Angel, an old connoisseur of garbage, had laid out, as if he were setting up an open-air market, bottles of Heinz ketchup, Cap’n Crunch and Count Chocula cereal boxes, bottles of relish and rancid mustard, rubbery bread, and plastic chickens, McDonald’s murderous hamburgers, the sickly concoctions found in gringo refrigerators, open bags of North American garbage food, chips, Fritos, Pop-Tarts, gobstoppers, smurfberry crunch, pizza-to-blow, and the spilled syrups of Coke and 7-Up and Dr Pepper, and side by side with the most grotesque examples of this antifood of suicidal madness — the balloon, fart, prepared, and greasy heart foods of the North — he put deodorants like Right Guard, the soaps and shampoos of Alberto V05, Glamour and hairspray and Dippity-Do jell, and capillary dye, Sun In, tanning creams made by Sea & Ski, and the most secret element of all, vaginal ointments — lemon-scented, strawberry, raspberry — menthol condoms, eucalyptus suppositories. All so the coyotes could smell them, know one from another, and attack those who used, digested, sweated, wore, put up with, or who were all this. All this escapes exclusive receptacles to join the shit in the sea and the national refuse of fried-food stands and plastic Virgins of Guadalupe, sumptuous zapote rinds and soda bottles used as nesting places for small mice and snakes; the garbage of the North comes out to join the garbage of the South and the coyotes are trained and fed by Hipi Toltec with pieces of his skin. Egg took charge of poison and gas logistics, the Orphan Huerta was responsible for drains and pumping stations, to say nothing of (he had a personal interest in it) the destruction of the amusement park: he spends half an hour looking at Pepito’s castrated cadaver, his balls cut off by the glass sent down the slide, and the Orphan, a crooked grin on his face, stands there watching him: so you had a mom and dad, did you, you little bastard, so you lived in Nouveau Heaven, and had your little vacations in Aca, so you had lots of Ocean Pacific swimsuits and lots of rubber balls, well now you’ve got glass balls, you little bastard!
The entire spectacle was conceived and directed by Angel and Angeles Palomar, as were the mottoes, especially the gigantic sign that now at midday is burning brightly on the decrepit walls of the last Sanborn’s in Acapulco:
SHIT MEETS SHIT
SHEET MEATS SHEET
LONG LIVE THE SWEET FATHERLAND!
LONG LIVE THE CONSERVATIVE REVOLUTION!
5. Christopher in Limbo
1. Your House Is Still So Very Big
While all this was going on in Acapulco, Don Fernando Benítez was flying over our mutilated nation: from up above, he saw it as an island in a gulf of shadows.
Then, as they landed, he understood that he was in a dry, silvery valley, surrounded by dark ravines that left it in eternal isolation.
The helicopter landed on a mesa, and Don Fernando thanked the pilot, an employee of the National Indigenist Institute. The pilot asked him if he was sure he didn’t want him to come back, but my Uncle Fernando Benítez said no; perhaps he no longer had the strength to climb all the way up here, but getting down would be a different matter. Right, said the pilot with a crooked grin, going downhill’s always easier.
The inhabitants of the mesa gathered together when they heard the noise of the propellers and dispersed without making a sound as soon as the chopper landed. Perhaps they thought the pilot would be leaving instantly to return to the Salina Cruz base, and that they, living at this isolated altitude, could return to their normal life.
The wind came and went, ruffling their tattered clothes.
A high, burning sun returned. The Indians looked at him without closing their eyes. But the wind did make them close them.
He saw a people in rags.
When the pilot from the NII disappeared into the distance of the southern Sierra Madre, my Uncle Fernando walked quickly toward the group of Indians which by then had begun to scatter. He raised his hand in greeting, but no one responded. In more than thirty years of visiting the most isolated and inhospitable places in Mexico, he had never seen such a thing. Uncle Fernando had spent half his life documenting Mexico’s four or five million Indians, those who were never conquered by the Spaniards, who never allowed themselves to be assimilated into the creole or mestizo world, or who simply survived the demographic catastrophe of the conquest: there were twenty-five million of them before Cortés landed in Tabasco; fifty years later, only one million were left.
My Uncle Fernando looked at them respectfully, with his intense, ice-blue eyes, as fixed and piercing as two needles behind his round, gold-framed glasses. He took off his worn straw hat, which was wide-brimmed and sweat-stained — his good-luck charm on these journeys that took him from the Tarahumaras in the north, who were tall and who would run like horses over the roofs of Mexico, to the sunken remains of the Mayan Empire in the southeast, the only place in the world where each generation is shorter than the previous one, as if they were slowly sinking into the sinkholes of their forests.
He always said and wrote that all the Indian nations, from Sonora to the Yucatán, had just three things in common: poverty, helplessness, and injustice.
“You are no longer owners of what the gods bestowed upon you,” he said in a low voice, stretching out his hand toward the first man to come near him that morning on the sunny, cold plateau.
But the man went on.
My Uncle Fernando did not move. Something he could not see told him, stay right where you are, Benítez, don’t move a muscle; easy now. The clouds that surrounded the plateau like a cold foam moved one flight lower and shredded in a hoary wind that combed through the dried-out fields. The men in rags took up their wooden plows, shook their heads, shrugged off the potbellied flies that tried to land on their faces, and began to plow, they were slow but they seemed to be working more quickly than usual — they raised their faces to the sun and groaned as if they knew that midday would arrive today sooner than ever — with clenched teeth, as if enraged about the time they’d lost. The noise. The wind murdered by the helicopter.
My uncle did not move. The groups of ten or twelve men plowed in perfect symmetry, they plowed as if they’d erected and then decorated a sacred talus; but each one of them, when he’d reached the edge of the field with his plow, awkwardly butted against the rocky soil and the twisted roots of the yuccas and had to make a huge effort to get his plowshare free, turn the tiller around, and plow in the opposite direction — as if he’d never seen the obstacle.
The rest was pure clockwork: the sun was the minute hand, the rhythm of work, the noise of feminine hands slapping the tortilla dough. The only irregular element was the passing of the hasty clouds that fled toward the sea; the wail of the babies clinging to their mothers, almost ripping off their old rebozos, the ragged blouses that had once been white, stiff, and embroidered — even the roses on an Indian blouse ended up wilting in these parts, my uncle said to himself: in other villages, kids are like little animals, free, daring, and happy; in Mexico, who knows why, kids are always beautiful and happy; a country of sad men and happy kids, said Fernando Benítez to himself without knowing why, at this the stroke of noon, surprised by the formula that came into his mind and which he wrote down in his notebook in his minuscule, illegible scrawl.