Voyage By Dhow

by Norman Lewis

  The audience, largely Japanese on package-deal tours, are mystified by the music but eager to show appreciation, and clap whenever they can. In the morning they are up betimes, cameras loaded and the wide-brimmed Mexican sombreros imported nowadays from Korea strapped to their luggage, ready for the jungle-smothered ruins. The hallmark of an advanced society is obsession with plumbing, so the Japanese lady in control of the group presents herself at the reception, bowing and smiling, to make a routine complaint about nonfunctioning flushes, after which the party is on its way.

  Sixty per cent of the State of Tobasco, of which Villahermosa is the capital, is swampland. It rains here softly and remorselessly for ten months on end, and as it rains the waters rise gently and spread their lily-decked margins over more and more of the landscape. When the sun finally shines it is on a scene that is deceptively meek. Aquatic plants, many of them sporting magnificent blooms, quilt the spread water to suggest a fictitious solidity, but only Indians can live here, and about 60,000 of them actually do.

  The thing to see near Villahermosa is the invention born of desperation and ingenuity by which the survivors of the redoubtable Chontal race, chased into the marsh by their Spanish conquerors, managed to stay alive. Using their bare hands they scooped slime from the bottom of the swamp and piled it up to form mounds and ridges above the water level, and on these they planted their beans and their squash.

  A few years ago government agriculturists appeared to have noticed what was going on—and had been for centuries—and decided that all that was required was the application of scientific farming methods to develop the camellón system, as it is called, into an important new source of food.

  Teams of experts arrived with the fertilizers, the insecticides, the new types of seeds and plants, and, above all, the giant dredgers borrowed from PEMEX, the state oil concern, with which the great swamp was to be dominated and encouraged to produce the new vegetable abundance. The dredger would build the camellones at a hundred times the speed of men working without tools, and the hollows left where the mud had been gouged from the swamp’s bed would be stocked with suitable fish. A trial batch of 600 approved families were to be presented with this living space created from virtually nothing and, working under scientific supervision, were to produce the new wealth. Exactly three years had passed since the beginnings of this hopeful experiment when I drove out to visit Nacajuca, headquarters of the project, a few miles down the road from Villahermosa, to see how things had gone.

  The rain, having fallen for some forty weeks on end, had stopped only a few days before, and the tropical sun had begun the slow process of sucking away the water. Most of the Chontals were out of sight, busy as usual with survival, but a few privileged ones who had managed to establish a foothold by the side of the raised metalled road carried on their normal occupations, knee-deep in water, mending and making things, cooking, washing the clothes and child-minding with an indifference that suggested they had forgotten the flood’s existence. A man busied himself with wire to mark out the boundaries of a garden two feet under water. A funeral party, all its members properly drunk, staggered and splashed towards a hillock where the coffin they carried would be temporarily interred to await reburial in the cemetery when it dried out. The most extraordinary vision was that of cattle swimming to feed on floating beds of water-hyacinths, only heads and shoulders showing above the water, the lavender blossom trailing from their lips.

  It was about midday when we reached the spot where they were building up new camellones. The dredger plunged its huge claw into the swamp, scooping up a ton of marsh at a time to drop it on the half-completed bank. A lorry dumped a load of cocoa bean husks on the mud and rotting vegetation as a small army of Chontals moving like sleep-walkers arrived with their mattocks to nudge the husks into the unsatisfactory soil.

  The Chontals inherit elaborate social graces from noble forebears, and they are saturated with the sly, defensive humour of the underdog. When I asked the man in charge of this party what the goings-on on his Tarzan T-shirt were all about, he displayed the ruin of his teeth in a stealthy grin and said, ‘These are the legends of a primitive people.’ I understood that I was included in this category. When these men sat down to their midday meal it was clear that they were eating the same old vitamin-deficient maize cakes and beans that the Indian Institute had described in its book on the project as not only inadequate for the needs of the body but detrimental to the mental faculties.

