T A B L E_T A L K What are your favorite national parks? Reminisce in the Wanderlust area of Table Talk R E C E N T L Y Mondo Weirdo By Tim Wall Bad trip: The pilots locked themselves out of the cockpit! (01/23/98) Passages By Christopher Hunt Waiting for Fidel (01/22/98) How to buy a Turkish rug By Laura Billings A priceless encounter (01/21/98) First descent By Steve Van Beek Rafting where no human has been before (01/20/98) Olympics bound By Gina Arnold A trip to Japan rekindles a life-shaping obsession (01/19/98) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Your virtual travel agency - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Browse the Passages archives		___________n e g l e c t e d C l a s s i c s ___________ERICO VERISSIMO'S EXTRAORDINARY ___________"MEXICO" DESERVES TO BE REPUBLISHED. Editor's note: This essay inaugurates an ongoing Wanderlust series focusing on neglected travel classics. From time to time we will ask a notable author to write an appreciation of his or her favorite neglected travel book. Here, Pete Hamill, the author of distinguished fiction and nonfiction works, praises "Mexico," written by Erico Verissimo and published in an English translation by Linton Barrett in 1960. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - BY PETE HAMILL | Travel books about Mexico are a rarity these days. That was not always the case; my own collection contains more than 100 books from the 1930s and 1940s alone, ranging from bilious accounts by Graham Greene and Aldous Huxley to a sketchy watercolor of a book by D.H. Lawrence. Most of the rest are truly awful in a charming, innocent way; there was a virtual sub-genre written by lonely women who fled the United States to rediscover humanity under the Mexican sun, usually in the company of a boy named Paco. To be sure, the bookstore shelves are thick with volumes about Mexico, particularly those guides for tourists that contain so many facts and so little truth. But the book by a traveler who digs more deeply into the spirit of a place, the character of its people, art, history and culture is written more often these days about Tuscany or Provence. Mexico is now the subject of anthropologists, historians and journalists preoccupied by NAFTA, the drug trade and immigration. That is why I cherish Erico Verissimo's superb portrait (published in 1960 by the now defunct Orion Press) and wish it were back in print. To begin with, the narrative breaks the familiar patterns of the Anglo-Saxon writer attempting to make sense of the Latin American realities of Mexico. Verissimo (1905-1975) was a Brazilian novelist of great reputation in the years before the boom in Latin American literature brought Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes and Mario Vargas Llosa (among many others) to the attention of a world audience. A Latino looking in wonder, astonishment or fear at other Latinos is itself a rare experience for the North American reader. In addition, Verissimo was, like so many other Latin American authors, a diplomat, serving in a variety of posts including a long passage in Washington. He brings to the encounter with a new country and its people the first-rate diplomat's sense of propriety and grace. Early in the book, he establishes that he is looking back on a journey that has made a deep impact upon him. "The taste of Mexico has not yet left my memory. Sweet? No. Bitter? Not that either. Rare, strange, different, a mixture of tortilla, straw cigarettes, chili and blood. A dry taste, sometimes with a certain harshness of desert land, not infrequently with unexpected and perishable sweetnesses of tropical fruit. If I were to assign it a color, I should say it is a grey taste. If I were asked to qualify it, I should venture: the taste of rustic tragedy." This is the mid-1950s, a bright, hopeful time in Mexico that many middle-aged Mexicans now look back at with nostalgia and regret. But even as Verissimo moves through Mexico City, speaking to taxi drivers and intellectuals, painters and writers and musicians, he is acutely aware of the dark currents of anger, defeat and violence that move beneath the placid modern surface. "I wonder why this city has so strong a personality. What is it that makes it so different from all others? Whence comes the aura of drama that envelops it? I believe the factors are various: many the tints that, combined, produce -- despite all the sunshine -- that dark ominous tone that gives us the sensation that something tragic is always about to occur -- a murder, an earthquake, a revolution." He traces some of the factors, those tints that combine in such a dark tone: history ("this city was erected upon the corpse of the Tenochtitlan murdered by Cortes and his soldiers"); the brooding, man-dwarfing presence of the two immense volcanoes that look down upon the city (now seldom visible through the smog); the fact that the city is slowly sinking into the old lake bed upon which it was built; the thinness of air in the high mesa, 7,200 feet above sea level; and above all the sometimes uneasy mixture of separate cultures -- Indian, Spanish and the dominant combination of the two called mestizo. In the capital, and in the smaller towns he visits to the south and north, Verissimo is moved by the presence of the pure Indians, descendants of people who had built here great civilizations. "I have the feeling that these Indians live in a world apart from ours, like fish in an aquarium watching us furtively out of their motionless eyes in a liquid, oblique silence. Hostility? No. Perhaps indifference. I don't think we can ever break the glass that separates us from that aquatic world. And all the tragedy of the mestizo lies in his dubious amphibious status." The book is full of observations on Mexican language, humor, sexual codes, music and the stoic, fatalistic attitude toward death. But Verissimo avoids the bloodless observations of the sociologist. The tone is embracing; he clearly loves Mexico and its people and writes about them with humor and irony, along with a healthy dose of self-effacement. He is not there to teach but to learn. When appropriate, he makes analogies to Brazil; often, in dreams or when alone at twilight, the Brazil of his youth forces its way into his consciousness, and this too is the mark of a fine travel writer: Other countries and cultures force the traveler to examine his own. Obviously, after 40 years, there are parts of the book that are dated. For a reader familiar with Mexico, there are omissions and elisions (the Verissimo who was a diplomat deals with the monolithic Mexican government in an oblique way and is gentle about the problems of corruption). But for the reader with an interest in Mexico, this remains one of the indispensable books. For the general reader, it is a model of the genre and a delightful journey in the company of a generous, intelligent human being. Some paperback publisher should rescue this fine narrative from the dusty limbo of the second-hand bookshops and allow a new generation to share that journey. SALON | Jan. 26, 1998 Pete Hamill's novel "Snow in August" was a national bestseller last year. He has published seven other novels, along with the bestselling memoir "A Drinking Life." He has written for newspapers since 1960 and served as editor in chief of both the New York Post and the New York Daily News. He first read Erico Verissimo's book while attending Mexico City College in 1956-57 on the GI Bill. N E X T+P A G E An excerpt from Enrico Verissimo's "Mexico"