: warm bolillos, a cold beer, and an aguacate cocktail.
But what most people really did, it should be admitted, was drive not walk over the bridge, and they parked in the back, a guaranteed safe haven for cars (for a small tip). Those people for the most part were Texans, and all day long on weekends the place would be packed with them. Given the chaos of the Nuevo Laredo streets, and the heat, it really was an oasis, a gringo oasis, one that had been there since the twenties, a good place for a drink or dinner on the way to and from shopping. The Texans felt secure because they were always in the majority, and since the owner was a Texan, they never had to worry about the salads, the water, the ice in their drinks, or even the arbitrary nature of Mexican authority. See those mirrors behind the bar? For years it was one long mirror, or so the story goes, running the whole length of the bar, at least thirty feet, until one day a Texan decided to shatter it with a beer bottle. An oil rich drunk Texan, no doubt, maybe even Glen McCarthy himself, the man the James Dean character was based on in “Giant.”
The three Texans I saw in there one Wednesday afternoon not long ago weren’t totally sober, but they weren’t making trouble. Old money was my guess, probably oil, but maybe even cattle or cotton. All three had the round rosy cheeks of prosperous middle-age, and they looked totally at ease in their jeans and polo shirts. They were drinking at the bar with a couple of lean Mexicans who were more sober and dressed more formally. The Mexicans looked like their ancestors had come over with Cortes. A business deal had just been completed, and everyone was feeling pretty good and acting like old fraternity brothers, arms around shoulders, half whispered dirty jokes. The Texan who did the most talking spoke good but heavily accented Spanish, and he was almost too dandyish for the crowd. He had curly red hair that came down over his collar, and he made a grand exit after a lot of hand shaking with his fellow Texans, abrazos for the Mexicans, and assurances that doing business with them was a pleasure.
The only thing that felt wrong to me was that it was five o’clock in the afternoon and those men were practically the only people in the place. While I was there, for as long as it took me to drink a couple of beers while standing at the bar, only two tables were occupied, one by two old ladies who’d probably been coming to Nuevo Laredo to shop, and to this place to eat, since the Second World War, and the other by a young couple who looked almost painfully out of place. Maybe they’d read about it in Lonely Planet, or maybe I was getting it all wrong. Why should it be busy? It was the middle of the week, George W. Bush’s Iraqi war had just started, and not too long ago, the papers had been full of drug wars in the streets. It was probably different on weekends and in normal times. A Carlos and Charley’s sat right across the road, which had to guarantee a certain amount of traffic, at least on weekends. But still, that afternoon it felt like an exclusive private club, as if I’d wandered into one of those places in Texas cities called the Petroleum Club. One of the Texans even looked at me as if he were trying to figure out who I was.
“Nobody,” I might have told him if I’d let myself stay for a third beer, which might have led to a shot of whiskey, just for the edge. But I had my heart set on cabrito, so after the two beers, and no whiskey, I went to the most obvious spot near the bridge, La Principal, where baby goat carcasses have been displayed prominently on spits in the window for at least forty years, probably much longer. No one was there either, but they did a steady take out business, the most popular items being cabecita, little head, and machito, liver wrapped in intestines. I thought about it, but then cautiously settled for more familiar parts, after which, mellowed out with just the right measure of barbecued kid and alcohol, all thought of standing at the bar until I fell down safely tucked away, I decided to sit in the plaza for a while and soak up the atmosphere. The clock on the nearby municipal building actually kept good time and chimed, I noticed, and there were no beggars, no chicle sellers, no gunfights. No one even approached me for a shoe shine. Which was fine. Everything was fine. It didn’t need to be exactly the same. Over the rooftops the sky in the west had turned a soft yellow, the air was cool and dry, and although the streets around the plaza were crowded, the plaza itself was tranquil, unless you counted the noisy flocks of lean black birds that were starting to roost in the trees.
I remembered seeing those birds forty years earlier, but in the middle of the night as I was walking back to my hotel from a whorehouse called El Diamante Azul. I thought about asking someone if the whorehouse was still in business, but my Spanish probably wasn’t good enough to explain nostalgia to a stranger, at least not in a way that would be convincing, and besides, I doubted if it was worth a long explanation even in English. I was of two minds about the whole notion of tracking down old haunts. On the one hand, what was the point? So what if they hadn’t changed? So what if they had? Surely, there was no way to wade into those waters for long without getting sucked under by an undertow of nostalgia. But at the same time I had to admit that what had brought me here in the first place was an almost obsessive preoccupation with change. My plan was to take buses all the way through the center of the country, stopping for a few days in several towns and cities, and ultimately arriving in San Cristobal in Chiapas at the beginning of Semana Santa, the week before Easter. As such, it would be a rough approximation of the trip Graham Greene chronicled in The Lawless Roads, the trip he took in the spring of 1938. The idea was to compare notes, both about what there was to see, then and now, and what should be thought about it. It would be a study in change, or the lack of it.
For the most part, then, it would be Greene’s old haunts not mine that I’d be tracking down. Nuevo Laredo and Mexico City were the only places on the route where my own previous experience might get in the way, and I was pretty sure that Greene’s presence, having him constantly in mind, would serve as a corrective to any nostalgic tendencies I might have. On the whole, Greene hated Mexico. He was scandalized by the squalor and corruption and irritated by the shoddiness of the goods and services, which he saw not as local color, but as depressing symptoms of the barbaric and godless corruption of the whole society. My own response has usually been more indulgent, and morally uncertain. Although many things in Mexico have improved since 1938, the country is still plagued by the same kinds of problems that Greene encountered, and it seems irresponsible to resist change. Nevertheless, I’m suspicious of it. I’m afraid that a country for which I have a great deal of affection will disappear, which may explain why, as a rule, I’ve ignored or tried to be amused by the problems I’ve experienced, an attitude that was put to the test not more than ten minutes after I checked into my hotel in Nuevo Laredo.
It was nothing serious. In fact, it was comic, but it was exactly the sort of thing you don’t expect in the United States and that you have to learn to live with in Mexico. A moderately priced hotel, the room looked like any you might find in the United States, but when I took a shower, the drain didn’t work. The problem had been anticipated, and more or less solved, by a second drain in the bathroom floor, but that created another problem. The tile became hazardously slick, which I learned when I nearly broke my neck trying to solve yet another problem, the wrapper on the soap. I had to turn the water off, get out of the shower, and put on my glasses to struggle with the soap wrapper, which it turned out had become pretty much a part of the soap, and the same was true of a second bar. It was hopeless, so I used the soap with the wrapper only half off, but I had to wonder how a respectable hotel could get away with having soap that, like the drain, basically didn’t work. Defective soap? It still seems bizarre, even though by now I should be used to the fact that many things don’t work well in Mexico. The mail, the roads, the police, the plumbing, and yes even the soap, can be, as they were to Greene, infuriating.
Or not. In a book called American and British Writers in Mexico, 1556-1973, Drewey Wayne Gunn makes an interesting distinction between the reactions to Mexico of twentieth century writers like Lawrence, Huxley and Greene, all of whom visited the country before World War II, and post-war writers like Kerouac and Burroughs. The prewar writers, Gunn maintains, have a conventional moral dimension that is either lacking or turned on its head by the later writers. Greene, for example, assumes moral indignation on the part of his readers to certain unpleasant details of Mexican life, details that, as he is more than happy to point out, the guidebooks fail to mention: deformed beggars, swaggering pistoleros, and the smell of urine from the hotel bathrooms, just to name a few. But less than twenty years later, Dean Moriarty in On the Road has another take: “Dig all the foolish stories you read about Mexico . . . crap about greasers and so on--and all it is, people here are straight and kind and don’t put down any bull. I’m so amazed by this.” Oblivious to corruption and poverty, never mind persecution and godlessness, Dean and Sal Paradise find everything good in the Mexico of On the Road: the cops, the whores, the dope, the desert, even the mosquito infested jungle, where Sal, sleeping on the hood of a car with his shirt off, actually enjoys the heat and the assault of insects. They help him lose himself in the country. He isn’t satisfied with just digging the place. Sal wants to become Mexico.
Greene makes his opinion of romantics like Kerouac and the Romantics clear early on in The Lawless Roads when he rants against arid landscapes and anyone who likes them. Deserts are ugly and useless, he says, and anyone who thinks otherwise is guilty of thinking of God as “a kind of alienated poet,” a close match to the way Sal Paradise must have been thinking that night in the jungle. Kerouac doesn’t mention God explicitly, but Sal clearly wants to become part of something not just bigger than and different from himself, but something strange and conventionally unappealing, something that all the squares, like Greene, would turn up their noses at. He would probably have preferred, though, to think of what he was looking for as transformation, or even metamorphosis, rather than alienation. Greene most often thinks of it as escape. He’s not interested in finding himself or losing himself. If anything, he’s afraid of it. More than halfway through his trip, when he arrives in Villahermosa, the capital of Tabasco, the state in which all the churches have been destroyed and the priests deported or killed, he learns that the names Greene and Graham are not uncommon. There is an unremarkable explanation (immigration from the southern United States after the Civil War), but Greene uses the fact, only half-jokingly, to explore his increasing unease, as he gets deeper and deeper into “godless” territory, about going native. Or in his case, I’m convinced, to the devil. The quasi-official purpose of Greene’s trip was to report on the persecution of Catholics in Tabasco, and in the prologue to The Lawless Roads he proclaims his faith, telling us that his boyhood experiences in English public school, where “appalling cruelties could be practiced without a second thought,” led him “to believe in heaven because (he) believed in hell.” He sums up conditions in “socialist” Mexico at the time as “a war . . .for the soul of the Indian.”
In 1938 Greene saw the world in general and Mexico in particular as a battleground of faith, and even harmless picturesque towns like Taxco, which were overflowing with romantic types, were nothing more than places “for escapists with their twisted sexuality and their hopeless freedom.” This streak of Puritanism is so strong in The Lawless Roads that when Greene does find something to like, he’s suspicious of his own reaction. San Cristobal, for example, is “lovely in its way,” with its little balconies, tiled roofs, and narrow streets, and the Chiapas scenery is “magnificent,” but when he compares his first view of the town, nestled quaintly in the mountains, to a Rider Haggard novel, it’s as if he needs to remind himself that in the right circumstance he’s as vulnerable as anyone else to romantic nonsense. And the circumstance couldn’t have been more right. That first view of San Cristobal came after two miserable days in the jungle, riding on a mule and sleeping on the ground in Indian huts with rats for company. First sightings after long hard journeys can apparently bring out the romantic streak in even the sternest moralist. Earlier, after a hellish boat trip, the lights of “godless” Villahermosa, viewed from the Rio Grijalva, remind him of Venice.
A very evil land, a priest, had said of Villahermosa only a few days before, but soon after he arrives Greene is drawn to a plaza by the sound of music, and he asks the reader to imagine, of all things, what is undeniably a romantic scene: a camera panning across couples dancing among palm trees and old colonial buildings, young people ritually walking around the plaza in opposite directions, and prisoners watching the festivities through the barred windows of the jail. Greene is enchanted, but not for long. He soon corrects himself. The other reality is there waiting for him the next morning: the heat, the vultures on the rooftops, the burned out and looted churches. It is a place, he tells us, where the criminals look more respectable than the police, and he seems relieved that on the whole, in the clear light of day, it has so little charm, and so much evil, that it couldn’t possibly seduce him.
Throughout much of his trip, Greene reads himself to sleep with Trollope. It enables him to keep in touch with the familiar and works as an antidote to the sordidness, and the temptations, of his immediate surroundings. He knows of course that Trollope’s England no longer exists, and probably never did. It’s a fantasy, a comforting myth of middle class civility, a sedative against the bugs and the rats in his room and the smell of the toilet, which he understandably associates with Mexico’s violence and corruption. But he’s homesick, which tempts him, as it does all of us, to idealize home and set ourselves up for the inevitable letdown. At the very end of The Lawless Roads, home at last, he finds England disappointing. “Mass in Chelsea seemed curiously fictitious,” he says. “We do not mortify ourselves. Perhaps we are in need of violence.”
What he misses, and his subsequent travels bear this out, is not Mexico, but the battleground itself. Throughout his life, wherever there was trouble, Greene was there: London in the blitz, Vietnam when the French were giving up, Haiti during Papa Doc. He was attracted by danger, and by corruption and squalor, by hell, but that shouldn’t obscure the consistently moral message that came from those travels. In later years, he was far less insistent upon Catholicism as a remedy, but he never let up on his criticism of totalitarian regimes, and his emphasis was always on the hollow, bankrupt nature of any society, socialist or capitalist, that places materialism above faith. Even after he started calling himself an “agnostic Catholic,” he looked at life more as an ongoing struggle for spiritual redemption than as a quest for earthly perfection.
Which made Greene, I think, have more in common with Mexicans than he knew or cared to admit. I’m familiar, as a failed Protestant, with the lore about how Catholics balance sin and redemption, how for example they go to Mass on Saturday evenings just so they won’t have to get up early on Sunday mornings with a hangover. I wasn’t surprised, then, when right after a Mass in San Luis Potosi, a Mexican friend, not entirely tongue-in-cheek, suggested that we should get drunk and maybe even look for some women. Ivan had studied for a year to be a priest before dropping out and had perhaps given the human condition more thought than most. That’s what Catholicism is all about, he explained, life as a cycle of sinning, of feeling miserable for a while, and then of getting clean, which makes it only sensible to love sin as an essential part of the process.
On that first day in Nuevo Laredo, after my cabrito, as I sat alone on the bench in Plaza Hidalgo, enjoying the black birds and the pale yellow sunset, I wasn’t thinking about sin or redemption, or any kind of struggle. I was sleepy and sober, just glad to be there, but I did think for a minute about that Texan looking at me and wondering who I was and how I happened to be there in what was once the original, pre-franchise Cadillac Bar and is now the El Dorado. If we’d talked, he’d have thought my plans were crazy. What was wrong with me? With the possible exception of the resorts, Mexico is either depressing or scary. Why did I want to punish myself? The fact that I didn’t plan any extreme hardship would have made no impression on him. He would have told me, after latching onto the only explanation that made any sense to him, that in spite of my foolishness, when it came right down to it all we gringo Texans were alike. For that matter, all men of any stripe were alike. All Kerouac wanted, in spite of his recycled New England transcendentalism, was a little cheap Mexican tail. What else in Mexico is worth the trouble? And what do you think Greene, in spite of his high flown and tedious Catholicism, was thinking about when he sat in that plaza in Villahermosa watching those dancers? The glory of God? Forget about all this change business, partner, whether it’s Mexico or yourself you’re worried about, and no matter what you call it. Alienation. Transformation. Redemption. Salvation. You’re thinking too much. Forget about all the old places that may or may not still be there, and Kerouac’s nirvana dreams and Greene’s piety and mortification. Go to Cancun, my friend, or better yet, stay home.
Chapter One: Texas
Texas seemed to be half Mexico already--and half Will Rogers.
In the late sixties a prominent South Texas attorney told me that Latino manners had taken a regrettable turn for the worse soon after World War II. The old men who came into his office still took off their hats, bowed, addressed him as “sir,” and kept their eyes lowered and spoke softly, but the younger men showed no inclination to do any of those things. The attorney was moderate enough in his views to allow, at least theoretically, that the prosperous and educated of any race were his equals, but he missed the old fashioned “courtesy” that he’d come to expect from all Latinos, rich or poor. Having come of age in the late forties and early fifties, he was in the last generation of a privileged group of white men who could take for granted their role as patrons in South Texas culture.
That’s not totally a thing of the past, but most white Texans these days aren’t comfortable with blatant paternalism. Texans of any ethnicity who are Anglicized prefer friendliness to courtesy. It’s the state motto: Friendship. Texans are even urged to drive friendly, and whether they practice what they preach is beside the point. They still believe that friendliness, like football and capital punishment, is an essential part of living well, the good life, and they know in their gut that the Mexican way of dealing with other people is something entirely different. So radically different, in fact, that it suggests a way of life that most North Americans, not just Texans, find disagreeable, and even morally offensive. Why would a total stranger volunteer to be a sus ordenes, at your service, unless he had some trick up his sleeve? It’s going too far. It has to be a con.
Several years ago, during my first trip to Mexico to study Spanish, a Mexican doctor with whom I’d just had coffee opened the passenger side door of his car for me, motioned for me to get in with a wide sweep of his arm and a slight bow, and asked what a person would say in English in that situation. I was stumped. My first inclination was to tell him that except for valets, men in the United States don’t open car doors for other men, but the language barrier--he knew less English than I did Spanish--made me think better of it. Rather than take the risk of some sort of homophobic misunderstanding, I made up something that sounded right--I think I said, “After you”--and changed the subject. The doctor and I were having coffee because he wanted to improve his English for the urology conventions that he often attended in the United States, and although I’ve lost track of him over the years, I still sometimes wonder if he’s ever rushed up to a taxi in Manhattan to open the door for a North American colleague, and with a flourish said, “After you.”
North Americans don’t really believe in service, certainly not between two able bodied grown ups. We find it either embarrassing or comic because it rubs against our notions of equality, or we find it threatening because we know it’s phony. The stereotype of the obsequious double dealing bandido didn’t materialize out of thin air, as anyone who has dealt with Mexicans in any significant way knows. I don’t mean that most of us have been robbed or killed by Mexicans, but simply that Mexicans don’t always mean what they say. When my urologist friend invited me to his house for dinner, he showed me a private apartment over his garage and told me I was welcome to stay there anytime. We both knew, though, that he would have been very surprised if I’d taken him up on the offer. Surprised and probably annoyed, and he would likely have found an excuse for turning me down. The point of the offer was not to actually give me something but to go through the motions, the formality, of showing his willingness to serve. Not because he was really eager to serve. That had nothing to do with it, but the gesture accomplished two things: it flattered me, I was a worthy guest, and it demonstrated the doctor’s generosity and prosperity.
Even that’s a problem for gringos. It’s still dishonest, and saying that you’re expected to know that it’s only a formality, a pleasant fiction, doesn’t help. That makes it a silly charade designed to gloss over a less generous reality. It’s far better to just be friendly, which might also be deceptive, but at least it assumes equality. The point of friendliness is to open up and show the other person that you are just like him, neither above nor below, and therefore can have nothing to hide. It’s at the heart of democracy. Be yourself and be friendly. Put all your cards on the table. It’s the American way, and everyone, no matter what corner of the world he’s from, should do the same.
Like most gringos, Graham Greene was suspicious of Mexican courtesy, and for the same reasons, but he wasn’t too fond of North American friendliness either. In The Lawless Roads, he often speaks as if being in Mexico is like walking through a maze of oily used car salesmen, all of them trying to play him for a sucker, and he’s particularly suspicious of the abrazo. O to be back in England! At least there they don’t shake your hand and hug you before stabbing you in the back. But while courtesy may mask the criminal, the problem with friendliness is that it suggests that there’s nothing there to mask. You have nothing to hide because, as a matter of fact, there’s nothing beneath the surface. Greene sums up his feelings, and prejudices, regarding both North Americans and Mexicans in a passage about his train ride from New Orleans to San Antonio: “All through the night the proverbs welled out [from a Texan] full of fake kindliness and superficial truth--a Metro-Goldwyn philosophy. And a New Mexican with an exotic shirt and an untrustworthy mestizo face talked back, neither paying attention to the other, all through the night talking at a tangent over the hip flasks.”
But it’s not just Texans. Greene knew that friendliness is a value shared by all North Americans. On the train to Monterrey, he meets an old man from Wisconsin, a widower and retired sheriff, who, having nothing better to do, has decided to see a foreign country for the first time in his life. As Greene describes him, he’s the most guileless soul imaginable. He knows no Spanish, but he’ll walk up to anybody and start a conversation, assuming that he’ll somehow be understood, and to Greene’s amazement, he usually is. He’s so innocent that it’s impossible to dislike him. It’s even tempting to feel sorry for him, or at least protective, but there’s also something annoying about his innocence. He soon gets on Greene’s nerves. He’s interested in everything, but at the same time, nothing foreign can touch him, like the tourists Greene finds in Monterrey, who “lived in a few square inches of American territory; with Life and Time and coffee at Sanborn’s . . . impervious to Mexico.”
Greene the relentless Catholic focuses on the old man’s religious convictions, or lack of them, to explain his character. He is surprised to learn that the American is not a rock solid Protestant, but a free thinker, of all things, who vaguely believes that something may be out there somewhere, but he doesn’t know what. To Greene that’s proof enough that nothing lies behind the old man’s easy going, gregarious façade, which, although he doesn’t make the point explicit in this context, makes him typical of most North Americans. The United States, in Greene’s view, is all glittering and friendly surface. Twenty years before Disneyland, Greene seems to think of the United States as already a theme park country, its materialism a desperate means of keeping people occupied with meaningless fantasy, “impervious” to reality.
When I flew into Austin in the early spring of 2003, sixty-five years after Greene’s trip, I already knew that I would have no trouble recognizing both the Texas and the Mexico of The Lawless Roads. I’d lived well over half my life in Texas, and I’d been to Mexico often enough over the years to know what to expect. I knew that Texas was still friendly, hail fellow well met, and that Mexico was still courteous, eager to serve. That much hadn’t changed, and I was pretty confident as well that I was not impervious to what each façade masked.
*****
I called Donald Weismann the week before I left for Austin, mainly to make arrangements to see him, but when I mentioned Graham Greene and Mexico, he immediately told me a story about visiting the ruins of a colonial church near Acapulco in 1937, the year before Greene’s visit. He asked his guide, a cleaning woman who offered to show him around for a few centavos, about the wooden stakes he saw stacked against a wall in the church. They were smoothly polished, pointed at one end, and of various heights and widths, and the guide told him that they’d been used by priests to widen the anuses of young Indian boys.
That story made me think of the anti-clerical socialist propaganda Greene encountered a year later: bones of nuns’ babies rumored to be on display in a hidden convent in Puebla, images in a Mexico City waxworks of priests flogging naked women, and of course the Rivera and Orozco murals. But Greene’s point was always morally straightforward. Anti-clerical propaganda was so absurd that it clearly demonstrated to any reasonable and educated person the unprincipled lengths to which socialists would resort, and he repeatedly makes the point that most of the Mexicans he talked to were indifferent to it. But Don’s guide didn’t seem indifferent. To demonstrate her point, she held up a stake and gestured with it at her buttocks, saying with conviction: “El Diablo es La Iglesia.”
As I write this, Don is 88 years old and pretty much the same as always. I met him in 1965 when I took an undergraduate course he taught at the University of Texas called “The Artist in American Society.” It was almost like a graduate seminar, only a handful of students, and what it amounted to was writing a long paper about an American artist or writer of our choice and then reading the paper to the class at Don’s house. I picked Jack Kerouac, got as drunk as I thought the situation required, and no doubt bored everyone to tears with a too long, monotone reading of a paper that was tedious to start with. In spite of that, it was the beginning of a relationship that so far has spanned nearly forty years. It’s never really been a friendship. We haven’t seen each other often enough for that, but Don’s influence has been every bit as important to me in its way as reading Greene and Kerouac.
In 1965 he had an impressive title at the university, but it was clear from the moment I first saw him that he was not a typical academic. Maybe not an academic at all, since it was more like Harold Hill had just walked into the classroom, a burly, handsome music man with a strong Milwaukee accent and a way of effortlessly making his point with stories, or rather, making the stories seem like the point. That was the significant difference. Don was a painter and a writer, a fact he had no interest in hiding, and how he managed to climb as high as he did in academia, I have no idea. Slight of hand, perhaps.
He lives alone now (his third wife is recently deceased) in a modest brick house in the suburban foothills of Austin. He walked out into the front yard to greet me with a warm handshake, and as he ushered me through his office, I noticed that his desk was covered with the legal pads that he uses every day for writing. We sat around a coffee table in his living room and drank beer and smoked cigarettes, and we talked about old times for a while, which for us means the class I took, a few old friends of mine he met, and the times I would show up drunk and uninvited at his house. He never turned me away. In fact, he always seemed glad to see me, regardless of my condition and that of the friends I usually had with me, which of course had its effect on how I felt about him. That and the time I went by to tell him good-bye when I was leaving Austin for good, and he reached in his pocket and gave me every dollar he had. Nine dollars to be exact. An old con man’s trick, no doubt, but it worked.
The conversation soon turned to Mexico. In the late thirties, Don was a high school art teacher and went to Mexico for the summer with a stake of $80, sleeping at times on tabletops. That was when he visited the church with the wooden stakes, but it was his later trips, after the war and with his second wife, Elizabeth, that he talked about the most that afternoon. Elizabeth was an art historian, an expert on Mexican art and architecture, and Don pointed out a collage of Mexican artifacts over his fireplace, a piece he did for a class he took from Elizabeth at Ohio State, which was how they met. On their first trip to Mexico they lived in a village near San Luis Potosi, and he told me a story about getting his typewriter and army uniform stolen by a state trooper. The trooper and Don were drinking buddies, but one morning after a particularly long drinking bout, Don woke up to find the typewriter and uniform gone. He never had proof that the trooper stole them, but after that night, he said, the Mexican “was less friendly and avoided me.”
The uniform and typewriter were the only two things Don had of any value. He described the uniform to me in great detail: the buttons, how it was sewn, the quality of the cloth. The two items would have brought the trooper a considerable amount of money. How much? A month’s salary? Two months? That’s as close as Don comes to interpreting the story, and I honestly don’t know what he thinks beyond that first probe into the trooper’s mind. How much? It’s probably best to leave it at that, to let each listener draw his own conclusions about the dynamics of a relationship between a gringo artist and a Mexican policeman, and normally I would, but I can’t help but wonder what it would mean to the man I had a brief discussion with in Massachusetts right before I left on my trip.
I don’t like to tell casual acquaintances that I’m going to Mexico because I don’t like to decide how to handle the inevitable cautions about thieves and murderers and how sad it is to see all the poor people, and my worst fears about that were realized when I happened to mention my trip to a man who like me is a regular at library book sales. He told me he’d been to Mexico only once, to Acapulco. The trip included a group excursion by bus to a jewelry store on the outskirts of town, and he couldn’t believe how many armed guards there were around the store, all with automatic rifles. When he asked the bus driver why there were so many guards, the explanation was that one in every four Mexicans are thieves.
That was the punch line, and it was delivered with a smug anxious grin that I had no trouble recognizing. Are you a white man or aren’t you? That’s always the question behind that grin. Was I surprised? Not really, but it was still odd to find it on Cape Cod, where there are virtually no Mexicans and never have been. It implied almost exactly what I’d been told about Mexicans when I was a kid in Texas, and when I saw the man later, after my trip, it made me want to tell him Don’s state trooper story. Unfortunately, I don’t have Don’s storytelling gift. Instead, I imagine Don telling him, and although to pick on someone like that for racism is like shooting fish in a barrel, in my imagination I’m shameless. I’d like to study his face as Don carefully describes the details of his Army uniform. I’d like to know how impenetrable he is, if he has the nerve, for example, when Don reaches the point where the trooper avoids him, to draw the easy moral from the tale. The lesson is simple: don’t get drunk with Mexican cops. But I think my library friend might even venture to tell Don, with condescending sympathy, the underlying moral, the deeper truth, the fundamental caution of the tale, which is, of course, that Mexicans are not like you and me.
*****
San Antonio is the first place Greene discusses in any detail in The Lawless Roads, and the first place I tried to find there was Matamoros Street, which in 1938 was famous for its whorehouses. According to Greene’s biographer, Norman Sherry, a guide book was available that included names, addresses, phone numbers and a rating system. Sherry visited the street in 1985 and reported that the whorehouses were a thing of the past. Matamoros Street had become just another rundown area of town. I couldn’t find it at all. I walked everywhere and even enlisted the help of a friendly hotel clerk who consulted maps and made several phone calls, all to no avail. I think it may have been where the new HEB headquarters is now. HEB is the most common supermarket chain in South Texas, and if its headquarters wiped Matamoros Street off the map, some people might consider that a form of poetic justice. H. E. Butt, the founder of HEB, was famous in South Texas for being a hard-shelled Southern Baptist, and he would no doubt have been pleased to have the center of his empire built on the ruins of whorehouses.
It’s predictable that Greene would look for whorehouses in San Antonio. Wherever he happened to be in the world, he considered it an obligation to find the local underbelly, the local version of hell, and whorehouses and freak shows were among his favorite attractions. In San Antonio, in addition to Matamoros Street, he finds an exhibit of the alleged mummified bodies of two Oklahoma outlaws, Dutch Kaplan and Oklahoma Jim, and he’s offered a peek at an aborted fetus, an opportunity he declines. This is balanced by the charming side of the city, the local version of heaven, about which, just as typically, he is suspicious. Although pleased by the little river that winds through the middle of town and by the “picture postcard” Mexico he finds in a downtown cathedral where the sermon is given in Spanish, heaven on earth for Greene is an illusion. The congregation makes him think of a Victorian photo album, but he compares the scene to an ivory tower, not only in its isolation, but in its tendency to distract us from Cardinal Newman’s “terrible aboriginal calamity,” original sin.
In a city like San Antonio, where poverty is so apparent, the most pertinent sin would be greed, which conveniently works as a prelude to what Greene will find in abundance in Mexico. Shelling pecans by hand was an important industry in San Antonio in the thirties, and the workers were mostly Mexican immigrants. At the time of Greene’s visit, they had gone on strike to protest the reduction of an already pitifully low wage. Greene attends a Catholic Action Committee rally for them, and while he’s mildly critical of the innocence of the society women who’ve organized the event, he’s sympathetic with their good intentions and careful to make the point that the church, at least officially, condemns the excesses of capitalism as vigorously as it does the godlessness of socialism. It’s an important point for him to make early in his trip to “socialist” Mexico. Heaven on earth may not be possible, but good works are still required, and he wants no one to think that he’s indifferent to the misery of the poor.
