Summer Medley, Volume 14 #3

Chiapas: A Reporter's Diary

In which a search for the Zapatista revolution yields a dying rabbit, a pregnant cat and chickens that don't give eggs

by Louisa Blair

February 2, 1996
Arrived in San Cristobal de Las Casas yesterday. It's a beautiful town high in the mountains with clean air and razor-sharp sunlight, narrow flagstone streets and foot-high sidewalks. Some friends have lent me their blue house, three blue rooms giving off a little courtyard with a backyard behind. A neighbour opened the door to me, gave me a cup of tea, then left again.

After an exhausting overland journey across Mexico with no Spanish, I flung myself down on the bed, amazed at having survived without getting shot, kidnapped, mocked, scourged, robbed, raped, etc., as all my Toronto friends had sorrowfully predicted. As I lay there I heard the clippety-clop-clipppety-clop of lots of horses galloping down the street, and dramatic revolutionary neighing. What a town! I told myself triumphantly. The rebels gallop through routinely on their horses, no doubt flourishing their swords, right past the house! I then realized that I had lain down on a battery-powered toy horse--when you touch it it makes a galloping noise followed by neighing.

I lay there thinking about why I'm here: to write some stories on the indigenous revolutionary movement in Chiapas, to learn some Spanish.

I do not feel lonely: I find myself in charge of a dozen chickens, a dying rabbit and a heavily pregnant cat. I found the rabbit huddled miserably among the chickens, incontinent and unable to move his hind legs. All the cat had to eat was potatoes. I am wondering what the ethics are of killing a damaged rabbit to feed a pregnant cat. The evening became very cold so I brought the rabbit into the bedroom for the night, thinking that at least he could die in relative warmth inside. The cat, so flea-ridden that the fleas were cavorting about openly upon her person, insisted on sleeping inside the bed with me.

I lay there with her thinking about why I'm here: to write some stories on the indigenous revolutionary movement in Chiapas that has so captured the imagination of the continent, to learn some Spanish, and doubtless also to avoid dealing with some deep blockages in my semiconscious psychosocial inner being.

That night I heard what sounded like mortars exploding. After a period of denial lasting ten minutes or so, I accepted that the revolution had started again, right in my very neighbourhood. This is real foreign correspondent stuff, I thought, digging out my microcassette recorder. I ran around the house locking every door I could find and then sat shivering and rigid on a chair. The cat looked at me fixedly with her famished potato-eyes, and the rabbit thrashed about angrily in his cardboard box. Finally, during a lull in the crossfire, I opened the door a crack and looked out into the street, wondering if the time had come to make an eyewitness report.

A group of drunk adolescents were setting off homemade firecrackers. A youth would hold onto the firecracker with one hand, shove a lighted cigarette up the end of it with the other, and then let go of it just as it started to rocket forth into the cold night air.

February 3
The chickens were ravenous this morning and I fed them the rest of the popcorn that I found in the kitchen. A lengthy search for eggs turned up nothing. La gata embarazada (the pregnant she-cat) still hasn't had her kittens, and the sick rabbit is still alive this morning, so I've decided he has a will to live. This morning the neighbour was out brushing his teeth on the other side of our chicken run. In anguish I held up the rabbit to show him its useless legs, and he suggested I take it to "el veterinario americano," as if being American were some mark of added credibility.

I set out to find him, rabbit in a cardboard box on my shoulder. Understanding nothing of the spoken directions, I followed successive pointed arms like vectors across the city, and finally arrived at a little whitewashed shop outside of which were several caged rabbits whose eyes, I couldn't help noticing, were puffy and diseased-looking. On the other side of the street a young man was killing chickens in the gutter to sell in his mother's butcher shop.

The veterinario americano looked remarkably Mexican and spoke no English at all. With a certain gleam in his eye he imperiously pushed aside his clamoring assistants and led me and the rabbit into a private examining room. After an exhaustive examination the veterinario americano pronounced that my rabbit had a "pene prolapso." With the help of his painfully explicit gestures I was able to guess he meant a prolapsed penis. It is so inflamed, I believe he said, that his hindquarters seized up. He sold me some liniment, which he said I must massage into the rabbit's hindquarters three times daily, and solemnly instructed me to push the penis back into its foreskin every time it emerged.

On the way home I passed through the market, where an old woman sitting on the ground selling oranges called out to ask me what was in my cardboard box. I showed her the rabbit and told her what was wrong with it, and she rocked back and forth with compassion saying, "Pobresito conejito" (poor little rabbit).

I was hoping to get going on finding an interpreter and making some contacts but instead I had to return to the market to buy some maize for the chickens, some chicken for the cat, some carrots for the rabbit, and also some firewood because I badly needed to take a hot shower. There's a tiny water tank next to the chicken run, under which is a tiny wood furnace. You have to use a machete to split the firewood into pieces thin enough that when you jump on them they break in half. The tricky part is not slicing off your thumbs.

The market is run largely by indigenous Tzeltal and Tsotsil women, the latter in their traditional thick black woollen skirts and bright blue embroidered shirts. I was dazed by the colours and the new vegetables and fruits and the tiny people. There were heaps of spooky vegetative things that turned out to be medicines: bits of bleeding root, gnarls of shrub and other Shakespearean strangenesses. The market women patiently told me the name of each unfamiliar thing and I repeated it and then immediately forgot it. They are a quiet people, not all the shouting that you usually get in markets. Some people were leading wonderful hairy piglets about in little rope harnesses. I was sorely tempted to add one to my menagerie. When I got home I realized I'd forgotten to buy some food for myself, so seriously had I been taking my husbandry responsibilities.

February 5
I have had to lay aside my plans to investigate the signs of Zapatista influence on the resistance to neoliberalism in Mexico's civil society in order to discover how to keep the animals alive and intact. Replacing the rabbit's pene prolapso, for example, has turned out to be pretty much a full-time job.

Three Tzeltal sisters with their three children came here yesterday for the day to make use of the hot water and retrieve their battery-powered neighing horse. They talked in a mixture of Tzeltal and Spanish. They were all too busy, having showers and cooking and laughing and hanging up laundry and discussing how to knit something, for me to ask them about the economic opportunities for migrant indigenous women in Chiapas, and the children were falling all over their mothers or tearing around after one another.

My vocabulary book reads like this: rabbit, pregnant, prolapsed penis; civil society, neoliberal agenda, oil royalties; carrots, firewood, leg (of animal).

To my surprise no one was shocked that the rabbit was living in the bedroom. They were skeptical that the pene prolapso was the cause of his ills, and said a rat must have bitten him. Instead of picking their brains on their feelings about Zapatista women commandantes, all I seemed to be able to do was ask them about food, rabbits, hot water, toilets.

I later took the rabbit back to the veterinario americano again, according to his instructions. We went into the same private operating room and he asked me to hold the rabbit's head firmly while he stitched the penis back into the foreskin. But he used thread so thick that the stitches broke through the skin time after time, and we were soon both covered in a fine spray of blood.

"Tiene que buscar una fila mas fine, por favor!" I pleaded, guessing desperately at the vocab, but he either didn't have any thinner thread or didn't know what I was going on about. Now he'll be fine in exactly five days, the veterinario told me, and with continued massage his legs will be back to normal.

I was struggling not to pass out, but I suddenly noticed that the rabbit didn't struggle at all. It gradually dawned on me that this is in fact a paraplegic rabbit, a permanently paralysed rabbit, and the veterinario americano didn't know what he was talking about. Today during a final massage session I found some bite marks above the rabbit's tail and I think my Tzeltal friends were right. The same rat that is taking all the chickens' eggs took a chomp out of the rabbit and hit the spinal column.

The pregnant cat still sleeps in my bed with her head lying on the pillow next to me.

February 6
Still no eggs.

