Voyage By Dhow

by Norman Lewis

  A little later the Vespers bell rang, and the mestizos came riding down the trails to attend the service; men, as Lorca would have said, with their mouths full of flints, slender and saturnine, and dressed in cowboy style with big sombreros and leather chaps. They doffed their hats as they passed, and the shaman gave them the easy smile that hid an implacable antagonism. These men were nothing. They had the souls of the mules they rode, he said. As an example of what they were capable of, he said that they bought and sold land—the most irreligious of all acts in the eyes of a communistic Huichol.

  The image of proselytizing Christianity as seen through an Indian’s eye was hard to refute. The record of the missions in the Americas is at best dismal, and at worst makes painful reading indeed, and, whatever the purity of their motives, the Franciscans must share the blame for the degeneration of the Indians of California, and for their final disappearance from the scene. Christianity has too often been administered as a sedative—something as deadly in practice as raw alcohol—designed to keep the fighting Indian quiet and persuade him to turn the other cheek while his destruction was being prepared. At Santa Clara, however, the mission offered a phenomenon that was new, at least to me; the spectacle of love, not only preached but put into practice. Here at last, and for the first time, I saw Indians as the early explorers and colonizers saw them, before the assassinations began; gentle, friendly, and brimming over with laughter.

  It was early evening with a resplendent sky full of toucans and parakeets, and soft lemon light. The girls had finished their domestic chores, and the boys had come down from the forests dragging wood on sledges for the fires; now they collected in little groups, curious and smiling round our hut. They were of all the ages of childhood. Some of them had the faces of little Eskimos, while others could have been European gypsies; and yet other faces were totally and unmistakably Mexican from the temple bas reliefs in the ruined cities of the south. What astonished me again was that the Franciscans had allowed them to dress in pure Indian style, with all the Indian gods embroidered across well-laundered clothing. Some of the boys had guitars and Huichol violins, and it seemed that we were to be serenaded, but despite the encouragement of the girls, who kept up a vigorous pentatonic humming, the musicians turned out to be too shy to entertain us with more than a few strummed bars.

  The shaman sat apart, writing with a ball-point pen in his notebook. Although illiterate by the standards of the West, he recorded the day’s events and the flow of his own inspiration, just as a pre-Columbian Aztec might have done, in a series of vigorous ideographs. Now he interrupted his writing to criticize the feebleness of the musical performance. He was opposed to witchcraft but this was one field in which the end justified the means. A Huichol parent who wanted his son to be a first-class musician normally sent him in the charge of an enchanter to the place where the magic arbol del viento grew. For three days and three nights the pupil would sit and listen to the wind in the branches, and then he played. When he returned home not a violinist could equal him. What was that tune that one of the older boys was scratching out so feebly? I told him it was ‘Silent Night’.

  David had had the splendid notion of bringing a Polaroid camera along to help break the ice on such occasions, and now he performed the important magic act of producing snapshots of a number of these beautiful children. The impact of instant photography was interesting to watch. Tension mounted with the stripping of the paper from the print and the laughter died from the faces leaving pure awe. The subject, clutching his or her portrait, would back away with it, trembling with excitement, to find a quiet place to be alone, while others crowded to the front to submit themselves to the same shattering experience. From this time on the children rarely left us alone.

  In the meantime the shaman had found two adult Huichols at work on the foundations of a building on the outskirts of the compound, and had gone off to enquire from them what were the possibilities of our witnessing any interesting ceremonies in this part of the sierra. He had already assured us that they were slight. People who live off the land, the world over, can best find the resources and the spare time for celebrating when the harvests are newly in—and in the Sierra Madre this is in the months of October and November. After that, food supplies begin slowly to diminish, and the arid season arrives when no rain falls in the mountains and the grass withers away. The Huichols, always semi-nomadic, leave the ranchos where they cultivate their patches of maize and squash, and take their few animals to explore the remote valleys in search of pasture. In bad seasons—and this had been one—the maize soon runs out, and the family eats once a day, and then every second day, and the active young men and women leave their families and trek down to the Pacific coastline to grow a cash crop of tobacco.