Which explains his delight in lampooning the guidebooks that so doggedly ignore that misery. In Greene’s view, the romantic aesthetes who tell the tourists what to see are as guilty in their way as the lazy politicians and greedy capitalists. You can’t tell God that you were too busy admiring a cathedral to notice starving children and deformed beggars. Or more to the point in the San Antonio of today, too busy shopping, a temptation that Greene might actually prefer to Latin charm. The new shopping malls, like the old cathedral, are safely isolated, to be sure, ivory towers of a sort, but the prevailing aesthetic of “quaint” and “cute” is now such a transparent parody of Latin charm that it’s easily dismissed as little more than yet another example of vulgar capitalism gone wild.
The Riverwalk is a combination theme park and outdoor shopping mall, think Fanueil Hall with armadillos instead of lobsters, and today’s visitors, much more easily than in 1938 I would guess, can enjoy San Antonio blissfully untroubled by any knowledge of crime, corruption, poverty and the like. Tourists don’t have to ignore those things; they can avoid them altogether. It’s possible to stay in a downtown hotel, shop in a mall, attend a theme park, walk along the pleasant little river, and go to the Alamo, without ever setting foot on a San Antonio street. To even find office workers, you have to walk up a flight of stairs from the river and head west. There you’ll find the city: buses and taxis, newspaper hawkers, men in suits and women in high heels. And if you continue west, homeless people and street beggars soon start appearing among the office workers, and near the courthouse you can find a lot of old men in straw hats passing the time on concrete retaining walls. Matamoros Street, when it existed, was just behind the courthouse, no doubt so that the politicians, as Greene was fond of saying of Mexican politicians, could keep an eye on things.
Just west of the courthouse is the serious dividing line. The closer you get to the elevated freeway, the fewer white people you see, and on the West Side, as it is commonly known, you see none. Greene spent most of his time on the West Side. It was there he saw the outlaw mummies, and he also walked the streets, especially at night, to get the feel of things. I remember standing in a long line, perhaps thirty years ago, to get into Mi Tierra, by reputation the mother of all Mexican restaurants in Texas, and that same night shooting pool in a nearby beer joint. It’s the warm, humid nights that make such scenes memorable. Greene talks about voices in the dark from open doorways. I think of Norteno music and hot rods. Thirty years ago Mi Tierra was an oasis much like the Cadillac Bar in Nuevo Laredo, by no means exclusively for gringos, but a place where it was safe to slum. These days it is even safer. Although located on the West Side and in a depressed area, it is surrounded by El Mercado, a tourist attraction that is far too clean and quiet to bear any resemblance to a Mexican market. It’s even air conditioned.
But Mi Tierra is still a good place. It may be a little self-conscious about its longevity, and the pictures on the wall are straight from Greene’s Victorian photo album, but basic things like menudo are still on the menu and the waitresses speak Spanish. Compare that to the Del Rio restaurant on the Riverwalk, which still has its vintage neon sign, but inside is not much different from its faux-Mexican neighbors. Now, of course, we’re talking about authenticity, not moral responsibility, and Greene has no use for authenticity except in relation to the church. To be concerned with how well something preserves or matches up to the traditions of the past is irrelevant, if not immoral, the meaningless activity of those romantic aesthetes who write the guidebooks. It leads us into the quaint and the cute, but worse, like all worldly temptation, past and present, it isolates us from what is really important, which is to always keep in mind that there is no authenticity without God. What is not in the City of God is in the City of the Devil.
A hard line, but one that Greene maintains, in theory if not in practice, throughout his trip, and I can’t deny that looking for authenticity without God, which is how I must look for it, can at times feel decadent, too precious, and pointless. Nevertheless, what kept me interested in San Antonio, after I gave up trying to find Matamoros Street, and after thoroughly enjoying my authentic enchiladas at Mi Tierra, was looking for more things that pre-dated the Riverwalk and the bright new air-conditioned version of El Mercado. After staring down my nose sufficiently at the tourists who fall for the fake Texas and Mexican curios, and resisting Texas according to the Imax theater, I strolled over to the Menger Hotel next to the Alamo, to admire its huge lobby, all green and white marble, its lush tropical planetarium, and its creaky wooden bar where legend has it that Teddy Roosevelt recruited Rough Riders. Both the Menger and the Alamo are embalmed remains of a distinctive way of life that still hangs on, but just barely, in central Texas. Limestone missions and houses, hills covered with cedar and live oak, German and Czech sausage, beer and barbecue. It’s often hard to tell if the polkas you hear from the dance halls are Mexican or Bohemian, and everyone’s a cowboy or a cedar chopper, a doper or a roper. That’s the myth, at any rate, the picture postcard version of Texas, as Greene might say, and much of it has been packaged for tourists over the last thirty or forty years, in a way that differs only in taste, at times, from the curio shops on the Riverwalk. On weekends the authentic hill country towns are packed to the gills with city dwellers looking for the real in restaurants with sawdust on the floors and carefully cluttered old fashioned signs on the walls, and in boutiques and gift shops run by rich people with nothing else to do, and it’s hard in that environment not to think of the expatriates of Greene’s Taxco, with their “hopeless freedom.”
*****
Not everyone in the Austin bus station was, as they say in South Texas, “Latin,” but almost everyone who looked respectable was. Before I got there, I thought I might look a little uptown for the crowd, with my black suitcase with wheels, but then everyone started pulling out cell phones and I relaxed. As a white person, I was in the minority, but as a member of the middle class, I fit right in. A woman behind me talked on her cell phone all the way from Austin to San Antonio, first in Spanish to her sister, then to a friend in English, giving an exit by exit, street by street, progress report, like an air traffic controller. The fat woman across from me wore a green and white nylon jacket and listened to a walkman. I heard a conversation about wedding dresses and several about where people were from and where they had in-laws and cousins. It was all relentlessly business as usual. The only thing strange about the bus in Texas was that all the people around me were bi-lingual and of a darker complexion.
Here are the towns you pass on the way to Laredo from San Antonio: Natalia, Devine, Pearsall, Dilley, Cotulla. Here is what you see: windmills, deer stands, barbed wire, mockingbirds, junked cars, white stucco houses with orange tile roofs, scrub oak, huisache, pasture, cattle, and four foot high prickly pear. It’s rolling prairie, flatter the further south you go, and in late March the grass is tall and green and you see bluebonnets and Indian paint brush in most of the fields. Writers often call tropical skies metallic, which becomes truer the closer to the equator you get. In Texas, no matter the season, it looks bleached.
Chapter Two: El Norte
Over there everything is going to be different.
It was still dark when saying “desayuno” to the hotel bellman got me directed to a cafe on the far side of the plaza. It didn’t look inviting. It was virtually empty, far too bright, and the seating was bare bones plastic and chrome, all of which I could see even from across the street. The façade was mostly window, which meant that in the dark, and even in the half light of early morning, it would be like eating in a fish bowl. And why wasn’t it packed with hungry workers at this hour? But I didn’t hesitate for long. I wanted coffee, and looking for another place would probably have been more trouble than it was worth.
I ordered juevos a la mexicana, which seemed appropriate for the occasion, and I should have ordered café con leche. A little milk would have helped wash down the very picante eggs, which came, in typical Norteno fashion, with refried beans, lettuce and tomato, two giant French fries, and corn tortillas. My black coffee was served in a water glass, and taking a cue from a woman sitting nearby, I used my napkin to hold it so as not to burn my fingers. There was a lot of take out business for pastries, but the woman, who sat facing me, was the only other seated customer. Greene would have called her face brutal, which is how pure Indian faces always struck him. Her heavy makeup gave her skin an almost purple tint, her navy blue suit fit too snug, and her hair was pulled back tightly in a bun. She stared straight ahead without really looking at anything, in the manner of someone sitting alone in a bar. While I ate, she ordered a second coffee, and she was still there, still staring at nothing in particular, when I left.
I was way ahead of schedule. The nap after my cabrito dinner the night before had lasted until five in the morning. I was wide awake and well-rested, but it was only a little after eight, the bus ride to Monterrey would take no more than three hours, and I wasn’t due to meet Ivan there until two. I bought a big cup of fresh orange juice at a stand that had just opened, then walked down to the toll plaza, partly from idle curiosity and partly in homage to Greene.
There wasn’t much to see, thanks mainly to a solid and annoyingly high fence on the Mexican side. Ten or twelve feet high, it was made of some sort of salmon colored plastic. I don’t know the story of the fence, but it looked new, and my guess would be that it wasn’t a Mexican idea. It ran further than I could see in both directions, so that there was no view of the river, just the bridge through the toll plaza, and not much was going on there. Very few cars crossed and only a dozen or so day workers waited in line to show their ID cards. This was the old bridge. There was probably more action down the river at the new bridge, but I was perfectly content where I was. From where I stood, it was a slow, easy going early morning with bright sunshine and just the trace of a pleasant chill in the air.
Greene, while waiting in Laredo for a ride to Monterrey that never materialized, was struck by the similarity of the two sides of the river: “it looked just the same . . . . It was like looking at yourself in a mirror.” He was referring in part to the landscape, the way it slopes up gradually from the river, but also to the fact that back then, and even into the sixties, the streets on both sides were lined with money changers. But that’s not all he had in mind. Long before you get to the river, as Greene noted and no one can miss, Texas starts to look and feel like Mexico. It is by no means a clean break, which provides him with an ironic context for his thoughts about borders in general.
The first thing he says about border expectations is that “life is never going to be quite the same again after your passport has been stamped and you find yourself speechless among the money-changers.” And he offers the reader a list of changes: more beautiful women for the romantic, a different kind of hell for the malcontent, death for the suicide. In other words, not just different. Better. The grass is always greener, an illusion that tempts even a man of faith like Greene, but as a good Catholic he can’t forget that all fresh starts are temporary. “The atmosphere of the border,” he tells us, “is like starting over again; there is something about it like a good confession: poised for a few happy moments between sin and sin.”
All things considered--the long night’s sleep, the good breakfast, and the perfect weather, all in a foreign country--how could I not that morning have experienced a few happy moments? I was there, undeniably there, on the other side of the river, looking back at the United States. I enjoyed those moments, even though, like Greene, I knew they wouldn’t last, and what’s more, unlike Greene, for me the question remained: for what? If not more beautiful women, another kind of hell, death, or as in Greene’s case, God, then what? I had no real business to conduct in Mexico. No reason for being there that could be called practical. No relatives to visit. No academic research, no political agenda, no social work, no souls to save. My excuse for this particular trip was an attraction, almost an addiction, to a travel narrative, the account of a journey taken sixty-five years earlier by an Englishman who, very unlike me, showed little tolerance and no love for Mexico. The Greene of The Lawless Roads, it must be said, is often irritable and intolerant about things I like and embarrassingly uncritical and naive about things I don’t. Still, I admire him. I even like him.
Turning away from the bridge, I explored several blocks of Guerrero, the main drag, but there wasn’t much to see. It was too early. A few blocks south, rush hour traffic was in full swing, but I encountered almost no pedestrians along the way, and nothing was open. Finally, just as I had the day before, I settled down on a bench in the Plaza Hidalgo. It was quiet, pretty much like it had been the previous afternoon, but even more so. No kiosks selling t-shirts, cigarettes, lottery tickets or corn on the cob, and the chain drug store across the street hadn’t opened yet. It would get livelier later. Maybe on weekends it was even crowded and bustling. A couple of crafts markets for tourists were only a block or two away, and that morning I’d passed high end furniture and dress shops that, like the Cadillac Bar and La Principal, I recognized from twenty, even forty years ago. Tourists still come to Nuevo Laredo, obviously. I’d just never been there so early in the day and in the middle of the week.
In the old days I would walk down the street in the midst of what felt to my gringo sensibility like anarchy, and being there was enough, satisfying in itself, an end in itself. I paid little attention to the details. It was the total effect, the complexity and strangeness of everything, that was intoxicating. The insanely crowded sidewalks, the deafening boom box music, the incredible piles of cheap goods for sale. I just liked it, so much so that it seemed pointless and unwise to wonder why. I simply immersed myself, went under for a while, and came out with a few happy moments. But it was a secular catharsis. To be sure, it was the result of letting go, of expelling demons, but it was not confessional. I was a shameless romantic, like Kerouac, with I suppose my “hopeless freedom.”
Greene would have cut me no slack for the fact that my “picture postcard” Mexico wasn’t pretty. That made it worse, taking pleasure from the beggars on the street and their misery, and falling for the “hideous” crafts and street food. Hideous is Greene’s favorite word for anything indigenous, and it served him well, not only as a weapon against insipid travel guides, but as protection against being seduced by the pagan, the very thing that in my youth, I admit, I’d always hoped for.
No such temptation presented itself to me that morning. I saw neither squalor nor corruption, and not much guidebook local color. Still no chicle sellers, and the municipal clock continued to keep perfect time. What I did see was vacant store fronts, among them a closed movie theater, which had to mean that somewhere in Nuevo Laredo there was a shopping mall, probably with a multiplex cinema. Nuevo Laredo in the 21st Century: suburban flight, inner city decay, but a clean, well-maintained central plaza, thanks to the tourist bureau or the city council working diligently to keep the place presentable and the street hustlers at bay. If only they could persuade the drug dealers not to have gunfights on the street, they might convince people that this was no longer a typical border town.
All well and good for capitalist prosperity, no doubt, but when a typical border town transforms its plaza into something like a formal living room, used only for company while the real life of the house goes on somewhere else, it becomes too much like home, and what sort of catharsis can that provide? Of course the center of Nuevo Laredo would never have existed in the first place, not on such a large scale, without gringo tourists. It’s always been a tourist town, but the gringos were expected to adapt by ignoring the unpleasantness and flocking to their own little oases, and the attitude of the Mexicans had been love it or leave it. That hasn’t completely changed. The center of Nuevo Laredo is still neither completely dead nor particularly charming, but in the past the message was clearer: once you cross the river, amigo, you’re not in the United States of America anymore. We don’t round up our stray dogs or hide our beggars, but if you want to come over and shop, and you don’t mind paying enterprising teenagers a dollar or two to watch your car, and being hounded by pitiful little street urchins, then bienvenidos a Mexico.
The immigration officer in the bus station was asleep, and since I already had my tourist card, I decided not to bother him. No one was in the customs booth. As I boarded the bus a kindly looking old lady asked me what I’d paid for my ticket, and when I didn’t immediately understand, she smiled and said never mind. The passenger across from me told her, which was his mistake. She asked him a million questions, which he answered courteously but without enthusiasm. He told her he’d been working “on the other side,” and was on the way home. In Monterrey she asked him to help her with her bags. The last I saw of him, he was looking unhappy and holding her suitcase while she went to the rest room.
*****
Ivan looks more like a Turk than a Mexican. A stocky Turk with a round face and a receding hairline, a character you might find in an Eric Ambler novel. He was my conversation teacher during one of my trips to Morelia, and we hit it off in part because he was closer to my age than the other teachers, but also because he’s an actor and writer. He attended acting school in Mexico City, a move his father financed on the condition that he also study English. Ivan hated the idea at the time but now thanks his father for it every day of his life. Although he landed a few jobs in commercials right after acting school, it proved to be a rough and uncertain life, and he eventually drifted into teaching English to Mexicans, and occasionally Spanish to North Americans.
He’s never been married, which may be the defining fact of his life, or at least the self-defining one. He thinks of himself as the battered but undaunted survivor of many tumultuous love affairs. Although his heart has been broken many times, he still has confidence in his charm, and he’s certainly an irrepressible extrovert, especially with women. Throughout our trip, he made fun of my maps. It was far easier, to his way of thinking, to simply stop an attractive woman on the street and ask directions. When he was my teacher, he showed me some poetry he’d written, mostly love poems, and invited me to attend his one man show at an arts center, a satire he’d written about the Casanova fantasies of Mexican men, which I realize now must have been an exercise in self-parody.
Our hotel in Monterrey was only two blocks from the main plaza that borders the downtown area, and although the plaza didn’t exist in 1938, as soon as I saw it, I thought of Greene’s comment that Monterrey is something of a letdown after Nuevo Laredo. It’s almost as if you travel south for three hours only to wind up back in the United States. The Gran Plaza is a huge open space, nearly a mile long and two blocks wide, framed on one side by mountains and on the other by glass and steel skyscrapers. It’s not a Mexican plaza at all. It’s a city park with few trees, minimalist benches, and abstract sculpture. The day we were there it was hot, and if it hadn’t been for the mountain view, we could have been in Houston.
Greene, during his first walk around town, was troubled by the sight of a couple of giggling teenage girls at an evening Mass. He’d hoped to find in Mexico a piety that was strong enough to withstand the extreme materialism of the socialists, but the teenagers made him worry about the pronouncement of the country’s socialist president at the time, Lazaro Cardenas: “I am tired of closing churches and finding them full. Now I am going to open the churches and educate the people and in ten years I shall find them empty.” But Greene didn’t have to worry about that for long. The next day was Ash Wednesday, and people turned out in droves not only at the downtown cathedral but at a mobile church that was pulled around the streets. And they weren’t giggling. Nearly everyone he saw that day had a cross of ashes on his forehead.
Ivan and I, during our first exploration of Monterrey, ate lunch at a place called Monjitas. I couldn’t believe my luck when I read about in Lonely Planet. It’s a restaurant where the waitresses dress like nuns, but it’s not anti-Catholic in any serious way. It’s trendy. There’s nothing really edgy about the convent themed menu, or the middle class diners, or even the plain and modestly dressed waitresses. They aren’t Playboy nuns. No flirting, no cleavage. It’s located downtown in a modern open air shopping center, an area that perfectly matches the Houston style of the Gran Plaza, and I doubt if anyone at Monjitas, workers or customers, loses any sleep over the old battle between the socialists and the church. Which may prove Cardenas right, but not in a way that would have pleased him. The current Mexican god, at least in the north, is capitalism.
Which is nothing new in Monterrey. It may even account for Greene’s giggling teenagers. My parents and their friends talked a lot about Monterrey when I was growing up. It was thought of as a step up from Nuevo Laredo. Not exactly Mexico, even they knew that, but a place where Texans of modest means could shop and go to night clubs in a style they couldn’t afford at home. A first class air-conditioned train, the one Greene took, carried tourists back and forth from Nuevo Laredo every day, which also made Monterrey a good spot for stopping over on the way to Mexico City. A place where, as Greene tells us, you could sit in Sanborns and ignore Mexico, or never know it existed, and I doubt if the hotels, restaurants and bars in Monterrey’s Zona Rosa, aside from putting on up to date faces, have changed much since the thirties. Even the 1900 Bar, where we ate crunchy little tacos and drank a couple of beers, was up to date in its own way. Its highly polished dark wood booths and brass fixtures put us in a Mexican version of the Teddy Roosevelt Bar in San Antonio. Pancho Villa, the guidebooks say, once rode his horse into the lobby of the adjoining hotel.
After the tacos I was perfectly satisfied that Monterrey was exactly like I thought it would be. A Texas city that happened to be in Mexico. I was ready for bed, but on our way back to the hotel, Ivan offered to buy me a beer at a place we’d passed earlier. I was more than skeptical and not just because I was tired. Large men in business suits had urged us to come in and meet the girls, and I thought I knew that story. Although most such places are harmless and still thrive all over the world, I’m always afraid of stumbling into a serious clip joint, and stumbling out, if I’m lucky, with nothing on but my shorts. I was sure that at the very least it would be more expensive than it was worth. Nevertheless, I reluctantly agreed when Ivan assured me that there was nothing to worry about, and that he was paying.
I tried to be a good sport, but I wasn’t happy as we were led to a table by our too solicitous host. It was dark, the music was loud, and the “girls” looked tired and bored, even the ones sitting with customers. But Ivan was brimming with enthusiasm and confidence. He was in his element. He deftly handled our host, who pressed him twice to invite one of the girls over for a drink. Ivan told him we were too tired, but that we’d be back the next night, which seemed to satisfy him.
For the first ten or fifteen minutes I felt trapped in hell, and the fact that I’d found hell my first full day in Mexico, much quicker than Greene, was not a consolation. Even if I subscribed to Greene’s indirect way of looking for heaven and walked out of there a believer, it wasn’t worth it. But then Ivan began to tell me, in spite of the assault of the music, about “fichera bars,” and I loosened up a little. Ficha means token or chip. When you buy a lottery ticket, for example, you buy a “ficha,” a share of the ticket, so the meaning probably comes from the fact that in the old days you bought tickets to dance with the girls. You would present a ficha to a fichera, and it was in a fichera bar in his home town, Ivan told me, that he had his first woman. It was a wonderful experience, he said, and now and again, when he has a little money, he feels drawn to such places. He doesn’t mind buying women expensive drinks in order to talk to them. In fact, it gives him great pleasure and satisfaction “to make love to them,” by which he means court them, tell them how beautiful they are and how that fits in with the story of his life, before taking them to bed. He made it sound like the last part, the actual fucking, was little more than a formality. Necessary to complete the fantasy, perhaps, but not really what he was spending his money for.
Bright and early the next morning we did penance. We took a taxi to the Bishop’s Palace, a yellow structure with a Churrigueresque facade that sits alone on a hill at the edge of town. When Greene was there, the palace still had holes in the walls that Villa had punched out for his cannons, and long before Villa, during the war with the United States, when the citizens of Monterrey fiercely defended their city, street by street, the palace served as a fort. Today it’s a museum devoted to local history, and to see it all, we had to thread our way through a class of cute eight year olds on a field trip. There are plenty of portraits and old manuscripts and other artifacts, but the main attraction is the panoramic view of the city and rugged mountains that from a distance makes Monterrey, if you can ignore the smog, look like a desert paradise.
That done, I was ready to move on. Originally, I’d hoped to see some baseball and visit a brewery. Both the Monterrey Sultans of the Mexican Baseball League and the Corona Brewery are important regional institutions, but now they both sounded like dreary tourist attractions, and at least I could tell myself that we’d sampled what are surely staples of any Greene journey: whores and Catholic shrines.
*****
On the road to San Luis Potosi, about an hour south of Monterrey, the rocky hills with low brush give way to a forest of ten foot tall cactus. For Greene they have no beauty. They suck all the moisture from the land, which makes the metaphor almost inevitable: their swollen trunks are like the fat politicians he sees on town hall balconies all over Mexico. As it happens, the symbolism was very much, perhaps a little too much, to the point. In 1938 in San Luis Potosi the local strong man, General Saturnino Cedillo, took water from the town to irrigate the fields of his ranch, leaving the citizens with a desperate shortage.
About three hours out of Monterrey, the bus stopped for a twenty minute break at a restaurant and convenience store in the middle of nowhere. Inside were tacos fresh off the grill, even a full course comida corrida, and for snacking on the bus, besides pork rinds and candy bars, you could buy packages of dried shrimp. Outside, where I stood with the smokers and coffee drinkers, the only sign of civilization was the highway. We’d left the cactus forest and even the low brush behind, and the rolling landscape all around us was barren, impressively so, like a moonscape. We’d also left the heat behind. The air was cool and dry, exhilarating. Would Greene have begrudged me this happy moment in the desert? Was I too near to thinking of God as an alienated poet? Later on the bus, as the sun set, the sky became pastel yellow and blue before turning red. Sunsets make the desert more bearable for Greene. He called the light a “faint gold,” and he says that it seemed to take pity on the land.
*****
At a cockfight in San Luis Potosi Greene decides that he hates Mexicans: “And suddenly one felt an impatience with all this mummery, all this fake emphasis on what is only a natural function; we die as we evacuate; why wear big hats and tight trousers and have a band play?” Mexican cocks fight with spurs, so the actual contact is over quickly, and most of what is called a cockfight at the local fairs is the spectacle: men in tight pants and sombreros singing sentimental songs to each other. Gambling is probably what generates the most interest, but Greene was right to focus on the spectacle.
Men in “big hats and tight trousers” are Mexican cowboys, and there may be as many movies about them, many with cockfight scenes, as there are Hollywood westerns. Those movies, though, are not about bringing law and order to the frontier. The Mexican cowboy movie is about loyalty and the sad but predictable consequences of depending on it. In a typical plot, the hero is betrayed by his best friend and his true love, and after a wild night of drinking enough tequila to kill a horse, he kills his best friend in a dual and sometimes even the unfaithful woman. In the Mexican western, happiness is not the goal nor the normal condition. There is no Garden of Eden to build or recapture, only to lose, inevitably, and the hero, in the long run, expects and even welcomes misery.
Greene knew that getting sentimental about violent death, whether the protagonists are roosters or cowboys, can only be fatalistic, and therefore pagan, and seeing it formalized made him want to go to church. The Templo del Carmen in San Luis Potosi, like most Mexican churches, is not known for its visual restraint, but Greene says he felt at home there and offers an apology for the church’s brand of “mummery.” Of the kneeling worshipers he found in the church, he asks, “How could one grudge them the gaudy splendour of the gilt work, the incense, the distant immaculate figure upon the cloud?” So what if the central event of the church is death brought on by betrayal, the stages of the cross the way to death, and a romantic death at that? Christ defeated death on Sunday, and that’s the real message. The Catholic church is not fatalistic. You can always choose to be good, and if you do, or even if you really want to, you will live in heaven forever. It’s true that in a Mexican Catholic church we don’t see the risen Christ, we see the suffering Christ, but above him, always above, standing over Jesus in all her splendor and purity, we see the Holy Virgin, that “distant immaculate figure upon the cloud.” The saving grace. The happy ending. It’s what makes the church different from the cockfight. It may be true that there is no escape from suffering in this life, and in a Mexican church Christ seems to suffer not for us but with us, but all the while the Holy Mother watches over Him and us with a calm pity that eases the pain and promises relief.
Greene’s takes that view, his faith, to a predictable conclusion in his account of his meeting with General Saturnino Cedillo, the last revolutionary general to give the Mexican government any serious trouble. No one denies that Cedillo was corrupt, and even Greene is easy on the man who was probably responsible for his death, Lazaro Cardenas, the same Mexican president who wanted to empty the churches. Cardenas is generally acknowledged to be an anomaly among Mexican politicians: impeccably honest and principled. According to most accounts, in spite of the fact that Cardenas was a socialist and anti-clerical and Cedillo was a conservative Catholic, on a personal level the two men were friends and a feud was not inevitable. Those same accounts, however, say that Cedillo’s intransigence and ambition led to the break and his death. President Cardenas was famous for not killing his enemies, but two months after Greene interviewed Cedillo, the general was killed by government troops.
Cedillo lived the life of a typical caudillo on a huge ranch in the mountains outside of San Luis Potosi. When Greene was there the general had his own army and had declared the independence of the whole state of San Luis Potosi. On the day of Greene’s visit, the verandah of the general’s ranch house was crowded with petitioners, most carrying guns, waiting for an audience with the boss. There were also many campesinos about, and Greene explains their relationship to the general as one in which service was rendered not for wages but security. It’s clearly a feudal arrangement, but he believes, nevertheless, that “it was all rather movingly simple and, in spite of the guns, idyllic.” Better than what the socialists have to offer, he says, working for wages in a factory where nobody knows or cares about you. He believes this in spite of Cedillo’s faults, about which he pulls no punches.
The general comes off as a vain semi-literate war lord with almost no understanding of issues beyond his own welfare and survival. Greene suspects that he’s been coached to use the word “democracy,” but has no idea what it means. A framed painting of Napoleon lies on the floor of his sala, and two whores wait patiently on a couch for the general’s bedtime. But it’s easy to be patronizing, and beside the point. The point for Greene is that authority and order give meaning to life, and when they are tempered by the mercy of the Church, when they are not pagan, the meaning becomes authentic. Faith and obedience are given in exchange for security and the presence of God, which in Greene’s world is a fair trade.
*****
The hotel in San Luis Potosi was exactly where the guidebook said it would be, but it looked abandoned. We didn’t see a sign, the light was off in the lobby, the glass in one of the doors was badly cracked, and the door we pulled on was locked. We were about to give up, but just as we were turning away the night clerk appeared and opened the door for us. A chubby middle-aged man with sandy hair and a fair complexion, he never stopped smiling and blinking his eyes. Yes, yes, of course they were open and had rooms. He ushered us up to the front desk, a cubby hole under the staircase, and apologized for not accepting credit cards. The owner of the hotel, he explained, was a cranky old Spaniard who kept having trouble with the credit card companies over fees. Not a smart policy, he agreed, but what can you do? Blinking and smiling, he shrugged his shoulders as he took cash for the room.
When he led us upstairs, we passed framed color photographs that had probably been clipped out of old magazines: smiling potters and weavers from monthly guides to the city, Life magazine type pictures of Castro, Che Gueverra, and John Kennedy. There was even a spaceship launch. The second floor was a mezzanine that overlooked an opaque glass ceiling that covered what had probably been a courtyard. Two old TV’s sat side by side in front of a sagging gray couch. It was so quiet that it felt like we were the only guests. Quiet and saturated with dust, like the closed up wing of an old mansion. Even the yellow sweater that the night clerk wore looked ready to disintegrate.
The room was no less dusty, but it had a balcony, fresh sheets and soft mattresses. It was fine except for the bathroom. I’m usually not too squeamish, probably less so than I ought to be, but in this case I exercised extreme caution. I’ll spare you the details, except to say that I was tempted to ask for a can of Ajax and a scrubby. There was hot water for a shower, though, even that late at night, and I took advantage of it, all the while keeping a close eye on where I put my bare feet. After my shower, I went out on the balcony. It overlooked the Plaza de Armas, a huge cobblestone square that at that time of night was impressively dark, empty and quiet. I stared hard at the colonial buildings that enclosed it to see if they had a pink tint, as they were supposed to, but it was too dark to tell. When I looked down I saw the night clerk standing just outside the hotel entrance, smoking a cigarette and enjoying the cool night air.
