I stress this essential tenet of my vocation, because it is important if you are to understand behavior that otherwise you might consider far from rational. Yes, I appeal to you because I know no person more capable of understanding. I have lived among stones. The taluses of Mitla, the friezes of Chichén-Itzá, the terraces of Uxmal, have been more than the site of my professional activity; they are the throne — please forgive the word, but this is how I feel — of a kind of honor regained. Mexico is a land of upheaval, almost always violent, and, in such cases, endowed with a certain epic grandeur; but more constant and cruel and insidious, I can assure you, have been the periods of peaceful upheaval such as those we have known the last sixty years. As a result, the wounds in my country never heal; we never grow the new skin of an aristocracy; we do not have an elite that can close our wounds. The compulsion for upheaval, either periodic, as in the past, or constant, as today, prevents that healing.
You belong to a society that does not repudiate the virtues of its ancient executioners when they become victims. Your aristocracy has been shot, guillotined, and exiled. But the political, aesthetic, and social culture of France has been zealously guarded. Thus, someone like yourself can enjoy the benefits of a vanished order along with those of the newer republican regime. This is, allow me to say it, not the best of all possible worlds, though it is the better of two possible worlds. There is a difference, though I would be happy if that option existed in my own country. I was thinking about these things when you said the night we dined in Jean’s house in Cuernavaca that Alexandre Dumas tells how Napoleon established an annuity of a hundred thousand écus in the name of the elderly widow of the Duc d’Orléans, whom you remembered, Branly, as the creator of the Parc Monceau. The motivation for his generosity was that in her salon on the Chaussée d’Antin the Duchesse was keeping alive the traditions of an aristocratic society that dated from the reigns of Louis XIV and Louis XV. Later, Dumas says that the first two hundred and fifty years of a life count only as memory. Would that were so of nations that vaunt their contemporaneity. I thought about your words all through the meal.
We Heredias of Mexico are what we are. Meat for the gallows, freed from the dungeons of Cádiz and Ceuta in exchange for participating in the conquest of the Indies. I shall not weary you with a detailed genealogy. Ten years after the fall of the Great Tenochtitlán, we had Indian wives and mestizo children in large numbers, along with vast expanses of land. Here, where there was so much land to be had and so many laborers to be enslaved, we could be what we had been unable to be in Spain. Hidalgos with a vengeance, immoderately indolent patricians, apathetic parasites. There was no reason to so much as lift a little finger in the New World, Branly. How then were we to demonstrate a power that like all functions atrophies if it is not exercised? Only with the enervation of appearances and the impunity of cruelty. History was to call this process the encomienda, royal grants of Indians, whole Indian villages, to Spanish colonists; the mita minera, forced Indian labor; peonage. Heredia is the name of many patriarchs, judges, and jailers in the new Hispanic world that survived for three centuries because we convinced that multitude of ragged creatures that they owed their very lives to our paternal protection, and to the consolation of our religion.
As a boy, I visited a hacienda that had belonged to one of my ancestors. It had been burned by Zapata’s troops during the Revolution. It was a ruin, a ruin in the image and likeness of those who had inhabited it: ugly, black, and cruel. The huts, jails, and presses scattered about the burned-out shell of the old sugar mill spoke to me of a world without grandeur, a world consumed by injustice at the very moment of its apogee. But is this not the legacy of Hispanic peoples: the coexistence of grandeur and decadence?
I believe that visit shaped my vocation. I grew up and sought the means by which I might assure my place in society. We had fought tenaciously to maintain our position through the capricious regimes of the nineteenth century. The liberal reforms of Juárez dealt us the first blow, cutting us off from our traditional alliance with the Church. But very quickly our situation improved, when, after twenty years spent in inept bumbling in pharmacies, imagine! and legal offices and newspaper editorships, and of adapting badly to something then called “modern life,” the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz created conditions favorable to regaining a portion of our former universe: large landholdings. But a new aristocracy is not forged in thirty years, and when I was born in 1931, my destiny was sealed: find a profession or live by my wits. No other path was open; the Revolution had administered the coup de grâce to the vestiges of the old Mexican oligarchies. From that time forward, Branly, everyone in Mexico, like the impassioned followers of Bonaparte in France, would have a right to everything. Do you not agree that this is the form democratic oppression takes?
I am telling you this, and what will follow, because I want you to understand more than the complexity of my psychic and historical makeup; I also want you, my cordial and hospitable friend, to be interested in me as a person. Yes, I built my throne on the ruins of the Indian world; you must not be surprised by the paradox. It is time that we false hidalgos, we enervated Creoles, and, of course, we resentful mestizos, from what was once New Spain, at last recognize who we are, recognize that the foundations of this land, its most profound achievement, its ineradicable identity, insignia, and nobility, are to be found in our ancient Toltec, Aztec, and Maya stones. In them I, a grudging professional, a great lord without a fiefdom, a tyrant without slaves, I took refuge. I spoke to them, and they spoke to me. You must believe everything I have told you, Branly. You must devote even more thought to the enormity of the paradox I have outlined. I could not accept that my image was to be found in what Aldous Huxley called the “humpbacked” Spanish colonial architecture of Mexico; and in what had been the seat of our power, the hacienda, I found only the horror I have described. Such was the spiritual victory of the vanquished: I, a Creole in search of lost grandeur, could find it only among the monuments of my victims’ past.
Professions deform one; archaeology is no exception. I spoke more with the stones than with my wife and my sons, Antonio and Victor. I had to travel constantly and our apartment on Río Garona Street became little more than a pied-à-terre for me. I met my wife Lucie in the French Institute of Latin America, that urban oasis on Río Nazas Street where my entire generation went to learn about film, literature, and, above all, about the civilization we thought it our personal responsibility to sustain during the years France was in eclipse. The first thing Lucie pointed out to me was that everything I told her about my ancestors was marked by that strange love for France which supposedly saves us Latin Americans from our ancient subordination to Spain and our more recent subordination to the Anglo-Saxon world. France seems like a safe and longed-for haven. Lucie was from one of the families of Barcelonnette in the Basses-Alpes who traditionally emigrated to Mexico. Her family made a fortune there in department stores, and now, as so often happens, she was atoning for the commercial sins of her ancestors by studying history and literature at the Institute. It was natural for us to meet, to fall in love, to marry.
I owe her a great deal. Unlike me, she found nothing shameful in business enterprises; she had no such pride or pretensions. She complemented my formation, my culture; French reason is a good antidote to Latin American delirium. It is also its incubator, and Lucie delighted in reminding me that my country had fought a revolution for independence because a few men had read Rousseau and Voltaire, an enlightened counterrevolution because a few others had read Comte, and a new intellectual revolution inspired by Bergson. I leave to you your opinion of the success of these ideological transplants. But I confess to you, Branly, that Lucie’s perception, her discipline, her capacity for work, were the goad to one of my own ambitions, my decision to read everything, to know everything, to find the interrelationships of all I had learned, and not to succumb to our century’s gangrenous absurdity, which in the business world, in the very same trade that enriched my wife’s parents — and, because they were grand hidalgos and never learned how to exercise it, impoverished my own — is today translated into mercilessly divorcing the past from the present, with the proposition that the past must always be something dead and we always something new, something different from that much-to-be-scorned past — new, and consequently thirsting for the latest innovation in art, clothing, entertainment, machines. Novelty has become the blazon of our happiness. So we drug ourselves against the realization that our destiny, too, will be death, the moment the future relegates us to the past.