Henestrosa, an emblematic figure in Mexican literature and author of "The men who dispersed the dance," lived more than 100 years and his work continues to be imperishable.
The almost centennial face of the writer Andrés Henestrosa peeks out peacefully on the screen of a video viewer. Plagued by hopeless ailments, he lies reclining in the red hammock in the backyard of his house on the outskirts of Oaxaca, in the town of Tlacochahuaya. Church campaigns ring out like a woven curtain of metallic sounds. In silence, Don Andrés observes the documentary filmmaker Jimena Perzabal busy putting things in their place and alerting the members of the recording team of The adventure of Mexico, who has moved here in order to achieve an unexpected portrait of the author of the book The men who scattered the dance. It is not at all easy to put in front of a camera a wise man, suffering from deafness and at times desperate for old and hopeless ailments.
On the terrace there is no discouragement, as the conviction of being with a soul inextricably associated with a landscape, a legend, an ancient tradition prevails. Who could doubt it, this old man born in the year 1906 of the 19th century is indeed one of those rare examples in which humanity is fused with the legends without time, the languages of ancient Mexico and the immemorial culture of the Zapotecs.
Without fully understanding what is happening around him, Don Andrés no longer resists the urge to speak, because his thing is to speak, write and string words together into the air. "Man can never live without giving an explanation of the phenomena, events and actions that occurred around him, precisely from this stubbornness the story arises."
BETWEEN STORIES
The shouting of a group of Piarists breaks the silence of the modest patio of the parish of the town of Tlacochahuaya. Sitting on a small chair, Don Andrés addresses the boys and girls who are reading one of the legends contained in The Men Who Dispersed the Dance. Between one story and another and having as silent witnesses the fountain and a lush tule tree, the veteran storyteller reminds his interlocutors: “As a child I heard these stories in different languages of the region, my uncles, my relatives, told me them, the people of the town. When I reached the age of twenty I wrote them with great enthusiasm, almost feverishly ”.
In front of the camera, Henestrosa recalls the moment when his sociology teacher Antonio Caso suggested that he write the myths, legends and fables that he recounted orally. It was April 1927 when the young student, recently sent to the country's capital, made his way with the support of his protectors José Vasconcelos and Antonieta Rivas Mercado. Without imagining it, the future poet, narrator, essayist, orator and historian laid the foundations of The men who dispersed the dance, published in 1929. “My teacher and the companions questioned me if they were myths imagined by me or were simply creations of the collective invention . They were stories that I had in my memory but told by adults and old people of the towns, I spoke exclusively indigenous languages until the age of 15, when I moved to Mexico City. "
The elderly writer, deep in his thoughts and memories, looks straight ahead without taking care of the video camera that follows him. Moments before, in one of the transfers Don Andrés insisted in front of the strangers who followed his words with exaggerated attention. “It is a pity that I was not born a hundred years earlier, when the tradition was rich and the indigenous languages were full of life, stories, legends, myths. When I was born many things had been forgotten, they had been erased from the minds of my parents and grandparents. I barely managed to save a small part of that rich legacy made up of mythical characters, men of clay and giants born from the earth. "
THE TELLER OF STORIES
Francisco Toledo, the painter friend of Rufino Tamayo, talks about Henestrosa. "I like Andrés the storyteller in his mother tongue, nobody like him to speak in a Zapotec so pure and so beautiful that it is a pity that it was never recorded." The lives of Henestrosa and Toledo go hand in hand in many ways, as both are great promoters of the culture of Oaxaca. Don Andrés has donated his library to the city of Oaxaca. The Juchiteco painter, attached to the founding spirit of the Dominicans, has led to the emergence of museums, schools of graphic arts, art, paper workshops and the defense and recovery of properties of the historical heritage of his land. Henestrosa and Toledo in different ways oppose the disfigurement of the authentic face of Oaxacan ethnic groups, colors and traditions.
IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF DON ANDRÉS
The members of The Adventure of Mexico, Ximena Perzabal and the Juchiteco painter Damián Flores, are heading towards one of the most emblematic towns of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec: Juchitán. There they will record with astonishing eyes what the writer said about the human landscape and fixed by nineteenth-century travelers as illustrious as the Abbe Esteban Brasseur de Bourbourg. The bad tongues say that the stubborn traveler was subjugated by the beauty of the Juchitecas and Tehuanas. Many decades later, Henestrosa himself supports what Brasseur has established: “In Juchitán and in almost all of Tehuantepec, women are in charge. In Zapotec woman means sowing, for this reason I have insisted that agriculture is a female invention. From childhood, grandmothers and mothers teach us that women are the ones who rule. Hence, one of the advice I always give to my countrymen is that only fools fight with women, because –at least in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec– they are invariably right ”.
The documentary dedicated to Don Andrés did not lack the presence of the child musicians who make the turtle shells vibrate and thus give life to melodies with millenary sounds torn from the earth. The scene recalls the author's words when in The Men Who Dispersed the Dance he wrote that as a child he traveled many leagues along the beach expecting to see the mermaid of the sea. However, due to the lack of virtue or sanctity, the boy Henestrosa only saw the fig flower and the god of the wind, and fortunately in almost a hundred years he has never forgotten them.
