IN SEARCH OF MEXICO: Latin America's enigma (Part II)

FOR WHATEVER REAL REASONS  people come here—foreigners or Mexicans—they also change. People become a little wacky. Their new life is a release from old constraints. They dress differently, and drink more. For many their new personality remains however a role. It is the altitude, or the mountains, or the summer rains, or the winds. However that may be, the atmosphere carries a strain of insanity that causes suppressed characteristics to emerge.

Part Two  | Read PART ONE

GAITHER STEWART [print_link]

AND THE FOLLY attracts like-minded persons from elsewhere; even the poor Mexicans become somewhat infected. People no longer seem mainstream. Somewhere they went astray. Their lives seem unreal. As if maimed by events at some turning point in previous lives, they are displaced, isolated on the edge of society, exiles by choice or circumstance. It is a town out of time, a people out of joint.

Diego Rivera’s Detroit: Industry North Wall, one of his collosal and controversial murals, completed in the United States.

In San Miguel the blue sky is high and near at the same time. Gas fumes hang in the air. Heavy trucks mix promiscuously with Suvs. Yellow and red domes of villas hang from the hillsides. There are small shops on each corner. Along narrow cobbled streets entire families sit in the doorways. As you approach the lower town, elegant shopping patios give way to street vendors and darker skin colors prevail. In the lower town you often hear the beating of drums. Sundays, on a sprawling plaza dominated by a white church with twin bell towers, half naked Concheros wearing high, multicolored plumes dance in front of the church.

We began a new life in our big flat located in a labyrinth of apartments and houses at the top of the hill overlooking the town. We never got involved in the social life of the big American community. Our new friends were among Mexicans. Dictated by social realities, the Mexicans we knew were however not people of the lower town, the real Mexican San Miguel. It was a question of class. hard to overcome. Friends of friends led us into an intermediate social class, a kind of “upper class” Mexican-international set, which however does not mean only white-skinned and rich. We learned that Mexico is a class society.

From my notes about people we knew and daily life, and after a certain gestation, I fabricated ten short stories, several of which are included in my collection Icy Current, Compulsive Course (Wind River Press) including “Dogman,” about the disappearance of San Miguel’s dogs, and “Off We Go Again,” about an exile from the Brooklyn mafia who made a theatrical career in San Miguel’s Peraltra Theater based on his rendition of Vladimir in Waiting For Godot. Since Milena and I are not tourists who have to see everything, we made few trips: a few times we bused to Mexico City to visit friends in Coyoacan and a publisher who however one day absconded from Mexico. Once I went to the capital for a political rally of the leftwing Partido Revolucionario Democratico where I met Obrador who in the 2006 presidential elections lost by a narrow and probably fraudulent vote count. And we drove to Guadalajara to visit Mexican friends who had once lived in Rome, whom we sometimes met halfway for lunches in the Mexican shoe capital of Leon.

Diego Rivera: Making a Fresco (1931)

A frequent subject of conversation and contemplation for me was the identity of the Mexican. Who is he? Is he an anachronism in the world of North America? Living among peoples whose physicality reflects their direct lineage from ancient peoples, it seemed natural to compare. As a journalist in Italy I had investigated the Etruscans, a civilization born at the same time the Olmec civilization emerged in Mexico. While in Mesoamerica the jaguar gods were being born and the Olmecs sculpted and laid the foundations for future Mexicans, the Etruscans erected and decorated their tombs north of Rome and the child Tagete revealed to them the secrets of time and of God’s creation. While “priests” ascended to power among the Olmecs, in Etruria ‘doctors’ predicted the cloudy future by reading the entrails of animals sacrificed to their gods; while ceremonialism and mysticism and human sacrifice guided Olmec society, the Etruscans lived their lives based on ineluctable destiny; while Olmec artists sculpted and frescoed temples in swampy areas of Veracruz and Tabasco, Etruscans did the same in their tombs in Tarquinia and Veio. Olmecs lie at the foundation of Mexico’s indigenous society; Etruscans became Roman kings and today’s Tuscans, at the heart of Italy, its language, its culture. More romantically than scientifically I have speculated that Olmecs and Etruscans both originated from the same place in Asia at the top of the world, from where the future Etruscans migrated west and the future Mexicans east and then south. It is quite possible they met at some later time. It is possible that ships of Etruscan arms merchants reached the shores of Mexico, two thousand years before Cristòforo Colombo, maybe unconsciously looking for their lost brothers. Photographs of Etruscan sculptures of men with fat bodies, snub noses, slanting eyes, thick lips and jutting chins, resemble Olmec work.

