In 2023, Nigel Purse visited Mexico and took with him a copy of Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory (1940), regarded by many Greene readers as his finest work. Nigel on his trip mapped and compared past and present and connected both to Greene’s masterful novel as well as to his Mexican travelogue The Lawless Roads (1939). It all makes for a fascinating Mexican detour.
Mexico: 29 October – 11 November 2023
‘It was like a shortcut to the dark and magical heart of faith … Faith, one was told, could move mountains.’ Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory
- ‘Two countries just here lay side by side.’ Graham Greene, The Lawless Roads
Standing inside Templo de San Juan in San Juan Chamula, the light dim, we saw a sight which I could barely have imagined. Overwhelmed by the scent of pine leaves which were piled and strewn on the floor of what was a former Catholic church in structure and design, there was an overabundance of humanity and thousands of candles, all stood on the floor, flickering madly and dropping wax onto the stones. There were no pews. Hung from the apex of the ceiling and draped down to half way up the walls were canopies. Shamans, dressed in black woollen jackets – save for one in white, who seemed to be in charge – roamed around in slightly minatory fashion. It was clearly their house and their show. At the far altar, bedecked in orange marigolds, were cabinets containing images of the saints and Christ, all dressed in indigenous apparel. Except the saints had been appropriated, in a curious inversion of the way the Spaniards had, in their turn, similarly appropriated some of the pre-Columbian traditions into Catholic ceremonies. Now those saints stood for Mayan gods again. The bustle was fervent. There was a hum of priestly murmurings. A strange smell of incense hung in the air, in contrast to the dirt-poor poverty and grime of the decaying streets we had just walked through outside (somewhat sinisterly overlooked by the hillside mansions the shamans enjoyed).
Faith has many forms and dimensions, but most contain a common basis: the idea that a greater source of moral power should be honoured. What befell us in that church, however, defied any idea I had of a religion. In an almost grotesque fusion of Catholicism and shamanistic cult families gathered, as is the custom in Chamula, for individual ceremonies. Each family sat, often three generations, as a shaman quietly uttered imprecations. While he did so the father of the family passed around small cups of pocha (a spirit which we tasted later in the morning and found to be like fire water, such a kick did it have), poured from large plastic bottles. Even the youngsters, their formal education banned by the shamans, took drafts. Incongruously, however, in what seemed to me to be a sacrilegious rite, but to them was part of the oblation, they also drank Coca-Cola, apparently in order to induce the burping out of evil spirits. As the shaman/priest chanted away a chicken was produced, clucking, from a plastic bin-liner bag and, with the shaman’s sleight of hand so as to suggest the miraculous, slaughtered (no doubt the faithful would have said ‘sacrificed’) in an act of worship which was believed to take away or atone for bad thoughts and events.
At one and the same time I had both stumbled across what Graham Greene – whose school at Berkhamsted had been mine, too – had called both, in his Mexican travel diary, ‘the lawless roads’ and also, in his great novel about a whisky priest on the run in Mexico, ‘the power and the glory’. Lawless, because the government’s writ does not run in Chamula: instead the townsfolk submit to the rule of the shamans. The power and the glory because, in spite of what I saw as their somewhat skewed morality, those indigenous people were in their own ritualistic interpretation merely doing exactly what their Spanish Catholic forbears and their human sacrificing Aztec ancestors did: they were practising their faith. Whilst the Aztecs had believed in the idea of the blood sacrifice of men to appease their gods and the Catholics had introduced the idea of the sacrifice of the blood of one god to redeem all mankind the shamans now practice what I had just witnessed: the sacrifice of an animal to atone for man’s failings. Was this, I wondered, the faith that Graham Greene talked of in The Power and the Glory: ‘faith … that healed the blind man and the voice that raised the dead.’? To the shaman doctors, for they are regarded as medicine-men too, and their entranced participants it was clearly piety. To me it was witchcraft: barbaric, even. It was more akin to what Greene had actually seen for himself on his Mexican sojourn and had described in The Lawless Roads: ‘the Indian religion – a dark, tormented, magic cult.’
Such is the polychrome, polygenic pot pourri of popular culture in modern Mexico. If ever two countries lay side by side it is in those hills about San Cristobal. For, not half an hour later we were to visit another town home to an indigenous population: San Lorenzo Zinacantan. Here, amongst mint-fresh clean streets, we enjoyed demonstrations of local cloth weaving and, in a smoke-filled room, tortilla making while some of our party took the opportunity to try on local marriage attire. There was much mirth and a few family photo albums will, as a result, have some interesting snaps. In the Iglesia de San Lorenzo we found a charmingly well-kept church, full of sanctity and holiness. The contrast with those scenes in Chamula could not have been greater.
