Heavens on Earth Page 3

  I will proceed to read the manuscript and will begin with my transcription of the two epigraphs Estela uses to introduce the text:

  I thank God there are no free schools

  nor printing, and I hope we shall not have them these

  hundred years, for learning has

  brought disobedience and heresy and sects

  into the world and printing has divulged them

  and libels against the best government.

  God keep us from both.

  The first epigraph was attributed to the Governor of Virginia, Sir William Berkeley. I greatly object to her use of this because these lines are not relevant to the text she translated, despite the fact that it was written in the past, in the unchanging flow of the time of History. But I’ve transcribed it here anyway so that the echo of the joke might some day reach the ear of another member of our colony, as it has mine.

  On the other hand, I have no objection whatsoever to the second epigraph:

  Would that Mexico be a shared homeland and inn;

  Treasury of Spain, center of the great world;

  Sicily in its crops, and in pleasant

  Mild summer its temperate region.

  Venice in plan; in high

  architecture Greece; a second

  Corinth in jewels; in profound knowledge,

  Paris, and Rome in sacred religion.

  Another New Cairo in grandeur;

  curious China, in trade; in medicine

  Alexandria; in rights, Zaragoza.

  Imitate many in mortal beauty;

  and be unique, immortal wanderer

  Smyrna; that Homer might enjoy

  in Balbuena.

  This was signed by Don Lorenzo Ugarte de los Ríos, Chief Constable of the Inquisition in Nueva España. It seems to me that one might divine a black humor in this selection.

  The next page of the manuscript, following the epigraphs, begins with a sort of confession by Estela, which is then followed by the words of Hernando de Rivas. I’ll divide the manuscript into cestos, respecting the order begun by Estela. Each voice will have its own cesto and I’ll close each when it’s the next one’s turn, whether it be Estela, Hernando, or myself. As is my custom, I’ll open and close each cesto with a phrase in Esperanto, my “Open Sesame” for the Center for Research.

  These clarifications made, I’ll begin transcribing Estela’s text and then continue with the text written by the Indian, Hernando de Rivas.

  I’ll now close this section from the colony of survivors called L’Atlàntide, in this luminous year without name or number, more than one hundred years after the disappearance of natural life on earth (no one knows whether it’s exactly 213 or some other number because we’re not allowed to count).

  Slosos keston de Learo

  EKFLOROS KESTON DE ESTELINO

  In order to explain my relationship to the text, I’m including a preface or introduction, in my own words, to my translation of the sixteenth-century manuscript signed by Hernando de Rivas, alumnus of the Real Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco. I want to explain why in the hell something that came to me by chance is so important and why I set out to re-write it. I’m doing this for myself, no one else. It is so important to me because in a way it’s mine—it’s part of my history, part of my being, part of my birthright. It belongs as much to my present as to my past. I’m not sure how to best put it. It’s important to me because…I’m afraid that before I begin translating, I’m going to have to explain a few things.

  But first, as a preamble to my explanation as to why Hernando’s manuscript is so important to me, I’m going to describe a sequence of images I’ve spliced together in what might be considered a sort of video clip in the form of a disjointed series of images commonly seen in today’s television and bad movies.

  The video clip begins with a scene that actually happened in my childhood; however, now I’m viewing it as a spectator, as if I weren’t part of it. The protagonists are a grandmother and granddaughter. First, I’ll describe the location of the scene because, rather than taking place in a typical household setting, like the kitchen or living room, this scene takes place in the natural herbal essence laboratory for the pharmaceutical industry owned by the grandmother. The home-based laboratory is of domestic proportions, about the size of a house. You enter the laboratory through a wide, dark passageway, both sides of which are lined with cardboard drums that contain dried herbs and powders, shiny metal canisters of alcohol, and all the raw materials used to make the pharmaceutical products she sold. A floor-to-ceiling wooden bookshelf, full of large glass demijohns containing transparent, translucent, and dark-brown liquids is in the middle of the laboratory. (The smell of the lab is indescribable. Rather than being unpleasant, it was more like an overly intense freshness that could quickly become sickening. Not for me though because I always loved being with my grandmother and would happily spend all the time possible helping her with her work. I used to help her filter the substances in the laboratory, or fill tamales, or make chocolate by hand in the kitchen for the family, or count crochet stitches. This is not part of the video clip, but remembering the laboratory reminded me of it. No other place smells like it—it was a mixture of valerian root, fresh herbs, and alcohol. I can still smell it to this day).

