On the Plain of Snakes Read online

  I was reminded of the observation by the ghost story writer M. R. James, in his creepy tale “Count Magnus”: “His besetting fault was pretty clearly that of over-inquisitiveness, possibly a good fault in a traveller, certainly a fault which this traveller paid dearly enough in the end.”

  All this time, while I was drinking the tea I had brought from home and asking questions, Beth was trying in English to get the waiter’s attention. But English was not much use in the Hotel la Fuente.

  “What do you want?” I asked.

  “A cup of hot water.”

  I beckoned to the waiter and translated the request; the cup of hot water was delivered.

  “The Chinese do that—drink hot water,” I said. “They call it white tea.”

  “I’m going to have real tea,” she said.

  I smiled in confusion.

  “With your tea bag,” Beth said, and reached across the table to the saucer where my discarded tea bag lay like a dead mouse. Being a resourceful traveler, she popped the thing into her cup.

  South from Saltillo, I was on the straight sloping road through the brownish, gravelly valleys of the Sierra Madre, which bristled with thousands of dark single yucca trees, the so-called palma china, which had put me in mind of an army of bent-backed old men with wild hair. No traffic on my side of the highway, but a fourteen-mile backup of trailer trucks (I counted the miles on my odometer) stalled on the other side, waiting to pass a wrecked car.

  The highway for most of the way to San Luis Potosí was a cuota, a toll road, as opposed to a libre road, no tolls. The libre roads were less well maintained and tended to cut through the small towns that the cuotas bypassed. The libre roads were crossed with speed bumps, called topes, which bounced even the slowest car and scraped the undercarriage. The topes could be maddening but they did the trick, taking their revenge on speeders. The towns on these side roads had the restaurants, little inns (posadas), and motels, which the cuotas lacked; but cuotas were generally faster and safer, except when there was a wreck and the eighteen-wheelers might be stalled for miles.

  CAPILLA DE SANTA MUERTE was daubed in blood red on a sign in a roadside settlement about twenty miles south of the small town of Matehuala. On my map this whole area was termed El Llano del Lobo—the Plain of the Wolf. Tempted by the names, and remembering what I’d seen of Holy Death in the brothel of Matamoros, I pulled off the road to pay a visit.

  “Good day, sir.” It was a woman, fanning herself in a plastic chair just outside the entrance. There was nothing ecclesiastical about her faded dress or white apron, but she said the chapel was hers and she was the priestess—and, waving her fan, said, “Come in—you are welcome.”

  The chapel, a one-story cement building that perhaps had once been a shop, stood in a row of old unvisited shops coated in grayish dust—selling cold drinks, farm equipment, tamales—and one of the roadside tire-repair businesses seen frequently in rural Mexico, “vulcanizing.”

  Incense wafted from the chapel, the inside walls draped in white bunting and bouquets of plastic flowers. Next to the altar on the back wall was a life-size statue of Holy Death, with all her attributes. I had seen portraits and posters of this skeletal image, but this was the first time I beheld the whole frightening figure of La Santísima Muerte, in a white satin robe and virginal bridal gown, staring from hollow eye sockets and fixing me with a lipless grin. She held a sickle, as the image of Death the Leveler, and a globe and scapular, aspects (like the bridal gown) of the Virgin Mary, a familiar figure—and a helpful one, a protector, a shield, offering hope to everyone, fortune to the poor, protection to criminals and narcos.

  “I have pictures, I have beads.” The woman with the fan was whispering behind me. Seated outside, she’d had an air of authority; standing in the shadows of the chapel, among the skulls and bones, she was small and slightly humpbacked, one hand clutching her apron.

  “I want to buy a picture,” I said.

  The woman went to a table at the side and selected a ghoulish picture the size of a playing card.

  “How much?”

  “What you wish.”

  I gave her some pesos, saying, “I’ll come back.”

  “This”—she tapped the picture—“will keep you safe.”

  Back on the road, I thought how, even in the grip of NAFTA newfangledness, the eternal Mexico persists. No matter how modern the Mexican motorway, with toll booths, service plazas for gas and food, and mechanics in blue uniforms saluting customers at the word Lleno—Fill it up—old Mexico is always at the periphery, in the form of iconic figures at the margin of the highway, the weedy roadside, in the grass, the nearby meadow, under the trees, the creek bank, the little shed, the just visible casita under the spanking-new bridge.

