Hold the Enlightenment (38 page)

We were all awake now, groggy and shivering, all of us watching Chilero rebuild the fire and wishing he’d shut up. There were seven of us on this archaeological outing to the mountains of northern Mexico. The campsite was no doubt beautiful in the summer, but it was the dead of winter, at six thousand feet, and the waterfall that poured over the canyon wall was frozen solid.

We were out camping on this crystalline winter evening so I could learn about my brother’s business dealings in Mexico. Presently, these included the semi-ingenious Mormon defense to planned marriage.

Chilero, who was something of a vaquero, crouched by the fire and systematically cursed us all—the focking gringos, the stupid Mexicans, the black guy, everyone. “
Me hablen,”
he screamed.
Talk to me
.

He thought we’d abandoned him to the night and the souls of the dead.

“Where are you!”

I decided to put Chilero out of his misery and fixed our position for him by finally speaking.

“Podríamos matarlo,”
I muttered to my brother. We could kill him.

This act of kindness was rewarded with a similar gesture on Chilero’s part. We’d all been asleep for some hours after assiduously drinking most of the night, and Chilero brought me just what I needed: a gallon jug of water in one of those flimsy clear un-labeled plastic jars. I took a big, thirsty gulp. It never occurred to me that in Mexico, tequila is sold in such unmarked jars. This was an unpleasant surprise, and a real tough way to wake up.

My brother glanced over at me and pulled the sleeping bag over his head. Sure, I was sick, but in a few hours, he was going to have to deal with the whole planned-marriage thing again.

My brother, Rick, is a trader in pots, ceramics, which he buys in Mexico and sells to upscale galleries in the United States. (Yes, yes: he’s heard every conceivable variation of the pot-dealer joke.) Rick buys all his fine-arts pots from one dusty village of about three
thousand people. The place is called Mata Ortiz, officially, Juan Mata Ortiz. If my Spanish serves me well, I believe the place would be called Juan “Killer” Ortiz in English.

My brother and I drove down to Mata Ortiz from Tucson, discussing the derivation of the name with a man named Alain Isabelle, another Arizona trader along for the ride.

Juan Ortiz earned the nickname “Mata,” or “killer,” during the Apache wars of one hundred years ago. He was second in command when Chief Victorio was defeated in 1880, apparently participated in a massacre of unarmed Apaches a year later, and was captured by Chief Juh the next year. The Apaches tortured and eventually killed the man known as “Killer.”

So, the town’s name either celebrates Ortiz the killer, or Ortiz the killed.

“We should stop at that little place for
sotol
,” Rick said.

This is a tequilalike drink which is kept in a five-gallon glass jar so you can see the dead rattlesnake floating near the bottom.

“They put the snake in the jar alive,” my brother said.

“But it’s clearly dead,” Alain pointed out.

“Of course it’s dead,” my brother said. “It’s a rattlesnake. It can’t breathe underwater.”

“So you’re telling me Mexicans like to see snakes drown.”

“I’m not telling you any such thing. They say the snake pumps out venom when it dies and that the venom is good for your health.”

“I don’t believe that,” said Alain.

“What, you think Macario lies about
sotol
?”

“You probably just didn’t understand him, is all.”

And so on. I said: “No more bickering.”

There was a silence of several seconds. “The Mexicans say we argue a lot,” my brother said.

“Yeah,” Alain said. “They say we’re like an old married couple and that we ought to get married because we fight so much.”

“Don’t tell him about that,” my brother said.

“What about the woman they want you to marry?”

“Don’t tell him about that either.”

“They want Rick to marry one of the village women,” Alain said, to my brother’s intense annoyance.

“Any particular one?” I asked.

“I’m not going to get married,” Rick said. He’s successfully avoided this entanglement for over forty years.

“We’ll see,” Alain said. “It’s hard to say no to Macario and Nena.”

And then we were bouncing down a cruel joke of a dirt road, running past apple and peach orchards, moving up into the Sierra Madre Occidental Mountains. The road dove into the Palanganas River—three feet deep at the most—then rose into a high, windswept plain. There were cows and cowboys on the land. The snowcapped Sierras rose several thousand feet above, and there, below us, on the banks of the river, was a dusty town of one-story adobe-brick buildings.

