FIESTA

 

‘Whatever its mood, its character, its meaning,’ says Octavio Paz, ‘the fiesta is participation, and this trait distinguishes it from all other ceremonies and social phenomena … it is significant that a country as sorrowful as ours should have so many and such joyous fiestas. Their frequency, their brilliance and excitement, the enthusiasm with which we take part, all suggest that without them we would explode.’

It’s a big town’s fiesta, honouring its patron saint, and crowds are gathering on the paths and under awnings. Down the street march brass bands, their big tubas catching winks of sunshine, their costumes dazzling — brilliant magenta shirts, girls dancing in yellow and emerald-green dresses, women carrying armfuls of flowers and wreaths to decorate the church. After them come characters dancing: men in monkey suits, people dressed as animals, a prancing skeleton wielding a sickle, boys dragging a cage containing someone in a gorilla suit. Lines of teenage boys dressed as Aztec warriors dance back and forth, clashing wooden swords with other boys dressed as soldiers or guards. Behind them, capering and dragging chains, comes a filthy Caliban figure, masked and in rags, running into the crowd and gibbering at children. So much of the intense meaning of this parade rests on trying to understand who these figures represent, and to do that you need to have absorbed a little of the heady mix of the country’s phenomenal history – its conquests and wars, its power struggles and revolutions, the symbology already present in the pre-Hispanic culture, which blend and jostle in such rich hybridisation with the icons and concepts embedded in the Church. Fiesta is like Carnevale: it revels in turning order on its head and communing with chaos and freedom. Bosses and authority figures are ridiculed as half-monkey or half-beast, ragged as tramps, while powerless or subjugated figures become kings. Clowns caper round as figures of fun, strutting self-importantly and dressed, with devastating accuracy, in the boots, ostentatious suits and reflector sunglasses of Gringolandia. Big papiermâché Mojigangas dance and prance through the streets, waving giant arms, behind indigenous dancers wearing enormous rainbow-striped circular headdresses, carrying floats woven from corn fronds and hung with mirrors and fruit. Vehicles roll along carrying a figure dressed as, say, San Miguel, with enormous feathery wings and a golden crown and sceptre, sitting regally on a huge white feather throne. Beneath their foot, the Devil, in a red suit with tail and horns, grovels obsequiously, pleading for mercy. The crowd cheers, children scream as the Grim Reaper shakes his scythe at them, grinning, followed by big puppets giving out balloons. Colour and energy come pouring down the street, abandoned and ecstatic. Another brass band; a group of marching schoolchildren; warriors in leopard-print loincloths; a flurry of royal figures in long red cloaks, this time with blue-eyed, bearded masks.

All eventually wind their way up to the church for a special Mass, followed by dancing, rosaries and fireworks long into the night.

In one of the communities, after the fireworks castle, each family sets off a ‘crown’ firework, all family members present standing in a circle holding the pole as whirring light pours over their heads and surrounds them with an incandescent corona. The fireworks are like a prayer for prosperity, an offering. Later still, a man wearing a white papier-mâché bull over his head charges into the crowd, pawing at the ground, causing delighted fits of laughter and screaming. He charges here and there, as other men pretend to be toreadors, taunting the bull with their jackets. The framework of the bull, known as a torrito, is strung with fireworks, which start howling and going off, fizzing on a long convoluted fuse, as he chases people through the streets. Other fireworks, which jump from the frame as they go off, spin and skitter around the ground with a high-pitched whine like a trapped wasp – they are known as watch-your-feets – and people leap and run off to try to escape them. The man playing the torrito runs with fireworks exploding from his costume – his hands clutch the framework inside as he lowers his head again and paws the ground before charging at his hysterical mates. All is chaos, exuberance, frenzy.

‘Enjoy this,’ the Mexican artist Chucho Reyes once proclaimed, ‘the adventure of disorder.’

The year is loaded with celebrations, both national and regional. Everything is interwoven around the three great social forces: religion, family and patriotism. Personal birthdays aren’t celebrated, but rather the day honouring the saint for whom you were named. If there are seven children in the class called Juan Diego, they will all celebrate their ‘birthdays’ on that one day.

Every town, no matter how poor, will have a Saint’s Day fiesta and some larger towns will have several, each commemorating a particular barrio. Within all this there are weddings and christenings, funerals and quince años parties.

Being part of a brass band, mariachi group or ranchero trio must be a good career move. The bottleshop gets plenty of action too, sensibly hiring out plastic tables and chairs with big orders. When you’re an esteemed foreigner working in twenty different towns, your social calendar gets so jammed you barely have a weekend to yourself.

You must take nothing to these parties and fiestas, not even a bottle of wine. Your host and hostess see it as their duty to shower you with hospitality, so much so that you’re expected, along with other guests, to souvenir glasses and tortilla baskets off the table when you leave, as a memento of the occasion. Each one will be engraved or signed with warm regards: ‘Thank you for coming to my fifteenth birthday, with love from Amelia’; ‘In memory of our wedding day, Alejandro and Lupita’.

These people know how to party. They put up shade cloth over laneways and set up tables, or pour sand over cobblestones to create a smooth floor. They stint on nothing in the name of celebration; it’s an honoured job, in these towns, to be given the task of being on the organising committee for the fiesta. Often, the clowns, or Xitases, in the monkey and monster masks dancing round in front of the band are actually members of this committee, keeping a benign eye on everything from behind the safe anonymity of their masks, cajoling the tipsy out of trouble and defusing potential problems. Once at a fireworks display I watched the surreal sight of a tramp, Frankenstein and a gorilla shinnying up the side of a building behind the Castillo to pour buckets of water on some smouldering leaves and twigs that had been set alight by the display, capering about all the while like the Keystone Kops while they efficiently dealt with the issue.

Another time some grinning, whispering URAC members approached Phil at a fiesta and they all disappeared for a while. When the brass band started up its deafening polka again, eight clowns sprang out of the shadows, one of them, ludicrously, a head and a half taller than all the others, storming sideways like Peter Garrett in a trenchcoat and a rubber ghoul mask, waltzing wildly with a large toy dog. There was an audible gasp, then people had to sit down, they were laughing so hard. Old ladies bent from the waist in their shawls, clutching their sides at the sight of a white person (a white person some said was a veterinario – a man with a university degree! Imagine it!) so joyfully transgressing the usual caste rules. When Australian Volunteers International outlined its aim as fostering mutual cross-cultural understanding, I doubt they envisaged anything like this.

The following year, just before the end of our placement, we were at the same town fiesta. A new gang of clowns was dancing around the square, swooping on onlookers and waltzing them off.

‘They’re good, aren’t they?’ I commented to an old man next to me.

‘Yes, they’re good,’ he said, ‘but last year, there was this huge tall foreigner among them. You should have seen him go!’ He looked back to the clowns and sighed wistfully. ‘Don’t know who he was, or where he came from, but he was bloody hilarious.’

There seem to be more roosters in town than usual, setting one another off with crowing and cawing. Sure enough, someone drags dozens of bales of straw into the Municipal Auditorium, as if they’re going to have a hoedown, and one evening the place is packed with men and roosters, ready for the pelea de gallos. A cockfight!

This is stubborn ‘cultural heritage’ material in Mexico which means they’re technically legal, if monitored, and they run whether they’re supposed to or not. Likewise, no money’s meant to change hands, which is like trying to control footy tipping or Melbourne Cup sweeps back home. There are fistfuls of notes changing hands in the crowded, charged atmosphere of the auditorium.

It’s easy to see where the expression ‘cocky’ came from. The roosters are small, living embodiments of machismo. They are dancing with glittery-eyed outrage, struggling within their confines to have a go at a competitor, strutting and crowing constantly, puffing their puny little chests out to make themselves look as big as possible. If they had hands, they’d be constantly, obsessively checking their crotches. Their owners are just as macho, eyes missing nothing, moving round the room with studied nonchalance, preening frequently. They stroke and caress their birds lovingly, smoothing down shining coppery feathers and glossy black tails.

As with many blood sports, the ritual involved before the action is so fetishised that it all seems a bit ludicrous to outsiders. The birds are weighed and the razor-sharp spurs they wear on their legs are approved and measured with callipers, then tied on as carefully as a surgeon stitching up an appendix. With those spurred claws pedalling, I’m surprised the handlers aren’t the ones to suffer the slashes. Then the spurs are cleaned with a cut lime (ouch! talk about sting!) and the birds are teased with a sort of decoy rooster to get their blood boiling before the actual bout.

The competing birds, when they finally catch sight of each other, are practically exploding with grandiose, barely restrained fury. Their beautiful feathers stiffen and quiver, their eyes gleam with stupid rage. I resolve to stay for sixty seconds. When the handlers, after much revving of the roosters back and forth, finally let them go, there is a terrible stillness in the crowd, like the eye of a tornado. The birds launch through the air at each other as though pulled on wires, meeting with a smack in midair and tumbling in a blur of claws and feathers. Within seconds one is grievously wounded, flopping over upside down to roars from the crowd. Its owner rushes from the sidelines to pick it up, puts the bird’s whole head in his mouth and huffs three hard breaths.

The rooster, like Lazarus, hits the ground running again with this quick blast of oxygen and is back in combat for fifteen long seconds before collapsing forward, covered in blood and viscera. There’s nothing deader than a dead chook. It’s flung unceremoniously into a box ready for tomorrow’s soup, and the winning bird is held aloft. It doesn’t look too long for this world either, heaving with blood-flecked, pop-eyed hysteria. The next birds are being readied, but my sixty seconds is up.

Not long after this, at a veterinary supply shop in the next town, I get a closer look at the secret weapons which allow the birds to so effectively disembowel one another. The stainless steel spur blades are lined up on a red velvet cloth in a glass display cabinet like diamond rings, and look like something James Bond’s archenemy might wear on each finger.

