by Mary Morris
I told her what I'd seen. "Nobody's perfect," she said, laughing as if she knew of what she spoke.
The bus terminal in Guatemala City looks like a traveler's vision of hell—thousands of dilapidated, idling buses facing in every direction, sitting in clouds of fumes. There were buses to Managua, to San Salvador, buses to Mexico City, buses to Laredo and to Panama City. I wanted to go to Salvador but the man who was selling tickets looked at me dubiously. "I won't sell you a ticket to Salvador," he told me. "The border is bad," he said. "It's not safe for you to go that way alone. Why don't you go to Copan." I was inexperienced with bus travel in Central America but decided that the ticket seller probably knew what he was talking about. I bought a ticket to Copan, the Mayan ruins at the border with Honduras.
I had time to kill so I walked around near the bus terminal. Not far from the bus terminal was a garbage dump. As trucks pulled into the dump, dropping their loads, the dump became a swarm of life. Small children picked through the rubble, coming up with a chicken bone or a scrap of lard. They rushed off, kicking diseased dogs who tried to take the bones from them. Women grabbed for bits of cloth, old men scavenged for scraps of wood or tin. Everyone dug for food, for whatever they could find. Some stuffed it in their mouths right there. Others hid it in their pockets. A boy I'd seen running with food from the dump came up to me, begging. I asked him about the dump. "Are you always here?"
"Oh, no," he said. "It's just that at this hour the trucks come in from where the rich people live and from the hotels. The food is very good right now."
I found a telegraph office and cabled Alejandro to say I'd be home the following Friday. Then I left the highlands behind and took the bus toward Copan. The landscape changed immediately. The terrain turned rough and tropical, the poverty even more severe, the people no longer Indian but mestizo, mixed blood, and they looked different from those in the highlands. These people of the hot, tropical lowlands seemed tired and spent, without hope, impoverished. Already I missed Panajachel and the magical elegance of the highlands.
Everything changed. There were road checks along the way. Police stopped our bus at random, waved it over. They boarded with submachine guns and demanded identity cards. A woman behind me whispered that this was to stop tax evaders and illegals, but it looked like something else to me. You don't need to stop tax evaders with submachine guns. The women put their heads down. The men looked away. Some of the men were taken off the bus and the bus drove away. One of the women wailed.
We drove on. The bus got a flat tire and we were delayed an hour while the tire was changed. I was nervous that I wouldn't reach Copan by evening and would have to find a place to stay along the way. I wasn't exactly on the tourist trail now and everything felt different. What had been hinted at in the highlands was out in the open here. We reached another checkpoint, soldiers and army this time. Soldiers wearing T-shirts, rifles at their sides, lay under a palapa. People were ordered off the bus. The bus drove on and the passengers acted as if nothing had happened. The woman who was wailing before had stopped; I glanced at her and she stared ahead, blank and dumbstruck.
The bus went on and I approached the driver. "Copan, right?" I asked, and he nodded. "Copan," he said. But I had no idea where we were. The names of the towns didn't correspond to anything on my map. We reached a river and a downed bridge at the crest of a waterfall. The bus driver just drove across this waterfall. I peered down the drop of the falls. On the other side the water rushed. I thought of the boy at Agua Azul and watched as he went over the falls again and again.
***
At a place called Chiquimula I was told I must change buses. While I waited for the bus to take me the rest of the way, I was attacked by a woman with no teeth. She chased me around a pile of coconuts. Some men tried to help, but the woman kept chasing me. Finally, still grabbing at me, the woman collapsed on the ground. She lifted up her skirt and spread her legs while all the men, mostly bus drivers, stood around laughing.
At about three o'clock I boarded a minibus for Copan. I was glad to get out of Chiquimula, to ride through the mountainous tropical jungle of southern Guatemala, until at about six o'clock the bus stopped. The driver motioned for me. "Jocotán," he said. "Copan," I replied, but he shook his head, indicating I was to get off here. "Jocotán," he said. I had never heard of Jocotán, but from what I could see from the window, I was fairly certain I didn't want to be there.
