LIFE WITH LIFE
By Carol Miller
Extract from TRAINING JUAN DOMINGO: MEXICO AND ME
PART THREE: Chapter XXVI: Pete
Despite what might have appeared to be good omens and auspicious beginnings, advertising was not for me. In time, I left Lalo Sanchez’ agency and went to work for a public relations firm, more to my liking, and with this schooling I had a number of undertakings at my disposal. The most interesting was promoting the racetrack for English language patrons, with the additional benefit of finally obtaining those elusive working papers. I was also able to get a job with the third of the magazines I had purchased so long ago, but instead of writing for author-historian Anita Brenner’s “Mexico This Month” I was condemned to selling advertising.
For several years I wrote travel for the public relations office of an international airline and its Mexican division, whose routes were presumably made more enticing by the articles we syndicated to hundreds of newspaper and magazine travel sections in Canada and the U.S. My favorite was written as a result of coming into the possession of a Mexican hairless Xoloizcuintle dog, and for many years I exhibited my bitch, Painani, and bred pups whose descendents are still prominent today, many of them wandering in the gardens at the Dolores Olmedo museum. The newspaper article, was called, somewhat embarrassingly, “The Original Mexican Hot Dog”. This handsome breed dates from Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, was known for the curative powers associated with its naturally high body temperature-- for example, when taken into bed, as a cure for rheumatism-- and was also a delectable supper if need be. Not everyone appreciated the pun, but it got a lot of coverage.
Yet when a husband and wife team in the textile business decided to convert one of their workshop buildings into a crafts market, in the rustic San Angel district of the city, this indeed was an innovation. The tianguis, or weekly gathering of craft producers who for one day would offer their own wares, without an intermediary, was only a variation of the native public market, in other parts of the world called a “fair” or a “bazaar”, and it caused a sensation. Five original partners initiated the Bazaar Sábado, and I was hired to promote it. The rest is history. It is still, even today, the epitome of crafts markets and has been emulated all over the world.
In those days, during the late fifties and early sixties, my favorite lair was the Foreign Press Club, actually the Foreign Correspondents’ Association, to me a setting of the utmost worldliness. Originally the club was tucked into a corner of the old Hotel Del Prado (which no longer exists, since it collapsed during the 1985 earthquake and more recently has been replaced with what was first the “Sheraton Centro Histórico” and is now a Hilton) but later it moved to the now-defunct but then glamorous Hotel Reforma, on the mezzanine where the landmark Ciro’s nightclub had been. It was a good, central location for its time, neither too far downtown nor stuck inside the newspaper district, but much nearer a neighborhood that came to be known as the Pink Zone –where a burgeoning restaurant, boutique, nightclub, gallery, decorator, antiques and hotel zone grew up around my original home, the Hotel Geneve.
The whole section had become quite fashionable, and it was both sleek and pretty. A lot of modern buildings had pushed their way between the Frenchified or Greek Revival mansions dating from the days of Porfirio Diaz, early in the Twentieth Century, and all of it strove toward “charm” (better evolved than manufactured) but Mexico had been urgently in need of a little international gloss. The time was right.
The Press Club, for the most part, attracted mainly the stringers, photographers and correspondents assigned to a jurisdiction known as “Mexico-Caribbean”. Associated Press, United Press, Reuters, France-Press and Time-Life, principally, maintained offices in Mexico City. Most of the other correspondents were resident representatives and worked from their homes. Some had been in Mexico for a number of years, others came and went, but any of them could be recalled and replaced on short notice. Often they spoke little or no Spanish. Their credentials provided an entrée to government press offices but they were customarily victims of the “official line”, subject to confirmation from the American Embassy. Their key source of investigation, the real opportunity to research, verify or question a story or a press release, was the Press Club, and the consensus of their cohorts.
This was certainly a glittering world for a mere travel writer, among burly, hard-drinking men just in from Nicaragua or Santo Domingo or a news break in Guatemala, or off to lunch with the Presidential Press Secretary, or recently returned from a trip “home”and a meeting with “my people” in Washington, Chicago, New York or Los Angeles.
One of the most colorful, and persistently present, of these characters was a little man the others called “the limey gnome”. He was Peter Anderson, a photographer for the Black Star agency assigned to Time-Life, a tiny man whose face and neck were always bright red, and whose bald head gleamed like a lantern, framed by a galloon of baby-fine white fringe. His bright blue eyes, encased in crinkles and wrinkles, often shone with malicious humor but more often they blazed. Of the seven famous sins, his choice was wrath.
Pete was born in London. His mother had been, or so he said, a music hall star. He certainly had the gift of song-and-dance, a Cockney or a West End or a BBC accent, and a talent, shrewd and intuitive, for satire. He never mentioned his father.
He rarely had time. He normally appeared, drenched in perspiration, dragging his jacket and his camera bags, dust all over his desert boots, to curl up with a drink and a scathing denunciation of everything that had crossed his path that day: the traffic, his assignment, his bureau chief, his editor in New York, the weather, the Telex, the bartender and the people present. He might, at that point, have pulled a tool kit from his bag in order to take apart one of his four Nikon cameras, down to the last screw and bolt, to reassemble it again before the mystified eyes of at least one spectator. I found him not only incredibly dexterous but amusing as well.
“What could you find amusing? You’re nothing but a third-rate hack who draws pretty pictures for nice people.” Then, really very pleased with himself, he would turn back to his drink or to a diatribe against the other correspondents. “You lushes are all a bunch of puppets. You take that government hogwash at face value. You’re free loaders. You think sitting through a State of the Union address is a day’s work.”
Pete had a gentler side, I discovered in time. He loved cats, Bach and films. That much we had in common. The Angry Young Men were coming into vogue and we became an “item” at the opening of all the North-of-England films, with new actors like Alan Bates, Albert Finney, Tom Courteney and Lawrence Harvey. Pete always made me pay my own way, of course, and often insisted I pay his as well because he had bought me a drink at the Press Club. Still, the primary basis for our relationship, not unlike my bond with Juan Domingo, was sparring.
Chapter XXVII: Life With LIFE
It was just after Kennedy’s visit to Mexico in early 1962. Jack, it seemed, was more popular than any movie star. The country was enamored of his every word so the euphoria endured, along with the bunting, for quite some time. Jackie had spoken to the people in halting Spanish and they went wild. The whole junket had been an unqualified success, with the promise of bilateral trade agreements, new loans and a more equitable border policy.
We were all sitting in the bar at the Maria Isabel Hotel, feeling rather smug. I had been talking with the Presidential Press Officer and two Mexican reporters when Pete danced around the tables and through a throng to lean over my chair and whisper that a senior editor of LIFE, from the Miami office and assigned to the Kennedy junket, wanted to speak with me immediately.
“Whatever for?” I asked.
“He wants you to come to work for us,” said Pete, quite flushed.
“A third-rate hack writer? You’ve got to be kidding.”
“Stop it,” he said. “I’m dead serious. And he wants to see you now because he’s leaving at midnight for Panama.”
“You really think I’m going to fall for it, don’t you? Leave me alone, I’m busy.”
“Look,” he said, “I’m sorry for every mean thing I ever said to you. We need you. The company has decided to close the Time bureau and turn it into a LIFE office, with a Time stringer. We need a good writer, a hard worker, a woman preferably, and bilingual. The pay is good and you’re assigned directly to me.”
“I can’t think of anything more dreary,” I replied. “I’d have to listen to you all day, and hear your complaints, and your telling me I have no discipline, that I write badly and that I see only the surface. Go away.”
“I recommended you personally,” he confessed. “You’re ideal for the job.”
“Why?”
“Because you have a positive view, which is what the magazine wants. Because you’re bright and have original ideas. I’m a bitter old man, who’s been kicked around all his life, but you have a fresh view and a great style. And you really know Spanish, which gives us a tremendous edge.”
“Put it in writing.”
With this he dragged me through the crowd to sit opposite a lean, tall man with a hard face and piercing eyes. “I’m sure this is all a mistake,” I apologized. “Pete insists you want to chat but I think you have to catch a plane.”
Within ten minutes I had been hired, briefed and toasted. The tall, lean man left and I only saw him again years later, when he returned to Mexico to assign me to a story on Juana Castro, who we chased all over the city.
Chapter XXVIII: The Hack
Pete was more docile after his capitulation in the Maria Isabel bar. We were able to establish a viable team. Many of our stories were assigned by New York, others we originated in Mexico. We had few limitations. The piece should have a positive angle, above all, and illustrate Mexico’s striving upward, toward internal reform and a new prominence on the world scene. We should keep clear of the government line, however, and under no circumstances accept gifts or privileges. This marked us as madmen or aliens but that was how it had to be.
