Here, There, Elsewhere: Stories From the Road

by William Least Heat-Moon

  We were in Santa Elena, an important place in the Mayan uprising of the past century, because my wish to see something genuine of Mayan life had been almost extinguished a day earlier at Uxmal. I’d overlooked the detritus of tourism: film wrappers, beverage cans, fouled diapers, and human excrement in the temple rooms. But, after dark, the famed sound-and-light show with its overripe voices of canned drama about Indian stereotypes and its overwrought choral music overwhelmed any classic Mayan traditions to leave me with only what I already had: secondhand knowledge of those small people who built so large and lastingly. I hadn’t really come in search of monuments or a pre-Columbian populace but rather for expressions of both that were yet alive. I asked Berto whether any such presence remained. “Tomorrow,” he said, “we go to a village where Mayas live and still are coming to templos—no—temples for real ceremonies when tourist people are away. If you see my people there, maybe you see different.”

  So, that morning I was seeing Mayas who happen to be Mexicans only by historical chance. Like those almost pure-blood villagers, Berto had a marvelously classic nose that seemed to start at midbrow and curve down like a palm frond to near his upper lip. I’d thought profiles such as his existed only in the Mayan codices where the faces are so different from the fierce and grimacing visages of the ancient Aztecs to the west. A compact, nimble man, Berto was forty-two and unmarried. Yesterday he said cryptically, “I am a wind.” When he named things, he gave me first the Yucatec Mayan word, then the Spanish, then the English, only occasionally hunting the right term.

  Santa Elena, in low jungle growth, sat at the foot of a hill surmounted by a cathedral. From the dusty plaza, steps cut into a living rock ledge led to the church, a worn limestone building of the eighteenth century. Growing in the step crevices were cardo santo plants with roots, when pulverized, that make a purge for stomach ailments, a remedy passed down from the ancient people. Here also grew Santa Maria, an herb to treat fevers. Beside the church, formerly also a small fortress, once stood a monastery, but only crumbling walls remained. Berto pointed to the cathedral: “Many stones come from a Mayan temple that was long ago on this hill.” He regretted the destruction, yet to him, the broken stones imparted an additional dimension to the church because ancient Mayas usually did not destroy an earlier structure, instead building over it to layer meaning and power. Some archaeologists believe Mayas were motivated by superstition, but Berto suggested it was a desire to (in my words) increment the richness of things and avoid reducing multiplicity into a oneness.

  On the south end of the plaza grew a tall ceiba, the tree commonly found at the corners of Mayan village plazas to honor the four sacred directions—the “cosmical points” Berto called them—from which all life comes. Every third week in January, the villagers danced around that ceiba in a ceremony to ensure the fecundity of the fields and people. I couldn’t comment on the fruitfulness of the land, but to judge by the number of children scampering about, the old rites were working well on the human side. During the dance, several men carry pig heads on trays while four others circle the tree as they pluck live turkeys; when the birds are defeathered, the dancers wring the necks. If a man fails to complete the plucking before the ceremony ends, a scornful crowd will beat him on the head with the bald if still-living turkey.

  Later, villagers will go off into the monte bajo, the low hills, to make offerings to Chaac, the deity of rain and productivity. Because the Yucatán is virtually riverless, and rainfall is largely seasonal, Chaac moves at the heart of their spiritual lives. “Without right mentality, it is easy to misjudge my people,” Berto said. “We are not worshipping idols—we are honoring natural force—energy.” Indeed, it seemed villagers took Chaac less literally than they did painted saints in churches.

  We walked down the rocky lanes lined with hip-high, stacked-stone fences—clearly not the defensive walls topped with broken glass of Mexican cities, but enclosures to keep animals in rather than anything out. Behind the rock fences were family plots of corn, squash, melons, beans (black, white, red), and fruit and nut trees, and from the hills, villagers took honey made from blossoms of the tajonal tree. Most houses there were in classic Mayan design: small ellipses of whitewashed mud-and-wattle walls, roofs of palm thatch. The almost elliptical shape of the houses represents a spiritual line in movement:

  The figure is an old notion that reminds Mayas of the turning of seasons and of life itself. Even the famous Temple of the Sorcerer at Uxmal, one of the purest examples of the regional Puuc style, is an architecturally rare, nearly elliptic pyramid. But Santa Elena now had several newer, square houses of concrete blocks. One old man earlier said to me, “In them there is no power.” Explaining, his fingers circumscribed an ellipse in the air.

