by Paul Theroux
As I passed the Santa Muerte shrine at Los Lobos, I considered stopping, just to talk again to the priestess. I rejected this as frivolous, yet I still had my Santa Muerte beads and the skeleton image dangling from my rear-view mirror. Was it his glimpse of this weird relic that caused the peevish policeman at the roadblock in the Isthmus to send me on my way?
In the dark back streets of Matehuala, looking for a place to stay, I remembered the friendly motel, Las Palmas, where I’d slept on the way south: behind a strong fence, secure for my car, with clean rooms, and local food.
“You are coming from?” the clerk at the reception desk asked. She was tall, in a tailored suit that was perhaps her uniform, and looked superior and chic, well dressed and poised.
I told her Oaxaca.
“Did you eat grasshoppers?”
“Lots of them. Ants, too. Very tasty.”
She pursed her pretty lips. “We have better food here.”
Cabuches were in season, the buds of the biznaga (or barrel) cactus, like baby Brussels sprouts. I had a plate of them, and the other Matehuala specialty again, cabrito al horno, baby goat baked with the skin on, tender and slimy.
The waiter, Hilário, asked me whether I was going north. I said yes.
“Don’t go through Reynosa. It’s bad there.”
“I was planning to go that way.”
“No.” He was firm. “My home is in Monterrey. I know Reynosa is dangerous right now. Especially this week.”
“What about Ciudad Alemán?”
“Better, I think.”
Driving through the small settlements in the heat and glare the next day—every building and every road sign, even the shepherds and the women and children carrying bundles, all coated with a fine film of dust—a feeling of melancholy descended on me. I guessed this was because of the self I remembered from being here long before, the dejected man who had no idea where he was going. But I was a different person now, because I knew where I had been. Instead of being purified by suffering—sometimes the consequence of a travel ordeal—I had made friends on the road through the plain of snakes, and that had lifted my spirits.
I had marveled at this desert landscape on my trip south; it still bewitched me with its stark beauty and unexpected wildness. Taking a side route away from Saltillo, I found myself circling the steep, gravelly brown mountains that serve as the dramatic backdrop to Monterrey, so simple and shapely, with sharp peaks and knife-like ridge lines, such an amazing eruption of sierra, yet so close to the flat land of Texas just north.
From this simplicity and rugged beauty I saw the density of Monterrey in its populous valley, the confusion of roads, the sun beating down on the mass of white, flat-topped houses that looked hot and Moroccan. I headed east and then north along the edge of Monterrey, through industrial suburbs and fenced compounds of bleak tenements, east to Cadereyta Jiménez—notorious for gangs—to Cerralvo (a restaurant, a gas pump), following signs to Ciudad Mier.
The road north was flat and straight through the fields of mesquite and tall grass, sparsely inhabited, only a few roadside villages and very few other cars.
Fiddling with the radio in my car, I heard music from a Monterrey station, classical music I had not heard anywhere else in Mexico, and happened upon a lovely piece (violin, cello, piano) I’d heard before, but couldn’t name. This sweet soundtrack soothed me and sped me onward, past the tall grass and twisted trees.
Long before, in Ciudad Alemán, on my traverse of the border, a shopkeeper had said to me, “Don’t go outside town. Twenty miles away are the ranchitos, and the mafia.”
I was traveling in the area of the ranchitos and the mafia now. It was around here, so the shopkeeper had suggested, the cartels were located. Just here, a year before, a series of Santa Muerte shrines had been found, forming a route through the semidesert and the thickets of low bush, as a way of guiding and protecting the narcos. Looking closely at passing buildings, I saw no people, just broken windows, empty stores, abandoned houses, and collapsed fences, suggesting fear and chaos. General Treviño to Las Auras—a huge villa off the road, and a ranch unambiguously named Ganadores—Winners.
“And that was the Notturno in E-flat Major by Franz Schubert,” the woman on the Monterrey radio station said as the music ended.
There were not many big houses—perhaps three in the hundred miles from Monterrey—but each fancy villa seemed to represent drug money.
At a road junction near the town of Mier I stopped to let a truck pass and was surrounded by eight youths pressing their faces against my windows.
“What’s up?”
Shaking a tin can at me, one boy said, “We’re collecting money for the Queen of the Day.”
I put some coins in the can and said, “Where’s the queen?”
A girl pushed past the boys and smiled at me. She wore a black, lacy see-through blouse, tight-fighting shorts, and—on this hot back street in Nuevo León—white patent-leather high heels. She placed a hand on each cheek, tilted her head like a stage coquette, and pouted moodily.
“I am the queen,” she said. Her fingernails were sparkly against her cheeks.
I asked of the eight of them, “Which of you have been to the US?”
Two of them said they had been across, to the Texas town of Roma, about six miles away. The torment of Ciudad Mier, suffering in its dust and neglect, was that the fabulous kingdom of money was just down the street and over the narrow river.
I was exhilarated as I set off, but a blocked road and a detour sign sent me into a deserted village, where I began to worry—a dirt road, no signs, ruined buildings, like driving into the sort of entrapment I’d been warned about. I kept on, fretting, until I saw a paved road in the distance, and took it. A mile or so farther on, the curio shops, the taqueria where I’d once had a meal, the shop where I’d seen a pear-shaped, orange-haired piñata in the shape of Donald Trump, the plaza where I’d had a shoeshine.
Although Texas was just across the river, no gringos circulated here. I was hungry, so I went back to the taqueria. Then I bought an ice cream. I sat in the plaza and had my shoes shined, savoring the delay.
But when I told the shoeshine man, Héctor, the route I had come, he said, “You’re very lucky.”
I didn’t think much about that remark. Without a hitch I crossed the international bridge to Roma. A boy on a Jet Ski skidded in circles on the Rio Grande below the bridge. I had taken a simple detour from Monterrey, as Hilário had suggested in Matehuala, a safe back road through the eastern suburbs of Monterrey and Cadereyta Jiménez. This sparsely traveled road, Route 54, was flat, straight, pretty, and placid-looking, through low woods and grazing land of the cattle ranchitos and a few small towns.
But “You’re very lucky” preyed on my mind. And later I researched the recent history of the area and found that Route 54 was strategic for human and drug smuggling, that this whole border state of Nuevo León had become a battlefield on which the Zetas and the Gulf cartel vied for dominance. Kidnappings and mayhem were common; in the manufacturing town of Cadereyta Jiménez (broom factory, oil refinery, workers’ tenements) five municipal employees were massacred in 2012, and in the same year, in San Juan, a town just seventy-five miles southwest of Roma, forty-nine bodies were discovered dumped on the federal highway I’d traveled, all of them decapitated and dismembered, all of them young men, and none of them (because of the butchery) easily identifiable. Near the bodies was a narcomensaje—a large Z spray-painted on the road, the sign that Los Zetas had been responsible, and a warning to rivals and the authorities.
Yes, I was lucky—incredibly so. Lucky in the people I met, lucky in the friends I made, lucky even in my mishaps, my always emerging unharmed, with a tale to tell. More than fifty years of this, ever the fortunate traveler.
I’d arrived safely in Roma, but I was not done. I needed to apply for a refund on my Vehicle Importation Permit, and renew my visa. So I drove along the Texas side of the border to McAllen and then crossed into Mexico
again, to the customs office in a building just inside the Reynosa frontier.
“I can’t do any of your visa paperwork today,” the clerk said. He wore a baseball cap and was dressed, as many men in Mexican border offices are dressed, no matter how senior, like a farmer or a field hand. “I can give you a refund on your permit, but there’s a three-day waiting period for the visa.”
“I can’t come back in three days. I need it now.”
“This is the law.”
I pleaded a little, explaining the inconvenience.
“Maybe talk to that man.”
He indicated a man in black, but looking agricultural, like the others. I explained my dilemma. He too told me about the specified waiting period.
A stark government sign on the wall behind the man’s head cautioned me, in large black letters in two languages, ANY ATTEMPT TO OFFER A BRIBE OR A TIP TO AN OFFICIAL IS FORBIDDEN, AND PUNISHABLE BY LAW.
“I realize it’s a problem,” I said, and explained that I needed it now.