Diego Rivera

The religions of the two peoples—or were they distinct peoples?—were similar even though one was quasi-monotheistic and the other polytheistic. Besides Judaism, the Etruscan religion was the only revealed religion in the Mediterranean world, revealed through the mouth of the child, Tagete, whose likeness was uncovered by a peasant digging in the fields. The child revealed to Etruscan kings the secrets of the origins of the universe: Tagete assigned the world twelve thousand years of time—in the first six thousand he created sky and earth, seas and rivers, sun, moon and stars, birds and animals, and finally in the sixth millennium, man. He assigned six thousand years to mankind, after which the time of man would end. Mesoamericans at the same time constructed their religions around the suns. Each sun was a new world. We live in the fifth and last sun, and struggle to maintain our world.

Diego Rivera, Day of the Dead

Mexico is different … and strange. People on this plateau have always been different. After the Olmecs, the Aztecs emphasized their otherness in their language and dress, and in their strange culture. They wanted to be different. They were a Spartan people who considered others inferior, stupid and comical. You cannot live in Mexico long without considering the culture of the Aztecs that is best known for human sacrifice. Only human blood could repay man’s debt to the earth deities, the debt incurred while living and partaking of earth’s offering to man. Dying was paying off the debt. Blood was the payment. Not that human sacrifice was the monopoly of the Aztecs; it belonged to their world and was practiced by the line of peoples preceding them in Mesoamerica, as well as by the lesser peoples surrounding them. What made them unique was the numbers, historians claim, the multitudes of victims slaughtered to the glory of their gods. The killing rites served to lend a kind of dignity and solemnity to cruelty and suffering. Christians too have exacted human sacrifice in different ways—in war as on the pyres of the Inquisition—all in the name of what? Of their monotheistic God? Or as someone said, in the name of sorrow. The case of the Aztecs is more complex. Theirs seems to have been a religion based on cruelty and suffering. Since to value suffering is as strange as they themselves were strange, one is tempted to believe that the hundreds of thousands, perhaps, over time, millions of victims, were above all intended to underline the Aztec differentness and strangeness.

Rivera mural at Mexico City’s National Palace.  Note the gigantic dimensions of the work. >>>>

Instead, after extensive reading of the studies of Aztec scholars, I have concluded that it was then as ever a question of power. The killings had to be numerous because they were the statement of the power of their gods and of the rulers’ capacity to represent them. In their competitive world among similar peoples of Mesoamerica their strangeness and the parade of victims across the killing stones atop their pyramids was, I believe, not only to make manifest their power but to also instill its acceptance in their competitor nations. Aztec style is still reflected in U.S. military-economic power today. The same principle applies.

Mexico is Western … and it is not. In Mexico City you see Western civilization. You see the West in San Miguel too. But in the dances of the Concheros on the church plaza you see reflections of the other Mexico. Though few Indios remain who do not speak Spanish—only in remote areas like Nayarit in the West or Chiapas in the South—Mexico is nonetheless more Spanish than countries like Argentina or Chile with all their European immigrants who avoided Mexico. For the same reasons Mexico is also more Indio. Mexico is the other side of the moon from Argentina. It is a country between two civilizations—between Western and indigenous civilizations—and between two pasts—one Spanish and the other pre-Hispanic.

A Cora mystic in a San Miguel cellar told me to remember that Mesoamerica has seen two millennia of civilizations that are not Western. For example, there are the great pyramids and remains from the year 200 of Teotihuacan, the first great city of the Americas. In every Mexican those pasts are present. Such complex pasts make contemporary Mexicans different, even the ones you see working on New York skyscrapers. Mesoamerican civilizations believed that just as worlds can re-flower, man too can re-flower. Death and life are close. Mexicans know what death is. Nowhere else can you touch it like here. Death is the mortal body abandoned by the soul. But death is not eternal. Mexicans overcome death. Death is not a prison. Few people anywhere really believe they will die but fear it anyway. Though each of us believes that we are in a way immortal and do not die easily, we die in fear.

No sketch of Mexico is complete without mention of Cantinflas (Mario Moreno), Mexico’s (and Latin America’s) most famous comedian and cinema actor. He often portrayed impoverished campesinos (or slum dwellers of pelado origin). The character came to be associated with the national identity of Mexico, and allowed Moreno to establish a long, successful film career that included a foray into Hollywood. Charlie Chaplin once called him “the greatest comedian in the world”[1], and Moreno has been deservedly referred to as the “Charlie Chaplin of Mexico”.

In Old Mexico, the past is also the future. And the future is the past. Progress is nothing but a return to the past. The Zapatistas in the south are fighting for restoration of their lands; Chiapas is a frontier, a frontier between modern social ideas arriving from Nicaragua and Mexicans engaged in the old battle for land and autonomy. For Mexicans, the Golden Age is in the remote past before Yankee capitalists tried to buy their lands. Utopia means a return to their origins and to original time of ancient civilizations.

