[Photo: “Mists of Time”, Rod Trevaskus, Geographic UK]

Gaither Stewart

Gaither Stewart

1.

One September afternoon Ethan was sitting at the sidewalk café on the main plaza of Coyoacán mulling over the implications of his unspoken declaration of independence from his wife, Guadalupe. He had arrived early today. At this hour the other tables were still vacant. The daily tropical shower had come and gone. And the sun shining through a thin veil of mist had turned the trees in the park vis-à-vis to silver. Something about being alone in the café reminded him of his early youth when he would stand lost on the city square at the top of the hill under the shadow of Sunset Mountain and the same feeling of lostness came over him. He let the remembrance carry him back in the hope of discovering his original self in his first home; instead, the cerebral adventure of conceptual return to that past soured and turned into sadness; he was only a blurred ghost on the fugitive empty square under the green mountain. Ethan disliked parting with the past.

Coyoacán. At over two thousand meters altitude the temperature was perfect. Then, as happened frequently of late he perceived acutely the sensation of being at the top of the world. He inhaled deeply. And the air seemed the essence of purity though he knew the toxic air in this city dominated even the fleeting illusion of purity.

He squinted in the direction of where Popocatepetl and Iztaccihuatl were supposed to be. He scanned the horizon in the vain hope that the curtain of invisible pollution had magically lifted and revealed the magnificence of the two volcanoes—not even the vaguest outline of a mountain was visible. Man-made impurity was greater than nature itself. But not everywhere. Again his insistent memory wandered back to the air of an ephemeral world apart from Mexico City. A world in the Blue Ridge Mountains where Mount Mitchel was majestically present. He called up from his deepest conscious his father’s simple feelings about nature: to him the mountainous curtain hanging between him and the flat country where he’d grown up was an obstacle to be overcome, not a magical geological giant. And so he too, the young Ethan, began to see the mountains as a wall separating him from the real though evanescent world beyond. But after he broke through nature’s barricade and saw what lay in the beyond, he missed the mountains, which now, once more, played a major role in his life. Oh, if he could only see ‘Popo’. The real top of the world where things would become clear. The great mountain would guide him in his relations with the world of Guadalupe, here, so far from both their first home together in Italy and from his original mountain home.

A welcome tranquility came over him as he observed the approach of the distinguished man with two small children walking through the park toward the café leaving in their wake the mist of other days. Every day the gray-bearded man came with the children and stood on the other street side under a big Ash tree and looked toward the café sitters. Mystery hung over the man of about fifty with the two children of five or six years. Sometimes he treated the children to ices and they would stand there together under the great Ash tree looking fixedly but, Ethan sensed unseeingly toward the café. Curiously, he never crossed the street, but the usual café people knew him. Some would cross the street and speak a moment with the older man, discretely pressing something into his hand. The man was not a beggar and no one treated him as such. So Ethan had begun doing the same. Since he was still the only one at the café he would chat a bit with the man he’d decided was a former university professor or had perhaps played a French horn in the city’s symphony orchestra, and was now down on his luck. Ethan crossed the street and bought ices for the children and he and the professor sat on a bench near the Coyotes Fountain and talked about Popocatepetl.

“But Professor, if Popo is invisible and no one can climb it, does the mountain really exist?” Looking in the direction of the mountains the idea again occurred to him that the end of time lay inside the toxic veil concealing Popocatepetl.

The man looked perplexed, stammered a bit, and said in an erudite manner that he was not really a professor and that of course Popocatepetl existed. “It and its companion volcanoes, Iztaccihuatl and La Malinche, are always there. The Aztecs worshipped them like gods.”

“Worshipped mountains, Professor? Well, some people worshiped the mountains where I came from too … but not my father.”

The other fell silent, stroked the head of the little girl and wiped clean the boy’s chin.

“Your children?” a jealous Ethan asked.

“My grandchildren. Their mother died of pneumonia, the father vanished into Bidonville.”

“Oh, how sad. Bidonville must be hell.”

“Who knows? No matter. Anyway, Popocatepetl means Smoking Mountain and Iztaccihuatl, the White Woman. According to an Aztec legend, they were once man and woman, deeply in love, and were transformed into volcanic mountains. The third and less important mountain is La Malinche—named for an infamous woman who betrayed her people and became the mistress of Cortés the conquistador. The worst thing you can call a woman here is Malinche.”

“Please tell me about it … by the way were you a professor of history?”

“If you insist. Maybe yes, maybe no. Some things you know, other things you can only guess. Like the unicorn for example. I believe it exists. Anyway, I can tell you some things. First of all, I assure you that Popocatepetl exists even though we cannot see it or climb it as Fidel and Che once did. As we know in this scientific age of atoms and viruses, invisibility does not mean non-existence … as only simple-minded persons may think. Eruptions are eruptions. They happen. The most recent was last January. They too exist… like the diseases the Spanish brought that killed the natives.

“In 1519 the Spanish conquerors arrived and erased the ancient Aztec culture that had passed its zenith. Moctezoma and his predecessors had ruled with Dostoevsky’s three essential earthly forces: miracles, the secret, and rigid authority. Lacking however was still the spontaneity of freedom so that after centuries cracks had begun showing in its structure. When the Spaniards arrived its civilization was already crumbling. And Spanish victors then wrote the history that became the truth for all time … a history that paints the dreamy Aztec civilization as mere myth in the Mexican pantheon.”

“Well, the Spaniards’ version has lasted. And that veil of fairytale and unreality still shrouds Western history of the Spanish conquest of what they found here.”

“Yes, but solid Aztec sources tell another story of the conquest: on the one hand, the breakdown of the Aztec network of uncertain and mutating alliances with the weaker peoples in its empire and on the other, a creeping rottenness in Aztecisn, by then a faith. But even though disintegrating at the roots, it was an empire. Transitory in the passage of history, but an empire. Moreover, total misunderstandings marked the ambivalent relations between the Spanish imperialists and the quixotic Mexica Aztecs who believed they could dominate the strange foreigners by a show of power … and the usual bribery. But the Aztecs never understood that those men who didn’t paint their bodies and wore armor were there to kill, conquer, and loot Aztec gold. Men who sat atop four-legged beasts, the horses that would be deadly drones today. Men who took Aztec diplomatic gifts as weakness and killed the messengers. Men who had no honor and slaughtered women and children and destroyed whole villages. Men who had no city of their own so they had to take the great sacred city of Tenochtitlan …”

“They sound like my fellow countrymen!”

“Well, yes, they do. The analogies are numerous. Anyway, though the Aztecs drove the Spaniards from the city the first time, smallpox—invisible to the visionary Aztecs—broke out and masses of people in Tenochtitlan died from disease and starvation. Before the year was out the Spanish rallied their forces here in Coyoacán and put Tenochtitlan under siege. Aztec subject peoples shifted their alliances and out of hate for their former masters joined the Spanish foreigners to crush the Aztecs in their city of gold. Against all odds, the Aztecs resisted so that the Spanish leveled the city with their cannons. Instead of a city of gold Spain took a city of rubble and the dead. The Aztec empire fell and its leader Moctezoma pulled down a nebulous civilization and its magical city with him. So has been the ultimate fate of world empires.”

“Professor, you have portrayed perfectly our shifting world today.”

“Oh, that is neither here nor there.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean to say that it is a supreme example of the follies of mankind. But look at what happened to our Mexico. We have never again counted. Not since the time of Tenochtitlan has Mexico mattered. The Mexican-American War was a war of America against a fragile and weary Mexico. The monster of this city we live in took the sacred city’s place. Poor Mexicans hung onto their old gods and today put together their ramshackle Bidonville while the rich white Spaniards live in great palacios in Las Lomas and still crush the poor without ever having seen them. Gibbons wrote that ‘Such is the constitution of civil society, that whilst a few persons are distinguished by riches, by honors, and by knowledge, the body of the people is condemned to obscurity, ignorance, and poverty. In The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire he wrote: ‘A long period of distress and anarchy, in which empire, and arts, and riches had migrated from the banks of the Tiber was incapable of restoring or adorning the city; and, as all that is human must retrograde if it does not advance, every successive age must have hastened the ruin of the works of antiquity.’”

“Professor, you know my homeland well.”

“Alas, I truly do. The old saying about Mexico’s ills still holds: Pobre Mexico tan lejos de dios y tan cerca de los Estados Unidos. Poor Mexico, so far from God and so near the United States. For there is no better place than Mexico to see first-hand the negative results of the pact between American capitalism and the tiny elite classes of society that exploits the country’s hard-working people. In Old Mexico, the past is the future. Progress is nothing but a return to the pre-Aztec past. For Mexicans, the Golden Age is in the remote past before capitalist Yankees tried to buy their lands. Utopia means a return to their origins and to the original time of ancient civilizations. Yet if Mexico like Popocatepetl is invisible to much of the world, we are still here and Mexico exists.”

“Well, though the Aztec empire fell, it seems Aztecism remains. The Spanish world empire fell too, but imperialism remains. We keep repeating the same mistakes.”

“The things of man are indeed fragile. The Aztecs are gone but their sacred Popocatepetl remains, roaring and blasting its lava to warn us, and we can’t even see it … it has its lava but we have our pollution.”

Ethan pressed an envelope into the other’s hands. “Something nice for the children,” he said. “Uh, Professor, I just got the idea of looking for your son-in-law in Bidonville. Maybe he needs help. How old is he? What’s his name?”

“Name? It’s as if he had no name but anyway he’s called Juan Carlos Morelos. About thirty-five by now. Looks older, I’m sure. Sickly type. Tall and skinny.”

“I hope to see you again tomorrow, Sir.”

“Tomorrow as every day. Coming here is our job,” he said with an embarrassed smile. Little children already working! It’s shameful.”

“Maybe I’ve found a job too.”