I have a small private joke with Alejandro. We’ll be waiting for someone or something and observe something odd – a donkey laden with straw and wood trudging down the middle of the highway, an armoured squadron of soldiers transporting what look like cannons and rocket-launchers – and I’ll say, ‘Hey, look at that.’

‘Welcome to the Third World,’ Alejandro will drawl in English.

He speaks good English, tinged with a slow Texan accent from his five years of working there. Now he works as driver and general helper at URAC, helping weigh children, load trucks, build fences, prepare barbacoa, anything. He is tall and solid for a Mexican, taciturn and laconic and thoughtful.

Once we were driving along and I was singing along with ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road’ on the radio.

‘You know the words to this song?’ Alejandro said. ‘What are they?’

‘It goes, “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, where the dogs of society howl, you can’t put me in your penthouse, I’m going back to my plough”,’ I recited.

A grin lit up his face. ‘You know, I never knew that,’ he said. Without elaborating further he waited for the chorus to come round again and shyly, carefully, sang along with it.

Early-morning sun glittered on the landscape. The verges were full of cactus in flower and boys tending their goats.

‘So you were living in a penthouse in the States?’ I said jokingly.

‘No, no, but I missed the country,’ he answered, and reverted to English again. ‘I was flying out of LA and we got into the air and right below us were … all these lights, this huge ocean of lights, you know? As far as you could see, lights everywhere. Millions of people all jammed into the one place.’ He paused and turned the radio down a little.

‘Then when we flew over the border and I really knew I was coming back I looked down and there were just little bunches of lights in the desert, small towns here and there. And that was the difference between the US and Mexico – I knew I was going back to the ... how would you call it?... The small scatters of lights.’

I remembered my first impression of Cuernavaca, my sensation that the city was teeming with lights, exploding into the dwindling empty landscape, and how that burgeoning population’s consumption needs filled me with a kind of panic.

I was wrong about that too, of course, in my kneejerk culture shock. The assumption about skyrocketing birth rates in the developing world being the main cause of the population crisis, while rich western countries stop responsibly and sensibly at two babies, is completely fallacious. The US population is growing faster than that of eighteen other industrialised nations, and it has two and a half times as many people as Mexico. In scarier terms – of energy consumption and the sucking up of dwindling resources – a couple in the USA having two babies is about the same as a couple in India having seventy, or a couple in Ethiopia having one thousand. I’d say Australia rates an extremely close second.

Yeah, we’re all equal, but some of us, obviously, are just forty-five times more equal than others.

We passed a village and had to slow down to avoid two or three half-feral pigs that were foraging on the side of the road. Black smoke billowed from a brick kiln, fed illegally by old tyres.

‘God, that’s bloody awful,’ I said.

‘Welcome to the Third World.’

We invite some people we’ve got to know, expatriate teachers at the English language school, up on our roof one night to drink beer and eat tacos, and we invite Alejandro, after a long day, to join us. He is visibly pleased, proud of holding his own in English among this group.

We open a bottle of wine and he takes a long draught, smacking his lips. ‘Ah, I’ve had this before,’ he says, ‘White wine, yes.’

It’s a clear, beautiful night, full of pinpricks of stars. Across the road the ranchero trio practice in the auditorium, their familiar clear voices soaring faintly together. As we eat we lapse into tired, companionable silence. Our friends congratulate Alejandro on his English, and he elaborates a little more on his time in the USA.

‘Yes, I was there for five years,’ he said. ‘Made a lot of money. Don’t know where it all went, though!’

I wait, wondering if he will tell the story of flying home over the tiny hamlets of lights, an image which had stuck in my mind – the small isolated communities scattered across the huge Mexican landscape like stars, the great wash of light of millions of people in Los Angeles, how it would feel to be returning.

‘And what made you come back?’ someone says.

He shrugs, smiles. ‘I got tired,’ he says.

Everyone laughs. ‘Welcome to the First World,’ I hiss in his ear, and he laughs and nods ruefully, raising his glass to me.

Early in September, around the corner comes the trolley of an unfamiliar street vendor. His wagon is laden, like a compact bristling fortress, with Mexican flags and banners. He is selling huge impractical sombreros, red, green and white striped T-shirts, face paint, whistles, fake Zapata moustaches, ear-splitting toy trumpets and ratchets. Shops and balconies all over town start displaying flags, and the council strings fluttering adornos across streets in the national colours. El Grito – The Cry – is coming! The sixteenth of September commemorates a date every schoolchild in the country can recite to you – the date of the ‘cry of independence’ yelled by Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla in 1810. A priest in Dolores, Guanajuato, he called his parishioners to take up arms against the gachupines (Spaniards born in Spain but living in Mexico) who had, he claimed, ‘been exploiting the wealth of the Mexican people with the greatest injustice for three hundred years.’ Legend has it that his rallying cry was, ‘Death to the Spaniards! Long live the Virgin of Guadalupe!’, which makes the original revolution sound very like a holy war. A few months later, Hidalgo was tried by the Inquisition and executed, but the War of Independence famously continued on.

A hundred years later, on the fifteenth of September, 1910, President Porfirio Díaz stood on the balcony of the National Palace and rang the very same bell Hidalgo had rung in Dolores. His rallying cries, though, were somewhat more secular and patriotic: ‘Long live the heroes of the Nation! Long live the Republic! ¡Viva Mexico!’ Below him in the enormous zócalo a crowd of thousands yelled ‘¡Viva!’ in reply, and El Grito was ritually reborn.

With one small modification. Hidalgo had actually rung the bell and bawled the raging call to arms at dawn on the sixteenth of September. But, well … the fifteenth was President Porfirio Díaz’s birthday.

But who’s to care? The main thing is getting to a square or plaza somewhere at eleven p.m. on the fifteenth, wearing the Mexican colours or the most traditional clothes you own, so you can listen to mariachi bands, take a photo of the kids on top of a wooden horse wearing a sombrero, and drink warm, spicy fruit punch made, delectably, of tamarind, guavas and cinnamon. Excitement and euphoria reach a crescendo just before eleven p.m., when the government official entrusted with giving the grito appears on a balcony or bandstand. Flags are waved, trumpets are blown, the mariachis sob an impassioned refrain, and then finally the call comes.

‘Mexicans!’ booms the official in his deepest, most impressive voice, and there’s a sudden silence.

‘Viva the heroes of Independence!’

‘¡VIVA!’ roars the crowd, with the decibel impact of a stadium of fans at the World Cup.

He names the heroes one by one, with deafening cheering and responses after each. Then finally:

‘¡Viva Mex-ico!¡Viva Mex-ico!’

‘¡VIVA!¡VIVA!’

The crowd seems to shout for the whole hour, dancing, waving its flags and banners, blowing whistles. Then the fireworks castle is lit, and not even the roar of patriotic voices can withstand the fighter-jet shriek of those spinning coronets.

There’s a social phenomenon you see here that is generally hidden the rest of the year. Bands of young men dressed as charros – flashy, Mexican cowboy types – or traditional peasants, roam the streets like young men full of bravado everywhere, wearing outsized sombreros painted with the words ‘¡Viva los cabrones!’and ‘¡Viva los hijos de la Chingada!’

Long live the bastards. Long live the sons of the screwed.

‘¡Viva Mexico, hijos de la Chingada!’ they shout exultantly in direct counterpoint to the official grito, and howl the lovelorn howl of the mariachi singers. Other people in the crowd seem embarrassed by the groups but resigned to them, as if they were football hooligans or street gangs, but maybe this cry is the real battle cry.

The verb chingar in Latin America is one of the most loaded and fraught – and therefore most used and abused – words in the whole living, breathing language. Its roots, scholars generally agree, are probably the Aztec word meaning residue or sediment, since it’s used throughout the Americas and some parts of Spain in association with alcohol. In Spain chingar means to get drunk, and in Cuba a chinguirito is a shot of spirits.

In Central America, closer to its Aztec roots, it’s taken to refer to dregs – in Guatemala and El Salvador, chingaste are the residue left in a glass, while in Oaxaca coffee grounds are called chingaditos. It’s also tied up with failure. A firework that doesn’t go off se chinga; a fiesta that gets rained out, a business venture that goes bust, a car that breaks down, is also chinga. There’s a strong sense that if you’re a tough guy, a real chingón you’ll chinga someone before they chinga you. You get the picture: it means to destroy, to fuck over, to injure, to do violence. The Chingada is the wrecked, the broken, the dregs, the violated, the torn open, the busted, the rooted, the humiliated, the annihilated.

It’s one of the worst insults you could throw at someone, particularly if a mother is involved in the insult as well. What these men are proclaiming is their patriotism in its rawest, most wounded form. They are celebrating and declaring their Mexicanness as citizens of a country whose nationhood did not spring from any pious religious war fomented by priests preaching independence, but from conflict and humiliation as an indigenous race was raped, subjugated, torn apart and destroyed by a conquering one. They are the mixed-blood offspring of this tormented union, who have survived to remember, to claim their inheritance and drag the ambivalence of their forebears into the open. Long live us! Long live the bastard children of the raped!

The young men call their grito and will not be silenced. They’ve certainly had a few drinks, but they’re not out of control. They seem to be laughing and crying at the same time; a torn, overwhelmed emotion that reminds me of the ambivalence expressed in the commemorative stone placed in Tlatelolco Plaza, the ‘Plaza of the Three Cultures’, in Mexico City, site of the last tragic stand of the Aztec empire, inscribed with the words: ‘On the thirteenth of August, 1521, heroically defended by Cuauhtémoc, Tlatelolco fell to the might of Hernán Cortés. It was neither a triumph nor a defeat. It was the painful birth of the commingled people that is Mexico today.’

