The railway lurched over the bed of Aguilar’s old road.
A nineteenth century publication mentioned the rail line in a piece for foreign travelers, but as economic health of the area deteriorated after the banking collapse, the state offered little to explain the names of the towns.
Do names require explanation?
Perhaps. Even so the haunted outposts remained an embarrassment. In 1965, Edicto 1511-1 specified that settlements in the district were due to receive post-offices, grade-schools, and with them, new names.
Yet the old monikers clung for whatever reason one could think of. Few of the locals read. The new schools were shoddily constructed. Who planned on attending classes? The post-offices were bogged by theft and inefficiency. Most of the roads were more or less useless. The ranchers communicated via radio or cell phone. It seemed the settlements were beyond rescue, names possible to remember, histories impossible to forget.
Living in ancient ways, the native population could tell anyone exactly what had happened since Europeans arrived, but preferred not to. No one asked. Most refused to talk at all. They lived anonymously in thatched huts beside small plots of corn and beans planted midst the scrub.
Sombra de la Muerte was supposed to have been called “Bed of Flowers“, but that led to confusion with the next village which was dubbed “Garden of Eden“.
No printed guide or publication showed original names of these towns, or even the particulars of the railway route. The Solitary Traveller, published in Australia in 1979 dismissed the entire district in one paragraph, basically saying, “Don’t go there”,” that the whole area was too hazardous for foreigners.
The region remained a featureless blot of green on the maps, details open to speculation. By 1950 scheduled trains dropped to less than two shortened journeys a week and remained so until the mid 1970’s.
Beneath a scrub of trash trees, tangled lianas and spurge, a limestone pan tore bottoms off curious vehicles and shredded tires. A kilometer from the railway, improvements to the state highway provided access for a cadre of ranchers who, with government funds, were attempting to establish beef as a local export. Passenger train use slowed to almost nothing but through a twist of fate deliveries of state-subsidized feed and fertilizer increased, and kept rail service alive. With forests cleared to make fields for livestock, and large trees felled to payoff local officials, rats took over, and with them snakes. After storms in the rainy season, walking at night on dirt paths was hazardous due to vipers seeking refuge from flooding.
Pies sin Suela hosted a silo for fertilizer. There was a taqueria, and a couple of speed bumps in the paved track that leads to the highway from the station. ‘Feet without Soles‘ meant the peeling of the bottom of a man’s feet, if he refused to work.
Carne Quemada was a staging ground for hardwood trunks. Limbs from these trees provided the fuel for curing rubber. But it was said the name had been given because the place smelt of burnt meat.
Sin Agallas. No guts. Workers who made trouble in that settlement had their bowels pulled out of a narrow slice in the lower abdomen. The entrails were placed in a bag tied round the victim’s hips. He could stuff his intestines back in if he so desired, either way he was released, and usually had strength enough to return to his village before infection set in.
Somehow the horrors perpetuated on the lowlands tribes were forgotten through images of ritual purification, as the railway gained elevation. Time forgets all things, all acts, kindness, cruelty, the creative, and the horrible. Time is abhorrently neutral.
La paz de los Muertos. Aliento último. Burnt scrub and banana plantations broke way to cocoa and coffee, then a succession of deserted towns with European heritage, also swallowed by jungle. The train lurched past these places.
At Pasada Sorbo a spring dried up during the Conquest. Perhaps a dying man walked towards the mountains, hoping to drink clear water from a river he would find. He had a vision of Christ before succumbing of thirst. A spring burst from the ground where he fell. That was the story.
The train spent a few minutes in each of these hamlets, more haunted than the last. Bizarre shadows of faces seemed to peer into the grime of the railcar windows. We imagined drained faces flitting across the shadows of overgrown ficus.
Ritos Finales had a hotel. Also a main street with four structures, as well as a garden zocalo with immaculate flowers set about a statue of Orozco de Aguilar holding a sword. Someone there was on state salary to maintain appearances. There was even a museum, where a guard looked after books, papers and portraits, and told stories of the Conquest, doing his best to soften the bits about torture. Logs of those grisly details were buried deep in the stacks of Biblioteca Nacional de España.
One saw the bedroom where Aguilar had passed during his sleep. To maintain discipline and quell an incipient uprising, his lieutenants ordered fifty Quintole men and women disemboweled. That was written in a 1980’s guidebook from Germany, but omitted in the official state documents. That guidebook has since not been reprinted.
Sombra de la Muerte, understandably, was deserted. The name was all that lived. Off this tiny intersection, a dusty spur led to the state highway. It was rumored you risked God’s judgment if you touched foot there.
The train whistled, stopped, then rolled on.
Conductors shouted stops in Spanish, then mumbled a bad translation in the native tongue, Quolé. The Spanish words for the camps were simpler, Campamento Uno, Campamento Dos, etc.