Ethan metroed to the international airport and taxied to nearby Bidonville. His yellow taxi zigzagged through a web of streets, entered a traffic-packed avenue and pulled to the side in front of a nondescript block of structures covered in Coca Cola placards. Behind them spread rows of tin and cardboard shacks, each different in shape and material. One was painted pink and ecologically green. This was it. Bidonville, Mexico City.

Night was descending over Mexico City. Ethan entered an alley and stepped inside Bidonville. And a sudden blackness fell over the world. He stumbled through the darkness searching for a light. Ankle deep in slime and overpowered by the stench, he marveled at the sensation: he suddenly felt free. Freer here than in Coyoacán. He seemed to see himself. You need this kind of freedom to find yourself, he thought. You need the courage to accept your freedom when you find it. If not, you feel death. He felt giddy. He knew it was his rogue freedom.  This was the total isolation from Guadalupe he’d needed. Like a hermit must feel. Still, he thought, it takes as much courage to be a hermit as to be, say, a heretic. Surrounded by European ghosts—Spanish and all the rest—he felt he was on the right path, maybe dangerous but the right one. But what if this is hallucination? Bidonville, in one of the world’s biggest cities. If I’m not careful my mind and body and soul will transform into a Bidonville. In that moment he saw, far down the alley, salvation in a weak flickering of dim lights.

Hesitantly he entered the shack. Candles were spaced around an unexpectedly big space. Mud from the earlier rain seeped inside. Mosquitoes buzzed around his head. Out of the shadows, a young man stepped forward.

“Hola, I’m Marcos. I’m helping out here.” Ethan’s eyes swept around the room. Layers of cardboard covered the earthen floor. Along the tin walls, crates of milk, dried foods, labeled bags of cornmeal, he imagined, beans, sugar and salt, and stacks of big blue bottles of drinking water. A cot and red blankets.

“Donations,” Marcos said. The man in his middle twenties was white, European-looking, well-spoken, wearing mud-caked pants. “But never enough for the thousands of people here.”

“Did the city send you out here?”

“The city? Mexico City doesn’t know Bidonville even exists. That is, it knows … but it doesn’t know. The rich just get richer and never look southwards. The good bourgeoisie doesn’t want to know of the existence of this other city. A parallel city. But invisible to the others. Bidonville City exists only because TV reporters film it from helicopters and report that drug gangs run this place. And because police raid it every time there is a drug-related killing in the area.”

“Are there really drug gangs here?”

“People here are more likely victims than pushers. Say, you’re not police, are you? You don’t have that look. But drug cartels and their pushers? No, I don’t think so. Anyway, can I help you?”

“I’m looking for the father of some small children I know. His name is Juan Carlos Morelos. About thirty-five, tall and thin and sickly.”

“Everybody here looks sickly. But not many tall and thin men. Most squat and tiny. But wait a minute! We’ll see.”

From the opening, Marcos whistled sharply. A few minutes later two dark brown boys of eleven or twelve ran up the alley. Marcos confabulated a minute or two with them and put something in their hands.

“My intelligence organization,” he said. “If Juan Carlos is here, they’ll find him.”

“Maybe you need some help here. I can contribute some supplies.”

“You want to help here? Nobody dares even enter here. But of course, you’re …” A tall shadow dressed in baggy dirty brown pants and shirt suddenly filled the entranceway.

“I’m Morelos,” he said, eyeing Ethan suspiciously.

It happened so fast that Ethan didn’t know what to say. Then: “I know your children. They need you.”

“I have no children. I have no one … not in this world.”

“You have Nella and you have Juanito, a father-in-law, and now you have me. You have more people in this world than I do. I only want to climb Popocatepetl. Breathe some good air. All of us need it.”

The man stared at Ethan as if he were loco como una cabra. Dressed like a foreigner, visiting him in this hell hole and wants to go mountain climbing, he had to be crazy as hell.

I couldn’t take care of them. My wife, Laurita … she died. She was real life. I had a job in our home … in Puebla. We had our children. The dirt, the dust, she got sick. With her gone, I began dying too. Los niños are better with Laurita’s padre.”

“Oh, he loves them. Everyone in Coyoacán loves them. But children need their father ….”

“Oh God, look at that!” Ethan exclaimed pointing toward a huge rat sitting on its haunches near the sacks It was looking at them with glistening eyes. “It’s as big as a cat.”

“Oh, that’s Caesar,” Marcos said picking up an iron rod and moving toward the beast. “No cats in Bidonville. The rats eat them too. Caesar thinks he lives here. I leave grain on a plate for him so he doesn’t attack the sacks of cornmeal.” When the rat saw the rod, he watched for a moment as if to determine if Marcos meant business, then judiciously scampered toward them, passed just next to Juan Carlos and out the door.

