On the Plain of Snakes

by Paul Theroux

  “You will drive out of here and on to Monterrey—lovely Monterrey,” the parking lot security guard crowed as he affixed my permit to the proper place on the windshield, making a business of it, in expectation of the tip he saw me chafing in my fingers. “A beautiful day for a journey, sir!”

  And within ten minutes I saw the reality of Reynosa, no longer the sedate Plaza Principal, but the broken roads and back streets and shacks of the scary town, scattered on both sides of a stagnant canal, shabbier and bleaker than what I had left behind.

  I took a wrong turn. I found myself on a bad narrowing road, among splintered fences, surrounded by sinister shacks. But a man lying on his back under an old dented car rolled over and crawled out to give me precise directions to the bridge over the canal, to the main road to Monterrey.

  And passing through Reynosa proper I saw how the pretty plaza near the border was misleading for being unthreatening and decorous, with its church and narrow streets of shops and taquerias. The full horror and hodgepodge of Reynosa was hidden from the pedestrians who wandered across to buy discount Viagra; it was deeper into the town, the disorder, the ruinous buildings, the litter, the donkeys cropping grass by the roadside. Reynosa was not its plaza, but rather another hot, dense border town of hard-up Mexicans who spent their lives peering across the frontier, easily able to see—through the slats in the fence, beyond the river—better houses, brighter stores, newer cars, cleaner streets, and no donkeys.

  At the first stoplight at the intersection of a potholed road of Reynosa, a fat, middle-aged man in shorts and wearing clown makeup—whitened face, red bulb nose, lipsticked mouth—began to juggle three blue balls as the light turned red, and a small girl in a tattered dress, obviously his daughter, passed him a teapot which he balanced on his chin. The small girl hurried to the waiting cars, soliciting pesos.

  At the next light, a man in sandals and rags juggled three bananas and flexed his muscles while making lunatic faces. A woman hurried from car to car with a basket, offering tamales. Farther on was a fire-eater, a skinny man in pink pajamas gulping smoky flames from a torch. And I thought: the odd, medieval strategies of the very poor, clowning, performing, selling homemade food; but not begging.

  Masked policemen and masked soldiers manned checkpoints on the main road, Boulevard Miguel Hidalgo, and peered at me before waving me on. Within minutes I was out of Reynosa and headed into open country, over the state line from Tamaulipas into Nuevo León. It was the same sort of Texas landscape of mesquite and cactus and browsing cattle, the other side of a river that, owing to an 1836 treaty and a war ten years later, turned this river valley into two countries, which had lately reverted to its earlier condition as a war zone, of fence-jumping, of Mexicans splashing madly across the river, of human trafficking and the drug trade and random killings, the cartels contending for dominance. I was now deeper into Mexico than I had driven so far.

  My head was buzzing with anxiety—it was all those warnings—but relief came in the form of butterflies of the sort I’d seen on the riverbank at El Cenizo. But there was just a small clutch of them there. I was not prepared for the masses of them here, the weird intrusion of them, first the small, crippled clusters of fluttering bits of yellow, toppling forward across the road, looking uncertain and slow, and then gouts of them, a straggling mass of buttery beating wings, and after a while clouds of butterflies so thick they blinded me briefly and smeared my windows and left powdery streaks of scales on the hood of my car when I smacked into them. And for miles the rabble of butterflies batted along the road to Monterrey, funneled through the passes in the valley in a mass migration, borne by the soft air and the sunlight. This wilderness of preposterous winged confetti continued to tumble, keeping low to the ground, but never falling far or flying straight, an interrupted progress that made their onward flight seem like a struggle.

  Long ago I had read of this butterfly migration, the seasonal movement of monarch butterflies, but it had slipped my mind, and only when I saw them sprinkled everywhere, emerging in their yellow labors from between the mesquite trees, did I remember how they came annually from the northern US states, converged in Texas, and flew through this part of Mexico. It was my luck to be crossing their path at just the right time, and the sight of them cheered me. “Many cultures associate the butterfly with our souls,” I later read. How some religions regard the butterfly as a symbol of resurrection, and how some people “view the butterfly as representing endurance, change, hope, and life.” And in Mexican life these days the butterflies are identified with migrants, making their way to the border and beyond.