He listened carefully, then beckoned me into his office, nearer the warning sign. He rifled through my papers. I noticed that one of his rings was a toothy skull, silver, with red stones for eyes, nudging and nibbling a hairy knuckle when he flicked that finger. He looked me up and down, seeming to make a mental calculation.
“Yes. I can help you,” he said in a whisper. “But it will cost something.”
At such a moment the wary traveler thinks: given the severe sign, and the willingness of the man, this must be a trap. I offer the bribe and then I am arrested for the crime of offering a bribe. But this was the plain of snakes.
“Cuánto cuesta?” I mouthed.
Fumbling with a ballpoint pen and agitatedly clicking it, seeming with each click to make a mental calculation, he finally gripped it and wrote “180” on a small piece of paper. Just as quickly he crumpled the paper, pinched it small, and pocketed it.
“Pesos?”
He snorted a little, and hoicked: a Mexican negative. I turned away and covertly selected nine $20 bills from my wallet, folded and flattened them, and palmed them to him. He did not thank me. He clucked softly, a satisfying ungumming of his sticky tongue, and made the money disappear. Then he prepared my documents and wished me a good journey.
This must not be an anecdote, I remembered, driving across the border, and I was almost tearful, hearing the echo of the Zapotec whisper, “Eet yelasu nara,” Don’t forget me.
The border fence, Nogales, Arizona. Close relations live on both sides.
Steve McCurry
Border Patrol officer, Nogales, Arizona.
Steve McCurry
María saying grace at the Comedor, the Kino Initiative’s migrant shelter in Nogales. Desperately poor, she left her three children behind to cross the border, to work as a cleaner. Arrested by the Border Patrol, she was roughed up, jailed, and deported. Her stoicism was a continued inspiration.
Peg Bowden
In Brownsville, Texas, a cross memorializes a migrant who died on this spot. There is hardly a stretch of border wall that does not have such a cross.
Steve McCurry
The author with weavers and campesinos in San Baltazar Guelavila, Oaxaca. All but two of them had been undocumented workers in the United States.
Michael Sledge
The author at the Comedor in Nogales, talking to a man who had been deported after working for twelve years in the United States.
Steve McCurry
Nogales street scene.
Steve McCurry
Child street performer, Oaxaca.
Steve McCurry
The author and an indignant citizen in Ciudad Alemán’s main plaza.
Steve McCurry
Late afternoon mezcal, Oaxaca.
Steve McCurry
A man at his family grave in a traditional Day of the Dead vigil at a cemetery in Oaxaca.
Steve McCurry
Celebrant in a Day of the Dad procession, Oaxaca.
Steve McCurry
The author walking on the Ciudad Juárez side of the border, along the culvert that contains the Rio Grande, a trickle here in the dry season.
Steve McCurry
The border west of Nogales, Arizona.
Steve McCurry
A side street in a poor community in Ciudad Juárez, source of much of the labor for NAFTA factories.
Steve McCurry
The author and Subcomandante Marcos (masked) at a Zapatista event in Chiapas.
Michael Sledge
Santa María in Ixcatlán, Mixteca Alta. This woman had woven the straw hat that morning to use as payment for milling the maize in her basket.
Michael Sledge
A shepherd in late afternoon, a remnant of the eternal Mexico, along the sixteenth-century Padre Tembleque aqueduct northeast of Mexico City.
Steve McCurry
About the Author
© Steve McCurry
Paul Theroux is the author of many highly acclaimed books. His novels include The Lower River and The Mosquito Coast, and his renowned travel books include Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, Dark Star Safari, and Deep South. He lives in Hawaii and on Cape Cod.
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Footnotes
* In that same year, near Plymouth Colony, Myles Standish and his men carried out a massacre on behalf of the Pilgrim fathers, killing so many Indians that they “irreparably damaged the human ecology of the region” (Nathaniel Philbrick, Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War, 2007).
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* About forty miles south of Van Horn, at place called Porvenir, a melancholy sign. On January 28, 1918, a group of Texans, Anglo ranchers, and soldiers snatched fifteen Mexican men and boys and massacred them on a bluff overlooking the river, the burned Porvenir to the ground.
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