  Each house, with floors of concrete or packed and swept earth, contained but a single room about eight-by-twelve feet; typically, several houses clustered around an open-sided cooking hut. The only furniture was a table, a few straight chairs, and hammocks—if hammocks are furniture; no one had a mattress-spring bed. Most homes had a television, many an electric sewing machine, some a stereo, a few automatic washers. I saw no refrigerators, electric ranges, or telephones. Scarcely anyone owned an automobile. Looking past electrical lines running into the houses, I was in a Mayan village the conquistadors might have encountered.

  Like the ancient pyramids in Yucatán, Santa Elena was more overlaid than assimilated, and Hispanic culture there seemed only to be pausing because villagers accepted Western ways selectively and somewhat superficially: electricity, a church, and, to a degree, a language. They had not forgotten their old tongue, deities, or dances. Beneath the layers, the Mayan presence waited, a fertile garden under a long winter.

  The spring day warmed, and the people took to the dim cool of their huts to sway silently in hammocks and so move the air, but for us, we walked to the Tienda de la Esperanza, the Shop of Hope, for a cool drink. We passed only a girl bearing on her head a bag of cornmeal from which her mother would make keyen, a kind of fermented mush. The girl’s blue eyes were striking against her dark skin. Berto pointed upward. “Kukulcan, the first Mayan god, he came from another place. His blue eyes he left among a few of us. Maybe a reminder. Yesterday leaves reminders, don’t you think so?”

  The uncultivated portions around the houses were gravel and dirt and sometimes glinted with twenty-centavo pieces, coins so worthless even children did not gather them. Villagers commonly laid down a threshold of bright ceramic tiles, but at one house the entry step was of worn and rounded stones which Berto pointed to: “These ones are from a lost templo. Do you see the design? It is nose of Chaac.” He drew in the dust the rain god’s long and upwardly curving proboscis that’s more akin to an elephant trunk than a human nose. That Mayan design, like the old houses and the temple at Uxmal, describes a virtual ellipse.

  But wasn’t a step made from a deity’s face a desecration? “If the face is pieces,” Berto said, “then it is only rock again. We honor the energy, the circling power inside.” I bent to touch the broken nose smoothed by bare feet of our time but quarried by hands centuries gone. “You like Chaac,” Berto said. “Maybe you are a worshipper of secrets in stones.”

  The Shop of Hope was shut down as was its promise of a cold beverage. Berto recommended going on to the town of Ticul to get a café meal before returning at sunset to keep his appointment with a h’men—that is, loosely translated, a medicine man who would try to ease pain in Berto’s shoulder.

  A sign along the road forbade leaving rocks on the pavement. That stony region of Yucatán was the Puuc (“hills”) where the soil showed a deep orange. Although the route to Ticul cut mostly through low jungle, we saw occasional fields of sisal, once the crop of the region but now largely done in by plastic fiber. Miles distant from their villages, men pedaled bicycles along, their backs slung with fagots of firewood or sugarcane or a rifle to hunt deer, turkeys, robins, and iguanas. Exposing themselves for a sunning, the big lizards made an easy target. One ev
en sat boldly on the crossbar of a telephone pole, and Berto said, “His time will be short.” I asked what a hunter did with a dead iguana, and Berto smiled. “Good for to eat.” Abruptly, from the middle of the warm pavement, an oil stain rose, got legs, and walked to the shoulder. I stared in disbelief. “Tarantula,” he said. “We don’t eat him.”

  In Ticul we stopped at Café Los Almendros and went out back to wash off the dust from our arms and faces, then took a table by the air conditioner. To the machine Berto whispered, “Gracias, Ik.” Ik is the god of winds. “First beer for thirst,” Berto said, “second for digestion.” The meal was botanas, small plates and bowls of various things. As we emptied one dish, the waiter brought another of something else: venison strips marinated in radish and coriander, spiced boiled eggs, black-bean soup seasoned with bitter orange, all of it accompanied by olives, spiced cucumbers, tortillas, and a salsa smelling like a blossom and tasting like hot smoke from a pistol barrel. With the last plate empty, Berto called for an iced pitcher of horchata: pounded rice, sugar, and cinnamon in water. I asked if botana didn’t refer to a plug to stopper something, and Berto nodded: “The empty stomach, it must be plugged, and then it stops making noise.”

  The h’men we returned to see was a field-worker who also conducted rain and planting ceremonies. H’men literally means “doer-undoer,” as in doing what needs doing and undoing what needs undoing. Berto’s ache needed undoing. To me, the treatment sounded like sorcery, and to that he answered, “I am always trying to know things—not believe things. But with a h’men, it works better believing than knowing.”

  In the dusky streets of Santa Elena, from around a stone wall, a cluster of blue specters suddenly loomed before us, and we both recoiled. Four girls, faces painted deep azure for a purification rite, were on their way to a fiesta. Berto was happy because their presence created a good aura for the h’men, whose dark hut happened to stand just behind the little specters. After disappearing inside, Berto came back out to invite me to watch—if I would keep silent about what would occur. So the h’men had requested. “I have luck today,” Berto said. “First, the blue girls, and now Tuesday—it’s good for, in your word, sorcery.”

  In the early afternoon two days later we drove to Labna, a small Mayan ruin relatively few travelers visited. On the road, we saw only one other car, an old smoking Dodge so full of people that the last two passengers huddled in the opened trunk. Once arrived, we followed a trail into a thick growth, past the hut of a family earning a few pesos from overseeing the Labna temples and from expertly carving cedar bas-relief images taken from the Mayan pantheon. Through a wood of bitter-orange trees and pitya cacti that yielded a good fruit, we wound our way in until the path turned from under the shade of large elephant’s-ear trees (so named for the pods) into an opening of hot sun, and there Berto said, “Here is many wonderful things.” Labna was a place of collapse with no colossal pyramids, no high temples, no reconstructions, nothing but desolate, stone ruins, many of them still suggesting an image of what they once had been.

  Travelers in the Yucatán, if they persist, may come upon a monument to fulfill a particular historical imagination. From the side of a caved-in cistern grew a ramon tree, its twisted trunk greater than my outspread arms. Berto surmised that ramon seeds once were stored in the cool cistern where somehow a sprout found a home in a cranny. On the north side of Labna lay long, low rows of small and windowless stone vaults, the unmortared joints precisely fitted, the facades incised with suns and moons and lattices of “cosmical points,” every corner hung with long Chaac noses cut and carved from limestone fresh from the quarry before the exposure to air hardened it. Some of the buildings had collapsed into undifferentiated heaps, and others were so far gone they were just scrubby mounds protected from the elements by brushy leaves whose roots had found a way into crevices, undoing the preservation.

  Frederick Catherwood’s 1841 illustration of Labna

  In the mid-nineteenth century, the American traveler and father of Mayan archaeology, John L. Stephens, with artist-draftsman Frederick Catherwood explored deeply into the overgrown peninsula and brought to light places unknown to all but the Mayas themselves. His Incidents of Travel in Yucatan describes an arrival that could have been exactly ours a century-and-a-half later:

  We took another road and, emerging suddenly from the woods, to my astonishment we came at once upon a large open field strewed with mounds of ruins, and vast buildings on terraces.

  At the top of one vault, an iguana lay warming itself and pumping its head and swallowing but roused itself from a half-doze to keep watch on the intruders. The sun was strong in heat and light, yet a clearing flashed full of winged motion—butterflies, swallows, and a motmot, the bird whose froglike cry can lead a Maya to find a source of water. We stepped into a dank and dusky corbeled vault to sit and cool down as Berto lamented lacking both water and the toughness of an iguana.

  Reviving before I did, he stood and walked across the clearing silenced by the heat. From the far trees came a high and wavering whistle, a pause, then again the thirteen notes in the pentatonic scale of the Indians of the Americas, a haunting minor-key melody. Unexpectably, improbably, a breeze rose and rattled the dry pods on the elephant’s-ear trees, and pushed into the vault a draft that circled as if to embrace me. Another thirteen notes, and once more the air moved. I had read about shamans in many lands who can whistle up a wind, but never before had I witnessed it, yet there it was.

  When I joined Berto under the trees I asked had he made the melody, and he whistled the eerily bewitching run of notes, and again came a puff of wind. I thought he must have some capacity to sense an approaching breeze, and he said, “Do you think this is sorcery too?” I asked him to do it again, but he said only, “Very old Mayan song. Muy antigua. The words say, ‘Come, Ik, come. Come, wind, come.’ ” In the hot dust he traced a pair of figures I’d seen many times in the past few days:

  “Vientos,” he said. “Wind symbols. Labna is a place of winds.” He pointed to a broken tower atop a high mound: “Wind observatory for the ancients.” How does one, I asked, observe wind? And why? “Priests were climbing the tower for to feel wind with their faces,” he said. “The wind tells the rains is coming and the direction they have.”

  West of the observatory stood the monumental arch of Labna inset with ornamentations. In its walls, more than ten centuries old, were depictions in relief of the huts like those at Santa Elena because Labna likely means “old houses.” Nearby, Berto pointed to where once a pair of limestone figures had sat, both now stolen. “That is change that does us no good.”

  On the way back to the road, we passed a small line of rock cylinders rising from the red soil. One, a thirty-inch phallus, was remarkably like ancient fertility sculptures I’d seen in the backcountry of Japan, but the carvings here belonged to Chaac because he too is a force of fertility. Berto, perhaps thinking of his comment about the missing pair at the gate, said, “To disappear can also mean to be ready to be born one more time.”

  That night the birds of the monte bajo threw their weird cries into the dark like sharpened blades until the dawn came on more melodiously but with no less volume. We rose and followed a long and rough road through a jungle hung with the drooping conical nests of the yuya bird, and kept on course by asking directions at every crossroad. Often we stopped the car to roll rocks out of the way or into a hole to aid passage. Berto’s shoulder pain had eased, and he happily reminded me that a Tuesday was usually good for sorcery, especially when it’s blessed by children painted blue.

  By early afternoon we arrived in Mani, a village settled a thousand years ago, before the fall of Uxmal and Chichén Itzá. At Labna, Berto had said as he waved toward the ruins, “For these I’m very proud for my people.” But in living Mani, a quiet came over him, almost a sorrow. Mani likely means either “without a nose,” perhaps a reference to a desecrated Chaac, or “it is finished.” The village appears Hispanic in layout and only lightly touched by the M
ayan past even though Berto assured me the ancient life was there yet. “Of course,” he said, “many things are lost because the Spanish, los conquistadores, tried to change our mentality.” Holy missionary fathers came and tortured and hanged Mayan priests, and Father Diego de Landa burned more than men here: He also destroyed artifacts and twenty-seven Mayan hieroglyphic rolls, historical resources of immeasurable significance. Then, as if to atone, he wrote a rich account about Mayan life, Report of the Things of Yucatan, and today the people revile him for what he destroyed and praise him for what he preserved, whatever its bias.

  His presence remained beyond mere memory, Berto believed. I asked where, and he led me toward the large seventeenth-century cathedral, a stucco-covered limestone building made distinctive by nearly two dozen colonial arches along its front with many more inside. To reach the church portal we had to walk through a children’s baseball game on the worn lawn where straying animals made it appear the second baseman was a pig and the left fielder a turkey.

  Near the great wooden sanctuary doors, a schoolgirl sat carving a Mayan deity from soft stone with her barrette. I turned down her offer to sell the unfinished idol but asked would she draw a long-nosed Chaac in my notebook for the same price. She paused, perhaps to consider whether she was stealing, then went to work with much concentration. She signed her drawing: graciana queme tún.

  Connected to the big sanctuary was a building of old frescoes faded nearly to nothing and a courtyard protecting a large, stone turtle with the head of a jaguar. “Everything is not yet all passing away,” Berto said. “This tortuga—no—this turtle is my people still remembering this ancient figure for water.” Upstairs, in a vaulted dormitory dusted with decayed stucco, Father Landa had lived. Across one corner, beside an arched portal, were two wooden wall pegs weathered to fragility; from them the missionary had hung his hammock for a year, and in those bare pegs his presence was starkly present.