Raw Cut | Rudi Krausmann | Travel Diary 9/9

Next morning, on one of these clear, crisp winter mornings in Mexico we set out in a mini bus to visit the groups of columns of Mitla. Already in 1533 the Spanish priest Toribia de Motolinea had sighted this ancient city. As we left from the Hotel Presidente, a guide was included in this tour. Porters in light blue uniforms were watching us, at leisure, boarding the bus. These tourists with Japanese cameras in colourful shirts and wearing new sombreros must have been a commonplace scene for them. A slim woman around thirty with very dark eyes was sitting next to us. Her name was Linda. She told us that she was born in Mexico but lived in Melbourne, Australia. By profession she was a dentist. And because dentists are making a lot of money Down Under she travelled to Mexico every year as a tourist in her own country.
"I could afford to visit other countries as well, but I only come to Mexico, because I can't live without Mexico," she said.
"Could you work here?" I asked her. "Yes, I could," she replied, "but the problem is that here very few people, except politicians, can afford to have their teeth repaired."
Before we came to Mitla the mini bus stopped en route. The reason was, what the guide described as the only tree in the world, which was 42 feet wide and 40 feet tall. It looked like a weeping willow to me. The Indians were so impressed by it that they conducted their ceremonies in front of it. They also imagined the gods hiding in the branches. This lasted until the conquistadors arrived with their missionaries. They were jealous of the Big Tree and built a church right next to it. Only slowly they attracted the Indians into their church. Even then they drifted back to the Big Tree as it contained more mysteries for them. One day during an earthquake the whole church except the frontal facade was destroyed, but the Big Tree stood there unshaken. The Big Tree stood there in all its glory while the church had turned to rubble. But there was a miracle after all. A little statue of the Holy Mary placed into the niche of the facade, had also been kept intact. While everything had collapsed, this little statue had miraculously survived.
"Un miracolo!" shouted the missionaries and rebuilt the church to the glory of their God and for the Indians to come back to the church and to kneel in front of the altar. This they did but only until the day of Independence. From that day onwards they wanted it again both ways. To have their ceremonies outside the Big Tree but also to pray inside the church. The modern Mexicans have become greedy, they want it both ways now. Plus fiestas.
"Is that the story of Mexico?" a tourist asked.
"Mas o meño," the guide replied and laughed.
By the time we arrived in Mitla we were shaken through. The road to the ruins of the ancient city has many holes in it. And when we stepped out of the bus into the sun, we were immediately surrounded by women and children selling anything imaginable. Dolls, plastic toys, combs, fruit, T-shirts, ice cream, belts, sombreros, old and new clothes etc. Apart from that we had also a choice concerning guides. German and Spanish or German and English speaking guides were available. The archeological site itself was encircled by a barbed wire fence to keep away the traders. The traders, of course, were only interested to sell their goods to the tourists, while the tourists, at least in Mitla, mainly wanted to see the sites. In my tourist guide it says that around 750 AD Mitla became the principal town of one of the most important city states in the Valley of Oaxaca. The name Mitla derives from Nahuatl Mictlan meaning the place of the dead. (Lyoban in Zapotec) Mitla was venerated as the place where the souls of the dead came to rest.
The Spanish conquerors had little respect for the souls of the dead and the living put up even less resistance. The missionaries built a church on top of a prehistoric site, using the stones of the temple as a foundation. But what remains impressive today are the ruins of columns from the temple, decorated by simple designs of cut stones used like in a mosaic. The supreme ruler of the ruling families lived in the temple and close to it, in fact nearly beneath it, are two tombs. One of them, as a support system, had a column, called:
LA COLUMNA DE LA VITA
In order to get to the column of life one has to get on one's belly and crawl to it.
"Why is it called the column of life?" I asked the guide
"Because the local Indians go there at night and embrace it."
"What for?"
"To find out how long they are still on this earth. The finger space which is left after the embrace of the column, indicates the years they are still going to live."
"And once they know how long they are going to live?"
"They will increase the siestas and the fiestas," said the guide.
The last night in Oaxaca we sat on the terrace of the hotel Santo Tomas and I had opened a bottle of mescal which we had bought en route from Mitla. Talking to two Danes who had also stayed at the hotel I mentioned that the idea of leaving Oaxaca had put us into a state of melancholia.
"Why don't you fly to Cuba?" one of them said. "Fidel Castro is handing out special deals: Return flight plus one week accommodation in first class hotels for only 225 dollars. Why don't you take advantage of this special and have a look at Cuba? It will make you forget Mexico within minutes."
"Your offer sounds so good it must have a problem?"