I gave up my travel writing and all my promotional clients, and photography as well. The photographer was Pete. I just tagged along, making notes, captioning his pictures, doing the interviews and the research, and often carrying his camera bags in the bargain. “Keep in mind at all times,” he would say, “that LIFE is a picture magazine. The photographer is king. The hacks do the captions and carry the bags.”
Pete worked with as many as four cameras on a major story. We tried to devise a system, like “four frames on Nikon II”, but I know enough about photography: the picture is a precious instant, there and gone. No one can take the pictures and still call out the frames, the choice of camera or type of film. I just had to keep my wits and a sharp lookout, because out of three or four rolls there might be only one really great shot; and the good shots were more than pride. They might make the cover.
So I followed Pete like a Cocker Spaniel, with my nose at his shoulder, and stepped out of his way when he jumped back a pace, but it was the only way to try to list the takes and their frames, and mark the rolls, and consign them to the proper bag and provide him with fresh film when one of the cameras was out. I tried to keep a straw hat close by to protect his bald head, or a jug of water and a damp cloth to save him from sunstroke, or a little food at the end of the day, when he was too exhausted to know he was hungry.
He said I was indispensable. How had he lived before he formed this team? But his antenna was always geared to my lapses. One day, covering a country fair and wine festival, and having arranged to meet at six in the morning, I appeared in the hotel lobby to find he had left me behind. Like the little pig, he had gone off an hour before, leaving the big, bad wolf stamping and snarling. Fifteen years later, when he was living in Australia or Hawaii or New York or one of the other places he moved, he mailed me a photograph of the scene, “so you can see how ghastly you look when you’re angry.” He had been hiding the whole time, just waiting to immortalize my reaction.
Our assignments were neither dazzling nor dangerous, for the most part, yet we managed to turn each one into a private celebration. After all, each was an experience, or a discovery. I envied the people who always managed to be in a spot when a big story broke, people for whom volcanoes erupted, revolutions broke out and governments toppled. To hear the talk at the Press Club each of the correspondents was such a person. Neither Pete nor I had ever been kidnapped, or declared persona non grata or been spirited out of a city in the dark of night. We compensated for our pitifully underprivileged condition by making the most of our very modest stories. We had faced certain death, we said, when a crowd rioted at a cattle fair, and we were almost trampled by the stampeding animals. Or when a truck nearly hurtled us into a deep canyon as we covered a day in the life of a transcontinental driver. Or when our boat capsized in a jungle river, that was crawling, we said, with ravenous crocodiles and venomous serpents.
On one assignment, actually an international newsbreak and very well covered, we spent at least two weeks in Puerto Vallarta, documenting the filming of “The Night of the Iguana”. This was hardly life threatening, but the new resort was blossoming under the limelight, there were very rowdy parties among the cast and crew, and Elizabeth Taylor, who bought a house and dazzled the crowd with her tanned beauty, was definitely the outstanding attraction, though she had no part in the film. The rest of the company diminished beside her: Richard Burton, who discovered tequila, Ava Gardner who already knew it well, Sue Lyon, Deborah Kerr. John Huston, who directed, had brought along his daughter, Angelica, to decorate the beach house he had just purchased up the coast. The legendary Mexican cinematographer, Gabriel Figueroa, fell in love with Ava Gardner and exhausted himself working assiduously on every take. Producer Ray Stark and his legman, Ernie Anderson, were hard pressed to keep order, mostly because the reporters, correspondents and camp followers were unconditionally enraptured with Liz. There she was, the most notable camp follower of them all, the color of a ripe chestnut with her eyes like distant planets in a night sky, her daughter Liza at her side. She was dressed in white Mexican cotton with a fringed turban around her dark hair, belting tequila on the set on the beach at Mismaloya.
We spent an entire month in the jungles of Campeche when the then-Agrarian Affairs Department decided to relocate the destitute farmers from a dust bowl in the north, by transporting them to “model”, that is prefabricated, communities in a climate, culture and geography completely alien to everything they had ever known. At first it seemed an idealistic sort of solution, (I had yet to discover the “territorial imperative”, you see) but nearly three generations later it is only the offspring of those original settlers who have managed to adapt. Even so, they still call their community after the northern state they left behind.
By contrast we got to do a very showy cover story on the idyllic home life of a handsome South American pop singer and his lovely actress wife, their two adorable children and their lavish San Angel home. They divorced later, but it still made a good story.
We finally got a political story when we were invited to join one leg of Gustavo Diaz Ordaz’ presidential campaign, in Baja California, which produced another cover. The man had a quality about him, I must say. His regime was undermined by the jokes, in poor taste to be sure, about his presumably unpleasant appearance, but in person, at close range, it was easy to put aside the image of his features. His charm, his talent for oratory and polemic, and his forceful personality, made him attractive, even handsome. Our cover was beautiful: it showed him head on, his large mouth broken into a an enormous and rapturous smile, his eyes in the bright sunlight blazing behind his eyeglasses, with one arm triumphantly in the air, while the crowds cheered. I learned then that the crowds, mostly poor farmers, had been brought to the scene in open trucks and were given a torta or a couple of pesos, in exchange for the cheers. Then they were collected and trucked down to the next stop. It hardly mattered. The euphoria of the setting and the sweet smell of victory were everywhere, and I saw a man stretch his lungs to breathe in power. Power. Sheer, unending, willful power. There is no disease nor any drug quite like it, nor any addiction so all consuming.
In rapid succession we did a major story on a promising Mexican actress from a celebrated family, but shortly afterward she committed suicide. We covered a private rehabilitation center, where the mutilated and the crippled were given physical and occupational therapy and artificial limbs and were then shown how to use them. We did an important story on the Mexican Medical Center, for which I had to dress in intern’s green and surgical mask, and take my notes while watching, out of the corner of my eye, a pulsing heart, throbbing liver and lacerated flesh. The “boys” back at the Press Club loved it. “Who got sick first?” they asked.
We decided to do a really important in-depth study of the Mexican film industry and why, in the mid-sixties, it was floundering, after the golden years of the forties and fifties, when anything would sell and the pictures had somehow, in spite of fairly primitive technique, terrible sound and lighting, bad acting and sloppy direction, managed to reveal the pulse and the breath of life in Mexico. We interviewed anyone who would have us: bankers, actors, directors, producers, technicians, projectionists, the candy salesmen, even the public. They all said the same thing. The old formula was no longer appealing. The set pieces of the charros in the country villages or the society ladies in their Lomas mansions or the cabaret singer in the slums or the native of the hinterlands or the detective or the vampire or the gigolo or the good-hearted prostitute, were all used up. What had made those films good in the first place? According to the consensus, the old players, many of them now dead, had had a kind of magic, that had never found its echo in the succeeding generation. And filmmakers in other countries were telling the stories better now. And distribution was becoming a problem. The foreign companies were buying or building new houses, to which the Mexican production companies had scant access. The Mexican film industry had to wait until the nineties, and the advent of a new cinema from Spain, to jump-start its production, as well as its following.
One day I was sitting in the office, all alone and feeling sorry for myself. It was my birthday but no one had remembered. Everyone was out to lunch and while I had said I would hold the fort, I was really pouting. Then the Telex started tapping. I planned to ignore it. What if no one had been here? Well, maybe just a glance. It might be urgent.
The message was for me, as a matter of fact. An Eastern Air Lines flight bound for Mexico had lost an engine over New Orleans and the plane had dropped such a huge distance and so suddenly that a number of passengers had been thrown from their seats. A stewardess had also been injured. Only the pilot’s quick thinking and clever handling had saved the plane and the passengers, who should be arriving in about an hour’s time at the Mexico City airport. I was to interview them for their reaction.
The cable was not signed “LIFE-Span” (LIFE en Español) but rather “Domestic”, which meant the U.S. edition, a great triumph for a foreign stringer. Still, it was late, hardly enough time to reach the airport. Maybe, I thought, I should wait until morning, and request a passenger list so I could follow the people to their respective hotels. On the other hand, that would have been the worst kind of journalism. I also had nothing better to do which is not a reason at all, only a lack of motivation. And anyway, if I waited until morning I would have lost the passengers’ initial excitement, the freshness of their impressions, the sheer immediacy of what had been a terrifying predicament.
I roused myself, shook off my lethargy and wrestled the mid-afternoon traffic. When I finally reached the airport the plane was on the ground and the passengers had long since departed for their hotels. It took another half hour to find someone authorized to release a passenger list. And another hour to phone the most likely hotels to see if the passengers were registered.
