Entre las Aguas

My second memory of Mexico is of water. Clear, cool blue-green water in a bathtub. We were visiting the Rafael’s, re-kindled friends of father’s who lived in a modern apartment somewhere off Insurgentes Avenue, which had a big window that overlooked the city, or so it seemed. It was warm, I was bored and I needed to go to the bathroom.

The bathroom was cool and fresh. Shiny chrome poles held up a white porcelain basin and the smell of green “pal-moh-liveh” soap added a savory of sorts to the moisture of cement tile. The softened light of the harsh sun outside filtered through the crinkly, translucent windows, reflecting sharply off the bright white of the sink and dissolving into the greenish refractions of the water in the tub. I would as soon have stayed there.

I reopened the door. Did the adults know that the tub was full of water? There was an abrupt halt in their conversation and a palpable momentary panic. I hadn’t done anything, they asked, had I? No... it was just that the bathtub was full of water -- crystal clear, bluish-green water. It was explained to me that one needed to store water because the water always ran out, daily. Ah.... As a child I accepted this strangeness with little criticism.

More interesting to me was the smell and texture of this water. Water in New York never felt this way. There was no contrast. It was just a substance. Here, the water was always playing off something and just as invariably always reflecting something. I stood staring into the tub, transfixed by its watery shadows. I wanted to run my hand through it feeling its yielding thickness.

Water may have run out every afternoon, but in the altiplano water was everywhere. In the afternoons, it evaporated in the dry heat or lingered in shallow pools on cool moist stone or collected in the crevices of lava rock.

In the early evening, as pipes creaked and clanked, the water sputtered back on and made hollow rushing sounds as it filled cement tanks, or simply overflowed from spigots or hoses that had been left open.

In the mornings, soft slapping sounds resounded throughout the city as buckets splattered their contents and water washed over cement sidewalks and stones adding its fresh liquidity to the piercing chill. Whisking sounds of wicker brooms scraped sheens of water into gutters with scratchy rythyms as red geraniums in metal cans or terracotta pots slowly came to life lifting the dew off their leaves in the still feeble, tentative morning sunlight. Somewhere, on someone’s roof top, a cock would rasp out its chortling crow.

Amoxcalco.... in yectli cocoxqui
ye con ya totoma, aitec

En la casa de las pinturas...
el hermoso faisán,
su canto despliega
en el interior de las aguas

In the House of Spring ....
the resplendent pheasant sings

His song unfurls

from within the waters.

--In The House of Spring,
Netzahualcoyotl (1402-1472)

A Fabled Road

The ascent from Veracruz to Mexico City is one of the world’s great passages. It is certainly the most famous road in the Americas, ever since Cortez, 16 horse and 500 men disembarked and ventured into the interior, drawn by the allure of the unknown, horrified by primitive savagery, awed by the land's primeval majesty and utterly dumbstruck by the fabulous splendour of Tenochtitlán, first glimpsed as the exhausted Spaniards reached the crest of Ixtlazihuatl and peered down at the metropolis of “spires and pyramids” arising from the waters of the alpine lake that filled the immense mountain-ringed valley.

Nos quedamos admirados y decíamos que parecía a las cosas de encantamiento que cuentan en el libro de Amadís ... y hay mucho que ponderar en ellos que no sé como contarlo -- ver cosas nunca oídas, ni aun soñadas, como veíamos.

"We stood awe-struck and told one another that it seemed like one of those enchantments that are related in the Tales of Amadis ... and there was so much to ponder in those things that I am at a loss how to recount it -- to have seen things never heard, never even dreamed of, such as we saw."

-- Bernal Diaz del Castillo

They also stood afrighted, for this stone-age cosmopolis of interconnected aquatic cities was home to at least half a million souls. The men implored Cortez to return to Cuba for reinforcements, but Cortez knew otherwise. Afraid and intrepid the Spaniards pushed on and were followed ever after by a stream of humans animated by every aspiration and avarice of which the soul is capable.

