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The first pilgrim, the first tourist, the first lost soul from another world, was a man called ‘Head of a Cow’ :Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca.
In 1542, he walked six thousand miles, beginning in Texas, in the present USA, and then down through Arizona and across the border, over the frontera and into Sonora in northern Mexico. Like those of many pilgrims, his intentions when he first arrived in the New World were very different. His family were slave-owners in the Canary Islands, and Cabeza de Vaca, raised in a household of slaves, was a military man. He sailed to the Americas as second in command of an expedition to seize Florida and build an empire fuelled by gold.
Instead, the conquistador and his party of explorers encountered fierce resistance and terrible storms in the Gulf of Mexico. They became lost and disoriented and sick.
They starved to death instead of finding the fabled wealth they expected, they suffered the truly incomprehensible fate of becoming slaves themselves to the ‘Indians’ of the coast.
Their numbers dropped from several hundred to four tenacious survivors, shivering on the coast of Texas – Cabeza de Vaca and two other Spaniards, and a ‘black man’, a Moor. With everything they had already survived, they must have been filled with a strange fatalism, because they resolved to set out on foot across North America, hoping to reach the Pacific Ocean and be rescued there by a Spanish ship.
By this time slavery had taught them several languages, and literally stripped them slowly naked of the remains of Europe they wore on their bodies and in their souls.
They wore no clothes, and they carried nothing that might encumber them.
The Native American tribes they came across as they walked took them to be shamans. The populations begged to heal them of their various afflictions, and the four men uneasily tried. To their own astonishment, many were cured.
Their entourage swelled to hundreds, with villages along the way giving them food, shelter and tribute gifts. Everything they were given, they shared out among the people walking with them. The four of them, carrying gifts like arrowheads and pelts and copper bells, walked at the head of this procession, naked and adorned with their magic amulets.
As they wound down into Mexico, the inevitable collision with other Spaniards came closer. Cabeza de Vaca wrote about the moment they realised was imminent:
During this time Castillo saw, on the neck of an Indian, a little buckle from a sword-belt, and in it was sewed a horseshoe nail. He took it from the Indian, and we asked what it was; they said it had come from Heaven. We further asked who had brought it, and they answered that some men, with beards like ours, had come from Heaven to that river; that they had horses, lances and swords, and had lanced two of them.
Civilisation!
Finally, in Sinaloa, it happened – they came upon a group of Spanish slave traders. This group had devastated and terrorised the local populations, and their reputation had spread. Cabeza de Vaca finally came face to face with his former incarnation.
But his compatriots stared at these strange naked figures at the head of a crowd of native people, and did not recognise them as their fellow citizens from the civilised world.
When they finally grasped that here were Spaniards who spoke the dialects of the Indians and had their trust, they demanded that Cabeza de Vaca conspire with them to make his entourage into slaves as well.
Cabeza de Vaca denounced them, and a ‘hot argument’ ensued. The Spaniards tried to convince the Indians that the men they were following, far from being shamans or holy men, were just ordinary, lowly Spaniards.
Cabeza de Vaca wrote later,
With us, [the Indians] said they feared neither Christians nor lances. This sentiment roused our countrymen’s jealousy. Alcaraz bade his interpreter tell the Indians that we were members of his race who had been long lost; that his group were the lords of the land who must be obeyed and served, while we were inconsequential.
This claim, though, seemed utterly impossible to the Indians, and they rejected it.
The Indians paid no attention to this. Conferring among themselves, they replied that the Christians lied: We had come from the sunrise, they from the sunset; we healed the sick, they killed the sound; we came naked and barefoot, they clothed, horsed, and lanced; we coveted nothing but gave whatever we were given, while they robbed whomever they found and bestowed nothing on anyone.
No, said the Indians, we were not the same men.
Cabeza de Vaca must have had some inkling, then, of his own transformation, of the way he had been broken down and remade by the New World. ‘To the last,’ he writes, ‘I could not convince the Indians that we were of the same people as the Christian slavers.’
Since then, millions of tracks have crisscrossed the continent, and millions of new pilgrims have followed in his footsteps – more conquistadors, prospectors, explorers, settlers, missionaries, anthropologists, backpackers – and each, in their own way, has attempted to conquer the country, to discover it.
But Cabeza de Vaca, naked and wide-eyed, taking everything he was given and giving it away again, is one of the very few to have been, instead, discovered by it. As he penetrated it, it conquered him.
His brief but extraordinary book, Adventures in the Unknown Interior of America, the continent’s first travel guide, reads now like an aching lament for a vanished world. The place he describes – its virgin forests and prolific rivers, its people, their incredible customs and beliefs, their dialects – has all but gone now. Only tiny, clinging remnants of it remain. Like the indigenous group who fed and clothed Cabeza de Vaca and his men in a valley he described as ‘the most beautiful place on Earth’ – a tribe who called themselves Rarámuri. Originally, he thought this meant ‘The ones who run fast’ but later understood it as ‘Those who walk straight’.
Cabeza de Vaca wrote how they migrated from winter quarters each year by walking tortuously narrow mountain trails, men, women and children alike, in single file, to avoid slipping down the canyons’ steep inclines. The group he was describing are the Tarahumara, who still live in the deep gorges and canyons in Northern Mexico, still cultivate their lands and speak their own language, still found their behaviour in the morality of ‘walking straight and correctly’. They’ve got their own ideas about civilisation. They know the people who leave the canyons to go to the city and become part of the modern consumer society as ‘the Mistaken Ones’.
We could never do that walk now. We buy expensive backpacks, but the vast majority of us don’t walk anywhere with them. We get on the courtesy bus, we take a taxi and stuff our backpacks into the boot. We hate recognising ourselves as tourists – we call ourselves ‘travellers’.
What strides ahead before us is our restless imagination, focusing constantly on trying to prepare for and control what lies ahead.
‘We are fated to live almost every moment of our lives in the future tense, in anticipation of things we will do, things we will achieve, people we will become,’ says naturalist Charles Bowden. ‘The past for us is a vast barren that pulls at us from behind, a place we know by reputation. But we do not live there. The present, it hardly exists, the briefest flickering as we stride ahead, our minds focused on our becoming, becoming, becoming. But the future, it justifies all our acts, occupies all our days and nights, and feeds all our lusts. We will be.’
Cabeza de Vaca took eight years to walk across what is now such a contested, seething frontier. He was treated as a shaman, and he earned the title; his new identity was bestowed upon him by those who had no other precedent to judge, and confirmed in that never-before-seen confrontation with his compatriots. He and his companions were recognised as something else, men who had burned away from themselves the characteristics and adornments of the Old World, and escaped, naked, into the crucible of the New.
I’m going home. I’m droning through airspace high above the world’s oceans and at some stage mañana, possibly mañana in the tarde, I’ll be walking into the Arrivals lounge.
I close my book and cast around for something a bit lighter to read.
I open the brochure informing me what music channels I can access with my headset, what movies will be screening as the hours pass, and what meals I will be served.
‘In designing the menu for your international flight,’ it says, ‘our chefs had a regional potpourri of ingredients available to them: the abundance and freshness of Australia’s famous seafood and farm produce and the exotic herbs and spices that only Asia can provide. The most important ingredient in our cuisine is freshness – fresh lean meats, chicken and fish, fresh vegetables and fruits, meticulously prepared to standards far beyond anything previously imaginable inflight.’
I flick through one of the glossy magazines they bring me. There’s a whole new generation of unfamiliar celebrities beaming up at me from those pages – I’ll have my work cut out for me learning to adore them all. The magazines even smell rich, impregnated with a chemical spiciness somewhere between aftershave and gloss estapol.
Joy, Passion, Obsession – it seems they are all perfumes now. A world of shadowed muscular bodies, of women draped swooning across pianos, of white hands taloned with glittering red polish, writhes at me from the pages. Why should I buy this rehydrating anti-ageing liposome-activating creme, developed in a lab in Switzerland? Because, apparently, I’m worth it.
The glossy catalogue slipped into the seat pocket alongside the sickbag spreads a cornucopia of items I never before realised I needed: battery-operated revolving tie racks, foldaway walking machines in handy zip-up leatherlook carrybags, desk ornaments fashioned from my own business cards, head massagers, chronometers, barometers, portable heart-rate calculators. There’s a wallet that beeps a warning when you remove your credit card from it, eliminating forever the risk (‘what a horrible feeling of loss and insecurity it is!’) of accidentally leaving your card behind somewhere. It’s available, if you’re interested, as a Beeping Wallet, an Executive Beeping Wallet, or a Lady’s Beeping Clutch.
There are clocks everywhere: watches worth ten years’ salary displayed on velvet, digital clocks worked into pens and desk blotters and onto golf bags, calculators the size of wafer biscuits for when you are seized by the sudden desire to add something up, wherever you may be.
