Eruptions
Survivors in Mexico
Rebecca West
Edited and with introduction by Bernard Schweizer
Yale University Press, 246 pp., $26.95
This book might have been the definitive anatomy of Mexico. A supremely gifted stylist and a subtle observer of human behavior in all its paradoxes and contortions, Rebecca West was notably adept at tracing the pull of the past—“the great intoxicant of nations”—upon individuals and countries, and she would have found much fertile ground in this history-obsessed place. She would not have lacked personal reasons to visit Mexico: the country—its volcanoes and volcanic passions—was an unfinished chapter in her family store since before her birth. When she finally came to Mexico in 1966, at the save of seventy-four, it was too late. She was burdened with family troubles and too weary for an undertaking that would have required no less physical and intellectual effort than Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, her masterpiece about the Balkans.
West’s timing was a pity, for Mexico’s history of religious and ethnic convergence represented something like the inverse of the history of the Balkans. In any event, Survivors in Mexico remained unfinished and unedited in her files. Published now in a commendable, painstaking, and timely edition by Bernard Schweizer, it is not the book that it might have been, but it is still one of the most original and intelligent attempts at comprehension of the “eccentric outpost of the West,” as Octavio Paz called Mexico.
The Mexican adventures of the West family constitute a novel in themselves. Hardly mentioned in the recent biography by Carl Rollyson, they are narrated in amusing detail by West herself in Survivors of Mexico. In 1852, in search of a father figure to take charge of the spiritual and moral education of her four children, the Irishwoman Arabella Fairfield—Rebecca’s widowed grandmother on her father’s side—contracted the services of Elie Reclus, one of the two brothers Reclus, young French anarchists (and the authors of the “strike of folded arms” and other forms of resistance) who were then refugees in England. In a comedy of errors, the stubbornly devout Christian Arabella believed that she was hiring a puritanical preceptor to guard against the evils of the century, while the atheist-anarchist Elie thought that Arabella’s works of charity represented a modern populist impulse. The eventual discovery of the misunderstanding did not end the agreement, because the children adored the wise and selfless Elie, who shepherded them for four years, at the end of which they began their formal education and the Reclus brothers returns to Paris, where Elisee would write the nineteen volumes of his monumental Nouvelle Geographie Universelle, and Elie would become a pioneer of social anthropology and a teacher of comparative mythology.
Both brothers possessed that rare combination—typical in anarchists—of scientific inclination and redemptive violence, which explains their no less extravagant fascination with volcanoes, those archetypal symbols of nature and revolution. Elie transmitted his telluric faith to the Fairfield children and to his disciples in Paris, among whom, at the end of the nineteenth century, was a young Mexican painter named Gerardo Murillo. Under the pseudonym of Doctor Atl, Murillo would play the double role of social agitator and promoter of the art of muralism during and after the Mexican Revolution, and for five decades he would paint the volcanic landscape of Mexico.
Charles Fairfield, Rebecca’s remote father, remained in contact with Reclus and met Atl in Paris. They spoke of the volcanoes in Mexico. Years before, upon leaving the army, Charles had visited Mexico as if on a pilgrimage to Mecca, with the sole purpose of prostrating himself before Popocatepetl, Iztaccihuatl, and the Peak of Orizaba. He died in 1906, when Rebecca was fourteen years old, but not before bequeathing on her this fascination. From then on, as West writes, “any volcano seemed something of the earthly ad the sacred.” In the epic of her life there remained a chapter yet to be written: she had to re-trace her father’s pace, and meet Doctor Atl, and see the incomparable volcanoes of Mexico.
This dream came true as a result of a New Yorker assignment to write a piece on the grandson of Leon Trotsky, the deposed revolutionary murdered in Mexico City in 1940. Her reporting naturally led her to Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, who lived in Trotsky’s neighborhood and are the subjects, along with Atl, of a long and uncharacteristically misguided stretch of Survivors in Mexico. These pages are flawed not only because of West’s insufficient reporting and Trotsky’s incidental place in Mexican history, but also because West anachronistically presents the famous pair of painters as pioneering a “Mexican art” that had in fact already been evolving for three decades in more complex, varied, and modern forms in the work of Rufino Tamayo and many others.
