MEDICINA

 

It’s hot again, the grass drying off, the fields bald and eroded. Phil comes back to the office after slashing some reeds down by the river to feed the sheep, and complains that something has bitten or scratched his arm. He shows the inflamed, risen skin and we wonder if he’s scraped past something toxic from the river’s polluted banks. An hour later he’s uncharacteristically still complaining, and the skin on his inner arm has risen in angry blisters like a bad burn.

‘God, I can’t stand not scratching it,’ he says. ‘I’ve never felt an itch like it.’

Jaime and Alejandro look at it and nod knowingly. ‘Cacixtle,’ they say. Another whispery Nahautl word that’s risen, floating, above the Spanish.

‘What the hell is that?’

‘A plant. You must have brushed against one.’

‘Is it like a nettle burn?’ I ask Phil.

‘Nothing like it. It’s unbearable,’ he mutters. The irritation spreads up his arm, huge bubbles filled with fluid.

‘Phil, you need a curandera!’ says our coworker Ceci.

Much discussion ensues about local healers and the nearby monolithic rock of Bernal which everybody says possesses mystical powers: it apparently rests on a leyline of ancient planetary energy, and herbs gathered near it radiate extra-strong healing powers. The rock’s energy charges the local people with extra strength, too – there are people living there, apparently, who are well into their late seventies and even a few in their eighties. How else to explain that except the life-giving magnetic force of the rock?

In a country where almost every prescription drug you can imagine can be purchased over the counter, Mexico has a strange polarised attitude to medicinal technology. It’s as if they’ve hurdled a century and gone from poultice to penicillin overnight.

Over the very same counter at the pharmacy where you can buy any quantity of steroids, Mogadon and Amoxil, there also sit twenty or thirty bags of dried herbs and powders for all sorts of ailments, from asthma to eczema to stomach ulcers. There’s a roaring local trade in dried rattlesnakes, allegedly a cure for cancer. Mothers rely on herbal teas to treat their babies for diarrhoea, and at certain times of the year you can see groups of women fossicking on road verges for certain seasonal roots and flowers.

Now Phil’s cacixtle inflammation, it seems, is going to be treated by a curandera at one of the savings meetings. After enduring its itch overnight and seeing that it’s spread to his chest where he’s rested his arm during the night, Phil would try smearing it with anything to get rid of it. Word spreads when he gets to the meeting, and a no-nonsense campesina woman strides up and introduces herself as the curandera. She picks up his scarlet, blistered arm and scrutinises it, nodding briskly.

‘Hmmm … baparú,’ she prescribes sagely. We’re excited. Now we’re going to learn some special herbal remedy, some ancient wisdom handed down through the generations.

‘Baparú.’

‘Baparú, sí.’

The word spreads, the women are nodding – everyone’s heard of this curative, it seems, except us. What’s more, the consultation seems to be finished.

Ceci amazes us with her next revelation.

‘I have some at home,’ she says out of the blue. ‘I’ll bring it in for you this afternoon.’

Later that day she hands Phil a little turquoise jar of baparú, the very thing which magically heals his cacixtle inflammation, and I pass on its English name to you here in the interests of sharing traditional medicinal lore: VapoRub.

Tequisquiapan sits in the high dry country between two gigantic mountain ranges. The plaque outside Claudia’s cafe might proclaim the townto be the geographical centre of the whole country, but it’s a claim that nobody takes too seriously. Looking at the topographical map, you’d have to get a huge iron and press the country flat like a tablecloth to know that for sure. The area is volcanic, famed for its hot springs where Aztec leaders would come and soak their battle-weary bones. Industry’s mostly drained off that hot water now, but there are still a few warm springs around town, made into swimming pools or communal washing troughs. Down the street and around the corner, you can go through an archway and down some winding steps to find murmuring women scrubbing clothes on their knees, dipping soapy garments into warm water that washes down an ingenious series of ancient drains and is replenished.

Fields are separated by random walls, constructed of the fist-sized volcanic stones studded through the earth like raisins in a cake, pitted ten metres deep and over a radius of thirty kilometres, as if discharged from some enormous scattergun. Every road is made of them, cobbled for miles and miles, and there are still fields full of them.

Here at the end of the twentieth century, it’s still cheaper to pay campesinos to de-stone, cultivate and harvest these fields by hand than it is to hire machinery to do it, and I see them every day out there, sorting stones or hoeing or picking crops, their white hats moving systematically through the vegetation. The landscape is big and bare, with spectacular desert sunsets and majestic abutments, and apart from the rainy season, when that voracious canopy of wild morning glory turns the whole area into a green and purple jungle, it looks a bit like inland Australia.

Where Australia has eucalypts, though, Mexico has cacti. The main varieties, tall and improbable, make the landscape look like something drawn by Dr Seuss.

There are the picturesquely named candelabra cacti, which with a whitened cow skull, a dozing cowboy, and the soundtrack of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly make up the quintessential Mexican cliché.

There are the tall órgano cacti, cylindrical and upright as organ pipes, sometimes grown as a handsome and impenetrable fence. There are varieties of agave called maguey and yucca, which shoot huge asparagus spears of spiky flowering tree from their centres once before they die. The campesinos tap these to extract a foamy white liquid, which ferments into a homemade beer called pulque. You pronounce this ‘pullkay’, like you’re already retching. If you’ve ever wondered how a cocktail of watered-down PVA glue and Foster’s Lager would taste, here’s your chance.

The infinitely preferable tequila is made from blue agave and nothing but, and comes in a range of qualities including a richly flavoured matured version the colour of cold-pressed olive oil. People sip it like sherry before a meal. It’s hard to believe a good tequila can be made from cactus. Well, up until about the third one. Then you drink the third one, and it’s ambrosial. You have a frith one, then a shnith. Then you skechool lukful the schleventch. . Then you brush your teeth and pop into bed.

Most ubiquitous of all are the nopales, or prickly pears. They’re so much a symbol of rural Mexico that they appear on the national flag. Around every settlement, part of every garden, climbing on the remotest rock walls imaginable, these give the horizon its dramatic silhouettes as the sun goes down. Their flowers are brilliant yellow, pink and red. When they are clustered with jewel-like fruit, called tunas, they are alive with birds and insects. Eating these fruits, so astoundingly juicy and sweet despite the dry toughness of the desert, makes you see how the nopal has spread everywhere – the hard, tooth-cracking seed passes through all digestive systems intact.

At URAC we are having a staff party, and since it coincides with Australia Day we offer to host it at our new apartment. Eagerly, the staff ask if we will cook a traditional Australian meal, something they have never tried before. Manuel tells us he’s driving to Mexico City the day before and we can come with him to buy anything we need at an ‘international’ food market there. I know what I’m craving, and the flavours that will knock their socks off: Thai food. My shopping list as I travel down the road at sunrise to Mexico City reads like this:

fresh ginger

green/red curry paste

tamari

coconut milk

fresh basil

lemongrass

What a strange revelation they are, these six items. As with most addictions, I guess you never really concede you’re a junkie until your supply dries up. Until you find yourself wandering the colossal food market, searching stalls, looking vainly through the sacks of spices, pimiento and scrolls of cinnamon, wondering if in some dusty corner of this labyrinth there are curry leaves or powder. Or standing in a supermarket aisle, wondering if a tin of pinacolada mix could possibly substitute for coconut milk. (The answer, incidentally, is no.)

These ingredients are like an incantation to me here. I’ve never lived in Asia, but I’ve lived in Melbourne. How many hundreds of superlative meals have I been served based on their vivid flavours? That aroma, exotic and strange, wafting from the Asian groceries on Victoria and Smith streets, that stinging, citrus sharpness of a clear noodle soup, that distinctive fragrance of frying green curry paste and basmati rice calling like a siren song from Thai restaurants. Here, without it, I’m made aware of my extraordinary good fortune.

Because here is a glaring cultural contrast. Mexico City, with a population bigger than my whole country, over twenty-five million people, can boast only this one small market, servicing mostly ethnic restaurants, where it is possible to buy ingredients for anything other than Mexican food. The vast majority of people have never tasted anything else. Japanese sushi bars are a new invention for the middleclass – a couple of nori rolls cost a day’s pay for an average worker – and the few Chinese cafes in the city serve a strange hybrid based on what they can locate or import.

We forget our debts. I never gave this a thought till I got here, but almost 60 per cent of the foods consumed in the world today were cultivated first by the indigenous people of the Americas, and they have found their way into the remotest corners of the world. Maybe you wouldn’t have chosen Thai food to showcase your country’s diet – maybe you would have prepared a good Aussie meal of shepherd’s pie and tomato sauce followed by vanilla and chocolate icecream. We might eat this at the pub or in front of the footy, thinking it’s a traditional Anglo meal untainted by multiculturalism, but we’d be wrong. Most of that meal comes to us thanks to Central and South American Indians, whose foods were taken by the conquerors back to suspicious Europe and beyond. The potatoes. The tomatoes. Vanilla. Chocolate. Then there’s the sunflower oil we cooked the meat in, the chopped capsicums we added, the sprinkle of paprika. Indirectly, there’s the corn syrup and cornflour in the ice-cream, by-products of the vegetable consumed every day here. A side serving of green beans and zucchini? A handful of peanuts before dinner? It’s all ours, thanks to someone else. Who are we kidding, telling ourselves that nothing we have is borrowed?

The high-protein cereal we give out to underweight children in the nutrition program is made from a grain called amaranth, an indigenous seed extremely high in protein and amino acids – thirteen times as nutritious as corn, in fact. It had always been used in ritual feasts by the Aztecs when the Spanish arrived; in fact, at sacrifices it was apparently mixed with human blood and moulded into little effigies and figures, eaten and offered as tributes to the gods. The Spanish nearly blew a gasket when they saw this. Amaranth, because it was utilised in a way which seemed a little too close to the Eucharistic host for comfort, was labelled ‘satanic’ and ‘devil’s food’. No Indian was permitted to grow it, and it teetered perilously close to extinction. Something banned as evil becomes something vital, something celebrated, and this pattern is everywhere.

I think about this as I experience what it’s like to be a migrant here in Mexico, nervously unable to communicate and unsure of the customs. It’s here that I start to understand the meaning of the word ‘multicultural’, in terms I have learned to assume as a given in Australia, terms so abstract and ephemeral that I need to dredge up something as lame as culinary diversity to try to describe what I mean.

Here, I start to explain it, try to find words for what it means, defend it, describe it, and I find that my throat closes up with frustrated anguish. That I am, to my amazement, very close to tears. I have never called myself patriotic, but maybe that’s because I have never before been such a distance from something so valuable, and so missed, and so fragile.