  The undulant butterflies did not cease; they fluttered and bobbed all the way to Monterrey—and Monterrey was another surprise. Yet before I reached it, I was uplifted by the thought that almost a whole morning into my journey across the border, nothing bad had happened to me, neither at the hamlets of La Vaquita and General Bravo nor the turnoff to the cattle town of China on its lake and dam, Presa el Cuchillo, a place well known for the goat meat in its cuisine—no roadblocks, no bandits, only sunlight and mesquite and mariposas, the blue-gray silhouette of the Sierra Madre in the distance and the enormous, mostly new city of Monterrey up ahead, looking like a city jackhammered into a quarry, set off by the glittering Cerro de la Silla, Saddle Hill. Mexicans tend to refer to some mountains as hills, though Cerro de la Silla’s highest peak, Pico Norte, is more than a mile high.

  Butterflies prettified the oil cracking plant and sprinkled themselves among the Monterrey steel mills and the campus of the Tecnológico de Monterrey. Tec de Monterrey, Mexico’s most important technical university, is the reason for the city to have transformed itself from an industrial hub to a leader in software development, with four hundred IT companies in business and still expanding. The school has been so successful, producing graduates who staff the software companies, that it now has campuses in twenty-five Mexican cities.

  And this is another reason Mexicans feel belittled and misunderstood. Monterrey, Mexico’s third-largest city, is a mere hour or so from the nearest town in the US, which would be sad little Roma, Texas, or its bigger neighbor, Rio Grande City, where the schools are struggling and there are no technical colleges and nothing to compare with Monterrey, hidden and growing behind its saddleback mountain.

  A simple detour in this surprising city—surprising for its obvious wealth, its boomtown bustle, and its intensive building—brought me near the campus of Tec de Monterrey. It was lunchtime, and by then, having been on the road for a few hours, I was less nervy about driving, calmer, having made it to here from the border and feeling less conspicuous, still among butterflies, and in the rattle of traffic.

  Another surprise was that the taqueria I chose for lunch was also near the Felix U. Gómez station of the city’s metro—the Metrorrey—twenty miles long, thirty-one stations, and more lines under construction. Who knew Monterrey had a rapid transit system? But it made sense, because this city of manufacturing, IT companies, schools, and a sprawl of colonias would be unsustainable without cheap transport.

  Outside the taqueria, I fell into conversation with a motorcyclist, Manuel Rojas, who was also a software engineer at a company nearby (“And it’s based in Massachusetts”). Manuel and his biker friends were trying to take a group picture of themselves. I volunteered to be the photographer, and I introduced myself.

  “Tec de Monterrey is the best school of its kind in the country, and it’s the reason this city is so busy. I went there, and so did most of these guys.” Manuel gestured to the other bikers. “There’s a medical school, too. Pretty soon we’ll have more software development here than manufacturing or heavy industry.”

  “What’s the pay like for someone in your company?” I asked.

  “Salaries depend on experience,” he said. “You might start at 15,000 pesos a month”—$833—“but if you’re good and experienced you can make 100,000.” That pay of $5,555 a month worked out to $67,000 a year, and represented a top salary, modest by US standar
ds, but enough in Mexican terms for Manuel Rojas to afford (like his friends) a newish Harley-Davidson and a reasonable apartment near the city, or a house in one of the many colonias.

  The demand for workers in Monterrey had created a housing crisis and meant that this mountain valley was crammed from one end to the other with cubicular two-story houses of whitewashed stucco, looking from a distance like a mass of dusty sugar cubes and, up close, mute and unadorned like orderly mausoleums in a graveyard of subdivisions. They were thick on the lower slopes of Cerro de la Silla on one side, and on the pair of mountains on the north, Sierra El Fraile y San Miguel—neither of which looked like a friar (fraile) or a saint, but more like a stupendous pair of slag heaps—treeless, stony, sharp-featured. But even with the five-star hotels and the tall buildings, Monterrey had the stung and wounded look of a Mexican city that had blasted its way into existence in a rocky landscape.

  Rents varied, Manuel said. A house on the outskirts could be had for $300 a month, but nearer the city center was ten times that.

  Manuel was in his early thirties, well spoken, handsome in his motorcycle leathers, patient with my questions, and polite in declining a drink or a meal. He had to go, he said. He was headed with his fellow bikers to a rally in León and wanted to hit the road (salir a la carretera), as it was 350 miles away.

  “How far is Saltillo?”

  “You can be there in an hour and a half.”

  So I drove to Saltillo on a good road in afternoon glare, through the steep brown hills of the Chihuahuan Desert—no traffic going south, but a succession of convoys of eighteen-wheelers passing me, heading north, many of them car haulers, stacked with Chevys and Mercedes on their way to the border, reminding me that I was on Route 57, known as the NAFTA Highway.

  Saltillo is called the Detroit of Mexico for its automobile production (of the twenty-five car plants in Mexico, five are in or around Saltillo), but it had Detroit’s disorder, too, the sprawl of working poor and bad housing and agglomerations of shops. Yet the center of the city, also like Detroit, had two good museums and a sculpted, busily baroque eighteenth-century cathedral and plazas of venerable municipal buildings befitting Saltillo as the capital of its state, Coahuila. I drove through its center, looking for a hotel, but got honked forward and quickly found myself headed out of town.

  In the interest of greater freedom on the road, I had made few plans in advance and no onward reservations. My method from the start of my trip and along the border was to look for a place to stay for the night at around four or five in the afternoon, spotting one by the roadside (“That’ll do”), swinging into the forecourt, and asking whether they had a room and a safe place to park my car. They always did.

  That was how I found myself at the Hotel la Fuente, set in a walled compound at the edge of Saltillo. To a casual onlooker it was seedy, with greater scrutiny it was adequate, and as a desperate traveler I found it just right. As with the cheapest Mexican motels, its main asset was its secure parking lot and its unsmiling guard, recommended in a country noted for car theft. My room hummed with the sting of mildew, the lighting was too dim to read by, the bed was lumpy and the bathroom was dusty, but after an anxious day on the road, driving from the border, it seemed perfect. The restaurant looked spartan, but the food was excellent in the simple way of provincial Mexico.

  From my inquiries on the border, I had the name of a man in Saltillo, Lopez, a friend of a friend, who had been living in the US until he was stopped for a minor traffic violation and, unable to explain his status, was arrested as an illegal and sent back to Mexico. After ten years working in a factory in Texas, he had gained the experience to be able to get a job in Saltillo and apply his expertise to a factory here. He met me at the Hotel la Fuente, his arms hanging loose, a polite, somewhat sad, and serious man. It was hard to tell how old he was. In a country where people matured early and worked hard, they often looked old in middle age. I took him to be fifty or more, but he could have been much younger. He was jowly, heavyset, in shirtsleeves—Saltillo was warm—with a soft handshake.

  “I have never been here,” Lopez said in the restaurant, looking around. Glancing at the menu he remarked that many of the items were local specialties, such as pulque bread, roasted baby goat (cabrito), and machaca con huevos (shredded beef and eggs). Lopez had the cabrito. I had tortilla soup and enchiladas and marveled that in a single day I had made it this far.

  “Not far from the border here,” Lopez said. “But over the border—that’s really far!”

  “What sort of work were you doing in the States?”

  “Plastic injection molding,” he said, poking his fork at the goat meat. “That’s what I’m doing here.”

  The term was new to me, and seemed like a conversation killer, but he said it was important for automotive parts. He was in quality control, and I liked his description of defects: “delamination,” “blisters,” “burn marks.”

  “Do you miss the States?”

  “I miss my children. My girlfriend and I split up, and she’s raising them there. There’s no way I can visit them, but my ex sometimes brings them to Nuevo Laredo. They come over the border and we have a meal.” He looked a little tearful. “Two boys, eight and twelve. They’re getting big.”

