I almost choked on my beer. “What?”
“I’m telling you, man, when you look close enough into the milpa, there’s so much fucking and sucking going on it makes those chicas look like nuns. Corn especially—she doesn’t care where the pollen comes from, just as long as she gets some, and that’s why she’s all those colors—because our corn has many fathers. When you hold it in your hand you’re holding her eggs, and those strands of silk—there is one for every kernel—that’s how the pollen travels down to fertilize them, but not all the pollen is the same. Maybe in your pueblo you have two or three varieties of corn, but in all of Mexico there are sixty, maybe more—for making tortillas or atole, for growing in the mountains or the valleys, in a lot of rain or a little—every color and climate, and it is us who made it that way, who modified it. But the corn modified us too. Corn is the mother of us all, hermano, it’s what we’re made of.
“But when I first got up to UNAM, all that mattered to me was the scholarship, the status and the chicas.” He tapped his bottle against mine. “Imagine if it was you, some campesino from Oaxaca, an indio from the Sierra fucking Juárez, and suddenly you’re in D.F. and they’re paying for everything, even your computer. Y el coño—fue un milagro,” he said, crossing himself. “So it took me a while to understand—you may be going to UNAM, but if you’re working in that lab, you’re working for SantaMaize. They opened it the year I got there and it’s where I did all my graduate work. You should see it, the building was designed by this crazy Danish guy and it’s state of the art, a cathedral for worshiping corn, all glass with one wall five stories high, shaped like a pyramid and covered in a mural that looks like it was painted by Rivera himself. One half is scenes from Aztec life—temples, markets, floating gardens, and in front is a milpa with men and women planting and harvesting corn, sorting the seeds and grinding cornmeal, dancing in feathers at a fiesta. On the other half is an enormous field of corn, stretching to the horizon with a combine harvester moving across it like a ship in the ocean and no people anywhere. Where did they go? I don’t know, but some of them are in the lab and you can see them in the mural at the bottom, men and women with pipettes and microscopes and video monitors showing the corn and all its parts—pericarp, endosperm, plumule, all the way into the cell, the nucleus, and finally the DNA itself, all so beautiful and possible, in such vivid colors. And rising up over everything like the sun, joining these two worlds together, is the SantaMaize logo—a single ear of glowing golden corn with the husk parted like the Virgin’s robes and bright green rays coming out just like the ones around Our Lady of Guadalupe. Every day going to work, this is what I saw.”
César leaned his head back against the wall. “And now I’m in that mural too.” It was the first time I ever heard something like despair in César’s voice. “You know how sometimes you’ll get an ear of corn that’s all yellow with only one or two dark kernels? That’s me in the lab,” he said. “I’m the dark one with the mask on his face—the indio they taught to take the corn, this generous being that is ancient, that is ours, and break her down like a fucking car engine.”
“César,” I said, “I have seen these people myself.” And I told him about the page from the Oaxaca Codex I saw down on Calle Cinco de Mayo, which is not only a picture of some corn—there are also men wearing suits and masks. One of them has a big needle and he is shooting something into the corn or sucking something out, maybe its pitao—its life force. The codex doesn’t say.
“I know that one,” said César. “Near the first-class bus station? That’s who I work with, that’s what I do. One of my first professors said that transgenic crops would be to food what the Internet was to communication. ‘You don’t know how lucky you are,’ he told us, ‘to be coming in now. Mexico is going to be a huge market and Syngenta, Monsanto, Pulsar, SantaMaize, all of them will want you.’ I still remember the way he rubbed his thumb and fingers together.
“A few of us students were worried about these transgénicos coming into Mexico, not as food but as seed, because that corn is all the same—the diversity is gone so one disease can kill it. It’s happened before and we didn’t want some corn invented in a lab last year to be mixing with native maize that has taken thousands of years to develop. But NAFTA and the Mexican government allowed SantaMaize into Mexico—only in the north, they said, on an experimental basis, but that’s like saying migrantes will only work in Texas. Corn is a migrante too. So we put together a petition calling for a moratorium on GMO corn. The problem for us is that NAFTA isn’t interested in some indio with a little milpa of one hectare growing native corn and taking a bag to market a couple times a year. NAFTA wants big farms and all the same corn—lots and lots, all the time, and this is who our government is subsidizing now, not the campesino. They’re telling us to leave the pueblos and work in the maquiladoras. Well, would you send your kids to Tijuana or Ciudad Juárez? But Mexicanos want their tortillas, right? They want them right now, and who do you think wants to sell the seed to grow the corn to make all those tortillas? This is the magical realism of NAFTA, Tito—Mexico, the birthplace of corn, is now importing surplus corn from el Norte—millions of tons driving the price down so campesinos can’t afford to grow it. Exporting people and importing corn. It is backwards, no?”
I will admit I didn’t know this, but I know my father and uncles. “If you don’t leave the campo,” I said, “how else are you going to get money to buy a truck or build a house?”