I discovered the next morning that the buildings really do have a pink tint and that our hotel was a low rent anomaly for that part of town. From the balcony I watched upscale citizens read newspapers and gossip while their children played. It was a leisurely Saturday morning, cool in the shade and warm in the sun, just as it ought to be in Mexico, and off to my right was the blue and yellow dome of the baroque cathedral.
The owner of the hotel, the cranky old Spaniard, was standing in the lobby with his hands clasped behind him as we went out. He was a lean and elegant man, so effortlessly patrician that he looked completely out of place in his own hotel, and he wished us good morning in the rich baritone of an aristocrat. The night clerk eventually told us that his boss came from a very wealthy family of Spaniards who had lived, or at least owned property, in San Luis Potosi for several generations. He didn’t know why the old man wouldn’t spend a peso on keeping up the hotel, nor why he wouldn’t sell the building. The state had offered him a good price for it, and then, when he turned down the offer, had tried to take it as an historical landmark. But that effort had failed, so now he just stood around while the place went to seed.
Later that day I saw him standing at the hotel entrance, rocking on his heels and nodding graciously to passersby, sometimes even exchanging greetings like a preacher at the door of his church. My guess is that it would be impractical, or at least financially risky, for him to restore the place, even if he had the money, and he probably had nothing else to do, or preferred nothing else, to standing around in the lobby every day. And why not let him? It was a beautiful old building, or could have been, but did I regret all that much not sitting with other gringos in that covered courtyard with my coffee and marmalade? A working class family with three kids occupied a nearby room while we were there, and people lived permanently in the rooms further back off the street. It served a purpose. The night clerk told us about two men from Holland who’d tried to negotiate a cheaper rate for a room with only one single bed.
“Bush es el terrorista; no capitalismo.” That chant woke me from a late afternoon nap. Demonstrators had gathered in front of the small Sears outlet next door. It wasn’t a large crowd, no more than twenty, and they held candles and homemade signs on poster paper. Many looked like teachers or students, but the leaders had a more old-fashioned militant style, longer hair and beards. It all seemed a little pitiful. The workers in Sears, no doubt all Mexicans, must have been at a loss. What did they have to do with the invasion of Iraq? And besides, no one was paying the slightest bit of attention to the demonstrators.
As they chanted and the light faded, Ivan and I joined the upscale families and couples who’d begun crossing the plaza on their way to the Saturday evening Mass. Church bells competed with the sing song rhymes of the protesters. We found seats in a rear pew, the better to watch everyone else go through the required motions. They knelt, crossed themselves, murmured responses. No one giggled, but no one cried or crawled down the aisle either. The Virgin, with ivory pale face and bright blue dress, watched over the smaller Jesus on the cross and held her arms out to the congregation. When the time came to shake hands, the moment I always dread at a Mass, three stylishly dressed young couples directly in front of us turned around with big smiles and warm greetings. I’m sure I blushed. I wanted to say, “Okay, I’ll shake hands, but you should know I really don’t belong here. I’m not a Catholic. I’m only a tourist.”
Ivan was no more of a genuine worshiper than I was, but he’s not so easily embarrassed. He shook hands as if he meant it, and then half an hour later, as we sat in a bar, he made his point about the role of sin in a Catholic’s life, its essential place in the cycle of redemption. He also told me that he lasted only a year in a priest apprentice program, and that when he’s low on money and goes to church and sees what an easy life the priests have, he regrets dropping out. But then he added, after a pause, that when he’s really thinking straight, he knows that if he’d become a priest he’d have spent his whole life being bored, cynical, and horny. Now, he says, at least he’s usually not bored or cynical.
For supper that night we walked to Café El Pacifico, a nearby restaurant that the night clerk said never closed. By that time it was after ten, and there weren’t many people on the streets, but we passed two sidewalk accordion players and several whores standing in doorways. All the whores were too fashionable and good looking, we decided, to really be women. Mariachis were lounging around outside the restaurant, but they didn’t seem to be getting much business.
The restaurant was about half full. Its one very large and brightly lit room had high beamed ceilings and wooden support columns throughout that reminded me of old black and white photographs of bars and hotel lobbies, but Café El Pacifico is not self-consciously picturesque or old-fashioned. It has no self-conscious décor. The tables and booths are strictly functional and a little shabby. The dominant color, if there is one, is white, and the clientele is anybody and everybody. Families, groups of teenagers, lovers, off-duty mariachis. They ate typical San Luis Potosi fare, crunchy little tacos filled with shredded chicken and diced carrots and potatoes, while the cashier, perched in the center of the huge room in a raised booth, kept an eye on things.
*****
We caught a bus for Mexico City the next morning, and an hour or two out of town, the desert gave way to farmland and to trees along creek beds and stone walls around fields. As we slowed down for a toll booth, I saw a family of campesinos, a mother and father and three little kids, all of them in white blouses, fishing with cane poles around a water tank.
Every toll stop is a little different, but all have soldiers in drab green uniforms, little open air cafes that smell of lard, and vendors who will board the bus if possible. The stop just outside of Mexico City was backed up enough with traffic so that the vendors had time to walk between the lanes, and that Sunday the most common items for sale were huge wooden crosses. I saw little kids carrying crosses on their shoulders that were taller than they were. On one side of the bus a handful of Indian girls, the oldest no more than eight, sat on the concrete stoop at one of the booths and shared tacos. Out the other, a tiny Indian soldier, his helmet covering half of his face, sat with his rifle behind sandbags.
Chapter Three: Mexico
. . . you become aware that Mexico City is older and less Central European than it appears at first--a baby alligator tied to a pail of water; a whole family of Indians eating their lunch on the sidewalk edge.
At the time of the Conquest Bernal Diaz saw a magnificent white city built on islands in a valley of lakes. Four hundred years later, Greene saw a city that was like a railroad track running out of a tunnel. He meant that it seemed to emerge from the mountains, which is not too different from the way I first saw it, twenty-five years after Greene, at night through the blue tinted windows of an air-conditioned bus. As we rode along the edge of a cliff in total darkness, far below us, appearing as if out of nowhere, came a long and narrow stream of sparkling lights.
That’s lost when you fly into Mexico City during the day, as most people do now. The only way you would even know it’s in a valley, never mind built on lakes, is to read about it. You see no lakes from the plane, and even if the smog is light enough to allow a glimpse of mountains, there is no sense of the city being surrounded by them. You’re simply in another grimy airport, then in hectic traffic, and finally in your hotel room.
Which is why I like to stay on the Zocalo. The layout of the city and its geography remain hidden, but if you’re able to see from your room the Cathedral and the National Palace, it’s not all that hard to imagine the great plaza as the center of things, and from there it takes only a modest leap of the imagination to pretend that power is still literally concentrated there, as it was for centuries before and after the Conquest, which makes it easier to remember, if you’ve done your homework, that under the cobblestones and behind the smog, the lakes and the mountains are still there.
Power is also still there, at least symbolically. The first time I stayed in a room on the Zocalo I wasn’t prepared for the flag raising ceremony at dawn. I knew nothing about it until a bugle woke me out of a sound sleep in what I assumed was the middle of the night. I probably had a hangover, but I somehow managed to crawl out of bed to find out what was going on, and although it was still dark, I could see the soldiers well enough. In their olive green uniforms and white helmets and gaiters, they looked like any precision drill team, all spit and polish, and along with the bugle, I could hear the smart clicking and stamping of rifles and boot heels. I was irritated, of course, not to mention miserable, but I couldn’t pull myself away from the window, and before long, I began to have a change of heart. Maybe it was the altitude, over a mile above sea level, or the beauty of all that carved stone enclosing such a huge empty space, or maybe I was still a little bit drunk, but as the soldiers raised the Mexican flag in the center of the plaza, my irritation gave way to admiration, and even a sort of envy.
As any guidebook will tell you, before the arrival of Cortes, the Zocalo was the site of Montezuma’s palace and an Aztec temple, and before the Aztecs, it was the site of the palaces and temples of the ancient civilizations that preceded them. The Roman Catholic church has occupied the site for nearly five hundred years; the Mexican state for two hundred. Thousands of chilangos, Mexico City residents, pass through the plaza every day, as do countless tourists, scholars and artists who come to admire and study the ancient Templo Mayor, the 16th Century Metropolitan Cathedral, the 18th Century National Palace, and along the way take in the local color: a gauntlet of street merchants where you can buy a live monkey on a string or consult a curandera about ailments of mind and body; a line up of skilled craftsmen sitting patiently on their toolboxes, waiting for a day’s work; roaming organ grinders with outstretched tin cups; sullen Indian dancers who’ve clearly spent a lot of time lifting weights. It’s a busy place. When the powers that be decide to allow cars, and who can tell when that will be, a constant stream of green and white VW Beetle taxis pass through, and at rush hour, hordes of office workers come and go from the subway entrance. Nearly every day there is some sort of demonstration of organized workers or students, and on the eve of Independence Day in September, the Zocalo is bursting at the seams with patriotic Mexicans who have come to see fireworks explode over the colonial buildings and to cheer the dramatic appearance of the President of the Republic, who stands on the balcony of the National Palace and waves a huge Mexican flag and shouts “Viva Mexico!”
On the morning Ivan and I visited the National Palace, just under that presidential balcony, a woman was telling the guards: “Fuck you, don’t mess with me.” She wouldn’t shut up or go away, but the guards were on their best behavior. As she shouted insults at them, they just grinned at each other, shook their heads, and did no more than block her from entering and motion for her to leave. The last time I’d visited the palace was a year after the Zapatista trouble, and I wondered what would have happened to her then. The atmosphere had been considerably more tense. The guards had not been particularly friendly back then and they kept your passport or driver’s license in a file until you left. This time they were polite and simply asked to look at your identification. It was much more relaxed, but I regretted even that formality. There had always been guards posted at the entrance, but before the Zapatistas you could walk right by them, without even a nod, which was part of the pleasure of seeing the Rivera murals. No security. No hoopla. Just world famous art virtually outside and free.
Greene has little patience with Rivera, but it’s interesting that he’s not as hard on him as he is on many other aspects of Mexican culture, such as the food and the crafts. He doesn’t say that the murals are “hideous,” and I think his restraint comes from the fact that unlike the peasant arts, the murals offer a European argument that Greene can understand and accept as worthy of rebuttal. The Rivera murals in the National Palace, billed as the history of Mexican civilization, present that argument in unambiguous terms. Mexico was a socialist paradise until the arrival of the Europeans, after which it became hell on earth, and if the great reformers of Mexico failed in their efforts to bring paradise back, it was because they were duped, raped, murdered and tortured by greedy and unscrupulous European capitalists and their toady criollo and mestizo allies. As such the murals are not hideously barbaric. They aren’t in any sense naïve. Instead, in Greene’s estimation, they are “unbearably sentimental,” which in the first decade of the 21st Century is hard to deny.
What Greene focuses on is Rivera’s use of Christian symbols to express a “vague political idea,” but as if to prove that he does not let his politics get in the way of his artistic judgment, he admits to a certain admiration for Orozco. For his wit. The relevant aesthetic principle for Greene is specificity. Rivera paints “Woman”; Orozco paints “Soldaderas.” There is no mention of color or form. Greene is interested only in narrative content, about which he is determined to come off as fair. In addition to the bone he throws Orozco, he is philosophical about Rivera’s appropriation of Christian symbols, such as Indians kneeling to plant corn or standing with outstretched arms in front of their persecutors. Christianity has always done the same thing, Greene admits, as a way of making the transition from pagan religions easier for new converts. How can he criticize Rivera, he asks himself, for trying to make socialist totalitarianism more palatable for the masses?
But none of that seemed particularly pressing to me that morning as I stood in the quiet courtyard of the National Palace and allowed myself to be harangued by Rivera. For the time being at least, the Catholics had won. It’s true that the Zapatistas were still causing trouble in Chiapas, and were in fact the reason for the security at the Palace, a new wrinkle on an old irony pointed out by Octavio Paz more than fifty years ago: socialist art commissioned by a capitalist government. Now that art, a national treasure, had to be defended from socialists by a government run by conservative Catholics. But the Zapatistas were no more than an annoyance, and the hopelessly corrupt PRI, in theory Greene’s old socialist enemy, but in practice more like a loose confederation of war lords, is simply trying to survive. There is of course a major left wing party, and its adherents, along with many in the PRI, haven’t completely abandoned church bashing, but for the most part there’s been a truce between church and state since the late forties. And as Greene hoped, despite Rivera’s propaganda and contrary to Cardenas’ prediction of empty churches, and even the march of capitalism, the church is still a force to be reckoned with in Mexico.
When Ivan and I left the Palace and walked over to the Metropolitan Cathedral, as far as I could tell, no one was paying the slightest attention to the hours posted for tourists, but the fact that such signs exist is telling. Unlike many of the great cathedrals in Europe, Mexicans still use the cathedral in the Zocalo for worship. There are always plenty of tourists, but when I’ve been there, they are far outnumbered by the faithful. And the faithful are serious. As Greene would surely tell us, they’ve come not to giggle but to talk with God, to mortify themselves, and to ask for help or forgiveness.
The icons and the architecture, the cold stone, the darkness, the great size, the doves in the rafters, the inevitable compassion of the Virgin and agony of Jesus are only half of the story. Perhaps because of my Protestant upbringing, it never ceases to amaze me that a cathedral is a sort of religious plaza, a sacred mall. It is a place to shop for inspiration and consolation and for the public display of misery and supplication, without which it is incomplete. A man you might see behind the counter at a pharmacy is on his knees with his head bowed; a woman who might be selling lottery tickets is quietly crying; a taxi driver might put a few coins in a collection box and cross himself. All believe that this might work, and even if it doesn’t, it’s their duty to try, and it will make them feel better. A child might be saved, the rent paid, a job found, and all because they’ve come here to this sacred place, only a stone’s throw from Rivera’s socialist history of Mexican civilization, to show their devotion, to make an offering, and to ask for help.
*****
About fifteen years ago I bought a comic book in the Zocalo that turned out to be a Mexican soap opera. Sort of. The story was about an injustice, and not, as I’d expected, a romance. I still have it. It’s called “Sentimientos,” and the hero is a singer songwriter who has the rights to his hit song (the name of the song is also “Sentimientos,” ie, “feelings.”) stolen by an unscrupulous record company executive. Don’t expect a happy ending. The hero winds up as poor as he was when he first came to the city. He doesn’t murder the record company executive, as a Mexican cowboy surely would, but returns to singing on city buses for a living, sadder but wiser, and the story ends on an educational note: how to make sure, if you happen to be a songwriter, that the same thing doesn’t happen to you.
There was a singer on the bus Ivan and I took to get back to the hotel after seeing the Virgin of Guadalupe. He was not as good looking as the hero of the comic book, and even I could tell that he was flat. “Don’t feel too bad,” his song went. “I will forget you and you will forget me.” Directly in front of us sat a woman in a maroon business suit. Since she’d come on late, and the bus leaves not on a time schedule but whenever it fills up, her little boy had to sit behind us, and she was constantly looking around to check on him. With her suit a little tight, her hair done up in a bun, and her “brutal” Indian face covered with layers of makeup, she reminded me of the woman in the cafe in Nuevo Laredo. All of the people on the bus are very dark and very Indian, and the clothes they wear look like what you see piled up for sale on flattened cardboard on the street. No one smiles, no one looks at anyone else, but nearly all of them, including the woman in the maroon suit, give a coin or two to the singer.
Even though the subway is about a nickel cheaper than the bus, you see mostly white collar workers on subways and working class people on buses. And unlike the subways, which are so clean and efficient that it’s easy to forget you’re in Mexico, the buses are banged up and dirty. You climb up into a world in which the concept of starting a route only when the bus is full makes perfect sense. Not everyone has a watch, and why leave when there are still empty seats? The singers make sense too, even though they cost the passengers a little extra money. A crowded bus in heavy traffic is not the most pleasant place to be. What’s wrong with a little music to help pass the time?
Everyone agrees that the people on that bus, the poor and the working class, are the people for whom the Virgin of Guadalupe exists. She appeared soon after the Conquest not to a Spaniard but to a poor Indian boy, and Greene makes the point that the Basilica was the only church in Mexico that the socialists never closed: no one, not even the most rabidly anti-clerical politicians, dared take the Virgin away from the Indians. I first visited the Basilica in the early sixties, before the new one was built, and about all I remember is the sight of old women crawling towards it on their knees. Even at twenty, an age ripe for extremes, I couldn’t begin to understand that level of devotion.
I don’t remember seeing the Virgin. My first memory of her came twenty years later, in the new Basilica on the moving sidewalk. It’s hard not to think of moving sidewalks in airports as you are transported past the image. On the whole the new Basilica, an asymmetrical concrete and steel monstrosity, encourages such comparisons. It sits on the edge of a huge barren plaza, a kind of concrete desert that is enclosed by a high fence topped with razor wire. It could be the exercise yard for a prison, an impression that is heightened by soldiers with pistols. The fence and the armed soldiers are recent additions, post-Zapatistas, and I suppose such precautions would deter an armed takeover of the sacred shrine. But one has to wonder who if anyone the guards at the gate would deny the right to visit the Virgin. And how vigilant they are, since among the visitors are the usual stray dogs, lying in the shade on the steps.
Ivan and I visited the Basilica twice. Once late in the afternoon and again the next morning. The reason we went back was that on the first visit we couldn’t get into the cemetery behind the old Basilica. The gates were locked and no one was around. Just two very dedicated looking guard dogs. Greene visited the cemetery with an old criollo woman who was disdainful of the Virgin and proud of her family’s romantic and aristocratic past. She went to the Basilica not to see the Virgin but to visit the grave of an ancestor, a general who had fought in the war for independence. According to what the woman told Greene, the general had been buried without his heart and his right arm. His right arm had gone to the town where he’d won his first victory, and his heart had gone to Guadalajara, where he’d met his wife.
I wasn’t interested in finding the general’s grave. Greene identifies him only as General B., but I didn’t look him up. All I wanted was to walk up the steps behind the old Basilica and then, as Greene had sixty-five years earlier, take a stroll through the cemetery. It’s still possible to walk up the steps, but the stroll wasn’t to be. The attendant was there the next morning, but he couldn’t be convinced to open the gates. The cemetery was not open to the public, so we contented ourselves with looking at the smog for a while from the hilltop, then started our journey to the monastery at Alcoman, home of the oldest frescoes in Mexico.
The bus dropped us off in the center of town. It’s an unpleasant place, hot and dusty, and the highway that runs through its center is packed with noisy traffic. As we walked the two blocks or so to the monastery, I began to feel the sun. In Texas the heat comes as much or more from the humid air as from the sun, it’s all around you, but in Mexico the heat unmistakably comes from above, which can feel like a knife in your skull.
At first there were no other tourists at the monastery. Most people skip it and go directly to the pyramids. Greene did both and made an issue of the contrast, the love and hope of Christianity against the death and mathematics of paganism. The church at Alcoman is beautiful, he tells us, mainly because it closely resembles monasteries in Spain. It’s a European haven, an oasis, in the wilderness. The surviving frescoes are noteworthy for the lessons in love they teach, lessons that were needed to counter the “terrible utility” of the obsidian knives that he sees later in the museum at the pyramids. No socialist paradise there. The knives were used to cut out the hearts of the sacrificed, and they look “as hygienic as surgeon’s instruments,” which is as cogent an argument for Christian conversion as you could ever hope to find.
Ivan and I poked our heads into the small bare cells of the monks, and we stood on the balconies and looked out over the dry plains at the terraced cobblestones on which the Indians heard Mass. Greene has a point, of course. Not only is it easy to see why the monks who came to Alcoman in 1539, only twenty years after the Conquest, would do their best to create a Spanish sanctuary in a very strange country, but it’s hard to think of their Christian message as villainous when set against the obsessive and systematic killing by the indigenous culture.
But it’s also difficult to not be enchanted by that culture. I first saw the pyramids near Mexico City in the early eighties. It was a Sunday morning and my wife and I practically had the place to ourselves. We’d passed curio and food stalls on the way to the site, but they were just opening, and as we walked down the Avenue of the Dead towards the Pyramid of the Sun, we saw no one. We heard flutes, though, first from one direction and then another. The place looked abandoned. No signs or ropes, and grass grew out from between the stones. The only sign of life was the music of the flutes, and then finally we saw one of the players. The flutes were chiseled in the shape of a man in a jaguar suit and were for sale at a very reasonable price. I bought one, and then, like thousands of tourists before us, including Greene, we climbed to the top of the Pyramid of the Sun. As Greene stood on the pyramid, he talked to a young girl from Oklahoma who thought it was all wonderful. I suppose I did too.
The walk back from the monastery was as hot and dusty as the walk out, and before heading back to the city, we stopped at a café for a cold drink. It was in an enclosed courtyard, and the only other customers were three men sitting at a table drinking beer. We sat down and waited for someone to take our order, but no one did. We looked at the Cokes in a case nearby and thought about helping ourselves, but Ivan finally said something to one of the beer drinkers, who called the owner in from another room. He was a tall, slender criollo, very courteous, and after taking our order, he took two bottles of Coke out of the case and left the courtyard. When he came back a few moments later, he was carrying the Cokes, two glasses, and napkins on a tray. With great ceremony, he opened the bottles in front of us, poured the Cokes into the glasses, and when Ivan pulled out a cigarette, he was quick to light it for him with a huge lighter that was attached to one of his belt loops with a chain. All of that for less than a dollar.
I didn’t want to face the sun again, but we had to get back. It’s a good idea to be prepared for anything in Mexico, prepared to submit, prepared to learn patience, especially when you rely on public transportation, and the bus back was a study in unnecessary Mexican chaos. We knew we were taking a local, that it would take longer, but we didn’t count on a monumental traffic jam. At first it was fine. Most of the riders were cute school kids in blue and white uniforms. They got on and off after only a few blocks, and entertained us by teasing each other. But about halfway between Alcoman and the city, in one of those dreary suburban areas with dry fields full of trash and huge blocks of concrete apartment houses nearby, the four lane road was reduced to one lane because of roadwork. But no one was working on the road or directing traffic. We sat in traffic, hardly moving at all, for nearly an hour. It was cool enough even with the bus stopped most of the time, but a chalky dust was raised by the frantically maneuvering cars. The bus driver had an air horn that he enjoyed blowing too often, and he played classic rock, mostly Billy Joel it seemed, on the radio. A sticker over the windshield said, “No llevo brujas.” (I don’t carry witches.) The driver of a bus on our right, trying to get in line from a side road, changed his mind and turned completely around almost in place, a maneuver that took him a good fifteen or twenty minutes. Snack vendors, quick to seize any opportunity, soon appeared from nowhere and invaded the bus. A car in front of us had a bumper sticker: “El Dios es Amor.”
*****
The bartender at the Opera Bar was more than happy to point out the bullet hole in the ceiling made by Pancho Villa. He also gave me and the two other foreigners at the bar a complimentary post card that prominently displayed the hole. Meanwhile, a quartet of old men, a stand up bass, a violin, and two guitars, serenaded an old couple with sentimental songs. The couple sat in the booth directly under the bullet hole, and at one point got up to dance, but they were too feeble to last for long. I was able, with the aid of two very expensive scotches, to view the scene, even the Victorian whorehouse décor, with a certain indulgence. I enjoyed myself, I have to admit, even though it was perfectly clear all along why the old couple had come to the historic Opera Bar. They might as well have been on a gondola ride in historic Venice.
I’m guessing that the Opera Bar didn’t have complimentary post cards in 1938. A senator was murdered there while Greene was in the city, which he says was unusual only because of the prominence of the victim. “Riddled with bullets,” he tells us, was a common headline in the Mexico City newspapers in those days, adding that a second senator was murdered elsewhere in the country on the same day. In its excess the violence bordered on the comical, and some would say that outside of the tourist areas it’s not much different now than it was then. Politicians continue to be assassinated, whole villages engage in civil wars over religion, and Satanic cults and mass murders, not to mention the drug wars, thrive in border towns. At times, laughing seems like the only sensible response.
Greene’s brand of humor, of course, is designed to elicit outrage, not belly laughs, but it’s hard not to see in it certain shared assumptions with a less elevated sort of humor. There can be little doubt that Pancho Villa, in so far as he survives at all in North American popular culture, is little more than an ethnic joke, hardly more real than the Frito Bandido or Speedy Gonzalez, and whether the humor is sophisticated or crude, whether we say we’re discussing an archetype or a stereotype, the Mexican hero/bandit is always impulsive and dangerous if he has the advantage, but harmless, even cowardly, when confronted by real, usually North American, power and efficiency. That’s when it gets really funny. In that mold, Villa is an appropriate object of scorn, more a clown than a hero, and it’s of little consequence that by most accounts he almost single handedly won the Revolution. What he’s remembered for on the north side of the border is robbing a bank in New Mexico, which amounted to an invasion of the United States, an act that was far too senseless, too crazy, to be taken seriously.
Like many revolutionary generals, even if his intentions were good, which is debatable, Villa was inept at peace. He couldn’t or wouldn’t rein in the excesses of his subordinates, nor was he comfortable in sophisticated circles, social or political. He was most comfortable as a war lord, an exceptionally gifted one perhaps, but it was probably poetic justice, and not just bad luck, that he was assassinated only after he became a caricature of himself, and to have the unfashionable looks and style of a mestizo, and a fat one at that. It’s not surprising that such a man would become a clown in gringo popular culture, and although historians take him seriously as a great general, it requires a poet like Octavio Paz to really see him clear, to see his beauty. It’s impossible not to think of Villa when Paz says of the Mexican fiesta: “It fires us into the void; it is a drunken rapture that burns itself out; a pistol shot in the air; a skyrocket.”
There used to be a place in Mexico City where you could see at least the semblance of a fiesta every Sunday night. In the early 90’s, before an outbreak of armed robberies by bogus taxis spoiled the scene, the guidebooks touted the Plaza Garibaldi for its strolling mariachis and festive family atmosphere, which, having my own North American definition of “family atmosphere,” led me not to expect much. Mariachis strolling around playing to families and sweethearts sounded like something you’d see in a Mexican restaurant in a suburban mall. But it wasn’t like that. The first time I went, I had to force my way through a thicket of drunks just to reach the main part of the plaza. I could see nothing but the men and women who blocked my way, but over their shouts and laughter, I could already hear the music, and somewhere in the mix was the continuous honking of horns. It’s not a beautiful plaza, not even pretty, and by North American standards it is dimly lit, despite the pulque bars and night clubs, but after wading through the dense crowd, any open space was more than welcome. It was literally a breath of fresh air, suddenly cool again, the tempo relaxed, and small groups of musicians in sombreros and tight pants were everywhere. Many just stood around, some tuned their instruments, others posed for pictures or serenaded little kids, groups of teenage girls, large families, sweethearts, and so on. They even serenaded cars and taxis that were double and triple parked on the street, which is where all the honking was coming from.
It was a scene that combined charm and frenzy, wholesomeness and danger, which is a good start towards describing the Pancho Villa you find in most serious narratives about him. Like Diego Rivera, he was a relentless womanizer, obviously too fond of eating, more inclined to the bold moves of the natural than to craft, and volatile and violent enough to be thought of as dangerous. Oddly, though, he didn’t drink. He could explode without the benefit of alcohol, which left him with no excuse for being the sort of man Greene hated for being “irresponsible,” a theme about Mexicans in general that runs throughout The Lawless Roads. When Greene comes down with a fever while visiting the ruins at Palenque, he tells us that he could see that his guide was “troubled.” Why? Not because he was worried about Greene, but because “he had the feeling of responsibility, and no Mexican cares for that.”
It is a nation of adolescents, Greene believed, the men with their elaborate forms of greeting like college boys with secret handshakes. He might also have pointed out the spectacle of Villa and Zapata riding triumphantly into the capital only to prove inept and uninterested in governing, and the nearly two decades of political violence that followed, abating only as the last of the revolutionary generals were assassinated. The violence waned, but the corruption got worse, until finally, or more recently at any rate, a generation of Ivy League educated technocrats came along who knew how to pick the country clean without it even noticing. And now, as we watch the heirs of Villa try to build a capitalist paradise in the North and the heirs of Zapata stir up trouble in the South, we are urged to believe that with an honest and sober president in charge, the fiesta is over, or at least tamed. The adolescents have grown up. The drunken rapture, the skyrocket, the pistol shot right through the ceiling of the Opera Bar, has been permanently and safely reduced to a tourist attraction, and Mexico is open for business.
Maybe. A couple of years after my first visit to the Plaza Garibaldi, I ventured into one of the pulque bars and saw a working class drunk try to give a bouquet of flowers to a woman in a group of middle class revelers. He was turned away, wisely no doubt from the point of view of the revelers, since it is likely that he thought of the flowers as his ticket to the party, where of course he was not wanted, and wouldn’t have fit in, except as an oddity. Or maybe the revelers took the bold move as an insult rather than a compliment. In any case, nothing happened, at least while I was there. The drunk simply went back to his table and sat there alone, brooding with his flowers, but of course it was impossible not to worry, even as I left the bar, that it wasn’t over. What would Villa have done? He too would sit there and brood, clam up, withdraw into a shell, nurse his wounds. He wouldn’t pray. He wouldn’t ask the Virgin for the virtues of patience and forgiveness, or if he did, it wouldn’t work. Nor would he plot revenge. That’s too detached, cerebral. He would simply wait for that moment of ecstasy when he could no longer restrain himself, no longer submit, and then explode. That’s what Mexicans of legend do, because they believe in their heart of hearts that the consequences of the explosion are at best of secondary concern. It’s the act itself, the beauty of it, that counts.
*****
During our stay in Mexico City, Ivan introduced me to three of his old acting school friends. The first was Martin, a slim, very pale middle-aged man with white hair. He wears all black. He’s retired from the National Lottery, a secure bureaucratic position he owes to the connections of his father, the writer Efren Hernandez, who worked in the same government office as Juan Rulfo. Martin teaches Tae Chi now, and over lunch he told me he’s writing a book about aesthetics. At the restaurant, he ordered fried fish and spent about five minutes wiping it down with a napkin.
It was an easy transition from Juan Rulfo to Greene, and from the tension between communism and Catholicism to Subcomandante Marcos, about whom Martin did not mince words. He’s a criminal, Martin told me. He’s responsible for many deaths, but after nine years, he still has no coherent plan of action. Why didn’t he follow through when the opportunity presented itself? Maybe he’s a coward, or maybe he realizes the inherent contradiction of his position, which is that of any socialist allied with traditional societies. What could he possibly propose in regard to the indigenous people? Does he want them to abandon their way of life and become socialist workers of the world?
I appreciated the irony of that as much as Martin, but I thought it odd coming from someone with such a solid socialist pedigree. It wasn’t until later that I suspected that I was hearing the PRI party line, or at least a sophisticated variation of it, which might still be odd given that the PRI was the party of Lazaro Cardenas and Greene’s socialist enemies, but times have changed. Everyone agrees that the “ideology” of the PRI these days, and for the past forty years or so, is accommodation. Socialism might be great as an ideal, but it doesn’t pay to force a round peg into a square hole on principle. It pays to give in to whoever shoves the hardest, and then only enough to keep them happy, so as not to get the other side too upset, unless of course the other side is so powerless that it can simply be intimidated or eliminated. Playing that game with skill is what the PRI is famous for.
But even after I put the pieces together, I didn’t challenge Martin. It occurred to me that both he and his father probably owed their livelihoods to the PRI, which might make any serious discussion about its failings a delicate subject. It was better, I decided, to simply be Ivan’s curious but discreet American friend, a role that came more easily the next day when I was introduced to Monserrat, a young woman Ivan says he has a crush on. She is very much his type. Cute but smart. The only trouble is that she’s married and has a two year old daughter. She’s not working now, she told us, but before the baby was born, she hosted a call-in radio show about child rearing and education. We met her in an upscale coffee shop in a high rise office building a few blocks from her apartment, and for over an hour, we talked over the screaming of her two year old. Through it all, Monserrat never showed the least bit of impatience or embarrassment, and no one else in the café seemed to even notice the screaming. I kept looking for disapproving glances, but although we sat right in the middle of the small and crowded area of tables, people squeezed around Monserrat’s huge SUV-like stroller and ate their cheesecake as if we weren’t there.
The more I observed her, the more convinced I became that she was invented just for the purpose of breaking Ivan’s heart. She wasn’t just cute. She was pretty and petite with dark hair and creamy white skin. And she wasn’t just smart. She was charming and socially poised. In spite of the screaming, she told me a little about herself and asked me questions and listened to the answers without showing the least bit of strain. And on the way back to her apartment, she expertly managed the giant stroller over the curbs and across the busy streets of the comfortable and moderately affluent urban neighborhood. The child, mercifully, had stopped screaming the minute we left the coffee shop. With trees lining the sidewalks and little neighborhood groceries and specialty shops on every corner, we could have been in Manhattan or any city in Europe, and Monserrat seemed perfectly at home.
I understand Ivan’s attraction to her. Sophisticated but with no pretensions, she was patient with his too obvious affection for her and pleasant to him without being the least bit encouraging. I had to admire her tact. She didn’t overdo it, but she shook hands with us and told us goodbye at the door to her building as if the last hour had been a pleasant experience, as if it really had been a pleasure to meet me and see her old friend Ivan again.
On the way back to our hotel we stopped for a beer in a small cantina, a timeless sort of white collar, all male, urban watering hole. The bar just inside the door was crowded and noisy, and a straight narrow aisle between booths led all the way to the back. Not many of the booths were occupied, but in those that were, the men played chess. With its scratched up hardwood booths and floors, thick smoke, and absolutely nothing on the walls, it felt like a place that had been there forever, had never changed, and was probably incapable of it.
As we drank our beer, Ivan talked about how it was hard to think of Monserrat as just a friend, how it sometimes tortured him, but that’s how it had to be of course. She was married. She had a kid. It was crazy to even think about a romance. I listened sympathetically, but I was also thinking about what it would be like to live in Mexico City. In a neighborhood like the one we’d just seen, which seemed comfortable without being outrageously exclusive, it might be possible to lead a completely isolated and charmed life. Greene’s ivory tower as urban fantasy. Walk everywhere down old tree lined streets that are kept up just enough to look nice but lived in. Eat in neighborhood cafes. Drink in neighborhood cantinas. Buy your Sunday paper from an old man who knows your name and read all you want about the radical Zapatistas in Chiapas, the trigger happy drug lords in Nuevo Laredo, the greedy capitalists in Cancun and Monterrey, not to mention terrorists and wars and earthquakes and hurricanes, and thank your lucky stars, or God, that none of it pertains to you.
Of course you’d also have to learn to avoid certain things nearer to home, and at the top of the list in Mexico City would be the subway at rush hour. The problem isn’t with the stations or the trains. All are new and clean and in good repair. And there’s no problem with feeling out of place or like you’re going to get mugged. The riders are almost all white collar workers. Even standing in a subway car jammed together like cattle isn’t as bad as it sounds, although I did take extra precautions to make sure my pockets weren’t picked, which sometimes involved awkward balancing tricks. The bad part is trying to get to the train, and then jockeying for position to get on it. The corridors at most stations are about as wide as a typical concourse at an airport terminal, and most are one way at any given time, and they are often crowded no matter what time of day it is. But the afternoon that Ivan and I went to visit Selma, another of his acting school friends, the corridor at one of the stations was more than crowded. It was packed solid from wall to wall, and when we stopped at the rear of the crowd, we were still at least a hundred yards from the train platform.
There was no forward progress and people kept coming up behind us. Whistles of impatience had already been coming from the crowd when we got there, but after a few minutes, we heard angry shouts and then a chant rose up around us, and I began to debate with myself the merit of being trampled to death in a Mexico City subway station. Surely not the worst of all possible ways to go, not even close, but of course I wasn’t eager for it to be my time. I don’t know if the chanting worked, but soon after it started, we began to move. And when that kind of crowd moves, you move with it. Security guards directing traffic stood at the entrances to the platforms, and it seemed to me that they were willy-nilly forcing people first one way and then the other. By that time, I wasn’t sure where Ivan was or which way we wanted to go, or even if it mattered. I went with the crowd, but at the last minute, the guard moved in front of me to block my way. For a split second, I actually thought about pushing by him, although I’m not sure now why I was so hell bent on going that way. But it didn’t come to that. Before I did something crazy, just in the nick of time, Ivan tugged on my arm and pulled me in the other direction.
The plan was for Martin to take us to Selma’s, and we found him waiting for us outside the subway station. His house is right next door to it. We followed him down a dark flight of concrete steps to a street about two stories below the station. It’s the last house on a street that dead ends at the subway and a freeway. Martin turned three or four locks, then ushered us into a small sitting room. There was just enough space for a single bed that had been converted with pillows into a couch, and a couple of old armchairs. Martin lives with his sister, and according to Ivan, she’s worked quite a bit in Mexican cinema and television. She could be Martin’s twin, but she’s even more pale and slight, her white hair even thinner than her brother’s. We talked for a few minutes about her dogs. Less than a week ago, she told me, she’d put down one she’d had for over ten years. I expressed my sympathy and petted the scraggly little mutt that had come with her into the room.
The visit was brief. The crowds in the subway had made us late. Martin led the way down another dark flight of concrete steps to the freeway. He lifted an arm and almost immediately a VW taxi pulled over. He gave directions to the driver as he drove, telling him exactly where to turn to make the best time. He made no other conversation with him. There was no discussion of price before getting into the taxi, no small talk during the ride, no haggling afterwards. We took several taxi rides with Martin, and it was always the same.
The taxi dropped us off at the end of Selma’s block because the street was being repaved. It was excavated down to a foot below the sidewalk level, which accounts no doubt for why it felt like we were walking through a neighborhood of empty houses still under construction. But there were also no lights visible from the houses and no sound. Just the usual dogs, the distant hum of traffic, and a dim yellowish glow from street lamps in a light mist.
The houses were identical and built right up to the street, and when we finally stopped at a wrought iron double gate, it looked like all the others. Absolutely no sign of life came from the house as Martin produced a key for the padlock and chain, but as we walked into a concrete parking area, Selma’s daughter opened the door for us. She invited us in and led the way through a spacious and colorfully tiled kitchen, like something you’d see in a cooking show, down a hallway decorated with family pictures, and into a smaller room full of old books and plush couches. The daughter, home from college with a friend, was a gracious Latin beauty who greeted Martin as if he were a favorite uncle.
Ivan had warned me that Selma liked to talk and had an opinion about everything. She’s a plump redhead, probably in her sixties, and although she was as courteous as her daughter, she did not exude warmth. She did, however, serve delicious looking empanadas, but since we’d had a late comida, I had difficulty forcing even one of them down. No alcohol was offered or asked for, and I noticed that Ivan even refrained from smoking. I was beat. We’d had a full morning of sightseeing, a large late comida, and a harrowing subway experience. All of that combined with my limited Spanish didn’t conspire to make me a brilliant conversationalist, but there was no need to worry. Selma took charge. She was a nonstop source of information and opinion, and although I had difficulty following her Spanish, Ivan filled in the gaps later. Among many other things, we learned that she was having health problems. She’d had an operation on her eyes, and we were given all the details. Then somehow the subject turned to the maze of problems associated with owning property in Mexico, and she used some difficulty about her husband’s ranch as an example, but added that she could care less what happened to it, since she hated the country anyway.
We had dessert and coffee in the kitchen, and Ivan asked for and was granted permission to smoke. In an effort to bring me into the conversation, he brought up Greene, which was all Selma needed as an excuse for telling us what she thought about PAN. She’d been opinionated before, but now she became bitter. It was like listening to a tabloid version of Mexican politics. All the PAN party members are Catholic fanatics, she told us. She even called them Cristeros and told us with certainty that if Fox hadn’t won, he would have started a civil war, a violent Christian revolution. He wanted all the schools to be Catholic, even though the Constitution of 1926 clearly guarantees separation of church and state. And the left wing PDF? She has no less scorn for it than for PAN. The current mayor of Mexico City is PDF, and he shamelessly panders to the masses with government subsidized tortillas and subway fares. By the process of elimination, I could only assume that I was again hearing the party line of the PRI.
Martin and Ivan nodded and either smiled or frowned, depending upon what she seemed to expect, at everything she said. I tried to keep my expression somewhere between straining to follow the Spanish and polite interest. But even if my Spanish had been better, or we’d been speaking English, I’m not sure that I could have said much. Selma paused only to catch her breath, and I followed her closely enough to know that she didn’t express herself in a way that invited debate.
Later in the trip, I asked a taxi driver who said he didn’t like Fox the standard question. Didn’t he think, nevertheless, that it was good for the country in the long run, for the democratic process, that Fox had won, or been allowed to win? He agreed, sincerely I think, but I don’t think Selma would. She confirmed my suspicions about Martin’s politics. Here was a defender of the entrenched old guard, the party that had evolved into a betrayer of the revolution and preserver of the old patrician ways, the party that now felt a sense of entitlement. Endemic corruption, including just enough handouts to the Indians and the urban poor to keep them pacified, might be threatening the whole fabric of the society, but all Selma could see from her beautiful tiled kitchen, as we ate her lavish dessert and drank her very good coffee, was the threat to her privilege, which she clearly interpreted as a personal insult.
The next day on the bus we passed through the countryside that Selma hated, rolling hills covered with eucalyptus trees, valleys of corn, sugar cane, and sheep. Smog followed us as far as Cuernavaca, where we found bougainvillea, giant billboards, acres of tennis courts, the inevitable traffic jam, and an Office Max and Mega Super Center. Cuernavaca was the first getaway for Mexico City’s richest citizens. Cortes built a palace there, which is now a tourist attraction. In Greene’s time there was already a superhighway and at least one billboard, for a razor blade. He makes a point of telling us that twenty-five years before he was there, ninety years ago now, Cuernavaca was abandoned by Diaz’s troops and Zapata moved in. The peasant army, as Greene calls it, massacred the bourgeois citizens, including old men, women, and children, as they fled up the hills towards Mexico City.
Chapter Four: Taxco
Taxco, I suppose, would be charming enough . . .if it had not become an American colony.
When I told Ivan on the bus that Lonely Planet calls Taxco one of the most “picturesque and pleasant” towns in Mexico, he didn’t have to think about his reply. “It might be true,” he said, “if you didn’t grow up there.” He wasn’t joking. He didn’t look at me or grin when he said it. My intent had been to flatter him, but apparently I’d touched a nerve. Was the writer at Lonely Planet a Mexican? Had he grown up in Taxco, the son of a country doctor and a school teacher, one of six children? That might change his ideas a little. Rich foreigners can visit all they want, or live in Taxco for years, even decades, but in the end they never know shit.
Ivan said none of that, but he’d never given me such a terse response before, and I felt put in my place. This was his home town we were going to, and if I really wanted to take advantage of that, if I didn’t want to be just another tourist, I should close my book and do what I was told. Fine. As a matter of fact, that’s exactly what I wanted to do.
No one thinks of his home town as glamorous. It’s natural to be dismissive of it, just as it’s natural to be nostalgic after a long absence, and proud, even defensive, when showing it off to foreigners. The house Ivan grew up in, one of several quite respectable looking structures perched high above the street that led to the market, was one of the first things he pointed out to me, and almost in the same breath, he apologized for the street vendors that lined both sides of the already narrow cobblestone street. It wasn’t typical, he said. They are tolerated only for the upcoming fair.
Lonely Planet also says that Taxco is a “gorgeous colonial antique,” but to borrow Ivan’s point on the bus, or what I’d assumed it to be, the view walking up from the bus station at the bottom of the hill is not the same as that from the patio of a luxury hotel. Or from a distance. The highway into town offers a view of a hillside community of white stucco houses with red tile roofs that might, as Lonely Planet says, indeed be Spain, but up close, as it doesn’t say, it’s unmistakably Mexico. Even without the vendors, the narrow winding streets would be choked with taxis, collectivos, stray dogs, and trash. You can’t take the Mexico out of Mexico, Taxco seemed to prove, no matter how many Europeans and Americans invade it, and no matter for how long they’ve been doing it.
Near the top of the hill the street gave way to winding steps that were even more congested with fruit and vegetable stalls and the crafts that Greene would have called “hideous junk.” At the very top Ivan stopped for a moment to point out a handwritten sign in front of a crafts shop. A quote from Aristotle. Something about what it means to be wise, as I recall, but the reason Ivan wanted me to see it was that the owner had been putting up quotations like that for as long as he could remember. A different one every day, he said, clearly pleased that the tradition continued, and just a few steps away was something else that he hoped would still be there. A place where you could get chivo, barbecued goat.
It wasn’t a restaurant. It was a space in the market with one picnic table and a counter. You order only the barbecue from the man who prepares it, then you buy tortillas from someone else, drinks from yet another person, and so on. And if you don’t take it with you, you sit down at the picnic table and eat with all the activity of the market going on around you. The barbecue man seemed to remember Ivan. He’d been cooking goat in the same location for at least twenty years. He was a good looking guy, perhaps in his mid-forties, with a lean Greek profile, longish hair and a mustache. He sat down to talk with us, holding his grandson on his knee while his beautiful daughter stood nearby. The man sitting across from us at the table said he was a Syrian. He’d been living in Mexico and “studying Spanish” for nearly ten years. I’d like to have learned more, but between trying to follow the conversation Ivan was having with the owner and figuring out how to eat the barbecue, there wasn’t much time left for life stories. When the Syrian left, a whole family sat down, nearly crowding Ivan and me off the bench. They were friendly, though. Two of the men were just back from Chicago, and they’d come to eat chivo to celebrate their safe return.
After we ate we started running into Ivan’s old friends, and I began to feel like I had a backstage pass to the town. One friend had a silver front tooth, spoke almost no English, and sold jewelry to tourists. I instantly disliked him. A sharp dresser, a womanizer with an exaggerated opinion of his own good looks, and not too bright, Greene would have called him an “untrustworthy mestizo.” But it’s not necessary, nor particularly accurate, to be racist about it. I knew a lot of guys like that in college. For a semester. Almost all of them wanted to be dentists but tended to flunk out the first semester. Another friend was more like an old hippy craftsman, now casually upscale, dressed in Levi’s and a polo shirt. He restored wooden icons for churches and museums, and we found him by chance in a museum workshop. Ivan confided to me later that he made him wonder what his life would have been like had he returned to Taxco soon after finishing school in Mexico City. With all the tourists and expatriates, the town had always provided ample opportunities for enterprising Mexicans, especially those with a good command of English and local friends. Ivan fit the mold perfectly. Why was he teaching English to shopkeepers in Matamoros?
Our next stop was a restaurant that, in Ivan’s history of Taxco, was owned by an Italian hippy who first came to Taxco in the sixties and made his living as a street singer. We sat on a balcony and watched the noisy and endless comings and goings of the white VW taxis and collectivos as they made their way through a small cobblestone square with a white fountain in the center. The Italian had borrowed money from his father to open the restaurant, Ivan told me, which seemed at first to be another installment on the theme of people making good while Ivan remained the same. And that may be how he intended it, but I also remembered the resentment I thought I’d heard on the bus: foreigners with money, an old story in Taxco, much older than the oldest hippy with a rich father. I thought again of Greene’s “escapists with their twisted sexuality and their hopeless freedom,” and when we left, Ivan showed me a picture on the wall of a young American man who had drowned while surfing in Acapulco. He had the innocent eyes, pretty face and long hair of a classic sixties character, and his story was that a rich older woman, also an American, had taken him away to Acapulco and his untimely death. He was greatly mourned by his old friends in Taxco, Ivan said, remembered now as a symbol of those times.
Before meeting Ivan’s brother, we had time to stop at a little restaurant and bar just across the square from the Italian hippy’s restaurant. Ivan knew the owners. He had performed there, and they’d loaned him the money he needed to attend his father’s funeral. They greeted him like a godson or a favorite nephew. The wife visited with us for a few minutes, long enough to be polite and to learn who I was and what Ivan had been doing with himself. They told us about a recent vacation they’d taken in Miami, and the husband made me a drink that Ivan said was the Taxco specialty, which was similar to a Tom Collins. Meanwhile, the wife excused herself and the husband came around from behind the bar and sat down with us. I found out that his wife actually owned the place, a detail that seemed important to him, and that they’d been married for 32 years. Now in their late middle-age, they are an attractive, prosperous looking couple with an air of sophistication, solid citizens of an upscale tourist town, the Mexican version, say, of established business owners in Nantucket, the kind who also winter in Florida.
*****
We met Ivan’s brother, Horacio, at the bus station. He pulled up in a beat up yellow pickup, and we put our bags in the back. Horacio is fat, friendly, and easy going to the point of saying “adelante” to practically anything anyone says to him. There wasn’t really enough room for the three of us and the gear shift, but we squeezed in somehow. When we stopped somewhere, we had to put all our stuff in the cab, and then Horacio had to come over and close the passenger door so that it locked. It had to be lifted and slammed in just the right way, and he was the only one who could do it.
After stopping for pozole to fortify ourselves, mainly because I insisted that I couldn’t drink any more until I ate something, we began what Ivan billed as a tour of the fichera bars of his youth. As it turned out, we spent most of the night in two places right next to each other. They were both on the edge of town and perched on the side of a hill, but they couldn’t have been more different. I liked the one called Valentino and hated the other one, where, even from the top of a ridiculously long flight of concrete stairs, the music, hard driving Latin rock, was deafening. The walls on the way down were painted pea soup green, and on the whole, it would have been hard not to make inferno comparisons, especially when we found half a dozen girls sitting in folding chairs at the bottom of the stairs. They weren’t aggressive; they just eyed us with haughty insolence as we passed. We sat on padded benches built low to the ground, paid outrageous prices for beers, and had to cup our hands and scream in each other’s ears to be heard.
I was almost wishing for hell, but with nothing else to do, despite the pain in my ears, I tried to check out the scene. Aside from one old man who insisted on doing the two-step to the rock, the men were young, in their twenties, and had to be tradesmen or laborers of some sort, in which case they were almost certainly spending most of a week’s salary in this place. I found that incredible. What could be here that could possibly be worth that to any man, drunk or sober?
Eventually, Ivan decided he wanted to try the Valentino, which I realize, by any objective standard, was dead. Only two girls were on duty, and the four of us--the jewelry salesman with the silver tooth had shown up--were the only customers. The man who served us drinks, and was obviously there to keep an eye on things, was a weary looking old mulatto with white teased hair. One of the girls was soft, plump and pretty; the other was attractive, but hard and angular. The soft one appeared to be smarter in that she either understood what Ivan was saying or was very good at faking it. But it doesn’t matter. All that he required was a pretty face and a good listener, and she filled the bill on both counts. He showered her with compliments and made himself sound important while I paid for a whole bottle of rum. The music was loud but not too loud, at least we could talk, and more country than rock. The mulatto put a porn tape on the TV.
The hard angular whore sat between me and the jewelry salesman. Her way of trying to loosen me up was to make fun of my reserve, which didn’t help, and the jewelry salesman, his silver tooth gleaming, made it worse by telling stale dirty jokes and indulging in sexual innuendo that was borderline offensive, even in a whorehouse, and failed every time to be the least bit clever. I would have been comfortable enough watching the porn tapes and listening to Ivan’s romantic bullshit, if they’d left me alone. But the whore had no clue how to approach me, and every time she tried to start a conversation, the jewelry salesman said something embarrassing. Meanwhile, fat Horacio sat directly across the table from me looking like Buddha. He was perfectly content to be ignored, and his presence made me feel better about the whole scene. A little wholesome sanity was needed as Ivan became more and more enamored of his own charm.
Ivan’s stamina was amazing and ultimately infuriating. He made the whore work hard for what she wanted. He talked for hours, buying her drinks all the while, but surely by three or four in the morning she wanted to get it over with as much as I did. Ivan told her all about our trip, my interest in Graham Greene, that I was a writer, etc., etc. And then how wonderful she was, how special and smart and understanding. How many times did he tell her that, in how many ways? I’m sure that before it was over he told her anything that popped into his head, and I’m sure he believed every word of it. That’s the point, of course, to be drunk enough and inspired enough by a woman to be totally honest, if only about how you would like to be or what you would like to want, a challenge to the boundary between delusion and lies that the habitually sane and sober of the world laugh or frown at. You’re drunk. You don’t mean it. It’s all whiskey talk. You’re a ridiculous performer, a clown that only whores pretend to understand. The rest of us, or most of the rest of us, those of us who worship without humor at the altar of sobriety, pity the isolated fool you make of yourself. And we are embarrassed by your need.
Finally, Horacio and I told Ivan to bring the epic he was telling his whore to a close, and we retreated to the peace and quiet of the parking lot to wait. Horacio immediately fell asleep behind the wheel of his pickup, and I took up a position on a concrete retaining wall. To guard against falling asleep, and to kill time, I fished a writing pad out of one of my bags and started describing where I was: the parking lot of a whorehouse in Taxco at four in the morning. I could barely hear the music from inside, and the fresh cool air and the quiet gave me a second wind. I was beyond tired, and as I jotted some things down, I had to admit that in spite of the fact that Ivan was being irresponsible, taking advantage of both me and his brother, it was one of those times when I was exactly where I wanted to be.
In the circle of light from the sign, there was only Horacio’s beat up yellow pickup, Horacio himself, snoring contentedly, and me. Taxco is all hillside. Out of the light, it was very dark, but I could still make out a steep rise to my left across the road and a steep drop off to my right behind the Valentino. Now and then a rooster crowed, and if I stared long enough I could see little concrete block houses scattered on the hill. Once or twice a white VW taxi passed by slowly, looking for a fare, and at one point I heard bells tinkling, which turned out to be two donkeys grazing alongside the road.
And for that I had Ivan to thank. It’s true that I don’t understand why so many men squander their hard earned money in such places, how so many men can be such fools, but I’m well-acquainted with the delusions of alcohol, the sincere fiction of drunkenness. Poor Ivan. The whore is thinking, just give me the money and fuck me, while Ivan is thinking that his words cast a spell. And they do. They cast a spell on him.
Greene may have less sympathy with such scenes than I do, but it’s hard to tell for sure. Not only was he married when he traveled through Mexico, he was on a mission for the church. It wouldn’t do for him to be cavorting with whores, or take too much pleasure from it, and he is careful to maintain an attitude of disdain. At the same time, he’s makes it clear that he feels obliged to explore whatever different kinds of hell he finds. In Mexico City he must visit what he calls the “swagger cabaret of Socialist Mexico, all red and gold and little balloons filled with gas,” and he must then descend into the Waikiki, “on a lower level socially and morally…” where “Lovely sexual instruments, wearing little gold crosses, lolled on the sofas.” He talks to an American girl, one of the “lovely sexual instruments,” but only because his companion insists. If we are to believe this account, Greene keeps his distance, both physically and emotionally. The episode is offered simply as further evidence of Mexico’s corruption, yet another obligatory look at the underbelly.
He makes no attempt to tell us how the cabarets might be uniquely Mexican, and he says nothing about Dona Malinche, the Indian mistress of Cortes and iconic whore of Mexico, a woman who has acquired a symbolic power that rivals and complements that of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Octavio Paz believes that they are opposite kinds of mothers. “Viva Mexico,” it turns out, is only part of a common phrase in Mexico. The rest is “hijos de la chingada,” which means “sons of the fucked.” Long live Mexico, sons of the fucked. Fucked in the sense of violated, which, at least according to Paz, who in his own way was as much a moralist as Greene, is always the sense of fucked in Mexico. It is a nation of the sons of Indian women who were seduced by the Spaniards, willingly or not, which is a choice that is not a choice, since it means either betrayal or defeat. In contrast to the Virgin of Guadalupe, the protector, Dona Malinche is the violated betrayer. It hardly matters whether she is guilty of deceit or of weakness. The male response to either in Mexico has always been the same. It has always been macho. The rage of the oppressed turns into the rage of the violator, and whether macho comes in the guise of charm or violence, the goal, like that of Cortes, is always conquest.
I hadn’t been sitting on the retaining wall for long when the hard angular whore came up and sat down beside me. She invited me to come back inside again, but I told her no. I also told her she could sit there as long as she liked, that it would be a pleasure to talk with her, but that I wasn’t going inside, not even to buy her a drink. I was much more tired than drunk, but I knew that slippery slope, and even though she was not my type, I wasn’t totally immune to her presence. I liked it, in fact, but I knew how to keep my legs crossed and my hands to myself. And she followed suit. She sat close and leaned a little in my direction, but she didn’t touch.
I asked her what the problem was with Ivan’s friend. Why was she wasting her time with me when the jewelry salesman with the silver tooth was still down there? He didn’t have enough money, she said. But wouldn’t I just come down and buy her a drink? No. She told me she’d spent some time in the United States but hadn’t learned a single word of English. Six months, she said, in Los Angeles and in Seattle. No English? No, a fact she seemed proud of for some reason, as if it had been a game. How long can you live in a country without learning a word of its language? Was it some sort of test of purity, I wondered? Patriotism? I must have really been tired. More likely she was just trying to make conversation. Maybe I would try to teach her a few words. Instead, I asked her where she was from.
Guadalajara, she told me, and she goes home once a year, for Christmas. Ivan speculated later that it’s a common arrangement. She can go back and no one knows what she really does for a living, or at least the arrangement is discreet enough for her to pass as a respectable woman. She has a good body, and she’s not unattractive. Might someone she knows in Guadalajara want to marry her? We didn’t get that far in the conversation. Before I got to that question, the bartender came up and told her it was time to give up on me. We parted in a friendly sort of way. She was nicer and easier to talk to without the jewelry salesman hovering, but she still had an edge, the kind that usually masks a hard core of stubborn stupidity, an incuriousness that, unjustly no doubt, I find annoying.
I suppose, then, that had I been drunk and foolish enough, or more Mexican by Paz’s definition, I would have wanted to conquer those defenses, those barriers of stupidity and aloofness. And I would have conquered, without a doubt, as long as I paid the bill, but what would I have found once I’d penetrated the walls? Openness, Paz says, is defeat, and the macho responses to openness are limited to either pity or scorn. There is always the brief moment of elation at the moment of conquest, that can be counted on, but then what? Can a whore be open in any real way? And to make it worse, as Paz tells us, the need for conquest, the pleasure of it, is itself a kind of openness, which no doubt explains the shame we feel afterwards. Or is it rage? Whatever it is, it must be doubly acute with whores, especially when the conquest is conceived, in all drunken sincerity, as romance. There’s no lolling about with a whore, no after passion euphoria. The whore shuts down, time is up, and it becomes clear in the inevitable moment of sobriety that we conquered nothing, that it was all a sham, an imitation of conquest. We simply rented for a while the use of one of those “lovely sexual instruments.”
*****
I’m not sure what time it was when we got to Horacio’s house. It was still dark, and I know that all during the ride Ivan was snoring and leaning on my shoulder, and I probably dozed off as well. Horacio kidded me later, saying that I tried to stay awake because I was afraid he was going to run off the side of the mountain. I honestly don’t know if that’s true or not. I don’t remember being worried. I remember being miserably tired and wondering if we’d ever get there. It was a half hour trip that seemed to take forever. As we chugged up the unpaved road, Horatio constantly digging into the side of my leg to change gears, the headlights shining on rocks and trees one moment and on absolutely nothing the next, we seemed to be trapped in an endless loop of curves.
Dogs barked and roosters crowed as we pulled up to the house, and much to my chagrin, the whole family got up to greet us. All I wanted was a bed. What I got instead was seven strangers staring at me: Horacio’s wife, his four kids, his wife’s sister, and her kid. I was a source of fascination for everyone. They were all amazed, all wide-eyed, but especially the youngest daughter. She was about nine or ten. She held her hand up to her open mouth in the universal pre-teen manner of showing shocked surprise, and then for no apparent reason she would break into fits of giggling and point her finger at me.
At least we weren’t cramped. It was a fairly big room, and even with a long dining table in the center of it, there was still plenty of room around the walls for couches, chairs and cabinets. I smiled and nodded a lot in an attempt to seem friendly and harmless, but I felt a little like I’d just escaped from the zoo. No one said a word to me. I thought about introducing myself, and should have, but I really didn’t feel up to making an announcement in a foreign language to a roomful of strangers. So we just stared at each other with increasing discomfort until finally Ivan and I were shown to a bedroom with two double beds in it. Ivan fell on one of them fully clothed, and I only vaguely wondered who we might be inconveniencing as I undressed and crawled under the covers of the other one.
I slept soundly until nature called with such urgency that I had to get up. My watch said seven o’clock. Ivan was still snoring. His bed was between mine and the window, and he hadn’t moved since he’d fallen across the mattress two or three hours earlier. No one was around in the big room. I found the bathroom by myself, discovered after peeing that the plumbing, if there was any, was not within my ability to understand it, and left without flushing. Back in bed, I noticed that I had a great view through a huge window on the other side of the room. The window had no screen and no curtains, so it was like a framed painting of a typical Mexican landscape, gentle curves of pale green hills in intense light. It equaled any view I’d ever seen in California or on the Mediterranean. Happy with that, charmed by it even, I closed my eyes and dozed until eight, when someone turned on the CD player at full blast.
I tried without success to wake up Ivan. There were things to do. I wanted to see the town, but I also needed to get my clothes washed, and we had to make arrangements to get back to Taxco in time to leave for Cuernavaca at a reasonable hour. I heard some dishes being rattled, and I went out hoping to find coffee. I did. Horacio’s wife was in the kitchen, which was an extension of the big room. I properly introduced myself, but we were both too shy to say much after that. I accepted a cup of coffee and sat down at the long dinner table.
The coffee put me in the right frame of mind to insist that Ivan get up, and after he’d had his coffee, he took me on a tour of Tetipac. It’s an eerily quiet little town, more of a village really, dusty and hot in the sun, cool and sleepy in the shade. A place where dogs can sleep undisturbed in the middle of the road, and the churchyard garden is full of weeds. The only street stand sold watermelon and had no customers. It was set up next to the plaza, which unlike the church had a well maintained garden. The municipal building, a depressing example of bare bones bureaucratic architecture, was at least relatively new and freshly painted. Most of the buildings between the church and city hall were apparently occupied with businesses, but it was a holiday I learned later, and almost no one was on the street. I’d have probably liked the sleepy atmosphere if I hadn’t been so tired and hungover. It was certainly the kind of place that could make you believe that nothing much has changed in Mexico for four hundred years.
As we walked around, Ivan filled me in with more details about his childhood. His father, who died only about three years ago, had been the government doctor in Tetipac since before Ivan was born. His mother taught school in Taxco, and his father came home only on weekends, although sometimes the children went to Tetipac to visit him. Ivan showed me the house just off the square that his father had lived in all those years. By the time he died, Ivan said, he’d become a legend in the town, well liked and respected. Ivan had no problem with that, was in fact proud of it, but he added that having him home only on weekends was a problem. Not because he was missed. Just the opposite. He was much stricter than Ivan’s mother.
We walked to the outskirts of town to visit his grave. The cemetery looked all but abandoned, so full of trash and weeds it might have doubled as a garbage dump. From there we walked down to a river where Ivan had hung out with friends on weekends and summer vacation. A good place to get away from grownups and smoke cigarettes, he said. It was a quiet, shady place, but the water was very low and full of trash. On the way back, we encountered several townspeople, all of whom wished us good morning, but I felt uncomfortable. Ivan seemed to feel right at home; I felt like a stranger.
He wanted a beer before we returned to the house, a little hair of the dog, and we found a small grocery store with tables and a juke box. It didn’t seem unreasonable to me for him to drink a beer, even at nine in the morning, considering how much he’d drunk the night before, but when he went through three cans in about fifteen minutes, I knew trouble was coming. As he started on the second beer, a kid--a teenager who looked a little crazy--came in and sat down with us without saying a word. He just grinned, and even Ivan was puzzled. He told me later he had no idea what the kid had wanted, but he put him to work. He gave him money to play the jukebox, fetch yet another beer, and buy himself a Coke. The kid never asked us for anything, but after awhile his presence began to seem a little menacing, and he finally got up to leave, as abruptly as he’d arrived, and he threw his empty Coke can into the middle of the street. Just before that, he’d exchanged a knowing look with the proprietor of the place, as if they both thought Ivan was a joke. For drinking beer so early in the morning? I don’t know, but it didn’t help me feel any less like a stranger. And a conspicuous one.
Soon after we returned to the house, we sat down around the dinner table with the family and ate pan dulce. Horacio sat at one end in a manner reminiscent of a comic Henry VIII. His wife moved back and forth from the kitchen, half-sitting now and then. She was a pretty woman and she had the same permanently sardonic gleam in her eye as her youngest daughter, which made her the serious side of the marriage. She never volunteered a single word, but when I thanked her for something, she was polite and always smiled. At the same time, there was a strength about her, even a toughness, that she didn’t try to hide.
All four kids were home because of the holiday. I didn’t see much of the oldest boy. The youngest, about twelve, was outgoing in that awkward and aggressive way that is typical of boys that age. He was eager for everyone’s approval, but at the same time, to get attention, he felt compelled to push things a little too far. The oldest girl said she was thirteen, but she looked eighteen. She was beautiful, said almost nothing, and kept staring at me as if she couldn’t quite believe I was real. The youngest girl was the smart and sassy one. She kept asking me questions and laughing at the way I answered in bad Spanish, or showing impatience when I didn’t understand right away. At first I was embarrassed and wished she’d leave me alone, but after a while I got used to it, and even began to like her. It helped when I turned the tables on her. I started asking her questions, telling her the English words for things, and then smiling at her when she had difficulty with the pronunciation. She became much more easy going, and I realized that even though she was being rude, it was to a purpose. She was trying to figure out why I couldn’t understand her very well. It had genuinely puzzled her, and she was looking for an answer in the way that came most naturally to her. She was definitely the smart one.
In addition to being badgered by the youngest girl, one other thing happened as we sat around the table that made me less than comfortable. Uncle Ivan started telling the whole family about our evening at Valentino’s, which surprised me. In fact, I’m sure I was blushing the whole time, but it was his family, so who was I to say what was or was not appropriate? In any case, his point helped saved the situation a little. Neither Horacio nor I, Ivan announced to the table, the two married men in the group, showed the least bit of interest in the women. And actor that he is, he had to demonstrate how stiffly we sat in our seats, how stoically we resisted temptation.
At some point after breakfast, I got all my clothes together and gave them to Horacio’s wife, and soon after that, the whole family except for the youngest boy piled into the pickup to take the wife’s sister and her daughter to the bus station in Taxco. I tried to nap. It had become stuffy, though, in the bedroom, and the youngest boy kept playing the stereo. Nevertheless, I dozed a little until I started hearing bursts of laughter and loud talking, which seemed to come at intervals deliberately designed to wake me up just after I drifted off. At first I thought the family had come home, but then I realized that I was hearing a two person conversation, and one of the voices was female. I got up to see what was going on and found Ivan sitting at the dining table with a strange woman. Several beer bottles were on the table, and Ivan had glassy eyes and a stupid grin on his face. He introduced me to the woman. He’d known her when they were teenagers and had learned from the youngest boy that she was a teacher at his school. When she learned that Ivan had asked about her and was at his brother’s house, she’d come by to see him. She wore a navy blue suit with a white lace blouse, was heavily made up and full figured, and would have looked just like the woman on the bus in Mexico City, and the woman in the café that first morning in Nuevo Laredo, except that even Greene couldn’t have called her face brutal. It was soft, round and homely. She was divorced with children, Ivan told me later, and she rode the bus to Tetipac from Taxco every day to teach at the local school.
Ivan kept trying to hold her hand, and she resisted with a patience and politeness that I found incredible. I wouldn’t have blamed her if she’d slapped the shit out of him. I wanted to do it myself, and what she really thought, I can only imagine. The charm Ivan had exhibited the night before with the whore had turned into aggressive womanizing, or that’s how the “charm” looked to me in the light of day with a real woman. My presence gave her an excuse to leave, and when she was gone, I wasn’t feeling too indulgent about Ivan’s condition. There were things to do, and I couldn’t help but think of Greene’s opinion that Mexicans can endure anything except responsibility. I would insist, I told Ivan, on paying for getting my clothes washed, and we needed to get back to Taxco in time to take the bus to Cuernavaca. Don’t worry, he told me. He would take care of everything. He didn’t say I worried too much, which was what many Mexicans told Greene, but he might as well have. I told him I didn’t want to take advantage of the family. I wanted to pay for the clothes, and I didn’t want Horacio to have to go to Taxco twice in one day just on account of us. We could take the collectivo. Ivan smiled, opened another beer, and waved all my concerns away. He would take care of it.
It wasn’t long before the family came back with roasted chicken and a huge stack of tortillas. After we ate, Horacio’s wife went to get my clothes from wherever they were and immediately pulled out an iron. I let her do three shirts which I couldn’t have worn otherwise and started folding and packing the rest. All the kids hung out in the bedroom and watched me pack as if I were showing them magic tricks. They couldn’t get over the key to my suitcase, and I’m not sure to this day exactly why it fascinated them so much. Its small size, maybe, or was it the idea that anyone would find it necessary to lock up his clothes? At one point, the boy asked me about some ball point pens that were in the transparent pouch on the lid of my suitcase. I had about a dozen of them. They were advertisement pens for my wife, a realtor, and I’d brought them along just for such an occasion. “You sure have a lot of pens,” he said. “You’re right,” I said, for once picking up on a hint immediately. “You want one?” Of course he did, and I gave one to each of the girls as well. For a long while, they simply held them up and stared at them as if they’d never seen a ballpoint pen before, or maybe they were trying to understand me better from staring at my wife’s picture, but from then on, right up until we left, they followed me around like little ducklings.
I asked Ivan if I should leave money. I didn’t want to insult them, but the family’s hospitality had almost been extravagant. A comfortable bed, two big meals, my clothes washed, not to mention two trips down the mountain to Taxco. My insistence on the collectivo had been conveniently ignored. Don’t worry, said Ivan. He’d taken care of everything. After many thank you’s and de nada’s, the whole family stood around, smiling and waving as we pulled away from the house.
Ivan slept on the way down the mountain almost as soundly as he’d slept on the way up. About halfway down, we had to stop for a piece of rope that was stretched across the road. It was the Mexican version of the lemonade stand. Two little boys were collecting a toll. Horacio gave them a couple of centavos, they lowered the rope, and we went on our way.
*****
In Cuernavaca I wanted a nice hotel. I wanted to sleep for a long time, serenaded by the gentle reassuring hum of air conditioning. Even a loud hum would have been okay, but Ivan had a different idea. He said he knew of a good hotel within walking distance of the bus station. In fact it wasn’t too far, but on that particular evening, any distance at all with my suitcase was annoying. I’d already had fits of irritability throughout the day, but as we struggled through the crowded streets, I settled into a decidedly black mood. At least twice I told Ivan I wanted to look at the guide book for a hotel and get a taxi, but he said, no, no, the hotel’s just around the corner, and you’ll like it. It wasn’t just around the corner, and I didn’t like it. It was clean, but that’s about all there was to recommend it. There was no air conditioning, the room was stuffy, and a family with little kids occupied the room next door.
Ivan said he wanted to go see a friend who worked at a store downtown. I said I wanted a shower and sleep. He left at around nine, and after my shower, I read for about two minutes, turned off the light, and in spite of the stuffiness and the noise from the family next door, I fell into a deep sleep immediately. I didn’t budge until around four in the morning. I didn’t know why I woke up, but I didn’t think much about it. I often wake up at four or five in the morning, and I sometimes have trouble getting back to sleep. I had good reason, though, that morning to stay awake. Ivan hadn’t returned. His bed hadn’t been touched. I lay there for a while and tried to think through the situation. It was entirely possible, of course, that there was no situation, that Ivan was simply indulging in a replay of the night before. But it was also possible, even if that were the case, that the morning would come around and I’d still have no idea where he was or what had happened to him. I knew I couldn’t leave without finding him, or at least trying to, and it made me tired just to think about talking to the police or hospitals. I didn’t even know if doing that would make any sense.
Not only that, but I didn’t have a key, which was not necessarily a minor concern. I knew from experience that the keepers of cheap hotels could be extremely suspicious and cantankerous, and I wasn’t eager to try to explain why I didn’t have a key. Should I take all my luggage down to the desk just in case they wouldn’t let me back in the room? It seemed like overkill, but I’d really be in a fix if all my stuff was locked in the room. I was still awake, still in bed and trying to work it out when Ivan showed up at six.
He apologized for making me worry, but mostly he tried to make light of it. Yes, he’d been up all night, but he was feeling good and was ready to do whatever I wanted. Everything was fine. He didn’t look fine, though, and I made no pretense of accepting his apology. Nor did I show any sympathy for his clearly miserable physical condition. I made no reference to how tired he looked, and I didn’t suggest that he get some sleep. I told him that as soon as I brushed my teeth, we’d go get breakfast and then spend the rest of the morning sightseeing. He could go to Matamoros anytime he wanted, but I was leaving for Puebla around noon.
Around that time, I noticed that money was missing. The night before I’d put a 200 peso note, about $20, next to my keys and wallet on a table near the bed. At least I thought I had. I was 99% sure not because I distinctly remembered putting it there, but because I knew for certain that I’d given the hotel clerk a 500 peso note and received the 200 in change. I told Ivan, and we both looked for it on the floor, under the bed, on the bed, in my suitcase, and in all of the pockets of all of my clothes. No luck, so finally I gave up and went to brush my teeth. Maybe I’d dropped it between the front desk and the room. Maybe there was some place in the room or among my belongings that I hadn’t looked. I didn’t have a good track record when it came to misplacing things. I’m loss prone, in fact, especially when traveling. Nonetheless, I knew before I finished brushing my teeth that if forced to bet on it, the only reasonable wager would be on Ivan as the thief.
I really didn’t want to accuse him. I didn’t even want to hint at it, and while I brushed my teeth and shaved, I decided on a strategy of wait and see. The important thing was not the 200 pesos but how it would effect our friendship, and I was in a pretty good position in that regard. We would be spending a few hours together, and only a few hours, enough time but not too much to figure out where we stood. Ivan knew how things looked, and whether he was guilty or not, if he was capable of deceiving me without it bothering him, I thought I’d know it before noon. As it turned out, I didn’t have to wait that long. He was sitting on the bed when I came out of the bathroom, and he confessed immediately.
The predictable story: he was drunk, broke, and horny. He’d come back to the room around four with the idea of going to bed, but he saw the money on the table, and I was sleeping soundly. It was too much temptation. He took it. The theft was that simple, but the story got worse. He picked up a whore, took her to a hotel much cheaper even than the one we were staying in, fell asleep, and when he woke up, the whore was gone and had taken all his money. I was his friend, he said, which was why he had to tell me, felt compelled to tell me, and although he hoped I would forgive him, he would understand if I couldn’t and pay me back somehow whether I did or not. The prompt, unsolicited confession softened me, but I told him I needed to think about it, and to learn more, which was true. If we were going to remain friends, I needed most of all to understand it in a way that convinced me that I wasn’t being played for a sucker.
My bus left for Puebla a little after noon. The bus to Matamoros left later from a different station, so Ivan was able to see me off. We discussed things over breakfast. Or rather, while I had breakfast and he had coffee. He told me that he was an alcoholic, that he’d gotten into trouble before, and that he’d gone to AA meetings for a while. He hated everything about AA, the meetings and the people, but he realized that he probably needed it. Or at least needed not to drink at all, since he obviously couldn’t handle it. Not in the long run. He’d go cold turkey for a while, drink sensibly for a while, and then slide slowly but surely back into drinking too much and doing crazy things.
This was not offered as an excuse. It was more of the confession, which I appreciated, and I responded with the predictable things about trust and friendship, all of which I believed, but I wondered as I said them if they really applied. Were Ivan and I friends? He said we were. I wanted to be. I liked him for his wit, his enthusiasm, his sentimentality. I even liked his irresponsibility, up to a point. Ivan, the irresponsible lover, the lovable uncle, the fearless actor. He’s the only person I know who’s gotten drunk in a Korean bar in Houston. I didn’t even know there were Korean bars, never mind in Houston. I think my eggs, sunny side up, nearly made him puke, but he held on. He promised to pay me back, and if he hadn’t come too close to becoming a priest at one point in his life, I’m sure he would have crossed himself to seal the deal. I almost asked him how he was going to get back to Matamoros with no money, but that’s a game you play with children, not friends. And I think he is a friend, despite the odds against it. I’m a gringo, no getting around it, and therefore rich. He’s an “hijo de la chingada,” no getting around that either, and therefore poor. Rich and poor by definition, if not in reality. I gave him another 200 pesos, which would get him home not entirely destitute. He said again that he would pay me back, every penny, and he did.
Chapter Five: To the Coast
. . . the train goes down six thousand four hundred feet; it moves in great loops to summer, the seasons change as you watch, the air thickens, and exhilaration stirs in the flaccid lungs . . . .
I stood on the hotel balcony in Puebla for a while and enjoyed the dry air and the view: the sun on the blue and yellow cupolas of Espiritu Santo church, the shaded cobblestone courtyard below me with its tiled fountain, and across the way the intensely blue façade of the Universidad Autonomia de Puebla. A guidebook view, to be sure, but that was fine, and being there alone with nothing to do was more than fine. After a long hot shower, I spent what was left of the afternoon in bed. It was pleasant just hearing voices from the courtyard and watching the drawn sheers move ever so slightly whenever a breeze passed over the balcony.
It was nearly dark by the time I got up. I still didn’t feel the least bit ambitious, but since I was starting to get hungry, I thought I’d walk around a little, maybe drink a beer, absorb a little local color, then find something to eat. I headed towards the central plaza, which was only a couple of blocks from the hotel, and found the streets there blocked off for a running event. Police controlled the flow of pedestrians; loudspeakers announced each race. It was a family affair, I soon realized. Mothers, daughters, fathers, sons, and grandparents wandered around in running outfits with numbers on their backs. The sidewalks were packed, the cafes under the portales busy, but it wasn’t hard to find a table. Most people, apparently, were there to run.
From my seat I had an excellent view across the plaza of the tallest cathedral in Mexico, which at night, lit up from top to bottom, looked to me like a Mormon temple. It’s not hard to understand why Greene liked Puebla, which he visited only after he’d been to godless Villahermosa. He tells us at one point that Puebla was the only town in Mexico where he might have been happy living, and it still has what must have appealed to him, a decidedly Catholic and European feel, both devout and comfortable, at least in the colonial area around the central plaza. The towering Cathedral, no doubt intimidating to reformers, must have seemed to Greene, ever sensitive to symbols, a strong but nurturing presence. At last he’d found a place in Mexico where God was still welcome.
The next morning, a Sunday, I visited the Ex-convento de Santa Monica, a ten minute walk from the central plaza. It was officially closed in the 1850’s, a casualty of the Juarez wave of anticlerical reforms, but it wasn’t really closed until 1934. For eighty years, thanks to helpful neighbors and the indifference of local officials, the nuns persevered, all the while maintaining only two points of contact with the outside world. Food was delivered by way of a secret door in a private house, and Mass was observed through dozens of small holes high on the back wall of an adjacent church. The holes are still there. They are about two inches in diameter and at eye level on the convent side.
Greene tells us that in 1938 the Masons ran the ex-convent as “a kind of anti-God museum.” It was where, according to a tourist in Monterrey, nuns’ babies were buried, and although that proved not to be true, Greene did find human remains. Skeletons in a pit. Tongues, livers, and hearts preserved in bottles. None of that is there now, but I suspect that most 21st Century travelers are content with the paintings of pierced and bleeding hearts rather than the actual relics, and for those who might be interested in such things, there are still many whips and crowns of thorns in the tiny cells and along the dark corridors.
In keeping with Greene’s point that Puebla, despite the prevailing political climate, remained on the whole Catholic, his guide, although a Mason, expressed sympathy for the nuns, and his account of the discovery of the convent by Mexican detectives made it sound like a scene from the Holocaust. The police were tipped off by a disgruntled servant. They were unable at first to find the hidden door in the small dining room of the private house, but finally discovered it behind a bookcase. The nuns were “dispersed,” the guide told Greene, and he gave him a rose taken from one of the courtyards, to remember the “poor women” by. Greene found it, he says, nearly a year later, pressed between the pages of Barchester Towers.
He largely ignores the felt paintings that cover the walls of many of the rooms. He’s interested in the nuns’ sacrifice and perseverance, not their taste in art, and while the paintings may be worthless as art, they are consistent with those moral themes, which can’t be said, unfortunately, for an exhibit of the Last Supper that now fills one of the first rooms on the self-guided tour. The life size figures look like the wholesome heroes of a Disney film, twelve disciples instead of seven dwarfs, and it wouldn’t have surprised me if they’d jerked their heads around to greet me when I entered the room. I had to wonder if there was a button I was supposed to push to make them speak.
If something more cheerful than whips and crowns of thorns was wanted, it’s too bad that the tiled courtyards weren’t considered sufficient. It’s true that after an hour of wandering around in what might be a setting for a gothic novel, a little sunshine was in order, but there was plenty of that in the colorfully tiled central courtyard, which is the first thing you see when you enter the convent and the last thing when you leave. In fact, I almost envied the nuns as I stood in the cool shade of their old fashioned open kitchen with its big iron kettles, and looked out at the rose bushes and orange trees in the bright sunlight.
I left the convent at around ten, and as I made my way back towards the plaza, I was perfectly happy to be in Puebla on a Sunday morning with nothing to do. Another happy moment, perhaps, although I’d confessed nothing. Sunday mornings in Puebla still feel like Sunday mornings, or at least that one did. Not much going on, the streets relatively quiet and empty, the sidewalks washed clean and drying in the sun.
In the courtyard of Casa de Cultura, just behind the cathedral, I found a crowd of old people sitting in folding chairs, listening attentively to traditional corridos. The chairs were arranged in neat rows around a raised stage, and the performers, a singer and guitarist, were clearly talented professionals. The audience was made up entirely of couples, and judging from the modest but by no means poor way they were dressed, I thought they might be owners of small businesses or government workers, bused here, maybe, for a little culture. They didn’t sing along or tap their feet, but they knew the songs by heart and closely followed the words.
Around the perimeter, a few tourists like me watched the performance standing, and a group of young Mexican men hovered over a card table to watch the progress of a chess match, one of the players a Fidel Castro look-alike. Behind the stage a book store stocked serious literature and history as well as art books, and a little garden coffee shop offered pastries. The upstairs housed a 12,000 volume antiquarian library, recently reopened after being damaged by the 1999 earthquake. Polished hardwood framed the ragged gray tomes that rose from the floor to a very high ceiling. Back downstairs, I wandered through an art exhibit, the style of the painter surreal comic book, the themes either political or romantic, rarely both in one painting. No religion. More pierced hearts, but here the pain was for romantic love.
After a while, in no hurry, I strolled over to the central plaza. It was still too early for crowds, and I had my choice of benches in the shade. For company, I had mostly young couples holding hands, “innocently,” as Greene would be sure to emphasize, and a few indulgent fathers, all looking like young architects or lawyers or doctors, with little kids. Were these men divorced, or was it a Mexican custom for fathers to take their kids to the park on Sunday morning? Maybe mothers get to sleep late or go to church. I don’t know. The only vendor out that early was an old woman who went from bench to bench selling sweets. She looked sweet herself, everyone’s idea of an ideal grandmother, all smiles and solicitation, and she sat down right next to her customers, the young lovers, now and then venturing a suggestion, as they looked over her wares.
That afternoon, after trying a turkey mole for la comida (a dish I’ve never been crazy about, but since I was in Puebla, I had to try it again), I went back to the main plaza, and it was hard to walk for all the people, never mind sit. The main attraction was a stage show featuring pop musical numbers by spunky teenage girls with bared navels, which may have had something to do with handing out awards for the races of the day before. People were jammed shoulder to shoulder in front of the stage, and taco and popcorn vendors were everywhere. Every bench in the park was occupied, even those in the sun. Around the edges of the crowd, juggling clowns tried to gather a crowd of children, and a man in a wheelchair drew charcoal portraits.
“…something out of a Rene Clair film,” Greene says of Mexico City’s Alameda Park on a Sunday afternoon, ten years before Rivera painted “Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in the Alameda,” a mural admired more for its charm than for its historical or political content. Both men had good reasons for scorning the Mexican bourgeois, for laughing at the Sunday afternoon parade, for hating all the “puffery” acquired no doubt by corrupt and violent means and at the expense of the poor, and yet neither seemed entirely immune to its appeal. Sundays in Mexican plazas are in fact hard to resist, whether in Puebla, where the bourgeois and the working class are pretty evenly mixed, or Chapultapec, where the workers of Mexico City bring their picnic baskets, or Coyoacan, which is almost exclusively upscale. And I think I know why. I think it’s innocence, no matter how pure, or even how real, it is.
In the early 90’s, more or less by accident, I spent a Sunday afternoon in the plaza in Coyoacan. I say by accident because the purpose of my visit was to see the houses of Leon Trotsky and Frida Kahlo. Trotsky was in Mexico City when Greene was there, but Greene had no interest in meeting him. Or admits to none. Instead he tells us of a visit to a socialist house of wax, which he turns into a parody of meeting Trotsky. After walking by several exhibits of priests abusing women and peasants, he comes to a wax figure of Trotsky, presented as a hero of the people, of course, and then he happens upon an opportunity for political comment that seems almost too good to be true. The next exhibit is “two waxwork hands in a glass case [that] were compared, the worn worker’s and sleek priest’s…” Greene can’t resist the cheap shot and asks, “which would Trotsky’s have resembled most?”
That was two years before Trotsky was murdered. His exile to Mexico in 1937, his murder by Stalin in 1940, and his association with Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, have since become a romantic socialist myth that rivals that of Che Guevarra, a fantasy with which, it’s safe to say, Greene would have had no patience. He might have shared, though, my fascination with Trotsky’s house, and I’m sure he would have found interesting ways of despising Kahlo.
Through blind luck I went very early on a Sunday morning and found that I had the Trotsky house all to myself. I walked all the way around the outside walls looking for the entrance, made my way through the modern museum full of glass and aluminum and recessed lighting, and then practically stumbled out the back door into the courtyard. It was eerily quiet. The improbably high walls, like prison walls with their watchtowers, blocked out any street noise, and the only sound in the little courtyard was the trickle of a garden hose at the base of a banana tree. Leaves raked into piles, the grass a little high, it was just carelessly kept up enough to feel comfortable, and there were no signs nor anyone around to tell me where to go. I felt like an intruder as I made my way towards the house, like someone who can’t resist spying when he comes to visit new neighbors and finds no one at home. To such a visitor, if the fortress like walls hadn’t been warning enough, the steel encased bedroom would certainly be a shock. Something was wrong here. Who slept in a bank vault?
What was wrong of course was the long arm of Stalin. As it turned out, Trotsky’s precaution of turning his house into a medieval fortress wasn’t paranoid and in the end didn’t work. He was stabbed at his desk in the back of the head with an ice pick, the culprit his secretary’s Spanish boyfriend. By that time, whether from unpleasantness over politics or sex or a little of both, Trotsky and Frida Kahlo were no longer friends, but a visitor to Kahlo’s house, which is only a few blocks away, might well wonder what had brought them together in the first place. It was closed that Sunday morning, but I’ve visited it since, and the contrast is startling. The Trotsky house is an intellectual fortress, all defense with its high walls and vault of a bedroom, and cerebral, the writing desk with its open book and rimless eyeglasses. But the Kahlo house screams. It’s a riot of color, mostly blue, and dancing skeletons. It’s the center of the universe for skeleton art, which like most Mexican art from that period, derives its power from being willfully unsubtle. It’s Pancho Villa art. Crude, impulsive, a series of sometimes exquisite, sometimes tasteless, explosions.
Even Greene might have had some sympathy for Trotsky’s predicament and ultimate fate, despite his soft bourgeois hands. Both men were obsessed with moral issues, but I don’t think Greene would have cut Kahlo any slack at all. Greene didn’t like explosions, at least not in art, and her lack of subtlety about pain, her wallowing in it, as he might have seen it, would probably have embarrassed and disgusted him. “Unbearably sentimental” might have been his judgment of Kahlo as it was of Rivera, but there’s a difference that I think would have shocked Greene to the point of hating her. At least Rivera’s sentimentality, like Trotsky’s socialism, had a moral foundation, whereas Kahlo’s paintings, despite her avowed Stalinism, suggest an amoral and impersonal universe, a pagan universe, one that she takes personally. And only personally. Her references to the indigenous culture and the Church have no political or even spiritual significance. They always refer back to herself, she’s the center of her own universe and the only reason that her pain is important, which explains why her reputation over the last twenty or so years has eclipsed that of Rivera. Nothing seems more relevant to us these days than ourselves, certainly not the old ideological battles of capitalism, socialism and religion. To portray ourselves as helpless victims of the twin demons of an impersonal natural universe and the web of culture is now the highest purpose of art, or as Greene would surely say, we’ve replaced God with ourselves.
And what’s left to pursue in such a world but our own happiness? We can enjoy our pain, as Kahlo did, or we can look for pleasure, but either way God is abandoned, which is why both Greene and Rivera were suspicious of those strolling “bourgeois families under the trees” in Alameda Park. Greene’s novel The Ministry of Fear, written soon after The Lawless Roads, is all about the temptations of happiness and how it’s possible only in a state of ignorance such as childhood or adolescence. With maturity comes pain, inevitably, and in contrast to Kahlo, Greene was interested in pain not for itself but for the choices it demanded. His characters struggle not to be happy, which with knowledge is impossible (except for those “few happy moments between sin and sin”), but to be good. In Greene’s world, and in Rivera’s, to give him his due, if the people who flock to the parks in Mexico on Sunday afternoons are as happy as they seem, they’ve refused to grow up. It’s willful ignorance on their part, a shameful illusion, and in that sense they live in a dream.