I realise afresh, too, something my complacency has let me forget : that food is a cultural bridge, often where no other kind exists. In a world of displaced people, languages and customs, it’s our Rosetta Stone. The gesture of preparing a meal for someone is one laden with symbolic goodwill, trust and hospitality.

I might stumble along with my tongue-tied Spanish as I visit URAC’s communities, but the welcome implicit in the constant gifts of homemade food is unmistakeable, and the loneliness and isolation I might feel fades as I hold out my hand to accept them.

I’ve stood on front doorsteps myself, welcoming new neighbours with a meal, turning up after a funeral with a plate, cooking something special for friends. Joy, crisis or celebration – so often our first impulse is to prepare something to eat together, for that moment of grace when everyone raises their glasses. This is how food operates: as a tribute, an invitation to begin. We approach our new adopted culture holding out our offerings, trying to build some bridge across the gulfs that separate us.

I once worked at a community centre once under a block of Housing Commission flats which gave me a new, less naive perspective on the cultural melting pot. We tried everything to get those Vietnamese, Turkish, Chinese and Latin American women out of those dark, airless flats. We put on language classes, driving classes, aerobics classes, excursions, bingo and – God help us – aromatherapy. Nothing really hit the mark. Then at last we thought of the right thing to ask:for them to come down every Wednesday and take it in turns to cook and share traditional food from their countries of origin. You couldn’t move in those sessions. Women came from everywhere. They came earlier and earlier and stayed long into the afternoon. For the multicultural lunch held on International Women’s Day, they arrived in stunning traditional clothes they’d put in the back of the wardrobe after arriving in Australia. They taught each other belly dancing, Vietnamese tea-leaf reading and salsa dancing.

It wasn’t about food. Food just gave us the excuse, and did what language couldn’t do. When I look back on those Wednesdays, the emotion I remember being most palpable in that big kitchen was relief.

Fresh ginger, curry paste, tamari, coconut milk, basil, lemongrass. I wonder, as I travel towards the megatropolis of Mexico City, whether I ever really appreciated the colossal privilege of simply being able to find these things in my local supermarket, any time I wanted them. Along with all the other culinary evidence of successful cultural assimilation, however grudgingly it was first admitted – all the fresh pastas and cheeses, the marinated meats and olives, the hummus and taramasalata.

What is our culture today, anyway, except an exotic blend of influences and traditions and ingredients? Like any living thing, if it’s not questing outwards, its days are probably numbered.

And I wonder, too, how Australians today would find their evening meal if they were transported back to those idealised Menzies years and made to shop for ingredients in an Australian grocery. What would their hand reach for, and miss? Would they survey those shelves and see with fresh eyes how bare and limited they are, and how strangely numbing and claustrophobic it can be to live in a monoculture?

We admire the definitive cultural statements of the foods of other countries, we see them as representing whole identities, but like us most of those cultures endured a diet so dull we would hardly recognise it, until they were revolutionised by what came back from the New World not so long ago. Imagine Italian food without tomatoes, zucchinis, capsicums or kidney beans. Not much of a minestrone, is it, without the ingredients grown by Native Americans that only got added in the seventeenth century? Today I am shopping for what I have been craving, and tomorrow, to celebrate Australia Day, I am making a Thai lunch for my curious workmates. Thai, because through no altruism or good deeds of my own, I come from a country where almost every cuisine in the world can be said to be typical, and where the recognition of this is something worth celebrating. Thai, because so many of the ingredients in this meal, including the characteristic prik kee noo luang chilli the Thais so love, all originally come from here, the Americas, and as global citizens it’s sometimes good, on our national days, for us to remind ourselves of the provenance of our influences and claims.

I know they will consider and savour the possibility of this idea, as alien and exotic as the flavour of curry, as they savour those tastes which have sailed around the world and come back to them, via Australia, and via homesickness. I smile at my list. I hold it like a passport. The sun is rising like a huge floating red lotus on the horizon.

Do me a favour the next time you drop down to your local Vietnamese or Turkish or Greek or Italian or Chinese or African restaurant. Your luck at being there, and your luck at being able to take it for granted. Clear your head for a minute, and make a toast to this – to debt, not amnesia. We should be attempting, humbly, to pronounce the names of these gifts being offered to us, and the names of those brave optimists serving it to us. We should be learning convivencia, if we want to eat at this table. We should be saying grace.

I lift children into the scales, stooping to put their shoes back on afterwards so they don’t get their socks dirty in the dust.

I’ve been reading a lot recently about structural macroeconomic adjustment, and the World Bank’s most recent report explaining why the economy isn’t behaving the way they predicted it would when the Free Trade Agreement was first introduced. The problem, self-evidently, seems to lie in trying to pay off the $13.6 billion trade deficit. Latest reports show that the free-market restructuring, analysed in 1994, seems to be increasing poverty rather than alleviating it. Well, say the economic experts, those figures are no doubt due to ‘the substitution of foreign goods for domestically produced goods’. I’m sure I’m not the only one who was under the impression that this dismantling of trade barriers was one of the very principles of the NAFTA agreement itself. That’s just a market distortion, they’re saying. Sure, there’s a hard decade or two at the beginning, but then the economic benefits of free trade and global deregulation will come pouring in.

The mothers watch the scales measuring their children’s health with tightly drawn faces. They nod and hug their children as we give out the amaranth supplements, explaining their preparation, how it’s better to mix them with milk than water. ‘Yes, I understand,’ say the mothers, gathering their other children about them, shifting with weariness.

Ground down.

As I lift the kids in and out of the scales and note their weights on graphs, I know that they’re better economic indicators than any figures on paper, and I trust that evidence in front of my eyes a lot more than I trust a blueprint on a big teak desk in a distant office in Washington, DC. They’re too thin. Their fathers aren’t around. Their mothers save thirty cents a week. It would take a lot of jiggery-pokery to convince me that these children, born into automatic debt which they will never repay, no matter how hard they work or for how little, aren’t at the bottom of this particular heap.

The rest of the meeting is taken up with talking about the recent floods in the south, which have left four hundred people dead and two hundred thousand homeless. Two hundred thousand – how easily the figure rolls off our lips, becomes another statistic, blunted of its horror. The deforested mountainsides have caused massive mudslides, so people are desperate for food and clean water, plastic tarps for shelter, anything. The members are keen to discuss what we might do to help these victims. I’m almost too embarrassed to look the group in the eye as we mention monetary donations, watching them standing round in the unseasonal chill wearing every article of clothing they possess, old women wrapped to the eyes in rebozos and bent double with sixty years’ hard labour. We are in someone’s yard – beautifully swept and tidy ready for the meeting, but stony, poor and empty.

Forty-two people, all women and children, stand patiently. What do they know about the disaster? Not much. A newspaper, even if you could read fluently, would be a big luxury round here. People are dead, homeless, thirsty, contracting cholera – this much they know. The victims have even less than them, so they talk about fundraising.

Economic downturns are on the agenda. We hold up charts illustrating how the proportion of people living in poverty in Mexico is back up to around 75 per cent, as bad as it was in the mid-sixties, after a brief moment of hope in 1981 when thanks to the oil boom and Solidarity activities, the figure dropped to 47 per cent. That is something worth commenting on here; a situation where slightly less than half of all people in the country living in poverty is seen as a success story.

‘Is Mexico a poor country, then?’ asks Maricruz.

‘No’, respond the campesinas. ‘Mexico is rich. Rich in natural resources, and in a human population desperate to work.’

‘So why are so many people poor?’ says Maricruz.

‘¿Quién sabe?’ they answer. ‘Who knows?’

And who does know, really? ‘Neoliberal economic rationalism’ sits on this culture as bizarrely as a coconut palm grafted onto an apple tree. People are too passive and fatalistic, cowed by foreign expertise and authority, desperate not to attract the attention of government officials. They’re resigned to always getting the rough end of the stick, it’s what their living history has taught them to expect; they haven’t got the right dog-eat-dog spirit.

There’s an expression here which indicates a boundless insight into deprivation: ‘The distance between the judge and the criminal is five meals.’ Any culture which can invent this as a maxim to live by is way too tolerant and accepting for neoliberalism. They’re sitting ducks.

I’ve read all the glossy reports and policy statements, and as far as I can see, here is the economic logic: make it untenable for agrarian workers, who used to grow enough food for national self-sufficiency, to stay on the land. Then the USA can subsidise its farmers to grown corn and beans, Mexico’s staple crops, and haul them over the border in the interests of free trade and deregulation, to undercut the going rate. Small farmers, clinging onto their land by the barest margin, can’t compete with the subsidised imports, and go under. Absorb them into the growing industrial and service sectors, and then, with agro-industrial export earnings, purchase the country’s food that the people used to grow themselves. Only now there’ll be a dependent workforce of people who need to buy their food to survive, and who’ll be willing to agree to almost any conditions the companies might impose – because if you’re hungry enough, you’ll agree to anything.

Official figures state that 35 per cent of the labour force is organised into trade unions, but there’s not much evidence of that on the ground. People tell me stories of blacklisting and harassment if they form or join unions, not just for them but for other members of their families. Human-rights groups have identified trade-union organisers as the prime new targets for covert torture and assassination. So people will work for less and less per hour, in toxic waste, in cementfloored sheds, in the blazing sun, in atrocious conditions. They will queue as casual day labourers for a minimum salary of twenty-five pesos a day – de-stoning, ploughing and picking for ten hours. Better, surely, to go to the factories, or over the border, or somewhere, anywhere, where you can provide for your family.

This is where the men are, now. Why? Well, that’s the way the world is, now. It’s structural adjustment, the macroeconomic system. The dueños, the bosses, the jefes, the experts know best. Meanwhile, I will give you all the money I have saved this month, to give to the poor forsaken flood victims.

If only we could supply roof guttering and watertanks to these houses to conserve the rainwater every year, if only we could get hold of a shipment of second-hand sewing machines so that women could make their own clothes, if only donors could send over some salvaged roofing iron, say, or chimney flues, so that we could build smokeless stoves. Then women wouldn’t have to walk miles each day to chop down trees for firewood to cook their food and sterilise their water, and kids wouldn’t get chronic eye infections from the open cooking fires smoking in the corners of people’s kitchens. If only we could dose everyone up with worm tablets, and persuade people to plant a wider variety of vegetables. If only I could organise eye tests and glasses for the kids who are failing school just because they can’t see properly, if only I knew the right channels so I could lobby the embassy, or Rotary International, or some philanthropic foundation, to ship over here the kinds of things you find at the opshop and the tip in Australia. If only.