Our friend Claudia, Milena’s Spanish teacher at the local university, was good-looking, outspoken, and white; she smoked in public, dressed flamboyantly, had lovers, traveled to Europe and spoke several languages. A constant subject of conversation with her was Mexico’s class differences. She insisted that it was much more than skin color. “Indios too reach high places in society,” she emphasized. “Yet we’re different. Now watch this,” she once said to us on campus, indicating a fat mestizo girl walking toward us with an armful of books. “See how she’s staring at us now. Yet it’s enough that you dress international style or wear a different kind of necklace and they’re intimidated.”

The olive-skinned girl looked Sicilian to me. Mexican mestizos recall southern Italians living in the north, alternately submissive and aggressive. As Claudia predicted, the girl in fact lowered her eyes when she passed. Claudia blamed it on their humility. We shouldn’t be deceived, she said. It was not a matter of color because Claudia herself was just as dark as the mestiza, “It’s social class! You can see it in their eyes and in the way they move. It’s class, not race, and it will never change.”

When I objected that they fought a revolution to eliminate classes, she explained that the Mexican Revolution was not a class revolution. It was about land. The Indios and the mestizos wanted land. They fought the revolution. Yet, Claudia also told us that she avoided the sun so as not to become darker, thus belying her claims that class distinction was not a matter of skin color too.

Once we organized a party at which Claudia was present together with a gay couple, one of whom, Isaac, is a big strong, vivacious dark-skinned Chichimec, the kind who can say or do anything and get by with it. Isaac delighted in baiting Claudia. Looking at her in his haughty manner, fingering his necklaces and smiling mischievously, he said that since European immigration to Mexico was never enough to equal the indigenous part of the population, the result was a high proportion of Indios … “and so … and so … everybody has always fucked everybody, any color, any sex, and today your nice brown skin and my beautiful brown skin are the natural result.”

Isaac’s companion was as white as I, reserved, conservative, cultured, and part of Claudia’s world. His color constituted his belonging.

With his index finger fixed in the corner of his mouth, Isaac looked at his companion reflectively, smiled slyly and said to the others:

“He’s the worst example of Mexicanness. He detests rich upper-class people like you, Claudia, the world he abandoned for me, but he can’t live with poor Indios either. So he’s not at home anywhere. He’s an alien in his own country. But look at me”—Isaac whirled around, his head high, eyes half closed, a beatified look barely concealed by a half smile that said he was at peace with the world—“I’m a real Mexican and I’m at home everywhere.”

“The truth is,” he said to Claudia, “if Indios dress in western clothes you can’t tell them apart from mestizos … or from you. If they don’t even fuck according to the sex of their partners, they most certainly don’t fuck according to the color of their skin.”

Despite sympathy for Claudia, a creation of her bourgeois upbringing in plush Las Lomas of Mexico City from which she sincerely wanted to escape, any European would delight in the scene. My idea of Mexico came to lay in the contrasts among the three Mexicans—Claudia, Isaac and Ricardo.

After all, Mexicans expelled the Spanish so they could become Mexicans. If they are not quite a nation, they are at least a people.

Epic of the Mexican People – Mexico Today and Tomorrow, 1934-35, Palacio Nacional, Mexico City

Life in Rome had seemed linear, one thing leading logically to the next, unfolding as if according to some plan for me. No longer. I thought if I were a fatalist I could blame the world’s upside-down life on the Mexican gods, huddled up there together, now and then waving their magic wands and observing the spectacle of the humanity they created and recreated, each new version worse than the preceding one. How can we even speak positively of evolution? Immoral gods must have inspired our scientists who invented the uplifting name of evolution. Legends about erratic Texcatlipoca seemed no less credible—the sadistic god who first provides the newborn person an individual fate, then sits back and laughs as he watches his creation strut and stagger through his terrestrial pilgrimage. Perhaps one of the gods, I began thinking, can explain why more and more people on our planet live worse and worse, while other people have never been richer. Politicians never admit that many people are acquiring lots of money for no work and too many are getting very little money for a life of work. I imagined a resurrected Tezcatlipoca roaring with laughter at politicians strutting about and spouting market-resolves-all slogans, that progress necessitates a certain amount of suffering but that relatively fewer people in the world are suffering today. And that each person must lift himself by his bootstraps, or disappear.

What bullshit!

Like our landlady’s gardener, Miguel, effacing himself like a slave after being chewed out by the good Christian lady, his lips curled in a tremulous false smile, sulking in the corner of the garden and watering the same spot for half an hour. Miguel said, “Sabe Señor, la vida no es un jardín de flores.” He was as indifferent to the colibri in the garden as he was to a delicate patio chair damaged by his wheelbarrow. Brutishly he seemed to lack the sensibilities with which we credit Latin peoples. Because of the callousness of many of the very poor, he accepted the ugly with the beautiful as part of life and perhaps because of a still inchoate internal revolt that periodically awakened in him a destructive instinct. Rebellion was written in Miguel’s face. Rebellion against something indefinite but evil. If not against the system, then against his past, against his present, against what he had always been. He wanted to yell obscenities as he did at the fiesta. He wanted to break things, steal the landlady’s things and hurt her. He was not sure what precisely he wanted to do. His own ignorance confused him. I saw that look often. It was in the dark ironic faces of celebrating construction workers, drunk as lords on the Day of the Revolution. It was in the faces of street vendors when foreigners haggled for hours over two pesos. Miguel rejected the concept of self-possession. He rejected self-mastery and ordered life. His was the eternal struggle in this part of the world—the battle between the rich white minority and the multi-colored masses of have-nots.

