MONTAGE/2

THE WEAVING WOMEN OF CHIAPAS

I watch the weaving women emerge out of the dawn mist, padding down the highland roads into San Cristóbal de las Casas. Small, dark, and beautiful, they glide over the cobbled streets barefoot, piles of fabric balanced on their heads, the intense colors of their huipiles set against the old colonial buildings. Some have children on their backs, swaddled in the garment called tzute. Taking their places in the plazas and markets as morning sun breaks through the mist, they laugh and tease, at ease with one another, like sisters. They look indomitable, these weaving women of Chiapas, their gazes sharp and unafraid, their smiles eternal, defiant.

At a weavers’ cooperative set in a cloister of the ex-convent Santo Domingo, I watch a brightly-garbed Mayan weaver run a Mexican customer’s Visa card through a machine, talking to her in Spanish, then resume her conversation in Tzutzil with her costumed colleague. I sit outside on a low wall among a group of Chamulan women, their wares spread on blankets, thinking about what I’ve just seen.

In ways we can't always describe, we mourn the loss of art and sensuousness in our utilitarian world. The more technology invades our lives, with its flood of impersonal, colorless, branded objects, the more value we find in a hand-woven Mexican cloth dyed from indigo, sea snails, cochineal, mosses, or tree bark. A serape come upon in a Mexican market, or in a shop where one lives, brings aesthetics back into our lives: color, pattern, texture. Time slows down, if only for a moment, releasing us from harried, hurried lives: for it takes a long time to weave, and the result is something that only time can deliver. Woven objects connect us to our own vanished histories: after all, who among us cannot trace our origins back to ancestors who wove? Handwoven textiles sustain and advance a living culture for both maker and user. Further, they propose an alternative conversation between industrial and preindustrial societies, in place of the weapons-driven one presently engulfing us.

***

POZOS

On a quiet Monday, I run into Carlos at the supermercado.

“Let's drive to Pozos,” he says.

We round up some tortas and Coronas for lunch and take off in Carlos's Nissan van, rumbling east along a two-lane road, past mesquite and madrona trees, cultivated croplands awaiting harvest. Elenita is in Oaxaca on a shopping trip for their store, Carlos says - a pretext, he suspects, for a visit to a Zapotec musician she's taken an interest in. Things worsen with them.

The town of Pozos, hardly larger than the cemetery we pass on the way in, has a small plaza, a few grand old houses set by a stream, an old miners’ church. Sparse ancients perch like lizards on benches in the flat sun. A deeply rutted road winds up a dusty mountainside dotted with elaborate ruins. Hard to believe Pozos was home to 80,000 people when the silver sluiced rich here. Today there is only the hum of insects, the wind’s whisper, the bleat of sheep on sunbaked plateaus. Pozos, like Sutter's Mill or Fitzcarraldo’s rubber-boom Iquitos, is a litter of abandoned dreams. Its name, which can mean “pits” or “wells” or “mineshafts”, has accrued more ominous meanings in our time: those prisons below ground where Latin American generals sent their political opponents, the desaparacidos: the well of time that drowns memory.

From the hilltop, the sky runs past the eye’s grasp. Clouds rain on a far golden plain, as in a medieval biblical illustration. Slumped door jambs frame hard blue sky, the buildings that once surrounded them mere ghostly, platonic suggestions. Faded frescoes on melting adobe walls bear faint lettering: yardage store, tool shop, mining enterprise.

“It's like a Sergio Leone Western up here,” I say to Carlos.

Avoiding the open wells, we roam past mounds of dark tailings, slag from the 300-odd mines where silver, mercury, copper and gold were extracted. Skirting dead reservoirs cluttered with green algae, we descend a mine shaft, our voices echoing in the damp darkness.

Back out in the sun, I carefully slide upon my stomach to the edge of a well and lean over. The intense mountain light eerily reflects the blue of the sky perfectly in undisturbed well water hundreds of feet below. I see my face in detail, as if in a mirror held at arm's length. I drop a shard of slate, wait a long time to hear the sound of the splash dissolving my image. Dizzily I stand up, having imagined my fall: the tumbling, the scream, echo, impact, oblivion.

We spread a blanket beneath a pepper tree. Carlos cracks open the beers and tortas cubanas. Hungrily we munch among stubbly cactus and gray-green agaves, grazing cows and wild horses. A few yards away, a dense swarm of black ants dismantles the remains of a mole.

For two hundred years Pozos was a vast mining enterprise. Engineers and miners from Germany, Italy, and the U. S. settled here with their families, accumulating tremendous wealth: grand homes, the best imported European and American goods. Traveling theaters and circuses came from all over the world to perform.

“So what brought Pozos down?” I ask Carlos.

“The workers flooded the mines during the 1910 Revolution to spite the owners. That's what some say. Others think it was the owners who flooded them to punish the workers. An old man I know says it was simply because the price of silver fell on the world markets. Nobody agrees on what happened."

By 1940, Pozos was a ghost town.

“See that cross at the top of the hill?” Carlos says. “Every year descendants come and offer prayers to Jesus in his guise of friend to workers.” He slugs back his Corona. “There are stories from the revolution of mine owners’ bodies being brought here in the dead of night and tossed down the wells.”