The ordinarily wise West did not have the time or the learning or the friends to orient herself in contemporary Mexican art or to be dissuaded from focusing excessively on Atl, a worthy but tangential painter and a rather pathetic figure in the political history of Mexico, in which he figures abjectly—like the more influential Jose Vasconcelos—as an intellectual supporter of the Nazis. (A fierce and militant anti-Semite, Atl could not forgive the painter David Alfaro Siqueirs for his Portuguese-Jewish heritage.) West devotes no less than a fifth of her brief and uneven book to reflections on these characters, which would sink the book entirely were it not for the truly dazzling insights of her two critical overviews of Mexican society and Mexican history, and her brief physical descriptions of Mexico, which seem inspired by the humanistic approach to geography that was championed by the Recluses, her intellectual grandparents.
West recognized this legacy in herself: “Since my father was so largely Elie Reclus, so I am.” In Survivors in Mexico, she offers in a single Reclusian page an elegant and precise impression of the Mexican landscape which also debunks the myth—originally fabricated by Hernan Cortes and nourished by the country’s “horn of plenty” shape—of Mexico’s legendary riches:
Mexico is as beautiful as Greece, but it is more perversely anti-human than even that barren land. In the far backward of time, the isthmus was wrecked by an explosion in its basement, which sent up a line of volcanoes, some now extinct, some still in practice, and three at least of marvelous beauty. There are the docile, serviceable lands around Cuernavaca and Oaxaca to show what a paradise was then riven down the middle; but riven it was, and there are huge areas where the surface is broken up into blocks, varying in size from acres to feet, set to angles to each other. Most of the rivers in such districts run at the bottom of deep gullies, hundreds or even thousands of feet in depth, and elsewhere there is a superficial layer of limestone through which the water runs as if it were a sieve, to be tapped only by wells.
West’s description of Mexico City is even more perceptive. Instead of being horrified by the size of the city and the overcrowding that characterized it already in her day, she pokes a little fun at it and even finds a certain charm in it:
In Mexico City there is in a street after street of tiny houses an architectural carnival. Here a small balconied reference to Venice is squeezed up against a neoclassical edifice rubbing its minuscule colonnade against the product of what someone remembers about the Bauhaus from an article seen in the dentist’s waiting room … How does one make love here without being congratulated by the neighbors in the morning? … The growth of Mexico City presents a grave problem, but it is characteristic that its solution looks gay and prettily surrealist in a jigsaw way.
West did not manage to meet Atl, who died in 1964, but she gazed in an almost mystical trance upon the famous glass curtain in the Palacio de Bellas Artes, an immense Art Noveau work of stained glass depicting the two volcanoes. She felt herself the sole possessor of the secret that inspired the piece, which was designed by Atl: “Cry out the ghosts of Dr. Atl and Elie and Elisee Reclus from the twenty-seven tons of glass cubes in which they are forever enmeshed, the spectacle is superb.” But her satisfaction was even more complete—it was the climax of her Mexican experience—when at last, “in between the silver trunks of the eucalyptus trees,” she saw the great volcanoes Popocatepetl and Iztaccihautl, and all the symbols and all the realities could finally be measured against each other.
II.
The appearance of The Plumed Serpent in 1926 created a before and an after in non-Mexican writing about Mexico. Before D.H. Lawrence, Mexico was a historical reality to be studied, not a symbolic entity to be deciphered. For almost four centuries, chroniclers, monks, historians, adventurers, revolutionaries, reporters, novelists poets, and travelers of every stripe arrived with the object of discovering the place for themselves. Of particular importance in this rich genealogy were the works by women. Perhaps the classic travel account was the one written between 1839 and 1842 by the wife of the Spanish ambassador in Mexico, the Scotswoman Frances Erskine Inglis, the Marquesa Calderon de la Barca, a friend and correspondent of Prescott. Her book is unmatched in its exhaustiveness, in its detail, in its color, but she was followed in the twentieth century by a notable succession of female perspectives (with, without exaggerating the point, are almost always more down-to-earth and generous than their male counterparts), to which there is now added the poetic, ingenious, and sensitive vision of Rebecca West.