All three of them then winced at the sudden whining of sirens. Red and yellow lights of police cars swept over the swamp of Bidonville where dark falls earlier than elsewhere. Leapfrogging searchlights from a helicopter swept up and down the flooded alleys separating the irregular rows of variegated sheds and lean-tos and inundated the room with distorted pale shapes. They heard the police cars ramming shacks at random. At each thud of metal against cardboard and tin, Marcos and Juan Carlos shuddered, waiting for the crumbling sound of another structure collapsing over someone’s head. People splashed down the alleys of the unmeasured sprawl.

“Lots of action today! Still, Bidonville is forever fugitive,” a depressed Marcos said, sitting down on a bench along a wall, his hands hanging helplessly between his legs. “It expands and shrinks like a dirty giant accordion according to the season and police interventions. Garbage and excrement are bobbing on the black waters in the alleys steeped in slime. Mud crawls everywhere, cold and sticky at night, stinking and fly-infested during the day. Mud seeps under my cardboard door that I prop up at night. But it’s an uneven battle against the filth. Living here inside the reality of Bidonville, I fear I offer little comfort and that I also forget real pity. Nobody pities anybody here.”

Ethan kept slapping at mosquitoes buzzing in his ears, nose, and mouth despite the spirals burning in each corner. Motionless Juan Carlos stood near the entrance, expressionless as if he didn’t count. Marcos rambled: “Bidonville inhabitants get used to the mosquitoes and the smells but because of the dampness and the night chill at this altitude many are bronchitic or tubercular. Actually police invasions are not frequent. From here it’s hard to imagine that you are even in gigantic Mexico City … that you really exist. Here inside the labyrinth, reality is illusory.

“It’s not the noise and chaos of Mexico that’s remarkable here: it’s the quiet. Nights you can hear the grunts in the darkness of human beings making love. Early today an anonymous tip signaled two bodies dumped in a ditch inside the perimeter of Bidonville. A police journalist told me drug lords had assassinated two rival dealers. So police are imparting a lesson to Bidonville as if it were responsible.

“Bidonville is the bottom of the world. The rejects of the visible world gather here. But it’s an invisible world. Its inhabitants are invisible … or they exist only in their dreams. Theirs is a dream of life. Though they might dream of a better life, day-by-day real life slips through their fingers. When I walk in the dark alleyways here, a chill creeps down my spine and I flick my flashlight to scare away the very real and visible rats. Yet, you know, though most people here are poor in imagination of a better life, some few are rich in a kind of innate brilliance. A few make it!”

Ethan and Juan Carlos taxied back to Coyoacán. New clothes and a shower in Ethan’s quarters, and Juan Carlos was a new man. Dressed in khaki and with clean black hair, though extremely pale there was something special about him, curiosity reawakening in his black eyes. Ethan decided Juan was a descendant of the Toltecs. Known for their immaculate ways, their wisdom, the clarity of their speech, Toltec peoples were artistic and great warriors. Bidonville had nearly eradicated those innate characteristics but the real Juan was reviving. Maybe, Ethan thought, he’s destined to be a great writer … or a realist painter.

Juan’s curious eyes swept the café on the plaza. He was meeting the West. Ethan saw in the scene confirmation that Mexico is Western … and it is not. In Mexico City, you see Western civilization. But in the dances of the Concheros on Plaza Mayor he’d seen reflections of the other Mexico to which Juan Carlos belonged. Though the number of indigenous people is great, nearly all speak Spanish, yet they are indigenous. At the same time, Mexico is more Spanish than countries like Argentina or Chile with their German and Italian immigrants. Mexico is a country between two civilizations—one Western, the other indigenous—and between two pasts—one Spanish and the other pre-Hispanic. In his El Laberinto de la Soledad, Octavio Paz writes that just as behind the Greeks stood the Egyptians or behind the Romans stood the Etruscans, behind the Aztecs and the Spanish conquerors that formed today’s Mexicans there stand millennia of peoples in a long and dizzying past. Mexico is different. People on this plateau have always been different. Aztecs emphasized their otherness—in their language and dress, and in their strange culture including human sacrifice. Ghoulish priests covered in blood cutting out human hearts on the killing stones at the top of their pyramids. They wanted to be different. Spartan people, they considered others inferior, stupid, and comical.

“We’ll be here tomorrow when your children and father-in-law come,” Ethan promised, watching Juan’s eyes for signs of nervousness or fear. There was none. For the first time, Juan smiled when Ethan added: “They always stand just across the street under that Ash tree.”

3.

Lermontov wrote of the flowers which the more you look after them, the less they respond to your efforts. Such had become Ethan’s relationship with his wife, Guadalupe. The more he loved her, the less she responded to his love. He had given up his old way of life and moved to her country to care for the woman he loved, leaving his job in Europe and accepting the minor role in their relationship. His new status could have been humiliating. But it was not. It was his existential priority that had changed. His new role in his still undetermined life was dedicated to his “Lupe”.

In their early years together in Italy, beautiful Guadalupe with her long dark hair was angelic. But today back in her homeland she had acquired the bewildering capacity to transform into a demon. Maybe it had to do with the ancient history of the Mexico City suburb where they lived. Coyoacán—place of the coyotes—built on the site of a pre-Colombian settlement from which the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés launched that final attack on Tenochtitlan. The dream city fell to the Spaniards and is now named Mexico City.