“It is a good spot for the perfect crime,” I say, recalling my vertiginous look down the well shaft.

“It almost was,” Carlos says, laughing. “Do you know the story about the man who was killed twice?”

I’ve heard different versions of the tale ever since arriving in San Miguel - a local leitmotif that seemed less a concatenation of facts than a way a town talks to itself. In Carlos’ spin on the story, several years ago Rene, who ran a small gallery in town, became involved in a dispute with an older Englishman. The disagreement grew heated, and Rene beat the man senseless - to death, he thought. Panicked, he piled the body in the trunk of his car and headed for Pozos, intending to dump it down a well. Somewhere en route, he heard a banging from the trunk. The man was still alive. Rene pulled over, took a tire iron, and finished off the job. Then instead of driving to Pozos, Rene, in a fit of remorse, turned around and drove back to San Miguel, turned himself in at the police station, and confessed. He was convicted and sentenced to life in prison.

Carlos’s version differs from ones I've heard around town, which all differ from each other. No, it took place in a bar on Calle Insurgentes and not in the man's house. No, the reason Rene got caught was not remorse: he simply ran out of gas on the road. That's why he never made it to Pozos, and that's where a policeman found him at dawn, sobbing uncontrollably. No, the second killing was by suffocation, not a tire iron. Besides, the man he killed was an awful, sadistic man, deserving of it. Not at all, others say: he was the sweetest of men. Portrayals of Rene vary equally: a golf pro, an astrologer, an angry Vietnam vet with a plate in his head, a gentle scholar of pre-hispanic Nahuatl, merely a man defending his honor. The stories’ dizzying variations make me wonder if there was even a murder at all, let alone a Rene in the town jail.

“You see,” Carlos says, “the double intent to kill is what the judges held against him. Killing a man is one thing, but twice. We have a legal term in Mexico, rematar, to re-kill. That's why Rene got a life sentence.”

“Where is he now?”

“In jail in the presidencia. You can go visit him any Wednesday. Ask him yourself what happened.”

***

EL MERCADO

A North American market is a depopulated assembly of shelves. A Mexican market is a spectacle. A visit to a U.S. supermarket is dispatched with - items checked off against the list, merchandise packed into the car, a solitary ride home. A trip to El Mercado, by comparison, may provide an entire day's entertainment, requiring as much time to tell about it as it took to visit.

“Escójale!” (Choose something!), cry the sellers. “Barato!” (Cheap!) Sight, sound, taste, smell: the Mexican market is a total immersion. Here, the full color palette is unleashed. Zesty licuados (blended fruit drinks), bubbling carnitas (pork), symmetrically piled arrangements of food whose very names are colors: orange, lime, melon, papaya, greens. Women in aprons from nearby villages proffer fresh tortillas, nopales (cactus), salsas. The abundant Aztec marketplaces the first Spaniards described were not so different from today's great emporia in Guadalajara and Mexico City, or the sprawling, provincial markets or villages: open-air stalls with items spread on blankets in the bright sun. Not merely foods of all kinds but anything one might desire can be found in el mercado: clothes, baskets, furniture, household items, CD’s and charms. “Escójale!” How can anyone be depressed at a Mexican market?

***

DREAMERS AND MAD MONKS

You can do things in Mexico you can't do elsewhere. Artists and architects, fascists and fanatics, aesthetes and addicts have long known this. Here you can disappear, adopt a new identity, become who you aren't - or who you really are. We invent a mask, Octavio Paz wrote, only to discover that the mask is our true identity.

Mexico's physical extravagance - deserts, jungles, mountains, and coasts- seems to invite extremes: cults and chupacabras, calaveras and consuls run amok; bandidos, tyrants, fugitives, and remittance men; brujería, santería, holy waters, and miracle cancer cures; angelitos and niños muertes. Certainly Mexico's history could be read as a litany of ruinous excess - from Mayan and Aztec blood rites to the rapacious Conquest to the flagellants of Atotonilco; from Porfirio Díaz’s imperial fin de siècle luxuriance to the murderous revolution that followed; from Emiliano Zapata to Frida and Diego to the drug cartels. Here André Breton found himself utterly outflanked by Mexico's innate surrealism and admitted it; here William Burroughs put a bullet in his wife's head and walked away free.

In Mexico, all manner of exiles, emigrés and expatriates have found shelter - from Trotsky to Fidel, from Luis Buñuel to Garcia Marquez, from the Shah of Iran to Howard Hughes. Ex-revolutionaries, deposed dictators, old Nazis and anarchists grow old together on plaza benches in baggy pants feeding the pigeons. In Mexico, strangeness may be noted but not censored. There's little that la mordida, la pica, the bite, can‘t arrange. Here you don't need no stinking badges.

So Mexico stands in the foreign imagination as a permanently exotic, lawless, and untamed antidote to the gray sterility of its northern neighbor. If in fact most Mexicans’ lives are little different from those of their northern neighbors - jobs, family worries, discount shopping malls - and if gradually the country comes under the rule of civil law, Mexico still plays to North America as its collective unconscious, it's Dionysian Other: land of salsa and sabor, fiestas and revelry, ghosts and gore. A country riddled with bullet holes and beauty.