On the Plain of Snakes Read online

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Borderlands

  Mexico Mundo

  Oaxaca, the Inframundo

  The Road to Nueva Maravilla

  The Way Back

  Photos

  About the Author

  Connect with HMH

  Footnotes

  Copyright © 2019 by Paul Theroux

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  hmhbooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Theroux, Paul, author.

  Title: On the plain of snakes : a Mexican journey / Paul Theroux.

  Description: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, [2019] | Identifiers: LCCN 2019004920 (print) | LCCN 2019005663 (ebook) | ISBN 9780544866485 (ebook) | ISBN 9780544866478 (hardcover)

  Subjects: LCSH: Mexico—Description and travel. | Mexican-American Border Region—Description and travel.

  Classification: LCC F1216.5 (ebook) | LCC F1216.5 .T54 2019 (print) | DDC 917.204—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019004920

  Cover design by Mark R. Robinson

  Cover photographs © Steve McCurry

  v1.0919

  Excerpt from To Die in Mexico: Dispatches from Inside the Drug War by John Gibler. Copyright © 2011 by John Gibler. Reprinted by permission of The Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of City Lights Books, www.citylights.com.

  The chapter titled “Along the Border” originally appeared, in different form, in “Myth and Reason on the Mexican Border,” written by the author and published in 2016 by Smithsonian magazine. Text reprinted by permission of the author. All rights reserved.

  Lines from “A Steppe in the Nazas Country” by Manuel José Othon and “Tarahumara Herbs” by Afonso Reyes, from Anthology of Mexican Poetry, compiled by Octavio Paz and translated by Samuel Beckett. First published in 1958 by Indiana University Press. Reprinted with permission of Indiana University Press.

  Excerpt of six lines from “Late Ripeness,” from Second Space: New Poems by Czesław Miłosz. Translated by the author and Robert Hass. Copyright © 2004 by Czełsaw Miłosz. Translation copyright © 2004 by Robert Hass. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

  A mis queridos amigos

  que me acompañaron por los caminos de México

  No los olvidaré

  An elderly campesino in a battered hat and scuffed boots was stumbling in the bleak high desert, in the sighing emptiness of the Mixteca Alta in Oaxaca state. He was alone on the track that leads from the remote village of Santa María Ixcatlán to the crossroads, miles away. Obviously poor and struggling along, he seemed to me an iconic Mexican figure, emblematic of the life of the land. He could have been a hungry farmer headed to the market, a hopeful worker looking for a factory job, a migrant setting off for the border, or someone seeking help. Whatever his destination, he was on a rough road.

  We stopped the pickup truck and told him to hop in. After an hour of bumping along we arrived at the crossroads. The man offered his hand and said, “Many thanks.”

  “What is the name of this pueblo, señor?”

  “It is San Juan Bautista Coixtlahuaca,” he said. “See, the old convent.”

  The broken church was vast and hollowed out and unvisited.

  “What is the meaning of ‘Coixtlahuaca’?”

  “El llano de las serpientes.”

  The plain of snakes.

  Part One

  Borderlands

  To the Border: A Perfect Example of Thatness

  The Mexican border is the edge of the known world, only shadows and danger beyond it, and lurking figures—hungry, criminal, predatory, fanged, fanatical enemies—a malevolent and ungovernable rabble eager to pounce on the unwary traveler. And the Policía Federal officers are diabolical, heavily armed, stubborn and sullen one minute, screaming out of their furious congested faces the next, then extorting you, as they did me.

  Send lawyers, guns, and money! Don’t go there! You’ll die!

  But wait—deeper in Mexico (floppy, high-domed sombreros, mariachi music, blatting trumpets, toothy grins) are the safer, salubrious hot spots you can fly to for a week, get hog-whimpering drunk on tequila, fall ill with paralyzing squitters, and come home with a woven poncho or a painted ceramic skull. Also, here and there, sunny dumping grounds for American retirees—a tutti-frutti of grizzled gringos in permanent settlements on the coast and in gated communities and art colonies inland.