Ethan loved Coyoacán. And he loved Lupe as everyone called Guadalupe. He loved walking by Frida Kahlo’s Blue House just around the corner from the café. Life’s satisfactions were no longer measured according to the same standards he’d known before. Life seemed to have reached a higher plane, even though he sensed that its finest qualities still escaped him. In any case, position and influence no longer existed. And now he had his extended family to care for: Juan Carlos, two small children, and their grandfather. Though he was little concerned with the egotistic values that once governed his existence, his life in this new Old World were nonetheless frustrating. He attributed his personal vexations to the one great shortcoming in his new world: Guadalupe was no longer the loving woman she’d once been.

What had happened? He was truly puzzled. And desperate. Were they no longer the same people? It seemed less a question of place than he’d thought—whether in Italy where they’d lived ten years, or here in her family house in the historic center of Coyoacán—but of the length of their time together and their proximity one to the other. And he recalled the old adage: ‘familiarity breeds contempt.’

Now Ethan’s existential situation was indeed peculiar. He spoke the language but the country where he’d re-settled was a hazy unknown. He’d always spoken Spanish with Lupe and he’d been here with her on short visits. But visits were one thing, permanent residence another. It was strange to hear what in Italy had been their somewhat secret language spoken everywhere.

Even the flight from Europe to Mexico several months earlier was different … this time a one-way trip. Ethan had perceived the approach to the triangle of Mexico as a metaphysical happening. After overflying the Rio Grande the earthen mass below rose upwards toward the heavens. Mountainous ridges swelled and tumbled forward from western skies like huge oceanic waves. And his past too skipped away across spinning gossamer clouds. Invisible worlds zoomed around him. Mexico narrowed and the sky retreated heavenwards. And the bluish mountains filling the triangular plateau called Mesoamerica formed a gigantic pyramid surrounded by the seas. It was the top of the world where time stood still. He’d felt a sensation of dizzying power and the mystery of the unknown.

Ethan too had wanted the move. His conviction that it was time to go beyond Italy and Europe had changed his orientation. He thought moving to Mexico must be like going to war used to be for young men—escape from the dead-end-you of home when your hopes begin to decline and your dreams fade and you are ready to do almost anything to survive. He’d thought of their move to Mexico as a move toward a new form of sanity in a disordered world, an attempt to get a handle on his life. To acquire a generalized awareness. A consciousness of everything. But that, he now realized, was utopian Nirvana thinking … in a way more terrible than his usual out-of-tuneness and solitude.

He’d concluded that for his survival in this new life he had to change his whole existence. Undertake something new. Reestablish a healthy spatial distance between Guadalupe and himself as his work had done in Italy. A buffer zone could save them. He had to isolate a block of time and space for himself. A time during which he could become a separate entity, independent of Lupe and her world.

So he’d set about creating his space. He now had a lost Toltec in his charge. He had another family that needed him. But he still suffered disorientation. And anxiety. Strange new impulses like his fixation on Popocatepetl. He knew that in every couple one loved more than the other. And since he was the one whose love—and dependence—was the greater, he suffered more from the widening distance between them, while Lupe continued to seem indifferent to his absences. She had her world; he still had to construct his. Missing in his lonely world had long been a genuine passion that was not Guadalupe.

Marcos in Bidonville had said that people in one district of this city never knew what people in other parts were doing—twenty-five million people? Thirty million? No one knew. A mystery. The city’s immensity truly merited a gigantic volcanic mountain with the fitting name of Popocatepetl or Smoking Mountain even if it remained hidden from view. Shy today, he thought, one day Popo will reveal itself.

An experienced urban walker, Ethan had walked and tabulated New York, then Paris and Rome. Now he would plot this gigantic city—his new space. A challenging venture when he saw that as Marcos warned for people of suburban  Coyoacán the center of the Old City at Plaza Mayor was a foreign country. People in western parts of the city knew nothing of the eastern districts. Some days he just wandered around the gigantic city too huge to see whole. Yet Mexico City-Tenochtitlan existed. It was visible … but not as a whole. And people in one part of the city truly didn’t know what was happening in the other parts. Its peoples—battling traffic, assuring personal security, drunk on weekends, and fighting for physical survival—showed no signs of knowing what life was about. The great Valley of Mexico seemed like the final stage of the madness of civilized man, Aztecan Tenochtitlan redux, suspended between the rich West and the Fourth World. Nowhere even a basis for optimism. He would unite this disunited city … conceptually: he set out to walk the length of Insurgentes, the great avenue that formed a 28.8-kilometer long north-south axis dividing the city into two halves like Broadway in Manhattan. Plodding northwards through the unusual heavy mist, he passed kilometers of slim colored glass skyscrapers, the vanguard of modernity even though Mexico itself was still a political caveman … a capitalist semi-dictatorship based on corruption and retention of power. He walked through underpasses and around traffic circles sucking in the carbon monoxide of incessant traffic. The white marble of the Bellas Artes Museum didn’t ameliorate the pollution or reduce the infernal noise or calm Mexico’s dust. Nor did the dainty delicacies of Sanborn’s restaurants or a Starbucks or a Burger King or the revolutionary murals of David Siquieros, Diego Rivera, and Clemente Orozco make the water potable. The delightful spring temperatures didn’t freshen smog-filled throats. And the blasé rich in Zona Rosa restaurants ignored the withered women on the streets rationing tortillas to tiny children. He saw a tragic country. It had to do with Mexico’s ancient origins … and its solitude on its highlands and in its jungles.