‘Chicken or beef?’ says the hostessas– my mind buzzing with paranoid tiredness at three-thirty a.m – I’m wondering whether this catalogue could actually be a diabolically clever satire.
I take the chicken, and open the foil lid suspiciously. If this meal doesn’t reach a standard far beyond anything previously imaginable inflight, there’s going to be trouble.
The Australian Customs officers look unbelievably casual in shorts and open-necked shirts, like they’ve been standing around having a barbecue and have just stepped inside to process these passengers. Somewhere out behind those doors, surely, is an outdoor setting painted mission brown and six beers in stubby holders, a plastic dish of coleslaw and a plate of charred snags.
Their manner as they look over our passports is completely relaxed and unofficious. There’s not a machine gun in sight. Beyond the check-out stand friends and family, a platoon of beaming people ecstatic to see us. Some kids – grown almost beyond recognition – have made us a huge ‘Welcome home’ banner that we run through like a premiership team, hearing the crayoned paper tear as we hit it, laughing. The weekend passes in a daze of celebrating.
There’s a theory about jetlag – a bit nutty, but hear me out – that it’s actually the disoriented period of time before your soul catches up with your physical, corporeal self, jetted too quickly across oceans and timezones. The soul, apparently, is bamboozled by the supersonic age, and would prefer the quietly reflective days of surface or ocean travel to keep itself oriented and safely in situ. Other theories say it’s the brain trying to adjust to the freakishly unnatural experience of dealing with too much light as we cross the datelines of the planet. Night should follow day, not more day, not a sun rising perpetually for seven hours. This leaks some chemical into the brain that runs haywire.
I lie tossing and turning, pumped with adrenaline and weird, cartoonish dreams. In them, I discourse brilliantly on more theories, not even considered by humankind, theories I debate in some frontal-lobe lecture theatre to an all-star cast of learned colleagues. We solve the mysteries of the time-space continuum, the nature of black holes, the magnets in the brains of pigeons, deep-vein thrombosis, the pros and cons of frequent flyer points.
I jerk awake, my soul definitely elsewhere, paddling along in some unchartered stretch of the Pacific Ocean, vainly trying to catch up with my body, which lies washed up like bedraggled flotsam on an island somewhere in Micronesia.
Jetlag, or soullag. Maybe that’s what I should blame for the pervading sense of strangeness as I step out into the city. In the CBD, everyone’s wearing black, as if they’re grieving for something.
People stand on the tram with CD headphones stuffed into their ears and dark sunglasses covering their eyes. They walk quickly, stiffly, clutching briefcases to their chests and huddling in doorways to speak into mobile phones. Something joyless and heavy is descending onto me as I walk around the city I’ve missed, something hard and cold.
It’s so clean and orderly, and yet so strangely empty.
There’s no centre. We’ve long ago abandoned that idea, giving our public places a kind of heart bypass in the process. The traffic can flow much more smoothly without one. People’s faces are strained and preoccupied, looking away quickly if you make eye contact. Teenagers in beanies like LA rappers throw me ‘What are you lookin’ at?’ scowls as they slouch along the shopping precincts.
Blank. Cold. Indifferent.
A man in the post office tries a biro on a string that doesn’t work, and in exasperation he throws it down onto the counter and buries his face in his hands.
People waiting for the tram look like they’re queuing up to have a tooth drilled. The tram arrives on cushion brakes and people negotiate with a machine for their tickets, then sit holding their mobiles on their knee. When the phones ring, they conduct their conversations as if everyone else around them were invisible. Where is the centre? Where is there a place to sit down? And where are the old people?
I wander down to the Arts Centre to see if there are any good plays coming up, and read the results of a user survey that has asked theatre patrons to list the most important priorities for them in attending the theatre. The most important consideration, respondents have said, is adequate car parking.
On the streets with an afternoon of spare time stretching ahead of me, I feel the last emotion I expected – a swamping sense of lethargy, of numb pointlessness. There is nothing I can do without money, no human exchange available here which seems valid without it, no reason just to wander to see what surprising thing might be around the next corner. I already know – there will be shops staffed by polite attendants, streets full of cars, people shielded and invisible to one another, not making eye contact, busy going somewhere else.
After a month or two, Phil can’t stand it and goes camping in the bush for a month.