As it happened, the timing was perfect. I found most of the people I was looking for, in their rooms resting or dressing for dinner. By midnight I had a really great story and was back at the Telex in the office, filing. My piece appeared in every LIFE edition, all over the world, with a by-line. I think I never had such a marvelous birthday.
Chapter XXIX: Fluff
“We need a different kind of a story,” said Pete one day. “Something showy, purely photographic.” I think he was jealous of my by-line on the Eastern Air Lines piece.
“I met a hat designer,” I said. “She calls herself ‘Helen’ and someone told me she does really goofy creations in architectural shapes.”
When we phoned Maria Elena Vera, alias Helen, she was so pleased with the idea of a LIFE story that she offered to enlist Silvia Pinal, the actress, to pose for us. “She’s one of my best customers. She can model the hats.”
A number of the hats were extravagant, but conventional. The really intriguing ones had been inspired in the designs of architect Felix Candela, a relative of Helen’s and one of the pioneers in the use of pre-stressed concrete, to achieve outrageous shapes, especially with his churches.
We made the rounds of the city with our architectural hats, using the buildings themselves as backgrounds, then set up a studio session with Silvia, who was ill, though trooper that she is, she posed anyway. With her make-up she looked radiant, but later she collapsed, and had to be taken to the hospital.
We rarely worked fashion stories, which usually require highly specialized photography. When we proposed a spread on the work of a Mexican designer, Esteban Mayo, who had devised a series of outfits inspired in native costumes, we really had no hope of approval for the idea. But when approval came, the cable specified that a specialized photographer would be arriving from New York to work with me. Pete was furious. He went home to clean his cameras while I drove to the airport to pick up the invading photographer. It was refreshing, I must say, to work with someone who treated me like a professional and who carried his own camera bags. When I offered to help him he was embarrassed. We shot the clothes on location, at the Pyramids of Teotihuacan, in the Zócalo, in the ruin of the Augustinian monastery of Acolman, in the newly opened Museum of Anthropology and at the Shrine of Guadalupe, among others. The whole thing was a great hit.
When we received approval on Pete’s next suggestion, he may have wished otherwise. We had decided to do a take-out on the “alpinists” of Mexico, a surprisingly diverse group, that regularly climbed Popocatepetl, the sentinel volcano that guards the Valley of Mexico and which back then was quietly minding its own business. Since then it has come to life and regularly puffs its smoke and shakes or rumbles, but in those days it was dormant. When Pete floundered, gasping like a fish out of water, at fourteen thousand feet, I took the camera myself and went on. I got a shot of the master himself in a Norwegian sweater, pick in hand, red as a beet. It appeared in the magazine.
Then we managed an exclusive interview with Senator Jacob Javits for LIFE’s New York edition, while he expounded his plan for the economic revival of Latin America. Amazing, that after all these years people are still trying.
After that we covered the enchanting ceremony of the Blessing of the Animals, that takes place every January 17, on the day of Saint Anthony Abbot. The neighborhood children wash and primp their pets –horses, dogs, donkeys, snakes, hamsters, mice, owls, hawks, guppies, parrots, macaws, canaries, cats, goldfish—and with ribbons and bows, streamers and lace, bring them into the courtyard of the Convent of Churubusco at precisely four in the afternoon, to be blessed by the local priest, obviously a Franciscan. Amazingly enough, the animals are all very stoic and placid: no skirmishes, no grumbling. With this one we hit both LIFE-Spanish and LIFE International.
One of our most popular stories occurred by chance. Farmers outside the Federal District, while plowing a field, literally stumbled on a huge stone figure that turned out to be a fourteenth or fifteenth century version, maybe earlier, of Tlaloc, the Rain God. The Anthropology Department went into action and arranged a flat-bed trailer to bring the gigantic statue into Mexico City. The idea was to plant it upright at the entrance to the brand new Anthropology Museum, soon to be dedicated by President Adolfo Lopez Mateos before he left office in late 1964. And there it remains, to this day. We covered the whole journey, which was accompanied by ecstatic fieldworkers and rapturous onlookers along the entire route, and the dramatic entrance of the Rain God into Mexico City. As might be expected, it poured that day.
Then Pete attached a motor to his shutter for a spread on Jai Alai, that fleet and hardy Basque ballgame. The result was wonderful, seen as a ballet, four frames a second, really an innovative approach in its day, while the players leaped up the baseboard or accomplished pliées in mid-air. It was fluff but it ran three pages.
Not all the stories were our own inspiration. We often received assignments as well, as for a hemisphere-wide survey on Latin America’s most beautiful women. Or a miracle seed that produces a larger and better yield of corn. Or a new medication for the treatment of amoebic dysentery. This one was a set-up but I learned a lot about the disease.
Our own stories varied. We did one on a man, one of the most handsome I had ever seen, who trained wild animals for the movies. With this one I got to meet “Major”, a toothless old lion.
One take-out had us cruising Chapultepec Park at five in the morning, stalking the boxer in training, the actor learning his lines, the ballet dancer, the yoga classes, poetry groups, lovers, joggers long before fitness had come into fashion. There were people rowing boats on the lake or deep in meditation or skipping rope or walking their dogs or hanging upside down like bats from the trees. There were the equestrians, the cyclists, the kids playing hooky. Any of these things could have been happening in any metropolitan park anywhere in the world, but somehow it looked Mexican enough to do the job, possibly because we aimed for local backgrounds, like venerable Chapultepec Castle on its hill, once home to the Emperor Maximilian and his wife Carlota and now the National Museum of History; or the then-brand new Museum of Modern Art.
We decided to do a Christmas story on the making and merchandising, as well as the breaking and ransacking, of the piñata. We discovered a collection of lost paintings, attributed to Diego Rivera, that had disappeared when the lady who posed for them returned to her native Brazil. When Charles de Gaulle visited Mexico we made the cover again of the domestic edition, with the crowds and the balloons and the bodyguards surrounding the general with then-President Lopez Mateos in an open car.
We covered an all-encompassing supermarket, the first of its kind in the country, the principle for which, according to the owner, had originated right here in Mexico, in the native markets, with their displays of fruits and vegetables, live animals and herbs, tools and furnishings, and everything else imaginable, under one roof. The owner said he was only returning to Mexico the merchandising concept that belonged there, and which he had simply adapted for the middle class.
Chapter XXX: Juana Castro
When Fidel Castro’s sister Juana “fled” to Mexico, we were assigned to find her, so that my original mentor, the senior editor from the Miami bureau, could interview her. We stalked her and we hounded her, and her family as well, and in the end we really did find her. He gave us no credit, however, when his story appeared in the magazine, disappointing actually because we invested a lot of ingenuity, as well as time and effort in the project.
We discovered, for example, a cousin, married to a Mexican, who lived not far from where I live now, in the Pedregal. I staked out the entrance to her house but since no one entered or left, for a long time, I found myself both bored and impatient. Then fate lent a hand. A shoeshine man had installed himself at the gate and the maid was bringing armloads of shoes to be polished and repaired. This gave me an idea. I snapped off the heel of my shoe, then told the shoeshine man I had had an accident that needed repairing. After that I limped to the gate while waiting for the maid to reappear. I explained my plight, and asked if she could be so kind as to permit me the brief use of a bathroom, as well as a telephone, just to make one insignificant call. (There were obviously no portable phones in those days.) I must have been very convincing. Or life in those days was less hazardous, and the maids less cautious.
Once inside the house it was easy enough to snoop, by feigning a fascination for European porcelain and Bohemian cut crystal. There was an abundance of both. And paintings of sunsets over tranquil seas, the only visible taste in art. The maid seemed pleased at my interest, as did the lady of the house, when she returned to find a stranger admiring her white satin bedspread. The lady was most gracious and even offered coffee and cookies, which I happily accepted. One thing was certain. Juana Castro was not a guest in her house.
We then tracked down the apartment occupied by Emma, Juana’s sister. From a neighbor’s roof and with the use of binoculars acquired during my racetrack days we made out fifteen suitcases in a rear bedroom, all with the initials J.C.R. –Juana Castro Ruz.
When we reported this to our mastermind editor, he insisted on approaching Emma personally, but she claimed Juana had already left the country. Our editor was getting nervous. One month had passed and every major publication in the world was on Juana’s trail.
Our editor ultimately made contact with Juana through an undisclosed intermediary. The interview took place in an automobile, parked near her hiding place. He found her, he told us, “friendly and articulate”. The point, of course, was to encourage her to speak badly of her brother, which she was already inclined to do, possibly with the encouragement of the CIA. Our editor managed a voluminous document, telling her story over the course of an entire week. Then, after transcribing his notes and translating them to English, he followed her to Rio de Janeiro for last-minute details requested by New York. The story was a great coup for LIFE. Our editor took all the credit for all the detective work but you and I know it would never have occurred to him to break the heel off his shoe.
