Old Man on a Bike

CHAPTER 4

Oaxaca

Oaxaca, Friday 19 May

The Hispanic buildings of Oaxaca glow a soft rose in the morning sun. The Hotel Central is a resurrected Spanish colonial townhouse two blocks from the zócalo. My room is furnished with period copies: bed and bedside cupboard, wardrobe, table and an upright chair. A simple cloister surrounds three sides of a flag-stoned patio where a neighbouring restaurant serves breakfast and light meals. Comfortable benches stand against the cloister wall; there are tubs of red hibiscus and jasmine.

This morning I dress in wet clothes and go in search of my bike and luggage. I find the hotel immediately. It is where I knew it was. I searched this street in the rain again and again last night. Fatigue must have left me confused. I need to be more careful. Hence my decision to enjoy a day of rest – although first I will leave the bike at the local Honda agent for its first service.

Mid-afternoon and I work at an internet café without the coffee and a connection that takes forever. In San Andres Tuxlas, I spent an hour trying to post photographs. No hope. Oaxaca is as bad and the mouse has a habit of sticking.

In the evening I sit on the steps in the zócalo and watch a poorly attended political rally. The speakers are drowned by a twenty-piece dance band playing outside the cathedral. A schoolteacher tells me that there will be a strike tomorrow. He asks whether I am an American. I answer that I am English and he sits beside me: ‘That ignorant Bush. All the hypocrisy of celebrating the fall of the Berlin wall. Now he’s building a wall to keep us out. For us the border is meaningless; we all have relations on both sides.’

Oaxaca, Saturday 20 May

Oaxaca, city of churches. The exteriors are uniformly simple and beautiful. As to the interiors, my prejudices are in good shape. I find the interior of the cathedral abysmal; railings enclose the central aisle and great iron gates forbid entrance to the side chapels. Sinful to chop such magnificent space into tiny pens.

In San Felipe Neri, the vast altarpiece reminds me of the worst excesses of Ukraine’s Orthodox decor.

And yet, professing to love simplicity, why am I overwhelmed by the beauty of Santo Domingo’s interior with its voluptuous basting of gold leaf? To see this one great church is worth the trip to Mexico.

Most touching to me is the Church of the Society of Jesus. A side chapel is dedicated to the Society’s martyrs. I read their names and dates written on the walls and am welcomed by familiars of my Catholic childhood: Edmund Campion, Hugh Walpole, Edmund Arrowsmith. Such English names. I sit in the peace and quiet of the chapel as if among old friends. High above the arched entrance to the chapel is an inscription: Compañeros de Jesus, amigos en el Señor. In the chapel dedicated to the Virgin Mary is written in thirteen indigenous Mexican languages and in both Spanish and English: ‘Am I not here for I am your mother …’

The Catholic Church in the USA, Ireland and England may be disgraced for its shielding of sexual predators, but in Mexico the Church is very much alive. These churches are the temples of today’s Mexico. Services are full. At any hour you find a scattering of people at private prayer. Watch people cross themselves as they pass on the pavement. The one danger to the Church in Latin America is that a reactionary pope will enforce its withdrawal from the active struggle for social justice.

A day of sightseeing and I retire in the evening to a café on the zócalo, order a bowl of soup and people-watch. Mexicans of all classes dress smartly for Saturday evening in the city. A group of US students stride at speed diagonally across the square. Unbrushed hair, shorts and T-shirts, sandals, sleeveless tops: these young seem to me so untidy and disrespectful of local mores.

Disrespectful or uncaring? Theirs is the ascendant culture.

Oaxaca, Sunday 21 May

I attend Mass at the first church built in Oaxaca – San Juan de Dios: simple in decor, white altarpiece decorated with eight big vases of white dahlias. My travels are solitary and I recharge my human contact batteries by shaking hands at the end of the service with neighbours in the congregation.

