A Visit to Don Otavio (11 page)

I went to inquire about means of escape. A debased character addressed me in English. ‘Want guide, Miss?'

‘No thank you.'

‘Want to see museum, many pots-pieces genuine Tarrascan Indian?'

‘I want to find out about trains.'

‘Want to see genuine Tarrascan featherworks, beautiful pictures all from humming-bird?'

‘Is there a train service?'

‘You want go excursion on lake? Want to go in Indian canoe to Yuyuáñ?'

‘I want a train.'

‘Want to go to Tzintzuntzán? No? Want to see waterfall? No? Want to go to Chupicuaro beach? No? Want to see dance of the Fish and the Christians? Very symbolistic.'

I gleaned the following concrete information: that Pazcuaro means
Place of Delight in Tarrascan, that there was a train to Uruapan this afternoon and a train to Morelia tomorrow morning.

‘What's Uruapan?' said E when confronted with this choice.

‘Oh you remember, that's the place where the baby volcano was born.'

Indeed some years ago, Uruapan had sprung into the kind of prominence enjoyed by Whipsnade or the Brooklyn Zoo at the birth of an elephant. In 1943, a farmer labouring in his field had seen a molehill bubble up in front of his plough and grow to the size of a haystack within the space of minutes. When the farmer returned with the priest, the molehill was the size of a house and spouting red-hot boulders. Within a week, this monster rose to a height of eight hundred feet, buried the land and homes of fifteen thousand people in fire and ashes and was photographed by
Life
magazine. It went on growing under the eyes of geologists who had rushed to its rumbling side from all over the world, war or no war. It was named Paracutín and became the subject of monographs and brochures in many languages. Now it is supposed to have reached its full height – three thousand feet – and very active. The region is devastated but there are many tourists. A professor told the
National Geographic that
‘… Paracutín is the greatest show on earth. It is, I believe, just as spectacular as Vesuvius ever was, and in its more violent phases it is better.'

‘I have not the slightest desire to see the wonders of nature,' said E.

‘Of course not, my dear. But what else can we do?'

‘
And where
does one sleep under this so-called volcano?'

‘I don't know. Perhaps
Terry
… Let me find it. “… grandiose, awe-inspiring … unforgettable …”'

‘Yes?'

‘“… roads to within twenty miles of the eruptive district may be strewn with volcanic detritus or deep in volcanic ash …”'

‘Yes?'

‘“… best to approach at eventide … a wrap … heavy shoes are desirable where the sand and lava dust are hot. Rubber overshoes may come in handy. Close-fitting bandanas should be worn to keep the penetrating volcanic dust out of ears and hair …”'

‘I will not go to this volcano,'
said E in the manner of Edmund Burke addressing the House of Commons.

The train back to Morelia was not a success. Even on the time-table it took twice as long as the bus. It was not very crowded, but it was boiling before it started and it did not start for a long time, and afterwards it was very hot. It was filthy. We had second-class seats – the first class there was – and dust rose out of caked plush at our every movement. The doors of the coaches were fastened open, a sensible arrangement as the windows stuck, and at every one of the thirty-seven stops dogs would get on to the train and rush through the carriages in search of leavings from the passengers' provisions. Items in various stages of disgustingness were dragged from under seats by these eager mongrels. If the catch was rewarding, a dog would not get off the train when it started but simply ride on to the next station.

‘Let's go to the best hotel this time,' said E,
‘if
there is one.'

‘There is indeed.'

We were rather out of conceit with the Cs and ready to be guided by
Terry
. “The management of the Hotel Y is widely known to, and liked by, world travellers. The President and Managing Director, Licentiate Eduardo Laris Rubio, distinguished statesman, internationally known lawyer, diplomat, one of the state's most prominent men, and direct lineal descendant of the Spanish crown families which founded Morelia … Lic. Rubio is a leader in jurisprudence, a linguist of ability (speaks scholarly English, Spanish, French and other languages) a writer, and a famous executive.” To one accustomed to the reticences and asterisks of Baedeker and the RAC guides, this was hallucinatory and of course we went.

‘You have come from Mexico,' said the porter.

‘No. From Pazcuaro,' we said with a glint.

‘Not as nice as Mexico, but very nice too,' said the porter.

The hotel was quite all right. Corn-flakes appeared at every meal and the staff said OK to our every request. The accomplished licentiate Laris Rubio did not materialise. ‘I suppose we ought to wait here for Anthony,' said E.

‘Of course we should.'

‘How does one get to that other lake of yours?'

‘Chapala? By way of Guadalajara.'

‘How long does it take?'

‘Oh, about eight hours,' I suppressed a few.

‘Eight hours in
what
?'

‘A nice bus.'

‘First-class?'

‘First-class.'

