Cormac McCarthy’s Mexican Mirror
¿Y ha de morir contigo el mundo mago
donde guarda el recuerdo
los hálitos más puros de la vida,
la blanca sombra del amor primero,
la voz que fue a tu corazón, la mano
que tú querías retener en sueños,
y todos los amores
que llegaron al alma, al hondo cielo?
¿Y ha de morir contigo el mundo tuyo,
la vieja vida en orden tuyo y nuevo?
¿Los yunques y crisoles de tu alma
trabajan para el polvo y para el viento?
And must that magical world die with thee
where memory guards
life’s purest breaths,
the white shadow of first love,
the voice that spoke to thine heart,
the hand thou wouldst hold in dreams,
and all the loves
that reached thy soul’s deep sky?
And must thy world die with thee,
Life’s familiar pattern made new and thine?
Do the crucibles and the forges of thy soul
Toil for the dust and the wind?
In Cormac McCarthy’s grisliest work to date, the screenplay for The Counselor, there is a scene,
a telephone scene, between the Counselor and a man known as Jefe, which means, as you know,
chief or boss, presumably the head of one of the Juárez cartels. He is never named—unlike Pablo
Acosta in No Country for Old Men—and his identity is not important. He is one of the nameless
Mexican sages and philosophes, peopling Cormac’s work from Blood Meridian forward. He
understands things the gringos—such as the Counselor or John Grady or Billy or Ed Tom—don’t
get.
As the Counselor—pathetic, hopeless, floundering—and the Jefe—passively supercilious and
wise as a shaman—continue their dialogue, the Jefe asks, seemingly out of the blue, if the
Counselor knows “…the works of Antonio Machado?” (147). The Counselor replies that he
knows the name, which of course means no, he doesn’t know the works. The Jefe explains—
simplifying greatly—that Machado was a schoolteacher and that he married “a very beautiful
young girl whom he loved very much. And she died. And so he became a great poet” (148).
Machado married Leonor Izquierdo when he was 34 and she was 14. Three years later she died
of tuberculosis. “And so he became a great poet,” according to the Jefe. The Counselor replies
that he is not “going to become a great poet” (148). I wonder if we are meant to ponder these two
senseless losses of women’s lives and come to some conclusion or at least some inkling about
why the results are so disparate, Machado a great poet, the Counselor a helpless and hapless
victim of his own greed. Machado, a rustic teacher, the Counselor a successful—but not
successful enough for his own desires—lawyer. All they really have in common is beautiful and
beloved young dead wives.
I think Cormac is using Machado because he wants to bring to bear one of Machado’s greatest
poems, the one I have just read. Earlier in their conversation, the Jefe told the Counselor: “At
some point you must acknowledge that this new world is at last the world itself” (146). And he
adds: “There is not some other world. It is not merely a he ate us”(146).
Cormac’s linguistic humor—he-ate-us is meant to be, as the Counselor points out, hiatus—is a
cryptic (or not so cryptic) reference to the Judeo-Christian idea that we come from the Guf, or
that our souls come from God and will return thence: “Then shall the dust return to the earth as it
was; and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it” (Eccl 12:7). That notion the Jefe is saying,
no longer exists. And Machado is the most beautiful expression of that negation: “And must thy
world die with thee?”
El Jefe is far more prosaic but says essentially the same thing: “…the world is in fact oneself. It
is a thing which you have created, no more, no less (150). “Life’s familiar pattern made new and
thine.” El Jefe says: “And when you cease to be so will the world” (150). Machado’s question,
“And must thy world die with thee?” is answered with another rhetorical question: “Do the
crucibles and the forges of thy soul/ toil for the dust and the wind?” El Jefe: “Your world—the
only one that matters—will be gone. And it will never come again. The extinction of all reality is
a concept no resignation can encompass. Until annihilation comes. And all grand ideas are seen
for what they are. And now I must go. I have calls to make, and then, if there is time, I will take a
little nap” (151). Machado, surely turning in his pathos-laden grave in Collioure, just across the
Spanish border in southern France, where he died in exile in 1939, could never have withstood
such a trivialized ambiente: “…if there is time, I will take a little nap,” una siestecita, a
trivialization only topped by the last line of the screenplay, when Malkina says: “…the slaughter
to come is probably beyond our imagining. Should we think about ordering? I’m famished”
(184).
