Yesterday's Train by Terry Pindell

Author:Terry Pindell
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466881747
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

6

Feast of Death

Mexico City to Oaxaca

Americans don’t like to traffic with death. We spend millions to enable people who have nothing left to live for to postpone dying. We stay clear of our cemeteries and invest them with horrific fantasies. Our dead simply cease to exist if we are atheists, go someplace else if we are believers, or remain the ultimate insoluble mystery if we are agnostics. But there is no joy in our relationship with our dead. We would rather not think about them; if we do, we feel we must mourn.

Not so the Mexicans, who in generation after generation have personally witnessed so much premature death. Mexicans do not mourn their dead; they celebrate them, and they bring them back from time to time to share food and drink. It’s partly a persistence of the pre-Columbian belief that the dead, by their deaths, contribute to the fueling of the world, the rains, the crops, the turning of the earth, and the continuance of life. It’s also a particularly literal interpretation of the Christian teaching that by his death, Christ guaranteed ours would have no sting. The two alloys of belief, forged in a fire of violence and so much immediate contact with death, define it as the unifying theme of Mexican existence. In it, the land and the sky, the past and the present, the hacendado and the campesino, the sorrow and the joy of life all come together. In death, according to Octavio Paz, the Mexican finds his truest identity.

* * *

There are more people than usual riding the Oaxaqueño out of Mexico City this Halloween evening, two months after the national election and two nights before Mexico’s Day of the Dead. Almost all are Mexicans; there are just four other foreigners besides us, a couple from Germany and a young backpacking couple, he from Wisconsin, she from British Columbia. An old woman with deep creases in her face arrives in a wheelchair and is carried on board and to her seat by her grandson. Young mothers with very small children, lovers, middle-aged sisters, grandparents, and large families quickly fill up the nine cars of this unusually long train. The fiesta for the Day of the Dead is celebrated all over Mexico, but Oaxaca is a region where the tradition is particularly strong.

This train once had Pullman sleepers for the overnight ride to Oaxaca but no longer, as the paying tourist traffic didn’t justify the expense. We won’t get beds, but in primera especial class we do have good reclining plush seats (with the damnable divider removed by some previous mechanically minded rider).

As the train pulls out of the station, we head for our favorite spot on the open platform but are steered away by the conductor who politely informs us that the division through which we are traveling has had a problem with kids throwing rocks at the trains. Is it political or anything like that? we ask. No, it’s just kids without anything better to do, we are told.

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