Killing the Buddha Read online

  The politician disappeared into his seat during all this time. He’d never really traveled outside the country, had no passport, and carried a torn and brittle birth certificate. Every time he showed the ancient document for ID, another flake of paper fell off and drifted to the ground.

  When we finally made it to the hotel, there was not a drink to be had. So we were left to the mercies of the in-room minibars.

  How is the faithful city become a harlot! It was full of judgment; righteousness lodged in it; but now murderers.

  ISAIAH 1:21

  I can smell the rotten blood seeping out of the wet ground. It is everywhere because of all the conquests. And it is here, also. We live in a world where eventually all the temples go to the torch, all the people go to spend time in Babylon, and the kingdom is never restored. This last is the rub. We keep licking this sore in our mouths and telling ourselves the kingdom will be restored. I part from Isaiah on this matter. I think we are already in the kingdom, ready or not.

  In this place with the humid air and lovely jacaranda trees, the killing came early and so did the torch. The politician and I sit in a café, drink cold beers and eat botanas. Red tiles smile from the floor, and on the walls there are old photographs of dead revolutionaries from a dead revolution. But the real killing came five hundred years or so ago. Nuño Beltran de Guzmán rode into this green with five hundred Spaniards and ten thousand native allies. He found people who lived hither and yon, some in caves, people who had kept the central power at bay, failed to worship the pyramids with that blood running down the steps. Guzmán was a slaver, and many he simply killed, the others he put in chains. One local leader he dragged behind horses, then burned alive. By way of explanation, he said that the man had converted and then relapsed. Then there was the matter of disease, strange organisms brought by the strange men, and the diseases killed even more than the sword. The temple burns, the trip to yet another Babylon begins, the flesh and bone become ash and dust. Guzmán started a city, though the location shifted a bit in the early years. And then, he was hauled back to his homeland in shackles and vanished from notice. Close to five hundred years later, his hand is still on the land. The natives he found never recovered in number or in their souls. He was the first breath of the modern in this place.

  Beads of moisture form on the cold bottles of beer. The big framed photographs on the wall hold a black-and-white revolution from almost a century ago. The blood brought no restoration, brought little beyond blood. Temples were burned and sacked at times in this revolution. There was a hatred of the faith among some who sought to fix this place.

  The politician has fallen into one of his silences. He is home but he does not know his way around.

  He rallies by remembering his childhood. His mother never learned the new language, his father used his back to earn a living. One day, the politician came home from school with a tattoo he’d inked on his hand. His mother put his hand on the kitchen counter, grabbed a Brillo pad, and rubbed and rubbed until all trace of his new marking was gone.

  “My hand,” he recalls with a smile, “was raw and open for days and days.”

  Thus saith the Lord the King of Israel, and his redeemer the Lord of hosts; I am the first, and I am the last; and beside me there is no God.

  ISAIAH 44:6

  The key thing is the anger over loss. Guzmán comes and destroys everything. The revolutions come and destroy everything. Hunger comes and it is north to Babylon and almost everything must be left behind and what little can be taken—language, custom, memory—these things are scorned, fall into disuse, and ebb away. New things take their place. Isaiah says the restoration will come, the world will be set aright once again. Babylon is a lesson, not a place.

  But what if this thought is not simply the wrong thought or the old, used up thought? What if it is the fatal thought, the one not even to be dreamed, never to be desired? What if the destruction always comes, Babylon always comes, and this is always part of the birth?

  You reach back, any of you, just reach back, all of us, and you stumble and we stumble into the tribe, and then the tribe starts talking and you learn of places now gone, of rites now dead, of powers now vanished, of young women with fresh scents now beyond your reach. You reach back and you start to believe in race, holy places, and if you linger, say you stay on the temple grounds or sit at midnight in the gardens with that demijohn of red wine, you swallow that magic word that floods your cells with ecstasy, the rave that hollows out nights for a thousand years or more, that syringe full of energy: destiny.

  God has a purpose for me, this I know.

  God exists.

  God does not exist.

  God exists but is unfit for worship because of the pain in my eyes.

  God exists but does not require worship because he is my sister.

  God is a word used by cowards, a babble of fear like that other word, restoration.

  God does not exist, but if he did, Isaiah would not understand him.

  God does not exist, but if he did, he would not talk to Isaiah.

  God does not exist.

  God has a purpose for me.

  This I know.

  Everything is crushed under the heels of the Guzmáns’ belief in destiny. Every Guzmán, killing and raping and slaving, believed in destiny. World without end, amen, it is written.

  And they shall build the old wastes, they shall rise up the former desolations, and they shall repair the waste cities, the desolations of many generations.

  ISAIAH 61:4

  Her teeth gleam between her red lips, and her eyes flirt from face to face. She is our guide and takes us to the government palace. The building is new with old stone, a re-creation of the style of the conquest, when broad stairways and heavy courtyards stamped the new ground with the might of Madrid. Her skin is pale, and her body gyrates within the tight bindings of her clothing. The high heels click as we mount the steps.

