Jai Alai, Mexico, Jai Alai!
THE LAST DAY I’M IN MEXICO I’m in the little church near Redondas in Mexico City, 4 o’clock in the gray afternoon, I’ve walked all over town delivering packages at the Post Offices and I’ve munched on fudge candy for breakfast and now, with two beers under me, I’m resting in the church contemplating the void.
Right above me is a great tormented statue of Christ on the Cross, when I first saw it I instantly sat under it, after brief standing hand-clasped look at it—(“Jeanne!” they call me in the courtyard and it’s for some other Lady, I run to the door and look out).— “Mon Jésus” I’m saying, and I look up and there He is, they’ve put on Him a handsome face like young Robert Mitchum and have closed His eyes in death tho one of them is slightly open you think and it also looks like young Robert Mitchum or Enrique high on tea looking at you thru the smoke and saying “Hombre, man, this is the end.”—His knees are all scratched so hard sore they’re scathed wore out through, an inch deep the hole where His kneecap’s been wailed away by flailing falls on them with the big Flail Cross a hundred miles long on His back, and as He leans there with the Cross on rocks they goad Him on to slide on His knees and He’s worn them out by the time He’s nailed to the cross—I was there.— Shows the big rip in His ribs where the sword-tips of lancers were stuck up at Him.— I was not there, had I been there I would have yelled “Stop it” and got crucified too.— Here Holy Spain has sent the bloodheart sacrifice Aztecs of Mexico a picture of tenderness and pity, saying, “This you would do to Man? I am the Son of Man, I am of Man, I am Man and this you would do to Me, Who Am Man and God—I am God, and you would pierce my feet bound together with long nails with big stay fast points on the end slightly blunted by the hammerer’s might—this you did to Me, and I preached Love?”
He Preached love, and you would have him bound to a tree and hammered into it with nails, you fools, you should be forgiven.
It shows the blood running from His hands to His armpits and down His sides.— The Mexicans have hung a graceful canopy of red velvet around His loins, it’s too high a statue for there to have been pinners of medals on That Holy Victory Cloth —
What a Victory, the Victory of Christ! Victory over madness, mankind’s blight. “Kill him!” they still roar at fights, cockfights, bullfights, prizefights, streetlights, fieldfights, airfights, wordfights—“Kill him!”—Kill the Fox, the Pig and the Pox.
Christ in His Agony, pray for me.
It shows His body falling from the Cross on His hand of nails, the perfect slump built in by the artist, the devout sculptor who worked on this with all his heart, the Compassion and tenacity of a Christ—a sweet perhaps Indian Spanish Catholic of the 15th century, among ruins of adobe and mud and stinksmokes of Indian mid millenium in North America, devised this statuo del Cristo and pinned it up in the new church which now, 1950’s, four hundred years later or five, has lost portions of the ceiling where some Spanish Michelangelo has run up cherubs and angelkins for the edification of upward gazers on Sunday mornings when the kind Padre expostulates on the details of the law religious.
I pray on my knees so long, looking up sideways at my Christ, I suddenly wake up in a trance in the church with my knees aching and a sudden realization that I’ve been listening to a profound buzz in my ears that permeates throughout the church and throughout my ears and head and throughout the universe, the intrinsic silence of Purity (which is Divine). I sit in the pew quietly, rubbing my knees, the silence is roaring.—
Ahead is the Altar, the Virgin Mary is white in a field of blue-and-white-and-golden arrangements—it’s too far to see adequately, I promise myself to go forward to the altar as soon as some of the people leave.—The people are all women, young and old, and suddenly here come two children in rags and blankets and barefooted walking slowly down the right hand aisle with the big boy laying his hand anxiously holding something on his little brother’s head, I wonder why—they’re both barefooted but I hear the clack of heels, I wonder why—they go forward to the altar, come around the side to the glass coffin of a saint statue, all the time walking slowly, anxiously, touching everything, looking up, crawling infinitesimally around the church and taking it all in completely.— At the coffin the littler boy (3 years old) touches the glass and goes around to the foot of the dead and touches the glass and I think “They understand death, they stand there in the church under the skies that have a beginningless past and go into the never-ending future, waiting themselves for death, at the foot of the dead, in a holy temple.”—I get a vision of myself and the two little boys hung up in a great endless universe with nothing overhead and nothing under but the Infinite Nothingness, the Enormousness of it, the dead without number in all directions of existence whether inward into the atomworlds of your own body or outward to the universe which may only be one atom in an infinity of atomworlds and each atom world only a figure of speech—inward, outward, up and down, nothing but emptiness and divine majesty and silence for the two little boys and me.— Anxiously I watch them leave, to my amaze I see a little tiny girl one foot or and-a-half high, two years old, or one-and-a-half, waddling tinily lowly beneath them, a meek little lamb on the floor of the church. Anxiousness of big brother was to hold a shawl over her head, he wanted little brother to hold his end, between them and under the canopy marched Princessa Sweetheart examining the church with her big brown eyes, her little heels clacking.
As soon as they’re outside, they play with the other children. Many children are playing in the garden-enclosed entryway, some of them are standing and staring at the upper front of the church at images of angels in rain dimmed