Mexico

  Father was so astounded at his mother’s words that he could not speak, but Mother, who was a Palafox and an important one now that her uncles and cousins were dead, said: “What a horrible thing to say!” but Caridad continued pointing at the shaft, now forever silent, and said in the kind of resolute voice her ancestor Lady Gray Eyes must have used when she decreed the destruction of the Mother Goddess: “It was an evil place and it had to be destroyed.”

  Now Father regained control of himself: “What are you saying, Mother?” and she told him plainly: “I was conceived in what was then the lowest cavern—the only place my father and mother could be together. The workers called it Caridad’s Cavern. With the donkeys that would never see the sun I lived down there, and I came up those dreadful steps only to carry silver ore on my head.”

  “But we built the cage,” Father protested. “Those ugly days are gone.”

  “And why wasn’t it built years ago? A hundred lives ago?”

  “These things take time,” Father López said. With a fury that surprised us, she turned on the priest and said with teeth clenching at times and her hands formed into fists: “You were worse than the managers. Where do you suppose they found their endless supply of Indians? Where did Jubal get the little girls who worked with me? From you priests in the villages, who sent them to the mines, told them that’s their work.”

  “Indians always worked in the mines,” Father López said, and for the first time I became aware that he was not backing down when she stormed at him because he was protecting his Church against accusations he had heard before. I was ten years old when these conversations at the Mineral occurred, and although I could not understand fully the complicated arguments of the four adults, I did see that Father defended anything that had happened at the mine, Father López championed his Church, Mother saw the Palafoxes as the people who had always known what was best for Toledo, while Grandmother Caridad said repeatedly that General Gurza was a far better man than they thought he was. At times I had the feeling that they were arguing to convince me, as the only uncommitted person in the group, and I listened with equal attention to whoever was speaking.

  Father López, whom no one had ever taken seriously, was especially careful to see that I understood what he was saying, for after participating in some general discussion about Indian rights or landownership, he would take me aside and say: “Can’t you see, Norman, that it’s the big landowners who give us the money to keep the cathedral working? They have a right to large fields because they know how to use them. An Indian? What does he do with his milpa?” That was the word for a little plot of land owned by one family, and I was hearing it a lot. “On his milpa he grows just enough corn for his wife to make her tortillas. But the big man grows more than his wife can use, and with the money he earns he supports the Church.”

  When Grandmother caught him talking with me she would drag me away: “Never believe a priest when he talks about anything but Jesus Christ. Everything else, he looks out only for his Church. And it’s the priests that threw us into the shaft.”

  As the discussions continued I saw that Father was listening attentively to both sides, trying to understand what forced López and Grandmother to see recent events in Mexico so differently. One afternoon as we had lunch outdoors at a spot from which we could see the beautiful aqueduct that one of the bishops Palafox had caused to be built almost two hundred years before, he said slowly, as if each word came separately to his mind: “How lovely they are, the old stone arches of our aqueduct. Carrying life-giving water from the pyramid to the cathedral—from you, Mother, to you, Father López,” and for a moment he held the two disputants by their hands. It was in that quiet instant, I can see now, that the idea for his powerful book was born—The Pyramid and the Cathedral, the two forces that had accounted for Mexican history up to this point: the ancient religion and the new; the Indian heritage and the importation from Europe.

  I think it must have been about three weeks that we remained there among the ruins of the Mineral, for the images of those quiet days live with me still: the tall smokestacks of the smelter breathing no more, the building in which the ore had been crushed silent forever, the great brooding pyramid, the arches of the aqueduct and in the distance the faint outlines of Toledo. It was the landscape of a fairy tale, just before the ogre comes thundering onto the scene to disrupt the dream.