I falter in my perseverance when they don’t write back to me, or give me a polite brush-off. I can’t penetrate the political payola system which implacably keeps things the way they are. I lack the will to be what people need here – someone with a few contacts who doesn’t mind being seen as a pushy nuisance.

With everything that has been invested in me, I still can’t change a thing; my contribution here seems infinitesimal, laughable. I lack the imagination to see how to make any real impact.

Energy has been poured into me for years, to prepare me to do something useful. I’ve always hated waste and mismanagement of resources, the ‘energy crisis’ which has seemed like everyone else’s fault, something that only required better redistribution and equity.

But here, I can barely convert a fraction of my privilege into anything constructive. My uselessness is exposed, as flimsy and conditional as a stage set. If there’s an energy crisis here, it’s me.

At the end of the day, I go to the class I’m ‘teaching’ one night a week to a local businessman who runs a wine factory, a job I’ve taken to offset our astronomical phone bills. His English is almost perfect, but he wants help to understand the idiomatic language of business and entrepreneurship so that he can chat with other executives when he goes to the USA for business meetings.

His factory manufactures inexpensive clones of famous liqueurs. Even the bottles look identical; it is only the labels which, when you look closely, sport names like Kalala and Controy. We read the Harvard Business Review and I correct the idiomatic terms he just can’t fathom, like ‘optimising investment flowthrough after downturnings’.

‘What is “downsizing”?’ he says.

‘It means the company is making its size more efficient by reducing the … well, it means people getting sacked.’ I say. ‘Laid off. Fired.’

‘I see. And what about this: “profits going south”?’

‘Well, I guess that means going down. Losing profits.’

He hesitates. ‘So “business moving south” means losing business?’

‘No. “Business moving south” means profits go up. Usually because of downsizing.’

‘So “business moving south” is good, but “profits going south” is bad?’

‘Exactly.’

He reads a report about an averted midair collision of aeroplanes. ‘Why was it called a “near miss”? Surely it should have been called a “near hit”?’

I laugh grimly and agree, wishing he would open the display case once in a while and crack a sample bottle of something. It’s a surreal exchange, one I’d usually be perversely enjoying, but I’m preoccupied tonight.

Mexico has just lost sixty centavos to the dollar in a devaluation, which seems like a trifle to a rich inhabitant of a First World country. But people here are making do on the very, very bare minimum of what it takes to survive; they can spare nothing. They are strained with anxiety at the news that the world monetary systems could hiccup again tomorrow.

That’s the way the world is, we say about the great unstoppable, irreversible tramp of macro-economics. You can’t change it, so don’t resist or intervene. Why don’t we say the same thing about crime, then, or disease? Like watching a biased umpire call a game, we keep quiet if the decision’s to our advantage, but we’re quick as lightning to object when it threatens to be otherwise.

‘If there was a raw product available here,’ I say, ‘and you could buy it more cheaply from Brazil, what would you do?’

‘Import it from Brazil, of course.’

‘And what if that meant that in a few years the local industry closed down here, so there wasn’t a nationally made market you could support, because it had gone out of business, so that you were forced to buy only from Brazil?’

He shrugs. ‘Well, that’s competitive. I would do whatever is cost-effective. That’s the way the world is.’

That language sounds familiar. Phil and I, and all the other Australian volunteers here, have just been given the bad news that funding for the volunteer program in Latin America has been cut in the latest Australian budget. Sending volunteer workers to Latin America, claimed the report on Australian aid expenditure, just didn’t offer the ‘durable returns’ on the aid dollar invested that other projects ‘more in keeping with Australian trade agreements’ did. To get those returns, it would be better to use aid money – less than half of one percent of Australia’s total GDP – closer to home, to offer business and corporate foreign interests an ‘enabling environment’ in which to establish economic development, in this ‘current climate of favourable globalisation’.

There’ll be no renewing our placement, no new volunteers coming here. We’ve extended our contract for as long as we could, but there’s a final deadline now.

My student is still leafing thoughtfully through the Harvard Business Review.

‘And this one: “economic fallout”?’ he says. ‘Wouldn’t it be more correct to say “fall-on”?’

God, could I handle a Controy now. I’m so tired, suddenly.

‘You’re the economist,’ I say. ‘You tell me.’

Here’s another little town abandoned by its men, who have drifted like thousands of others in the region to the factories on the border, or over the border itself into fabled El Norte, the USA, where they make ten dollars a day, working bringing in someone else’s harvest and living in tin sheds. This is mythical money here in Mexico. If you’re lucky enough to find a job here, you’ll work an eight or nine hour day for around four dollars. The very few lucky ones who are documented and fluke a job with an hourly rate in the USA, obviously, can make that much in an hour.

A few months of that and your family can get plumbing, your kids can get shoes and schoolbooks. It’s worth the risk, slipping over the Río Bravo, worth not seeing your family for months at a stretch, worth crawling over illegal scaffolding to solder joins the other workers on the building sites won’t go near, worth even a spell in jail.

Meanwhile, those ilegales make a convenient scapegoat for US politicians to blame – for unemployment figures, for crime, for drugs – while providing for that country the kind of cheap labour that makes its economy so strong and its standard of living so high. In California, where a third of US agriculture is based, almost 90 per cent of the harvest is done by Mexicans. Everyone in Mexico knows that the time to try to sneak over the border is harvest time, when the demand for hard, dirty labour is high and the border patrols suddenly become a whole lot more lax. After the demand is met, security tightens up again. US commentators fan the flames of xenophobia by constantly trumpeting the daily statistics of illegal workers slipping over the border, but they ignore the other number – the majority who return, or who make six or more trips a year to coincide with seasonal work. It always seems richly ironic that US citizens have a common opinion of Mexicans as being dirty and negligent, and yet employ them, as cheaply as they can, to clean their houses and mind their children.

It’s a hard, alienating, often degrading trip over that frontier to the north. Sometimes the people here call the USA el otro lado– the other side – and every time I hear it I think of spirits passed over into the netherworld.

This town is not exactly a ghost town, but emptied of able-bodied men, it’s like there’s a war on. Women and children make up the great bulk of people living in the houses along its hot stony streets. Nothing gets maintained, there is no money. Children drive little herds of thin, springy goats out from the corrals to search for feed in the campo, old people trudge up and down the steep streets hauling water from the communal well. Pigs and chickens and packs of stray dogs forage in the gutters and garbage heaps.

Coming back to this after seeing the slick prosperity of California and Texas clearly sets up in the young men of Mexico a complex mixture of resentment and envy and shame and restlessness. They rarely go back to farming. Usually, by the time the money’s run out they’re gone again, the tunnel vision of no option pulling them away, and the women and children are left, like everywhere, the borrowers and savers and scrimpers, like everywhere.

I collect up their savings, and set up the scales.

A third of this community’s kids under five in our survey have turned out to be underweight, and every fifteen days we visit the families of eight children with the more serious malnourishment. The first time, we pick up the volunteer coordinator Teri and her daughter Sofia and niece Dolores to help us find their houses.

Dolores is nine years old, a stunning beauty. I keep stealing glances at her – it’s like having a gazelle in the car – at her freshly washed hair falling in a curtain over her shoulders, her long feathering eyebrows, her calm almondshaped eyes meeting mine and smiling shyly. Sofia is just three, grubby and exuberant. I sit in the back with these girls, sorting through the graphs and the names of children we need to see, as we travel from house to house, across rubbled roads and past wandering pigs, dusty, big-eyed children playing in the dust, old men sitting outside the little general store adrift in changes they’ve given up trying to understand.

The town is mired, like a ship frozen solid in locking molecules of ice, or like one of those vehicles you pass with a shudder in a mirage-baked desert – burnt out, stripped of tyres, axles snapped like bones. This is economic restructuring from the point of view of those who’ve given up on the trickle-down effect, whose only experience of the great manoeuvrings on their behalf has been, in fact, the reality of the turbocharged sucking-up effect. Somehow, they know, they are even poorer than before. What’s in hock now are the things they always thought money couldn’t buy – the reliable presence of their families, the ties of their extended kin, pride in working the land. No wonder they’re hanging onto their children like lifebuoys.

Women ask me all the time why I have no children, what’s wrong with me. It’s pointless talking about choices in a place without any, and anyway, what woman would choose to live this way, without children, without grace? It would be like saying you have chosen to give yourself a disability. They look at me and I can see they have a hard time even seeing me as an adult female. Children are your life, your conduit to fleeting immortality.

Whatever they manage to save, it is unquestioningly for the children. It’s for a modest family party at the end of the school year with a meal of chicken and a small cake, for a notebook and some pencils. They want for their kids the opportunity and security they lack for themselves. There are fifty million individuals under the age of twenty-five in Mexico, and for a while there it seemed like that might be an asset rather than a curse for the country, but now the years are passing and the scales are tipping too slowly for this generation.

Sometimes when I come to a town like this, I can’t get the idea of adopting children out of my head. Getting children out of this. Now, for example, in the car, I entertain a fantasy of adopting Dolores, taking her back to Australia, taking her to the dentist, telling her she can go to university if she wants. She could sleep in my spare room; she could have a frivolous adolescence rather than one filled with hard monotonous work and the deadness of a lost and struggling pueblo with no sewerage or running water. She would be my town’s exotic beauty, and she could use a bit of attention and admiration, this solemn little girl, she would blossom under it.

And Sofia, this tiny bundle of energy in her stringy T-shirt with the tangled hair – well, I could adopt her too. I can’t stop thinking about the opportunities I could offer, compared to their future here. I could lift them out of this, give them more than enough of everything, return them healthy and educated and full of confidence to Mexico as young adults, ready to change the world. Unaware of my plotting on their behalf, the girls chat to me as we drive.

‘How many brothers and sisters do you have, Doña Cati?’ says Dolores softly.

‘Two. One brother, one sister.’

‘What are their names?’

I tell her. Dolores is the youngest of ten. She recites the names of her brothers and sisters, four names each, according to the custom, and each of their birthdays, including the two who died in childhood, counting them all off on her delicate tapering fingers.

‘What are the names of your mother and father?’ With every question she gains confidence. What colour hair does my mother have? How old is she? How about my uncles and aunts? When are their birthdays? I am stumped. She waits, her face a calm question, sure that I have only momentarily forgotten.

‘Hello, Uncle Juan Carlos!’ bawls Sofia, waving frantically out the window at a man driving some coathanger-thin cows along the road. ‘My uncle,’ she says confidingly, settling back into her seat. ‘And Cati, look, look! There’s our church! And see that?’ The car bumps past a scrappy concrete block building sitting squarely in a field of weeds. A few faded painted flowers decorate its walls.