Amid the caravan of ordinary people, came hard settlers intent on stealing a new life, barefoot friars eager to establish utopias free from european stains, pettifogging oidores, ostentatious viceroys, spies disguised as Jesuits, adventurers disguised as liberators, innocent fools like Maximillian, astute Scots like Fanny Calderon de la Barca, and, lastly, in a kind of cosmic twist, conquered Spanish refugees fleeing a victorious invader from Africa.

As often, this human cavalcade descended back down, decepcionado like Cortez dispossessed of victory and haunted by his crime, abandoned like Iturbide fleeing the country he had united and liberated, banished like Don Porfirio Diaz waving farewell from the porch of his train to the country he had oppressed and built ... or just plain dead, like poor ol’ Maximillian rotting in his coffin with mismatched glass eyes.

Others, trains of burros in tow, travelled back down the serpentine roads enriched beyond belief with all the lineage and luxury the sweat of others could buy. And still others, descended to the coast like athletes of a sort, tired but with new found appreciations earned in unexpected contests with a place now left behind as a stranger well-met. In her last letter, departing from Veracruz, Fanny Calderon wrote,

"I find, personally, one important change in taste, if not in opinion. Vera Cruz cookery which two years ago I thought detestable, now appears to me delicious. What fish! What incomparable frijoles!"

Well... this is a trifle, she says, but with trifles as with matters of more importance it is the lost prejudice and gained of perspective that is the prize.

And then of course, there was always Santa Ana, el espectro de una nación, repeatedly ascending and descending, carrying his leg under his arm, without ever learning anything.

--0O0--

Yes... the road from sandy Veracruz to high mountain valley of Mexico is a fabled passage -- not just because it has born the transit and traffic of human dreams, for those are everywhere; but because it served as the exit, the entrance or the stage itself for those stories that parade all the absurdity, depravity and magnificence of our species.

Concluding his monumental History of the Conquest of Mexico, the restrained and judicious Prescott bursts out: “The whole story has the air of fable rather than of history! a legend of romance, -- a tale of the genii!!”

Yes... asi como las cosas de encantamiento que cuentan en el libro de Amadís

That strange air of fable permeates the whole of Mexican history which compounds the folly, vices and heroism of all history with a macabre comedy and unrelenting tragedy. In all events, it was quite a tale and one that left palpable vestiges of itself all along the road

For, in those days, one was not cut off from the past as now. Le Standard had not yet taken over. There were no super-lane highways with their isolated and uniform rest-stops reliably selling the same, odorless factory snax. There was no air conditioning enveloping you in uniform comfort coolness throughout the day, like a living corpse. In fact, as often as not there was no electricity and hence no radio and certainly no TV dinning out everything within earshot with interminable nonsense.

No... there was none of that. The noises of the present were echoes of the past and the road was very close to the paths immemorially trod by Indians of mysterious origins and then by men from Estremadura making their way through the parched and sandy plains, of la tierra caliente, much like their Iberian homeland but here mingled with exotic patches of exuberant fertility and near impassible thickets of aromatic shrubs, wild flowers and towering jungle trees until, passing into the tierra templada, nature opened up grand and terrible, covering the landscape with tracts of jagged lava thrown up into freakish forms during fiery eruptions but now clouded in soft mists wafting in from the Gulf, which carresed the base of the mighty Orizaba resplendent in its mantle of snow visible from the sea and beckoning upward to the dry plains of la tierra fria where broad fields of corn, rows of maguey, and now orchards of fruits and flocks of sheep, brought forth under bright skies and low clouds, dewy moist in the morning, hot and dry at noon, frigid at night as the piercing cold crept down from surrounding mountains covered with towering larch, oak, cypress, and pine.

