Mexico (2 page)

"You want somebody ..." the young man asked, leaning slightly forward.

"I wanted to hike into town." For some unaccountable reason I added, "The way I did when I was a boy."

"Memories?" the young man asked with amusement. He reached out with an indolent gesture to indicate that he was willing to carry my case and assured me, "I'll sort of ..." His voice trailed off.

At this moment an older man seated behind me intercepted me as I started passing the cameras back to the American youth, and in excellent Spanish asked: "Aren't you John Clay's son?"

"I am," I replied in Spanish.

"I thought I recognized your father's bearing. You want me to look after the cameras?"

I considered the question only for a fleeting moment, during which I compared the undisciplined young American lounging in the back in his ridiculous Pachuca sweater with the Mexican businessman in his conventional dark suit. In Spanish I said, "I'd deem it an act of kindness if you took care of them for me." Thus the motion of my arm, originally directed toward the young American in the backseat, was easily diverted in flight, as it were, to the Mexican closer at hand. To the American I apologized: "He'll know where to deposit them."

The young man laughed--insolently I thought. With three chopping movements of his palm as if delivering karate blows, he dismissed me.

"Where are you stopping?" the Mexican businessman asked.

"At the House of Tile," I replied. "Please leave the cameras with Don Anselmo."

"He's dead," the man said simply. "His widow runs the inn."

"She knows me," I replied, starting to dismount, but then I realized that I was about to hike into the city with no camera at all, and it occurred to me that if the event I was concerned about did take place, I might profit from having some good background shots of the festival to provide local color. So I begged the disgusted bus driver to wait for an additional moment while I retrieved one of my rapid-fire Japanese cameras, and with this slung around my neck I stepped down onto the highway at Kilometer 303. The bus accelerated swiftly, leaving a hazy trail of exhaust, and I was alone at four o'clock on an April afternoon at the spot where, above any other in the world, I wanted to be.

But I was not alone for long, for overtaking me with their soft, resolute strides were the two Indian women on their way to the fair, and as I stood somewhat bemused in the road they nodded gravely and passed on. How magnificent they were, those women coming down from the hills to grace the fiesta that their ancestors had initiated more than four hundred years before. They were a timeless part of the red earth of Mexico, and of the restless motion of the earth. When they nodded to me, their faces were impassive like the basalt statues on Aztec monuments, and yet their eyes glowed with the fire that had consecrated this land. They were the Indians of Mexico, and everything began and ended with them.

I remained motionless as they moved out of sight, held fast I think by a respectful unwillingness to add my ungainly movements to the subdued ballet their soft motions had created, but when the Indian women finally disappeared around the bend ahead, I shifted my camera strap and started slowly along the path they had followed.

For the past two years my magazine had kept me working in the trouble spots of Latin America. I had covered Vice President Nixon's catastrophic tour of the area and Fidel Castro's abominations in Cuba, and I was threatened with burnout. Apparently the home office had become aware of the risk, for Drummond, my editor, who seemed to keep an eye on everything that happened in the world, sent me a telegram that he felt sure would revive me:

Rumor tells me two Mexican matadors are heading for a showdown in which one of them is likely to force the other to such extremes that it will be the same as murder. People say Victoriano the filigreed dancer and Juan Gomez the brutal Indian are natural enemies. They're scheduled to compete in a festival at Toledo. Didn't you tell me you were born there? Take a week off. Go there. Catch what you can, but focus on the drama. Pick up camera gear from our office in Mexico City and get powerful photos.

At first I was inclined to wire back "No thanks" because of professional vanity. This was the casual kind of story I did not like to fool around with; I was a writer and not a photographer. If it had been an important story, the magazine would have sent me a major photographer, and the fact that Drummond hadn't made me suspicious that the whole affair was his device for giving me a vacation I needed without upsetting the home
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office accountants. I resented such trickery and had been about to say so in a snippy cable from Havana when I was restrained by a little lecture I gave myself: "Take it easy, Clay. There's every reason you should head for Toledo. As a bullfighting fan you knew this boy Victoriano in Spain, and you've been casually following the career of Gomez for years. With a little brushing up, you could turn out a pretty fair article. And forget the photographer insult. You do know how a Leica works, and the new Japanese cameras can take pictures by themselves."

