A hundred and fifty thousand undocumented migrants from El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala and all of Central America pass through Arriaga, in southern Mexico, every year. There they wait for la bestia, the beast, the freight train that will carry them north to the United States border. Christophe climbs aboard with one of them, Luis, from Nicaragua. In the same country, others still live from the road: a Romani family of Romanian origin who take their circus from village to village, a shepherd who walks for hours to find water for his goats. Some flee, others wander by inheritance or by inclination.
Christophe rides the bestia “just for the experience”, for a few kilometres; others ride it to save their lives.
Kilometres and kilometres of walking for this water hole, one of the only places in the region where water can be found.When evening comes, people come out of their burrows and settle along the rails. Word goes round that the train will be there around two in the morning. It is not a passenger station, but almost: everyone is waiting for a freight train to climb aboard, and nobody hides it. Luis guides him between the wagons: those are the worst, too dangerous; this one is three-star. On this platform there can be up to eighteen people, and if the train is stopped by the mafia, you see them coming and have time to run off across the fields. “The reason we take this train is because we don’t have money.” What little they have, they earn by begging, enough to buy a little food and water. Luis has learned to speak like the Mexicans, and nobody notices: a chameleon. When the train arrives, the good places are taken. There remains a pipe above the axle, between the wheels. The roof is for daytime; at night, the branches lash.
Luis warned him: from the roof, “you see everything. The mountains, the landscape. You even see people fall off the train and die”.
On the roof, Luis assures him, “if you’re tired, you can sleep”; he sometimes sleeps “with half the body here and the other half there”.They call it the beast because a second’s inattention is enough: you drop off to sleep, you drop off the train, and you die. For the cartels, this traffic is the second source of income after drugs. Those travelling on this train have each paid seven thousand dollars to get to the United States more or less safely, and above all not to be kidnapped; anyone who does not pay is held captive, and a ransom is demanded from his family. At the stops, vendors hold out food to the wagons. Luis has been travelling like this for ten years, and has tried to cross twenty-nine times. “And now for me it’s just one more day on the road to paradise.” His worst memory dates from the twentieth journey, when there were rapes. For his freedom, the cartels would ask three or five thousand dollars; for Christophe, a hundred thousand at the very least. He advises him to get off at the next stop. On the bestia, you don’t say goodbye: it brings bad luck.
Each stop in a village becomes a “little business among friends”: this train is “really the sinews of war”.
“It may look like a holiday, but it’s not a holiday at all”: this “real business” is said to be worth fifty billion dollars.
After Luis’s warning, “only one way out now: keep smiling, but abandon ship as fast as possible”.
Luis has been trying to get into the United States for ten years; when his family let him down, “go to hell”, he told himself, and he set off again.Further north, near Mayrán, a circus. These Roma are called the Hungaros, the Hungarians, because they were the first to come to Mexico. Among the Costich, around Raoul, alias Pete, the father, and his three sons, the family numbers some thirty members. The pig Christophe is leading on a leash will end up at dinner: it is eaten for the feast of the Virgin Mary. Several times a day, a car drives round the village to announce the show. At the wheel, one of the sons never wanted any other trade: “Me, what I love is circus life.” People complain that their way is blocked, then weep when the circus leaves. Anastasia, a little girl, would like to “go on being a dancer in the evening and be a doctor in the daytime”. In the evening, Raoul tells their story: Romanian blood, two hundred years in Mexico, ancestors who showed bears and made monkeys dance. In the morning, in front of photos of his mother’s circus, from the 1930s or 40s, he dares to say the word: “We are cursed. And we are condemned to wander.” Packing up takes two days. Every fortnight or three weeks, they have to find another audience, a site, permits, and stay discreet to escape the local mafias.
The circus children grow attached to the friends they make in each village; when they leave, they miss them for a few days, then make new ones in the next.In Coahuila, in the far north, a few centuries ago there were as many as two hundred groups of nomads. In the village of San José del Refugio, two hundred and sixty inhabitants, people point out Tarzan’s house, but the shepherd is deep in the mountain, an hour’s walk away. His territory is “as big as my eyes can see”. He wants nothing to do with the village: “If I went to live in town, I’d be like a bird in a cage.” They call him Tarzan because animals like him, and he talks to them. Each goat gives a litre of milk, two in the rainy season, but this is the dry season. He curdles the milk with rennet, makes two cheeses per pot, sells them for twenty-five or thirty pesos and gives no discount: it has rained only three times this year, there is nothing for the animals to eat, hay has become very expensive. God, he says, is angry. You have to cross the mountain to find water. A shepherd means “walking, running, trotting, jumping, leaping”. He lives alone, and every day, he says, he learns new things.
“Here, I live humbly, but I’m happy. And I have my health.” Far from the village, says Tarzan, “nobody judges me”.
Rennet, juice from a goat’s stomach, curdles the milk almost at once; legend traces it back to nomads of eight thousand years ago.
“And you, how do you see me?” Christophe answers: “As a shepherd poet who is ready to reach for the moon.”“One evening, I set off with my horse towards the moon.”Tarzan