  Facing her liquid library (the wall that was full of large demijohns) and at the foot of the tall windows that look out into the courtyard where sacks of herbs lay, there are metal drums that contain the liquid preparations that are filtered drop by drop into the mouths of the demijohns that are always dying of thirst because the drops fall ever so slowly. A large iron table covered with a single piece of granite stands in the center of the laboratory and a set of scales and a hand-pump (that’s used to empty the large demijohns) sit at the foot of the table.

  The grandmother and granddaughter talk while the former removes a paper filter from the funnel, over which the tap of one of the metallic drums drips, and replaces it with a new one. Earlier in the scene, as they do every month, the grandmother and the granddaughter had worked together to fold the large sheets of white filter paper into pleated fans, which they first cut with a knife into perfectly sized squares. The grandmother places these paper fans into the funnels; the former molding themselves to the shape of the latter as the filtered substances drip from the taps of the metal drums into large demijohns like the ones on the bookshelf. When the demijohns are full, the grandmother labels them with the name of the extract contained within.

  My young life was marked by all the things inside my grandmother’s laboratory, Velásquez Canseco, which takes its name from the two last names of my grandfather who’s been dead almost twenty years now. I can still clearly see the labels, pens, bills of sale, and the old typewriter on which she typed them, as well as the paper filters and large glass demijohns that held the secrets made in the laboratory. And I remember my seemingly innate attraction to the mysteries of the substances that were made using seeds, almonds, and hazelnuts, as well as all types of herbs, including chamomile and alfalfa. As I recall, the herbs occasionally arrived full of slimy snails that we grandchildren loved to play with and that our grandmother valiantly battled against in order to keep them away from her rose bushes.

  In the scene I’ve been describing, the grandmother and granddaughter are talking in the laboratory while the grandmother works with the filters and large demijohns when the subject of a hand cream that just arrived on the the market comes up. It’s called Nivea and it comes in a blue tin with the name written in white letters across the lid that looks like the tin of the Crema Teatrical the grandmother has used since time immemorial.

  “You shouldn’t use Nivea,” the grandmother says disapprovingly to the granddaughter. “Never.”

  “It makes your hands soft, Abue.”

  “It might make them soft, but it has glycerin and glycerin darkens the skin. Your hands will turn brown.”

  It darkens them? Turns them brown? I didn’t understand what she was gettin
g at. “It darkens them, it darkens them,” I kept repeating to myself. I didn’t see the problem. When we actually had this conversation, many years before, we children were on school vacation. It was two days after we had arrived, toasted and black as nightafter having spent three weeks in Acapulco. What did it matter if glycerin darkened our hands since we had already “darkened” our entire bodies with the exception of our bottoms and a strip across our chests, two ridiculous white patches of skin that were visible only under the spray of the shower?

  As a child I never dared talk back to my grandmother when she used that severe, judgmental tone. Nor could I have understood that her comment—unjustifiable in any situation—was a bad habit left over from her own childhood. My grandmother was born and raised close to Comalcalco, Tabasco, and many of her relatives lived in Chiapas. I didn’t know the Chiapas relatives, but as a child I tasted many of the foods they used to send from one of their ranches in Pichucalco. I remember fondly the cheese from Chiapas, which was delicious when she mixed it into her fideo soup. By itself, however, the flavor was too strong for my taste even though my grandmother used it to make quesadillas in her special way, putting them on the comal at low heat so they were crisp and crunchy like tostadillas. One of these days I’ll be brave enough to make them myself and see how they taste. Now you can buy the Chiapas cheese almost anywhere, but when I was young it would arrive in Mexico City almost like contraband. Back then, you couldn’t find it at the grocer’s or in the supermarket, and you could only occasionally find it at one of the weekly mercados. It was shaped like the Dutch cheese ball (which is what we used to call aged Gouda when I was a child) that the cousins from Chetumal used to send to my grandmother. Those of us who live in the capital like to say that Chiapas is as far away from Mexico City as Holland is. But even though now you can easily find the Chiapas cheese locally, I never buy it. I prefer to keep it safe in my memory—a precious relic of my childhood—as if it were a part of my grandmother and therefore untouchable. I think the only time I was brave enough to buy some of the ingredients that she would use in her kitchen (for celebrations under any pretext) was a few months ago at the Villahermosa market where I bought a large, smoked freshwater gar; pickled oysters in diamond-shaped glass bottles; and something called mameyes. But these mameyes were different from the mameye fruit that is hard, round as a ball with a rough rind, an enormous bumpy pit, and hard, firm flesh. It’s an incomparably delicious fruit whose flavor evokes the taste of peach, a bit of mango, a tiny bit of piñon, and another tiny bit of pear. I also bought fresh nances and sweetened cocoplums. The latter are black and so cloyingly sweet that you only want to eat one and really just to get to the center of the pit for the rosy, round almond that is crunchy and hollow, and whose taste is both unusual and incredibly delicious. A friend who went to Cumaná, Venezuela, for a conference told me that the Venezuelans make a kind of cocoplum nougat in which the seeds and flesh are mixed together. But I didn’t find any because it wasn’t the right season.

  From Villahermosa I also brought back a couple of kilos of chinines (a huge fruit that is a distant cousin to the avocado, but has a white fibrous flesh that’s a bit too sweet) and three dozen live crabs tied together with the fibers of a banana leaf and packed in a cardboard box that I carried by its corded handle and put at my feet on the plane. Crabs are so stinky that it’s no exaggeration to say that the stench is unbearable. When the flight attendant was trying to figure out what the hell smelled so bad—or which inconsiderate mother was carrying a dirty diaper in her purse—she passed by and didn’t suspect me with my wouldn’t-hurt-a-fly look. In order to maintain my feigned innocence vis-à-vis the “stinky diaper,” I kept my reading glasses on and didn’t take my eyes off my book the entire trip, except when the flight attendant passed by I would briefly raise my eyes from what I was reading, smile at her, and—hypocrite that I was—wave my hand in front of my nose so that she’d know that the inconsiderate person’s crime was bothering me too (even though we were one and the same). As soon as I got home, I threw the crabs into the bathtub of water I had left to rest so the chlorine would evaporate. The following weekend I invited a few friends to share in the delights of my gastronomic purchases. We prepared an unforgettable feast even though for me it was also bittersweet because nothing tasted the same without my grandmother. The one thing that was the same, however, was the sound of the crabs clawing the inside of the large metal tamalera as they were trying to escape while they were being steamed alive.

  Cooking crabs is a cruel process. The first thing you do is to throw the live animals into the pot and then you have to rope someone into preparing them. Whoever has the job of pulling the flesh out of the thin legs and then stuffing the “head” of the animal with the leg meat will suffer almost as much as the crab did. The flesh attached to the cartilage of the crab’s thin legs has a more delicate flavor than the fat claws (known as the teeth or grinders). The grinders are eaten separately and are not braised, but simply boiled in salted water. If the crab is fresh, the boiled grinders are deliciously aromatic and don’t need any seasoning. You shouldn’t have to add any herbs or even a squeeze of lemon before eating them. In fact, lemon on the claw of the fresh crab is a gastronomic crime.