Around the tables and benches in the plaza wanders a man with a strange contraption on his back – something like a big car battery wired up with handles. It’s something that seems diabolically designed to tap into the precise emotions running high tonight: an electric shock machine.

Men – always men, always in groups – hail the man and take it in turns to grasp the handles. Then a dial is turned, which gives the user an ever-increasing electric shock. Who’s going to be the most macho and tolerate the higher charge without flinching? For this is the most admirable trait, aguantar, to endure. To lose face is like losing caste. To weaken and let go, to give in to pain and show your vulnerability, to be defeated rather than triumphant, means you will never be admiringly called a chingón.

It’s torture to watch; I can only imagine what torture it must be to take part. There are a few middle-class tourist guys hailing the electric shock machine over, the rowdy yuppie type the locals call júniors, but it’s more of a joke to them. The poorer and drunker the young men, the more it seems to cost them when they finally jerk their hands from the handles in agony. Still, somebody else hails the man over to his group.

His friends taunt him good-naturedly, but the smiles fade as the switch is flipped on and the current is activated, preparing to subject another man to a blast of power greater than himself, the ordeal required, tonight, to prove his manhood. His face is set in a mask – expressionless, impassive. The provocative sombreros are on the ground now, forgotten; their traditional clothes make the men look like the peasants of a hundred, two hundred years ago. The volunteer grasps the handles, like someone locking his fingers in the cinch of a bucking bronco, or holding out his palm ready for a nail.

The faces around him are intent, hungry with empathy, lit by a kind of gratitude. They’re watching the meter jerking higher on the machine, watching that jaw-clenched denial of weakness, the refusal to betray how the pain is borne as dignity is undermined over and over, watching a man stoically tolerating every chinga thing there is to be endured.

Death is close in Mexico, hovering, leaning over your shoulder, breathing down your neck. Close, feared, mocked, made light of, placated like the school bully. You can laugh nervously at Death by presenting Him as a skeleton dancing, playing the guitar, driving a bus or going to the dentist, like anyone. You can eat Death in a special sweet bun called Bread of the Dead, made with two crossed bones on top, or as a lolly skull, with raisin eyes and white peanuts for teeth. You can flatter Him with wreaths of marigolds and candles and copal incense. But there’s always Doña Catrina, the famous woodcut created by nineteenth-century artist Posada, to remind us what’s what. With her empty eyesockets and fleshless grin beneath her big picture hat, she’s there to pull you and your fond illusions about life up short. She’s Lady Death, the elegant society grande dame in expensive clothes and button-up boots, a skeleton nonetheless, inside all those fancy clothes. Amass all the wealth you like in this world, that’s where we’re all ending up. So you don’t talk in hushed euphemisms about ‘passing away’; in the fatalistic irreverence of Mexico, you ‘turn in your driver’s licence’, ‘move to Skeleton City’, ‘move to the Valley of the Bald’ or ‘elope with the Skinny One’.

Doña Catrina’s a figure children and adults love dressing up as on All Souls’ Eve, when the spirits are out and about, twirling a parasol and inclining her head charmingly to passers-by. Lesser ghouls and goblins dart about the street, collecting lollies or coins in jars or buckets. You can see where Halloween might have been dreamed up, but this celebration is far, far older than European settlement. The Day of the Dead is one indigenous tradition the Church had enormous difficulty attempting to eradicate back in the sixteenth century. Instead, they negotiated a merger– Día de los Muertos would be fused with two Christian holy days, All Saints’ Day on the first of November and All Souls’ Day on the second. The result today is one of the many syncretic fusions between traditional indigenous rituals and the Catholic rites imported from Spain. Westerners visiting the country, squeamish with their own neuroses about mortality, usually recoil from the celebration, calling it morbid, grotesque, sick.

But Día de los Muertos acknowledges death as the continuum of life, full of its own ritualised obligations and observances. Momentarily, the bonds between the living and the dead are broken, and the spirits of the departed return to Earth to visit us. Never is the ongoing literal interpretation of this belief more apparent. Families make visits to the graveyard to trim the weeds and scrub the tombstones of their dead. They mass the graves with fresh flowers and repaint the boundaries with fresh whitewash, available in a big communal barrel. Generations of surviving kin set out picnics on the graves, and settle down overnight to await the spirits’ return. They bring the new baby to show them, they bring framed photos of absent family members and explain where they are and how they’re doing. They chat to the dead, remembering happier times, reminiscing, telling the children about the little quirks and idiosyncrasies of the departed, smiling at the stories, shedding tears, saying rosaries, toasting memories in nips of alcohol and cups of hot chocolate. The dead return. They hear they are still loved and remembered, they hear the children listen to the cathartic familiar recitations, and they live on. Their ghosts breathe in the essence of the favourite foods and drinks set out for them, and are nourished by them. They note that symbols of their favourite hobbies and possessions are recalled and laid out, they see the tangible evidence of enduring love which has not forgotten them, and they are comforted. Sometimes they send a sign that they are present – blowing out a candle, perhaps, or moving items around when nobody is looking. The beer left out for them goes flat faster than it ever would usually, and the fruit and sweets the next morning have lost a little of their flavour – all these things are signs that the ghosts have really been present, spiritually eating and drinking their food, listening to the anecdotes and prayers.

Claudia makes a shrine, an ofrenda, in her cafe. She constructs it in a style traditional to Veracruz, where she comes from, using palm leaves she’s had to hunt around for specially. Inside, she piles petals of golden marigold, the flowers used to summon the spirits, and their name, yet again, stubbornly recalls a language that has survived the Spanish invasion: cempazúchitl. She places photos of her deceased relatives on the pile, and surrounds them with apples, mandarins and cigarettes. She strings up the beautiful tissue-paper flags called papel picado, decorated with extraordinarily fine cut-out designs of dancing skeletons and bony mariachis. Around the ofrenda she hangs pieces of cut sugarcane.

‘Claudia, that looks so beautiful,’ I say. She nods, touching the canes.

‘The dead like sweet things,’ she says. ‘Come and try this.’

She’s candying pumpkin in the kitchen, basting chunks of it with spiced syrup.

‘That’s what we’ll be having tomorrow night,’ she says. ‘That, and a few rums. Come down.’

‘Do you use the hollowed-out pumpkin for a jack-o’-lantern?’

She screws up her nose. ‘Hate that Halloween gringo nonsense!’

At work, the office staff have constructed a group ofrenda, four metres long, full of draped cloth and candles and flowers like a richly coloured miniature stage. There are photos of fathers and long-dead aunties, with tobacco and coloured tortillas arranged around them like tribute offerings. There are sweet buns and cups of hot chocolate, little bottles of tequila and mescal, packs of cards, jewellery and memorabilia.

The ofrendas I see for children – tragically, pathetically – are decorated with little pairs of christening shoes, toys, balloons, miniature piñatas, marzipan bars, cans of soft drink. Photos are rare on the children’s shrines, especially those made by the campesinos.

I try to imagine how it must be, to lose a child and have no photographic record, to call them to mind with an occasion instead, with the strength and comfort of an oral tradition and the painful hope that their souls will return one night a year to see how they live on in your heart.

People do seem inexpressibly comforted by their own ofrendas, and those made by schoolchildren and social groups that fill the plaza. They stand and look fondly at the careful loving displays, the flickering candles. The children are angelitos now, little angels; their grip on life in this world not strong enough to hold them from heaven. All Saints’ Day is reserved for them; All Souls’ Day remembers the adult dead.

For the living, there are chocolate and marzipan skulls from the stalls, with names piped across their foreheads in icing. There are little sugar coffins, half-opened to reveal shock-haired skeletons grinning out. I look more closely at the little skulls with the peanut teeth and see they’re moulded, with stunning poetic justice, out of amaranth seeds.

In Mexico City there is a booming art form of skeleton art called calacas, devastatingly mordant in wit and black humour. There are tiny, brightly painted model rooms showing skeletons sitting drinking at a bar, or watching TV, or even standing in a row at a urinal. The more prosaic the scene, maybe, the more you can neutralise the sting. There are skeletons lying in hospital beds, being attended to by skeleton nurses and doctors; skeletons dancing a lambada in party clothes; skeletons jumping out of graves to shock tequila-swigging skeleton friends. Tiny placards offer witty death proverbs, little obituaries in verse called, like the skeletons, calaveras.

‘El muerto a la sepultura y el vivo a la travesura’ – ‘The dead to their graves and the living to their mischief’.

In the market, the more expensive chocolate gift skulls and coffins are labelled similarly: ‘Todos nacemos llorando y nadie se muere riendo’ – ‘We’re all born crying and none of us die laughing’, and ‘La vida es corta como una torta’ – ‘Life is short, like a sandwich’.

How very true.

These satirical calaveras, traditionally, have been used to lampoon not just death itself but public figures and tall poppies: polilticians, actors, athletes, celebrities. One from many years ago pretty much sums up how the Great Leveller will deal with the pompous and arrogant: ‘The skull is the Englishman, the skull is the Mexican / The Emperor Maximilian and the Roman Pontiff / The greatest leader of the nation, dukes, kings and advisers / In the grave, they’re all equal; all skulls in a heap’.

One ofrenda in the plaza has a table covered with big pottery casserole dishes, like the kitchen before a big party. Inside, they’re full of tamales and stews, piles of tortillas, roasted ears of corn, pots of chocolate atole. I speculate whether anyone would ever reach in and steal this food, and even as a cultural outsider I feel a sudden nauseating jolt of taboo at the thought. You’d be just tempting fate stealing the food of the dead. After All Saints’ is over, it is possible to drink the tequila and eat the fruit and sweets the dead have ‘eaten’, because they have already taken their nourishment from them. Heaps of flowers decorate the tables and the ground; floating cut-paper flags flutter everywhere. Children dress up as ghosts and sprites and parade through the streets, their tall crooked witch’s hats silhouetted in the streetlights and the white bones painted on their black skivvies looking disconcertingly real. They count up the money people have given them and buy the grinning chocolate skulls and sticky pieces of candied pumpkin and squash.

