Carlos Fuentes - The Crystal Frontier

but the distance, their ignorance of the land and the people are nothing compared with the hunger, the thirst, the exposure, the nights without cover, the days without shade, their bodies more and more naked, darker, until the fifteen Spaniards left can’t be told from the Pueblos, the Alabamas, and the Apaches:

only the black servant, Estebanico, is darker than the others, but his dreams are luminous, golden, he sees the cities of gold in the distance while Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca looks at himself in the mirror of his memory and tries to see himself reflected there as the hidalgo he was, the Spanish gentleman he no longer is; the only mirror of his person are the Indians he finds, he has become identical to them, but he misses the chance to be one of them, he is equal to them but does not understand the opportunity he has to be the only Spaniard who could understand the Indians and translate their souls into Spanish:

Cabeza de Vaca cannot understand a history of wind, an endless migratory chronicle that takes the Indian from the hot hunt of the plains to the tepee of the snows, from the tanned and naked body of summer to the body wrapped in blankets and skins of winter,

he does not want to rule over this world; nomadism attracts him but he denies it because here no one moves to conquer but simply to survive,

he does not understand the Indians, the Indians don’t understand him: they see the Spaniards as shamans, witch doctors, sorcerers, and Cabeza de Vaca acts out the only role assigned him, he becomes a cut-rate medicine man, he cures by means of suction, blowing of breath, laying on of hands, Our Fathers, and abundant signs of the cross,

but in reality he fights, horrified, against the loss, layer by layer, of the skin and clothes of his European soul, he clings to it, pays no heed to the advice of his internal voice: God brought us naked to know men identical to ourselves in their nakedness …

which God? Cabeza de Vaca wanders the corridors and bedrooms of the great houses of the Pueblos, sees a god he doesn’t recognize fleeing from floor to floor up hand ladders that at night it pulls up in order to isolate itself as it pleases from the moon, death, the stranger…

eight years of wandering, of involuntary pilgrimage, until he finds the compass of the río grande, río bravo and takes again the road from Chihuahua to Sinaloa and the Pacific and inland to Mexico City, where he and his comrades are received as heroes by Viceroy Mendoza and the conquistador Cortés:

only four survivors are left of the four hundred who departed Sanlúcar for Florida — Cabeza de Vaca, Andrés Dorantes, Alonso del Castillo Maldonado, and the black servant, Estebanico:

they are celebrated, they are questioned: where did you go,

what did you see, what do you promise?

Cabeza de Vaca, the two Spaniards, and the black tell not what they saw but what they dreamed,

they were saved to tell a mirage,

they were given turquoises and sumptuous skins torn from the backs of the strange gray cattle of the plains, the buffalo, they glimpsed the seven cities of gold of Cibola,

they heard word of the incalculable wealth of Quivira, they propagate the illusion of Eldorado, another Mexico, another Peru, beyond the río grande, río bravo,

an immortal dream of wealth, power, gold, happiness that compensates for all our sufferings, for the thirst, the hunger, and the shipwrecks and the Indian attacks,

they survived in order to lie,

death would have fused them with the truth of the desert,

poor, hostile, underpopulated lands,

life gave them the opulent wealth of lies,

they can fool everyone because they survived:

río grande, río bravo, frontier of mirages from then on

where men survive so that they can lie

Mr. Stud, that’s what they called him from the time he was a kid because of his shiny black hair like patent leather and his long eyelashes, but he called himself Mr. Shit because that’s how he always felt, growing up surrounded by the mountains of garbage in Chalco, dedicated since childhood to digging around in the disfigured mass of rotten meat, vomited beans, rags, dead cats, scraps of unrecognizable existence, giving thanks when something kept its form — a bottle, a condom — and could be brought home. An acrid cloud accompanied Serafín from his earliest days, and when he left the cloud of refuse, the smell was so sweet, so pure, that it made him dizzy and even a little nauseated: his country was the mud streets, the puddles, the children with screwed-up knees, unable to walk properly, stray dogs fucking, affirming their lives, telling us in barks that everything can survive despite everything, despite the pushers who get eight-year-old kids started on drugs, despite the extortionist cops who kill at night and then turn up by day to count the bodies and add them to the gigantic rolls of urban death, forever overcome by the fertility of the bitches, the rats, the mothers. Everything can survive because the government and the party organize corruption, allow it to flourish a bit, and then organize it as improvement so everyone will accept the notion that it’s the PRI or anarchy, which do you prefer? By the time hair had sprouted in Serafín’s armpits, he already knew everything about the evil of the city, no one could teach him anything. The problem was survival. How do you survive? By giving in to the masters of thievery, voting for the PRI, attending meetings like a jerk, seeing how the kings of the garbage got rich — what the fuck — or by saying no and joining a rock band that dares to sing about what a pisser it is to live in Mexico, D.F., in an underground network of rebel kids, or by speaking up even louder, refusing to vote for the PRI, and running the risk, as he and his family did, of having to take refuge in a half-built school, almost a thousand of them huddled together there, their shacks demolished by the cops, their miserable possessions stolen by the cops, all because they said, We’re going to vote the way we feel like voting?

At the age of twenty, Serafín headed north. He told his people, Get out of here, this country is beyond salvation, the PRI alone is more than enough reason to leave Mexico. I swear I’ll figure out a way to help you up north. I’ve got relatives in Juárez, guys, you’ll hear from me …

On this night of clenched fists and arms opened in a cross, Serafín, now twenty-six, expects nothing from anyone. He’s spent two years organizing the gang that crosses the border almost every night, thirty armed Mexicans who pile up wooden boxes, old scrap iron, roof tiles, and abandoned car bodies on the tracks of the Southern Pacific in New Mexico, change the switches, stop the train, steal everything they can to sell it in Mexico, then fill the cars with Mexican illegals. How many nights like this does Serafín Romero remember as he drives off in his truck from the train stopped in the desert, the truck filled with stolen goods, the train filled with peasants who need work, the stolen goods all brand-new, still in their packages, shiny — washing machines, toasters, vacuum cleaners, all brand-new, none turned yet to garbage that will end up on a mountain of trash in Chalco … Now he really is Mr. Stud, now he really has stopped being Mr. Shit. And Serafín Romero thought, leaving the stopped train behind, that the only thing missing for him to be a hero was a whinnying stallion … and oh yes, the night air of the desert was so dry, so clean.

no one lives more opulently in opulent Mexico City than Juan de Oñate, son of the conquistador Cristóbal of the same name, who discovered the Zacatecas mines, infinite hives of silver, a man who reached the Villa Rica de la Veracruz without a doubloon and now is able to bequeath to his son one of the greatest fortunes in the Indies, an inexhaustible vein of silver that allows Juan de Oñate to be named price regulator in the capital of New Spain, to roll through that city in the best carriages, surrounded by the best women, the best pages, to be attended in his palace by squads of majordomos and priests praying all the livelong day so Oñate will end up in heaven: