“The music of the Nayar,” murmured the Old Woman. “I knew a village of Coras where the church had been abandoned. I was there once, and I recall hearing that music of flute and drum. The church was constructed a little more than two centuries ago, after the late Spanish conquest of that rebellious and inaccessible region. The Indians, the ancient fallen princes, were the masons on the construction. The missionaries showed them engravings of the saints, and the Indians reproduced the images in their own fashion. The church was an indigenous paradise, an opaque vessel containing the colors and forms of the lost kingdom. The altars were golden birds chained to the earth. The dome was an enormous smoking mirror. The white faces of the plaster sculptures laughed bestially; the dark faces wept. One could believe that the Coras, only recently defeated, were reaffirming the continuity of their lives by appropriating the symbols of the conquistador and investing them with a form that continued to represent aboriginal heavens and hells. The missionaries tolerated that transformation. After all, the cross governed. And now one sign would represent the same promise, formerly fragmented into a thousand divinities of wind and sun, water and deer, parrot and blazing bramble. When the work was completed, the missionary pointed to the Christ on the altar and said that the church was the place of love because in it reigned the God of love. The Indians believed it. By night they entered the church and beneath the gaze of that tortured Christ who suffered like them, fornicated at the foot of the altar amid soft bird-like laughter and sighs like wounded cubs’. The missionary discovered them and threatened them with all the fury of Hell. And the Indians could not understand why the God of love could not be witness to love. They had been given a promise, which was the same as permission. And suddenly the fulfillment of the promise had become a prohibition. The Indians rebelled, banished the missionary, and filled with mute deception closed the doors of the church of the false God of love. They decided to visit that church, which for them had been converted into the cloister of Hell, only once a year, and disguised as Devils. The walls are cracked and the atrium is overrun with weeds. A devouring desert, a ruined land whose only temples are the magueys. But the firmament overhead is enormous and burning. The Indians paint their bodies black and white and blue, slowly, caressing one another as if they were again dressing in ancient ceremonial garments: the land is the canvas; the origin of paint is vegetal. Afterward, they simulate a collective fornication beneath the dome of the sky. But the acts of that long sensual passion celebrated every Holy Week are identified with the acts of the Christian Passion. The sighs of abandonment in the Garden of Olives, the cup of vinegar, Calvary, the Crucifixion, the company of the two thieves, the wound in the side, the garment wagered at dice, death, the deposition, and the burial of the holy body are interpreted sexually, like a sorrowful sodomy: God, physically, loved men. It is very strange. The church was a symbol and in it they wished to effect a real act. The sun is real, but beneath its rays they enact a merely symbolic act. The ceremony is observed by a masked man on horseback wearing the large sombrero of the horseman. This horseman cloaks his body in a cape of red silk and covers his face with a feather mask. Only on Holy Saturday does he show his face; Christ has arisen, but not the historical Christ who suffered during the reign of Tiberius and was delivered unto Pilate, but the founding god, he who delivered unto men the seeds of corn, who taught them to cultivate and to harvest: a god not belonging to the time of Christ but to the time of a constantly renewed origin. It is very strange. Do you know that place and that ceremony?”
Yes, you know them, but you say nothing to the woman. You suspect the real intent of her question. She repeats it, is still, and then … what day is it? she asks. You believe it is useless to answer. Slowly she struggles to her feet. You fear she will fall. You also rise, to take her arm, but your instinct keeps you at a distance, though nevertheless dependent upon her; beside her, but not touching her, you duplicate quite naturally her infirm step, picturing the imminent collapse of that fatigued body; finally, brusquely, she supports herself against the central pole of the hut that holds up the straw roof. You move toward her; she clutches the pole but extends her hands toward you, imploring you with words you cannot hear.
“What? What are you saying? I can’t hear you.”
You approach her as you would a little girl, or an animal. You try to divine her desire. You cannot escape her odor. Ancient salt. Mineral husks. Herbivorous fish. Rotten oranges. Black and volatile fumes. A second, viscous skin that passes from her hands to your defenseless skin, now that finally you take her like a little girl or an animal, trying to divine her desire, and lead her to the tiny garden behind the hut: the parcel of land barred on three sides by bamboo, the fourth side a thick adobe wall, a pretension of private property the distant bombardment makes ridiculous.
You cannot escape her smell. You cannot stop touching her. The damp rags that envelop her. You feel the vertigo of an elusive memory.
In the forgotten garden everything is weeds, and if once someone tended it, today it bears evidence of different labor: rusted bicycle wheels, saws, a box of nails, some empty gasoline cans. It looks like a garden of metal, a gallery of scrap-metal sculptures. Its only purpose now is to serve as depository for useless objects that may someday, unexpectedly, again become useful. The wire of the wheels can be used for binding wire. The empty cans as floats. The thick, bullet-pocked wall can be used again.
“Don’t you see?”
“Yes. A garden. Things.”
“No. Something more.”
“Nothing is happening here.”
“Give me a drink.”
You hand her the gourd and look around. The weed-filled garden is indifferent to your gaze, merely describing to you its own nature, compact, green, bounded on three sides by the fence of bamboo tied together with thick maguey rope, the fourth by the wall of crumbling adobe. Weeds emerge from damp ground only to end in split, dried-up, burned tips.
We know this territory inch by inch, from the river Chachalacas to the peak of the Cofre de Perote, and from the Huasteca Tamaulipas to the mouths of the Coatzacoalcos: the besieged half-moon of our last defense against the invader. The rest of the republic is occupied by the North American Army. And facing the Gulf coasts, the Caribbean fleet observes, bombards, and launches raids. Here in Veracruz we were founded by a conquest, and here, almost five centuries later, a different conquest attempts our eternal destruction. We know inch by inch, sierra by sierra, barranca by barranca, tree by tree, this last citadel of our identity.
The Old Woman raises her arm; an age-spotted hand appears from among her rags and a finger points toward the depths of the jungle. Beyond the cimarron trees, sleeping violets, and greedy, spotted tiger-flowers. She points, and then stoops as if to trace a circle in the dust. Her index finger is a knotted scepter. The veils that fall from her head tremble, and she springs like a puma. She digs her fingernails into your chest and you stagger back, off balance; you feel her hands like a tourniquet about your throat and the breath of a weary journey near your mouth: “Why are we staying here? Why do you not take me to a different place?”