The goat is lying on the ground with a swollen belly, dying. One leg jerks spasmodically, and at intervals it bellows into the air like human groans. This goat is dying Tacho, it would be better to kill it. The goatherd approaches the animal, gropes it under its black skin in search of its heart, and sticks the knife into it. In less than 30 seconds the suffering is over and the dogs feast on hot blood with licks.
This is the world of Tacho, Eustacio Ascacio Velázquez, in the Mexican mountains of Coahuila, 80 kilometers from the United States. If the day is clear, the mountains of Texas can be seen on the horizon. The cougar glides along these paths, smelling the majada and the bear comes down every night to gut the garbage cans, gets into the houses, uncovers the water tanks and stands on its legs in search of water. So rampant and so rampant. If he catches a kid, fine; if he butchers ten, better for him and worse for Tacho.
From bottom to top, high-top boots, denim pants and charro belt; shirt, the one that touches, denim jacket and the head always under the wide-brimmed hat, as if out of a western. The few times that it is discovered, to eat, for example, the forehead and hair appear white as if stretching, even with the marks of sleep. Other than that, the exposed skin is black from 73 years in the desert sun. Tacho is tall and is missing his left hand, which he lost in an explosion who knows how many meters underground. One day he appeared in a video claiming his rights as an ejidatario from the mining exploitation and the film director Carlos Eichelman Kaiser saw it. Today, Tacho is an actor.
Red shoes. This is the title of the film, which competed in the Horizontes section of the Venice Film Festival, where the goatherd is the protagonist. He plays a man like him, tough from the fields and the mine, who has to undertake a trip to the Mexican capital to recover the body of his daughter. Sins of yesteryear are macerated in his head that have to do with patriarchal violence. The tape is a kind of road movies from the desert to the capital, from life to death, which will be released next year. Tacho has not seen it yet, because the director wants the first time to be on the big screen and that will happen, if nothing goes wrong, at the Morelia Film Festival (Michoacán) on October 25 at six in the afternoon. How is the artist going to deck himself out for the red carpet? “Look, here I have my country clothes, right, I have a red shirt, I have another, my pants are black and my boots; and my hat, if I want to wear the black one or the white one that I wear all the time, right; and the belt I’m wearing, which has a lot of pebbles. This is what I wear in the field, so ‘you can see, this old man is a rancher,’ he explains sarcastically. It’s hard to understand him with that laid-back northern Mexican accent and because he doesn’t have teeth, but he doesn’t show under his cornigacho mustache.
Tacho hardly knows how to read, much less interpret a dramatic text, so to rehearse the role he had a luxury assistant, his wife, Cipriana Cárdenas. The business was more or less like this: Cipriana transferred the director’s instructions: ‘Tacho, you have to approach the actor and ask him to lend you money to travel to the city, because you have to bring your daughter, who has died, to bury her . You have to tell him: ‘I need money, compadre, wouldn’t you leave me something for the trip?’
While he grazed the cattle between San Pedro palm trees and prieto chaparros, Tacho pondered the phrases that he would later repeat in front of the camera, either in San Luis Potosí or in Mexico City, where the film was shot, under the orders of Eichelman Kaiser, to who today they receive at the ranch as one of the family. This is how the filmmaker also feels, who has managed to take his debut feature to Venice. Tacho and Cipriana could not be at the Mostra due to an aircraft strike. Cipriana, 65, thanks Lufthansa for leaving her in Mexico, traveling by air is not funny to her.
Natural actors, as they call those who are not by profession, are frequent. Whether it’s the lack of budget or the authenticity that these people bring to the role, the thing is that, every once in a while, someone stands out. Famous in Mexico was the performance of Yalitza Aparicio, who played a maid in the award-winning film Rome, by Alfonso Cuaron. That character, Cleo, launched a young woman who had just finished her primary studies and had no job to stardom. She signed up to casting.
To get Tacho out of his ranch and go out to shoot, the production had to pay the three shepherds who take care of the herd of 300 goats, and the dashing actor at a rate of about 12,000 pesos a week (about 610 euros). The miner, already retired, receives much less pension, and for a kid they pay him about 1,000 pesos. “I grew up with my uncle, because we were a lot of family, I helped him and he gave me five pesos to go to the movies on the weekend.” He speaks of Salaverna, in the State of Zacatecas, where he was born. Same landscape of arid mountains on the outside and full of silver on the inside. There he became a miner, like his father. “But that doesn’t have money, they gave us seven pesos for eight hours of work, I was 17 years old. At 18 I went to the big mine, 1,400 meters below, I liked it a lot”.
