“Please to look here,” said the guide.
The businessman complied, peering myopically into a glass case that held a few fragments of Aztec jewelry against a background of reproduced pen-and-ink illustrations from the time of the friars.
“Yes,” said the guide, “and then the Aztecs...”
“Were wiped out by Cortes?” said the businessman.
“There was a woman called Marina. She was, how do you say...”
“Cortes’s mistress?”
And so on. I noticed that the businessman was reading the informative plaques and although they were in Spanish it was hard to misunderstand certain famous events followed by a date.
“It happened in 1519?” asked the businessman.
“Yes,” said the guide.
I caught the businessman’s eye and he smiled back. His mouth was covered with a pink, powdery film that looked out of place and childlike, like candy that had not been wiped away. He held his gut, ran his hanky over the smooth hairless part of his head, then turned back to his guide.
I progressed through the museum at my usual pace. There was one of the ubiquitous Diego Rivera murals splashed up on the terrace that I spent close to an hour studying. I imagined myself inserted here and there, beside the skeleton figure, in yellow pumps with hefty calves, with my profile pressed hard against the brilliant blue of a Mexican sky.
I liked Rivera a good deal. I liked the populations of his pictures, the storytelling, the death chase—a real pursuit of scuttle and conquest. Rivera was rumored to have eaten human flesh. I’d read somewhere that he thought eating people enhanced his ability to render the human form. Apparently, a friend of his who was a furrier had told him that minks were fed mink flesh to enhance the quality of the fur. Rivera thought some life force was trapped in dead flesh. Of course, I found this all a bit hard to believe. That Diego Rivera was governed by a number of appetites seemed highly plausible, but the idea of Rivera actually tracking someone down was hard to picture, unless the quarry was very slow.
Diego Rivera’s unconventional belief alongside Aztec history seemed to suggest that cannibalism was a Mexican thing, up there with the Hat Dance and tequila. But I didn’t believe it still applied. You needed cannibals to be labeled that way, and it had been a while since Mexico had given us any. Papua New Guinea was supposed to have cannibals. I’d read about Michael Rockefeller’s disappearance. He was on an art-scouting mission skirting the coast, where most of the natives had never seen a white man. The story goes that his canoe capsized and he began to swim for shore. Maybe the Asmat got the pot boiling as soon as he hit the water. The natives most likely had been watching him for days, hidden behind the jungle shrubbery, still as trees. The whiteness of his skin might have been appealing—white looks misleadingly tender—even if the hair was off-putting. Perhaps the Asmat had heard that Michael was an American prince, that his was the flesh of royalty.
When I thought about it, I never pictured Michael flayed and boiled. He was in the water doing an elegant crawl, a stroke perfected in the Hamptons, a stroke useful for reaching floating decks and girls whose bare shoulders were slick with coconut oil. I saw his head bobbing in and out of the waves, his breath rasping with the effort. His mind conjured up the images of hungry sharks, but the shore was near and just a few short pool-lengths away.
Michael, in the water, with salt stinging his eyes and small fish nibbling his feet.
New Guinea had also given us the primitive brain-eating Fore (Aunt Marion, as I eat my first lobster: “Don’t eat the brain. It’s poisonous.”) and the Fore had given us kuru, “laughing sickness,” similar to mad cow disease, always fatal and an exotic plume in the cap of Western civilization. William Arens—an anti-cannibal, whom I had had to read in Anthropology 210—pointed out that no one had actually seen the Fore eating human flesh. And it hadn’t been proved conclusively that kuru was a direct result of cannibalism. So, although the kuru of the Fore turned out to be the stuff of a Nobel prize, it was not necessarily that of reality. I imagined a Fore chief talking to his “first contact” anthropologist.
Anthropologist: Are you sure you’ve never eaten human flesh?
Chief: No. I’m pretty sure I haven’t.
Anthropologist: Never?
Chief: No. I’d remember something like that.
Anthropologist: Not even after the death of loved one, to make them live on in you?
Chief: Well, it is an interesting thought...