‘That’s the kindergarten,’ says Sofia smugly. ‘That’s where I’m going soon.’

I think of the kindergarten in my town in Australia, its lawns and gardens and state-of-the-art developmental play equipment. Inside, the children make things with lavish amounts of clay and paint, unheard-of quantities of clean paper and felt and crayons. If they want to sleep, there is another room full of mattresses and cots – it would be considered a scandal, a source of outraged indignation, if there was not.

‘In Australia, Doña Cati,’ says Dolores, ‘do the girls go to secondary school?’

We hunt for the houses, hidden behind broken-down rubble walls and rusty metal gates. Sometimes small children are playing alone in the yards, poking at fires and digging holes in the dirt, their mothers out working or buying that day’s food. Sometimes the mothers themselves come to the gate, along with all the children at home. Six or seven of them crowd there, staring at the car and at us, listening wide-eyed to what we’re there for. At one house two boys race out and jump around me.

‘Can we sit in the car?’ they shout, reckless with excitement at the thought. ‘We can, yes? Just a sit in your car?’

They jump in, touching the dashboard, the radio, searching with manic energy in the glovebox. These boys could share a room at my place – bunks, maybe. I would buy them new clothes and a couple of second-hand bikes. My dog and they would fall instantly and eternally in love with each other. They could calm down, surely they could, in the face of secure abundance, they could relax and not have to run riot.

As we empty them out of the car to leave, one of them hoists his too-thin baby sister up suddenly onto his shoulders and jiggles her violently to say goodbye. Her head jerks back and forth on her neck. I imagine dislocated collarbones, bruised vertebrae. The little girl laughs uproariously and waves. Her brother squeezes her with barely containable adoration.

‘Hey, Mum!’ says Sofia.

‘What is it, mi vida?’ answers Teri lazily.

‘What is the elephant song?’

‘You know it. Sing it to Cati.’

Sofia sings it to Teri’s soft chuckling. Dolores giggles, too, at Sofia’s off-key donkey bray.

‘Ah, Sofi-Chofi’, she says tenderly.

‘My name,’ crows Sofia, ‘is Sofia Maribel Hernández Chávez.’

‘Why is it you only have two names instead of four?’ Mexicans often ask me. ‘Why don’t you use the names of your parents and of your husband?’ A Mexican tells you their name and it places them firmly within their life, within the kin patterns of their town, a proud litany of latitude and longitude which charts you onto the grid. They want to write my name, and they want to use every name I can lay claim to. ‘Luisa,’ they say softly, inscribing my second name. My surname. Phil’s surname. They wipe their hand and grasp the pencil again to painstakingly form the letters, like someone uncertain of your country, trying nevertheless to help you find your way home.

‘This house,’ says Sofia excitedly as we pull up, ‘is where we buy bolis!’ She leaps out of the car, already wheedling requests to Teri. I say I’ll stay with them while Teri and Beatriz go inside. Just inside the gate, two young girls have set up a little stall and they glance out, blushing shyly. Dolores and Sofia go to choose between the bags of chips and chewing gum on offer and come back to the car with snacks. Dolores has a packet of orange churrito chips drowned in scarlet chilli sauce and Sofia has a boli, a frozen milk drink in a plastic bag. Industriously, she gnaws off a corner of the bag and sucks some drink out.

‘My mum is talking to Doña Angelina in there, isn’t she, Dolores?’ she says, settling in for the long wait. ‘She’s got a new little baby.’

Dolores licks her fingers fastidiously. ‘Give Doña Cati a bite of that,’ she says. Sofia takes a suck of her frozen drink and hands it to me carefully.

‘I love these,’ she says.

Twenty minutes pass. The girls wait in the hot car with absolute patience. They explore the reclining seats and scrupulously share their snacks with me and each other. We compare shoes and they admire my earrings. I look at the rosary beads Dolores wears around her neck and she passes them through her hands and explains the prayers to me that she has learnt in catechism class; how the beads are divided into the divine mysteries – the sorrowful mysteries, the joyful mysteries and the glorious mysteries.

Sofia lolls in the sun on the carpeted rear ledge behind the back seat, touching the hatchback window with sticky, dreamy fingers.

When Teri and Beatriz finally return and the car starts bouncing and skidding down a steep track I ask her to hop down, back into her seat.

‘Don’t want to,’ she says, clinging precariously to the bench. In Australia, I think, she would have a safety seat, and she would be buckled into it securely; she would be cosseted, protected, treasured.

‘Come on, Sofia, it’s a bit dangerous.’

Teri glances behind her and smiles indulgently. ‘She likes it there,’ she says languidly, turning back to the front. ‘Dolores, where is Señora Teresa’s house?’

‘Teresa Luisa Perez Hernández or Teresa Amelia Reséndiz Barron?’ asks Dolores.

‘Barron,’ I say, consulting the list.

Dolores directs us, street by street. She knows the whole town, knows who lives where, knows the birthdays and names and quirks of every one of her relatives. She cannot read a map, so it is all in her nine-year-old head, a vast and complex web of community survival.

‘How many people live here?’ I ask her. She considers.

‘Somos sesenta,’ she replies: we are seventy. I think I have misunderstood.

‘Seven ... hundred people?’ I hazard.

‘Seventy families, Doña Cati.’

I imagine this carved on those signs outside Australian country towns, on the highway where it tells you it’s a Tidy Town and a Rotary and Lion’s Club town – we are one hundred and forty. We are ninety. No – instead we are single lonely units of census, segmented and defined by demographic databanks, administered by social clubs and charities and awards for tidy streets, families interstate by choice, remarried, fractured.

‘Where is your house?’ Sofia says to me suddenly, staring into my eyes as she breaks my reverie.

‘In Australia. Another country. All my family is too.’ I make a wry face, and grin.

‘A long, long way away?’

‘Yes, very long.’

‘All of them?’

‘Yes. All of them except for me.’

Sofia blinks once or twice, getting this idea into her head. Her huge eyes are like two spoonfuls of black tea. Then she reaches over and gives my face a quick, sticky, compassionate stroke.

I have been found out by a three-year-old. For a few strange, unexpected seconds I am close to tears with homesickness, rushing out of nowhere. Sofia gazes at me with absolute comprehension. Then she jumps out of the car as it pulls up, clutching her frozen drink, her tiny body wiggling in her minuscule jeans.

‘This is my house,’ she says to me, pointing. ‘Dolores lives over there, and I live here.’

The firmness in her voice, the certainty, and most of all that tender little stroke, dispel any lingering fantasy of mine that she will ever see Australia.

I get out of the car to play a while with the girls while Teri and Beatriz are talking. Teri’s house is three rooms, square and cement. Her two boys, Sofia’s older brothers, come racing out of the yard bearing slingshots. Across the dirt road is a giant concrete slab, some unfinished house or basketball court or community centre, permanently on hold now. Teri’s husband is working in the States, her kids haven’t seen their dad for over two years. That’s the way the world is.

Behind the slab, in the undergrowth of cactus and burst plastic bags of garbage, a squat black pig forages. Up the steep and rubbly hill, supporting a pole holding two fifteenlitre water containers, hobbles a tiny old woman. She places her feet carefully, conscious of what a fall would mean, permanently bent from the grind of it. The sun blazes down and I blink away blurriness, seeing Dolores there, sixty years from now. Then I look back at the crowd of kids who’ve gathered for the novelty of kicking a soccer ball around with a guera.

Dolores offers me the last of her churritos, screws up the cellophane bag and meticulously dusts crumbs from the front of her enormous darned vest, on its ninth hand-me-down.

‘Let’s go, mi vida,’ says Teri. Sofia jumps like a puppy. Dolores holds out her ballerina’s hand to me. ‘Thank you, Doña Cati. Until next time.’

‘Next time,’ I say to her, ‘I want to bring a camera, and take your photo, okay? A present for your mum.’

Her hand covers her mouth, blushing with shyness and pleasure. The photo, I know, will depict her standing stiffly, grinning a big obedient grin, the standard pose. It will be nothing like her, with her soft, luminous quiet. This is pretty much what I represent, I think: the outsider with the expensive camera, the laughable Spanish, the family whose birthdays I can barely recall who are, incomprehensibly, somewhere else.

My life, too, is incomprehensible, because I have no children, and how could I take another woman’s life away from her? These girls are not my daughters. This is where they will grow up and grow old and carry water up that hill – it’s unthinkable that it should be otherwise. They are home.

Sofia waves and jumps exuberantly as the car pulls away, gnawing at her plastic bag, waiting for the next thing in the day. Dolores’s hand goes to her mouth and I think for a minute she is hiding a smile, her eyes shining. But then her hand comes away in a quick movement of bestowal, and I realise she is blowing me a kiss. She is blessing me with grace.

On the cusp of the Pope’s visit to Mexico, ‘forever faithful’, the empire of Rome seems fonder than ever of citing how many Catholics there are in the world. Eight hundred and fifty million, it’s been claiming of late. I go into churches all the time to test this hypothesis, and attend every religious ritual I can. They’re not hard to find here, obviously. The boom of fireworks at dawn will give it away, the bank-up of traffic that reveals a procession is ahead, some pilgrimage is in progress. People who receive five working days holiday a year spend that time walking in the blazing sun to a shrine two hundred kilometres away. They sleep in the fields at night and walk all day, singing and carrying devotional banners. When they arrive within sight of the shrine – usually a cathedral or church containing a particularly sacred statue – they occasionally prostrate themselves and travel the last few kilometres on their hands and knees, or, more traditionally, encumber themselves with some burden or painful handicap: a crucifix, or large cactus pads tied to their backs like the ultimate hair shirt, to display the depth and intensity of their penance.

