Voyage By Dhow (11 page)

He got off at Tepic, capital of the Wild-Western, gunslinging State of Nayarit, and I did, too, wanting to enquire after my old friend Ramon Medina, shaman of the Huichol people, with whom I had spent some time in the sierra exactly ten years before. The shaman was a unique artist, the originator of those extraordinary pictures in wool now seen in degenerate versions in Mexican folk-art shops throughout the world. He was also Mexico’s foremost bowman and a faith healer of such renown that he had been kept in Zapópan, the Lourdes of Mexico, for a year or two to treat the many sufferers from phobias and psychosomatic disorders attracted to that town. It had now become a matter of personal regret that I had fought shy of accepting his treatment for the affliction of a life-long nervous cough by allowing him to expectorate down my throat. I learned at Tepic, where the shaman’s fame had been great, that he had died some years before, almost certainly murdered by one of the many gunmen that infest the sierra of Nayarit, and prey on the isolated Indian communities that have taken refuge there.

At this point in the journey I backslid. The original intention had been to travel by bus all the way from the U.S. border to the Guatemalan frontier with Mexico at Tapachula, but I had done 1,200 miles from the border and now, with a pair of lightweight trousers half worn through, and the earth shuddering like jelly every time I stepped down from the bus, there were still another 1,200 miles to go. The final straw was a failure to get a seat on three
rapidos
in succession, and I gave up and took the plane to Mexico City, to spend the night in the vast, unreal peace of the Maria Isabel-Sheraton Hotel. This was the only hotel in the downtown area of this turbulent city where a room was to be found. It is favoured by Americans and I mingled in its marble halls with Elks and Rotarians who had come there for conventions, faced up to its gargantuan meals, and listened to the soft, ubiquitous moan of its airport music.

The Sheraton’s portions of food—this also applied to neighbouring restaurants—were so vast that they could not be contained on ordinary plates, and the pound or more of meat with all its garnishings was spread over an elongated metal dish. The vacuum-religiosity of such places was reflected on a card propped on the table which said, ‘We owe it to “Him”. Let us be big enough and grateful enough to acknowledge this fact today and each following day, and before partaking of this food, let each of us bow his head and give thanks.’ The waiter said that about one third of the food he served was returned to the kitchen to go into the swill.

The hotel presents each guest with the Lloyd’s (monthly) Economic Report, a complacent document which has nothing to offer the visitor but good cheer. A minimum increase in the private sector investment of 235 per cent was projected for the year. For the past year the nation showed a 7 per cent growth in real terms, and among the 152 member states of the United Nations it was in the 10 per cent, having the highest living standards. A deal was afoot with the French to supply three nuclear power stations—and so on. From where one sat in the fairy palace of the Sheraton it was impossible to disbelieve that this was so. On the other hand, Mexico City, said by some to have a population numbering nearly 20 million and therefore to rank as the largest city in the world, is said by others to have the most extensive slums in the western hemisphere, which, when I spent some hours in them, showed little signs of improvement since the days of Dr Oscar Lewis’s famous report. It has been said, too, that most Mexicans earn about £300 a year. Who is one to believe—Lloyd’s, or the sociologists who deny that the vast revenues from oil and steel have any serious effect on the poverty of the man in the street?

Exercise was called for to cope with the digestion of the hotel’s copious and indulgent meal, so I took a walk round the city block on which it is built, where I found seventeen indigent families camping out for the night in the street, these in most cases consisting of mother and two or three small children. They live there, and in the vicinity of the other luxury hotels, scraping a living as best they can, but for the most part dependent upon the charity of passers-by—in the main the travellers from overseas. Hard times are confronted cheerfully. One mother of three said, ‘On the whole I can’t complain. We come to places like this because foreigners are more generous than our own people. My husband is a labourer back in our village but he’s always out of work, and I usually do better than he does. To tell you the truth the children enjoy an outing to the city. It’s a change for them. Anyone can put up with sleeping on a clean pavement, and if it rains we can always go to the arcades. If any of the children come out in sores or pick up a cough you often find that someone who happens to be a doctor will stop and give you something for it, so in this way it’s even better than being at home.’

