This I Believe: An A to Z of a Life

M — Mexico

The next morning we arrived at the broad causeway. . [which led] to Mexico, and we stood there, marveled at what we saw, and we said it was like those things of enchantment described in the book of Amadís. . some of our soldiers even asked if what they saw was not a dream. .

BERNAL DÍAZ DEL CASTILLO,

THE TRUE STORY OF THE CONQUEST OF MEXICO

The conquistador’s dream — his awe — rapidly turned into the nightmare of the indigenous world. Of that enchanting thing that was once Tenochtitlán, not a single stone remained in the end. The dreamer became the destroyer. Despite all that, however, let us not forget that the conquistador was also a man of desire: a complex desire made of fame and gold, space and energy, imagination and faith.

There is no such thing as innocent desire because desire implies not only possessing the object of our desire but transforming it as well. Discovery leads to conquest: we love the world so that we can change it. Bernal Díaz’s melancholy is that of a pilgrim who finds himself facing a paradise he must immediately destroy. Awe will give way to pain and the only way Bernal Díaz can save both is through memory. He is the first Mexican writer, the one who initiated the Spanish-language narrative tradition of the New World.

An immense country five times the size of France, Mexico loves itself, paradoxically, through all that is small. Not because we Mexicans like to dress fleas but because we compensate for the vastness of our land and landscapes with delicate decorum, meticulous, tender attention to the tasks of daily life, from a cuisine whose preparation often requires hours and even days (“slow food”) to the protracted lunch of three, four, six hours so that we may infuse the acts of community life with words, memories, fraternity, and human joy and warmth. A country of contrasts, despite the cliché, it is a community of space, a gathering place. The saddest songs and the happiest songs. The most humble of men and the most arrogant of men. The most natural, perfect courtesy alongside the most offensive vulgarity. Extremes that are painfully invisible and patently present.

“Who goes there?”

“Nobody, sir.”

“Who goes there?”

“Just your father, you motherfucker.”

“At your service.”

“Go to hell.”

“My house is your house.”

“One more step and you’re a dead man.”

“I’m nobody.”

“You don’t know who you’re talking to, you wretch.”

“I’m the master of my own hunger.”

“I earned my money, and I don’t have to share it with anybody.”

“Whatever you wish, sir.”

“Watch it: around here, what I say goes.”

“What can I do? I’m the one they left behind.”

“Jalisco never loses, and when it does, it steals.”

“Yesterday I may have been marvelous, but today I am not even a shadow.”

“You do whatever I fucking say.”

“Woman, woman divine, your poison is so sublime.”

“You are to blame for all my anguish, all my sorrow. .”

“This is a motherfucking mess.”

“My heart belongs to Daddy.”

“What lovely eyes you have beneath those two lovely eyebrows. .”

“What are you looking at, fucking asshole?”

The Mexican use of language — rich, mutable, serpentine— conceals as much as it reveals. And though I may have selected from the extremes of spoken expression, from genuine humility to insufferable pride, I cannot omit that middle ground of courtesy, intelligence, and the ability to both speak and listen, which are the temperate zone between the convivial tropics and the silent mountainside. The average Mexican speaks in relatively measured tones, with a tendency, yes, toward lowering the voice. The verbal energy of the Spaniards seems downright scandalous to us.

“Why do you speak so loudly?” asks a Mexican intellectual, sitting in a café one day, of the Spanish poet León Felipe, who happens to have the bearing of a towering, thunderous Jupiter.

“Coño,” the poet replies, in his booming voice, “because we were the first to shout ‘Land!’ ”

(I should mention, incidentally, that there is nothing louder than a group of gringos who, when convened in public, somehow feel the need to show off what a marvelous time they are having, with eruptions of offensively loud cackles. It’s their money, they can spend it however they want to.)

Mexicans don’t shout. We were shouted at—“Land!” to be precise. Precisely because of this we suffer, not from the complex of a people conquered, but from the complex of a people bewildered by the “modernity” they must confront. We always arrive late at the banquet of civilization, said Alfonso Reyes. And to a certain degree, he is right. Fernando Benítez said that Mexicans haven’t managed to invent a single useful object for the modern world. We are, however, great improvisers: we reassemble things that are broken, connect cables, pirate lights, resuscitate roosters in the cockpit, and ably cook what nature granted us: we are the chefs de cuisine of poverty. But the minute you give us a chance— in an oil well, in a border-town assembly plant, at a modern factory in the center of the republic, at a dynamic corporation in the north, on a movie set — we prove ourselves to be the workers who learn the fastest and who take the greatest advantage of technical progress.

In our better moments, we understand that the more authentic our experience, the deeper we delve into the roots of our origins and the more we reach out toward another excellent formula expressed by Alfonso Reyes: the notion of being generously universal so as to be profitably national. We have by no means learned this lesson perfectly. In Mexico there are far too many sospechosistas, or suspicionists, as Daniel Cosío Villegas called them. Those who see Mexico as the eternal victim of a vast foreign conspiracy to exploit us, belittle us, humiliate us. There is plenty of evidence to prove that this is true, or at least has been true in the past. According to my childhood history book, given to me by a U.S. elementary school (and I quote directly from the text), “Mexico’s backwardness is due to the insurmountable indolence of an inferior race. . ”

But then we are succumbing to mental colonization if we are always so concerned with what foreigners think of us. And the same is true of the attitude that rejects all forms of openness and importation as a mortal danger to the national essence. After all, what does this purported national “essence” consist of if not a multiplicity of encounters between the indigenous, the European, the African? To define the national identity categorically is to transform it into a mausoleum. Modernity is inevitable but it can also mean freedom if we perceive it as opportunity. What we cannot do is condemn all that is new or all that comes from the outside as sickness, misfortune, or shipwreck. Mexico has so much modernity. For the indigenous, Tzotzil, Chamula, or Tarahumara, their culture is their modernity. They deserve respect and yes, even protection. Not adulation that perpetuates the misery, ignorance, and injustice with which they live. In the twenty-first century, will Mexico be a country that is open, that fears neither its indigenous legacy nor its mestizo modernity? Demographically, soon neither a purely indigenous nor a purely white Mexico will exist, and so we are far better off if we can understand the value of both.