On All Saints’ Day, families begin their walk down to the cemetery to commence their vigil, carrying paintbrushes, brooms, clippers, baskets of food and drink. At twilight hundreds of candles are lit, and quiet weeping and murmuring of rosaries fills the air. Many families stay here all night, ready to greet the spirits and commune with them, waiting for the bells that chime out at midnight to toll the suspension between the two worlds as the departed return to earth. The next day, the scents of candles and food mingling with the sharp, wilting sweetness of so many flowers, the cemetery will be packed.

It seems the most natural thing in the world to place a bottle of beer on the ofrenda at work for our recently dead Australian grandfathers, both fond of an ale, before we go down to the plaza. It seems magical, expectant, down there, with the little dressed-up ghosts running around the fountain and the candlelit shrines honouring loved and remembered ancestors.

They’re coming tonight, the spirits, those aching manifestations of all we don’t understand, the embodiment of life’s deepest, strangest mystery. They are called ánimas, these souls, and that seems right. The bells will ring and we will feel their presence, try to give the unknown a welcoming and familiar human face, try to pay grieving tribute with small gifts. We will look at the bony, knowing smile of La Catrina and think, fleetingly, of our small lives, as ephemeral as these fireworks. We are laughing, but we know that none of us is going to die laughing.

There is a framed quote from the Florentine Codex in one of the ofrendas, made by a school intent on recreating Nahuatl food and displays.

‘We come to earth to sleep,’ it says. ‘We come to earth to dream. It is not true, it is not true, that we come to earth to live.’

A few weeks later is the feast day for the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception, followed just a few days later, on the twelfth of December, by a huge national day celebrating the Virgin of Guadalupe, Mexico’s own sacred apparition of Mary. So many Mexicans make a pilgrimage to the Basilica where the miraculous holy image of her is displayed on a cloth, behind bulletproof glass, that a moving walkway has been installed to carry the hundreds of thousands of devotees past the altar. Sixteen million people a year make the journey, and the new Basilica, built after the original sixteenth-century building started sinking and cracking too ominously for visitors, now houses up to ten thousand adoring worshippers at a stretch. Thousands more approach along the avenues on their knees, saying endless rosaries, their faces deeply reverent, turned inwards.

It seemed so strange to me, at first, that the Virgin of Guadalupe should inspire such fervent veneration from Mexico’s indigenous groups; people who’ve got a rough deal in anyone’s language. You’d think, on the Holy Days that celebrate this bastion of the religion that has caused them so much unremitting misery and oppression, they’d be doing anything other than dancing adoringly outside churches and cathedrals. After all, the Spanish town of Guadalupe was the very place Columbus prayed before he set sail to wreak havoc on the Americas, and standards bearing the image of the Virgin were carried by the conquistadors in their battles against the pagan tribes.

The early Franciscans, in fact, actively discouraged indigenous peoples from worshipping the Virgin of Guadalupe because they feared, since her shrine had been built, typically, slap-bang on the sacred site of an indigenous earth goddess, that the boundaries would blur and the Virgin Mary would be confused with the original holy figure. They were right to be nervous. As the Spaniards destroyed temples and slaughtered indigenous priests, and native populations were decimated by disease, slavery and execution, a figure offering compassion, forbearance and gentle motherly comfort must have seemed a light in the terrible darkness.

The apparition that appeared to Juan Diego, the ‘humble Indian’ who witnessed her visitation, made a speech which seems, even today, to promise so much to those who remain stoic, steadfast and uncomplaining: ‘I am your merciful Mother … and the mother of those who cry to me, of those who have confidence in me. Here I will hear their weeping and sorrow, and will alleviate their sufferings, necessities and misfortunes. Let it penetrate your heart, my little son, do not be troubled or weighed down with your grief. Do not fear any illness, vexation, anxiety or pain. Am I not here, who am your Mother? Aren’t you under my shadow and my protection? Am I not your fountain of life?’

These promises and others are inscribed in bronze lettering above the entrance to the Virgin’s Basilica. Outside, every possible permutation of souvenir to Our Lady is on sale: baseball caps, T-shirts, clocks, postcards, statues, tiles, scarves, pens, little nickel milagritos.

People gaze at the apparition as the walkway carries them forward and buy whatever tiny trinket they can afford after the expenses of their pilgrimage. They see this journey as a Muslim might regard a visit to Mecca.

She looks very small, this woman who commands the unconditional love and fervent prayers of so many, who assures you that your suffering is not in vain, whose image adorns so many walls, windows, doorways, savings books, fireworks, dreams. She is short and dark-haired, and her suffering eyes are downcast. Her skin is morena. The colour of earth.

Then suddenly the market is full of chunks of moss, lichen and mistletoe, and small wooden rustic shelters.

‘For the nacimiento,’ explains Maricruz. The nativity scene. Everyone buys one of these if they can afford it, and if you can’t, there’s a big life-sized one getting set up in the zócalo. You set up your own in a conspicuous corner of the room, and start decorating.

The market, which last week was a welter of stalls selling raffia baskets, biketyres, cassette radios, pirate tapes and watchbands, has transformed its stock to meet seasonal demand. Now it has everything you could possibly require for your nacimiento – four or five different-sized Marys and Josephs, the Blessed Infant himself in manger-lying, nappychanging position, and a mountain of shepherds, donkeys, sheep, goats, chickens, cows and horses. Then there’s a whole run of the above characters, only dressed as traditional Mexican peasants, in ponchos and sandals.

There’s also a cavalcade of Wise Men, the statuettes adorned with false eyelashes, which gives the disconcerting effect of three guys in pastel outfits who’ve just stepped off a chorus line.

There’s a facet of the Mexican brain which seems as mesmerised by adornment, as unerringly drawn to colour and design, as a bowerbird. What other culture would have the genius to match red and black stripes on a tablecloth with hot pink, the beloved colour they call rosamexicano?

Who else would have the Matisse-like audacity, when choosing the pigment colour to wash over their freshly limewashed house, to pick cobalt blue with violet window frames, and with bright-red geraniums filling the window cavities? Who else would arrange fruit in stunning chequerboards of colour, or construct, over many days, porticos for the church doors during Holy Days ingeniously made out of corncobs, ribbons and paper flowers? In 1520 when Cortes sent a collection of ‘strange and marvellous objects’ from Mexico back to Europe to be exhibited in Brussels, the great artist and engraver Albrecht Dürer was mesmerised by what he saw. ‘Nothing have I seen in the course of my life,’ he wrote about those handicrafts, weapons and household objects, ‘would have given me such happiness. They were objects of wonderful artistry.’

Colour is everywhere. When council workers repaint the big pink church tower in the plaza, they try out a few shades for effect – first burnt sienna, then bright ochre yellow. They finally settle on both: russet red with yellow contrasting stonework and curlicues. It’s a masterstroke – the effect in the sunset is stunning, and the sun sets reliably and gorgeously every night on those glowing walls under the dome.

Why stop? that sensibility seems to say. Why settle for beige, or a thousand shades of safe off-white? At Christmas, why hang one puny string of tinsel over your door, so miserly and constrained? There are banners and bunting to hang in the streets, exuberant decorations to string up in cafes and bars, workplaces just crying out for tissue-paper chains of snowmen. It’s not enough to have flashing Christmas lights, you have to have lights that spin in four colours in the shape of the Star of Bethlehem, rattling out the muzak version of ‘Santa Claus is Coming to Town’.

By the same token, why settle for just three Wise Men? Especially when other models feature them riding camels? Little by little, people’s nacimientos begin to creep across the room. More moss! More mistletoe! Add the Flintstone miniatures from McDonald’s, and the plastic models from the KinderSurprise eggs! Why shouldn’t Fred and Barney worship at the manger as well? Bring on a few extra cows from the plastic farm set!

In the twelve days leading up to Christmas, your nativity scene starts expanding to encompass the figurines radiating out from the manger like the last day of the Royal Agricultural Show, when all the animals enter the ring and form a swarming crowd round the judges’ stand. The kings, numbering about a dozen or so, flutter those eyelashes under the fairy lights, and the sombrero-clad shepherds mill like freeloaders. It’s like Woodstock must have looked to someone who’d taken the brown acid.

In those twelve days, there are street parties, processions, Holy Family re-enactments, and hot rum punch for the adults as the kids go nuts over the piñatas, spilling mandarins and sugarcane and lollipops over themselves in a shower of excitement.

Midnight Mass is packed, then everyone gathers for a middle-of-the-night dinner somewhere, which, with many toasts and messages of good will, goes on into the early hours. Christmas Day is a rare day of rest, when rules of decorum are relaxed. People appear in the street in their pyjamas, revelling in the holiday. Traditionally, I’m told, Christmas itself didn’t mean presents. Children put their shoes outside the door in the first week of January, when the Three Kings, returning to their kingdoms from Bethlehem, would pass by and fill the shoes with small gifts. One of the side effects of the current growing commercialism of the occasion is the pressing expense for parents to buy their children something for Christmas now, so they won’t feel left out. At URAC we stuff hundreds of bags with lollies, to be confronted in the communities with painful decisions about how many children we have on our 10,000-strong register of members, and how many bags we’ve brought, and how many sisters and cousins there are who are not members of the Union but have hopeful and expectant children too. For the first time ever, women follow me back to the truck, reduced to wheedling about extenuating circumstances. They whisper to me of visiting relatives, extra kids, no money for gifts, their eyes on the ground, and furtively I tear open the boxes and pass out dozens of extra bags. I can’t find it in myself to worry about disharmony, not when it comes to thirty-cent bags of jellybeans, not when children in Australia are putting out monster pillowcases for Santa to fill with Game Boys and PlayStations. Down at the market, I buy hundreds of lollipops by the metre, and the shopkeeper counts them off on the big cellophane roll in tiny stamped squares of coloured sugar like little stained-glass windows.