But the bus driver made it clear that this was the end of the line for me that day. As I got off, he explained that I had to spend the night here. "At five A.M. a truck will come and take you to Copan," he said, and then he drove away.
I stood in the middle of a dusty square, boiling and tropical, amidst skinny dogs with open sores, chickens with tumors all over them, hordes of flies, enormous flowers I had never seen before. A steady drumbeat in the distance would continue into the night.
I managed to find one of the only pensions in town, the Pension Ramirez. A very nice old mestizo woman with gray hair showed me a room. It consisted of bamboo walls without windows, a straw mattress on a dirt floor. Because I do the best I can to protect myself, I am not usually concerned about rare tropical diseases. But there is one disease, called Chagas disease, which terrifies me, and it can be acquired on dirt floors frequented by opossums. The opossums carry an insect called an assassin bug which bites you and then defecates in the wound. The feces enter your blood system and the parasite incubates there for one to twenty years. The first symptoms resemble those of malaria, but in the end it behaves more like AIDS.
I did not know if the disease occurred in that part of the continent and I didn't know the word for opossum, so I tried to describe the animal to the woman. She looked at me quizzically. Then, thinking I was displeased with her facilities, she grew concerned. "No, no rats," she swore up and down. "No rats."
For a dollar and one night I decided I'd be all right. From the porch I could see the mountains and the jungle where I would go the next day. I took an ice-cold shower in a kind of open outdoor hut. Standing wet and naked at the edge of the jungle, with thatched roofs in the distance, I was glad to be off that bus and about to cross into another country. Giant bees buzzed around and I noticed again that the flowers were very, very big.
I headed back to the center of Jocotán to try to find a place to eat. As I walked, I heard someone call my name. "Mary," a voice said. "Is that you?" To my surprise, there stood Jean-Paul, a Belgian whom I'd met at a café in Mexico City a few months before. Jean-Paul had indicated then that he wanted to see me again, and I think he was nonplused for it to be at the border at Jocotán, while traveling with his maladjusted son and his very fat wife, who had a staple in her ear. But he seemed very happy, almost desperate, to see me. They were coming from Copán and assured me that in fact Jocotán was a sort of dropping-off point for people on their way to the ruins. Clearly tourism had not hit Jocotán, yet I was relieved to know a truck would pick me up and take me to the border.
Jean-Paul's wife, Françoise, was an art historian and very nice, though she kept touching the staple, which she said suppressed her desire to eat. But all she could think about was eating, and she suggested I join them for dinner. They had already planned to dine with someone from their pension, so we all headed off in the direction of the main square.
Josh Greenbaum was an economist from Berkeley who was traveling through Central America; he had come from Tikal via Belize. Josh told me this in the few moments it took to walk from the main square to the "restaurant" we found, which consisted of two tables in somebody's backyard. We swatted flies and drank beer, awaiting the especialidad de la casa—a dish called ropa vieja (old clothes).
"How long have you been traveling?" I asked Josh.
"Oh, only four weeks this time. I have to be back in Berkeley in two weeks."
"You're traveling alone?"
He nodded. He had silky brown hair that fell across his brow and wonderful cocoa-brown eyes. "And you?"
"Yes," I sai
d.
"My God," Françoise piped in, rubbing her staple. "I could never do such a thing. Aren't you nervous? Aren't you afraid? I couldn't stand it. I absolutely would find it intolerable."
"I meet people along the way," I said.
Josh asked me where I was going. "To Copân," I said. "Then back to Mexico City via Tegucigalpa. And you?" I asked him.
"Oh, I'm not sure. Maybe to Panama. Probably to Guatemala City. Maybe straight to San Jose. I've never seen Copân."
"Well, I leave crack of dawn."
He shook his head. "I'm going west."
"Well, Josh"—Françoise was back in the conversation—"you shouldn't let her go alone. Why don't you go to Copân?"