We have a proven identity. We know what it is to be Mexican, we know how it unites us and how it divides us. We don’t confuse ourselves with anyone. But we don’t separate ourselves from anyone, either. The search for a national identity — the nation-narration — has left us perplexed for centuries. To think that we do not possess any identity is a pre-Copernican form of living in the universe. It gives us a pretext for not moving forward from the identity we have acquired to the diversity we have yet to conquer. That is where national identity and personal identity become a creative challenge. Let us conquer political, religious, sexual, and cultural diversity. Let us move from identity to diversity through a path of respect. Let us renounce, as Héctor Águilar Camín advises us, the cult of “the legend of the defeated” as our repository of self-admiration.

Nevertheless, we must pay the tithe of risk to achieve courage. In Mexico, risk is the facility with which we move from desperation to optimism, only to fall back into desperation — or grab on to faith, the next life preserver. The PRI dominated us because it was our mirror. Revolutionary, agrarianist, laborist, socialist, nationalist, sectorial, corporativist, developmentist, stabilizer, authoritarian, open, populist, neoliberal. In a succession of reactions to previous inadequacies or failures, we run the risk of throwing out all we have achieved, and surrender only to those things we see as most desirable. Or, more tragically, force ourselves to love only that which is born out of loss and desperation, as if we had a rosary of lost utopias to which we might add our own nostalgic experience. Juárez and Cárdenas were great men because they were men of their time who nevertheless possessed historical memory. Though we may be frightened of the world we live in (and there is plenty to be frightened of), we cannot seek refuge in the nostalgia of singular, spectacular heroicides. Let us choose, instead, to learn lessons and avoid mistakes.

In my books, I have expressed some of the more extreme Mexicanophile faith of certain compatriots, bordering on the “There is only one Mexico” vein. “One does not explain Mexico. One believes in Mexico, with fury, with passion,” as Manuel Zamacona says in La región más transparente (Where the Air Is Clear).

I have also given a voice to the disillusion of many Mexicans: “Don’t let yourself get carried away with enthusiasm; in Mexico disappointment is quick to punish people who have faith and take it out onto the street.”

And so I return to the kingdom of small things in Mexico because they are the greatest things. The modesty of an artisan, the pride of a cook. The melancholy of a singer and the cry of a rebel. The discretion of lovers. The beauty, without exception, of all the children of Mexico. The inborn courtesy of good Mexicans. The lasting, imperishable beauty of the loveliest Mexican women. Patience, when it is wise reflection. Impatience, when it is meditated rebellion. Isolated triumphs of the landscape in the midst of an abrupt, impatient, occasionally too leafy, occasionally too sterile natural realm, unattainable in its solar heights, undesirable in its hellish depths (only in the Mictlan mythologies of Mexico is the inframundo, or underworld, both heaven and hell, a flowering inferno). Mexico is the heart of the battle in which the beautiful and the steadfast — art, sculpture, cities, and temples, things built for all eternity — fight the toxic progression of the ugly — garbage, the chaos of the city, the desolation of the countryside. .

My vision of Mexico will always be caught between the enigma of the dawn and the certainty of the dusk, and to tell the truth, I don’t know which is which. Doesn’t each night contain the day that preceded it, and each morning the memory of the night that gave it life?. . For this reason the victories of the human realm are greater in Mexico. Though our reality may be extreme, we do not deny any aspect of it. Rather, we try to integrate them all into the art, the gaze, the taste, the dream, the music, the word. . Mexico as the portrait of a creation that never rests because its work is still unfinished.³

An incomplete country, Mexico is patient and serene, yet it still harbors the rage of a hope that has been frustrated too many times. This country has waited for centuries, dreaming, for its day in history to finally arrive. Its scowl and its smile have become one. Mexico is tender fortress, cruel compassion, mortal friendship, instantaneous life. All its ages fuse into one — the past that is ahorita—right now — as well as the future ahorita and the present ahorita. No nostalgia, no lethargy, no illusion, no inevitability. A nation of all possible histories, Mexico only asks — with force, with tenderness, with cruelty, with compassion, with fraternity, with life, and with death — for things to happen, for once and for all, now, that already that is a sigh, an exclamation, an epitaph and a convocation, all at the same time: I’m coming. Enough is enough. He’s already dead. Let’s get together already. It is my history, not yesterday’s nor tomorrow’s, and I want my eternal time to come today, I want love today, paradise and inferno, life and death, today, I’m tired of all the disguises, accept me as I am, for our wounds and our scars, your tears and your smile, my flower and my dagger are inseparable. Nobody has waited as long, nobody has battled so fiercely against the inevitability, passivity, ignorance that others have invoked to condemn it, as this nation of survivors that should have died a natural death after all the injustice, all the lies, and all the scorn its oppressors have heaped upon its aching body, the aching body of Mexico. Through many millennia of suffering and rejection, of oppression, so many centuries of unconquerable defeat, Mexico has risen, time and again, from its own ashes. Until when? What will be the time limit of our next great hope? What shall be the intensity of our next great desire?