by Mary Morris
At six we got to the bus station, which was basically a mud hut at the edge of town where a woman served terrible coffee. Eventually a rickety, dirty bus arrived and we boarded. We found seats near the rear. Suddenly scores of French and German tourists arrived and managed to push themselves on.
We had a twelve-hour ride in a crammed bus with no shocks on a bumpy dirt road that descended into the steamy lowlands of the tropics. A French woman sat on my armrest, her thigh literally in my lap. I wouldn't have minded if she'd asked if she could sit on the armrest, but she just plunked herself down and we spent the entire ride giving each other little nudges and pushes.
We were hot and uncomfortable and I had no idea how we'd make it through the journey into the jungle. At each stop, barkers ran up to the bus, selling Popsicles, warm Cokes, fruit-flavored slush, barbecued corn, and tacos. I was dying for some slush, but we knew the water could be bad, so we settled for warm Cokes. Catherine, who exhibited an impressive capacity for sleeping in unpleasant circumstances, dozed as we drove down to the hot and muddy lowland jungle. I was wedged between her and the French woman sitting in my lap. But I soon forgot my discomfort.
Entering the lowland jungle I confronted a fantasy of my childhood—a world of butterflies, butterflies I had read about in my youth when I belonged to a South American butterfly club. Butterflies I had seen only in the enormous butterfly book my parents had given me or on display at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. Butterflies that in my heart I had never really believed existed, until now.
A blue morpho, that iridescent turquoise-blue butterfly, hovered over fallen fruit. Another flitted through the jungle. The blue morpho, most secretive of butterflies, most private, the butterfly whose life history is unknown. I saw others I recognized. The Heliconius doris with its long, narrow wings. A brilliant silver shoemaker with its emerald-green wings. A bamboo page, a common page, a figure-of-eight butterfly, the cobalt-blue and black Nymphalid, the orange Grecian shoemaker. The owl butterfly, the Southern cattle heart, the plain yellow swallowtail.
They were all right there. The ones I had spent years studying, then forgetting. And now they were all here, for me to remember.
At about seven o'clock that evening, exhausted, filthy, disgusted from the ride, we arrived at Palenque. The town was an array of mud and cement houses. Garbage was everywhere, flies were in everything, and people, exhausted from the heat, swung as if drugged from hammocks suspended between bumt-out palms. We clomped through the town and stopped to get some fruit salad. Catherine gently picked three dead flies out of hers and flicked them to the ground. I could not bring myself to eat mine.
She was running short of money and wanted to stay in a place that would cost us each only a dollar a day. The rooms consisted of straw mats on a dirt floor and I balked at staying there, in the tropical heat, so Catherine agreed to check into a decent hotel here in Palenque if I would stay in a hammock place on Isla Mujeres. At that point I would have agreed to a lobotomy.
We found a hotel near the ruins called the Motel de las Ruinas. The big draw for both of us was its beautiful, gigantic swimming pool filled with sparkling water in which we intended to spend all our free time. For some reason we were given a room with a double bed. We stripped down and jumped in the shower. Catherine went in first and came out screaming. A large toad was tucked in the corner of the stall. I am squeamish about insects and she is terrible with reptiles. I couldn't get it out so we showered with the toad watching.
We lay on the bed, naked, the overhead fan churning away, until we found the energy to go out for dinner. We had seen some sort of a restaurant about a mile down the road and we decided to walk while it was still light, hoping to get a ride back in the dark. As we walked, we listened to the jungle sounds. Shouts, shrieks, screeches, hoots, howls, yells. The road was lined with carcasses. Dead snakes, land crabs, small rodents. A large black spider that looked like a black widow raced in front of us across the road.
It was dark by the time we reached the restaurant, which consisted of a few picnic tables, a dirt floor, and red and green Christmas lights encircling the tables. It also had a baby wild boar named Petunia, who ran around begging for food. Petunia, when fed and contented, rolled over onto her back to get her tummy rubbed. I was surprised to find that the belly of a wild boar is soft as a baby's.
