by Laurie Lee
Mexico
Flying in to Mexico on a warm spring night, the only colour I saw was the moon, newly risen and rusty, picking out curves in the Rio Grande. I remember feeling the presence of Mexico even before I could see it: its vibrations seemed to possess the sky; I felt the raw, tense muscles of the sierras below me, the antiquity of buried yet surviving gods.
It is always strange and questioning to arrive at a place at night, especially a place one has long waited to visit, when its features are shadowed and turned away in sleep, and one can only speculate and wait for the morning.
The next morning, in fact, I woke in Mexico City to find a bright sun and the veils drawn away. Here was the beginning, the heart of Mexico, standing on a plateau seven thousand feet high, populated by five million people, and ringed by mountains, and guarded by two great volcanoes. Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl gaze down through perpetual snows, and it is from behind their twin peaks that the sun rises each day, and it was from between them, long ago, that Cortez and his men entered the valley to destroy the Aztecs.
For Mexico is the oldest living city in America. It was built on islands, with gardens anchored in barges, and even today it has a floating air. Its lakes have dried up, but it has a cushiony crust that acts as a shock absorber for earthquakes, and you can still feel a curious dimpling in the ground when a heavy truck goes by.
Today the capital is in a time of building, extending, and changing daily. I saw skyscrapers of glass and mud-baked hovels, colonial churches and Hilton hotels, Parisian-type boulevards and open-drain back streets, blond Americans and obsidian Aztecs. My hotel was Edwardian – full of brass cuspidors, potted palm trees, and whispering bell-boys. While outside there were Indians selling stuffed tamales and corncobs to passers-by.
Mexico City, they’d warned me, was pretty strong stuff; I’d been advised to approach it with caution. ‘As it’s over seven thousand feet up, beware the lack of oxygen; one drink has the strength of three; food’s highly spiced, so take it easy; watch out for altitude sickness …’ In fact I never felt better, I walked on my toes, the altitude cleared my head, food was various and delicious, and after three quick tequilas I felt I possessed the secrets of the world.
Tequila, the national drink, is made from the heart of a cactus. It is served short and colourless and is taken with fresh sliced lime and a dash of salt on the hand to refresh you. Three, to begin with, is perhaps two too many, but it is exalting without being sinister. For lunch I ate tacos – little rolled-up tortillas stuffed with pork, chili sauce, and raw onion. It is an old Indian dish, enjoyed by Mexicans of all classes, tasty and more comforting than a sandwich.
Walking the sun-warm streets I seemed to see the city close up, lit by sudden flashes of chance. Flowers blew about like coloured wastepaper, and the place was curiously exposed with life. I remember a man in a doorway eating fried eggs from his hat, which he’d sprinkled with scarlet peppers. Another, nearby, was selling sauce from a bottle – a penny a shake, if you brought your own food. I saw a boy with a gun carrying two canvas sacks stamped ‘Wells Fargo’ and jingling with pesos; and a red, racing fire-truck whose bells and sirens said, not ‘Look out’ nor ‘Alas’, but ‘Hurrah!’
I remember the faces, too – the broad-jowled mestizos, and the occasional steel-grey descendant of Spain; but mostly I remember those far older than Spain, the original soft-footed possessors of the country. What other modern city still has so much of its prehistory walking so vividly about its streets? I saw families of Indians, bare-toed on the pavements, bringing in vegetables and pottery from the hills, the men striding ahead as though opening up a jungle, the women and children trotting after. Their dark faces, carved as from volcanic rock, were the faces of Mayan idols – high-cheeked, hawk-nosed, with sharp flaring nostrils, some with slanting Mongolian eyes. Mexico City today may be nudging the future and paving its streets with automobiles, but it can no more shake off these possessors of its past than a tree can shake off its birds.
Later in the day, I drove up the three-mile Reforma to the Zocalo, the old heart of the city. This vast empty square, in the afternoon sun, seemed haunting and far removed from the present. Here stood Montezuma’s Palace, and the Temple of the War God – to whom twenty thousand prisoners were once sacrificed in a day. Here the iron hand of Spain slapped down on the Aztecs and reduced a civilization to a mere curiosity. The Halls of Montezuma were replaced by Cortez’s Palace, the shrine of the war god by the Spanish cathedral.