And through the length of this passage, the traveller passed abandoned, ancient cities, colonial towns now garishly lit with neon signs worked into baroque ornamentation and, most persistently, impoverished villages and light-less family settlements of a few thatched mud huts from whence wafted the smell of burning ash, mixed with the moist succulence of maize and the gamy aroma of chicken, -- “el pan de maiz y gallinas” that Bernal Diaz, long after the Conquest, remembered accepting gratefully from the hands of welcoming natives who today hauled cords of wood, dripping sap, wrapped in hemp past gutted and abandoned haciendas or sold fruit juices, baskets of yellow apples or camotes under tented “puestos” along the highway as gear-grinding buses blasting their acrid clouds of diesel smoke sped by.

No... in those days, The Standard had not yet blanded this confluence of atmospherics, sounds and aromas that was always adapting but still remained unchanged throughout the centuries. The road like so much in Mexico was an open corridor between past and present suffering one to live in persistent paradox.

And now, joining the transeuntes on this age-old passage came our mid-century family of three: mother born to a thoroughly conventional New York Irish family, not quite conventionally married to father, now resigned from his diplomatic post returning to conquer his Homeland with new found technologies; and me, obliviously asleep, who knew nothing of any of this at all.

Primera Memoria

Once the tube was removed, she was again able to speak. Although I was confident that a step toward recovery had been taken, our talk turned imperceptibly to the past. And toward the past, inevitably toward Mexico.

“Do you think,” I asked, “one could ever retell what it was like...those days?” Mother paused. Her eyes wandered off to that space where the kaleidoscopic experiences of a lifetime are re-sensed as one. “No...” she said softly, “I don’t think so....” She shook her head imperceptibly, “Nuhh... I don’t think you could.”

-- oOo--

I dimly remember that it was dark and that it was raining as the wide berthed car pulled up to the docks. Trunks and baggages. Gleams of metal and light in shadows of blue and grey and black. Family, friends and assorted colleagues from the U.N.’s “Latin” contingent were there to see us off with the usual hales, farewells and promises. But what I remember most distinctly was my cozy little bunk in a small nifty cabin that was made entirely of polished chestnut coloured wood. I nestled into bed hugging my rag dog, Droopy, and waited for the boat to pull out leaving the glowing spire of the Empire State to slowly vanish in the murky night. When I awoke next morning, everything that was familiar was gone.

We were days in the water and it seemed like we weren’t going anywhere. There wasn’t anything to do but hang over the chain link rail keeping track of the foam and hoping to spot a fish. Precisely for that reason, Father saw fit to tie a leash around my waist, as the S.S. Orizaba, being a tramp steamer, had no protective railings to speak of. He announced this “solution” with evident self-satisfaction and since he had the rope handy it was also evident that the “problem” was something he had given thought to beforehand. Like a lot of what Father did, it was completely reasonable and totally exasperating.

Eventually, my complaints were acceded to and I was allowed to wander about designated places away from the perimeter of the deck. There were no other children on the boat and I made friends with a nice silver-haired lady who was going to retire in Cuba.

Docked for the day in Havana, we took a cab-tour of the city of which I recall nothing except that it was uncomfortably hot. Mother later told me, that our cab driver bemoaned life under Batista and implored father to take him with us to Mexico. “Of course, it was impossible. He was a sweet man and desperate to get out. We all felt awful. He was crying. It was very sad; but there was nothing we could do.”

Finally, after nine days on the not so high seas, we disembarked at Vera Cruz where, four centuries before, my ancestors had first set foot in this new world. I don’t think we even stayed the night but rather straightaway boarded a bus that took us up the fabled route to the altiplano and to Mexico City.

In those days, all highways were two lane roads and, since the country is mountainous, curvy two lane roads skirting treacherous ravines and barrancas. The interminable shifting of gears and swaying of the bus from left to right and back to the left and again to the right made me dizzy and sleepy. My eye lids faltered. I leaned my head against the window and last I knew we were spinning down, softly and helplessly into the sunlit brown, tan and ochre swirl of the barranca’s vortex. That is my first memory of Mexico.

Este, que ves, engaño colorido,
de la natura ostentando los primores,
con falsos silogismos de colores
es cauteloso engaño del sentido

(-- per Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz)