REPORT FROM SIERRA MADRE #4

Davíd Werner

Copyright by Davíd Werner
1967

THE TOLL OF THE RAIN

AUTUMN

The rain, which came in like a lion at the beginning of summer, in autumn went out like a lamb. Each afternoon in the latter days of September, the dark clouds would come as usual, flashing and grumbling down from the high sierra, obscuring the sky and the sun. Sometimes a few fat drops would sputter down, enough to make children leap and shout and women scrubbing clothes in the arroyo snatch up their garments drying upon boulders and dash back toward their casas. But frequently it was a false alarm. The drops would stop as suddenly as they had begun. Or the clouds would part and the sun reappear, often while the drops still fell. It was a season for rainbows. Then a day passed when it did not rain at all. Then two consecutive days. Then four. The last rain fell in scattered spots in the barrancas somewhere around the 20th of October.

Gold is the conspicuous color of Autumn in the upper barrancas; not the soft, dying gold of autumn leaves, but rather a vivid, flaming gold like that of the poppy-covered flanks of the California. foothills in spring. As the summer rains subsided and the days began to get hotter as in spring, a glowing inflorescence of saffron-colored daisies began to paint the slopes of the barrancas. These vivid orange-red blossoms burgeoned upon a jungle of wiry vegetation which had sprung up like a startled pheasant during the last days of the rainy season, crowding out the other herbage until little remained but a dense tangle of these colorful composites, which rose from four to eight feet high, and continued to shoot upward even as they were blooming. Each day a. billion new buds would yawn and stretch their luminous petals. Each day the slopes grew brighter. As one stood on a hilltop surveying other hills in the distance, the sloping fields of golden daisies, interrupted by the rich green of hillside corn patches, formed a delightful and colorful mosaic. The daisies grew in greatest proliferation where the hillsides had formerly been cleared, burned, planted with corn, then abandoned. Although the villagers regard these fast-growing composites as their enemies and battle to keep their cornfields clear of them, the daisies are most certainly an important factor in the long term survival of the villagers. Once a. steep hillside has been cleared and burned for planting, all the surface soil is washed off in the torrential summer rains, and the land becomes useless for planting until sufficient new topsoil is formed, a process that takes up to fourteen years. Yet fourteen years is a. brief period for reestablishing such devastated terrain, and much of. the credit is due to the exuberant proliferation of these pioneering daisies which spring up on the man-ravaged slopes at the close of each rainy season and die back again each dry season, stabilizing the soil and creating new humus at an astonishing rate, so that, in relatively few years, man may plant and despoil it anew.

So dominating is this maze of daisies in its peak season, that it has engendered its own curious insect life. Someone unaware of the significance of protective coloration might suppose that many of the small denizens of the daisies had been decorated for purely aesthetic reasons, so perfectly do their colors harmonize with those of the flowers. One pollen-plundering click beetle has tying covers of the same saffron hue as the flowers, while a common long-horn beetle has a sparkling green body with saffron colored legs. Green and orange caterpillars nibble upon the leaves. Scrambling like a. many armed ape through the daisy jungle, and pouncing upon the smaller denizens whose camouflage fails them, are wooly tarantulas, up to four inches across, whose long fur is the same saffron hue as the flowers.

The daisies are in full bloom for almost a month. Then, slowly, in early November, as the corn in its steep patches begins to dry and yellow in the sun, and the petals fall from the daisies, a gradual exchange of color takes place on the slopes of the barrancas, until the expanse of wilted daisies forms a gray-green background to the fields of straw-colored corn.

Most of the corn is ripe by mid-October, yet picking does not begin until mid-November or early December. The mature ears are allowed to dry upon their stalks so that the grain will not rot with moisture after harvest. During this drying period, as ever, the farmer is subjected to the weather's whim. A surprise cloudburst in November, or early winter rains in December, before he has finished harvesting, may cause him great loss.

The desiccating corn is also marauded by many birds and beasts. At lower elevations, near Ajoya, the armadillo dines greedily in the milpas, as do the urracas or magpie jays. In plantings near streams, the mapache de arroyo, or raccoon, is a prevalent pest. At middle elevations, near Verano, the tlacuache, or possum, and tejón solitario, or coati mundi, together with the zorra, or fox, are among the chief invaders of the ripened corn. Near villages, domestic hogs make their way to milpas, while remoter patches are raided by their wild cousins, the javelín or peccary, and venado, or deer. In the higher reaches of the sierra, the occasional bear plays havoc with a milpa. A bear is said to demolish a large section of a cornfield and carry all the ripe ears to a central pile before he sits down to eat. At any elevation, cahuillas, small crows which travel in large flocks, may descend upon a harvest and pick it bare as fast as it ripens. But in all areas, perhaps the biggest threat to the corn is the domestic dog. Characteristically, dogs of the barrancas are underfed, and are used to a corn diet because they are rarely given more than left over bits of tortillas. Dogs have learned to raid cornfields, banding together in small packs at night. Like the bears, the dogs frequently pull down a. number of stalks and carry off the ears to a sheltered spot before beginning their feast. In spite of their bad habits, the dogs are, of course, an invaluable aid to the farmer in tracking down the wild raiders of the cornfields. Like the saffron-colored daisy, the dog is both man’s enemy and friend.

The last half of October axed beginning of November in the barrancas is the season for cortando las hojas, or cutting leaves. The leaves of the corn stalks are harvested as fodder for mules and cows. They are stripped from the stalks, leaving the ripe ears jutting ridiculously from their naked poles. The leaves are then bound into large manojos, or bundles, with wild vines called bejucos, or with long, thin strips of bark, called majaguas, frequently from the guasima tree. After bundling begins the task of stacking the manojos atop a tasolera, a square platform on poles, up out of reach of a hungry mule. Sometimes the farmer builds his tasolera at the edge of his corn patch, far from his casa, as did Irineo Vidaca. But if he has enough burros, or – as in Bonifacio's case – children, to help carry the leaves, he will transport them to his cases and build his tasolera there.

Back and forth, every day for over a week, Bonifacio and his children came trundling past my dispensary at the Vidaca house, bringing down the leaves. Each child bore a load many times his own volume, but proportionate to his size. I had to laugh each time I saw the comical file of these two-legged bundles, with Bonifacio's stout legs under the biggest load of all, come scuttling by at more of a smooth, running pace than a walk. On their return trips to the milpa, Bonifacio and his young ones would frequently pause outside my dispensary, their faces wet with sweat and plastered with bits of corn leaf, to say hello and frolic for a moment before they hurried back up to their fields. They had to hurry, for if a heavy rain fell before the leaves were stacked on the tasolera, they would mildew and be lost.

Stacking the tasolera marks the end of another phase in the agrarian cycle, and, as such, may become a kind of ritual and celebration. Neighbors gather, and help toss the bundles up to a man on top of the mounting stack, who arranges them like shingles around a tall central pole. The process looks simple, but it is quite an art to get each manojo so placed that the rain is properly shed. The pile gradually tapers as it rises until it comes to an acute peak at the top of the pole, which, as the last touch, is capped with a bule, or gourd. Sixty-eight year old Esteban Sánchez of Los Pinos is renowned for his skill in stacking, and came to help Bonifacio form his tasolera.

"Echando las hojas" – tossing the leaves – also looks easy, but is (as I discovered on attempting it) a little like trying to throw feathers. As the tasolera gets higher, the tossing becomes more difficult. The men compete with each other, laughing and shouting when the bundles go wild or fall short of their mark. In the last stages, often only one or two of a dozen men can successfully land the obstreperous bundles upon the peak, ten to twelve feet above the platform.

This autumn, thanks to the abundant summer rain, there has been a bumper crop in the barrancas. The people have again begun to eat well – or at least what they consider well. There is a sense of plenty, a joyousness, expansiveness among the villagers. Hunger is temporarily forgotten. With the harvesting of the corn and sesame in November and December, people have been bartering cloth and clothing which the traveling fayuqueros have brought up from the lowlands; they have, been fattening their chickens and hogs – which also grew thin in las aguas – and the chickens have begun at last to lay. Once again, also, now that corn can be traded for cash, the traffic of illegal alcohol from the coast has become a big thing. Parties and dances are being thrown, usually by the vendors of the vino; to which old friends – and old enemies – are drawn together. Sometimes the merriment ends in fighting.

Las secas de otoño – the dry season of autumn, then, has been a season of gold upon the mountain slopes, of joy and prosperity afforded by the bumper harvest, and, unhappily, of bloodshed and suffering resulting from the misuse of that prosperity. Yet in response to the tragedy and suffering, the villagers of the barrancas have rallied a new degree of generosity, cooperation, and sacrifice.

This last quarter in the Sierra Madre has been for me the busiest, most momentous, most terrible, and – strangely – most beautiful of all. More has happened than in the other three seasons put together. Somehow, many of the small events which formerly seemed unrelated have begun to fall together like a puzzle, so that now, at the close of one year, I feel that I have just begun to catch w glimmer of the structure and
enormity of this small corner of the universe. My only regret is that I cannot write it as I have felt it. May the reader bear with me.

GOYO'S FAMILY REVISITED

Not until three days after my return to Ajoya from Verano at the end of the rainy season did I manage to tear myself away from the storm of people coming for medicines and make my way toward Las Chicuras. I was nervous about attempting to cross the flooded river, but was eager to see the Reyes family, as my friends in Ajoya had neither seen nor heard from them in some time. No rain had fallen for the last two days, however, and the water level had dropped noticeably. To play safe, I removed my boots before guiding my mule into the river. The swirling water rose all the way to the saddle , but Hormiga kept her footing, and without mishap we emerged high and wet on the other side. Half an hour later I rode into Las Chicuras.

Goyo's younger sister, Inez, was sweeping the dirt yard in front of the Reyes casa as I rode up. "¡Davíd!" she cried, and at once Goyo, Chaparro, and Angelita came running to meet me, followed by the wobbly baby, Harmida. Next came Goyo's young aunt, Benancia, who now seemed fully recovered from the bullet wound which her husband, José, had dealt her five months before. I learned that she was back with José again, and that they and their two small children were living together with Goyo's family – making a total of fourteen persons living in the one-room, stick-walled hut.

Goyo hurried to try out Hormiga, whom he had never before seen, while little Chaparra hung on my hand and grinned up at me. Angelita, called "La Cuata" (the twin), was dancing in circles shouting "¡Dabi! ¡Dabi! ¡Dabi!".

"Where's your mother?" I asked, looking around for her.

"Didn't you know?" exclaimed Benancia. "She was 'stung' by a snake!"

I hurried inside the hut, to find Goyo's mother, Jesús (Chuy), lying on a catre, her foot swollen to double its normal size. "Welcome home!" she exclaimed, making an effort to sit up. She added mockingly, "It's about time you got here! See what happens when you stay away!"

"What kind of snake was it and how long ago did it bite you?" I asked, inspecting the foot.

"Six days ago," she replied. "I don't know what kind of snake. We think a coral. Remedios and I were returning from Güisache where we'd borrowed sugar and beans – the river was still too high is get back to Ajoya. It was night and pitch black. Suddenly I felt a stab in my foot. We heard the animal slither off into the brush. That's all I know . . ."

"You should have seen it three days ago!" cried Inez. "It was swollen like this!" She held up her hands about eight inches apart.

"It could have been worse," laughed Chuy. "Actually, only one fang went into my foot; the other struck my sandal. So you see, God the Father protects his children."

"How have you been treating it?" I asked.

"With contraveneno and the leaves of guaco," she replied.

"Antivenum!" I exclaimed. "Where did you get it?"