  Oh, and the fat cats and petrocrats in Mexico City, thirty listed billionaires—including the seventh-richest man in the world, Señor Carlos Slim—who together have more money than every other Mexican combined. But the campesinos in certain states in southern Mexico, such as Oaxaca and Chiapas, in terms of personal income, are poorer than their counterparts in Bangladesh or Kenya, languishing in an air of stagnant melancholy on hillsides without topsoil, but with seasonal outbursts of fantastical masquerade to lighten the severities and stupefactions of village life. Famine victims, desperadoes, and voluptuaries, all more or less occupying the same space, and that vast space—that Mexican landscape—squalid and lush and primal and majestic.

  And huge seasonal settlements of torpid, sunburned Canadians, as well as the remnants of fifteen colonies of polygamous Mormons who fled to Mexico from Utah to maintain large harems of docile, bonnet-wearing wives, all of them glowing with sweat in the Chihuahuan Desert, clad in the required layered underwear they call “temple garments.” And isolated bands of Old Colony Mennonites speaking Low German in rural Cuauhtémoc and Zacatecas, herding cows and squeezing homegrown milk into semisoft cheese—Chihuahua cheese, or queso menonita, meltable and buttery, very tasty in a Mennonite verenika casserole or bubble bread.

  Baja is both swanky and poor, the frontera is owned by the cartels and border rats on both sides, Guerrero state is run by narco gangs, Chiapas is dominated by masked idealistic Zapatistas, and—at the Mexico margins—the spring-breakers, the surfers, the backpackers, the crusty retired people, honeymooners, dropouts, fugitives, gun runners, CIA scumbags and snoops, money launderers, currency smurfers, and—look over there—an old gringo in a car squinting down the road, thinking: Mexico is not a country. Mexico is a world, too much of a mundo to be wholly graspable, but so different from state to state in extreme independence of culture and temperament and cuisine, and in every other aspect of peculiar Mexicanismo, it is a perfect example of thatness.

  I was that old gringo. I was driving south in my own car in Mexican sunshine along the straight sloping road through the thinly populated valleys of the Sierra Madre Oriental—the whole craggy spine of Mexico is mountainous. Valleys, spacious and austere, were forested with thousands of single yucca trees, the so-called dragon yucca (Yucca filifera) that Mexicans call palma china. I pulled off the road to look closely at them and wrote in my notebook: I cannot explain why, on the empty miles of these roads, I feel young.

  And that was when I saw a slender branch twitch on the ground; it lay beneath the yucca in soil like sediment. It moved. It was a snake, a hank of shimmering scales. It began to contract and wrap itself—its smooth and narrow body pulsing in the serpentine peristalsis of threat, brownish, like the gravel and the dust. I stepped back, but it continued slowly to resolve itself into a coil. Not poisonous, I learned later. Not a plumed serpent, not the rearing rattler being gnawed by the wild-eyed eagle in the vivid
emblazonment on the Mexican national flag. It was a coachwhip snake, as numerous on this plain as rattlesnakes, of which Mexico has twenty-six species—not to mention, elsewhere, milk snakes, blind snakes, rat snakes, pit vipers, worm-sized garden snakes, and ten-foot-long boa constrictors.

  The joy of the open road—joy verging on euphoria. “Behind us lay the whole of America and everything Dean and I had known about life, and life on the road,” Kerouac writes of entering Mexico in On the Road. “We had finally found the magic land at the end of the road and we never dreamed the extent of the magic.”

  But then, driving onward, reflecting on the old twisted trunks of the yuccas and their globular crowns of spiky sword-like leaves (“The leaves are erect when they are young but they become arched when they get older,” a botanist writes, seeming to suggest a fogeyish image), each a solitary stick in the asparagus family—and it does seem like a succulent spear that’s swelled to become a desert palm rooted in sand, tenacious but bending as it ages. I also think, It’s been a hard summer. Unregarded, shunned, snubbed, overlooked, taken for granted, belittled, mocked, faintly laughable, stereotypical, no longer interesting, parasitical, invisible to the young—the old person in the United States, and the man and writer I am, is much like the yucca, much like the Mexican. We have all that in common, the accusation of senescence and superfluity.