He couldn’t change things. He accepted that. But like any peasant at the fiesta, Miguel wanted chaos.

Mexico is also chaos. Political chaos. Not chaos sent by the gods but constructed by men, the Mexican capitalists in collaboration with America. The social chaos and the insecurity engendered by corruption.

The topics of conversation with Maria Dolores and a group of liberals in Mexico City were, first, criminality, and second, security. Like the taxis: I loved the handy Volkswagen taxis with the front passenger seat removed cruising around the huge city and driven by talkative geniuses. Pero, no! Nunca! I was warned that those uncontrolled little cars were the most nefarious criminal traps in old Tenochtichlan: in cahoots with criminal bands they zip around a corner and stop in a secluded spot for you to be robbed, or worse, by their waiting cronies. Ah, the freedom of innocence!

In San Miguel, on another level, we spoke of the dreaded Federales: How, when and how much to bribe them so they do not confiscate your car, perhaps forever. Night driving is most definitely out. Bandits, you wonder? Or stray cattle on dark roads? Or sudden speed bumps? Or shoulderless narrow roads? Well, yes, those things too. But chiefly because of the Federales out there in the total darkness of the highlands waiting in ambush.

Sometimes, you think you have things figured out. You want to change or you don’t want to change, you believe or you don’t believe, you’re content or you’re a revolutionary, you’re bound to your place in the world or you launch yourself into space, you take out insurance and then stand on the precipice, you study and learn that you know nothing, you learn languages and are told that words express little.

So what are you to do?

I read Mexican writers in the San Miguel library who advise us to concentrate our energies on reaching to the beyond, to what is called in Spanish the más allá. Beyond what words can express, beyond convention and expression and thought. The más allá is kind of nothingness. Maybe a shadow. It dangles before us, a temptress, forever just out of our reach. We have no words for it but we know it can make us free. It makes us want to overcome our human limitations. Yet the intangible nothingness we try to grasp is the ultimate intoxication of our life of dream.

That is Mesoamerican thinking.

One asks what then is there, in that nothingness?

The Mexican answer is: Most certainly God. What else is He but the ultimate, inexpressible nothingness?

Pancho Villa’s car. He is said to have been riding this vehicle when he was ambushed and killed.

Mexico makes you think such thoughts. Man’s relationship with the divinity is complex; it has been since the beginning. Noah and Moses talked directly with their creator God and relayed to the people His words, messages and admonitions and His complaints and whining and lack of patience with His creatures.

The Greeks and other ancient peoples created simulacrum gods to intercede for them. The Romans kept gods all over their houses and turned to them indiscriminately, first to one, then to another. As the Egyptians covered mummies with masks that transformed pharaohs into gods and the Greeks covered their heroes with masks that were fundamental in their theater, also for the ancient peoples of Mexico the mask was a mystical device, not only for protection and salvation; the mask identified their soul with powerful gods. The mask proceeds even religion. Masks make gods. Masks too are sacred since they incarnate guardian spirits. But underneath the masks are both gods and men. Olmec and Aztec masks were in fact intermediaries between gods and man.

Mortal men, divine spirits. The great mystery is, which is true reality? If we accept that we are also Spirit, we still cannot forget the physical container. So the question remains the same as in the beginning, what is man? The peoples of Mesoamerica always confused men and gods. Like Quetzalcoatl, the Plumed Serpent god, who was both king and deity. Like Jesus. Defeated by other gods or perhaps by other men, Quetzalcoatl sailed away, but promising to return. Ancient Mexicans also had their messiahs.

In San Miguel I again became fascinated by winds. After an interview years earlier with Dutch film director Joris Yvens and his film about Mongolian winds and then an article I did on the many winds of Italy’s Lake Garda, winds have become for me a basic element. The winds of the Mexican highland region called the Bajío are enigmatic, transforming palms and bougainvillea on rooftop terraces into silent dervishes. The mystical winds cast a hush over the noisy town, carrying with them the silence of the deserts.

Where do they come from? Where do they go, the crazy winds raging around the plateau among the ranges of the Sierra Madre? The greatest wind of all comes from the barren northern deserts, a spill off from Gulf storms. Maybe the wind originates in Canada, blows down the plains of the United States and northern Mexico, gathering force for the climb up to the highlands. It is forever a mystery. The wind is just there, as intangible as the air in your hand. It arrives from nothing, and returns into nothingness. You hear it. You feel it on your body. It surrounds you and penetrates you. But you cannot grasp it. It is empty. You can take shelter from it but the wind is still there, ubiquitous, victorious, eternal. Many people therefore believe it is divine.