Later I visit a small orphanage run by two nuns, one Mexican and the other from Chile. My companions are a paediatrician who gives his free time to the orphanage, his architect wife and their few-months-old daughter. Our arrival coincides with the children’s midday meal. The children range from six to eighteen years. Not all of them are true orphans; some have only one deceased parent. However, all come from a background of crippling poverty. Some have suffered permanent brain damage inflicted by long-term protein deficiency. Others are openly intelligent.

I congratulate the Chilean nun, a woman in her early sixties, on the extraordinary peace that reigns in the refractory. ‘La lucha,’ she replies. ‘La lucha.’ A daily struggle.

So comment Cubans on life under Castro, El Commandante en Jefe.

A six-year-old holds out her arms to me to be lifted, then buries her face in my shoulder. Later, a small boy installs himself on my lap as I chat with fourteen-year-old Theodora who has ambitions to be a secretary and, as she admits shyly, a writer.

Boys, four to a room, sleep on the ground floor; girls are upstairs. The older girls share with the younger ones, as mother substitutes. Toy rubber and plastic animals stand on the dividing walls between the girls’ showers. This is a gentle place for kids to grow, gentle and filled with love – so unlike those erstwhile Irish orphanages in which generations of children suffered abuse.

I am told few foreigners frequent or know of the restaurant where we lunch. We eat at a table in the garden. I blanch as the paediatrician orders cockroaches. Thank God ‘cockroach’ is the local slang for crayfish tails grilled on charcoal. And thank God (or the generosity of the paediatrician) that I never see the bill – I suspect that it would have been more than I usually pay for my food in a week.

Conversation turns to politics. Mexico was ruled for decades with enforced corruption by the Party of the Institutionalised Revolution (a splendidly Orwellian name). In the present election, presidential candidates from the ruling conservative PAN and the socialists are abreast in the opinion polls. The paediatrician expects and hopes for a socialist victory. He is dark-skinned, from a peasant family and worked his way through medical school. He was expected to practise as a state-employed GP out in the country. In studying to become a specialist, he was handicapped by racism among senior doctors in the hospital. Nurses were instructed to report him as drunk if he came to the hospital at night to visit patients. He talks of the countryside and a system of land tenure instituted by the revolution, which condemns the peasantry to poverty. Often they are better off selling their land to big landowners and working for wages. They are victims either way. Many leave to find work in the city. There is no work. Few Mexican manufacturers can survive competition from China and its cripplingly low labour rates.

Oaxaca, Monday 22 May

A day of expectations: I am due to talk to students at two public high schools. I rise early, brush, shower and shave. Clean shirt, clean trousers. My shoes were polished yesterday evening. I breakfast on the patio with two Chilean diplomats and watch a hummingbird poke his beak in the red hibiscus. I wheel the bike out to the road. Teachers within the Oaxaca state system have come out on strike. The teachers are heading for the city.

I visit the most prestigious of Oaxaca’s private schools, Blaise Pascal. While waiting to be interviewed by the headmistress, I sit in the shade of a jacaranda tree outside the school caféteria. Mid-morning break heralds the any-school-in-the-world charge. In Herefordshire, students demand bacon butties. Here, the favourite is stuffed tortillas. Dress is less formal: jeans, trainers, school sweatshirts.

The paediatrician asked yesterday whether I found Mexico racist. I replied that it was difficult for a foreigner to be sure, that I believed it was less so among the younger generation. Now I watch the younger generation in their break. At my age, so much is a reminder of the past. I spot one splendidly sulky, heavy-jowled Catalan matron of fifty going on seventeen. A group at a table are identical in gesture and in the way they laugh to my son Josh and his friends. I see no demarcation by colour. Do I know how to look?

Two teachers have called in sick (the strike?). The head of the English department, an Englishman, is delighted to inflict me on his students. A young Mexican American is in charge of my first class. This is her first day teaching at the school. Classes are conducted in English and she asks me to speak to the students in English. Most of the students are sixteen. I relate a little of my background as a writer and the purposes of my journey. I search faces for irritation, boredom, contempt.

I ask in Spanish whether they understand, more or less.

These are teenagers. Naturally they respond with silence.

‘More?’ I ask.

More silence.

‘Or less?’

This raises a shy laugh.