Then came Lawrence, and Mexico began to represent something different: an unexplored reserve of salvationist myths. The symbology of muralism was political and social; but Lawrence cared only for the mythological. He was not seeking a lost paradise or a promise of social harmony; he was inciting “the generous impulse of the blood.” Mexico became Sexico. Lawrence’s romantic rebellion, reflected in his plumed novel, invoked a truth that asked to correspond not to the empirical order of things, but to the substance of dreams, a truth hidden by appearances, a Reality beyond reality. Lawrence’s work established a particular way of looking at Mexico, a hugely influential point of regard that is not only symbolic but also magical and even occult or esoteric.
Katherine Anne Porter, who wrote several memorable stories and essays about Mexico, found this approach disconcerting. “The Plumed Serpent is a confession of faith,” she maintained, “a summing up of the philosophy of D.H. Lawrence. Mexico, the Indians, the cult of … Quetzalcoatl … all these are pretexts. Symbols made up to measure his preoccupations … He turned soothsayer, and began to interpret by a formula: the result is a fresh myth of the Indian, a deeply motional conception but a myth none the less, and a debased one.” Lawrence’s great novel itself is redeemed, as Porter rightly recognizes, by its “sheer poetic power, a mystical thrust above his obsessions and debased occult dogma.” But the degradation to which Porter alludes is not aesthetic, it is not historical and ultimately moral. It consists in denying everything that—in Lawrence’s literary imagination—departs from that which is purely and primordially indigenous, from the deep and unfathomable power of blood.
“These people are volcanoes,” writes Lawrence. “The volcanoes that exist all over the country are symbols of the people; they will erupt again and more forcefully than before. What seems like laughter in their eyes … is not laughter. It is heat which is returning to its state as lava.” Not even Rebecca West, the venerator of volcanoes and admirer of the genius of Lawrence since the 1920s could share this mystical philosophy of blood. Perhaps that is why she avoided topics that might have reminded her of coarse Lawrentian vitalism on her trip to Mexico, such as the liturgical vicistation of the Day of the Dead. “I could have only D.H. Lawrenced that,” she wrote. For West, as for Porter, Mexico is emphatically not an Aztec hieroglyph, nor does it hold the secret keys to a cosmic rebirth. Mexico is a conglomeration of premodern, modern and anti-modern, and now postmodern elements, which demands a balanced interpretation of its history and a frank and concrete approach to its boundlessly complex reality. Before imagining what Mexico represented, it was necessary to discover how and why it had become what it was.
“Why had she come to this high plateau of death?” Kate Leslie, the Irish heroine of Lawrence’s novel asks herself. She has come “to return the magic to her life, and to save herself from the deterioration and sterility of the world.” Those are different reasons from those that animated Rebecca West, herself half-Irish and a great interpreter of myths who kept her distance form myths, in order to avoid being swallowed up by their romance of the irrational. To the extent that Kate may be considered an alter ego of Lawrence, it is perhaps worthwhile to compare her opinions to West’s in Survivors of Mexico. The two works belong to different genres, and they were written at very different moments. The wounds of the “bronco Mexico” that Lawrence observed had yet to heal after the blood-drenched Revolution. His Mexico was one of the pistol-toting generals, military rebellions, bands of armed landless peasants who murdered landowners, bloody strikes, clashes between Catholic peasants and Jacobin politicians. Not only Lawrence, but also a short-lived president of Mexico named Eulalio Gutierrez, said that “the Mexican countryside smells of death.” But forty years later, West encountered a very different country: urban, peaceful, stable, with a growing economy and a reasonably efficient welfare state.”