Diego Rivera painted his ‘History of Mexico’ around the main staircase and along the upper gallery of the palace of Cortez – now the National Palace. The work is a brilliant and bigoted masterpiece and offers an explosive introduction to the country. Rising from the roots of the walls on throbbing rainbows of paint, the story unfolds like a proliferating jungle.
One large fresco depicts the old Aztec market. A tall tattooed beauty bears an armful of lilies among human limbs hung up for sale. There are corncobs and beans, fish and wild birds, lizards, frogs and deer; and glittering in the background the silver lake-city of Mexico, with its causeways and floating gardens, its thousand peaked temples, their steps washed with blood, and the walls of the volcanoes behind.
Wherever you look at these murals, the details are compelling, sensational flashes of strife and terror – a red-bearded Spaniard putting an Indian to the sword, a stone knife in a horse’s belly, frail bows and arrows pricking at the mouths of cannons, an Aztec temple burning; then rape, torture, the branding of slaves on the face, the chaining of peasants for work in the mines, a fair blue-eyed baby on its Indian mother’s back, priests snarling over nuggets of gold. From this grows revolution and its proclamations, rifles and banners in the streets, till the great blood-red face of Mexico’s pagan sun is replaced by the pale whiskered moon of Karl Marx.
It is a powerful, naïve, flash-vision of history, seen through the eyes of a man of passion. Distorted though it may be, it has the thrust of life, and could have been painted by no one without blood-roots in Mexico. Its glowing themes and colours, laid on these stern Spanish walls, seemed to me to be a reconquest by the Indians.
Mexico City at night is for self-indulgence. The streets round my hotel – Calle Londres and Hamburgo – were lighted treasure boxes in the early evening. Here was hand-beaten jewellery in gold and silver (chunky-barbaric or fine as an eyelash), blown glass, embroidered blouses, Indian scarves and shawls, and calfskin suits as soft as your cheek. There were also bright precious stones newly dug from the hills – chalcedony, opal, and onyx – and old squat gods still caked with earth, primitive paintings and carved wooden saints.
With a Mexican friend I went to several bars and nightclubs: La Ronda, Jacaranda, Can-Can, El Presidente. We ended up at Mauna Loa, where the dining-room is thatched with bamboo and palm leaves and has a pool full of sleeping flamingos. When dinner began the pool was covered for dancing, and the music woke up the flamingos, who uncoiled their necks and started walking round the tables spiking the food with their long pink beaks.
Later, rather dazed, we walked back to the hotel, and passed a night school where they were learning English. On the blackboard, in chalk, it said: ‘Call the Doctor’. A group of Indians stared in through the window. ‘Aren’t you just flabbergasted by Mexico City?’ asked my friend. ‘And aren’t you flabbergasted that I know the word flabbergast?’
The next day I set off, with a car and driver, on a round trip through Guadalajara, a six-hundred-mile journey through mountains and tableland. I got my first smell of the country coming over a rust-red ridge of volcanic hills into crumbling, dusty farmland. After the glassy brilliance of the capital city, here was the naked flesh of Mexico. Among a scattering of hovels stood neat stacks of maize topped with lucky charms and little crosses of straw. Hens and pigs raced about, and bent low in the fields were those Indians who had always been there.
After a drive of an hour, the country whitened like frost, and we came to Tula, the holy city of the Toltecs. Cem
ent factories nearby chewed the ashen ground, and all the trees were covered with dust. On the top of the hill stood the great stepped temple, the house of the priests and the sacred courts of the ball game.
This was the shrine of Quetzalcoatl, the blond, bearded god, the plumed serpent, said to have come from the east. From this hill his cult spread eight hundred miles south to Yucatan and was also adopted by the conquering Aztecs. Quetzalcoatl, they say, stole the corn from the ants and gave it to the Toltecs to cultivate, and later sailed back east towards the rising sun, promising he would return. Who was he then? Corn god, sun god, or some early visitor from the Mediterranean? Whoever he was, when Cortez landed from Spain the Aztecs thought he was their god returning.
The temple at Tula is one of the most remarkable in Mexico. It is topped by fifteen-foot warriors carved from huge blocks of stone, majestic, silent, and threatening. The lower walls are protected by carved jaguars and eagles – the defensive forces of land and air. A farther wall bears a frieze of the symbol of Quetzalcoatl, plumed serpents disgorging human skeletons. Most sombre of all is a separate stone figure, Chac-Mool, the reclining rain god, who holds on his belly a dish for torn-out human hearts, while turning his head in a blank stare at the horizon.