In the life-size nacimiento in the zócalo, the Holy Babe is absent from the manger when we pass on Christmas Eve.

My friend Lulú, who’s hosting midnight dinner, explains. ‘He’s not born yet, you see,’ she says. ‘And they’re probably worried someone’s going to steal Him, anyway.’

Sure enough, on Christmas morning, He’s miraculously appeared in the straw – light-skinned, blue-eyed, with a little Napoleon curl on His forehead.

We’re invited to a big wedding in the city. The son of some friends is marrying a young woman whose wealthy family has powerful connections. It’s a blow-out – held at a sumptuous ballroom of a big city hotel, with a four-course meal and a twelve-member band in mariachi regalia. An actual ex-president is a guest, flanked by bodyguards who look like they’re auditioning for parts in The Godfather. I feel underdressed, badly groomed in my flat shoes and boring outfit, frayed round the edges in the presence of so many beautiful people.

After the speeches and the food, the dancing starts and the band’s brass section steps to the fore. The bride and groom jump up on two chairs and grab a scarf between them, forming a bridge. That scarf has played a part in the wedding ceremony, symbolically tying the two of them together. Now every man in the room, even the ex-president, links arms and dances through that bridge at such a speed that the men on the end look like they’ll go flying through the air, lashed like the end of a whip. They keep their footing and dance, spinning through the chairs and tables, around the waiters and the clapping women.

As the groom’s best friends reach the two chairs, the couple lower the scarf so they have to limbo under it. When the last man is through, every woman and girl grabs hands and takes their turn dancing round the ballroom in a single twisting line, weaving in and out, showing up the men with their nimbleness, pouring one by one under the joined hands of the bride and groom. The bride’s mother and aunties and sisters dance under the arch, laughing up at her with brimming eyes, blowing her kisses. Bags appear from somewhere, full of whistles and maracas, and they are handed out to revellers as the band zips into another redhot salsa. It’s like Carnevale, as joyful and uninhibited as the Chinelos. Hours later we drive home with the mother of the groom, the car stuffed with confetti, balloons, maracas and pots of food for the next day’s party, our feet aching.

Two weeks later we attend a member’s wedding, the daughter of one of URAC’s few dairy farmers. It’s one of those rare cold days, where an early-morning frost has turned into a cold buffeting wind. We are invited early, to have a hot chocolate with the family before the ceremony. Don Ezekiel is neatly dressed, but only in his warm checked jacket and his best boots. ‘It’s my fifth daughter, and I’ve got three more after her,’ he says with a laugh. ‘I’ve already done this too many times to hire a suit.’

The women of the house, by contrast, are in beautiful apricot satin, and they’ve all been to the hairdresser’s. I sit in their kitchen and feel, again, like a poor and dowdy cousin. They’re all radiant, excited. Morning light shines into the room and lights up the blue enamel pots and pans hanging by hooks on the kitchen wall; the big saucepans needed to raise and nourish a family of eight girls and then all the extended kin they’ll be bringing into this kitchen – the new husbands, the new in-laws, the new grandchildren.

Don Ezekiel takes Phil off on the pretext of looking at the cows, as three generations of women sit drinking atole and gossiping. I look out of the kitchen doorway. There’s a central concrete courtyard in this house, and opposite us are two other rooms. That’s it. Don Ezekiel and Doña Marguerita have raised all eight of their girls in these three rooms, and today is momentous– another one is marrying and moving away, leaving them with only the three youngest. The bride-to-be, sitting with big rollers in her hair as her sister paints her nails, teases Marguerita about it.

‘You won’t know what to do with yourself!’ she says. Her mother smiles, gazing at them all, and suddenly she’s wiping tears from her eyes, fumbling for her handkerchief, laughing at herself but weeping nonetheless.

‘It’s true, it’s true! What will I do?’ she cries. ‘Only three of my daughters left – I miss you all so much! The house will be so empty!”

After the Mass and the ceremony, the whole village walks up the hill together to the reception, led by five musicians serenading los novios. Don Ezekiel has buttoned his woollen jacket up to the neck, and somewhere between home and the church he’s wet his hair and combed it flat. He’s a big man in this community, a man with dairy cows and enough land to run them on, but today he is a man rich in wedding obligations, a man blessed with daughters. A relative’s house and courtyard on the top of the hill have been set up for the fiesta and there’s the ubiquitous elaborate cake at the head table, bottles of tequila and soft drink all round and, out in the kitchen, chicken and mole sauce, rice and beans and brightly coloured tortillas waiting under foil.

He casts his eye over the arrangements, acknowledges congratulations with handshakes and a brief joke. He seats himself next to his beaming wife, ready to preside over the celebrations as all the living generations of two families tie themselves together into one complex extended family, as his daughter and his new son-in-law cast their lot together for life.

He gestures to us, offers us a seat near the family, indicates the new bottle of tequila on our table and mimes, with a grin, that we should crack it open.

He raises his glass and glances around quietly, and for a second I think I can see it through his eyes. This is what you earn and what you are given. The bottles on the tables, the raffia tortilla baskets to be souvenired as mementos, the chattering guests all in some way related to you, your daughter holding a new man’s hand: these are the tributes you lay down on the altar with a prayer of thanks. Work and rewards, debts and dividends, memories, tears, dancing, and a big white cake. Yes, everything is in order.

We sit down. Doña Marguerita’s mother and sisters are starting to bring out the food, and the band is starting up another love song.

We go on a holiday to the steamy, flat and sultry state of Veracruz. South of the city we drive down to another town, an old port on a slow, dreamy river. The road, pale and segmented like paving, is bordered with high, waving marsh grasses and bamboo, like a jungle, and in front of us small dark-skinned boys wearing nothing but old shorts step out of the vegetation holding up fish and turtles.

Over a bridge and into a town snoozing stretched in the late-afternoon sun, like an old cat. There are hardly any other cars on the streets. We find a hotel and stroll. Everything here feels so different to the mountains – so tropical and flat and lush. The houses are Caribbean in style, painted in luscious colours of melon and lime green, emerald and turquoise, raspberry and purple. Looking down a street is like viewing lined-up tubs of gelati.

The houses have wide wooden shutters and columns supporting deep porches, and the floors of these porches are intricate designs of tessellated tiles, cool, geometric shapes shaded with bougainvillea and banana palms. Gates are open, and on the porches sit two or three wicker rocking chairs, ready to sit in at twilight when the air cools down. The temptation to slip inside a front porch and ease yourself into one of these chairs is very strong. In fact, you could while away the rest of your days here, rocking and fanning yourself and chatting with whoever came past your gate. You could paint your house rosa mexicano, and pick avocados and limes off your very own trees.

Instead, we see tall palms a few blocks away and follow them to the plaza, where boys play table soccer outside a cafe and a white bandstand sits surrounded by bench seats and tall floodlights. The blazing sun smoulders down as we sit sipping lemon squash, flooding the sky with red, casting the tropical palm-tree horizon into silhouette. You can smell the river and all the estuaries and canals crisscrossing this land; the scent of cool, reed-filled water underscores the hot pavement and tropical humidity. It’s Sunday night, and slowly the inhabitants of the town, who must have been resting all afternoon behind those enticing wooden shutters, start wandering into the plaza. Some of the men wear white tropical shirts and trousers, and finely woven straw hats.

The women seem to have been out somewhere, maybe church, maybe for a holy day – they are in beautiful traditional skirts and blouses, with their hair plaited or coiled into buns, and quite a few of them are carrying boxes in carrier bags. People’s skin is darker here, noticeably so. Their cheekbones flare, and their hair is curly – beautifullooking people, relaxed and dignified. An older man sets up some old stereo speakers outside the bandstand and puts on a tape somewhere. Crackly waltz music emanates from the speakers as the two lights over the bandstand go on. As the sky darkens and these lights get brighter they are swarmed by insects, forming a dense concentrated aurora around the pool of light.

Older couples begin to waltz sedately in the paved area around the bandstand, the men very upright in their white shirts with neat red bandanas around the neck, the women graceful, chins raised. The sky goes that particular shade of electric blue. The Blue Danube starts, and a young Down syndrome boy dances by himself, eyes closed, under the palm trees. People laugh and chat, greet others, sit down and place those mysterious bags at their feet. What a calm and civilised little oasis, we are thinking as we order some dinner. What a pleasant Sunday night. There are no other tourists around, no bustle, just a lovely peaceful town having a waltz or two.

Some guys in their twenties have brought some nailedtogether planks down to the corner of the square and are busy arranging them. A stall? A table of some kind? They put together a big squarish platform, fitting the top sheet together so that there’s a run of joists underneath but open holes either end. Some of their friends come over and we’re speculating that maybe it’s a kind of skateboard ramp, when the waltz music crackles to a close and the guitars come out.

