The coyote’s laugh, if you’ve never heard it, sends real chills down your spine: Gingerich sees groups of the beasts on the hilltops, gathered in circles, as if they are holding a meeting before attacking the lost, helpless gringo tourists in their pink jeeps. The coyotes pour down crags and hillsides; no one on the coast road can move now, the animals are much faster than any old taxi or new Mustang: a knot of silence, no one dares to blow his horn out of fear of attracting their attention, so the traffic jam stretches from the new hotel Señorita Mariposa on the site of the old Navy base of Icacos to Elephant Stone Point on the Caleta peninsula, and at the amusement park the noise of the squirting fountains and hoses and the artificial waves isolate the happy families from the horror around them. Don’t tell me that all this isn’t cuter than the beach, more comfortable and modern, says Reynaldo, who imagines himself in the Cathedral of Amusement for Suburban Man, Eden Regained! Matilde, who is very Catholic, follows him intuitively because in nature it’s just like that, well, you know, that’s where Adam and Eve sinned, right? Our First Parents were chased out of there by angels snapping towels, just like Pepito snapping his towel at the parrot, who now reappears as a bird of ill omen, screaming on top of the slide: Bastards, It’s All Over, All Over, Bastards, which Pepito had taught his little parrot at night under the covers. Soak Your Ass for the Last Time, You’ll Be Drinking Through Your Ass Soon, My God, make him shut up, Rey, what will people say, at least no one knows it’s our son or our parrot either, said Matilde who prefers to look toward the pool, where the waves were beginning to stir again and her Reynaldo, what? Because the parrot from his forest perch is screeching Matilde Rebollo is a Whore and Reynaldo Rebollo is a Faggot, ay ay ay, Matilde starts to faint now for sure, everyone would find out, her husband stopped her, the fat matron gets away from him, falls into the pool, and there she becomes entangled with the insecure bodies of those of her class enjoying their tropical vacation, amusement paid for out of savings, mindful of advertisements, and the considerations of prestige: both of them, Reynaldo and Matilde Rebollo, hugging in the pool, amid one hundred and thirty-two other bodies defined by centuries of monastic pallor or canefield ringworm, and our Pepito, where, for God’s sake, is he? why don’t we see him? why can’t we get out of here? How slippery this is getting, Rey, the waves are getting higher, isn’t it too much now? Why don’t they stop it? Answer me, Rey, but Reynaldo was dragged to the eye of the cyclone along with the other one hundred and thirty bodies submerged by the artificial waves that kept them from moving freely, tossed like corks, less than corks! The pounding of water on their heads, once, again, again, and again and again, the machines manipulated by the Orphan Huerta down in the underground control room, the cascades of broken glass hidden in the slide water, the screams, the astonishment, and once again the silence.
The cockroaches checked out of the hotels of Acapulco that morning, the coyotes moved in to devour the asphyxiated bodies, the bodies with dilated pupils, clenched teeth, foam-covered mouths, and that smell like almonds; and the cadavers with acid guts, burning tripes, metallic tongues, and blue vomit. Behind the pack, the dispossessed from the hillsides reunited by the Four Fuckups along with Angel and Angeles, who told the homeless: Do unto them what they did unto you: Acapulco belongs to two nations, tourism below and squatters above, okay, now come down, and this young fellow here, Hipi Toltec, has been training the same coyotes they used against you.
