The Jaguar's Children (16 page)

 

In all the time we were in Altar, César went outside in the daylight only once—that last morning to the church of Guadalupe, which was three blocks away. “With all the Oaxaqueños coming through here you'd think there would be a shrine for Juquila,” he said. “This is where we need her most.”

“You really believe in her?” I asked. “Or are you just lighting candles for your mother?”

“My father taught me that in every kernel of corn is the Creation. For me,” said César, “Juquila is the face of that mystery. When I look at a kernel of corn, that's who I see.”

“They always looked like teeth to me,” I said.

“Maybe you didn't look close enough.”

César finished his beer and opened another with his belt buckle. I was on my second and trying not to shiver. César took a sip and looked off to where the stars faded into the glow of Nogales and Tucson. “You know in the Sierra on a clear night when the stars seem so close? Did you ever imagine you could reach up there with your finger and move them around?” César snapped his bottle cap across the parking lot. “That's what they taught me to do at UNAM.”

“With the corn?”

“They aren't just studying it up there,” he said. “They're taking it apart, one gene from another, and putting it back together in a different way and saying it belongs to them, like they invented it. What would God say to that, I wonder. It is the reason I still pray to Juquila. I am the first Zapoteco to see these things, to understand what our ancestors understood without seeing. But we're like children playing with the master's tools.”

“How do you do it?” I asked. “Move the genes around.”

“For corn you use a gene gun.”

“No mames,” I said. I thought he was playing with me.

“¡Animal! Es verdad. This gene gun is a real thing, and it fires golden bullets—”

“No estés chingando.” I turned away then because I was cold and had no patience for jokes.

But César said, “No, Tito, I'm not shitting you. This gun is powered by CO
₂
and the bullets are tiny grains of gold. Each one is coated with DNA, with the transgene, and you fire it into the cell of the plant you wish to change. This is how it's done. In the lab we call it transformation, but into what? That's the question, right? Because you don't aim a gene gun, you point it in the general direction and shoot. The bullets come out like a shotgun blast and the genes go everywhere. They're like spies, you know? Or assassins—working from the inside. And once they're in there, they can do things you didn't plan on. They can mutate, they can sterilize themselves, they can make food with less nutrition or none at all, and the bugs they're supposed to kill can become resistant. And what happens when these transgénicos pollinate the native corn? Nobody knows yet.

“But what I know for sure is that the ritual of corn—the cycle of planting, harvesting, saving and planting again—this is the rosary of our existence, unbroken, every kernel a bead touched by someone's hand, and we are telling those beads, and they are telling us, who we are, over and over, season after season, year after year—not in a circle, Tito, but in a spiral, a double helix. Can you see this? One side is us and the other is the corn. In that DNA is the oldest man-made codex. I have read it myself and in every kernel is a message from the past to the future—the story of
us
, and that's what I'm trying to understand.” He looked at me to make sure I was listening. “It is the story of how
teocintle
, the grandmother plant of all the corn, was transformed by our ancestors, generation by generation, from a wild grass into our closest companion, more loyal than any friend, sweeter than any milk.”

“My father doesn't give a shit about the corn,” I said. “But you would have liked my abuelo. When he saw a few kernels spilled in the road, he'd pick them up and say, ‘Would you step on your mother too?'”

But César wasn't having a conversation. “For eight thousand years this has been happening,” he said, “since long before the Zapotecs or even the Olmecs. Corn is where civilization comes from—from here—not only from Babylon and China. Güey, the corn made possible everything we do and are—pyramids, writing, astronomy, art. It happened here first, and we're part of it—all that time we spent as kids stripping the corn and sorting it and putting it in the sack—some to eat, maybe some to sell, always saving some to plant next year. Sometimes I'd get bored doing this and I'd sort the kernels by size or color or shape, like candy or precious stones, because there are differences, you know, if you look close enough and long enough. When I was about ten, I counted how many kernels were on a single ear and the first one I counted had six hundred and sixteen so that was my lucky number. After a while I noticed that the rows were paired, always even numbers. I could see there was an order to it, but I didn't know what it meant.” César was smiling as he talked, but he wasn't looking at me. It was more like he was remembering for himself.

