Voyage By Dhow (8 page)

This solution we accepted with huge relief, although San Andres was twice as far away as Guadaloupe Ocotán, and we had heard there were fewer Indians there. A suspicion lingered that the padre might have decided that this was the best way of getting rid of us. Why—it was hard to say. Writers and photographers could be a nuisance in off-the-beaten-track places like this. A Mexican magazine had just published unflattering photographs of the Coras, taken by a visiting journalist, as a result of which the outraged Indians had barred whites from the Cora tribal area of the sierra. As soon as it was quite clear that there was no chance of our turning up at Padre Alberto’s mission, the atmosphere cleared and we parted the best of friends.

After leaving Padre Alberto, we made a courtesy call on Dr Ramos, of the Instituto Indigenista, whom we found seated at his desk beneath a fine
nearika
of the doubled-headed eagle. On our enquiring whether this was the work of the shaman Ramon Medina, the director said that it was, and added that the shaman happened to be in Tepic at that time. He thought he might agree to meet us and allow himself to be photographed. This was an almost incredible piece of luck because the last time Ramon Medina had been heard of in Mexico City he had been living on his family rancho, somewhere in the remote sierra. A tentative appointment was fixed at the Institute’s office for four that afternoon.

The shaman arrived punctually; a remarkable figure even in Tepic, where there were many Indians in the street, and not a few of them in bizarre regalia. He was a man of about forty, with a small, brown, smiling face and penetrating eyes and, in his cotton shirt and trousers embroidered with deer, eagles and jaguars, and his wide hat decorated with coloured wools and fringed with pendant ornaments, he dominated the discreet environment of the Instituto’s office.

Fears that he might not wish to be photographed were soon dispelled. Regarded by his countrymen on ritual occasions as an incarnation of the Fire God, the shaman was remote from small-scale intolerance, and he allowed himself, endlessly benign, to be studied from angle to angle, and shifted from position to position, while the shutter of David’s camera clicked interminably.

It was a huge advantage that although he spoke no English, his Spanish was slow and precise, as if learned late in life, and there were no problems in understanding each other. When we told him of our plans, he shook his head. It would be impossible to see anything of the lives of the Huichols if we went by ourselves. They came down into their five villages only for ceremonial purposes, living otherwise in isolated ranchos throughout the sierra, which no stranger would ever find. We told him that we proposed to make the attempt, whatever happened, and the shaman said: ‘In that case, perhaps you would like me to come with you.’ This we assumed at first to be a piece of Indian politeness, like the offer of a well-bred Spaniard to accompany you when you stop him to ask the way. It was difficult to believe that the shaman really meant what he said, but he did. He was as free as the air to come and go where and when he pleased, he said. We could leave at that moment if we liked.

Disconcerted a little by this almost inhuman display of independence, we finally agreed to pick the shaman up next morning, and at 5.30 we went in a taxi to find him in a glum little street on the outskirts of the town, where all his neighbours were waiting with their lamps lit to see him off.

The plane should have left at six, but by the time it lumbered down the runway and bumped into the air towards the sierra the sun was well up. Besides the three of us, there were two other passengers: a Huichol and his exceedingly pretty wife, aged about fourteen. She had the small-boned, elegant face of an Andalusian dancer, without mongoloid traits, but her cheeks were brilliantly rouged in Indian style. At the airport she had sat apart, her back to her husband, in demure Huichol fashion, but now protocol had collapsed under the strain of the experience, and she had buried her face in his neck.

Through the scratched and misted windows of the Beechcraft, a dramatic landscape had been spread beneath us, rocking gently as the air currents buffeted the plane. We stared down into the green baize-lined crater of the small volcano, and not far from it—despite the fact that Nayarit is supposed to be devoid of archaeological interest—a neat construction of concentric rings that was unmistakably an ancient pyramid appeared and slid away. Ahead, the sierra threw itself in grey waves against the horizon, and the Beechcraft thundered towards them. After my years of air travel in jets, it seemed hardly to move but to lie suspended, flinching and shuddering in each trough of the mountains before the struggle up to clear the next shattered Crusaders’ castle of rock, with a hundred feet or so to spare. At these moments of maximum effort the fuselage flexed gently, and the pilot reached out to make an adjustment here or tighten a wingnut there. The Rio Chapalanga, drawn in its gorges like a flourish under a signature, appeared and vanished again. The shaman, remote from preoccupations and perils, said that the fishing in this river was good, and he pointed with relish to locked-away valleys where jaguars abounded.

