Category: ~ New Stories of Mexico and Elsewhere

Brooding Man

Posted on by sterlingbennett

On the way up from Mexico one time and feeling the need for more connection with my ancestral roots, I stopped in Mogollon, New Mexico where my great-grandfather and grandfather worked a silver mine at the end of the 19th Century. Mogollon—pronounced the New Mexican way as Moh–gah–yówn (as in “own”)— is a ghost town with something like seventeen full-time families, down from 3,000–6,000 during the boom years. It lies in a rugged canyon tucked in between the Apache-Sitgreaves and the Gila National Forests.

I walked around alone, listening, looking for messages, signs my people might have left for me. I picked my way through the rotten timbres of miners’ cabins. I worked my way up onto the side of the canyon and looked down at the town, trying to get a sense of my history from above, brooding, sweating,and  suffering from ancestor-deficit disorder, when I saw the biggest goddamn rattle snake I have ever seen, picture books included. (I attribute this sudden outburst of miner’s language to possibly the only influence left behind by these two male ancestors.)

The snake lay coiled and twitching a few feet in front of me–just about where I was planning to plant my next step. He wasn’t as thick as my wrist, but very close to it.

A chill slid up my back, my face flushed–both, I think, from the kind of embarrassment one feels when nearly making a fatal mistake. I had almost not seen him, and so I quickly studied the ground around me, fearing I might be standing in a nest of his brothers and sisters. When I established that he and I were alone, I back up a step and took out my camera—documentation for my family tree?—and took a photo of him. The view into the ancestral canyon no longer interested me. I put the camera away and carefully picked up two long branches that, over the years, had fallen from the pines around me. And with these, like a blind man, I tapped the ground in front of me as I chose my retreat.

I was a man of my own purpose now, snapped out of my brooding and hoping to put distance between me and all of them–the snakes, as well as my mute ancestors. The Fathers who left no traces.

I think something  like Coincidence–coiled and impersonal–had chosen to intervene, perhaps to give me a signal that I should wake up and pay attention to where I was going, get along with my life, and stop moping around on the sides of hot wet canyons, where I didn’t belong any more than my grandfather and his father had, back then, at the turn of century. In the time of silver, and no knowledge of me.

I Am Supporting My Wife Candelaria

Posted on by sterlingbennett

A few days ago, I wrote the following: “There is a little man, who was surely a much bigger man when he was young, who stands in an alley in the center of Guanajuato, selling little bags of delicious calabacitas, small round squash, that taste, in my opinion, like corn on the cob. Only after years have I begun buying the squash from him. I suppose because of the way he looks. I would say he is about three feet tall, and that is because he is bent over, his torso parallel to the ground. He is dressed as the very poor are dressed: clean, worn, more than modest. I am not even sure he can see, because he never looks up, or out from under his straw hat. Nor does he move around; it is always the same posture. Bent over, announcing his wares over and over, in a kind of singing croak, whenever he senses someone passing. I do not know his name. I do not know his history. I think he is too old to cultivate and harvest what he sells. So, someone must supply him with his produce: squash and, I think, sometimes, garlic. And then set him up at his spot, where he stands, I think, for most of the day. He has a history, and a story, perhaps grandchildren and great-grandchildren. He has surely loved and been loved. And I know nothing about it.”

Today, I stopped a bought five small round zucchini squash from him. I asked him his name. He mumbled something. I asked him two or three times more. My writing partner, who is Mexican, stood beside me, also trying to understand. I asked the man his age. “Ninety-five,” he said. “I’m supporting my wife Candelaria.” We finally understood his name. “Apolinar Mesa,” he said, patiently, repeating each time more clearly the information I was asking for. And each time, he would add, “I’m supporting my wife Candelaria.”

I was bent over, as I talked to him. His seemed to have different colored stones in his eyes. It wasn’t clear to me that he could see, although he appeared to be looking right into my eyes. I walked through the alley (callejón) again a few hours later. The shadow where he had been standing had disappeared, and he was also no longer there.

Barbara Davoli, a friend and Facebook friend commented as follows:

“What a great story about Apolinar. My neighbor and I were just talking about him a few days ago. I was thinking of trying to sell the buckets of limones that fall from my tree daily, and he came to mind. According to my neighbor, he really does support his wife and himself by selling these veggies. He has several children here in Guanajuato — a few are professors at the university — who want him to move in with them. But he refuses — he prefers to stay in his home with his wife and continue to support her as he has done his whole life.”

Heie Boles’s Puppet Show

Posted on by sterlingbennett

Last night, at the Teatro Cervantes, in Guanajuato, Gto., Mexico, I had the extraordinary experience of watching three generations of puppeteers from one family–el Teatro de pájaros–present the “La flauta mágica (Magic Flute)” by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Emanuel Schikaneder.

Heie Boles’s puppet story begins many years after the Second World War when, in her fifties, she mounted props and equipment on her old bicycle and puppet-staged Grimm’s fairy tales in the pedestrian areas of German cities. For children, it was often new material; for adults, a chance to re-live an important part of their childhood.

Last night, I caught a glimpse of her and Dan, sitting in the audience. She had already done her work (Concept, Text, and Direction) and now watched her daughter Ester Boles and two grandchildren, Antar Trejo and Danae Trejo– along with their colleague Artemio Rovinski–make the puppets moves in ways I could not begin to explain. The figures swooped and dipped and matched their gestures in the subtlest ways with the speech spoken through them. I know Ester, Antar, and Danae, but their spoken parts were so delightfully professional and animated that I did not think to try to recognize their individual voices. Heie sprinkled German exclamations here and there throughout Mozart’s perfect Spanish, to the laughter of German speakers in the audience.

Mozart’s music was live and played by the Capella Guanajuantensis, which included Djamilia Rovinskaia (Barock violin and viola), José Suárez (clavichord), and Antar and Danae’s father Cuauhtémoc Trejo (Barock transverse flute. Cuauhtémoc enjoys the distinction of being entrusted to play Emperor Maximilian’s surviving Claude Laurent glass flute)—three gentle and gifted musicians, who seemed to enjoy the puppets just as much as I did.

For me, it was all a play within a play, something like Russian dolls, with so much cross-cultural history, so much family history, so many layers of talent and dedication—the extraordinary thing that is a family, in all its parts and pieces, creating a work of art together, for the enjoyment of the larger community.

Again—and for this I thank the whole family—I began asking the old question: What is it about puppets? I thought again of Heinrich von Kleist’s essay “Über das Marionettentheater” (Regarding Puppet Theater, 1810) and the theory that human actors and dancers cannot achieve the grace of the puppet that responds to its center of gravity, or Schwerpunkt, in this case the central pole’s movements (managed by Ester, Danae, Antar, and Artemio)–to which the limbs respond.  And, behind them all, Heie Boles.

To my mind, the whole performance had to do with Grace, a concept we don’t talk very much about anymore. I’m not even sure how to define this word, except that it has to do with a moment full of giving, modesty, great and understated talent, and gentleness, where the heart sighs as a child’s might and our lips form a smile.

Nailed to Reality

Posted on by sterlingbennett

There is a theory circulating, around me mainly, that Mexican writers–because of their national history, the church, the social structure, and their mothers–see reading their writing in public as the kind of adventure that can have no good ending. In all my considerable humility, I believe this is because, for Mexican writers, the distance between fiction and reality is not great enough. As if one were nailed to the other, and impossible to pry apart.

The writers I have seen at the local salon either don’t read at all or read so quickly that one can’t absorb what they’re saying. A cloud of anxiety rises around them and then streams out over their listeners like fog from dry ice.

My friend the fiction writer teaches Theology at the local university. He is a very good writer, but he will not read for others. That is, I suspect, partly because he has a built-in safety mechanism which keeps him from showing parts of himself that are not perfect. Comedy, irony, and the ridiculous are all too dangerous, even when only directed at others. He takes Goethe’s famous line from Faust I, Prologue in Heaven, most seriously: Es irrt der Mensch solang’ er strebt. Man errs however much he strives.

Mexican writers know instinctively that something like fiction, or irony, can be taken literally. For example, my friend wrote a story about a conversation with the Devil. When he read it to his wife, she looked at him with astonishment.

“Was that this morning?” she asked.

He thought she was referring to his writing session with his French writer friend. She meant, it turned out, an actual conversation with that lisping cloven-hoofed personage she would never invite to her house for all the reasons learned from the priests who have taken her confessions over the years.

After lunch, while washing the dishes with her daughter, she mentioned, “Your father had a conversation with the Devil.” The daughter, a lovely intelligent creature, assumed her mother was referring to her former boyfriend.

My friend published the story “A Conversation with the Devil” in a local literary journal, bowing to pressure from his French friend. Rather than use his own name, he chose F. Scott Fitzgerald Cruz as his nom de plume–and was immediately recognized by half of the city’s bureaucrats, municipal and ecclesiastical.

