Integrité

48 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal Billy, however, feels indebted to the Mexican people. Coming upon a truckload of Mexicans needing roadside assistance, he stops to help because some Mexican peasants saved his and Boyd‘s lives years ago. He says, ―I liked the country and I liked the people in it…. Those people would take you in and put you up and feed you and feed your horse and cry when you left. You could of stayed forever‖ (90).

Still there is a mystery at the core of Mexico. As Eduardo the pimp says, ―No one knows this country‖ (211). And Billy agrees with him, for Mexico deceives the American. ―I damn sure dont know what Mexico is. I think it's in your head. Mexico…. The first ranchera you hear sung you understand the whole country. By the time you've heard a hundred you dont know nothing. You never will‖ (218). Among the mysteries is the Mexican devotion to the Virgin. Mac, reflecting on the death of his daughter on Candelmas Day, says, ―Candlemas.

Somthing to do with the Virgin. As what didnt. In Mexico there is no God. Just her‖ (116).

Although John Grady has visited Mexico often, speaks the language, and even knows elements of the culture (for instance, he knows Magdalena needs a padrino), he does not and will never understand the tragic vision that undergirds the Catholic Mexican worldview. The pimp Eduardo sums up the gulf between the Protestant North and the Catholic South this way: ―Americans cannot bear that the world be ordinary. That it contains nothing save what stands before me. But the Mexican world is a world of adornment only and underneath it is very plain indeed. While your world…your world totters upon an unspoken labyrinth of questions‖ (253).

Do the deaths of Magdalena, John Grady and Eduardo suggest that the gulf between the tragic and comic worlds cannot be bridged? Certainly for John Grady, his world is never ordinary. It is filled with wonder and possibility and, it is true, many questions. But John Grady never doubts that a man‘s actions—even the decision to kill the man who murdered Magdalena—have significance. John Grady has his revenge, but at great price. Yet the deaths of Magdalena, John Grady, and Eduardo have no apparent effect on Mexico.

Rodriguez sums up the conflict between the Mexican tragic vision and the Protestant north (represented by California) this way: I think now that Mexico has been the happier place for being a country of tragedy. Tragic cultures serve up better food than optimistic cultures; tragic cultures have sweeter children, more opulent funerals. In tragic cultures, one does not bear the solitary burden of optimism. California is such a sad place, really—a state where children run away from parents, a state of pale beer, and young old women, and divorced husbands living alone in condos.

(Rodriguez xvi-xvii) The last words are left to Billy who even in old age continues to suffer, but also to endure. Homeless, broke, mourning the loss of his brother and his best friend John Grady, he wanders the West, sleeping under thruway bridges and sharing