Voyage By Dhow (10 page)

The word
malhechor
, used locally for bandit, came up, and Castañera was aggrieved, but still cool. Not only was he no outlaw himself, but he was one of their victims. As proof of this he took off his shirt to display the scars of a terrible wound in the stomach, produced by the exit of a dum-dum bullet, and we were invited to examine the tiny white circle in the skin of his back where the bullet had entered. He had been shot from ambush, he said, on 22 June 1969, on the trail we had just come down from Santa Clara, about five kilometres from San Andres. The argument that no man with such a wound could be other than innocent failed to impress the shaman. Adolfo was agreeable enough to allow David to photograph him, holding his rifle, and after that it was taken away from him. In a final attempt to establish a bond between himself and David and myself—the only other non-Indians present—he told us that he had visited San Diego, California, which is both the Paris and the El Dorado of Central America. He was a man of education, he said, and he had travelled the world. But the Huichol
topiri
, standing at his back, his sacred cord untied, knew nothing of this, and Castañera was led away in custody, while a messenger hurried from the village to find the reluctant
Tatouan
on his rancho and bring him back to preside over the ‘court’ proceedings.

Ramon had warned us that we must leave San Andres by four p.m. so as to be able to reach the mission by nightfall, and we were now impatient to see whatever there might be to see in the time that remained. However, the shaman was not to be found, and it seemed to me imprudent to take the law into our own hands and go off on our own. Societies such as these are governed by the most intricate protocol, and it is easy to give unwitting offence. I could never, for example, in the absence of the shaman, decide whether it was in order to photograph the village shrine, or to examine it too closely, or whether even we were being ill-mannered in sitting, as we did, on the long ceremonial bench outside the council house. I recalled the experience of a French friend who had ridden into a Moi village in the highlands of Vietnam and, tying his horse to the nearest post found that he had offered it—irrevocably—as a sacrifice to the ancestral spirits. In the circumstances a vigilant inactivity seemed called for, and we were relieved when Ramon eventually reappeared.

The news he brought accounted for his un-Indian state of agitation. He told us that he had just found the body of a murdered man in a house a few yards from were we sat. We followed him to it and went in just as the Huichols were lifting down the corpse from the space it had been crammed into, between the rafters and the roof. The shaman explained that he had sensed death in the village, and had been drawn by his instincts to this house, which was unoccupied and had been kept locked up for some months. He added the information, as if passing on facts that he had read in a newspaper, that the victim had been killed in the mountains and had been brought here to be hidden by a band of about six men. In this corner of the sierra, which abounded in ravines and caves, and where wild animals would soon have removed all traces of an abandoned corpse, it seemed strange to us that the assassins should bother to put themselves to such trouble. But who could say what motives—irrational though they might seem to us—were involved?

The dead man, identified as Miguel Garcia, had been killed by a gunshot wound in the right side of the chest, and the major cause for consternation in the village was that—according to the shaman’s expert advice—he had died between two and three days before, and not only had putrefaction set in, but all the delicate machinery of the manipulation of the soul, which must begin its journey to the underworld five days after death, had been thrown completely out of gear by this delay.

Death had taken the village off its guard. At this moment we should all have gathered by the body to drink ritual beer, but there was none. There were no candles to be found either, no animal of any kind that could have decently been sacrificed, hardly enough maize flour even for the five funerary tortillas that would sustain the spirit on the first stage of its journey. What could be found of the dead man’s possessions had been assembled for burial, but it was essential to include with them symbolic bodily parts: arms and legs, and a head, woven from some sacred material, that would replace the physical body as corruption advanced. None of this could be discovered, and the shaman had to make do with ordinary grass. The atmosphere was one of depressed improvisation, against a background of the controlled sobbing of the dead man’s sister.

The
Tatouan
and his officers now arrived, presenting stoic Indian faces to the ritual confusion. Wearing their ceremonial hats, decorated with buzzards’ and eagles’ feathers, they stalked in slow procession into the council house to begin their deliberations. A grave fifteen feet deep was almost finished outside the village’s limits, but their first ruling was that, whatever the religious imperatives, the body must remain unburied until all the relatives had been assembled—and some of them lived on ranchos a day’s ride away.

