Daughters of Babylon (3 page)

The
Nagual
Lupo Sanchez worked, ate, drank, slept, dreamed, and made love with near equal fluency in Spanish, English, Nahuatl, Zapotec, Mixtec, and Chantal de Tabasco. He covered distances in rhythm.

Swatting at the midges

that precede the woolly mammoth

will not improve your chances

when you finally meet the beast.

Eight paces, that stanza had brought him. Eight paces closer to the hammock that awaited in his thatch-roofed adobe in Las Cuevas where he could rock away the ache of 18-hour days of swinging a machete, sweating, bending, swatting, squatting, stacking lengths of sugar cane, and coughing up dust while the soulless brute from Monterrey bellowed from the padded driver’s seat of an air-conditioned Blazer through a rooftop bullhorn, “Speed it up, you lazy sons of—!”

Lippy dogs and trippy cats

and other cheap distractions…

Four steps further, Lupo crossed himself in deference to Euphenia, his dear mother, may she rest in peace, who’d never tolerated profanity from her only son, even when quoting miserable sons of bitches.

There were other verses to the nagual’s narrative—

there’s a clever little coconut

beyond the yellow door…

—470 to be precise, that he’d composed as part of his training with a
bruja
, witch, known throughout the Sierra Madres as La Pantera Negra, Black Panther. One might even argue that the rhyming ditties were his only training. Lupo wore through twelve pairs of
huarache
sandals to compose a rhythmic narrative that aligned precisely with a journey of 15.6 miles from the iron gates of the Obregón hacienda to the village well at the center of Las Cuevas, his birthplace. When he asked the witch, a brown-skinned dead ringer for Ava Gardner, why he wasn’t learning curses and spell casting like a true sorcerer, she told him his joints were too gummed up with stupidity. He had to clear them first. Eleven pairs of
huaraches
fell apart before she explained with more detail the purpose of the nagual’s narrative, and of course, by then, he’d figured it out for himself.

He met La Pantera thirty years ago, when he was eighteen. Mexico had entered the war against the Axis, and Lupo couldn’t wait to enlist. He was going to drive Sherman tanks up and down the Rhineland, scything enemies the way gardeners of rich Americans rode motorized lawn mowers, sitting easy on the straight stretches, leaning deep into the steep bits. Unfortunately, a sexton with prophetic inclinations had warned his mother at Lupo’s First Communion to keep her only son out of all military conflict; and so when he was six, she’d taken him, leaving behind four nearly grown daughters to live in New Jersey where, as an undocumented alien, he could be neither Mexican nor American. Since he’d come of age, she couldn’t stop him, of course, from thumbing a ride to Mexico where he could do whatever he damn well pleased, but then there’d been that party in Ciudad Juarez, and tequila was new to him; and when he woke the next morning, he couldn’t remember the poker game where, holding a full house of three kings and two aces, and nothing left to bet, he’d anted himself. The woman who’d been watching his idiocy from a corner of the bar knew the decks were marked but did nothing to stop it. La Pantera was twice Lupo’s age and flirtatious, which led him to believe she must be Cuban because Mexican women never hung out in taverns unless they were whores. Turned out she was Zapotec and the proprietor of her own
cantina
deep in the western Sierra Madres. She’d come to the border town to pick up a 1940 Packard 120 and drive it back home. Wits anesthetized by the worst hangover of his life, Lupo agreed to accompany La Pantera Negra because she needed someone to share the driving—and because if he didn’t, the
banditos
he’d lost to would have broken both his legs and sold him to a Colombian drug lord.

She told him on that heady road trip that he had the makings of a…something-or-other—like a shaman—he’d never heard the word before—and she was going to help him develop those skills. All he had to do in return was work off the gambling debt she’d covered on his behalf.

Pocket words and rock an ocean;

tip the boat, you’ll lose the motion…

“How long is that going to take?” he asked La Pantera, somewhere on the highway between Parral and Durango.

“That depends,” she said, freshening her ruby red lipstick in the rearview mirror. “You like the
peyote
, getting high, the
mescalito
?”