Three young men play a sharp, rhythmic staccato on two big guitars and one small one, and they sing a few choruses together, tuning up as they go. After a couple of songs, the women sitting around the square reach into their bags and take out pairs of Cuban-heeled shoes, and put them on. A few people at a time get up and make their way to the knot of musicians, then suddenly a man is up on the wooden platform, dancing. His heels drum the wood in counterpoint to the guitar chords, tapping sharply back and forth, his movements precise, his arms hanging straight at his sides. He extends a hand to a girl, and there’s applause as she jumps up. She dances opposite him, lifting out her skirt with one hand, turning away from him, turning back, dropping her eyes coquettishly. The song is a call and response, with three or four musicians singing on the chorus. The man jumps down and another one steps up in his place. Rhythmic clapping, twisting hands, a hat that’s raised and held over the girl’s head as she turns and taps her heels. She steps down and another young woman in dancing shoes jumps up. One by one, the people in the square take their turn on the platform as the musicians strum their fast, rollicking songs, different voices taking different verses to whoops and appreciative bursts of applause and laughter. A ten-year-old girl gets up, and then another, frowning in concentration at the steps they’ve learned. The sound of their heels echoes across the square, the voices of the singers rise high and clear.

An older women steps up to dance and her movements are small and controlled; this is a dance she’s been doing for years and years. ‘La maestra,’ murmurs someone next to me. She invites one of the younger boys hanging out nearby up to dance and his friends all rib him at the applause. You can see he’s torn, ducking his head and grinning bashfully, desperate to appear cool, but she puts out her hand again, and he jumps up in his baggy Levi’s and huge white Nikes. He knows the steps, but he acts the fool at first, self-conscious and gawky. There’s laughter, but only for a few seconds, and he seems to feel it, and the expectations of the eyes upon him. The older woman steps down to give him the floor and he straightens his shoulders, kicking his feet with more style as people clap, and suddenly his teenage awkwardness is gone and he’s beautiful up there, his hair out of his eyes and his hand rising from his side to extend down to a girl he likes. She gets up, giving him a little smile as their shoulders pass back and forth and their heels come down in a driving rhythm. The guitarist’s fingers blur on the strings. The song they are playing is ‘La Bamba’, but in a fast, rocking-horse tempo I only just recognise, as if there are more notes than usual in every bar. The percussive beat the guitarist is playing with the heel of his hand is different too, and the repetition of the refrain is almost hypnotic. The two dancers turn and spin, catch each other’s eye, flirting and twisting, never touching but with a world of language going on between them, dancing finally for nobody but themselves to a song they must have first heard before they could talk.

After an hour and a half of dancing, the musicians call it a night and people start making their good nights and drifting away down the cool paved streets. Girls stoop and put their everyday shoes back on, and their dancing shoes back in their carrybags. The waiters are clearing away the tables in the cafe as the same group of men dismantle the platform, put their guitars back in their cases and head off for a beer. Everything’s quiet again.

What we’ve been watching, I find out the next day when I stumble upon the maestra again, is the original fandango. The kids who come for a swim in the hotel pool, though – because we’re the only guests and it’s the first day of the school holidays and really hot – say that it’s just normal. Just dancing. I have a photo of them all balanced on the ledge of the deep end, wet and brown-skinned, all dancing a giggling fandango of their own devising.

We think culture is hard work to keep alive; we think we need reverent, hushed respect for legacy, but looking at that town, I wonder. Maybe all you need is a wooden platform and some guitars, a grandmother who buys you dancing shoes for your eighth birthday, and a town that would rather dance than watch TV on a balmy Sunday night. Maybe keeping a heritage alive just takes a decision to be joyful.

Of course, it can’t hurt to learn ‘La Bamba’ as well, that catchy little song dear to every Spanish teacher. Ritchie Valens covered it, Los Lobos covered it, even the Mormon Tabernacle Choir has recorded a version of it. In our Spanish classes in Cuernavaca, we’d puzzled over the lyrics as if they were obscure hieroglyphics. Dictionaries by our elbows, we’d hesitantly translated the first two best-known verses:

Para bailar la bamba, para bailar la bamba, se
necesita una poca de gracia,

Una poca de gracia y otra cosita, y arriba y arriba, ay
arriba y arriba iré,

Baila bamba, baila bamba …

Yo no soy marinera, yo no soy marinera, por ti seré,
por ti seré.

Para subir al cielo, para subir al cielo se necesita una
escalera grande

una escalera grande, y otra chiquita, ay arriba y
arriba y arriba iré

Baila bamba, baila bamba …

Yo no soy marinero, yo no soy marinero, soy capitán,
soy capitán …

Our English version came out like something put through a translation engine. The words seemed to go:

To dance the bamba, to dance the bamba you
need little bit of grace

A little bit of grace, and one other small thing,
and up and up, oh, up and up I will go,

Dance the bamba, dance the bamba.

I am not a sailor, (Marine?) I am not a sailor,
(but) for you I’ll be, for you I’ll be.

To climb up to the sky (to heaven?), to climb
up to the sky what you need

Is a big ladder, and another small one, oh, up
and up and up I’ll go,

Dance the bamba, dance the bamba.

I am not a sailor, I am not a sailor, I am a
captain, I am a captain.

Near perfect, said our teacher, who had the merest smattering of English. But what did it mean? Was it just nonsense? An eloquent shrug.

At the time I shrugged it off too, thinking it was no weirder a folksong than plenty of others you come across. After all, if Yankee Doodle can stick a feather in his cap and call it macaroni, why not, when one is planning to climb into the sky, keep a small ladder in reserve alongside your big one? At first, the classic Mexican song ‘La Cucaracha’ seems equally crazy:

The cockroach, the cockroach,

He can’t walk any more

Because he’s lacking, he’s lacking

Marijuana to smoke.

What? And yet, start scratching at history and it’s like getting the punch line to a joke. When you find out that the government soldiers back in the Mexican Revolution were seen as little better than thuggish mercenaries derisively known as ‘cockroaches’, who allegedly wouldn’t march unless they were supplied with plenty of weed, you can’t help grinning as you sing that little ditty.

It’s not till that visit to Veracruz, though, to witness that exuberant traditional dancing and singing, that I really start to puzzle over ‘La Bamba’ and what it might mean, why the tradition has been adhered to so lovingly. Now, I am not a folklorist, but for you I’ll be, for you I’ll be.

It’s not a straightforward task. ‘La Bamba’ has hundreds, some say thousands, of verses; there are at least two hundred versions recorded and the song is easily three hundred years old.

That’s as it should be, though, because it’s evolved from a style of music called Son Jarocho, where singers improvise coplas, or couplets, on the spot, adlibbing and one-upping each other.

Maybe the boastful claim about being a captain rather than a sailor is a kind of triumphant refrain sung when you invent a wittier couplet than your competitor, and maybe ‘Up, up, up’ is about raising the stakes again, going in for another round.

And what exactly is a bamba? Start delving into this, and it’s like turning a key in a lock. The Spanish word bambolearse means to swing, which sounds promising, but then there’s the Andalusian folksong tradition from the sixteenth century, the bambera or seis, a form of highly structured poetic improvisation where couplets of ten syllables are sung in verses of six lines. Son Jarocho seems to mimic this form almost perfectly, as well it might, considering the sixteenth-century colonisation of Mexico by Spanish men intent on transplanting their own culture there. The courtly dance which accompanied this music, the fandango, is a Castilian term.

But I’ve heard about this style of wittily spontaneous improvised music before, in the Caribbean and the West Indies and even among black American rappers and hip-hop singers. Calypso, for instance, is well-known as a musical form which slyly improvises topical or risqué social commentary. This whole coast, from North America down to South America, including the islands in between, was populated with black slaves from West and Central Africa brought by the Spanish to labour on plantations, and their musical influences have permeated the whole continent. In Puerto Rico, for instance, there is a musical style invented by enslaved Africans and their freed and escaped descendents. The music was characterised by improvised call-and-response choruses, and a teasing interplay between dancer and drummers. As with calypso, it was a social, political and spiritual outlet for these oppressed people, seen by many as an expression of cultural resistance. These dances were held outside the plantations and in the town plazas on Sundays and holidays, sometimes lasting all night, and they are still celebrated today, in the flourishing musical style is known as – aha! –bomba.

Son Jarocho seems to encompass just this fusion – the creole mix of African, indigenous and European styles and instrumental forms, blending together to produce its own distinct cultural voice. ‘Jarocho’ was originally the name given to the ‘mulatto’ people who were children of indigenous Mexicans and the African slaves brought to the Caribbean and the Veracruz coast. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it was a Spanish term of contempt.

Now, though, it’s a source of pride to call yourself a Jarocho. The dark-skinned people of the region define themselves as hardworking and outspoken, loyal, noble, and rightly, excellent dancers.

The Son Jarocho style, too, has survived the attempts of the Catholic Church to ban it during the colonial era. The bishops took exception, inevitably, to its frequent ‘devilish’ use of sexual double entendres and the way it made fun of religion and death. Who were those bishops? Who cares? Nobody remembers their names, but the Son Jarocho forges on – sexy, flirtatious, irreligious, and alive.

And it’s the oldest recorded verses of ‘La Bamba’, the ones Ritchie Valens didn’t sing, that give its most interesting secrets away.

‘This is the bamba, my brother,’ says the song, ‘The black song, which has been danced by everyone with great love … a beautiful greeting from an African. Oh my Veracruz, come on, my lover. Oh Africa, forget your troubles; come, I’m inviting you to listen ...’

They may be phrased in courtly sixteenth-century Spanish stanzas, but these lyrics are loyal to their own living history, not that of Grenada or Toledo. In fact, just like other creole forms from around the Caribbean, it’s openly subversive – people all over the continent, it says, ‘have tapped their heels to this song, to honour the memory of the Cimarrón.’

The Spanish coined the term ‘Cimarron’ four hundred years ago, to refer to the ‘wild’ fugitive African slaves who escaped to live in the mountains and forests of Central and South America and the West Indies. It’s a term that’s still used in parts of the Caribbean, and there’s a group of people in Panama who claim to be descended from one of these Cimarrón ‘tribes’.

Even the platform the dancers dance on, called by the Nahautl-derived name huapango or the Spanish tarima, is said to have been made when the drums of the slaves were confiscated by their masters, so that they could still beat out a rhythm with their feet.

