No flamingoes. So we dive we dive we dive into the mercy of silence, cross tan constellations of starfish in buckskin boots, skim a colony of conch—a cargowreck of smashed trumpets. Deeper. Two startled turtles with the heads of hawks, dear proud heads impossible hearts.21 Slide through fish like storms of leaves—twitch and still, school and scatter—hojarasca, a thousand-headed ganglion….
Side by side we glide past crests and combs, slabs of colour—spectral rhino hides in our underwater photographs. Come dive on a reef of pelts piled where dropped—drop in drive thru diveby extinction of the buffalo in Disney hues. Dive and drift, skim the brochure, take our underwater jungle cruise—but do not stay too long in this cartoon safari. In these dream gardens, in these palaces of bone. That beckon. Profuse, fluorescent … prodigal bouquets for the convalescent dead.
The tulips are too red.22
Evening. Sunset. Sea of painted glass.
Darkness. Crayons streak the fishing harbour—a string of coloured lights along the jetty. Thick smears of broken wax. We can hardly bear to look. At each other. Can barely speak with it. We measure off the distances, with lengths of silence.
The night smells of cinnamon.
Tomorrow, Beulah, what would you like to do. Do we go for the manatees? Or Fort San Felipe built in the 17th-century. Sweet Jacinto, your turn to make believe. Here is where the first Spanish ran aground. Two years before Cortés. They have repaired the bronze guns, the balustrade—
Jacinto … tomorrow I’m leaving. Tomorrow I’m leaving Jacinto.
But, we …
To Chichén Itzá.
But why?
For the equinox. To see the shadow. Of the serpent, moving down the steps.
Why.
It’s what all the tourists—
Why.
Something I planned. For a long time. To see it for myself.
Why.
It’s important … to me.
Why, Beulah?
The end of something. I need to see it end.
I did not ask where. I do not care why you are going there. I ask why you are leaving. Here.
Three weeks.
It is not three weeks. It is one Maya month. You can have no idea. What it can mean—I will go with you.
Don’t you have work, important work?—how long were you planning to keep me—
I will go. Contigo.
No.
Why.
I need to go alone.
Why.
Because I can.
Why.
Don’t. Please.
I know Chichén Itzá.
No more guides, Jacinto. No more rescues.
There will be thousands. In some years a hundred thousand people. Do you know what such a crowd is?—what kind of thing? It is like a god with no jaw.
He does not sleep in the hammock with me. He sleeps in the bed. He wakes me, stands by the hammock in the darkness.
Are you awake? Are you listening? Beulah we have something, I think. Do not throw it away. On a plan.
Three weeks. Why can’t you just accept—
What you are doing is very dangerous. At the fire—with the men. The drugs.
You think I’m going back there. Chichén Itzá is so ridiculous to you?
This knowledge you want—
I didn’t invent this, you did.
Who?
America—don’t the anthropologists tell you people anything?
I am speaking seriously.
Synaesthetic sacred rites all across the Americas, the highest transports—you’re the guide you tell me.
Ahh, yes, five senses in one—a shopping flyer, a supermarket. Have everything at once, but something else first. This is not you speaking. This is your culture’s sickness.
You said that before.
Time is your disease.
Now explain it.
Are you ready to hear?
Let’s find out.
Our masterpiece was never drugs. And it is not a recipe. The Maya masterpiece was time. Eres muy lista … but you know nothing about us. A little about the Aztecs but only in books. By white experts. You will not know us through books or drugs. They are gone, but the Maya are here. One is standing before you. Here. Now …
Dear sweet Jacinto, pacing back and forth across the balcony. I climb down from the hammock. Sit in a cane chair. The secret of the hammock, señorita, is to lie.
Plans—this sickness of your culture. Going to the end of things. There is no end, Beulah. Or you do not get there, it comes to you. Whether or not you ask. So there is no need, to go alone.
I’ll be back—soon.
How much has changed already in the one month we know each other? In this last week? Soon—you spend your lives in soon—so near so far. Your time is a caged animal. Your soon is the cage I walk in now. Look at me.