A very appealing dream. When I walked over to the central plaza in Coyoacan after seeing Trotsky’s house, I wasn’t really expecting anything. I just wanted to find a place to sit down. It was still early and not too crowded, but it wasn’t long before the plaza began to fill up, and pretty soon it was like a party. The usual street vendors were there, as were the muscular and sullen Native American dancers, and the organ grinders in their gray uniforms with their hats out for change, but the crowd was made up mostly of upscale families who looked like they’d just come from church, and teenagers more outrageously and self-consciously outfitted than any I’d ever seen in the US. For the families with little kids, a group of clowns put on a game of conejos y lobos, which sent well-fed and well-dressed kids running, screaming and giggling all over the plaza. Many of the teenagers were gathered around a young man on a metallic green customized bicycle that was like a mobile theme park devoted entirely to the Beatles. Their photographs were plastered all over it, “Revolver” was blasting out over a tape deck, and little dolls of each Beatle hung from the handlebars.
After a while I found an unoccupied bench at the very edge of the plaza, in the sun but pleasantly isolated from the frantic activity. Sitting across the walk from me was a middle-aged man who looked a lot like Garcia Marquez. He had a full head of wavy gray hair and a big moustache, and he wore a yellow sweater over a white dress shirt, brown slacks, and shiny brown cardigans. As he read his Sunday paper in the sun, a little boy, filthy and in rags, walked between us. He couldn’t have been more than eight years old, and he was bent over nearly double by the weight of a huge tropical plant that he carried on his back. Absorbed in his paper, “Garcia Marquez” didn’t see him. I seemed to be the only person in the whole plaza with enough gringo sensibility to notice him and to think that there was anything unusual or pitiful about him.
But I probably wasn’t. A Mexican might say that I was the only person there impolite enough to notice, rude enough to break the spell. The only time I’ve ever seen a middle class Mexican publicly acknowledge poverty or any sort of unpleasantness, on a Sunday or not, was at a sidewalk café a few years ago in Morelia. A woman scraped fruit into a plastic bag off the plates of her children and handed it to a street urchin, a boy of about twelve. When she caught me looking at her, she winced, then frowned and lifted her head a little, as if to tell me to mind my own business.
******
In Puebla Greene was on his way not towards but away from Tabasco, the godless state, hell on earth, but Puebla could easily have served as the calm before the storm, an idyllic respite before battle. As it happened, the town of Orizaba, midway between Mexico City and Vera Cruz, served that purpose. The oxygen in Orizaba, a town five thousand feet below Mexico City, makes Greene giddy: “. . . you begin to believe after all that this is a country to be happy in.” His hotel is full of cooing doves, quiet organ music, fountains, and even a sympathetic American, a rare character in Greene prose, who wanders around chirping to himself “sentimentally.” It’s almost as if he has gotten off the train in a little out of the way place in the French or Italian countryside: footbridges over mountain streams, quaint little squares appearing suddenly down winding lanes, flowers and fountains everywhere, and very few people. Greene was in Orizaba during the feast of St. Joseph, an occasion that was among his most positive in Mexico: “This, I felt, was how a saint’s day should be celebrated--joyfully, with fireworks and tortillas, domestically.”
This is Greene at his least irritable and his most charitable, and for good reason. It’s not that he has suddenly been seduced by the romanticism of guidebooks. It’s that shortly before he arrived the town acquired, or recaptured, “authenticity.” Six months earlier a young girl had been shot and killed by the police when she ran from them after leaving a secret Mass, “the thin taste of the Host still on her palate.” Until then all of the churches in the state of Vera Cruz had been closed, but the reaction to the girl’s murder was so extreme that the governor had to give in and allow them to reopen. The people had seized the moment, God had returned to Orizaba, and Greene can allow himself in good conscience to enjoy its charm.
Unfortunately, there’s not much about Orizaba these days that suggests charm to a foreigner, and an act of God is partly to blame. Most of the town’s colonial buildings were destroyed by the 1973 earthquake. In addition, which may or may not be God’s fault, the population is now over a hundred thousand and the first and lasting impressions are of heat and traffic. St. Joseph’s is on the main drag downtown, and although a pretty big church, I hardly noticed it the afternoon I passed it looking for a restaurant, and that evening in its small courtyard, I couldn’t begin to conjure up that feast of St. Joseph’s back in 1938. Instead of fireworks and tortillas, “domestically,” in the streets of a quiet little town, I had to listen to four lanes of traffic racing by outside the church gates. A few blocks away, the main square was no better. The streets around it were congested with bumper to bumper traffic, mostly teenagers honking horns.
If I was looking for guidebook charm, I should have stayed at one of the resorts on the edge of town that cater to gringos who come to climb the nearby volcano. Instead, not wanting to rely on taxis, I chose The L’Orbe Hotel in the center of town. It was modern and clean, but the view from my window was of a bridal shop and a huge shoe store. A family with three dogs lived on the roof of the bridal shop in a tin shack. The dogs were chained during the day, and soon after I checked into my room, I watched one of them have difficulty getting comfortable in the only scrap of shade available. At least they had plenty of water, and when the family got home, the woman came out immediately to take her laundry off the line and unchain the dogs.
It was stuffy in the room, and the air conditioner blew warm air. When I got up in the middle of the night to open a window, and turned on my light, the dogs started barking. I tried to read until it occurred to me that the dogs might never stop barking until the light was off, and meanwhile the family in the tin shack might be cursing me for having it on. I was having a hard time with Emma anyway. Jane Austen doesn’t work for me as a traveling companion, but it’s not her fault. I tried Boone’s Lick later in the trip, thinking that McMurty, a fellow Texan, and one with a middle-class realist myth not unlike Trollope’s, might be more parallel to Greene’s experience, but with no more success. Trollope worked for Greene because he was looking for a way to defend himself in an alien country. Trollope was an antidote, and while I subscribe in general to the idea of reading against the country you’re in, even if just for a break from a place you like, a welcome contrast, I’ve rarely been able to read anything successfully while traveling. I’m too restless, even when doing nothing is the only option, and besides, doing nothing, giving in to its necessity, can at times feel like an accomplishment. That night in Orizaba I had little choice but to lie there in the dark and listen to the dogs. They finally shut up, but I never really got back to sleep.
Greene soon qualifies his opinion of Orizaba. His euphoria fades, and he says that he came to sense there a “great lethargy.” The main square is empty, the politicians, as always, sit around doing nothing, and at Mass he doesn’t see the “mortification” he’s come to expect in Mexico. Why aren’t these people ecstatic over God’s return? How can they now take life as usual for granted? To make himself feel better, he finds a priest who speaks just enough English to take his confession, which always cheers him up. A few happy moments.
Greene never explains how the lethargy could exist. If God is back, I want to ask him, what could possibly be the problem? My guess is that what he calls the town’s “lethargy” reminded him of that Victorian ivory tower he found in San Antonio and the Rene Clair scene at Alameda Park. After the initial shock of pleasure, peace of mind soon makes Greene uneasy, suspicious. In the long run, he might have preferred the Orizaba I found sixty-five years later, a small city that, like other small cities and working class neighborhoods all over Mexico, is drab and tacky. The other side of Sundays in the park. No style. No grace. Orizaba is the anti-Puebla, crammed with people doomed to wear cheap flea market clothes, eat soup in grimy little cafes, ride on broken down buses. It is squarely in the middle of the pointless, pagan universe Greene loves to hate and pity, and whose misery the church, and only the church, can alleviate. Misery is always easier to live with than happiness. Where there’s misery, there’s hope. As Greene tells us from the start, it’s always going to be different over there, in the next town, the next state, the next country.
On the way to Vera Cruz I saw eight foot tall sugar cane, groves of fruit trees, and two potted palms sitting in an empty swimming pool at the Motel El Silencio. At one of the toll booths, a man wearing a flak jacket over a white dress shirt and a black tie, holding a rifle in one hand and a taco in the other, waved a car down. On the TV monitors, Adam Sandler, the 21st century all-American boy, whined and mugged his way through a moronic, mean-spirited comedy. Maybe I should have laughed. Adam Sandler could well be, more than McMurtry, the real Trollope, the true realist of gringoism, the more authentic reflection of the way we want to be now.
*****
For four hundred years Vera Cruz was where everyone who came to Mexico landed and where everyone who needed to escape departed. The Conquistadors for the glory of Spain, Maximilian and Carlotta to expand yet another empire, and Woodrow Wilson’s American troops to protect (what else?) the interests of oil companies. It’s also where Mexican presidents traditionally fled when they were worried about being shot. More than once whole governments were carried over the mountains to the sea and back again. For four centuries, until airplanes could come and go directly from the interior, and in spite of the spectacularly rugged mountains separating it from Mexico City, Vera Cruz was the best way in and the best way out.
The day I arrived it was stormy and unseasonably cool, a little rain now and then under dark clouds and a fierce wind, but I ventured out anyway along the Paseo del Malecon, a broad walkway that doubles as a sea wall. The wind off the Gulf felt like a heavy wet blanket, and I nearly lost my cap more than once. Still, I wasn’t the only tourist taking a walk, and the small stands along the wharf were open for business. They had the usual trinkets, t-shirts and postcards, and nearly all of them still sold the sea shell Virgins in framed glass cases that Greene saw.
I had la comida at the Gran Café del Portal, which is and isn’t a venerable Vera Cruz institution. The story is complicated. In fact, authenticity, in the secular sense, is confounded as Lonely Planet tells it, but what it amounts to is that the real venerable old café doesn’t exist anymore. For years and years the café at the corner of the zocalo was called the Gran Café de la Parroquia. It was cavernous, always crowded, with lots of coffee paraphernalia and a colorful décor. Now it’s just cavernous, its name has changed, it’s crowded only in the evening, and it has a big screen TV. There is still a restaurant called the Gran Café de la Parroquia nearby, but it’s in a new building with no notable atmosphere, and it apparently has no connection to the original cafe of that name. Lonely Planet says that both the food and the atmosphere is better at the cafe in the original location, and I had no quarrel with the filete de Vera Cruz there, a steak smothered with green olives, carrots, zucchini, tomato, onions, and bell peppers. Very Cuban, which actually means very Spanish. I doubt, though, that Greene would have cut the dish any slack for being more European than tacos. Still too colorful and complicated for his English palate.
On the way back to my room, I bought three cigarettes from an old man selling them on the sidewalk for two pesos each, and I was obliged at one point to cross the street to avoid sparks coming from the busted base of a street lamp. That’s Vera Cruz these days, at least around the zocalo. A fine meal, and then you’re nearly electrocuted just walking down the street.
I had the same sort of uneven experience with my hotel. Even though it was the week before Semana Santa, and the town was full of tourists, nearly all Mexicans, I had no trouble getting a room overlooking the zocalo. Eventually. I didn’t tell the desk clerk anything about what kind of room I wanted, and the first one I was given was across an alley from a construction site with jackhammers. The second room was quiet, but when I tried to take a shower, the knob to the faucet came off in my hand. The third try was the charm, even though I had to pay more for a balcony and still had problems. The carpet hadn’t been vacuumed recently, the air conditioner blew warm air, the mini bar didn’t work, and water from the shower came out with the force of a fire hose and drenched the floor.
Still, I liked it. It was spacious and had a high ceiling, the dark heavy furniture looked like it might have been elegant and expensive at one time, the bed was comfortable and king size, and the bathroom had a white marble floor and an old fashioned tub with legs. And best of all, of course, was the balcony, from which I had a bird’s eye view of all the action on the zocalo. Another balcony and another zocalo, this one with palm trees, an 18th Century cathedral and sidewalk cafes, all of it just seedy enough around the edges to look like a set from a Humphrey Bogart movie.
There was, however, a fly in the ointment. For a while I thought a KFC had replaced a seafood restaurant highly recommended by Lonely Planet, but it wasn’t as bad as that. The KFC was there, and I had an excellent view of it from my room, but the restaurant was there too, a couple of doors down, and the next afternoon I stopped in for what was the best meal of my whole trip. Swordfish soup, a juicy and tender swordfish steak in a mild tomato broth with more than a hint of cilantro and just enough of a chili bite to get your attention.
That same day I took a look at the Mocambo, an old fashioned beach resort south of the city. I knew I wouldn’t find Ava Gardner or Errol Flynn there, but I thought it would be interesting to see what had happened to a place built for the fashions of fifty and more years ago. And maybe too, with a little luck, I could get some sense of what it had been like in 1950, even if all the old rich and famous people were dead and the younger ones were in Cancun.
It’s all white and stucco like old hotels in Florida and sits on a bluff high enough to provide a panoramic view of the water from both the rooms and the terraced patios and pool behind it. It’s a magnificent view, but I was the only one there that day to enjoy it. The Mocambo was completely deserted, as if closed for the season. It’s true that the weather wasn’t the best, but I didn’t expect a place that size to have no guests. And I saw no one except two bellmen in the lobby.
The beach, it turned out, was separated from the terraces and the hotel by a chain link fence, which made me think of the scene in Suddenly, Last Summer when the Mexican boys clamor at the fence separating the private beach from the hoi polloi, a scene that also comes to mind whenever I hear people talk about the contemporary resorts. But I can’t speak from personal experience. The last time I was in a beach resort in Mexico was in Acapulco in 1963, which probably counts more towards a Mocambo kind of experience than Cancun.
I saw evidence that buses were used to transport the hotel guests to the beach, but there seemed to be no buses, and in any case, I wasn’t a guest. I had to walk back through the hotel and down to the next road to get to the beach, which, when I finally got there, was understandably deserted. The waves were huge and the wind so fierce that the blowing sand stung my skin.
By my last evening in Vera Cruz, the wind had died down and the skies had cleared, and I amused myself watching the action in the zocalo from my balcony. Black birds roosted in the palm trees, and the 18th Century cathedral was lit up across the way. As a young man, I’d have probably gotten into trouble in the Vera Cruz zocalo, and even now, if I had a friend along, I might be tempted to drink too much and have too much fun. Alone, however, sober and detached on my perch on the balcony, I thought at first that the scene was a little too well-managed, even slightly self-conscious about what it was supposed to be, about its own legend, but I think now I was being too harsh. Maybe I just couldn’t quite believe that anything so pleasant could really be spontaneous. By North American standards of control, the scene would stretch tolerance to the breaking point, which is to say that it’s as easy going a place as anyone could ever hope to find. Its apparent innocence and harmlessness took me by surprise, and it may also be that even alone, if I’d sat down there and had a few beers, and maybe even a couple of shots of tequila just to keep things going, I might have decided that in all the world there was no better place to be.
The vendors were as entertaining as the musicians. Women who looked like ageing movie stars from the 50’s, as if they’d learned how to look from the guests of the past at the Mocambo, walked around with large bags of peanuts that they sold in small portions on paper plates. Borderline respectable looking teenage boys pestered every table with outstretched arms full of watches, and ragamuffin little kids wandered around blowing whistles that sounded like cats fighting. The lottery ticket sellers, all of whom looked like moonlighting school teachers or government workers, did a brisk business and were unbelievably patient. Sometimes they’d spend half an hour at one table, calmly looking on or offering advice as each person carefully studied the numbers. God knows what there was to study, but many people leafed through the big sheets of tickets as if they were reading a novel. Just before dark a husband and wife set up a portable cigar stand, Cuban cigars, and the wife periodically made the rounds of the tables with boxes. All of this and more went on as several bands played simultaneously, often no more than a couple of tables apart: mariachis, marimbas, nortenos, and what I presume is a kind of traditional folk group, old guys in loose white shirts and straw hats with a miniature harp and two four string guitars.
A few casually dressed gringos were scattered among the always high style Mexican tourists at the cafes. Three young men who could have been oil field workers, or maybe sailors, played the role of American suckers: they bought a box of cigars and had apparently expressed some interest in watches, since the teenage boys had spread dozens of them all over their table. Three women well into their thirties, with British accents, giggled through colorful umbrella drinks. Bridget Jones on a budget holiday. And a very pale and thin gringa, my guess was American, as plainly and modestly dressed as is possible, walked around with a dark full-figured woman who wore a sort of peasant costume. Was the gringa a nun, I wondered, or a very ascetic activist? Could have been both. The pair stopped for a moment to listen to a marimba band, and the gringa smiled and nodded at whatever the other woman said.
The only trouble I saw didn’t amount to much. An old man started dancing along with a group of teenage girls to a marimba band. I could tell he was drunk even from the balcony, but he looked respectable enough and the girls seemed to enjoy his antics, up to a point. They were part of a large group of teenagers, and when they rejoined their friends at their table, the old man tried to get them to dance again. At first they refused politely, but he wouldn’t give up, and they ignored him. He hung around the table. He wouldn’t leave and he wouldn’t shut up, and I thought for a while that it was going to end badly. Finally, though, the percussion player in the band got between him and the table and gave him a lecture. The old man argued briefly, but only half-heartedly, and then went away.
On second thought, maybe I wouldn’t get into trouble in Vera Cruz, no matter how much I drank. Maybe it’s a charmed place where getting into trouble isn’t possible. Greene called it “gay and pretty,” and in the same paragraph, predictably, the word “shabby” shows up. It’s still like that. It wasn’t a second class resort in the thirties, and while it may be one now, it seems unnecessary to say so, or beside the point. The beaches aren’t in the same class as those in the Caribbean or on the Pacific, it’s no longer a major port, and it’s doubtful that invaders or fleeing tyrants will use it in the near future, but it continues to be popular with Mexican tourists. It has historic sites, a distinct cuisine, a lively Carnaval, and an annual festival devoted to Caribbean culture, mostly its music. It’s still holding on to itself, still recognizable from a description of it sixty-five years ago, as the place where Greene plucked up his courage for the boat trip to the godless state.
He gets drunk with his guide in a cantina. Not only that, but after one too many tequilas, or just enough, the guide decides to accompany him on the boat, “as a friend, to prove that a Mexican is as good a sport as an Englishman.” Everyone Greene has talked to has warned him against the boat. No one has ever heard of a gringo taking it, and his confidence is not boosted by the fact that free life insurance comes with every ticket purchase. But as he and his new Mexican friend discuss the terrible conditions and dangers of the boat, Greene’s frame of mind is that of a man stoically facing a date with the hangman. Or, more to the point, a perilous journey to the underworld.
Uncharacteristically, which pretty much proves that he was drunk, Greene is flattered by the guide’s offer and doesn’t try to dissuade him, even after he learns that the Mexican is supposed to be watching over his nephew. The nephew, a small boy with a dog, clearly worships his uncle, and he goes with them to the boat, the dog running behind the taxi. The boat is even smaller, filthier, and darker than Greene had imagined, and when the engine starts, it rattles like it’s about to fall apart. At the last minute, the guide changes his mind and leaps back onto the pier. They all wave as the boat pulls away, the guide, his nephew, even the bystanders to whom the guide has told the whole story, and the dog presumably wags his tail. The Mexican in this case was not “as good a sport as an Englishmen,” but he certainly showed more responsibility, an irony that is too obvious not to be intentional, but that Greene chooses not to discuss.
He is hungover and seasick for most of the 42 hour trip. The beds are wooden shelves, the toilet filthy and odorous, and the food “anonymous fish scraps from which the eyeballs stood mournfully out.” On top of all that it is brutally hot and the boat never stops rolling. Greene is vague about why he has to go to Villahermosa by boat. A sentence about there being no trains and “apparently no roads” is all he offers as an explanation. It may well be that he had no choice, but it’s also true that the trip is convenient symbolically. Hell on earth, or so he imagined, awaited him on the far side of the water.
There’s a good road to Tabasco now, a modern highway. It takes eight hours to travel from Vera Cruz to Villahermosa in a comfortable air-conditioned bus. The seats are soft and spacious and the rest rooms are clean. Adam Sandler, or someone just like him, continued to plague the video screens, but nothing’s perfect. I tried to ignore the movie and made notes of what I saw: three tiny evangelical churches, a huge gray pig, a VIPS coffee shop (like Big Boy), signs for Cemex, Corona, Tae Kwon Do, Magno Black Bull, Volvo, Chrysler, and Dodge. The bus driver kept an Ugly Alice doll, from a popular Venezuelan soap opera, in his window. The land started to get swampy after a while, but it was cattle country, not jungle. I saw my first thatched roof, but it was not a native domicile. It was for local color at a restaurant. I didn’t know yet that concrete blocks had completely replaced native huts.
There was a lot I didn’t know about what to expect, but the ride towards Tabasco didn’t fill me with dread. Since it was no longer godless, I had no pressing need, even if I’d been Catholic, for confession, and no excuse for getting drunk in Vera Cruz. Like Greene I thought Vera Cruz charming, but I didn’t think of it as the last stop on the road to hell. And besides, I wasn’t looking for hell.
*****
I may not have thought Villahermosa would be hell, but I did imagine it resembling the Tampico I remembered from 1980, which at the time had a seedy colonial atmosphere straight from one of Simenon’s African novels, and countless other African novels for that matter, Greene’s included. Twenty-five years ago in Tampico there were still decrepit wooden buildings with sagging second floor verandahs right on the main plaza, and an underground meat market that might have been an abandoned parking garage with flies. Even so, there were fine moments in Tampico: in the middle of the day at la comida three old men, a marimba band, took it upon themselves to set up shop across a window sill from my wife and me as we ate camarones veracruzano, a shrimp dish so good that we couldn’t stop ourselves, even though every bite peeled another layer of skin off our throats; and in the early evening, among the palm trees in the plaza, as relief from the suffocating heat, crowds of families came out for strolls and descended on kiosks that offered a bewildering menu of fruit drinks.
Greene’s Villahermosa is all heat, flies, vultures, and dentists. It is burned churches, criminals that look more respectable than the police, and the setting for The Power and the Glory, in which a reluctant alcoholic priest hides from godless socialist cops. But we shouldn’t forget that first night, when, exhausted to the point of silliness from the miserable two day boat ride, Greene thinks the lights from the river look like Venice and he’s enchanted by the music and dancing in a small plaza. Needless to say, Villahermosa isn’t Venice. It doesn’t even live up to its own name. It’s not a beautiful city. But neither is it Tampico in 1980. The streets are relatively clean, the people are friendly, and thanks to oil and cattle, it has an air of prosperity. And I didn’t even see the modern part.
According to Lonely Planet, an impressive anthropological museum and park and a new business section with modern buildings and boutiques are located north of the old downtown area, which makes Villahermosa yet another example of how cities in Mexico are becoming more like the United States. As the inner cities collapse, sooner or later they become renovated tourist attractions. But Villahermosa, its old churches burned in the thirties, has nothing in its center to attract tourists, which can have its advantages. At times, the people were so eager to please, so excited to see a gringo, that it was embarrassing. I was such a novelty to the bellboy that I thought he would never leave, and despite my pale face and obvious gringo-ness, I was asked directions twice by total strangers.
Villahermosa these days is a Mexican Corpus Christi, a hick oil and cattle town with an unassuming and unexpected charm. Old men smoke and drink coffee at sidewalk cafes, and good taco joints can be found on almost every corner. Best of all, though, everything seemed to work. I finally found a hotel room with a good air conditioner. It sounded like a B-52, but it worked.
Not hell at all, but not exactly heaven on earth either. The Plaza de Armas, where Greene saw the dancers that first night is now part of an urban renewal project, no longer the real center of town, and most of the buildings around it are either fairly new and built on the cheap or still run down. The municipal buildings that face the river probably date only from the sixties and seventies. They are painted bright colors, but that doesn’t prevent them from looking plain and boxy, and the church, which had been destroyed and turned into a “socialist playground” in Greene’s time, has been unconvincingly rebuilt in a faux colonial style. The only really old building that survives, probably 19th Century, is being restored, but I saw nothing that might have been the old jail, where the prisoners watched the dancers from behind barred windows.
On the river side of the plaza is a treeless area of concrete and rock paving is bordered by modern arches, which always look cheap in Mexico. It’s a modern little zocalo where, as near as I could tell, no one gathers. Its centerpiece is a hyper-realistic Norman Rockwell style sculpture of the kind you see in the states outside of malls, of a sailor giving directions to an old woman. It looks a little weather beaten, shabby around the edges. A new footbridge spans the river, which is good for a view of the Grijalva’s steep banks that Greene, after nearly two days on the boat, had to climb by making his way along a narrow board in the dark.
That first evening, cleaned up and rested from the bus ride, I decided I wanted a pizza. After two weeks of Mexican food, I was ready for a break, even from Mexico itself. The plan was to bring the pizza back to the room and watch the most brainless TV I could find under the wonderfully cool air conditioner, but it didn’t work out that way. Instead, I wound up spending nearly two hours talking with the owner of Douglas Pizza.
There are two parts to Douglas Pizza, a take out counter and a restaurant. When I walked up to the counter on the sidewalk, the owner, without preamble, asked me in English where I was from and then told me, as if he’d been waiting all day to get it off his chest, about a group of Italians who the day before had given him a hard time about the name of his restaurant. They objected to the American name, arguing that it implied support for the Iraq war by pandering to the cache of anything American in out of the way places. That’s probably true, that the locals like it because it sounds American and that the name attracts American travelers, but the owner didn’t defend the name on business grounds. His great-grandfather, he told me, as he’d told the Italians, was a Scot named Douglas, a cultural attache to the British embassy, a fact that failed to impress them. These were hard line Italians.
When I said I was against the war but had no objection to the name Douglas Pizza, he insisted, in the courteous but firm way that seems to come naturally to well-heeled Mexicans, that I come into the restaurant. Before that, I wasn’t clear on whether or not there was a restaurant, since the place I’d passed next door to the take out area had looked closed. It was open, he told me, but electricity in Mexico is expensive, so he never turns on the lights and air-conditioning until he has customers. It would cool off quickly, he assured me, as he showed me to a table and asked what I wanted to drink.
When I invited him to join me, he had the waiter bring him a cup of herbal tea, which he explained he drinks for his arthritis. He doesn’t smoke or drink alcohol. Originally from Sonora, he said he’d been a classics teacher and a traveling black market salesman before opening his restaurant. An unlikely combination, I know, and I was a little dubious until we’d talked for a while. I was quickly outclassed in the classics discussion, not hard to do but he convinced me that he knew his stuff, and the details he provided about black market dealings made that sound plausible as well.
Not wanting to betray my ignorance, I tried to steer the literary discussion away from the Romans and Greeks. We agreed on the merits of Borges and Ray Bradbury, but he didn’t care for Vargas Llosa. He won’t last, he told me, absolutely sure of himself. And like every Mexican I’ve ever discussed literature with, he recommended Chesterton when we started talking about Greene and Catholics. Early in the conversation, as a way of inquiring about my business in Villahermosa, he’d remarked that the town doesn’t get many foreign tourists. Most foreigners he sees are writers and intellectuals, he said, and most of them are on their way to Palenque, which was so on the mark that I immediately launched into my whole spiel about Greene.
He said he remembered the boats from Vera Cruz, and he thought that one still existed and had been turned into a restaurant. Garrido Carabal, the socialist strong man in the thirties, is still a hero to the people, he said. Not because he burned the churches, and not because he was a socialist, but because he introduced a breed of cattle that helped the economy in the thirties and is still important. Freedom of speech and religion? Both fine things, he said, if you have money. Not wanting, however, to leave the impression that he was a philistine himself, he made it clear that in his opinion Villahermosa is a cultural wasteland. They don’t even know what a symphony is, he told me, never mind want one. And like many Mexican parents of the middle class, he hoped that his son, who studies in France and has a Belgian girlfriend, never comes back to Mexico.
*****
The next day I hired a driver to take me to Frontera, and it may be that the unseasonably mild weather that had followed me from Vera Cruz undermined the effect, but I suspect that even with the usual heat, Greene wouldn’t recognize the first town he saw in Tabasco. There are no palm leaf huts to remind him of Africa, and the churches have been rebuilt. The huts are now made of the more durable and un-picturesque concrete block, and the churches are plain and practical. I wasn’t bothered by mosquitoes, and I saw no groves of banana trees or jungle on the highway. It’s cattle country now, thanks apparently to Garrido Carabal, all the way from Villahermosa to Frontera. The only trees were a few along the road that had a plum-like fruit that was in season. We passed a man on horseback standing up in the saddle to cut off a small bunch, and further down the road, a little girl sat on a branch, from all appearances as comfortable as a squirrel as she helped herself to the fruit.
In town the dock was fenced and the gate locked, but my driver talked the customs man into letting us through to take a look. The customs house looked like an old fashioned train station and might well have been there in the thirties, and I finally found the remnants of jungle. I could look up the river and see nothing but overhanging trees on either side, the highway Greene took to Villahermosa, but it’s also where the fantasy of reliving the thirties stopped. Back on the plaza, no vultures, no mosquitoes, no dentists. In other towns in Mexico, I’ve seen streets teeming with dentists, but not here. Frontera was just another Mexican small town, not unlike small towns anywhere in the world, even North America, or at least those that aren’t carefully preserved and all gussied up for tourists. Like Villahermosa, this was a commercial town, all business and totally unselfconscious. Some things, like the church and the plaza, were fairly new and well-maintained, and others, like the customs house, which was no longer useful, had been allowed to run down.