In 1930 the last native Quolé speaker, an old woman Ti-nassa-Doroona, whose name meant “Flower who Remembers’, exited this life without event. She recorded no specifics of her hundred plus years, or even simple memories of the Conquest as told to her by her grandmother, except that during old age, she said she would die when her dog, a yellow short-hair of mangy appearance, also passed away. She claimed the dog contained the souls of her departed husband and four children whom she had already outlived by thirty years. When her dog was shot by an angry neighbor, she met Jesus that same evening, mumbling unintelligible words, to a cousin, who happened to be visiting.
Ti-nassa-Doroona’s cultural importance to the town was noted in a small brass sign affixed by the Cultural Office to a wood post in front of her house, which today stands vacant. The Cultural Department was charged with crediting local traditions where possible.
Quole has never been written or studied. Only a few crude translations exist, rendered by a early 20th Century botanical scholar from Saarbrücken. By the Gold Rush of the nineteen hundreds, few Spanish words were spoken, even by natives. To this day a linguistic treasure exists in the multiple pidgins and creoles that evolved in the region.
The rail terminus, some five hundred miles from Los Azules, and about two thousand meters higher in elevation, was the small hill town of La Palabra de Dios. Here inhabitants remained a mix of tribes from the hills, potato farmers, herders as well as descendants of those rubber workers from the lowlands. There also lived a few relatives of Aguilar himself, his lieutenants, and native concubines. These grey-skinned ghosts exhibited signs of heavy inbreeding, heads sloped, ears long, skin pale. They flitted through the quiet streets, spoke little, and kept to themselves.
The church today bears images of 22 saints. Two rows of eleven large retablos flanked a tin-enameled image of Jesus soaked in blood and wrapped in thorns at from his head to his waist. With so many nails driven into his extremities through the painted tin, he easily could be confused with a Central African votive doll. Some of the saints appeared to be more animal than man, another few seemed to have breasts as well as male organs. One of the saints was a child. The saints’ names were spoken in dialects untraceable to any Christian originals.
The only guide in the town, a long-haired arrival from the capital, spends most of his life waiting for a curious tourist. If one pays him a few pesos, he will attempt to link each of pagan images to a more popular Christian saint. The easiest connection to make was Saint Francis, who in addition to being surrounded by animals, wears the skin of a jaguar. St. Sebastian instead of being pierced by arrows, has a European spear run through his gut and another through his head.
In each instance the worshipped figures appear either as oppressor, or one of the oppressed. Canvas paintings on the wall told the same story. Native feet were burned at the slightest provocation with red-hot cast iron, or legs lashed until the skin hung in flayed shreds. Women and children were impaled on stakes. Painted images of merciless angels courted the dying with heads of serpents and lizards.
Señor Padré Gomé of Santa Maria de la Dios, was a son of the town. All addressed him as Señor Padre, since his father Señor Padré Antonio had opened a cafeteria adjoining the chapel in order to have a place to feed the faithful when they visited to worship, and to defray costs. The father was known as Señor Antonio, and the son, who gave the services, Señor Padre.
On the morning after Señor Antonio died some five hundred Quole speakers, most of whom were unrecognized by the church, stood at the door with silent faces, and waited for Señor Padre to open the chapel. Señor Gomé welcomed them into the church. One of the boys fetched them water. They stooped on the floor. Around the images candles flickered and cast undulating shadows.
Many had brought offerings. Chickens, the heads of goats, fruits, flowers.
Of mixed blood, Señor Padré Gomé as a baby was refused baptism at the basilica in Los Azules. So were all residents of Palabra de Dios.
The reason for the refusals was political, and concerned a Papal Bull issued in 1795. The Bull was in response to a bloody insurrection by the clergy, that resulted in the death of four of God’s faithful. The Holy Father pronounced the diocese a “A Sacristy for the Dammed”, and so the entire congregation was ex-communicated in 1796 with the proviso that re-admission to the Body of Christ could occur in two-hundred years, pending good behavior. Then 1940’s in a gruesome repeat of the incident, reinforced the Church’s determination never to rescind the Bull.
While war raged in Europe, a few Quoles got upset about the confiscation of land containing a sacred spring. On Easter Sunday, as their Christian masters prayed to the Lord Almighty they surrounded the church in the tiny hill station, and hacked thirty-two of the faithful to death. Victims included Christians of European and tribal origin both. The mob also burned ten houses in the town before dispersing. The crime was blamed entirely upon locals, but the Holy Father did not alter the terms of the nearly three-hundred year old Papal decree. In fact no feedback at all came at all from the Vatican regarding this incident, perhaps because Rome was occupied at the time by Fascists.