The Bajío wind is not gentle and soothing like the west winds that cool Rome in August. The Bajío wind is violent and aggressive, irregular and unpredictable, as if generated by a gigantic machine operated by an unseen hand, as capricious and malevolent as the wind god Ehecatl himself. The whole time in Mexico it reminded me precisely of the mysterious Mongolian winds of Yvens’ last documentary, Une Histoire du Vent, presented at the Venice film festival—shortly before his death in Paris in 1989—when I had the good fortune to spend an evening with him. Yvens lived all over the world, dedicated his life to the elements: earth, water and wind. He made a film together with his friend Ernest Hemingway, Terre d’Espagne; his metaphysical film, Pluie, analyzed the visual effect of the rain falling on Amsterdam; and again on water, he made La Seine ha rencontré Paris. More down to earth he favored wars of liberation around the world, taking the side of Vietnamese and Laotians against American aviation, and in China in favor of the Cultural Revolution.

Lake Garda winds lack not only the mystery of Mexico’s winds and of Yvens’ Mongolian winds, they lack also the content. The playful Mexican god Ehecatl unleashes his magic winds carrying Tlaloc’s savage rains lashing the highlands of the Bajío, unchains his lightening to electrify the high skies and fires cannonades of thunder to crash and rumble among the mountains. The winds and the rains thus join to create a seductive and enticing moment. The abrupt change from brilliant sunshine to the violent blackness of the storms arrives like a swift judgment. You stand on a terrace and wait for the lightening across the skies before the thunder crashes just beyond a church spire. Tlaloc’s rain is unpredictable and threatening. Water flows horizontally across terraces and under doors and trickles across tile floors. Wind and rain! Rain and wind! Ancient Mexicans also believed that only in the Rain God’s paradise were rains regular. For rain too is a god, bigger than man. It is a religion: for some reason the rain of the Mexican highlands’ seems less wet than in Europe; Tlaloc’s rain dries immediately.

At two thousand meters, human ears crack and pop as you witness the battle among the elements, caught up in an epic struggle. You are a mere human being, tiny, tiny, yet, in Mesoamerica you can witness the war between the cold air of the highlands and the humidity of the lowlands. Highlanders watch the wind and the rain rage around them but they understand little of what is happening; the intensity is simultaneously miraculous and exciting and terrible and frightening, the beginning and the end of all things. The hot sun, mad volcanoes, deluges of rain and the crazy winds make Mexico an unstable land. You stand on the edge of an abyss … between two worlds. Two persons, two worlds. The image must be significant.

Just as the question of time guided ancient Mexicans, it guides Mexico today. Our life, our existence in the here and now, is a question of time. Are we here, or are we dreaming we are here? Are we only illusion? For the enigmatic Huichols in western Mexico making their identical beads, over and over, always the same, only two times exist—original time and the present. For them the present is merely consciousness of the former time. Their eternal present nullifies both history and the real present. Isolated in their mountains, engulfed by solitude, encircled by invaders, condemned to misery, they spend their lives in search of their original time—the time of a perfect eternity. As for Dostoevsky, for them existence is both illusory and eternal. A hallucinatory dream, it is so real that it transcends reality. A vision awake can be so real that it seems like a dream. That is why it is so elusive, the reason it fades into darkness. For some mystics darkness means the death before life. Darkness is necessary for light. And light is life. Our dreams are in light. Light within the light. Yet the frontier between light and dark is a fine one. Is the dark an empty void or simply the absence of light? Or is dark merely the perception in our minds that there is no light, thus creating the sensation of darkness? In that sense, darkness is only illusion. Light and darkness are not opposites, but complementary, as inextricably linked as death and life.

In the same way that light and darkness meet, for some peoples man is something between earth and God, a meeting point, half human, half divine. Therefore, the similarity between religions and art styles the world over. Like a reflection in a dark mirror, we can only see vaguely earth, man, and a minimal part of our solar system. We know little of these things. To me the earth seems bigger than ever before. So what can we know of God? In that respect, I just pose Hegel’s doubt: What if man were morally superior to uncaring gods?

Or what about this: without the world, God is not God.

In the San Miguel library I encountered in a poem translated from Nahuatl “We exist only in Your book while we are here on this earth” the confirmation of the omnipresence of the Mexican god, Tezcatlipoca, the terrible eagle god of ancient Mexicans, still alive for some modern Mexicans and to some extent present in their Catholicism. God of the gods, the unpredictable god of human destiny, Tezcatlipoca continually erupts in the lives of his creations. In his obsidian mirror he sees dreamlike images of the deeds of men on earth and obscure visions of future events. Like Yahweh, capricious Tezcatlipoca praises men one moment and punishes them the next; he makes life on earth a dream, and then from another dream creates another life, just as Borges does in tale after tale, as in his Las Ruinas Circulares. In the mad god’s vision we’re fleeting and insignificant, creations of His mind.