Anthropologist: How about after slaying an enemy, to insult his remains?
Chief: I haven’t slain an enemy, but I have insulted one. Is this of any help?
Anthropologist: How about to satisfy protein deficiency?
Chief: We do lack protein. Other than the occasional pig, meat is hard to come by.
Anthropologist: And there is the gustatory aspect.
Chief: Gustatory?
Anthropologist: Interesting. You wouldn’t have any cultural head revulsions?
Chief: I don’t think so.
Anthropologist: Any interest in the brain?
(long pause)
Chief: Sure. Brains are great. We love brains.
Anthropologist: Ever eat one?
Chief: A brain? Yes. Just last year. I don’t know how that slipped my mind.
Anthropologist: Just one brain?
Chief: Maybe it was two?
Of course, anthropologists were usually better than that, but in our culture there was a weird enthusiasm for cannibalism. Cannibalism was a big thrill as long as we weren’t doing it. Cannibalism also, for the most part, was embraced with little supporting data as if in Western culture, as our faith in God failed, we still were able to believe in cannibals—their cauldrons and drums, savory stews and pit roasts—feasting at the edges of the world.
“Do you like Diego Rivera?”
I turned to see the businessman, who was smiling at me. I looked back at the mural, aware of the businessman’s hot breath near the side of my face. “Rivera’s a hack,” I said. “This is not the work of an artist, but a testament to the power of his personality.”
“It’s very colorful,” said the businessman.
“As is Cuernavaca,” I smiled.
The businessman smiled a salubrious smile and ran his hanky across his head again. “Is this your first time?”
“In Cuernavaca? Yes.”
“That’s too bad.”
“Why?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I was hoping you might tell me what’s to see here, where I should go next, now that I’ve seen the palace. Just beautiful, I thought. Didn’t you?”
“Pocked with gloom,” I replied. “Why don’t we head back to the Zocalo?”
“Get a snack?”
“Or a drink.”
He worked in the petroleum industry and lived with his wife (shell-shocked) and two children (porcine) on three floors of a sprawling house (white, flat, with whimsical windows) in a (treeless, sun-blind) suburb outside Houston. I handed him back the photo. I was vaguely aware that I was maintaining conversation with the man. A few pleasant nods here, a laugh there (which surprised me because I had no idea what he had just said) were charming enough, apparently. This man and I had the same motivation: he wanted to get me drunk and I wanted to get me drunk. The businessman was drinking too: beer, Dos Equis, no lime, from the bottle whose mouth he wiped vigorously before bringing it to his succulent lips.
“What are you doing in Mexico?” I asked.
“Me?”
I nodded. He laughed as if it were a very personal question. He leaned into me. “I’m a headhunter.”
“You are?”
“I met with the guy in Mexico City yesterday. Made him an offer.”
“Do you think he’ll take it?”
“I would.” The businessman took a bottle of Pepto-Bismol out of his pocket and shook two of the chalky pink tablets onto his hand. He took them both, washing it all back with a mouthful of beer.
“Why do you keep taking t
hose?” I asked. “Don’t you feel well?”
“I take them to keep the stomach bugs away.” He nodded meaningfully. “Montezuma’s revenge, you know.”
“Clever boy,” I said.
“Do you want some?” He offered me the bottle. I waved him off.
“No thanks.” I grabbed my cigarettes and lighter and put them in my handbag. “I wish I was a headhunter.”
“You do?”
I nodded. We asked the waiter where we could go dancing and he gave us some simple directions. I was imagining what I would do with the businessman’s head if it were in my possession. I’d have to shrink it and that would take some time, because his head was the size of Christmas ham. His cheeks hung down, weight and counterweight slabs of flesh. His small, upturned nose poked up through his face like a meat thermometer. His eyes were blue, watery, probably dripping with mucus from all the allergens in the thick Mexican air, but maybe clouded with fat, the same kind that congeals on the surface of cooling broth. A head like that would have to be smoked for weeks—months even—before it was suitable for wearing around one’s waist. I’d seen shrunken heads in a museum, little pieces of demonic fruit with bitter mouths and sockets of crumpled vacancy, eye sockets where the sudden vacuum of death softly imploded upon itself.