I resolve to clean the house, pull my beloved books down from the attic and recreate the feel of home. I jump awake in the morning, wondering what’s happened to the church bells, the roosters, the sound of the street stirring outside. I crave that chorus of greetings, the sense that I am a single thread in a knitted-together day.
There are boxes of things to deal with. When we left we’d cleaned out our lives, we’d thought, reduced our belongings to the barest of essentials, and stowed them upstairs. Now, pulling those same boxes down and checking their contents, I can’t believe how much superfluous stuff we own. Why all these candlesticks, these jugs, these shoes? What is the sentiment that compels me to accumulate it? I wire up the stereo and sit back on my heels gazing at the plethora of cassettes I haven’t heard for nearly three years spilling from boxes. All I want is my CD of Mexican music to fill this silence.
In the supermarket I am constantly greeted by old friends and acquaintances, delighted to run into me.
‘Hey, you’re back! You’ve been away, haven’t you? South America, wasn’t it?’
‘Mexico.’
‘Right! How was it?’
‘Well … God, like another universe. Fantastic. I can hardly …’
‘Good on ya. How does it feel to be home?’
‘Well, to tell you the truth it’s sort of hard to adjust … it was really hard to leave after such a long time ...’
‘Must be good, though, to be home safe and sound in good old Aussieland?’
They stare at me already nodding, willing me, it seems, to answer yes, to confirm that it’s a jungle out there, that I kissed the tarmac as I arrived, prostrate with gratitude and relief. They want to hear all about it, in fact, but they haven’t got time right now. We must get together, they say, and have a proper talk sometime. I stand nodding, in the supermarket that contains no rich scents of fruit and vegetables, no chequerboard displays of beans and apples, no vendors cajoling you with tastes and samples, no forest of hanging piñatas swinging overhead, no kneeling old ladies spreading foraged mushrooms from a shawl, no meat section to send the health inspector screaming. I stand in the aisle, breathing in the sanitised, refrigerated air and holding my bathroom cleanser and mousetraps and garbage bags. I glance up, crushed by the weight of the unsayable. Over my head, a banner advertising the friendliness of this supermarket chain says, ‘Aren’t you glad you came?’
They’re still insistent, uncomfortable with my silence, wanting to wrap up this twenty-five word soundbite with solid confirmation.
‘So it’s good to be home, eh?’ they press.
I nod. ‘Yep, just great,’ I say.
Kenny was right. You’ve got to know when to hold ’em, and know when to fold ’em.
I remember a great cartoon from a few years ago. It depicted a teeming Australian street scene. Everywhere – on people’s T-shirts and sunvisors, on the sides of buildings, on car windows and numberplates, even on a banner being dragged through the air by a small plane, was the slogan ‘I ♥ Australia’. It was plastered on every surface.
In the foreground of the cartoon two policemen were carting off a man who was wearing a T-shirt saying ‘I am reasonably fond of Australia’.
I’m laughing a bit more hollowly at that cartoon now. So many exchanges seem surreal, and I’m not just talking about the people who sit in cafes filling their idleness by discussing the pros and cons of navel piercings. People seem consumed by the possibilities of their future – how they’re going to change, what they’re going to be buying next, the shiatsu massage or meditation course they’re going to be undertaking which will radically improve their lives. They talk of diets that are going to cleanse their livers and detoxify their systems, requiring them to insist that their food is pure and organic, full of macrobiotic, out-of-season fruit and vegetables driven all the way from Queensland. It will require constant, attentive vigilance, this regime of what they will be putting into their bodies.
They are going to simplify their lives and escape the ratrace, so will soon be doing a workshop and buying a program from California being marketed as ‘Voluntary Simplicity’.
They seem torn between restlessness and listlessness, as they catalogue all the things they’ll be doing or purchasing next. Once we begin to talk about the present, I am aware of a floundering absence in conversations, which people fill with minutiae: details of shopping expeditions, price comparisons on consumer goods, plots on TV shows I’ve never heard of. I hear something else I honestly haven’t heard for almost three years: whingeing.
I can’t get over the unfamiliar, pervading feeling of aggrieved discontent, a sense that everything is inadequate and disappointing, endless inventories of why people are not yet happy. It’s as if the present is something to be gotten through, like a punishment, and the future, the new and perfected self, will be the reward at the end. Then they will finally be happy. After all, they finish, frowning, that’s what life’s all about, isn’t it?
