Voyage By Dhow (12 page)

It was shortly after enjoying this experience that I stopped for two Americans stranded by trouble with the automatic transmission in their opulent new car. There were thirty miles of wary driving round the edge of a number of precipices between them and the last town they had passed, and I had to break the news to them that the situation that faced them was roughly the same. I offered them a lift, but they wanted to stay with the car, so, promising to try to arrange a rescue, I drove on.

The next town was a mile or two off the main road and, stopping at a cantina to enquire the way, I found myself talking to the local chief of police, who had just arrested two youths for making an affray and had paused for a beer before taking his prisoners back. I told him about the stranded car, and he offered to help me find a mechanic. He led the way down to the town, and courteously invited me into the jail where the two prisoners were put in one of a row of cage-like cells of the type shown in Western movies, where they continued their arguments and threats. We then set off in the almost hopeless search for someone with an experience of automatic transmissions.

This town was a museum-piece of the traditional Mexican scene: a square with a seething market, a general store stacked with cartridges, nails and tattered stockfish, a pub called ‘I’ll be here when you get back’, a main street with trenches hacked out of its surface to slow down the traffic and a great number of people going nowhere in particular, including a man with a pig on a lead, and another carrying a canary in a cage. For all the world it was a multi-coloured Mexican version of a Lowry. Inevitably fireworks lit surreptitiously popped here and there, hissing thirty feet into the air to explode with a blue cauliflower of smoke. The mechanic’s wife, when in the end we tracked him down, said that he was asleep, but the chief of police would have none of this and led the way through the house into a backyard where we found him soldering together a toy spacecraft that had to be ready for some child’s saint’s day. In the end he agreed to go up the road and see what could be done. Had he any experience of automatic transmissions? the police chief asked. No, the man told him, but he had his intuitions. ‘Tell them to flog the thing and try a Volkswagen next time they come to this country,’ the chief of police said.

San Cristobal de las Casas is the last town of stature of the Deep South before reaching the Guatemalan frontier. It is built in the high mountains, an enclave of the colonial past, its walls pitted with the cannonballs of forgotten revolutions, and its streets full of sharp, Alpine colour under a sweetly discordant muddle of old bells. The misfortune of San Cristobal is that the Pan-American Highway runs through its outskirts, and down it has come the advance guard of the invasion of our times, including 2,000 American hippies who have settled in the town and attempted, with signal lack of success, to copy the appearance and life-style of the Indians who form the great majority of the surrounding population.

The presence of these expatriates has stimulated a never deeply buried anti-American feeling—based supposedly in the memory of ancient oppressions and interventions—and insulting graffiti are frequently scrawled on the walls of the houses in which they lodge. Although many young Americans have tried to transform themselves into Indians, so far only one Indian is known to have returned the compliment by becoming a pseudo-hippy, having abandoned the industrious, hyperactive life of his people to spend much of his time in one of the cafés, imitating a hippy imitating an Indian.

The State of Chiapas, of which San Cristobal was the old capital, is on the last frontier of tourism in Mexico; a frontier now widely breached, and in course of demolition. Mayan tribes who survived the holocaust of the Spanish conquest, and contrived to keep a nucleus of the old civilization intact, find themselves faced by a more ruthless destroyer of their culture as the tourists pour in.

In the past half-century, the anti-clericalism of Mexican revolutionary governments, plus in this case geographical isolation, has favoured the re-emergence of the Indian personality, and even in the end the unconcealed practice of the ancestral religion. In some churches the Catholic priest has been replaced by the Indian shaman. This return to the ancestral customs and beliefs has sometimes gone along with a rejection of valuable and positive aspects of the dominant civilization. Peasants have preferred to bundle all their goods on their backs to bring them to market rather than use a wheeled vehicle, and in Amatenango, a village devoted to the making of pottery near San Cristobal, a well-meaning attempt by an American woman to convert the villagers to the use of the potter’s wheel led to her murder.

The violence of our times has spread in all directions down the Mexican roads. San Cristobal has been transformed in a single decade from a town of extraordinary tranquillity into one in which it is no longer safe to walk in the streets after dark. Both Indians and whites have been frequently attacked and occasionally murdered, and women of both races have been raped. The tribal elders watch what seems to them the decay of the Western world and struggle to prevent the spread of its contagion into the Indian areas.

Indians feel themselves more threatened by metaphysical than physical violence. In the recent past they have been largely left to live their lives in peace in their own way, but the mountain villages are now under assault by groups of tourists who offend by their permissiveness, often behaving insultingly—sometimes, as the Indians see it, in a sacrilegious manner, when they force their way into their shrines and sacred places. These invasions provoke violent reactions. Tourists have been frequently attacked in villages such as Chamula, which attracts great crowds of foreigners on feast days and is now patrolled by cudgel-armed vigilantes determined to keep the invaders in their place.

I drove up to Chamula with an Indian friend without whose help it would have been impossible to break out of the quarantine imposed upon visitors from the outside world. It was a Sunday morning, and the wooden shacks round the fine colonial church—now taken over for the performance of Indian ceremonies—were afloat in a freezing mist. A coachload of tourists from a local agency had already arrived, and they were fiddling uneasily with their cameras which could only be used surreptitiously, and with some risk to themselves under the mistrustful eyes of the Indians with their staves. In the last week a stern notice had been put up, and an English translation supplied:

ALL VISITORS
. IT IS STRICTLY FORBIDDEN TO TAKE ANY PHOTOGRAPHS IN THIS MUNICIPIO AND OF THESE FESTIVITIES CARNIVAL SO THAT OUR CUSTOMS AND RELIGIOUS TRADITIONS WILL BE RESPECTED.

SINCERELY

NOTE. INFRINGEMENT WILL BE SEVERELY PUNISHED.

The Chamulas set out to show that they meant what they said. A set-pattern exchange of compliments and courtesies had to be gone through with half a dozen dignitaries of varying ranks, and bitter coffee drunk with the
Alcalde
, dressed like a minor Spanish nobleman of the sixteenth century, before we could be given the freedom of the village!

Even then two
mayores
carrying cudgels slung like rifles from their shoulders were assigned to keep an eye on us. Their first act was to conduct us to the lock-up where two prisoners were held under austere conditions, to make it clear what happened in Chamula to people who broke the rules. We were told that these two men were being held, until they showed sincere repentance, ‘for failing to comply with their civic duties’. The climate of the mountain villages is authoritarian, with a reverence for hard work, and tasks for all, men, women and children alike, are allotted according to age, sex, and ability. Idleness is more than frowned upon.

The visit to the church that followed was the most remarkable experience, in its way, of the whole Mexican journey. Many tourists had had their cameras smashed trying to photograph these scenes where Indians worshipped in the old style, crouched on the bare pavement among the twinkle of innumerable candles and the red and white blossoms spread to represent the souls of the living and the dead, the theatrical presence of the shamans escorted by their guitarists, the incantations, the frenzy of possession and the ritual drunkenness. Two rows of Christian saints, twenty or more of them, carved larger than life, blood-striped and formidable in their anguish and wrath, looked down on this scene. Hanging from their necks were the original mirrors given by the Conquistadors to the tribal ancestors in exchange for their gold, and they seemed to be held here like captives or hostages in this wholly non-Christian scene. Realizing that the memory could not cope with the bizarre richness of the surroundings, I took out a notebook, but one of our guardians, ever watchful, signed to me to put it away. Even note-taking was prohibited in this Mayan holy of holies.