Despite his weight, the businessman was a fluid dancer. He had a buoyancy that I would have thought impossible out of the water, but he seemed at home at the disco, favoring seventies standards over the techno and house, switching from beer to shots of tequila. My body—because of the amount of alcohol consumed—was beginning to rebel in not-so-subtle ways. I could still dance, but walking was proving difficult. I had to struggle to keep my torso over my legs as my feet seemed overeager to shorten whatever distances needed to be shortened: the distance from dance floor to bar, from bar to bathroom, from bathroom to table (smoke break) from table back to dance floor. Whatever visual compensating my brain usually performed seemed to have shorted out and the whole evening was being presented to me as if I was viewing it through the lens of a handheld camera. I suggested we get a taxi back to his hotel even though it was less than a mile away. And I probably suggested everything else, even though I can’t remember what everything was, and think this one of the kinder sides of overdrinking, even though the next morning my head felt that it was pumped full of frozen air with my skull threatening to fracture along its original sutures.
I was lying on the floor when I woke up. This was no surprise. That businessmen was girthy and what might have been a double bed for another couple was no double bed for us. I moved my head slowly upward as I came to a sitting position, allowing for the liquids contained to find their level. The businessman’s hand hung off the bed, palms the color of pork loin, relaxed sausage fingers and the University of Texas ring that bound around his pinky (although it must have once belonged to another finger) squeezing deep into the flesh in what must have been a most uncomfortable way. My stomach had sent a warning signal. I breathed heavily through my nose, hoping to calm my stomach, but ended up scuttling to my feet and racing for the toilet. I tell you, I felt very sorry for myself as my stomach purged itself clean. I had skipped dinner the night before, somehow smoked and drank my way through the businessman’s beefsteak, although I’d considered the lengua. But my stomach was full. Three rounds later, I’d emptied myself out. I wasn’t prepared for what I saw floating in the basin. Digestion had not run its course. I saw chunks of something floating in clouds of yellow bile, worn at the edges by my stomach’s futile effort, a stomach unable to match the need of appetite. I felt a cold sweat in my pores, an intestinal shudder, then slowly looked back to the bed.
The businessman’s feet were bare. The toes pointed down, off the end of the bed. He didn’t move. My violent retching had not disturbed him. I had a choice. I could go over to him, bid some sort of farewell, or I could leave. There really was nothing left for me to say. I got up and brushed my teeth using his toothbrush. This disgusted me, but I found my delicacy hypocritical. I washed my face using his soap, dried my face and hands using his towel. And when I purchased my bus ticket back to Mexico City, I used his money, which he had left in an impressive stack of bills on the bedside table.
17
My plane left for New York early on a Monday morning. I had the woman at the hotel desk call for a cab. She seemed suspicious of me and kept trying in Spanish to come up with some sort of explanation.
“Maleta,” she said. “Maleta. Maleta.” She mimicked carrying a suitcase by curling her arm up against her side and grimacing.
“No maleta,” I said. I held up my backpack.
“Su caja,” she said, and with the skill of Marcel Marceau created a box in front of her.
“Oh, that? No. No.” I smiled. “Just me. Solamente mio e la bolsa mia.” I thought “bolsa” meant bag, but might have meant something else. Bolster? Bolo? Who cared? These last few minutes were hardly the time to learn Spanish, although I had some regrets at not knowing more. I stood on the street to smoke a cigarette and wait for the taxi. I could see the woman staring at me still, through the dirty glass. Up and down the street trucks were parked delivering chickens, thousands of them, plucked and pink. I had never seen so many dead chickens and I wondered at the number of people required to eat that much poultry. The sky was hazy and gray and somewhere, from one of the trucks, Mexican pop music was blasting away. The men worked quickly unloading the open crates and there was a festivity in the scene that I knew I would miss once back in the States.
