Books: Mystery Mosaic

MANUEL THE MEXICAN (370 pp.)—Carlo Coccloli—Simon & Schuster ($4.50).

Nineteen hundred years after Christ was crucified outside Jerusalem, a Mexican child whose father was a man named José and whose mother was called Maria de Jesús was born in a mulecart at Tepoztlán, an Indian village between the capital and Cuernavaca. His mother had him christened Manuel.

Twenty-one years later, on Good Friday, 1954, Manuel was crucified on a hill outside Tlaltenalco. He had been scourged; real thorns bloodied his head; those about the cross wore armor—not of Roman soldiers but such as Cortes’ men had worn when he brought the cross and sword to Mexico 435 years before. It was the annual Passion play* of Tlaltenalco, and there were tourists, who did not fail to note that Manuel’s beard was paper. It came unstuck and fell off somewhere along his Via Dolorosa.

It is the contention of Italian Novelist Carlo Coccioli that both events—Passion and Passion play—had an identical reality for the witnesses. In the modern world, argues Coccioli, an Oberammergau can only be a charade; since the Middle Ages, it is only in a place like Indian Mexico, with its hallucinatory sense of time, where past and present are meaningless, that the supernatural can be accepted as reality and the actual world as an illusion.

More than a Puzzle. Author Coccioli has told the life and death of Indians of Tepoztlan, which parallel the Gospels in elaborate detail. Skill, insight and a rich, image-decked style make this chronicle more than a theological teaser or a jigsaw puzzle about just which Biblical figure is lurking under what sombrero. Coccioli has achieved a mosaic of miniatures in which the state of Morelos is the Kingdom of Judaea, and in which the pre-Columbian pantheon is transfigured to decorate a Christian altarpiece. Coccioli has leaped over the two stumbling blocks—banality and blasphemy—that beset the path of those who would compete with the Evangelists. He speaks through the mouth of one of his characters, a scholar who has studied the case of Manuel: “The Lord who knows the bottom of our Mexican souls knows that I am not blaspheming.”

In novelist Coccioli’s Mexico, pageantry of gods and devils makes a public matter of the dramas of the heart, and Christ must compete with old idols. In a thousand villages the Aztec gods—whose shrines were toppled by the conquistadors —are remembered by the defeated. Ancient drums as well as bells sound from the church tops. In such a world. Manuel the Mexican came naturally by his belief that Tepozteco, lord of his race, was also Christ, and that Tonantzin, the Aztec Virgin, was also Christ’s mother.

Intoxicated by God. His story is told in terms of a quest by the novelist for the heart of Manuel’s mystery. Manuel’s father worked on the coffee finca of Werner Poncet, a German planter of perverted tastes. After José had killed a man with a machete and in turn been murdered, Maria took flight from this Mexican Egypt to give birth to Manuel. From infancy he is one apart. He has a “disease” not quite epilepsy, but something that sometimes makes him unaware of things around him. At nine he whittles a wooden nail to wound his palm. He smears himself with pig’s blood. In episodes intended to echo Jesus’ sojourn in the temple, he learns the ancient Nahuatl language and mythology.

One day he meets his John the Baptist, a peddler named Guadalupe, a fanatical Cristero veteran of Mexico’s religious wars. They wander among shrines and through deserts until the boy becomes convinced that it is his destiny to unite in his person Christ and the Lord Tepozteco. The Passion play of Tlaltenalco gives him his opportunity, and he enters the village on Palm Sunday, riding a Chevrolet.

For some readers, at least, Manuel the Mexican will be a memorable tour de force. Novelist Coccioli is able to evoke the “malicious torpor” of the bizarre Mexican scene more brilliantly than anyone since Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, which was the story of a man to whom drink was a religion. Coccioli succeeds in the more difficult story of a man intoxicated by God. His complicated moral seems to be that sanctity is inviolable, that revelation is continuous, that time present is time past, and that, whether or not Christ is also the Lord Tepozteco, it is unarguable that God is also Dios.

*For news of another sort of Passion-play story, see CINEMA.