Word: manuel
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Twenty-one years later, on Good Friday, 1954, Manuel was crucified on a hill outside Tlaltenalco. He had been scourged; real thorns bloodied his head; those about the cross wore armor-not of Roman soldiers but such as Cortes' men had worn when he brought the cross and sword to Mexico 435 years before. It was the annual Passion play* of Tlaltenalco, and there were tourists, who did not fail to note that Manuel's beard was paper. It came unstuck and fell off somewhere along his Via Dolorosa...
...pantheon is transfigured to decorate a Christian altarpiece. Coccioli has leaped over the two stumbling blocks-banality and blasphemy-that beset the path of those who would compete with the Evangelists. He speaks through the mouth of one of his characters, a scholar who has studied the case of Manuel: "The Lord who knows the bottom of our Mexican souls knows that I am not blaspheming...
...public matter of the dramas of the heart, and Christ must compete with old idols. In a thousand villages the Aztec gods-whose shrines were toppled by the conquistadors -are remembered by the defeated. Ancient drums as well as bells sound from the church tops. In such a world. Manuel the Mexican came naturally by his belief that Tepozteco, lord of his race, was also Christ, and that Tonantzin, the Aztec Virgin, was also Christ's mother...
Intoxicated by God. His story is told in terms of a quest by the novelist for the heart of Manuel's mystery. Manuel's father worked on the coffee finca of Werner Poncet, a German planter of perverted tastes. After José had killed a man with a machete and in turn been murdered, Maria took flight from this Mexican Egypt to give birth to Manuel. From infancy he is one apart. He has a "disease" not quite epilepsy, but something that sometimes makes him unaware of things around him. At nine he whittles a wooden nail...
...some readers, at least, Manuel the Mexican will be a memorable tour de force. Novelist Coccioli is able to evoke the "malicious torpor" of the bizarre Mexican scene more brilliantly than anyone since Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano, which was the story of a man to whom drink was a religion. Coccioli succeeds in the more difficult story of a man intoxicated by God. His complicated moral seems to be that sanctity is inviolable, that revelation is continuous, that time present is time past, and that, whether or not Christ is also the Lord Tepozteco, it is unarguable...