None of the above
* * *
•
My father’s medical records from the turn of the millennium no longer exist. I can’t corroborate my mother’s claims that Papi was “Schizophrenic,” a conclusion she reached based on personal assessments. She is not a mental health specialist. But it’s not accurate to call Papi a “Shaman” either. Both labels—“Schizophrenic” and “Shaman”—obscure the complex dimensionality of his in-flux reality. North of the border, Papi might be diagnosed, medicated. South of the border, he might be revered, consulted. There are exceptions to the scientific-supernatural divide, of course. Urban areas throughout Latin America have adopted the Western psychiatric approach; they lock up locos and prescribe lithium. In the United States, curanderos of the Tohono O’odham Nation rely on voices and visions to guide the families of missing migrants to skeletons. Both approaches—the scientific and the supernatural—are incomplete on their own. The former implies a purely physical mind. The latter ignores material reality. Acknowledging the power of interpretation—over the mind and the world—is a way to branch the two. The power is not total, but it is real. It is neither material nor magical. It is both. It extends forever in all directions.
* * *
•
I prepared my backpack for one of my final road trips: to Chicxulub, the site of the asteroid impact that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs and more than seventy percent of life on earth. I wanted to collect some sand from the beach. The sand was symbolic of the power of regeneration and transmutation—of the endless capacity of life to begin anew. I would bring some back with me to the United States and give some to my father. I could no longer live in Mexico. I wanted to be close to my family.
I headed north across the peninsula with empty plastic bottles in my backpack, stopping to jump into cenotes along the way: the bat-filled cenotes of Dzitnup, the gold-bathed cenotes of Cuzamá, the tree-lined cenotes of El Corchito and Celestún, where a crocodile sunbathed on the shore as I swam. The coastal town of Chicxulub was so alone and motionless it felt dreamlike. The contrast between the town’s stillness and the explosive significance I knew it possessed produced a powerful illusion in my mind: as I walked through the deserted, postapocalyptic streets, I felt that the reality of the town hinged on my perception—that if I sufficiently willed it, I could cause the seaside shacks to morph into ships or sea creatures, as if in a lucid dream. I saw women staring out at me from windows, blinking slowly. I could almost hear their thoughts, questioning me.
The wind was gritty with sand and seashells, whipping my skin. It was so fierce that the fishermen had not gone out to sea. I found them congregated on a patio, drinking beer. They told me about El Norte, the name of the wind. They said it crossed the Gulf of Mexico and pummeled the northern lip of the peninsula. Lesser winds had toppled their boats in the past. I asked the fishermen about the asteroid. They had all heard of it, but they knew little about it. “How long ago did that happen? That was thousands of years ago,” said one. “I’m seventy years old, but I didn’t see it,” another added, skeptically.
I walked to the beach and sat in front of the sea. I asked Chicxulub for permission to take some of its supernatural sands. The wind blew harder, creating a layer of broken seashells on my cheeks. I cupped the seashell-laden sand in my palms and let it drip into two bottles and a bag. I poured fistful after fistful. When I finished, I placed the containers of sand in my backpack and whispered my thanks to Chicxulub. Then I headed to the pier. Standing in the middle of its narrow length, my body battled the wind, which threatened to toss me into the turbulent Gulf of Mexico. The dominant color of the place was cream. Everything seemed to mix with the color of the sand: the wind, the sea, the sky. The crater, more than a hundred miles in diameter, was not visible anywhere, buried beneath everything. It was discovered in the 1970s by geophysicists who were on a quest for petroleum. Deep inside the Gulf of Mexico, emanating from Chicxulub, they detected a gigantic symmetrical arc that led to a bounty of shocked quartz and tektites. They found an anomaly in the earth’s gravitational field. In the Yucatec Maya language, chicxulub means “the devil’s tick” or “the demon’s flea.” It is incredible to me that the indigenous people gave this place such an ominous name. They could not have known about the asteroid when they named it.
CHAMÁN
The next morning, at a hostel in El Progreso, five miles from Chicxulub, I received two Facebook messages from my sister:
dude mom won a million dollars.
dont tell anyone.
