Snow in Mexico

Nothing would seem righter or more natural this weekend of all weekends than to talk about Jerusalem, but I'm not going to do it. I was there once a dozen years ago, just about Easter time, and nothing in a lifetime of travel stands out today with quite the poignancy of the morning I stood by an olive tree in the Garden of Gethsemane where Christian tourists shifted and whispered and looked out to the raw hills and the bronze Dome of the Rock, the place on all the earth most sacred to the Moslem.

It seemed a blessed relief then that after centuries of slaughter and hatred, these two peoples should not only come to tolerate each other but to live in the same town, going about their daily business in sight of each other's most holy shrines. 

It seemed then that we were looking at a settled bit of history and we went on down to Ethiopia and up to Lebanon and other pleasant places, which now are racked again with the old hatreds and feuds. I won't talk about Israel and the Arabs, not out of tact or because we don't really know what came out Mr Begin's visit to Washington but because nothing is being said here that is not being said in London or Melbourne or Jordan or Tehran. The arguments are the same and nobody appears able to reconcile them. 

The one thing I will say is this. I gather from foreign visitors and newspapers that a lot of people abroad attribute the administration's, or even the American, reluctance to be firm with Israel to something darkly described as the powerful Jewish lobby in this country. This is a fiction. Of course in New York, a city with the largest Jewish population of any city on earth, there is a powerful Jewish community, as there is in other cities. But even in New York, it's split deeply about American policy in the Middle East and, in and around Congress, there is no more of a Jewish lobby than there's a Catholic lobby. 

That being said, Americans – like everybody else – argue about the American stake in the Middle East and wish they could stay out of it, but every time the pros and cons have been thrashed through, the uncomfortable fact emerges that the Middle East lies in the shadow of the Soviet Union, whose enormous fleet could seal off the pipelines to our oil and our energy. So, whatever horrors are committed on whatever side, the United States is involved and is going to be. 

Well, after two weeks out of the United States, I find myself not so much out of touch, as in a state of quarantine between two cultures, between one America and another, between Mexico and the United States. People asked if you had a good time, tell you you look well and they put it down to the sun and they hope you didn't have a bout of what the Mexicans call the 'turista' and everybody in the Americas calls 'Montezuma's revenge.' 

Montezuma was the Aztec emperor who, at his first sight of Cortes, assumed the Spaniard was a returned Aztec god and ordered him to be treated with hospitality bordering on reverence. But Cortes pulled down the shrine of the god he'd been mistaken for and there was no doubt then that he was a human invader and conqueror. He clapped fetters on Montezuma and kept him under rather regal house arrest on the understanding that he would provide the Spaniards with gold, jewels and women. Cortes then broke into the native temples, destroyed the images, set up a cross and an image of the Virgin. And this outrage brought on a total war between the Aztecs and the Spaniards. Montezuma was paraded on the battlements and told to beg for peace and he was shot down by arrows and killed. 

Today in Mexico you might ordinarily expect that Americans would be resented and Spaniards revered. On the contrary, it seems Americans are the most welcome of guests and while you see everywhere the remains, or rather the whole structure, of Spanish civilisation – most of all the religion to which the native Indians were forcibly converted – at the same time there is enormous devotion to the pyramids and statues and awesome relics of the Olmecs and Mayans and Aztecs. 

But while Mexico is an intensely Catholic country, there is a strong, lingering resentment still of the Spanish Conquest and the means it employed. And all of this immense and violent tradition, the whole legend of how Montezuma was betrayed by the white man has, of course, down 400 years, passed into the history books. And now the name comes up only when a tourist is afflicted with the traveller's complaint, 'Montezuma's revenge'. 

One José Martinez, a Mexican driver, told me that he sometimes takes a batch of his countrymen on trips north to the United States' border towns. They go into Texas for a day or two and then, he said, they often complain that they have suffered from 'George Washington's revenge'. I suppose it's the same everywhere as with the first popular names given to syphilis – it's never a product of your own country. It was, to us the Spanish disease. To the Spanish, the English disease; to the English, the French disease. 

Well, I found out something that is the bane of the Mexican Tourist Board, which is the foreigner's main preconception about Mexico and which, like so many other national preconceptions, is really a product of the advertising boys. You hear the word Mexico and you think of scrub desert and a sombrero, and under it a native crouched and folded in exhaustion against a cactus plant in blinding sunshine. It seems to come as a shock to the unlikeliest people, to the couple we went with, for example, to hear that Mexico goes from a high temperate zone, Cumberland, say, and I insist on calling it Cumberland, to a low torrid zone, Egypt, and in between it has a wealth of mountain pastures with, for example, candlestick pines that are not seen in Essex or Virginia. 

We started out the first day driving north-west of Mexico City and coughed a good deal here and there as we drove through a smog that can be more fearsome than any I know. On the last morning, having done a 600-mile loop around small and big Spanish, colonial towns, we woke up in our motel and it was raining. The girl who ran the motel was in a state of high excitement. She'd made a journey, she said, up to Toluca, which was the last town we'd go through on our way back to Mexico City. She had been there to see something that she'd read about and heard about, but never seen. Ten guesses and you probably wouldn't get it. Snow! A storm, she said, had blocked the highway and the hills above Toluca on our road. 

Well, we were... we were kindly toward her, knowing that a snow flurry would naturally send Mexicans into panic and we assumed there might have been an inch or two, and then we set off. The snow had fallen the day before but when we got into the mountains it seemed that every inhabitant of Mexico City was out and parked on the other side of the highway. Thousands of children and parents were up to their knees on the hillsides throwing snowballs, making snowmen, sometimes just letting the magical stuff slide from their hands, which in that part nobody had seen for 48 years. 

They're at all times an ingenious people and in no time they began to build snowmen on the radiators of their cars so, of course, they wouldn't be able to see to drive, in the form of men in scarves, in the form of saints, matadors, igloos. It took us four hours for a 90-minute ride and, back in the city, people stood and gaped at cars going by with snowmen on them, the way they might have waved at a queen. 

So the next day, the local reporters had a picnic. I'm looking at the morning paper now and I'm sending it to a friend, an old Mexico buff who will not take my word for the first paragraph which reads: 'On Friday night, Mexico City was practically cut off from its surroundings as the snowbound highways to Cuernavaca, Toluca and Queretaro were closed to traffic. Police reported 180 accidents on the roads, three persons died, 17 were injured and more than 60 half-frozen derelicts were rescued by the police.' 

The weather bureau warned of a two-day stretch of what it called Arctic weather, but the weather bureau was wrong. Sunday was balmy and shining and, the snowmen having melted, the boys and girls and the little old ladies of the street stalls turned their ingenuity to the palm tree, or its fronds. It was, of course, Palm Sunday and the beginning of the most elaborate and unbroken celebration of all the biblical episodes of Holy Week. The stalls sold palm fronds but not just in their natural form. They were twisted and beguiled into hats, toys, dolls and offered with a smile and a blessing. 

Somewhere, I suppose – and in case some anthropologist is listening I'd better suppose – there may be in Mexico an Indian tribe that retains the faith of the early Olmecs or Toltecs or whoever, but in my wanderings through the landscape and through the books, I haven't yet heard of one. On the contrary, the poorer, the barer, the more desolate the village, the more certain is the sight of an adobe church and a cross on it. 

Down in Taxco, a town on a mountain side not far from the Pacific, the whole of the week is given over to re-enacting the Christian drama with the local people, from the entry of the Christ figure into town on Palm Sunday, the procession of patron saints, up to Thursday when Roman centurions gather in their plumes and lances and that night there's the washing of the feet and the Last Supper. On Good Friday, the death sentence is read by one of the Roman soldiers and the road to Calvary is trodden. 

Possibly the bravest man in this drama is the local character who plays Judas. He says that for days after it's all over, he's bullied and scorned and children throw stones at him. The crucifixion takes place in a convent and then there is the descent from the cross and the image put in a coffin and the day ends with a procession of silence. The last ceremony is on Easter Sunday at 5 p.m. with a process of the faithful carrying the image of Christ bearing the five wounds, 'El Senor de la Resurreccion'. It gives remarkable pause to us in our slacks and sport shirts looking on. 

Well, next week I promise you, back to the more comfortable land to the north and the heathens.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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