  “Tell me more about the factory where you work,” I said.

  “Thermoplastics. It’s not interesting. The pay is about a quarter of what I was making in Texas—and we have educated people here. There’s sixteen universities in Saltillo and lots of colleges.” He chewed a little. “I’ll manage. It’s just that everything’s so different now. Twenty years ago I had no problem crossing the border—all of us shopped there, when we had money. But it got worse and worse.” He sighed. “Politics!”

  “Ours or yours?”

  “Both! Our government is bad, yours—well, you know the talk. ‘Mexicans are criminals and rapists.’ And really, I was working hard, and all the Mexicans I knew were good workers.”

  He spoke about uncertainties: how NAFTA might be renegotiated to the detriment of Mexico, how stringent immigration policies meant his going to the States again was out of the question, how the current president, Enrique Peña Nieto, was as poor a speaker and as much a liar as our president. But he laughed. “It’s not in my hands!” And so we talked about happier things—his new girlfriend, her job at GM, their trips to visit her family in Monterrey, and outings to San Luis Potosí, where he had friends. A lovely city, he said, and urged me to stop there.

  Reflecting on Lopez’s mood, it struck me that the experience of living under a corrupt government and trying to stay honest yourself made people cynical and distrustful of authority, but at the same time self-sufficient and dependent on friends and family, because no one else would help you.

  “Any advice for me? I’m driving south.”

  “Don’t drive at night. You’ll be fine. You’ll learn a lot. And Mexico City is a lot safer than it used to be.”

  He had to go, he said—he didn’t like driving at night either.

  Writing my notes after he’d gone, I was unaware that a couple had begun to eat at the next table, but then I heard them murmuring in English, so I said hello to the first gringos I had seen since Texas.

  They announced themselves as Canadians, who had taken a wrong turn at Ojinaga and had fought their way here in an old car from Chihuahua, well over four hundred miles.

  They were Beth and Warner—not married, they quickly added. But Warner’s wife, Judy, was Beth’s best friend, and when Beth said she was driving to Mexico to spend the winter, Judy said, “Warner needs a vacation. He can help with the driving, and fly back when you get there.” So off they went, “sharing a room,” as Warner explained to me, “but separate beds.” They were pleasant, and I admired them for not making a hoo-ha about their journey through the desert.

  I wanted to talk about Mexico and the roads. They were preoccupied with their children and their challenges.

  “My daughter’s bipolar,” Beth said.

/>   “My stepson’s autistic and borderline troubled,” Warner said.

  I asked them to amplify a bit.

  “She refuses to take her meds and then it’s awful,” Beth said.

  “It’s criminal tendencies with my stepson,” Warner said. “But in some ways he’s an idiot savant.”

  “In what way criminal?”

  “It’s the girlfriend—not really girlfriend, because she’s gay, but he dotes on her, which is a problem for her gay lover, who’s crazy, by the way. Anyway, they go to gay bars and he chats up a fellow and dances with him, and while they’re dancing, his girlfriend picks the fellow’s back pocket. The gay lover sometimes freaks out, and in fact she called the cops on him, but before it went to trial, she dropped the charges.”

  “That was considerate.”

  “Turned out she was wanted in connection with a homicide in which she was named as an accomplice, for driving the getaway car.”

  “So your stepson was off the hook?”

  “Not really. He still went to jail, but that’s a whole different story.”

  Fascinated to know more, I joined them at breakfast (huevos motuleños, Yucatán-style eggs layered on tortillas with ham and beans) and learned about the scams and petty crimes and the time the gay girlfriend broke into Warner’s house and began smashing things, while the stepson (flourishing a pellet gun) was charged with assault with a deadly weapon (“because it looked like a gun, see”) and ended up in jail.

  For as long as I talked to Beth and Warner, I ceased to think about Mexico and even forgot I was there, because their stories about madness and mayhem—told plainly, in a Manitoba monotone—held my attention. And I kept having to apologize for my questions. But they forgave me my curiosity.