From Tula we turned eastwards through lion-coloured country, tufted with cactus and wiry mesquite, with a scattering of blue lakes where busy Indian washerwomen were plunging their arms into the reflected mountains. We passed San Juan del Río, a town of pink domes, which seemed to be in the grip of some curious holiday. Most of the men were in the bars, most of the women in the cemeteries, while the rest were out plodding the country roads carrying banners and wheels of fireworks.
Presently we arrived at Querétaro, a town as noble as any in Castile. It is packed with churches and colonial mansions, and to enter it one drives under a magnificent aqueduct that still brings water six miles from the hills. Streets are paved with flagstones, and the great doorways of the houses are heavy with nails and heraldic devices. Everywhere there is a glitter of glazed tiles and fountains and glimpses of patios full of flowers and birds.
In a back-street workshop I saw a boy polishing opals, another digging them out of lumps of quartz and then throwing them casually into a bucket of water where they sprang alive like instant fire. Down in the market there was a group of Indians who appeared to be eating the heads of wolves. They asked me to join them, but instead I went to a bar, which was full of pictures of dying bullfighters. Two old men were talking, and, as I ordered a beer, I heard one of them say to the other; ‘Pedro’s so bored he’s been out in the country painting faces on all the stones.’
The Covento de la Cruz still dominates Querétaro like a fortress. One small brown friar seemed to be all that was left of that once great brotherhood of Franciscans. He was busy selling thorns from a bush in the garden, picking them carefully and popping them into envelopes. Near the bush was a ladder leading to a small stone tower where the Emperor Maximilian was imprisoned. As we drove from the town we passed the Hill of Bells where the bewildered emperor was shot.
It was now afternoon, and the landscape seemed empty. The light shone in the heat like glass. I saw an Indian family sitting in the shade of a tree like tropical fish hiding under a rock. But nothing else moved save a few flapping vultures and the wild dog that ran beside them.
Then, as it cooled, we came to the edge of a hill and looked down at San Miguel Allende. Trickling in terraces from the hill to the plain, it is a memorably beautiful town, and after Mexico City it was like drinking a fine old wine after excesses of chemical fruit juice.
Almost perfectly preserved, its Spanish-colonial buildings seemed as fine as those of Querétaro. Architecturally, everywhere there was power and grace, lightness as well as strength, and the rose-pink stone gave a warmth and humanity even to its severest religious structures. The walls of the houses were decorated with coloured paper, with silver and copper masks. A delicate-pink light bounced up from the pavement, filling faces with gentle radiance. All was colour – the parish church with its Indo-Gothic tower, a genial fantasy in strawberry stone; young men in broad hats with swinging tassels; donkeys with embroidered harnesses; and girls in blue blouses, red skirts, and black stockings, each with a shower of dark hair to her waist.
San Miguel was one of the cradles of Mexican independence; and I was reminded of this, as we drove out of the town, by the sight of a red-shirted drunk wandering happily round the streets closely followed by two hired musicians.
The sun was going down as we passed Dolores Hidalgo, whose bells signalled the revolution. As colours flared and died, we drove into the forested mountains, home of bee keepers and charcoal burners, and saw the last light fading on curling wood smoke, painted beehives, and almond blossoms. My final glimpse of that day was typically surrealist, the sort of thing one learns to expect – two old men, far out in the country, walking into the sunset, one carrying a cello, the other a huge bass fiddle.
We spent that night in Guanajuato, an old mining town in a gorge, which from the hills, as we approached it in the dark, looked like a vein of silver in a cave. Guanajuato, in fact, had one of the richest silver mines in America, sufficient to refill the coffers of Spain, in the days when Indians worked chained underground and were paid off with lumps of silver.
The mountains that crowd round the town are immense, almost brutal; metallic, turned inside out. But packed in the gorge are great churches and villas – relics of those ancient riches – and beautiful winding streets, wrought-iron balconies, and little squares full of trees and fountains.