That is Mexican thinking.

The mysticism of Mexican peoples like Huichols and Coras is their search and their refuge. It is the place they can dream mad dreams and live a life of magic. These are areas where man is forever a stranger, forever free, as in a dream where you do anything you like, for as long as you like, you are ageless, time is free, time flies forwards and backwards, eternity is vivid, visible, formless, shapeless, silent. The conquest five centuries ago changed little for these peoples. Like Christianity in dark Africa, their religion is a mixture of Catholicism and old beliefs. Their gods are represented today by the saints, but in reality their true gods are the same old trinity of the sacred deer-maize-peyote. As often noted, behind every altar of Mexican churches is hidden an idol; see that and you see Mexican art.

The attempt to penetrate such mystical freedom can be a terrible thing. Just as the mystic tries to see himself, you too come to see yourself poised to topple over the brink, tumbling, head over heels, crashing against jagged rocks, bouncing off the steep walls, down, downwards, like an avalanche. One word could push you over. You don’t know which word. You only fear the word exists. That elusive word is out there somewhere, and you know it can change your life. Is the word chaos? Or the nothingness, from which everything emerges? Or perhaps it is silence, the metaphor for God.

It seems to me that the whole history of Mexico is a testimony of man’s desire for a god. For ten thousand years men here on this plateau have created their gods—from the sun, from fire, from light, from sound. Gods, gods, and more gods. Ancient Mexicans saw Him in their maize, in the deer, in mushrooms and peyote. I thought of the Cora mystic as a shaman because of the aura of divinity he exuded and the ambiguity of his nature and sexuality. When I met the mystic in the cellar of his mask store he told me that it was the “necessity” (he said) of gods that has made Mexicans both universal and otherworldly. “Our vision has placed us outside time. All our sacrifices have been to rise up to God. Now, I think, it’s His turn to come down to us and love us and help us. To come down and give us a hand and change things. If Solomon was right that man is just a little lower than the angels, He wouldn’t have to move very far at all to change everything.”

One friend in San Miguel was Paul, married to a Mexican. He hated the constant fiestas, holy days, the Great Revolution parade, the Day of the Dead. Above all, he hated the climate. When I once commented that the good climate was the reason Gringos spent the winters here, he said sardonically that the real reason Americans come here is for cheap servants and to escape their placid lives in the States. “There have to be lots of compensations for the contaminated water, the chronic bronchitis, the amoebas, the dust and this shitty climate.” His wife Renata was white, upper class, rich, educated, with nothing in common with the Indios or dirt vendors or working class mestizos. She said she felt like a foreigner in her own country. But the web of poverty that hangs over the lower town saddened Paul. When he was pissed at Renata, he would say he could identify more with the poor classes than with rich white Mexicans, for they were the real strangers in their own country. “Those are the real people out there,” he would say, waving his hand vaguely toward the gate and beyond. He meant the people down in the San Juan de Dios quarter and those in the never completed houses and the shanties on the hill on the road toward Atotonilco and Dolores Hidalgo, which a sign identified as “Olympus” and under which some Chichimec satirist had written with black paint in sprawling letters: “home of the gods.”

San Miguel Gringos are not expatriates even if they like to cast themselves in that category. Most of them run back home at every opportunity—Christmas, their daughters’ birthdays, summer vacations. In San Miguel they are actively engaged in filling up their days on park benches talking about the States and how they enjoy their fascinating and risky life in a borderline country. In reality they miss “back home.” Gringo residents of this art town, many of whom never frequent theaters or art exhibits or chamber music concerts at home, are particularly reverent in the face of any manifestation of art and creativity. Once they arrive in San Miguel they morph mysteriously into artists and connoisseurs of the arts, for the theatrical productions and concerts at the Peralta Theater and art exhibits at the Instituto Allende.

We had a maid in San Miguel. Elena was young, had light skin, was quite good-looking and was an unmarried mother. Her six-year old son came to work with her each day and spent considerable time with Milena or me. Rafael had never seen his father, nor his grandfathers nor grandmothers. He only had his mother. He was a cute and loveable little boy, with dark mestizo skin. I often wondered how he felt about the class divisions and I wrote a short story of the world seen through his eyes. I imagined he was terrified of becoming an Indio because they were so poor and miserable since they only ate tortillas and beans. They were not darker than he. Some were nearly as light as his mother. They looked like other Mexicans. What would it mean to turn into an Indio, he wondered? It was not clear to him why he might turn into an Indian if he didn’t eat as his mother warned. Nor did Rafael understand why Gringos were rich and Indios the poorest people in the world? Quién sabe porqué?” I couldn’t tell him why. Nor could his mother tell him why.

