The Last Supper: And Other Stories by Howard Fast Page B

we turned off the main highway onto a small side road through a broad, beautiful, but strangely uninhabited valley. Even the grass huts and little patch fields of the peasants were missing here, nor was there a burro to be seen munching the grass or a bullock pulling a wooden plow against the horizon. We drove on until Serente pointed to a hulking purple mass. “There it is,” he said, and I commented that it was very high and that it hardly seemed possible that a car could climb it. “Perhaps, but the old Mexicans built a stone roadway up to the place, and much of it still remains and the rest is dirt fill. They were mighty workers in stone, and a very great people, and their works dwarf the antiquities that we Europeans admire so. Mexicans are very proud, and one of the reasons is that they have not forgotten the old times.”
    â€œOthers have.”
    â€œYes, others have.”
    Serente was an excellent driver. We turned off the road onto what seemed to be only a dirt cow track, but after we had crossed several fields, it emerged as a fairly good dirt road. It wound up the side of the mountain, with ancient stonework buttressing the hillside above, it as well as the road below, and it went on and on, in endless curves and convolutions, and as it mounted, the hills around us rolled back and the whole broad vista of the valley below spread out before us. Finally, we came to a place where the car could go no further, and Serente parked in a small clearing, and from there we went on by foot over the four or five hundred feet that remained to the summit.
    From Serente’s description, I had anticipated an unusual sight, but my thinking was shaped by the other ruins I had seen near Mexico City and in the, South. Those ruins represented years of archeological work, and this place had hardly been touched—only a single pyramid excavated—yet in its vastness, in the grand purpose of the concept that had made it, in the immensity of its ruins, it dwarfed anything I had seen before. It took my breath away. It left me awe-stricken and speechless, and full of a sense of the awfulness of time.
    We had emerged on the top of a long, rolling plateau, and for a mile of its length in front of us, and half a mile behind us, an enormous dead stone city lay, dead and clothed all over with verdure, but with here and there an outcropping of stone, a ledge, a wall, a sill; and under the green cloak, the shapes remained, mighty buildings, tall pyramids, sunken courts, giant columns with only the base left, formal gardens where brightly dressed people had once walked, and fountains which had once picked the Mexican sunlight into all of its bright colors. We walked through its lonely emptiness, interlopers in time, and examined the single pyramid that had been uncovered. It was strange, different from any pyramid I had ever seen before, but precise and handsome in its workmanship. I asked Serente whether he knew what manner of people had once lived in this city. “They don’t know yet,” he replied, “but whatever they called themselves, we know that they were the same people as the peasants who live in the neighborhood now. The people who are fastened to the earth never change. They endure everything and survive everything—” But did they, I wondered? Serente had told me that at one time, it was estimated, ten thousand people lived in this city on a mountaintop, and how many tens of thousands had lived in the valley below to grow the food to feed these? But now the valley was silent and empty. I asked Serente.
    â€œIt is not empty. A few people still live, there. They are the remnant of agony. I saw the agony of Spain myself, and I was a part of it, but the agony of Mexico is something else. All that is hideous and monstrous on this earth has bled Mexico. She has been raped, not thrice, but a hundred times, raped, bled and betrayed. Church and North America taught her lessons and still teach