  In the conference room everyone wears suits and sits along the large wooden table, polished to an icy surface. The politician has been up pressing his pants, getting the wrinkles out of his shirt. He is nervous. He will be speaking the mother tongue, and he fears his barrio language will be found inadequate.

  And strangers shall stand and feed your flocks, and the sons of the alien shall be your plowmen and your vinedressers.

  ISAIAH 61:5

  What I remember of the meeting is not really the woman’s glowing skin or scent, or all those suits lining the table with notepads at the ready before them, or even the presidente reeking of power. What I remember is that the politician was the only man of color at the table and how his brown skin melded into the varnished surface of the wood. The business at hand hardly mattered. The skin color mattered. Outside on the sidewalk, beggars leaned against the government palace, women with dirty, long skirts, the hands out begging. And every beggar looked like the politician, that same rich brown, and everyone at the table of power looked like snow.

  After the meeting and the exchange of gifts, the obligatory photographs, the good cheer, the pats on the back, we went out into the streets again where all the brown people strolled, and then off for drinks. We never mentioned this matter of color.

  He asked me, “Was my Spanish good enough? What do you think?”

  I think Guzmán still runs this place, that the killing has never ended and the wounds still bleed.

  The presidente had given us each a plaque, silver plates with Mayan figures. Mine means grace and power. I know this because the politician can read the ancient figure language, a symbol-talk as dead as the temples themselves.

  Isaiah is useless to me at these moments. He is about punishment, suffering, and then restoration through God’s mercy. I am standing in the real restoration, the mixing of blood, the beggars and rulers, the flow of time down hard, stony paths. There is no going back for anyone. Isaiah’s prophecies are so much trash. But that is not the issue. It is about now and the day after now. Or it is about ruin forever.
<
br />   But ye shall be named the Priests of the Lord: men shall call you the Ministers of God: Ye shall eat the riches of the Gentiles, and in their glory shall ye boast yourselves.

  ISAIAH 61:6

  Isaiah says the lion will eat straw like the ox. No, he won’t. The lion will eat the ox so long as a tooth remains in his mouth. Just as the ox will murder grass all the days of his life. And the men will want the women and the softness of their forms. I know this absolutely as I hear the woman’s high heels click away on the stone. The leather red, like her lips.

  Going through the walls of Salvation and entering the gates of Paradise has led us to Hell. The prophets have done us no good. And it is dishonest to say the prophecies are simply metaphor since we know that these metaphors have been iron and blood and ruin.

  We want meat and so we go to a grill featuring the food of Argentina, and that food is large slabs of beef. We drink, God, do we drink. The days have taken their toll what with the procession of offices, functionaries, and that caste system based on color, the man with the broom always dark, the man with the suit always light, that race judgment that we constantly notice but never mention to each other. We dine like wolves and drink like men from the desert.

  The meal is all bloody chunks of steak and ribs, condiments of the pampas. There is much gnashing of teeth, the fine sheen of juices coats our faces.

  The politician relaxes after a fashion, and he tells a story about the time his grandmother died.

  When she died, the politician’s father went south, crossed the border, and attended to the burying. He finally found a priest who would speak over his mother’s corpse. Some had been reluctant because of her marrying three times without the sacraments of the faith. But even this priest still spoke of her life as a series of moral lapses.

  Afterward, he and his brother drove the priest back to town, the politician’s father sitting silently by the window as the priest rattled on. When they got to the town, the father took a wad of money, the promised payment for the funeral, and he stuffed it into the priest’s mouth and then cast him from the pickup like a plague.

  His son tells me this. He also notes his father went to mass each morning.

  I say nothing. I am the unbeliever.

  I did not lose it at the movies, it was in a green field on a spring day with my mother’s dress clinging to her body as she hung clothes on the line. A snake slithered through the grass, I stumbled after it with my two-year-old legs. My mother screamed, grabbed me up, and I have never caught up with that snake disappearing into the green under a spring sky.

  So do not talk to me about the restoration. We are restored, the slime of the sea courses in my cells, my eyes stare out from under dinosaur lids, and the lion will not eat straw like the ox, but the lion may eat me. And I may eat the lion. We may have sinned, that is true, but we will not be redeemed. We are the redemption.

  All the people who want to go back, to achieve the restoration, they are fighting life and they bring death. We are going forward, and we are following a snake into the tall green grass.

  Now, finally, it is written.

  Or this way. I have to get to this unease within me, I have to take a knife and stab myself and rip out my entrails and bring this unease out, lay it on cold marble, the flesh still quivering, that sticky, warm feel of flesh as the heat finally begins to leave it. There is a backbeat to all this, and this backbeat is in the stones of the field, the weeds nibbling at the edges of our vineyards, in the fossils being retrieved from their long-lost graves, the backbeat is in everything that ever was and will be. Isaiah sits down at the snares, picks up the sticks, but he cannot play this backbeat. Ever.