Angel, an old connoisseur of garbage, had laid out, as if he were setting up an open-air market, bottles of Heinz ketchup, Cap’n Crunch and Count Chocula cereal boxes, bottles of relish and rancid mustard, rubbery bread, and plastic chickens, McDonald’s murderous hamburgers, the sickly concoctions found in gringo refrigerators, open bags of North American garbage food, chips, Fritos, Pop-Tarts, gobstoppers, smurfberry crunch, pizza-to-blow, and the spilled syrups of Coke and 7-Up and Dr Pepper, and side by side with the most grotesque examples of this antifood of suicidal madness—the balloon, fart, prepared, and greasy heart foods of the North—he put deodorants like Right Guard, the soaps and shampoos of Alberto V05, Glamour and hairspray and Dippity-Do jell, and capillary dye, Sun In, tanning creams made by Sea & Ski, and the most secret element of all, vaginal ointments—lemon-scented, strawberry, raspberry—menthol condoms, eucalyptus suppositories. All so the coyotes could smell them, know one from another, and attack those who used, digested, sweated, wore, put up with, or who were all this. All this escapes exclusive receptacles to join the shit in the sea and the national refuse of fried-food stands and plastic Virgins of Guadalupe, sumptuous zapote rinds and soda bottles used as nesting places for small mice and snakes; the garbage of the North comes out to join the garbage of the South and the coyotes are trained and fed by Hipi Toltec with pieces of his skin. Egg took charge of poison and gas logistics, the Orphan Huerta was responsible for drains and pumping stations, to say nothing of (he had a personal interest in it) the destruction of the amusement park: he spends half an hour looking at Pepito’s castrated cadaver, his balls cut off by the glass sent down the slide, and the Orphan, a crooked grin on his face, stands there watching him: so you had a mom and dad, did you, you little bastard, so you lived in Nouveau Heaven, and had your little vacations in Aca, so you had lots of Ocean Pacific swimsuits and lots of rubber balls, well now you’ve got glass balls, you little bastard!
The entire spectacle was conceived and directed by Angel and Angeles Palomar, as were the mottoes, especially the gigantic sign that now at midday is burning brightly on the decrepit walls of the last Sanborn’s in Acapulco:
SHIT MEETS SHIT
SHEET MEATS SHEET
LONG LIVE THE SWEET FATHERLAND!
LONG LIVE THE CONSERVATIVE REVOLUTION!
5
Christopher in Limbo
1. Your House Is Still So Very Big
While all this was going on in Acapulco, Don Fernando Benítez was flying over our mutilated nation: from up above, he saw it as an island in a gulf of shadows.
Then, as they landed, he understood that he was in a dry, silvery valley, surrounded by dark ravines that left it in eternal isolation.
The helicopter landed on a mesa, and Don Fernando thanked the pilot, an employee of the National Indigenist Institute. The pilot asked him if he was sure he didn’t want him to come back, but my Uncle Fernando Benítez said no; perhaps he no longer had the strength to climb all the way up here, but getting down would be a different matter. Right, said the pilot with a crooked grin, going downhill’s always easier.
The inhabitants of the mesa gathered together when they heard the noise of the propellers and dispersed without making a sound as soon as the chopper landed. Perhaps they thought the pilot would be leaving instantly to return to the Salina Cruz base, and that they, living at this isolated altitude, could return to their normal life.
The wind came and went, ruffling their tattered clothes.
A high, burning sun returned. The Indians looked at him without closing their eyes. But the wind did make them close them.
He saw a people in rags.
When the pilot from the NII disappeared into the distance of the southern Sierra Madre, my Uncle Fernando walked quickly toward the group of Indians which by then had begun to scatter. He raised his hand in greeting, but no one responded. In more than thirty years of visiting the most isolated and inhospitable places in Mexico, he had never seen such a thing. Uncle Fernando had spent half his life documenting Mexico’s four or five million Indians, those who were never conquered by the Spaniards, who never allowed themselves to be assimilated into the creole or mestizo world, or who simply survived the demographic catastrophe of the conquest: there were twenty-five million of them before Cortés landed in Tabasco; fifty years later, only one million were left.
My Uncle Fernando looked at them respectfully, with his intense, ice-blue eyes, as fixed and piercing as two needles behind his round, gold-framed glasses. He took off his worn straw hat, which was wide-brimmed and sweat-stained—his good-luck
charm on these journeys that took him from the Tarahumaras in the north, who were tall and who would run like horses over the roofs of Mexico, to the sunken remains of the Mayan Empire in the southeast, the only place in the world where each generation is shorter than the previous one, as if they were slowly sinking into the sinkholes of their forests.
