I moved into a moldy two-bedroom in a Colonia Roma complex where Che Guevara was rumored to have lived while plotting the Cuban revolution. Termites crunched on the walls; the ceilings crumbled. Cockroaches crawled in and out of my clothes. I thought: This is where I should be living, not that fancy penthouse. This is the real Mexico.
An exchange student from Bolivia became my roommate. Rodrigo spent all day reading Russian literature and smoking cigarettes. He was a tortured soul, grasping his forehead in misery, but somehow also cheerful, whistling and humming in our apartment. He had striking emerald eyes and walnut skin. Although he was very handsome, we were too alike for romance, we understood each other like twins. We developed an idyllic platonic rapport. I cooked and washed the dishes; he took out the trash. He killed the cockroaches, which darted like enormous black bullets with antlers even after he stepped on them. “It’s not dead yet,” I told Rodrigo, watching the roaches drag their entrails. He stomped again. “It’s dead now.” I wiped up the guts with paper towels.
My cousin Eddie came over regularly. Like his father, Chucho, he called me Juanita. He was the most spiritual person I had ever met. He was not interested in videogames or sports or girls, like other teenagers. He spoke about energies and magic and the nonlinearity of time. Eddie was a riveting storyteller and as proficient as an old professor on various subjects. We went horseback riding in La Marquesa, a national park in Estado de México, an hour’s bus ride from Mexico City. I gave him a crash course on riding—heels down, shoulders back—and we galloped through the trees, plunging into canopies of flowers so low and thick we had to hug our horses’ necks. Afterward, we ate blue maíz quesadillas that old campesinas cooked on stone comales.
One day, Eddie told me the story of his grandmother, Goyo’s daughter, the niece of Abuela Carolina. Maria Antonieta was the kindest, most positive person in the universe, a beautiful, benevolent octopus holding together disparate strings of sinners and drifters, with patience and understanding, before she fell into a depression and possibly committed suicide. Her body was found in a sewage canal, drowned in the aguas negras of Ecatepec, months before my father and I arrived in Mexico City. She died the day she was supposed to start a residency at a mental health clinic. I can’t digest the thought that she killed herself, Eddie said. I tell myself she was heavily medicated, that she was walking past the canal, that the thought crossed her head and she was falling before she knew what was happening. She hated water; she was terrified of it.
Eddie told me her death cast a gloom over the whole family, over the world. He began to doubt the existence of things like magic and the afterlife. Then my father came to Mexico City, a beacon of spiritual light, inspiring ecstasy and hope in everyone he touched or beheld. I knew he was different from the moment I saw him, he said. It was his eyes. Just by looking at me, he took away my sorrow about my grandmother’s death. Eddie told my father about his fears and troubles, and my father spoke sage words about spirits and parallel worlds that bestowed on Eddie a renewed faith in the meaning of life. He loved my father, and didn’t mind that Papi showed no interest in staying in touch after leaving Mexico, ignoring Eddie’s emails. Mystics always have that in common: solitude, my cousin said. Any bonds they have to this world—people, material belongings—separate them from their spirituality. Mystics have to eradicate all of their terrestrial links because what ties you to this world keeps you from achieving a maximum spiritual state. And it’s sad, it shouldn’t be that way, and it’s not that you want it or even understand it, but your body, your very flesh and soul demand it. Solitude. No one will understand you. But I understand your father. I know that he would have been an incredible dad, loving, stupendous. But his nature…goes beyond common sense and desires.
Eddie’s descriptions of my father struck me, simultaneously, as astute and absurd. I had seen Papi’s enchanting side, but I had never heard him wax poetic about spirits or parallel worlds. Eddie claimed my father was an expert in the Kabbalah of esoteric Judaism, specifically the Sefirot of the Tree of Life—the ten channels through which the unknowable reveals itself to conscious humans. Papi had mentioned to me that he was studying the Kabbalah. But when I asked for details, he changed the subject. My father spoke to me almost exclusively about his grievances. And if I volunteered information about my woes, it was fuel for criticism. I couldn’t express emotions without provoking his contempt. I had to be journalistic 100 percent of the time.