Our friend Claudia’s boyfriend, Juan Francisco, was a very well-known painter. He had frequented the German School in Mexico City, was spoiled and irascible and always criticizing Claudia: “You’re thirty years old, verdad? But you’re still the spoiled rich girl from Las Lomas, still dependent on your father. When are you going to grow up? You don’t even know why you’re here with me. Tell me, if you know. Why are you here? But just don’t mention the word love, please. So why? You know what the truth is? You don’t want to grow up. You know what you should do, niña bien? You should go back home and live your life with Papá and the rest of your class.”

Claudia squirmed at his words raining down on her. Especially that ‘rest of your class’ got to her. Her promiscuity was in pure innocence. Naively, she believed that normal life outside Las Lomas was like that. That was not to say that she felt like the emancipated woman. Her life was simplicity itself. Claudia just had no conception of moral restrictions. Her amorality was a reflection of her entire class. Actually they were Juan Francisco’s origins too, but he shouted to Ehecatl’s winds that he had rejected that ‘disgusting class.’ Above all, Claudia hated his epithet, niña bien, the spoiled rich girl.

“You can have your own apartment and vacation in La Jolla,” he shouted, “but you’ll always be Papá’s little girl, a product of Las Lomas, Mexico City. Away from there, you’re lost. You think you’re immune to the problems that face everyone else but no, dearest little girl, you don’t know what the real world is about.”

Juan Francisco was in diagnosis and suspected that his mother spoke behind his back with his psychiatrist about his lack of progress. What did they want to cure him of anyway? he wondered. Of being a Mexican? They’d taught him how to live with his symptoms but he continued to coddle his hypochondria, his claustrophobia, his paranoia, his occasional agoraphobia. He joked that he had so many manias that he was half Greek. As if being Mexican were either normal or abnormal! They were right. As he soared, omniscient, omnipotent, he had beat his former wife, hit Claudia, screamed at his mother, destroyed his paintings, terrorized his friends. Manic-depressive! So hopeless. So final. Like having short fingers or big feet, he said. The only proof they had was his symptoms, and he wasn’t about to surrender them. Besides, he was on good terms with death, like all Mexicans. He claimed he didn’t care any more about death than about pre-birth. “It’s all darkness. I only know that I exist now. But I don’t know who I am. Sometimes during the night I don’t even know where I am. So I just hang onto Claudia’s tits for my life. And during the day I stagger and stumble around. Roots seem so old-fashioned anyway. I’m ashamed of being Mexican. But if I’m not Mexican then what am I?”

San Miguel was for him both haven and exile.

Juan Francisco consciously painted his solitude. He came to believe that his solitude, fearsome and loathsome as it was, was not only his weapon and his defense against the world. It was his art. “That’s why we Mexicans are the world’s best painters,” he boasted. “Our solitude!”

Solitude. Mexican solitude. This is an important concept for thinking about Mexico and Mexicans. As in an instantaneous snapshot, I see myself, or the echo of myself, on a solitary trip to Mexico City. I have just come out my hotel and crossed the Reforma near the Angel Monument. I wander into the Zona Rosa. I again walked through the entertainment district, asking myself why it is in life that one could not withdraw painlessly and enter a new life? And if you succeed, have you really left everything behind? Or is there always a residue? Sometimes, in moments of solitude, there seems to be no escape, and life appears to be a cul de sac.

There is a lot of loneliness in everyone’s life. Loneliness is associated with sadness but also with melancholy, which is not exactly the same thing. Loneliness and solitude are not the same thing either but they are closely related and go hand in hand, perhaps one inside the other. Maybe loneliness is a desire for solitude. Loneliness is very familiar to most of us. It is a feeling, an emotion too. It is the sense of alienation many of us feel in a crowd, at a party, in a classroom, when we are consciously distant from what is happening around us. Lonesomeness is not only intensive loneliness, but also the awareness of your state and wishing it were not so. Solitude is when you really are alone, though it is not necessarily disagreeable. You can choose solitude without feeling lonely. Solitude by choice is positive, a rock and a sign of strength. Loneliness is usually an undesired sense of dependency to be overcome and causes despondency but also the flightiness of creativity.

Artists like Juan Francisco often portray lonely figures. Human, but lonely … or abandoned. I find the essence of the art of my Russian painter friend Anatoly Krynsky in the lonely images of prancing centaurs depicted on a cabinet door in his kitchen. The same as in his clowns and kings, so sad, so alone. Like the little stone figures in his etchings, alone and abandoned. Once united with their creator in the Eden of the artist’s fantasy, now separated, lonely and longing for reunion, perhaps like men vis-a-vis God.