"I made it," she replied, "I put an alacrán, an ubar and a cienpie (scorpion, black widow spider, and centipede) in a small jar of alcohol and heated it in the fire. Then I put it outside in the dew overnight. Every few hours I rub a little of the antivenum lightly over the 'sting' and tie five leaves of guaco over it." (Guaco, a cucurbitous vine with a large tuber, is well known for its medicinal properties.)

"Where are Remedios and the older boys?" I asked.

"Remedios left yesterday with José for Candelero to return his father's mule which he had borrowed for plowing. Camilo set off this vecerero (calf herder) at La Mesa, the ranch of Jesús Manjarréz. It's hard work. He's only fifteen, you know. He has to get up between three and four in the morning and work until dark. Jesús Manjarréz only
pays him five pesos a day."

"That's criminal!" I exclaimed. (The basic minimum wage is twelve pesos for an eight hour day.)

"That's Jesús Manjarréz," replied Chuy stoically. "But what can we do? Martín was heartbroken when school began this September and he couldn't go. But Remedios says he has to work. Of course he couldn't go to school yet anyway, none of the children can: the river is still to high to cross safely."

"¡Davíd!" cried Goyo, trotting up on Hormiga. "Have you seen the milpa? The corn is as high as the house, and the elotes are like this!" He waved the stump of his arm a foot from his good hand.

"Big fibber!" snapped Inez.

"Come on!" cried little Chaparro, tugging at my hand. "Let's go to the milpa! The elotes are big like this!" He giggled and stretched
his hands as far apart as he could.

"¡Chaparro!" barked Chuy. "Be still!" She swung her legs over the side of the cot and slipped her good foot into a sandal. "We'll all go to the milpa!" she said. "And bring back elotes and melones and calabasas. We'll have a feast to celebrate your return!"

"You shouldn't go with your foot like that!" I exclaimed.

"I shouldn't," said Chuy firmly, "But I will! If I lie on my back any longer they'll put candles!" She tried stepping with her swollen foot. "¡Ow!" she exclaimed. She hobbled across the but and picked up a large costal and a butcher knife, placed a tattered sombrero on her head, lit a small, brown, tapered cigarette, and said, "Let's go."

There was no dissuading her. The best I could do was to offer Hormiga for her to ride.

We were just about to take off when Chuy, noticing the dirt around La Cuata's mouth, shouted at her three year old, "Angelita! Have you been eating earth again?"

The child shook her head vigorously.

"¡Huh!" exploded Chuy. "¡Si comes tierra te voy a quemar la boca – ya veras!" (If you eat dirt I'm going to burn your mouth– just you see!)

The little girl opened her eyes wide with terror, and spit.

As we hiked toward the milpa, Chuy riding atop Hormiga and the children scampering ahead, Chuy turned in the saddle and said to me, "What makes children eat dirt, anyway? They say it's because they have worms."

"One theory has it that it's because of iron deficiency," I said.

"Oh," said Chuy. "When I was a child, I went on eating dirt until I was fourteen years old. I adored it. I liked the smell of it -just certain kinds of dirt, mind you. My mother tried everything she knew to make me stop. She whipped me. She made me eat garlic. But I'd still sneak out and eat soil. She tried blowing cigarette smoke in my face – that's the usual cure – and finally she made me start smoking. So I started smoking at age fourteen and I've smoked ever since. I stopped eating dirt, all right,, but I substituted one vice for another. Now I can't give up smoking."

"Look, Davíd!" cried Inez, pointing ahead of us, "La Milpa!"

Ahead of us rose the steep hillsides and ridges which in June I had seen as a burned and barren waste over which Remedios and his four sons had scrambled, punching holes with their güicas and dropping in grains of corn. Now these hillsides were glowing green. The tall corn was, indeed, in places nearly as tall as the casa.

"What did I tell you!" cried Goyo proudly. "We grew it, Dad and I, with Camilo and Martín and Chaparro. But nearly all of the weeding I and Martín and Chaparro did by ourselves!"

"That's true," said Chuy. "By the middle of July we were running out of both corn and money – in spite of what you gave us – and Remedios got the chance to plow the fields of José Celís for ten pesos a day. José's fields are on this side of the river, and in summer it was too flooded for José's men to plow them, so Remedios and Camilo got the job."

"I thought José Celís once paid to have Remedios shot," I said.
.
"He did." said Chuy. "But what else could Remedios do when all these little ones have their mouths open like baby birds, screaming for food?" She laughed and added, "¡Así es!" (That's the way it is.)

When we reached the milpa, Chuy dismounted. We tethered Hormiga to a guamuchil tree. Chuy continued on foot, hobbling but not complaining. We climbed up and down the steep slopes, weaving our way between the tall corn stalks. We broke off the tenderest elotes we could find. We selected the best pumpkins and squashes from their vines. Here and there we stopped to eat some of the small, oblong, pulpy melons which were beginning to burst with ripeness. As we trudged along, little Goyo went bounding this way and that, whooping and running ahead to find a hiding place to jump out and surprise us.

"Look, Davíd!" said Chaparro as we came over the steepest ridge. "¡Ajonjolí!" (sesame). The sesame was growing as a garden of white flowers on the narrow alluvial flat between the base of the corn-covered slopes and a small stream. Sesame is grown as a cash crop by some of the campesinos, and I had loaned Remedios enough cash to buy the seed and a harness rig for plowing, in the hopes that the subsequent crop might put the family a little more on its feet.

"Look, Mama!" cried Goyo in alarm as we arrived at the sesame field. "¡Mochomos!" On a miniature super-highway winding across the ground between the plants, thousands upon thousands of leaf-cutting ants, each bearing in its jaws a proportionately huge piece of sesame leaf, streamed by like a busy regatta of tiny sailboats. We found that nearly a third of the sesame plants had already been stripped of their leaves, leaving the spikes as naked as corn stalks after the leaves are cut.

"¡Chaparro!" cried Chuy. "Run back to the house and bring the poison." Chaparro left on the run. Chuy shook her head. "We've been fighting the mochomos all summer," she said. "We'll be lucky if we get half the crop we hoped for."

When little Chaparro came running back with the ant poison, panting hard, we tracked the ant trail back to where it entered the ground and poured some poison down the hole.

"Does that stop them?" I asked.

"Oh, for a day or two," said Chuy.

Chuy and I filled the costal with the calabasas and melones and elotes while Goyo ran to bring my mule. In one trip we could carry only a fraction of the produce we had gathered. Chuy mounted Hormiga; I heaved the heavy costal in front of her onto the saddle horn. Goyo, Inez, Chaparro, and I filled our arms with as many calabasas and melones as we could carry, and we set off in the direction of the setting sun.

"¡Al fin ahora no hay hambre!" said Chuy, looking back over her shoulder at the milpa. (Now at last there is no hunger!)

And as she rode, she sang.

DOCTOR "NAPPY"

Potentially, one of the best steps that the Mexican Government has taken toward bettering conditions for its citizens in remote regions has been the establishment of rural health centers, or "Centros de Salud", staffed by a doctor and several nurses and dedicated especially toward providing medical services to the poorer villagers. Each municipio has at least one such Centro de Salud. The doctor is supplied with both salary and free medicine so that families who cannot afford to pay will not be deprived of sound medical treatment. The Centro is also responsible for a program of inoculation against the more dangerous immedicable diseases – polio, tetanus, whooping cough, diphtheria, and smallpox – in every village within its territory.

Fifteen years ago, the Centro de Salud in San Ignacio got off to an excellent start under the dedicated direction of Dr. Raúl Vega, who – technically speaking – is not a "doctor" at all. A native of San Ignacio, Dr. Vega studied in the medical schools of Guadalajara and Mexico City. Unable to complete his degree for lack of funds, in 1932 he set up a practice in his home town. He had achieved a notable reputation by the time the Health Department installed him as head of the Centro de Salud. Dr. Vega carefully supervised the construction of the new Centro, and to this day the physical plant remains excellent. It is in the shape of an "L" with two large wards, each with six beds, and has a consultation room, minor surgery, kitchen, dispensary, laundry, and store room. Upstairs are living quarters for the doctor and nurses. The building has glass windows, running water, a flush toilet, a shower, and is attractive.

Seven years ago the Health Department, in an attempt to raise its standards, made an effort to place a full-fledged M.D. in each Centro de Salud. So it was that Dr. José Félix Lopez, M.D. from Mexico City, was placed as head of the Centro in San Ignacio. Raúl Vega was retained on the staff, but soon found coexistence with Dr. Félix untenable, and resigned.

I can appreciate why Raúl Vega resigned: Dr. Félix doesn't care about anyone's health or welfare but his own. Apart from that, he is an agreeable and genial man, clean, orderly, and handsome. He is easy to get along with, that is if one doesn't mind being slapped on the back constantly and asked how many girls one has screwed in this village and that, whether such and such a señorita doesn't need an injection with hot beef, that is, haw haw – etc., ad infinitum. I get a little exasperated when I come hurrying to the good doctor about a sixteen year-old girl who has been severely hemorrhaging, and before he replies whether he will give her blood transfusions or not, he winks naughtily and asks, "What does she look like? Is she good for...?" and knocks his fists together, swinging his hips. Or, likewise, after I have explained to him how many children, like Pipi, have been stricken with polio in the barrancas, I grow irritated when he responds, "If you bring some of your students with you, sure I'll go vaccinating with you up into the mountains. But you've got to bring Gringas. Just Gringos won't do. Gringas! Understand!"

When the occasion demands, Dr. Félix has a very convincing spiel; in fact, his expressed concern for the villagers can be truly moving. After Dr. Price, the pediatrician from Palo Alto, California, had been guided through the Centro de Salud, he was puzzled. "Dr. Félix talks like a very dedicated man," he said, "but I wonder! If he can afford his new Chevrolet convertible and that luxurious radio-phonograph console, why doesn't the Centro have a single microscope? And, with all the villagers we've seen in such dire medical need, why is the hospital empty?"

The hospital is always empty, or nearly so, because Dr. Félix prefers it that way. I have known him to dismiss patients still in critical condition even when no other hospital bed was occupied. Dr. Félix makes a point of keeping his hospital immaculately clean, and this, of course, is more difficult when there are patients. The villagers, for their part, have little confidence in the Centro. The sick would rather go to Raúl Vega or La Apolonia, or sell their chickens and pigs and go to Mazatlán for treatment. Even from San Ignacio, patients come to me in Ajoya, although I try to discourage it. They have learned, through experience, that the Centro attends in a most cursory manner those patients who have little money. They have found that Dr. Félix too often prescribes or applies medicines, at the patients' expense, which do little good. The villagers say of the doctor, "¡No sirve!" (He does no good.) Many even speak of him with contempt, charging that he has converted the hospital into a whorehouse, that his nurses are his mistresses and that his gardener is his pimp. If what the people say is correct, two of the doctor's nurses already "salieron embarazadas" – came out pregnant – and the doctor narrowly escaped being assaulted by the father of one of the nurses as a result.

Part of Dr. Félix's responsibility is to see that the children throughout the municipio are vaccinated. A large portion of the villages and ranchos of the Municipio de San Ignacio are accessible only by burro trails, yet Dr. Félix has never once set foot beyond the road's end in Ajoya. In the second Report from the Sierra Madre I mentioned how delighted I was that Dr. Félix had at last condescended to make a vaccinating tour with me to the upper villages of the barrancas. I told of my hurried 70 mile circuit through the barrancas to advise the villagers that we were coming to vaccinate. Yet in the third Report, I made no mention of how the vaccinating had gone:

It hadn't! The day Dr. Félix and I had scheduled to leave from Ajoya, and Dimas Lomas was ready with his mules, I waited and waited, but Dr. Félix never showed up. At last I phoned San Ignacio and contacted the head nurse, who told me that the doctor said he couldn't make the trip. I asked to speak with the doctor, but the nurse said he was busy. I found that hard to believe! I asked her why the doctor couldn't make it, and she said she thought it was because he had trouble getting ice. I told her to tell Dr. Félix that if he couldn't get ice, I could, and that I would expect him in the morning. She told me to hold the line. A few minutes later she came back and said that she had been mistaken; it had not been the ice but the vaccines which the doctor had been unable to get. I thanked her, and asked that the doctor call me as soon as he was no longer busy.