I was upset about my father’s departure from Mexico City, and jealous about the fact that he evidently preferred talking with Eddie rather than with me. I started reading The Divided Self by the Scottish psychiatrist R. D. Laing. The book’s analysis of Schizophrenic patients sounded to me like Eddie’s descriptions of my father, without the mystical overtone: “His longing is for complete union. But of this very longing he is terrified, because it will be the end of his self. He does not wish for a relationship of mutual enrichment and exchange of give-and-take between two beings ‘congenial’ to each other. He does not conceive of a dialectical relationship.” Laing argues that “schizoid” symptoms develop in individuals who seek to eliminate in themselves natural impulses, such as a desire to be touched. The repression causes a splintering of the self, and the person becomes divided from himself and others. He despises his own desires and the desires of others. Fleeing intimacy becomes a survival strategy. “The individual experiences himself as a man who is only saving himself from drowning by the most constant, strenuous, desperate activity,” Laing continues. “Engulfment is felt as a risk in being understood (thus grasped, comprehended), in being loved, or even simply in being seen.” But Laing rejects clinical diagnoses: “There is a common illusion that one somehow increases one’s understanding of a person if one can translate a personal understanding of him into the impersonal terms of a sequence or system of it-processes.” I still refused to reduce my father’s beliefs to brain-chemical imbalances. But the idea of Papi as a shaman struck me as overimaginative, to say the least.
You know, Papi used to smoke crack, I told Eddie. If he saw the “fourth dimension,” it was probably a hallucination.
Eddie’s mouth dropped open. Juanita, don’t you know? The curanderos throughout Latin America use substances to open doorways in their minds.
I sighed. I had listened to my father’s stories for hours on end. He had never concluded he had shamanic powers. Still, I had to admit it was strange that my entire Mexico City family viewed him with a kind of spiritual reverence.
On Mexican Independence Day, I joined Eddie’s family on a hike of El Cerro de San Pablo Tecalco, a mountain outside the capital. We drove halfway up, then hiked so high we were standing above the fireworks. A few clouds hung far beneath us in the lower levels of the sky. Eddie asked me to follow him on a dirt trail into the dark. As we walked through the cacti and prickly shrub, we came across a green pond. Eddie dropped to his knees and dipped his hands into the green water, splashing his face, taking vigorous sips. I grimaced. The water looked unsanitary. Drink these magic waters with me, Juanita, he said. These waters will awaken your powers—but only if you believe. Eddie looked at me with such earnest expectation I felt I had no choice. I cupped some of the water in my hands and took a meager sip. I burped and gagged as it trickled down my throat. It made me sick for weeks.
Back in San Diego, my father overdosed on tinctures of black walnut, wormwood, clove, goldenseal, gentian and more. The mysterious illness that had killed Pechocho and Muñeca was back. It had returned in Mexico City. His paralyzed foot regained its capacity for movement when he left the capital, but every bone in his body ached with an impossible density; Papi felt so weak he could barely support his weight. At first, he suspected Mexico City bacteria and parasites, but he had tried countless antimicrobials. He experimented with potent new concoctions, combining this mineral and that seed. His neat cursive writing filled stacks of notebooks. He reviewed existing folders of research on his computer and made new ones with labels such as “Antibiotic therapies” and “Detox.” None of his herbal remedies worked anymore. Months went by. Depressed, full of self-loathing and frustration, Papi once more turned to whiskey.
At a national coffee conference, I met a man named Francisco Piedragil. He had bloodshot eyes, an Aztec nose and snow-white hair tied in a loop at the base of his neck. His skin was the color of cocoa seeds. He was the president of Cecafé, the Guerrero state coffee council, managing federal funds for the growers. I asked him innocuous questions about coffee subsidies. You’re asking all the wrong questions, he said. He spoke not with scorn or in rebuke, but in confidence, as if we were co-conspirators. He leaned in so close I could see the individual hairs in his chaotic gray eyebrows and smell the whiskey on his breath. You should be asking me about how the opium poppy farmers in my state are switching to coffee because of the high prices. I’m leading the effort.