"None, except there are no longer first class hotels in Cuba, they disappeared with the bourgeoisie," the other Dane said. We told them that we had not the time nor the money to make a stopover in Cuba, tempting as it would have been. Our plan was to spend a few days in Mexico City and then return to Sydney via San Francisco. The Danes said that they were going out to get drunk, as this was their last chance in Mexico. We watched them leave the hotel and disappear in the streets of Oaxaca. These two Danes had made us restless and later we too went out to the Zocalo. M decided to have her shoes polished and the old man who was doing it wanted to know how much she had paid for her shoes. In the course of 30 years working in his profession, he had learned English quite well from his customers. When she told him that she had paid 100 dollars for her shoes in Austria, he proudly pointed out that his shoes, of similar quality, had only cost him 20 dollars. If his shoes are polished, they certainly look as good as hers, he told me.
"Do you polish your own shoes?" I asked him.
"No, never. That is something that I will never do."
"Who is doing it?"
"My son," he replied proudly.
"Is he going to take over your business one day?"
"No. Business is not yet bad, but it is no longer as good as it used to be. At least at the Zocalo, there is too much competition. And the tourists have become meaner, they prefer to go now into the side streets to have their shoes polished for half the price, but for that they have to stand up. They no longer need to sit in our chairs like kings and queens, we at least still give royal treatment. And top it all, some of the young tourists no longer wear shoes, if that trend continues, our industry will collapse."
We paid him 2,000 pesetas, the standard price at the Zocalo, which is till less than a dollar. In the outskirts one can get the shoes polished for 500 pesetas, around 20 cents, but one could get one's wallet stolen at the same time.
When we walked into the Hotel Alban, we saw behind the reception desk a photographic print of Villa and Zapata, the two most revered figures of the Mexican revolution. Villa had a mocking and Zapata a sad smile and it was rather an irony of time than of history that their mass-produced stares looked down on tourists who had lined up to pay for their tickets for the Mexican dances, performed in the aristocratic courtyard of the hotel. Below the poster was a quote from General Luis Garfias, professor at the Military College of Mexico and the Superior School of War.
'The Mexican Revolution was a great social movement which, like all events of this nature, caused much suffering and bloodshed, but the end result was the birth of a new country which now strives to march towards its destiny along the path of peace and prosperity.'
"What is the destiny of Mexico?" someone asked.
"No se," replied the receptionist.
"And the destiny of a revolution?"
"Un contradiction."
When we came home after midnight we sat down at the terrace for a last drink and watched the stars. In the corner sat a Mexican girl doing some writing and listening to the music of Vivaldi from a transistor radio. When she was at the point of leaving, we asked her to join us for a drink.
"Thank you for your kindness," she replied, "but I must get home."
"What were you writing?" I asked. "A love letter?" She blushed.
"Nothing of the kind," she laughed. "I was doing the accounts for the Hotel Santo Tomas."
"At this time of the night?"
"Yes, unfortunately I have to do it at night, it is an extra job. During the day I work in the office of a chartered accountant. You see I want to save some money to spent my holiday in the United States. Are you American?"
"No, but we came from there"
"Fantastic place, isn't it?"
"I prefer Mexico," I commented. She could not believe what I had said. It gave her such a shock that she stopped speaking English, which she knew rather well.
"Les Estados Unidos son mucho mas moderno et la gente hay mucho mas dinero," she replied and rushed away with the transistor radio and the accounts sheet under her arm. Her high metal heels resounded in the Mexican night.
In the morning we were picked up in a small Volkswagen bus and taken to the airport. Beside us sat an artificially blond middle-aged lady from San Francisco with her husband. They had stayed at the Hotel Presidente where the price of a double room for a night would sustain a Mexican family for a month. But they could not enjoy it. Despite the excellent food and service they were kept awake all night by screeching cockatoos. They asked the manager to chase them away, but the cockatoos kept coming back.
"I would have shot the birds if I could have got hold of a gun." The husband said. By law it is not permitted to shoot the cockatoos, the manager had informed them "We will never stay at the Hotel Presidente again, won't we, darling?"
"Never!" she replied.
"The Hotel Presidente used to be a convent." I said. The husband started to giggle.
"But there are no more nuns there, I can assure you. Instead, in the evening at the bar there is quite a different species of women offering their services. They may be good at anything except praying. Maybe I should have stayed alone in the Hotel Presidente?" His wife punched him in the chest.
When the plane reached the outskirts of Mexico City and starts coming down, I had the feeling that the pollution is even noticeable in the cabin. That could have been my imagination. The 20 million living in Mexico City are supposed to be there not by choice but by necessity. And they are dying slowly the modern death But in the past, when the Aztecs were given the land it was in the hope that the plentiful snakes would kill them off. It says in a native text.

The Aztecs were overjoyed
when they saw the snakes
they roasted them all
they roasted them to eat them
the Aztecs ate them up

Finally, after many battles they settled there and their principal deity, Huitzilopochtli, god of sun and of war had led them to supremacy in Mesoamerica during the 15-th and the beginning of the 16-th century.

