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"A Foreigners Tale"
© 2003 T. Adams
"My father thought Mexico was the best place on earth," said Isabel as she heaved a huge pot for steaming tamales onto the stove in her kitchen. "But he always felt like a Spaniard. Always like an adopted son. And even though he loved it here, he sometimes generalized about how ignorant or backwards the Mexicans were. This attitude drove my mother crazy because she was a mountain girl who knew the enormous dignity of the country people. In that way he was always a conqueror."
It was the full moon in August and we were talking again about Isabel's father. Since she'd received her father's family portrait from her cousin Martin in Spain, it was all we could do not to talk about it. The portrait now hung framed in her kitchen just above the counter where we worked. This morning we'd begun serious preparations for a gathering that was to be held in Isabel's garden. A Huichol shaman, a maracame en route from Santa Catarina in Nayarit, was conducting a ceremony for thirty people this evening. As hosts, the task to keep thirty people warm was going to be tough. Three days earlier the weather had turned unseasonably cool and in between conversations about Alberto Fuente we fretted about the amount of hot food and drink we'd need to serve.
"When will the maracame begin chanting?"
"At moonrise. And he'll continue until dawn."
"When will we ingest the peyote?" I asked, trying to get a sense how the night might proceed.
"Quizá once." Maybe 11.
We'd been shopping all morning for supplies and the kitchen was heaped with food. There were three kinds of tamales and the makings for three kinds of salsas, boxes of chocolate discs wrapped in waxed paper for the bottomless pots of hot chocolate we were going to serve, mountains of fresh chamomile, and most importantly, fifteen small peyote cacti, gathered from the mountains of San Luis Potosí and delivered yesterday to Isabel's door. These were to be washed, carefully trimmed of their strychnine tufts, and then sometime after midnight, dropped into a blender, mixed with passion fruit juice and served in tiny glasses to the people participating in the ceremony. This was not my first experience with peyote, but it was my first experience in a circle with a Huichol maracame where only one other person spoke English.
With Beto's help we'd already cleared a huge ring in the garden, dug a fire pit, and stacked a load of firewood and ocoté near the chair the maracame would use. We'd gathered passion fruit, the maracuyá, that had fallen from the vines. As we stacked the fruit in a stout tulé basket, Isabel told me that the best specimens were yellow, the slightly withered ones that looked past their prime. "They give the best juice," she advised, and they did when scooped, blended with water and sugar and strained. "Sometimes in the sun I can smell the juice's perfume coming through my skin," she'd said, not knowing how utterly exotic that had sounded to me.
By 8 p.m. we sat in the kitchen, waiting for guests to arrive, with glasses of tequila in our hands. The maracame, Eusebio, had arrived at 5:30, dusty and tired from a long bus trip. He was lying on the bed in Isabel's guest room with his eyes closed and his hands folded on his chest. I'd been setting up a table for offerings on the terrace when he'd pulled the string on the bell outside the garden door. He'd called out "Eusebio" when I asked who he was. When I opened the door I met a big-chested man with glossy brown skin wearing the embroidered white manta cloth tunic and pants of the Huichol. His voice was pleasant and his eyes calm as we exchanged greetings. He was alone and carried a woven shoulder bag.
As we sat waiting for the night to begin we returned to our favorite topic, Isabel's father. Isabel walked over, slipped the portrait from its nail and placed the picture on the table between us. As the tequila worked its way into my bloodstream I stared at the sepia eight-by-ten photograph of the Fuente family. Six handsome people looked out at me from the past. Alberto Fuente sat in the middle of the photo looking like he wanted to be somewhere else. For a boy of thirteen, posing for a family portrait must have driven him crazy. Behind him to his left sat his mother Isabel, a widow. Her husband, Estanislao, had died from a heart attack seven years earlier. Her face, composed and pleasant, hid the turmoil of the years following his death. As the surviving parent, she owned the family home but faced the problem of how to earn enough money to meet the expenses of the family. Next to her, stood her oldest daughter, Isabel, named for herself in the same way men pass their Christian names onto their oldest sons. Isabel, the daughter, inherited the task of becoming the breadwinner for the family. Her marriage to Herminio Peréz became the wellspring for the family's prosperity when she and Herminio began the department store, Casa Herminio. Because of her position in the family and her drive, the power in the family shifted from the mother to the daughter and she became the authority for the rest of the siblings. It was she who arbitrated disputes, handed out punishment, and chose the role each child would play within the family. Her face, well proportioned and strong, might have been sensuous had she not been imbued with so much authority so early.
Standing next to Isabel was Maria Theresa. A reserved girl with light green eyes, a small build and wearing a light fringe of bangs, she looked at the camera with a directness not seen on the other faces in the photo. At 15, just months after she posed with her family she went to live in a nunnery fifty miles south of Aviles. She lived as a nun for 18 years until she died in 1931. Just after her thirty-third birthday in April of that year, she felt a sharp pain from a molar in her jaw. For seven weeks she bathed the tooth with clove oil to stem the ache that gradually became torture. When the pain had become too intense to bear, she'd begged for zinc oxide to mix with the oil. With it, she formed a paste that she packed inside the cavity of the tooth. After four more excruciating weeks of agony she begged the Mother Superior to call a dentist to extract the tooth, but Mother Edwinia refused.
On a cloudless night in the middle of June the infection finally reached her heart as she lay writhing and sweating in the hard bed of her cell. It was Isabel's likeness to this sister's photograph that caused Martin to react so strongly to their meeting. Seeing Isabel was for him a clarion call from the dead. Maria Theresa's death had created a deep fracture within the family. Half of them blamed the cruel Mother Superior and the other half had been either too young or too naïve to know that the death was senseless. Martin's mother had sided with the part of the family who knew Maria Theresa's death had been a crime. From the day he'd been able to understand their talk, Martin had heard bitter stories of her untimely death and watched as the edges of her photograph curled with age in its place on the family altar.
"Well," I said, "that explains the mystery of meeting Martin, doesn't it?"
"Sí. The past is a powerful thing, no matter how much we think we are free from it," she said. And I agreed with her and for a while we sat sipping our tequila, thinking our own thoughts, and listening to the small sounds of the house.
At 10:30 p.m. the garden was filled with people sitting crosslegged on blankets around the fire. Eusebio had begun chanting around 10 and people sat quietly bundled in sweaters, scarves and gloves with their heads down and their eyes closed. The only light in the garden was from the fire and from the moon overhead. His monotonous chant, "uhn nun nun na, uhn nun nun na" had lulled most of us into a watchful trance, but for me the hour had stretched too long. I was uncomfortable sitting on the ground and I thought more than once that I wouldn't last the night. After an hour of chanting he stopped to rest his voice, and I gratefully left the circle. Other people rose from their places to stretch, use the bathroom inside, or wander into the kitchen for cups of tea. The temperature had been steadily dropping and several people lit the fire we'd laid in the living room fireplace.
Isabel and several friends were already in the kitchen preparing the peyote drink when I got there. I busied myself with the tray and glasses and waited for them to finish while I clenched and unclenched my hands. My fingers were stiff from the cold. Finally the correct proportion of juice to cacti had been calculated and Isabel began pouring the concoction into the glasses on the tray. The maracuyá nectar was a pale yellow as it washed into each of the thirty glasses. One of the men offered to carry the tray outside so Isabel and I each took a glass, touched them together with the traditional toast of Salud!, locked eyes for a moment and drank. As we waited for people to be served their drinks, I asked her how her father had come to Mexico.
Subscribe to Mexico Connect and read the complete article . . .
Tales from the Maracuyá - Series Index
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Miguel de Allende
