Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation (32 page)

But the neighbor on whose wall the apparition reflected was growing desperate as hordes of devotees trampled greater swaths of his lawn and carried on singing and chanting all night long. He decided to illuminate the apparition with two gigantic mercury floodlights, thereby bathing the amber-toned reflection in a fluorescent silver glare that erased any hint of the Virgin Mary’s outline and drew gasps and angry shouts from the crowd.

One reporter heard a woman scream at the neighbor, “If you have any love in your heart you will let us see the Virgin!”

“If you believe in Mary, the mother of God, you will turn out the light,” yelled another.

The mother of the family of the young visionary collapsed.

In the days that followed, the family repositioned their Impala in the driveway and used camping flashlights to try, without success, to cast the Virgin’s reflection against their own garage door. All they managed were jittery Rorschach blots of a shapeless milky light. Once the car was moved, the image of the Blessed Virgin Mary reading the Bible was to disappear forever. For several days, the devout and the nosy continued to come after sunset. For months after they stopped coming, the neighbor kept his modest house saturated in as much light as the Lincoln Memorial.

She had not been a Virgin who had come with much to say. As always, she had chosen an obscure place under humble circumstances to manifest herself. This time there were no clouds, no cherubim, no starry mantle. As apparitions go, she was more of a chimera or a cipher rather than an interlocutor between worlds. For those who believed in her light, she brought the message that the interaction between the mortal and the divine in those lands has not ended.

From her debut in the Americas on a sacred hill in Mexico City more than four hundred years ago, here at end of the twentieth century, she came to a parched, rundown Texas suburb. The faithful had congregated to see in the apparition’s low-wattage glow that the enchantment of the homelands is not over.

On the night the miracle-busting floodlights were turned on, when the mother of the young seer of Pleasanton Road passed out, some of the devotees had gathered around her, holding hands, and improvised a song they sang over her as she lay unconscious,
“Stay with me, Lord, stay with me, the spirit of the Lord is moving through my heart, stay with me, Lord, stay with me.”

 

 

The air over Tenochtitlán was a brownish gray chemical mist. The chalky haze of fuel exhaust and smog made it hard to see anything but a blur of wet streets, low buildings, factories, and roadways. We spiraled down, drifting in a hush, into the ancient precints of the Valley of Mexico. I remembered one nineteenth-century painting by José Maria Velasco in which Mexico City is seen from the village of Amecameca, circa 1870. The sharply outlined white city is on the far horizon, across an expansive prairie dotted with cactus and maguey. Beyond are the volcanoes, Popocatépetl and Ixtahuitil. The air over the valley was so clear then you could see for a hundred miles.

Now, we float in on the dirty clouds of our century, the nectar of Tlazolteotl, the Aztec deity who brings forth new creation out of the filth she consumes. The spattering rain on the airplane windows looks rusty, corrosive. This is zeitgeist weather for Mexico City in the time of la crisis.

“It’s been like this since ‘la crisis,’” a cab driver says on the way into town. “Things are really screwed up. Nobody has any money.” He’s right. Later, in the Plaza Santo Domingo, no one has change for a fifty peso note, roughly the equivalent of ten dollars.

“La crisis” is Mexico’s amazing, perpetually imploding economy. It is the peso, falling in a bottomless fiduciary abyss like a Siqueiros wraith on fire. But it’s also the unbreathable air, tracked daily in newspaper logs of the levels of toxic chemicals present in the air. The rot of political corruption, like an abscessed tooth, shakes the nation, from the heady
personajes
of state to shoe-shiner unions.
Militares
are shooting
campesinos
in Guerrero while politicians hurl recriminations of “Bad Spelling!” at one another.

There are village uprisings of Indígenas in Tabasco, in Michoacán. The influence and power of
los narcos,
in tandem with the Colombian drug cartels, is fluorescing. Then, the twenty-seventh anniversary of the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre sparks a riot. Ex-president Carlos Gortari de Salinas is alleged in the press to be the “intellectual author” of the assassination of his successor, presidential candidate Colosio, and the present president, Ernesto Zedillo, may yet emerge as a central witness, probably never to be called. Meanwhile, the “postmodern” Zapatistas, the Mayan rebel army in Chiapas, are staging an ongoing natonal dialogue on political reform as an ersatz graduate seminar media event.

“The wars of the conquest continue.” That was the bulletin that the Zapatistas had littered by the thousands around the village of San Cristobal de las Casas, in the first days of their New Year’s War,

 

By their own account, they were an army of indigenous peoples of southern Mexico, declaring war against the illegitimate government and army of Mexico.

Then, more earthquakes, in Colima, in Chiapas. Hurricane Rachel strikes the gulf coast, then returns to sea, regathers storm force, and lashes the Mexican coast again. And Popocatépetl, the volcano outside Mexico City, which last erupted in the ’30s, is fuming. One of my aunts in Coahuila says, “It’s like the time of the plagues in Egypt.”

“La crisis” is social apocalypse in extreme slow motion. And there is an erotic élan in how the Mexicanos manage to savor the inexpressible melancholy of it all. In a dark serendipity, the center of Mexico City is decked with elegant, somber banners advertising an exhibition of the torture machines of the Inquisition. Another
taxista,
part Greek chorus, part human barometers of la crisis, is quoted in the press saying,
“Esto no se arregla.”

“This cannot be fixed.”

 

 

The year before, as I drove south along the coastal highway through western Oaxaca, the road had curved through burnished hills for miles without any evidence of civilization or settlement. On the right, the cliffs along Mexico’s spine dropped off to flat, chalky beaches. Crawling ocean waves glimmered under a heavy Pacific mist. On the left, countless tiers of large gray granite boulders stood craggy against the hillsides, the gnarled cedars glowing deep green against the scorched golden grasses, the entire landscape suspended in a rare effect of limpid afternoon light.
I know this light.
A tea-colored sunlight suffused the hills, as if the afternoon would dissolve slowly, infinitely, into every shadow, every creek bed, every gorge.
I know this light on this land, in exactly this way.

I had never been to Oaxaca before. I had never even seen pictures of Oaxaca, except for photographs and drawings from Monte Alban, the ancient acropolis ruins of the Zapotecs, inland near Oaxaca City. It was Bedouin déjà vu—to be startled by sudden familiarity with a constituent quality of light in an unknown place.
My blood has moved through here before,
I thought.

These were the journeys to the center of Mexico that I made:

South from Aztlán, through a phalanx of crowded border checkpoints, bypassing Nueva Rosita on
Cincuenta Siete,
into the heart of Mexico via the two-lane highway of Huitzilopochtli, the first God of the Mexica.

Following the western coast south along the spine, down the Pacific highway past the shrines of Resortlandia—Puertos Vallarta, Azul, Escondido—then Tehuantepéc and Tuxtla Gutierrez and on to Chiapas, where Mexico’s next revolution was erupting.

The umbilical journey was that which the Mexicans called
La Ruta,
the erased journey. It is the route that Cortés, our secret, shameful grandfather, and his army took on their military campaign against the Aztec empire, from the sultry nights and sleazy cantinas of ancient Veracruz to the traffic-glutted streets around the ghost of the Great Temple of the Aztecas, next to the Zócalo plaza at the center of Mexico City.

There wasn’t a single monument to Cortés left standing in la Capital after the 1910
Revolución
. The record of the journey had been largely obliterated, excised from maps and commemorative plaques at roadside landmarks. But I had pieced together the route with my mother’s friend Helen Anthony, using a recent book by a French historical geographer that correlated the accounts of Cortés in his letters to the Spanish king Charles V and the narrative of the Spanish soldier Bernal Díaz de Castillo with the geography of contemporary Mexico. Sitting together in a booth, at a seafood café in the Mercado de la Ciudadela, Helen and I unfolded a large map based on satellite images of the Mexican landscape.

La Ruta
was traced in a Day-Glo turquoise line against verdant green, emerging from Veracruz on the gulf, winding its way up into the coffee bush mountains of Jalapa, descending then in a reticulated pattern, all plains and valleys, crisscrossing the new highway toward Cholula, then over the volcano Popocatépetl, through Coyoacán, arriving, finally, in the mesh of pavement and buildings at the center of Mexico City.

 

 

The rented Volkswagen Bug clattered with the throttle all the way open, revving in a high-pitched whine down the empty Orizaba superhighway to Veracruz. Mexico’s toll highways are ghost tracks, with many Mexicans unable or unwilling to pay the high tolls, leaving the brightly lit three-lane roads devoid of pilgrims, especially at night. It had taken hours to leave Mexico City, the traffic congealed for miles through the poor precinct of the city known as Nezahaualcoyotl, where the fumes of burning garbage heaps leave a permanent acrid haze over the district. Then, from Puebla on, an unimpeded trail, where I was passed only occasionally by swift and thundering eighteen wheelers, bearing painted slogans like, “IN THE HANDS OF LORD JESUS CHRIST,” and “VIRGENCITA, DO NOT ABANDON ME!” Where the road ends in Orizaba, a vast industrial plant looms on the horizon, sending pillars of flame up into the bruise-colored night sky, illuminating a city of gangways, storage tanks, plants, and power stations.

From there to Veracruz it was a dark, two-lane blacktop, where I had to grip the wheel of the Bug to keep from being flipped off the road in the gusting wake of a passing truck. On both sides, farmers were burning their fields after harvest, and the waist-high flames from far off silhouetted legions of cows and goats crowded along the road, making the drive at times perilous and slow. After a meal of red snapper at the Gran Café de la Parroquia, I slept in a room over the plaza, the shutters open to a group of musicians, guitars, mandolins, violins, and bass, playing the doleful, tango-esque musica Jarocha of the city, made famous by the great Veracruz composer Agustín Lara. The singer’s pleas for mercy from his scornful lover rang across the plazas, the violins striking small notes as faint as meteor light.

The next day, setting out alone on
La Ruta,
the journey began in the village known as La Antigua, where Cortés was said to have moored his ships to a pair of fat-trunked ceiba trees that still stand on the banks of the river inlet that cuts through contemporary Antigua. The commemorative signs marking the two bedraggled, low-hanging trees are rusted over and defaced, their legends barely legible now, except for “FUCK CORTÉS.”

Cortés’s original garrison in Antigua is a ruin, the fallen walls grown over with thick, densely woven trunks and vines. Inside, a group of campesinos had built an adobe shack, surrounded by banana trees, their pigs and chickens unloosed through the part of the quarters one map showed to have been the private lodgings of Cortés himself. Nearby is the little chapel, barely bigger than a shed, built by Cortés’s men as a sanctuary in which the first Mass was offered on the Mexican mainland, and the Spanish
Requierimiento
was read three times aloud, claiming legal domain for King Carlos V over all of those lands forevermore. If the taproot of the Indian world was lost in time, this modest, still meticulously kept chapel was the beginning of what would become Mexico, part Indio, part Español. Cortés had children with Indian women, among them, Malintzín, the Totonaca Indian slave whom the Mayans had presented to Cortés as a gift. She had learned Mayan, and her original language had been Nahuatl, the language of the Azteca empire. Along with a Spaniard who had been shipwrecked and learned Mayan, they formed the translation chain of the conquista: Malintzín interpreting Nahuatl into Mayan, and the Spanish officer translating Mayan into Spanish. From the very beginning, Spanish and Indian languages were threaded through Cortés and his army like invisible filaments, binding Indio and Español inextricably together.

Along
La Ruta,
I went to the village of San Miguel Tzinacapan, high in the mountains of northeastern Puebla, one of the places where the
Volador
tradition has been maintained unbroken since the time before the conquest. Cortés’s army passed near here on their way inland first to Cholula, then onward to Tenochtitlán. Today, you turn onto a winding mountain road that takes you through the Spanish-sounding villages of Grijalba, Oriental, and Zaragoza. Tzinacapan is literally at the end of the road. It is a small, close-knit village of Nahua people, descendants of the Aztecs, who still speak Nahuatl, though they prefer to call it “Mexicano.” Up in the mountains of Puebla, the conquest was never completed. The statue of San Miguel the Indians worship so vigorously in a torrent of song and dance is a stand-in for the warrior god of their Nahua
antepasados,
Huitzilopochtli, the god who led the Aztecas on their epic exodus into Mexico from Aztlán in the north.