Chapter XXXI: A Bright Day in November
We were on a junket in the state of Morelos one November day, touring the small towns where the Minister of Social Security was dedicating a number of health and social services centers, accompanied by the President and a whole entourage, five busloads in all, of government officials, press and hangers-on.
In every town the church bells were tolling, the flags were flying, the streets were festooned with garlands of tissue-paper cutouts and the balloons soared into the blue, blue sky.
I had gotten separated from Pete and was happily making the rounds on the arm of a friend, the owner of a newspaper chain, when we heard the pocket radio nearby, and then the murmurs, and someone said, “Just ignore it. It’s probably not true.” And someone else said, “But he’s been shot. Is he dead? Does this mean war?”
And then a man in a suit pushed through the crowd, shoving and poking his elbows and hurling people aside, until he stood near the President; we could see him whispering into the President’s ear and Lopez Mateos’ face went white. He recovered quickly. He was a professional, a man who knew what was expected of him.
I asked the man with me to explain. “I don’t understand,” he replied. He took the pocket radio from the villager –“Please,” he said, “just for a moment.” People were crying but the band still played and the bells still tolled. The scene suddenly had a cold, gelatinous quality.
“They’re saying that someone shot Kennedy,” my friend said. “It must be a joke.”
When we reached the last stop on the tour and all the social security centers and clinics had been properly dedicated, a group of the foreign press told me to talk to the Minister for them, and to apologize for not staying for the luncheon and the bullfight, but that they wanted a car to return to the city. The President and the Minister both put their arms on my shoulder and nodded. The President was very understanding. He himself apologized for not calling off the rest of the festivities, in order to pay his respects to his good friend, John F. Kennedy, but he was obliged by tradition and by duty to remain and see the day through. His guards, however, had multiplied, and he was visibly upset, but a trooper is a trooper.
We drove straight to the Press Club where the television was turned to full volume. Even so, it was impossible to understand the newscaster. Everyone was screaming and pressing closer to the screen. “Someone just shot Oswald, in plain view and broad daylight, in the middle of the Dallas police station.” Everyone was incredulous. The rest was a blur because we were all crying, all of us, grown men, seasoned correspondents, the bartender, people on the street when I went to look for my car, other drivers in traffic, even the watchman at the door of my apartment building when I finally got home.
Pete and I had earlier proposed a story: “LIFE goes to a Bullfighter’s Wedding”. Paco Camino was going to marry Norma, the daughter of Mexico’s most celebrated bullfight impresario, Alfonso Gaona. We had arranged to cover the wedding in every detail: the bachelor party, Paco’s celebrated collection of Suits of Lights, the roomful of gifts, the dressing of the bride in her legendary lace mantilla brought especially from Spain to complement the hand-embroidered, pearl encrusted gown, and the groom in his smart traje andaluz, as well as the civil ceremony with its illustrious witnesses (including the President), and the church, and the banquet at the Maria Isabel –the biggest and most important of the new hotels in town at that time.
It was really to be a great spread, eight pages and therefore one of our biggest, with a cover guaranteed for November publication in both LIFE-Spanish and LIFE-International. Who knows? We might even have made the domestic edition. Norma and Paco later divorced, of course. It was to be expected. But Norma is still my friend; I see her now and then, at parties. She never fails to remind me, and anyone else present, that the cover story on her wedding was ditched because Kennedy was shot. “My timing was bad all around,” she says. “Know anyone who might like to buy my mantilla? It belonged to royalty.”
A year after the assassination Pete and I were assigned to another job of detective work, but this time we got the credit. It seems, or so it was said, that Lee Harvey Oswald had traveled to Mexico to apply for a visa to Cuba before he returned to Dallas. The Warren Commission had turned lax on the subject but a number of “assassination buffs” were pressuring for further research into Oswald’s actions, activities and associations, anything that might provide additional clues, not just to the murder itself or the way it was carried out, but to the motive.
The day after the shooting Earl Warren himself was quoted as saying, in a small item that appeared in a lower corner of the New York TIMES and then was never, ever referred to again, that the reasons behind “this dreadful act” could not be assimilated by, or even presented to, the American public, for at least one hundred years. Why not? And if the Commission was satisfied, as it said it was, with its findings as published and the case had rested, at least a number of other people, including LIFE, were probing for answers to the questions the Commission never asked.
Pete and I managed to reconstruct a good deal of the extensive document that appeared in the issue of November 9, 1964: Oswald’s presumed bus journey, showing the countryside as he might have seen it and his entrance into the city, the people he reportedly talked to during the long ride from the border, his cheap hotel near the bus station, the lunch room where he ostensibly took his meals and the comments and observations of the people who say they saw him, if it was really him –the owner of the hotel, the widow who ran the lunch room, the maid who cleaned the room, the night watchman, employees at both the Cuban and Russian embassies, clerks at the bus line. It was a grisly and unappealing assignment, yet somehow we felt we were doing something to help. Not that it mattered. It was just a story, and it was all speculation.
Chapter XXXII: The Poppy Hunt
The cable from New York instructed Pete and myself to investigate the annual “narcotics campaign”, to see if there might be a story in it. “POLICE CONDUCT DRUG ROUNDUP. SUGGEST FOUR PAGE TAKE-OUT”.
We began by running down the various police forces in the country. There is a regular police department, naturally, but then there were also traffic enforcement, and the secret police and the federal police.
It seemed we were onto a dazzling, and possibly dangerous assignment after all. We had heard about “The Man With the Golden Arm” but “The French Connection” was yet to come, so we were actually quite innocent. This was late 1963. And while the whole idea of drugs was faintly repelling, the story could be dynamite, if we found, as Pete liked to say, “a hook to hang it on.” He always insisted that “a story needs a beginning, a middle and an end, but it also needs a focal point, that brings the rest together.”
When we made contact with a Lieutenant Colonel, Héctor Hernández Tello of the Federal Judiciary Police, we found what we were looking for, the local equivalent, in fact, of the FBI, with a liaison to Interpol.
Hernández Tello, or Héctor as he said to call him, was a large man with a heavy face and droopy eyes, a cynical mouth but a singular sweetness. I told Pete I thought he could probably be generous, even decent. “I doubt that,” mused Pete. “I’d hate to have him grill me. I’ll bet he’s seen ‘em come and go. Heard every lame story in the book.”
“So, how about this drug roundup?” I said in Spanish as I turned back to Héctor.
“Well, yes,” Héctor replied. “Our investigations bring in caches of drugs in various forms. The stuff we round up in the republic (throughout the country), the mariguana, for example, we take over to the municipal cemetery at Dolores, and burn it in the crematorium. We’ll invite you next time, if you’d like to watch.”
“Oh, indeed,” said Pete, not knowing if he was supposed to sound enthusiastic or blasé.
“What do you do with the people? I mean after a drug bust,” I asked.
“We prosecute, of course, but only the little fish stay locked up. The sharks and the barracuda get away; it’s only a matter of time. Their connections go right to the top.”
“The top of what?”
“Well, you know. The top. Big people. International big people. People with investments. People who protect their sources.”
“Would it be possible to photograph a raid?” asked Pete.
“I suppose so, if you obey orders. Raids aren’t conducted on a playground, you know. We’re dealing with bad people, vindictive people, but clever people for the most part, people who could probably be a big success in life if they invested as much effort in another line of work. But they’re always after the big hit, the once-in-a-lifetime shot. Or they get roped in. Once a user, usually a pusher.”
“Is there a high incidence of addiction in Mexico?” Pete asked.
“Not really, compared to the States, at least not yet. I foresee a time when narcotics will be endemic in Mexico, as they are up there, north of the border. It’s too available as an escape, for one thing. Or as a substitute for a loving family. Or discipline. The slum youngsters, and I mean youngsters –five or six or seven—go for the glue sniffing and the pills. It’s just as addictive. Did you know that? The older ones go for pot, if they can afford it. Later, it’s heroin, all right, but they have to sell it in order to be able to buy it. The upper classes prefer cocaine, because it’s expensive and that’s a sign of status. It also leaves no marks. People think it’s not addictive, too, but the long-range effects are terrible. They’re just hard to notice at first.”
“The cocaine comes from South America, right? What about the heroin?”