‘I suppose you wouldn't like to spend the rest of your days in Morelia?'

‘I would not.'

‘I was afraid so. Then, say, we leave tomorrow? And you
will
send a telegram to Anthony?'

Some thirty miles south of Guadalajara, we stopped by the roadside at dusk and left the bus for some refreshments laid out for us inside a patio, and on coming out again found a mildly operatic outfit fumbling with the luggage ropes: three or four men in fine hats and bandanas tied over their faces on mule-back, and a pack-mule.

The driver and conductor shooed us back into the patio. ‘Gentlemen, we must wait a little moment,' they addressed us with the disciplined calm of sea captains, ‘the bandits have come.'

‘What bandits?' said E.

‘It is their hour,' said one of the passengers.

‘Why doesn't anyone do something about them?'

‘Gentlemen: they are armed. Armed with firearms.'

‘They do not take much,' said another passenger.

‘What
is
all this?' said E.

‘They come down from the mountains at dusk,' was kindly explained to her. ‘Bandits do not like to show themselves in broad daylight – there are certain prejudices – and they don't like to come out all that way at night, in the dark, when who knows what criminals and malefactors may be about.'

There was a clatter of hooves, the conductor said briskly,
‘Vamanos'
; we went outside and saw the train of mules cantering off. The luggage ropes had been re-tied; rather sloppily. Off we went.

‘Not in the least Defoe,' said E. ‘Trollope.'

At Guadalajara it turned out that a thing or two were missing. From our lot, a large bag and a small box, both brand new, one containing all E's clothes, the other some note-books of mine, some photographs and a manuscript without a copy.

‘Damn Mark Cross,' said E. ‘Never liked new luggage; didn't want to get it in the first place.'

T
HE TARRASCAN INDIANS at Pazcuaro are poor. The seamstress and the people at the cook booths in Morelia are poor; the clerks in New York City who cannot escape the heat of summer and the elderly people at Cheltenham whose investments have dwindled are poor; the major-general who has nothing but his pay might refer to himself as a poor soldier; the bandits on the Guadalajara highway think of themselves as making a good living. The descendants of the Aztecs sleeping on the pavements of Mexico City are paupers. We speak of poverty as being abject, extreme, dire, genteel; crippling, unmitigated, relative. It can be all of these but it is always the last. When we say that someone is relatively poor, we mean that he is really quite rich; relatively rich. All wealth is relative; and so is its absence. Poverty is one of the most relative concepts we have. Absolute poverty is something else: it is either destitution or the voluntary renunciation of all tangible possessions. The first can only be a brief and drastic incident, not a pattern of existence, as it must soon end in alleviation – relative poverty or wealth – or in death; the second escapes the three most negative concomitants of poverty: anxiety, the threat to fulfilment and the lack of scope.

Poverty has been defined as the lack of means. What means? Means of existence. What kind of existence? Desirable. To whom? Desired by whom, from what vantage ground, for whom? A child? A man? All men?
Now? Next year? In five years? Later? In a town? In the country? In
a
country? In the world? In which world?

The answers must lie between two shrugs.

About a quarter of the people in Mexico live on money. Town shopkeepers, army officers, school-teachers, bus-drivers, doctors, miners, post-office and railway employees, clerks, artists and notaries, waiters, domestic servants, lower government officials and beggars. A much smaller number of people has money, makes money, uses money. Holders of concessions, directors of public utilities, hotel managers, middlemen, promoters of new needs and industries and imports, successful lawyers, the few ex-landowners, who were given cash compensation and officials in the higher graft brackets. The other half, three-quarters in this case, live on the land. Thus Mexico is an agrarian country with no appreciable surplus output and a topsoil strata of commercial activity. The Tarrascan Indians, in more or less the way of the rest of the country people, live in an economic pattern now obsolete in the West and diluted in the East that was, mutatis mutandis, the pattern of agrarian civilisation since before Babylon. This pattern is called primitive, but the people who live in it are no more savages than the rural inhabitants of Yorkshire or Normandy. The differences are ones of outlook and domestic objects. The Tarrascan Indians live from hand to mouth, but once more, after a lapse of four hundred years, own the means of production: the land and raw materials. They are not farmers
or
fishermen, shipwrights
or
masons. They grow what they eat and wear, and sometimes a little more. Where there is water, they fish; they are competent to build their own or their neighbour’s house and boat and even turn a neat, small dome called a half-orange; they weave cloth, plait straw, knit hammocks, cure hides, make nets and harnesses and cook-pots. Bricks are made of adobe, the clay dug from their land; the thatch comes off the palms, matting off their coconuts, wicker from reeds. There is sugar-cane in the fields, tobacco grows in the kitchen garden and coffee in the shrubbery. In lucky regions there is also a vile kind of cactus that can be tapped for a mildly alcoholic liquid which looks like cloudy beer and tastes like butter-milk. They have no capital outlay on seeds, stocking
and chemical fertilisers. What they cannot raise or make, they do without. Livestock are hardy and prolific beasts – donkeys, pigs, goats and a species of tough hens. What one man lacks or is not so good at, another one in the community can supply or do in exchange for services or goods. The larger acquisitions: knives, firearms, formal riding clothes, musical instruments, silver ornaments or a cow, can also be made by way of barter. It is all a big round not of taking in each other’s washing but of producing each other’s food and toys. Schools, when there are schools, are free, and the witch-doctor will always accept a chicken. Money is indispensable only for salt, matches, and such personal expenses as drink (for those who cannot grow their own), lottery tickets, baptism, the marriage service, funerals and taxes. As occasions for these arise, a man will sit down and spend a day or two weaving a blanket or turning out a batch of soup-pots, then seize a piglet and a cluster of bananas, bundle everything up and pile it on his wife’s back and set off to market. There is no need for a licence or a stall, but the next market-place may be miles away and sometimes they will have to walk all night. If their goal is anywhere near a road they will take a second- or third-class bus as far as it will get them. Those bus-fares are the only cash items in their budgets that could be put down as overhead. Every time they sell something in the market, a tax-collector of the Republic will peep over their shoulders and then and there grab the amount, and sometimes more, of coppers due. This straightforward method makes the state look both rapacious and petty, and often unkind, yet in the circumstances – provided that these people ought to pay taxes at all – it is probably the least painful and the most effectual way of administering them.