Catherine didn't like Petunia and seemed annoyed at my feeding her. I was nervous about the prospect of having to walk back to the motel in the dark and managed to irritate Catherine by devoting most of the meal to trying to find us a ride. We ate plates of rice and beans, cooked meat and plantains, all of which was good, and drank warm beer. But whenever a new customer appeared, I rushed over to ask about a ride. Eventually an Italian couple on their honeymoon took pity on us. "You poor girls," the woman, who was not much older than us, said. "Wandering alone like this." She clutched the arm of her bespectacled husband at the thought. They lingered over their meal, touching hands, while I rubbed Petunia's belly and Catherine sat in silence. Finally they were ready to leave and they went out of their way to take us home.
NOBODY GOES TO PALENQUE IN MID-AUGUST AND what we were doing there then remains a mystery to me. Perhaps it was just a case of bad planning. But there we were, and we experienced it in its full force. The minute we stepped outside in the morning the heat struck us, bowled us over like a blast furnace. Our jeans, which we'd washed out the night before, were stiff as boards, dry as clay in the morning sun. But my hair never felt dry the entire time I was in Palenque; it was always soaked with sweat. As we walked to the ruins, the people swung in their hammocks, expressionless, barely moving, dead looking, brains boiled. The jungle of Palenque was not like that of the highlands. Here there were no hills, no vistas, no gentle rolling of the land. In Palenque you were at the bottom of a pit of the lowlands, enclosed in a jungle prison. No breeze blew through this hollow. It felt ominous, treacherous, omnivorous, and indifferent, as if it would swallow you with a single gulp. If you stood still for just a moment, vines would engulf you, snakes would poison you, small crawling things would devour you, the air would be stolen from you. And you would be forgotten.
We entered the lost city of Palenque, a city of overgrown trails and crumbled ruins, a mysterious place about which little is known. Once a thriving city, Palenque was abandoned suddenly in the tenth century when all the great Mayan centers were abandoned for reasons unknown. I walked through its main causeways, among its temples and houses and courts where sports were played. I walked through these ruins with steam baths, public toilets with septic tanks, aqueducts, and drainage systems. I tried to imagine the city that had been.
Palenque, whose civilization was concurrent with that of the dawn of civilization in Greece and Egypt, is a place of questions, of things you must accept because no answers are forthcoming. Palenque isn't even its original name. After many years archaeologists have deciphered a date, which translates to 682 B.C.; they believe it is the completion date of the first pyramid. But no one can explain those pagoda-like temples reminiscent of those in China or at Angkor Wat in Cambodia. No one knows about Pakal, the prince entombed in an obsidian mask at the bottom of the great pyramid of the same name. He is believed to have been a captive, a prince of another tribe, yet the people of Palenque spent years building him the only pyramid in all of Mexico that is also a tomb.
Catherine and I climbed. We climbed each temple, every pyramid. We descended into the cool, wet depths of the tomb, then rose to see the astrological markings at the observation tower. We saw the entire valley from the observation tower, where the Mayan rulers observed the stars and charted their course and made their calendar—a calendar more accurate than ours. No one knows how they accomplished this, and no one knows why the Mayan people dispersed, leaving their cities and their religious centers centuries before the conquistadors arrived.
I left Catherine and climbed to the top of the Temple of the Sun; I saw the Temple of the Foliated Cross and imagined in the distance
people struggling up the hill. Mayans going to their places of worship, dragging boulders, building their temples, stone by stone, painting beautiful pictures on the walls. I saw them fighting back the jungle, futilely pushing it away. I could see them from where I stood, a great, passionate, religious people who had disappeared but for their ruins.
Then I walked into the jungle a little ways. A horde of soldier ants descended a tree. In my path were a red-bellied spider with skinny legs, reminding me of the black widow we thought we'd seen the night before, and butterflies of topaz, amber, turquoise, earth brown. Tigers, monarchs, delicate lace-leafed butterflies, little pearl and azul ones, big yellows and the giant blues—the cobalt-blues—all flew past me. I heard the sounds of strange animals as I made my way through the lush vegetation.