But somehow, Ethan thought, Mexico is not decadent as were the Aztecs at the time the Spanish arrived. Mexico can rise again. It’s a viable society of young ambitious people, a country on its way up. At one point on Insurgentes Nord he stopped in his tracks when he heard jazz from the open window of a bar identified as Bar Americano. At the window, he listened to the music of the past: Dave Brubeck. He saw the radio on the bar counter. He hummed along. The radio DJ announced they’d just heard Poor Butterfly … and then translated the title as Pobre Mariposa. Ethan thought Poor Butterfly was more romantically melancholy. He added the Bar Americano and the song titles to his notes where he listed names of streets and buildings and bus stations and museums and restaurants, accumulating a mass of unrelated raw data … but he never reached the north end of the avenida and never succeeded in linking in his mind the countless divisions of the city. Next time he would walk crosstown to La Reforma and the Polanco and Las Lomas districts of the rich in the West and back to the poor neighborhoods in the East.

Reformists have sparked hopes for renewal of this country, demographically the size of Italy and France together and twice that of Argentina. If little remains of the Great Revolution besides hope, something is going on under the surface of Mexico’s social fabric that could reemerge as happened in Bolivia and Venezuela, something enormous, something as gigantic and unstoppable as the winds sweeping down from the north.

4.

Juan Carlos moved into the apartment with his children and father-in-law, Victor Ibarra Villalobos. It was the first floor of a two-story house near the Frida Kahlo Blue House Museum, an apartment that a mysterious Coyoacán social organization had awarded him years earlier for unspecified outstanding services to the community. Ethan still called Victor “Professor”, who although he never acknowledged that he was once a history professor, he knew a lot about many things ranging from ancient Mexico to the socio-political sciences. Victor Ibarra’s curious contacts among the café crowd—many of whom were influential persons in the township—succeeded in creating the position of assistant gardener of the communal park opposite the café for Juan Carlos, who truly had a magical touch in the world of nature. And to Ethan’s surprise there soon appeared posters and signs around the Coyoacán center announcing upcoming lectures by Professor Victor Ibarra Villalobos in the township auditorium.

“Well!”, Ethan exclaimed, suppressing a mild reproof of Victor’s reticence about his background. “Who are you?”

“It’s complicated,” Victor said softly, reddening and spreading his hands as if in regret of a whole life … but without further explanations of his cryptic words. “We’ll see after the two talks I will present.”

“We’ll see what?”

“We’ll see where we go from here.”

Ethan’s relations with both Victor and Juan Carlos were close, their house his second home. When he came the children danced around him in expectation of the red and green ices he brought and they called him Tio Etan. And Juan Carlos always said: “Mi casa es tu casa.

Victor’s public lectures were sensational events among the people of Coyoacán. The auditorium was packed. Juan Carlos, Juanito, Nella, and Ethan had the best seats in the front row together with communal dignitaries, academics and intellectuals eager to hear Professor Ibarra’s well-known lessons again. Ethan gradually became aware of a certain nostalgia pervading the front rows as if for the return from exile of a prodigal son. People were unusually attentive, leaning forward toward the stage and little chatter was heard before Professor Ibarra stepped from the wings, greeted by a ripple of a hesitant applause. Ethan was still mystified. Where had Victor been? What had he done to alienate himself for perhaps years?

“I will begin at the end,” were Victor’s first words at which someone just behind Ethan said softly: “Hurrah!” “But first I extend my gratitude to those true friends who made this my, umm, my return possible. You know who you are as do I.

“This evening however I have decided to risk all—again—and send an oral message to Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador, Mexico’s President. ‘Despite many warnings—including mine—Amlo, as we call you, you made the pilgrimage to Washington and signed also in my name a meaningless trade pact. The first step toward another surrender. I warned you, dear President, many times: Do not go, Amlo. But you went. Do not go, Amlo, I warned. Do not drink the Cool Aid, Amlo. Do not eat the forbidden fruit, Amlo. But you went and drank and ate. Do not let yourself be branded with the mark of the beast, Amlo. But you did. And you are now branded, Amlo. Therefore the curse will now pour upon us Mexicans. Accursed by the Spanish, now accursed again and again and again by the Yankees. Doom hangs heavy over us. When the empire of all empires in Washington falls, so will our beloved Mexico fall, again.’