Salt and matches are dear, being also taxed; but it is easy to manage without by using a bit more chile, striking a spark or borrowing a live coal. Drink is cheap. A pint of
tequila
, 90 proof, reliable though decidedly not aged, can be had for a shilling; and doubtless there are concoctions of less standardised merit at a lower price. Lottery tickets and the services of the Church are cash. So, many people do not undergo the marriage ceremony and incur debts for a relative’s obsequies.

The Church is often blamed for charging for certain of her
sacraments, and for charging with such impartiality from the rich and poor. In France, village
curés
rather half starve (and many do) than exact fees from their parishioners. Not so in Mexico. The priests are poor and they have got to live, but the Church, who is not, could make some provision for their living if she chose. This aspect of the Catholic clergy is particularly shocking to those who are accustomed to regard the succour of the poor as an integral part of the duties of the vicar and his wife. Yet the same people will tell one with much smugness that psychoanalysts have to charge large fees – quite against their wills of course – or their patients would have no faith in them; and wasn’t it Aimée Semple MacPherson who said that salvation doesn’t do them half as much good if they think it’s free?

The Tarrascan Indians, then, do not lie awake over the sack and the rent, the next instalment and the possible bonus. They do not plan a future for their children. The lines for that are laid. Whether they eat, is not determined by trade slumps, the cost of living or the state of the stock market. What they produce, they consume or their fellows consume and pay for in kind. But they must produce or starve. So eating is determined by a man’s health and strength, the quality of his or the village’s grant of land and by what he would readily call himself the acts of God – rain or drought, a hailstorm, land-slides, a new volcano. The farming is not scientific, and certainly laborious. The climate and valleys are fertile, but there are more mountains than valleys and some of the fields are incredible little acres, almost perpendicular, scratched out of the side of a rock and unworkable with anything but a hand plough. A good downpour or a slide of boulders and the acre is gone. For seven or eight months a year it does not rain at all, and then the rains may not come or wash in torrents down the mountainsides. There is not much rotation, about two-thirds of the land is planted with maize, an exhausting crop at best, so that even in years of no disasters the yields are low by all standards. The Tarrascan Indians might well lie awake after all. They do not. They have an Oriental streak; though it is not so much that they submit to fate but are unwilling to concern themselves with anything between the immediate and the eternal. They are Catholic Fatalists.

Is it then a tolerable life? Materially it is insecure, but no more so than most lives, and the worst of insecurity may indeed be apprehension (though it is not for outsiders to discount it on that ground), and it is arguable that it is better for a man to have to pray for rain than scramble for advancement. It is not usually a long life. At the present turn of history, it may be a safer one than ours, but to be ill still means quite likely death. Again, it may be preferable to succumb rapidly to a mortal disease than to be kept breathing for months under oxygen and drugs, but when it comes to dying of appendicitis at thirty-two and of the measles at ten, being lamed for good by a simple ill-set fracture and having to bring nine children into this world in order to keep two in it … The work is hard, but neither monotonous nor mechanical, and a man is largely his own master. There is a good deal of leisure. Of course it is back-breaking to dig stones out of a clay soil and walk twelve miles with a hundredweight of mangoes on one’s shoulders; but surely it is not as physically and spiritually exhausting as the forty minutes twice a day spent in a crowded underground railway on the way to an office. Against the hours of lugging and hoeing, there are the hours of slow shaping of objects (often hideous), of fishing, of seeing things grow. It is work that can satisfy the body and the smaller flickers of the creative impulse, provide an anchor for the simple mind and not unfertile ruminations for a complex one in middle-age. It would drive the modern mind potty with boredom and restlessness. It does not accommodate ambition. It is not, in the Western sense, a comfortable life, and no American workman or English housemaid would put up with a one-ring charcoal stove and no wireless. Indeed, the whole existence would be intolerable to a Westerner today. It is still heaven for any Western child.