The results came quickly. The Federal Commission of Electricity moved him up into a consumer category no longer eligible for government subsidization. His wife and daughter, at communion, each received three red Cheerios on their tongues, instead of the holy wafer. When he went to pay his predial, his property tax, they directed him to a different window, one that had bars on it, as if the bars might offer better protection for the person waiting on him. Half of those who rented his several business properties began to pay their rent more than ten days late. The men who passed his house regularly in the morning, calling “Gaaaassss!” for natural gas and “Aawaa Ciel,” for water, which is a product of the Coca Cola Company, no longer came by, and his wife had to call the companies and demand delivery. Even then, the water garrafones and the gas tanques leaked, spilling water on their floor tiles and seeping gas into the family lungs. When he gave up his briefcase at the central university library, where he went to write, the receptionist and the guard, who accepted his briefcase for a numbered tab in return, gingerly examined the item, as if it might explode or have the capability to fly around over the city at night.

When I learned about the story, the fictional conversation with the Devil, I suggested he read it at the local literary salon. He looked at me very seriously and said, “You know the iron cages at the top corners of the Alhóndiga, where they hung the heads of Allende and others, rebels against the Spanish, and let them rot for years?”

I nodded.

“Well, that’s why they do it,” he said, as if he were talking of just yesterday.

I nodded again, as if I understood.

I told a friend of mine, who has written many books in Northern California, about my Mexican writer friend. I told him about the conversation with the Diablo, and that it was a fine piece of writing that should be published in the States. My California writer friend asked for a copy. My friend sent the story north, but then, after a week of consideration, asked that it be returned, since he feared that it might affect his visa status.

Hoping to help finalize things–move them along, so to speak, I mentioned, in a pique of disappointment, that the National Security Agency had probably already detected the word “devil” in the email transmission. It was, after all, a country where at least 40% of the people followed an orthodox religious conservatism. Perhaps a higher percentage in the intelligence agencies. And those people were probably sniff-sensitive to something like conversation with the Devil, and detected either the smell of heresy or a whiff of conspiracy.

That was several Mondays ago. Monday morning is when he and his French friend write at the café that has the best coffee in Central Mexico. His email transmissions have ceased, I learned from the Frenchman. Telephone calls go unanswered. He does not show up at the café. And I do not think he will be coming to the next literary salon reading, scheduled for a week from today.

Any good Mexican publisher who reads this report should consider sending men in black, at night, with flash lights, to find the manuscript. And take it. Out of his hands, so to speak. They should publish it, change his name entirely and, here and there, elements of his style, to protect him from recognition. Mexico’s federal attorney general will have to work out ahead of time the mechanics of full protection from any foreign or domestic governmental or ecclesiastical agency, observing the Constitution’s strict reaffirmation of the co-existence of fiction and reality. In this way, all of us will be able to read one of Mexico’s great writers. Whoever that may actually be.

Nut Cake

Posted on by sterlingbennett

We sat in the Café Zopilote Mojado. How shall I translate it? The Café Wet Buzzard? The four of us, his wife and mine, sipping cappuccinos and nibbling at a rich, perfect flan. I had also ordered pastel de nuez. Nut cake. My friend, an esteemed veterinarian, said, “You ordered nut cake?” He frowned in bewilderment. “But you don’t even know what kind of nuts.” My friend is cursed with a literal mind, and by a need for certainty.

“No, I don’t know what kind of nuts they are,” I admitted, inviting his skepticism. I know my friend, and I was glad to diddle with his need for verifiable information. I watched him, and took the measure of his doubt.

“Aren’t you going to ask them?” he smiled. He was referring to the two young women who were waiting on us and preparing the food.

“I doubt they know what kind of nuts they are,” I said. His look of bewilderment grew. There was a short pause, while he shook his head.

“You don’t care what kind of nuts they are?” he asked, as if we were getting to something about my character. Like a missing gene. I said I didn’t care, I would accept whatever they brought me.

Eventually, the cake came. Along with my second cappuccino – a luxury I seldom allow myself. I spread out the accompanying whipped cream with my fork, then cut into the cake. There were no discernible nuts. There were many very small dark flakes of something slightly larger than the flour. The cake went down easily. I was quite happy.

“You didn’t get any nuts,” my friend observed.

I nodded, and added that I also didn’t know what kind of nuts I didn’t get. His wife and mine, meanwhile, were having a different kind of conversation. They were talking about how they had met us, the men. He had been studying at the University of California, Davis. They had found each other in a sociology class. Their conversation caught my friend’s attention, and he joined in. He had done post-doctoral studies in literature and sociology in order, he said, to make himself more attractive to women. At that point, our wives smiled, erected a gentle invisible wall, and resumed their own conversation.

He turned back to me. “To snare more beauties,” he said, with a wink and an understood jab-jab in the ribs. His wife clearly had been a beauty and still was in her sixties.