Their devotions to the statue could intrigue a social analyst for days, but to the penitents it’s deadly serious. It makes sense to them to stroke gladioli across the statue’s robes and then across their own heads, or to kiss the plaster feet repeatedly, or to cut off their own hair and leave it pinned to the statue’s velvet clothing in ribboned plaits. The more candles you can afford to light, the stronger the prayer. The more blinding the incense, the more likely the heavenly hosts will smell it and take notice of your supplications. The louder the fireworks and more elaborate the fireworks castle, the better the harvest is going to be. I have been an honoured guest at many town fiestas where the same band was called back to play year after year because ‘Our Lady loves that kind of music’, just as She loves her annual jaunt around the streets, hoisted on a float, strung with oranges, cookies, lollies and candles, with all the children dressed as Aztec kings dancing down the street in front of Her. She loves her visit from the statue of Our Lady carried from another town eleven kilometres away, and because the two love to meet at dawn this means the whole town will rise at three-thirty a.m. to carry Her there, stopping every few hundred metres for a decade of the rosary. Witnessing these meetings in chilly dawn mist, as shawland poncho-wrapped peasants trudge up the cobbled road carrying decorated statues towards each other, singing, it’s hard to believe you’re at the cusp of the twenty-first century, and harder still to see how the dogmas of Vatican II have had the slightest influence on the lives of these people. The Reformation exploded over the issue of false gods, of idolatry, of blasphemy, but don’t try telling that to these people as they raise their cheap framed prints of the Virgin over their heads to capture the holiness of the sound of the cathedral bells as it tolls down on them. Those prints go back into oneroom houses and radiate santidad those prints cure cancer.

You can buy soap which cures cancer, as well, and amulets that help you win the lottery. You can put white powder from the curandera into your husband’s shoes and he will never stray to another. Whole sections of the market are devoted to articles these pious Catholics need for worship: black chickens to cure bad humours, wax figures, piles of tiny nickel milagritos shaped like sheep or guardian angels or arms and legs or eyes, depending on what you’re praying for – relief from ailments or a lucky break. When your prayer is answered, you pin the milagrito to the robes of the saint’s statue you prayed to. The feet of these saints are worn away with kissing; their velvet is threadbare with stroking. Behind them in glass cases are enormous mosaics of Biblical scenes, seven or eight metres across, made entirely from hundreds of thousands of returned milagritos. The saints’ clothing is strung with ribbons holding tiny photos of children, adolescents, blurry colour pictures of lost or long-departed relatives. A pair of baby shoes hangs from a ministering finger. A piece of the other hand is broken off, no doubt now ensconced in a household shrine now like a holy relic.

Catholics, one and all. ‘This household is Catholic,’ say signs outside every second house in Mexico, rich or poor. ‘We reject the propaganda of Protestants and other sects. Long live the Virgin of Guadalupe!’

We live in the north, where mainly mixed-blood mestizo Mexicans live their devout lives, growing up attending catechism classes every Sunday after Mass but still managing to hang bunches of herbs over the door which they have picked at crossroads to give them greater potency. The members consecrate a new pig farm by inviting a priest to pray for success and shake bunches of flowers dipped in holy water over every stall.

Every Sunday there is something new on the biblical calendar. Like the Presentation of Jesus in the Temple, when children from all over the town dress as tiny Jewish scholars, right down to the charcoal beards and moustaches. Or the Ascension of Mary, where three young women parade up the streets to the cathedral dressed as various stages of the Virgin’s life:young, old and dead in a big display case. (But only dead bodily, as was explained to me, because she had ascended. Wasn’t the doctrinal teaching that Mary had actually ascended bodily? Isn’t the celebration of the Ascension about that very thing? Ah yes, but this moment is before she ascended). Like Snow White waiting for her prince, the young woman feigning death in the perspex casket was carried past as onlookers all crossed themselves.

Or the myriad pilgrimages that pass at dawn beneath my window, the pilgrims chanting and singing praises in their cheap, tough shoes and battered hats ready for the forty-kilometre walk ahead in thirty-six degree heat. Once some pilgrims turned up at the door and asked to stay the night, like Jesus and the disciples might. It’s a clever test of social piety, and they are rarely told there’s no room at the inn. Fifteen people slept on our floor, whispering and giggling into the night like adolescents on a Christian Youth Camp, and left at dawn with a note saying ‘God Bless You from the Devotees’.

Or, my favourite, the Blessing of the Taxis, which takes place at a roadside chapel outside town on the holy day of St Christopher, the patron saint of travellers. The local orange Renaults, polished and decorated with streamers and balloons, line up like patrons at a drive-in and pop their hoods for the priest to sprinkle holy water into their engines and murmur prayers for safety. After the ceremony the taxistas drive around the town in convoy, causing the mother of all traffic jams, hands pressed joyously to the horns, greeted everywhere with smiles and waves.

I run one of my sewing classes in a one-room house with a towering life-sized plaster crucifix hanging on the wall, dwarfing everything in the room. Square glass boxes in town squares and the vestries of churches will contain a doll dressed in a miniature doctor’s outfit, complete with tiny stethoscope, labelled ‘Doctor Jesus’ and surrounded by flowers. Even truck stops consist of stalls selling fruit and water and shelves of votive candles, which you can light at a makeshift altar before your trip.

The further south you travel in Mexico, the more indigenous the population becomes, and the more the religion becomes fused with something much older, much stranger, much more mysterious. The Benedictines and the Franciscans knew their stuff. They built churches on extant sacred sites, often destroying the temple or pyramid and rebuilding the church from the same stones. They focused on the soaring lines and columns, the fake gilt ceilings, plenty of lifelike imagery gesturing sombrely from the walls, statues with real clothing and hair. To say Christianity sparked a chord in the Mayan and Aztec sensibility is like saying water sparks a chord in ducks. The concept of the resurrection of a young sacrificed figure they already had; the notion of hellish suffering they were soon to find out about. Indentured as unpaid mission slaves, dying like flies from smallpox, typhoid and the sword, they must have seen the sense in a Christ figure crowned with thorns and writhing in agony. They have taken comfort in it ever since. ‘This is life,’ says the Aztec Florentine Codex. ‘A path of petals, and a path of thorns.’

To tread that path to Catholic heaven, that road of pleasure and pain, may require some relinquishment of ‘pagan’ beliefs, but not many. The Franciscans turned a blind eye for four hundred and fifty years as worshippers brought bowls of corn gruel to church and laid them in front of the altar, muttering ancient, pre-Hispanic prayers, or made crucifixes for the shrines deep in the forest where spring water signalled the presence of spirits. As long as the locals kept coming, it seems they were able to interpret the Good Book in pretty much whatever way they liked. Having them stay at the mission meant an ongoing free labour force, diseased and depleted as they were, to enrich the kingdom of Spain with silver, gems and natural resources. When they became troublesome, as they did in Cuba and off the Veracruz coast, they were quickly baptised and dispatched. ‘Satan has now been expelled from the island, his influence has disappeared now that most of the Indians are dead,’ reported the zealous Spanish missionary and historian Oviedo in 1554, adding piously, ‘Who can deny that the use of gunpowder against pagans is the burning of incense to Our Lord?’

It says something about the ferocious power of passive resistance that Mexico’s indigenous have managed to keep such a myriad of beliefs and traditions together. There is a stubborn refusal to assimilate, to be objectified, counted, vaccinated and herded. It drives the government crazy, this reticent and determined carrying on as always, this polite but firm ‘no thanks’. The Zapatista movement in Chiapas is fundamentally a civil movement, concerned with a simple four-part demand which the government has signed but refuses after several years to ratify. The demands sound like the most reasonable, the most unhysterical manifesto imaginable. The right to speak and teach in their own languages. The right to apply community laws. That all government troops return to their barracks, out of the forests of Chiapas. The right to the standard citizen rights of other Mexicans.

‘Make no mistake,’ Subcomandante Marcos said in news reports after the 1997 massacre of forty-five defenceless indigenous civilians praying in a church. ‘This is a low-intensity war between memory and oblivion.’

Memory is what keeps it alive: the corn gruel, the constant burning of copal, frankincense and cedarwood, the scattering of pine needles on the church floors. I attend a fiesta in a tiny impoverished town where every person will sit down together outside the church to eat a communal meal, and watch that meal being blessed before lunch. Women, men and children enter the central aisle of the tiny church on their knees, singing a hymn, swinging incense. They stop and hold the food up to the four cardinal compass points, praying, offering it to the four corners, the four winds. I once saw a documentary of elders of a Native American tribe do exactly the same thing with a brazier before a ceremony, and I have seen ceremonial dancers in the Aztec tradition commence with precisely the same ritual.

The four-pointed crucifix hangs on the wall before us. We are in America, not the Vatican City.

One of the most uplifting and resonant rituals I ever saw took place in a small village on the shores of Lake Atitlán in Guatemala. The requisite statue of St Anthony, the personage the Catholic fathers had ensconced, was carried from the church to the piercing music of a thumping brass band, whose members were all dressed splendidly in hot-pink shirts. The town elders, wearing special coats and highheeled buckled shoes which called to mind fifteenth-century Spain, were in charge of the deafening fireworks and rockets to accompany the float. As the villagers carefully manoeuvred their saint up the street, I saw that he’d been dressed in indigenous clothing – a bright red skirt, a woven blue shirt, exactly like everyone present.

They had prised his plaster Bible from his hand and replaced it, triumphantly, with an ear of corn.

Holding his truly holy icon aloft, resplendent in local colours and surrounded by flowers and palm fronds and mirrors and peacock feathers, the plaster saint had been resurrected, quietly and determinedly, as something meaningful. The Catholic Church makes much nowadays of its sincere attempts to stay ‘relevant’ in a world where it fears it is becoming redundant – if only it could see its relevance in action on Lake Atitlán. St Anthony leads the procession in spite of himself, the float he stands on decorated with a blue cloth from a corn company, still printed with maize cobs and the English words ‘First Quality’, the genuflections making way for the brass band and the people with the fireworks. Later he will be restored in the church and bless each baptism, First Communion and wedding the locals can muster on this auspicious day. Memory fights against oblivion, the cedar-wood smoke drifts heavenward with their prayers. These rituals survive battered and transformed but with their true invisible shape somehow intact.

In San Juan Chamula, in southern Chiapas, you can see foreign tourists look around the church there with faces registering the shock of Dorothy’s when she realised that wherever this was, it sure wasn’t Kansas. The church itself rises like a brightly painted toy out of the surrounding concrete poverty of the town, repainted in gelato pastels and whitewash, its facade honouring bas-relief depictions of flowers, fruit and animals. Tourists have been beaten up for snapping illicit photos inside this church, so says the sign outside. For that reason I have no images of it, to prove to myself that it really was as strange and extraordinary as it was. Only my memory can call to mind that eerie, smoke-filled interior. There are no Catholic priests in San Juan Chamula – the villagers lost patience with them and forced them out. Then they rearranged the church to suit themselves. First the altar was taken out and the Blessed Sacrament snuffed. The straight lines of pews were removed. Then every piece of statuary the locals could find was arranged around the walls, like columns of Vikings in Valhalla. The statues were given black wigs; they were repainted with darker skin tones and dressed in indigenous clothes. Objects were placed around their necks and in their hands. They stood there, many of them headless and armless. The floor was strewn with pine needles and sawdust and a guttering, flickering carpet of thousands of candles.