At dusk Catherine and I staggered back to the hotel with only one thought in our minds. We would strip, put on our suits, and take that swim. We walked in silence and I do not recall ever being quite so exhausted. As we approached the hotel, the pool appeared before us, turquoise. We kept walking, but the pool was not so shimmering as it had seemed the day before. As we drew nearer, I did not take my eyes from it. Catherine gaped as well. When we were only twenty feet away, I stopped. "Look," I said.
Catherine nodded. "It's not possible," she said.
We reached the edge of the completely empty swimming pool, the pool which had been full of water the afternoon before but did not have a drop in it now. We rushed to the man who sat in the office drinking a warm Coke, feet on his desk, and he told us that the pool was dirty so they had decided to drain it. We shook our heads in utter disbelief. We went to our room to shower and I felt someone was playing a cruel joke on us—there was no water. We rushed back to the man at the desk. He told us that they'd run out of water. For reasons we've never understood the hotel decided to drain the swimming pool on the same day they ran out of water. "When will you have more water?" Catherine asked.
The man shrugged. "Later," he said.
We went back to our room and lay on the bed, miserable, not speaking. Then we wiped ourselves off with half a dozen Wash 'n Dris each and went to the restaurant where we'd eaten the previous night. Petunia, who seemed to know me now, rolled over on her back to have her stomach rubbed throughout the meal, much to Catherine's annoyance. Eventually the owner came over and sat down. He asked if we liked Palenque and we said we did, but we were very hot and our hotel had no water. "Then you must go to Agua Azul," he said. "It is beautiful. Dozens of waterfalls. Yes, you must go there and swim."
We were lucky that morning. About a hundred people were waiting to push onto the local bus that would take us to Agua Azul, but the ticket taker took pity on Catherine and me. He was a young man of about seventeen with a kind and handsome dark face, warm brown eyes. And he wore pink. He wore a shiny pink shirt with some kind of animal—elephants, I think—all over it, and pink pants. One doesn't normally see a man dressed all in pink. That fact has stayed with me, and always will.
Since we were going all the way to Agua Azul, two hours up the mountain—not just to Egipto or Santa Maria, the mud and thatch villages along the way—and since we were the only blue-eyed gringas around, the ticket taker got us seats before the local people piled on. Then he opened a window for us and let everyone else board.
There seemed to be no limit to how many people the bus could hold. As many as showed up squeezed on. Mothers clutched screaming babies and pushed and dragged their chickens and goats. Men with machetes stood bleary-eyed in the heat. All had misery in their faces, the pain of drudgery.
The bus climbed and the breeze and the cooler air made everyone feel better. Slowly, as people got off, we felt the terrible heat letting up. The ticket taker in pink joked with us. He asked if Palenque had been hot enough for us. And he said Agua Azul was a beautiful place.
In two hours we reached Agua Azul, with its twenty or so main waterfalls and a series of lesser ones; small pools formed at the bases of some falls, and we could swim in these. Our driver said we'd stay for about two hours, then return. Catherine and I changed into our suits in a small wooden dressing room. A dead tarantula lay on the floor.
I headed for one of those little pools at the base of the falls while Catherine got a beer and started off on a walk. Our bus driver, a very gentle, elderly man with soft gray eyes, sat on the edge of a rock and pointed to a pool near him. He told me this was not a bad place to swim. I eased my way into the icy water and felt the cool go through me. I felt alive, tingly, happy to be in water. I began to swim. I swam out into the pool and back again, but about midway I could feel the current—strong, pulling at me.
Catherine came back. She said she'd seen a large wild boar, drowned, in one of the pools. "Be careful," she said. I looked at where I'd been swimming. The pool where I swam fed into a waterfall that fell about ten yards. It didn't look so treacherous and I wasn't very concerned. Catherine went to make us sandwiches with some vegetables, bread, and cheese we had brought from town. She said she'd be back with lunch.
I went into the water again. A boy had entered the pool and was swimming beside me. I swam out and back a few times, and each time I felt the current at that one place. Finally I decided it was dangerous and that I should not swim all the way across and back. But the boy, flailing about like a puppy, was not a very controlled swimmer, and he was making his way back and forth well beyond the place where I was stopping. I remember thinking to myself, I should tell him that the current is very strong. I should say something. But I did not. I didn't want to pry or bother him. He must know what he is doing, I told myself. Then Catherine called me for lunch.
I hoisted myself out of the water. As I walked toward her, my body felt cool for the first time in days and I smiled. I felt incredibly vigorous and content as Catherine held a sandwich out to me. Hungry and ready to eat, I reached for it, but our hands never connected. Her face changed from one of greeting to one of stunned horror. Her mouth opened, but all she could do was point to the place where I had been swimming.
From the corner of my eye I saw the boy who had been swimming next to me. He seemed to be riding one of those carnival watersled rides because he was practically sitting up and the current was just taking him along. I could see his face now and he looked familiar to me, like an old acquaintance you meet after many years but cannot quite place.
He was silent. That is what I remember most. The silence. He never screamed or shouted or cried for help. His face had the concentration of a good student taking an important exam. When he got to the falls, he twisted his body, trying to grab onto a branch, and then he was gone without a sound. Suddenly we were both screaming and pointing at nothing, at nothing at all except the rush of water.
The Mexicans did not believe us. They said no boy was missing. No one was missing anyone, but we were hysterical. "Someone went over that fall," we told them. At the same time I could not help thinking how I had done nothing. How that boy had been swimming near me and I had thought to say something and had said nothing. And then I thought how close it had come to being me. If I had gone out just a little farther, it would have been me.
Then our bus driver came toward us slowly, eyes glassy. He clasped in his hands the pink shirt and pink pants of the ticket taker, who had given us our seats. He said nothing. He simply held out the boy's clothes.
It took a while, but a search party was organized. About a dozen young Mexican men stripped down to their shorts and with sticks went to the base of the falls, where they formed a line. We sat on the bank over the falls, watching. Catherine seemed nervous and soon began pacing. But I sat, transfixed, never taking my eyes off the search party. I watched the bodies of young men, bodies so perfect and beautiful that I wanted to touch them as they bent over the water and put their faces in, like divers after mother-of-pearl. They walked and probed as I sat and waited, but no body was found.
A Mexican who seemed to be in charge came over to us. "He is at the bottom of the falls. It has happened here before.
The body will be trapped there forever." The bus driver was in tears now. He knew the boy and his family well. The Mexican shrugged. "We'll keep looking," he said. They searched for two hours while we waited on the bank.
Finally the driver patted me on the shoulder. "Let's go," he said.
"I should have done something," I said to Catherine as we got on the bus. "When we were swimming, I should have said something."
"Be grateful it wasn't you," she said.
"I am, but I should have done something."
Catherine opened up a copy of Tropic of Cancer and read all the way back to Palenque. I tried to talk to her, but she would not discuss the incident with me. She just said, "It wasn't your fault. It was an accident, so forget it."
CATCHING THE NIGHT TRAIN TO MÉRIDA FROM Palenque is a little like trying to escape from Casablanca during World War II. Hundreds of campesinos ran about us, fighting to get tickets, pushing in line. Others sat on sacks of rice and potatoes, looking dumbfounded and confused. Some had chickens, goats, lambs, all tied by the feet and struggling to get away. Mayan Indians wandered about. Tourists rushed by, trying to procure nonexistent first-class tickets.
Catherine and I had both wanted to leave Palenque after the day at Agua Azul, but now at the train station, I felt dazed and let Catherine take care of things. I sat on our luggage, as if I were not even there. Eventually Catherine returned, displaying two first-class tickets. I have no idea how she got these. I had anticipated spending the night on a sack of flour, but somehow she had managed this. She said we were guaranteed seats, even though they weren't reserved. I needed her to take over at this moment in our trip and I was appreciative.