  Ramon had shown himself as anxious as we were that we should see all we could of the life of his people, and in our presence and without the slightest embarrassment he had prayed long and earnestly to the Sun god for the success of our journey. Now, coming back, he announced that his prayers had been answered. Unpropitious though the season was, it turned out that the people living within two days of the village of San Andres—near the airstrip where we had landed—would hold a fiesta there that Sunday, with archery, music performed on ancient instruments, dancing, great quantities of tesguiño (ceremonial beer) and possibly a bull-sacrifice, if an animal could be spared. We pointed out that we were bound to miss all this, as the mission plane was due to fly in early on the Sunday morning to take us off. For a moment the shaman’s face fell, but he brightened to assure us that even if we missed the fiesta itself, there would be plenty to interest us in the preparations for it, which would certainly begin on the previous day.

  He now produced a disquieting piece of information. He had just learned that four days before—on the Monday—bandits had broken into a Huichol rancho just out of sight in the fold of the hills from where we stood, robbed the owner, and then murdered him by hanging.

  The degree of deliberation that had gone into the atrocity shocked us. To hang a man seemed more barbarous than to shoot or knife him—but why kill at all? I had been told that bandits were still common enough off the beaten track in Mexico, but had always assumed that, in an encounter with them, to offer no resistance would be to ensure that one’s life would be spared. In the sierra, the shaman said, bandits were not like that. They were cruel men. They robbed and they killed, and hanging—which called for practice and expertise—was the preferred method. I now recalled Padre Ernesto’s story of coming across a woman hanging from a tree on one of his photographic jaunts, and I also remembered that besides his Hasselblad camera he always carried a .306 repeating rifle.

  It came as a pleasant surprise when a little later one of the boys came to summon us to supper. The shaman excused himself, saying that he never took food after midday, and we followed the boy to a deserted dining hall where he served us bowlfuls of atole—a sweet, cornflour gruel—followed by tortillas and bean-stew; all of it delicious.

  The night was cold and we slept in our clothes under what we could find in the way of blankets, drowsing off in the end to a soporific background mutter of the shaman’s prayers. After three in the morning the strengthening chill made it impossible to sleep any longer. This was the hour, too, when the Huichol day starts, and we could hear Ramon shuffling about in the darkness, and finally the door opened and closed behind him as he went out. At about four, activity outside became general, and Huichol children, irrepressibly musical, came and went about the morning’s business, strumming their guitars and playing their Huichol violins.

  At about six, we ourselves decided to face the gelid air and dragged ourselves stiffly up the hillside in the direction of a fire. Here we found the shaman, who had been joined by a semi-circle of mestizos—silent and motionless pyramids of blankets capped by their immense crammed-down sombreros, so that nothing showed of them but their eyes and the toecaps of elegant boots. Presently we were joined by some of the boys who had been for a swim in th
e freezing river. Ramon found evidence of self-indulgence in this. Three in the morning was the time to take one’s dip, not dawn. He mentioned that this was the habit of any woman worthy of consideration. Such dousings fostered the natural sexual coldness that the Huichols appreciated in their womenfolk. He added the interesting information that any Huichol who had intercourse more frequently than once every ten or fifteen days was regarded as a debauchee, and the ideal of sexual conduct had been established by the tribe’s divine ancestor, the deer, who limited sexual activity to a brief yearly season. Later, when the mestizos had gone, he added the opinion that apart from the fact that they had no souls, the main cause of their inferiority was their over-indulgence in intercourse, by which they wasted their blood.

  The sun came up with reluctance, although assisted by the shaman’s prayers. David and I went off for more tortillas with atole, and the shaman, who now admitted that religious scruples prevented him from eating mission food, allowed himself to be tempted by a packet of the rich tea biscuits David found indispensable to travel.

