Voyage By Dhow

by Norman Lewis

  The dead man, identified as Miguel Garcia, had been killed by a gunshot wound in the right side of the chest, and the major cause for consternation in the village was that—according to the shaman’s expert advice—he had died between two and three days before, and not only had putrefaction set in, but all the delicate machinery of the manipulation of the soul, which must begin its journey to the underworld five days after death, had been thrown completely out of gear by this delay.

  Death had taken the village off its guard. At this moment we should all have gathered by the body to drink ritual beer, but there was none. There were no candles to be found either, no animal of any kind that could have decently been sacrificed, hardly enough maize flour even for the five funerary tortillas that would sustain the spirit on the first stage of its journey. What could be found of the dead man’s possessions had been assembled for burial, but it was essential to include with them symbolic bodily parts: arms and legs, and a head, woven from some sacred material, that would replace the physical body as corruption advanced. None of this could be discovered, and the shaman had to make do with ordinary grass. The atmosphere was one of depressed improvisation, against a background of the controlled sobbing of the dead man’s sister.

  The Tatouan and his officers now arrived, presenting stoic Indian faces to the ritual confusion. Wearing their ceremonial hats, decorated with buzzards’ and eagles’ feathers, they stalked in slow procession into the council house to begin their deliberations. A grave fifteen feet deep was almost finished outside the village’s limits, but their first ruling was that, whatever the religious imperatives, the body must remain unburied until all the relatives had been assembled—and some of them lived on ranchos a day’s ride away.

  In this the shaman, who had called for immediate burial, was overruled. He was overruled too in the matter of the bandit suspect, who received a short and perfunctory trial and was released—seemingly for lack of sufficient evidence. The man was given back his gun, but as a concession to Ramon’s objections it was unloaded and Ramon was allowed to take the bullets. He left the village, with a swagger emphasizing victory—and, departing, he shot us a last meaningful glance that was devoid of amity. In a way the verdict came as a relief. We were obliged now to accept the fact that in the sierra human life was cheap indeed. At first there had been hints of rough justice and, to the last, the shaman—still certain that the man would be found guilty—had insisted that we would take him back to Tepic with us, to hand him over to the federal police there. There now remained the uncomfortable possibility that somewhere in the forest between San Andres and Santa Clara an armed man with a grudge against the shaman might be lying in wait. In consequence, when we set off we walked well separated and in single file—the local method of reducing the risks inherent in such a situation.

  Reaching the Nautla Gorge, we threw ourselves down to rest. The mission was only half an hour’s scramble away down the mountainside and already the sun had fallen behind the peaks.

  By this time our relationship with the shaman had grown close and cordial, and he chose this moment to create us honorary compañeros of the Huichol people, and formally invited us to set out with him on the annual peyote pilgrimage, which would start in twenty-five days’ time. For the sixth time Ramon would lead his people, at the head of four captains, across mountain and desert for twenty days to Rial Catorce in the high desert of San Luis Potosí. We would march rapidly in single file, carrying nothing but bows, sacred tobacco, holy water and ritual implements, sustained on the journey by the virtue engendered by our own austerities.

  Huichols regard peyote as deer that have transformed themselves by magic into the sacred cactus, so the peyote would not be simply collected, but ‘hunted’ with bows and arrows, and it would be prayed and sung to before being eaten. Afterwards, renewed by the visions we had imbibed, our faces painted with symbols of victory, we would set out again on the long march back to the Sierra Madre, in the knowledge that whatever our state of weakness and emaciation when we arrived, we would surely be rewarded by a long and good life.

  It was an adventure of great attraction to both of us, and Ramon agreed that if we found it impossible to make our arrangements at this short notice, the invitation could be renewed next year.

  In the meantime there were aspects of the day’s happenings that remained obscure, and as tactfully as I could, I asked Ramon if he could explain more clearly how, and at what point, he had decided that a dead body was hidden in the village, and, also, whether the travesía he had discovered on the trail from Santa Clara that morning had been in some way connected with this tragedy?

  But here the blunt linguistic instrument of Castilian failed us both. The Huichols speak a version of Aztec, rich in nuance and undercurrents of allusion, that are untranslatable into the basic Spanish of a foreigner, and my categorical questions called for muted and conditional answers that could not be given. On one thing, however, he was definite. I had been unable to accept the story of a body being hidden by casual murderers in a village house. Did he really believe that the Huichol in San Andres had been killed by bandits?

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘The man was killed because he wanted to be a shaman.’

  We went on, thankful to arrive within sight of Santa Clara and its guardian dogs. The first owls were flying, a coyote snapped over the horizon, and a blue, mountain dusk had already fallen over the mission buildings when we arrived. The children had built their camp fires on the slopes, and when they saw us they came out to meet us, full of laughter and carrying their guitars.

  1970

  MEXICAN MOSAIC

  ‘WHERE DO YOU CARRY your money?’ asked the small middle-aged man at the back of the rapido bus from Mexicali, on the U.S. frontier, to Mazatlán.