“I had trouble in the literature class,” he said. “But I loved literary criticism.” I had helped him read some Spanish headlines in the Mexican political weekly Proceso earlier in the afternoon. He had thrown up his hands at the first unfamiliar word he came across.

“It’s the same problem I had with poetry, only worse,” he said, referring to the Spanish. “But I loved symbolism,” he said.

I thought about that now. He loved symbolism, but not vagueness, and not any kind of delay in understanding, not puzzling out meaning, whether in poems, or articles in Proceso. I could not resist my lower nature. I said, when I had his attention, “According to the great German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, a symbol changes a phenomenon (Erscheinung) into an idea (Idee), the idea into an image (Bild), so that the idea in the image remains always active and unapproachable, and, though expressed in all languages, including art, can not be put into words. Erscheinung, Idee, Bild.” This was something I had learned in graduate school, and I wasn’t sure I understood it any better now, as I said it, than I had then.

My friend looked at me as if I had just denied the existence of gravity.

“A symbol stands for something else,” he said.

“That’s allegory – the direct knowledge of what is meant. But what we have here – the nuts – is nothing more than simulation.”

He looked at me, uncomprehending, resisting what I had said, but also with sympathy – for a deficiency in me only a veterinarian could sense.

I continued. “If there had been nuts, instead of merely dark flakes, they could have stood for something, like for the essential nature of this cake. That would have been allegory. Nuts stand for essence.”

I was fairly impressed by my discourse, so I continued. “You know, like when Melville refers to the wild watery loneliness of Starbuck’s life. Wild watery loneliness stands for ocean stands for Starbuck’s life. Double allegory,” I observed matter-of-factly.”

At that point, not quite sure about what I had just said, I took a little more whipped cream on my fork, cut down on the cake, lifted the morsel, popped it into my mouth, and slowly chewed. I took a sip of cappuccino.

“They’re symbolic!” my friend said, with a fierce smirk of certainty. “The flakes are symbolic.”

I smiled at him indulgently and did not pursue the matter. He was a man cursed with a literal mind, and nothing Goethe, Melville, or I could say was going to change anything. He had snared his beauty, he was still with her, he had a successful veterinary practice – and he knew a symbol when he saw one.

When he died suddenly a year later, from an unexplained and permanent drop in blood pressure, three unaccounted for older women showed up at his graveside memorial. They were dressed in fashionable black and, like his wife, were enduring beauties. All three stayed in the background, but mixed graciously, when the occasion arose.

My friend’s college roommate, a man of many chins, bathed in a pallbearer’s sweat, explained in muttered confidentiality who the women were. I watched them as the minister spoke inaccuracies and other well-deserved praise about my friend. I could not take my eyes off the women. How had he done it? What explained this cadre of attractive women that had come to mourn him? There was some explanation, some cohesion of significance that hung just at the edge of my grasp. For some reason, I recalled the conversation mentioned earlier. Us sipping cappuccinos in the Zopilote Mojado, The Wet Buzzard. And now I did not know whether I stood before symbol, or an allegory. All I could think, as I watched his casket sink down out of sight, and what I heard now in my mind, was that he had been right about the nut cake, and that it had represented something more than just nut cake. But beyond that, I could take it no farther, other than to say that he was a man who, in the end, had been blessed with a literal mind, and had represented something I understood but could not express. Least of all in words.

The Bishop and The Turkey Egg

Posted on by sterlingbennett

My friend – the ubiquitous writing partner you’ve heard about – is proof of God’s existence.

This is what people say: That people in your life are proof of God’s existence. This is when I say my own god – small g – is the god of the turkey egg.

A turkey egg is a lovely thing. A warm sand color, with brown specks. A couple of weeks ago, I ate a turkey egg for breakfast. The yoke was as large as two chicken yokes. The white was a little looser. The taste was not discernibly different.

That turkey egg proved the existence of God, capital G.

This is what people say. That is how believers argue. Everything bites or – in this case, pecks – at the tail of everything else. My shoe, for example, proves the existence of God. Anything I say or do proves the existence of God. The same is true, apparently, of everyone else on earth. We are talking about three, four, five, maybe six billion people. Each one is the proof of God’s existence.

This is what people say.

What we have here is a closed system of argumentation. God exists because he – or, as some say, she – exists. The question of God’s existence is exempt from all analysis. Logic and belief in God are mutually exclusive. God-believers use this circular argumentation to counter logic.

For example, logic says there is no proof that God exists. God-believers answer, as usual, You are proof that God exists. This is a clever but avoids the point. My existence, in fact, proves nothing about God’s existence, unless it is assumed – never proven, of course – that God created me.