Was it always like this? This is not how I remember my friends, or my society. I’ve fondly painted Australians as easy-going and informal, talkative and unpretentious. I’ve longed to get back, to speak again in the richness of my own language, with people who’ve known me a long time and share my background. Now that language seems full of miscommunication, misunderstandings, a vacuum where there are no words to describe how it feels.
Everything seems weird that used to seem normal. Maybe my soul has been blown off course somewhere, dragged itself onto some atoll, and is sitting waiting, solitary and silent, for help to arrive.
People aren’t making money, they’re growing wealth. A bank billboard shows a giant Monopoly board to advertise investment loans, with the gloating slogan ‘The one with the most property is the winner.’ Parents drive their kids to the park and sit watching their every move from the car as they play, then drive them home again. They boast that their street is not like everyone else’s, everyone’s friends – they all get together for Christmas drinks once a year, they look out for each others’ property.
They ask, ‘Weren’t you scared for your safety in Mexico? How did you handle all that crime?’ as they alarm their cars, triple-lock their doors, install laser security systems against ‘home invasion’, and bolt themselves inside every night with the TV on for company, a series of remote controls laid out on the coffee table in front of them.
They relate to me how everybody was shocked into coping when an explosion caused a gas shortage during our absence. They had to endure cold showers, they say, for days and days. No gas! Honestly, it was like a Third World country.
My hands flail, clench, brimming with useless gesture. I’m back to being without words again, inarticulate, lacking the right vocabulary.
They have questions but they don’t like my answers. As for my own words, they seem flat and colourless, experience reduced to dull fragments of anecdotes.
I sit in a friend’s kitchen as she’s clearing up after lunch, letting her words wash over me. She’s talking about how the heating in the local swimming pool isn’t quite the right temperature, and parents are very annoyed. They’ve all sent their kids on a school holiday program, and now nobody is sure if the water in the pool is warm enough to swim in. It’s just not good enough, she says.
I can hardly hear her. As she’s speaking she’s rinsing glasses under a gushing tap, pouring gallons and gallons of pure, clean drinking water down the sink. I watch, mesmerised, as she fills one of the glasses and raises it to her lips, drinks it down, turns away leaving the tap running as she picks up the kettle and unplugs it.
‘And that’s another thing,’ she says in the new, familiar tones of duress. ‘Have you seen how the supermarket’s expanded into that new location? It’s so much bigger – everything’s on different shelves now, so you can’t find what you want where it used to be. It’s very distressing.’
An unfriendly city, a groping for words, a friend’s puzzled, hurt smile; these small things make us, inch by inch, into exiles.
I’m constantly turning corners in the town and finding brand-new buildings, big shining ostentatious houses, three cars in each driveway. It’s as if everything considered worth having is laid out on the lawn for display like big toys or a winning hand of cards – a boat, a four-wheel drive, a big impressive driveway sweeping up towards the security doors.
I walk up the empty, hilly street towards my own chilly house. I think of kids calling, kicking homemade soccer balls, teenage boys singing on street corners, a meeting scattering, laughing, as a flock of sheep trots through it, a child running through the garden holding a newly laid egg in her outstretched hand, grinning from ear to ear at the pleasure of having something to give.
The word we learned in Mexico for being homesick was extrañar– to miss. It’s a multilayered verb, that one. An extranjero is a foreigner, a stranger. To find something extraño is to find it puzzling and strange. It can also mean ‘to banish’. And ‘to grow apart’.
To miss something is to become a stranger, to be banished. To be sick for home.
The old church is locked and empty, I notice, but the new Tabaret down the road is packed.
‘So, what are you going to do now?’
It’s a question I hear perhaps ten times a day, and it never stops grating. Partly because it suddenly seems so invasive, so evident of a constant compulsive judgement based on defining your identity through some job and the restless need to keep focused on the future, no time to waste on reflection or readjustment.
But also because, to be honest, we’re flat stone motherless broke, off the loop and unemployable.
In fact, in a crushing piece of irony, I look at my bank statement and see I have accrued exactly seven cents in interest.
It’s time for a New Start. At Centrelink we are marshalled into a conference room and handed a long set of regulations.
‘I’m going to go through the conditions a page at a time and when I reach the end of the page I will ask you if every point is clear and if it is I want you to initial the page and move to the next, is that clear?’ says the guy running the registration procedure. I guess he’s the Customer Service Consultant, or the Client Registration Throughput Provider.
‘Are those instructions clear to everyone? Raise your hands if so.’
We silently raise our hands.