How appropriate it seems to me is the name of Mexico itself: a linguistic corruption by the conquistadors of the word ‘mestizo’, meaning mixed. But, today in Mexico ‘mestizo’ is a duality that underpins the very fabric of Mexican life. But such dichotomy is not new in Mexico. The Aztec myth of the serpent and the eagle, which determined where their capital, Tenochtitlan, was to be founded, also contained in the two animals the essence of Mexico’s struggle. And ‘mixed’ is how my wife, Irene, and I found modern Mexico.
‘Vamos,’ was a word our guide, Sonia, was to use a lot, recalling Greene’s whisky priest. We first heard it at Teotihuacan. Dating from just three centuries after Persepolis its scale was similarly overwhelming. According to a Nahuatl saying, it is ‘the place where men became Gods.’ It possesses both the numerical precision and imagination of a cosmological statement of belief made in the pre-Christian world of Mesoamerica.
- ‘…heresy here was not an aberration of human feeling … but a mathematical error.’ Graham Greene, The Lawless Roads
For the Maya it was the source of both power and glory: the birthplace of the sun and moon, commemorated in two giant pyramids, where time first began to turn. It is also home, on a gigantic scale, to myriad palaces, altars and patios, covered with the barely visible, usually red in colour, wall paintings of the sun, rain and snakes. While it is chickens that are sacrificed in today’s Mexico, here five hundred years ago human sacrifice, which was conducted on a still visible platform directly in front of the sun pyramid, was central to the Aztec relationship with their gods.
In 2023 the glory of Mexico City must surely be the Anthropological Museum. Sonia steered us around the vast volume of artefacts, dwelling only on what mattered and providing the necessary narrative to explain. Herein lies the repository of Mexican culture, which is multi-dimensional: the rise and fall of the Olmec, Teotihuacan, Maya, Toltec, Aztec and Zapotec, all piled on top of each other with each successive civilisation borrowing what it found useful from its predecessor. Until, that is, Hernan Cortes arrived in 1519. Just as Pizarro later did in Peru, Cortes’ modus operandi was to destroy the Templo Mayor in Tenochtitlan and build, using the same stones, a Catholic cathedral exactly on top of where it stood. All around the Zocalo (the main square in the old town) a precarious twisting of elegant colonial buildings is the only testimony left to the fact that Moctezuma’s city lay on a lake, upon which the Spanish built today’s Mexico City.
In Chichen Itza and Palenque Greene found what he called ‘the enormous tombstones of history’. While the latter emerges, dripping, from he called the ‘wild nature’ of the jungle’s timeless clutches the former’s massive pyramid displayed an unarguable majesty all of its own. Here we found the physical remnants of the power and glory of Mexico before its conquest. One of Greene’s literary contemporaries concluded:
- ‘The architects of pre-Columbian America were more fortunate than most of those of Europe. Their masterpieces were never condemned to invisibility, but stood magnificently isolated, displaying their three dimensions to all beholders.’ Aldous Huxley, Beyond the Mexique Bay
Set high on the hills outside Oaxaca, and again on a vast scale, Monte Alban exuded the temporal might of palace and the spiritual tone of temple. For Greene, it ‘is the work of men who knew their architectural business consummately well.’ But, for once it was not his verdict which resonated with me, a founder member of Greenes House in 1976. Instead, it was here we understood what another early twentieth century author had noticed, ironically inspired this time by Berkhamsted School’s school psalm, number 121:
- ‘”I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, whence cometh my strength.” At least one can always do that, in Mexico.’ D.H. Lawrence, Mornings in Mexico
All three sites, plus that of Uxmal – home to yet another magnificent pyramid which dramatically confronted us square on, seemingly touching the heavens, as we emerged from the entrance walkway – also contained the same pre-Columbian scene of both power and glory: the ball game. In courts with their distinctive hoops on the walls two teams fought with the desperation of gladiators, playing a game which seemed to combine the obscurity of the rules of the Eton wall game and the spectacle of real tennis to get a rubber ball through the hoops using only knees, thighs and elbows. There was glory, for sure, in the sporting outcome but also power in the consequences that one side (and, curiously, it is unclear whether it was the losers or the winners) were subsequently decapitated, as was depicted in wall carvings at Chichen Itza. Nowadays minatory buzzards circle over Monte Alban while humming birds hang, magically defying gravity with the beguiling delicacy of their exertions, sucking nectar from the flowers of the Cazahuati. By contrast, a vulture perched over the ruins of Kabah, master of all he surveyed with the entirety of our tourist companions in his thrall, obligingly wafted his wings. There was magic in all those stones.