But even as I reprimanded myself I knew there were other, deeper reasons for accepting the assignment. I was gripped by a memory of Mexico in the spring and the splendor of Toledo and the Festival of Ixmiq. So I took the job, because I wanted to see my homeland again.

If you had asked me: "Isn't this a case of ordinary homesickness?" I'd have had to say: "A man fifty-two years old doesn't indulge in homesickness. This is far more basic." I had been born in Mexico in 1909 of an American father who had also been born there. In 1938, when I was already a mature man and married to a fine Mexican woman, Father and I had been forced to quit the country. The Mexicans had stolen our property and we could not stay. When my wife confronted the thought of moving to Montgomery, Alabama, with me, she couldn't stomach such an exile and divorced me.

It was then that I became a writer, though not a real writer like Scott Fitzgerald, who had also gone to Princeton; I was more like Richard Halliburton, another Princetonian more my age and type. I dabbled in travel books, never successfully, and debased myself by writing as-told-to junk. My magazine found me useful, because without a wife or children I could be dispatched on little notice to cover any hot subject that exploded in Asia, Africa or South America.

It had been in January of this year, 1961, that 1 caught a glimpse of the gray years that lay ahead of me. I had been in Havana trying to explain Castro's bewildering behavior during his first two years after overthrowing Batista. In 1958 and '59 I'd been a strong Castro supporter, living with him in the mountains, writing articles about him giving him moral support as he marched toward the capital, and rejoicing with his bearded ones as they captured Havana. After that it was all downhill. He lied to me, said he had never been a communist, swore he wanted peace with the United States and laughed at me when I asked: "Fidel, why are you breaking diplomatic relations with us?"

When my onetime hero revealed himself as such a liar and a fraud, I had to evaluate myself, to see if I was any better. What I saw during those three bad days in Cuba did little to reassure me. I had accomplished little. I'd written nothing that would last. I had no wife or children, and I was confused as to whether I was a Mexican or an American.

But as I stood beside the little concrete marker K. 303-- indicating the number of kilometers from Mexico City, about one hundred and eighty miles--I felt the good heat of Toledo upon me and suspected that I had done right in accepting the assignment. And when I looked past the marker and at the parched land I knew I had. I had always been fascinated by these cactus plants, with their burden of thick red dust, because for me they were the truest product of the Mexican soil. Unforgiving, bitter and reluctant, they etched themselves against the dark blue sky and stood like gaunt cathedrals. I loved their awkward angularity, the fact that they offered no concession to anyone, and that year after year they were the same. They were very Mexican, these perpetual cactus bushes. Oftentimes an Indian farmer would surround his little plot of land with them, and then the goats had better beware. At first sight they seemed worthless for anything except for functioning as improvised fences, and yet it was they that gave character to the land; without the cactus bushes this would not be Mexico.

One of my earliest fancies had been associated with these unruly and forbidding plants. At about the age of six I developed the idea that my father was controlled by an unseen cactus plant, had indeed sprung from one. He was an angular man, and his sharp beard, when unshaved, resembled the spines I had so often tested. He had both the ruggedness of the cactus and its essential strength. I often thought of him as standing solitary against the sky, the way the cactus did, and in later years when the city of Toledo erected a granite monument to him, that is how his statue stood. Like the cactus, my father had a majestic beauty of his own, and it sprang directly from his unyielding rectitude, for he was one of the best administrators Mexico has ever known. When I was a senior at Princeton with time to restudy my father's famous book I realized that it, even more than he, had a kinship with the cactus. It was sharp, angular, lacking in flowery rhythms, but it achieved a local immortality primarily because it did stand alone, like an isolated cactus bush. It was a completely self-inspired book, like none other that had ever been written about Mexico. And that was the source of its greatness.