And yet, at the level of customs and mentalities, the country had changed as little as its volcanic landscape, and this is why it was able to see itself in the mirror offered by Octavio Paz in his classic book The Labyrinth of Solitude, which appeared in 1950 and was based partially on Lawrence. (West, by the way, compares Paz to Montaigne.) Nor is it a coincidence that the first edition of other telluric work, Under the Volcano, by Malcolm Lowry, appeared in Mexico years later and was a great success. So which key best unlocked the soul of Mexico, magic or reason, symbol or fact, myth or reality?
In that scene that serves in Lawrence’s novel as an introduction to Mexico, Kate attends a bullfight, a tense and repulsive spectacle of bloodshed, sadism, and death, which triggers in her series of grim revelations regarding “this heavy continent of dark-souled death,” its “squalid evil,” its “pure brutish evil,” its propensity for crime, lies, and despair, the “burning furious rage” of a malevolent country that devours its prey like a serpent and “pulls you down like a great weight!” West could have gone to see a bullfight, which were popular in the 1960s as they were in the 1920s, but the cool-headed and judicious writer preferred to seek out people, and so she attended a different Sunday spectacle with her husband, taking a walk through the Bosque de Chapultepec and the neighboring amusement park, where she discovered a de-Lawrenced Mexico, the peaceful landscape of the Mexican family:
This choice seems the odder when it is thrust upon one here, in Grasshopper Hill, particularly a the weekend or on the holidays, when it is thronged with families walking together in amity delicious and quite unfamiliar to foreign eyes. In Mexico the bottom has not yet fallen out of parenthood. Here it is rare to see a child staring in hatred at its mother and father seeking with Spock-fed vitality for a grievance, which, if it goes on taking its orange juice, it will be able to concert into a cause of life-long war.
Lawrence believed that the Catholic religious was a “foreign” reality in Mexico, and only skin-deep. The churchly domes that dotted even the country’s most inaccessible corners seemed to him “trembling pagodas of an unreal race, gorgeous churches waiting, above the huts and straw of the natives, like ghosts to be dismissed.” Dismissed by whom? By an older and inner telluric force, an indigenous spirit capable of absorbing even Jesus Christ. In a poem inserted into the novel, Jesus relaxes once more “into the eye of the Father” and “sleeps in the healing sandals of the Savior,” going down “past the mount of the sun” to see below him the “white breast-tips of Mexico / My bride.” Nor do the hundreds of thousands of pilgrims who have visited the Basilica of the Virgin of Guadalupe year after year since the seventeenth century, many of them journeying to Mexico City from the countryside literally on their knees, move Lawrence greatly. “All of this is unreal,” he told his friend Witter Bynner. “It is done only for the spectacle. One minute they are prostrating themselves in the churches … the next day they are out walking in the streets, full of joy and pulque, as if they had never heard of Jesus Christ.”
Imaginative as she was, West nevertheless saw a living religion, and not a ghostly one: “This society, if not Roman Catholic in a way it can please Rome, is dyed indelibly with Catholicism.” In one of the book’s many illuminating passages (and in prose as intensely poetic as Lawrence’s), West reflects on the worship by poor Mexicans, and particularly Indians, of “the life-sized effigies of the suffering Christ,” which they dress in “crimson cotton velvet gowns, as if he were the defeated kind, whom they had found naked and paralyzed by the roadside and have to clothe.” The Indians, West believes, are “exiles” in the river of time, and they love Christ because they see him “as if he were the most unfortunate exile of them all.” His sacrifice is their sacrifice. As if debating with Lawrence—what a pleasure such a debate would have been!—she accept that “if one goes over to the side of the Indians, one has to take over their Aztec gods, that is fair enough. But also one has to take over the Christianity in which they and their gods took shelter when the disaster came.”
Exploring the foundational myth of Mexican religious identity—the appearance of the Virgin of Guadalupe on the cloak of the Indian peasant Juan Diego in 1531—West recalls the Franciscan Juan de Zumarraga, the first bishop of New Spain, before whom the miracle, or the “beautiful story,” as West calls it, took place. And from here she spins several admirably perceptive threads. She recounts the story of the so-called “spiritual conquest,” the initial work by the Franciscans, which, if it failed to stave off defeat and the ensuing demographic disasters, did console the conquered, and gave them a place in the Catholic world order/ Also, by recognizing their natural liberties, the “spiritual conquest” saved Mexico from the extremes of cruelty and slavery of the European domination in America. And on another Sunday morning ,with her acquired sensitivity to the weight of history, West watched the penitents walking on their knees toward the basilica, “each carrying a candle, and some of the women a baby as well.” She acknowledged the human gravity of the event, the spiritual solemnity of the faces, of the old women who pray “half-inside and half-outside an open door.” She head the typical silence of the Mexican Crowd, and she remarked:
It seems a gross idea of pleasing God, but a sideways look at these penitents’ faces suggests not brutish superstition but rather oversensitivity. People know their own business best; and there is a certain propriety in the performance of extraordinary acts in this place which came into being for extraordinary reasons.
So which divinity presides over Mexico, Quetzalcoatl or Christ? Anymore who has visited Mexico with open eyes knows the answer. Anyone who has witnessed the visits of Pope John Paul II to Mexico (including the most recent one, its purpose the canonization of the Indian Juan Diego) knows the answer, and knows that it flatters Rome.
III.
“Mongrel men of a mongrel city,” says Lawrence at the start of the novel. A Mexican character called Toussaint holds forth on the perverse consequences of the Mexican mixing of races: “you mix different blood races and you produce the half-breed. Now the half-breed is a calamity. For why? He is neither one thing nor the other, he is divided against himself … He is unfortunate, a calamity to himself. And this is Mexico. The Mexicans of mixed blood are hopeless. … There is no hope for Mexico short of a miracle.”
But Rebecca West, who had delved for five years into centuries-old ethnic hatreds of Yugoslavia, was able to see with greater profundity. The social and cultural miracle of Mexico—and this worldly miracle was a real one—could be found in the color of the beverage that she used to drink on those distant Balkan days: “coffee, chocolate, chocolate and milk, coffee and milk … but always brown.” The Mexicans have “solved another [problem], which everywhere else I have been had seemed insoluble”: the problem of color, of skin tone, of race. In the two remarkable chapters that she devotes to “race relations,” West mocks the schizophrenic tendencies of many (light-skinned) Mexicans who were still complaining in the 1960s (in Spanish, of course) about what “the Spaniards did to us.” (The same complaints continue to be heard today.) Nor did she fail to notice the national ambivalence regarding indigenous traditions, with dead Indians idolized and live Indians the object of guilty aggression. But the Mexican mix, the thrilling ethnic impurity, the hybridity, redeemed everything:
For it is wonderful to find oneself in a country where the population is black and white and see that though they are subject to rage (even specially so), there is not among them the disgusting bickering of master and slave, which never can come to agreement because slavery lies athwart the argument, blocking the road to solution. Here, if a white man and a man of mixed blood quarrel, it is simply as if a dark man has fallen out with his brother who takes after the other side of the family and is fair: no more than that.
Like a parrot and a dog that “chatter” without communicating across the unbridgeable “gulfs of dimension,” so Indians and non-Indians belong—according to Lawrence’s explanation in Mornings in Mexico—to different orbits that never intersect. “The Indian way of consciousness is different from and fatal to our way of consciousness,” he wrote with his characteristic certainty and simplicity. “Our way of consciousness is different from and fatal to the Indian. The two ways, the two streams are never to be united.” The Plumed Serpent goes a step further: it not only posits the unresolvable difference of the Indians, but also prophesies the reversal of the Conquest: “a conquered race sucks the blood of the conquerors so that now the race of the conquerors of Mexico is soft and boneless, children crying in helpless hopelessness.”