And so, what is it that so totally supplants our Judeo-Christian tradition? I think it’s a kind of
Mexican fatalism. The Jefe says: “…here there is no choosing. There is only accepting. The
choosing was done long ago.” In this way he brings in Machado: “Do you know the works of
Antonio Machado?” (147). Machado’s poem is the axis of the screenplay, without Cormac’s ever
directly saying so. What in Machado is a negative wondering—the poem is made of three
rhetorical questions, with profound echoes of the Siglo de Oro, the golden age of Spanish
literature—becomes in Cormac’s work utter fatalism: “The choosing was done long ago.” Why?
I have long held—since my first article on Cormac—that in the same way that Joseph Campbell
calls all religion and myth and art and philosophy “one glorious song,” so can we understand
Cormac’s works as one long strung-together story. This unity or progression, or both, is perhaps
even more apparent in Western Cormac, and as the Mormon in The Crossing remarks: “And like
all corridos it ultimately told one story only, for there is only one to tell” (143). In all of them,
Mexico is a mirror in which we—the United States of America and Americans—are reflected or
see ourselves. And it’s not a normal mirror, but one that sometimes deliberately distorts, like the
ones—concave and convex—from Madrid’s Callejón del Gato that Machado’s contemporary,
Valle Inclán made famous a century ago in which fat looks skinny and skinny looks fat, but
neither so far from normal as to be unrecognizable. In fact, distorted or not, we are all too
recognizable and that is, I think, Cormac’s intention.
In the central action of Blood Meridian, Or the Evening Redness in the West, all of the
Americans, including the judge, are involved in some form of bounty hunting or filibustering,
which is to say the wholesale slaughter of Indians and Mexicans—not always distinguishable,
especially by their scalps. And this slaughter is frequently reciprocal. Aside from the enigmatic
judge, there are not many identifiable sages who reflect on the behavior of the filibusteros, but
there are frequent reminders of bad behavior, such as, to choose one example, the “array of
saints…shot up by American troops…the figures shorn of ears and noses…(26), and especially
the “…carved stone Virgin [who] held in her arms a headless child” (27). The headless Christ
child and disfigured saints are a minor-key, but nonetheless symbolically freighted, version of
much worse things to come. The Mexicans, the Americans, the Comanches and the Apaches are
more or less equally savage, but under the wise and evil leadership of the judge and Glanton the
reflection of the United States in Mexico’s mirror, its much diminished mirror, especially after
“Polk’s War,” is negative when not shameful.
Then there’s the Mennonite prophet who, like some reincarnation of the Elijah figure from Moby
Dick, warns quite accurately: “Do ye cross that river with yon filibuster armed ye’ll not cross it
back” (40). Prophets, dead babies and the headless or scalpless are Cormackian hallmarks. As is
a kind of gnostic agnosticism as when the judge affirms: “The mystery is that there is no
mystery” (252). Perhaps the readiest example of the negative reflection is the—I think—
exaggerated amount of manifest-destiny criticism that the novel immediately sparked. (Never
mind the 300,000-year-old scalping from the epigraph.)
The tonal change that comes with All the Pretty Horses reverses the reflection of Americans.
Instead of the plundering and killing and raping nineteenth-century filibusteros in the desert, we
discover a few teenagers who escape to a seemingly idyllic Mexican paradise, ingenuous 50’s
idealists who have no idea about how Mexico works. The results are both paradisiacal and
catastrophic. In spite of some grisly moments, the change in tone is a welcome relief, but the
American boys suffer greatly as a result of their ignorance of Mexican ways, in spite of the
bitterly recriminate philosophy and wisdom of la dueña Alfonsa with her fatalistic vision of the
incorruptible coiner at his bench and of the Borgesian infinitely manipulated puppet show. But
better, perhaps, to evoke Borges than, say, the Wizard of Oz.
Emilio Pérez, the papazote in the Saltillo prison, sums up the whole problem rather exactly:
“Even in a place like this where we are concerned with fundamental things the mind of the anglo
is closed in this rare way. At one time I thought it was only his life of privilege. But it is not that.
It is his mind” (192).
Cormac is using Pérez, somewhat obliquely perhaps, to criticize the attitudes of the U.S. “It is
not that he is stupid. It is that his picture of the world is incomplete. In this rare way. He looks
only where he wishes to see. You understand me?” (192). Later he says “Americans have ideas
sometimes that are not so practical. They think that there are good things and bad things. They
are very superstitious, you know.” John Grady, somewhat incredulous I think, rejoins: “You
don’t think there’s good and bad things?” and the papazote replies “Things no. I think it is a
superstition. It is the superstition of a godless people.” “You think Americans are godless?” “Oh
yes. Don’t you?” (194).