Extreme poverty, as I have always observed in Mexico, is in no way inconsistent with happiness.

There was a choice of routes from Mexico City to the deep south, and someone recommended an east-coast approach through the swamps and the oilfields of the State of Tobasco, so I flew to Villahermosa and there hired a self-drive car, so as to be able to reach areas not served by the buses. In this simple operation an unexpected complication arose. Villahermosa, an oil-rich city, glutted with cars, and on the edge of an area currently producing the staggering total of 2 million barrels of oil a day, was a place where it was as hard to buy petrol as it is to find freshly caught fish in an English seaside town. The manager of the car-hire firm presided over a row of shining new Mexican-made Volkswagen Beetles, but all of them had empty tanks, and a pint of petrol had to be syphoned with enormous difficulty from his own car to get me to the one filling station, where by luck and by favour I managed to fill her up at 30p per gallon.

Villahermosa draws a few tourists by reason of being within easy reach of the Mayan pyramids of Palenque. It offers striking contrasts. The sudden raucous prosperity engendered by oil is grafted on a rootstock of impassive Mexican calm. One sees a heron prospecting an abandoned tanker for edible ticks in the belief that it has come upon some gigantic new species of zebu cattle, while a bird of the same order occasionally mucks in with the guests in the swimming pool of the local hotel. This establishment has both character and charm. Beautiful Mayan waitresses serve the mettlesome
plat du jour
—which may be tripe cooked in chilies—with the dignity of priestesses officiating at a religious ceremony. Frogs like miniature race horses gallop up and down the air-conditioned passages, and in the evening guests are entertained with ‘Rose Marie’ and ‘Pale Hands I Loved’ on the Yamaha organ.

The audience, largely Japanese on package-deal tours, are mystified by the music but eager to show appreciation, and clap whenever they can. In the morning they are up betimes, cameras loaded and the wide-brimmed Mexican sombreros imported nowadays from Korea strapped to their luggage, ready for the jungle-smothered ruins. The hallmark of an advanced society is obsession with plumbing, so the Japanese lady in control of the group presents herself at the reception, bowing and smiling, to make a routine complaint about nonfunctioning flushes, after which the party is on its way.

Sixty per cent of the State of Tobasco, of which Villahermosa is the capital, is swampland. It rains here softly and remorselessly for ten months on end, and as it rains the waters rise gently and spread their lily-decked margins over more and more of the landscape. When the sun finally shines it is on a scene that is deceptively meek. Aquatic plants, many of them sporting magnificent blooms, quilt the spread water to suggest a fictitious solidity, but only Indians can live here, and about 60,000 of them actually do.

The thing to see near Villahermosa is the invention born of desperation and ingenuity by which the survivors of the redoubtable Chontal race, chased into the marsh by their Spanish conquerors, managed to stay alive. Using their bare hands they scooped slime from the bottom of the swamp and piled it up to form mounds and ridges above the water level, and on these they planted their beans and their squash.

A few years ago government agriculturists appeared to have noticed what was going on—and had been for centuries—and decided that all that was required was the application of scientific farming methods to develop the
camellón
system, as it is called, into an important new source of food.

Teams of experts arrived with the fertilizers, the insecticides, the new types of seeds and plants, and, above all, the giant dredgers borrowed from PEMEX, the state oil concern, with which the great swamp was to be dominated and encouraged to produce the new vegetable abundance. The dredger would build the
camellones
at a hundred times the speed of men working without tools, and the hollows left where the mud had been gouged from the swamp’s bed would be stocked with suitable fish. A trial batch of 600 approved families were to be presented with this living space created from virtually nothing and, working under scientific supervision, were to produce the new wealth. Exactly three years had passed since the beginnings of this hopeful experiment when I drove out to visit Nacajuca, headquarters of the project, a few miles down the road from Villahermosa, to see how things had gone.

