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Officially, the revolution sought to exorcise the influence of all things Spanish. Monasteries and convents were closed. Royal land deeds were nullified. Monuments to conquerors and viceroys were destroyed. Artists, with government support, painted epic murals of the pre-Columbian world that had been wracked by the Spanish. Poets and writers celebrated the Mestizo world of the new Mexico, a fusion of Indian and Spanish cosmologies. Gradually, the Iberian light cast on us by our Spanish past was further eclipsed.
    But, I am back in Mexico, looking for traces of those first days in the age of Nueva España. From the doorstep of the church, I see an old man, unshaven, wearing two weathered denim jackets, meticulously shoveling soil into a bucket in the small cemetery that lay inside the walled churchyard. When he tells me his name is Ramón Lopez, I joke that we are parientes, or relatives, as Mexicans often call each other when they share a common family name. He asks me where my mother’s family came from, and when I reply, “Cotulla, Texas,” he whistles in amazement.
    “I don’t think any of my Lopez ever made it that far north!” Cotulla is only one hour north of the border.
    The heavy rains of the day before had sunken the dirt in the grave of his third wife, and Ramón has come there to fill it in for the third time since her death a month ago, at age seventy-eight. His earlier two wives are buried together in another grave, nearby. As to his age, Ramón says only he is older than the dirt, laughing with a coarse rasp through a toothless grin.
    “I don’t remember Cortés,” he says, “but I remember Zapata! My mother gave his soldiers chickens and avocados when they camped nearby, unknown to the dictator Porfirio’s army.”
    After I tell him of my morning’s quest, he says there is no such painting of Cortés in this church, and he should know. He has been the caretaker there for sixty-eight years, during which time he has dusted off the noses of every saint, scrubbed every chipped mosaic, and cleaned the gilded frame of every painting.
    “Maybe the padrecito has it in his bedroom, I don’t know, because I never went in there. Or maybe they took it to la Capitál. They take anything that’s worth money.”
    But there is something he wants to show me. Ramón wipes his hands on his pants and asks me to follow him to the rear of the church building. After we walk through the scrubby brush at the edge of the churchyard, Ramón stoops down on one knee and pulls away the high, grassy weeds near the bottom of one wall, exposing an old, elaborately carved stone disc, slightly larger than a garbage can lid, set into a circular niche in the wall. Ramón wipes it with his jacket sleeve.
    “You know what this is?”
    At first, the carved miasma I see there makes it hard to focus on any details. It isn’t one of the old stone calendar discs of the Indian time-keepers, calibrated and segmented in glyphic language, like the great Aztecan sun wheel of Tenochtitlán. It is exquisitely carved with interlocking stems and flowers, coursing around a central tree, and all around it are thistle heads, rabbits, frogs, scorpions, bees, conch shells, and an arc of stars and their rays. Around the entire border, the sleek, curved glyph for wind appears in an unbroken chain, making the whole circle look radiant and in flux, as if the stone were meant to capture the churning energy of a creation where all things are connected in a single great motion.
    While the wall has clearly been whitewashed hundreds of times, the stone is pristine, cherished, hidden away, and guarded by the people like a secret treasure. The Spanish often chose to build their churches over the Indian pyramids, as they did over the great ceremonial pyramid in Cholula, not too far away from here. Here, this old Indian disc is imbedded in the church wall like a cornerstone, anchoring the Christian sanctuary in the dark Mexican earth of the ancestors’ time.