On the Plain of Snakes

by Paul Theroux

  “Una tormenta eléctrica,” Lucia added, when the lightning cracked out of the shifting clouds and lit the hillsides briefly before they blackened again.

  Some peasant huts, the small rough ones known as jacales, built into the steepness, rocked in the wind, their tin roofs streaming. On some of the more level terraces cattle were browsing in the weeds, their coats soaked and dark, the lightning enlarging them and seeming to electrify them, making them stiff-legged and mechanical, like oversized metallic toys.

  “Where is this village of yours?” I asked. “Is it far?”

  “A little bit.”

  By now we had been on the road for over an hour, and the rain still hammered down—not a cloudburst, as Shirley had suggested, but a storm, slowly destroying the road under me and reducing the visibility to twenty feet.

  “Would you like to go to the United States?”

  “Yes, to Los Angeles,” Shirley said. “Not to live, but to visit.”

  “Maybe New York City?”

  Lucia said, “Also.”

  These mentions of big cities seemed bittersweet when, in the driving rain, the road sloped through another valley—more wooded here—and I saw a church steeple ahead, and a sign, and we entered a paved road.

  The sign said VILLA TEJúPAM DE LA UNIóN, and I could see when we got closer that the church—lovely from a distance—looked hollowed out and ruinous, but Shirley assured me it was solid and well attended; the high cracked wall was misleading. The houses in the village were one-story structures, sodden and dark, and down the road a restaurant, Bugambilias, was shut. The streets were empty on this rainy day, a cowering dog the only sign of life.

  The young women humped and buttock-bumped sideways and slid out of the back seat to press against my window, thanking me, their pretty faces wet with the rain, their hair plastered against their cheeks, the rain still falling on their hats and shawls.

  “How far to Oaxaca?”

  “Stay on this road.”

  “Is it far?”

  “A little bit. You will pass Yodobada and Yanhuitlán.”

  “Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!” they called out.

  I drove on, ecstatic, having met the challenge of Mexican back roads, the hairpin bends, the rockslides, the high desert, all of it ominously enhanced by the thunderstorm. And why had I been confident? Because of the women in the back seat. If I’d had any problem—a flat tire, a crash, a breakdown—I was sure they would have happily stayed with me and helped. Cooperation and mutual aid were keys to the survival of their Mixteca culture. So I’d skirted my way around the blockade, clogged with traffic, that had obstructed the wide highway, and at last I found a kind of delight in the unexpected and dramatic detour, a little victory that seemed essential to my traveling in the Mexican backlands.

  The road was straighter after that, the meadows greener, the rain softer, but I had climbed to 7,400 feet. I passed Yodobada (pop. 226, nearly all indigenous), and twenty miles south I again joined one of the oldest thoroughfares in Mexico, the Camino Real—the Royal Road—which for centuries connected Mexico City to the southern regions. I entered the village of Yanhuitlán. I slowed the car for a better look, and stopped—dazzled by the biggest church I’d seen anywhere in rural Mexico.

  On the grassy platform of a hill, the church of Santo Domingo Yanhuitlán was tall, high-sided, and austere, braced by stepped squarish buttresses rising almost to its roof, its flat facade inset with niches where stony-gazed saints looked vigilant. What was most impressive was its unadorned immensity, its fortress-like solidity, its stark and solitary position in a country town of plank-built houses and bony huts, the biggest thing in the landscape, bigger than any hill and perfectly preserved, its tawny stone pinkish, having been rosily dampened by the rainstorm that had now abated.

  I needed to stretch my legs. I parked and climbed the thirty or so steps leading to the arched entrance that framed its enormous wooden doors. I walked to the door under the bell tower, where a skinny russet-haired dog was skulking, eyeing me. As I approached, the dog became animated, circled me, crouching, then darted and nipped at my foot, then took a bite of my shoe, leaving a blob of slobber on my toe cap, growling when I kicked at him. As I backed away the dog resumed his skulking at the doorway, and I thought, You win, perrito.

  But when the dog loped after a mangy cat, I slipped into the church, marveling at its immensity. In its time this building was the tallest church in the Americas, its time being around 1558, when it was finished. It took twenty-five years to complete, six hundred laborers toiling at the masonry, the stone cut from a quarry in Teposcolula, a dozen miles away over the ridge of hills to the west. Fifteen Dominican friars from Spain lived in its convent. And who financed its construction? The townspeople of Yanhuitlán and nearby villages, paying tribute, the laborers themselves forking over twenty cacao beans a week for the privilege of shifting and cutting the stone in the quarries and cutting wood for scaffolds, making its buttresses, chiseling the niches, cementing the cloisters for this monastery complex that was also a fortress. And when the church was finished and Christmas and Easter were celebrated, the thousands of townsfolk were required to bring money or cacao beans—“failure to do so would result in public whipping on the church patio.”

  I knew nothing of this when I stood under the high ceiling and gazed at the gold altarpiece and the strange baptismal font, set on four thick upright snakes. And then I stepped outside into the mist, dazzled by the sight of this great, broad-shouldered stone monolith with a steeple, now obviously restored to its former grandeur—not a crack or a scar anywhere evident on its smooth, pinkish, skin-like sides. It was my luck later to find a book about it, Building Yanhuitlan: Art, Politics, and Religion in the Mixteca Alta Since 1500, by an Italian scholar, Alessia Frassani.

  The town had once been populous and flourishing, in Frassani’s telling—twelve thousand people clustered in neighborhoods paying tribute and attending services, some reluctantly. In preconquest times, Yanhuitlán was the second-most-important Mixtec cult center in the region (the first was at Achiutla, about twenty miles southwest). A number of Mixtecs held to their old beliefs, of annual sacrifices to Xipe Totec (Our Lord the Flayed One), and the veneration of their gods, resenting the fact that the church had been built over their temple to the local deities, obscuring the site, like a frivolous Spanish tea cozy over a sacred Mixtec pot.

  This church-for-temple replacement, like the one I’d seen in Cholula, was a missionary stratagem; it happened everywhere in Mexico, it happened in South America, the Christian church built on the foundations of an idol worshiper’s temple. You see it vividly in Rome, one example being the ancient temple dedicated to the Indo-Iranian god Mithras, made into the fifth-century basilica of St. Clement. The instigation was the apostle Paul’s: “Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, him declare I unto you.” But like the Athenian mockers of Paul and the Roman cultists of Mithraism (many of them soldiers), when the belief was suppressed, some Mixtec elders—leaders known as caciques, and nobles—vocally resented the desecration of their temple, this towering thing squatting heavily upon it.

  The Dominican friars demanded that the townsfolk surrender their idols, the carved images of their own gods, to be destroyed, or ritually executed by burning. Xipe Totec was the god of rebirth, and there were four other main deities: Zagui, who controlled the rain; Tizono, the heart of the town; Toyna, the patron of the town; and Xitondoco, the merchant god. All of them (you might say) better suited and more useful to an important agricultural and commercial center, purveying wheat and silk, than the image of a crucified foreigner, encumbered by his dogma of sin and damnation, with the promise of possible ease in a nebulous afterlife.

  Images of the Mixtec gods were kept on household altars and propitiated with plumes and cloth and the resin used for incense, known as copal. But in time, with the persuasion of the Spanish friars, the representation of the bloodied and crucified man became familiar as the sort of human sacrifice that was req
uired in Mixtec rituals (men were flayed alive to propitiate Xipe Totec, their skin worn like a cape by the nobles), and the Christian cross looked somewhat like the cosmic tree of ancient lore.

  “Not only does the Mesoamerican cosmic tree resemble the Christian cross in its quincunx shape,” Frassani writes, “but the growth of the tree itself is strictly connected to the regenerative function of human sacrifice. Since colonial times, the Christian Holy Cross has taken up the meaning and function of the ancient cosmic tree, conflating cosmological knowledge about world order and ritual significance through the enactment of the periodical sacrifice of Jesus.”

  This syncretic sandwich combining two ritualistic traditions, the Mixtec beliefs and imagery with the Christian system, satisfied a great number of people in Yanhuitlán. But not all: some clung to the old ways. Because of their defiance, three prominent local leaders were declared heretics and forced to undergo severe trials, which became known as the Yanhuitlán Inquisition, two and a half years of interrogation by a Spanish priest, Grand Inquisitor Francisco Tello de Sandoval, and his assistants. This judicial process was not very different from the terrifying Spanish Inquisition of the mother country, which had started in 1478. And it was contemporaneous with many tribunals in Spain involving torture, auto-da-fé, and strict sentencing—heretics fined, exiled, ordered to be galley slaves, or burned alive.

  Inquisitions took place all over Mexico. Pictures of executions of idolatrous Indians appeared in histories detailing conversion in Mexico—one, The History of Tlaxcala, by the sixteenth-century historian Diego Muñoz Camargo, includes a woodcut that depicts six Tlaxcalans hanging from a gallows for their idolatry, and in the foreground two being burned to death while the pious, impassive Franciscan priests look on. Nor were such executions reserved for Indians alone. One of the first (in 1574) resulted in the death of “twenty-one pestilent Lutherans,” and in the mid-seventeenth century, so Claudio Lomnitz writes in Death and the Idea of Mexico, a diarist, Gregorio Martín de Guijo, “records the public execution of sixty-six effigies and thirteen live Jews in Mexico City.” As for the inquisition in Yanhuitlán, all the proceedings were documented in more than three hundred handwritten pages, one of the most important examples of “New Spain’s inquisitorial persecution.”

  “If their intention had simply been to spread our faith,” Montaigne wrote in his essay “On Coaches,” a fierce denunciation of the Spanish conquistadors and their cruelties in Mexico—and published in 1580, at the very time this was happening—“they would have thought that it grows not by taking possession of lands but of men, and they would have had killings enough through the necessities of war without introducing indiscriminate slaughter.”

  What emerged from the inquisition of the Mixtec leaders who openly resisted the imposition of the Christian faith?

  Defiance. The intransigent Mixtec leaders had exhorted their people, “Give them your old images—keep the new ones, the better made and precious ones,” and “Don’t attend mass in the church . . . honor your ancestors here”—at their own altars.

  The Spaniards will soon be gone, the Mixtec traditionalists promised around 1540, and then the local people would be able to go back to worshiping their own gods and observing their own traditions. No more paying tribute or heavy fines, no more forced labor, such as their being impelled, under armed guard, to scour the nearby rivers for the gold the priests demanded.

  It emerged in the Yanhuitlán Inquisition that the stubborn Mixtec adherents offered food and incense to the gods at their home altars before going to church, “so as to avoid the wrath of their ancestors.” And in another devious stratagem, uncovered by the inquisitor, they chewed a narcotic green tobacco (Nicotiana rustica) they knew as piciete, to become thoroughly stoned during Mass, so blissed out on the weed that they would not hear the alien preaching.

  But resistance failed, multitudes were converted, and as a subtle accommodation more old customs were absorbed into the Christian rituals, such as the tradition of placing a greenstone into the mouth of a corpse before burial. And Mixtec imagery was adopted even in such Christian objects as the baptismal font I’d seen, carved from a single stone, in the baptistry at Yanhuitlán, where four plump plume-sided serpents, the Quetzalcoatl of legend, poured from the mouths of serpents’ heads at the corners of the font, one snake emerging from another, their upright bodies supporting the great stone bowl adorned with leaves.

  As I stood in front of the church, a helpful elevated spot, I could see that the great commercial center of Yanhuitlán was diminished. On his visit in 1953, captivated by the church and wishing to draw vignettes of it for his book Week in Yanhuitlán, Ross Parmenter was told there were 2,200 people living there. It was now reduced to a village of fewer than 900, almost a mile and a half high on the cold plateau, the Royal Road bypassed by the toll road. Yanhuitlán was another town in the highlands of the Mixteca Alta that produced migrants to the US. Its singular attraction was the stupendous church in this desolation; yet the grand edifice made me feel weirdly uncomfortable—but why?

  “It’s a strange and insufferable uncertainty to know that monumental beauty always supposes servitude,” Albert Camus wrote in the last volume of his Notebooks (1951–1959), speaking of the forced labor that creates great buildings like this. (He was in Rome when this idea came to him.) “Perhaps it’s for this that I put the beauty of a landscape above all else—it’s not paid for by any injustice and my heart is free there.”

  I continued down the rain-washed road, the old Camino Real, through the valley and across the hills to Nochixtlán, where the burned-out buses from the teachers’ union action a year before still sat in the main street, rusted and windowless, the slogans on the pedestrian overpass still legible: JUSTICE AND RIGHTS FOR ALL PEOPLE. I zigzagged through the farmland of San Jerónimo Sosola, keeping to side roads, until I came to the denser communities at Villa de Etla and San Pablo Etla, and finally at nightfall the sprawl of Oaxaca in its valley, four miles across, at this time of day a mass of restless lights, like a bowl of fireflies.

  Intact Oaxaca

  A dead cat lay on the sidewalk. This was in Oaxaca city, on the corner of Calle Tinoco y Palacios and a narrow lane, with an unreadable name on a broken sign, near my posada. The cat was large, not a mere gato but what Mexicans called a gatazo, a big cat—a flattened, half-inch-high carcass, like a fluffy scrap of carpet, recognizable as a ginger tom, frowning and toothy in death, a bit flyblown but dried out, stiffened, and beginning to mummify. Because the streets were so similar, I used this cat as a landmark—“Turn left at the dead cat”—and always found my way home, never having to humble myself by asking directions.

  It was another lesson in Mexican idiom, too, because dar el gatazo—to show the big cat—is slang for making yourself look good.

  Poor but complex and handsome, like so many of its people, and dignified in its poverty, indestructible in its simplicity, Oaxaca was a proud place, too. As for its name, to the antihero of Under the Volcano—Malcolm Lowry at his most florid and hyperbolic—Oaxaca “was like a breaking heart, a sudden peal of stifled bells in a gale, the last syllables of one dying of thirst in the desert.”

  To me the name was clunky and familiar, because it was my home for the weeks ahead. The city was orderly and joyous without being recklessly licentious, like other Mexican cities I’d seen. But in the harmonious symmetry of its old-fashioned layout, one antique street looked to me much like another. It took me a while to see that an old, unremarkable, one-story corner house, at 600 Pino Suárez, which I passed every day on my way to Spanish class at the Instituto Cultural Oaxaca, had been occupied by D. H. Lawrence when he lived here with his wife, Frieda. On the inner patio he wrote the final version of The Plumed Serpent and some of the pieces in Mornings in Mexico.

  It is worth remembering the way the latter book begins: “One says Mexico: one means, after all, one little town away South in the Republic: and in this little town, one rather crumbly adobe house built round two sides of a
garden patio: and of this house, one spot on the deep, shady verandah facing inwards to the trees, where there are an onyx table and three rocking-chairs and one little wooden chair, a pot with carnations, and a person with a pen. We talk so grandly, in capital letters about Morning in Mexico. All it amounts to is one little individual looking at a bit of sky and trees, then looking down at the page of his exercise book.”

  Thus, Lawrence in Oaxaca, at his best, seeing things as they are. And it was pretty much how I spent many days in my posada in Oaxaca, dibble-dabbling with my pen in my notebook.

  There was a good reason for Oaxaca being unaltered, and unalterable. A few days after arriving in this colonial town in a high valley, justly celebrated for its beauty and its traditions, I was reminded again of how “the past of a place survives in its poor”—how the poor tend to keep their cultural identity intact. They depend on its compass and continuity and its pleasures for their self-esteem, while the rising classes and the rich tend to rid themselves of their old traditions, except in a showy or ritualized way, because they became wealthy by resisting them and breaking rules. Oaxaca, with its powerful and visible identity and its living culture, was hard-up as a result of staying true to itself.

  As proof of this, I met a man, a Oaxaqueño, who said he was aggrieved.

  “We are poor in Oaxaca, and I will tell you why. All our houses are hundreds of years old, all our streets are narrow. It is forbidden to destroy any houses, it is forbidden to widen the streets. We cannot build big hotels or resorts here, like other places in Mexico. We cannot change. It is forbidden. So we remain poor.”