  The panorama of emblematic Mexicans begins to appear next to the slick autopista, a great relief to the eye and the mind. The vaquero on his horse, wielding his switch as he gathers in his grazing cows; the goatherd in a straw hat chasing a stumbling, bowlegged kid; the boy in sandals and rags, leaning on a guardrail, watching his flock of sheep; the caballero rocking on his bony horse and adjusting his reins; the old woman with a bundle on her back struggling through the tall grass; the mule cart heaped with melons or sacks of beans, a slouching man tapping the mule’s flanks with a whip; a woman in a white apron seated under a sign, TAMALES and CARNE SECA; a skinny child chasing a skinny dog chasing a skinny chicken—and in the distance an old town, its cheese-colored church spires visible. I was reminded of Ray Midge in Charles Portis’s The Dog of the South: “I waved at children carrying buckets of water and at old women with shawls on their heads. It was a chilly morning. I’m a gringo of good will in a small Buick. I’ll try to observe your customs! That was what I put into my waves.”

  So, driving across the plateau of these bittersweet reminders of the antique past persisting into the present, and what the Potosino poet Manuel José Othón (1858–1906) described as “immensity above, immensity below . . . in the deep profile of the haughty sierra, and the horrendous gash of its mine-works,” I came to San Luis Potosí. After days of overnighters in motels in my long drive from home and along the border, I thought: I’ll stay here a while.

  San Luis Potosí is a victim of the usual Mexican pattern of the old harmonious colonial city brutally martyred in the cause of modernization—officialdom destroying it in order to make it live. It has an ancient city center of noble churches, temples, and cathedrals; a bullring, Plaza de Toros Fermín Rivera; paved plazas surrounded by arcades of shops and restaurants, ringed by buildings that grow uglier as they sprawl into suburbs; and finally, flat-faced factories in the industrial part of the city that produce jobs and income. In the case of San Luis Potosí, the factories make cars, aircraft parts, robotics, glass doors, medical technology, and much else, its workforce composed of assembly-line workers as well as highly educated graduates of the city’s sixteen universities and institutes of technology.

  Driving into the old part of town, I saw a sign on the roof of a tall building, HOTEL MARíA CRISTINA, so I steered toward it. In spite of its snooty name, it was a serviceable hotel, $40 a night, within walking distance of every historical sight, and it provided a garage where my car would not be stolen or vandalized.

  In this city of a million people, and all the disruption of manufacturing and traffic, you would think of a place turned upside down and modernized out of recognition. But Potosí was poor, and Potosinos were oppressed by the weakening peso and the high cost of living, and in such a situation—I had noticed this all over the American Deep South on my previous road trip—people hold on to their culture. Rich people, arrivistes, and new-money snobs emphasize their enhanced status by chucking the homespun traditions that the poor cling to—they have little else to cling to. The English writer V. S. Pritchett noticed this in his travels in Spain and elsewhere: “The past of a place survives in its poor.”

  This is what accounts for Mexico’s density and variety, for its fiestas that have their origins in Az
tec ceremony, for its beliefs that have their roots in death worship, for the masks worn by schoolchildren and revelers in plazas today that have their counterparts among Zapotecs, who flourished and wore those same masks two thousand years ago.

  Cuisine is culture, and traditional cooking persists in places that have been ignored by gourmet chefs or high-end restaurants. Mexico’s street food (antojitos) is local and usually delicious, often preferred by diners who eat it, snacking at picnic tables or on stools, rather than have a three-course meal in a restaurant. Among the best meals I had in Mexico were the ones I ate in Potosí—and the relief of being able to walk around without having to search for a parking place added to the pleasure of strolling to a Potosí restaurant.