  Before being stuffed into the head, the flesh taken from the thin legs is sautéed with onion, garlic, capers, aromatic herbs, pepper, and the juice of the liquid used to clean the heads after the innards are removed. So where does the cruelty come in? That which pertains to the crabs is perfectly clear—they’re cooked alive. And the person who prepares them suffers with the work involved in extracting the flesh from the thin legs, which requires a rolling pin and patience. The thin legs first have to be cracked with a rolling pin and then the pieces of shell have to be painstakingly removed from the flesh until it’s free of any remnants. Additional suffering comes by way of the olfactory sense—the smell is awful. This makes the entire process laborious because everyone involved has to endure that stench for hours. The finished dish, however, is exquisite and it seems that the odor of the live crab, which is renewed by the crushing, remains in the shell once the dish is completed.

  Back to the video clip: the grandmother, in the white coat she wore to work in the laboratory, and the granddaughter, in pants and a shirt, are talking, faithfully replaying a scene from my childhood. Suddenly, an enormous blue tin with Nivea Cream in white letters falls between them. It becomes a blue strip that divides and splatters them with huge blue splotches. On the grandmother’s side the blue splatters turn white; on the granddaughter’s side, they turn dark brown. The white splashes on the grandmother’s side transform into parasols under which fair-skinned women walk, most of whom are dressed in fitted, embroidered silks and brocades. Some wear veils over their faces and bright white gloves to protect their skin. Thus, white from head-to-toe, the women are even more dazzlingly beautiful.

  The camera angle widens as the enormous blue jar suddenly falls, allowing us to see the houses next to the sidewalks that are elevated almost half a meter above street level. Children chase each other around and young men in hats pass by. Older women, dressed in deep mourning, sit in their rocking chairs next to the doors of their houses, embroidering or crocheting as the afternoon fades. From time to time they acknowledge the passersby, greet the young people, nod their heads to some of the young men, and talk among themselves in a leisurely, unhurried manner. None of the women in the rocking chairs are Indian, and none of the Indians walk on the sidewalk with the men and women described above. The Indians walk on the street, which is not paved with asphalt or stone, but is rather just a dirt road, made of a “brown” mud the same color as those who walk on it.

  A heavy rain, or tropical storm, suddenly lets loose. To say it’s pouring rain is not an exaggeration or a cliché, but rather describes the situation perfectly. The streets are flooded with rain. The women, their rocking chairs, and the children quickly go inside the houses. The Indians lift the white passersby onto their shoulders so that the ele
gant people won’t get their feet wet, so they won’t get covered with the muddy water that runs like a river through the streets. In the midst of running through the rain under their burdens, the Indians transform into mules; as the torrent of water becomes even heavier, they turn into enormous, almost monstrous, animals better equipped than mules to carry their loads; and then, as the water streaming by the houses becomes a wide, roaring, brown river, they morph into functional machines that transport smiling and elegantly dressed passengers. The beautiful white women maintain their composure and keep hold of their little veiled hats, gloves, and white woolen spats; likewise, the white men hold onto their hats, and their linen suits and silky smooth cotton cravats remain unwrinkled.

  The camera angle widens further and the screen is once again split in two—the grandmother on one side and the granddaughter on the other are still involved in their conversation. On the granddaughter’s side, the brown splatters of cream take the form of semi-nude sunbathers, toasted brown and dancing around a bonfire on the beach. Some of them are blonde, some are brunette, and others have black or white hair, but both the men and women wear their hair long so those who have shirts on could pass for either gender. Because their bodies are almost androgynous, burnt by the sun, turned leathery by the wind, and hardened by exercise, they’re free of any gender distinction whatsoever. The black foam of the waves that break on the beach is as dark as the night. Suddenly, out of nowhere, the waves join in the dance of the “savage” naked men and women who wear feathers on their arms, heads, and ankles and whose skin is painted with brilliantly colored stripes. Meanwhile, on the grandmother’s side, under a harsh rain, the white people continue riding on the backs of the Indian-machines above the tempestuous river that the street has turned into, smiling cheerfully as if everything were peace and joy across the face of the earth.