“Oh, it reaches the States, the really big market, from Turkey and the Near East, Afghanistan, or a hot new source in what they call the Golden Triangle down in Southeast Asia, at the junction of Burma, Laos and Thailand. That market got a great boost from the Vietnam War and it’s going to get worse, believe me. But heroin is also produced in Mexico. The sad thing is, our people can shake down a few kilos at the border or at the airports, but the big shipments are moved in light aircraft from clandestine airstrips, that fly under radar range, or in boats or in railroad cars.”
“Is heroin production legal in Mexico? I mean, where does it come from?”
“A certain percentage of the poppy grown in this country is produced under supervision, for licit purposes, for hospitals and the pharmaceutical industry. Heroin, you know, is a refined version of morphine. To begin at the beginning, the poppy is ‘bled’, or ‘milked’, for raw gum, which is opium. Then the opium is refined into morphine and finally, in its most purified version, it becomes heroin. The cultivation of the poppies in the mountains is sponsored by ‘the bad boys’. When the raw gum is ‘milked’, by making a diagonal cut along the bulb at the base of the flower, a little like harvesting rubber, it is collected in little cups and rolled into lumps about the size of a golf ball. In early Spring it’s all taken down out of the mountains by donkey into the laboratories in Culiacan, the capital of the state of Sinaloa. Maybe you’ve been to Mazatlan, on the coast. It’s much better known, and much more of a tourist attraction. Anyway, in the surreptitious laboratories the gum is semi-refined. By that time the price has increased one thousand-fold, from fifty pesos for the gum in the mountains to fifty thousand pesos per kilo. By the time it reaches Tijuana the same kilo is refined again and the price goes up to half a million. When it crosses the border, its worth has doubled. And after it has been ‘cut’ or adulterated, and divided into the little packets that hit the street, the original kilo has really paid off. It might bring in U.S. $80,000. We’re talking in current prices, but they will go up, and up, because no one puts a stop to it. On the contrary, narcotics traffic will become the super-trade of the next century.”
“Why?”
He looked at us for a time under his heavy eyes. Then he sighed, and lit a cigarette, very slowly, studying the flame, then adjusting its intensity, then closing the lid of his heavy gold lighter. “Why did the British fight the Opium War in China? Why are people greedy at the expense of the youth and vitality of a whole population? Why do the Americans take us for granted?” Since we kept silent, he went on. “You’re not interested in a sociological analysis. You’re after a story. If you like I’ll invite you both on our annual narcotics campaign. Call it a poppy hunt.”
“Please explain yourself,” said Pete.
“Every year, in early February, just before the poppy comes to bloom, our agency, in conjunction with the facilities, and a few men, from the army base in Culiacan, organizes a trek into the mountains that divide the state of Sinaloa from its inland neighbor Durango, and, it says here, we tear up the poppies. Not all the poppies. There are parcelas everywhere, and the most ingenious irrigation system you can imagine. We just do what we can. It’s as simple as that.” He made it sound like a walk in the park.
“How do you tear up the poppies?”
“Break them, smash them, trample them, anything we can manage with our limited equipment and manpower. But first you go to Culiacan, you do a little target practice in case there’s trouble and then you’ll head out in jeeps toward the mountains. You’ll have to live off the land, you understand. We have no facilities, really. We go through the motions of this poppy hunt to prove good faith to the Americans, but they give us nothing to work with. We had a light plane but a month ago it crashed. The Narcotics Division at the American Embassy claims we are inept, but they don’t know what this country is like. We had two helicopters, too, but one went down just a few days ago. The Americans use a lot of helicopters in Vietnam. I suppose they have none to spare. We certainly can’t afford to buy a second helicopter. So we can’t get my boys in or out of those mountains, unless they go overland. We can’t even drop supplies. You’ll see what it’s like.”
“You mean we just barge into the mountains with a bag of beans on our backs and a rifle on our shoulders?” Pete was incredulous.
“That’s about the size of it,” Héctor replied.
“I’ve trekked, Pete,” I said. “It’s no big deal. Not nearly as bad as climbing Popo.”
Héctor studied me from under the hoods of his eyelids. “You really want to go? It’s no place for a woman.”
“She’s not a woman,” said Pete, defensively. “She’s a reporter. And if she can take it, so can I.”
“There will be five or six federal agents, maybe a dozen soldiers, perhaps a reporter-photographer team from a Mexican paper. As long as you are going I might as well throw them in. And no comforts. No privacy.”
“She’s used to that,” Pete said, before I could answer.
“Tell you what,” Héctor said. “I’ll leave you up there three or four days, maybe a week. Then I’ll send a helicopter in to bring you out. If I can get one.”
“Great. And if not?”
“You’ll walk out, like the rest of them.”
“Fair enough,” said Pete, rubbing his little white goatee.
“Still want to go?” Héctor was looking at me.
“I wouldn’t miss it for the world,” I said. Pete just sighed.
Chapter XXXIII: A Hook
The poppy hunt was our “hook”. Meantime, however, while we waited for February, we dutifully stood by while sixty kilos of mariguana went up into the blue sky in black smoke at the crematorium in Dolores Cemetery. “This kind of smog might help the traffic problem,” said Pete.
We also covered a bust in a slum, but it was all very pat, more for our benefit than for Héctor’s. “I feel like someone in a gangster movie,” I told Pete. Like I say, we were very innocent. “Pull your hat down over your eyes. Swagger a little.”
It was hard to tell the good guys from the bad. They all seemed provided by the National Actors’ Association: plump, with shiny foreheads and skimpy moustaches, ill-fitting jackets or tattered turtleneck sweaters and baggy trousers. The cops made a big show of pushing the robbers around but Pete did better with the shanties and the grubby streets. And then there was that miserable, scrawny woman with the veins in her arm all warped, like ropes bruised and twisted under the blotchy surface of her skin. He photographed her, a little heartlessly, while the narcotics agent held up her sleeve, though she managed to cover her face with her free hand. The agent later posed with her “appliances” –her spoon, candle and hypodermic. “The background tells the story,” said Pete. “Poverty, degradation, desperation. I hope we get better stuff, though, on the poppy hunt, because this isn’t very convincing.”
We were to meet at the airport one morning in February, for the hour’s flight to Culiacan. Héctor was there to see us off, like a jovial uncle sending the kids off to summer camp. “Watch out for the bedbugs,” he said, laughing uproariously.
It was only when we reached the airport in Culiacan that we met the rest of our new “family”. Foremost was a bulky captain with a large belly that hung over his belt. He had huge jowls. He seemed someone not to be taken lightly. His eyes were hard, slightly inflamed. They bored through the back of my brain while they revealed absolutely nothing, nothing at all, neither kindness, nor concern, nor even curiosity, despite the pleasant smile and the apparent deference. He had obviously been assigned to take care of us and, as Pete said, “to make it look good”.
Next to him was a wiry man, taut as rawhide and just as lean, as if he were stretched over a bow and primed to fire. They called him “Negro”, which means “black” of course, but he was more correctly a deep olive bronze, like a statue with a burnished patina. He was lively and agile, and hummed under his breath as he saw to our bags. “I’ve been here before,” he called, very congenial, very disarming. His last name was Durazo. Many years afterward, grown fat and shiny, he became Mexico City’s police chief and later graduated to a Los Angeles prison, but on that February morning, in 1964, he was like a spring, tightly coiled, potentially dangerous but funny and ubiquitous.
Three other agents sauntered around us. In their nonchalance, it seemed, they were sizing up the situation. “The word’s out,” said Durazo, “but not to worry.”
Our remaining two companions were a reporter and a photographer from Mexico City’s major tabloid, La Prensa. The reporter was young, bright-eyed, nervous and suspicious. He carried a book under his arm and feigned unconcern, but he was excited. His jaw twitched. “What are you reading?” I asked politely.
“Nothing you’ve ever heard of!” he snapped, and turned away.
“What’s the matter with him?” I asked Durazo.
“He’s a police reporter, and full of himself. A little paranoid in the bargain. He thinks having a woman around is going to cut into the action.”
Chapter XXXIV: A Few Biscuits
A pair of jeeps from the army base deposited us, along with our modest luggage, at the hotel. “Have your lunch,” said the captain, “do any shopping you need to do, and get a little rest. Target practice in the morning. Be in the lobby at five sharp.”
“It’s too early for lunch,” said Pete. “Let’s take a look around before the shops close for siesta. Ah, the provinces. The simple life. None of the hustle and bustle of the city. Look at those boots, here, in this window. And there, really fine woolen socks. I haven’t seen anything like this in the city. They must be imported.”
We had no idea what we might need for our trek. I had brought my own low-heeled Andalusian boots, jeans, a light sweater, several pairs of lightweight socks, a deerskin jacket that had been rained on so often as to make it look completely indifferent, a number of T-shirts and my sleeping bag. “I think I’ll just buy a pair of sneakers. It’s madness to break in new boots on a trek. And I think dressing in layers makes the most sense. It might be cold at night but the sun gets hot at noon.”
“Nonsense,” Pete said. “It’s February and we’re going up into the mountains. It might get bloody cold. These are splendid boots, very soft. Won’t need any breaking in at all, and anyway, I need them. I can use them later, for other assignments. You’ve brought far too many items of clothing, my dear, far too many. You’ll see that when you have to carry them. I’m well prepared: my good, heavy Irish fisherman’s sweater and this lovely down jacket. You, on the other hand, will freeze.”
He bought the heavy socks, as well as the boots, and then we stopped at the bank, to change larger bills into the smallest possible denominations. “No one is going to change a thousand pesos in the mountains. Even a hundred might be too much. You know how these village grocers can be.”
“Speaking of grocers,” I said, “ here’s a store. I think we should stock up.”
“You’re out of your mind. We’ll have to carry all this stuff.”
“Not really,” I insisted. “We’re going in jeeps, remember? I’m going to buy a few cans of tuna fish and an opener.”
“Then get a can of sardines.”
“I don’t like sardines.”
“Then tinned ham or lunchmeat.”
“Good idea.”
“And a few biscuits.”
“We call them crackers. Don’t buy them unless they’re tinned, otherwise they’ll be smashed to crumbs.”
“Right.”
Back at the hotel with our supplies we ran head on into Fausto, the reporter from La Prensa. “What’s all that for?” he asked.
“Just a few things in case we need them.”
“You’ll have a lot to carry.”
“The jeep will carry them,” I said, smugly.
“Only as far as the jeep can go,” he replied, turning away.
Chapter XXXV: The Discreet Caravan
The next morning, as the sun broke above the dry horizon, we stood on the firing range at the army base, machine guns in hand. “Ladies first,” said Durazo. I pointed my gun at the target, braced myself, closed my eyes and fired. When the echo died I opened my eyes. No one spoke. Finally Pete asked, a little accusingly, “Where did you learn to shoot like that?”
“I didn’t,” I answered. “It was luck. I don’t even like guns. My father was big on guns, though. Maybe it’s congenital.”
“At least we may assume that the lady can, in effect, take care of herself. Now let’s see what the rest of you can do.”
The reporter from La Prensa and Rodolfo, his photographer, seemed the best of the lot. “And they’re not even police agents,” sighed Pete. “It’s going to be an interesting trip.”
The following morning, very early, our “discreet” line of vehicles raised a trail of dust and smoky exhaust that could easily be detected from anywhere in the mountain range, by anyone, that is, who hadn’t already heard our shots and seen us parading around town.
Pete and I rode in the second jeep, with Durazo, behind the captain, who had Fausto and Rodolfo with him. Behind us lurched and rumbled two troop transport trucks, no doubt salvage from World War II. They carried the other agents, the soldiers and the gear, such as it was: extra fuel, bedrolls, weapons and ammunition, water in canteens (plastic bottles had yet to make their appearance) a case of soft drinks and a bag with a day’s supply of tortas, prepared at the army mess. Pete and I had wanted the forward vehicle, “to get front line pictures”, he said, but the captain insisted it might be dangerous, and we were his responsibility.
We bounced along until the sun was high in the sky, serenaded by Durazo, with his private version of a then-popular rock and roll number, something of Bill Haley’s, or maybe it was Elvis. The screaming brakes and protesting transmissions of the trucks behind us served as his chorus. We had left the valley floor by this time. We were entering the foothills, where a road skirted a riverbed and cornfields lined our way.
By mid-afternoon we had reached a town, Tamazula, modest birthplace, Fausto pointed out, of Guadalupe Victoria as he had called himself –his real name was Manuel Felix Fernández—a general and statesman who took part in the War of Independence from Spain. He was president from 1824 to 1829, when he abolished slavery, a radical measure for the time and not lost on Abraham Lincoln. It was lost, however, on Pete, who was baking in his Irish fisherman’s sweater, and who had removed his boots in order to ventilate his heavy woolen socks. “You’re the one who’s keen on Mexican history,” he snapped, “not me.”
We passed through town as quickly as possible but our “discretion” hardly went unnoticed. A brace of mountaineers, walking beside their donkeys, ducked out of sight very neatly, and after that we encountered no one at all on the road.
A little farther along we parked right on the trail, in single file, on a very conspicuous crest above a canyon, to avoid ambush Durazo said, but I thought he was being melodramatic. He told us to have our picnic, and to eat whatever we had on hand. Pete and I shared our tuna fish and crackers with him and he in turn proffered a portion of his ham and cheese torta, but I was more thirsty than anything else. Our calculation of the contingencies had failed to include anything liquid. The captain, however, leaned his head under our canvas awning and asked if we wanted a Coke. I politely declined. Afterward I was sorry but since I had promised Pete it was one for all and all for one, with no complaints or signs of weakness, I had to dig a petrified relic that had once been chewing gum from the bottom of my handbag, and make do with it.
By nightfall we were really in the mountains. At some point, probably near Tamazula, we had crossed the state boundary into Durango. The unpaved road had narrowed and grown ever steeper, the air was chill, and the darkness settled with an eerie black silence, unrelieved by stars or night birds or even a firefly.
We assembled the vehicles in a circle near a cluster of huts, as if they had been stagecoaches on the old frontier, in anticipation of an attack by Apaches. An old woman wrapped in a rebozo emerged from the door of one of the huts and motioned us inside. A wooden table in a corner was laid with a platter of scrambled eggs floating in lard, and another platter of fried beans. All of us pushed toward the hut. The latecomers, or the more respectful, remained outside the door. We asked for chile and the old woman placed a slender bottle of manufactured hot sauce on the table. I noticed the brand: “Tamazula”. The mouth of the bottle was crusted and the lid was stuck. A young girl brought a stack of freshly made tortillas which she handed through the window as there was no more room inside. The tortillas were spongy and hot. These people must have been prepared for us. They must have heard us, hours before, toiling up the deserted dirt road, our brakes and our transmissions echoing from canyon to canyon like a blatant, not entirely welcome, private language.
The captain distributed some of us among the various huts. The soldiers slept under the trucks, taking their turns at guard duty. Pete and I were sent to the only hut, it seemed, with a wooden rather than a dirt floor. The woman who had given us our supper appeared. She was barefoot. Her feet were cracked and stained, like a turtle’s back, and deformed. Wisps of graying hair straggled across her face as they escaped the folds of her rebozo. She must have been very, very old. Or maybe not. Maybe she was only forty but life had been hard. Her hands and arms were bony and stained, like her feet, from dirt and hard work. Her fingers, with their long, uneven nails, were curved like claws. Arthritis. A chicken had roosted on the back of a lopsided chair. Two children slept, wrapped in each other, on a mat in the corner. There were no bedsteads but she offered Pete and me another mat each, to put under our sleeping bags.
Pete snuggled into his down-filled, flannel-lined khaki jacket, which he wore over the fisherman’s sweater. “Layers!” he snorted, while he watched me put one T-shirt after another over my head, then my thin sweater, and finally my jacket.
“The air spaces keep you better insulated, or so I was told.” That was my only reply. While I put on my five pairs of socks he turned over and went instantly to sleep, without bothering, for once in his life, to argue. It had been quite a day.
Chapter XXXVI: Stale Bread
The old lady gave us stale bread and watery instant coffee at dawn, and we set off again, this time down a trail into a canyon. The bottom narrowed considerably. “We leave the trucks here,” said Durazo.
“Just like that?” asked Pete.
“Oh, we’ll leave a soldier to guard them and send for them later.”
“What about the jeeps?”
“We’ll keep them until they can go no farther. Or until our gasoline cans are empty. Hold on, now.” He launched into his rock and roll number and in the best of spirits set the jeep’s gears in motion for the nearly vertical climb out of the canyon. “I think you two better get out for a moment,” he said.
We joined the captain, Fausto, Rodolfo and the rest of the men on the stony canyon floor, to watch. Pete and Rodolfo began taking pictures, then comparing cameras, film, shutter speed. The atmosphere was actually quite jovial. Language was no barrier. Meantime, after a number of attempts to clear the rise, and a severely strained gearbox, Durazo gave up. He had made it a matter of pride, but there was nothing else to be done. “All right,” he said. “From here we walk. Gives us much greater mobility.”
