‘To Miahuatlán, Close to the Corn Flowers’ by Dylan Brennan
Half-way down to Miahuatlán we passed a dead man lying at the side of the road. Up to the present we had seen only the monuments of murder. Little crosses, festooned with paper roses, or with a bunch of withered flowers at the foot – one came upon them at every second turn of the road. A fight or an ambush, a corpse and, finally a cross. And yet the country is not unsafe for travellers. The butchery is domestic, between friends: an affair of vendettas, of local patriotisms, of jealousies and rivalries. All that strangers need fear is meeting with a drunkard. A man who has swallowed a few glasses of the terrible raw spirit, distilled from the juice of the agave, is temporarily insane; and since he will certainly be carrying a machete and almost certainly a revolver or a rifle, his lunacy is apt to be dangerous.
- Aldous Huxley, Beyond the Mexique Bay, 1934
Search Google Images for Miahuatlán – or, indeed, any small town in southern Mexico – and you’ll eventually come across a corpse. I’m doing it right now and, after the obligatory shots of the church, thin young girls parading down the streets for the high school anniversary celebrations, and the verdant area down by the river, sure enough, the butchery begins. I can only stomach reading one of the articles. I click on a photograph that’s tough to look at. A man with a yellow t-shirt and blue jeans, black shoes, lies face down in a large, butterfly, moth, Rorschach test of smeared crimson. It’s not a pool of blood, not anymore, now that it’s dried. Melitón García Vargas was forty-five years of age. He was the head of the ACOIMSC – the Association of Indigenous Communities and Organisations for the Miahuatlán municipality. He was legally identified by Cenobia Ramírez Ramírez, his wife. His killer was caught as he ran from the house, knife in hand, his clothes blood-sodden. The culprit was a member of the same organisation. Most of the corpses I see on this Google image search are victims of shootings, most of them facedown, with the exception of one boy who lies out in the fresh air near a quarry, a large hole blown through his right eye, his left eye gazing at the stars. All those shootings in Miahuatlán and I clicked on the image of the stabbing victim. Probably because I nearly was one.
In the early morning from my lozenge-shaped bedroom window I could see the bird delicately stomping on its own tiny heap of shit in the courtyard. It was tied up and seemed restless. This was to be my first Thanksgiving and an older teacher, Craig, had chosen to buy the turkey live and to kill and prepare it himself. I lived with various other teachers at what was known as La casa naranja – The Orange House. Each of us had a large en-suite room and shared the patio and vast, colonial-style kitchen. For that reason, when there was cause for a celebration, it tended to happen at our place. I was later told that the creature should have been killed by gently nicking its throat and caressed as the life flowed freely from the jugular, a relatively calm expiration. That’s not how it happened. In the dusty patch of wasteland in front of The Orange House we gathered round as Craig rubbed the bird and helped it to calm down as its neck touched the flat stone. He whispered to it, told it everything would be okay and asked for forgiveness. The knife was not sharp enough. As he brought it down quickly with a blunt thud, a scrambling frenzy ensued. A mania of twitching feet and feathers. Kicking, flapping, fluttering a dust storm about our eyes. Time passed as we stood implanted, magnetised to the dirt. I could see the chicken and quail man who sold eggs next door to our house laughing at us, pointing. City güeros with no idea what needs to happen in order for us to eat meat. With a hot face I fell to my knees and grabbed the hysterical being and held it still. Fucking do it now Craig. The knife came down thud thud five or six more times till the head was severed. Sinewy flesh-threads caked in dust and hot arterial wine soaked my socks and hands. I helped pluck the thing while it slowly cooled. Though the giblets were removed in time, a bitter taste remained. Craig reached deep inside and gave me its gizzard. I squeezed it huge in my hand, a warm beanbag of muscle and grit.
¡Puto gabacho! (American faggot!) – wrong on both counts actually, I’d tell them, but it would make no difference and I’d get the same comments the next time and again after that. It wasn’t even a bar but a tiny store that sold small boxes and packets of household goods. And beer. The same three old boys drunk each day. Their attitude towards foreigners was typical of some of the Miahuatecos. Particularly the taxi drivers. Where are you from? Irlanda. Ah, well I worked for a while in Virginia, but then the pricks kicked me out. That’s nice. I don’t really know the States to be honest. But it wouldn’t matter, on they’d go. Chicago, Maryland, Texas. All working illegally. All eventually winding up back in Miahuatlán driving taxis. Returning home with a schizophrenic vision of all things foreign. A vision that straddled the line between jealous hatred and wistful yearning that, ultimately, nearly got me a blade in the heart. For the Miahuatecos, if you lived in their town and you weren’t Mexican, well you must be a gringo. In reality, the teachers at the UNSIS (Universidad de la Sierra Sur) came from a variety of places. Ireland, Canada, Australia, Holland. There was this one teacher who particularly stood out, a tall blond woman from South Africa with a scriptural reference tattooed on her foot. Every morning on the way to work, walking past that small house with the goats in the garden, a tiny child would hiss ¡gggrrriiinnngggaaa! at her. Eventually fed up with this, she approached the little girl and gently informed her that she was, in fact, African. The look of incredulity in those little obsidian eyes. This golden mane at dawn could not be African. She’s trying to make a fool of me. ¡Gringa! But now almost whispered, the voice more tremulous, less certain.