He always said and wrote that all the Indian nations, from Sonora to the Yucatán, had just three things in common: poverty, helplessness, and injustice.
“You are no longer owners of what the gods bestowed upon you,” he said in a low voice, stretching out his hand toward the first man to come near him that morning on the sunny, cold plateau.
But the man went on.
My Uncle Fernando did not move. Something he could not see told him, stay right where you are, Benítez, don’t move a muscle; easy now. The clouds that surrounded the plateau like a cold foam moved one flight lower and shredded in a hoary wind that combed through the dried-out fields. The men in rags took up their wooden plows, shook their heads, shrugged off the potbellied flies that tried to land on their faces, and began to plow, they were slow but they seemed to be working more quickly than usual—they raised their faces to the sun and groaned as if they knew that midday would arrive today sooner than ever—with clenched teeth, as if enraged about the time they’d lost. The noise. The wind murdered by the helicopter.
My uncle did not move. The groups of ten or twelve men plowed in perfect symmetry, they plowed as if they’d erected and then decorated a sacred talus; but each one of them, when he’d reached the edge of the field with his plow, awkwardly butted against the rocky soil and the twisted roots of the yuccas and had to make a huge effort to get his plowshare free, turn the tiller around, and plow in the opposite direction—as if he’d never seen the obstacle.
The rest was pure clockwork: the sun was the minute hand, the rhythm of work, the noise of feminine hands slapping the tortilla dough. The only irregular element was the passing of the hasty clouds that fled toward the sea; the wail of the babies clinging to their mothers, almost ripping off their old rebozos, the ragged blouses that had once been white, stiff, and embroidered—even the roses on an Indian blouse ended up wilting in these parts, my uncle said to himself: in other villages, kids are like little animals, free, daring, and happy; in Mexico, who knows why, kids are always beautiful and happy; a country of sad men and happy kids, said Fernando Benítez to himself without knowing why, at this the stroke of noon, surprised by the formula that came into his mind and which he wrote down in his notebook in his minuscule, illegible scrawl.
The children here cling to their mothers, incapable of leaving them, and the women shoo away the flies that drink up their babies’ eyes.
He put the notebook in one of the pockets of his guayabera and shook his head, in just the way the Indian farmers shook the flies off their faces. He shook his head to free himself of that formula which kept him from understanding the mystery, the ambiguity of this land inside Mexico, the seed of Mexico, but so totally alien to the white Mexico with blue eyes, of the Nouvel Observateur and Time, and BMWs, toothpaste, toasters, cablevision, periodic checkups in Houston clinics, and the imminent celebration of the Quincentennial of the Discovery of America—a fact totally unknown by the men, women, and children he was contemplating: an undiscovered population unaware that it had ever been discovered, a date, an enigma imposed on it by others.
The men, women, and children he was contemplating.
And now hearing: they began to wail something in a language my uncle, abandoned on the insular crown of the mountains, had never heard before, something like Zapotec, he thought, he was going to write it down, but he realized he shouldn’t lose even an instant in writing, that his eyes were his uncertain guides, helped powerfully by the thick dioptric lenses in his glasses, but they, too, after all were bathed by light, not permanently separated from light, screw that, not yet, he said to himself: my Uncle Fern, a bantam rooster, a fighting cock, almost eighty years old, sprightly, short, but straight as a die, loaded with memories, romantic adventures, diabolical jokes, and bragging arrogance: my Uncle Fernando Benítez, whom your worship the reader will get to know very well because in my prenatal life he was my firmest ally and the nemesis of my horrid Uncle Homero Fagoaga, who in the very instant of my conception excrementally plowed the air over the Bay of Acapulque.
Now my Uncle Fernando was listening to that impressive music wailing, which had no other purpose than to greet the sun at its zenith: the Indians, high noon on their heads, the blazing sun of the tropics, a desert in the clouds, first close to their hands, then to their naked shoulders and burned faces, finally as straight as an arrow aimed directly down onto the top of those heads, covered in black, straight hair, the heads of the Indians of the mesas.
They stopped. Time belonged not to them but to the sun.