Plenty of verses of this famous song are dedicated to pretty girls, to flirting, to the love of dark-skinned women, to prowess on the dance floor, to jokes about having to climb to heaven on a ladder. But these are among the oldest verses recorded:

To dance the bamba, to dance it

What you need is a little bit of grace

A little bit of grace, and one other small thing

Oh, up, up, up I’m going to go

And dance the bamba, dance, dance the bamba ...

I am not a sailor, I am not a sailor

I’m a captain, I’m a captain.

Here comes the bamba, here comes the bamba of Santa Cruz

A hymn from the very old land, the very old land that is Veracruz

Oh up and up and up I’ll go, to dance the bamba.

How beautiful is the bamba, how beautiful is the bamba at dawn

when everybody is dancing, when everybody dances it …

Ring the bells, ring the bells of Medellín

I sing you my song; I sing you my veracruzano song

A beautiful greeting, yes, a beautiful greeting from an African

Oh my Veracruz, come on, my lover, oh Africa, forget your troubles

Come, I’m inviting you to listen …

Veracruz, Africa – the emotions are the same

Come and dance, come and dance the bamba.

This is a Jarocho song; this is a song of the candle,

How beautiful, how delicious when Aunt Adela dances it,

When the children dance it, when they dance in school,

When the old people dance it, from the time of my grandmother;

This is a Jarocho song, this is a song.

I sing the bamba sincerely, because it comes from deep within my heart

It’s the bamba, my brother, a song of African blood

It’s been danced by everyone with great love

From Veracruz to Chicago, they have tapped out this dance

To honour the memory of the Cimarrón

Who sang in the mountains, beating out with drums

The rhythm of the bamba from out of their hearts.

Oh, up, up, up I’m going to rise,

Up, up, to the highest skies

And I will fly, I will fly, I will fly.

Yes, I want to dance it, that wild delicious fandango. But how? It’s giving me instructions, but the language is so fluid, so ambiguous.

‘Un poco de gracia / A little bit of grace …’ The problem is, gracia might mean more than one thing. It’s ‘grace’, but it also means ‘humour,’ ‘a favour’ and ‘thanks’. Do I need a bit of grace, or a bit of lightening up, or a bit of gratitude? And what’s that tantalising one little thing more?

And that refrain: ‘¡Arriba y arriba!’ Here’s where you get into semantics. That could mean just ‘up and up,’ or it could be in the imperative, commanding you, the listener, to get up now. If you say it while you’re pointing up, it could mean ‘upstairs’, which lends itself to all kinds of interpretations.

Is it an invitation? Watching the faces of those dancers, I truly hope so. I hope both arriba and baila are imperative, telling the listener to get up and dance, inviting you to muster your grace, your humour and your thanks, and get up. To stamp your feet to that rhythm, the song of the candle, the beat of the bamba from deep in the hearts of fugitive slaves. To forget yourself and dance like children, like aunties, like grandparents.

If you want to dance the bamba, that’s what you need.

Then, as the other African American slave hymns tell us, in almost exactly the same words, we’re all going to rise.

A few more weeks, and we’ll be leaving. It’s impossible to believe – before long we’ll be back in Australia. I try this idea on for size speculatively, like it was an unlikely rumour. Time seems to have rucked up and looped itself like knitting, making a nonsense of everything linear and measured. I can remember, two days before leaving Australia, sitting at the kitchen table, staring out the window. I sat there pulling focus with my eyes – the green garden beyond, the apple tree stuffed with fruit, and back to the six-paned window.

It’s old, this window, like everything else in the house, splintery and warped. The glass in the panes has been handrolled; it waved and rippled the apples, as if I was crying, which I wasn’t.

At clearance sales renovators buy old windows like mine just to cut this type of glass out – it’s become fashionable to distort your view. I have grown attached to it, myself; hate the thought of replacing the panes with new machine-made glass, invisible and perfect. I like the bathroom mirror, too, fogged and silvery, the way it used to erase and forgives the hard lines appearing on my forehead and under my eyes, around my mouth, between my eyebrows. Living in that old house, I learned to appreciate things that survive – the wedding ring rubbed thin around the back, the heavy old key which drops the lock sweetly into place. Walking down into the living room, I would bend and touch the wooden step worn down over a hundred years into a smooth curve, burnish the dented brass doorknob with my hand. Under the rug, the boards have the skewing sawtooth marks that show they have been sawn by hand by two people standing for hours, one in a pit, one above. Holding them together are nails with handmade square heads. When I knocked down the beams and ceiling joists to make a new room in this house, I spent the afternoon in apologetic conversation with the ghost of the builder of 1901.

With nothing but a chisel and a hammer, he’d outdone my power tools with his perfectly wedged and mortised joints. He’d taken a great deal of time with them for something that was always going to be hidden inside a roof, for nobody to see except their destroyer. Finally I took a mash hammer to them, feeling them finally give like a ship on a reef; smelling old, old forest, tall timber as long gone as he was.

Now that room opens up onto the lake. In it you can watch the rain lashing, mist curling off the water, the first haze of green on the willows. Through that watered glass, rippling your vision. I remember holding a cup of coffee, knowing I should have been packing, but standing. Deep in my head sometimes, when I find I can’t drag my eyes from something, I send my hand down into the bottom of some well, to touch the bottom with a question. Should I be crying? No. Should I be feeling something I’m smothering? Nothing. Time to go. And now it’s time to go again, time to try to return.

My grandfather, doing some carpentry once in the shed, took my frustrated child’s hand in his, soothed the banged thumb, and traced the circles on the timber I was impatiently hammering. We counted out from the centre. ‘See? It’s taken forty-seven years to grow for you, another three years seasoning in the shed. It deserves more than fifteen minutes to make something good. Take a bit longer with it.’

Take a bit longer. Every board on that house’s walls I’d eased free and stripped and replaced, working the tongue back into the groove, pre-drilling, oiling. Leaving it was like leaving a giant clay pot, or a giant passive lover, marked all over with my hands and fingerprints.

The house leaned on itself, shifting, tired, yawning; an old person getting comfortable. My tenants told me they would take care of it, that they would look after the garden and watch for leaks, but tenants always say that. It is a ragged opus.

It was good for me to let it go.

Out at work, I stagger into thin shade against the blazing heat. It seems impossible that I used to have a woodstove, that I once voluntarily sat by it and tried to soak up warmth.

It’s so hot that as I sit talking to the women under the mesquite trees in the mid-afternoon shimmer, I can feel my hair splitting, drying like stalks of maize.

I am still working on the nutrition program, making slow progress. We are keeping on with the program even though the government, which originally began the project as a pre-election publicity exercise, has withdrawn support. Originally they hoped to trumpet their fine record of social support, I suppose, but when results showed the rate of underweight children under five stands nationally at anywhere between 30 per cent and 90 per cent (the higher figures belong, inevitably, to Chiapas), they realised they had a public relations disaster on their hands and gagged all results from the organisations involved. We’re keeping on with it for as long as we can.

Around the trees where we do the weighings the ubiquitous cringing dogs still creep, trying to lick up scraps of food, trying to at least be on the periphery of whatever the humans are doing. The kids still throw stones at them, hard, and the dogs start yelping even before the stones hit them, then cower away, then creep back, blinking in abject apology. They want this brutal human contact so much they tremble. They want to be painlessly ignored, passed over, forgiven, allowed to remain.

The mothers of the children being weighed wrap shawls tighter around their heads against the pounding sun. The watch the weight on the scales, watch their children stepping off onto a flat stone and putting their ragged old shoes back on again. Their faces, as they accept their packets of protein cereal, are still and watchful – they have had years to perfect techniques to keep shame and distress out of view. The older children in the family watch respectfully and a little enviously as we hand out the cereal. Tomorrow morning, in nine cases out of ten, everyone will probably eat a bowl of this, and it will be gone. Shared and gone.

Bumping down the rocky roads in the truck, I squint into the heat. My skin, after all this time, has burnt to a pigmented brown, the lines when I smile like tiny dry creekbeds. Time to face it – I’m a fair-skinned person on the wrong continent.

Two and a half years too late, twenty years too late, I buy sunscreen and sit looking at the tube in the car, wondering if I should even bother applying it. The two lines between my eyes are deepening.

Here, when I catch sight of my reflection, I feel a jolt of panic at what’s visible there. Perhaps I am frowning more; perhaps I am knitting my brow, taking all this in. I am absorbing it, and it is re-emerging on my face, unmistakable. I want my kind, cloudy mirror back, which smoothed all this surface and plumped it out and made it less ... etched.

One day I asked a woman where she kept the complex patterns for her loom weavings.

‘Up here,’ she said, ‘la memoria,’ and tapped her head, not on the temple but on the point between her eyes, exactly where the lines are forming on my own. The third eye. The puzzled, worried, angry, tense eye. The memory eye.

We look at the world through curtains of what we spend our lives weaving. Through the strands of the patterns we’ve stored there, which will be there forever. I knit my brow, yes. I knit everything together, and this is the pattern I have made: two vertical lines of anxiety, five horizontal lines of questions.

At odd moments I worried about my house, bearing up to winters across the globe in Australia. I imagine it encased in fog, a creaking Mary Celeste. Water drips off the eaves, stained with the mulch of dead leaves. It drips onto the porch, patiently ageing it away. My tenants do not notice. They are inside, feeding the stove, eating stewed apples, running their fortunate hands over the handmade blackwood table. Their toddler bangs and bangs his fork on the surface of the wood, where as many years as my grandfather lived are laid down. Like a ghost, I hover outside the window, wringing my hands, making vague untangling movements, finally resigning myself to it and giving it away.