There was no such mystique in our journey from San Cristobal to Palenque. When Mexican roads are not clinging circuitously to hillsides they are arrow straight. They are still, in parts, as Greene found them, ‘lawless’. Forced to take a much longer route in order to avoid protestors who had developed an unfortunate habit of blocking the shorter route in a display of provincial defiance, we got up at 4 am to begin the journey and did not arrive until after dark. Our route, in contrast to the brown surroundings of the capital, was largely through long stretches of lush green rainforest. At times the roads passed through dirt poor, shanty communities which might just as well have belonged in one of Greene’s novels. The same thought crossed my mind in Chamula. There we saw indigenous people living in the misery of a poverty which was all too clear. In the incessant and unforgiving rain we walked down streets full of litter, past a butcher’s shop selling hooves on roads and pavements which were fractured and splitting.
On our journey to Palenque we dodged enormous, Brobdingnagian double trailer trucks and minuscule, Liliputian motor cyclists. The yellow line in the middle of the highway appeared to be only for guidance and not for demarcation. Once, we were stopped by police, vigilant in pursuit of illegal immigrants. The fugitive ghost of Greene’s whisky priest lives on, but in a rather different guise. Past brown sugar plantations and shack shops purveying outsize water melons and gorgeous looking, bulging pineapples. Fallen trees littered the landscape as we navigated floods and roadblocks alongside precipitous ravines and swollen rivers. Here we encountered neither power nor glory.
Glorious, by contrast, was the Mexican cuisine. The essence of even that could be described as mixed, which gives the food a distinctive complexity. There is no Mexican meal which does not involve a combination of sauces – predominantly red salsa, black mole and brown bean sauce, each themselves the product of multiple ingredients. Enchiladas, esquilladas, tacos, tamales. You name it, we tried it – in varying degrees of quality. Nothing escaped a dousing of lime juice. We passed on Oaxaca’s grasshoppers and larvae, mind you. Oaxaca is the food capital of Mexico and it contains, reputedly, the country’s finest restaurant; Casa Oaxaca. Booked for months in advance it defied Sonia’s efforts to find space for our party. Instead, with what we reasoned was nothing to lose, we went and stood at its front desk. Our luck was in and we relished the squashed vine soup with Mexico’s famous stringy cheese, squash blossoms and quesadillas. All garnished with a salsa, made by our waiter with a pestle and mortar at our table to our order from an array of spices and ingredients. Oh, the mole! It was a meal we will never forget. Greene had enjoyed Oaxaca, as I did, too. ‘Yes, Oaxaca is a fine place,’ he commented. Later we were similarly fortunate to experience the Caribbean culinary influence of the Yucatan at La Chaya Maya in Merida. All too frequently we found ourselves anointing our meals with margaritas: mescal based in Oaxaca; tequila everywhere else.
Another of Mexico’s underrated glories is its wildlife. This we enjoyed up close and personal on a boat ride down the Sumidero Canyon on the Grijalva River. From the advantage of its velocity we glimpsed spider monkeys, gymnastically looping about in the trees, contemplative pelicans with exaggeratedly long beaks, delicate egrets perched on rocks, cormorants on the wing low over the waters and buzzards. Crocodiles lounged, louche, on the river bank, one or two with jaws wide open: very arresting. Under the shadows of the towering sides of the gorge itself we half expected two fugitives, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, to come plummeting from the sky into the waters.
- ‘…huge gorges covered with forest, sometimes grey walls of rock falling like a curtain for five hundred feet, trees grasping a foothold in the cracks and growing upwards…’ Graham Greene, The Lawless Roads
Merida, ruled as it had been direct from Spain and not Mexico City, seemed to have a singularly acute sense of its past. Here, there was power but little glory. The part run down, part magnificently restored colonial mansions and calle were almost more Spanish than Spain. The vividly enormous ‘Realistic’ art murals of Fernando Castro Pacheco in the Governor’s Building and the vibrant carvings on the splendid Monumento a la Patria to Mexico’s history – in the middle of a roundabout, a bit like Piccadilly Circus, where, devoid of shade, we nearly cooked as Sonia related the stories of Mexico’s more recent past – seemed, according to our guide’s narrative, to contain as many villains as heroes.