Each of us shouldered his own gear and whatever else he could manage. We were not long out of the canyon and over the crest to another gorge when Pete’s feet began to rebel against the new boots. By the bottom of the gorge I had relieved him of his camera bags. By the time we had crossed a stream, and labored again up a steep embankment, the boots had gotten wet, had dried, and had turned as stiff as cardboard. Pete left them there. We rested for a time, to let his blisters dry and then, shod once again in his faithful desert boots, he suggested that the lady was sufficiently recovered in order for us to continue. Fausto and Durazo thought this was hilarious.
Beyond the gorge we found a tiny valley, with cornfields perched at unlikely angles, a few fruit trees and a farmer, with his mule, moving rocks. The captain immediately ordered the soldiers to requisition the mule, but the man refused. The captain cocked his revolver. Still the man refused. Pete and I sauntered close to the captain. “Tell him we’ll rent the mule,” I whispered, “and tell him to come along to keep an eye on it.” The captain glared at me and was about to tell me to mind my own business when Durazo nudged him. “Maybe she’s right,” he said. “Try it. It won’t look good in a foreign magazine if we shoot the farmer.”
The farmer, though his face betrayed no expression, was visibly delighted. He quickly unhitched the mule and packed our gear onto its back, linking the items by their own straps and fixing the whole tottering mess with a cinch fashioned from the traces. Then the man grabbed me and pitched me onto the top of the heap. “Let Pete have the mule,” I pleaded, but the men would have no part of it.
“We are Mexicans and we are gentlemen,” said Durazo, taking up Pete’s camera bags onto his own shoulders. “The lady rides.”
Chapter XXXVII: Imperialist Journalism
I rode and they walked, up and up into the mountains. There were no communities or farmhouses, no village grocers to buy food from, no little country stores. So we picnicked again. The menu was simple. Stale tortillas, sour-tasting water from the captain’s canteen –which he had filled without first rinsing it at the stream we passed—and the rest of the few provisions Pete and I had bought in Culiacan. The men were growing accustomed to having me around. I was less of a novelty than before. Their language was not entirely offensive but Pete felt I should bring the situation back into some semblance of respect and order. “Otherwise this could become awkward,” he insisted.
Yet when I shouted to Fausto and two of the agents, to clean up their dialogue, they were furious. “Who does she think she is?” muttered one of the men.
“An imperialist journalist,” Fausto huffed.
By late afternoon Pete’s face was bright red and his eyes were glazed. He was limping. “Please, Pete,” I begged. “I don’t care what the men think. Take the mule. I really prefer walking.”
“Never,” he gasped. “You’ve managed to create quite a situation out of all of this. I hope you’re satisfied.”
He sat down to rest. We all pulled up beside him, which gave us a view of the canyon below, as well as the path that ascended to the top of the ridge. Along it plodded two mountaineers with their donkeys. We shouted to them, ordering them up until they were next to us. The donkeys were loaded with firewood. “Unload those donkeys,” cried the captain. “We’re…” he glanced at me, and then at Durazo, “…we’re going to rent your donkeys, but you can come along to take care of them.” He handed the men two worn one-hundred peso bills, the equivalent then of eight dollars each, and the men tentatively set to work repacking the animals, dividing the mule’s gear among the rest of the bundles.
“But you’re packing them badly,” I said. I pointed to the cinch. The man pushed me aside.
“In this part of the country women walk two paces behind the men,” said Durazo. “Stay out of this.”
“But those poor animals will flounder on the first incline. The weight isn’t properly distributed. It isn’t the kind of pack they’re accustomed to carrying. All the weight is on their kidneys. The cinch will loosen after an hour. There’ll be sores on the poor beasts’ little bellies.” I was patting the soft fur on their underbellies and working up a good head of steam.
“Animals were put on this earth to serve Man,” said the captain. “If they flounder we’ll shoot them. Now move out of the way.”
“Come on,” said Durazo. “Leave it alone. These donkeys were born in the mountains. They’re nimble as goats and used to carrying every kind of pack. Look at this one. He has the sign of a cross on his withers. That means he is blessed with divine protection because he is descended from the donkey that carried Mary, our Mother, to Bethlehem.” Then he said, in comic English, “Take it easy, lady.”
We all laughed, except Fausto. “These gringos think they can run everything, don’t they?”
An hour later we found a man on a small horse. We rented them both and added them to our straggly caravan. Durazo gave me the horse. Then, with the willing aid of one of the agents, he plopped Pete on top of the mule. “I don’t need concessions,” sputtered Pete, mopping his flaming brow with the sleeve of his sweater, which was turning gamy. Durazo pulled him off the mule, lifted the sweater over his head, took a lightweight shirt from his own pack, dressed Pete as if he were a baby-- a procedure Pete was only too willing to give in to-- then plopped him back on top of the patient mule. “The hell you don’t,” said Durazo.
By late afternoon, when we stopped for a breather, Durazo strode up beside me and tapped my hand. “Look up there,” he said.
“Where?”
“Up there. In the clefts of the mountains.”
“All I see are the afternoon shadows.”
“Some of them are green. Look carefully. Those are poppy fields. Tomorrow, maybe the next day, we’ll be up there. Then you’ll see the aqueducts.”
Chapter XXXVIII: The Village
By evening we had reached a knoll, and to Pete’s and my amazement, a village. Not a large village, but it was certainly an assembly of huts around a clearing that served as a plaza, with a rural schoolhouse along one entire side. “We’ll camp in the schoolhouse tonight,” instructed the captain. “I want everyone together. We’re getting too close. We were spotted long ago and this could be dangerous.” He started assigning the shifts for guard duty.
“I want a shift,” said Fausto.
“We have pros for the job,” said the captain.
“But I need the feel of this, for my story. I want the sensation. I need to know what fear is like.”
“How melodramatic,” Pete muttered under his breath.
“The captain kicked at the dust. “All right, it sounds good,” he said. “But don’t take any unnecessary chances. Shoot first and ask questions afterward. And tell the lady to put a ribbon or something in her hair, in case she goes off to pee.”
They all looked at me. I stared straight back at them, without blinking, while I took a strand of yellow yarn from my bag, like the women in the marketplace used, and tied up my hair. “You think you’ll see this in the dark?” And I stalked off to help Pete put his day’s film in order.
There had really been very little, as yet, to photograph, mostly just location shots, to identify the countryside or to record our stops and starts. Pete was disappointed. “I think the whole story’s a bust.”
“You’re just tired,” I said to him. “Tomorrow will be better.” But I was equally disillusioned, and just as convinced that Héctor had sent us off on a side-show, while the real action was going on far away from Pete’s lenses.
“The imperialist press,” Fausto had said. Was that also Héctor’s feeling? That we were just indulging the Mexican government’s “modest” efforts at narcotics control?
The villagers, meanwhile, provided eggs, beans, tortillas –which one of the women invited me to help make—and a bit of meat for supper. “What kind of meat is this?” asked Pete. “It’s really superb.”
“You must really be hungry,” Durazo said.
“Why?” I asked him. “What kind of meat is it?”
“The tacos on this plate are man’s best friend. And the ones over there came from a donkey that didn’t have you to champion its cause. Eat hardy.” When I failed to raise my eyes from the plate, he said, “What did you expect? Caviar? This is the ass-end of nowhere.”
Chapter XXXIX: The Hut
The villagers brought cots into the schoolhouse and set them up in rows, like a barracks. Pete and I were assigned the two in the middle, away from the window. For protection. I slept surprisingly well, even with the twenty men stirring and snoring, the guard changing, and Fausto, chattering with another man outside the door. He was supposed to be on guard duty.
After a breakfast of toasted tortillas left from the night before, and boiled coffee, we set out again, up and down the gorges, up the canyons, over the ridges, into the far recesses of the western Sierra Madre. When Cortez returned to Spain to report his findings to the Crown, and the king asked him to describe Mexico, he is reputed to have taken up a piece of parchment in his hand, crumpling it until it was craggy and wrinkled. Then he tossed it on the floor at the king’s feet and said, “This is Mexico!”
The donkeys were chaffed by now. They stumbled often, but no one seemed to care. They were flogged with a long stick and made to set off again. The mule plodded along with a nodding Pete who dozed from his perch. There was no chance of his drifting on this narrow trail. My little horse was livelier than he had appeared at first glance and I was actually enjoying myself, with the scent of the scrubby mountain brush in my nostrils, dryness and the cheering sun, and the humming of the insects against the inevitable chorus of the men thumping along in their boots, their chatter, Durazo with his song. “Get rid of that yellow ribbon,” he called out to me. “You’re a perfect target.” I just waved at him.