  If I am correct in assuming that Father conceived the idea for his book during those three weeks in 1918, he certainly had a lot to work on, for after Father López and Grandmother had argued vigorously, Mother would suddenly remind them that it had been the Palafoxes who had brought civilization and Christianity to Toledo: “They found the Mother Lode and built the Mineral. One of them built the aqueduct. All the buildings you see on the horizon—they built them, too, the schools, the churches. Without them, Toledo would still be a collection of adobe huts.” Then she added an afterthought: “And we built the bullring, too, and the ranch where the Palafox bulls are raised,” and I could see that she considered the weight of that contribution equal to that of the cathedral.

  The desire of the adults to convince me of their arguments never abated, and in the fourth week this tug-of-war led to a dramatic experience, which I remember as if it happened yesterday. It occurred when Father López invited me to accompany him on one of his secret visits to believing Catholics in one of the villages north of the pyramid. We had a long walk in the hot sun, so that when we reached the village we were tired, hungry and thirsty, and I saw how the villagers, so poor they had almost nothing for themselves, scurried about to find food for us. Then Father López suggested that they might like to join him in a reading of the Mass. When they said: “That’s why we hoped you’d come,” there in the center of the village, with armed men on watch to flash a signal if soldiers who hated the Church approached unexpectedly, this little fellow, wearing no robes to distinguish him and with no cathedral behind him to lend him dignity, took out a little book that could have caused his death had the revolutionaries found it on him. He read the words I knew almost by heart; I had heard them so often with Mother. They meant nothing to me, but to the huddled Indians they meant everything, for when he finished, they clustered about to kiss his hand and place their own hands on the missal. It was an act of faith whose intensity I had never before seen, and when he indicated that the rude service was over, the men and women lingered with us to talk of the bewildering events of recent days.

  “Will the Mineral be reopened?”

  “His father says no.”

  “Who is the boy?”

  “He’s one of us. His grandmother is Caridad, you know her.” Indeed they did, and favorably, for they asked: “Will she stay at the Mineral?” and Father López replied: “In these days, who knows anything?”

  “I know something,” a man in white peasant garb said. “I was in Aguascalientes and the talk was that General Gurza, losing battles against the norteamericanos up on the border, is going to retreat back to Aguas and make his headquarters there.”

  “May God spare Aguascalientes if he arrives,” a woman cried, and several men crossed themselves, but Father López drew the informant to him: “Who said General Gurza would be bringing his trains south?” and the man replied: “Men from the north who had drifted down to Aguas to escape his soldiers, they rob and kill, you’ve seen.”

  Not wishing to walk back to the mine in late afternoon, when military patrols might be operating, we waited till sunset, and as I moved about the village I saw boys who were not much older than me carrying rifles, and any house that I entered at the invitation of the owners gave the impression of a little fortress. “We love Jesus,” one of the women told me, “and we’ll die rather than allow Gurza’s men to destroy our village and our church.”

  “Why wasn’t the Mass held in the church?” I asked and they explained: “It’s been nailed shut by the soldiers to keep us out, but we sneak in and say our prayers. But to conduct Mass there with all of us together at one
time is too dangerous.” When I started to ask why, a woman drew close, stared into my eyes, and asked: “Didn’t you people at the Mineral hear what they did at San Cristóbal?” When I shook my head, she said: “Gurza’s troops rushed in, caught people saying Mass, barred the doors and burned the place to ashes.”

  “The people, too?” I asked, and the woman nodded, as did the others.

  In the darkness Father López and I walked back toward the pyramid, then cut to the east to find the Mineral, where my anxious family demanded to know where I had been. When I said: “Saying Mass with Father López at San Isidro,” my mother cried: “Irresponsible, subjecting a boy to such risk,” and Grandmother said to Father López: “Serve you right if they’d caught you. A priest showing off to a small boy,” but when the excitement died, my father told me quietly: “You did right. You ought to see everything. It’s your country, too, but I wouldn’t do it often. There are people out there who hate priests.”

