I considered this. “Can I have a ticket to Cuernavaca?”
Cuernavaca seemed to be the least sinister place on earth, no death stalking the streets. Vendors strolled by with straining bunches of balloons. The sky was a brilliant blue, as if the beige tarp of the city had been rolled back. The volcanoes, Popocatepetl and Ixtaccihuatl, loomed up in monumental profile. Beyond their peaks the brilliant sky was full of promise and mystery. The plaza was clean and well laid out. I was aware of the heat, but a clean breeze was blowing, resulting in an unidentified tinkling of glass, making everything seem enchanted. I bought a pack of Chiclets from a small, barefoot boy in exchange for directions to Cortes’s palace. He volunteered to walk me over for ten pesos, which seemed like a good deal to me and exorbitant to him, so we were both happy. He even gave me some extra gum to cement the goodwill between us.
Cortes’s palace was made of stones, a maze of rooms that led into one another in a seemingly accidental way, as if each room were giving birth to the next as I passed through it. The light was filtered and alien, shining here and there, but every room had a pocket of darkness, a cold spot of gloom. I thought of the palaces I’d seen in Europe: the Pitti Palace in Florence, the Residenz in Munich, the Schoenbrun in Vienna. There was none of that lightness, frivolity, excess here, rather the feeling that adobe walls—the very ceiling—had calcified out of crushed bone, been cemented with thickened blood. Glass cases were arranged on the walls displaying pens and inkwells, woven goods from the Philippines, leather-covered bibles from Spain, the junk of colonization. Small clusters of people moved from case to case reverentially, arranging the occasional strand of hair or probing a rogue zit, when they thought no one would notice. I was studying my own reflection—wondering if the odd light and the angle of the glass had made me look so deathly pale—when the businessman entered the room. He was wearing a suit, which I guessed was made of tropical wool. He wore yards of the stuff because of his size. The businessman was sweating profusely, mopping away the rivulets of sweat with an inadequate handkerchief. He had a tour guide who, for the sum of fifty pesos, was impersonating an English speaker with some knowledge of Cuernavacan history.
“Please to look here,” said the guide.
The businessman complied, peering myopically into a glass case that held a few fragments of Aztec jewelry against a background of reproduced pen-and-ink illustrations from the time of the friars.
“Yes,” said the guide, “and then the Aztecs…”
“Were wiped out by Cortes?” said the businessman.
“There was a woman called Marina. She was, how do you say…”
“Cortes’s mistress?”
And so on. I noticed that the businessman was reading the informative plaques and although they were in Spanish it was hard to misunderstand certain famous events followed by a date.
“It happened in 1519?” asked the businessman.
“Yes,” said the guide.
I caught the businessman’s eye and he smiled back. His mouth was covered with a pink, powdery film that looked out of place and childlike, like candy that had not been wiped away. He held his gut, ran his hanky over the smooth hairless part of his head, then turned back to his guide.
I progressed through the museum at my usual pace. There was one of the ubiquitous Diego Rivera murals splashed up on the terrace that I spent close to an hour studying. I imagined myself inserted here and there, beside the skeleton figure, in yellow pumps with hefty calves, with my profile pressed hard against the brilliant blue of a Mexican sky.
I liked Rivera a good deal. I liked the populations of his pictures, the storytelling, the death chase—a real pursuit of scuttle and conquest. Rivera was rumored to have eaten human flesh. I’d read somewhere that he thought eating people enhanced his ability to render the human form. Apparently, a friend of his who was a furrier had told him that minks were fed mink flesh to enhance the quality of the fur. Rivera thought some life force was trapped in dead flesh. Of course, I found this all a bit hard to believe. That Diego Rivera was governed by a number of appetites seemed highly plausible, but the idea of Rivera actually tracking someone down was hard to picture, unless the quarry was very slow.
Diego Rivera’s unconventional belief alongside Aztec history seemed to suggest that cannibalism was a Mexican thing, up there with the Hat Dance and tequila. But I didn’t believe it still applied. You needed cannibals to be labeled that way, and it had been a while since Mexico had given us any. Papua New Guinea was supposed to have cannibals. I’d read about Michael Rockefeller’s disappearance. He was on an art-scouting mission skirting the coast, where most of the natives had never seen a white man. The story goes that his canoe capsized and he began to swim for shore. Maybe the Asmat got the pot boiling as soon as he hit the water. The natives most likely had been watching him for days, hidden behind the jungle shrubbery, still as trees. The whiteness of his skin might have been appealing—white looks misleadingly tender—even if the hair was off-putting. Perhaps the Asmat had heard that Michael was an American prince, that his was the flesh of royalty.
When I thought about it, I never pictured Michael flayed and boiled. He was in the water doing an elegant crawl, a stroke perfected in the Hamptons, a stroke useful for reaching floating decks and girls whose bare shoulders were slick with coconut oil. I saw his head bobbing in and out of the waves, his breath rasping with the effort. His mind conjured up the images of hungry sharks, but the shore was near and just a few short pool-lengths away.
Michael, in the water, with salt stinging his eyes and small fish nibbling his feet.
New Guinea had also given us the primitive brain-eating Fore (Aunt Marion, as I eat my first lobster: “Don’t eat the brain. It’s poisonous.”) and the Fore had given us kuru, “laughing sickness,” similar to mad cow disease, always fatal and an exotic plume in the cap of Western civilization. William Arens—an anti-cannibal, whom I had had to read in Anthropology 210—pointed out that no one had actually seen the Fore eating human flesh. And it hadn’t been proved conclusively that kuru was a direct result of cannibalism. So, although the kuru of the Fore turned out to be the stuff of a Nobel prize, it was not necessarily that of reality. I imagined a Fore chief talking to his “first contact” anthropologist.
Anthropologist: Are you sure you’ve never eaten human flesh?
Chief: No. I’m pretty sure I haven’t.
Anthropologist: Never?
Chief: No. I’d remember something like that.
Anthropologist: Not even after the death of loved one, to make them live on in you?
Chief: Well, it is an interesting thought…
Anthropologist: How about after slaying an enemy, to insult his remains?
Chief: I haven’t slain an enemy, but I have insulted one. Is this of any help?
Anthropologist: How about to satisfy protein deficiency?
Chief: We do lack protein. Other than the occasional pig, meat is hard to come by.
Anthropologist: And there is the gustatory aspect.
Chief: Gustatory?
Anthropologist: Interesting. You wouldn’t have any cultural head revulsions?
Chief: I don’t think so.
Anthropologist: Any interest in the brain?
(long pause)
Chief: Sure. Brains are great. We love brains.
Anthropologist: Ever eat one?
Chief: A brain? Yes. Just last year. I don’t know how that slipped my mind.
Anthropologist: Just one brain?
Chief: Maybe it was two?
Of course, anthropologists were usually better than that, but in our culture there was a weird enthusiasm for cannibalism. Cannibalism was a big thrill as long as we weren’t doing it. Cannibalism also, for the most part, was embraced with little supporting data as if in Western culture, as our faith in God failed, we still were able to believe in cannibals—their cauldrons and drums, savory stews and pit roasts—feasting at the edges of the world.