I called my mother, confused. She explained in a low voice suffused with joy that she had just won the grand prize of the 2014 Ronald McDonald House Charities raffle, usually a $4 million home. She was getting a million dollars instead because not enough people had bought tickets for the sale of the house. My Facebook response to my sister vividly captures my feeling: Seriously, this ALMOST makes me believe in Jesus Christ our Lord. LOL…KARMA IS REAL.
* * *
•
Sometime that week, in near-death delirium, Papi felt moved to call his mother. “Necesito ayuda,” he croaked. When she came to pick him up, his skin was the color of chicken broth. He handed his mother the address for a rehabilitation clinic in Tijuana.
* * *
•
I sped east on a bus from Chicxulub to Mérida, planning to travel through Chiapas—the last place I wanted to see in my father’s country. In Mérida, at Hostal Zócalo, a metal locker door came unhinged and fell four feet onto my foot. It shattered the bones in three toes. I screamed and cried for ten minutes as other hostel guests surrounded me. In the emergency room, I learned that the bones of my third toe were splintered in irreparable little pieces. I could operate, but I would make it worse, the surgeon said.
I was crippled in the hostel for a week. I kept my foot elevated on pillows as I waited for the profuse bleeding and the pulsating agony to stop. I considered continuing my travels on crutches. But it was impossible. Gravity made blood rush into my mangled toe when I stood, causing throbbing so excruciating I cried. A full-bodied seventy-year-old Brazilian woman who looked thirty-five took care of me, bringing me mangoes and telling stories about her husband, who she claimed was the head of the CIA. “He is always working,” she sighed, peeling our mangoes with a knife. “He is so old but he never wants to retire. For now, I travel alone.”
Back in Playa del Carmen, I lay bedridden for another week. I learned my father was in a rehabilitation center called Clínica Libre. I headed to the airport on crutches and flew north to see him, bringing some of the Chicxulub sand, which I now believed I had paid for with the sacrifice of my toe. My sister joined me at the clinic. We waited in the lobby, where an aging toucan swayed on a stick in a large black cage. It stared at us with apathy from under drooping lids. The therapist, Blanca, called us into a small room with two couches and a reclining chair. She told us our father didn’t know we were coming; the visit had been organized as a surprise, as a family therapy session. She handed us both a form. On one side, we had to fill in the blanks in negative phrases such as “I felt hurt when you ” and “I felt frightened when you .” On the other side, we had to complete positive phrases such as “I felt proud when you ” and “I felt loved when you .” The goal was to make real for our father that his self-destruction was hurting people who loved him, not just himself, and thus motivate him to start taking care of himself.
My father entered the room, his skin the pale yellow of mantequilla. His eyes seemed faint and faraway. He lit up for a moment when he saw us. Michelle and I took turns hugging him. The therapist gestured at a sofa in front of us. Papi sat down. Blanca nodded at me. I stared at the form in my hands, dreading what I was about to do. I took a deep breath and began reading: “I felt anger when you criticized me as a teenager.” I looked at my father, expecting him to become defensive, to make grunts or gestures of dissent. He did not. I con
tinued: “I felt hurt when you failed to recognize my efforts to make you proud. I felt alone when as a child you weren’t there. I felt scared each time you told me you were going to die.”
His eyes grew wet. He let me talk. He just listened. Then it was Michelle’s turn. “I felt sad each time you forgot my birthday,” my sister said. “Especially because it was only two days before yours.” With each anecdote, Papi’s eyes became heavier with tears.
“Okay, now the positive,” the therapist said. We told Papi about the good feelings he had provoked. “I felt love each time you opened up to me about your past,” I said. “I felt grateful when you hugged me in Jalisco as a little girl, and agreed to leave Autlán.” My sister recalled how special she had felt when our father had taken her to ride the trolley as a little girl. When they got off at the border, they encountered a street vendor selling toys, including a stuffed chick emerging from a stuffed egg, which Papi bought for her. She told him how appreciated she felt when he took her to a Rosarito beach and shucked oysters for her. Papi seemed to soften with each story. But when my sister finished, he stiffened again. The room was silent and awkward. The therapist seemed to be waiting.
