But even as I reprimanded myself I knew there were other, deeper reasons for accepting the assignment. I was gripped by a memory of Mexico in the spring and the splendor of Toledo and the Festival of Ixmiq. So I took the job, because I wanted to see my homeland again.
If you had asked me: “Isn’t this a case of ordinary homesickness?” I’d have had to say: “A man fifty-two years old doesn’t indulge in homesickness. This is far more basic.” I had been born in Mexico in 1909 of an American father who had also been born there. In 1938, when I was already a mature man and married to a fine Mexican woman, Father and I had been forced to quit the country. The Mexicans had stolen our property and we could not stay. When my wife confronted the thought of moving to Montgomery, Alabama, with me, she couldn’t stomach such an exile and divorced me.
It was then that I became a writer, though not a real writer like Scott Fitzgerald, who had also gone to Princeton; I was more like Richard Halliburton, another Princetonian more my age and type. I dabbled in travel books, never successfully, and debased myself by writing as-told-to junk. My magazine found me useful, because without a wife or children I could be dispatched on little notice to cover any hot subject that exploded in Asia, Africa or South America.
It had been in January of this year, 1961, that I caught a glimpse of the gray years that lay ahead of me. I had been in Havana trying to explain Castro’s bewildering behavior during his first two years after overthrowing Batista. In 1958 and ’59 I’d been a strong Castro supporter, living with him in the mountains, writing articles about him giving him moral support as he marched toward the capital, and rejoicing with his bearded ones as they captured Havana. After that it was all downhill. He lied to me, said he had never been a communist, swore he wanted peace with the United States and laughed at me when I asked: “Fidel, why are you breaking diplomatic relations with us?”
When my onetime hero revealed himself as such a liar and a fraud, I had to evaluate myself, to see if I was any better. What I saw during those three bad days in Cuba did little to reassure me. I had accomplished little. I’d written nothing that would last. I had no wife or children, and I was confused as to whether I was a Mexican or an American.
But as I stood beside the little concrete marker K. 303—indicating the number of kilometers from Mexico City, about one hundred and eighty miles—I felt the good heat of Toledo upon me and suspected that I had done right in accepting the assignment. And when I looked past the marker and at the parched land I knew I had. I had always been fascinated by these cactus plants, with their burden of thick red dust, because for me they were the truest product of the Mexican soil. Unforgiving, bitter and reluctant, they etched themselves against the dark blue sky and stood like gaunt cathedrals. I loved their awkward angularity, the fact that they offered no concession to anyone, and that year after year they were the same. They were very Mexican, these perpetual cactus bushes. Oftentimes an Indian farmer would surround his little plot of land with them, and then the goats had better beware. At first sight they seemed worthless for anything except for functioning as improvised fences, and yet it was they that gave character to the land; without the cactus bushes this would not be Mexico.
One of my earliest fancies had been associated with these unruly and forbidding plants. At about the age of six I developed the idea that my father was controlled by an unseen cactus plant, had indeed sprung from one. He was an angular man, and his sharp beard, when unshaved, resembled the spines I had so often tested. He had both the ruggedness of the cactus and its essential strength. I often thought of him as standing solitary against the sky, the way the cactus did, and in later years when the city of Toledo erected a granite monument to him, that is how his statue stood. Like the cactus, my father had a majestic beauty of his own, and it sprang directly from his unyielding rectitude, for he was one of the best administrators Mexico has ever known. When I was a senior at Princeton with time to restudy my father’s famous book I realized that it, even more than he, had a kinship with the cactus. It was sharp, angular, lacking in flowery rhythms, but it achieved a local immortality primarily because it did stand alone, like an isolated cactus bush. It was a completely self-inspired book, like none other that had ever been written about Mexico. And that was the source of its greatness.
I studied the cactus for some time and wished that I had absorbed a little more of its unyielding vigor, just as I occasionally wished that I had inherited more of my father’s relentless probity, for I knew myself to be vacillating while he was always sure of where he stood. He lived in a simple world, where categories were rigidly maintained without necessity for explanation: for John Clay, Englishmen were demonstrably superior to Americans, who were obviously better than Spaniards, who were inherently better than Indians, who were infinitely superior to Negroes. Banks were better than newspapers, Protestants than Catholics, Lee than Grant, and silver much better than gold. Education was good and sex bad. Paved roads were very good and an insecure water supply was an abomination. Hardworking engineers saved the world and soft-living writers corrupted it. Nevertheless, he is now remembered as a writer, for his book, The Pyramid and the Cathedral, constructed from the relentless dichotomies of good and evil that he espoused, had somehow caught the inmost spirit of Mexico.
I started hiking down the road, delightfully aware that after a few hundred yards I would see opening before me the prospect of Toledo with its shimmering towers, but as I walked I noticed that in the field to my right the cactus plants had disappeared, for the Indian farmer, whoever he was, had rooted them out and replaced them with orderly rows of that amazing plant, the maguey, and as I walked beside these dark green shrubs, man-high and undulating in the sun, I recalled something my father had told me forty years ago. It could have been in April as we walked that day along a patch of maguey, for I remember that the sun was warm but not oppressive. He stopped and poked at a twisting maguey with his cane and observed, more to himself than to me: “A land is never occupied until the cactus is rooted out and maguey planted.”
This was a surprising thing for my father to have said, for to him drinking was an abomination, and it was from these maguey plants, whose mysterious arms twisted about the landscape as if seeking to embrace it, that the Indians had centuries ago learned to brew their intoxicating mezcal drink. I would have expected my father to hate the maguey for that reason. Instead, he reflected: “These are the plants that lend grace and dignity to the land. They’re like dancers with beautiful hands. Or like women. They’re the better half of life.”
I remembered these curious comments when years later I read his book at Princeton and came upon his remarkable evocation of the cactus and the maguey as contrary symbols of the Mexican spirit. Cactus was the inclination to war and destruction. In contrast, “maguey,” he had written in a much-quoted passage, “has always been the symbol of peace and construction. From its bruised leaves our ancestors made the paper upon which our records were transcribed; its dried leaves formed the thatch for our homes; its fibers were the threads that made clothing possible; its thorns were the pins and needles our mothers used in bringing us to civilization; its white roots provided the vegetables from which we gained sustenance; and its juice became our honey, our vinegar and after a long while the wine that destroyed us with happiness and immortal visions.” Cactus, my father wrote, was the spirit of the lonely hunter; maguey was the inspiration of the artists who had built the pyramids and decorated the cathedrals. One was the male spirit so dominant in Mexican life; the other was the female, the subtle conqueror who invariably triumphed in the end. My father argued that it was not by accident that the Indian worked all his life fighting the cactus and received his only respite from the sweet liquor of the maguey. He had also written that if cactus was the visible spirit of earth’s hard core that generated life, the twisting arms of maguey were the green cradle of nature that made life bearable. He ended this comparison with the passage that was later inscribed on his monument: “Where the cactus and the m
aguey meet, my heart is entwined in the tangle of Mexico.”
Here, beside me now in central Mexico, the cactus and the maguey met. For an instant, in these adjoining fields, the unyielding cactus and the wild, aspiring maguey stood side by side, and in them my heart was entangled as my father’s had been. I was an American citizen and had helped protect my country in two wars, as a fighter pilot in World War II and as a combat reporter in Korea, but my spiritual home had to be here, for somehow these two plants had helped determine my character.
I now faced some two hundred yards of steeply climbing road, and the work of hiking became demanding, but I was fortified by the assurance that in a few minutes I would once more enjoy the sight that had tempted me to leave the relative comfort of the bus. At last I approached the crest of the hill where the road pursued a ledge between two reddish heights. With my eyes half closed I walked the remaining yards until I felt a fresh breeze greeting me from the other side of the pass. I stopped, opened my eyes wide, and saw before me the vision of my youth. It was the city of Toledo, the old mining city of colonial days, its monuments intact, and it was the fairest sight I had ever known.
To the north, just barely visible beyond the sloping edge of the hill that helped form the pass in which I stood, rose the gaunt and terrible pyramid of the Altomecs. Reddish brown in the sunlight, truncated sharply at the top, its tiers of steps clearly outlined against the mass, it stood mutely as it had for thirteen hundred years. It was enormous, brooding, mysterious. It spoke to me now, as it had nearly half a century before when I was a boy in its shadows, of fearful rites and death and the terror that accompanied ancient life in Mexico. It was the most westerly of the Mexican pyramids and had been erected in its primitive form sometime in the seventh century by a shadowy civilization known simply as the Drunken Builders, whose domain had been overrun in the year 1151 by one of Mexico’s most savage tribes, the Altomecs, whom even the warlike Aztecs had feared. Through the centuries the gaunt old pyramid had witnessed a succession of cultures and had undergone complete resurfacing five separate times. In various rituals during its nine hundred years of religious use, well over a million men had been sacrificed on its altars, their blood running down its steep flanks in rivulets.
There it was. There it was. With relief my eyes left the monstrous pile and looked straight down the road and over the indistinct roofs of the city to where the twin towers of the cathedral rose against the deep blue of the western sky. How subtly beautiful they were, those ancient towers built in 1640 by a Mexican bishop who had studied drawings from Spain and had vainly tried to imagine what his ancestral Salamanca had looked like and the spires of Zaragoza. The spires that he built in Toledo were not soaring pinnacles but honest, sturdy pillars of gray stone. Nestled between them, however, was the most glorious façade in all Mexico. It had been erected by another bishop, in 1760, after the mines had begun to spew out silver, and it was a masterpiece not of silvery gray stone but of marble. Its manifold niches were decorated with the statues of saints, and every aspect of it spoke of poetry and celestial music.
From the hillside overlooking the city I could not see the marvels of this façade, but from the manner in which reflected light shone from the ornaments, I knew that this gem of colonial architecture continued to shed its radiance as it had when I was a boy. Experts from New York and London had termed our cathedral “the acknowledged masterpiece of churrigueresque design.” My mother said, “If angels wanted to build a church of their own, they would have to copy ours.” My father, who did not much like churrigueresque flamboyance, replied, “They might use it as a model for a wedding cake, but hardly for a church.” In this matter I sided with my mother, and although later I was to see such awe-inspiring cathedrals as Chartres and Salisbury, I always thought that our cathedral in Toledo was the most angelic I had ever seen. If I were a Catholic, I would want my church to look like this. Flamboyant it was. Gingerbready it was. But it was also an evocation of the period when Mexico was secure, before the terrible revolutions, and before the corroding doubts of the twentieth century.
And then, off to the right, my eyes sought out what I had really come to see. From my earliest days at the mine I had known the pyramid as a monitory thing whose fierce ghostly priests might torture me if I did not behave, and I had always taken pleasure in the cathedral with its fairy-tale façade, but what had been intimately mine, a definite part of me, were the Arches of Palafox. And there they were! Entering the city from a northeasterly direction, this fantastic line of arches carried an aqueduct from springs that rose beyond the pyramid. Upon the arches depended the city’s water supply, and I recall that when I first saw these graceful curves marching over the hills I thought how providential it was that their stony legs were of varied lengths so that they exactly accommodated themselves to all the ups and downs of the rough terrain.
The arches are still the glory of Toledo, and even the most jaded visitor who might be repelled by the pyramid or alienated by a Catholic cathedral has to respond to the subtle rhythms of this aqueduct. Dominating the landscape, its top is a bold line that is absolutely flat, but there is infinite variety in the arches, which grow deep to traverse a valley or fade away to nothing as the water channel rides directly across the crest of a hill. As a boy I used to sit for hours watching the aqueduct, which old Bishop Palafox had built in 1726, and it seemed to me to have been divinely inspired not for the purpose of providing water for our city but for that of linking the pyramid and the cathedral.