The doctor never called. Next morning I borrowed Caytano's mare and rode the 17 miles into San Ignacio. Dr. Félix was not at the Centro.

"Where is he?" I asked the head nurse.

"He left to vaccinate in Coyotitán," she replied. He should be back for lunch."

"How can he be vaccinating if he couldn't get the vaccines?" Feliz asked.

"The head nurse blushed. "You'll have to talk with the doctor," she said.

Shortly after noon, Dr. Félix pulled up to the hospital in his spiffy, light blue convertible. I was there to meet him. He looked surprised. "How did you get here?" he exclaimed.

"On horseback," I replied. "And you?"

The doctor fell into his usual banter. "How are all the girls in Ajoya?" he asked, smiling broadly.

"I understand you've been vaccinating in Coyotitán?" I began.

"You know, you really ought to make something of Ramona," the doctor continued. "She'll do it. The other day when she came in for her blood test she told me she liked you . . ."*

"I'd like to speak to you about our vaccinating trip..."

"What's the matter? Isn't Ramona pretty enough...?"

"I have the mules all ready and waiting if ..."

"Ah, Davíd, what a friend!" The doctor clapped me on the shoulder. "I'll admit she looks like a toad, but she smells nice. Heh heh! And she's got a lot of meat on her. The other day she was sitting in that chair with her legs apart. Umm! Have you noticed her thighs?"

"Yes," I said. "Now, ice I can get. The vaccines you have. The program we have all drawn up. Seven villages have been notified that we are coming. The mules and Dimas are ready. When do we leave?"

Dr. Félix was suddenly serious. "Now I've been giving a lot of thought to this," he said, "and I've decided it's all too uncertain. I don't like to take part in something unless I'm sure it's going to turn out right. Would you care for a cigarette?"

"No thanks," I said. "Why shouldn't it turn out right?" (I could think of a lot of reasons.)

"Well, in the first place..." and he followed with a song and dance about not being sure how long the ice would last or how the "primitive" people would accept being vaccinated. Et cétera. It became increasingly clear that he was both too lazy and too chicken to go. At last he said, "I’ll tell you what, Davíd. Why don't you go ahead and give the first round of vaccinations, and if everything goes well, I'll go with you on the second trip."

"All right," I said, controlling my anger. "I'll do it. Where are the vaccines?" Dr. Félix gave them to me in an iced thermos, and I left.

As I rode swiftly back to Ajoya over the winding dirt track, the fresh air and quiet calmed my spirit. It was not until that night when I was lying awake in bed planning the trip, that it dawned on me that I should have gotten a letter from the doctor authorizing me to vaccinate. This was imperative, especially considering that I was a foreigner, and not long had passed since people in Verano had rumored that persons taking my medicines would die in two years' time. The villagers tend, at best, to be skeptical about vaccination. When they are sick, they may clamor for an injection, but when they are well – and the vaccines can only be given to children who appear well – it is another story. For example, this spring in Ajoya an army doctor came to vaccinate, and only 15 or 20 percent of the parents brought their children. The soldiers managed to capture a few more. Then, three weeks later, when the youngest son of Davíd Salcido died of encephalitis resulting from mumps, the villagers angrily threw the blame on the vaccination. In like manner, about six years ago, when Mencho Pereda, the kind-hearted medicine man from Jocuixtita, decided to vaccinate the village children, a couple of the first children reacted mildly to the vaccine, and the villagers, who up to that point had trusted Mencho and come to him for treatment, protested angrily. One man threatened to kill him if he vaccinated any more children, so he didn't. Not a child had been vaccinated in Jocuixtita since! All this considered, I had good reason for wishing Dr. Félix to accompany me, or at least to give me written authorization.

I telephoned San Ignacio again, and asked the head nurse to ask the doctor to write the authorization.

"He says he can't," she said when she returned:

"Why not?"

"He says he hasn't got the authority."

"But he's already given me the vaccines and the complete okay!" I protested. "All I want is for him to write me a note that he's done so."

"Just a minute," said the nurse, and a few minutes later she returned and said, "He can't."

The following day I made another trip to San Ignacio. My conversation with the doctor followed roughly the same pattern as the day before, Ramona not excluded. He ended up by clapping me on the back and saying, "I'm sorry, Davíd, old friend. It's a touchy question. I'm sure you understand..."

I understood, all right! The doctor wanted me to do his job for him, but preferred to stick out my neck instead of his own. "The hell with it all!" I said to myself, and left.

It was not until some two weeks later, as I was passing through San Ignacio on my way back to the United States, that I saw the good doctor again. Dr. Félix was very friendly, and asked me to make specific inquiries for him in California, where he plans to visit.

"Tell you what," I said. "I'll get the information that you want, if you get the written authorization that I want. Okay?"

Dr. Félix clapped melon the back. "Ah, Davíd! What a guy! It won't be easy, but I'll try."

A few days later I received a telegram in Palo Alto, which read:

HAVE OBTAINED AUTHORIZATION FOR YOU TO INNOCULATE.

DO NOT FORGET YOUR PART OF AGREEMENT. DR. FÉLIX L.

"Whoopee!" I cried. Yet on my return to San Ignacio a week later, I found I still had to haggle to get the letter. But after two weeks I cornered Dr. Félix, having followed him all over town until almost midnight, and he wearily sat down at his typewriter and wrote:

To whom it may concern:

Davíd. Werner, the bearer of this, we authorize to give neoes6aroy vaccinations where necessary. We beg you to assist him in whatever way he finds necessary.

/s/

J. Félix Lopez
The Centro

"Hadn't you better date it?" I suggested. And he did.

"Hadn't you better stamp it?" I suggested. And he did. Upside down. It was not until I had left that I noticed that the stamp merely said, "ANO DE LA AMISTAD" (YEAR OF FRIENDSHIP).

At last I had authorization – such as it was – and could commence with the inoculation of the village children. But now that the personal obstacles had been overcome, the natural obstacles commenced. The rainy season began with a crash, and I resigned myself to waiting until the end of "las aguas."

INNOCULATING THE CHILDREN OF THE UPPER VILLAGES

It was the fourth of October when I set out on the first inoculating trip, accompanied by Tatino Chavarín. The rainy season was not completely ended, the river was still too high to risk fording with all our equipment, but we could not afford to delay any longer if we were to complete the series – one application per month for three months – before my exit from the Sierra Madre in early December. My plan was to administer the DPT – diphtheria, pertussis (whooping cough) and tetanus – combined inoculant to children of ten years and under, and the oral polio vaccine to children under five.* I had decided not to vaccinate against smallpox, as many years have passed without an incidence of smallpox in my region. Also, with the smallpox vaccine there is more chance of untoward reactions.

The vaccines had to be kept cold, most critically, the polio vaccine. In Palo Alto last June, I had been donated a battery-operated refrigerator, and had secured two automobile storage batteries, plus a compact, hand-crank generator to keep the batteries charged. I ran into many snags, however, in getting the rig to work. When I discovered that the insulation of the small refrigerator was so efficient that it could keep ice up to four days in the hottest weather, I decided to forget the batteries and generator (which would have necessitated an additional mule) and transport the refrigerator alone, using it as an icebox. This way we would need only one pack mule.
I decided to vaccinate only along the main route to Verano, namely in the four major villages of Güillapa, Bordontita, Jocuixtita, and Verano. I regretted not including Saus, La Cienega, Chilar, and Caballo de Arriba, which are the next largest villages of my stomping grounds, but decided that they were beyond the limits of ice and energy,
at least for the present.

As ever, Tatino and I ran into endless difficulties in securing borrowed mules on time. We had planned to leave at the crack of dawn but discovered at the last minute that the mule and the one-eyed horse we had borrowed needed shoeing. On top of other delays, it was 10:00 A.M. before we got underway. This meant that we arrived late in Güillapa, and the children – whom the school teacher had assembled and kept waiting for us until noon – had been dismissed and were scattered hither and yon. We gathered them together again with the help of a crew of parents, but by the time we finished inoculating it was late in the afternoon. We arrived in Bordontita well after dark. Next morning we were vaccinating at the crack of dawn. Francisco, the gentle, alcoholic school teacher, quickly gathered all the children together, and we were through and on our way by mid-morning, arriving in Jocuixtita just ahead of the afternoon rains. That night we inoculated in the light of carbide lamps. The entire trip we had to work against time, for if the ice melted before we finished in Verano, the vaccines would spoil and be useless. With driving effort, and missing several meals, we had managed to keep up fairly well with the schedule we had set. Then, on the morning of the third day, when we were hurrying to leave Jocuixtita for Verano, the boys we had sent to look for our grazing animals returned with the borrowed mule and one-eyed horse, but not with Hormiga.

"Didn't you bring my mule?" I asked.

"We looked for her everywhere, but we couldn't find her," the boys replied.

So Tatino and I hurried to look for Hormiga. Between us I think we must have covered ten miles, over hill and dale, until at last Tatino whooped to me that he had found her. Next we had to catch her, which took some doing as she had taken a fancy to her freedom. We succeeded in herding her back onto the trail, but we had lost about two and a half hours.*

As it turned out, our ice held out longer than our vaccines! In Verano, we ran out of both the polio and the DPT, and still the parents continued to arrive with their children, begging us to vaccinate them. The women from the three houses of Sapotitos, a rancho about two and a. half hours away, arrived with small children and babes in arms requesting vaccination, but I had no vaccines left. I told them to come back the following month, when I would be sure to have enough.

The second trip we brought more vaccines, and still we ran out. The third trip we brought still more, and ran out. I was amazed at the success of our vaccinating program, and at the response of the villagers. The majority of the parents, far from objecting to my inoculating their children, were eager. The children were less so, as expected, but for the most part even they did not seem to mind a great deal. We did our best to make the experience happier for them by awarding each child a pencil or handful of colored crayons after injecting him. They were surprisingly good sports. There was, in fact, more yowling on the part of the children under five, who received only the oral polio vaccine, than on the part of the larger children whom we stuck in the backside. We conducted the inoculating either in school houses or in the portals of private homes. This meant that the children could watch each other being jabbed. When one child had been injected the others would all ask, "Did it hurt?" and the first child would grin and say, "No!" And so they would build up each other's courage. Only about five percent of the injected children wept, and this was almost always before they were injected.

In Verano there was one curly headed boy, named Alfredo, who, the first time around, began to scream and fight as his mother dragged him to the cot to be injected. I tried reassuring the child, but it was no use. Then his mother started beating him.

"That won't be necessary," I said, and Tatino and I took hold of the struggling child. The mother lowered his pants. They held him as firmly as they could, and for extra security I sat down on him, too, before injecting. I stuck him as lightly as I could, and standing up again, I said, "There, was that so bad?"

Alfredo shook his head sheepishly, took his pencil, and walked out.

The next time around a month later, Alfredo was one of the first children to arrive for vaccination. He marched over to the cot, lowered his pants, and did not even jerk when I injected him.

"Did it hurt?" asked the other children.

"Course not!" snapped Alfredo indignantly, and took his place with the others to watch the fun.

I was fortunate that, among all the children I inoculated, not . one resulted with severe reactions. A few had slight fever for a day or so following, a few felt a little sore in the backside, but I had warned the parents that this was to be expected, and no one got upset.