“I feel like it’s important to mention our mother,” I blurted. If this session was supposed to make Papi aware of the pain he had caused people who loved him, she could not be left out. “Adelante,” Blanca said, nodding her head.
“You hurt Mom a lot, Papi, but she—”
Papi interrupted me for the first time in the session: “Your mom? I didn’t hurt your—I didn’t—your mom—hurt—I—no. I mean maybe, maybe a little. But she didn’t give a damn about me. She got over it quick. Real quick.”
I stared at him, speechless with surprise. He clearly believed what he was saying. But there was an effort to his conviction, a corporal one—crinkles and corrugations in his face, crooked angles in his arms, contorted spine. I conveyed the story of my mother as best I could, without letting go of Papi’s gaze. I told him what I saw as the blatant truth: that she loved him, that he crushed her, that she forgave him, that she still loved him. I spoke slowly because each word seemed to unfurl him. His fists unclenched; his body uncrumpled. I didn’t want to lose my grasp. When I finished, his mouth hung open. He stared at me for several shell-shocked seconds. Then he came loose. His catharsis slammed into me like electricity. His body shook with sobs. He coughed and convulsed. My father was cracking open.
I walked over, tentatively, and kneeled. I grabbed his arm. Heat radiated from his quaking body. His shirt was soaked with tears. “It’s okay, Papi,” I said, because I didn’t know what else to say, and because it was true. “It’s okay.”
When he looked at me, his irises seemed flecked with embers. Beyond the dying light was a man I’d never known.
CAXCAN: AN EPILOGUE
I ask my father to name everything—his mouth, his nose, his eyes, his heart, blood, skin, fingers, dreams, feet, navel, ears, memories, tongue, guts, neurons. “Thus was their counsel when they had defeated all of Xibalba,” reads the Popol Vuh. Our tangled tale is done. Clocks no longer rewind. The roads are not conch, cobblestone and caracol. Interstate 5 stretches before me, all asphalt and lines. I pass the green sign that reads “Mexico Only” to interview deported migrants who live in sewage tunnels under the border—men rejected by two nations—for my job with a public-broadcasting outlet in San Diego. I head back home, their stories in my pockets. “Anything to declare?” ask the U.S. customs agents. “Nope,” I say, and drive back to my country.
* * *
•
As I finish this book, I click through folders on my computer and pull up one of my scanned photographs of Juanita—the black-and-white one in which La Adivina rests a hand on a tree branch in front of crumbling adobe walls. I recall chalking pentagrams on the sidewalk as a Wiccan child, but I don’t remember why. I am suddenly curious about them again. I turn to the works of Éliphas Lévi and rediscover their purpose: pentagrams invoke the power of the human body with its five senses, the mastery of the human spirit over the material world. It is important to draw pentagrams with a single point toward the sky. “A reversed pentagram, with two points projecting upward, is a symbol of evil and attracts sinister forces because it overturns the proper order of things and demonstrates the triumph of matter over spirit. It is the goat of lust attacking the heavens with its horns, a sign execrated by initiates,” Lévi writes. My heart drums in my chest. In the photograph of Juanita, the pentagram of twigs and leaves hanging from a branch is upside down. I never noticed.
* * *
•
I contact my cousin Eddie. It is December 2016. He has joined a secret group for sorcerers in Mexico City and is studying neuroscience at Mexico’s prestigious public university, the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). A few days ago, he called to tell me that his dead grandmother, Maria Antonieta, visited him in a dream, saying he needed to travel to northern Mexico to speak with a clairvoyant relative who can help find our kidnapped cousin, Diego. Eddie said: By “clairvoyant relative,” I’m certain she meant your father. If not him, then another one of Juanita’s descendants in Tlaltenango. We need to go to Tlaltenango, the three of us.
When I first learned about Juanita, I called two distant relatives in Tlaltenango, asking if I could come learn more about her. They both said similar things: Do not come; nobody remembers a thing about her, not even where she was buried or where she lived. More important, the road from Zacatecas is extremely dangerous; there are constant kidnappings; we rarely leave the pueblo anymore. It is not worth the risk.