West will have none of this. As she walks spellbound, like Alexander von Humbolt or the Marquesa Calderon de la Barca, through Indian markets—“The fruit shone brightly as if they were in a poem by Keats, some, like the one with the pale gold husk curling back from the garnet-red pulp, were formal like jewelry. … There were bunches of tiny bananas like casts of children’s hands in soft gold. I have seen a pile of straw hats which exploited their unpromising form as ingeniously as I had seen done in a drawing by Braque”—West sees the Indians seeing her “To the Indians we were appearing as characters out of the Forsyte Saga, say old Jolyon and Aunt Juley. Old and thick-blooded and dreamless creatures, able to deal with the cash nexus but no good for anything else.” And then, in an exhilarating moment of untendentious perceptions., West rebels against the injustice in this situation of … the Indians!
Her rejection of the putatively absolute and fatal difference of the Indian is West’s most anti-Lawrentian stance. (She would have offended Subcomandante Marcos, too.) For her, Mexico is not the romantic site of otherness, but yet another locus of human saneness. That is why she is surprised by the surprise, of an old Indian in Yanhuitlan (“He looks like a neat small-boned Lear, and it is the violent skies above him and the violent earth behind him which are his Regan and his Goneril”) when the guide relays to him a detailed remark that her husband Henry has made bout frosts in the mountains. How could the Indian believe that the couple could not possibly have their own knowledge or experience of frosts?
There is not a shadow of prejudice in West’s attitude toward the Indians. She knows—and this is reflected in her historical chapters—that they are the real “survivors” to whom her title alludes, and that the accumulated weight of history that they bear has been onerous indeed. The stoic pre-Hispanic material culture that West discusses in detail (no domestic animals, no beasts of burden, no wheel) placed demands on the people that were as rigid and merciless as those of the cosmogonies that West describes in the chapter “Religion and Sorcery.” Here she puts all her intellectual sorcery to the test of unearthing the central deficiency of the Mexican religion—Aztec, she calls it—and her insights are remarkable: “Too obstinate a determination to make the universe consistent. They lacked what Keats declared to be the necessary prerequisite of greatness, Negative Capability, the capacity for being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”
At the age of seventy-four, West had earned the right to connect all her reading with all her experience and to rethink everything freely, even what it meant to inhabit the cosmic prison of the Aztecs, a prison of capricious gods who could only be confronted with frenzied magic, and of men trapped in a time that passed without passing, a time that was not progressively linear but pointlessly circular, fickle, and, in the end, unpredictable:
To arrive at the Mesoamerican state of mind, read the Book of Revelation and consider what it would be like to have been already four times through the experiences there described, to have heard four times the loud voice crying to the birds in high heaven, “Come and be gathered together unto the great supper of God, that you may eat the flesh of kings, and the flesh of mighty men, and the flesh of all men, both free and bond,” and to know no reason why that loud voice should not speak again.
West did not believe in formulas for saving the Indians, and even less in prophecies that they would save themselves. She did not believe in the indigenous dream of Mexico. From her experience of the twentieth century, she knew very well that symbolic or mythological or metaphysical dreams become nightmares in waking life. The Indians were not pure beings, or inscrutable entities, or “real men” who turned all “others” into shadow people, or theological bulwarks guarding against suspect progress or gods awakening. They were people like everyone else: “And what the Indians (and indeed all of us) have a right to insist upon is that the thinkers of the world should work out general principles likely to lessen the pain. … That indeed was the aim of Jewish and Christian ethics.”
IV.
“The reason for this, like everything that happens in these parts, is historical.” In a conversation with a cab driver, upon visiting the statues and monument of the city, at the Museum of Anthropology and the pyramids of Teotihuacan, West recognized the basic fact of Mexican life: the ruthless pull of the past. Faced with the schizophrenic quarrel, within this single civilization, of one set of ancestors with another, West proceeded like a good psychoanalyst of culture and put the country on the couch to re-create the moment of original trauma, the Conquest.