  Later, the director of the project spoke of his experiences with good-humoured resignation. He had learned a lot from the men he had set out to teach, he said. Probably as much as they had learned from him. Some of their attitudes had shocked and surprised him a little at first. He had run up against the hard fact that they had no sense of money or trade and this being so the marketable surpluses the Institute had hoped for with which they might have bought such consumer goods as transistor radios, or even Japanese mopeds, were out. ‘I accept now,’ he said, ‘that the Chontal wants to work with his family, produce just enough to live on and consume all he produces.’

  He had been stunned by such things as their tolerance in the matter of the irresponsible idleness of certain of their fellow workers. The idea was that ten men should form their own little co-operative nucleus to farm a camellón efficiently, but it didn’t work out that way. ‘You find two or three don’t want to work at all. They just sit round all day and talk about their dreams, and the others don’t mind in the slightest. You and I would resent a situation like that, but they don’t. They never criticize each other and you’ll never believe how conservative they are. We introduced new vegetables, but most of them were attacked by plant diseases, and when we got them to use sprays they poisoned the fish. We found out that the cocoa bean husks they’ve always used seem to be the only fertilizer that works on that soil.

  ‘Their diet’s terribly short of protein, so we persuaded them to raise pigs, but when the time came they wouldn’t kill them. “Christ,” they say, “I can’t kill that animal. I love him like my brother. Kill him after I’ve been giving him a wash and brush-up, and food out of my own mouth every day for the last six months? Excuse me, your honour, but what do you take me for—a cannibal?”’

  Scarlet dragonflies flew in through the office window, and the director cuffed them away, and laughed. ‘After all, what are we after? Our hope and intention was to fill their stomachs, because everything depends on that. Do you know what we’ve discovered in the end? We’ve learned that the traditional agriculture of these people’s ancestors fills their stomachs faster than we can. So technicians are out. Insecticides are out. Diversification is out. We sow by the moon and the rain, and we sow maize, beans, squash, yuccas and plantains. We’ve gone right back to the Mayan solution of the pre-conquest. All they needed was a little land to be able to take off. At least we’ve given them that.’

  The only road due south from Villahermosa crosses the high sierra, and no driver should take it on in a car which cannot be repaired by the blacksmith-electrician team likely to be found in any of the small towns passed in a day’s driving. There are terrific gradients, and many bends, some spread with the mud of recent landslides. The forest that climbs through up to the cool, thin air displays tropical embellishments: parrots surfacing suddenly like a shoal of glittering fish from the quilted foliage, an occasional toucan, a scrambling, raccoon-like animal in the road. A café has been built at the highest point, with wolves’ and bears’ skins tacked to its walls, where the boss entertains the occasional customer after serving the food with the extraordinary knack he has developed of catching the flies that have settled on his plate—eight to ten in a single swipe of the paw.

  It was shortly after enjoying this experience that I stopped for two Americans stranded by trouble with the automatic transmission in their opulent new car. There were thirty miles of wary driving round the edge of a number of precipices between them and the last town they had passed, and I had to break the news to them that
the situation that faced them was roughly the same. I offered them a lift, but they wanted to stay with the car, so, promising to try to arrange a rescue, I drove on.

  The next town was a mile or two off the main road and, stopping at a cantina to enquire the way, I found myself talking to the local chief of police, who had just arrested two youths for making an affray and had paused for a beer before taking his prisoners back. I told him about the stranded car, and he offered to help me find a mechanic. He led the way down to the town, and courteously invited me into the jail where the two prisoners were put in one of a row of cage-like cells of the type shown in Western movies, where they continued their arguments and threats. We then set off in the almost hopeless search for someone with an experience of automatic transmissions.

  This town was a museum-piece of the traditional Mexican scene: a square with a seething market, a general store stacked with cartridges, nails and tattered stockfish, a pub called ‘I’ll be here when you get back’, a main street with trenches hacked out of its surface to slow down the traffic and a great number of people going nowhere in particular, including a man with a pig on a lead, and another carrying a canary in a cage. For all the world it was a multi-coloured Mexican version of a Lowry. Inevitably fireworks lit surreptitiously popped here and there, hissing thirty feet into the air to explode with a blue cauliflower of smoke. The mechanic’s wife, when in the end we tracked him down, said that he was asleep, but the chief of police would have none of this and led the way through the house into a backyard where we found him soldering together a toy spacecraft that had to be ready for some child’s saint’s day. In the end he agreed to go up the road and see what could be done. Had he any experience of automatic transmissions? the police chief asked. No, the man told him, but he had his intuitions. ‘Tell them to flog the thing and try a Volkswagen next time they come to this country,’ the chief of police said.

  San Cristobal de las Casas is the last town of stature of the Deep South before reaching the Guatemalan frontier. It is built in the high mountains, an enclave of the colonial past, its walls pitted with the cannonballs of forgotten revolutions, and its streets full of sharp, Alpine colour under a sweetly discordant muddle of old bells. The misfortune of San Cristobal is that the Pan-American Highway runs through its outskirts, and down it has come the advance guard of the invasion of our times, including 2,000 American hippies who have settled in the town and attempted, with signal lack of success, to copy the appearance and life-style of the Indians who form the great majority of the surrounding population.

  The presence of these expatriates has stimulated a never deeply buried anti-American feeling—based supposedly in the memory of ancient oppressions and interventions—and insulting graffiti are frequently scrawled on the walls of the houses in which they lodge. Although many young Americans have tried to transform themselves into Indians, so far only one Indian is known to have returned the compliment by becoming a pseudo-hippy, having abandoned the industrious, hyperactive life of his people to spend much of his time in one of the cafés, imitating a hippy imitating an Indian.

  The State of Chiapas, of which San Cristobal was the old capital, is on the last frontier of tourism in Mexico; a frontier now widely breached, and in course of demolition. Mayan tribes who survived the holocaust of the Spanish conquest, and contrived to keep a nucleus of the old civilization intact, find themselves faced by a more ruthless destroyer of their culture as the tourists pour in.

  In the past half-century, the anti-clericalism of Mexican revolutionary governments, plus in this case geographical isolation, has favoured the re-emergence of the Indian personality, and even in the end the unconcealed practice of the ancestral religion. In some churches the Catholic priest has been replaced by the Indian shaman. This return to the ancestral customs and beliefs has sometimes gone along with a rejection of valuable and positive aspects of the dominant civilization. Peasants have preferred to bundle all their goods on their backs to bring them to market rather than use a wheeled vehicle, and in Amatenango, a village devoted to the making of pottery near San Cristobal, a well-meaning attempt by an American woman to convert the villagers to the use of the potter’s wheel led to her murder.

  The violence of our times has spread in all directions down the Mexican roads. San Cristobal has been transformed in a single decade from a town of extraordinary tranquillity into one in which it is no longer safe to walk in the streets after dark. Both Indians and whites have been frequently attacked and occasionally murdered, and women of both races have been raped. The tribal elders watch what seems to them the decay of the Western world and struggle to prevent the spread of its contagion into the Indian areas.

  Indians feel themselves more threatened by metaphysical than physical violence. In the recent past they have been largely left to live their lives in peace in their own way, but the mountain villages are now under assault by groups of tourists who offend by their permissiveness, often behaving insultingly—sometimes, as the Indians see it, in a sacrilegious manner, when they force their way into their shrines and sacred places. These invasions provoke violent reactions. Tourists have been frequently attacked in villages such as Chamula, which attracts great crowds of foreigners on feast days and is now patrolled by cudgel-armed vigilantes determined to keep the invaders in their place.