Charles Darwin might comment: Evolution created you. Perhaps it created your God as well – although there is no evidence of the latter and overwhelming evidence of the former.

Sigmund Freud, in his little book, “Das Unbehagen in der Kultur,” or as we know it, ”Civilization and Its Discontents,” postulates that humans suffer a need for dependency. On the deepest level, they want a father who will protect them from dangers, calamities, disease, and – most especially – from uncertainty.

This last affliction is the most grievous one. Facing uncertainty requires self-reliance and intelligence and courage. It is not easy to live, let alone die, with uncertainty.

Two paths extend from this point, one could argue. The rule of human law, on the one hand; and the rule of laws ascribed to God, on the other. The latter are, of course, often formulated by and to the advantage of groups of men who claim access to and understanding of God’s intentions.

The path of human law I would like to think of as the rule of good moral codes, formulated over time by wise leaders. The Old and New Testaments are filled with moral teachings. Generally, as enunciated by thinkers from Kant to Martin Luther, the best of them, the good ones, say, “Treat others as you would want to be treated.” Except that Kant made an exception regarding Africans, as Luther did for Jews.

In a reasonable society, moral codes would be based on this golden rule and moral reasoning would guide all human affairs. Reason would be the basis for deciding what is just and good. Reason would allow a conclusion that just laws create the good life. Qualities like generosity, kindness, innocent until proven guilty, and habeas corpus would protect people from tyranny that is based on stolen power or stolen legitimacy.

A king who says, I am the law, is an example of stolen or assumed legitimacy, that is, without the permission of the people. A high priest or a senator or a Congressman who says, God’s law is the only law, is nothing more than a small king claiming a legitimacy which is not supported by reason – that which is good and just – nor by the will of the community.

When Descartes wrote, cogitat ergo sum – I think, therefore I am, in my opinion he undermined all kings and tyrants, all fundamentalists, and many believers. Descartes freed men and women from the need for dependence on a father figure who decides for us whether we exist or not. If a person thinks, in the sense of using logic (cogitat), he or she does not say, God exists, or, Reason has nothing to say about the existence of God, or, The priest knows better than I.

Belief in God, then, requires the suspension of reason.

Fine, I can say, I will suspend reason, keep it in a little box, and open this other little box and believe in anything I want to, in order to satisfy my need for certainty. I will maintain that there is Rana Gigantesca, a Giant Frog, who will save me from disease, hunger, war and natural extinction. This supernatural being will offer me certainty in an uncertain world.

This attitude would be fine until I started persecuting others who did not believe in my giant frog. When I started burning these non-believers at the stake or taking their children’s heads off with my sword or with my cluster bombs, I would be following the worst consequences of belief. I would be substituting a murderous assumed legitimacy for the rule of reason and for good moral codes such as fraternity, equality, and liberty. Not to mention generosity, respect for all living things and – the greatest of these – tolerance toward others.

Not long ago, a woman – Katharine Jefferts-Shori, was ordained a bishop in the Episcopalian Church. She is the first woman bishop elected in the past 500 years. A well-known high priest of evangelical fundamentalists and self-anointed spokesperson for God’s intentions, sputtered in consternation, while being interviewed on the matter.

The woman bishop, he protested, had said that Jesus is our mother, and that Jesus is not the only way to God.

But I say, by saying these things, Bishop Jefferts-Shori allows the two paths to co-exist: the rule of good moral codes and rule of faith in the existence of God. The god she talks about is no longer the domineering stern protecting Freudian father. Rather she is the comforting and tolerant mother. The concept of Christ as mother opens the door simultaneously to both tolerance and belief. The new bishop was advocating more than one path to well-being and the good life.

The evangelist responded with undisguised amazement. He giggled in derision. He conceded something to logic and immediately constructed an analogy. The path to God, he said, is like landing a small plane on a fifty-foot runway. There is only one way to do it, so that you land safely.

Of course, within the logic of his metaphor, what he says is true. There is only one way to land safely on a fifty-foot runway, and that is with great skill and unusual amounts of luck.

Alas, the male evangelist’s assumed legitimacy as paternal spokesperson for God is not enough make a good analogy out of a bad one. Just by saying there is only one way to have faith does not make it true.

I accept the little box Bishop Jefferts-Shori wants to open, and I like the vision she gives of her god or giant frog as one of generosity and tolerance.

As for myself, I will continue to eat turkey eggs when they become available. I will continue to marvel at the beauty of their evolution, at the soft shimmering luminescence of their sand-colored shells with their brown flecks. Though they prove nothing beyond the existence of themselves, they are at least laid by the mother of the species, and that – in and of itself – I find comforting in this uncertain world.