  The Indians die, the culture goes to dust. The peyote brings dreams but nothing comes back. There is no restoration, it is not part of the arrangement. Inside my body, there, those organs I’ve ripped out of my guts and plopped on that cool marble, yes, those, now reach out and touch them, don’t be afraid, touch them and feel all the lost ones, the tiny creations swirling in the first days of the primordial soup, the smoke coming off the pyramid as the incense burned and the still beating heart in the priest’s hand made the sun return and life continue, Orozco looking dour as his brush moves across our minds, the lonely species of pine clinging to a lost stronghold on some crag, the whale sounding in the deep blue sea with all the Jonahs tumbling like dice in his belly, my dead father, the mega fauna gone from land, everything, there on the marble, touch it, there.

  So don’t talk to me of restoration. You are going to get us all killed. I’m meeting her for drinks, and we are going to do the backbeat until we die.

  For, behold, the Lord will come with fire, and his chariots like a whirlwind, to render his anger with fury, and his rebuke with flames of fire. For by fire and by his sword will the Lord plead with all flesh: And the slain of the Lord shall be many.

  ISAIAH 66:15, 16

  Orozco came back to Mexico in the thirties, and the government in Guadalajara gave him the commission to paint a fresco in the government palace. I drag the politician to it, practically propel him across the empty Plaza de Armas, lazy in the midday sun. I want to dispel the pall that has settled over me from our time in the cathedral. The church was too smug for me, all the answers on the lips of the dead saints far too pat. I am not good at certainty and I have no stomach for the promises of all the Isaiahs. I am not a heretic, that would make me of the tribe. I am a different species, deaf to the enchantments of the fall, the punishment, and then, of course, the worst for last, that damnable restoration.

  Decades have passed since I last went up this stairwell. The steps are polished stone, the entire building states the new order brought so long ago by Guzmán and his sword and slaving. The palace is the boot heel of the new order smashed into the faces of the natives. The politician has been trained up on the conquest, the rape of the nation, and then the long struggle, all those revolutions, for justice. And of course, the restoration of the original world, the one fabled and kept in a drawer in velvet cloth, the heavenly realm where all was in balance and love hung from the trees like ripe fruit. The politician feels Isaiah in every cell of his body.

  Orozco does not.

  So we enter the building, turn the corner, and he starts up that stairwell, and after two steps, maybe three or four, stops dead in his tracks. The huge head of Father Hidalgo, the spark that started the revolution before the next revolution, stares down with a face of wrath, his hand on that brand crackling with flames, bodies crumpled at his feet, the bodies gray, lifeless, and rich with rot. And off to Hidalgo’s right are the bishops and generals, all gray, and they have created death and ruin, a landscape forsaken by God and littered with carcasses. To his left is a landscape of Nazism, capitalism, and communism, and it also is a landscape where corpses scream, and the ruin of all hopes. The huge fresco says: Everything we have tried has failed, all our ideologies have proven lethal. And the huge fresco says: We must try again and again and again, try forever, not until we get it right, we cannot get it right, we are incapable of getting it right, we are animals, but we are animals with dreams and perfume and fine teeth to tear asunder choice meats, we will never eat straw like the ox, we will never enter the walls of Salvation and wander the city of Paradise. But we will go toward it and we will fail and we will love and we will kill and we will take the color from the sky, the kiss from her dead lips, the breast from the cold mouth of the dead baby, we will. That is it: We will. And whosoever promises us Paradise, that is the traitor. Whosoever offers us Salvation, that is the killer in our midst.

  Because in the middle is the man of fire, old Hidalgo, who in 1810 came out of his godforsaken village with thousands of Indians at his back and walked the land with murder, killed the invaders, cast out the evildoers in his lust to restore the kingdom, brought justice to the enemies. And wound up with his head in a cage suspended from the city walls and in his wake a vast death. He is the primordial hero of the nation, and each year on the sixteenth day of September
the presidente of the nation gives out Hildalgo’s cry, the fabled El Grito, the presidente spits in the face of all the infidels, screams at each and every one of the Babylons, and invokes the cause of freedom. Then the presidente retreats inside his palace and wallows in the rot and corruption of his life and our lives. Such is the custom of the nation.

  The fresco offers no answers, paints all the false paths, and yet the walls insist on the man of fire, the burning brand in his hand, the necessity of the quest and damn all the ruin it has so far brought.

  The politician falls into one of those pools of silence he so loves, wanders there and leaves me behind, and for twenty minutes he seems to eat the fresco enveloping the stairwell. And then, after that, we never speak of it, because there are things beyond the words. If you go to the words in these matters, you wind up with Isaiah and that list of enemies who must die to pave the way for the restoration.

  We go to the ancient market town where the crafts of the Indians are still preserved like holy relics. The politician eagerly haunts these streets. He buys special keys with his initials carved into them, a tablecloth with the symbol of the nation, that eagle devouring a snake; he buys dolls for nieces, little statues for others. His bag sags with small treasures.