Alfonso Reyes

Tarahumara Herbs



The Tarahumara Indians have come down,
sign of a bad year
and a poor harvest in the mountains.

Naked and tanned,
hard in their daubed lustrous skins,
blackened with wind and sun, they enliven
the streets of Chihuahua,
slow and suspcious,
all the springs of fear coiled,
like meek panthers.

Naked and tanned,
wild denizens of the snow,
they - for they thee and thou -
always answer thus the inevitable question:
"And is thy face not cold?"

A bad year in the mountains
when the heavy thaw of the peaks
drains down to the villages the drove
of human beasts, their bundles on their backs.

The people, seeing them, experience
that so magnanimous antipathy
for beauty unlike that to which they are used.

Into Catholics
by the New Spain missionaries they were turned
- these lion-hearted lambs.
And, without bread or wine,
they celebrated the Christian ceremony
with their chica beer and their pinole,
which is a powder of universal flavor.

They drink spirits of maize and peyote,
herbs of portents,
symphony of positive aesthetics
whereby into colors forms are changed;
and ample metaphysical ebriety
consoles them for their having to tread the earth,
which is, all said and done,
the common affliction of all humankind.
The finest Marathon runners in the world,
nourished on the bitter flesh of deer,
they will be first with the triumphant news
the day we leap the wall
of the five senses.

Sometimes they bring gold from their hidden mines
and all the livelong day they break the lumps,
squatting in the street,
exposed to the urbane envy of the whites.
Today they bring only herbs in their bundles,
herbs of healing they trade for a few nickels:
mint and cuscus and birthroot,
that relieve unruly innards,
not to mention mouse-ear
for the evil known as 'bile';
sumac and chuchupaste and hellebore
that restore the blood;
pinesap for contusions
and the herb that counters marsh fevers,
and viper's grass that is a cure for colds;
canna seeds strung in necklaces,
so efficacious in the case of spells;
and dragon's blood that tightens the gums
and binds fast the roots of the loose teeth.

(Our Francisco Hernandez
- the Mexican Pliny of the Cinquecento -
acquired no fewer than one thousand two hundred
magic plants of the Indian pharmacopoeia.
Don Philip the Second,
though not a great botanist,
contrived to spend twenty thousand ducats
in order that this unique herbarium
might disappear beneath neglect and dust!
For we possess the Reverend Father Moxo's
assurance that this was not due to the fire
that in the seventeenth century occurred
in the Palace of the Escorial.)

With the silent patience of the ant
the Indians go gathering their herbs
in heaps upon the ground -
perfect in their natural silence.



trns. by Samuel Beckett 


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