‘I would ask you now to please initial the first page and turn to the next.’
I glance around the room at the disparate group sitting around me. There are seventeen-year-old school leavers and others who look like shell-shocked, forty-five-year-old retrenched professionals. There have been two identical registration meetings that morning scheduled, and three more to go after this one. It would have taken someone five minutes to sort and schedule all those applicants into groups that reflected their work experience and age range. Instead we are all standardised to facilitate streamlining. We initial the page and turn it over as the facilitator outlines our legal and binding obligations in filling out Jobseeker Diaries. We sit with our heads bowed and pens poised, silent, because in this vibrant new climate of ongoing commitment to best practice economic accountability, if you don’t make people pay for something, they don’t respect it.
‘Next we’re going to discuss some key strategies for making the best possible impression at job interviews,’ the facilitator forges on. ‘Now, hands up who knows what a “résumé” is?’
I get sick and need a course of antibiotics. I remember stepping into Jesus Farmacia and shaking my head at the cornucopia of drugs there, as well as the herbs and twigs and lichens packaged up for those with faith in older things. Credulous people, I would have thought at first. People with a need to see their remedies packaged with an amulet and a bit of divine, chancy intervention. Now I step into my local chemist shop and make my way to the prescriptions counter at the back. I wade through shelves glittering with expensive perfumes, with cosmetics arrayed like paint palettes, with hair dyes and mousses. Displayed with a kind of seductive, glass-and-chrome science is a barrage of anti-ageing creams. They’re selling us liposomes and nanotech and collagen-rich ampoules of rehydrating retinol-A enhanced emollients, defence moisture gel-lotions, promises that we will never have to grow old, that we can stay young and radiant forever. Our wrinkles will be fine lines, dramatically reduced. We can inject botulism under our skin to remove any evidence of troubled emotions within. We can cheat, minimise and deny ageing, and stay perfect, like those beautiful bejewelled Aztec masks, designed to deify and hide what’s wasting away beneath. For these grandiose, illusory comforts, to deny death, we will pay and pay and pay.
I stand awash in it, waiting for my script to be filled, holding the folded, crisp notes to pay for this course of tablets.
It’s time to declare my baggage. I’m here, and there’s no getting round it. My culture, with its dumb, neurotic obsessions, its sickening surfeits, its dreadful, overfed narcissism, it’s blind, smug, dopey acquiescence.
I can hardly bear to be in my skin. Antibiotics aren’t going to fix this, I can tell.
Cabeza de Vaca tried to readjust, tried to become Spanish again. Records say he couldn’t stand the softness of beds, and would slip out during the night to sleep on the ground.
He found his clothes itched him, his feet suffered in their new shoes. In his writings, he complains. The shoes, he says, make it hard for him to walk straight.
He suffered something else, something appalling in its irony – he witnessed the knock-on effect of his own odyssey. Men heard the stories, rumours spread that the country’s interior contained cities of gold, and further expeditions and forays were carried out. Cabeza de Vaca, I am certain, was forced to see himself as an instigator in this path of destruction, watching more greed, more enslavement, more torture and death, as the great conquest rolled forward, burning and cauterising and soaking up everything in its path.
He tried to turn back into the inhabitant of the Old World that he’d once been. He picked up a sword again. He wrote flattering letters to Spain about how the Indians had accepted the love of Christ. After nearly dying so many times of starvation, thirst and disaster, he recovered his health and was sent to Paraguay, but it seems some profound misunderstanding occurred over the humaneness with which he treated the Indians there. He was returned to Spain, an embarrassment to the name of conquest. What do you do with someone like that, so uselessly stretched out of shape? They sent him to prison.
I stand out in the garden at night and look at the stars, burning in the darkness like phosphorescence flicked from a paintbrush, something you could swim in if you could only break free of the ground. I think of the starry night back in Arroyo de Zituni when I waited impatiently, furious at the world around me not recognising and acknowledging my every need, all the ugly aspects of my own self-interested society exposed, in me, under the slightest duress.
What should I do to stop feeling so tormented? Switch off my water and power, gather wood to cook my food, dig my own pit toilet in the backyard? Would I feel better if I did? Would it somehow assuage my nagging guilt if I felt I was living more like 80 per cent of the world’s inhabitants?
Winter is around the corner and I’m dragging my feet about it. I should be getting myself a wood licence, getting some mates together with the trailer and a chainsaw and going out to cut firewood for the cold months ahead. I’ll have to dig those sweaters out of the boxes that I shoved back upstairs when I first got back.
