Miguel Jesus Rodriguez slowed his pace and stopped walking
just where an unpaved lane ran uphill from Anche de San Juan.
He was carrying the folding wooden framework on which he hung
the necklaces, crosses and bangles he tried to sell each day
on the pavement of the Jardine in San Miguel de Allende. His
wife, young son and two daughters, who often sat or stood with
him on the pavement, had already left carrying the bags
holding the unsold merchandise. It had been a good day. The
new arrivals - the North American holiday-makers - had liked
the Mexican craftwork he offered. So Miguel felt satisfied
with the day, and was in no hurry. Standing for hours each day
on the pavement in the sun and occasional rain, had taught him
patience. Besides which, the lane ascending to his left exuded
quietness. It seemed to absorb the noise of the taxis and
buses struggling up the slope of Hidalgo.
Without being conscious of it, Miguel Jesus took a few steps
up the lane. Then he became aware of what he was doing and
stopped. He knew where the lane led. As a boy he had run
through all the alleys and blind turnings of the town. This
one led to the edge of the houses, up on the hill where the
desert began, and the cacti flourished in the dry dust. He
remembered this and tried to recall how many years it had been
since he climbed the lane and left the traffic rumble and the
claims of work behind. He couldn’t remember just when,
but the attempt did produce a feeling in him of a divide, a
threshold, on one side of which was the open opportunities and
sensitivities of childhood; and on the other, the invisible
but tangible demands of family and work.
Miguel was not a deep thinking man, but this divide, and the
different world of experience on each side, was suddenly clear
to him. He sensed the lane as a threshold, and perhaps if he
walked up the hill, he might cross over the divide. He found a
crumbling stone wall to hide his wooden frame behind, and
walked on. He walked slowly, even nervously, because the
feeling of shifting and change was very real. And while the
far side of the divide was natural to him in childhood, he was
a man now. The passions and pain of childhood felt too raw for
him to experience.
But the lane was not in fact threatening him. The feeling he
met was more akin to having looked at a big stone wall for a
long time, then having somebody point out a pattern lost in
the stones. The wall suddenly reveals images previously
unrealised.
So things were flashing into Miguel’s awareness as he
slowly walked away from Hidalgo. It led him to feel he was
walking away from a world. It was not a world made up of
houses, people, hills and desert, but of ideas, feelings and
convictions of what was important, and what consequences were
linked with actions in the world of adulthood.
Looking ahead up the hill, and then looking back toward San
Miguel, the world of objects remained the same. Yet Miguel
could feel the relationship with the road, the houses, and
himself, shifting. He stopped walking again to look back.
There below him, almost as real as a tree, or the scraggy dog
licking water from between the rugged stones of the road, he
could see the whole world in which his energy had been
immersed. There was the concern about feeding and supporting
his family; the struggle to keep a roof over their head; the
difficult feeling about what status or recognition he had with
and from those around him. He could see his immersion in how,
through trading, he might claim a share of the world’s
wealth, and beyond that, the humiliation of seeing other
apparently ordinary men and women manage to amass
extraordinary properties and goods, thereby becoming masters
and mistresses of him.
Then there were the minutiae of his concerns, such as
whether the rain would last, and keep away custom, pushing his
family to hunger, and whether his mother’s poor health
meant she was dying.
As he looked back he wept quiet tears, seeing how lost he
had been in that world. It had all seemed so real, and
surviving in that world was important, as was his mother’s
health. But his tears swelled because he was on the threshold
of another world, one that promised something more. So with
some inner pain he turned and walked up the hill.
His cries became louder, like a poor beast in pain. But he
didn’t know why, only that something was trying to emerge
from within him, and was tearing through whatever was in the
way of its progress toward birth. It thrust up into his chest
and throat, ripping through constrictions and hesitations.
At one point he stumbled as if drunk, and cried out
involuntarily. "I can’t do this! I can’t do
this!" But even as the cry left his lips he staggered to
his feet again and reached the desert.
And there it was, the doorway to this new world of
experience. And he walked through into an immersion in love
such as he had never known. It was a love that knew every tiny
part of Miguel, and drew him to itself. He sensed it as a
being so vast, so huge, he failed to comprehend it and fell on
his knees before it, only managing to say, "My God! My
God!" over and over.
Then the being appeared to touch him, and he was no longer
Miguel Jesus Rodriguez who had been born in San Miguel de
Allende, and lived a few years in its streets and houses. In
an instant he was a river of life that flowed through all
time, touching life in a body again and again, leaving shells
in its passing. Shells on the seashore of a timeless ocean. A
small part of Miguel’s mind that still clung to his life
in time and the body, saw how insignificant his concerns in
that world were. He knew, as if he had always known, that the
being he was now knowing himself as, permeated all living
things, and no one could die, because they were all held and
loved in this ocean of life beyond time. Miguel knew that all
tribulation was a way of trying to get reluctant humanity to
cross the threshold he had walked through.
Then the being touched Miguel again, and light burst out of
him in a final tearing of barriers.
Miguel realised he was on his knees at the edge of a dirt
track. Nearby was a huge cactus, at the base of which the wind
had piled empty coke cans and torn plastic bags. It was the
world he had walked away from, yet all was changed. The same
scarred old cactus, the cluttered rubbish of cans and car
parts were there, but Miguel was aware of a shimmering dancing
incandescence that he was part of, but yet was forever
unknowable, all in the same instant. Miguel saw it, yet
nowhere on the dusty desert could he point to it. But
everything he looked at was IT. And because he was also
himself the illusive shimmering he saw in everything, he felt
at the centre of things. Gradually he stood up and reached out
to nowhere in particular, took hold of his mother, and she was
healed. There was no distance here, and everything that could
ever be, already existed in the shimmering. So he had opened
to his mother what was already hers to have.
Then, suddenly it was gone. The cactus and the coke cans
were no longer moments in a timeless, space-less world. They
were no longer part of the essence that was also Miguel Jesus
Rodriguez. There was distance now between himself and the
houses down the hill. He was no longer the river flowing
through time. He was alone in the desert.
When he had walked home and opened the door to his small
house, the children were all in the patio standing around
Ignatz, his wife, as she cooked the tortillas. They all looked
at him as he walked in carrying the wooden frame. He could see
a hint of anxiety in their expressions, and watched it melt
away as they gazed at him questioningly.
Then Ignatz smiled and the children moved to him slowly,
still gazing at him and wanting to touch him.
He stood still, allowing them to approach him in their own
manner. Little Maria held out a kitten she was carrying.
Miguel picked her up in one arm with the kitten, reflecting
the love she was radiating to him. Then Chico and Francesca
moved to his other arm. He looked up to see Ignatz with a tear
rolling down one cheek. He smiled at her, and no words were
necessary.
Tony Crisp
Copyright ©2002 Tony Crisp
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