  “You’re my namesake!” the owner of one restaurant said to me when we exchanged names. He was Pablo, and a namesake (tocayo) is an ally and a potential friend. He introduced me to enchiladas potosinos and his variation of enchiladas suizas (the Swiss part is hyperbole, referring to the dish’s thick cream sauce). Good manners also persist in societies so poor they are ignored and uncorrupted by hustlers and money people, as politeness is a habit of life, a way of getting on. A further point about Mexican politeness, summarized in a shrewd observation by the English philosopher and traveler R. G. Collingwood in his book The New Leviathan (1942): “The most beautiful manners I have met with are in countries where men carry knives, and if anybody gives them a nasty word or a nasty look, stick them into him.” As my tocayo, Pablo became a helpful informant.

  “What’s that fuss in the plaza?” I asked the next night (pozole verde—hominy, chicken, green tomatillos, sliced avocados, much else).

  Passing through the grand Plaza de Armas, with its spectacular cathedral and ornate eighteenth-century governor’s palace, I had heard a woman screaming denunciations into a microphone under a flapping banner and being watched by a stern-faced crowd.

  “She is with the Caravan,” Pablo said.

  And he explained: The Caravan was a movement of concerned Mexicans determined to keep the memory alive of the forty-three students who had been abducted and had disappeared—almost certainly murdered—in Guerrero state three years before. The students’ deaths had remained unexplained, the parents still grieving and angry.

  After dinner, on my way back to the hotel, passing through the Plaza Fundadores (Founders’ Plaza, commemorating the city’s beginning in 1592), I lingered in the Plaza de Armas to listen. Now the wind had slackened, and I could read the banner: AYOTZINAPA! LOS ASESINOS ESTáN EN LOS PIñOS! The Murderers Are in the Pines!

  Ayotzinapa was the place where the forty-three students had been abducted in September 2014.

  Spread across the cobblestones under the banner were large portraits of young men, each one titled in Spanish WE ARE MISSING, and their names, Marco Antonio Gómez Molina, Jorge Álvarez Nava, José Luis Luna Torres, and others.

  This was another example of Mexican simultaneity, like the goatherd by the motorway: in the lovely old plaza, on a fiesta evening, among families enjoying the night air, youths costumed as witches and goblins, bikers in leather jackets labeled Rebeldes (Rebels) leaning on their motorcycles, children playing with flashing toys, the balloon sellers, and the idle, mildly curious bystanders like me, a frantic woman was howling about murders and drug gangs.

  “When will we know! How long will we have to wait!” Gesturing with her microphone to the Palacio de Gobierno, a vast brown edifice that looked implacable, she shouted, “Listen to me about this injustice. I tell you, those people in the government know more than they say—and because they are silent, they are complicit in these horrible murders.”

  Though the children went on playing, encouraged in their jollities, and the smiling men hawked their balloons and toys, the older people in the plaza watched with alarm.

  “Think of their mothers! Think of the families of these murdered students! How they have not been buried properly—how their spirits cry out for justice!”

  When she was done, I talked to her a little—and I was the only one. The families and the revelers were shy, embarrassed perhaps by her accusations, wary lest anyone notice that they might be part of this demonstration. Mexicans generally were outraged by the murders, but the anger of this woman, her boldness in this sedate setting, made the outrage more public, and perhaps the onlookers feared consequences.

  But the woman was fearless.

  “I’m a stranger here,” I said, “just a wandering gringo. But I’ve been listening, and I’m interested in what you’re saying.”

  She said her name was María. She asked, “Where are you from?”

  I told her.

  “We brought the Caravan to the United States two years ago, to inform the people, and many listened and shared our concern. They were very sympathetic.”

  And María told me the facts. It was a mass kidnapping at Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College in Iguala, Guerrero state. The students had been in two buses, intending to travel to Mexico City to commemorate the 1968 massacre in the plaza at Tlatelolco when hundreds of protesters—the number of deaths remained secret—were killed by armed snipers and riot-control police. But the Ayotzinapa students on the buses were stopped, arrested, and handed over to a cartel gang. It was thought, María said, that the students were taken to a garbage dump and killed on the orders of Iguala’s mayor, who was in cahoots (en cohorte) with the drug gang and the police. Only two bodies were found and identified; the rest vanished, “and they are crying out for justice.”

  “Have you made progress with the investigation?” I asked.