Indians have been attracted to settle in the Chamula region for two reasons, the first a spiritual, and the second a highly practical one. A few miles away, behind Tzinakantán, rises up the highest peak in the State of Chiapas, and this is regarded as a rich repository of animal souls, the Naguals, with which the Mayas of this area link their own. Anthropologists are in dispute about the precise nature of this empathy, or soul-making, and my Chamula friend was bewildered at what he saw as the imaginative poverty of Western intellectuals who were unable to grasp the basic simplicities of Indian metaphysical thought. He explained that most of his people, although not all, developed a mystic affinity with one or several animals of the ‘noble’ kind, for example, the jaguar and the deer, and that the human benefited from the instincts and the sensitivities of the animal, although since his well-being ran a parallel course with that of his Nagual, he was bound to suffer from its death.

The village of Tzinakantán being in such close proximity to the magic mountain, it followed that this was the best possible place for an Indian to spend all the time in he could. When we drove over from Chamula we found about a thousand of them, dressed in all their finery, clustered on the terraces in its centre to discuss their problems, or getting drunk in the well-conducted, ritual fashion that fosters visions and dreams. The practical attraction of the region lies in deposits of fine clay used in the making of pottery. A number of villages have exploited this since the remotest times, and in pre-Hispanic days their production was exported to all parts of the Mayan empire. Most celebrated of the potters’ villages is Amatenango, where the potter’s wheel was once rejected in so emphatic a fashion.

Amatenango’s tragedy is also the vicinity of the Pan-American Highway, passing within half a mile of the low hill on which it is built. The life of this village as described by a traveller in the 1950s followed archaic ceremonial patterns, most of which have been brusquely swept away. It was the habit—still observed in other less accessible villages—for the male head of the household to rise in the small hours to perform the principal act of creation, that of lighting the fire, after which the family gathered for a three-hour exchange of ideas and discussion of moral problems before the day’s work began. Thereafter the men occupied themselves with such manual tasks as digging and preparing the clay, while creative activity passed into the hands of the women, who fashioned the pots, shaping them with their hands, smoothing surfaces with the instruments employed by their ancestors for at least 1,000 years, and painting them with traditional abstract designs. At this point the men would be called in to make fire again, and the pots would be baked—as now—in bonfires of brushwood lit in the village streets.

Every stage in the pot’s preparation required its small ceremonial act, its mumbled invocation, or its libation, and when finished it was regarded with pride, and with respect for the impulse of creation translated to the clay. A potter would be happy, as she might in the case of the surplus puppy, to find it a good home. The medieval craftsman’s desire to impose his personality upon his production survived, as it still does in the remoter textile village of Bochil, where an order for a large number of the exquisite embroidered blouses which are its speciality was recently turned down because the buyer insisted on absolute uniformity, whereas by tradition no two garments could ever be exactly the same.

Amatenango was the last of the villages we visited, and it was immediately clear that something was wrong. It is a picturesque place with well-made wooden huts screened by high cane fences. The women’s blouses, brilliantly embroidered in reds and yellows in imitation of tropical birds, remain as yet unchanged—although they are certain to go—and the spectacle of these magnificent creatures at work firing their pots in the street bonfires is irresistible to the camera of any tourist. The village has indeed been featured in the promotional literature of several tour operators, bringing in the main visitors from Japan and from France. At the moment of our arrival a Club Mediterranée group was just about to leave and was being besieged by a horde of the only ill-mannered Indian children I have ever encountered, selling ugly pottery toys, demanding to be photographed for payment, and when refused shouting insults in broken French.

My Chamula friend led the way to the house of a potter he knew, where the feeling of disharmony became stronger. There were no words in the Tzotzil language spoken in the villages for the processes of trade, for stock, profits, discounts, competition, turnover, etc., so the villagers who find themselves drawn into commerce are obliged to turn to Spanish, and these people were speaking Spanish most of the time.

The complex protocol of village life had been largely abolished. On the occasion of this visit we should have been courteously seated, but thereafter kept waiting in near silence outside the house while the Lares and the Penates of the home accustomed themselves to our presence before being invited to enter. But what was the point of such a procedure when almost daily groups of excited tourists would arrive to stand and stare, to point their cameras, and even to push their way into the houses without further ceremony?