The Jaguar's Children (25 page)

“And the reason I am telling you,” he said to me, “is because wherever you are going, you must know what you are made of, and who.”

These green eyes like my father and the professor I do not have. I look only like my mother's son. If there is gringo in me, it's hiding on the inside. And now I'm wondering where.

Abuelo told me a strange story about him once, and always I wondered if it was true. The professor was talking to Abuelo about Diego Rivera and his murals telling the story of Mexico. In one of them is the great pyramid at Tenochtitlán, and my grandfather told my abuelo how Rivera imagined it in the time of Moctezuma before the coming of Cortés—so many being sacrificed and their blood running down the steps like a waterfall.

“One night,” said Abuelo, “the professor told me how Señor Rivera, he wonders if the Aztecs are only sacrificing these people or if they are eating them also. Well, Rivera is a man who will try anything. Just look at him—that mouth and that panza—nothing is safe. Señora Kahlo was brave or crazy to sleep in the same bed with a man like that. Who can say if it is true, but the professor and Señor Rivera were explorers, young and curious men trying to understand what it means to be Mexicano, and one of them says, ‘I must try it.' And the other says, ‘Yes, we must.'

“This is what the professor tells me,” said Abuelo, “that Señor Rivera wants to know how it is to be a priest up there on the pyramid—to take a man, break his chest open and pull the living heart from his body with only your bare hands and a stone blade. He wants to know that moment with the manfruit beating in your hand, wants to feel that muscle still alive with all its colors bright and shining, beating and beating because it doesn't know anything else, beating because to not beat is to not be.” And Abuelo is saying, “No, Profesor. No es verdad.”

But it
is
true, AnniMac. Oaxaqueños know all about it because we are doing this same operation at home—pulled alive from our family, our pueblo, and put in a stranger's hands to beat and beat until we can't. Since forever.

And the professor says to my abuelo, “Sí, mi amigo, es verdad. Mira.” He takes out his wallet then, and pressed in there, flat like a phonecard, is an ear. From a man. It is old and dry, but it is for sure an ear. Abuelo doesn't believe him completely because many men took such prizes in la Revolución and maybe this ear was from that time.

“You're not having a joke with me?” he says. “You and Señor Rivera really ate this?”

“Not this,” says the professor. “The meat.”

Maybe you can forgive my abuelo, but he asks him, “What does it taste like?”

“La ternera,” says the professor. “Veal, but with a little something extra.”

“Spicy?” says Abuelo. “¿Como la conchita?”

“No,” he says. “Not exactly. In my experience it is unique.”

“Would I like it?” asks Abuelo.

“I think you would need to be very hungry,” says the professor. “Or a jaguar.”

Sat Apr 7—10:59

 

The metal is hot now and I have folded my sweatshirt under my shoulder, my bag under my hip, and I have my sneakers on again. Because of the shape of the tank, my feet must go up the other side and I can't feel my toes so well anymore. I think this is pushing the blood into my brain and I can feel it in there—the pressure and the pounding—like my heart has moved into my skull. My stomach is clenched like a fist. I am lying on my side with my bottle for a pillow, and this keeps my face by the pipe where there is now a small breeze blowing. It is so hot, but I have discovered the secret to cooling myself—it is in the eyes. That air—such soft feathers on my eyelids. I keep them closed so there is less evaporation and because it hurts them now to be open. It is also why I speak so soft, trying to keep the water inside. I hope you can hear me. I understand now that this pipe is the only way back to the living world—to air and light and sound, and soon I will pass through it.

 

Sat Apr 7—11:33

 

Too hot for anything. One bar. César's battery one-third. His water three-quarters gone.

And breathing starts to feel like the sand on fire.

This and the waiting.

 

Sat Apr 7—14:22

 

Hello anybody. This is Héctor María de la Soledad Lázaro González. And I am still alive.

 

Sat Apr 7—17:31

 

I heard someone—a man, I think—begging to die. I could not recognize his voice because it was a raven talking, but I recognized the word—morir, and I put my fingers in my ears. I had water and air and I did not give it, and I put my fingers in my ears until the voice went away.