Seeking better conditions, the whole family went to La Encantada, in Coahuila, but the mine in Mexico brings nothing but disappointments. “The mining company appropriated 2,000 hectares of the ejido, they widened the road and we are still on trial because they did not give us the rent for all that,” says Mario Valdez, a partner of Tacho, an agricultural engineer from Saltillo, who is also an ejidatario. Two judicial processes, one of 11 years and the other of about 20, keep the wounds open because there is still no sentence. The fight continues, but in the meantime, the ejidatarios have to go through the humiliation of being stopped on their way home until the Canadian mine owners check the vehicles and raise the metal boom to open the way, if they see fit.
Hundreds of butterflies leave yellow streaks against the windshield of the car on the way to the ranch. Kilometers of dirt where the coyote’s roadrunner, or the coyote himself, crosses from time to time. Sometimes it rushes through the winding of a rattlesnake, as feared as it is appreciated in those lands because they attribute healing properties to it. “But those snakes are in danger, right?” “Yes, we are all in danger,” Cipriana replies and instantly bursts into a chorus of laughter due to the double or triple meaning of her appreciation. The risk of dying from a sting is certain and goatherds are in danger of extinction, too. Few want to live the hardships of the ranch, where there is no running water or electricity. Cipriana gets desperate moving her cell phone as if she were swatting away flies to see if she attracts the mine’s internet signal, practically the only gesture that she remembers that the 21st century is already running.
Juan José, 31, is one of the goatherds who accompany the couple on their chores. He has butchered another goat that died yesterday so that the dogs can share it without showing their teeth. The mule is at the door with the saddle on and the rope coiled. Juan José and Tacho watch the afternoon fall with a cigarette in hand, watching how the mist covers the mountains. “These are cold clouds, right, Don Tacho?” They are. At night the wind will howl angrily over the four concrete block walls that the miner erected next to the sheepfold. “This kitchen was the first little room we made.” Next to it is another where the goatherd sleeps and the couple spends the night in another room with a fireplace. Everything is full of knick-knacks and the flies give no respite to the cats, or to anyone. Tacho and Cipriana could sleep in the mining town, a kilometer further, where the company lent them a house back in the day. There’s a television and a bathtub, a sofa and a refrigerator, but you can’t hear the puma if it happens to visit the cattle in the open-air pens. In those lands, the human being is measured against the beasts with the loaded shotgun. And with the boots on all night if necessary.
Killing cougars is prohibited. You can’t shoot the bears that roam the town every night either, which is why the mine has hired two boys to scare them away with a trumpet to keep them away from the houses. It’s a dangerous job, perhaps, but fun. They seem loving, but watch out for one of those caresses.
Tacho is from that lineage of men trapped under the ancestral steamroller of machismo: there is no fear, there is no pain, just work, nobody here gives up. Heroes in a world that no longer values Superman. You have to see him recount, with the cigarette and the can of beer, the day he lost his hand when he leaned it on something that exploded in the mine. “I threw the light at him, pure nerves hanging, I grabbed the shirt with my teeth and made a tourniquet. The partner told me: ‘what happened?’ ‘I hurt myself’. He fainted at the sight of his dangling hand. I picked him up and took him to the others. ‘What happened’, they asked me: ‘my partner fainted’. They didn’t notice that I didn’t use my hand, I had it folded with my sleeve. And later, before the doctor: “What does he bring?” ‘A little bruise,’ I told him. ‘You have to operate’. ‘Well, do what you have to do.’ There were no tools, ‘send him to town’. It was a foggy May 13, I couldn’t lift the plane, we left by van […] I woke up with my arm hanging from a hook. ‘Ring the bell, Secundino, I’m very hungry. Hey doctor, I don’t need blood, I need to eat’. I am very good at eating, gorditas, taquitos, everything ends. I was in the clinic for nine days and I was released.”
He was then in his “twenties” with three children. She kept working in the mine doing the same thing as before. They gave him a compensation of the time.
Juan José, the pastor, is entertained by anecdotes, especially the paranormal ones, that if a dead person appears here, that if a black hand comes out there. With that and the cell phone the night goes away, if it gets a signal. Until dawn and he mounts the mule and goes to the mountain. That was Tacho’s life before going out on the adventure of the cinema: landscape of iridescent rocks, cliffs carved by the wind and endless horizons where only the eye traveled. And so is that of his pastor. Sitting at the door, he will ask the visitors: “Is Mexico very far?”
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