If I had heard him correctly, he had just handed me the commodities story of my dreams. Why he had chosen to confide in me, an inexperienced gringa, was a mystery to me. In retrospect, I have no doubt it was precisely that—my youth—that served as a lubricant on his inhibitions. But at the time I was not willing to see it, nor do I think it’s important now, except to show that Piedragil was a man with big dreams.
I asked Piedragil if he would show me where this crop shift was taking place. Of course, he said. The town is called Eden.
I flew to Acapulco and took a cab to Hotel Copacabana, where Piedragil was going to pick me up in the evening. I jumped into the ocean and swam, then dried off and typed a daily-turn story for the newswire about the month’s coffee output in Guatemala. When Piedragil arrived, he wrapped me in an aggressive hug, laughing as if we were childhood friends who hadn’t seen each other in years. He smelled of cigarettes and undeodorized armpits—my father’s smell. Night had fallen; Nick had told me not to stay in Acapulco after dark. The former tourist hub had become one of the most dangerous cities on the planet due to unprecedented cartel violence. But I was hungry, and Piedragil wanted to have dinner on a terrace by the beach. We smoked cigarettes and drank Victorias—the only clients in the restaurant. Piedragil told me his story. He spoke in a low, deliberate voice that bewitched me. He had grown up a guerrilla in Guerrero, setting fire to Nestlé coffee husks in protest of the multinational corporation’s presence on the sierra. Now he fought the drug traffickers, an obstacle to the campesinos’ ambitions for peace. He described the mass graves in the mountains and traced the bloodshed to the demand for drugs in los Estados Unidos as well as the “pointless war on drugs” waged by corrupt Mexican officials on behalf of los gringos. An hour passed, then two. His words merged with the rustling breath of the ocean winds. Around 9:30 p.m., we ordered dinner. A man in a red outfit, with horns and a tail, appeared beneath us on the beach. He poured gasoline into his mouth and blew on a torch, causing the fire to roar and expand. He stared at us, eyes wobbling on his wet, red, blistered face. He was drunk or dying. Piedragil dropped coins in his direction.
The waiter arrived with a plate of large shrimp doused in red sauce. Piedragil ate the shrimp with his hands, detailing how he had persuaded the campesinos of Eden to abandon the illegal drug trade to plant coffee instead because coffee was selling for record-high prices that year. Many had begun to win regional and national awards for the quality of their beans, even though they were naturales—normally considered inferior to lavados, which undergo an expensive washing process. Still, violence reigned among the campesinos. “They look at death like they look at sleeping,” Piedragil said. “It’s no big deal to put someone to sleep.”
“Why do they see it that way?”
“It is the culture of Mexico. Especially in Guerrero. They are dragging behind them centuries of repression. Those who are alive today are the children of the fiercest killers. The fearless ones. The ones who have seen spirits with their own eyes, and aren’t afraid to lose their lives. They see death as a dream.”
His hands were covered in red sauce. He looked at me, one eye more pale than the other in the candlelight.
“But don’t worry,” he said, reading my mind. “If someone wanted to kill me, I’d be dead already.”
He smiled with his teeth.
Piedragil dropped me off at an empty hotel on a dirt road. My bed crawled with tiny ants; a flattened cockroach adorned the wall; the room’s only window refused to close. That night I dreamed of poppy flowers. I dreamed of being filled up with them. Their round bulbs entered my body through every crevice and pore, so my flesh stretched and expanded. Then I exploded. I woke up nauseated in the morning.
The road to Eden was bumpy the whole way. The producers gathered in their town hall, and Piedragil instructed them to speak freely. Then he vanished. I stood in front of the men, trying to remember my father’s casual pose. I offered them cigarettes, but they declined. Whenever one man opened his mouth to speak, another man cut him off: “We’re past all that. We shouldn’t talk about the poppies—only the coffee.” I tried breaking the men up into groups, encouraging them to talk among themselves, but the town-hall structure had ruined any chance of comfort. I was going to have to wait for another opportunity to interview them.
When Piedragil returned, he announced it was time to eat beans at the house of the town’s poorest and oldest woman, La Doña. But first, we were going to have a drink with a campesino, who had slaughtered a pig for us. We could not eat twice, but we could share some mezcal to show our gratitude to the campesino.
