Mexico (3 page)

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 facade 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 fa?ade, 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 facade, 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 wa
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omething 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 Cortes 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 Diaz, 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 fa9ade 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.

I think it must have been at that moment when I renewed my acquaintance with the grandeur of Toledo that I felt fully the dissatisfaction with my own accomplishments that had been dogging me for months. "Damn it, Clay, get yourself straightened out. You have twenty more years, maybe thirty. Make them count." As soon as I uttered those last three words I liked them, saw them as the challenge that had been building since my disillusionment in Havana, but how exactly to respond I did not know. However, as I resumed my march toward Toledo I was buoyed by a reassuring thought: Where but in his place of origin can man best find the important answers?

It was five in the evening of a quiet spring day when I entered Toledo along the street I had so much treasured as a boy. It was flanked by rows of brightly colored houses that crowded each inch of space, so that I seemed to be passing down a canyon whose walls were alternately red and green and purple and most of all a brilliant golden yellow. At one corner I could look down another street of similar colors and see the clean new building that replaced the shambles of shacks and warrens that had served as the market when I was young, and I knew that a few more steps would bring me to the central plaza of Toledo, which was the essential heart of the city. One block more ... half a block ... and then ... here I was, in the plaza itself.

For a long time I studied it from where I stood, and to my pleasure I found little changed. Directly on my right was the historic blue-and-yellow hotel known as the House of Tile, where I would be staying. In the late sun it was more scintillating than ever, each of the tiles that formed the facade flashing like an individual mirror.

Along the north-south axis of the plaza, and fronting on the Avenida Gral. Gurza, so inappropriately named to perpetuate the memory of the rebellious general who had ravaged this part of Mexico, stood the cathedral, its somber silvery-gray towers flanking the delicate luxuriance of its central facade. Not a stone was out of place in this veritable poem of marble, and old women passed through the side portals as they had been doing since 1640.

Facing the cathedral, along the eastern edge of the plaza, was the building that had occupied a curious place in the affections of those city residents who were so vociferously anticlerical during the revolutionary days that they refused to enter the cathedral. Instead they revered this ancient building that had been built in the 1500s by two ancestors of mine, a devout Catholic bishop and his strong-willed Indian wife. Originally a refuge for impoverished old women, later a nunnery of the church, it had become in the 1860s the grandiose Imperial Theater. Its reconstruction had been commissioned by the Austrian Maximilian and his Belgian wife, Carlota, when they ruled Mexico as the emperor and empress and dedicated by them with a performance of Bellini's Norma. Rebuilt to Maximilian's specific plans, it represented his understanding of the classical Greek style. In its new incarnation it remained a magnificent building, chaste but royal, and had played a significant role in Mexican history. From its stage the ill-starred emperor had delivered his last address to his reluctant subjects. In one of its dressing rooms he had spent two weeks of his imprisonment, and from its Athenian portals he had climbed into the wagon that had carried him to the fusillade at Queretaro. Later, the famous theater had been the scene of numerous constitutional conventions at which the future of Mexico was hammered out, and it was here that I heard my first opera as a very young child, with Luisa Tetrazzini singing Aida.

But the building that gave the plaza a special distinction was the low two-story colonial structure that ran the entire length of the southern side. It had been built in 1544 by my ancestor the first Bishop Palafox, and was in every respect one of the masterpieces of Mexican architecture. Its total aspect epitomized that odd union of Spanish elegance and Indian strength which marked the intellectual history of Mexico. I remember my father's telling me one day as we sat in the plaza facing this dull-red structure, "When our first settlers Janded at Jamestown, this building was so old it needed new flooring. In 1607, when America started, our tenth viceroy was paying a state visit to this Hall of Government."