  So, I can identify. But leaving home for Mexico at a time when I feel peculiarly ignored and weakened in status is not sad or lamentable. It is the way of the world. This is a triumphant mood for a long trip, just slipping out and not telling anyone, and fairly sure that no one will notice I’ve gone.

  Again like the despised Mexican, the person always reminded he or she is not welcome, whom no one ever misses: I could not be more sympathetic. I am this yucca with crazy hair and a bent back; I am also (though traveling in the other direction) a shifty migrant. Yo soy tú, I think: I am you.

  A Gringo in His Dégringolade

  In the casual opinion of most Americans, I am an old man, and therefore of little account, past my best, fading in a pathetic diminuendo while flashing his AARP card; like the old in America generally, either invisible or someone to ignore rather than respect, who will be gone soon, and forgotten, a gringo in his dégringolade.

  Naturally, I am insulted by this, but out of pride I don’t let my indignation show. My work is my reply, my travel is my defiance. And I think of myself in the Mexican way, not as an old man but as most Mexicans regard a senior, an hombre de juicio, a man of judgment; not ruco, worn out, beneath notice, someone to be patronized, but owed the respect traditionally accorded to an elder, someone (in the Mexican euphemism) of La Tercera Edad, the Third Age, who might be called Don Pablo or tío (uncle) in deference. Mexican youths are required by custom to surrender their seat to anyone older. They know the saying: Más sabe el diablo por viejo, que por diablo—The devil is wise because he’s old, not because he’s the devil. But “Stand aside, old man, and make way for the young” is the American way.

  As an Ancient Mariner of a sort, I want to hold the doubters with my skinny hand, fix them with a glittering eye, and say, “I have been to a place where none of you have ever been, where none of you can ever go. It is the past. I spent decades there and I can say, you don’t have the slightest idea.”

  On my first long trip—to central Africa, fifty-five years ago—I was exhilarated by the notion that I was a stranger in a strange land: far from home, with a new language to learn, committed to two years out of touch, teaching barefoot students in the bush. I was to remain in Africa for six years, learning how to be an outsider. My next teaching job was in Singapore, and when that ended after three years, I abandoned all salaried employment and became a resident in Britain for seventeen years, carrying the compulsory Alien Identity Card.

  Partly from passionate curiosity and partly to make a living, I kept traveling. The risky trips I took in my thirties and forties, launching myself into the unknown, astonish me now. One winter I was in Siberia. I went overland to Patagonia. I took every clanking train in China and drove a car to Tibet. I turned fifty paddling alone in my kayak in the Pacific, threatened by islanders, tossed by waves, blown off course in a high wind off Easter Island. Even traveling from Cairo to Cape Town in 2001, and stopping in Johannesburg for my sixtieth birthday, seems an unrepeatable journey—at least by me, when I remember how I was fired upon by a shifta bandit in the Kaisut Desert near Marsabit, and being robbed in Johannesburg of my bag and everything I owned. A decade later, on an African trip for a sequel to that book, resuming in Cape Town and heading for the Congo border, I turned seventy in the Kalahari Desert and defended myself against oafs in the stink and misery of northern Angola. All these trips, ten of them, became books.

  “Write the story of a contemporary cured of his heartbreaks solely by long contemplation of a landscape,” Camus wrote in his Notebooks. Heeding that advice (which has always been a mantra to me) at a time when I believed I might be done with long journeys, I took to my car and went on a two-year trip through the back roads of the Deep South, with a book in mind. I was rejuvenated in the precise sense of the word, tooling along in my car, made to feel young again.

  In those years, traveling in the South, I made a detour and crossed the Mexican border for the first time, at Nogales. It was a travel epiphany that woke me to a new world. I marveled how, pushing through an Arizona turnstile in a doorway blowtorched into a thirty-foot iron fence, in seconds I had stepped into a foreign country—the aroma and sizzle of street food, the strumming of guitars, the joshing of hawkers.

  “Just across the street Mexico began,” Kerouac writes. “We looked with wonder. To our amazement, it looked exactly like Mexico.”

  I met some migrants then, Mexicans intent on slipping across the border, others who had been deported, and on that visit I saw a middle-aged woman praying before her meal in a migrant shelter, the Comedor of the Kino Border Initiative. She was Zapotec, from a mountain village in Oaxaca state, who had left her three young children with her mother, intending to enter the United States and (so she said) become a menial in a hotel somewhere and send money back to her poor family. But she had become lost in the desert and, spotted by the US Border Patrol, seized, roughed up, and dumped in Nogales. The image of her praying did not leave my mind, and it strengthened my resolve: on my trip whenever I felt obstructed or low, I thought of this valiant woman, and moved on.

  Knowing the risks that migrants took emboldened me, and hearing nothing but ignorant opinion about Mexicans, from the highest office in America to the common ruck of barflies and xenophobes (maybe disinhibited by their bigoted leader), I decided to take a trip to Mexico. I studied the map. I had no status except my age, but in a country where the old are respected, that was enough—more than enough.

  And a further crucial consideration related to my age: how long would I be able to drive alone in my car over great distances, through the deserts and towns and mountains of Mexico? After you’re seventy-six, you need to renew your license every two years. If I failed the eye test next time, my driving days would be over. Knowing that I had limited time—my license with a use-by date—urged me on. My car had served me well in the South. So I contemplated an improvisational road trip along the border and the length of Mexico, from the frontier to Chiapas, with the kind of excitement I felt as a young man.

  A Mexico book was on my mind, but there are hundreds of good books about Mexico by foreigners, one of the earliest by an Englishman, Job Hortop, who was a crewman on a slave ship as well as a galley slave himself for twelve years on Spanish ships. He wrote of Mexico and his ordeals in The rare travales of an Englishman who was not heard of in three-and-twenty years’ space, in 1591, which was included in Hakluyt’s Voyages. The first comprehensive account of Mexico in English appeared around fifty years later, written by another Englishman, Thomas Gage, who arrived as a Dominican friar in Veracruz in 1625.* Gage’s book of travels and the wonders of New Spain appeared in 1648. An important boo
k of the mid-nineteenth century was the richly detailed, epistolary Life in Mexico (1843) by Fanny Erskine Inglis, writing under her married name, Marquise Frances Calderón de la Barca (as the Scottish wife of the Spanish ambassador, she had access everywhere and was habitually indiscreet). Another enduring and insightful work of Mexican travel (which praises Fanny’s book) is Viva Mexico! by Charles Macomb Flandrau, published over a hundred years ago.

  And Stephen Crane, D. H. Lawrence, Evelyn Waugh, Malcolm Lowry, John Dos Passos, Aldous Huxley, B. Traven, Jack Kerouac, Katherine Anne Porter, John Steinbeck, Leonora Carrington, Sybille Bedford, William Burroughs, Saul Bellow, Harriet Doerr, and more—the list is long. Mexico has been lucky in the eminence of its visiting writers, and though they all see something different, Mexico invariably represents for them the exotic, the colorful, the primitive, the unknowable. One of the common deficits of the visiting writers is that they had a very slender grasp of Spanish.

  On his short (five weeks) trip to Mexico in 1938, Graham Greene did not speak Spanish at all. His Lawless Roads is lauded by some critics, but it is exasperated and bad-tempered, a joyless, overdramatized, and blaming book, contemptuous of Mexico. He traveled in Tabasco and Chiapas at a time when the Catholic Church there was under siege by the government (and elsewhere in the country the government battled with heavily armed Catholic “Cristeros”).

  Greene, a convert to Catholicism, took the suppression of religion personally. “I loathed Mexico,” he writes at one point. And later, “How one begins to hate these people.” Again, “I have never been in a country where you are more aware all the time of hate.” He describes praying peasants (indigenous Tzotzils probably) in Chiapas with “cave dweller faces” and his having to suffer “unspeakable meals.” And toward the end of the book, “the almost pathological hatred I began to feel for Mexico.” Yet the novel that was inspired by his Mexican travel, The Power and the Glory, is one of his best.