Silently, on bare feet, he swings back and forth—pendulum that strokes the nightsea gleam. My small eclipse.
Time is not a line, Beulah, time is not a ladder time is not a mountain side. Time is Yaxche.
Yaxche.
If you would put away your books and your experts I could show you, I could try. What is soon to you? Wait wait always first something else. A scientific culture—how can you be so slovenly about time? Your toy calendar—still no place notation for time even now. Time is your disease. I have read in five more years your magnificent computers may die of it. A culture of wealth and property. How much of what your parents now hold can they pass on to you? Of the items now in their house—that they do not really own yet anyway. How many of these objects will not fall apart, fall out of fashion, be repossessed? A dress, a car, a bowl, a tool?
One piece of advice that holds true for always?
My mother threw everything away, Beulah. Your parents will not have to.
Time is money you say. No, your money is time—how much is it truly worth Beulah Limosneros? I have seen them in New York in California in Tejas. Dishwashers, microwave ovens, running water—so much running and still you have no time. No time to cook. No time for others that you do not secretly begrudge. For family for friends. A technological culture. For every painful step your knowledge takes your ignorance runs back ten. Radio—can you explain it? What makes a toaster pop? Can you bake a bread of corn or wheat, light a fire without gasoline? Feed yourself for two days in the forest?—what forest? Name the hills the flowers the insects the plants all around you—even in your own country, your mother tongue, your home town? Do you have home towns? Can you tell what month—what day it is by looking at the constellations?—even see the sky at night? Draw a picture of what you see, without shame, or sing a song before others—without shame—play an instrument? How many of you ever wrote a poem? And, for those few, how long has it been?
What can you teach a child that you are sure of? One thing that lasts? Can you keep anything holy?
My pendulum stops. Stands naked in the dark. Between me and the sea. We had nights that smelled of cinnamon…. Long nights of want, nights of once. In a place called Bacalar.
You had to wait for the Mayans from India to give you zero. But still you have no concept of zero time. You cannot take time out of time. No true concept of both-and-neither. It is just a game for intellectuals I have read. You have no word for neverness. And it is this time out of time, this fusion of everything that thinks and feels and sees and is and time—you can just barely glimpse your ignorance. Except like a shopping trip like a duty free port like Belize. And this ignorance of yours is not bliss, it is your agony. Time you can cut into tiny fractions but time for you has no stop. Your physicists have barely begun to imagine it, how it might run faster or slower, yet you have sped it up without knowing what it was. You make it flat. You make it run on a line. Straight on and up. Like a train, like your progress rocket. But you cannot make it step off the rails. Walk across a field. Pick a mango. Sit. Rest. Look at the stars….
The equinox, Beulah. In Chichén Itzá. Your March 20, 1995. Is this 1995 yea
rs after the birth of Christ or after his crucifixion? How many of you can say? And if it is the crucifixion was it done in the year zero or one? Thirty-three years’ difference. Plus the uncounted months from Christmas to Easter. And why is your Easter always moving around? And why can’t you decide when he died?
It is a kind of smoke in your heads. Time.
Months of 28, 31, 29, 30 days. How many of you even know how old you are? How long is a month? Do you count your age from conception or delivery? And what if you are born late or early? And when you turn twenty are you starting your twentieth year or ending it? How many scientific Americans still nod on Sunday to hear the world began in 4004? Is that 4004 years before his birth or 4038 years before his death … give or take a few months, and a few more days for Easter, and the count that begins at zero or one….
It is a smudge, a greenwood fire burning in your minds. Time.