He shrugged. "I've seen enough ruins," he replied.
We dropped the subject of travel and had a fairly pleasant dinner of ropa vieja—a kind of shredded beef—and rice. Jean-Paul and Françoise said they were on their way back to Belgium from a year in Mexico City, and Emmanuel, who had some fairly serious socialization problems, seemed thrilled to be getting out of Latin America. He had acne and several nervous ticks. As he complained about being dragged around in the tropical heat, his face twitched in unspeakable ways.
After dinner we sat in the main square and a procession passed. It must have been a religious celebration, but it was very weird. Christ in armor, sword in hand, rode on horseback, looking distinctly like Cortés. Firecrackers popped and men who marched behind him beat a single, steady beat on lone drums. Lobotomized-looking people, expressionless, dead faces, followed. The procession left me with the sense that anything could happen here.
Josh walked me back to my pension. We strolled slowly in the heat of the evening. "Well, it was very nice meeting you," he said as we reached the pension.
"It was nice," I said.
"Have a safe journey." He kissed me on the cheek. I wished him a safe journey as well.
Returning to the pension, I climbed into a hammock outside, at the edge of the jungle, waiting for the heat to drop, listening to the sounds of the night. I found myself completely absorbed by a chirp, a hoot, a cry, a bark, a call, a whisper, a shriek.
I have no idea how long I stayed in the hammock, listening to the birds and distant monkeys and that steady beat of a drum, almost tribal, which resonated through the night. But it was a long time before I got up and wandered into my room to sleep on the ground in a bed of straw.
WOMEN WHO TRAVEL AS I TRAVEL ARE DREAMERS. Our lives seem to be lives of endless possibility. Like readers of romances we think that anything can happen to us at any time. We forget that this is not our real life—our life of domestic details, work pressures, attempts and failures at human relations. We keep moving. From anecdote to anecdote, from hope to hope. Around the next bend something new will befall us. Nostalgia has no place for the woman traveling alone. Our motion is forward, whether by train or daydream. Our sights are on the horizon, across strange terrain, vast desert, unfordable rivers, impenetrable ice peaks.
I wanted to keep going forever, to never stop, that morning when the truck picked me up at five A.M. It was like a drug in me. As a traveler I can achieve a kind of high, a somewhat altered state of consciousness. I think it must be what athletes feel. I am transported out of myself, into another dimension in time and space. While the journey is on buses and across land, I begin another journey inside my head, a journey of memory and sensation, of past merging with present, of time growing insignificant.
My journey was now filled with dreams of other journeys to cool, breezy places. The plateaus of Tibet, the altiplano of Bolivia, cold places, barren, without tropical splendor. I did not dream of Africa and its encompassing heat. I longed for white Siberia, for Tierra del Fuego, the Arctic tundra, vast desolate plains. I longed for what came next. Whatever the next stop, the next love, the next story might be.
Josh was sitting in the back of the truck when it pulled up to my pension. "I thought you were going to Guatemala City," I said.
"Well," he said, smiling, "there are other ways to get to Panama." He grabbed my duffel and pulled me on. Then we sat across from each other as we set out through a lush pass in the mountains, bouncing in the back through a very misty morning, past charging rivers, herds of cattle and goats, toward the border of Honduras.
At about five-thirty the driver stopped to pick up two women. They were teachers who worked in one-room schoolhouses in the hills. One of them told us she walked an hour from where the truck would drop her to her school and she did this twice a day every day.
"You must be exhausted every day," I said.
She had a bright smile, sleek black hair, and dark eyes. "Oh, no." She laughed. "The walk is beautiful and I always arrive feeling refreshed."
"You never get tired of it?" I asked, incredulous.
"There is always something to see," she said, smiling. At six-thirty, she got off, heading toward the mountains, waving, then disappeared along a trail.
At seven we reached the frontier and found it closed. We took our bags, waved good-bye to our pickup, and waited for the border to open and for some other vehicle, which we assumed would materialize, to appear. For an hour or so we clomped around, taking pictures of an enormous cow that was nearby. At last the border opened. "You want to go into Honduras?" the guard said with a bit of a sneer.