Is it a happy life? It is safe to say that it is not a frustrated one. It is ungracious to answer such questions for others. In this encroached and interlocking world one has to ask, and perhaps not stay for the answers. What can I ever know about the Tarrascan Indians? What do they know about themselves? How would they impart it? Would they have started with an account of the economic structure of their lives and the nature of their work? Would they have talked of dances and feast days and rituals,
of traditions, dreads and beliefs? Would they have mentioned the lucky grasshopper and the she-ass that cannot be milked under a new moon, the wicked Saint who let them down and the lizard who was somebody’s grandfather? Would they describe their rhythm of routine and excess, the drinking and knifing that are the joy and commonplace of every holiday? The love for their children? the full and variegated religious life, that happy blend of the more polytheistic aspects of Roman Catholicism with private intimations and the fetishes of an earlier creed, that runs through their days like the bloodstream through the body?

Is it then a good life? If the good life is to live at peace within a pattern and at the same time expand awareness and enlarge the world by letting down the separations between man and man, the unseen and the seen, theirs has at least some of the potentialities. They are not acquisitive; their interest in power is sporadic and slight, their sense of identity undeveloped; they are not much attached to anything, including their own lives. They have a feeling for ritual and form, and their intercourse with the deities appears to be easy and frequent. They have no craving to fill every particle of time with activities and distractions, and they show almost too ready a disposition to waive the prejudice in favour of two times two making four. Thus they have leisure; freedom from possessions and that Western thorn, worry; a frame-work and a myth. Yet they seem to have made few connections. They are affectionate to animals but it would not occur to them to feed a dog. They love, but lack sympathy and seem as unconscious of their fellows as they are of themselves. Kindliness and decorum are periodically burst by fits of rage and spleen. Any mood or piece of demagogy may turn incitement to murder. If they do not mean to be cruel, their callousness is hair-raising and the result, cruelty. There appears to be something tight-shut about their pattern, a sense of
les jeux sont faits:
they cherish the iron, deaf-mute obstinacy of the ignorant – the baby’s always had opium. Our notions of their civilisation are blunt; theirs of ours preposterous. They cannot reach out, or be reached through books, and the processes and achievements of Western thought are equally closed to them. The Inquisition dispensed the aboriginal inhabitants of the Americas from conformity to dogma, and
thus they never became acquainted with such offshoots of the Aristotelian method as would otherwise have come their way through the theologians. To educated persons from the West this apparent absence of any known form of intellectual life is always disturbing.
‘La bêtise n’est pas mon fort.’
Yet the Tarrascan Indians may draw from other sources. Who can tell? Is that implied daily intimacy with another reality only a naïve extension of the life they know? the meditations, brooding over slights and wrongs? the raptures day-dreams of beans and women, the contemplation somnolence? Or is there something else? If only they could speak about their hours of listlessness and solitude, and disclose the vacancies or visions of their stares.

Is it the best life they could have? It is the life they know. It has shaped them and they have helped to shape it for centuries. Individuals here and there may make a clean break, communities can only modify their pattern from within, they cannot step out of it. There is no other life, ready-made, waiting for the Tarrascan Indians. There is, of course, room for improvement in their present one. Irrigation, conservation of rainwater, storage of grain in good years against bad, anæsthetics and birth-control, jump to the mind. How are they to acquire and assimilate these useful things with their pre-requisites of foresight, technical training and capital expenditure? They can hardly be dropped, gift-package or loan, into their pattern of existence without disrupting its balance and perhaps its very structure, leaving chaos. The Tarrascan Indians are no wards. Nobody is anybody’s ward. It is easy to poke and prod and throw a bit of cheese, but the anthill cannot be added to from outside. The products of a civilisation are its own fruits, to graft them as we do, according to the promptings of profit or philanthropy, is like putting the pudding into the soup in order to make the soup less salt. The result is neither soup nor pudding, but a mess. In
Black Mischief
, the Zoukouyous of the Azanian Guards stewed their issue of boots and ate them. Few cultures have so sturdy a digestion.