A month has 20 days, Beulah. Punto final. One tun. One year. Eighteen months of exactly twenty days. Five dog days each year. Time out of time, Beulah. Five days. Like our time here in Bacalar. Katun—each a decade of twenty. Baktun—twenty katun. Each cycle increasing by a factor of twenty. A simple system, Beulah. A stone age system. We have used it to make calendrical calculations. 142 nonillion years into the future. To the day, to the hour. But here the smudge is growing bigger. It is now a forest fire. Your word nonillion, look at your dictionary. Any number followed by 36 zeroes … or else 50. Or else 50. Fourteen zeroes difference, your dictionary cannot decide. Yet your Big Bang! happened only nine zeroes ago. This is becoming serious. An explosion, a holocaust, a fire that covers the Amazon. In Europe a billion is a million million. In America only a thousand million. Yes even today, in your information age. A mathematical culture. The zero, it still does not really count for you. Zero number, zero time. You still do not quite see, do you? Even after fifteen centuries—and fifteen new deserts. Time is like a mistake to you, the smear of an eraser. How can you bear to have this smudge in your heads? Is that why you have set the world on fire? It is your disease, Beulah. Like the first confusion of a fever, the clumsiness of the ill in the way you touch the world. And now your progress rocket burns out, like bad fireworks. Like bad time. Like a sun flaring out. It is why you smash and burn everything that is precious and precise.
Like a tree.
Your ideas of infinite time are even less interesting than of space. Your time is like the first geometry we teach a child. You have confused time with space—an infinite line running back and forth like a metronome. Then you confuse infinite time with eternity—a symphony so complex, that branches and leaves and dies like a tree, that swells like a seed. But time is not reason Beulah time is not a line, the tracks of a train. Time is mind, it runs how it will and where and why. And there is a mind of time out of time.
We were a people of the forest. Time, like the sky, was always green. Zero time is a living thing. Now it has come out of the forest to kill you. It swallows your dreams. It feeds where you eat. It feeds on what’s left of your trees while you sleep. It is an abscess, an ulcer, an absence inside. It is a blur in your minds, a waking dream. It is the food that starves you.
And we were its wizards. Once. Once, there was a zero time.
Quédate, Beulah. Tomorrow morning I will borrow another car. There is a place I have been waiting to show to you.
I am begging you now.
CENOTE AZUL
[2 Mar. 1995]
COME SEE THE MANATEES. Stay one more day. Hear them sing like mermaids. Each to each.23 Stay one more day in once, not soon. This is how they tempt you. The wizards in the road. Will you stay? We will bask in the sea. Singing each to each. Will you stay? We are all welcome here. Stay one more day in once upon a time. In a place called Xcalak. Take a boat from Bacalar. To places spelled with Ks and Xs. Like ecstasy. Like axes.
They tempt you with the world, the tulips are too red. They heal you, build you up. For more, for Never is enough. But the silence has reached here too. And it will spread. It follows you. In a slattern’s slouch and sprawl.
Alright Jacinto Ek Cruz. One more day for what you have tried to do for me. Tomorrow, a place upstream. Of Cenote Azul.
Tomorrow is a place for divers, Beulah Limosneros. Like yesterday. I have seen photographs from underwater. Divers in a cave. Water so clear it looks like they are flying, like bats….
Here, Jacinto? This is really it? It’s the third ‘Blue Cenote’ sign we’ve passed.
There are a hundred cenotes azules, Beulah. It is the name we use when we have lost the old names.
Parched scrub, dusty parking lot, cardboard signs Cenote Azul fifty metres. Park the ancient Tercel, take a beaten path, follow the trash of drinking cups and straws. Dengue hatcheries. Through the last screen of branches I hear children’s voices—laughter and shouts, deep splashes.
Turquoise!—colour as oasis of the eye!—a diving tank sunk in limestone a greenish blond. The water starts two metres down, jump from anywhere! A step of notches to climb back up. Karst, this rock is karst.
Cenote Azul. Here we are. In this water you can see sixty metres to the bottom.
Here? So many people….
No, we go upstream. Two kilometres.
Upstream—what stream?
That runs beneath our feet. Cenote is where the earth falls, into the rivers that run under us…. Come. This is palmetto. This is chechen. If you sleep under this in a storm, it rains down poison. And this one, in a certain season when the sun shines hard it pops like popcorn. The whole tree, for hours.
An hour deeper into forest. We walk under taller trees, through a deeper green. Through a line of leaf-cutter ants.
Is it not like a picket-line, Beulah, tiny strikers waving signs?
Look, the iguana eating them, I haven’t seen that kind.
Basilisco rayado, not quite iguana, but a cousin.
