So J.H. –>

I find myself in an amazing place; Last night we had a fire because it got a bit cool; today we eat lunch outside in the sun… but first, the weather … the dedication in Borges’ book, A Universal History of Infamy reads:

To those of us concerned with inscriptions (on rock, on paper) this comes as a blessing.

People here (as elsewhere) struggle to live, and no one can give name to that. Previously, Indians found in town after dark were jailed. The at-one-time Governor (Gobernador) of this state (Chiapas) was indicted for his Indian-killing policies. Rare to see an indictment because the Mexicans approve of this practice. This boy’s methods had become ‘unsound’ (Kurtz-style, Heart of Darkness). At some point the rule-makers changed their game, and now Indians walk the streets of this town at night. The man for whom the town was named Fra Bartolome de las Casas, First Bishop of Chiapas, was the first in his time to suggest that Indians were human beings and that enslaving them was wrong, early 1500s. Now the poor people in this area are deforesting the countryside, and Indians sell their land to lumber companies for a pick-up truck, lack of awareness in humanity at this time. Terrible corruption blotted up with human faces.

Strange scene –> a few days ago we went to the nearby Indian town, Chamula. There the Chamulans make offerings of Pepsi (poured in small glasses) to the Saints (who have combined with/replaced the Earth Gods) in the ancient Cathedral. The floor covered in pine needles, candles lit in homage set out in groups on the floor. Then we go to the ruin of another cathedral, graveyard packed: goats, lamps, burros grazing among crosses, and on certain graves bottle tops from Pepsi sprinkled, simply left, from offerings made by those still above. “An adaptable people,” my cousin says of the Chamulans and their Pepsi.

And we are accosted by a Chamulan woman and her child in that grave yard. She begging us to buy a belt from her and her daughter with a smile and full of play. Here it all was: the graves, the woman pleading, the bright child offering a bright doll in her hands. I imagined those below murmuring in darkness and soil; and we were above, the brown earth, the soft green of the grass, the bright blue of the woman’s shawl, her face: vivid. She not aware that she was pleading amongst graves. Other things that cannot be communicated. The faces of so many people I see now are beautiful, but they do not know. They are full of wonderful things but do not know. The loss of dignity, the loss of what is sacred. Well, I will say it: so many doomed. But this cannot take away my happiness nor theirs.

AZ