It was still early. As the sun moved higher in the sky, the day became warmer and woke the smells, until that curious Mexican mixture of sparkle and decay, blue sky and bedragglement, asserted itself. In the bright air was the dismal town of Bocas. Here were four green trees, and a church on a steep hill, its whitewash reddened by dust, and cactuses so large cows were tethered to their spiky trunks. But most of the town was mimicry: the church was a house, the houses were sheds, most trees were cactuses, and without topsoil the crops — red peppers and corn — were skeletal. Some children in torn clothes skipped over to look at the train, and then, hearing the honk of a horn, ran to the sandy road to see a heavily-laden Coca-Cola truck — up to its axles in sand — straining towards the town's one store.
Mexicans habitually site the town dump along the railway tracks. The detritus of the very poor is unimaginably vile, and though it smoulders it is far too loathsome to catch fire. In the Bocas dump, which was part of Bocas station, two dogs yanked at one heap of garbage, two pigs at another. These animals went on rooting — keeping their distance- and I noticed that both dogs were lame, and one pig's ear was missing. The mutilated animals were appropriate to the mutilated town, the ragged children, the tumbledown sheds. The Coca-Cola truck had parked. Now the children were watching a man dragging a frantic pig across the tracks. The pig's hind legs were roped, and the man yanked the screaming creature backwards.
I do not consider myself an animal-lover, but it is a long way from disliking them to maiming and torturing them. And I came to see a resemblance between the condition of domestic animals and the condition of the people who mistreated them. It was the same contempt, and the whipped dog and the woman carrying wood had the same fearful eyes. And it was these beaten people who beat their animals.
'Bocas,' said the conductor 'it min kish.' He smacked his lips and laughed.
In Spanish I said, 'Why didn't you tell me you are a smuggler?'
'I am not a smuggler.'
'What about the contraband you put in my room?'
'It is not contraband. It is just some things.'
'Why did you put it in my room?'
'It is better in your room than mine.'
'Then why did you take it out of my room?'
He was silent. I was going to let up on him, but I remembered again that he might have been the cause of my being in the Nuevo Laredo jail this morning.
I said, 'You put it in the room because it is contraband.'
'No.'
'And you are a smuggler.'
'No.'
'You are afraid of the police.'
'Yes.'
The ragged man outside the train had dragged his pig across the tracks. Now he was dragging the pig backwards to a pick-up truck parked near the station. The pig howled and scattered stones with its scrabbling trotters; it sounded demented because it was intelligent enough to know it was doomed.
'The police bother us,' said the conductor. 'They don't bother you. Look, this is not the United States — these men want money. Understand?' He made a claw of his brown hand and snatched with it. 'That is what they want — money.'
'What was in the bag? Drugs?'
'Drugs!' He spat out the door to show me how ridiculous the question was.
'What then?'
'Kitchen utensils.'
'You smuggle kitchen utensils?'
'I don't smuggle anything. I buy kitchen utensils in Laredo. I take them home.'
'Don't you have kitchen utensils in Mexico?'
'In Mexico we have shit,' he said. He nodded and then said, 'Of course we have kitchen utensils. But they are expensive. In America they are cheap.'
'The customs man asked if they were mine.'
'What did you tell him?'
'You said, "Don't say anything." I did not say anything.'
'See? No problem!'
'They were very angry.'
'Of course. But what can they do? You're a tourist.'
The train whistle sounded, drowning the pig's cries. We started out ofBocas.
The conductor said, 'It is easy for you tourists.'
'It is easy for you smugglers because of us tourists.'
Back in Texas, with a sweep of his hand, taking in Main Street and the new shopping centre and a score of finance companies, the Texan says, 'All this was nothing but desert a few years ago.' The Mexican pursues a different line. He urges you to ignore the squalor of the present and reflect on the glories of the past. As we entered San Luis Potosí towards noon on the day that had started cold and was now cloudless in a parching heat, I noticed the naked children and the lamed dogs and the settlement in the train-yard, which was fifty boxcars. By curtaining the door with faded laundry, and adding a chicken coop and children, and turning up the volume on his radio, the Mexican makes a bungalow of his boxcar and pretends it is home. It is a frightful slum, and stinks of excrement, but the Mexican man standing at the door of the Aztec Eagle with me was smiling. 'Many years ago,' he said, 'this was a silver mine.'
The boxcars, now closer together, became horrific, and even the geraniums, the women preparing food in the doorways, the roosters crowing from the couplings, did not mask the cruelty of the fact that the boxcars were going nowhere. They were cattle cars, and here in San Luis Potosí they parodied their original function.
The Mexican man was enthusiastic. He was getting off — he lived here. This was a famous place, he said. There were many beautiful churches in San Luis Potosí; very typical, very pretty, very ancient.
'Are there any Catholics?' I asked.
He gave me a nasty little three-beat laugh and an anti-clerical wink. 'Too many!'
'Why are these people living in cattle cars?'
'Over there,' he said, pointing past the tops of the boxcars, 'in the Plaza Hidalgo is a fantastic building. The Government Palace. Benito Juarez was there — you have heard of him. In this very place he ordered the execution of Maximilian.'
He tugged his moustache and smiled with civic pride. But Mexican civic pride, always backward-looking, has its roots in xenophobia. Few countries on earth have greater cause to be xenophobic. And in a sense this hatred of foreigners had its origins here in San Luis Potosí. Like many reformers, Benito Juarez ran into debt: it seems almost to amount to a condition of reforming governments. When he suspended payment on the national debt he was invaded by the combined forces of Spain, Britain and France. Ultimately only France's armies stayed and, seeing that he could not defend Mexico City, Juarez retreated to Potosí. In June, 1863, the French army entered Mexico City and made the Archduke Maximilian of Austria the new Emperor of Mexico. Maximilian's rule was muddled and contradictory, a tyranny of good intentions. But he was weak; he needed the French presence to keep him in power and commanded little popular support (though it has been said that the Indians liked him because he was blond, like Quet-zalcoatl — Cortez enjoyed the same bizarre notoriety for his resemblance to the Plumed Serpent). Much worse, Maximilian was a foreigner. Mexican xenophobia is far stronger than any tendency towards internal bickering, and it was not long before Maximilian was being denounced from the pulpits of Catholic churches as a syphilitic. His wife, the Empress Carlotta, had not borne him any children: that was the proof. Carlotta made a desperate trip to Europe to rally support for her husband, but her appeal was ignored and she lost her mind and died insane. For much of this time, America was engaged in the Civil War as well as urging the French to withdraw from Mexico. After the Civil War, America — which had never recognized Maximilian — began arming Juarez, and in the guerrilla war that followed in Mexico, Maximilian was captured and shot at Querelare. This was in 1867; Juarez had retained San Luis Potosí as his capital.