Banded basilisk. Chocolate brown, striped in lime. Stern-eyed, cowled, its throat a wimple of white. We wade deeper into green. Two green parrots flush—their broken faces a bob of apple-red, twin pugilists, little rams with bloody-brows….
Jacinto stops. These tall ones are mahogany. This is ceiba. Their roots run down into the river here.
Where? Scan the ground the high canopy, filter the dappled light…. Clean muscular trunks, veined in heavy vines—calfed—sandalled they stride a lawn of giant ferns, elephant ears. Hush….
We stand on the heart of a riddle, we dance in its palm. Paradox, a river that runs underground. Birdcalls in the hush, sun and shade, coolness in warmth, spaciousness as embrace….
Come. He slips under a fern, another. Still I do not see. Another.
Here.
A meteor has crashed to earth broken its crust of karst—scorched it lilac—veined it rust. Mintgreen wells to the wound—roots creepers vines start from the water in a shock of green wire I can’t make sense of this. My eyes … make them slower, slower … see the ruined windings of an ancient motor, a clock. Broken trunks furred in a caterpillar moss crisscross the cenote five metres across. Stand stunned in a bower of tall ferns, in a blind of zero time.
On the crater’s far side spreads a blistered skin of water lilies … Sprigs of shy orchids nestle in the vines. They hover just above the green water, their roots are strands of golden hair … that skinnydip.
I remember … this mint green, the Bow in winter. Wintergreen cracks in a river of ice. A breeze stirs the canopy—
Ohh—a shaft of sun—a turquoise wedge driven deep into green.
God.
I wanted you to see. Before you leave.
He undresses. In two stoops of white cotton. Two huarache shucks. He is naked, hairless as a child. Scentless as a fawn. We can swim. There will be no one. He stands at the edge, his naked back to me. A ray of light. A shadowbrand of perfect leaf in the small. In the small brown small of this back. He stands, watches the water. You see, he says, angel fish. He speaks without turning his face, half turns his shoulders. He is swelling for
me or a shape he has seen in the water. Tropical fish, they come upstream in fresh water. The food is so rich. His nakedness … a slow wag, a little swing bridge of friendliness. My heart could break for this. He stands there so calmly, speaking to me, swelling still, so painfully now. This long sprain of cinnamon from a dove’s swollen throat, petal-soft ruff….
Will you swim?
He turns to face me. His large black eyes. He seems unaware. A length of anatomy, straining. A length of him, for me. To me. This small man. He clambers down the vines—little bum—pauses at the water, points—That one is an iguana. Clinging sideways in rigging, a lizard sailor.
Is it cold?
Same as the earth.
He goes in, lowers himself on the roots. Lowers himself to the brows, to the little bowlcut bangs. Crown dry, temples damp, scrolls down his neck, to the blades of his shoulders.
Will you swim?
I follow him to the edge. I make myself naked for him. For this small man, this scribe. I see his want. Now in his eyes. They follow me up. I stand for him. Naked in this air, in this blind space, in this zero time. I feel his onyx eyes. Their glow, their pause, their lingering. They follow me up. My thighs. I do not flinch. I let him in. This is me, this is real.
I follow him down, by the roots of trees. Down to the warmth of the earth to my chin.
This is making love. This silence, ankles wound into vines. Surges of water, this weightless angels’ buck and plunge. Holding on. Hanging by roots, pushing back with white palms. Bucking like angels … we are mustangs with wings. We are mustangs with wings.
A whir, a hummingbird low in the orchids—lady doctor, dancing in her emerald sari. Her ruby veil tucked beneath her chin to work, a veil as soft as red as tulip lips. Jacinto, this is real, this is me. In this silence.
No … not silence.
In this small tide that rises and falls, in this breath before a moan before a sigh before the hush, in this lung of karst, this is not silence but the breath that quickens it.
Your hazel breath. I answer you with almonds—
Splashdown to water—our voyeur iguana, my startled laughter my breath moves in your mouth. I quicken you. We are in motion, in love, in the echoes of breath, in the warmth of the earth in a place off the map, where the lizard swims….
Hunger's Brides Page 141