“One day, my father got some other corn from our cousins across the valley, from Santa Magdalena. It was mixed up in a bag with ours, but as soon as I held it I knew something was different. I was twelve then and I said this to my father—that there was something funny about this corn. He asked me how I knew and I showed him the kernels, the shape of the ear. He went and told the padre and the padre said, ‘Maybe he will be a scientist.' It is thanks to my father and that priest that I went to Guelatao for schooling, and I do this work for them—for my family because for us corn is family.”

He took another sip of his beer and I could hear him swirling it around in his mouth before he swallowed it. “You know the young corn,” he said, “when it's still sweet? I like to take a kernel of that and roll it around on my tongue until the shell dissolves and you get to the sugar inside. When I was younger I might be thinking about a girl and she would mix together somehow with that sweet taste in my mouth and I'm telling you . . .” He was laughing and I wondered if he was a little bit drunk. I never heard someone talk about the corn like this before so I just listened, and you know if you talk to César, mostly you're going to be listening because you never met someone so full of words as him. “Back in school when you borrowed my copy of
The Savage Detectives
—you read it for the blowjobs and those crazy sisters, right?”

I almost choked on my beer. “What?”

“I'm telling you, man, when you look close enough into the milpa, there's so much fucking and sucking going on it makes those chicas look like nuns. Corn especially—she doesn't care where the pollen comes from, just as long as she gets some, and that's why she's all those colors—because our corn has many fathers. When you hold it in your hand you're holding her eggs, and those strands of silk—there is one for every kernel—that's how the pollen travels down to fertilize them, but not all the pollen is the same. Maybe in your pueblo you have two or three varieties of corn, but in all of Mexico there are sixty, maybe more—for making tortillas or atole, for growing in the mountains or the valleys, in a lot of rain or a little—every color and climate, and it is us who made it that way, who modified it. But the corn modified us too. Corn is the mother of us all, hermano, it's what we're made of.

“But when I first got up to UNAM, all that mattered to me was the scholarship, the status and the chicas.” He tapped his bottle against mine. “Imagine if it was you, some campesino from Oaxaca, an
indio
from the Sierra fucking
Juárez
, and suddenly you're in D.F. and they're paying for everything, even your computer. Y el coño—fue un milagro,” he said, crossing himself. “So it took me a while to understand—you may be going to UNAM, but if you're working in that lab, you're working for SantaMaize. They opened it the year I got there and it's where I did all my graduate work. You should see it, the building was designed by this crazy Danish guy and it's state of the art, a cathedral for worshiping corn, all glass with one wall five stories high, shaped like a pyramid and covered in a mural that looks like it was painted by Rivera himself. One half is scenes from Aztec life—temples, markets, floating gardens, and in front is a milpa with men and women planting and harvesting corn, sorting the seeds and grinding cornmeal, dancing in feathers at a fiesta. On the other half is an enormous field of corn, stretching to the horizon with a combine harvester moving across it like a ship in the ocean and no people anywhere. Where did they go? I don't know, but some of them are in the lab and you can see them in the mural at the bottom, men and women with pipettes and microscopes and video monitors showing the corn and all its parts—pericarp, endosperm, plumule, all the way into the cell, the nucleus, and finally the DNA itself, all so beautiful and possible, in such vivid colors. And rising up over everything like the sun, joining these two worlds together, is the SantaMaize logo—a single ear of glowing golden corn with the husk parted like the Virgin's robes and bright green rays coming out just like the ones around Our Lady of Guadalupe. Every day going to work, this is what I saw.”