It was Mata Ortiz, a village that is to ceramicists what Paris in the 1920s was to writers.

The story is legend: in 1976, Spencer MacCallum, an anthropologist, found three extraordinary handmade pots in a Deming, New Mexico, junk shop called Bob’s Swap Shop. The owner said that “some poor people” had traded the pots for clothes. MacCallum bought all three pots for $18 apiece. “To me,” MacCallum wrote in
Kiva, the Journal of Southwestern Anthropology and History
, “they showed such integrity of form and design” that “I was determined to find the unknown potter.”

The trail took him to Mata Ortiz, a dusty railroad town on the high plains of Chihuahua, several hundred miles due south of Deming. People there worked on the railroad, or picked fruit for about $5 a day. MacCallum’s questions led him to Juan Quezada, a man who had dropped out of school in the third grade and who is today regarded as a genius in certain academic circles.

As a teenager, Juan cut firewood for sale to the village. The mountain slopes where he worked were littered with lustrous shards of ancient polychrome pottery. The Indian culture is called Paquime, or Casas Grandes, and it flourished near Mata Ortiz
around the year
A.D.
1000. Juan, an artist by temperament, felt driven by some internal obsession to re-create these pots. The raw materials—clay, minerals for paints—were locally available, and—a major consideration for an impoverished artist—they would be free for the taking.

Juan had never seen anyone make a pot, never read any books on the subject, but he re-created the ancient techniques through a process of trial and error that took fifteen years to perfect. MacCallum subsidized Juan for a while, encouraging him to follow his creative muse and produce his best work.

Juan eventually quit his railroad job and taught his family the techniques he’d discovered. Today, a Juan Quezada pot sells for thousands of dollars. He teaches pottery classes both in Mexico and the United States. His work is on display in museums around the world.

In the early 1980s, other families in the village, noting the Quezadas’ success, began making pots. Most learned the techniques from Juan.

The first book written about the Mata Ortiz phenomenon was
The Story of Casas Grandes Pottery
(1991, Western Imports, Box 12591, Tucson, AZ 85732). The author is Rick Cahill, my brother, and he does a thorough job explaining the mechanics of the technique: how the clay is sifted; how the pots are formed by hand, without use of a potter’s wheel; how these intricate works of art are painted with a human hair, generally plucked from a child’s head; how the pots are fired one at a time, under a fire of dried cow chips. The book is on sale at various galleries that sell Mata Ortiz pots, as well as tourist shops throughout the Southwest.

Rick’s book brought many buyers to Mata Ortiz, and, I believe, helped prices rise to current levels. The village is beginning to prosper. Today there are over three hundred potters making a living in Mata Ortiz. Bill Gilbert, a guest curator at the New Mexico Museum of Art, says that while the forms and designs utilized in the early part of the revival derived directly from the prehistoric Casas Grandes style, “aspects of what is taking place … appear more
closely related to highly energized studios or movements in contemporary art.”

This is what has been called the Miracle of Mata Ortiz.

In Mata Ortiz, my brother generally stays with Macario and Nena Ortiz, who call him
primo
, cousin. Macario is one of the world-class potters in the village, a big, hearty man who stands well over six feet tall. He has built the only two-story house in the village and it is painted in colors I imagine a decorator would call “teal and blush.” Both Macario and Nena make intricately designed pots, though the interior of their home looks more like a Montana rancher’s home than that of internationally known artists.

The kitchen cabinets are built in, there is a gas stove, and a woodstove for warmth and tortillas. A few nice works of art adorn the walls, but the major decorations are framed photos of various family members, a framed print of the Last Supper, and a bas-relief wooden sculpture of a nude young woman standing on her tiptoes and reaching up, as if to pick an apple. The woman has the type of body only seen on chrome mud flaps.

We sat at the dining room table, eating chicken mole, with a family friend named Chilero. When he was a kid, Chilero had sold chiles on the street corners of Mata Ortiz, hence the name. These days, Chilero works for Macario, growing chiles and wrangling cows on one of Macario’s properties. I had the impression that Macario employed any number of neighbors and friends, and that he essentially supported several less fortunate families.