  He went on to suggest that I should keep a reasonable float of a few hundred pesos wherever I usually did and put the rest in my sock. His qualifications to advise on such precautionary measures were solidly based, for he was a long-distance bus driver by profession, travelling home as a passenger after a journey up to the border two days before, when his bus had been held up by bandits.

  ‘But aren’t they going to look in your shoes?’

  ‘They’re in too much of a hurry,’ the bus driver said, ‘and their nerves are shot to pieces. They grab whatever they can and they get out.’

  Like so many law-abiding people dazzled by the charisma of violence, he seemed grateful for the experience and happy to find saving grace in the highwaymen who had carried rocks on to the lonely road and pointed a submachine-gun at his windscreen.

  ‘They’re not too bad,’ he said. ‘Say buenos dias to them, and they say buenos dias to you.’ One of the passengers had mentioned that he was out of work and they’d given his money back, as well as being politeness itself to the women passengers.

  There was always an adventure waiting round the corner on the long-distance buses, the driver said. It was a point of honour to get into a station on time and this sometimes meant pushing the cruising speed up to eighty miles an hour. On the last trip southwards he had hit a cow at full throttle and splashed it all over the bus, which had to be taken out of service and hosed down at the next town. It was a good thing, he said, to sit up at the back as he did, just as it was better when you flew anywhere to get as close as you could to the tail of the plane.

  The bus driver was the first Mexican I spoke to on this journey, and like so many of his countrymen in subsequent random encounters, he immediately took charge of my welfare. The bus rampaged on through the long hot day, and then into a haggard nightscape of cactus and flint. The dreaming, hollow-eyed villages came and went, and lean men going home asleep on their horses awoke to kick them into desperate life and charge for the verge at the hideous outcry of our siren. We stopped at dreadful hours at woebegone staging points when passengers got down and staggered away carrying their fatigue like some three-dimensional burden as they went in search of food.

  In these hallucinatory moments I foraged u
nder the umbrella of my friend’s protection. The dishes on offer at these places were strongly regional in character: pork cooked in chocolate, or tacos of meat in a maize-pancake sandwich. At one stopping point a man succeeded in selling a number of hydrogen-filled balloons to passengers who were too dazed to realize what they were buying. At another a cartomancer, crying, ‘It isn’t the betrayal so much as the doubt that kills’, promised to tell males of the party whether or not their wives were being unfaithful in their absence. Occasionally there were pleasures on offer, other than the satisfaction of hunger, for those who were prepared to cram them into these few bleak moments in the dead of night. ‘Travellers waited upon with speed and formality’, said a notice displayed in one stark pull-in. But however speedy and formal the young ladies lurking rather hopelessly in the background might have been, the iron schedules of bus travel slammed the door on such adventures. ‘Ten minutes,’ the conductor had warned, ‘and not a second more.’ And in precisely ten minutes we were under way again.

  At each major town faces changed as we lost fellow travellers who were by now old friends, and took on a fresh influx of strangers eager for membership of our temporary family. For a while we were on a sort of Canterbury pilgrimage by high-speed bus when eleven fat men from the Middle Ages got in, all of them called Francisco and all of them on their way to a prestigious shrine of the saint by that name. They rolled about the bus fizzing with excitement and forcing bottles of Montezuma beer on the other passengers, and when they settled, like true pilgrims, it was to tell stories endlessly. Their huge posteriors spread over a seat and a half wherever they sat, and a thin doctor, also a Francisco, who was travelling with them and hoped to get them all back alive, said: ‘You may think these men are fat, but actually they’re starving to death. All they ever eat is rice and beans. If you stuck a pin in them, they’d deflate.’ It was twenty miles from the bus stop to the shrine, he said, and the intention was to walk the last seven miles barefoot. ‘It could cut the soles of their feet about a bit,’ the doctor said, ‘but otherwise if they survive could do wonders for their general health.’

  We dropped our pilgrims off in a mist-veiled morning full of cactus and circling buzzards a few miles before Tepic, and here we took on a Huichol Indian decked with feathers and beads and carrying a bow and a sheaf of arrows in a dry-cleaner’s plastic cover. Eagles’ pinions sprouted from the rim of his flat straw hat, and his tunic and pantaloons were densely embroidered with deer, pelicans and heraldic cats. He sat in noble isolation from the rest of us, moving only once to fill a paper cup with water from a tap at the back, then having rummaged for a while in his splendidly ornamented satchel, he found an Alka Seltzer, unwrapped it, dropped it into the water, and gulped down the result.

  He got off at Tepic, capital of the Wild-Western, gunslinging State of Nayarit, and I did, too, wanting to enquire after my old friend Ramon Medina, shaman of the Huichol people, with whom I had spent some time in the sierra exactly ten years before. The shaman was a unique artist, the originator of those extraordinary pictures in wool now seen in degenerate versions in Mexican folk-art shops throughout the world. He was also Mexico’s foremost bowman and a faith healer of such renown that he had been kept in Zapópan, the Lourdes of Mexico, for a year or two to treat the many sufferers from phobias and psychosomatic disorders attracted to that town. It had now become a matter of personal regret that I had fought shy of accepting his treatment for the affliction of a life-long nervous cough by allowing him to expectorate down my throat. I learned at Tepic, where the shaman’s fame had been great, that he had died some years before, almost certainly murdered by one of the many gunmen that infest the sierra of Nayarit, and prey on the isolated Indian communities that have taken refuge there.