“Oh, yeah, man,” he answered eagerly. Because Mamita would have skinned him alive, he’d never indulged in narcotics, but Longport, New Jersey, was a port town, and he knew of the Chinese opium dens, and the Moroccan hashish dealers with stilettos so sharp they could shave off an eyelash of resin, one inhale, and charge two bucks.

“Too bad,” she said, “because you’re never gonna touch it, long as you’re with me.”

That getting high would not be part of his training threw Lupo into a serious funk for months. Shamans and
curanderos
, after all, were notorious for partaking of the mescalito, of the peyote and toloache; for meeting and battling animal spirits—how hard could it be to convince anyone you’d fought Wild Boar and won? And there was that other thing Pantera talked about. Oh yeah, to break the boundaries of perception so that…well, so that one could say one had broken them, he supposed. But La Pantera Negra, whose cantina was named after her, showed no interest in his dog patch wisdom.

“First of all, you are not a shaman in training, you are
nagual
, which is something like the framework of the house where the shaman lives. It’s hard to explain in words. Sending you to kingdoms of mind-bending plants would be useless, first of all, because you’re too dumb to bring information back with you, and secondly, I need someone who can bring back far more than information. This world that’s currently bombing itself to oblivion will reap the fruits of its action for the next hundred years, at least. You’d stand a better chance of survival if I smeared you with pig fat and fed you to coyotes.”

“All right then,” Lupo said, “how about vision questing? I could sleep in a cave and meet my totem.”

“This is Mexico, not South Dakota. Trust me, you don’t want to meet your totem in these deserts. Anyway, I have something much better in mind for you.”

And that was how he learned to make tortillas—shameful, woman’s work no self-respecting Mexican male would ever do—and to compose a narrative that, repeated a precise number of times, sang him from the gates of colonial oppression to the well spring that had washed his newborn body clean.

Years later, when he’d grown past the point of thinking with his dick, Lupo asked La Pantera why she’d plucked him from the path of violence and early death that awaited him.

“I could see you were a virgin,” she said, “naïve as a duck egg, but your passages were clean.” He laughed until he wept, then understood. There are many meanings to the word, passages.

Lupo nudged the tattered straw sombrero off his forehead so that the deep, curving brim rested along his shoulder blades and allowed the slight breeze of walking to dry the sweat off his brow.

The chatter will not leave you

but the witches they will cleave

and if you master the maneuvers

there’ll be fewer who can stream you…

He and his three companions were now 1.6 miles from the last paved intersection before Las Cuevas. Lupo stroked the length of his machete that was sheathed and holstered and riding his bony left hip. She’d performed like an angel for him these last six weeks with a whisper-sharp blade, never complaining, but he could feel her steel curves quietly contorting like a diver with the bends, like a Tarahumara who’d run a few too many marathons. She would need a good oiling before he settled for the night.

His stomach growled and his loins stirred, and he hoped that maybe after he’d tended to the cane knife and the hammock had rocked the heaviest of agonies from his joints, he might persuade one of the witches to deliver a massage with the new scented oil they were distilling. He wasn’t fussy which one. Tita, Malvine, Deli, they all had masterful touches—masterful bites, too, when you crossed them—as complex and nuanced as the varieties of chili that go in to make a Veracruz
mole
.

The women walking with him were his counterparts. People in the region called them Lupo’s witches, Lupo’s wives, sometimes less complimentary things, but neither he nor any of the
brujas
bothered to set the record straight. They were the multi-celled vision of a single eye. Above all, the witches were loyal—not to him, so much, but to the construct of nagual that ran so deep and pure that it folded round the pulled pork of Lupo’s exhaustion like a soft corn taco.

Never ask Napoleon

to wash your brother’s car;

the bucket seats will throw him

and he’ll blame you for the scar.

They walked past a clump of cactus that always grew in the neighbourhood of the psilocybin mushroom. He felt the rhythm of Deli’s knitting change behind him. She’d noticed the windfall too. “I’ll come back for them later,” she said, her needles clicking.

“Malvine can do it,” he replied. “Is that all right with you, Malvine?”

“Happy to,” said the woman on his right. “Dely needs to keep her feet up until the baby comes.”