Today I went to the cathedral to meet Don Samuel Ruiz, the bishop of Chiapas, who is currently mediating in the negotiations between the Mexican government and the Zapatistas. He has always fought for the rights of the indigenous people and as a result now walks around with four armed bodyguards. I hoped for an exclusive interview after Mass. But another priest took the service and spent most of the time going up and down the aisle blessing people amid clouds and clouds of incense being flung around by a little boy in jeans. People pushed forward to receive this great favour, lining the aisle with bowed heads.

Behind us was a life-sized sculpture of Jesus on his hands and knees, in a purple gold-brocade miniskirt, with suppurating wounds bleeding all over the cathedral floor. A massive crown of vicious thorns that had sprouted Mayan-looking sun's rays weighed down his head, and his multiply punctured skin was a terrible grey, in fact exactly the colour of some of the chunks of meat I saw in the market this afternoon and didn't buy. I love being a Catholic.

February 8
The rabbit is no more. When I discovered worms thriving joyfully in the lifeless flesh of his hindquarters I decided that his time had come, and asked the toothbrushing neighbour, who turns out to be an expert rabbit-killer called Julio, if he would mind mercy-killing my rabbit (Favor de matarlo con mucha misericordia). After handing him over the fence I went inside and busied myself grimly boiling up some chicken livers for the cat, who is still pregnant. The chickens are fine, although every night some of them escape and I spend my first waking minutes chasing chickens and flinging them over the high fence.

Each day, to keep myself in touch with political events, I walk to the Zócalo, the town square, and buy a radical newspaper, La Jornada, and a reactionary one, Excelsior. Then I sit down and try to read them, using my dictionary and writing down new words. My vocabulary book reads like this: rabbit, pregnant, prolapsed penis; civil society, neoliberal agenda, oil royalties; carrots, firewood, leg (of animal).

Quite soon I give up reading the newspaper, lured away by what's happening in the Zócalo. It is always full of people. People going to church, people selling hammocks, people standing at the bank machine, people polishing other people's shoes under the laurel trees, old men playing the violin for money, tourists eating tamales and talking about their diarrhea, young people on the bandstand flirting with one another, politicians hurrying between the flowerbeds with their briefcases, little children selling Chiclets and Zapatista dolls.

February 10
The house now seems to be full of people who sit around talking politics, about the things that I came down here to find out. I understand just enough Spanish to know that they're saying things that I absolutely must know about, but not enough to quite make out the content. At times the conversation moves away from politics and the people around me are clearly being wickedly witty and laughing like drains, and I remain stony-faced until someone makes a rather pathetic joke that even I can understand and then I laugh hideously loud and long and everybody either turns and stares or blushes with embarrassment for me. Still no eggs.

February 12
The negotiations between the government and the Zapatistas have started up again in San Cristobal. I went to look at the line of soldiers surrounding the conference centre, who are standing back to back with a parallel line of campesinos forming their own "peace ring," in a quiet ironic protest against believing government troops to be any guarantee of security. The soldiers would not let me in without a laminated yellow press pass.

When I got home the cat was in the midst of giving birth to four kittens in the drawer where I keep my belongings. One of them was dead, and I wrapped it in the pages of my background material notebook, which was bloodstained beyond deciphering, and consigned it to the fire. I suppose I must take her choice of a birthing centre as a compliment. After all it was I who guiltily bought her choice cuts of meat from the market, fighting my way through the starving dogs and rifling among the bloody heaps of tubes and pipes and gizzards and mysterious little bubbly lumpy bits of animal innards piled up on the butcher's tables to find something I thought would tickle her fancy, when I should have been out interviewing a commandante, a bishop, a government negotiator or an Ordinary Person.

This morning the three sisters brought a pair of rabbits from their parents' farm, a male and a female, to replace the old one. While we were hanging out the washing, their children discovered a cache of eight eggs under the post that holds up the clothesline. Fertility reigns once more, and perhaps I can get on with investigating the struggle against neoliberalism.

Compass associate editor Louisa Blair recently spent two months in San Cristobal de Las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico.