The Last Supper: And Other Stories (10 page)

“Who am I to judge?” Gomez smiled. “We are talking of Christ in Cuernavaca.”

“You see, the Mexican is always the center of the earth,” the Chilean said gently. “Oh, what a people!”

“With good reason,” Gomez said.

“Any Mexican reason is a good reason. Their ego would even include a monopoly of the world's suffering—a monopoly of all afflictions, including the United States.”

“You are too kind to us.”

“The trouble is,” the
exile
said, “that no North American can even begin to understand Mexico.”

“With the possible exception of yourself,” Serente put in.

“Possibly. I think I understand Mexico—in part, at least.”

“I don't,” the Chilean said comfortably. “Nor will I ever. I have even decided to stop trying. I have been here only three weeks, but I have decided that it is easier to love Mexico than to try to understand her.”

“We are very easy to understand,” Gomez said slowly. “We are plain people and very poor and our backs are bent because always upon them there has been either a Spaniard, a priest, or a North American. Why is that so hard to understand? Why does everyone complicate it so?”

“And when your backs are no longer bent?”

“You will see Mexico then,” Gomez nodded. “It will be like this garden—all of it.”

“But we have all forgotten the little girl,” said my wife. “What will happen to her?”

“She will die,” said Gomez flatly.

“And we must accept that?”

“I have never really understood,” observed Serente, “why people come to Mexico to vacation.”

“To see our cathedrals,” said Gomez, and then I observed that we had seen one of them today, and that I had told my story to a priest.

“In your Spanish?” Serente snorted.

“He spoke English excellently. He learned it in Spain during the Civil War.”

“What was he doing in Spain?”

“Mexico was uncomfortable for him then, so he went to Spain. I did not ask him what he did there. I could guess.”

“And did he listen attentively to your story?”

“Very attentively.”

“And what did he say?”

“He said that the life or death of the little girl is up to God, and he resented my interference.”

The
exile
smiled bitterly and said, almost in the way of a non sequitur, “When I was in India, many years ago when it was still a British colony, I spent an hour with the Communist Party District Organizer of the State of Bengal, and I asked him about his program. He pointed out that while the program was long and involved, he could condense it into one sentence. All we have to do, he explained, is to teach our people to spit once together, and then there will be such a wave of water as will wash every Englishman into the sea.”

“Once together,” nodded Gomez appreciatively. “A simple act that often takes many centuries to perfect.”

“I don't like your smile,” Serente's wife commented. “It's rather nasty.”

“But homely. Don't you think we often confuse the two?”

Then the Chilean asked me, “But what made you think that the man's face was the face of Christ? How could you know?” He used a Spanish idiom that confused me, and Serente had to translate the question.

“Well, there is a face. It's the face that reoccurs in most of the paintings and sculptures.”

“I wonder,” the Chilean reflected. “There is so much speculation even as to whether Christ ever existed. Rembrandt painted Jewish faces, if there is such a thing. When the Spaniards came to our land, the Christ they brought had Spanish faces, but little by little, our own painters and sculptures made it a Chilean face, the patient, tired face of the Chilean miner or the the Chilean peasant. I don't understand why you felt so strongly that this was the face and figure of Christ.”

“Neither do I,” said Serente. “The man has been a patient of mine, and it never occured to me.”

His wife said, “Things occur to writers that would never occur to you. That is why they are writers. But really we must come to dinner. It's an interesting dinner, but it will spoil if it waits too long.”

More than that, it was a very good dinner, a wonderful dinner, with hot
tortillas
, veal with
mole
over it, that ancient, incredible chocolate sauce that the Aztecs perfected a thousand years ago,
frijoles
, hot and whole in their own sauce,
arroz
, the good Mexican rice, with chicken and shrimps to go with it, and
calavo
, mashed with onions and garlic, fresh tomatoes and cucumbers, and cold Mexican beer, which is as good as any beer in the world and better than most.

The talk at dinner turned to other things—with a sense of relief to my wife and myself—and they talked of Mexican art and the struggle in Chile, the incredible endless struggle, so consistent, so unabating, and then the difference between Mexican dances and Spanish dances, and why so many Spaniards in Mexico—the anti-Republican Spaniards—owned grocery stores, and how the super-highway between Mexico City and Cuernavaca had been built by peons who were paid six pesos a day, and what a hollow mockery the magnificent statue of the workers at the Mexican end of the highway was—although Gomez objected to this as an entire characterization and pointed out what was implicit in the sculpture, that these were new gods the people were raising, even in their misery, the image of the workers, not of a saint. Then the
exile
spoke of University City, and the wonders in mosaic that Diego Rivera had wrought there, and the Chilean asked whether is was not true that because the new university had been built so far from the city, the students lacked bus fare to get there? It was true, Gomez admitted, admitting that Mexico had the most magnificent university and possibly the poorest—in pesos—student body in the whole world. Then the talk turned to Guatamala, so recently betrayed and raped, and how instead of the earth-shaking moan of anguish and hatred arising from Mexico, only a few tears had fallen. But more tears than one might have expected, Serente said, recalling an Indian woman in his office weeping uncontrollably for what had been done to the good place of the south, and his wife told of the Guatamalan flag that Rivera had painted upon the gates of his house, proudly and defiantly and pathetically, for the whole world to see.

So the evening went, a good evening, with warm people and good talk and good food. Republican Spain lived a moment and so did the Republic of Guatamala, and others lifted the fallen standards out of the dust and held them, and so memories and hopes were mingled. None of these were people who lived by the secure retreat of talk and speculation; all of them had ventured their bodies and souls in what they believed, and they knew the winnings and the losses in the life they lived. And finally it was over and time to go, the moon high in the sky which the brief evening rain had washed so clean and pure, and we began to say our good-byes. Dr. Serente offered to drive us home, but Gomez who was staying with an uncle who lived near our hotel, said he thought he would like to walk home because the night was so fine, and we decided to walk with him. We said little as we walked through the darkened streets, for when an evening such as this is finished, it is hard to pick up new threads, and as a matter of fact the silence was restful and comfortable. Because it was the shortest direct way, we turned into Dwight W. Morrow street after we had crossed the empty plaza, and in the last block before we reached Morales, we saw a man standing under the street light.

“Look,” my wife said, no more than the single word, but we knew what she meant, He was a telephone cable repair man, out on a late call, and he had just climbed down from the cable pole. The light lit him and magnified him as he stood there, legs spread, arms akimbo, a coil of wire over one shoulder, a climbing rope slung over the other, his tools in his leather belt and his feet in heavy leather climbing boots. He stood there like a rock, his whole muscular body and his fine chiseled Indian face of one piece and part, his cotton shirt open at the neck, his lips parted in the slight smile of recognition that honest folk have for one another so late, at night. Gomez greeted him softly and with dignity, and he in turn returned the greeting with the same calm dignity. There was no comment made, and Gomez needed to make none. We said goodnight to Gomez, and we went home …

A day or so later, my wife, not willing to let the matter rest as it was, went to see Serente and begged him to take money from us to go through with the operation on the little girl; but as in my own case, he was able to convince her that it was impossible. He pointed out to her that he did not even know where these people lived; he had no address for them; they had a few acres of land, somewhere out in the hills; and unless they came to his office again, he could not reach them. Better than I was able to, he pointed out the overwhelming difficulties in what had seemed to us to be a very simple matter. He also stressed that there was no proof at all that the operation would be successful. “You offer charity,” he said to her. “You do it because you are kind and good. But I think you know what charity is. Charity is like facing a thousand hungry people with a crumb of food. You will think I am cruel to say it, but the bad thing about charity is that it pours water on anger. There is no hope for this land but anger—terrible, terrible anger.”

To us, our frustration was a lash on pity and sentimentality. In Mexico, where the great god of dollar can buy twelve and a half pesos, the poorest American tourist is overcome with delusions of grandeur until the moment when he looks at himself. It is true that many never look at themselves, but some do—and for those there is at least a flash of insight in which they see themselves as others see them.…

About ten days more passed before we saw Serente again. His practice was an uneven one. If somewhere in the hills there was a sudden sweep of dysentery, of virus or of one of many other diseases, a flood of patients would overwhelm his office. The poor Mexicans knew he was Spanish—and Spaniards are not liked by Mexicans, whose memory is a long one—but they also knew that he never turned patients away, and there was many another doctor who would not look at a patient unless the pesos laid on his palm first, so his practice slackened only rarely. But then, one day, he turned up at our apartment at about two o'clock, haggard with the pressure, of work, and said to me,

“Either I get away for a few hours, or I go out of my mind. What do you have for this afternoon?”

“Like all afternoons here, I work hard at resting.”

“Oh. Why can't I be a tourist?”

“You don't have the personality for it. Where do you want to go?”

“To a strange, wonderful place called Xocalco, an ancient city on top of a mountain. It is about thirty kilometers from here, and it will do us good to spend an hour there. It is very restful. Will your wife release you?”

“I think so. But I'm told I'm a sick man, so I wonder about climbing mountains.”

“This one, we can climb most of the way in my car. It will do you good, believe me as a doctor.” My wife agreed with him, and in a little while, Sexente and I were in his car, speeding through the green, gleaming rice fields and then climbing into the great wall of mountains that lies south and west of Cuernavaca. Then we turned off the main highway onto a small side road through a broad, beautiful, but strangely uninhabited valley. Even the grass huts and little patch fields of the peasants were missing here, nor was there a burro to be seen munching the grass or a bullock pulling a wooden plow against the horizon. We drove on until Serente pointed to a hulking purple mass. “There it is,” he said, and I commented that it was very high and that it hardly seemed possible that a car could climb it. “Perhaps, but the old Mexicans built a stone roadway up to the place, and much of it still remains and the rest is dirt fill. They were mighty workers in stone, and a very great people, and their works dwarf the antiquities that we Europeans admire so. Mexicans are very proud, and one of the reasons is that they have not forgotten the old times.”

“Others have.”

“Yes, others have.”

Serente was an excellent driver. We turned off the road onto what seemed to be only a dirt cow track, but after we had crossed several fields, it emerged as a fairly good dirt road. It wound up the side of the mountain, with ancient stonework buttressing the hillside above, it as well as the road below, and it went on and on, in endless curves and convolutions, and as it mounted, the hills around us rolled back and the whole broad vista of the valley below spread out before us. Finally, we came to a place where the car could go no further, and Serente parked in a small clearing, and from there we went on by foot over the four or five hundred feet that remained to the summit.

From Serente's description, I had anticipated an unusual sight, but my thinking was shaped by the other ruins I had seen near Mexico City and in the, South. Those ruins represented years of archeological work, and this place had hardly been touched—only a single pyramid excavated—yet in its vastness, in the grand purpose of the concept that had made it, in the immensity of its ruins, it dwarfed anything I had seen before. It took my breath away. It left me awe-stricken and speechless, and full of a sense of the awfulness of time.

We had emerged on the top of a long, rolling plateau, and for a mile of its length in front of us, and half a mile behind us, an enormous dead stone city lay, dead and clothed all over with verdure, but with here and there an outcropping of stone, a ledge, a wall, a sill; and under the green cloak, the shapes remained, mighty buildings, tall pyramids, sunken courts, giant columns with only the base left, formal gardens where brightly dressed people had once walked, and fountains which had once picked the Mexican sunlight into all of its bright colors. We walked through its lonely emptiness, interlopers in time, and examined the single pyramid that had been uncovered. It was strange, different from any pyramid I had ever seen before, but precise and handsome in its workmanship. I asked Serente whether he knew what manner of people had once lived in this city. “They don't know yet,” he replied, “but whatever they called themselves, we know that they were the same people as the peasants who live in the neighborhood now. The people who are fastened to the earth never change. They endure everything and survive everything—” But did they, I wondered? Serente had told me that at one time, it was estimated, ten thousand people lived in this city on a mountaintop, and how many tens of thousands had lived in the valley below to grow the food to feed these? But now the valley was silent and empty. I asked Serente.