The central event seems clear: the powerful Aztec empire—more advanced in some areas than its counterparts in Europe—was not in the process of decline when the Spaniards conquered it by 1521, “But had been annihilated by an act of aggression against which it had not been able to prepare.” Yet contrary to received opinion, the final assessment is mixed. It is true that the Conquest brought about ecological disaster, the destruction of the careful systems of irrigation, the razing of the forests, and the terrible drop in the population as a result of epidemics; but it is also true that “the Spaniards did much for Mexico” by introducing animal and vegetable products, production methods, and technical tools.
But when West stops being Freud and turns into Jung, she takes her fantasy too far. In one such passage, she explains the curse that gold represented for the Indians, a curse later to be turned on the Hapsburg empire in the form of inflation, the “Byzantine tradition of magnificence,” belated technical development, irresponsibility, guilt, and decadence, the origins of which West attributes to the symbolically “violatory” character of mining (she speaks of the miner as a “rapist”) and the “excremental” (“symbol for excrement”) character of metal money (for the Indians, gold and silver were “excrements of the gods”). Here she is Lawrencing the subject.
In a series of brief essays—a mix of biography, history, reportage, hard fact, audacious opinion, and poetry—based on a few well-known primary sources (Bernal Diaz, Gomara) and a respectable contemporary bibliography (Salvador de Madariaga, Lesley Byrd Simpson, Jacques Soustelle), West returns to the story of the Conquest, which has been told a thousand and one times before. Her narration has in some places a suspiciously Eastern slant, as in the reference (probably taken from Prescott) to the “Moslem paradise” of Moctezuma. Understandably for someone who had studied the Muslim killings in Serbia, West sees shadows of the East wherever she looks. What, for example, is the basis of her wild hypothesis that the Conquest raised fears that the greedy conquistadors would transfer their loyalties to the Turks, the ascendant naval power of the time, and follow the lead of the four hundred monks who crossed the Strait of Gibraltar to North Africa to become Muslims?
But these conjectures aside, West’s telling of the tale is perfect: she includes everything one ever wanted to know about the irresolute and tortured Moctezuma, the sensual and obliging Dona Marina (what would West not have given for Luis Gonzalez’s description of her as a “trilingual secretary”!), the shrewd and cerebral Cortes (who was nothing like the figure painted by Diego Rivera, and not very different from the clever man depicted by such recent writers as Jose Luis Martinez, Hugh Thomas, or Juan Miralles). But West’s script is not written by these characters so much as by the fatal clash of two divergent understandings of Quetzalcotal, the Mesoamerican god who so impressed Lawrence. From the moment that Moctezuma and Cortes meet in Tenochtitlan on November 8, 1519, the narrative acquires a greater intensity, because Moctezuma is finally convinced that Cortes is Quetzalcoatl, and Cortes—upon confirming once more that there is blood on the walls, the habitual blood of sacrifice—steps into his role in an act of theological resolve and performs accordingly.
West’s account has the wonderful and wise effect of reconciling her Mexican reader to his ancestors. She has made him see that in other lands, and even in recent times, racial and religious conflicts similar to those that Mexico resolved over the centuries have caused whites to enslave blacks, Nazis to exterminate Jews, and Muslim Bosnians and Christian Serbs to slaughter each other. It turns out that as a space for human cohabitation, Mexico, despite everything, has not fared so badly. And this conclusion is as valid today as it was when West delivered it.
“It is nothing but a sort of infectious disease, like syphilis, all this revolution and socialism,” says one of Lawrence’s characters. In the time that she spent in Mexico, West learned enough to refute him, and to understand something that is not easy for foreigners to grasp: the institutional legiticamcy, strangely timeless and even permanent, of the Mexican Revolution, “something like what Marx called a social revolution, but cozier.” In a few swift lines, West captured the essence of the paternalistic and corrupt regimes of the era (“careless of accountancy, never forgetful of social justice”), noted the country’s alarming demographic tendencies, and—most surprisingly—anticipated the crisis of 1968, observing that if the Mexican president stopped adopting a paternal attitude, the people would immediately turn against him. But perceptive as these judgments may have been, they come nowhere near to be covering the abyss that opens between Mexico at the time of the Conquest and Mexico at the time of West’s experience of it. This is the central problem of this extraordinary book: it contains an immense gap of four hundred fifty years.
