Mexico by James A. Michener

INDIAN ANCESTORS: THE BUILDERS

Toward midnight, while there was still noisy activity in the plaza, the Widow Palafox came to my table, tapped me on the arm and whispered, "Your package of manuscript reached the airport and will be in New York at just about this time. You owe the messenger but we paid and will put it on your bill."

She led me through the ancient doorway and onto a small patio that I had loved as a child. There was the stone fountain on which I had played and the mass of brightly colored flowers that had always bloomed in such profusion. We climbed a series of stone steps to the second floor of the hotel, where a broad cloister ran completely around the upper section of the patio, into which it dropped tendrils of flowering plants. The heart of the hotel had always been this quiet patio of weathered stone, echoing cloister and abundant flowers.

The widow took me along the cloister until she reached a door on the plaza side, and pushing this open she led me into a room famous in the history of Mexico. It was no ordinary room: its sides were extremely irregular, since they had to follow the wandering walls of the hotel front, and its haphazardly placed windows had always looked down upon the cathedral and for the last century upon the statue of Ixmiq as well.

When the widow moved the door, a faint creaking that dated back to 1575, when the structure was built, told me that I was home, for it was in this room that my mother and I had hidden in 1918 during the second sacking of Toledo, when to continue living at the Mineral was impossible. It was from the largest of the windows that at the age of nine I had looked down on the rapists and the firing squads. I remember standing there and announcing matter-of-factly to my mother: "They're going to shoot some more. " She had hurried over and when she saw who the victims were to be-the seven good people from the very building in which we had found refuge-she had screamed, "Oh God! No! " One of General Gurza's men who commanded the firing squad turned momentarily from his duties and pumped a couple of revolver bullets at us, which had missed the window but splattered the surrounding stones, where the chips they tore away left shallow pockmarks that were still visible in the light from the terrace below.

"I was standing here when the executions took place," I remarked to the widow.

"They were crazy days," she mumbled.

"After the captain shot at us, my mother hid on the floor but I crept back and peeked out to watch the squad do its work."

"That hole in the wall," the widow explained, pointing to a prepared space over the bed, "is for a plaque that one of the historical societies is going to put here."

"Let's make it a little larger and add, ‘Norman Clay slept here, too."

"May your sleep be good," the widow said, closing the squeaking door.

The room held such vivid memories that it even evoked the history of my powerful Indian ancestors.

When I was about ten years old and living once more at the Mineral, my father who, as an engineer and a scientist, was interested in speculating on historical might-have-beens, said: "At breakfast when we were talking about the choices that men sometimes have to make, you told me: ‘It doesn't matter. ' Well, making the proper choice can matter, Norman, and I want you to remember an excellent example of how a decision that must at the time have seemed of no consequence turned out to be vitally significant. " To demonstrate this, he reached for a stick with which he drew in the sand a Y, saying:

"This will stand for a decision that had to be made about four thousand years ago by some people from eastern Asia, probably from Siberia, who crossed over the Bering Strait and hiked southward through Alaska and the western United States. " (In later years I often wondered how my father could have known about this migration of our Indian ancestors, because during his time the relics of this Siberian trek had not yet been uncovered in Alaska; perhaps he was merely guessing. Of course, on one point he was quite wrong; we now know that the migrations from Asia took place not four thousand years ago but more like twenty thousand or possibly forty.)

"These Indians wandering south from Alaska came at last to San Diego," my father explained, "and they held a council to discuss what to do next. Some said, ‘Let's continue down the coastline, because we've been doing that for three hundred years and it's familiar territory,' but others argued, ‘Let's leave the coastline and strike out inland. ' The upshot was that each group went its own way. No one could have foretold that one group had made a brilliant choice and that the other had chosen disaster."

I remember looking at the two arms of the Y and asking, "Which one did right?"

"Visualize the map of California," he said, "and think."

I tried to do this, but all I could remember was the map in my Mexican schoolbook, and it showed California merely as one of the lands stolen from Mexico by the United States, so I could not deduce the point my father was trying to make.

"Was the arm pointing to the sea the good one? " I asked.

"It led to California Baja," my father said grimly, and I instantly recalled what I had learned about that brutal, barren peninsula of heat and waterless sand. "Centuries later, when the Spaniards explored that desolate land, they found that the Indians who had gone there had degenerated close to the animal level. They lived almost without what we call a culture-no houses, not even clothing. They had no decent food and almost no water, and although the ocean about them was full of fish, they had never learned how to catch them. They were as pathetic as human beings can be and still live."