César spat. “You can’t eat a truck, cabrón. This is our land we’re talking about—nuestra soberanía. One of my professors was an old-school liberation theologist from Puebla, and he helped me get a little grant to go to Oaxaca and see if transgénicos were growing there. I suspected this because my father told me about some corn he saw at the market in el centro, corn like he’d never seen before—almost white, and cheap. Because this is the strategy, Tito, same as the narco—first they make it easy, but once you’re using, they raise the price and make you buy more every year.”
“How can they make you?”
“They come to your pueblo with a contract. But they’re trying to get approval for suicide seeds and that will save them the trip.”
I thought I heard him wrong and I looked at him.
“Corn with a terminator gene,” he said, “what they call a V-GURT, so it sterilizes itself. That way, even if you save the seed, it’s no good for planting. You must buy it new every time. Well, saving seed is what we do, no? It’s how we got here. When I saw what these terminator genes could do I began to understand the implications for us, and that’s when I wondered if I made a mistake. SantaMaize is working on one right now. It’s not public yet, but they’re calling it Kortez400—with a K. There are different ways to do it, but the Kortez uses this protein called an RIP. You insert the RIP into the gene sequence, and if it’s ever planted again the seed kills itself in embryo.
“When I went into that program, Tito, I really thought I was going to make things better, and not just for me. Corn is supposed to feed people, right? How can that be a bad thing? But at SantaMaize, corn isn’t food. It’s control. It’s life with an off switch. And corn is tricky because the pollen travels through the air. With the right wind conditions it can jump over a mountain and once their seed is in your milpa, once their corn is mixing with yours, how are you going to separate it?”
Before I could ask if this was why he was hiding, he said, “Imagine some pendejo finds your sister alone in the milpa and rapes her and she has a kid—”
Maybe it’s the beer, but before I know it I am thinking of my sister Vera and I start to choke up, which is strange because I hardly see her now, but something César said reminded me of when I was fourteen, just before I left for secondary school, and my father slapped her for something—right to the floor. I was so angry and frightened, but I could only watch because I didn’t want him to do it to me. Now I am sitting here trying to keep my shoulders still, trying to hide this from César, but it is hitting me har
d that I am really leaving and I wonder if I will ever see Vera again, or my parents, and all I want in that moment is to go back, to go home. I start to stand up then because I have to walk, but César pulls me down and looks into my eyes, and I realize now that he thinks the tears he sees in there are for the corn and he keeps talking.
“—so now that kid is part rapist, but he’s still your sister’s baby, right? He’s your blood too. So what are you going to do? You can’t cut the kid in half and throw away the part you don’t like. It’s all of it or none of it and that’s a problem when it’s your family. But if SantaMaize can prove with science—by looking at gene markers and sequencing—that you’re using their product, that your corn is part their corn, well, what are you going to do about that? Call your lawyer? SantaMaize got a thousand lawyers. They eat you like pollo.”
This is what César is saying while I’m wiping my eyes and trying not to choke on my beer because I want to be hard, but it’s hard to be hard, especially when someone’s telling you the world that made you is being killed in front of your eyes and what can you do but wait for some men you don’t know and don’t trust to take your life in their hands and drive you someplace you never been before where all you have is your uncle’s phone number and with this you’re supposed to make some new kind of life because the old one is broken and you don’t know how to fix it except to do what everyone else is doing and go somewhere far away with bad food, cold weather and people who hate you.
You know what I’m saying?
What would you do?
16
Fri Apr 6—20:48
So cold. No one speaks now because they can’t—only the terrible sound of breathing. I should share his water, but with who? It will be gone in a minute. In the pueblo, in the hard times, people join together, but in here there is no history and no connection, only the thirst which has no conscience. So I guard his water like César guarded his phone because the only way to live is to be still and quiet—to wait longer. To wait until you come.
If the Spanish Church taught us one thing, it is patience.
Fri Apr 6—20:57
In the afternoon so many memories came to me disguised as dreams and this one felt so real—in the café on the Zócalo with Sofía from my Customer Service class. I was there, but I was not myself, I was el Valiente. Maybe you know him from la lotería—those bingo cards were famous with the tourists. Of them all, el Valiente es mi favorito—un hombre serioso como Benicio del Toro only taller with a bloody machete in one hand and a sarape wrapped around the other. On the card they show him with a sombrero at his feet. Maybe it just rolled off a dead man’s head, or maybe his enemy threw it down in surrender—you cannot be sure.
We were sitting under the arcade, Sofía and me, alone for the first time, and I was trying to order two cold beers, but I couldn’t get the waiter’s attention. How I missed seeing Odiseo I don’t know. Of course the café was crowded and my eyes were on Sofía, but even in a dream our governor is hard to miss—that sagging-mustache face and bad skin. I should have known there was a problem because we were dying of thirst and no one was coming. All the waiters were serving Odiseo and his posse, and I couldn’t believe it was really him, the Matador of Oaxaca.
Around his table is a barricade of men in suits and leather jackets and from the outside they look like vultures on a kill, heads down, dark shoulders pushing for position. On the table is a plan of the city, because right now Odiseo is tearing it out from under our feet and the traffic is hopeless. His brother is in the cement business and of course all those gutted streets must be filled with something. Mexico is a democracy and Odiseo has only a short time left in office so he must get busy—many pockets to fill, people to kill and BMWs to buy. Because of him there are crosses now around el centro.