And so this little Church lived in a kind of Purgatory, and its faithful, in a kind of Hell. The town drew strength from beaten jungles that lay at its feet. The lineage of the clergy and stories surrounding the Gospels morphed into a Cult and myth of suffering. In Rome they said the people there had grown horns. In the capital one crossed oneself before mentioning La Palabra de Dios, by name. And around Iglesia Santa Maria de la Palabra de Dios, the history of the town it resided in was never mentioned for reasons of publicity.
Priests of the church traced their lineage back to both natives in the lowlands, and tribals from the hills, as well as a few white inhabitants who had no Catholic aspirations other than that of achieving forgiveness. It seems enigmatic and puzzling that such a diversity of laity should be so obsessed with genealogy, but all who were associated with the diocese were devoted historians. In recent years, some Danish geneticists started a project mapping genes in the area bracketed by Aguilar’s railway.
It could be said all who lived in La Palabra de Dios were obcessed. Obcessed about what? To one day obtain forgiveness by his Holiness? Or was it to alleviate the spell of guilt that clung like black lichen to stones of the settlement?
With the supply of holy books and communiques cut off, and all congress with the rest of the church severed, nothing formal mattered since most of the congregation could not read. At candlelit services, held usually at dawn and at dusk, one heard fragments of fifteen different languages. The Fathers communicated Holy Words to tribal elders who made offerings of corn, semi-precious stones, amber, carvings of copal and perfumed wood. Penitents wore bags of mud about their necks.
The theme of every service was pain. Suffering and guilt hung by a sordid chain from the neck of the town, a noisy bell, a heavy rotting beast.
The church persisted in efforts of forgetting, by force of the human spirit, it trudged through the slime of Purgatory, confident it had already experienced the fires of Hell. The confusion of oppressed and oppressor in the roster of saints seemed to reinforce notions of forgiveness. You could beat a man’s feet every day of your life, be forgiven, and then be sainted. There was even talk of sainting Aguilar, because his acts of oppression had taught the congregation so much.
Father Gomé hoped removal of the Papal curse might be hastened by the election of a liberal Pope in recent years, but despite numerous appeals, this had not happened.
Forgiveness was not forthcoming. Clergy and laity moved on. Services were punctual. So many candles were lit in the dark interior that even on the coldest of mountain nights when the frosty air of the snowcapped peaks bore into the gravel valley tucked between mountains like the breath of a dead angel, the interior of the tiny basilica stayed warm.
Once each month Gomé journeyed down the rail line to make his report to the Archdiocese, hoping to show the Bishop that God’s work was being done, and that the congregation was doing penance for its previous crimes. The Vicar would not admit him. Gome left his report on a silver tray in the vestry. It was hand delivered to the Bishop after he left.
Gomé did not expect admittance to the Bishop’s chambers. He only feared that the Church might lose its head and inform him that he and all future residents of the town were no longer welcome to cross the threshold into the divine light of the nave. Re-admittance to the Body of Christ was being considered. To Gomé this meant the congregation had already been forgiven by God.
Gomé spent a few brief moments in solitary prayer, though it was said junior priests kept an eye on him from a chapel in the transept, less some of the silver objects at the choir suddenly go missing.
The Bishop’s large fingers bulged with rings as he took up the request. He glanced at the perfumed letter, turned to the Vicar and scoffed. “These letters smell of the Devil, no? God has a right to live in Hell, yet he chooses not to do so.”
The Vicar filed Father Gomés’ letters, together with those of Gomés’ own father, and also the nine priests who had served before them, in a set of bindings that were not labelled. One could say what what one wanted about the Church. It kept all records.
Despite the torture told by frescos on the ceiling and retablos along the nave, Santa Maria de la Palabra de Dios was filled with flowers. Incense billowed from a hundred small silver braziers. The air was giddy with pollen, sweat and perfume. Haunted faces knelt and lit candles and prayed to a God of Suffering. Crescendos of wailing men and women rose and fell, the chorus from a endless tide of pain. Tears from brown cheeks pooled onto the floor, and rows of worshippers replaced those who rose to give up their place. Machetes rattled against the worn tiles. Tears ritually gathered by flat copal wood spatulas were managed by a sub-priest who poured them over a fired effigy of the Holy Son. The statue had acquired a patina of green mould and salt. It had lost form entirely, resembling more an abstract fierce form of the Mayan Rain God, Chaak.
And so, with history as a backdrop, we come to the subject of this story, the only daughter of Father Gomé, a young girl from La Palabra de Dios, who was, through a bizarre quirk of fate, adopted last year by an English family, and who now lives and studies in Mexico City.
I met Erica, on my last trip to the capital.
She worked as a tour guide in the Central Zocalo. Her long straight hair was impeccably combed. She wore a slim black miniskirt and a long-sleeved white button down shirt. She spoke English, quite well, tinted by an accent from somewhere else.
“I am not Mexican,” she had said to me, shortly after we met. “I have a long story to tell you. Do you want to hear it?”
It was then she told me of the train ride I should take to better understand her country.