I ask for questions. From teenagers? Stand out from the group? Am I crazy? They will keep their questions for each other out of class.

So I ask the questions. How many have relatives in the north – the US? Four raise their hands. What do they think of Bush planning to build a wall?

‘Stupid,’ a girl says, and the class nods.

They know of Condoleezza Rice?

Yes.

She made a speech in Europe stating that Americans never torture. Do they agree?

Nobody moves.

Have they understood? I rephrase the question. ‘How many of you believe that the American government condones torture?’

Serious stuff is embarrassing. They whisper to each other. One raises his hand, then another, then all together – although no more than shoulder height.

I ask what differences exist between their parents’ generation and their own.

‘The way we think,’ a girl answers to general agreement.

‘Think in what way?’ I ask.

‘You know,’ accompanied by a teenage shrug that I recognise from home as a definite end to the conversation.

I try a different tack. ‘I have sons. Jed is sixteen, Josh twenty. If I asked them the same question, they would say that I wouldn’t understand. That’s what you tell your parents, right?’

Laughter.

A boy asks, ‘What do you think the differences are?’

This seems of general interest – or it gets them off the hook of being required to supply answers themselves.

I say that that I made my first trip through Mexico in the early eighties. I don’t recall ever seeing young people kiss on the street. Now it is moderately commonplace.

‘What else?’ a girl asks.

I think, what the hell? Go for it. I tell them of the paediatrician’s accusations of racism – that I had been watching them at the canteen.

They wait.

I say, ‘I’m a foreigner. I can’t tell. I don’t know how to look – although it seems to me that, if racism does exist, it is less common among your generation.’

These kids are from wealthy families, pale to bronzed. Many glance involuntarily at a dark girl in the front row. What would she say? And will they discuss the subject among themselves after class? Or will they dismiss me as a silly old foreign fool?

I take two more classes of the same age group, the last on the approach to midday break. Students are keen to get out of class. I stand by the door and slow them by relating, as a lone traveller, the warmth of companionship I feel when shaking hands after Mass. The students shuffle into line. Although embarrassed, they are generous of nature and smile as they clasp my hand. A few even mumble one of those monosyllables that pass among teenagers as conversation.

I have one more class for a full fifty minutes in the afternoon. These are final-year students. Three of the male students make it clear that I am a nobody and talk instead to their girlfriends. One of the girls asks permission to visit the bathroom. I say that I am not a teacher – that whether she goes to the bathroom or not is her decision. A second girl asks and I give her the same answer.

Three girls in the front ask me about writing and what books I read and what I know of Latin American writers. Great. We form a foursome and leave the other students to their own devices. I am delighted that they discuss only Hispanic American writers. Having just read Like Water for Chocolate earns me a little street cred. Two of them are admirers of the Márquez/Allende brand of fantasy/mysticism. I suggest Salman Rushdie as Márquez’ equal and more directly political. The third girl is more taken by reality and politics.

I end by telling all those that remain in the classroom, the conversationalists who have ignored me (those that haven’t gone to the bathroom and stayed there or wherever they stayed), that I had been asked by the first class what changes I saw between theirs and their parents’ generation. I had seen four male students enter the headmistress’s office wearing baseball caps. None of their parents would have been so ill-mannered.

Striking teachers have been arriving in Oaxaca all day. They stretch tarpaulins across streets in the city centre, and make beds of flattened cardboard boxes on the pavement. Hundreds sleep on footpaths and in the centre of the street. They lie curled on their sides and they lie on their backs. Some, accustomed to good mattresses, can’t sleep. Tourists duck under the tarpaulins as they wend their way to and from the cafés on the zócalo. On each street and square, small groups of union officials gather in conclave.

The Chilean diplomats and I talk until late on the hotel patio. Chile has a new president, Michelle Bachelet, a socialist and a single mother. Her father was arrested for opposing the US-backed anti-Allende coup and died in prison. Both the new president and her mother were arrested and tortured.

Richard Helms was the CIA director.

Henry Kissinger was US secretary of state.