"Yes, we're going to the ruins." I have no idea why I felt the need to say that, but I did.
"Well, if you want to go into Honduras, that's your problem." He stamped our passports just as another minibus arrived, heading for Copan.
We spent the day at the ruins. We had no plan, really, no sense of whether we would stay there or try to get out of the jungle and to some city by night. The ruins were fairly deserted and we spent the day climbing around. We had not gone far when we startled an enormous blue-black snake that had been asleep. The snake rose up on its side, then chased us along the path for several feet. I had never been chased by a snake before and was amazed at how fast it could move. Josh hurled a stone at it and the snake disappeared into the jungle.
We walked deeper into the jungle and a wasp stung me twice on the knee. Josh scooped wet mud and packed it around the bites. My knee became very stiff and I thought I couldn't go on, but he coaxed me and I did.
We came to a pyramid. It was hardly excavated. The steps were broken, stones were covered with moss, but we climbed. My knee hurt, but I didn't care. We climbed and climbed. It was a very high pyramid and when we reached the top, we were silent. We sat still on the top of this unexcavated pyramid, looking at the tremendous jungle that stretched before us.
I liked Josh. What more can I say. I liked him. I wanted to go with him to Panama. I had only just met him and I hadn't thought it through, but I wanted to go. Thinking about it now, I'm not sure what it was that I liked about him so much—he was, in fact, rather ordinary—but I think it had something to do with the fact that he was an American. He was an intelligent American male and he represented for me all those things that were now missing in my life. He could have dinner with my parents at my father's club. The men would wear suits and ties and discuss the market over Scotch and soda. My mother would wink at me across the table. Later she'd take me aside and say what a nice man he was and how they hoped they'd be seeing more of him.
I thought about Alejandro, sitting in that dark apartment, waiting for my return, telegram in hand, but all I could think about was going on with Josh to Panama. That afternoon as we walked, we spoke of more personal things. I told him I had a boyfriend in Mexico City. He said he had just broken up with a woman in Berkeley.
We checked into the Mayan Copan and had dinner on the patio. Sitting there with Josh in the steam of the jungle brought back to me what until now had seemed farthest away—the hot summer days and nights of Manhattan. Suddenly I found myself longing for a dripping ice cream cone while the plaintive song of a saxophonist echoed up the avenue. I longed for the heat of the pavement, cheap wine during a concert in the park, and black children jumping dou
ble-Dutch while illegal aliens sold assorted ices—pineapple, anise, coconut. I wanted to be transplanted, to feel the pace of the city in summer—an afternoon spent at the matinee, a weekend flight to Jones Beach. I even longed for what repulsed me—the garbage, the stench of urine, the homeless, the yellow smogged sky. All the things I swore I'd never miss.
After dinner we sat on the porch of the hotel, drinking rum and Cokes and speaking of our travels. Josh told me about trekking through Afghanistan and hiking across the Khyber Pass, about wanting to walk to Turkistan and getting captured by rebels somewhere along the way. He said that he had talked his way into and out of every situation you could imagine. "But if I were a woman," he said, "I don't know if I'd do it alone."
"It has its ups and downs," I said.
"Have you ever had anything bad happen to you?"
I shrugged. "Some near-misses, that's all."
He sipped his rum contemplatively. "I've heard terrible stories."
"Like what?"
He leaned over and kissed me on the lips. "I don't want to ruin your evening."
"You may as well tell me now."
He pulled his chair closer. "Well, this happened to a friend of a friend of mine. Not someone I really know. I met him once, that's all. I'm not even sure it happened the way my friend said. This man went to Turkey with his wife. To Istanbul. He never talks about it, but they went to Istanbul. It was a kind of second honeymoon. They wanted to start a family, so anyway, they went on this second honeymoon—"
I reached across, touching his hand. "Just tell me the story." He held onto my fingers and did not let go until he was done.