The bones under my skin are rising up to be claimed. How can I walk around with my features expressionless, how can I expect this will not weather me? Here is the maze of lines made by years of laughing, tilting backwards on kitchen chairs. Here are the marks across my forehead, falling into their habitual lines every time I ask a question. Here are the lines of grief. Where do I keep my patterns? Here, here – let me cover my whole face with your patient hand, let me guide it over every nick and scar. This is what we are made for, to have skin this thin, skin which reveals us like a pane of glass.

I go on squinting into the sun every day, helpless in the face of all this time. It will happen, whether we fight against it or not, whether we throw stones at it or ignore it, whether we apply sunscreen every day or forget it. The leaks will get in, the first green leaves will come, the panes will one day have a ball thrown through them. I hold what I know about this like a bowl of water. In both hands, knowing as the potter knows that it is beautiful only because part of my mind is already grieving for it. We hold this fact as we hold the bowl, we encompass the tragedy we know is imminent. If we want to hold water, we must see the bowl already broken. We are dragged towards that pulsing point. We cringe in its presence, of course we do, shivering with need. But we can choose to be obsequious, or tilt our faces up.

There is a Native American legend that when the old master potter can no longer make pots, when his life work is finished, he gives his finest piece of work to a new potter, the one he feels will be the new master, in a ceremony of initiation. The younger potter does not keep this beautiful vase, this masterwork, to admire or contemplate. He smashes it into shards, and grinds the pieces into his own clay.

The rains will come here again, carpeting the desert with blooming life and new growth, and we’ll be gone. The parties in the auditorium will play new songs, people will marry and christen their babies. URAC’s membership, already nudging 11,000, will keep growing.

The council workers will slowly, slowly, make their way round the town, pruning the unfurling new shoots of bougainvillea, whistling and chatting. These tough, resilient children stepping out of the scales will grow just as tenaciously, loving their life, which is not the same as expecting always to be happy.

People give me notes they have printed carefully on ruled notepaper, farewelling me, asking for God’s blessing for me, thanking me. They give me crocheted cloths for my tortillas back at home, serviettes they have painted by hand – with original designs, they add with a smile. Claudia gives me a tiny pair of silver earrings made by her friend the local silversmith, and I know she must have bartered quite a few free meals with him to afford them. At community meetings, people arrive ready for convivencias, with party food and soft drink wrapped up in their bags. I eat my body weight in chilli-smeared tacos, and one more slice of that white sugary cake. On our final Union Day meeting, Phil and I organise a party ourselves, but before we can start serving food for the two hundred people there, we are called up onto the stage for a farewell speech.

At the back of the big barn where we hold the meetings, four older men assemble and clear their throats. One strums a guitar. Slowly, they begin to walk towards us, singing a corrido. Their voices are pure and sure, but when they begin to sing ‘adiós’ the notes crack a little, and the audience begins to sing along softly, a sweet, quiet harmony of regret and separation. I stand, holding my notes and letters, looking at the four campesino men as they approach. I imagine them getting together to practise, discussing which traditional song would be appropriate, changing a few words to make it specially for us.

I imagine their wives washing and ironing their best shirts for today, for this moment, the cotton glowing white in the morning sun as they gaze up at us singing their goodbyes.

The current of all those hearts feels enough to almost pull me off my feet, the pain of leaving is almost unbearable, and yet I find myself gazing back steadily, drinking in the moment, dry-eyed. I take Phil’s hand, brimming with calm. Nothing will overspill in me, I contain it all, I welcome it all in, I surrender. How, in this rich, rich moment, could I ever pity myself?

A picnic in the campo. A fresh breeze blows cumulus drifts in patches of shadow over the fields of young corn. The cacti are swarming with life; ants and bees and vibrant little birds, and soon these flowerheads will become hard buds, and then in the market, everywhere, will be bags of peeled green fruit, dripping with juice. The old silver bell in the church in Barrio de la Magdalena rings in the distance, shivery with hundreds of years of tolling out over this landscape. How can I leave here? Lying in bed on a Sunday morning as the sounds of busy life wash up through the balcony doors – clicking heels going to church, children laughing, young men whistling to guide the trucks backing up to load chairs from last night’s party at the Municipal Auditorium, the people downstairs greeting customers, the tortilla machine cranking into life around the corner. I look down and the street is full of floating soap bubbles from a street vendor making his way to the plaza, shining in the sun. My bag waits in the bottom of the wardrobe, the house is silent – we’ve given our ghetto blaster to the office girls, hoping that they might be enticed to buy a new CD.

‘Every person wishes for your return,’ Alejandro writes to us in a note, ‘and my house is always ready for you.’

How can I leave here?

Choosing what to take, what to carry, what to leave behind. My footsteps track back and forth, numbly, mechanically; straightening edges and folding my life up over and over, pretending it’s something I can take away with me under my arm.

It’s Saturday night, twilight, and there’s only one place to be – the plaza.

Mass is over and the air is settling with social life, the birds fighting for roosts in the plane trees. There’s a smell of cologne and clean hair, freshly scrubbed floors, food being cooked in the cafes under the colonnades. The tourists sit at the outdoor tables, drinking cold beers, the only ones who can afford to pay half a daily local wage for a Bohemia. They sit watching the activity around them as if the locals are their show, not realising they’re the show for the locals. The Indian kids work the tables, selling them souvenirs, and everybody else strolls. They’re all ready for a bit of music and talking tonight, after six days of long hours of work in the factories and the fields.

The young girls, their faces like flowers, all walk clockwise in groups of friends, strolling as if they don’t even notice the attentions of the boys, whose shirts glow in the twilight as they wander anticlockwise. The boys’ hair is combed with gel and they carry keys on a chain. If you’re talking about front doors and cars, these keys don’t open anything. The things that these keys need to open cannot be easily explained. The boys affect nonchalance; the girls catch a dark yearning eye as they do a turn of the square, perhaps bestow a shy, secret smile on somebody. Next time around there might be a few words they can say, and that friend of their cousin is so handsome, and so polite. There are grandparents in the square, with long memories, who know how to turn a blind eye. They watch, their faces soft, knowing how the blood speaks and faces burn, how hearts must be hammering, how quickly the time to be carefree melts away.

‘Kiss me, my dear one,’ sings the ranchero singer under the eaves, the guitars plucking sweetly. ‘Kiss me when the sun goes and the moon hides its face.’

It’s Saturday night, and we’re all equal now. We all know the steps of this paseo, the words to this song. We rise to take a turn of the square. We remember this language, of sunset and flashing white smiles, the old, old choreography. These are the steps to the dance, the secret promptings of the heart risking itself to get up and take its place there.

We rise and slip into our place in the mingling crowd with the kids in this town, their parents, their grandparents, the little children running in and out. We greet each other, we clasp hands, we attest by our very presence how poor we feel without this.

We must rise or else we will never understand. We cannot sit this dance out and watch it all as our entertainment, the world as our theme park. We want to believe we can, us gringos; that we have the buying power to pay for front-row seats. We don’t want this risk, we want to be the world tourists who are perpetual spectators, exempted from getting up from our seats and finding our place in this dance. But we cannot close ourselves off from this and watch it like reality television. If we do, we reduce ourselves to being nothing but the passive consumers of other people’s lives, as if they were some kind of commodity. This dehumanises all of us, erodes these fragile, necessary bonds. We must get up or die of loneliness.

Driving home from the picnic in the van over the hard cobbled back roads, we pick up a man hoping for a lift. He’s been out fossicking, he tells us, in his son’s small claim, hunting for the milky opals you can sometimes find in the rich volcanic rock of the region.

He hasn’t found much yet, but he’s hopeful. Have we seen the local jewellery, made from opal? It’s beautiful, isn’t it?

‘We’ve got opal where we come from, too,’ says Phil. ‘In Australia.’

‘Ah yes, I’ve heard that. Different, isn’t it? More blue?’

‘That’s right. We’re … well, we’re going back there very soon.’

‘Is that right? Back to your country?’ He uses the word common with the campesinos here: tierras. Back to your earth. Your soil. Impossible for them to conceive of a place except in terms of land.

‘Yes. Back home.’

He nods thoughtfully, his cracked dirty hands cradling a few chips of pale rock. When we reach a crossroad he leans forward.

‘Here, please, this is fine. How much do I owe you?’

‘Nothing, Don. A pleasure.’

‘Well, thanks. Go with God.’

He swings out and walks away, turning to give us a salute.

Under our feet here, under this tough ground of dust and porous volcanic boulders, run streams of warm spring water gushing up into small oases, and frozen into the rock sediments, ancient seams of opal like glittering, vitrified coals. I’m going to remember that; the warm springs and the cold opal, the water and fire hidden beneath the surface.

The Mexicans, before the Conquest, revered the earth so much that when they made a promise, to make good their word they would bend and touch the ground. That sealed their solemn oath – it, not the word, was their bond. In some parts of the country, they probably still do it.

Soon we will be back on Australian soil; that equally mysterious landscape, that uneasy sense of ‘own’.

I catch sight of myself in the side mirror as we bump over the roads, at the new face I am going home with. Well, here is the map of me – the lines for laughing, the lines for sorrow, the lines for asking questions. Sorrowful, joyful and glorious, I have been witness to those small mysteries, and tried not to turn away. What makes me tremble now is that I am so revealed; any stranger – you, for instance – can look at me and see immediately that I have been powerless in the face of this, that if I have railed against it, I have failed. I’ve let it mark me. I’m here for the duration, and there’s no point hurrying now.

You need to stop hammering and count the rings, to remind yourself to make something good. You need to touch the sawtooth marks, and refuse to sand them back any more, refuse to modify the story. The battered windscreen is glittering with sandblasted gouges as we drive. It hazes, ripples, seems to melt – as mysteriously liquid, to me, in this moment, as a mirage.