Finally, on the nature of evil he says, from his reflective Mexican point of view: “There can be in
a man some evil. But we don’t think it is his own evil. Where did he get it? How did he come to
claim it? No. Evil is a true thing in Mexico. It goes about on its own legs. Maybe some day it
will come to visit you. Maybe it already has” (194-95).
Now you can see this Mexican pessimism in two ways. As meramente fatalist or as prophetic.
Clearly, I see it as prophetic. And progressive. Both in the short term—Alejandra unknowingly is
dreaming John Grady’s death—and in the long term, as we will see, tracing this evil forward to
The Counselor. As my good friend, que en paz descanse, Carlos Fuentes, once said in his
brilliant synopsis of Spanish and Latin American culture called The Buried Mirror, describing
Benito Juárez: “Juárez was the very embodiment of Indian fatality, Roman legality, and Spanish
stoicism” (273). Put that all together and you get the complex jigsaw puzzle of Mexican
prophetic fatalism.
How different from Juárez is the papazote of the Saltillo prison, the very embodiment of stoic
and fatalistic Mexican jailhouse lawyer? Is Pérez speaking for himself, simply as a character, or
is he speaking for Cormac, wholly or in part?
Seems to me that is always the question and the answer will always depend on how we see
ourselves in Cormac’s mirror, which is at times faithful, and at times reminiscent of John
Barth’s Lost in the Fun House, as when in The Crossing Gaspar tells the primadonna, “El
secreto…es que en este mundo la mascara es la que es verdadera” (229). Which in Cormac’s
Spanish means: “The secret is that in this world the mask is the one that is real.”
Or when the blind man says that “…the light of the world was in men’s eyes only, for the world
itself moved in eternal darkness and darkness was its true nature and true condition and that in
this darkness it turned with perfect cohesion in all its parts but that there was naught there to see”
(283). Really, “the light of the world”? Aside from the Christological language, the novel is full
of Calderonian illusionism as when the blind man remarks that “…sometimes in the night he
would dream that this darkness were itself a dream…” (289). Ah the metaphysics and the
subjunctives of The Crossing. Life Is a Dream by Calderón de la Barca: Que toda la vida es
sueño/ y los sueños sueños son, the end of the most famous soliloquy in all of Spanish literature.
“That all of life is a dream
And dreams are but dreams.”
The equivalent of Hamlet’s “To be or not to be…”
Obviously Cormac can’t resist that sort of linguistic obfuscation and enlightenment. A
characteristic metaphysical chiaroscuro, so Mexican, so Cormackian.
And just one final question about The Crossing: At the end, the very last line: “…the right and
godmade sun did rise, once again, for all and without distinction” (426). To whom is that ironic
observation addressed?
Let’s return to the reflections in the mirror. In Cities of the Plain, we encounter one of Cormac’s
most ruthless evildoers, one who is also prophetic. I am talking of course about Eduardo the
alcahuete, the pimp. Again Cormac falls back on the Spanish classics, in this case La Celestina,
eponymously named for the most famous alcahueta in Hispanic literature, of whom Tiburcio’s
one-eyed mother is an exact rendering (check out, for a visual reference, Picasso’s 1903 blueperiod “portrait” of Celestina).
Eduardo, lean and vain, and himself infatuated with the diminutive and epileptic waif,
Magdalena—how could she be named other—has one very specific and horrific pronouncement
to make.
And you all know exactly what that is. First: “They drift down out of your leprous paradise
seeking a thing now extinct among them. A thing for which perhaps they no longer even have a
name. Being farmboys of course the first place they think to look is in a whorehouse” (249).
Pretty fancy sociology for a Border pimp, but of course he is not merely a borderpimp, he is one
of Cormac’s Mexican mirror-bearing sages. He’s bad, but he’s smart—he addresses the night,
which means he opens out as a thespian, as he opens in to us: “In his dying perhaps the suitor
will see that it was his hunger for mysteries—for mysteries—that has undone him. Whores.
Superstition. Finally death. For that is what brought you here. That is what you were seeking”
(253). Never mind that he is wrong about John Grady seeking death—Eduardo is using John
Grady as an example.
“That is what has brought you here and what will always bring you here. Your kind cannot bear
that the world be ordinary….your world—he passed the blade back and forth like a shuttle
through a loom—your world totters upon an unspoken labyrinth of questions. And we will
devour you, my friend. You and all your pale empire” (253).