  “It’s three years since the murders took place, and still we don’t know what really happened. All we know is that the boys are gone. Forty-three murders in one place.”

  “And no one is suspected?”

  “The mayor is in jail, but he’s not talking. Someone knows—someone in the government, or the army, or the police. This is a government of secrets. If there are secrets, there can be no justice.”

  I asked her why she was doing this here, and now—denouncing the government and demanding answers.

  “Because we have not had any answers. The families are so sad—they lost their children. I am here as a reminder. And I am not the only one. If you go to Mexico City, you will see a big encampment at the Ministry of Justice, demonstrating.”

  “What about writers—are they protesting?”

  “Yes, many,” María said.

  “Juan Villoro?”

  “Villoro has written a great deal, and he is a friend to our movement.”

  In the late-night shadows of the plaza, María and her little band of truth seekers unfastened the banner and rolled up the portraits of the dead students—the limp cloth tattered from use, the colors of the faces cracked and faded—as the gathering of onlookers dispersed, and the plaza became festive again.

  This mention of Juan Villoro was fortuitous. He is one of Mexico’s most illustrious writers, a novelist and short story writer and a prolific journalist and social critic. I had been in touch with him for some time. I made a note to ask him what he knew of the murdered students. Like María, Juan was a necessary reminder, in this case, of the dark side of Mexico, the Mexico that everyone whispers about. You don’t need to be in Mexico long to understand that it is a country of obstacles, a culture of inconvenience.

  The obstacles in Mexican society range from—as María said—mass murder to serious hardships to mundane nuisances. You might ask: Why would a young mother of small children—like many I met on the border—take the risks of hopping the fence and enduring the privations of hiking in the desert just to labor for minimum wage in (as some told me) a meatpacking plant or a hotel? One obvious answer is that the risks and privations in Mexico are much worse that those endured in a border crossing.

  These inconveniences, big and small, are suffered by everyone except the fat cats, for whom life is a shuttling back and forth in limousines, guarded by goons, or flying over the chaos in their private helicopters.<
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  Paranoia is the chronic condition of fat cats, who are well aware of the disparities in income. The peculiar resentment for the rich or well-off in Mexico is expressed in the sarcasm of popular speech: fresas (strawberries) are wealthy conceited people, and their overdressed, obscenely privileged children are niños bien (rich kids). These beautiful people exist in an atmosphere thick with suspicion, often accompanied by intimidating muscled bodyguards.

  I discovered this in a small but unusual way in San Luis Potosí. The Hotel María Cristina claimed its laundry facility wasn’t working, but a staffer said I would have no trouble finding a laundry about six blocks away. Walking out of the hotel, down the narrow Calle Juan Sarabia to the corner of Calle de Los Bravos, I saw a large SUV pull up and obstruct traffic, illegally parking in front of the unadorned Hotel Nápoles. Two men in black, wearing opaque sunglasses, got out and snatched the rear door open for a middle-aged man wearing a fedora, with a fawn-colored jacket like a cape over his shoulders. This cosseted, well-guarded figure, with an aura of power and money—a cabrón (big goat) in the admiring sense, a padrino (godfather), perhaps—took three strides to the Hotel Nápoles and the entrance to the café just inside, La Colomba, where he was greeted by a sinister smiling mustached man, who hugged him and led him into the shadowy café, which was closed to the public.

  This dramatic arrival seized my attention and, eager to know more, I stopped and stared, wondering who this cabrón might be. As I gawked, the two heavies who had been in the SUV turned their goggles on me and approached, visibly swelling as they came nearer. It was then I realized that my arms were full of laundry, an absurd tangle of clothes in which, a suspicious bodyguard might suppose, I was hiding a weapon.

  “Hola?” the larger of the heavies mumbled, and crowded me, poking my armload of clothes.

  “Laundry,” I said, and slipped away.

  But the lavandería was closed. This meant that I had to return with my great ball of clothes to the corner of Juan Sarabia and Calle de Los Bravos, and this time both musclemen watched me with mounting suspicion, their mouths tightening, shoulders lifting, as though I was an assassin circling his prey, still with his absurd tangle of clothes, his hands hidden. They looked poised to take me down.