At last a narrow tongue of tableland came into sight across a low precipice, with a patch of fabric among its trees that was the landing strip, and we banked to come in and touch down.

We climbed down from the plane and looked round us. We were in a clearing of a forest of sparsely planted oaks; bromeliads knotted with their thin daggers of blossom among their branches. Harsh sunshine shattered itself on facets of jade and ice on the rocks beyond the runway, and a freezing wind hissed down. Saying something about worsening conditions, the pilot clambered back and made haste to take off. A group of Huichols with painted faces, squatting in expressionless contemplation of this miracle, got up and trotted away into the trees.

We were carrying a tremendous load of cameras and tinned foods, and the problem that now faced us was how to struggle under this weight to the mission, which the shaman Ramon assured us with a smile that only inspired doubt was only one hour away. Two apathetic and fragile-looking Huichol women now appeared, as if from a hole in the ground, and the shaman immediately enlisted them as porters.

The loads were distributed, the shaman taking the heaviest package, and we were about to make a start when he asked us whether we had brought arms. He seemed surprised that we had not. Slung over his shoulder was a splendidly ornamented satchel, and from this he took a 9mm pearl-handled Star automatic pistol, which he stuck in his belt. Had he known we were unarmed, he said, he would have brought his Luger as well, and perhaps his bow. I asked why, and the shaman said we might have shot a deer. His explanation surprised me, because I had read somewhere that the deer was regarded by the Huichols as their totemic ancestor, as well as a minor deity. The ordinary people, I had read, ate deer flesh on the occasions of their major feasts, but it was taboo to their shamans. Ramon later admitted that this was so, and that in his case the killing of a deer would involve a complete magic dislocation, which would inevitably bring about his instant death.

We now set out over a narrow trail up a gradient leading to low peaks ahead, the shaman leading the way, followed by David and myself, and then, at a respectful distance, the two Huichol women with a valise apiece suspended from cords tied across their foreheads. The landscape had become delicately artificial, a piece of chinoiserie carved from ivory and shell for the amusement of the court of Versailles, and the shaman slipping ahead of us through the trees looked like a tartar from a Russian ballet, or an ornamented Polovtsian, rather than the Indian he was. There was no undergrowth in the forest, and great boulders had been artfully arranged among the beautifully distorted firs and oaks. Clouded blue water trickled through a valley over porcelain rocks, which Ramon told us were full of opals. A macaw, indigo and orange, flashed from the high branches and Ramon held it for a moment with a strange ventriloquist’s whistle. There were gay, squawking birds everywhere, and a few years ago, the shaman said, we would have seen wolves along the trail, and might even have had the luck to run into a bear, or a jaguar; but of late more and more Huichols had come to own .22 rifles, and the animals had withdrawn further into the sierra.

An hour passed and then two hours, and the track became narrower, steeper and more cluttered with boulders. At one point we passed along the edge of a slope looking down over a gorge that was a small version of the Grand Canyon in dour greens, and the women who had been calling to the shaman came up and pointed to a Huichol rancho—the first we had seen—on a hillside a mile or so away. The shaman’s face changed, and when I asked him what was the matter he said the rancho had been attacked by bandits who were active in the neighbourhood—although in this case the attackers had been driven off. The day was hot now; here we rested, and Ramon, after offering a prayer to the rain god, went down on his hands and knees, blew the scum from the surface of a marshy puddle that had been there since the last rainy season, and drank deeply.

Three-and-a-half hours after setting out from the airstrip we finally came in sight of the mission. It had been eight miles over hard terrain, and only the shaman showed no signs of fatigue. Coming down the path to the compound we met Padre Joaquin, the Franciscan in charge, who had just arrived in the mission’s Cessna, and we were a little surprised to learn that he had been the only passenger. Our reception seemed less enthusiastic than Padre Ernesto had led us to hope that it might be, and no great intuitive effort was called for to conclude that this was probably the last man in the world to speak to about organizing a pagan fiesta. Ramon had suddenly fallen back and was invisible among the trees, but the father had certainly caught sight of him and it occurred to us that the appearance in these surroundings of a shaman in all his Stone Age trappings might not have been altogether welcome.

The padre was a man of few words, and little was said until we crossed a stream in which a large, battered metal object lay half-submerged. He told us that this was the remains of the mission’s workshop, which the Huichols had burned down two years before. Speaking with some emphasis, he added: ‘They were hostile to us at that time.’

To further conversational efforts he replied briefly. The primary function of the mission, he said, was to educate Huichol children, and at that moment they had some sixty pupils of both sexes—all of them boarders, because their family ranchos were too far away for them to return home each day. No charge was made for instruction or board. The children had the afternoon free from study, so we would not see many of them about. He made no offer to show us the mission, but wanted to be quite sure that there was no mistake about the arrangements for our departure. The plane would come on Sunday morning—early, he said, to avoid the high winds. He showed us to the hut, on the edge of the compound, where we were to sleep and quickly made an excuse and left us. A suspicion that he would not be sorry to see the back of us was beginning to grow in our minds.

Later, sitting with the shaman among the trees in this refined landscape, while woodpeckers with fiery crests scuttled up and down the trunks all round, I made a cautious approach to the topic of the conflict between the two religions, and Ramon set forth his views on the subject with frankness and authority.

The religious instruction the Huichol children received at the mission, he said, was unimportant. A Huichol soul always remained one and could not be ‘caught’ by the Christians. Whatever the shortcomings, the errors, or the backsliding of this life, he, the shaman, would come for it at death. He would release it from the thorn on which it had been impaled for its sins, draw it through the purifying fires and guide it past the animals that menaced it at the gates of the underworld. Freeing it after its sojourn in the land of the dead, he would escort it on part of its journey to the sun, and if after five years it craved to return to earth he would build the grass shrine to be placed in the family house, where it would live on in its earthbound form as a rock crystal.

Warming to his theme, his voice pitched in a high incantatory drone, the shaman described the endless after-death saga of the imperishable Huichol soul. And this was the charge that he laid against the missions. Baffled in their attempt to convert the Huichol, their policy was to capture his children by turning them into
mestizos
through their parents’ intermarriage; the boys and girls at the mission, he said, would be encouraged to marry out of their tribe. The children of such marriages would be baptized, and they would be lost to the Huichol race.

A little later the Vespers bell rang, and the
mestizos
came riding down the trails to attend the service; men, as Lorca would have said, with their mouths full of flints, slender and saturnine, and dressed in cowboy style with big sombreros and leather chaps. They doffed their hats as they passed, and the shaman gave them the easy smile that hid an implacable antagonism. These men were nothing. They had the souls of the mules they rode, he said. As an example of what they were capable of, he said that they bought and sold land—the most irreligious of all acts in the eyes of a communistic Huichol.

The image of proselytizing Christianity as seen through an Indian’s eye was hard to refute. The record of the missions in the Americas is at best dismal, and at worst makes painful reading indeed, and, whatever the purity of their motives, the Franciscans must share the blame for the degeneration of the Indians of California, and for their final disappearance from the scene. Christianity has too often been administered as a sedative—something as deadly in practice as raw alcohol—designed to keep the fighting Indian quiet and persuade him to turn the other cheek while his destruction was being prepared. At Santa Clara, however, the mission offered a phenomenon that was new, at least to me; the spectacle of love, not only preached but put into practice. Here at last, and for the first time, I saw Indians as the early explorers and colonizers saw them, before the assassinations began; gentle, friendly, and brimming over with laughter.