My future wife came to town for the first time during the biggest celebration in Miahuatlán. Mezcal, horses and their filth in every street as the caravan of saddled citizens returned the flag to the main square. It had been gone for three days, all part of the ritual to celebrate the Great Dictator’s battle against French invaders many years before. The victory that gave the town its full name – Miahuatlán de Porfirio Díaz. Makeshift prison cells and civil marriage registries set up all over town to trap the drunk and unsuspecting, a fee to be paid to escape, should escape be desired. Fellow teachers and I were nabbed at the taco stand and forced to drink shots of homemade aguardiente, a young fermentation of agave sap, sediment and all, and the fire inside me grew and before I knew it I was behind bars with a group of adolescent girls and paid 20 pesos to be let out. More mezcal for the güeros, they’ve never tasted anything like it. The boys carried bleach in plastic soda bottles and squirted flowery dresses and a foam party began and fireworks and the main square tilted or seemed to anyway. There was a fragment of a door inside the town hall that had been used to imprison the Mexican Lincoln, Benito Juárez, and I was asked to leave as I couldn’t stand up straight. At some point a woman in a vegetable and fruit shop gave me some free palo de chile and laughed as it turned my mouth numb and pointed and brought out the neighbours to join in and they gave me something fiery to wash it down. Amidst all this Lily was waiting for me at the edge of the madness. She wasn’t where I thought but at the bigger station on the other side of town. She was angry. After everything that had happened and I couldn’t bother to pick her up on time?! I had to run as all things seemed madly living and spinning and I sidestepped the sprawling legs of drunkards and accidentally stood on a toe and, like a sleeping dog violently jolted awake, one of them rose with dead eyes and the glint of a blade at my chest and I threw him to the ground. Not a hero but reflex. He was short and four sheets to the dry wind and fell with ease. I ran into the street to be knocked nearly over by the passing squad truck, all heavy weapons and balaclavas all black. I pointed out my aggressor, assumed he’d be dealt with and continued my run to the station. When I got there I saw her standing on the street corner with a massive suitcase and ran to greet her. My excuses were a jumbled rant of pungent breath. Then he appeared beside us. She had no idea who he was but I knew he might still have that knife. He said the USA had raped his country. I told him I agreed and when he went for me again I said I was Irish. That gave him brief pause before he blurted out that he didn’t care and that he was there to kill all out-of-towners. A taxi screeched to a halt and we fled into night.
All this a warning of things to come perhaps. A new prison started to sprout outside town for the most dangerous in the country and teachers started to leave and the rubbish collectors went on strike and people burnt their waste in their gardens during the day and shot stray dogs at night and rats roved the streets, fat and cocksure. She started to come down to Miahuatlán to see me with frequency, to stay for longer and longer stretches of time. I would introduce her to students we’d meet about town and former students, who’d leave education once they became pregnant. She made the kitchen hers, preparing soup from the tenderest meat found closest to the cow spine. But there was nothing else for her there, no chance of a job. I sensed we’d leave soon now she’d got what she came for, I was fine with that, it was what I wanted. In the early winter months she’d wait for me outside the university gates and we’d walk home together through the fields of maguey. We never needed Venus to show us the route but she did anyway. Down gently the arroyo slope and through the bamboo past the dog that would back off when you pretended to throw a stone. Before the rainy season washed out the landscape the sky stretched out before us, exuberant, elephantine. Tangerine bleeding to hibiscus and the impatience of the stars. And I knew. If someone comes for you, all the way down from the deserts of the north, down to Miahuatlán, well, then you know.
From issue #3: autumn/winter 2016
About the Author
Currently based in Mexico City, Dylan Brennan writes poetry, essays and memoirs. His debut collection, Blood Oranges, was published by The Dreadful Press in 2014. His co-edited volume of academic essays Rethinking Juan Rulfo’s Creative World: Prose, Photography, Film is available now from Legenda Books (2016).