As we drove in a taxi from the airport in direction to a cheap hotel called 'The Oxford' situated in the heart of the city, close to the Monumento de la Revolution, we cut across the splendour and the depravity of this metropolis. The beautiful and the ugly, the rich and the poor, the old-fashioned and the new, the modern and the post modern can be seen at a glance, and it gave me the feeling that this city collapses every minute from pollution, poverty, extravagance, heat, noise, hopelessness but at the same instant resurrects itself by faith and history. History in Mexico means first of all revolution, a revolution which was in retrospect destructive and constructive, but in terms of the spirit uplifting for the educated and uneducated alike. The monument which was built to commemorate its heroes is a heavy, concrete structure, rather ugly in its design with a fountain at the centre. The fountain contains the inscription:
JUSTICIA, LIBERTAD, DEMOCRATIA
Its wall serves the tourists as much as the lovers. The tourists to make photographs, the lovers to support their bodies against the pressure of desire. The names of the famous revolutionaries like Madera, Villa are hammered into this rather sombre monument. Below the Monumento a la Revolution is an old steam engine, once transporting the more ordinary revolutionaries to the fields of battle. This steam engine has a particular attraction now for 'the children of the revolution.'
More worn than the revolution was unfortunately our hotel, 'The Oxford', in particular the carpet leading to sleazy rooms and faded curtains, whose cheap furniture also gave refuge to prostitutes occasionally. In the corridors we would encounter shadowy figures in dark suits disappearing into their rooms bursting with the popular tunes of Latin American songs. What was the connection with Oxford, one could only guess.
As we stretched out on the covers of the bed M. said wearily:
"I don't think we shall last here long."
"We only have to last three days & nights."
"Even that is too long." She took out her travel guide Let's go Mexico. It said about our hotel:
'Big comfortable rooms. Ask for one overlooking the attractive park. Bathrooms satisfactory. Rooms have black and white TV, carpet and radio. Bar service downstairs. One bed 20,000 pesos. Two beds 30,000 pesos. Male bed sharing not permitted.'
About the Gran Hotel Texas, which was only a block away it said in the same guide: 'Fine rooms with crimson carpeting, beautiful orange bedcovers, black and white TV, phone and turquoise tiled bathrooms with windows. Charming management. Free bottled water.' And it cost only 5,000 pesos more. We seem to find always the wrong hotels.
This first day in Mexico City we did little. Apart from walking around the Monumento a la Revolution and thinking about the past revolutionaries we ate a simple meal in a nearby restaurant. The place was decorated with bullfighters and bullfights. And the waiter, probably an ex-torrero, gave us utmost attention because we were the only customers. But the food was terrible, we only enjoyed the bottled iced water. We could have had it for free in the Gran Hotel Texas, but not in 'The Oxford'. In the evening, when we tried out the television, we were surprised to find 13 channels, including a 'canal de cultura' and a pornographic one. On the cultural channel a historian was interviewed about a new archeological site, on the pornographic channel American blondes made love to muscular, brown coloured men, they were the latest exports from the United States. And this first night we slept badly in Mexico City.
Instead of visiting the Museo Nacional de Antropolocica we went to the Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Ruffino Tamayo in which the maestro had collected his version of modern art. It even contained a drawing by the Australian artist John Passmore. The following day we made the imperative visit to Teotihuacan with the pyramids of the Sun and the Moon, connected by the Street of the Dead. (Calle de los Muertos.)
200 BC, when the Europeans still lived in caves, in the Valley of Mexico a great civilisation had flourished. It was a theocratic society and lasted over a thousand years, but disappeared as mysteriously as it had appeared. When the Aztecs founded Tenochtitlan in 1325, Teotihuacan was in ruins. Today international and indigenous tourists trod the Streets of the Dead in search of the past, irritated by vendors of souvenirs and cold drinks.
From Mexico City it takes more than two hours by bus to the pyramids, and on guided tours it is customary to stop en route at the Basilica de Quadalupe -- there is an old and a new one -- and even the new one the pilgrims, not the tourists, enter on their knees, hoping that a visit to the Virgin of Quadalupe will bring them good fortune. In the legend it says that the Holy Mary had appeared twice to the Indian Virgin and where she had appeared on the spot flowers grew miraculously in winter. Now the image of the Virgin painted on an Indian carpet, is seen by thousands daily, who move past it on an automatic stairway. Albert Speer, the armaments minister in the Third Reich had visited the Virgin of Quadalupe on his imaginary voyage around the world from his prison cell in Spandau.