Wow or as we say in Spanish Guauou! Some pimp, some fancy and prescient pimp. Of all the
pimps in all the border towns along the 2,000-mile border, he must be the most eloquent. Is
Cormac talking to us through Eduardo? His public—his readers—are us. Americans. There is no
message for Mexicans here: “You and all your pale empire.”
At the end of All the Pretty Horses, we watch John Grady, having buried his abuela, ride past the
oil field at Iraan, past the “mechanical birds” rising and dipping “Like great primitive birds
welded up out of iron” (301) and we see him and the horses pass in tandem “like the shadow of a
single being. Passed and paled into the darkening land, the world to come” (302), which turns
out to be the Calle de la Noche Triste, the street in Juárez to which he staggers and dies, the same
street as in Zacatecas—where a few years before Alejandra had dreamed his death—the same
street that she refers to vacantly, like the Calle del Deseo, as “but names for Mexico” (253). The
Street of the Sad Night, a sad night indeed for John Grady and for Billy, who has seen noon at
night and for whom all that waits is the vision “of a terrible darkness looming” (286).
Collectively this amalgam of sad streets with the same sad name will lead to “the world to
come,” the death predicted and inflicted by Eduardo.
In Blood Meridian and the trilogy we gringos are the filibusteros, the intruders, the interlopers,
the invaders. No Country for Old Men turns the tide and the Mexican narcos, fording in their
American-made SUVs the Río Bravo del Norte, are the invaders in this world to come, which is
now 1980. They are the ones who bring “the colossal goatfuck” with them along with their dogs
and their dope. Now the mirror is reversed and the evil comes to the United States and we begin
to understand what Eduardo meant.
Why? Ed Tom Bell has an idea: “You finally get into the sort of breakdown in mercantile ethics
that leaves people settin around out in the desert dead in their vehicles and by then it’s just too
late” (304). His final dictum is as damning as it is true: “… you can’t have a dope business
without dopers” (304). And from there it’s straight into Revelations and the Second Coming:
Revelations 1:17: “And when I saw him, I fell at his feet as dead. And he laid his right hand upon
me, saying unto me, Fear not; I am the first and the last:”
You can’t have the number 1:17 plastered all over the back end of the novel and have Ed Tom’s
wife reading from Revelations at the end of the novel and not put them together. At least I can’t,
especially when in the next book, which begins “in the dark and the cold” and this book which
ends with “carrying fire….in all that dark and all that cold,” (309) are seamlessly linked,
mirrored in fact, mirrored from a world that stopped at 1:17. What, if not the end of days?
The linking and the mirroring and the numerology are either the clue to the book or the worst
literary joke of all time. Obviously I do not subscribe to the latter. The novel’s title comes from
Yeats’ “Sailing to Byzantium,” but the plot mirrors Yeats other greatest poem, “The Second
Coming,” in a deepening suggestion of what Cormac portends: “Things fall apart”, “Mere
anarchy is loosed upon the world”. In a dialogue between Ed Tom and the sheriff of Maverick
County we hear Bell say: “Dope.” The sheriff responds: “They sell that shit to schoolkids.” And
Bell rejoins: “It’s worse than that….Schoolkids buy it” (194). How can we fail to hear Yeats:
“The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere/ The ceremony of innocence is drowned”?
(194).
“And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born.” If
we go to Revelations 11:7, we read: “…the beast that ascendeth out of the bottomless pit shall
make war against them, and shall overcome them, and kill them.” So is it the Antichrist, in
another kind of mirroring, slouching toward the Texas border? We have Ed Tom’s description on
the novel’s second page, although we probably didn’t get it the first time: “Somewhere out there
is a true and living prophet of destruction and I don’t want to confront him. I know he’s real, I
have seen his work. I walked in front of those eyes once. I won’t do it again.”
Do I think Chigurh is the Antichrist? Yes and no. About himself Chigurh says before he kills
Carla Jean: “Even a nonbeliever might find it useful to model himself after God” (256). And then
he sounds like Yeats: “Every moment in your life is a turning and every one a choosing.
Somewhere you made a choice. All followed to this” (259). And he sounds like the Jefe from
The Counselor.
Maybe it’s better to say, in the line of Chigurh’s own logic, that he’s what the story of the
Antichrist mirrors. And Revelations is the story of mankind’s inevitable downfall. I don’t think
it’s a literal question. Yes, we are meant to get all the allusions, but Chigurh says: “Most people
don’t believe there can be such a person [as himself]. You can see what a problem that must be
for them. How to prevail over that which you refuse to acknowledge the existence of” (260). He
doesn’t want, as he puts it, to “second say the world”. Probably neither does Cormac.
What could be more evil than Chigurh? ( Pause) Malkina.
Malkina is not Mexican, she’s Argentine. Malkina is an invented name, foreign-sounding, not an
uncommon practice in Argentina, but surely a Cormackianism. What is uncommon is the content
or meaning of the name. Russell Hillier has already pointed out in The Explicator that Malkin is
a diminutive form of Maud or Mary, and that it can mean in English Renaissance slang ‘a lowerclass, untidy, or sluttish woman’ and also can stand for female genitalia, all this from the OED,
and all of it spot-on, given Malkina’s automotive antics and general demeanor as what Stacey
Peebles calls a vagina dentata.
What they seem to have missed, however, is the association with Suttree, the novel. The last time
Sut crosses paths with Mother-She, he (or the Narrator) says: “Give over Graymalkin, there are
horsemen on the road with horns of fire, with withy roods” (282). The practices and ingredients
of the old witch frequently mirror those of the Three Witches from Macbeth, but in this allusion
there is a direct link through the name Graymalkin: the third witch in Macbeth says: “There to
meet with Macbeth,” and the first witch replies, ending the scene: “I come, Graymalkin!”
Graymalkin means an old, gray, female cat, especially a witch’s cat, a familiar associated with
the Devil. Draw your own conclusions. And don’t forget the wampus-cat from The Orchard
Keeper, the one that leaves no tracks in the snow (60, 157).
Cormac loves associations with folklore, with the mythic, the symbolic, the religious. Is Malkina
literally a witch? Is Chigurh literally the Antichrist? Is the Judge literally an archon or a
demiurge or the Devil? If you ask Cormac he will say, as he has, that he doesn’t know what
caused the catastrophe in The Road. He doesn’t know! He doesn’t know?
But the real evil in all these stories is the reflection of our own weakness, our own lack of
character. Cormac’s vision of us, especially as seen in that Mexican looking-glass, is somewhere
between an admonition and a condemnation, between a prophecy and actual desolation.
As the Jefe says to the Counselor, whose namelessness suggests Everyman, “…there is no one to
talk to” (144); adding “I only know that the world in which you seek to undo your mistakes is
not the world in which they were made…there is no choosing. There is only accepting. The
choosing was done long ago” (147). If we are meant to take that judgement in any larger sense,
then Eduardo was right: “We will devour you my friend, you and all your pale empire.”
Operative word: pale, a reference to skin color, most obviously, but also meaning “to become
feeble in comparison with.”
We should notice the decline in character as we move through time. The filibusteros and the
Judge may be evil and on the wrong side of history, but they are hardy and almost preternaturally
strong at times—survivors. John Grady and Billy are less hardy and less experienced but they are
not helpless—they are resourceful and strong and sometimes daring, although painfully romantic
and John Grady does not survive. Ed Tom is a man of action, but he is outgunned by evil and
quits twice. The counselor is greedy and pathetic, even pitiful. Worse yet, he is helpless.
For a final comment on Cormac’s mirror of us from Mexico, I have to return to Malkina’s
closing speech. When she says “…the slaughter to come is probably beyond our imagining”
(184), I tend to believe her. I don’t think Cormac is kidding. That Santa Fe Institute crowd that
he hangs with is not exactly optimistic.
If the American character declines, the bad guys just get worse. Chigurh and the Mexican
“business men” lack the judge’s education and formation. And Malkina and the Jefe, with their
cold-blooded bolitos and snuff films, are downright chilling.
To put it all together: In the world to come, “Who is to say?” to quote the Captain from All the
Pretty Horses, what will happen? After all life is a dream and the mask is reality. We don’t want
to “second say” the world, even though we feel the slaughter to come in our bones.
And then there is The Road.
When Carlos Fuentes asks at the end of the Introduction to “The Buried Mirror,” “Is not the
mirror both a reflection of reality and a projection of the imagination?” (11), I think he has also
described perfectly Cormac’s mirrored and mirroring view of Mexico. Perhaps, though, it is
Antonio Machado that has asked the deepest question of all, one that Cormac McCarthy seems to
treasure but has almost buried within the horror of The Counselor: “Do the crucibles and the
forges of thy soul/ toil for the dust and the wind?”