César leaned his head back against the wall. “And now I'm in that mural too.” It was the first time I ever heard something like despair in César's voice. “You know how sometimes you'll get an ear of corn that's all yellow with only one or two dark kernels? That's me in the lab,” he said. “I'm the dark one with the mask on his face—the indio they taught to take the corn, this generous being that is ancient, that is ours, and break her down like a fucking car engine.”

“César,” I said, “I have seen these people myself.” And I told him about the page from the Oaxaca Codex I saw down on Calle Cinco de Mayo, which is not only a picture of some corn—there are also men wearing suits and masks. One of them has a big needle and he is shooting something into the corn or sucking something out, maybe its
pitao
—its life force. The codex doesn't say.

“I know that one,” said César. “Near the first-class bus station? That's who I work with, that's what I do. One of my first professors said that transgenic crops would be to food what the Internet was to communication. ‘You don't know how lucky you are,' he told us, ‘to be coming in now. Mexico is going to be a huge market and Syngenta, Monsanto, Pulsar, SantaMaize, all of them will want you.' I still remember the way he rubbed his thumb and fingers together.

“A few of us students were worried about these transgénicos coming into Mexico, not as food but as seed, because that corn is all the same—the diversity is gone so one disease can kill it. It's happened before and we didn't want some corn invented in a lab last year to be mixing with native maize that has taken thousands of years to develop. But NAFTA and the Mexican government allowed SantaMaize into Mexico—only in the north, they said, on an experimental basis, but that's like saying migrantes will only work in Texas. Corn is a migrante too. So we put together a petition calling for a moratorium on GMO corn. The problem for us is that NAFTA isn't interested in some indio with a little milpa of one hectare growing native corn and taking a bag to market a couple times a year. NAFTA wants big farms and all the same corn—lots and lots, all the time, and this is who our government is subsidizing now, not the campesino. They're telling us to leave the pueblos and work in the maquiladoras. Well, would you send
your
kids to Tijuana or Ciudad Juárez? But Mexicanos want their tortillas, right? They want them right now, and who do you think wants to sell the seed to grow the corn to make all those tortillas? This is the magical realism of NAFTA, Tito—Mexico, the birthplace of corn, is now importing surplus corn from el Norte—millions of tons driving the price down so campesinos can't afford to grow it. Exporting people and importing corn. It is backwards, no?”

I will admit I didn't know this, but I know my father and uncles. “If you don't leave the campo,” I said, “how else are you going to get money to buy a truck or build a house?”

César spat. “You can't eat a truck, cabrón. This is our
land
we're talking about—nuestra soberanía. One of my professors was an old-school liberation theologist from Puebla, and he helped me get a little grant to go to Oaxaca and see if transgénicos were growing there. I suspected this because my father told me about some corn he saw at the market in el centro, corn like he'd never seen before—almost white, and cheap. Because this is the strategy, Tito, same as the narco—first they make it easy, but once you're using, they raise the price and make you buy more every year.”

“How can they make you?”

“They come to your pueblo with a contract. But they're trying to get approval for suicide seeds and that will save them the trip.”

I thought I heard him wrong and I looked at him.

“Corn with a terminator gene,” he said, “what they call a V-GURT, so it sterilizes itself. That way, even if you save the seed, it's no good for planting. You must buy it new every time. Well, saving seed is what we
do
, no? It's how we
got
here. When I saw what these terminator genes could do I began to understand the implications for us, and that's when I wondered if I made a mistake. SantaMaize is working on one right now. It's not public yet, but they're calling it Kortez400—with a K. There are different ways to do it, but the Kortez uses this protein called an RIP. You insert the RIP into the gene sequence, and if it's ever planted again the seed kills itself in embryo.

“When I went into that program, Tito, I really thought I was going to make things better, and not just for me. Corn is supposed to feed people, right? How can that be a bad thing? But at SantaMaize, corn isn't food. It's control. It's life with an off switch. And corn is tricky because the pollen travels through the air. With the right wind conditions it can jump over a mountain and once their seed is in your milpa, once their corn is mixing with yours, how are you going to separate it?”