All of the men gathered in the campesino’s empty concrete living room on plastic chairs. Piedragil and I poured everyone mezcal in plastic cups. Piedragil spoke to the producers in his slow, captivating way. The producers leaned forward, spellbound.
“If you want your coffee to be successful, you’ve got to make it taste the same every time,” Piedragil said. “That way, consumers will say, ‘I like this brand.’ Mezcal for example. Mezcal, they say, is the drink of the gods—because you always drink it and end up with your butt cheeks pointing toward Heaven.”
The men guffawed. One cleared his throat and said: “I have a fear. Well, it’s not so much a fear as an anxiety. You have helped us so much, Piedragil. What is going to happen with the new administration? What if we don’t get a council president who cares about us as you do?” Piedragil shook his head. “I’m not such a good person. I get paid for what I do. The problem is some people get paid and don’t do their jobs.”
“But he’s asking what we’re going to do.”
Piedragil’s hawk’s gaze swept across the room.
“You’ve got to make yourselves alive.”
The room was silent. I saw goosebumps on the men’s arms, on my own.
“Look,” he continued. To help himself see, he put on his glasses—two pairs, each missing a lens. “The only relationship more powerful than a friendship is that which you have with an accomplice. All you have to do is understand that you produce some of the best coffee in the world, and that you are accomplices in this.”
I needed to use the bathroom. While walking to the door, I noticed a producer with a young face and kind eyes standing near the back—one of the men who had tried to share information in the town hall but had been interrupted. I approached him and whispered: “If I come back tomorrow, alone, will you take me to the opium poppies?”
He nodded.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“David.”
Outside, two roosters fluffed their feathers and rammed into each other, fighting. There was so much anger. A burst of it, an explosion. Their feathers were red and shiny in the glare of the setting sun. The bathroom was a hole inside a wooden shed. I squatted over it. When I returned to the campesino’s living room, most of the men were gone. Those who remained were trembling in their seats. Piedragil’s assistant, Mayra, was standing up. She was a curvy, dark-skinned woman with curly hair; her eyes were wide with terror.
She said: “But they have guns, licenciado.”
Piedragil shrugged and said: “So what? We have our hands.”
I blinked. “¿Qué está pasando?”
“Nothing, mi niña. Take a seat and drink some mezcal while I teach you the three rules of life. Never get scared. Never get nervous. And always be soft.”
“It’s time to go dine at La Doña’s,” he continued. “I wish I had three stomachs so that I could eat pork and beans and chicken, in three different houses. But alas, I only have one, and it is a stomach that, like the rest of me, is governed by the heart. Poor Doña has been waiting for me.”
As we walked out into the dusk, Mayra explained in a shaky voice that one of the producers had been contacted by radio. “They told him two trucks carrying seventeen armed men were descending the mountains from the neighboring town of Paraíso. A few days ago, men came from Paraíso, threatening to kill everyone if they didn’t continue planting poppies. They’re coming back.”
“What? Are you serious? How long will it take them to arrive?”
“I don’t know,” Mayra said. “I know nothing. Piedragil won’t listen to me.”
Piedragil marched ahead of us. We followed him to La Doña’s house. I grabbed my phone to call my editor, but I had no service. In La Doña’s candlelit kitchen, the white-haired campesina served us beans and tortillas. Mayra and I gulped down our food, desperate to depart. Piedragil was too busy talking to eat. Mayra took his fork and stuffed his beans into her mouth. He didn’t seem to notice. “It’s time to go,” she said.
“Don’t you see I’m eating? We must eat in peace! We mustn’t let others terrorize us!”
La Doña offered more beans.
“No thank you,” I said, my stomach in knots.
“Yes please!” Piedragil cried, holding up his empty plate.
“Piedragil, didn’t you tell me we had to leave before dark?”
He waved my question away with his hands. “It’s already dark! Night has fallen! What difference does it make? If you’re worried, we can stay here. Right Doña? We can spend the night with you?”
I searched my bag for a cigarette. I stood and said I was going to smoke outside.