In this the shaman, who had called for immediate burial, was overruled. He was overruled too in the matter of the bandit suspect, who received a short and perfunctory trial and was released—seemingly for lack of sufficient evidence. The man was given back his gun, but as a concession to Ramon’s objections it was unloaded and Ramon was allowed to take the bullets. He left the village, with a swagger emphasizing victory—and, departing, he shot us a last meaningful glance that was devoid of amity. In a way the verdict came as a relief. We were obliged now to accept the fact that in the sierra human life was cheap indeed. At first there had been hints of rough justice and, to the last, the shaman—still certain that the man would be found guilty—had insisted that we would take him back to Tepic with us, to hand him over to the federal police there. There now remained the uncomfortable possibility that somewhere in the forest between San Andres and Santa Clara an armed man with a grudge against the shaman might be lying in wait. In consequence, when we set off we walked well separated and in single file—the local method of reducing the risks inherent in such a situation.

Reaching the Nautla Gorge, we threw ourselves down to rest. The mission was only half an hour’s scramble away down the mountainside and already the sun had fallen behind the peaks.

By this time our relationship with the shaman had grown close and cordial, and he chose this moment to create us honorary
compañeros
of the Huichol people, and formally invited us to set out with him on the annual peyote pilgrimage, which would start in twenty-five days’ time. For the sixth time Ramon would lead his people, at the head of four captains, across mountain and desert for twenty days to Rial Catorce in the high desert of San Luis Potosí. We would march rapidly in single file, carrying nothing but bows, sacred tobacco, holy water and ritual implements, sustained on the journey by the virtue engendered by our own austerities.

Huichols regard peyote as deer that have transformed themselves by magic into the sacred cactus, so the peyote would not be simply collected, but ‘hunted’ with bows and arrows, and it would be prayed and sung to before being eaten. Afterwards, renewed by the visions we had imbibed, our faces painted with symbols of victory, we would set out again on the long march back to the Sierra Madre, in the knowledge that whatever our state of weakness and emaciation when we arrived, we would surely be rewarded by a long and good life.

It was an adventure of great attraction to both of us, and Ramon agreed that if we found it impossible to make our arrangements at this short notice, the invitation could be renewed next year.

In the meantime there were aspects of the day’s happenings that remained obscure, and as tactfully as I could, I asked Ramon if he could explain more clearly how, and at what point, he had decided that a dead body was hidden in the village, and, also, whether the
travesía
he had discovered on the trail from Santa Clara that morning had been in some way connected with this tragedy?

But here the blunt linguistic instrument of Castilian failed us both. The Huichols speak a version of Aztec, rich in nuance and undercurrents of allusion, that are untranslatable into the basic Spanish of a foreigner, and my categorical questions called for muted and conditional answers that could not be given. On one thing, however, he was definite. I had been unable to accept the story of a body being hidden by casual murderers in a village house. Did he really believe that the Huichol in San Andres had been killed by bandits?

‘No,’ he said. ‘The man was killed because he wanted to be a shaman.’

We went on, thankful to arrive within sight of Santa Clara and its guardian dogs. The first owls were flying, a coyote snapped over the horizon, and a blue, mountain dusk had already fallen over the mission buildings when we arrived. The children had built their camp fires on the slopes, and when they saw us they came out to meet us, full of laughter and carrying their guitars.

1970

‘W
HERE DO YOU CARRY
your money?’ asked the small middle-aged man at the back of the
rapido
bus from Mexicali, on the U.S. frontier, to Mazatlán.

He went on to suggest that I should keep a reasonable float of a few hundred pesos wherever I usually did and put the rest in my sock. His qualifications to advise on such precautionary measures were solidly based, for he was a long-distance bus driver by profession, travelling home as a passenger after a journey up to the border two days before, when his bus had been held up by bandits.

‘But aren’t they going to look in your shoes?’

‘They’re in too much of a hurry,’ the bus driver said, ‘and their nerves are shot to pieces. They grab whatever they can and they get out.’