 

Sat Apr 7—17:42

 

In your country is it a sin to be a migrante? If it is a crime it must be a sin, no? Is this our punishment from your American god?

When I was small I asked my mother if I was a sinner. “You were born a sinner,” she said. “But you are not old enough to confess. Yet.” But yet has come and gone, and you are my confessor now. Y este aquí es el confesionario más grande del mundo. I confess to you I would rather have some cool water right now than some long forever by the side of Jesus. To drown would be a blessing.

 

Sat Apr 7—17:54

 

It is a coffin in here. O una crisálida.

All of us had the same wish, but no one could see past themselves. We were together alone, no better than animals who in their panic only hurt themselves more. I saw a burro once, a young one, with his head caught in a barbed-wire fence. Every time he tried to pull his head out he cut himself, and every time he cut himself he panicked and cut himself more. The other burros in the field came over and stood with him, but what could they do, so that is how we found him in the morning—dead in the fence with the vultures on him and the burros standing all around. The only difference between us and that burro is we paid thirty thousand pesos. Too much for a coffin.

You change, you know, in such a situation. Who would want to be deaf and blind? But that is what I wished for today. Some of them went quietly—in the dark you don't even notice. But others threw away their beads and medallions, and I'm telling you, for a Mexicano that is the true sign of despair. They became angry, crazy, they hurt themselves and tore their clothes. I could not recognize their voices anymore. It sounded like animals in here attacking them, but they were attacking themselves. Because they saw things that weren't there. Because their skin stopped feeling like something that belonged to them. Because the pain you make upon yourself is easier to bear than the pain from the world outside. Some hit their heads on the tank again and again until there was only silence. Others clawed at the walls until the skin of their fingers came away—until I came to understand the sound I was hearing was not the sound of fingernails but the sound of their own bones against the metal.

The human soul was not made to know such things and live.

 

Most of the people in this truck believed in God when they got to Altar. Even after the coyotes abandoned us they believed in Him and His mysterious plan. I know it because I heard their prayers. But now? If they could speak, I think they would raise their hands and say to you—to the pope himself, “
¿Qué plan?
God has no fucking plan!”

Unless it is to suffer.

Sat Apr 7—18:02

 

César—still he breathes, even with so little water. He is the strongest of us all. He is the only sound in here now. Listen . . .

 

Sat Apr 7—18:07

 

Are you still listening, AnniMac? Can you hear what I must tell you? When we were in Altar, César asked me for something and I would not give it. All this time I've had his phone I tried to make it up to him, tried to carry it and keep it safe. But I can't anymore. César's water is almost gone and I am out of time. This is César's confession, but it is my confession also. I will speak for him because he cannot. It's all I can do for him now.

 

This is how we came to the third part on that page of the Oaxaca Codex. If you walk along the wall there, past the beautiful corn growing and the men in masks with their needles and special plans, you will come to another figure. This one is a campesina—una Zapoteca como mi mamá, and César's also—no shoes, long braids, heavy skirt and huipil, a rebozo around her shoulders and another on her head. But this campesina's got a carabina, a .30-30, and she's pointing it at those men in the masks like she's going to blow those chingados away.

 

Midnight came and went past Lupo's garage and still we waited for the truck to be ready. All this time César talked to me, talking without stopping. “It's getting so late,” I said. “Maybe we should rest for a while.”

“No, hermano. You are from the Sierra and these are your people. You need to know what is happening.”

Well, what am I going to say? It's hard to say no to César.

“Last summer,” he said, “I went down to Oaxaca to ask people about their seed, what they were using and where they got it, and I discovered that yes, there is SantaMaize corn growing in the Sierra Juárez, right in my own pueblo. You could spot it from far away because the ears were so much bigger and, inside, the kernels were almost white. We were told this wasn't going to happen. We were told they were importing this corn for food only, not for planting, and that the government had promised to control it. So how did a truckload of this seed find its way into the Sierra? No one could explain this to me.