I hiked down the road, keeping my eyes fixed on the slope of hill that limited my vision to the right, and with each step another of the bishop’s arches came into view until at last I could see the whole magnificent sweep of the Arches of Palafox; but it was not this spectacle that I was seeking. It was something that still lay hidden behind the hill, and I broke into a run, so eager was I to see it again.
As the hill fell away the thing I sought came into view, and I halted, in the middle of the ancient road where stout Cortés had once halted to inspect what he sought. There it was, the old, abandoned silver mine of Toledo. It stood perched against a gray-brown hill, an assembly of roofless buildings, the remnants of a place from which more than $800 million had been dug when a single dollar was worth five today.
This was the Mineral de Toledo, that legendary hole in the earth whose name had been more famous in imperial Spain than that of Lima or any other city in the New World. In those now shattered buildings I had been born and my father before me. Up there my father had resisted General Gurza, the revolutionary wild man who had come to capture the mines. The precious seed bull Soldado had been sequestered in a cave in a successful attempt to salvage the bloodline of the Palafox ranch. Up there General Porfirio Díaz, the benevolent old president, had come in 1909 two years before he fled to exile, driven out by General Gurza and his murderous gang.
The history of our mine had been the history of Mexico, and it was appalling to see it in ruins. Of our Mineral de Toledo it was said that half the wealth of Madrid had been dug by Indians from its deep mouth. Now it was empty, a scar in the earth, but how warm its vacant buildings still seemed. I could almost see, in the distance, my father marching erectly about the property, supervising the excavation of the last ore.
This was Toledo! The pyramid, the cathedral, the arches, and the mine. How deeply entwined my emotions were with this place I did not appreciate till later in life, for when my father took me with him to Alabama I quickly established myself as an ordinary American. I’d already gone to college there, then I served in the American armed forces and dated American girls, though I found none to marry. I worked for an American publication, ate Southern cooking and forgot things Mexican. But often, in moments of accidental reflection, I caught powerful reminders that I had been born a Mexican, for the sights and sounds and tastes of my childhood days were deeply ingrained. I could not think of myself as only an American, for now, as I stood just west of K. 303 at the point where all of Toledo first became visible
, every object of importance that I saw had been built by some ancestor of mine. The pyramid had been raised by one of my Indian forebears. It had been refurbished in 1507 by another ancestor. The earnest Spanish bishop who built the cathedral had had a daughter who played a role in my lineage; the later bishop who had constructed the churrigueresque façade had had a son; and the great bishop who had built the aqueduct had sired fifteen children, one of whom served as an ancestor. The Mineral, of course, had been salvaged by my American grandfather after the Civil War and had been operated in its final days by my father. I could look nowhere without seeing the handiwork of someone in my family, stretching back for more than a thousand years, tied to the harsh red soil of Mexico. For nearly sixty generations my ancestors had stood where I now stood surveying the mountain-rimmed valley of Toledo, and invariably they had found it gratifying. I recalled the letter my grandfather had written to his young wife in Richmond in 1847 during the Mexican War while resting at this spot: “Colonel Robert Lee has dispatched me on a scouting expedition to inspect the famous silver mines of Toledo, and I am now halted in sight of this famous city. My guide is a resident, Captain Palafox of the Mexican army, leading a troop of his soldiers and mine, and I must confess that looking down upon his city I observe a sight as inviting as any I have seen in my own country, and I trust that it shall be God’s will that as an outcome of this present war these two lands be joined together. When they are, I would not be unhappy to live in the area I am now overseeing, for in my opinion it could produce fine cotton.” Years later, after the defeat of the South, my grandfather would choose exile in Mexico, where he would be employed as engineer for the mine owned by this young Mexican captain who had brought him to Toledo. In time the son of that American lieutenant would marry the niece of that Mexican officer, and they would be my parents. So, by the fortunes of war and exile, I became a Palafox of Toledo as well as a Clay of Richmond.