A Place Rumoured to Exist

We chipsters recently had occasion to watch a movie we had seen almost 15 years ago; and, seeing it again, thought we would jot down some thoughts about it.

Hombres Armados (1997), by John Sayles, could be described as a pastoral, picaresque frame-tale set on a pilgrimage to a place rumored to exist. 

Since the movie doesn’t fit neatly into any genre, it might do just as well to ask what makes for a pilgrimage?

The word “pilgrim” derives from the Latin for “foreigner” or stranger.  It originally referred to “all of them who wasn’t Romans.”  As these out-landers came under Roman rule, they were governed by traveling circuit judges, from whence the word acquired its further connotation of wandering.  By the Middle Ages, the two senses of the word acquired their present day denotation of wandering strangers in foreign places.

In theory, the wandering was not aimless but was directed at a specific place — usually a shrine or sacred precinct of some sort — for a specific purpose — typically to acquire a cure or earn some sort of merit. 

But to say as much does not take into account the certain perils and uncertainties of travel up until the 19th century.  A medieval person might purpose to go to Jerusalem and might aim himself in that general direction (over there where the sun sets) but he had no true and reliable itinerary or predictable schedule.  In practice, Jerusalem was so far away, so virtually beyond reach, that it might as well have been a cloud or a dream.

Even where the geographical goal was closer, there were still the barest outlines of roads, few inns, and even less of that thing called “safety.”  To undertake a pilgrimage was itself to hand over one’s life to the Will of God, a chancy and dubious proposition if ever there was one and the doing of which required a great amount of that thing called “faith.”

Pilgrimage became an obvious metaphor for “life” itself and there were those devotees who upped the ante by making no preparations beyond a step and a prayer.  Saint Francis didn’t even bother with sandals.

Needless to say, medieval people, who were always makings lists of one sort or another, divided pilgrimages into three types:  as a penitence, as fulfillment of a promise or as either a penitence or a promise on behalf of someone else. 

Hombres Armados is, then, the pilgrim-tale of five people who meet on the road to a place called Cerca del Cielo which in Spanish has the dual meaning of “near to sky” and “heaven’s circle”.

The interlocking narratives are framed within the story of a city doctor who ventures into the jungle in search of students he had trained to bring medical care to impoverished indians in the southern hinterlands of an un-named but paradigmatic Ibero-Indian country.

Doctor Fuentes is a cultured, white haired, white-man — what used to be called a criollo or American-born person of pure Spanish descent.  He speaks in a refined almost Castilian accent.  He is well-off. As he departs in his Grand Cherokee, his son asks if he can “borrow the Mercedes” while he’s away.

Once beyond the confines of asphalt civilization, Dr. Fuentes quickly gets lost and has to rely on an orphaned indian boy, known only as conejo or rabbit, who offers to guide the doctor for “two reales” plus crackers. 

Conejo has no name because, we are told, his raped mother “pushed him out” so that he lives “like a dog.” But Conejo is a scamp and is the one who gives the story it’s picaresque character.  Unlike the others, he is unburdened by purpose or sentiment.  He is amoral the way Nature is amoral and tells things (“explain” is already too involved) with a lean, economy of fact that would be the envy of academic positivists.  He joins the doctor’s journey because he has nowhere else to go and the scraps are reliable.  Like a smaller Sancho Panza, he is the foil to the doctor’s errant aspirations and quandaries.

As they venture farther and farther into rude territories they encounter a series of mishaps one of which is an indian army deserter, Domingo, who forces Fuentes to perform roadside surgery on a bullet wound and to act as his driver. 

It is something of a consensual kidnapping.  “Where to?” asks Fuentes. “Adelante” comes the reply.  Domingo has no destination in mind except “away,” and it serves him just as well to join the doctor in his search for the medical missionaries he had sent into the jungles.

“You will never find them,” Domingo says and one by one, village by village, the medical missionaries are rumored dead, said to have been killed by armed men — sometimes “the army” sometimes “las guerillas.”  “So now you have no doctor?” Fuentes asks one villager. “It would seem to make things simpler” comes the acerbic reply.

On the road again, a man suddenly dashes into the highway and holds up his arms. Ignoring Domingo, Fuentes stops.  The wayfarer gets into the car and introduces himself as Padre Portillo.  “Where are you going?” Fuentes asks, “Further on,” comes the reply.

Domingo suspiciously asks the priest where he is from and Portillo replies that he is no longer from anywhere.  He is a ghost who lays his head wherever. “So you screwed some chick,” comes Domingo’s cynical retort.  “No,” Portillo replies wistfully, “it was far worse than that.”

“A priest without faith is as bad a soldier without a rifle,” Fuentes remarks.  “Are you a believer?” Portillo asks. No, Fuentes, replies, he’s a científico, a believer in progress. “Always adelante, eh?” Portillo says wryly.  Yes, Fuentes answers, at least until he finds the last of his students and what happened to his life’s legacy.