“Dear friends I cannot help but think of Tezcatlipoca that terrible eagle god of ancient Mexicans who is still alive for many of us. God of the gods, the unpredictable god of human destiny, who continually erupts in the lives of his creations. In his obsidian mirror Tezcatlipoca sees dreamlike images of the deeds of men on earth and obscure visions of future events. Like Yahweh, capricious Tezcatlipoca praises men one moment and punishes them the next. He makes life on earth a dream, and then from another dream creates another life. In the mad god’s vision we’re fleeting and insignificant.

“The Norteamericanos are today a vanishing people. An egotistic and narcissist people. But our history shows that we Mexicans are a universal people. On the other hand, the reality of Mexican destiny makes you wonder if it’s positive to be so universal that you can accept anything philosophically. For no more than has its toxic proximity to the USA, universality has not brought great fortune to Mexico. It seems that only the most ancient peoples are capable of being simply men. Men who don’t strive for perfection and just lead good lives are universal without realizing it. It makes them free … but at the same time vulnerable to the claws of the hawks.”

5.

Professor Ibarra’s two speeches stirred up considerable talk among the café people. He still came each afternoon, now to the café itself, as a rule with Ethan or the guest of one or another. An “Ibarra circle” was forming. There was an aura of mystery about him. Many words were spoken about Amlo’s Washington trip and the expected long-range ramifications on Mexico itself. The border wall was still on people’s minds, which the more cynical believed Mexico would end up paying for. According to some of the café crowd, Lopez Obrador had detailed reports on Ibarra’s dire forecasts for the homeland. Ethan was surprised to learn that Ibarra and the President were former friends and “comrades”. Yet, while Ibarra vanished into oblivion Lopez Obrador went on to become the leader of the national center-left party and now President of the republic. Mexican mysteries.

One day as they strolled through the park toward the café, Ethan on an impulse stopped Victor and suggested they taxi to an unusual bar in an unexpected place: the Gran Hotel in the city center. Victor looked at him in a funny way but nodded. Ethan stopped a yellow taxi. “I’ve long wanted to see it,” he said. Victor shrugged and after a hesitation gracefully slid into the car. This man, Ethan thought, so elegant in spirit and movement, now sitting so composed and self-assured, truly possesses those unusual qualities that he found himself willy-nilly imitating. Chatting about one thing or the other along Avenida Insurgentes, the song in the Bar Americano came to mind. He knew Victor spoke perfect English even though he avoided using it, so he asked which title he preferred, Poor Butterfly or Pobre Mariposa. “Oh, that song goes far back. I know it as Poor Butterfly which I prefer. The songwriter had a real duende that you don’t hear in the title Pobre Mariposa.”

Ethan stared at him in surprise. “Is there anything you don’t know?” he asked, truly flabbergasted.

“I’ve lived a full life … in many places. What can you expect?”

“Then you surely know the Gran Hotel de la Ciudad de Mexico?”

“I’ve heard of it. An old hotel, dating back centuries, to before the United States of North America was born … famous too for its Art Nouveau canopy. Well, so that’s the surprise! Just as well!”

And the interior was breath-robbing: four stories and a canopy of Tiffany stained glass art. They sat on a balcony of the third floor bar overlooking the art nouveau splendor. They sipped mojitos. “A remembrance of times past,” Victor murmured. When Ethan asked which times, Victor told him all: “My father, Manuel Ibarra, was a leader of the student protests in 1968 against the huge sums spent on the Olympic Games that year in Mexico while people lived in poverty. He penned the slogan No queremos Olimpiadas, queremos revolución. When the army opened fire on the ten thousand students gathered on La Plaza de las Tres Culturas, they killed hundreds of students including my father. The army stacked the bodies for all to see on the square, over a thousand some said. The only crime of the dead was agitation. I grew up with that memory. When I spoke about it in elections decades later against the same corrupt political system, they exiled me. I went to Cuba. Then to France and finally to the USA. And now I’m back! All of that is packed in my message to President Lopez Obrador … our dear Amlo.”

A few weeks passed. October was ending. The mists grew heavier, nuanced, unreadable taking at times eerie shades of yellow and green. Every day Ethan checked the skies with ever lessening optimism for a visible sign of the presence of Popocatepetl. One evening he and Juan Carlos were sipping Coronas on the terrace at Ethan’s house when he again proposed a hike up the trails of the Smoking Mountain. “You have holidays next week. Let’s go now. Winter will soon arrive.”

“Popo is closed to hikers. Too dangerous. Eruptions are still predicted. You know that story.”

“Juan Carlos, you lived in Puebla, practically under Popo so you must know the secret trails … the uncontrolled ones. The crater is 5,426 meters high. The map shows we can drive to the Paso de Cortes and on to Tlamacas at about 3,000 meters. If we hear any rumbles we can just drive away. Hikers’ guides calculate it’s only a six-hour walk to the top. Think about it, Juan, the top of the world! And we’ll know it’s really there.”