  We then set out on the hard walk back to San Andres—this time travelling light, except for the shaman who had volunteered to carry the cameras. The day had made a brilliant start as we walked through glades patterned with minute scarlet flowers, among small shellbursts of sunshine and rocks and water. Once again we stopped to rest and look down over the frenzied landscape of the Nautla Gorge, where the Huichol idols are stored in the cave of Te Kata. The cave, Padre Ernesto had said—tempting us to further adventure—was only a half-day by mule from Santa Clara, and no white man had ever been there. It was a temptation we had to resist.

  A little further on, as the terrain levelled out, we saw a Huichol coming up towards us through the trees, but after a moment he left the trail and appeared to be making a detour to avoid us. The shaman called to him when he came level, although by this time he was a hundred yards away. He stopped and we saw that he was carrying a yellow-painted rifle. There was a short interchange in Huichol, after which the man went on, and the shaman stood watching him until he was out of sight. He seemed subdued. ‘There’s to be no fiesta in San Andres after all,’ he said.

  We walked on for another few minutes. Suddenly Ramon stopped and held us back. Two branches had been laid to cross over the trail, and the shaman bent down to study them and warned us not to pass. He then announced that this was a travesía—a matter of witchcraft—and the intention was to warn off visitors to the village. Picking the branches up, he threw them into the air and blew after them. Then he wiped his hands as carefully as if they had been contaminated with radioactive matter. He asked if we still wanted to go on, adding that he had dealt with the spell. We told him that we did.

  A mestizo now appeared, riding towards us, and the shaman barred his path. This man looked like an extra from the film Viva Zapata, with narrowed, sleepy eyelids, a few hairs drooping from the corners of his mouth, and a heavy pistol sticking out of his saddle bag. The shaman started a stern questioning in Spanish, and the mestizo, having to explain his presence there, began to look alarmed.

  He was going to Jesus Maria, he said, to try to buy cattle. He couldn’t say from whom. There was a man there whose name might have been Pedro, or Juan. He couldn’t remember. Nor could he supply the name of the Tatouan (governor) of Jesus Maria. The shaman asked him if he had any associates in this district, and he said he was the partner of a Señor Adolfo Castañera. He fidgeted and sweated while Ramon interrogated him, his hand on the butt of his gun. In the end he was allowed to go. ‘He is one of those who murdered the Huichol,’ Ramon said. It seemed impossible to ask him how he knew, and in any case there was an imprecision in the charge permitted by a certain woolliness of language. ‘Uno de esos’—it might have meant that the man himself had been among the killers, or that he was of the kind that committed such murders.

  San Andres came into sight beyond the airstrip, and when we arrived there was little doubt that any intended fiesta had been called off. The village comprised about fifteen stone-built windowless houses, spaced round a wide square, and both the buildings themselves and the earth they stood on were a deep and lugubrious red. In the centre of the square stood a shrine and by it a post, to which arrows had nailed three small faded garlands of orchid flowers. This, we were later informed, was the post to which deflowerers of virgins were tied to be flogged, and the three crowns symbolized cases of ravished virginity.

  At the moment of our arrival the only human form in sight was a single Huichol sprawled half asleep against the veranda of what seemed to be the village’s principle building. This, Ramon told us, was the topiri—the police officer—and he pointed out the insignia of his office; the sacred cord wound round his waist, used to tie up prisoners, and the staff of office with its bunch of ribbons, stuck into his belt. The topiri, immured in an obsidian reserve, replied with eyes averted, and without changing his posture, to our questions. He mentioned briefly that a week or two previously a ceremony had taken place that it would have been interesting for us to see. A new Tatouan had been elected, and according to Huichol democratic procedure he had not been informed in advance of his candidature. As the office provides for no remuneration but imposes many onerous duties, he had been persuaded to accept nomination only after a short period of imprisonment without food. The Tatouan was now away on his rancho, recovering from the experience, and all his officers had gone off about their personal affairs. Somebody had had a premonitory dream, which had brought about a change in the date of the fiesta.

  The shaman, always eager to promote our journalistic interests, asked the topiri if there were any prisoners in his charge at that moment, and was disappointed to hear that there were not. A pity, he said. The Huichols kept their malefactors in stocks. It would have made an attractive photograph.