“Did you know your brother is getting married?” Macario asked me.

“Let’s talk about business,” Rick said.

“Your brother should have children,” Macario said.

“Children are a blessing,” Chilero pointed out.

“I’m only here two weeks out of the month,” Rick countered. “How can I have children?”

“The village will help,” Nena said.

“Somebody wrote a book about that,” I said. And indeed, neighbor children were always running in and out of the Ortiz house.

“There is a woman in Tucson who I’m serious about,” Rick said.

Macario shrugged off the comment. “First, of course, you need to buy a house.”

“Macario, I don’t have money for a house, or for a wife, or for children.”

Macario knew how to fix that. Rick should just buy a lot of Macario Ortiz pots, sell them in the United States, bring the money back, and buy a house that—it just so happened—Macario owned and wanted to sell. A bottle of tequila was brought out, opened, and the cap thrown in the trash, as is the custom.

And then, sometime later, we were knocking on the door of an adobe-brick house with apple and peach trees in the yard. The place had electricity, running water, a wood-fired hot-water heater, and a genuine sit-down toilet. Macario’s married son lived there. Macario wanted to build him a new house. But he needed to sell the old one first.

A price was mentioned. It was too much. Rick didn’t have the money. That was all right with Macario. Rick could write a check for the whole amount, and then, when the check was good, Macario would cash it.

“So,” Rick told me later, “I wrote him the check so we could finally stop talking about it. I can always change my mind later.”

“I think you just bought a house,” I said.

“Macario—you’ve got to know Macario—thinks I’ll be happy here. And I am happy here. In his mind, he does this stuff for my own good. He’s my best friend.”

As far as I could see, the deal was supposed to go like this: My brother would give Macario a lot of money for his pots, which Rick would sell for a profit, that profit to be spent on a house Macario owned. As a homeowner, Rick would be in a position to marry someone and support her family. A family, I thought, probably presently being supported by Macario Ortiz.

Then, of course, if my brother were to marry in Mata Ortiz, there would be a big fiesta, and Rick would have to buy some cows to slaughter for the wedding celebration. Macario, as it happened, has a nice herd of cattle.

“But,” Rick told me, “I’m not getting married.”

…

In honor of my visit, we drove my truck up into the Sierra Madres, to a place where the Piedras Verdes River intersects with the Arroyo Casa Blanca. The place looked a little like the canyonlands of Utah. Not that we were able to see it that first night.

It took most of an afternoon to gather up all the people who wanted to come, and we didn’t get started on the four-hour drive through the mountains until after dark, which is how we came to camp on a sheet of ice beneath a frozen waterfall.

Then Chilero stumbled out of the truck about three in the morning, screaming and cursing. When everyone was thoroughly awake, he began playing his guitar and singing. For hours.

“Debemos matarlo,”
I said.
We
must
kill him
.

Just after dawn, we walked up the hill to a cave set high in the canyon wall. The Cave of the Pot was a Paquime habitation site about
A.D.
1000. Set in the center of the cave was a large granary, perhaps twelve feet high, shaped rather like a child’s top or a pot. There was a series of low, tumble-down walls, with the distinctive T-shaped doors the Paquime culture favored.

I sat near the granary, and looked out across the valley of the Piedras Verdes, thinking. During my stay in Mata Ortiz, I had watched Macario work. He sometimes put in sixteen-hour days, and several of his new pots echoed the shape of the granary in the Cave of the Pot.

Rick and Macario were sitting beside me.

“The thing is,” Rick told Macario, “my brother and I were raised Mormon.”

It took a moment to digest the blatant lie, but then I saw where this was heading.

“The Mormon religion,” I said, nodding in an imbecilic manner.

“So,” Rick said, “I couldn’t really get married in the Catholic Church.”

“But you don’t go to the temple,” Macario said.

“I’m an agnostic Mormon.”

“Jack Mormon,” I said.

“That’s right,” Rick said. “Jack Mormon.”

“Well, then, no, you couldn’t be married in the Catholic Church.”

Macario seemed to dismiss the entire idea. He turned to study the granary. I imagined that he was planning a new variation on the shape. Some fine new pot. A museum-quality piece of work.