Mad Jesus: The Final Testament of a Huichol Messiah from Northwest Mexico

33: Dark City Lights

202 | I made my way through the darkened hallway and took the elevator up to the top floor. I began to climb up the rickety steel staircase to the roof.There were no lights. I heard someone distinctly chanting in Huichol. Chucho was there. I would tell him that Enrique had the tape recorder and be finished with the matter. As I reached the roof the wind caught me and I held tightly onto the staircase in the darkness.There was a long row of rooms.It was completely dark except for a brightly burning fire at the far end of the passageway .All the rooms had at one time been painted, but the weather and sun had left nothing but rough concrete and stucco covering them. It was definitely Chucho singing somewhere at the end of the row of rooms, probably in front of the fire. I listened to the song.The language of a Huichol shaman’s song is extremely difficult to understand, even without the noise of Mexico City. The songs of a shaman are long, drawn out, repetitious, and very strange. I caught a word here and there.The flames flashed along the little passageway.They did a sinister little dance against the walls and on the weathered doors.It would have been better if I had gone back down the steel staircase and never seen Chucho again, but I didn’t, and he awaited me. His song drew me on. It was a song about Santo Cristo and the creation,or it sounded like the Huichol version of the creation. It was a strange creation indeed. The ontology of a different world: Chucho’s world. xxxiii Dark City Lights As I walked down the crumbling concrete passageway in the darkness past the rickety doors—thirteen doors total, one for each of the twelve floors and one for the portera—I listened carefully to Chucho’s low chant. Flames were leaping out of a large bucket at the end of the passageway,but I could not see Jesús in the darkness even as I approached the twelfth door. Chucho must have been right around the corner chanting in the repetitious drone of a mara’acame. It grew louder as I approached the final door. I could imagine he had before him his wands of power, his movieli, his medicine bundle, his takwatsi with crystal souls, hair and bones of animals he had seen in dreams,and other strange things.I could imagine him sitting there in an uweni, wearing his most baroque costume and staring off into blank space with peyote visions swirling through his head. I came out of the dark narrow passageway to the blaze of Mexico City all around me,on one side the golden angel atop the floodlit monument to independence, on the other, Chapultepec Castle where Maximilian and Carlota had lived.Below the castle the gleaming white marble monument to the Niños Heroes,the cadets of the military academy who leapt to their deaths from the castle rather than be captured by invading U.S. Marines, and Diana the huntress leaping from a fountain of light.Tall buildings above and below gleamed in the darkness, dwarfing Chucho’s fire in an old paint bucket. Chucho was seated just as I had imagined him with his movieli and takwatsi laid out before him. He had the glazed look of someone in a trance. I walked over to where he was seated, ducking below laundry lines held aloft by flimsy sticks strung all across the back half of the building ’s roof. He was about  feet from the fire, chanting, looking into the flames as if he didn’t even see me. I walked to within about  feet of the blazing bucket.The entire back half of the roof was open.There were laundry sinks on one side and a low wall, less than  feet around the rest of the roof. Chucho just kept on droning out his song among the glittering lights high atop his precipice in these urban canyons. I was trying very hard to catch as much of his song as I could.I crouched down to listen. XXXIII | Dark City Lights| 203 XXXIII | Dark City Lights 204 | He paused, looked up at me, and asked, “You like my song, Don Timoteo? Do you understand it? I am singing of the Mothers and of...