Dürer’s winged genius sits in a reflective pose surrounded by his tools—a compass, scales, an hourglass and a magic square of numbers. The desperate artist languishes under the observation of a dog, a cherub and a bat holding the inscription “Melencolia I.” I sense that the meaning of Dürer’s work concerns the relationship between melancholy (and loneliness and solitude) and creativity. My conclusion is that melancholy (and thus also loneliness and a striving for rejoining) is essential to creativity. What greater melancholy than that in the couple in Picasso’s “The Frugal Meal”—the haggard man with an arm draped around the bony shoulders of his woman companion, each looking in opposite directions, each alone in their common solitude. Hopeless yet assailed by nostalgia—Picasso’s loneliness and nostalgia for another existence. A nostalgia that leads the artist back to his natural loneliness—for one thing he knows: he knows where creativity resides. From Goya’s deafness, from Dürer’s meditation, from Picasso’s nostalgia emerges my formula: solitude>loneliness>melancholy>desperation>inspiration>originality>creativity.

But also the converse is suggested: sociability>enjoyment>exhilaration>fashion>imitation>non-creativity.

On our hill in San Miguel Allende I came to consider the cactus the symbol of solitude, and thus the symbol of Mexico. A row of cacti in Mexico looks back at you so uncompromisingly, so smugly and yet so alone in the world. The cacti however are quite different close at hand. What from the road might seem to be a mass of green thickets, from up close is independent life itself—throbbing, thriving, and surviving, both receiving the sun of life and giving life—but each alone, as if by choice. They don’t need anything or anyone. I have read that some forms of cactus under certain controlled conditions could survive on the moon. Alone. In lunar solitude. It has to do with oxygen. They don’t need much of it. The magueys. The agave. The noble plant. They provide needles for sewing, fiber for paper, clothing, baskets, medicine, roof thatching, fertilizer, fructose, and above all pulque, mezcal and tequila. You could construct a new human existence with the cactus. The wild plants, in their self-sufficient solitude, seem more real than human life. The cactus could be a way of life. Alone on a desolate cactus plain. Alone with a homeless soul that like Juan Francisco hangs onto Claudia’s tits for salvation—the crying, searching, falling, emerging, swearing soul, in search of self-sufficient solitude.

You need earthliness and the great act of individuality to reaffirm your human link, rejecting loneliness and cherishing solitude. First, romanticism and individuality, then rejoining. In that order. Yet you have to detest contrived individuality and flamboyance for flamboyance’s sake. You have to hate the strutting. Sometimes you would like to be a show-off, scandalous, quarrelsome, vehement, implausible, nonsensical, exuberant and bold, all in order to reform, so that your rebellion and diversity and your solitude would be more meaningful.

But in Mexico I came to compare my differentness with that of the cactus. Or with the Aztec. It lies deep in me. Only I know it.

In Mexico I also became aware that I was fortunate in that I was not numbered among countless, in-tune-with-themselves, normal people. For me, the fixed, attuned, comfortable people are the real foreigners. They are the lonely ones. I can’t help but feel disdain and pity for the “normal” ones. You have to coddle your desperation. Your solitude. Some people who start out in normality, attuned to life, somewhere along the way let down their safeguards and let go their sanity and allow their real selves, their mad, uncontrolled and uncontrollable, wild and tumultuous solitary selves to surface. And are devoid of one iota of envy for ordered, sane, directed lives.

Secretly I had thought of our move to San Miguel as a move toward the sanity of disorder, another attempt to start life anew. Once I had felt compelled to get a grip on things. To get a handle on life, the ordered condition that I also sometimes imagined probably didn’t exist anyway. But what would it be if it did? A generalized awareness? A consciousness of everything? That, I came to realize, would be more terrible-wonderful than my out-of-tuneness, my waywardness, my solitude. Now, surrounded by Aztecs and pyramids and the New in the Old, bathed by powerful Bajìo winds sweeping down the plateau at two thousands meters, compulsions for order slipped away from me.

My old world had surely ended.

For greater pressing reasons we left Mexico anyway. Yet I had had time to perceive a premonition of new miracles in the air. The portents were there.

While I was writing this in the village of Montagna in Alpine Italy my friends, to tease me, often played a disk of the Pink Martini with the slow, plaintive, melancholy rendition, with loud and languid trumpets and a tinkling piano in the background—for the solitary Mexican effect you have to pronounce each word singly, with a pause between each phrase—of Que serà … serà that in a way bedevils my attempts to disdain destiny and somehow sums up my arrival and departure from Old Mexico:

Que serà … serà

Whatever will be … will be

The future’s not ours to see

Que serà … serà.

(The above was recorded in Montagna di Valtellina in August of 2006.

North Carolina native Senior Editor GAITHER STEWART is Cyrano’s Journal Online and TGP’s European correspondent. He’s based in Rome, but he’s currently planning a long stay in Buenos Aires sometime in 2010. His latest book, political thriller THE TROJAN SPY (Callio Press, 2010) is due to appear in July.