But I’m overwhelmed with lethargy, still, drowsing in the late-autumn sunshine like the grasshopper in the Aesop’s fable, not wanting to think about the chill that lies ahead.
The Southern Cross and the Pointers lie stretched above me. Years ago someone taught me how to find my way using the stars if I was ever lost and disoriented in the wilderness, but who are we kidding? When have any of us, really, been in those sorts of dire straits? We’re too affluent to bother with such haphazard compasses – we’ll phone up the rescue service on our mobiles, or just flag down a passing car, or arm ourselves with state-of-the-art mapping devices. The wilderness doesn’t scare us, kept at bay with perimeter lights and eco tours and designated walkways, the Land Cruiser chock-full of provisions before we set foot into the great unknown. We put a concrete path in and advise walkers not to leave it, fence off the precipices, close off the risk areas due to public liability, reduce it all to a limited scale we can manage. And only occasionally, when we glance into a forest or into a sky, do we feel something almost forgotten pull at us, reminding us.
It is a moment that makes us feel brittle and small and foolish, standing there with our maps and guidebooks, in our two-hundred-dollar boots. The burden of our loot weighs us down, and that is not a comfortable feeling. We would rather think of ourselves as living responsibly, touching the earth lightly, putting out the papers for recycling. We are comforted by a script we live by in which we cast ourselves, in fact, as ‘battlers’, people without any special privileges, just getting by. But we stare into the forest, or the sky, or the desert, and get an inkling that we’re not telling ourselves the truth. We are full of rhetoric that allows us to avoid the simple, pressing problem that we are a booming species of six billion beings, consuming at a rate faster than we’re replacing. That the world is shrinking as we expand, rapacious and demanding. And that some of us are consuming forty, a hundred, five hundred times as much as others in a kind of blind, headlong last hurrah.
I’m back in that world now, with a few of the blind spots sanded off. Back where, rather than giving up some of our affluence or curbing our appetites, we talk about our ‘lifestyle’. We continue to chant the mantra that the ‘market’ or the ‘economy’ will find a solution. Who are we getting these defences ready for? Why are we already arming ourselves with these arguments, leaping to defend ourselves in the name of choice, as if choice were infinite, and our entitlement an automatic given?
I stare at the sky, imagining social breakdown under these rampaging pressures. I imagine us, left behind a barricade with these theories and inventories, our labels and impact statements, clutching the arm of whoever will listen, bleating self-righteously about lifestyle. Outside that barricade of paper and junked, useless consumer goods and dead computers full of old data, will pile the garbage we have gone on putting out long after the system which used to come to remove it for us has collapsed.
The poor people of the world, who have learned to survive on a wholly different set of choices and decisions, will be eyeing that mother of all garbage dumps in a completely different light. They will know how to purify water, how to scavenge food, how to truly adapt to their environment, as we clutch our stomachs with cholera, and wonder why the toilet won’t flush, and why someone won’t come and tell us what to do next.
Those street kids in Mexico City and Mumbai and Lagos, they’ll be the ones with the living skills.
The wilderness, what’s left of it, prods us gently to remind us of something we’ve forgotten, baffles and defies our comprehension, shows us our own speck like vulnerability.
I’m out in the country, but it’s still not really dark. The sky that really puts us in perspective is out in the desert, where you can see those stars really blaze, away from the refracted light of the cities and towns on the edge of the continent. Here we all are, clustered around the edges and coasts, clinging to the edges, turning our backs on that interior. From the beginning we insisted on seeing it as terra nullius – empty land.
I can’t see it, but as I watch I know the stars are shifting fractionally round the hemisphere, crawling over from one horizon to another, inexorable. I will never rise, weightless, to float in them. I am rooted to the ground like the trees around me, only far less useful. My pessimism and heaviness seem to tie themselves to my ankles like lead weights.
I feel the cold rising through the earth and against the soles of my feet; through the thin crust of a small, tired planet. When I breathe in I can smell that indelible, unmistakeable scent of eucalyptus. I’m on my tierra. This is my land, whatever that means.
It’s here in Australia that I’ll have to cast my lot. I am Australian, with no wish to be an expatriate. I’m going to have to learn, here at the cusp of a new millennium in a young, ancient country, where to place my lever and push. Whatever I feel I’ve lost possession of, I can own that understanding, prickling and uncomfortable as it is. And if it feels like it doesn’t fit any more, there’s nothing for it but to start unpicking and tearing along those old seams, to piece together something new for myself.