From there we travelled on past the outskirts where the shanty towns stretch far into the barren hills which are without water and sewerage but have, as the occasional sign of luxury a television antennae. Here, when the sun has set behind the skyscrapers, the poorest of viewers can still choose between 13 channels culture or pornography. 'Poor Mexico, so far from God and so near the United States' as its former dictator, Porfirio Diaz, once exclaimed.
From the dust thrown up by our bus we glimpsed for the first time the Pyramid of the Sun and the Pyramid of the Moon. The Aztecs attributed these structures to giants who inhabited the world and where their lords, once buried, had become gods. They called it Teotihuacan, 'Place of the Gods.'
Past a supermarket of souvenir shops, where one could buy anything from postcards to black figurines of gods mass-produced in nearby factories, we followed our guide to the Street of the Dead.
"Why is it called the Street of the Dead?" someone asked.
"Because many skeletons were found here."
"How come?"
"Nobody knows."
"Now the dead walk the Streets of the Dead"
"Pardon," said the guide.
"In the 19-th century God died, in the 20-th century man died."
"About this I don't know." Replied the guide. "In any case I meet you again here in two hours. If you intend to climb the Pyramids do it slowly. The Mexican sun is a killer."
"How high is the Pyramid of the Sun?"
"It rises to 63 m, but the temple which once crowned is missing. The restoration bungled it in 1910 by giving it five levels instead of four. Nevertheless, from the top you can view the surrounding country."
"Where can we get something to eat?"
"You can eat in La Gruta, a restaurant which lies in a cave just behind the Pyramid of the Sun. I can recommend it. General Porforio Diaz had lunch there in 1906. Now you can get a Hamburger for 9,000 pesos."
The guide turned around, lifted his sombrero and smiling turned away from us. What he thought about his tourists only the ancient gods would know.
As we walked along the Calle de Muerte children surrounded us in groups trying to sell small animals made of clay. They gave one hardly a chance to look at the cave paintings which had survived thousands of years. One represented a tiger and had still retained an exquisite ochre colour. As a substitute we bought a clay turtle which also could be used as a flute. I have never tried it as an instrument, but it decorates my desk.
The Temple of Quetzalcoatl, once a walled in stadium to protect the foundations of the Pyramid of the Sun was much in demand by the tourists. It had suffered tremendous soil erosion caused by the gods of the Rain and the Wind. Its main attraction was the sculptured head of the plumed serpent, in whose mouth of fire the visitors were allowed to put their hand in. "There is little life without danger," said the guide, "the problem with our modern age."
On our last day in Mexico City we spent an hour sitting in the public garden next to the hotel. We looked at the flowers and the young lovers strolling past kissing each other. For a moment it seemed like any other city.
"I begin to like it here," I said to M.
"I too like it a lot." M replied, "it has so much to offer, specially in the arts. From prehistoric to post modern."
"Yes, Mexico has so much of everything, including poverty. It is hard to say where its problems are most severe, as it is struggling on all fronts, politically, socially and economically, but never losing heart. It also has something magical about it."
"No wonder that the master of magic realism, Gabriel Marchez, although born in Columbia, chose to live in Mexico City."
"I wonder what his problems are?"
"I read in an article that he has the problem of what to wear before he starts writing in the morning. It takes him sometimes one hour to decide, although he is only dressing for himself"
"And after he has written?"
"He sits in his garden and drinks tea with his wife. Sometimes he breathes in the fragrance of the flowers and meditates on love and death."
"And what are we going to do now?"
"I am going to have a drink in the bar."
"And I am going to have a rest in our room."
The bar of 'The Oxford' was crowded already in the early afternoon. Men and women had huddled together and started singing to the tunes of a guitar played by one of the customers. As the city offered little opportunity to have a siesta, this melange of perhaps commercial travellers and part time prostitutes took every chance to have fun, to have a fiesta. Between this densely smoke filled room a little girl in a white, torn dress was trying to sell some pencils but received little attention. And while I stood in a corner of the bar sipping a Margarita, a piece of reality, which occurred in the morning, already took on the contours of a dream in the afternoon. It had the following content:
On the Paseo de la Reforma, a main avenue in Mexico City a policeman had stopped a car for speeding. The policeman insisted to pay the fine immediately. The young driver, wearing blue jeans and a red shirt got out of his car but instead of paying the fine he took out the revolver from the policeman's belt and shot him.
Flying over Northern Mexico the next morning we looked for a while at the desert below and then we both started to read. In a collection of essays by Octavio Paz called 'The Labyrinth of Solitude' I found a passage which puts in a nutshell the contemporary situation of man: 'Modern man likes to pretend that his thinking is wide awake, but this wide awake thinking had led us into the mazes of a nightmare in which the torture chambers are endlessly repeated in the mirrors of reason. When we emerge, perhaps we will realise that we have been dreaming with our eyes open, and that the dreams of reason are intolerable. And then, perhaps, we will begin to dream again with our eyes closed.'

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