In the dream it is December so all the flower beds are planted with nochebuena por la Navidad, but with Odiseo so near those bright red leaves only make the Zócalo look like it’s bleeding again. Thirty meters from our table is the municipal palace that Odiseo was forced to abandon because the people hate him so much, and out by the fountains under the laurel trees are the common people who cannot afford a beer in a nice café with tourists and matadors. Between us and them Odiseo’s indio bodyguards orbit like dark moons, hands in their coats, eyes flashing here and there, searching for anything that can put the planet at risk. They are matadors too, and the city is their killing floor. Men like them have been captured on film in the heart of our city shooting people down like dogs.
One of those people was my cousin Paquito, the son of my Tío Martín. They killed him last October in the strike. He was my age, but we never saw that part of the family much after Papá and me were deported. I went to the funeral, but I never saw Tío Martín. On the same day Paquito was killed, I saw a photo taken by a cameraman at the very moment the cameraman himself was shot. That day, the flame tree blossoms were falling in the street so heavy you could hear them hitting the pavement and from a distance they looked like seashells on fire. I was with some other students at the barricade across the big intersection by the Panteón General, and there had been a warning by phone that the paras were coming—not police but assassins with no uniforms and their own guns. These were campesinos who looked just like us and this made everything harder. I didn’t see it myself, but I could hear the shooting and it was chaos—all of us running. I can tell you, the sound of a gun in the street is different from in the forest. There is only one animal who is hunted in the street.
I saw the photo after. It was posted on the Internet. There were three of them—all Zapotecos. The one who shot the cameraman looked a lot like our water guy—the same fat face with small eyes far apart and a big panza, only there’s a smoking barrel staring right in your face. The cameraman died for that picture—right there in the daylight, in front of everybody with the flame tree blossoms all around him. But here is the Mexican part—the man accused of killing this cameraman? He is one of the protesters the matadors were sent to kill. I think he’s still in jail.
Here, in the café on the Zócalo, the man who ordered those killings is sitting right behind me like nothing happened, our elbows almost touching. I could turn around and offer him advice. I could whisper “Asesino” in his ear. Jesucristo, I could kill him myself. But I’m as chickenshit as the rest of them, sitting there pretending this is only normal—just like at home when the father beats the mother and everyone sits down to la comida like nothing happened, and the son hates himself for only eating, for doing nothing to defend the one who feeds him.
Odiseo doesn’t notice. None of those chingados notice, and it’s hard to be told like that—right to your face with no words at all—that you have no power, that all you have is the fork in your hand and what are you going to do with that? Poke him to death? Ask him, please pass the salsa? And you know everyone else is feeling the same except for the Spanish café owners, the same ones who were saying last fall when buses were burning and business was bad, “What we need now es una masacre.” Those ones are glad to see Odiseo and his compas at the table drinking micheladas because it means there is order again, that the army has gone home and that the people have one more time been broken—and now that this is done maybe the tourists will come back.
In the end, I was not el Valiente. I was el Cobarde, and there is no lotería card for him. No sombreros rolled on the Zócalo, we never got our beer, and Odiseo lived to kill another day.
Can it be possible for a whole city to have la esquizofrenia?
Without putting a hand on me, the matadors killed something in me that day—by not seeing me even though I was close enough to grab their balls. They were a wall of backs and attitude, their table a compound. But that’s Oaxaca for you—a city of walls. Getting inside can take a lifetime or a ladder. Getting out takes a coyote or a miracle.
Fri Apr 6—21:15
The battery is under half and César’s water is going too fast. It takes all my strength not to drink it. I think it’s the only
good water left in here. I tried to give some to César, but I don’t want anyone to see when I do this with my finger—make it wet and touch his lips, hold them open so some drops go in. His breath now is only a quick, thin scraping sound and his heart is beating too fast. Without him I can’t bear the cold. I can hear someone’s teeth rattling.
Death is in here with us now, cold and heavy. The only reason I am still functioning—besides César and his water—is because I am in the back and this is where the pipes are for pumping the water out. They are down near the bottom of the tank and one is closed, the one that damaged César, but the other is open. A child can put his hand through it, but a man cannot. Just outside the tank, this pipe makes a turn so you cannot see out, but some light comes in there. It looks to the west, I think, because the pipe goes orange at the end of the day and then it is not so long until the cold. Here, the air is fresh and even at midday it blows a cool breeze when you compare it to the breathless heat inside the tank. With my face by this small opening as big around as my own mouth, I feel sometimes as if I am bathing in the air and I can forget this hot wet stink all around me.
Last year, before the strike, I was taking classes at the university and I had some hope for my life in Oaxaca. Even then I had to borrow money and work for my father who was filling the holes made by Odiseo and saying over and over, “Remember Tío Martín and his truck? You can have that too, so what are you doing here pissing your life away?”
The Jaguar's Children Page 13