The heat, the atmosphere, were intense. Thick smoke swirled in the darkness and hundreds of people milled around in the space left by the pews and the altar, praying in the Tzotzil language, kneeling, playing instruments, selling candles, singing, chanting, spitting, whispering, drinking. Complicated rituals were being enacted: turning in all directions with incense braziers, rearranging of candles, repeated sprinkling of the floor and the statuary with water and alcohol. People knelt in family groups before the statues, making offerings. One family arranged eggs in a line, bent and kissed the floor in supplication, rearranged the eggs. Men lay paralytically drunk. Others prayed with bottles of Coca-Cola, waiting a suitable amount of time for the Coke to be blessed by the saints before waving it in the sign of the cross and giving it to their feverish babies. Over in the corner, the contorted life-sized crucifix that had hung over the altar lay forgotten and gathering dust. Bits of plaster arms and legs and heads surrounded it, waiting for some complex resurrection.

Not one word of Spanish was spoken inside that church – one look and a missionary would have run screaming, the ousted bishop would have had an aneurism with the blasphemy of it all. My skin prickled. Much as I wanted the Pope to see this, all these people he so naively counted as faithful Catholics, I was glad he wasn’t there. It would have finished him off.

As for me, my secular, barely tolerated tourist interest in proceedings quickly evaporated into trembling awe. The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end, my heart hammered out of control. Friedrich Nietzsche, think again. John-Paul Sartre, get in here. In this dark altar-less room with its Coke bottles and rubble of saints’ heads and homemade musical instruments playing the same two notes over and over was the ark of the covenant, the Grail, the One True Cross and the holy of holies, twisting through the air like live circuitry. It was testament to a people’s survival, that church, as if every grim emotion and every step of their thorn-strewn journey was condensed into that low, implacable, unquenchable chant, that refusal to die. ‘Fall on your knees,’ that voice said, ‘and know that I am God.’

After the Chiapas massacre, we start hearing all kinds of horrifying rumours – that the government-trained paramilitary group responsible videotaped themselves doing it, that the victims were twenty-one women, fifteen children and nine men, that up to sixty thousand soldiers are camped now in the forests of Chiapas, where they are harassing people daily. The government bungles a public-relations exercise where it releases photos of ‘Zapatistas’ handing in their weapons to smiling paramilitary officials. Although the figures are dressed in indigenous clothes with their faces hidden behind the anonymous balaclavas and bandanas of the Zapatistas, they wear army boots, and the photos are quickly exposed as fakes. With so many soldiers waiting for someone to get out of line, Chiapas seems poised on a hair-trigger of more conflict, and the national mood is sombre. Foreign peacekeeping volunteers and observers are expelled from the country, the media expressing indignation that these international busybodies are involving themselves in the affairs of ‘our Indians’. The Zapatistas, and the independence and land rights they stand for, make the powerbrokers extremely uneasy. It’s no coincidence that the movement burst violently to world attention on 1 January 1994, the day the North American Free Trade Agreement took effect.

Marcos seizes on something the government claims in its defence. It says that indigenous Mexicans, including those in the Zapatista movement, should feel safe to live and travel within the country with complete confidence, that security forces are well trained and monitored, and that nobody has any reason whatsoever to claim persecution.

In that case, Marcos announces, small groups of Zapatistas are going to visit every region in the country, to talk to people and demystify the movement, to try to counter the demonising of the group in the media. It’s important, he says, that the Mexican people as a whole see that the Zapatista movement is made up of indigenous men and women who only thirty years ago were not even allowed to walk on the pavement, who only want the same citizen rights and security as everyone else. Meanwhile, the Zapatista command will remain anonymous and invisible, since that is the way the indigenous people have always been treated. The masks are not a publicity stunt, they say, but a necessary symbol: ‘the Mayans of Chiapas did not exist. Our lives were worth less than those of machines or animals … We were silenced. We were faceless.’ They describe themselves as ‘the face that hides itself to be seen.’

Painted into a corner by world attention and the rhetoric of its own promises, the government uneasily concedes that, yes, it will ensure the Zapatistas safe passage through the country.

They’re coming to our region, if we’ll have them. There is much discussion at URAC.

We have been approached by organisers and the Zapatistas are keen to come and speak with our members, and we put this to a big meeting, offering the microphone to anybody who wants to speak. People stand, troubled, and express their fears – that hosting the Zapatistas will mark us as political and cause us trouble as an NGO, that it will bring harassment and reprisals, that the Zapatistas themselves are scary in their balaclavas, like the Shining Path, like terrorists. Finally the visit is put to the vote.

‘Who here is scared and nervous at the prospect of the Zapatistas visiting?’ says Alfonso to the assembled members. Hundreds of hands are raised.

‘Who would like to go ahead with the meetings in spite of that?’

There is a long pause. Then slowly, hesitantly, hundreds of hands are raised again. People’s faces are grave and determined. They are willing to countenance the possibility that they may have been misinformed, that members of an indigenous armed uprising from faraway Chiapas might have their own side of the story.

The Zapatistas arrive, three women and two men, incongruous in their identical balaclavas and red kerchiefs. They are tiny – not one of them reaches my shoulder. The groups have spread out all over the country, travelling by bus and in convoy from their remote villages for often the first time in their lives. A strange spirit of jubilation seems to strike the country at large as the mission gains momentum and nobody gets killed. The fifteen male Zapatistas who visit Mexico City play a game of soccer with the city team, and the photo of the two teams – the mestizos towering over the indigenous – makes front-page news. The Zapatistas lose, but take it in good humour. ‘We would have won, but these balaclavas slowed us down,’ the captain is reported as saying.

The people who visit URAC speak slow and precise Spanish – their second or third language, and one they would rarely use at home. They stand in front of curious savings groups in our member towns, quiet and dignified, speaking in low voices. At first people don’t know quite what to ask. Nobody pretends to understand all the political ramifications of this visit. Then someone asks what kind of beans and corn they grow in Chiapas, and suddenly everyone is chatting like old friends.

‘I’ve got a question,’ a woman called at one meeting. ‘What do you mean by this demand to be allowed to speak your own languages? Doesn’t that just cause more problems? I mean, we’re all Mexicans, like you say, all equal – wouldn’t it be easier to all speak Spanish? Why create that division? Why do you insist on something like that?’

The Zapatista woman at the front of the group folded her hands in her apron and answered in her soft, accented voice.

‘Tell me,’ she said, ‘what language did your grandmother speak?’

‘Otomi,’ said the woman. ‘And what about your mother?’

‘Well, she spoke a little Otomi, too.’

‘Did she teach you a few words?’

‘Yes, she did.’

‘And you, have you passed on that language to your own daughter?’

There was a pause. ‘No,’ said the questioner.

‘Why not?’

‘Por pena,’ replied the woman honestly. For shame.

‘Por eso,’ said the Zapatista woman softly. That’s why.

A deep silence fell then, full of tiny nods and winces.

At the end of each meeting, after hearing about the hardships of everyday life for the Chiapas peasant farmers, people disappeared, hurrying round corners. They returned with sacks of corn, bags of beans, tins of food, neatly wrapped packages of children’s clothes. I knew these gifts represented whatever meagre surplus the URAC members had managed to scrimp, given now without a second thought.

‘For the people in your village, in Chiapas,’ the women murmured as they passed them to the visitors. There were no effusive thanks or speeches full of praise, just quiet nods. Before we left for the next meeting, someone would stand nervously and clear her throat.

‘We want to thank you for coming all this way and showing us this solidarity, and showing us that we are all campesinas together,’ the speaker would say, and there would be a brief smattering of applause followed by the kind of sad, resigned silence that falls between sincere and realistic people who know that in a different world they would be friends, and know that they will never see each other again.

The visiting Zapatistas were feted with great hospitality and curiosity one night at the home of a rich, politicised Mexican teacher in town. They sat quietly amid the chatter and finger food, answering questions. At one point, one of the women stopped speaking and raised her hands to her breasts, frowning with discomfort.

‘Oh!’ she said. ‘That’s really hurting … my little daughter would be breastfeeding right now at home.’

‘My goodness,’ exclaimed one of the wealthy teachers. ‘Whatever would induce you to leave your little baby before she was weaned? What could matter more for her?’

The Mayan woman looked up at her from behind her red bandana, and thought for a while.

‘Peace,’ she finally answered.

‘There was a scattering of jades,’ the Aztec poets said when they felt an orator had spoken well and been clearly understood, as if ideas litter the ground like jewels.

I’ve been shown again and again here the poor fit of words, their inexactness, the loneliness of searching for the ones you need for your ideas. I’ve lost my voice often; it’s seems to be the only sickness I’ve had. My throat constricts, the words rasp, my Spanish blunders clumsily along, left behind in conversations and lapsing into easier silence.

Odd memories are surfacing, travel memories. A time in Barcelona with my old friend Susan, where with eight words of guidebook Spanish we ordered ice-cream and got two toasted cheese and tomato sandwiches. We bent over our plates in shaking, helpless hilarity, and finally, of course, ate the sandwiches.

Standing in the middle of a ruined domeless cathedral in Berlin, weeping with loneliness and my total, overwhelming inability to communicate with anyone, and feeling the quick rough caress on my arm of an old woman who hurried away, hardly meeting my eye.

Scrounging up some grant money years ago to run a writing class for people with literacy problems, and meeting Brett, wrestling fan and school dropout, sixteen years old. I set the class an exercise to write a simple poem – three lines: object, simile, action. They laboured over them (‘a red apple, like it’s calling my name, I eat it’) and we finally got to Brett’s.

‘A dusty road,’ Brett had written, ‘like an unopened book. I walk, and start to read.’

I remember staring at him, tongue-tied.

‘That’s it,’ I blurted.

‘Thanks,’ he answered.

We hoard these scraps for a reason, I guess. They arrive unexpectedly, like letters long lost in the system, turning up at last to give you the news. Here, I need them, need to patch something together with them, remembering that words may yet suddenly bend themselves to be revealed, that sometimes we ask for an ice-cream and if we get a sandwich, laugh and eat it, tuck the moment away.

