TALES OF THE SOUTHWEST

  EL    BRUJO   PART 1: JANNO   Janno stared at the immensity of the yellow and ochre plains that terminated in an upsweep of bluish-brown mountains framed by a deep and cloudless blue sky. The Guadalupe mountains never looked so clear and stark, the outlines sketched with a clarity that brooked no fuzziness or hesitation. This was the Chihuahuan desert west of the cities of El Paso and Juarez, where the   ocotillo , the agave and the desert brush sprang   thorny and sharp from the silt left behind millions of years ago by a long evaporated inland sea. In parts of this desert, that silt took the form of dunes of gypsum that glittered blindingly white in the hot sun. In an   unimaginably long span of time that serves to put man’s overweening sense of his own self-importance in perspective, between distant   times to the era when humans inhabited and built civilizations in this area, forms of inner consciousness grew. The earth of...

  It was the tamales that I remembered most of all. The taste of spicy chili pork impregnated in the steamed corn flour wrapped in its husk   crept back into my memory with the sharp yet mellow insistence   of a classic   song from Mexico: “ Me gusta tu, y nada mas que tu.”      Rosa Alarcon had prepared it and a panoply of other Mexican dishes whose original intentions were to be merely snacks but eventually acquired the heft of an early evening’s supper. Aside from the tamales, there were the chili rellenos , whole green peppers from Hatch that were lovingly dipped in a tempura batter. Then there was the menudo, in and of itself a meal, quite different from the Philippine menudo because it was beef tripe and hominy grits swimming in a tomato- sauce infused sea of “caldo”, a soup. A slice of lime brought a tangy finish to this heavenly concoction, a true child of Mexico.   And then, for dessert, there were the tamales of a different sort ma...