“And there was something else I learned from my father who had bought some of this corn himself. He grows two crops in the summer and after he harvested the first one he tried to replant some of the seed, but not a single one came up. He showed me and there was nothing in that milpa but weeds and beans with nowhere to climb. When I saw this I got scared because my father knows what he's doing and unless there's no rain his crops don't fail. So I took some of his new seed back to UNAM and when I studied the gene sequence I found the RIP, the cell toxin for Kortez400. I was in shock. What more do they want from us, Tito? Already we accepted their language, their government, their god. Must we beg them for food also?”

I didn't know what to say, and César didn't wait.

“So I have this data,” he said, “but it's like finding a bomb and it's ticking and I don't know where to put it. The Ministry of Food, Agriculture and Rural Development doesn't want to hear about it because it will make them look bad, and SantaMaize doesn't want people knowing they have an unregulated product loose in the campo.”

The beer was gone and I was feeling it along with the cold. “Cheche,” I said, “I can see this is bad, but isn't it always like this? Already we buy water—at home even. If you don't make it yourself, you have to buy it, right?”

“¡Cabrón!” he said. “The corn is ours already! And the water is too. Can't you see the problem here?” César was quiet then. I thought he was waiting for me to say something, but he wasn't. “About a month ago,” he said, “I had a dream. I was back in the pueblo, stripping and sorting a basket of corn just like when I was a kid. Everything was normal until I got to this one ear that was bigger than the others. In the dream I'm thinking, What's this? And when I pull the husk down, instead of kernels there are rows and rows of tiny white skulls.”

A shiver came through me, and I knew the cold I felt was from César. In the Sierra, in almost every pueblo, there are certain people who can see things before they happen, who can feel things others cannot, and I understood then that César was such a one. In that moment, César—who I looked up to since I was fourteen—was asking me for something, something more than a favor. Always I wanted to have something he wanted—not so I could keep it from him, but so I could give it. Now he wanted me to see what he saw—to help him carry it. But the truck was going in an hour and I was so afraid, not only of the future in el Norte but also of the future César saw in Oaxaca. “OK,” I said, “but what am I supposed to do? Why are you telling me?”

Well, AnniMac, his answer was a surprise. He said, “Because something might happen.”

“Like what?” I asked.

César rubbed his face with both hands and looked up at the sky. He took a big breath and I could hear his chest shaking. “Last night,” he said, “I had it again, that same dream. Listen to me now. Please. When I got back to D.F., I wanted so much to tell my colleagues what I had found, but my position there—the whole department—is funded by SantaMaize. I'm the only researcher from south of Puebla. Except for the janitors, I'm the only indio in that entire building. If I do anything or say anything that could discredit them, they'll send my ass right back to Oaxaca. For months I sat on this information wondering who I can trust. Maybe I am weak, but this was hard for me and finally, in January, I told my girlfriend who is here from the States. She's been in D.F. only six months and she says I must go to the press right away. I said to her, ‘Do you know how much money is involved here? Do you know what happens to informants in Mexico? How many journalists are killed?' Then she tells me I should go to the foreign press, they will protect my identity. But how can I be sure of that? So I called my father. There is nothing but the radiophone in our pueblo so I reach the village office and they call his name over the loudspeakers. About five minutes later, my father comes to the phone. ‘I am eating,' he says. ‘Why aren't you?'”

“He's just like my abuelo,” I say, but César wasn't listening—

“I don't want to give my father a lot of detail because he is standing there in the office, so I describe the situation in simple words. He reminds me that it is the Mexican government who gave me the scholarships and it is because of them I have knowledge to study these things. Then he says to me in Zapotec, ‘César, you are a Mexicano and you are a scientist, but before this you are a Zapoteco from the Sierra Juárez. We fought the Aztecs. We gave this country Benito Juárez, and we still have our language. These are not accidents. You are the first one of us to study these things about the corn, and this is not an accident either. There is a reason you are speaking for us and for the corn. So don't forget—that is what you are doing. Now, la comida is getting cold already. Cuídate.'