Language is not a coded system that we finally begin to decipher, that’s like saying a sheet of musical notations is a sonata. Here I’ve longed for a shortcut to the code, some kind of ‘Teach-yourself-Beethoven-in-six-months’ scheme, but the world of shared understanding is a world away from just grammar and vocabulary. Start thinking that near enough is good enough, that we can jam these strange pegs into the stereotype holes with just one more whack of certainty, and pretty soon you end up with a toasted sandwich in front of you to teach you a little humility. It’s not about language. That’s the boat we cross in, or sink in. You were right, Brett, and while I was busy studying literature you were learning it – it’s a closed book, it’s a dusty road. Anthropologists and linguists spent decades trying to translate the Mayan codex and couldn’t crack the spine of that book. And yet the jades drop among us, don’t they – as plentiful as stones, or rain. We are hieroglyphics to each other, but what is scattering down on us is still precious.

What I should have said to Brett was thank you, for that clear green piece of a poem.

Just as now I should stay aware of the chafing leash of my own frustration, eat what’s put in front of me, reach over the river of language and try to catch someone’s eye. We weep and laugh with helpless frustration at it; we put out our own hands, both to caress a stranger’s arm and to stop ourselves from falling. We find jade and don’t know why we pick it up. It’s only when we start walking that we start to read.

It is a beautiful day to be out walking, a Saturday. I step out of my front door with Phil onto The Street of Child Heroes and am immediately approached by a woman holding a huge basket of wrapped biscuits, each packet tied with a ribbon, arranged carefully in a circle.

‘I wonder if you’d like to buy some cookies,’ she begins. ‘I have nut, vanilla, chocolate, or an assortment. Here, if you’d like to try one …’

Her beautifully manicured hands touch the packets. She is far, far better groomed than me, bright and charming and courteous.

‘No, thank you.’

‘Only ten pesos a packet,’ she continues, not forcefully, but just as quietly and politely.

‘Not right now, thanks.’

‘Well, thank you, and go well,’ she says, and walks on. And I am twenty steps down into the plaza when from nowhere tears pour from my eyes, huge sobs start hacking in my throat.

‘What’s wrong? What’s wrong?’ says Phil in alarm.

I sit down on a bench and am consumed with sudden, sodden grief. Usually I’m able to bundle it up, stow it somewhere like an unwanted sweater, tell myself I’ll indulge it later in private. But now the flood of tears is as unstoppable as a river. I hold my face in my hands, conscious of being in so public a place. How can I begin to explain what has set this off – that young woman, so determinedly cheerful and resourceful, so hopeful and polite and wellspoken and peddling biscuits to uninterested strangers on the street, steeling herself in her best clothes for a day of brush-offs, condescension and small change, refusing to give up.

‘Oh, that girl,’ I weep foolishly. Phil squeezes my shoulder.

‘I’ll go and buy some biscuits from her.’

‘Jesus, it’s not about the biscuits.’

It’s not even really about her – there are plenty of people on the plaza this morning equally deserving of compassion or tears – the sad-eyed Indian children watching the tourist city kids eating pancakes, the blind lottery-ticket seller, the shoeshine men who do a twelve-hour day, every day, people begging and people refusing to beg, tiny gnarled old ladies with heads bowed in humiliation over their bowls. All of them, any of them, could have equally triggered this outpouring, but this morning it’s nail polish and lipstick, the carefully washed and pressed clothes of someone whose dreams, if she allows herself any, are really only of a living wage. There are so many millions like her all over the country ... well, all over the world, who deserve something more than this. It’s too much, all this waste, all this hopeless hope. It’s as if there’s a huge subterranean well of tears waiting for their moment, and none of us are anywhere near scraping the surface of what we should be crying over. Phil gets up and locates her, brings me back some biscuits, and I cry even harder that this is what we are reduced to – ten pesos of salved conscience, and that this for all its petty futility is nevertheless almost half the daily basic wage.

I am just the privileged consumer on the end of all this economic wreckage, and on bad days I think this is pretty much all I’m good for. I find myself deciding how to spread around my spending money in a pathetic attempt at sharing out my relative wealth. I stave off the guilt of it in increments – this morning I will patronise one juice stall, tomorrow the one around the corner – knowing all the time that the juice stalls, if I really opened my eyes, stretch all the way down the road, into the long polluted distance of chronic, precarious poverty.

‘Which of the following best describes what your house is made of,’ says the first page of the nationwide census on child nutrition and living conditions we helped members of URAC fill out, so that we could be included in the survey.

‘(1) Bricks or concrete. (2) Wood or tin. (3) Palm. (4) Carton.’

I’ve noticed that what westerners often do when confronted with these unanswerables – a house made of cardboard! – is to deflect attention from the thing itself back onto more familiar territory: themselves. Poor me, look at what I’ve been confronted by, all this misery. They return home to relate how they’ve been affected by what they accidentally stumbled across, and the ‘tread carefully’ commiseration they now need to try to recover from the trauma of seeing it. The wretched, suffering life of the crippled man begging outside the hotel might overwhelm us at first, but the way we process it is to claim that we’re suffering too, as a result of just seeing it in passing.

It’s as if our nagging guilt is quickly quelled and repackaged, to re-emerge as the self-pitying, me-too victimhood we seem so strangely comforted by. In the end we step over him, irritated at what he reminds us of, almost blaming him for making us feel even a flicker of discomfort.

Living here, I’m constantly aware of how toxically selfindulgent such a response would be; a useless waste of energy and time. I’m uneasy even relating this now, presenting it as material to illustrate something about myself. It’s too easy to slip from pathos to bathos. It seems like such a wallow to burst into tears at the sight of an old man licking his plate clean, or to claim that the faces of begging children haunt my dreams, when the last thing anyone here needs is a whiny westerner determined, yet again, to somehow make themselves the centre of attention.

When I see people cry here, it’s with the overwhelming flood of sentiment as the strolling musicians at your table wish you a happy anniversary, and your husband of fortyfive years stands and joins in the chorus with them, gazing at you. Or at your grandchild’s baptism, or your only son’s graduation parade. I never see a tear shed with self-pity, or in an attempt to win sympathy.

But as an outsider trying to live here, trying to hold reactions on a tight rein and not make people gratingly aware of the pity I feel for them doesn’t change the fact that I do feel pity. My chest is squeezed with sorrow, my stomach aches with it, I struggle to hide it and to make connections that do not throw into constant relief such stark economic disparity.

We kid ourselves that this is possible, of course. It would be more comfortable to imagine that this disparity didn’t matter, that I’m not carrying in my pocket someone’s weekly wage which amounts in my own society to petty change, that my awareness of this is not a corrosive and ever-present reality.

In any case, I’m wondering if these aren’t tears of shame, not guilt, if those two states can be separated. I’m shamed by dignity, by unadulterated generosity and humility, by sincere and unconscious integrity. And I am rich, as it happens, in this economy. So why not leave the house with pocketfuls of pesos and hand them out to all the kids with hungry eyes, buy the biscuits and the giant ceramic rosary beads and the homemade dolls and every other piece of extraneous unwanted stuff? Why not live with the resignation that it’s a buyer’s market like you wouldn’t believe, the rest is just nicety to quell our conscience?

And those biscuits. They’re just one of the millions of small flags of refusal to be crushed by the overwhelming and unrelenting big picture. How can people be so hopeful?

In a cafe near my house, the rich sit casually hanging their arms out the picture window, loosely holding the leashes of the trophy pets they’ve brought with them from the city for the weekend: Weimaraners and huskies and schnauzers, all of them soporific with overfeeding, dressed in expensive dog clothes. Two metres away, old indigenous women sit begging, shading their bowed heads with torn pieces of cardboard, their hands restlessly adjusting their hats in their laps which contain nothing but centavos, a denomination so small in this wrecked economy that the people inside might fling the coins into a beggar’s hat rather than bother returning them to their pocket after paying the breakfast bill.

It’s the big picture, painted with broad strokes, which is so easy to be enraged by: the dog T-shirt, the lolling fat arms, the studious, sleek ignoring of the women, the fact that they are Indian. It is the tiny detail, though, which makes my throat constrict with something else – the ribbons carefully plaited into the old women’s grey hair, the way they modestly cover their bare feet with their threadbare dresses, the thought of them hunting out a piece of cardboard earlier, knowing how long the day ahead was going to be.

It’s a shock to recognise how hard you’re capable of being, how inured you can become to it all. I almost wrote that it’s a price to be paid, but that just seems ludicrous. It’s not a price to pay, it’s a condition of management you set. Your guilt will be debited and demanded incrementally, anyway, like a MasterCard bill: you can try to pay up front and avoid the penalty of accumulating interest, or you can feel a moderated, manageable guilt now and keep paying for longer, when later you will feel very guilty at your capacity to feel a little bit guilty.

We westerners strive for the ‘big picture’, the global terms, which is really only the view you are afforded from the top of the heap. We will use that view, in fact, to defend ourselves from glaring empirical evidence. First I felt that to deal with it, to make it more manageable, I just had to marshal the facts together. Somehow if all the data could be lined up like statistical ducks in a row – numbers of children malnourished, figures for unemployment, reality turned into quotable soundbites – I would feel a little more armed, or armoured, going out the door. Now I can’t believe how useless a trap I fell into.

Once I was at a concert where two well-known folk singers were performing jokily together on stage. They messed up a song’s introduction and burst out laughing.

‘Can’t you count?’ said one in mock anger to the other.

‘Sure I can count,’ he replied, ‘I just don’t know where one is.’

That’s me, alright. I know how to count but I don’t know where one is. The realisation that there is nowhere to start, that all you can do is start with the thing nearest you, is crushing. Because we imagine ourselves the movers and the shakers, the agents of change in the white hats, the accomplishers, everything at our fingertips.

There is nothing at our fingertips, in reality, nothing except the disparity and injustice of our luck and the sliding scale of our awareness of it. What’s in your face is the young girl in the tortilla shop who works such long days of drudgery but who is so beautiful that if she had been born elsewhere she’d no doubt be making millions as a model, and that bleached-blonde woman, five metres from her, busy buying an ice-cream for her poodle. There is the hungry child whose father is buying chrysanthemums with every centavo he has to spare for a tiny cement chapel, where they will rot and die and be replaced by others as he hauls cement ten hours a day to pay for them, praying hard that his life might change. There are Margarita’s girls, all of them too small and thin, and Margarita herself consumed alive in bearing them, hair and teeth falling out, nourishing them on her own body. There is the man begging on the steps of the Metro, holding a head X-ray and a catatonic, staring child in his arms, rocking himself with misery, his eyes gazing inwards at something I dread seeing. There are details boiling to the surface of this big picture which seem almost like grandiose symbols – the old campesino man passing the barbed-wire enclosure of the private tennis court, courteously handing the ball back to the people inside who take it and turn away without a word as he wishes them good day. If this were a movie, you’d say it was too heavy-handed to be real.