“Free Mexico is a bully, and the old colonial, ecclesiastical Mexico was another sort of bully,” says one of Lawrence’s characters. West could not have disputed this Lawrentian mistake, because she did not know those Mexicos. By stopping her inquiry at the sixteenth century, West ignores too many thing: the centuries of the Hapsburg and Bourbon viceroyalties, the War of Independence, the civil and ethnic wars of the nineteenth century, the invasion by the United States (she almost completely omits to mention Mexico’s proximity to the United States), the extremely important War of Reform, the French intervention, and so on. It is significant that in referring to Porfirio Diaz West makes to colossal blunders: “great soliders make poor statesmen: and “Diaz had left the state coffers empty.” Even Diaz’s severest critics concede that he was a great statesmen, perhaps Mexico’s greatest; and nobody has ever claimed that personal corruption was one of his faults.
West understood Mexico’s original trauma, but she did not have time to see Mexico’s abiding dilemma: the tension between tradition and modernity. At the center of the dilemma is the War of Reform that was fought from 1858 to 1861 between conservatives and liberals, and its sequal, the French intervention in the years between 1861 and 1867. In this crucial decade, the country was caught between two conflicting projects: one liberal and fully dedicated to democracy, the other conservative and rooted in variations of the closed corporate structure of a colony. The clash between the two projects led to a kind of compromise that lasted more than a century: a liberal society, a mixed economy, a conservative state. With the elections of 2000, Mexico seemed to opt decisively for the path of liberal democracy, proposed time and again over its long history. It is not yet clear whether this great endeavor will take firm hold. Too many myths stand in its way.
When the “didactic Toussaint” lectures Kate Leslie on the “chaos” caused by the mixing of races, he refers to President Benito Juarez to illustrate his case: “a pure Indian. He floods his old consciousness with the new white ideas, and there springs up a whole forest of verbiage, new laws, new constitutions and all the rest. … It grows, like a week on the surface, saps the strength of the Indian soil underneath, and helps the process of ruin.” West mentions Juarez only twice, in an offhand way, as if he were a statue, without suspecting that his story represents—especially now, almost two hundred years after his birth—exactly the opposite of what “Toussaint” predicted. Benito Juarez was in fact a Zapotec Indian who learned Spanish at the age of twelve. He governed Mexico from 1858 to 1872. Over the course of his long political career (which included legal, legislative, and executive posts in Oaxaca, the state where he was born, and in the federal sphere), he underwent an ideological and political transformation that, while not complete, contained a message of greatest importance for the Mexico that West visited, and even for present-day Mexico.The lesson of Juarez is not, as the indigenists of today would prefer, a post-modernized Lawrentian idealization of the Indians and the consequent segregation of them by perpretuating their old prostration. It is, rather, a call to complete the cycle of the liberal alternative (“new laws, new constitutions and all the rest”) thanks to which Mexico has been, since 1858, with all its defects and limitations, a country of true civil liberties and equality before the law. Through the efforts of the liberal generation of Juarez, many “pure Indians” and others not so pure effectively “flooded” their “old consciousness with the new white ideas,” but these ideas represent a legacy of republican civility and secularism that Rebecca West did not witness. It is upon this legacy that Mexico must build its future, not on the jungle of our social and national myths, or upon the dark appeals of blood and faith. I do not doubt that Rebecca West would have agreed. She studied Mexico, not only with intelligence, but also with love. “Only in Quetzalcoatl there is sweetness,” she wrote. There was sweetness in her too.
(Traducido del español por Natasha Wimmer.)
Publicado en The New Republic, 17 de noviembre de 2003