Richard Milhous Nixon was US president.

Helms and Nixon are dead. Kissinger is revered as an elder statesman.

The Chilean diplomats find it ironic that so many socialist governments have been elected in Latin America during George W. Bush’s neocon administration. Add the disasters of Iraq and Afghanistan, and Bush, by his own conservative standards, is the most unsuccessful president in US history.

As to Britain, the Chileans are disgusted that Tony Blair, a professed socialist and leader of a Labour government, should have enslaved himself to US neo-cons.

Road to Tehuantepec, Tuesday 23 May

Seven in the morning and the ten central city blocks of Oaxaca resemble a refugee camp and already stink of human urine and faeces. Imagine if the strike continues for a week, or even a month – as it has in the past.

This strike is an annual affair and coincides with the run-up to final exams. The exams are cancelled, with all students given a fictitious pass grade into university. Universities then have no idea as to the true achievements of their entry students. Meanwhile hotels and small shopkeepers despair at the loss of tourist income.

How will the strike affect the presidential election on 2 June? Mexico’s TV commentators are invariably white and right. In the past week, a vituperative press and TV campaign (financed by the oligarchy) has put the PAN (Conservative) candidate marginally ahead of the centre left.

Oaxaca has been good to me. The Hotel Central, its staff and its lovely patio provided a home from home. The owners were immensely kind and hospitable, and both informative and intellectually provocative. All but four of the students at Blaise Pascal were courteous and patient. The kids at the orphanage were loving and deserve to be much loved. The church congregation blessed me with their companionship. Now back on the bike.

I take the road to Mitla. The ruins at Mitla are ancient. I try to find them interesting. My imagination won’t function. My guidebooks ignore the road northeast from Mitla towards Zapotec so I take it out of cussedness. The road climbs for eighty kilometres. The ascent is more gradual than the ascent from Tuxtepeca. I feel fine. However, I am growing familiar with the Honda’s performance and I know that we are well above 2000 metres. This is a dry country of thin soil and dust and rock. The mountains seem endless. Cactus forest gives way to conifers. Branches are tipped with flared bunches of bright green needles, looking like something between a bright-green lavatory brush and the grass skirt of a whirling ballet dancer.

For the traveller, the views are magnificent. However, real people inhabit the scattering of villages that cling to the mountain, with lives of a terrifying harshness.

I pass through a small town. Election time and an obvious politician (white, naturally) waves and wastes on me a dentifrice smile as I bump over a sleeping policeman. He is playing at being one of the boys for the day. He stands beside a gleaming double-cab pearl-grey pickup. I buy a bottle of water at an open-fronted stall and watch a while as he glad-hands the townsfolk.

A vast building is under construction above the town. On flat land you would presume it was an aircraft hanger. I ask a middle-aged male passer-by and he tells me it is a conference centre. Here? Up a mountain? The entire population of these barren mountains might fill half of it.

The man grins and says, ‘Algo politico’. Something political – magnificently visible proof of a politician’s interest in his electorate – what North Americans refer to as ‘pork-barrel politics’.

I ask how people survive.

Every family has members in El Norte.

‘Ilegales?’

‘Claro.’ Clearly.

Near the top of the pass, the road surface changes from tar to dirt. A road sign at an intersection names places that I don’t find on the map. I haven’t seen a car or a truck in the past half-hour. Vultures and buzzards float far overhead. I’m a little nervous. Nervous? Frightened? Yes, a little frightened. The space is overwhelming. Such emptiness.

An ancient pickup pulls alongside. The radiator belches steam. Both the driver and his companion are darkly featured. Raggedy parkas puff them up so that they seem square – memories of the dwarfs in Snow White. Neither man has shaved in a while. The driver has long hair. I don’t have much confidence.

I ask which road leads to Zapotec and how far.

‘Very far.’

‘Is the road dirt all the way?’

‘Yes, dirt all the way.’

‘Good dirt?’

The driver shrugs. ‘Some good, some bad.’

‘Very bad,’ confirms his companion.

The driver rams the pickup into gear and lets out the clutch.