We came over a butte onto a river valley, broad and fresh. Green trees spread their shade along the bank and the water bounced along a pebbled lane in the center of the arroyo. We scattered into small groups to drink, to splash water over our necks and faces, and to water the animals. The captain said he would scout our course in one direction while Durazo checked the opposite bank. The rest of us dozed. I was nearly asleep when I heard the shot.
It was one clean blast, high caliber. It echoed down the canyon. The sound seemed to last forever. Everyone in our camp dissolved into total chaos, running in every direction, murmuring, heading for cover. “Get that woman out of here,” shouted Fausto. “It’s the yellow ribbon!”
Pete, half asleep next to me, rolled over wearily and said, “I’ll bet that stupid captain let his gun go off. I’m staying right here.” We both returned to our nap.
Durazo and the captain appeared almost at the same time from opposite directions. “Did you hear the shot?” called Durazo. “Where did it come from, do you think?”
The captain looked very chagrined. “I thought I heard someone hiding in the brush,” he confessed. “I got so nervous my gun went off.” Pete and I looked at each other, trying not to smile.
“Was anyone there?” Fausto asked him.
“Must have been a rabbit,” said the captain, turning to reassemble his gear.
“Did you bring him home for supper?” asked Pete. He had a knack for being irritating, offensive even.
Durazo tapped us with his foot. The captain was already far down the line, rousing the soldiers from the bushes where they had hidden. “We’d better get moving now.” He called to the others, “I found a trail going off this way,” he said, pointing to the left, “and with fresh tracks.”
I was on my horse, heading in the direction he indicated. Two soldiers padded quietly along behind me. The trail led into an offshoot of the river valley, up a canyon. I could hear the rest of the assembly trailing farther back but I was really lost in the beauty of the rugged landscape, in the hard shadows and sweet sounds. The sounds. These were other sounds. I pulled up my horse and stopped to listen. A pig grunting, chickens cackling.
“Look up there,” I called to the soldiers, who froze in terror. We could see a little hut with a cactus fence around it. It was not a natural fence, however. It was a neatly constructed fence, planted deliberately, with wire wound around the bodies of the cactus to form a simple stockade. A wisp of smoke curled from behind this barrier off into the cloudless blue sky.
This was, indeed, an unlikely site for a dwelling. There were no signs of a village nor any other houses nearby to indicate a community. Only a very narrow trail led off the canyon floor to the upper level, which was occupied by the stockade on its ledge, like a lookout.
I prodded my little horse up the incline and stopped at the entrance to the corral or enclosure that surrounded the hut, inside the cactus stockade. Durazo veered in front of me, panting from his uphill charge. “You’ve got to be crazy, woman. Get back!” His gun was cocked and he rallied the panicky soldiers behind him into a phalanx, their rifles, with bayonets attached, in firing position. “Get out of the way!” he said again, trying to push past me.
“Take it easy,” I said to him, in English, then in Spanish, “there’s no one here.”
“How do you know?”
“There are no children.”
“So?”
“Children are always curious to see who’s coming. They should be peeking from behind something.” I dismounted and led my horse inside the corral, where it immediately found a bit of straw to nibble on. Three pigs trotted out of the way. The chickens and a turkey fluttered under our feet. The wood-burning stove was lit and water boiled in a clay pot. Smoke and steam curled upward, mingling against the darkening sky. On a table next to the stove lay a basket filled with ripe, red tomatoes still warm from the sun, whose last rays drenched the tomato patch at one end of the enclosure. Fresh dough lay beside a hot griddle, ready for the evening’s tortillas.
Inside the hut were two broad bunks –surely our quarters for the oncoming night—an overturned chair, and a child’s jacket in the middle of the floor, a jacket of good quality with the label of a store in Culiacan.
Durazo, the captain and four soldiers raced up the path. Someone had been here, only minutes before, and could not have gone very far. The rest of us remained in the hut. Pete immediately got out his cameras while I chopped the tomatoes and a handful of chiles into a salsa for our supper. I tried to make tortillas the way the woman had made them the night before, but mine were lopsided, with thick edges and holes in the middle. One of the soldiers came up beside me to show me the proper way to shape the dough; I left him to finish the task. Another soldier had found a few eggs.
Durazo and the captain returned a short time afterward, with a tearful woman in hand. A little boy stumbled after them, trying to keep up with his mother. “Where’s her man?” asked Pete.
“She says he’s gone to Tijuana on business,” replied Durazo. “I guess you know what that means. I’ll put her under guard and we’ll go up to the poppy fields in the morning.”
“Did you find anyone else?”
“Her sister-in-law in a hut around the other side of the mountain. You can’t see it from here. You’ll get your pictures in the morning. Satisfied?”
Chapter XL: Coquelicot
The following day was Pete’s reward. He took more pictures of the hut, of the lady with her child, the sister-in-law, and the general setting. We had climbed less than an hour when we reached the patches of green poppy nestled in the joints and crotches of mountains. We saw only one bloom; it was early in the season. But that one red bloom at least partly justified the flower’s celebrity: it was a perfect crimson cup, flecked with black, deep and mysterious, with a glossy puddle of shining yellow at the bottom. The plant itself is lustrous, as cool and dark and moist as the word “green” itself. When Durazo took a stick and beat at the plants at random, they toppled too easily. Nothing so rigid and proud should be defeated with a single, haphazard swipe, but there they were, the crumpled plants, oozing a viscous liquid until the whole patch turned runny and the flies came.
“The plant is mostly water,” Durazo explained.
“But there’s no water here,” I said.
Durazo led me to the edge of the parcela and pointed. A make-shift aqueduct of upturned bark, supported by forked sticks, ran from field to field and up over the mountains, along the ridges and down again, only to curve and double back on itself, on and on, like the Great Wall of China. By this ingenious device water was brought up and over and across the mountains, for miles and miles, to provide the precious nourishment for the sultry green of the forbidden poppy plants.
Chapter XLI: A Rescue Operation
We spent the day trampling the parcelas, moving from field to field, while Pete took his pictures. After a time the novelty wore off, with only the drone of the flies and the crunching sound of sticks and rifle butts against the green plants. By afternoon, however, the drone we heard was too persistent and far too loud to come only from the flies. A light plane was cruising the range. “They’re looking for us,” Durazo said. He pawed through his gear until he found, and extricated, a small radio transmitter.
“More war surplus,” Pete said, ungratefully.
“A helicopter will pick you up tomorrow morning at ten, on that knoll over there,” Durazo instructed us. “You’ll go back to Culiacan with Fausto and Rodolfo, and take the afternoon flight to Mexico City, with a brief stop in Guadalajara. You should be home by dinner time.” Pete looked relieved.
Chapter XLII: Fausto
We had lunch, the four of us, in the restaurant at the hotel in downtown Culiacan. The typical northern melted cheese, served with great quantities of chile and a stack of flour tortillas, seemed too heavy, after the frugal fare in the mountains. Pete was nearly crippled from sunburn, blisters and raw muscles, and was happy enough to contemplate some semblance of “civilization”, yet the sleepy provincial city, quiet by ordinary standards, crowded in on us. After the silence, the space and the caustic beauty of the mountains, it seemed a teeming, raucous metropolis.
We found a message waiting for us, that Héctor wanted to invite the four of us to lunch sometime after we had returned to Mexico City. Rodolfo added that he wanted us to meet his family: he would offer another luncheon, on a Saturday, with plenty of rum and tequila, “Eh? And we’ll celebrate ‘til breakfast on Sunday.”
Fausto asked if I liked films. When I said I did, he asked if I would like to take in a movie after we got back. We made a date for our first evening in town, but one of the plane’s engines caught fire between Culiacan and Guadalajara, so there was a delay. We arrived after midnight. The movie had to wait until the following evening.
The New York office was thrilled with our story. It ran eight pages, the maximum allowed any piece. Pete was pleased with the separate cable, which confirmed the editors’ delight at the outcome of our rather outrageous expedition. As for me, they invited me to New York, to visit their plush offices, to entertain me in a private dining room at a hotel next to the Time-Life Building and to tell me they would love me, forever and ever.
I left the magazine, nonetheless, soon after that. When I told my friend Margaret about my movie date with that intense young reporter I had met on the poppy hunt, she asked if I planned to see him again. “I don’t think so,” I answered. “He’s too young, for one thing, and for another, he picks on me all the time. For that I have Pete. I’d be wasting my time.”
Fausto and I did see each other, however. We were married for ten years and had two children together. We are still friends and neighbors. As for Rodolfo, his photographer, he died when the DC-3 press plane, bound for Poza Rica on a presidential press junket, crashed and everyone on board was killed.
oOo