  At this point in the journey I backslid. The original intention had been to travel by bus all the way from the U.S. border to the Guatemalan frontier with Mexico at Tapachula, but I had done 1,200 miles from the border and now, with a pair of lightweight trousers half worn through, and the earth shuddering like jelly every time I stepped down from the bus, there were still another 1,200 miles to go. The final straw was a failure to get a seat on three rapidos in succession, and I gave up and took the plane to Mexico City, to spend the night in the vast, unreal peace of the Maria Isabel-Sheraton Hotel. This was the only hotel in the downtown area of this turbulent city where a room was to be found. It is favoured by Americans and I mingled in its marble halls with Elks and Rotarians who had come there for conventions, faced up to its gargantuan meals, and listened to the soft, ubiquitous moan of its airport music.

  The Sheraton’s portions of food—this also applied to neighbouring restaurants—were so vast that they could not be contained on ordinary plates, and the pound or more of meat with all its garnishings was spread over an elongated metal dish. The vacuum-religiosity of such places was reflected on a card propped on the table which said, ‘We owe it to “Him”. Let us be big enough and grateful enough to acknowledge this fact today and each following day, and before partaking of this food, let each of us bow his head and give thanks.’ The waiter said that about one third of the food he served was returned to the kitchen to go into the swill.

  The hotel presents each guest with the Lloyd’s (monthly) Economic Report, a complacent document which has nothing to offer the visitor but good cheer. A minimum increase in the private sector investment of 235 per cent was projected for the year. For the past year the nation showed a 7 per cent growth in real terms, and among the 152 member states of the United Nations it was in the 10 per cent, having the highest living standards. A deal was afoot with the French to supply three nuclear power stations—and so on. From where one sat in the fairy palace of the Sheraton it was impossible to disbelieve that this was so. On the other hand, Mexico City, said by some to have a population numbering nearly 20 million and therefore to rank as the largest city in the world, is said by others to have the most extensive slums in the western hemisphere, which, when I spent some hours in them, showed little signs of improvement since the days of Dr Oscar Lewis’s famous report. It has been said, too, that most Mexicans earn about £300 a year. Who is one to believe—Lloyd’s, or the sociologists who deny that the vast revenues from oil and steel have any serious effect on the poverty of the man in the street?

  Exercise was called for to cope with the digestion of the hotel’s copious and indulgent meal, so I took a walk round the city block on which it is built, where I found seventeen indigent families camping out for the night in the street, these in most cases consisting of mother and two or three small children. They live there, and in the vicinity of the other luxury hotels, scraping a living as best they can, but for the most part dependent upon the charity of passers-by—in the main the travellers from overseas. Hard times are confronted cheerfully. One mother of three said, ‘On the whole I can’t complain. We come to places like this because foreigners are more generous than our own people. My husband is a labourer back in our village but he’s always out of work, and I usually do better than he does. To tell you the truth the children enjoy an outing to the city. It’s a change for them. Anyone can put up with sleeping on a clean pavement, and if it rains we can always go to the arcades. If any of the children come out in sores or pick up a cough you often find that someone who happens to be a doctor will stop and give you something for it, so in this way it’s even better than being at home.’

  Extreme poverty, as I have always observed in Mexico, is in no way inconsistent with happiness.

  There was a choice of routes from Mexico City to the deep south, and someone recommended an east-coast approach through the swamps and the oilfields of the State of Tobasco, so I flew to Villahermosa and there hired a self-drive car, so as to be able to reach areas not served by the buses. In this simple operation an unexpected complication arose. Villahermosa, an oil-rich city, glutted with cars, and on the edge of an area currently producing the staggering total of 2 million barrels of oil a day, was a place where it was as hard to buy pet
rol as it is to find freshly caught fish in an English seaside town. The manager of the car-hire firm presided over a row of shining new Mexican-made Volkswagen Beetles, but all of them had empty tanks, and a pint of petrol had to be syphoned with enormous difficulty from his own car to get me to the one filling station, where by luck and by favour I managed to fill her up at 30p per gallon.

  Villahermosa draws a few tourists by reason of being within easy reach of the Mayan pyramids of Palenque. It offers striking contrasts. The sudden raucous prosperity engendered by oil is grafted on a rootstock of impassive Mexican calm. One sees a heron prospecting an abandoned tanker for edible ticks in the belief that it has come upon some gigantic new species of zebu cattle, while a bird of the same order occasionally mucks in with the guests in the swimming pool of the local hotel. This establishment has both character and charm. Beautiful Mayan waitresses serve the mettlesome plat du jour—which may be tripe cooked in chilies—with the dignity of priestesses officiating at a religious ceremony. Frogs like miniature race horses gallop up and down the air-conditioned passages, and in the evening guests are entertained with ‘Rose Marie’ and ‘Pale Hands I Loved’ on the Yamaha organ.