“Smoke here! La Doña—the girl can smoke in your house, can she not?”
La Doña assured me with a smile that I could. Piedragil leaned forward in his chair. “Panic,” he said. “Panic causes people to make the most stupid mistakes.”
I lit up my cigarette and took hard drags, glaring at Piedragil. I wasn’t panicking. I was pissed. Piedragil was knowingly endangering me. He was breaking the rules of this place, overthrowing my sense of the plot. The old man with the chaotic eyebrows was supposed to have whisked me to safety as soon as we got word of the approaching criminals.
La Doña’s husband spread his arms wide open and declared that he was going to go to bed a very happy man, having spent the evening with a güera (white girl). I forced a smile at him through my second cigarette. Then I stood up and declared: “Piedragil, we are leaving. Now. My editor expected me to be in touch hours ago. I am sure he is worried about my safety at this point.”
Piedragil stared at me in silence. Then he sighed. “Okay. Let us go,” he said sadly.
We sped away from Eden through the pitch-black night, crammed in the bed of the Cecafé truck. The cold wind whipped my face as I clutched the rim of the truck. I could see nothing anywhere.
The next day, one of Piedragil’s employees dropped me off at David’s house in Eden. David informed me the men from Paraíso had turned around the night before. He smiled: “Maybe they heard a gringa was here.”
I followed him into the forest on foot. The landscape was so thick with vegetation we had to break branches to make a path. “So whose flowers are we going to see?” I said, pulling spiderwebs from my face.
“He’s just a man,” David said. “He’s not here this week. That’s why we can go.”
“So it’s not your plot?”
“I stopped planting when Piedragil came.”
We crossed a river using a fallen tree. We were surrounded by coffee bushes with bright red berries. David stopped by a cacao tree and plucked off the large yellow fruit. He cut it in half with a knife from his pocket. Large brown seeds lived in its fibrous, spiderweb-like substance. He plucked a seed and ate it. Then he held out the plant for me to try one. The juice of the spiderweb stuff was mildly sweet. Spit out the seed or it will make you light-headed, he said. The terrain became so steep we had to crawl on all fours, using moss to hoist ourselves up. We passed plantain trees and stacks of wooden logs. I gasped when I saw a giant stinkbug on the path. David picked it up. He’s harmless, he said, placing it on his arm. All he does is stink if you scare him. The creature limped up his arm. It was missing a leg. It looked like tree bark.
After we had hiked for about an hour, the trees gave way to a vast clearing: bulbous pink flowers rose up out of the green. An extensive sprinkler system cloaked the clearing in a mist. Bees dipped in and out of the opium poppies. Their bulbs burst at the seams with black sap. “The bees—don’t they go crazy?” I wasn’t sure of the word for “high” in Spanish. He told me the bees went crazy, but not as crazy as the squirrels who ate the coffee berries.
“Wait here,” he said. He walked to the center of the field, scanned the forest, then beckoned me with a hand. I heard twigs breaking behind him. A man holding a rifle appeared with a dog. The dog ran toward David, but then stopped to urinate on one of the poppies. I held my breath. David spoke to the armed man for what seemed an eternity. The tension in their faces was not dissolving. Eventually, I couldn’t take it. I walked forward with a ditzy smile, hoping my blonde hair and green eyes and petite stature would save us. “Mucho gusto, señor,” I said, sticking my hand out to shake the stranger’s. He looked at me with a bewildered expression. “Do you mind if I take a few pictures? I’m not identifying the town. It’s a story for a financial newspaper about coffee prices.” The man seemed to relax, realizing I posed no threat. “Está bien, no hay problema,” he said.
In December 2012, Piedragil’s body was found facedown on a pile of coconut husks in a garbage dump near Acapulco, hands tied behind his back, blindfolded. He had multiple gunshot wounds. I saw the photograph of his corpse in one of the Mexican tabloids. He looked more asleep than dead, as if passed out drunk on the bed of coconuts. He wore huaraches and his usual earth-toned clothes: green shirt and brown pants. I remembered his words in Acapulco: “If someone wanted to kill me, I’d be dead already.”