  This melancholy time in our lives was dramatically interrupted by the arrival of a high-powered team of mining experts from Nevada who wanted to explore the lower levels of the Mineral to ascertain whether renewed mining would prove practical. Bringing in their own cage, great spools of light-weight wire cable and a surprisingly effective little donkey engine, they set up what they called a jury rig over the shaft and descended in twos and threes to inspect the caverns. Their activity excited Grandmother so much that she camped by the jury rig to watch the fall and ascent of the cage. On the fourth day she grabbed me by the hand: “They said we could go down,” and into the improvised system we climbed, listened to the whistle and started the swift plunge to the depths.

  I had been in the lower caverns only once, when it was crowded with Indians and donkeys, and to see it now in its vast emptiness was eerie. “This is where the men slept who never went up the steps,” Caridad explained. “This is where I stayed when I was too tired. We kept the donkeys over there.” When she was finished with her story, I had a clear understanding of what life had been like in the caverns, but during a quiet spell, while the Nevada men were probing the spots where work had ceased with the dynamiting of the shaft, Grandmother made plans with the engineers whereby she and I would climb to the older cavern above us and wait there for the cage to pick us up at the end of the workday.

  “I want you to know what it was like, Norman. Especially the stairs,” and with her climbing the rock-hewn steps she had known so intimately, and holding my hand, we started up. I kept my left shoulder pressed against the smooth rocky wall of the shaft and my feet as close to the left as I could. It was a terrifying experience for a boy of ten, and as fear began to grip me Caridad comforted me: “Don’t look up. One foot at a time. Shoulder to the wall,” but I could not obey her, for the speck of light was so far above and the treads of the steps so small that I panicked, wedged myself against the wall and whispered: “I can’t.” When she turned back to encourage me, she saw that I really was unable to move, so great was the terror that gripped me.

  She did not attempt to move down to my level; the tread where I stood was too small for that, but she did manipulate her own feet so that she could reach back and assist me. “We’ll take it one at a time,” she said, in a voice so comforting that I felt I had been saved, but when she wanted to pull me up, I cried: “I want to go down,” and her hold on my arm tightened. With an almost fierce determination she said: “Climbing up is easier. Going down I’d not be in front to help.”

  Paralyzed by fear of the darkness below and the frail wisp of light from above as it bounced off irregularities in the rocky walls of the shaft, I was unable to climb either up or down, but then came the reassuring voice of the old woman who had done it a thousand times, with a heavy load balanced on her head: “Norman, it was always easier for me to climb up than down,” and with her steady hand guiding me I resumed my upward movement, one cautious step at a time, while my heart pounded furiously.

  In that way we reached the spacious safety of a middle cavern, where we left the stairs and I rejoiced at the freedom of movement I now had. Eager to prove that I had lost my childish fear, I almost leaped here and there, even going to the edge of the shaft to inspect the dreadful stairs I had just climbed. As I stood there, my grandmother said an amazing thing: “When I’m dead they’ll tell you about the time an evil man plunged down from the spot where you’re standing. They’ll say they always thought I had pushed him.” She paused, took my hand and said: “I did,” and in a rush of words she added: “There are times when you must. When evil men will not listen.”

  “Must do what?” I asked, and she said: “Whatever has to be done.”

  Since it would be more than an hour before the Nevada men would be signaling for the cage to haul them back to the surface, we had ample time to explore the cavern that had been the principal center in Caridad’s early days, and when we finally rested on a pile of rocks she said: “You hear Father López and your mother talk about how they tried to help the Indians This is how,” she said as she pointed at the cavern bathed in pale light. Grimly she added: “This is how we lived, Norman, and if anybody asks you, you tell them.”

  She spoke for some minutes without interruption about the plight of the Indians, and then she surprised me by saying with vehemence: “It’s all wrong, you know, for us to speak of me as an Indian and of Father López as a Mexican, and you and your father as norteamericanos. We’re all mestizos, half and half, and we should recognize that.”

  When I asked her what she meant, she explained: “When Spaniards came, who came? Men and women and children? No, only men. Are they going to live alone all their lives? No, no! They marry Indian women, like your Grandfather Jubal marry me. So from the beginning, all mixed, all half and half. I’m not pure Indian. I doubt I ever saw a pure Indian in all my life. All mixed.” I said: “Mother tells me her Palafoxes married only other people from noble families in Spain. She says she’s pure Spanish.”

  “She like to believe it, but book says: ‘All big Palafoxes in church marry Indian girls.’ I think so.”

  “Why are you so angry with Father López?” I asked and she replied: “Not him. He good man I think. But it was other priests put us Indians here in the caverns. They tell us it’s our duty.” Suddenly she stopped, shivered, and looked at the shaft with all the fear I’d displayed only fifty minutes before: “When a woman with a basket fell from broken steps up there, she start to scream, we run to where you are, and see her face as she falls past us. We see her eyes, her terror, sometimes two a week. If she have no one who wants her, they bury her back of empty caves this level.”

  We sat in silence and then her keen ear detected movement below; the Nevada miners were sending signals upward to inform us they wanted to remain below, probably for more exploration, and when Caridad heard this she seemed to accept it as a fortunate respite, for she took my hand as we sat near the gaping hole and said in her musical Spanish: “Norman, you mustn’t believe what they say about General Gurza. Yes, he does kill people sometimes. Yes, he does burn hateful buildings. But he is a good man. Trust me, Norman, he’s a good man.”

  Since this was too ridiculous to accept, I said: “Father, Mother and Father López, they all say he’s a monster. I hate him.”

  Tugging on my arm, she reprimanded me: “Don’t listen to them. Make up your own mind,” and she continued: “Mestizos, people like me, we all cheer for him. He does our work for us—punishes the rich, drives out the priests, helps the poor. When the norteamericanos try to catch him, he makes fools of them. He is our hero, Norman, and you will never understand your Mexico if you accept rich men’s lies that he’s a bad man.”

  For half an hour she told me of life in the Indian villages, of the misery of peón families who tried to grow a little corn. She explained how the arrival of Gurza’s train in an area gave the little people hope and they prayed for his successes.

  “You’re against the priest, the cathedrals, and now you say you’re praying.”

  “
We pray to the Virgin of Guadalupe, not the priest who asks us for money in the cathedral.”

  The nice distinctions she was making were too confusing for a ten-year-old boy to untangle but what I do remember was her quiet insistence that General Gurza was a friend of the real Mexico, a point that she hammered home some days later when she privately learned from her Indian friends that Gurza’s train was heading for Toledo and might arrive within the next days. To my mystification the women said that he was coming not from the north, as usual, but from the southeast. That night at supper Father said: “I hear that monster Gurza tried an attack on Mexico City but has been driven off. If he retreats this way, he’ll be in an ugly mood,” and he warned us to beware.

  The next day government scouts reported that Gurza was approaching the city, and my parents started boarding up our home and hiding anything of value, but Grandmother was behaving like her usual calm self. While the others were occupied with protecting our property she took me by the hand and started walking along a footpath by the aqueduct into the part of Toledo occupied by the poor people. There for the first time in my life I saw the miserable little houses shared by several families, the grown children with no shoes, the dirty pump from which everyone took drinking water, and the misery of the poor in a nation at war. But as we talked with women that Caridad knew, I got the overpowering feeling that they were hoping that General Gurza would come roaring into their city, for then their lot would be improved. He was their hero, and as I moved among them I could hear them singing the latest ballad composed in his honor:

  “Brave General Gurza!

  He takes his train everywhere.

  Good General Gurza!

  He fights our battle for us.

  Kind General Gurza!

  He gives money to the poor.

  Brave General Gurza!

  He don’t fear nobody.”

  Then, as the rough words with the awkward rhymes increased in volume, I heard a rumbling noise from the southeast corner of the city and men came running to inform us: “General Gurza is coming! His train is at the bend!” and before my grandmother could take me out of danger, the battered train, survivor of a dozen attacks by government troops, Mexican and American, was chugging into the very area where Caridad and I were trapped by the milling peóns, and I was terrified.