My taxi arrived and soon I was speeding off to the airport. I wondered how Barry Buster was doing down in Chiapas. I pictured him pulled over on the side of the road ambushed by rebels, gorgeous Gaia smoking a cigarette by the side of their SUV, kicking the dirt with the toe of her boot, interceding in bored, Castilian Spanish. I wondered what the bones would tell.
Seeing Barry Buster made me think about finishing college, but I was too high-minded for an education. Most classes were mental weight-lifting, intended more to tighten the brain muscle than to expand the mind. Why go back? I nearly had enough credits to graduate, which was good enough. I knew an awful lot: parabolas, kinship systems, geographic strata, irregular declensions, parts of the stage, and orbiting electrons. A fine understanding of art. A good grasp of literature.
What I knew of Dante I knew from college. In one of my literature classes we had taken a quick pass at The Inferno. Dante first introduced me to Italy and although The Inferno was squeezed in with The Canterbury Tales, Paradise Lost, and the Bible in a course that lasted eleven weeks, I did manage to retain some of it. My teacher was an earnest woman just out of graduate school, who did not speak English, or at least not a dialect I recognized. All of her arguments were “two-pronged,” everything was a “lens” for something else and “informed” an event that usually happened two centuries earlier. Her hair was frizzy in an intellectual way. Her shoes seemed to have been cobbled by elves. I have no doubt she published in many unread journals and has gone on to be a great success. Her name was Lynn something-or-other and she liked smacking her fist into her palm as if she were FDR. Most things made sense before she explained them to us, and a couple even after her efforts. One concept that fascinated me was the notion that there were two kinds of paternity.
The two kinds of paternity were the Abraham/Isaac variety and the Oedipus/Laius variety. Abraham/Isaac paternity relied on thwarted sacrifice—although the son will sacrifice for the father, in the end this is deemed unnecessary. In fact, the son’s and father’s survival were raveled together like two loving strands of DNA. Israel was founded when God intervened in Isaac’s sacrifice. Father and son were bound in a covenant, which came to be symbolized by—of all things—circumcision.
And then there was the other kind of paternity, the Oedipal variety, wherein the son’s survival was dependent on the father’s death. To this I add the reverse—a mirror image and therefore the same thing—a Saturnine paternity, inspirational to Goya in Saturn Devouring Hi
s Children, and that of Count Ugolino, which is the subject matter of the Thirty-Third Canto of The Inferno.
Dante meets Count Ugolino in the Pit of the Ninth Circle. Ugolino is frozen into the ice with another spirit. Only their heads break the surface and despite all he has seen at this point, Dante is stunned. Ugolino is eating his companion, Archbishop Ruggieri, as the “starving gnaw their bread.” Ugolino’s teeth tear wildly at that part where “the brain meets the nape,” which may not seem anatomically correct, but given Ugolino’s hunger, seems possible.
Ugolino was a Pisan aristocrat who lived in the twelfth century. He was Dante’s contemporary and Ugolino’s grandson, Nino Visconte, was a friend to the poet. Ugolino is exiled from Pisa in 1275 for conspiring with the Guelphs against the ruling Ghibellines. In 1284 the Guelphs return Ugolino to Pisa and to political power, but shortly after that Ugolino betrays the Guelphs and somewhere down the road yields three Ghibelline-controlled castles to the enemy—the Guelphs?—and then conspires with Archbishop Ruggieri, in 1284, and prominent Ghibelline families (Gualandi, Sismondi, Lanfranchi) to oust Nino Visconte from Pisan political power. Nino heads to Florence to escape his grandfather and becomes friends with Dante.
Nino whispers in Dante’s ear and thousands read of Count Ugolino, dizzying traitor turned filiacidal cannibal.
I find it hard to believe that Ugolino could be so one-dimensionally bad, but none of the count’s admirable traits have made it into history or literature. Archbishop Ruggieri betrays Ugolino—for having yielded the three Ghibelline castles—and Ugolino is locked in a tower with two sons and two grandsons. He will never again gamble at politics, move the castles, soldiers, and noblemen as carved game pieces. Now his only concern is hunger.
A Carnivore's Inquiry Page 17