“Oh, it’s there, Ethan. I’ve been there. It’s there. But it’s forbidden. Why don’t you just go with an organized tourist group.”

“What! Me, on a tourist jaunt. Why that’s insulting, amigo mio. Besides, it’s not only to make sure Popocatepetl is there. Listen, Juan Carlos. I’ve just got to get to the top of the world. I have to. Just one time.”

“They organize hikes in Puebla too,” Juan Carlos added weakly. “It’s the easiest.”

“Yes, but they won’t go up Popocatepetl. It’s forbidden.”

“Yes, forbidden. But they will take you up Iztaccihuatl and you can see Popo perfectly.”

“And also La Malinche. But that’s not the same thing, you know that, Juan Carlos. Not the same thing at all.”

“No, de acuerdo, that’s not the same thing.”

“You have to understand that it’s not only to make sure it’s there. Listen, my friend, you’ve been there. Maybe many times. You’re a Toltec. You know many things. Maybe you know what the top of the world is like. Now I have to know too. I’ve just got to get to the top of the world. I have to. Just one time.”

“No, looking at Popocatepetl from Iztaccihuatl or Malinche is not the same as climbing Popo,” Juan Carlos repeated.

Ethan looked at his friend closely. It was hard to remember that only a few months ago he’d been withering away in Bidonville. Now he was nearly convinced to go with him on this mad mountain climbing jaunt.

“Ok,” Ethan said. “You go as far as Tlamacas. Then I’ll walk to the top alone. I don’t mind going to the top of the world alone. Not at all.”

Ethan turned and waved at the Toltec standing now with his hands on his hips and a false smile on his pale narrow face. Juan Carlos lifted one arm in a weak salute and sat back down on the straight chair in front of the abandoned lodge. Ethan knew he would sit there to await his return in the tranquil immobility of which only ancient peoples are capable. He believed Juan Carlos had finally understood that it was a matter of existential significance: he understood that Ethan had to go to the top. He just didn’t agree that it couldn’t be postponed to better times when mountains would again stand quiet and majestic. Ethan looked upwards: the dense pine forest was pleasant like a cool appetizer at lunchtime on a hot day in the Rome countryside. He zipped up the light sweater he’d started with. The traces of the trail worn by the many feet before him were still visible though now nearly erased by liberated vegetation. He thought that even when the trail finally became invisible it would still exist and in some future would re-live and carry others to the top of the world. When the trees began thinning, he felt a pleasant coldness despite the exertion of the climb. When he passed the last trees of the timberline, vast Alpine meadows opened before him. And then when he stopped for his first unobstructed view of Popocatepetl, he felt a slight tremor and heard the low-intensity explosion above him. Aggressively though reverently he accelerated his pace upwards across the meadows. His urban hikes had prepared him for this physical endurance test. And he suspected it was the ecstasy like that of the heretic singing glory to God while burning at the stake that made him insensitive to fatigue and pain. Subsequent explosions and smoke plumes only excited him more. He smiled at the plumes of ash. The earth moved under his feet. The whole world was in movement.

“Wait, wait, I’m arriving”! He calculated he was higher than five thousand meters. Much higher. Though he no longer felt the cold he put on another sweater and a skull cap as he knew he should, looked upwards and felt falling ash on his shoulders and head. Tremors and explosions, smoke, and ash were only mildly disturbing when Ethan began the last leg of the climb to the top.

Ethan thought of his habit of speaking to himself in the name of space beings from the planet of Karamarksun, observing the repetitive things we do. ‘Would you look at that! What in heaven’s name is it doing now? So alone there. Apart from the mass. No, let’s don’t make it disappear yet. Let’s follow its twisting and turning in its solitary antics. Let’s make notes for future investigators.’

‘Ah, come on,’ says another. ‘This is so stupid it’s boring I think I will just blow the thing away.’

The End

The mural is titled “Man, Controller of the Universe.” It is a recreation of the mural “Man at the Crossroads” which Rivera was originally commissioned by the wealthy Rockefeller family to create for Rockefeller Center in New York City. Because of its radical implications, the Rockefellers had the original mural destroyed 1934. Lenin is included in the mural, right-center.

In the mural, the man at the center is caught at the crossroads between capitalism (to man’s right) and communism (to his left).

In the mural above, the man at the center is caught at the crossroads between capitalism (to man’s right) and communism (to his left).

Below, art nouveau interior of the Gran Hotel Ciudad Mexico.

A veteran journalist, essayist, and internationally recognized novelist. His latest novel is Time of Exile (Punto Press), the third volume in his Europe Trilogy, of which the first two volumes (The Trojan Spy, Lily Pad Roll) have also been published by Punto Press. These are thrillers that have been compared to the best of John le Carré, focusing on the work of Western intelligence services, the stealthy strategy of tension, and the gradual encirclement of Russia, a topic of compelling relevance in our time. His newest novella, Words Unspoken, is available in multiple formats. He makes his home in Rome, with wife Milena. Gaither can be contacted at [email protected].