But Fuentes has doubts and doubts about his own good intentions.  He should have known better than to send them off trained but unprepared.  “Perhaps innocence is a sin.” 

Night falls, and the four travelers put up by the side of the road where they are joined by two itinerant laborers who earn their keep collecting and selling sap from rubber trees.  To pass time, “in the absence of television,” the chicleros suggest they tell stories. Portillo, who has been eager to confess from the start, tells his tale in the crackling glow of the camp fire.

Come morning, while the others are asleep, Domingo approaches Portillo and says he wants to confess.  Portillo replies he is no longer a priest and cannot hear confession, but Domingo forces it on him anyway.  The two stare at one another helplessly; one running away from a crime, the other wandering because he ran away.   Domingo angrily tells the priest he’s good for nothing.

The journey resumes through meandering tropical ravines.  and in a short while they are pulled over at a military check point adjacent to a “Model Settlement #4,” called “Hope.”  When asked for his identification, Portillo replies that he’s a ghost.  This gets him hauled away for questioning.  As he leaves he turns to Domingo and says “te absuelvo.”  Domingo calls him crazy.

While giving some rudimentary medical care to the settlement’s inhabitants, Fuentes learns that Domingo had been a medic in the army and also that he has a way of dealing with patients that goes beyond the scientific method. 

Conejo who has been scavenging information from other urchins returns and tells Fuentes that the last of his students is rumored to be at a place called Cerca del Cielo.  Domingo confirms that he too heard of that place when he was in the army but it was just a rumor and probably does not exist. Still Fuentes is determined to unravel his legacy. 

As the three drive off in the rain, a young woman from the settlement emerges from a field of sugar cane and stands before the Jeep.  Her figure is emblematic.  She wears a powder blue sweater over her shoulders. Her skin is a light brown morena and her person is immaculate.  The young woman, never speaks and might even be mute.  We know only that  she had been raped. Her face is locked into an expression which is at once innocent, victimized and as if trapped in some kind of moral coma or  soledad (solitary sorrow).

By morning, the Jeep is useless and the group sets off on foot up steep and muddy slopes without paths.  Domingo angrily denounces the scheme and says that that Cerca del Cielo doesn’t exist. He then scrambles on in a desperate fury.

Another nightfall,another sunrise, and the woman steals off with Domingo’s gun. She sits down by a stream in silent despair.  Fuentes notices and walks over. 

He tells the girl not to pay attention to Domingo who is disappointed, embittered and has lost all hope. 

“There’s a place where the air is like a caress,” Fuentes says, “where gentle waters flow, where your burdens are lifted from your shoulders on wings of peace... a place to grow, and where each day is a gift and each person is reborn...”

Fuentes does not believe his own exaggerated poetry, unscientifically cribbed from travel brochure.  What he knows is only what is evident: the last of his student doctors is nowhere to be found.  Exhausted he lies between the huge roots of a tree having verified that his life’s legacy was pointless. 

Domingo too is disgusted. Model Settlement #4, he spits out, was better than the nowhere they have arrived at, “the place where rumors come to die.”  At that moment a young indian child emerges from the bushes and tells Domingo that her mother needs a doctor.  At long last, a smile brightens the young woman’s face.

Sayles is not interested in realism; at least not of the physical kind.  Cinematographically, the movie has the artificial air of a stage-setting — mere scenes for framing moral stories built around three types of sin:  innocence and the sin of good intentions; anger and the sin of violence against others; fear and the sin of loving self.

But Sayles is also interested in ambiguity and irony — qualities which infuse Ibero-American history, particularly Mexico.   One U.S.  historian spoke of Mexico’s “long history of mocking anti-climaxes that range from the ludicrous to the ghastly.” 

Sayles is less punishing.  Without question, there are real devils abroad in the land through whose infernal works the three failures have to maneuver. But Sayles relieves the ghastliness with comic relief at the expense of American tourists who are cluelessly full of questionably accurate information.

Sayles uses the intersecting itineraries of failures, devils and fools to ask us to consider a broader political proposition.

At the start of the film, Fuentes eats out at a restaurant with his daughter and son in law, a niño bien or well-born boy.   The privileged twerp is derisive of Fuentes’ humanitarian project. “Have you ever met an Indian?” he asks.

“It was a good idea! a good idea, like the Alliance for Progress,” Fuentes adamantly asserts.

“Doctor...” comes the reply, “my family has lived with los indios for generations on our ranch.  Let me tell you ... the more  little morsels of modernity you give them — ideas, medicines, television — the more you destroy their souls.”

The answer Sayles provides is that truth and hope are where you don't expect to them.