The driver and I sat at a table in a little place near the dock where an old woman poured the coffee out of a percolator on a gas stove. I asked him what he knew about Garrido Carabal, and he said his grandparents remembered him and occasionally talked about the time they burned the churches, but he knew nothing about it and had no opinion. Par for the course in Mexico. Business owners, immediately recognizing gringos as someone of their own class, will talk your ear off about politics, but cab drivers are more cautious. Or maybe more uninformed and less interested. In any case, on the way back we talked baseball. His son played Little League and was a pretty good shortstop, he told me, and he himself had been a catcher. First base, I said, making a throwing motion with my left hand to explain why. When we had to slow down once for highway construction, men came up to the car selling baskets of the fruit I’d seen people picking off the trees earlier. Baseball, highway construction, people selling fruit on the side of the road, grassland spread out as far as I could see, the occasional palm tree. Not romantic guidebook country, not heaven on earth, but not Greene’s hell either, as far as I could see. To me it felt almost like home.
Chapter Six: Chiapas
Here were idolatry and oppression, starvation and casual violence, but you lived under the shadow of religion--of God or the Devil.
The hills started about half an hour south of Villahermosa. Turkey farms replaced the cattle ranches, and we began to see red chiles laid out to dry on plastic tarps beside the road. It was no longer grazing land, but it wasn’t jungle either, and even if it had been, it wouldn’t have interfered with my comfort. The road to Palenque had plenty of twists and turns, but the trip was smooth going all the way and climate controlled, which is no doubt why, when I saw the turnoff to Salto de Agua, even though reason was overwhelmingly on the side of skipping it, I had a twinge of guilt.
Greene wasn’t interested in Salto de Agua or Palenque. He wanted to go straight to San Cristobal from Villahermosa, but there was no good road at the time and only unpredictable air service, so he flew on a mail plane as far as Salto de Agua. It was supposed to be no more than a brief stopover, but the rains stranded him, and after nearly a week in the middle of nowhere, he started to get stir crazy. He also worried that the Mexican authorities would become curious about why he was in the country. He was not the least bit interested in the ruins, except as fodder for his condescension towards archeologists, but archeology was the only plausible non-political reason for a gringo to be in the area.
The excursion turned out to be a disaster. The mule ride was much longer than the guide said it would be, and the town of Palenque Greene likened to a barbarous middle ages outpost. He made it sound like something out of Conan the Barbarian or Xena the Warrior Princess, but that wasn’t the worst of it. He became ill. He ran such a high fever and was so weak from diarrhea that he was taken to a nearby ranch owned by a Norwegian brother and sister, which for Greene was like being taken to paradise. He spent a couple of days there recovering, sitting on the front porch and commiserating with the Norwegians about the failings of Mexicans.
It was mostly time and money constraints and the impracticality of making plans at the last minute that kept me from making even a side trip to Salto de Agua. Hiring a driver again seemed extravagant. I would have had to take a bus, probably second class, and then decide after I got there whether to spend the night, assuming it was even possible. What if there was no hotel and no bus back until the next day? It was too risky, especially since my brother had just joined me, and while he doesn’t mind a little adventure, starting our time together with a potential disaster didn’t seem wise. But practicality wasn’t the only reason I had for choosing the easy road. I was under no fanciful obligation to myself to make the trip an exact replica of Greene’s, nor did I see the point of deliberately courting hardship or danger. For the most part, given the moral dimension of his agenda, and the conditions in Mexico at the time, the risks Greene took were unavoidable.
Nevertheless, I couldn’t help but wonder if I wasn’t playing it too safe. It was going to take two not even very tedious four hour bus rides to get from Villahermosa to San Cristobal. When we approached an Army checkpoint, I even hoped for a little Zapatista inspired tension, but there were no boardings, no inspections. For part of the way to Palenque, we were spared even the movie. About halfway through something called “Jane Austen’s Mafia,” the tape malfunctioned, and after half an hour or so of listening to static and watching horizontal lines, the passengers started to complain and the driver took the tape off and didn’t replace it.
*****
Palenque today is not the middle ages outpost of Greene’s account, but it still manages to be mean and aggressive. From top to bottom, it is not just a tourist town, but a town full of carnys. Every visitor is a sucker, and the vendors know it and don’t try to hide what they think. I thought of Greene’s reference to the “get rich quick beggars” at the train station near Mexico City. In Palenque, as Greene might say, everyone is a cynic. All they want is your money, and the quicker the better.
The decor of our hotel and everything around it was faux jungle: thatched roofs, Indian carvings, Indian names. The guests were about evenly divided between Europeans and Mexicans, and the pool below our room was popular all day long with both groups. Starting at the cocktail hour and continuing into the early evening, a marimba band played in the courtyard outside the hotel restaurant. We were in the land of tour buses and umbrella drinks.
Our first night there only reinforced that impression. We met a friend of a friend, an archeologist, at a place called Don Mucho’s, where it wouldn’t have surprised me to have run into the crew of The Love Boat, or to be more up to date, the winners of a Survivor challenge. It was packed with kids, backpackers and archeology students, all enjoying the strange contemporary ritual of traveling thousands of miles just for the privilege of hanging out with each other. Which isn’t fair, I know. Western travelers have always created a scene, circled the wagons, in foreign places, even, and maybe especially, bohemians, at least as far back as Lord Byron and Shelley. But no one would mistake the kids at Don Mucho’s for bohemians. They are tourists, even the bona fide students are tourists, and how they dress is the only difference between them and their older counterparts. It’s true that unlike their parents and grandparents on the tour buses, the kids all look incredibly tall and healthy, but their tattoos and body piercing, as sure as the floppy hats and cameras of their elders, give them away. Under the thatched roof of Don Mucho’s that night, they were entertained by the jungle beat of drums and the skill and daring of fire eaters, and it must be said that our archeologist friend seemed to enjoy every minute of it. Greene would have loved hating him. He even found it amusing to convince our waiter, for a few pesos, to drink a shot of flaming tequila. It was like being at a fraternity party.
The archeologist was our self-appointed tour guide and protector. He recommended the brand of tequila we drank and told us what was good on the menu. He also assumed that we didn’t read the newspaper. The owners of Rancho Esmerelda, a nearby farm and guest ranch recently seized by Zapatistas, were his “friends,” and he had absolutely no sympathy with the “so-called Zapatistas.” They tortured the workers, he told us, and I said nothing, but it was a word I didn’t remember seeing in news reports. “Beat up” was the term used, I believe. The archeologist advised us not to leave the bus station in Ocosingo. It’s a bad place, he said, which made me think of Greene’s confessor warning him about Villahermosa.
When the performance of a female singer began, he requested “Besame Mucho” and seemed to think it was an obscure song with which we might not be familiar. We were given the news, with no hint that it might be something we already knew, that Linda Ronstadt included it on an album of Spanish songs. I didn’t tell him she made two of those albums. Instead, minding my manners, I asked him about himself and learned that he has a law degree as well as a PhD in archeology. He has spent his whole career at Palenque, since the seventies, and his job, in addition to fund raising in the states, is to find new sites--“like Indiana Jones,” he laughed.
Greene saw no archeologists when he went to the ruins, and no tourists. It was apparently a real Indiana Jones kind of place in the thirties, mostly taken over by jungle, very little excavation. Sixty-five years later, the jungle has been beaten back to a safe distance, and the site is crawling with tourists, mostly Mexicans, but also many Europeans. It was difficult to not be in a crowd, but the archeologist, decked out in his uniform of khaki shorts and hiking boots, an ID like a backstage pass around his neck, did his best to give us an insider’s tour, and to be fair, he was a generous host and a good storyteller.
How accurate it all was, I couldn’t say, but we were told of the “Romeo and Juliet” tomb into which a young couple sealed themselves alive and died from dehydration. The woman died in a fetal position, but apparently had not been entirely resigned to the situation, since her handprints were clearly visible on the plaster. We also stood on the top of a tomb where the king mixed blood from his penis with corn so that a shaman could predict the future. We learned that there was intermarriage and trade between the Mayans and the Aztecs, that competing egos, that old devil pride, was the motive for ever larger pyramids, and that slash and burn agriculture eventually used up all the resources. The lecture was interesting and professional, if a little condescending, and despite the hordes of tourists, I was able to conjure up a little historical fantasy, the sort of thing you do as a kid, imagine the scene as it might have been a thousand years ago.
The tour softened my attitude towards the archeologist a little, but then, as we were walking back to the site entrance, he undermined any progress he’d made. All of a sudden he began to shout, wave his arms and point his finger at three young Mexican men who were sitting on a high ledge of one of the temples. Apparently they’d ducked under a rope to get to the forbidden ledge, and the archeologist ordered them to move back, all the while snapping his fingers and gesturing as if shooing flies. He also pointed with the exaggeration of a silent movie actor to the ID card around his neck and loudly announced his title. Too bad he didn’t also have a whistle. As he stood there in his short pants and hiking boots, I couldn’t help but think of John Cleese, except that there was nothing funny about this particular scene at the time. It was more like a deadly serious, excruciating example of colonial arrogance in a film about British rule in India.
The young men stood up immediately, but then held their ground. Their point was that the archeologist had no business snapping his fingers at them. They didn’t argue about being in the wrong. It was the archeologist’s manners that bothered them. A woman on the ground with a camera, perhaps related to them, came up to the archeologist and told him flatly that he was being too aggressive. Her point had no effect. He didn’t lower his voice or soften his tone. In fact, he shouted at her that the young men were showing disrespect for their heritage and contributing to the destruction of an historical monument. He had no intention of backing off from the manner he’d assumed, or maybe the point she made didn’t register. Maybe he honestly didn’t understand that they were simply asking him to be more polite, although that’s hard to believe of someone who has spent nearly his whole adult life in Mexico.
Very, very slowly, clearly not caring about sitting on the ledge, but wanting to save face, the young men backed off. The woman with the camera didn’t. Switching to English, she continued to have words with the archeologist and finally became so exasperated with him that she told him that he had no right to order anyone around because he was not a Mexican. A dubious point, clearly, one that might justify all sorts of outrages in the name of national sovereignty, but it was impossible for me to have any sympathy for the archeologist.
It was just one incident, but I thought I was beginning to understand why gringos, especially if most of them were as sure of themselves as our archeologist friend, might not be popular in the area. I soon learned, however, that my opinion, which I kept to myself, was not shared by everyone in our group. As we walked away, one of the young Czech women who had joined us on our informal tour expressed her solidarity with the archeologist. Of the Mexicans in general, she said, “They have no respect for their own heritage.”
*****
The zocalo in San Cristobal looks more Central American than any other plaza I’ve seen in Mexico, including Vera Cruz and Oaxaca. Many Mexican plazas have gazebos, palm trees, shoeshine stands, and marimba bands, but only in San Cristobal did I have the feeling that I was on a movie set, one designed to perpetuate stereotypes, and sure enough, the minute we set foot in the plaza we were swarmed by kids asking for money. It wasn’t begging. They were con artists. The kids wanted us to make a donation to their school. They showed us sheets of paper with their names and the name of their school above the signatures of previous benefactors, along with the amounts donated. It was a good scam. They looked more like school children than street urchins, and the signatures looked authentic. We fell for it.
As the kids jockeyed for position and pleaded with us, and as it began to sink in that we were suckers, we were able at first to use the list as a shield, to buy time with our study of it, but when after a few minutes the assault showed no sign of letting up, and was even getting worse as more children smelled blood, we gave in. It seemed like the easiest way to escape, and it probably was, but we should have known that no matter how generous our “donation,” and it was absurdly generous, we would be subjected to even more aggressive pleading from those who hadn’t received a cut. Just kids, no more than a dozen or so, none of them over ten years old, but it felt more like we were being pecked at by hysterical crows fighting over road kill, except that in this case, playing dead eventually worked. To get rid of them we had to shut down, not look at them and hardly move, play possum, and after a while they drifted off to look for easier pickings.
All but one little girl. She wouldn’t go away, wouldn’t stop whining and looking pitiful, all pretense of a “donation” abandoned. She couldn’t have been over ten, but we became so desperate to get rid of her that we tried to hide in a church. It didn’t work. Unfazed, she followed us in. She wasn’t the least bit embarrassed, but we were, so next we tried a table at the gazebo café in the center of the plaza. By that time she’d stopped whining and simply named her price and stared at me with her hand out. I was hoping the waiter would get rid of her, but she backed off just enough when he came around.
For some reason, it was me not my brother that she focused on. She simply stood there with her hand out and named a price for going away. I don’t remember the amount, but it wasn’t much, and I might have given in if I’d trusted her. Maybe not, though, since I was afraid that any sign of weakness would bring back the hordes, and besides, by that time I was in a pretty bad mood. It was a stand off. Neither she nor I even pretended that we weren’t irritated. Her pleading became more and more like a demand, and my refusals, when I deigned to notice her at all, became more and more abrupt. I began to think she might actually attach herself to me permanently, but finally, after the long face off, maybe as much as a quarter of an hour at the café, she decided to end it. “Chinga tu madre,” she said, and walked away.
That set the tone for me in San Cristobal. I never quite got over the feeling that the whole town shared her sentiment. Fuck your mother. She said it with absolute contempt. There was a purity about it, and about that little girl in general, that was unsettling and beautiful, a hard bright core of sincere hatred in her eyes and her voice. She had the makings of the perfect whore, I decided, or the perfect revolutionary.
We never saw her again, but that first day it was impossible to walk through the zocalo without being accosted by Indian peddlers, all of them women and girls. I hated it, but there wasn’t much else to do there except walk or stand around. It was usually impossible to find a seat at the gazebo café, and the seats weren’t too comfortable anyway, and there were no sidewalk cafes. With a beer and a comfortable place to sit, I might have halfway enjoyed the performances that went on throughout the day on a stage at one end of the plaza. Standing up, however, and with nothing to drink, the showcase of local talent and traditional customs seemed more like an interminable high school talent show. And standing still was always risky, even after the initial wave of peddlers subsided. No more than a couple of minutes after we dared once to stop walking, I was approached by a filthy young man with a squint eye who asked me if I wanted to dance. I was friendly at first, tried to make a joke out of it, but he stood much too close and was obviously a little crazy, or drunk, or both, and like the little girl, he followed us from place to place. He wasn’t as stubborn as she’d been, but he managed to run us out of the plaza.
The next morning, with the idea of making a tactical retreat and correcting our first impression, we ate breakfast with other gringos at an American owned “Mexican” bakery and café. We ordered croissants and latte and watched an old woman make tortillas behind what looked like a witness stand in a courtroom. She never stopped smiling, her silver teeth gleaming while Kenny G played discreetly in the background. A sign informed us that the tortillas were “not made with genetically altered corn,” and on the opposite wall in a glass case a multicultural shrine honored the Virgin of Guadalupe, Buddha, and Ho Chi Min.
It was just the sort of place Lonely Planet must have had in mind when it called San Cristobal a “bohemian, artsy, floating community of Mexicans and foreigners.” Not just a tourist town, in other words, a hip tourist town, which was not the case in 1938, or else Greene wouldn’t have liked it. And in so far as he liked any place in Mexico, Greene liked San Cristobal. Priests still couldn’t enter the churches, but at least they were open to worshipers, plus he was staying in an attractive and comfortable hotel, and even he couldn’t ignore the appeal of the mountain setting, the narrow cobblestone streets, and the colonial architecture. Still, none of that would have been enough if San Cristobal had been another Taxco, as it is now.
Not that he didn’t have problems. It so happened that he arrived in San Cristobal just after President Cardenas kicked all foreign oil companies out of the country and nationalized the industry. The move would cripple the Mexican economy, and the newspapers blamed all gringos, which made Greene’s walks through the streets of San Cristobal less than comfortable. The taunts and menacing looks were so bad that the usually fearless Greene began taking a Mexican escort with him wherever he went. But just the fact that he was singled out for taunting suggests how few foreigners were in the town, and no Indian peddlers or beggars swarmed him in the plaza. Most of the Indians he saw had come down from the mountains to observe Semana Santa. They ignored him, and he found their silence and seriousness impressive.
There are still pilgrims, of course, Indian and Mexican and no doubt foreign, but these days the overwhelming impression during the week before Easter is that the town is full of tourists, most of them Mexican, and judging from appearances, every bit as innocent as pilgrims. Near the end of the week the pedestrian only street that runs between the zocalo and Santo Domingo church was packed with middle class families, and they all seemed to be laughing, talking a mile a minute, and eating snacks. It was a street fair, or just another Sunday in the park, or at the beach, or in Orlando. There were also quite a few middle-aged and older Europeans around, most of whom had come on tour buses, all with short pants and cameras and without children. They tended to stay together in large groups, moving back and forth across the plazas like flocks of pigeons from one photo opportunity to another, an entourage of Indian women with amber for sale always trailing behind.
*****
Rancho Esmerelda is closer to Palenque than San Cristobal, but the incident there, which happened right before I left home, still serves to illustrate the ongoing tension in the state of Chiapas. All I knew about it was what I read in the papers, and the facts not in dispute were that Zapatista’s took the farm and guest house away from the American couple who owned it, and the Mexican government did nothing. Less certain was why it happened, but the implication in the accounts I read was that the Zapatistas resented the success of the Americans. Not only was the guest house popular, but the farm was apparently well on its way to establishing the viability of macadamia nuts as a cash crop for the area. Jealousy was inevitable, and to add salt to the wound, the workers at Rancho Esmerelda reportedly were paid more than the customary local rate.
It’s hard not to be reminded of Greene’s quiet American. The owners were former Peace Corps volunteers, which in itself doesn’t make them dangerously naïve idealists, but even if you applaud their project, and agree that it would benefit everyone in the long run, the results can’t be ignored. I don’t know that they were arrogant and high-handed like their “friend,” the archeologist, any more than I know that the Zapatistas involved were ignorant and intolerant thugs, but that’s the problem with Chiapas. Unless you have a vested interest, it’s hard to choose sides. Should we support the Catholic villagers who exile or murder evangelical converts in the name of tradition? Should we support them even when their local governments are not democratic and violate human rights, especially those of women? Chiapas is the poorest state in the country, and the Mexican government wants to pour money into the area to develop industry and tourism, which of course would undermine and ultimately destroy the traditional way of life. The Zapatistas on the other hand want less development and a more equitable distribution of land, which is also problematic, since most experts agree that even if the Zapatista plan doesn’t include slashing and burning rainforests, the last thing the Mexican economy needs is more small and inefficient farms.
The problems seem urgent and intractable, and to be a tourist in such a place can seem frivolous, if not downright immoral, but busloads of tourists, mostly European, invade not only San Cristobal but the villages around it every day. They come to see the Indians, and in the villages that are used to it and where tensions are not too high, the Indians are glad to be seen, even photographed, as long as they are paid for it. It’s also possible to visit certain villages in small groups with a guide, but striking out alone to explore the area is considered dangerous. The particular issue around San Cristobal is with the evangelicals, many of whom now live in slums on the outskirts of town, having been exiled from their villages by Catholic traditionalists. In those villages you would not want to be taken for a missionary, and needless to say, riding a mule through Chiapas for several days and nights, as Greene did in 1938, would not be smart. I never really considered going that far, but after realizing that my choice had been reduced to either a foolhardy adventure or a guided tour, I did think about not going at all.
I wasn’t interested in watching Indians perform their culture to me for money, but unless I wanted to risk my neck, it seemed to be the only game in town. So why not just bite the bullet and go to Chamula, the village where everyone else went? Besides, the tourist invasion is as much a fact of daily life in Chiapas as anything else these days, and wasn’t one point of the trip to see how things had changed? San Cristobal is not the isolated pretty little town it was in 1938, and the sooner I accepted that the better. San Cristobal is a tourist town, and the nearby villages are tourist attractions. That’s just how it is.
Nevertheless, I couldn’t quite bring myself to travel to Chamula like everyone else. The usual way, if you’re not in a tour bus, is in a van, arranged by a tourist agency or simply with one of the freelance guides who hang out around the zocalo. Less usual, but not really extraordinary, is by horseback. There and back is a half day trip, which is a lot of punishment for someone like me who can’t ride. I also wondered if it wouldn’t be a silly attempt to get some notion of Greene’s two days on a mule. In the end, though, I put both of those reservations aside. There was not much chance that we’d have to sleep in a native hut with rats for company, or come across mysterious black crosses in the middle of nowhere, but at least I would get a better view of the countryside, which silly or not would be closer to the way Greene saw it.
I was hoping to see a little wilderness, but it was more like a ride through a park. It was wooded and the nearby hills are beautiful, but we never lost sight of cleared land, and here and there we saw families working in small fields, and women and girls in pastures tending sheep. Our group that day numbered about twelve, and our guide probably takes a tour down that trail and back every day. As we rode past the women in traditional dress tending sheep, we must have looked just like the foreigners on horseback they’d seen the day before, and the ones they would see the next day, which didn’t, however, stop them from staring at us. Maybe it was just that we were their only diversion, but even so, the blank unwavering intensity of their gaze made it easy to believe that we were no less alien to them than the Spaniards had been five hundred years ago. Gringos might be everywhere, and Mexicans might rule the towns, but we were still aliens.
Our guide, Marcos, was an old hippie, an urban cowboy, and a showman. In his mid-fifties, he was lean and leathery, wore a beat up cowboy hat and sported a goatee. He likes horses more than people, he told us, which I’m sure Robert Redford has said in at least three movies. When we dismounted just outside of the village, he entertained us with a performance piece on the Chamula church and the history of the Mayas, and there was so much new age bullshit in it that I wondered how the rest of the group, all in their early twenties, took it. All were Europeans, but my guess was that they were not much different from American kids, and Marcos must have thought so too in what he decided might appeal to them and what he could get away with. He kept saying “we” when he referred to the Mayans, and he confided to us that when he lived in Colorado, he would ask the mountains for safe passage when he had to drive in bad weather. Everything has a spirit, and all spirits can help or hurt you, he said, which means of course that it pays to respect everything. In his cowboy hat and with his fluent English, he was one of us, but also, as he told it, one of them.
Like any good entertainer, Marcos knew how to spice things up and just how far to go. Not so long ago at festivals in Chamula, he told us, in order to commune with the spirits, everyone would get drunk on the local alcoholic beverage, including the children. Marcos participated and can testify to the beauty of those festivities, and he regrets that Coca-Cola has now replaced alcohol as the sacramental drink. It’s not true, however, at least according to Marcos, what Lonely Planet says about Coke being used to burp out evil spirits. What is true, how Coke could possibly substitute for getting drunk, he didn’t say, and no one asked. The group laughed, but a little nervously, when he included children getting drunk as part of the beauty of the experience. I had to admire Marcos. It was just the right amount of edginess for the tattooed college kids in their shorts and hiking boots.
I was not surprised to learn that he’s a city boy with a gringa ex-wife. He told me later that he grew up in Mexico City, married an American woman and lived for many years in Colorado. An old hippy entrepreneur, I decided, temporarily down on his luck. I could see him in an import business with his ex-wife, and I could see him fitting in as comfortably in Taxco as in San Cristobal, or for that matter, the Rocky Mountains, one of Greene’s “escapists” with his “hopeless freedom.” The freedom in this case to pray to mountains and escape to the hills to get drunk at religious ceremonies with the indigenous people. Which does not, of course, if that’s the whole story, earn him the right to speak of himself as Mayan, but when I thought of him and all of the hippies of thirty or forty years ago going up into the mountains to get drunk or stoned with Indians and groove on their religion, I was reminded of the Indians Greene saw sixty-five years ago who moved quietly in the other direction, out of the hills on Good Friday to lay pine bows on the altars of the recently opened Christian churches in San Cristobal. Were they any more Christian than Marcos and his hippy friends were Mayan? Perhaps not, but I suspect that they were more serious. Greene admits that he can’t imagine what the Indians he saw were thinking, how Christian they were in a European sense, but he is still moved by their piety.
Piety, whatever its context, Christian or pagan, is what makes the church in Chamula impressive. I really didn’t think that a place so saturated with tourists could have any serious effect on me, and that opinion was reinforced by the fact that you have to buy a ticket at the municipal hall before you can enter the church. It was also not particularly awe inspiring that the first thing I saw inside was the backs of tall Europeans. They were seen, however, through a dense fog of smoke, and the next thing I saw, coming out of the fog, was a procession of tiny musicians, all at least a head shorter than me, two heads shorter than the Europeans, marching in single file like a circus band in a Fellini movie. The music they were playing might have been beautiful to those European ears, or it might have been noise. What was certain, I felt, with no little surprise, was that it was not played for them.
We had just missed some sort of ceremony, and as the Europeans dispersed and I ventured further into the church, I began to see Indians sitting or kneeling on the floor. For the most part they were gathered around incense burners and scores of candles that were scattered in front of wooden cases, some as large as wardrobes, that lined the walls. In the cases, all with glass fronts, were icons, paintings or little statues of saints, along with an apparently random collection of sacred objects like safety pins, pieces of cloth, buttons, coins, glass jars and tin cans.
Something that looked like the wooden frame of a house took up a lot of the floor space, and there was a stage at the far end where an altar normally would be. But instead of an altar, or even a podium, there were two randomly placed metal folding chairs. No attempt at beauty, or order, or even cleanliness. The floor of the whole church was covered, or perhaps littered, it was hard to tell, with pine needles, and the glass in all the cases that held the saints was dirty. A conservative Catholic, someone like Greene in 1938, would be scandalized. It almost seemed like a deliberate perversion, or at least neglect, of a Catholic church. But that wasn’t likely. I neither saw nor felt any irony, never mind malice, in the faces of the people on their knees.
Marcos gave us half an hour or so to wander around the village before we headed back, and while we sat in front of the only café in the village, an old woman selling dolls came by. My brother had a camera with him that he hadn’t used because of the warnings from both Lonely Planet and Marcos, but as recommended, he asked the old woman if he could take her picture. She agreed for the price of two pesos, about twenty cents, and after watching her get her picture taken, and then studying the photograph later, I decided I understood the value, aside from needing the money, of requiring payment. It kept strangers at bay.
*****
On Thursday night we arrived at the plaza of the Barrio de Mexicanos fifteen minutes early and found it without spectators. No surprise, we told ourselves, this is Mexico. At least we knew we had the right night. Food stands were in place and open for business, an LP of the Brandenburg Concertos was playing over a loudspeaker, a Mass was in progress in the adjacent church, and stages had been erected on two sides of the plaza. There was even an unplanned diversion, a man on a ladder cautiously using a long pole to work on a fuse box, from which now and then sparks would fly.
The plaza didn’t get crowded until about an hour after the scheduled starting time, but even then we had to wait, and for a while it was fun. The food vendors were clearly volunteers, the mothers and grandmothers of the event’s participants, the food itself from their own kitchens, and the crowd was about evenly divided between upscale Mexican families with video cameras and Indians of all ages, from sleeping babies wrapped in shawls to old barefooted women. The Mexicans were boisterous and the Indians were patient, which was interesting for a while, but the crowd lost its novelty and the scene had long since turned tedious by the time a needle screeched wildly across the Bach LP and a bevy of little girls dressed like nuns climbed up on the stage. They marched across it as the home video cameras rolled and were followed by the twelve disciples and Jesus. The fake beards, heavy makeup and elaborate costumes made me think of comic melodramas at theme parks. The actors lip-synched the words to a tape that came over the loudspeaker, and they gestured and posed and made faces as if shooting a silent movie.
It soon became clear, however, that in the minds of the performers and for most of the audience, this was not just a melodrama. It was a ritual, more like a Mass. Everyone knew the story by heart and nothing was rushed and no detail was omitted. When Jesus started washing the feet of the disciples, my first thought was that it could easily be done symbolically. One washed pair of feet could stand for all washed feet. But that’s not how it was done. We watched Jesus carefully clean all twelve pair of feet, really clean them, toe by toe. The Indians watching this process seemed mesmerized, hardly moving a muscle or blinking an eye, as if the cleaning of each foot had profound significance, while all around them the Mexicans jostled for the best video angle.
It was after midnight by the time Jesus was betrayed by Judas, judged by Pontius Pilate, and thrown in a jail cell with two thieves. The cell sat right in the middle of the plaza. People could walk up to it, which many did as the crowd began to disperse, and Mexicans and Indians alike approached it as if “Jesus” was really Jesus. No laughs. No taunts. “Jesus” stayed in character. He looked glum, and the onlookers were polite, tentative but curious about how he was taking it.
The next day the plaza was miserably hot in the sun, and by the time we arrived every scrap of shade was taken. Unlike the night before, when no more than a smattering of Europeans could be seen, many gringos had shown up for the Passion, a mixed lot of young backpackers and middle-aged Germans with floppy hats and huge telephoto lenses. The biggest lens belonged to a woman who was either a professional or very good at looking like one. Wearing a black cowboy shirt and jeans, her face permanently clenched like a fist and her coarse blond hair tied back in a pony tail, she moved constantly and aggressively like a seasoned paparazzi. The scene in general was more aggressive and the crowd more diverse. The Indians had come back and so had the upscale Mexican families, but there were also many working class Mexicans, and gangs of teenage boys, their style an odd hybrid of zoot-suiter and rapper. The food volunteers of the night before had been replaced by roaming vendors of snow cones, balloons, and various kinds of juice sold in tied up plastic bags.
As always we had to wait an absurdly long time, and when the sentencing finally started, it was no less tedious than the Last Supper, and then we had to wait again for the march through the streets. There was no crowd control. I saw no policemen anywhere, and everyone jockeyed for wherever they thought the best position would be for the beginning of the march. I was so uninterested by then that if I hadn’t had so much invested in Holy Week, I’d have gone back to the hotel to read Larry McMurtry. But everything happens eventually, or at least that’s what you have to tell yourself in such situations, and finally, mounted Roman soldiers showed up and used their horses to push the crowd back.
Once we saw which street the procession was taking, we walked ahead and found a shady spot well in advance of the crowd. As it came nearer, and the crowd began to gather around us, we saw that the police had finally arrived. A policeman on foot led the way, followed by a patrol car, four motorcycle cops, mounted Roman soldiers, and Jesus with his cross, flanked by foot soldiers with spears, and finally Mary and her entourage. I found it hard, though, to concentrate on the procession because I was worried about a stray dog that had been taking a nap in the shade. He became confused by all the people who suddenly decided to gather on the sidewalk, disturbing his peace, and the drumbeat, quickly getting louder and louder, would have scared me if I hadn’t known what it was.