Altogether, we inoculated 249 children, from ten years and under for the DFT, and from five years and under against polio. This is a small number considering all the children throughout the barrancas, but it represents about 75% of the younger children in the four villages where we did inoculate, and should be enough to prevent serious epidemics in these villages.* In San Ignacio, several children died in a whooping cough epidemic this summer. In December a whooping cough epidemic struck villages along the upper reaches of the Rio Piaxtla, and along the coast diphtheria. has struck a number of the villages in Pridemic fashion. It is a comfort to know that at least one small area of the barrancas now has some protection against these diseases.

TATINO'S LOVE LIFE

Having written of my impressions of Dr. Félix at the Centro de Salud in San Ignacio and of his cavalier preoccupation with sex, it seems well, by contrast, to say a word about the approach to sex of the villagers. For although Dr. Félix is a citizen of the same country, he comes from a very different world. As a boy, Dr. Félix grew up in a huge metropolis where he was orphaned from the soil and from Nature, where sex, as he learned of it, must have been something naughty and elite; joked, whispered, and even shrieked about; distorted, idealized, and sought – sight unseen – almost like God. By contrast, the villagers of the Sierra Madre have grown up in a world where sex is as plain an element in their daily lives as is the hot dust under their feet in las secas or the fresh taste of rain in las aguas. Three year old Beni, in the casa Chavarín, says to her mother María, "What are the pigs doing?" – And María replies simply, "They're making babies." -"Oh!" says little Beni, and stares with avid fascination until she has had her fill, then turns to other things. It is as simple as that. People grow up regarding sex as normal, necessary, pleasurable –or sometimes painful – and commonplace. It is a man's nature, they say, to "llenar la barriga y vaciar la bolsa" (fill his belly and empty his pouch). And because "filling his belly" is the appetite he is least confident of satisfying, the campesino's wishful thinking frequently turns more toward a beautiful cornpatch than a beautiful woman... For as little Pelayo sings with his thrush-like voice,

Se acaba el maiz, (The corn runs out,
Se acaban los frijoles, The beans run out,
Pero nunca se acaba But the harvest of women
La cosecha de mujeres Never runs out )

Sexual indulgence in the villages of the Sierra Madre – as anywhere -may be harsh or gentle. But it is always prevalent, and perhaps for this reason sex is less idealized and glamourized than is good food. Above all, sex is not sordid. Bestial at times, true. But never have I seen the villagers make it dirty and cheap. Somehow a villager can manage to talk about the same anatomy of the same girl with basically the same motives as Dr. Félix and yet ring as fresh a note as the city-bred physician rings foul. In general, the villager finds little need to talk about his sex life, or anyone else’s, (unless, of course, it is a scandal). Sex is not something to be whispered or guffawed about, or that children need to sneak away about, to tell jokes that are funny because they are taboo. Sex, like a bath in the river, is a refreshing and clean respite.

It is true, that with such "directness of desire" comes an array of concomitant problems. When a man's appetites get the better of him he may rob another man's corn, or he may rob another mail's wife or daughter. Such acts are frequent. Little Goyo's Aunt Benancia was raped when she was only thirteen; Goyo's mother was assaulted twice when she was fifteen. And so on. Although in the villages there is little sign of the overt preoccupation with sex so conspicuous in America today, sexual union is a very significant pastime in the lives of the villagers, being the cheapest (at least initially) as well as the most habit-forming form of entertainment. To the maturing girl sex can be a real threat – not because she is afraid of sexual contact -but because she is afraid of being mistreated or made pregnant by a man who cares for her body only. At the same time, being raped tends to be less traumatic, I think, for a village girl than for a girl from a more restrained and self-righteous culture; the village girl often learns to take such mistreatment in stride.

In the barrancas only one word, robar is commonly used to say "to steal", "to rape" and "to seduce". The villagers in general do not condone a man's "robbing" a girl against her will, yet neither do they seriously condemn it (unless she is a very young girl – under twelve – or if the man does her some other physical harm). The villagers tend to regard the offense much as they would that of a youth's robbing another man's orchard. Of course the parents of the abused girl, or her boyfriend or husband if she has one, frequently go up in smoke. Feuding and bloodshed may result. Life gets fairly stormy at times.

All this considered, however, in the people's matter-of-fact approach to sexuality there remains a kind of innocence, which is to me as refreshing as standing by night on a lone mountain and looking up at the host of sharp stars in a clean sky; after many dreary nights of peering up at the sparse, half-suffocated stars above a city.

In the months I have known Tatino Chavarín, stayed with him in the home of his parents in Ajoya, gone hiking with him, swimming with him, gone with him to the milpa, talked with him of a hundred different things, he never said a word to me about his sex life. Not until two days after we had completed the first round of vaccinations did the subject first arise.

After helping vaccinate, Tatino needed to get back promptly to Ajoya to help his brothers harvest the sesame crop. As he had never been to Verano before, I offered to guide him up over the ridge to Bordontita, where he could easily find his way along the river.

We set out from El Rancho del Padre shortly after dawn. When we were a hundred yards from Irineo's big casa, Tatino said with a laugh, "Did I ever have a scare the day before yesterday!"

"How so?" I asked.

"Do you remember that fat woman with the curly hair who came in the afternoon with all the other mothers?"

"Do you mean Escolástica?" I said.*

"Yes," said Tatino, "I was afraid she was going to explode when she saw me. If her eyes had been fangs I’d be dead!" Tatino reached out and plucked one of the saffron daisies. "It had to do with her daughter."

"You 'robbed' her?" I ventured.

"Yes . . . You see I was about sixteen at the time, and Cirila was thirteen or fourteen..." As we wound our way up the mountainside of daisies, Tatino told me that when Micaela and Ramón had taken a trip to Mazatlán, he had lured Escolástica's daughter into the back portal of his home and "robbed" her. The girl then told her mother, who marched off to San Ignacio and demanded that the judiciales (state police) arrest Tatino, which they did. Tatino was taken before El Presidente in San Ignacio (a different Presidente than the present one) who sentenced him to twelve years in prison. When Ramón and Micaela returned from Mazatlán and found their son was in jail, they went to the Presidente and begged him to let Tatino off, offering all the small funds that they could scrape together. But the Presidente refused. As luck would have it, Jesús Manjarréz of San Ignacio, a wealthy and influential friend of Ramón, arrived a few days later from Mexico City, and at Ramón's request quickly arranged for Tatino's release. Escolástica was, of course, furious and has remained furious with Tatino ever since. Her daughter has long since married.

"That was eight or nine years ago," said Tatino. "You'd think she'd cool down. But no!"

"Was Escolástica's daughter the first you ever robbed?" I asked.

"Lord, no!" replied Tatino, and gave his one-eyed mare a swat on the rump. "The first was when I was about twelve years old, or maybe thirteen; I'm not sure. My, mother lost my birth registration when I was still little." He picked another flower. "You see, it happened like this: One evening after it was dark, a group of us boys were playing 'Mamitas'. That's a game where one half of the boys run and hide while the other half cover their eyes and sing out:

"Mamita, Mamita, (Mamita, Mamita,
Y el pan que to doy! And the bread that I give you!
Si más to diera The more that I give you
Mas comiera." The more I shall eat.)

and the other half, from their hiding spots, sing back:

"Relój-o, Relój-o, (Clock-o, Clock-o,
No mires pa' donde voy. Don't look where I go!
Viene San Pedro, Come Saint Peter, he'll
te quiebra un ojo break your eye
Con un tapojo!" With the blinder of a mule!)

Then the first half run to hunt for the second.

"Well, when it was our turn to run and hide, a friend and I ran down that little path that takes off beyond the house of old Cecelia, you know, the witch who hexed my uncle, and we hid below in the deep, brushy wash. While we were hiding, a young woman of about twenty, called Lina, who lived in the house behind my aunt Lupe, was coming back from Raúl Padilla's along the path with a bottle of kerosene she'd bought. She had her little boy with her, about four. 'Let's grab her', said my friend. He was about the same age I was, maybe a little older. 'All right!' I said. Well, we dashed out of the ditch and grabbed hold of her. Her little boy ran away, screaming. We hauled the woman down into the gully and made her lie down. First my friend robbed her, and then I did. Well, like I say I was only twelve or so. It was the first woman I'd ever had! But I liked it! More than just about anything. And do you know, she didn't even struggle or cry out. I think she liked it too... Yes, she was married, but her husband had been away for months, so that in those days she didn't have her man 'by the foot'. That night was just the beginning. After that my friend and I used to go to the same spot every night and wait for her to come by for kerosene. She made a point of coming, whether she needed kerosene or not. Every night we'd grab her and lead her down the gully and rob her. Sometimes we'd spend as much as four hours,
taking turns. We didn't get much sleep on those nights, but it was worth it! Unfortunately it only lasted about twenty nights. Her boy told her father, and the old fellow followed secretly her when she left the house. As ever, my friend and I met her down into the wash. I was all excited and ready when we heard a noise and jumped to our feet. Her father was charging out after us, and we ran off down the arroyo. The old man ran after us, throwing rocks. He didn't hit us."

"He didn't take any action against you?"

"Nó", said Tatino. "I don't think he recognized us. It was dark."

Suddenly I realized we had taken the wrong trail. Absorbed in conversation, we had drifted along through the tangle of saffron daisies and tall grass until we had come out on the ridge top. I had automatically led the way to the right, toward Jocuixtita, instead of taking the trail to the left, which follows the ridge crest down toward Bordontita. We turned our animals around and headed back along the ridge.

Tatino was now in the mood for reminiscing. "I've had narrower escapes than that," he said. "One time, for instance, when I was about eighteen, I was in Coyotitán visiting relatives, and a young woman I got talking to invited me into the house. She told me her husband had left that morning to work in the, hills and wouldn't be back for several days. So we got into bed together. Next thing we knew her husband was pounding on the door! Said he'd forgotten his machete, and told his wife to open up. Well, there was no other way out except by that door, and there was only the one room. 'Quick, under the bed!' whispered his wife. So I climbed under the bed, and she let in her. husband. He lit a cachimba and began to poke about the room. Meanwhile, there was I with my pants off and my breath held, under the bed." Tatino laughed at the memory of it. "Then the fellow bent over to look for his machete, and spotted me! Well, he jerked out his knife and scrambled under the bed. And we fought. I managed to get hold of the hand with the knife, but he cut me twice, pretty deep." Tatino swatted the one-eyed mare until it came along side Hormiga, and showed me his hands. Across the back of his right hand was a long scar, and on the side of the wrist of his left hand was another. "We fought for a long time, all over the room. At last his wife helped me get the knife away from him. by beating her husband's hand with a mano del metate (pestle for grinding corn) until he dropped the knife. I ran out of the house, and out of Coyotitán. I didn't stop until I got to San Ignacio. I was pretty weak by that time. I'd lost a lot of blood."

We came out on a high crest which overlooked, to our left, the deep, winding valley of the Rio Verde, still dark and mysterious in the shadows of early morning. To our right, far below us in the distance, lay the red-tiled roofs of Jocuixtita, clustered in the middle of the daisy-gilded slopes, now aglow in the early sunlight, while behind them rose the somber escarpments and towering crags of El Cerro de los Chivos.

I pointed out to Tatino a beautiful little rancho, now vacant, called La Higuerita, in a high pocket midway between our viewpoint and Jocuixtita.. "You were lucky," I said. "The owner of that little rancho came back to his house one night this spring and found his wife with another man. Only the other man didn't come out of it as well as you did. He's in the hospital in Culiacán with a bullet through his spine, paralyzed from the waist down."

"Only the lucky stay alive!" said Tatino with a shrug. His eyes swept out over the magnificent panorama. "The mountains are pretty after the rains," he added. "I like it when everything’s so green and full of life." We clucked to our animals to move on.
Tatino continued to relate his many exploits with the opposite sex. He spoke with no special pride or shame, and always with a kind of child-like enthusiasm. He had simply enjoyed himself, and he said so. On some of his trips to the cast he had experimented with prostitutes. He had been to both the large, government regulated whorehouse near the army camp in Culiacán, and to the small burdél oculto near the junction of the Rio Piaxtla and the main highway, where "the house can't let the police and soldiers know it exists... officially, that is."

