Swift as Desire Read Online Free PDF

the
conquista.
As I have told you, the Spaniards burned many, many codices, so there are many things we will never know about our ancestors.”
    As doña Itzel took a long puff of her cigarette, a tear ran down young Júbilo’s cheek. He refused to believe that so much had been lost. It couldn’t be true. This stone slab spoke to him, and although he was unable to understand it, he was sure he could decipher its mystery, or at least he was going to try.
    He spent days learning the Mayan number system, which is based on the number twenty and employs dots and lines for its written expression. Curiously, this training helped him, years later, when it came to learning Morse code. But at the time, he had no idea he was going to be a telegraph operator and his only concern was to find the hidden key that would allow him to decipher the Mayan dates. Nothing could have made doña Itzel happier. To see her grandson so completely absorbed in the culture of the ancient Mayans filled her with pride andsatisfaction. And more important, I think that was what allowed her to die in peace, since she realized that her legacy on earth was assured in a member of the family. She was now certain that Júbilo would not forget his Mayan roots. She died peacefully, smiling. And while Júbilo was saddened by her death, he could find some comfort in it too. His grandmother died at the right time, before modern development could scandalously overtake Progreso, her quiet pueblo. It was indeed ironic that his grandmother had lived in a town named Progreso, because although she was an active woman with liberal ideas, she in no way shared the urge for progress that was so common at the time. She accepted that women could smoke and fight for their rights, she even supported the 1916 movement to regulate abortion in the Yucatán. But she was adamantly opposed to the advent of the telegraph, the telephone, the train, and all other modern technological advances, which in her mind only caused people’s heads to fill with noise, made them live more frenetically, and distracted them from their true interests.
    In some way, his grandmother saw all these advances as crude successors of the positivist thought that defined the
Científicos
, a group of misguided characters who had kept President Porfirio Díaz in power for many years. It was during Díaz’s dictatorship, in 1901, that the book
Mexico: Its Social Evolution
was published. Written by the positivist doctor Porfirio Parra, the book was a clear testimony of what the day’s most respected and refined authorities really thought about Mexicans. In a singlestroke, this book disowned Mexico’s Indian heritage, leaving it out of the story completely. Parra claimed that before the arrival of the Spaniards, the Indians only knew how to count up to twenty, and that their mathematical knowledge only extended to life’s bare necessities and was never used for scientific investigation. According to Parra, the origins of Mexican science lay in the facts imported by the conquistadores, not in any native knowledge. It was a history charged with racist undertones, not to mention ignorance, and it justified doña Itzel’s fear that all these recent technological advances would obscure the fight to break away from
Cientificismo
’s legacy and to return to true Mexican, Indian, values being mounted by great Mexicans, like José Vasconcelos, Antonio Caso, Diego Rivera, Martín Luis Guzmán, and Alfonso Reyes.
    For doña Itzel, it was clear that the real question surrounding the issue of the train lay not in whether one would be able to reach his destination more quickly, but in why he would want to. The danger she saw was that technological advances served no purpose if they were not accompanied by an equivalent spiritual development. Even though they had gone through a revolution, Mexicans had not acquired any greater consciousness of who they were. And now, living even faster than before, how were they to connect