  A few more Huichols had drifted into view and we were doing our best to make friends, examining the details of their beautifully decorated clothing, when a distraction occurred. A mestizo carrying a rifle on his shoulder had appeared at the entrance to the village. He came towards us a short distance, walking with swinging hips, in a mincing effeminate way, and then stopped. There was a moment of absolute silence and some theatricality when, for a time, nothing moved; and then, without shifting the position of their bodies, the Huichols turned expressionless faces to the newcomer, who stood looking down from a slight rise in the maroon earth. It was a brooding Eisenstein composition of iron profiles and watching eyes set against deep shadows. Ravens were over us in the dark sky and the man with the gun looked from side to side, suddenly nervous, and began to kick in a desultory way at a horse’s jawbone at his feet.

  Two or three Huichols now moved towards him, casually and without evident purpose, and soon he was in the centre of a little group, which the shaman joined to begin a sharp questioning. The shaman asked him for his name, and he turned out to be none other than Adolfo Castañera—the associate of the man on the mule. He was asked now to give an exact account of his comings and goings, and this seemed to be unsatisfactory. Ramon asked him if any of the Huichols present would vouch for his respectability, and Adolfo pointed to a man whom he said had known him for several years, but the Huichol would only agree that he’d seen him once or twice. No more than that.

  The word malhechor, used locally for bandit, came up, and Castañera was aggrieved, but still cool. Not only was he no outlaw himself, but he was one of their victims. As proof of this he took off his shirt to display the scars of a terrible wound in the stomach, produced by the exit of a dum-dum bullet, and we were invited to examine the tiny white circle in the skin of his back where the bullet had entered. He had been shot from ambush, he said, on 22 June 1969, on the trail we had just come down from Santa Clara, about five kilometres from San Andres. The argument that no man with such a wound could be other than innocent failed to impress the shaman. Adolfo was agreeable enough to allow David to photograph him, holding his rifle, and after that it was taken away from him. In a final attempt to
establish a bond between himself and David and myself—the only other non-Indians present—he told us that he had visited San Diego, California, which is both the Paris and the El Dorado of Central America. He was a man of education, he said, and he had travelled the world. But the Huichol topiri, standing at his back, his sacred cord untied, knew nothing of this, and Castañera was led away in custody, while a messenger hurried from the village to find the reluctant Tatouan on his rancho and bring him back to preside over the ‘court’ proceedings.

  Ramon had warned us that we must leave San Andres by four p.m. so as to be able to reach the mission by nightfall, and we were now impatient to see whatever there might be to see in the time that remained. However, the shaman was not to be found, and it seemed to me imprudent to take the law into our own hands and go off on our own. Societies such as these are governed by the most intricate protocol, and it is easy to give unwitting offence. I could never, for example, in the absence of the shaman, decide whether it was in order to photograph the village shrine, or to examine it too closely, or whether even we were being ill-mannered in sitting, as we did, on the long ceremonial bench outside the council house. I recalled the experience of a French friend who had ridden into a Moi village in the highlands of Vietnam and, tying his horse to the nearest post found that he had offered it—irrevocably—as a sacrifice to the ancestral spirits. In the circumstances a vigilant inactivity seemed called for, and we were relieved when Ramon eventually reappeared.

  The news he brought accounted for his un-Indian state of agitation. He told us that he had just found the body of a murdered man in a house a few yards from were we sat. We followed him to it and went in just as the Huichols were lifting down the corpse from the space it had been crammed into, between the rafters and the roof. The shaman explained that he had sensed death in the village, and had been drawn by his instincts to this house, which was unoccupied and had been kept locked up for some months. He added the information, as if passing on facts that he had read in a newspaper, that the victim had been killed in the mountains and had been brought here to be hidden by a band of about six men. In this corner of the sierra, which abounded in ravines and caves, and where wild animals would soon have removed all traces of an abandoned corpse, it seemed strange to us that the assassins should bother to put themselves to such trouble. But who could say what motives—irrational though they might seem to us—were involved?