It was only an instant of raised faces and hands stretched forward—not to protect themselves from the sun but to try to touch it. From wherever they might be—the fields, the entrances to their adobe shacks, a sonorous well like the bell missing from the church in ruins, here there was no priest, shopkeeper, teacher, or doctor (in the modern sense, noted my uncle scrupulously)—the men, women, even the children helped by their mothers tried to touch the sun without averting their eyes from it. No one protected his eyes. Midday passed as it had come: an instant now lost forever.
The cloud banks around the plateau came down another step. Now it was possible to see the other side of the extremely deep canyon, to see another frozen plateau on top of one of the thousands of extinct Mexican volcanoes.
Another tribe had gathered there, right at the precipice. My Uncle Fernando walked as far as he could, until the tide of clouds kept him from going any farther. The people on the other shore were too far away; he could not hear what they were saying, although he could guess what their gestures meant. Dressed in white, with starched, shining shirts and trousers, these were a different people, not the abandoned tribe my uncle had perhaps just discovered—why not? as astonished as Cabeza de Vaca must have been when he discovered the Pueblo Indians—but a people who had connections outside their village: they were waving their arms as if they wanted to bridge the gap between their village and this one: they stretched out their hands. They were smiling, but there was anguish in their brows: they didn’t want to frighten him, that’s all.
He turned his back on them. It made no sense to push them into an impossible communication. They would say nothing to each other. He sat down to eat the tacos wrapped up in napkins he carried in his knapsack; a drink of water. He listened. The music from the throats of the tribe lingered on, hanging sonorously on the mountain peaks for a long time after silence had returned to the earth, interrupted only by the punctuation of a baby crying. He looked. The gesture of the hands greedy for sun remained sculpted in the air an instant longer than the flesh that had made it. The silence was stronger, more persistent than the wails of the baby; but even more powerful was the image of this place that he began to free from all similarities with anywhere else.
When afternoon began, the ten- or twelve-year-old boys turned out to guide their elders in the plowing and sowing: they stumbled from time to time because they still did not know how to set the pace with their fathers, but the boys guided their fathers in the same way a father helps his son take his first steps. All, young and old, leaned on the plow staffs, long or short, that also served to split the earth. And the small boys—he saw and understood immediately—cradled their mothers.
He smelled. In the mountain afternoon, near and secret smells displace the vast cargo of the passing wind—its storms and errant flowers. As the sun sinks in the distance, the earth withdraws into itself, snuggles under its covers and smells itself in its intimacy. The men left their plows, picked up their torches, while, heedless of the bright light of sunset, the boys lit them and the men then instantly raised them on high.
On the distant side of the canyon, the Indians crossed themselves a
nd went down on their knees.
On this side, the women, feeling the smoke in their noses, stood up with their infants. They all walked toward the dusty spot that could pass for the center of the village.
It was only a dry mound, with that smell of old excrement left out to weather, forgotten even by the flies that live in the fields. But here the mountain of shit was sculpted, arranged—by whom? Who was the witch doctor responsible for this coprologic stele? Where was he? First the entire village silently knelt before it, their hands joined, and now, for the first time in the whole day, they closed their eyes and took a deep breath: they didn’t chant, they only breathed rhythmically, in unison, they breathed in the smell of shit, the strongest smell of the body, thought my uncle, the one that displaces all the rest and confirms our physical existence: the soft metal of the body, its offering to the gods: shit is the gold of our body, shit in the same way that gold is the excrement of the gods, their feces which are our riches.
My old Uncle Fernando felt himself to be mortal and stupid. His spirit suddenly waned, as if flowing through a sieve, and he tried to rationalize the absurdity of the body. Only symbols, allegories, or ideas could be more grotesque than the body and its functions: symbols, the allegories, or ideas superimposed on the body in order to alleviate it of its own mortal horror. He felt his bowels loosen and only barely managed to control himself. There where he could no longer imagine it urinating, shitting, fornicating naturally, without a perturbing symbol that said to his body: You need me because you are mortally absurd.