Like so many law-abiding people dazzled by the charisma of violence, he seemed grateful for the experience and happy to find saving grace in the highwaymen who had carried rocks on to the lonely road and pointed a submachine-gun at his windscreen.

‘They’re not too bad,’ he said. ‘Say
buenos dias
to them, and they say
buenos dias
to you.’ One of the passengers had mentioned that he was out of work and they’d given his money back, as well as being politeness itself to the women passengers.

There was always an adventure waiting round the corner on the long-distance buses, the driver said. It was a point of honour to get into a station on time and this sometimes meant pushing the cruising speed up to eighty miles an hour. On the last trip southwards he had hit a cow at full throttle and splashed it all over the bus, which had to be taken out of service and hosed down at the next town. It was a good thing, he said, to sit up at the back as he did, just as it was better when you flew anywhere to get as close as you could to the tail of the plane.

The bus driver was the first Mexican I spoke to on this journey, and like so many of his countrymen in subsequent random encounters, he immediately took charge of my welfare. The bus rampaged on through the long hot day, and then into a haggard nightscape of cactus and flint. The dreaming, hollow-eyed villages came and went, and lean men going home asleep on their horses awoke to kick them into desperate life and charge for the verge at the hideous outcry of our siren. We stopped at dreadful hours at woebegone staging points when passengers got down and staggered away carrying their fatigue like some three-dimensional burden as they went in search of food.

In these hallucinatory moments I foraged under the umbrella of my friend’s protection. The dishes on offer at these places were strongly regional in character: pork cooked in chocolate, or tacos of meat in a maize-pancake sandwich. At one stopping point a man succeeded in selling a number of hydrogen-filled balloons to passengers who were too dazed to realize what they were buying. At another a cartomancer, crying, ‘It isn’t the betrayal so much as the doubt that kills’, promised to tell males of the party whether or not their wives were being unfaithful in their absence. Occasionally there were pleasures on offer, other than the satisfaction of hunger, for those who were prepared to cram them into these few bleak moments in the dead of night. ‘Travellers waited upon with speed and
formality
’, said a notice displayed in one stark pull-in. But however speedy and formal the young ladies lurking rather hopelessly in the background might have been, the iron schedules of bus travel slammed the door on such adventures. ‘Ten minutes,’ the conductor had warned, ‘and not a second more.’ And in precisely ten minutes we were under way again.

At each major town faces changed as we lost fellow travellers who were by now old friends, and took on a fresh influx of strangers eager for membership of our temporary family. For a while we were on a sort of Canterbury pilgrimage by high-speed bus when eleven fat men from the Middle Ages got in, all of them called Francisco and all of them on their way to a prestigious shrine of the saint by that name. They rolled about the bus fizzing with excitement and forcing bottles of Montezuma beer on the other passengers, and when they settled, like true pilgrims, it was to tell stories endlessly. Their huge posteriors spread over a seat and a half wherever they sat, and a thin doctor, also a Francisco, who was travelling with them and hoped to get them all back alive, said: ‘You may think these men are fat, but actually they’re starving to death. All they ever eat is rice and beans. If you stuck a pin in them, they’d deflate.’ It was twenty miles from the bus stop to the shrine, he said, and the intention was to walk the last seven miles barefoot. ‘It could cut the soles of their feet about a bit,’ the doctor said, ‘but otherwise if they survive could do wonders for their general health.’

We dropped our pilgrims off in a mist-veiled morning full of cactus and circling buzzards a few miles before Tepic, and here we took on a Huichol Indian decked with feathers and beads and carrying a bow and a sheaf of arrows in a dry-cleaner’s plastic cover. Eagles’ pinions sprouted from the rim of his flat straw hat, and his tunic and pantaloons were densely embroidered with deer, pelicans and heraldic cats. He sat in noble isolation from the rest of us, moving only once to fill a paper cup with water from a tap at the back, then having rummaged for a while in his splendidly ornamented satchel, he found an Alka Seltzer, unwrapped it, dropped it into the water, and gulped down the result.