For a painfully long time, the dog couldn’t decide whether he should be in the shade on the high sidewalk, which was his natural inclination, or in the street, where it was free of strangers but uncomfortably sunny. I was afraid he was going to simply turn circles in the street from sheer panic, but after running around frantically with his tail between his legs until the very last minute, the advance guard of police only a few feet away, the drum beat bearing down on him, he finally made his choice, a good one. He leaped up on the sidewalk and made himself scarce, curling up snugly in a more or less unoccupied doorway.
We returned to the plaza long enough to see Jesus and the two thieves raised on their crosses. Kids were everywhere. They were perched in the trees, jammed on the gazebo, and sitting on bleachers erected on the main stage. The crosses were huge and the sight of real half naked men hanging on them was impressive enough to make me wonder what the kids were thinking. They were clearly fascinated, but probably not thinking about suffering, the sins of the world or salvation. I don’t recall ever seeing anything on that scale when I was a kid. The Baptist church I grew up in didn’t approve of spectacle and Disneyland was too far away.
*****
The town sponsors an event called the Quema de Judas, the burning of Judas, from which Judas has disappeared. It’s a chamber of commerce event. Good and evil are still present, but the Church is not, or God is not, as Greene might put it, and the point, aside from boosting tourism and civic pride, is to ridicule social evil (provided of course that it’s foreign in origin) and symbolically cleanse the community. It’s an ancient rite of spring that, like May Day, can be used for political commentary, and in 2003 the overwhelming favorite for the honor of being reviled and burned was the “terrorista” George W. Bush.
The municipal plaza in San Cristobal is a relatively small space. It may be fifty yards square at the most, and it’s enclosed on one side by colonial buildings and on the other three by modern faux colonial arches. As we waited for the inevitable late start, we were treated over the PA system to the soothing, professionally modulated tones of a radio personality. He told us until I practically had the spiel memorized of the wonders of San Cristobal: the natural beauty, perfect climate, unique architecture, and fascinating history. He told us how friendly and industrious its citizens are, and when he paused to catch his breath, he played us the town song, an inspirational jingle that could have been written by Barry Manilow.
By the time we’d heard the town song three or four times, the plaza had filled up with both tourists and those friendly and industrious citizens. We all stood shoulder to shoulder around twenty or so elaborate paper creations that hung like piñatas from a high wire. The wire ran right down the center of the plaza, almost from one side of it to the other. All of the entries were finalists in an annual competition. Some looked like modern sculpture, others like they belonged in a Mardi Gras parade. The prevailing style was thirties social realism and nearly all attacked Bush and the Iraq war: Bush with a sign around his neck labeling him a terrorist, Bush wearing a gas mask, Bush looking like Napoleon. I didn’t mind seeing Bush ridiculed. I thought he richly deserved it, but it did cross my mind that there might be a few local controversies worth bringing up.
As far as the crowd was concerned, though, this wasn’t about Bush, never mind villains closer to home. And certainly never mind Judas. This was about fire and watching something burn, and the crowd cheered when the firemen finally arrived. Handsomely decked out in shiny helmets, face masks and heavy protective clothing, they moved the crowd back a few feet and liberally doused each entry with gasoline. For some reason, the process took forever, and as the smell of gasoline began to invade everyone’s nose and the burning failed to start, the crowd started to whistle and clap with impatience. Meanwhile, the radio announcer was still droning on and on about San Cristobal and he played the town song again. The firemen took so long that they had to go back and throw gasoline on some of the entries a second time, which prompted many in the crowd to shout insults.
Finally, one of the firemen struck a match and tossed it at one of the double doused entries. Flames covered it immediately, and the crowd cheered as Bush’s face curled and dissolved. Another cheer went up when firecrackers went off, but that was nothing compared to the rockets. When the first one shot up out of a burning effigy, everyone gasped and stepped back. Luckily, they all fired up instead of out at the crowd, but my brother commented that firemen and policemen in California would be apoplectic at such a scene. The crowd was not more than eight or ten feet from the fires. Only bikers or high school kids, unsanctioned and out in the middle of nowhere, could get away with such a thing in the U.S., whereas this was an officially sanctioned event, and a wholesome family and date affair. I saw almost no Indians. Small children sat on their fathers’ shoulders to get a better view, young couples held hands, and teenage girls giggled and screamed. I heard nothing about Bush. Not everyone hates Bush, not even in Mexico, but almost everyone loves a fire.
*****
Greene reports that in 1938 Christ was led into the Church of Guadalupe in chains while effigies of Judas and his brother were hung on a cross from the bell tower. The church, built on a hill on the edge of town, can be seen from almost anywhere in San Cristobal. In Greene’s account, “Boys stood on the roof and made a racket with a “tin tray and wooden clappers” in celebration of the traitor’s death. Judas was “a hideous figure in a straw sombrero . . . [He] sagged greyly from the cross, a figure of unholy despair . . .” His brother was “a stout, stuffed figure . . .with a scarlet face.”
Judas’ brother? Greene passed it off as a novelty, comic relief, but I wonder what he would have made of the news from anthropologists that twins or doubles is a common theme in the cosmology of Chiapas Indians. At the Christmas celebration of the Zinacantecos, a people whose land is adjacent to Chamula, not one but two baby Jesus’ are born, and that’s just one way the tribe has modified Catholicism to suit its own needs. Culturally speaking, San Cristobal is a long way from the villages of the Zinacantecos, and there is no reason to think that Greene was seeing anything but the Passion on that Good Friday in 1938. Surely the priests would have sanctioned nothing else, but if Greene had ventured back into the hills, he might have seen the Zinacantecos observe Good Friday by carrying a large statue of Jesus around their church, or at least it would have looked like Jesus to Greene. It is known to the Indians as Saint Intierro, a god who lives under the earth and is often called the “The Buyer.” Each year “The Buyer” pays for the salvation of the Zinacantecos by allowing himself to be crucified by demons.
Jesus was a buyer, of course. Anyone who has attended Sunday school knows that he paid for our sins, and it might be argued that the Zinacantecos have at least preserved the meaning of Christ’s sacrifice. What does it matter that two Jesus’ are born and that the crucified Saint Intierro may not be either of them? What would matter to Greene, I think, is whether their religion remained “a problem in mathematics” or had acquired the concept of Christian love, whether their world view focused exclusively on survival, as if the cosmos were just one big protection racket, or on the power of Christ’s love to transform us.
Even among Mexicans in the towns it’s impossible to know for sure. Is piety a sign of love or a practical necessity? All day on Good Friday Jesus hangs from the cross in front of the Cathedral next to the zocalo in San Cristobal, and on Saturday, he lies in state. He’s not the same Jesus we saw in the Barrio de Mexicanos. This an El Greco Jesus, thin, pale and tortured, and the faithful stand in long lines to pay their respects. The day I was there some ate ice cream while waiting to kiss his robe, his crown of thorns, the painted wounds on his feet and hands. It was a mixed crowd. Men in suits and ties waited their turn with barefooted Indians. Most were reserved and moved on quickly, but some lingered and became emotional. A woman fell dramatically to her knees at Jesus’ feet and passionately covered them with kisses. Others moved reverently around his body, laying on hands. The children, for the most part, seemed more interested in the view from the platform than in the dead savior. They often stared back at the crowd while their parents knelt and prayed. One old man solemnly kissed Jesus’ forehead, made the sign of the cross, and then made change for himself out of the collection plate.
This El Greco Jesus was carried through the streets on Saturday night in the back of a flatbed truck, accompanied by dozens of men in black and white robes and pointed hats. My brother and I waited near the Cathedral for the procession to come back to us, and even from a distance we could sense a somber mood, like a funeral march, a real one, complete with grief.
We took up a position on the pedestrian mall, near two metal pillars, each about a foot and a half square and four feet tall. They were for keeping out cars. The crowd around us increased as the procession neared, but most people were following along behind rather than waiting. I had a clear view of everything, like a box seat, but at the last minute two German couples brushed by me on the run. They weren’t kids. They were mature adults, but they were very excited, laughing and shouting, having a great time. The men, already a foot taller than anyone else on the street, leapt up on the traffic pillars, teetered for a moment before getting their balance, and then snapped away with flashbulbs as Jesus passed by.
That brought me back, abruptly, to my first impression of San Cristobal as a too familiar movie set. What’s the difference between a movie set and a photo opportunity for tourists? It’s a tourist town, no getting around it, and I was a tourist. No getting around that either. A gringo tourist, far less innocent than the Mexicans who’d come to town with their families. My place was with the croissant eaters at the “Mexican” bakery, and when it came right down to it, no matter how intensely I hated them for five minutes, surely I had more in common with the Germans than with the hooded men following Jesus down the street. I couldn’t even see the faces of those men. They all looked alike, all held themselves and walked the same, a parade of extras, symbols of devotion for the faithful, a splash of local color for me and the Germans.
Nevertheless, there was a time or two when it was different, when Germans didn’t interfere with my forgetting who I was. Every evening in the plaza in front of the Cathedral, long tables were set up on which were placed rows of water glasses with spoons in them. A hot drink was served in those glasses, I don’t know what it was, but there was a choice between red and amber, and you ate tacos with it made of shredded carrots, cheese, pickled onions, and fermented cole slaw. Also available were already made cow’s head tacos, and as always, tamales and pan dulce. On Thursday night, the pounding of hammers competed with the clinking of spoons on glass. Carpenters were building the platform that the next day would hold the crucified El Greco Jesus. Like every night in San Cristobal, it was chilly enough for a jacket, and I found it pleasant, almost as I might have as a kid, to stand patient and unobserved in the middle of the busy plaza. On one side, workmen hammered and sawed in the dark; on the other, steam rose from the drinks at the long tables.
Epilogue
Mass in Chelsea seemed curiously fictitious; no peon knelt with his arms out in the attitude of the cross, no woman dragged herself up the aisle on her knees.
If you fly home and you’re reluctant to leave Mexico, just sitting at the gate in Mexico City with other North Americans can be depressing. North Americans talk loud and often, and they’re restless. They never just sit and wait. They talk on cell phones, they eat constantly, and when they’ve had enough talking and eating, they sulk behind newspapers or in front of TV screens, like kids forced to do something boring and stupid. Which is not just okay. It’s a good thing, one of those faults people like to brag about. Rulers of the world don’t have time to be idle or patient.
Given that, it follows that hating buses is almost patriotic. A plane ride may be a waste of time, and just as confining and passive, but at least it’s relatively efficient. The pain of doing nothing, of being in limbo, is shorter than on a bus. Even a new, clean, roomy, and comfortable bus, as most first class Mexican buses are, offers little in return for the added time spent in them. Who in his right mind would trade away twelve hours for more leg room and a free sandwich?
If you start in Oaxaca and you’re lucky it can take about twenty-four hours to get to Nuevo Laredo by bus. If it’s spring, what you see as you travel up the country’s backbone towards Mexico City is mostly dry hills, old buildings and poor people. In Mexico City, you enjoy a brief respite of green Volkswagen taxis, street performers at traffic lights, and trash along the sides of the roads, but then you’re back on the highway for more dry hills, old buildings and poor people, until finally you’re in the desert, and there’s still a long way to go. You’re still in Mexico, still in a place with an alien surface, hostile or romantic, take your pick, but now the hills are faraway mountains and there are no old buildings and no poor people. Just hours and hours of flat dry land.
My bus crossed the desert after dark, and until well after midnight, the interior lights prevented me from seeing anything but myself in the window, and my attempts to read were frustrated by a John Cusak romantic comedy on the TV monitor. But I didn’t want to read anyway. I wanted to stare out the window, and finally, after the last movie played and all the lights were turned off, I could almost see the landscape, and now and then in the distance, in the middle of nowhere, I did see little clusters of lights.
We approached Nuevo Laredo not long after sunrise, and it already looked like home. Heavy equipment dealers, chain link fences, prickly pear, mesquite, and the occasional palm tree. Sand blew across the highway, small piles of it gathering along the curbs, and I began to see new jacked up Dodge Rams and Chevy Sierras. In town we passed old brick houses with gray board porches and carpet grass lawns. No walls around them. We could have been in Dallas or Houston. Then the river, and the huge stars and stripes towering over everything. Crossing over and presenting my passport would be a technicality.
I wanted to be home. If I’d slept on the bus at all, I hadn’t noticed, and being able to speak without first translating to myself would be a treat. But I also didn’t really want to leave. I’d gotten used to Mexico. Greene talks about the human capacity for getting used to anything, even the most uncomfortable and squalid conditions, but that’s not what I mean. Or not all I mean. I’m no part of Mexico and never will be, the good or the bad. I don’t fit in. I’m the gringo on the street. But a certain kind of familiarity is possible, inevitable after a while, an attachment however slight, and it breeds affection, for warts and all, and melancholy sets in even before you cross the bridge.
On his way back to England on a German ship Greene meets a man named Kruger. If you travel enough, especially alone, you are bound to meet a Kruger sooner or later, men who are cut off for one reason or another from home, who have no money and no prospects, and yet remain certain that their fortunes will soon turn around. They know a friend with a deal, a woman who is waiting, a place where it’s all milk and honey. Kruger’s place was the Amazon, where, as Greene put it for him, “a man could live on nothing, without violence or hate, where what you planted always grew and the water was good to drink and the climate was kind . . . and there was nothing to worry about anymore for ever.”
Kruger had been broke and in prison all over the world. He’d been a soldier, a seaman, a farm hand, a construction worker. He was a big man, Greene tells us, who claimed not to be afraid of anything, scorned money, played with the children on the boat, and was liked by all the passengers for his “goodness.” He was also a deserter from the German army. He’d come on board escorted by two detectives, and the last thing he told Greene before getting off the ship, bound for a Nazi prison, was not to worry so much.
It’s not surprising that Greene, always expecting the worst, would warm up to an optimist like Kruger, but it’s curious that he would call him an “escapist.” It’s the pot calling the kettle black. One of Greene’s autobiographies is named Ways of Escape, an apt title for the life of an Englishman who chose to be an outsider at every turn: a writer, a Roman Catholic, and a married man who lived most of his life in a mild climate with other women. Greene’s style was more sophisticated than Kruger’s, and he had more money, but in his way he was also eager to escape the life he was born into and similarly obsessed with visions of utopia.
Which may be why he’s so hard on them. He’s easy on Kruger because he likes him, but as a rule Greene shows no mercy for the utopian dreams of tourists, expatriates and socialists. His agenda is to follow through on his boyhood epiphany in the school quad and experience hell on earth as a way of finding indirect evidence of heaven, the real heaven. Even as his Catholic faith waned later in life, he continued that quest. His trips to troubled countries, preferably when they were at their very worst, were anti-escapes into dystopias, and they continued throughout his life to affirm for him, if not a Christian heaven, at least some idea of goodness and his own capacity for empathy and compassion.
In Greene’s moral universe, escape from worry and struggle into a personal earthly paradise, no matter how human and inevitable the temptation, is to give up on yourself and turn your back on the rest of the world. It is giving in to the devil. The only “authentic” life is in pain, and the only “authentic” escape is death. Not a cheerful view, but there is consolation in the church, its rituals and its miracles. Greene spends a whole day in Chiapas searching out “San Miguelito,” a saint in a box reputed to cure the incurable and speak several languages. No matter that it sounds improbable. He is determined to see for himself: “I would go to any expense . . . how could one go on living later with the thought that fifty pesos stood between oneself and, well, revelation of some kind, divine or devilish, if the voice spoke?” Revelation implies relief, some sort of joy or knowledge, surely, that would last a lifetime, which makes it both seductive and scary. “Suppose there was a miracle, suppose out of some box a voice did speak . . . it was a horrifying thought that life could never be the same again; one couldn’t go on living as one had been living. What happens afterwards to the people who are present at a genuine miracle?”
After spending several hours in an open car on a road that he says was like a donkey trail, and then waiting for two hours, Greene is finally allowed to see “San Miguelito,” a small picture postcard in a tea caddy of Michael slaying the dragon. His description of the scene and his place in it is classic Greene. He’s the weary skeptic, suspicious of quick fixes, and the scene is tacky in an almost charming, even almost inspiring, way. Colored streamers, marimba music, fireworks, an old woman in sneakers, suffering villagers, and a shifty eyed saint keeper. Even pigs and chickens in the yard. The perfect place for a miracle, but Greene isn’t sure he wants one. “What happens afterwards to the people who are present at a genuine miracle?”
He never finds out. There was no saint in a box, no road to Damascus or Buddha’s thumb for Greene. Like most of the rest of us, instead of benefiting from a sudden revelation, he has to continue to muddle through. In his old age, as his faith waned and he began to call himself an “agnostic Catholic,” he looked for other means of consolation, but at his most devout, even though he never actually witnessed a miracle, the church was what made muddling through bearable, with its ritual, its various forms: the cleansing confession, the nurturing Mass, the inspiring images. He knew that other forms, whether socialist, Aztec, or capitalist, had the same purpose, but they lacked authenticity, and the fact that the church’s authenticity relies on miracles taken on faith didn’t bother him. He doesn’t say why. Why is reserved for the inauthentic: the elaborately adolescent and no doubt insincere Mexican greetings, the “puffery” of cockfights and bullfights, the “hideous” bright colors of the food and crafts, the obsessive mathematics of human sacrifice, the dreary socialist utopia.
Greene knows that Mexicans are obsessed with form, but he is determined to the point of willful evasion to separate the secular from the sacred, and to accept only the sacred as valid, which may be why he avoids making any connection between forms and time, except for one reference to the “humanizing” influence of the church over the centuries. But that’s historic time. Time in Mexico has always fascinated foreigners in its pagan version, as self-contained, outside of history. Except for Holy Week, when he was there, Greene never mentions the many religious observations and festivals of the Mexican calendar. Nor does he seem to notice that the daily routine is as rigidly formalized as the yearly. Mexicans may be justifiably famous for being late for every occasion, except Mass and bullfights, but the importance of time on a daily basis is hard to exaggerate: clerks in stores, as if prompted by some ancient memory of the danger of inexactness, will correct you if you say “buenos dias” even a minute or two after noon. Every hour is the time for something, la hora de ___, and it’s easy to see how faithfully the rules are followed, especially in regard to eating. The food counters in markets are packed at ten in the morning and deserted at noon. Restaurants are crowded and shops are closed from two until four or five o’clock in the afternoon. Stores are closed and streets are deserted after eight-thirty because everyone is home having a light supper.
It can be argued convincingly that modern influences have eroded the daily routine in Mexico, both sacred and secular, and traditional concepts of time in general, to such an extent that it’s no longer an important factor in the society as a whole. That Mexico is now a part of history. Nevertheless, the old forms, though weakened, still persist, and it’s pleasant to think that there’s a place in the world where it’s considered normal, even right and necessary, to pause in the middle of the day for a four course meal with friends or family, then talk for a while or nap a little until time to go back to work. Not just on weekends or vacation, but day after day after day.
For most North Americans, I realize, it would be unbearable. More tedious than relaxing, closer to hell than heaven. An old fashioned, outdated hellish prison, like traditional church services, like long bus rides, boring rather than consoling. A continuous cycle of the same old thing, like sinning, confessing, repenting, and sinning again, the intent being to maintain the status quo, which is not suited for the modern world. Forward and backward are what the modern forms allow. Progress is consolation, not circling back to the beginning.
I haven’t kept up with the first Mexican family I stayed with in Morelia. I let too much time pass before deciding to return and by then too much had changed. I regret that. I’ve lived with other Mexican families from time to time, but I spent only two weeks in that house, which is hard to believe given the fondness I developed for Alcira and her son Alfonso, and how easily I fit into their daily routine.
Not only had I never lived with a Mexican family before, I’d never even spoken to or written this particular family. The stay had been arranged through a service, and my only confirmation that the family knew I was coming, and when, had come from a last minute call I’d made to the service’s Florida telephone number. A woman who was annoyingly matter of fact told me not to worry.
Nevertheless, I did, and it didn’t help when the taxi driver in Morelia had difficulty finding the right street, and that when we finally got there, like most middle class Mexican houses, it presented itself as only a high wall and a gate. An attractive wooden gate, the branches of a healthy looking lime tree hanging over the wall, the whole neighborhood in fact looking perfectly respectable, even prosperous. To be safe, though, I asked the driver if he’d wait until someone answered the door. I tried to tell him I didn’t know the people, and I must have gotten it halfway right. He smiled indulgently, almost protectively, and nodded.
Alfonso opened the gate and knew exactly who I was. He showed me to my room and explained that his mother had gone to Mass. If I was hungry, she would make me something when she got back. The room was Spartan but not without its appeal. An overhead light, no lamp, a small yellow table that needed paint, and a comfortable enough double bed. From a little balcony I could look out on an orange tree in the back garden.
Alcira made me an avocado and cheese sandwich as soon as she got home, and when she asked me what I wanted to drink, I requested iced tea, which threw her and Alfonso into total confusion. They’d never heard of such a thing. I quickly told her I’d drink whatever she had, and I resolved at that moment to always say that, and as it turned out, I never regretted it. She brought out a pitcher of agua melon, cantaloupe water, and it was so good that I had to restrain myself from drinking the whole pitcher. Agua melon, or variations of agua fresca, watermelon, pineapple, etc, was served with every midday meal, and at night, for la cena, the drink was always cholocate, prepared by slowly dissolving tablets in hot milk, as often served with chicken tacos or quesadillas as with toast and strawberry marmalade.
La cena was always at eight-thirty, “la hora de comer,” the time to eat, announced not as news but as a reminder that indeed the time had arrived. I only needed to check my watch to confirm it. The time for la comida was less rigid, but certainly not before two and preferably by three, and by mutual agreement breakfast was waiting for me on the table after I took my shower promptly at seven. The schedule was agreed upon during that first meal, which I ate at the ridiculous hour of six. All it took was the iced tea incident to convince me, or perhaps remind me, that I wanted to fit in, and I wasn’t slow to grasp the significance of Alicira’s promptness in bringing up their daily routine. I responded in the most accommodating way as she courteously informed me of their habits and what options I had.
It was a routine I not only took to as if I’d been born to it but that I fell in love with. I arranged with Alcira to make my own coffee when I first got up, which was usually around six, and I would sit for an hour at the little table in my room and do homework or write in my journal. At seven I showered and got completely ready for school, then went down for my orange juice and cereal, or chilaquiles, or a scrambled egg and refried beans and tortillas. Alcira was always doing something in the kitchen while I ate, although frequently she’d come sit with me at the table. Her favorite topic was Alfonso, what a good student he was, how serious and responsible, and she told me she had a daughter in New York who was studying to be a dentist. She also quizzed me thoroughly about my family. One time the subject of O.J. Simpson came up and she told me she was absolutely certain that he was innocent. He was a good man. She could tell just by looking at him. Not only that, but she had an elaborate conspiracy theory that explained everything.
It was five minutes by combi, a minivan bus, to the school, or a twenty minute walk, and I quickly decided that I preferred walking. There was never much traffic to fight at intersections that early, and the last stretch was through el bosque, a large and pleasant park. Some mornings I had it all to myself, on others I’d see a class of middle-aged women in sweat suits doing aerobics. The school was in a colonial building on a pedestrian only cobblestone street. Kids often played soccer on the cobblestones; bearded men played chess in front of a bookstore coffee shop a few doors down; and smartly dressed women picked up their kids, all in cute blue and white uniforms, from the school next door. The school building had a courtyard full of hanging bougainvillea and a lawn in the back shaded by palm and eucalyptus trees. Nothing to complain about.
The Spanish lessons weren’t bad either. My grammar tutorial was held in comfortable leather chairs in the school café; the conversation tutorial was often spent walking around the town. At one o’clock I was free for the day, and rather than get back to Alcira’s before la hora de comer, I took advantage of the time to check out the town on my own, a museum or a market, or I might just wander aimlessly through the downtown streets or sit for a while in the park.
If I waited until two-thirty or three to show up for la comida, Afonso was usually there for his afternoon break from his summer job. Alcira would join us, and so would Pedro, a seminary student from Chicago who was there for the whole summer. The meals usually consisted of three courses: an appetizer such as avocado slices or some sort of tostada, a sopa seca, which is the pasta course, often rice, and finally a pork chop or a steak or a baked piece of chicken, usually with jalapeno soaked jicama on the side. And of course all the agua fresca you could drink, which in my case was plenty. After three or four days I decided I’d never eaten better in my life, nor could I think of any conceivable way to make it better.
On the practical side, the meals were a relatively un-stressful way to practice my Spanish and at the same time get to know the people I was living with. The pace was never hurried, and we often sat around the table and talked for half an hour or more afterwards. Learning Spanish was apparently a requirement, or at least a firm recommendation, for Pedro’s path to the priesthood, and although he’d clearly developed a rapport with Alcira and Alfonso, he seemed to like staying in his room a lot, had made no friends, and complained bitterly about his teachers, the other students in his classes, and the vagaries of the subjunctive tense. But he warmed up to the dinner table conversations. It so happened that he went out of town the weekend I was there, and when he got back, he entertained us with stories about visiting Father Tom in Guadalajara, an older priest who’d wined and dined him extravagantly, even to the point of taking him to a striptease show, about which Pedro seemed uncertain whether to laugh or be embarrassed.
Pedro also helped me communicate with my hosts, especially Alfonso. The rule was to speak only Spanish, and we abided by it with a fair amount of rigor, even Pedro and I when we were alone. But now and then the conversation among the three of us, Alfonso, Pedro, and myself, would become so complicated that translations seemed warranted. Alfonso knew a fair amount of English, and Pedro had a lot more Spanish than I did, so when we really got rolling, although I always tried to say it in Spanish first, we’d often go with whatever worked best. Quite often the conversation centered on money.
Alfonso was unfailingly courteous, but it was clear from the first that my trip seemed to him an unbelievable extravagance. I had no practical explanation for it. At his insistence, I did my best to give him an idea of my financial situation without getting too specific, and the information clearly made him envious and more determined than ever to somehow make it to the United States. His eyes got wide when I told him what I thought the average income was for a middle class North American.
By the end of the week not only was I completely hooked on the dinner table conversations, I was feeling so at home in general that I regretted having only one more week there. What it amounted to was an infatuation, and I hadn’t realized how little I knew about the family, or how much I’d idealized them. Early in the second week, Pedro brought me back down to earth a little. Alcira and her husband had owned a restaurant that failed, he told me, and he’d been forced to go to the US to look for work. He worked at a grocery store near Chicago, lived in an apartment with four or five other men, and sent money home regularly. He hadn’t been home for over two years.
The money Alcira’s husband sent, Alfonso’s summer job, and what Alcira got from the school was what she and Alfonso lived on, and if any of it came in late, as it often did, they had trouble paying the bills. All of this came in the context of the news that Alcira had a heart problem. The week before I came she’d collapsed in the kitchen and had spent a couple of days in the hospital.
Alfonso thought I was the luckiest person in the world, and now and then I could see in his face that his envy almost prevented him from liking me. He fought it and was always courteous, but after hearing the family’s story, I could see his point and why, at our dinner table conversations, he hadn’t shown much patience with my interest in Mexico. As far as he was concerned, there was nothing good about it. It was corrupt, poor, and exasperatingly inefficient even to a Mexican. End of story, and I knew that despite his courtesy, he’d cast me as one of Greene’s romantic fools. It was easy for me to talk about Mexico’s charm and local color. I could afford it, and I could go home.
He also decided that I was helpless, completely naïve to the ways of the world, and in need of constant protection. When he and his mother took me to the airport, Alcira went back to the car to rest, but Alfonso insisted upon staying with me until I got my ticket. I told him it wasn’t necessary. There was plenty of time, I had a reservation, and I was perfectly capable of getting on a plane all by myself. After all, I’d managed to get all the way from my house to his without incident, hadn’t I? And besides, I’d traveled in Mexico several times before without the aid of Mexican minders. But he shook his head and looked at me as if by now I should know better. “I will stay with you,” he said. “Remember, this is Mexico.”
Not all Mexicans want to come to the U.S. Not even all working class Mexicans. Between bus stations in Mexico City, a taxi driver told me he’d lasted less than a month in California because he’d rather make less money and sleep in his own bed. Like the whore in Taxco, he never gave the other side a chance to become familiar, just as most North Americans don’t. Fear pulled him back before he could go native.
Whether or not his is a minority view, many if not most Mexicans are clearly in love with North America, even if, or maybe especially if, they only know it from television. When I first met Ivan, he told me that his fondest dream was to one day walk the streets of New York. This side for Mexicans is the promised land, the heaven on earth we’re all looking for. It’s where they can escape into historical time, make progress, and shed the piety and the humility that keeps their own world stable.
I helped Alfonso get the forms for a program for Latin American graduate students at the University of Texas, and I learned later that he was accepted, but now it’s been over ten years since I’ve heard anything from him, or Pedro, or Alcira. I’ll never know if Pedro became a priest. Sadly, Alcira’s heart has probably given out by now, but I would bet that Alfonso did well in school and managed to figure out how to stay in the U.S. I suspect that the whole family is now in North America. Maybe the father was rescued from the cramped apartment and his supermarket job in Chicago. Maybe the daughter is a practicing dentist. Like most American families, they might be scattered all over the country. Chicago. Texas. New York. “Americans move a lot, don’t they?” my urologist friend in Morelia asked me once.
The United States won’t become Mexico. It will be the other way around. Monterrey is already Houston. God knows what Juarez and Tijuana are like. I don’t want to know. But all Mexicans will wind up over here sooner or later, without even having to cross the border. The other side will become the same side. Thankfully, though, it will be a slow process, and I’ll be dead and gone long before it happens, before all ways of escape from this side are closed by progress, before law and order prevails on all the roads, and before all Mexicans are finally, God bless America, just like you and me.
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