Rather amusingly, in one of Merida’s calle, down which we so enjoyed strolling, we passed a most entertaining advert for a dentists’ practice, prominently featuring a drill. Given its prominence, I do not suppose they have so much trouble in sourcing drill bits as Greene’s dentist, Mr Tench, did, I reflected.
As if to draw our attention to the Spanish heritage our delightful hotel in Merida is a former Franciscan church and convent, named after Frey Diego, the Spanish bishop who encouraged the missionary zeal of the Counter-Reformation’s most ardent evangelical hit-squads to convert and wipe out all trace of the Mayan way of life. It looks like he succeeded. While Hernan Cortes, the Spanish conquistador, has been virtually erased from Mexico – such is the lingering hatred of the conquest – much of Diego’s legacy remains. In Oaxaca’s San Domingo the immense power of Spain was on show: a masterpiece of the Counter-Reformation from floor to ceiling. Commanding awe, its imposing Baroque design was a statement direct from God himself: ‘I am in charge,’ it seemed to say. There was no doubting that it was no earthly authority that holds sway there. Greene’s response considered only the political, not the ecclesiastical: ‘One stoops under the weight of the monstrous Spanish dynasty,’ he wrote. Here was both glory and power, I thought.
At La Soledad – in what Greene found to be ‘the most human church … in Oaxaca.’ – we enjoyed an ethereal organ recital of distinctly European flavour (Bach?, we mused). Merida’s cathedral was enormous: domineering because of scale, but entirely plain. Campeche’s merely sweated in the evening heat. San Cristobal’s churches we found in a near permanent state of closure, supposedly for restoration. By contrast, the post-modern Basilica de Guadalupe, one of five churches in a higgledy-piggledy complex in Mexico City, spoke of today’s world and, with its pictures and statue of John Paul II, merely reminded us that the pull of Catholicism in Mexico today is stronger than ever. Power, indeed.
In San Cristobal only faded authority in the form of the crumbling Spanish haciendas and the churches was visible. Disfigured beggars vied for the streets with roaming dogs. Ambulantes (street vendors) abounded while the bars pumped out a constant beat. While Greene had enjoyed the early hours in San Cristobal – ‘It was a lovely town to wake to in the morning light,’ he writes – I found delight in the evenings. There, amongst the troubadours and the vivid colours, we enjoyed one of Mexico’s most authentic glories. We sat on a street table, supping up the distinctly and characteristically bitter hot chocolate for which Mexico is justly famous. We had seen it made, pressed from beans, in Oaxaca. Reflecting on the brief influence the French had in nineteenth century Mexico, I realised, sitting under the stars of the San Cristobal night, why Aldous Huxley had concluded that, ‘Mexican culture still remains predominantly French.’
We have been blessed on our travels with many, many fine guides and Sonia is one of the very best. She could be described as politically ‘progressive’. I admired the way she railed against what she sees as social injustice. We are regularly (and, delightfully) treated to her views on the corruption of past presidents and Big Oil and the modern drug cartels which bedevil parts of Mexico today. For Sonia, her Mexico is all power and no glory. The 500,000 Pesos per month allowance for former Presidents (corrupt or otherwise – and there aren’t many who seem to qualify as ‘otherwise’) is a particular thorn in her world view, along with the oil barons who, she alleges, syphoned off large volumes of the black stuff into their personal accounts. We are left in no doubt who will get her vote in the forthcoming presidential elections. Her final, acerbic verdict on the politicians was delivered with genuine contempt: ‘They don’t do nothing. They are lucky. They are feared.’ What I loved most about Sonia was her insatiable appetite for learning. Her historical thirst, in particular, was utterly unquenchable.
As we struggled, windswept and cold in the driving rain, up the hill to the top of Chamula it was impossible to ignore the shell of a ruined church and the rows of crosses in its adjacent graveyard, festooned in yellow marigolds as it was for the Day of the Dead. Greene had dealt with this sight in his fiction:
‘A grove of crosses stood up blackly against the sky’, Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory
But, he had seen it for himself and his epitaph on the mountains outside San Cristobal de las Casas was impossible to ignore: ‘here in the mountainous strange world of Father Las Casas, Christianity went on its own frightening way. Magic, yes, but we are apt to minimize the magic element in Christianity … The great crosses leaned there in their black and windy solitude.’ Graham Greene, The Lawless Roads
NIGEL PURSE 2025