Traumatized by repeated encounters with death, I decided not to go. I pieced together the story of Juanita with the few documents I could find online, the recollections of her grandchildren and a few photographs and letters they possessed. She remained a mystery. But the discovery of Juanita’s inverted pentagram in conjunction with Eddie’s dream renews my desire. I send the photograph to Eddie. What does it mean? I ask.
My cousin gasps as he sees it. A sorceress would never allow her symbols to be seen without a reason. She wanted you to see this.
Eddie, what if this has been inviting sinister forces into our lives? What if Juanita left open a door to the underworld?
He is silent awhile. Then he says: You’re the first person to find her story, to notice the pentagram in the photograph. If you think she left a door open, she did—and she did it on purpose, for you to find it…and close it.
I persuade my father to come with us. Eddie sends me instructions for a spell he wants me to conduct the night before our departure: “Light a candle and as you light it you are going to say this: ‘Marvelous light, symbol of our love, present yourself. FIAT LUX.’ So that your soul will be balanced with your mind and we can follow our intuition when we arrive in Tlaltenango. If you start to feel afraid, blow out the candle and start again. Pray three Our Fathers in Latin, you can find them on the Internet. Then finish by saying: Hecho está en el aquí y en el ahora.”
I carefully follow each step. In the morning, I pick up Papi from Abuela Carolina’s. We take an Uber vehicle to the cross-border bridge, walk into Tijuana, fly to Zacatecas and drive a rental car to our hotel. We plan to stay in the state capital until the next morning, when Eddie’s flight lands, then drive to Tlaltenango. My father and I arrive at sunset. Zacatecas is gorgeous, cradled in mountains, colorful old houses and ancient doors on clean, cobblestone streets. Murmurations fill the orange sky like tornadoes, thousands upon thousands of birds undulating like a single mass. Wow, my father says.
* * *
•
In the morning, Eddie arrives. We drive to Tlaltenango. Eddie talks excitedly in the back seat, arguing that kabbalistic calculations regarding my birthday reveal “a straddling of spirit and human worlds.” He has a hypothesis: I am the reincarnation of Juanita. The magic spell he had me conduct was meant to awaken her spirit inside me—so I would show
us the way in Tlaltenango. I roll my eyes, unconvinced, though I do think it would be fascinating if true. My father starts to believe him. Eddie says: Did you know that tonight is a full moon? I shake my head. Well, Juanita, you planned the trip, without even realizing it, for the exact day the moon is going to be 100 percent full, Eddie says. It’s the perfect conditions to encounter a door to the underworld, and close it. We arrive in the town, which looks like a typical urban neighborhood of Mexico, with trash strewn on the sidewalks lined with stores and stands of street food. It doesn’t resemble the mystical rural pueblo I envisioned. The date is January 12, 2017.
We meet Wilfrido, the grandson of Juanita’s last son, El Doctor, Felipe. Wilfrido looks a lot like the Juanita in the photos, but a chubby, male version, friendly as a teddy bear. His warmth contrasts charmingly with the sharpness of his canine teeth, and I love him right away. He has an elfin tip on his ear like I and my father have, though less pronounced. He shows us Felipe’s grave, saying Juanita was buried in the same cemetery, but the bones were later removed, like all old bones, and placed in a mass grave at an unknown location.
Wilfrido invites us to his home in the attic of his motorcycle-repair shop. He laments that he has none of Juanita’s belongings; he was a child when she passed away. He once had Felipe’s old spell books, but they were destroyed in a flood. While browsing the motorcycle-maintenance manuals on Wilfrido’s bookshelves, I notice four volumes of Grandes Temas de lo Oculto y lo Insolito, three volumes of Grandes Enigmas and eight books on medicina natural.
I ask, with a smile: Are you hiding something, Wilfrido?
He chuckles and shakes his head. These questions have always intrigued me. I wish I had Juanita’s gift, but I do not. I would tell you if I did.
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