Seen from the hills in daylight, the buildings of Guanajuato resemble a crowded library of ancient books, leather-bound, well-thumbed, disordered and overlapping, but each different and irreplaceable. Lyrical as they are, they include some sinister curiosities – the standing dead in the catacombs (preserved by the minerals in the ground), the flooded mines, the abandoned suburbs of Marfil, with their creeper-grown streets, and the iron cages hanging from the walls of the granary which once held the severed heads of the revolutionary leaders.
The next day, at noon, we came to San Juan de los Lagos, and to an occasion I shall never forget. Some sixty thousand pilgrims had come from all over Mexico to honour the feast of the local Virgin. The sight was staggering, not of this age at all; like a mass gathering of Biblical tribes. A thousand white tents, flapping in the hot, dry wind, covered the hillside round the little town, filling the woods and canyons, crowding the banks of the river, even pressing against the walls of the houses. A roar of life rose above the encampments, a mixture of music, laughter, and cries; smoke from a thousand fires filled the sunny air, harnesses and blankets hung from the trees; magnificent horsemen rode among the tent poles and children scooted round their hoofs like turkeys.
The great multitude of pilgrims was a decoration to the landscape; they belonged to these dusty groves; standing, walking, crouching in the shade of trees, or gathered in family groups at their food; but particularly by the lake, where their white and blue figures shone in the distance like quivering irises, and the graceful veiled women came with jars on their heads, pausing awhile above their bright reflections, then knelt to draw water or to wash their brown arms among the muzzles of the drinking horses.
The great local fair was one of the most important in Mexico, and the local Virgin one of the oldest. Down in the town it was almost impossible to move; peddlers, musicians, feather-tufted dancers, jostled each other on every side. Many of the pilgrims had come great distances, whole families spending days on the road. Many had come in answer to a vow, and to some it was a last act of faith: I saw a number of old women, and a man with a boy on his shoulders, coming down the steep cobbled street on their knees, finishing their journey at the point of exhaustion with glazed eyes fixed on the church.
San Juan de los Lagos, on this day of wind and sun, called up prodigious energies of adoration and gaiety. The inside of the church throbbed all day with cries, and people panted t
o fight their way in. Outside, the dancers, some in animal skins, some in feathers like Aztec priests, cavorted unceasingly in trance-like groups to the music of lute and drum. I saw as many as a dozen groups at once, tossing their heads like shaggy chrysanthemums, while the mirrors stitched to their clothing sent reflections of the sun racing like meteors across the dark walls of the church.
I couldn’t bear to leave this rousing multitude and wanted to share in it. I sat in the square to eat my prepacked lunch, and hired a wandering orchestra to play for me. For about fifty pence I got a heart-rending song accompanied by four fiddles, three guitars, and a trumpet. I couldn’t eat what the hotel had given me – so I gave the egg to an old lady, the apple to a boy, and the sandwich to a passing horse.
The next day we started back from Guadalajara – a large and sophisticated town. The drive to Mexico City took two fast days and covered some dramatic country. First, red rolling hills, full of solitary horsemen, and occasional herds of long-horned cattle.
We came to Lake Pátzcuaro and Tzintzuntzan – ‘the place of the hummingbirds’. (Many old Indian names are onomatopoeic: Guanajuato, for instance, ‘the place of the frogs’, has a fine swampy croak about it; and ‘Tzintzuntzan’ is said softly and evenly, to produce the whispering buzz of wings.) Tzintzuntzan was the great city of the Tarascan Indians and is still dominated by the burial mounds of their kings. It is a small village now and seemed to be full of little girls, who raced around me like humming tops, and sold me some angels made of straw, showed me some old olive trees, and then rang the church bell for me.
We spent a night at Pátzcuaro, and ate whitefish from the lake, and looked at the butterfly fishing boats and the islands. This rose-coloured town, with its large straggling squares, stone arcades, and tall, cool trees, had an air of freshness – part lake and part mountain – that set it apart as a place to return to.
The drive next day – nearly two hundred miles through mountains – was like a shuffling of coloured cards. I remember Morelia; another superb colonial town, with buildings of an extraordinary elegance, and squares of great trees dripping with curtains of bougainvillaea shot through with ice-blue jacaranda. After Morelia came the mountains, climbing to ten thousand feet, through silent and scented forests, and stopping at Mil Cumbres to see a thousand blue peaks, heaped like diamonds, stretching away to the Pacific.