The warmth of the women’s affection coaxed the tiny hairs at the back of Lupo’s neck to rise. Mushrooms were but one small aspect of the joy in their lives. Employed in Meso-American medicinery since time immemorial, they brought his household steady cash from pharmaceutical companies and research universities across Europe and the United States. Rock stars and quacks too, unfortunately, were stampeding Mexico for the ’shroom, but La Pantera’s insistence on keeping Lupo’s passages clean had served him well. He knew which strands to pick up and which to leave alone.

“In the old days,” La Pantera, who’d been gone now for many years, told him one evening, “mankind was of one tribe and one language. The world thrived. There were no limits to abundance, joy, creativity, prosperity. When the naguales, you could call them advisors or practitioners of the abstract, visited kingdoms of plant and animal, there was no fragmentation between there and here. They returned with blueprints for the pyramids of Teotihuacan; they brought guardian songs to the chacmools of Tula; they opened corridors to mastery for every branch of art, science, and commerce. That was many suns ago. Today, we are mongrels, declining and incomprehensible to one another. You, for example, you’re half gringo and half mestizo, which makes you a cauldron of Oaxaca-Maya-Spanish…what did you say your father was?”

“Well, he never admitted to being my father,” Lupo said. “I am told he was a petroleum engineer from Texas. I don’t know where his ancestors came from.”

“Scots-Irish, probably, which brings in the Vikings, Celts, all the way back to India and the Himalayas. You have no idea what floats inside the blood cells you inherit from your mother—it may be good, it may be terrible. But I know you have more important things to do with your life than to shake a rattle over rum-soaked alcoholics like a two-bit village
curandero
.”

She had a way with praise, that one.

The first of Lupo’s witches to hear the rumbling, not of his stomach but a four-cylinder German engine with dirty plugs, walked always to the left of the nagual. Tita had large, splay-toed feet that were impervious to footwear. Her slap-slap stride was the longest of them all, a disproportion she adjusted by slowing her walk and extending the swing of her arms. If Lupo carried the rhythm of nagual, she was its propulsion.

Tita was a Zapotec from Chiapas, daughter of a mechanic whose final exhalations, after a lifetime of knife fights and searing black moods, reeked of raw cane liquor and diesel. She was named Serafina at birth, and her mother died nine days later of breast fever, at which point Fulgencio Orozco, shattered with grief, took to calling his daughter Chiquitita, teeny little one, so the devil couldn’t catch hold of her unshriven Christian name and steal her away to Hell. The devil did manage, however, to grab hold of Serafina’s heel. How else to explain why “Tita” stretched and grew to the large-boned, freakish height of six feet in a village where the tallest men brushed five foot four, their dutiful women half a head shorter?

Despite her deformity, Fulgencio loved his only child. He taught her how to strain and purify motor oil and how to build carburetors from scratch. She learned to repel the evil eye—easy, you ignore it. She also learned with a mechanic’s practicality when not to interfere with the order of things simply because she saw them coming.

A nimbus of stinking gray exhaust was approaching from the east on the only stretch of paved road outside the hacienda grounds. The vehicle would arrive at the T-intersection precisely at the moment when the Nagual Lupo Sanchez and her sisters got there (Tita had never been fond of the word “witches”) and either turn left toward the hacienda—not likely, there were better access roads closer to the plantation—or right toward Las Cuevas. Unless, of course, the engine gave up its wretched, miserable existence first.

People and automobiles, Father had taught her, are essentially the same. Each is a system of component parts and functions: you have your strut suspension that distributes stresses and eases the ride through wishbone or compression links; you have heating and cooling systems that circulate and mirror each other and function, given the right lubrication, with minimal fuss. Every mechanical problem holds a solution until it doesn’t, and then you find some way around or through it. Solutions within solutions, infinite retrieval, that was all one needed to trust and believe to be a good mechanic.

The 1968 Volkswagen camper van came into view. It was pumpkin-coloured with an off-white, pop-up roof. Only four years old, it should have been maneuvering the potholes with the easy indifference of a plow horse. Instead, it lurched and gasped like a fat
patrón
dancing cha-cha at his daughter’s wedding. They were all aware of the intrusion now—Malvine, Delia, the
Nagual
Lupo Sanchez. They were all making miniscule adjustments, drawing conclusions, dropping them, formulating new ones in the continuous, moment by moment steering that is life.