The rain, having fallen for some forty weeks on end, had stopped only a few days before, and the tropical sun had begun the slow process of sucking away the water. Most of the Chontals were out of sight, busy as usual with survival, but a few privileged ones who had managed to establish a foothold by the side of the raised metalled road carried on their normal occupations, knee-deep in water, mending and making things, cooking, washing the clothes and child-minding with an indifference that suggested they had forgotten the flood’s existence. A man busied himself with wire to mark out the boundaries of a garden two feet under water. A funeral party, all its members properly drunk, staggered and splashed towards a hillock where the coffin they carried would be temporarily interred to await reburial in the cemetery when it dried out. The most extraordinary vision was that of cattle swimming to feed on floating beds of water-hyacinths, only heads and shoulders showing above the water, the lavender blossom trailing from their lips.

It was about midday when we reached the spot where they were building up new
camellones.
The dredger plunged its huge claw into the swamp, scooping up a ton of marsh at a time to drop it on the half-completed bank. A lorry dumped a load of cocoa bean husks on the mud and rotting vegetation as a small army of Chontals moving like sleep-walkers arrived with their mattocks to nudge the husks into the unsatisfactory soil.

The Chontals inherit elaborate social graces from noble forebears, and they are saturated with the sly, defensive humour of the underdog. When I asked the man in charge of this party what the goings-on on his Tarzan T-shirt were all about, he displayed the ruin of his teeth in a stealthy grin and said, ‘These are the legends of a primitive people.’ I understood that I was included in this category. When these men sat down to their midday meal it was clear that they were eating the same old vitamin-deficient maize cakes and beans that the Indian Institute had described in its book on the project as not only inadequate for the needs of the body but detrimental to the mental faculties.

Later, the director of the project spoke of his experiences with good-humoured resignation. He had learned a lot from the men he had set out to teach, he said. Probably as much as they had learned from him. Some of their attitudes had shocked and surprised him a little at first. He had run up against the hard fact that they had no sense of money or trade and this being so the marketable surpluses the Institute had hoped for with which they might have bought such consumer goods as transistor radios, or even Japanese mopeds, were out. ‘I accept now,’ he said, ‘that the Chontal wants to work with his family, produce just enough to live on and consume all he produces.’

He had been stunned by such things as their tolerance in the matter of the irresponsible idleness of certain of their fellow workers. The idea was that ten men should form their own little co-operative nucleus to farm a
camellón
efficiently, but it didn’t work out that way. ‘You find two or three don’t want to work at all. They just sit round all day and talk about their dreams, and the others don’t mind in the slightest. You and I would resent a situation like that, but they don’t. They never criticize each other and you’ll never believe how conservative they are. We introduced new vegetables, but most of them were attacked by plant diseases, and when we got them to use sprays they poisoned the fish. We found out that the cocoa bean husks they’ve always used seem to be the only fertilizer that works on that soil.

‘Their diet’s terribly short of protein, so we persuaded them to raise pigs, but when the time came they wouldn’t kill them. “Christ,” they say, “I can’t kill that animal. I love him like my brother. Kill him after I’ve been giving him a wash and brush-up, and food out of my own mouth every day for the last six months? Excuse me, your honour, but what do you take me for—a cannibal?”’

Scarlet dragonflies flew in through the office window, and the director cuffed them away, and laughed. ‘After all, what are we after? Our hope and intention was to fill their stomachs, because everything depends on that. Do you know what we’ve discovered in the end? We’ve learned that the traditional agriculture of these people’s ancestors fills their stomachs faster than we can. So technicians are out. Insecticides are out. Diversification is out. We sow by the moon and the rain, and we sow maize, beans, squash, yuccas and plantains. We’ve gone right back to the Mayan solution of the pre-conquest. All they needed was a little land to be able to take off. At least we’ve given them that.’

The only road due south from Villahermosa crosses the high sierra, and no driver should take it on in a car which cannot be repaired by the blacksmith-electrician team likely to be found in any of the small towns passed in a day’s driving. There are terrific gradients, and many bends, some spread with the mud of recent landslides. The forest that climbs through up to the cool, thin air displays tropical embellishments: parrots surfacing suddenly like a shoal of glittering fish from the quilted foliage, an occasional toucan, a scrambling, raccoon-like animal in the road. A café has been built at the highest point, with wolves’ and bears’ skins tacked to its walls, where the boss entertains the occasional customer after serving the food with the extraordinary knack he has developed of catching the flies that have settled on his plate—eight to ten in a single swipe of the paw.