My bare feet dig into the ground. I’m shivering.
I bet Cabeza de Vaca and his companions ate their shoes, huddled there confronted with the journey ahead of them, yearning for something known and recognisable. I bet that once they started walking, they hardly spoke, as their bare feet carried them onwards and the country hardened and burnt their skin like fired clay, devouring every illusion, every vanity, every non-essential thing they had been.
That’s what the indigenous people of Mexico look like – people fashioned from clay, sturdy and smooth-skinned.
I visited a backyard kiln once, in a little town. It was a beehive shape, roughly constructed from bricks and rubble and packed inside with fuel: dried dead cactus. The potter stirred inside with a stick, poking at the cooling grey ash. He put in his hand and pulled out a terracotta urn by its small curled handle and handed it to me, grinning, a vessel so fine and classical in its shape that it could have been made a thousand years ago and only unearthed, now, from some ancient ashy tomb. Except that it was still warm, and like the sea that night in the Whitsundays, seemed to be crackling with tiny filaments of energy, fizzing with arcing, stirring, barely audible electricity.
And here was its artist – an old man with a homemade oven in his backyard, making terracotta pots for campesinos to carry water, each one a minor work of art, and costing twenty pesos in the URAC shop. I carried my faintly buzzing prize home like a Ming vase, set it up next to a door in the sun and admired it every time I walked past. I bitterly regretted not being able to bring that pot home. The woman I gave it to thanked me for such a useful gift, went to a tap straightaway, and filled it with water.
Maybe, instead, I should have taken a mallet and smashed that beautiful pot into pieces. Cut my fingers on its sharp, curved shards. Sat with those broken pieces in my hands, mindful and full of the remorseful weight of memory. Ground it up into dust and incorporated it into something I need to make and remake for myself. Maybe that’s what I’m trying to do now.
I have kept a cup, though, that I bought once in a street market in Michoacán. It’s earth-coloured with cobalt-blue designs around the rim – geometric forms identical to the ones I’d seen on pyramids, woven into fabrics, on vessels from hundreds of years ago on display in the Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City. On the bottom, in blue handwriting, is printed its provenance: ‘Fam. Chichipan. Tzintzuntzan. Mich. Mex.’
Tzintzuntzan is the town, its name derived from the local P’urhépecha word, so onomatopoeic and vivid, for hummingbirds. ‘Chichipan’ is an indigenous name, not Spanish. The once great indigenous city of Tzintzuntzan, built in 1200 and famous for its potters, almost went under in 1643. After the ravages of plunder and conquest, a plague of typhus reduced the population from 20,000 to just two hundred. Two hundred souls left gasping with loss, the whole P’urhépecha race numbering just a few thousand, their great civilisation vanished forever.
But the P’urhépecha survived. The hummingbird was a sacred animal to these people; they believed warriors were reincarnated as these small iridescent birds, and that they pulled the chariot of the sun across the sky each day, pulling it up out of the kingdom of darkness. In the landscape around the town of Tzintzuntzan there are still hummingbirds, the buzzing sound of their flight whispering the name of an ancient city. The sun goes on rising out of the dark horizon. The P’urhépechapeople still make beautiful pots and cups, inscribed with the same ancient designs, and someone from the Chichipan family made me this one.
I sit holding it now, thinking about what unimaginable things must have been broken and ground up to make it, and considering the world view that lets you put your name and address on every beautiful thing you make, that guides your hand to be so open, that faith in a good world.
It comforts me, this cup, more than any other material thing I still possess from Mexico. I feel some invisible but vibrant current of energy flowing through it, connecting me still with its maker, a faint, humming, living tug.
If you can’t bring yourself to believe me, let’s try something out. You can equip yourself with a backpack global positioning system fed by twenty-four orbiting satellites, a cyberatlas stored in your iPhone, and all the cash you feel you need.
I will carry this cup, signed with its maker’s name like a homing device. Let’s leave our shoes behind and walk, dreaming of what we might become and the welcome we might hope for, the hands that might brush our own.
I will speak in the new language I have begun to learn, of believing this cup will be filled for me when I hunger and thirst, if I can only carry it with enough humility and trust, if I can only give away everything I am given.
Let’s both start walking, knowing there will be no path into this New World, each with our own navigational aids, and let’s see who finds their way back first.