"No," said Tatino. "I haven't been very often. I don't get down to the coast very much, and when I do, for us fifteen pesos is a lot of money. But I like to do it when I get the chance, especially when I haven't got a regular woman in Ajoya. A man shouldn't go too long without 'putting the pole'; if he does little stones will form in his 'eggs' and he'll have to have an operation to get them out."

"What do the young men from Ajoya and the upper villages do who haven't got a woman and don't have the chance to get to the burdeles on the coast?" I asked.

"They either bear it or they rob a girl," said Tatino. "But there are always women who are ready or who can be persuaded. For example, there's Ubaldina, the inocente. She likes it a lot and will do it for a peso, or sometimes for nothing if a fellow hasn't got a peso." I noticed that Tatino rarely mentioned the sex act by name, but rather spoke of "it". "I've never done it with her myself," Tatino continued. "She repels me. But I know Eberardo has. When Eberardo comes back to the house so happy that you think he's drunk, but he's not, and he can't get that big smile off his face, you can bet he's been with Ubaldina." Tatino shook his head. "Of course if a man's got a lot of money," he added, "he can have just about whoever he wants. Your good friend, Ramona, as you already know, is the secret mistress of Chuy Vega. He pays her fifty pesos a time."

"Are you sure of that?" I asked.

"Where do you think she gets the money to buy all those clothes and perfumes?" replied Tatino. "After all, Davíd, Ramona's no longer a child! She's eighteen now. She's ready and she's looking. Have you seen the way she shows her thighs? One day when Ramona was sitting out front of the shop, Nicolasa, the old witch, came out and cried at Ramona, 'Why do you keep exposing your thighs? Don't you know it makes men rear up like burros?' She knew, all right. That's why she did it. All the men and boys who were standing around exploded with laughter. Poor Ramona covered her face with her hands and ran back into the shop... but she was laughing."

I learned from Tatino that not all of the men of Ajoya confined their sexual taste to women. For example, he told me that Raúl Padilla, one of the wealthiest men and the owner of the largest shop in Ajoya, was a mesatero, a man who spends one month with a woman and the next with a man, according to the changes of the moon." He said that Raúl openly declared his position and offered twenty pesos a time to young men who would oblige him. "There are always those who accept," said Tatino. "After all, twenty pesos is two days wages. I've never done it though. I don't think that I'd like it." Tatino went on to tell me that José Lomas, Tatino's young cousin and formerly the best hunter in Ajoya (he used to bring me all kinds of wild game because he knew I missed not having much meat) had been el marido (husband) of Raúl. "But the people started talking," said Tatino. "They said that José was a puto (male whore) and that he had 'salted' (brought bad luck to) the pueblo. They even blamed him for last year's drought. The women made it unbearable for José's wife when she went for water or to wash in the river. At last even his wife began to think ill of him. José couldn't take it any longer. That's why he took his wife and children and left."

"If the people were so condemning about José," I asked, "why don't they say anything about Raúl?"

"Oh, they do," said Tatino. "But in whispers. After all, Raúl is rich, and the people have to beg for credit at his store. José, on the other hand, is poor. Poor guy!"

"You don't hold anything against José?"

"Why should I?" shrugged Tatino. "The people are always after somebody's hide. No, I don't see that José did anything wrong: he made twenty pesos a time."

Ahead of us the ridge burst suddenly upward in a dark escarpment of volcanic rock. We followed the trail around it to the right, cutting through a, dense forest of bamboo-like otate. Twined about the filmy otate were rich bouquets of a pink-flowering pea called coronillo, whose lavish festoons were being visited by large, lazy butterflies, snow-white above with a round yellow sun-spot painted on each wing.

Tatino suggested that I should get married in Ajoya so that I wouldn't be tempted to leave. He suggested the sixteen year old daughter of Antonio Sánchez. "Antonio would let you," he insisted. "He'd be delighted. What do you say?"

"She's pretty and I like her," I replied, "but . . ."

"You could just tell her you were going to marry her, and later leave her," explained Tatino. "Shall I talk to her for you?"

"I wouldn't feel right about it," I said.

"Why not?" said Tatino,). "The girls don't mind being tricked. They expect it."

"What about you, Tatino," I suggested. "You're how old? Twenty-four or twenty-five? Haven't you got any thoughts of getting married?"

"Oh yes," said Tatino, "I'd like to get married, then I wouldn't have to keep jumping from one woman to the next."

"How many women would you say you've had?" I asked.

"Not many," replied Tatino. "Let's see . . ." He counted on his fingers. "Only fourteen, not including whores."

"Have you had any children by any of them?" I asked.

"Just two that I know about," he replied.

"Have you ever asked a girl if she'd marry you, and meant it?" I asked.

"Just once," said Tatino. "It was a couple of years ago, around the time you came with your students. I was going with a young girl from Durangito. She was only twelve. One afternoon I took her out into el monte and we found a little clearing where we thought no one would find us. Well, we'd just finished doing it, and were sitting there side by side talking, when we heard someone coming through the brush. It was her brother. He had a rifle with him. He was hunting cüiches. 'What are the two of you doing here?' he asked us. 'Talking,' we said. 'Just see that that's all!' he said, and he went away. I knew there was likely to be trouble, so I asked the girl if she would come and live with me. She said yes, and we did it again. Then we started back toward Durangito to talk with her parents. But we met her father coming our way. He had his rifle with him. I told her father we planned to get married. He got mad and said to the girl, 'I'll give you a choice, daughter: You can have a father, or you can have a husband, but you can't have both. Not yet! Which will it be?' Well, she began to cry, and said, 'I think I'd better go with my father.' – 'As you wish,' I said. But I was hurt and angry inside. I really wanted her then. She was crying. Her father took her by the hand and led her down the trail a few meters, and there he beat her with his fist. My God, how he beat her! And I couldn't do anything because he had the rifle. Then he led her off toward their casa, and I went back to Ajoya. About two weeks later her father came to Ajoya and asked me if I would marry her. He said he'd changed his mind and it was all right with him. But I'd changed my mind, too, by that time, and said no."

"You're not going with any woman now, are you?" I asked Tatino. "I've never seen you with one."

"I hope nobody's seen me," said Tatino. "I don't want my parents to know. They'd have a fit. You see, she's María Elena, the wife of Manuel in the house next door to us."

"How do you manage it?" I asked.

"Each of us sneaks out in the middle of the night as if we have to excuse ourselves. It's an old trick we learned as children from our parents. First one parent gets up and goes out as if to take a dump; and a few minutes later, the other. But they don't come back for half an hour or so, so all the kids know what's happening, if they're awake. The two of them go to a spot in el monte that the father cleared very clean with a machete the day before. When they come back, the children all pretend they're asleep. Or if one of the smallest children is so stupid as to ask his folks where they've been, the father says, 'Shut up! Go to sleep!'. . . Well, that's more or less how María Elena and I do it, too."

"What will Manuel do to you if he catches you?" I asked.

Tatino grinned. "Kill me . . . if he can!"

We reached the point where the ridge we were following began to drop off abruptly and we began to wind our way down toward the junction of the Arroyo de Caballo with the Rio Verde. We could see the village of Bordontita far below us in the distance.

"She is such a beautiful thing!" said Tatino happily.

"María Elena?" I said.

"No," replied Tatino with a laugh. "María Elena's not lovely at all. She's ugly. I mean the thing itself, you know, the act! How I do like it. I've been doing it since I was twelve, and the will hasn't left me at all." He looked out over the wide valley. "I like it as much as I like riding all day through the mountains, as we are doing now, when everything is green and alive. It makes me feel strong, you know what I mean? And it is natural. The most natural thing I know."

Tatino smiled broadly, and looked a little pleased with himself for having thought out all his feelings so well. "We certainly have talked!" he said, laughing. We rode on down the slope in silence.

On re-reading what I have written on "Tatino's Love Life", I notice that the first and last time I used the word "love" was in the heading. Tatino's exploits with the opposite sex clearly and openly are expressions of lust, with no pretensions of love. In fact, the word amar –to love– has virtually been dropped from the local language, the villagers using only the word querer –to want, or to like– to express their deepest, most passionate bonds. A deep love is nevertheless very evident in many close relationships. If Tatino's affairs are conspicuously devoid of real affection, it may be because he has not yet set up house with a woman and tried to live with her through thick and thin. By contrast, Tatino's parents, old Micaela and the blind Ramón, after thirty-five years of floods and droughts, harvests and hunger spells, simple pleasures and crushing adversities, have become united by a bond so complete that the visiting nuns' insistence that the aging couple marry seems absurd. Their "marriage" is clearly far more righteous and durable than are the superficial pacts awarded by church or state! Many times, as I observe the depth and closeness of the bonds between persons such as old Micaela and Ramón, I recall James Thurber's simple insight: "Love is what two people have been through together." Tatino, for all his adventures, still has a long way to go.

FLORINDA'S LOT

One, of my most frequent visitors at El Rancho del Padre during the long rainy season was Pancho Alvarado Soto, the quiet, thirteen-year-old son of Florinda Alvarado from Sapotitos.* Pancho's father died last spring, probably of tuberculosis. Whether or not this has had anything to do with Pancho's frequent visits, I don't know. In any case, I began to get used to, even look forward to Pancho's regular appearance at my dispensary. Sometimes he would tell me his mother sent him, and ask for some medicine or other, or for more powdered milk for his baby nephew. But more often he would simply appear and stand – quiet as a shadow in the background – watching as I questioned and gave medicine to other patients. One of his great fascinations was
my camera, and I showed him how to use it. But he was always tremendously shy, and rarely did many words pass between us.

One day as I was typing in the portal of my dispensary, Pancho appeared and watched with absolute fixation. The better part of an hour passed, during which he scarcely moved. At last I turned to him and asked,

"Sabes leer y escribir?" (Do you know how to read and write?)

Pancho shook his head embarrassedly and muttered, "Es que vivimos muy lejos de la escuela." (It's that we live very far from the school.)

"Lástima," I said. "Vale mucho saber." (Too bad. It's important to know how.)

Pancho did not reply, and the next moment I saw him sneaking quietly away.

Unknown to me, Pancho hurried home and pleaded to his mother to let him go to school in Verano in September, provided a teacher should come. Florinda was reluctant to let him. Not only would his going to school mean a two and a half hour hike each way, over a 2000 foot pass and treacherous trails, from Sapotitos to the school in Verano, but she needed Pancho to help with harvests, especially since the death of her husband. Pancho was so eager and insistent, however, that Florinda gave in. In the last days of September, when Professor Gautamo Manjarréz arrived in Verano, I gave Pancho pencils and a notebook, and he began classes, leaving his home before dawn each day, and arriving again after dark.

The first chance I had to visit Florinda's home in Sapotitos was one Sunday in mid-October, following the first vaccinating trip. The rancho of Sapotitos,* located on the upper reaches of the Rio Verde, comprises three widely separated casas. Florinda's family lives in the smallest and poorest of these, a carelessly constructed shack sheltered in a grove of large zapote and palo colorado trees at the junction of Arroyo del Rincón. The shack is at the edge of a small sugar cane field, and was built by Florinda's husband shortly before his death, when he became too weak to hike back and forth to the field each day from Santo Domingo, where the family lived before. When Florinda's husband died, the maintenance of the family fell on the oldest remaining son, Manuel, age twenty-two. Manuel is one of four children still living, out of eight that Florinda gave birth to. (One of Florinda's children died in a whooping cough epidemic at age six; three others died in infancy.) In addition to his mother, his younger siblings, and an orphaned, fifteen year old, simple-minded cousin, Manuel also has a wife of his own and five children to feed– a total of eleven. '

When I arrived at Sapotitos, escorted by young Pancho, Florinda hurried forward to greet me, followed by Manuel, who offered to take Hormiga to a spot where she could graze. This was the first time I had seen Manuel since a year and a half before, when our Pacific High School group had passed by along the river, and Manuel had cut each of us a tall stalk of sugar cane to gnaw upon.

The small shack in Sapotitos was bursting with people when we arrived. As chance would have it, that same Sunday, Victoria Torres, her husband and three small children had set out from Pie de la Cuesta on a seven hour journey to Verano, to bring me their four year-old daughter, who suffers from epileptiform seizures. Victoria is the twenty-six year old sister of Manuel's wife, Delfina, and as she and her family had been passing Sapotitos, they had stopped to say hello. When they had learned that I, too, was on my way to Sapotitos that very day, they decided to wait for me. Later that same afternoon Manuel returned from a wild boar (javelín) hunt accompanied by two young friends,* who also decided to spend the night. Altogether, this made a total of nineteen persons spending the night in the small hut.

Victoria Torres told me that her four year old girl had been having seizures since she was a few months old. Recently the child has been having as many as one hundred fits in twenty-four hours. Her brain has obviously been damaged by the attacks, for she has lost her capacity to speak and even to play. Victoria thinks the child's illness was the result of a severe susto (scare or mental shock) which Victoria received when pregnant with the baby. She told me that one day when she was already badly upset by the drowning of a young girl in the river below her home, word also reached her of the savage death of her twenty-two year old cousin, Elodia Jiménez Cebreros, in La Quebrada. (I had already heard tell of this unfortunate event: five years ago Elodia's father, Camilo Jiménez, threw a dance at his house in La Quebrada, the same house at which young Pancho Cebreros was stabbed to death last spring! Against his daughter's protest, Camilo insisted that his daughter dance with other men until her new husband got there. Her husband arrived, found Elodia dancing with another man, shot her three times, and left.) Victoria said she was so shocked by the news that she was unable to eat or sleep. She feels sure that this is the cause of her daughter's ataques.

As night was falling, it began to rain. There was scarcely room for the nineteen of us to huddle under the leaky roof of the tiny hut, and I wondered how we were going to pass the night. But Manuel, Delfina, and their children went out and curled up in the shelter of the empty corncrib, so that, with some overlap, there was room for the rest of us to lie down.

Long before dawn, Florinda, Delfina, and Victoria were up grinding new corn and making tortillas. The rest of us rose at the first touch of light. Thirteen year-old Pancho had already gulped down a couple of tortillas and hurried off on his two and a half hour hike to school. It last the sun emerged above the dark mountains to the east, streaming, through the morning mist and making the myriad raindrops flash in a spectrum of colors upon the light green leaves of the towering sugar cane. Soon it was hot.

"¡Vamos a bañarnos!" suggested young Lucio eagerly. (Let's bathe.)

"¡Vamos!" And Manuel, Lucio, Domingo, Lino (another youth), and I took off up the river to a good swimming hole.

The swimming hole was a deep, turbulent pool flanked with giant water-sculptured boulders separated by pockets of dark sand. Along the shallow perimeters of the pool were clumps of graceful, white spider lilies. We stripped off our clothes and sprang into the water. The young men frolicked and fought like bear cubs, laughing and swearing at each other. Manuel, especially, impressed me with his strength. Tall for a villager, he is very thin and stringy. Yet he would sweep up the other youths like bales of corn leaves in his long arms, and hurl them bodily into the swirling current of the river, much to everyone's delight. It was great fun.

After we had finished swimming and returned to the casa, Florinda. asked me if I would take a picture of her husband's mule. She told me she would have to sell it, and wanted the picture as a memory of her husband. Manuel offered to take the mule down to the river in the sunlight. I suggested that we photograph the mule drinking. And so the fight began. The mule refused to put its nose in the water, and Manuel tried to make it. Each got angrier and more stubborn as the struggle proceeded. Manuel tugged and swore at the huge, black mule; the mule tried to kick Manuel. The eyes of each grew wide with fury. I cried to Manuel not to bother, but he was beyond listening or reasoning. He struck the mule in the head and heaved it bodily toward the water. But the mule was as stubborn as he, and at last Manuel had to admit defeat. When at last he had cooled down a bit, he laughed at the foolishness of it.

"KILL THE WITCH! SLIT HER THROAT!"

After our first vaccinating trip in October, it was more than two weeks before I followed Tatino back to Ajoya. I took a long way about, making a sixty mile loop of some of the more easterly villages – including La Siertita, Azoteas, Pueblo Viejo, Candelero and Limón de las Castañedas – for I had never been into this rugged area before, and had long-standing invitations. It was a good trip, full of unexpected adventures and heart-warming welcome in each village and rancho along the way. As ever when I arrive at villages where I have not been before, I was appalled at some of the diseases and injuries which had been inappropriately treated or simply neglected. Yet, for me personally, the trip was without mishap, except for once when my mule, Hormiga, let me down with a splash. The fault was my own: Hormiga had lost her rear shoes, and I had neglected to replace them before the trip. The Arroyo de Verano still carried a good bit of water, and was in bad shape for travel after the rains. At one spot, where we had to drop down a steep trough of cascading water and cross a deep pool at the bottom rock. She skittered downwards, her feet flying like a frenzied tap dancer's, and cannonballed into the pool. She landed off balance, her hooves sinking deep into the soft mud of the bottom. For a moment she floundered frantically, then keeled over sideways with a splash. I barely managed to hoist my camera over my head with one hand and extend my other hand toward a. protruding rock to catch my fall, as I, too, went splashing under the floundering mule. Irineo's grandson, Alvaro, who was at that moment passing through the canyon on his way to El Tule, at once sprang into the pool, caught hold of the halter, and hauled the mule away. As the three of us sloshed out of the pool, Alvaro and I were laughing so hard we nearly fell into the water afresh, not that it would have made much difference.

When I arrived back in Ajoya, the village was astir with talk about the recent deaths. The first death had been that of Juan, the cirrhotic, nicknamed Chutele, or Tejón, because as a little boy he used to climb trees stark naked, where – with his dark skin, skinny face, and bright, black eyes – he had reminded the villagers of a coati-mundi. The next two deaths – which took place five days after Chutele died and two days before my return to Ajoya – were those of sixteen year old Candelaria (Cande) Castro, and her new-born child.

Chutele's relatives – as I mentioned in the third Report – had for a long time been accusing old Nicolasa, Rosaura's washer-woman, of having hexed Chutele by placing a frog or a rat inside him through black magic. This, they said, was the cause of the grotesque swelling of his abdomen. As Chutele continued to get worse, and his belly to swell, the hostility of his relatives toward Nicolasa had continued to increase. Then came the night when Chutele took a sudden turn for the worse. As it happened, Nicolasa was sleeping in the house of Ramona's grandparents, Gregorio Alarcón and Rosaura. Shortly before midnight a. group of men came banging on the heavily bolted doors. Rosaura got up, went to the door, and without opening it, called out, "What do you want?"

"We want Nicolasa to go with us to the loma to cure Chutele!" . they said. "He can scarcely breathe."

"Well, she's not coming out!" cried Rosaura through the heavy doors: "I won't let her!"

Rosaura, knew only too well how they would have Nicolasa "cure" Chutele: they would beat her and very likely kill her, for it is thought that by killing a witch her evil spells are automatically lifted from those she has hexed. (The effectiveness of such a "cure" in a "hex" such as Chutele's is well established. Everyone in Ajoya knows the story of Felipe Estrada who, like Chutele, had his abdomen "swollen like a bloated cow" while the rest of his body grew thinner and weaker, and how, at last, he went to see a curandero –witch doctor– who told him he had been hexed, and named the old spinster, Paula as the witch. Everyone knows that so sooner had Paula been dragged out of her casa in Carrisál and beaten to death than the distension of Felipe's abdomen disappeared, as if by magic. Anyone who doubts this can go to Carrisál and ask Felipe, who is now an old man, but remembers well.)

"Open up!" demanded the men at the door. "We want Nicolasa!"

"No!" shouted Rosaura with finality.

The men moved away, grumbling and swearing.

The next morning word circulated through Ajoya that Chutele was dying. Nevertheless, when the sun had risen high and hot in the morning sky, Old Nicolasa – disregarding Rosaura's warnings – put her load of wash on her head, as was her custom, and made her way to the river. She constructed a small teepee of brightly colored rags stretched over converging poles, and thus sheltered from the sun, she began to scrub the garments, beating them on a flat stone to loosen the dirt.

Suddenly she heard a noise and looked around. Rubén Zepeda, Chutele's seventeen year-old nephew, drew close to her and said stiffly, "I've come to ask you to go with me to cure my uncle. He's dying . . ."

Nicolasa, angry at the young man's implication, gave a snort and turned back to her washing.

"Please come!" begged Rubén, and again he added, "He's dying!"

"¡Hijo de la chingada!" shrieked Nicolasa. "What in the devil makes you think I can do anything for your damned uncle!"

Ruben caught the old woman by the shoulder and said in a shaking voice, "Are you going to go with me? Yes or no?"

"No!" snapped Nicolasa. "Leave me alone!"

She jerked away from him. Ruben caught hold of her again and threw her to the ground. He closed his hands around Nicolasa's throat and began to strangle her, crying "Kill my uncle, would you, you lousy witch! Die, damn you!"

Two other women who had been washing clothes a short distance upstream came running to Nicolasa's aid. These were the aged Saturnina Castro, wife of Martín Chavez, and her niece, Jesús Castro. They clubbed Rubén with sticks until he let go. ("As soon as I let her go I felt sorry for her and wished I hadn't done it," said Rubén afterwards.) Nicolasa, her throat badly injured, gasped to regain her breath. Saturnina and Jesús escorted her back to the home of Rosaura, where the old woman collapsed.

That afternoon Chutele died. For twenty-four hours his wife and children sat around his small, swollen body, weeping, and praying for his soul. Then he was carried to the hillside cemetery in a small, wooden coffin. Half the village saw him buried.

Four days later, in the evening, sixteen year old Cande Castro, a niece of Saturnina, gave birth to a small boy baby. It was a difficult birth, yet for the first hour or so afterward, both she and the child seemed to be doing well. Then, of a sudden, Cande went into a state of collapse, with high fever and labored breath. The midwives gave her agua de carmín and the standard herbs, all to no avail. Cande's mother was frantic, and cried out, "It must be that she's been hexed! Bring Nicolasa and see if she can cure her!"

Again a. group of men came knocking on the heavy doors for Nicolasa. Again Rosaura turned them away. A few hours later, Cande succumbed, and the new born infant died minutes after his mother. Now there was no doubting the cause. It was Nicolasa! Cande's mother shrieked to God for revenge, and the village, like a great wall, echoed her pain.

From that day on, Old Nicolasa lived as a virtual prisoner within the confines of the Alarcón home. Shortly after my return from Verano, when I heard of what had happened, I went to call on her. Ramona and Rosaura greeted me as warmly and spontaneously as ever, but poor Nicolasa – who usually comes forward with her bony arms spread wide to embrace me – now stood silently, her arms drawn in against withered breasts, in the darkest corner of the hall. I went to her and hugged her, and she tried to laugh, but tears came to her eyes.

" . . . It's not just that I'm afraid to go out into the streets anymore," she said. "I'm embarrassed to! The way the people all look at me, Davíd, I tell you it really makes me ashamed, ashamed so that I can't stand it. I can't even go to the river to wash! What else is there to do?" She looked at me and smiled unhappily. "What did I do, Davíd, I ask you that? I didn't do anything to Chutele, or to this Cande; I scarcely knew her! Why would I want to do any harm to her? Yet they blame me. Why me? I'm losing my mind, curse them all!" She bent her head to dry her eye on her shoulder. "You don't have any medicine for my throat, do you? It hurts so much I can hardly swallow."

I examined her throat and found it was still swollen and blue. "I'll bring something," I said, and left.

"All this talk about witchcraft is a lot of nonsense!" snapped Rosaura when I returned. "I'll tell you why I don't believe in it. My father, Bonefacio, started urinating blood in Nogales, and a doctor said he had to have a kidney stone removed. My father wrote for me to sell three calves to pay for it. So I sold them. Well, my father arrived in San Ignacio and met a band of gitanos (gypsies) who told him he'd been hexed. They said they would cure him for 900 pesos. So my father gave them 900 pesos, and the gypsies left, saying that the cure would take place invisibly in the course of three days. So! At the end of three days he was worse! We had to sell a full-grown cow to pay for the operation: They took out a stone as big as a dung beetle. And he got well."

"I know," I said. He showed me the stone when I stopped by at Vainilla on the way back from Pueblo Viejo."

"My husband, Goyo, has piles," continued Rosaura, "And do you know he spent over 3000 pesos trying to get cured of a hex before he finally had them operated on. No sir, nobody's going to make me believe in witchcraft! Look what they've done to poor Nicolasa! By the grace of God she's not dead."

"Better I were," said Nicolasa sadly.

"Why do you defend her," drawled easygoing, seventeen-year-old Chón, when I was back at the casa Chavarín, "since she's guilty."

"She is not guilty!" I returned, a little annoyed.

"Huh!" snapped Micaela.. "I can name at least a dozen people right in this village that she's done away with." And she named them.

All over Ajoya people were dragging forth evidence against Nicolasa. Catalina, the wife of Heliodoro, remembered that one day she had argued with Nicolasa over the use of a lavadero (a big rock for washing), and the next day as she was going down the steep path toward the river, a huge black snake "fatter than natural" had fallen from the bank onto her foot. Micaela's sister, Lupe, related how one day when she was going to wash Nicolasa had touched her on the back and said, "¡Con eso to chingo!" (With this I give you the shaft!), and from that time or, Lupe began to have eye trouble, stomach trouble, foot trouble, back trouble, and trouble with her daughter. Even blind Ramón recounted how Nicolasa had brought about the death of his brother. (Before, he had been blaming old Cecilia).

The village was full of talk of witchcraft whether it applied to Nicolasa or not. Librada, the wife of old Caytano, remembered how Abraham Lomas had paid "La Joroita" to put "huevos de burro" (donkey balls) on Chencho Velazquez so their mutual sweetheart, Cuca Sánchez, wouldn't love him. Sofía Chavarín told how her first cousin, Carlota, had been jealous of the marriage of Victoria (Toys) Nuñez with Gregorio Alarcón's son, Librado, and how Carlota – on the advice of Micaela's half-sister, Cosme, had succeeded in breaking up the marriage by repeating the "Oración de San Antonio" (Prayer of Saint Anthony) at twelve noon for nine consecutive days while she burned a candle lit al culo (at its ass end) with a needle through its center.

The stories were endless, and everyone was busy telling them. Anyone who sided with Nicolasa was suspect, especially Rosaura, about whom people dug up all kinds of nasty gossip. "Rosaura protects Nicolasa she’s got a secret love affair with Ricardo Manjarréz. She’s been paying Nicolasa to hex her husband, Goyo, so he won't find out. The whole village knows, and poor Goyo doesn't suspect a thing!" and, "When Goyo's son Salvador wanted to abandon Rosaura's daughter, Jovita, Rosaura had Nicolasa hex Salvador so that he wouldn't be able to respond to other women." Et cetera.

It was too much for me. The day after I arrived in Ajoya, I saddled Hormiga again and rode across the river and the hills to Las Chicuras, to visit the family of little Goyo. But I was still upset.

"It's completely unjustified the way people have been accusing Nicolasa!" I confided to Goyo's mother, Jesús.

"Is it?" said Jesús challengingly.

"Don't tell me you think she's a witch too!" I cried.

Chuy laughed. "I really don't know," she said. "But in any case Nicolasa's brought it on herself."

"The way she talks, you mean?"

"Exactly!" replied Chuy. "Why, do you realize she's threatened to hex our whole family to death! Whether she meant it, who knows? But she said it, sure enough." Chuy lit a brown cigarette in the coals. "You see, her son, Davíd, and an uncle I used to have named Lino, got into a fight over a girl they both liked. This was about twelve years ago when they were both young men. Well, a few days after they had been fighting, Lino got drunk. My uncle used to drink quite a bit. Well, this day Lino was walking up the alley past the house of María Vega, and he simply dropped dead! Somebody remembered that Lino and Davíd had had a fight, and they decided that Nicolasa had probably hexed Lino. So a group of people went to Nicolasa's casa on the loma, and asked her 'Is it true that you hexed Lino to death?' –'Damned right!' screamed Nicolasa. 'And I won't stop until I've killed off every last relative he's got!' And that," concluded Chuy, "includes me and my children!"

"But surely that was just something she screamed out in anger because they accused her," I suggested.

"Maybe," replied Chuy. "But there are things Nicolasa has done that I can't explain. Like the time she changed into an owl That was several years before Lino died, when Remedios and I were just recently married and we lived in Saus. A friend of Remedios named Santiago was visiting us, and just at dusk they spotted a lechusa (barn owl that had landed in the closest tree. uantiago, as a joke, cried out at the lechusa, 'Mire! Eso es la. Nicolasa, hija de la chingada! ¿Porque vino pa'ca?' (Look! There’s Nicolasa, daughter of a bitch! Why did you come here?) The lechusa flew away, and that was that. Well, the next day Remedios had to go to Ajoya, and he decided to stop by at the house of my grandmother next to Nicolasa's casa there on the loma. As he was passing Nicolasa's house, who should step out but Nicolasa. She took one look at Remedios, and screamed, '¡¿Que hubo, cabrón?! ¡Hijo de la chingada! Porque me maltrataba ayer?' (What say, bastard! Son of a bitch! Why did you speak evil to me yesterday?) Well, I'm telling you, Remedios just about died!" Chuy scratched her head. "So who knows if Nicolasa is a witch or not?" she said. "All I know is what people say."

NOR A DROP TO DRINK

When I first began my sojourn in the barrancas of the Sierra Madre, I had no intention of trying to "modernize" the villages in any way, other than be providing some small medical assistance to those who were visibly in need. It seemed to me presumptuous
– and it still does – for an American to assume that radical changes from the "primitive village-life" in the direction of "modern civilization" should necessarily be changes for the better – especially when, for all our modern know-how, we still do not know how to live in harmony with our neighbors, with our families, or with ourselves – at least if our delinquency, divorce, mental illness, drug addiction and suicide statistics are correct. I came to learn from the villagers, not to show them how to live!

As I became immersed in the village life, however, I began to run into dilemmas in restraining my endeavors to "some small medical assistance." In Ajoya, for example, a large amount of the illness and death, especially of children, arises because the people bring their drinking water from the same river near which they go to defecate. True, I could dole out medicine for hundreds of cases of dysentery, and I have done so; most of the children have gotten well until the next time. True, I could encourage the people to boil all their drinking water, and I have done so, with the result that one family in thirty has begun to boil its water. But clearly the only significant way to combat the severe problem of dysentery in Ajoya would be to radically modify the time-honored and picturesque tradition of bringing water from the river. A system of pure drinking water in Ajoya could do more toward diminishing sickness in that village than I could do with all my little pills in a lifetime.

When my friend Fidel Millán, Ajoya's fat and parasitic bartender, came to me one day last Spring to tell me that a "Comite para la Introducción del Agua Potable" (Committee for the Introducción of Good Drinking Water) had been formed, and was asking my assistance, I was delighted. I never dreamed what I was getting into.

While pure drinking water would be a benefit to every family in the village, rich or poor, it was "los ricos" who were the most eager to establish it, not so much because the water would be pure, but because it would be piped in. The water needs of "los ricos" are greater; they must irrigate their fruit trees, water their livestock, and put down the dust in their spacious courtyards. To supplement the water which their wives and children haul up from the river they must hire carriers at 50 centavos (4¢) per load.

A group of the wealthy landholders, led by Jesús Manjarréz and José Celís, had therefore formed the above mentioned committee, and contacted a federal agency established to improve water systems in towns all over México. The government agreed to send engineers to put in a deep well, complete with pumping station and water lines, if the village would raise the first 15,000 pesos and provide the necessary local materials and unskilled labor required.

15,000 pesos (about $1,200.00) may not seem like much in a village with over 700 inhabitants, especially when you consider that in Ajoya, the ten wealthiest persons own, among them, somewhere in the neighborhood of 5000 head of cattle, any fifteen of which, when fattened, could easily bring in the required 15,000 pesos to get the pure water project underway. (A good cow is worth between 1000 and 1500 pesos.) Apart from the cattle, there is also to be considered the profit these same persons make on the harvests from their enormous bottomland terrains, or from the corn which they buy from the poorer villagers, and resell six months later at 1500 profit. It is these same wealthy persons who are most eager to have water piped into their homes and who formed and belong to the Committee for the Introducción of Good Water. Yet in spite of all this, what a discouraging battle it has been to try to raise those 15,000 pesos! I could have gone back to the U.S.A., got a job digging gooseberries, and have earned the blinking money in half the time and with half the sweat that I have expended trying to raise the funds in Ajoya.

The whole story is far too long, and too painful, for me to relate. I can touch only on the highlights. My major efforts have been in two areas: first, to convince the rich to contribute in proportion to their capacity; and second, to convince the campesinos to cooperate.

I discovered that my idea, that each householder contribute according to his capacity was revolutionary in Ajoya. The members of the Committee had automatically decided to raise the 15,000 pesos by demanding 150 pesos from each of the 100 or so householders in Ajoya. They completely ignored the fact that although there may be a small percentage of the householders in Ajoya, (themselves included) who are well accustomed to blow two or three hundred pesos in a single night's borrachera (drinking spree), also there is another, not so small percentage of Ajoya's householders who are lucky if they see 150 pesos in the course of a year. The Committee's proposed extraction of 150 pesos from rich and poor alike was therefore not only unreasonable, but impossible: even the most skillful fingers cannot pick the pocket that is empty! But the ricos were bound to try. The Comité even instated Fidél Millán, the fat bar-keep, as its presidente (really as its con-man) because Fidel with his lazy good humor maintains a middle-of-the-road position between los ricos and the "campesinos" and could be sent from house to house to collect the money. Yet after three months Fidel had collected only 832 pesos (87.00).

The poor campesinos were skeptical of the program from the start, not because they didn’t want good water, but because they were suspicious of getting stung again by their enemies, the rich. As blind Ramón pointed out, "Three years ago ellos came around collecting money for improvements on the school building, so we tightened our belts and chipped in. That was the last we ever heard of our money. There still haven't been any improvements made, not one! And nobody seems to know where the money went. No sir, I'm not going to contribute one centavo more for the Agua Potable or anything else. . ."

Ramón's reaction was typical for the campesinos. Nevertheless, as I made my way from family to family, explaining the importance of pure drinking water to the health and even the lives of themselves and their children, pointing out how the incidence of dysentery goes up every time it rains and the river rises, the campesinos began to override their distrust and agree to cooperate, to the extent that they were able. Many stipulated that they would help only if I myself would keep tab on the money and follow the project through. If it was left to los ricos, they wanted nothing to do with it.

But it was clear that even with all the campesinos cooperating, the majority of the money still would have to come from the minority of the people, the rich. I sat down with Fidel, and we made a list of all the members of the community who should be able to contribute at least 1000 pesos without hurting. The list numbered twelve for certain, eighteen as a maximum. Then I made a proposal: if there were nine persons in the village who would contribute 1000 pesos toward the Agua Potable, I would match them with 1000 pesos of my own money (really money donated for my México project) to complete 10,000 pesos. The remaining 5000 pesos we would try to raise from the poorer members of the village.

At first I thought it was really going to work. Although the first village meeting I tried to organize proved a total flop (everyone said he would come and then almost no one showed up) I made the rounds to every house in Ajoya, and succeeded in getting pledges from about half the families, amounting to over 3000 pesos. For the 1000 peso pledges from los ricos Jesús Vega and Raúl Padilla were the first I visited, and each agreed that, "If nine other persons contribute 1000 pesos, I'll do the same." I was delighted. But the rest of los ricos gave me a song and dance about how hard pressed they were, how many of their cattle had died, how many debts they had to pay, etc. I talked myself blue trying to convince them, but to no avail. Jesús Padilla, for example, who had been perfectly content to have the poorest campesino pay 150 pesos, the same amount as himself, was suddenly upset that he should be asked to contribute as much as Jesús Vega, who is twice as wealthy as he is. Marcelo Manjarréz, who three years ago handed over 14,000 pesos to a troupe of gypsies for a portable movie show, complete with generator (which he could never make work) regretted that he could not possibly afford more for the purified water than the 150 pesos originally agreed upon. After three visits, I talked him up to 200. The rest of los ricos all listened to me sympathetically, said they sincerely wished they were able to help out more, but regretted that they were unable to afford it.

Early in July, at the commencement of the rainy season, the Nuevo Centro de Población in Ajoya held a meeting at which I was given a chance to talk on the Agua Potable. I re-emphasized the urgency, from a health standpoint, of having good drinking water, and suggested that we reconvene at the close of the rainy season; when, with the harvests ripening and the cattle fattened, people should be in the best position to contribute generously to the project. I encouraged each householder not to worry about whether he was giving more than somebody else, but to give the maximum he was able toward the project, which might save the lives of his own and the other children of the village. My little speech was greeted with hearty applause, and we set the last days in October as the time for the next meeting.

Shortly before the October meeting, when I had returned to Ajoya from my first vaccinating expedition, I went to make plans with Jesús (Chuy) Manjarréz, who is the official treasurer and effective leader of both the Nuevo Centro de Población and the Comite para la Introducción de Agua Potable. I suggested that the fairest way to collect money for the water project would be to ask each householder to contribute a small percentage – somewhere between 0.1 and 0.2 percent – of his property value, principally the value of his cattle.

Chuy agreed, but said it would be very difficult to get the wealthier cattle owners to admit that they possess as many cattle as they have. He pointed out that, in order to avoid the taxes on their cattle, many of the big cattlemen report only a small fraction of the cattle which they own, and pay handsome bribes to deter investigation. "For example, Marcelo Manjarréz," said Chuy, "reported in the last census that he had only fifteen head of cattle, while in truth he has closer to six hundred. Most of the other cattlemen did likewise. I believe I'm the only one who told the truth."

"How many head did you say you had?" I asked.

"Roughly two hundred head," said Chuy, pleased with his honesty.

I did not refute him, although only a few days before, little Goyo's brother, Martín, who was working as vecerero for Jesús Manjarréz in La Mesa, had told me that Jesús has six hundred head of cattle at the very least.

Jesús Manjarréz told me that he would help me present my plan for proportional contribution at the forthcoming meeting. In the meantime I paid calls on a number of the other ricos to try to win them over in advance.

First I went to see Jesús (Chuy) Vega, by far the wealthiest man in Ajoya, owning four houses, four huge ranches, and well over a thousand head of cattle. According to my plan, Chuy Vega would be asked to make the largest contribution, and I thought that if I could convince him to pay his share, others would more willingly follow suit.

"An excellent plan!" cried Chuy Vega. when I had explained it. "I'm behind you all the way, Davíd."

"Wonderful!" I said. "Could I ask you how many head of cattle you have?"

Chuy chuckled and said, "Well, you know how it is, Davíd. When I'm drunk I say I've got 5000 and when I'm sober I say I've got five."

I chuckled with him, and replied, "They say that drunkards and children always tell the truth. I'll put you down for five thousand."

"0h no you don't!" cried Chuy, waving his fat hand.

"Then how many cattle do you really have?" I asked him.

Chuy Vega grew sober. "To tell you the honest truth, Davíd," he said, "I've sold a lot of my cattle and I've had a lot of them die. Right now I've only got about eighty little cattle."

"Now how about telling me the truth," I suggested.

Chuy frowned. "That's the very truth, Davíd. I swear it. Eighty head. A hundred at the very most!"

"You won't object if I check with your cowboys, will you?" I asked.

Chuy waved his fat hands. "Come now, Davíd – you don't have to do that! I'll tell you what. You can put me down for two hundred head. It's more than I have, but because I want to help bring about the agua potable . . ."

"Two hundred head for each of your four ranchos?" I suggested.

"Oh no!" cried Chuy. He shook his head and laughed. "You're a hard man, Davíd," he said.

My next stop was at the home of Tomás Lomas, the father of Dimas. Apart from talking to Tomás about my plan for the Agua Potable, I wanted to see if he could lend me two mules for my next vaccinating trip into the barrancas. Tomás greeted me energetically, agreed to have two mules ready and waiting for me the following Thursday (he didn't), and also said he would cooperate whole-heartedly with my plan for the water. I explained to him the difficulty I had been having in getting people to admit the number of cattle they possessed.

"How many did Chuy Vega say he had?" asked Tomás.

"Two hundred," I replied.

Tomás was outraged. "What!" he cried. "Why Chuy Vega has close to three thousand head!"

"And how many would you say you have?" I asked him.

Tomás shrugged his broad shoulders. "I'm just a small rancher, myself," he said. "I've got some thirty head of cattle, no more."

"I've seen at least double that number with your brand ranging in the uplands," I said.

Tomás squinted his eyes and looked hard at me. "What uplands? Where?" he demanded.

"In the Arroyo de Verano near the river," I said.

Tomás looked over to his son, Samuel, who nodded back that it was so. "Very well," said Tomás. "You can put me down for sixty head."

"I happen to know that you have better than two hundred head," I said gently.

Tomás sprang out of his seat. "Whoever told you that told a lie!" he cried. I did not argue with him.

The meeting of the Nuevo Centro de Poblaci6n was scheduled to begin at noon on a Sunday late in October, in the village salón (public meeting hall). By one o'clock there was still. no one there, and I went to search for Jesús Manjarréz. I found him drinking beer in the tienda of José Celís.

"Is the meeting going to take place?" I asked him.

"It should begin any moment now," said Chuy, slightly drunk.

I had just stepped out into the street again when María, the stout school mistress, came hurrying up to me.

"Come quickly to the house of my sister, Teresa," she said.

"Is Teresa bad again?" I asked.*

"No," said María. "It's her baby. Hurry!"

"What's wrong with the baby?" I asked as we strode along.

"I don't know," gasped María. "It's susto, I think. It scares me." (Susto – literally "fright" or "shock" – is a condition common in infants, thought to be caused by evil spirits.)

We arrived at the ill-kept casa of Teresa and found the mother hovering over her seven-month-old child. I was appalled. The youngster could not have weighed more than fifteen pounds. His face was lean and drawn, making it look older and more human than it was. His shrunken belly sank beneath his protruding rib cage, and his arms and legs were skeletal, emaciated in extreme. All this, however, was not the mother's immediate concern. The baby looked dead. He was still breathing faintly and had a weak pulse, but his big eyes stared fixedly ahead of him, wide open. I moved my hand in front of them and they did not move, or blink. Teresa began to weep.

"It frightens me!" said María with a shudder.

"What do you feed him?" I asked Teresa.

She told me, whimpering, that from the day the baby had been born she had fed it only cornmeal and water, and sometimes rice, because the other women had told her that since she had asthma, it would be bad to breast feed the baby. Now Teresa's breasts were dry.

"Why didn't you ask me for powdered or canned milk?" I asked.

Teresa sobbed. "I was ashamed to ask you for any more help. You've already given so much medicine to me and my other children."

"The baby could have had cow's milk!" snapped María, suddenly angry. "Four months ago I offered Pedro, my sister's husband the use of a cow I had in Agüines, but he never got around to bringing it. And he never buys milk, either. When Pedro gets his hand on a few pesos he gets drunk! Poor Teresa, sick as she always is..."

Teresa lit a match to a piece of blessed palm and sprinkled the ashes into the baby's mouth. Then she passed a small, plastic-enclosed figure of San Martín de Porres back and forth over the staring infant, while she and María said in unison:

"En el nombre de la Santísima Trinidád,
En el nombre de Jesucristo, el Hijo de Dios,
En el nombre de María, Reina del Cielo,
En el nombre de José, Patrón de la Iglesia Universál,
Beato Martín cura a mi hijito
Para el honor y gloria de Dios
Y la salvación de las almas."

(In the name of the Holy Trinity,
In the name of Jesus Christ, the Son of God,
In the name of María, Queen of Heaven,
In the name of José, Master of the Universal Church,
Blessed Martín, cure my little son
For the honor and glory of God
And the salvation of the souls.)

"Ohhh!" cried Teresa. She caught hold of my arm. "He's not going to die, is he? Tell me he's not going to die!"

"I don't know," I said gently. I had never seen a child in this state before.

María. slapped the child gently, and murmured, "En el nombre del Santo Niño de Atache!" Still the baby stared ahead, zombie-like. María snatched up a bottle of agua de carmín and poured a half-teaspoonful of the bright red fluid into the child's mouth. The baby neither spat it out nor swallowed. María slapped it again. The baby continued to stare straight ahead with frozen eyes.

"I can't stand it! I can't stand it!" wailed Teresa, and ran from the dark room.

"What's wrong with the baby?" asked María, terrified. "Is it susto?"

"The child is starved, that's one thing for certain," I said sadly. "Other than that I can't say."

Teresa returned and stood, sobbing softly, in the doorway, afraid to look at her child again. María covered her face and began to weep also.

Then a strange thing happened. An overwhelming feeling of sorrow and concern came over me. I reached out and put my hand on the child's forehead, looked intently into its staring eyes, and willed with all the force I could muster for the child to come back out of its strange, comatose trance. While I still had my hand on his forehead, the child's eyes began visibly to soften, to melt, almost. They blinked, and began to move. Whether this was due to the warmth of my hand, to some psychic force I do not understand, or mere coincidence, I cannot say. In any case, the child wakened, as out of hypnosis. It was uncanny!

"Look, Teresa!" cried María. "His eyes have come normal again. I think he's all right."

Teresa hurried in to peer at her emaciated baby. The child coughed and sputtered and began feebly to move its arms and legs. "Thank God!" sighed Teresa. "What should I give him?"

"Milk!" I said. "I'll bring a few cans of baby formula right away."

When I returned with the milk, Teresa was standing over the baby holding an empty tablespoon in her hand.

"What did you give him?" I asked.

"A purgative of cooking oil," she said: I shuddered. "Did I do wrong?" she asked anxiously.

I shook my head. "Just don't give him any more of anything without asking me," I said. Teresa nodded. I gave her instructions on how to prepare the milk, saw that she did it right, and watched her begin to feed the child.

"I'll come back after the meeting," I said, leaving.

She followed me to the doorway. "Will he be all right now?" she asked fearfully.

I answered her in her own idiom. "Si Dios quiere." (If God wills.)

It was now past two o'clock, and the meeting had still not begun. I found Jesús Manjarréz in his home, stone drunk.

"What about the meeting?" I asked.

"I can't." said Chuy simply. "I can't even walk!" He laughed