I studied the cactus for some time and wished that I had absorbed a little more of its unyielding vigor, just as I occasionally wished that I had inherited more of my father's relentless probity, for I knew myself to be vacillating while he was always sure of where he stood. He lived in a simple world, where categories were rigidly maintained without necessity for explanation: for John Clay, Englishmen were demonstrably superior to Americans, who were obviously better than Spaniards, who were inherently better than Indians, who were infinitely superior to Negroes. Banks were better than newspapers, Protestants than Catholics, Lee than Grant, and silver much better than gold. Education was good and sex bad. Paved roads were very good and an insecure water supply was an abomination. Hardworking engineers saved the world and soft-living writers corrupted it. Nevertheless, he is now remembered as a writer, for his book, The Pyramid and the Cathedral, constructed from the relentless dichotomies of good and evil that he espoused, had somehow caught the inmost spirit of Mexico.

I started hiking down the road, delightfully aware that after a few hundred yards I would see opening before me the prospect of Toledo with its shimmering towers, but as I walked I noticed that in the field to my right the cactus plants had disappeared, for the Indian farmer, whoever he was, had rooted them out and replaced them with orderly rows of that amazing plant, the maguey, and as I walked beside these dark green shrubs, man-high and undulating in the sun, I recalled something my father had told me forty years ago. It could have been in April as we walked that day along a patch of maguey, for I remember that the sun was warm but not oppressive. He stopped and poked at a twisting maguey with his cane and observed, more to himself than to me: "A land is never occupied until the cactus is rooted out and maguey planted."

This was a surprising thing for my father to have said, for to him chinking was an abomination, and it was from these maguey plants, whose mysterious arms twisted about the landscape as if seeking to embrace it, that the Indians had centuries ago learned to brew their intoxicating mezcal drink. I would have expected my father to hate the maguey for that reason. Instead, he reflected: 'These are the plants that lend grace and dignity to the land. They're like dancers with beautiful hands. Or like women. They're the better half of life."

I remembered these curious comments when years later I read his book at Princeton and came upon his remarkable evocation of the cactus and the maguey as contrary symbols of the Mexican spirit. Cactus was the inclination to war and destruction. In contrast, "maguey," he had written in a much-quoted passage, "has always been the symbol of peace and construction. From its bruised leaves our ancestors made the paper upon which our records were transcribed; its dried leaves formed the thatch for our homes; its fibers were the threads that made clothing possible; its thorns were the pins and needies our mothers used in bringing us to civilization; its white roots provided the vegetables from which we gained sustenance; and its juice became our honey, our vinegar and after a long while the wine that destroyed us with happiness and immortal visions." Cactus, my father wrote, was the spirit of the lonely hunter; maguey was the inspiration of the artists who had built the pyramids and decorated the cathedrals. One was the male spirit so dominant in Mexican life; the other was the female, the subtle conqueror who invariably triumphed in the end. My father argued that it was not by accident that the Indian worked all his life fighting the cactus and received his only respite from the sweet liquor of the maguey. He had also written that if cactus was the visible spirit of earth's hard core that generated life, the twisting arms of maguey were the green cradle of nature that made life bearable. He ended this comparison with the passage that was later inscribed on his monument: "Where the cactus and the maguey meet, my heart is entwined in the tangle of Mexico."

k Here, beside me now in central Mexico, the cactus and the maguey met. For an instant, in these adjoining fields, the unyielding cactus and the wild, aspiring maguey stood side by side, and in them my heart was entangled as my father's had been. I was an American citizen and had helped protect my country in two wars, as a fighter pilot in World War II and as a combat reporter in Korea, but my spiritual home had to be here, for somehow these two plants had helped determine my character.