I do what I always do to escape – I read more books. Especially the Huehuetlatolli, the orations and texts of the Aztecs written in the Nahuatl language, called the Florentine Codex by its sixteenth-century translators. I am looking for a few scatterings of jade, a few things to pick up and carry with me like a compass. This was the culture, you have to remind yourself, that tore the hearts out of hundreds of child sacrifice victims at a time as they were herded in queues before the altar. Who lashed small planks onto their babies’ heads to press their foreheads into the desired backwards slope, with a heavy fatality rate. These words are about death, too – the death of flowers and warriors, as soothing as a cool hand on the forehead. I read how the dead were bid farewell:

O my son, you have known hardship, you have endured suffering;

Our Lord has shown you favour,

In truth the abode of us all is not here on the earth

Only for a moment, for an instant, do we warm ourselves in the sun ...

And now the Lord of the Region of the Dead takes you,

The place where the journey ends ...

Never again shall you return,

Never again shall you make your way back ...

They gaze without flinching into the face of mortality, these texts. The translation has to be fairly hit or miss, yet their sadness is pure and quiet, not given to noisy outbursts in public.

Can it be true that one lives on earth?

Not forever on earth, only a little while here.

Be it jade, it shatters.

Be it gold, it breaks.

Be it a quetzal feather, it tears apart.

Not forever on earth; only a little while here.

Inside the body, the orations say, is where we store all of this, all our knowledge and pain pushed under, granted only the poignant imperative of remembering it all.

‘These are the words which the men, the women of old left you,’ says one, ‘handed down to you, words which are carefully folded away, stored away, in your entrails, in your throat.’

The monks who transcribed the Codex had the presence of mind to record a few idiomatic expressions of the Aztecs. The visual images of butterflies moving like soft hands patting out tortillas stays with me as I buy tortillas from that beautiful young girl and return to the plaza, dry-eyed now, back on top of things, wishing for the fatalistic Aztec clearsightedness which would allow me to embrace it all without feeling the overwhelming, impossible hunger to repair it. I want to find the balance between being compassionate and sufficiently dispassionate, to not be swamped by sentiment that makes me useless, and not let pathos spill over.

The Aztecs had another phrase I can’t stop thinking about. Ompa onquiza’n tlallticpac: The world spills out.

‘Now the world is spilling out,’ says the Huehuetlatolli. ‘When we are very poor and in great want, and our rags are very old and torn, barely covering us, worn thin, falling apart, and one’s body is visible through them, we say: “Now the world spills out”.’

The same week, by coincidence, I read another book which mentions a Victorian affectation, now a much-sought-after antique: lachrymatories, tiny crystal bottles in which people would collect their tears, which they would give as gifts to loved ones. Like holy water, they were credited with healing powers, as tears frequently seem to be in mythology and folklore. A single tear falls on the sleeping prince, or the scarred king, or the beloved brothers turned into swans. It’s as though the act of being moved to weep tears is what breaks the spell. Our rags are very old and torn, barely covering us, and whether we can help it or not the world spills out of us. Those of us, maybe, who don’t know that kind of physical want, find what spills out of them is distilled back into water, the great undiluted saltiness of that ocean of tears.

Psychologists tell us we cry at happy occasions – births, weddings, celebrations – because we can’t bear the pain of knowing they’re transitory and ephemeral, that this innocent child will grow to know the treachery and pain of the world; that this radiant couple will fight and bicker like anyone else. We can’t cry for millions, so we cry by ones. Maybe, as we feel that bit of ourselves tearing open as we surrender to those tears, our only reward is a fleeting glimpse of where a starting point might be.

It could be that I am not even being moved by anything as pure as pity. Perhaps on some level I am weeping because I know we will all be licking our plates humbly clean one day, that our beauty will be wasted, that our love will disappear, that wealth will warp all our intentions and that no tear, however nobly shed, is going to break the spell of the terrible randomness of injustice.

On another level, I glimpse that it is something struggling to stay alive which forces out those tears, not hardship or suffering. When a mother insists that her malnourished two-year-old daughter who weighs just eight kilos walks, yes, walks well, she is just not walking today, it’s not completely the child’s life expectancy which makes me have to turn away, but her mother’s remnant dignity. It’s the grace and generosity of Margarita telling me her daughters call me ‘my Cati’, trying to share her one treasure with me; the coloured ribbons in the grey plaits; whatever it is that compels someone to get up early and dress hopefully in their best clothes to sell biscuits on the street.

We don’t need a little stoppered bottle to store these tears. We collect them in some black well inside, we feed them in small sips to the dark caged bird there, we fold them away. In our entrails, and in our throats.

I visit the small cement house of Doña Aurelia in Tunas Blancas where we have a savings meeting, and wave to her husband as I pass through the gate. I admire his small desiccated garden where gnarled little fruit trees are planted amongst cornstalks and dried beans. Everything’s dying in the heat, there’s been no rain. The sun falls on our heads in a solid yellow drumming as he points out one small tree with one pomegranate growing on it. The first one it’s ever produced, he tells me, smiling, just the one this year, but it’s great, isn’t it?

We smile and part. Three hours later as I am getting back into the car he stands waving at the gate then turns and disappears for a minute, returning hurrying, hobbling, his back arthritic and used up with a lifetime of bending and hauling. He approaches the car, leans over and drops the warm pomegranate into my hand, gives a deep and courteous nod, and steps back.

I hold it. Keeping my gaze still, feeling the wings of that bird beat hard against my chest.

I’ll do whatever I can, I think, just give me my lever and show me where to push, but let me stop the world from spilling out, show me where one is. Let me clothe myself and not fall apart, so I can look at it all without having it blurred. Keep the world inside, distilled and concentrated as the only fruit on the tree, with every unshed tear packed as cunningly as a seed to grow something unthoughtof, and let me pick it without even thinking, and give it away.

Or else let me shed them all and be empty, and start again.

‘Ready?’ the folksinger said to his mate, mischievously. ‘On one ...’ As if music might be the reward for all that counting. As if our feet, despite everything, find themselves ready to take that first step of something which – could this be possible? – might be a dance.

After blistering the region with droughts, El Niño weather patterns send unseasonal rain, along with a couple of highly unusual snap frosts. The rain falls in such quantities that it starts to undermine amateur building techniques and precarious hillside corn plantations, and it collects in the hills and gullies to break the banks of creeks. One of the small, more isolated towns in the Union calls in with a request for sandbags and cement.

Santa Rosa Xajay is built on a sequence of steep hills, with houses and small patches of cultivated land cut into the slope. Floodwater has found tributaries all down the roughly terraced slopes, gathering dirty water and debris. It’s poured through pig yards and cut topsoil and small plants from gardens, washed around garbage and swept it along. Finally, in a tide of thigh-high liquid compost, it’s poured relentlessly into the lowest house in town, belonging to one of the poorest families, gutting its small, bare garden and filling its single room.

Evidence of the trickle-down effect at last.

We arrive as its owner and his wife are hauling the contents of their house onto the roof to save themselves from total destitution. They own a cupboard, a mattress, a bundle of sheets and clothes, a sack of corn, and four pairs of shoes. Seeing these belongings hauled onto the tin roof sets up a familiar, corrosive, throat-tightening awareness that it takes a crisis for people to reveal the full shameful extent of their poverty, and that their meagre shred of pride is on display now for everyone to see.

Their house, built from small bricks and rubble, is kneedeep in garbage and pig shit.

Everyone’s relieved to see the truck. We set to work stacking sandbags to divert the floodwaters down the side of the house and away into a gully. The wife sits on the roof wiping mud from her belongings, concerned that the corn, their emergency food store, is going to be ruined with getting wet.

After the last sandbag’s smacked down we stand looking at the devastation.

How would I feel, if it were my house I was surveying now, and my security and savings laid waste? I can’t see where I would start, what I would do next – I’m having a hard enough time not bursting into tears. But nobody else has got the time or the luxury for that.

The owner of the house takes a breath, then picks up a mallet and a crowbar. Slipping down the muddy slope, he wades into the garbage-strewn pool of effluent filling his house, and I see him hesitate in there, considering. Then he positions the crowbar against the wall, raises the mallet and swings it down hard. There’s a sudden gush of floodwater through the wall – he’s knocked a brick out. The water starts to slowly seep away, leaving a high-tide mark of scum on the bare walls.

He walks around the back of the house to prise the brick completely free, then carefully washes his hands and returns, shaking all of our hands formally in turn. His wife climbs down and we leave them with a bag of cement. As we leave, they’re smiling. Progress has started. Now they can get on with the business of cleaning up.

We drive through the town, handing out bags of cement to people everywhere, hard at work mopping up after this latest disaster. Now that the worst has happened, people can take stock and start working.

The morning seems to be alive and roaring around us, green and galvanised, rinsed shining with water. Water has carved great erosion gullies alongside tracks through the town. Kids are playing excitedly in the sudden rivers, making boats out of leaves and sticks and racing through the current. School’s out, and they’re making the most of it.

This life is the Region of the Fleeting Moment, say the Nahuatl texts. The universe is ruled by flux – impermanent, evanescent, transitory.

What would you do if your town was flooded? Would it take you five minutes to gather your belongings and get onto higher ground, and would you send your children out to make boats? Would you be able to wade into mud and see the brick that must go?

We can shore ourselves up, elsewhere, against the blunt reality of what true survival entails. We’re swamped with comforting insurance policies, with statistics and mission statements written in a language that flatters us, tells us we are going to ‘foster’ change and ‘embrace’ paradigm shifts in community development.

But here we stand, and none of that knowledge is worth a thing to anybody. Our pitiful hoarded truths are on display now, waterlogged and puny in the bright light, and we are so loath to heft the mallet and stare that task squarely in the eye.

There’s no fostering and embracing. Only the truly brave among us see immediately what is required and don’t hesitate. The rest of us shrink, and make our excuses.

I think of the power in that man’s arm, all that filthy water rushing and swirling through the hole he made, the broken banks he must have repaired, the walls he would have whitewashed again, starting afresh from nothing. I think of his smile as he waved us off, how he offered to pay for the cement, of his wife standing straight-backed beside him, and the seeds I am certain they replanted.

I remember that thawing, glittering day, the landscape transformed by catastrophe, and someone, with a million reasons to bury his head in his hands, seeing the uselessness of selfpity and walking into that flooded, wrecked room with such unwavering purpose.

I remember that pomegranate, warm as an egg in my lap as I drove, weak with gratitude for everything that had been given to me.

Not forever on earth, no. Only a little while here.