  I drove up to Chamula with an Indian friend without whose help it would have been impossible to break out of the quarantine imposed upon visitors from the outside world. It was a Sunday morning, and the wooden shacks round the fine colonial church—now taken over for the performance of Indian ceremonies—were afloat in a freezing mist. A coachload of tourists from a local agency had already arrived, and they were fiddling uneasily with their cameras which could only be used surreptitiously, and with some risk to themselves under the mistrustful eyes of the Indians with their staves. In the last week a stern notice had been put up, and an English translation supplied:

  ALL VISITORS. IT IS STRICTLY FORBIDDEN TO TAKE ANY PHOTOGRAPHS IN THIS MUNICIPIO AND OF THESE FESTIVITIES CARNIVAL SO THAT OUR CUSTOMS AND RELIGIOUS TRADITIONS WILL BE RESPECTED.

  SINCERELY

  NOTE. INFRINGEMENT WILL BE SEVERELY PUNISHED.

  The Chamulas set out to show that they meant what they said. A set-pattern exchange of compliments and courtesies had to be gone through with half a dozen dignitaries of varying ranks, and bitter coffee drunk with the Alcalde, dressed like a minor Spanish nobleman of the sixteenth century, before we could be given the freedom of the village!

  Even then two mayores carrying cudgels slung like rifles from their shoulders were assigned to keep an eye on us. Their first act was to conduct us to the lock-up where two prisoners were held under austere conditions, to make it clear what happened in Chamula to people who broke the rules. We were told that these two men were being held, until they showed sincere repentance, ‘for failing to comply with their civic duties’. The climate of the mountain villages is authoritarian, with a reverence for hard work, and tasks for all, men, women and children alike, are allotted according to age, sex, and ability. Idleness is more than frowned upon.

  The visit to the church that followed was the most remarkable experience, in its way, of the whole Mexican journey. Many tourists had had their cameras smashed trying to photograph these scenes where Indians worshipped in the old style, crouched on the bare pavement among the twinkle of innumerable candles and the red and white blossoms spread to represent the souls of the living and the dead, the theatrical presence of the shamans escorted by their guitarists, the incantations, the frenzy of possession and the ritual drunkenness. Two rows of Christian saints, twenty or more of them, carved larger than life, blood-striped and formidable in their anguish and wrath, looked down on this scene. Hanging from their necks were the original mirrors given by the Conquistadors to the tribal ancestors in exchange for their gold, and they seemed to be held here like captives or hostages in this wholly non-Christian scene. Realizing that the memory could not cope with the bi
zarre richness of the surroundings, I took out a notebook, but one of our guardians, ever watchful, signed to me to put it away. Even note-taking was prohibited in this Mayan holy of holies.

  Indians have been attracted to settle in the Chamula region for two reasons, the first a spiritual, and the second a highly practical one. A few miles away, behind Tzinakantán, rises up the highest peak in the State of Chiapas, and this is regarded as a rich repository of animal souls, the Naguals, with which the Mayas of this area link their own. Anthropologists are in dispute about the precise nature of this empathy, or soul-making, and my Chamula friend was bewildered at what he saw as the imaginative poverty of Western intellectuals who were unable to grasp the basic simplicities of Indian metaphysical thought. He explained that most of his people, although not all, developed a mystic affinity with one or several animals of the ‘noble’ kind, for example, the jaguar and the deer, and that the human benefited from the instincts and the sensitivities of the animal, although since his well-being ran a parallel course with that of his Nagual, he was bound to suffer from its death.

  The village of Tzinakantán being in such close proximity to the magic mountain, it followed that this was the best possible place for an Indian to spend all the time in he could. When we drove over from Chamula we found about a thousand of them, dressed in all their finery, clustered on the terraces in its centre to discuss their problems, or getting drunk in the well-conducted, ritual fashion that fosters visions and dreams. The practical attraction of the region lies in deposits of fine clay used in the making of pottery. A number of villages have exploited this since the remotest times, and in pre-Hispanic days their production was exported to all parts of the Mayan empire. Most celebrated of the potters’ villages is Amatenango, where the potter’s wheel was once rejected in so emphatic a fashion.