Coming into the End Zone

by Doris Grumbach

  Robert Taylor and I felt a little like John Stephens and Frederick Catherwood, who first saw Chichén Itzá in the nineteenth century or, at least, first recorded their sight of it, until a busload of tourists arrived. We were alarmed, but needn’t have been. They walked in one phalanx to the edge of the site, stared, took out their cameras (one to every tourist), snapped pictures of what they could see from that distance, turned back, got on the bus, and were driven away. Total visitation time: fifteen minutes.

  But this is not what I started to say. At two other small but beautiful cities, Sayil and Labná, both of which had fine ‘palaces,’ corbel archways, and, at Labná, the remains of a mirador (observatory), there are crews of ‘restorers’ at work. Stones driven to the sites by pickup trucks are being slapped into position with white cement, so thick that in places it overwhelms the stones. There is no sign of any authority dictating where the stones should go, only a crude plan designed to make everything appear whole, and thus please what the Mexican government must expect to be an influx of visitors and their accompanying Mexican guides. These voluble chaps, in my experience, will spend their time profitably, creating ingenious fictions for their tour groups.

  Returning to Uxmal after two days in the crowded Spanish city of Mérida was, for me, like returning to a cherished dream, one that comforts me when I awake from nightmares and think: How can I get back into last night’s dream of a sunlit place? Uxmal is Maya’s city of cities, with the finest buildings, the most carefully restored places, the most awe-inspiring views and vistas. After two days revisiting the places I love, we came back one last time in the early morning of our departure, before the buses from Mérida arrived. We each went our own way, having decided to have some time alone at the place we wanted to remember most clearly. I went to the Governor’s Palace, and, as always happens there, I saw details I had not noticed before: the beautiful abstractions that the decorations on the great frieze create, the two perfect corbel arches, set into the building without a thought to symmetry, the clear, central Chac, the balustrade at the right which breaks mysteriously before the arch.

  No one is quite certain what use the building was put to. Some say it was the residence of high holy men or ‘governors.’ Someone else suggests the great long corridors with many small rooms constituted places of civil business. If so, it must be the world’s most beautiful office building.

  I sat on the back of the stone jaguar who lies lazily before the palace, trying to store up behind my eyes every fine detail to sustain me until my next visit. Then I heard a familiar click. Cameras. Laughter. The guide rattling off, to a party of German tourists, his customary display of misinformation. No one seemed to be looking at the Governor’s Palace except through the lenses of cameras. Three of the German women, substantial but healthy-looking, posed in a corbeled arch doorway and everyone took pictures of them. I left, and joined Ted and Bob, who had been driven off the Temple of the Dwarf by a similar influx. Their disturbance was in Italian. We said farewell to the beauty, the mystery, the awesome silence of the city of a people who inexplicably left their ceremonial grounds to the ignorant and insensitive mercies of tramping, talkative Europeans and Americans, as well as Mayan guides unashamedly distorting their own history.

  In these temples, and perhaps under the hundreds of still uncovered mounds, there were the bodies of decorated and well-supplied priest-kings. I have read that a small piece of jade (the most precious possession of tenth-century Mayans) was placed in the mouths of the dead. Some say this was to guarantee their entry into heaven, others that jade was thought to be life-giving. The essence of the stone would be absorbed by the spirit of the dead to ensure his continued spiritual survival. A similar practice: ceremoniously punching holes in pottery buried with the dead to kill the vessel, reducing it to the same state as the dead.

  But to assure the preservation of life after death: In the museum in Mexico City is a magnificent mask, made entirely of jade, which probably served to cover the face of a great chief buried in the Temple at Palenque. As we drove away, we debated whether to return to Palenque next year or to spend the time in polluted Mexico City. Most of the treasures of the ruins are there, in the Museo Nacional, where one can see them displayed under and behind glass, in protective isolation, no longer housed in their original buildings, no longer protecting the dead from annihilation.

  Two hundred and seventy-five long miles, on a ribbon of a road from Uxmal to the campgrounds at Kailuum: We traveled through the endless henequen fields. Sometimes there were little oases of red water at the side of the road created by massive mangrove trees. We took many detours, driving very slowly through villages where the thatched-roofed palapa houses, the same structures that the ancient Mayans lived in at Chichén Itzá and Uxmal, surround a small cenote, the heart of the village. Only old women and young children were visible. One boy brought an armadillo to our car when we had to stop for a bump constructed across the road and indicated he wished to sell it. Another elderly lady in a spotless white embroidered dress held a similar one up for me to consider. The bumps serve their purpose of bringing cars to a stop; the vendors stand close to them. We smiled and replied in Spanish, and then remembered that the language here is Mayan. We did not know a word of it.

  Further on we came upon fields of chicle, a crop that is important to the Mayan economy. It is transported north to chewing-gum factories, wrapped invitingly to be sold in supermarkets to occupy the constantly masticating mouths of millions of Americans. We saw the workers bringing blocks of the gummy substance to the side of the road. Most of them have ‘chiclero’s ear’: parts of these organs have been eaten away by an insect that lives in the chicle fields and feeds on humans.

  Tired but exhilarated, we settled into a week of rest and mindless, sunlit, waterlogged relaxation at the campgrounds in Kailuum. Sybil arrived by air from Washington, and taxi from Cancún, having seen to all the house-selling chores. Everywhere at Kailuum there was evidence of the terrible devastation done by Hurricane Gilbert six months ago. The old palm trees along the beach and behind the campgrounds had been uprooted, beach sand transported to roads, and the dining room destroyed and then restored by hardworking Mayan residents who first rebuilt their own houses and then much of the camp.

  But the tents were up, the primitive, comfortable furnishings in place, the two bathhouses restored, and the blue-green Caribbean, once again calm and unthreatening, still lay a few feet away. For seven days we slept, ate, walked barefoot in the sand that was everywhere, snorkeled, talked to new acquaintances, swam, lay in our hammocks, drank and ate again, and went to bed to read by candlelight, the camp lacking electricity.

  We saw trails of pelicans cross the enormous blue sky. I remembered hearing of a woman swimming in the waters off Cozumel who was taken for a fish by a pelican and attacked, and had to have seven stitches in her scalp. These pelicans looked too set on their path towards Cancún to stop for a human head.

  As I always do, I took note of what people were reading on the beach. A beach book is easily characterized. Its garish cover and sun-browned pages are curled, spotted, and swelled by salt water from the hands of its owner. It smells of suntan lotion, and is always thick, on the owners’ widely held belief that a very long book serves the time better and is more sustaining than a thin one. It is usually by James Michener, Tom Tryon, Ken Follett, Louis L’ Amour, Stephen King, or John le Carré, occasionally by Anne Tyler, John Irving, or Toni Morrison, never by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, or Charles Dickens, although these chaps also wrote absorbing stories of considerable length.

  If one is reading on the beach, there is nothing to prevent constant interruptions by acquaintances walking by. Many people assume that reading is a poor substitute for doing something, not valuable in itself. My mother, as I remember, supported this view. Seeing me reading on the couch, she would say: ‘If you’re not doing anything, would you mind setting the table?’

  Sybil remembers that a girl caught reading a book in he
r family was especially vulnerable. Spotted by her mother when Sybil was so engaged, she would invariably be asked to do a chore.

  After several such interruptions, Sybil said, ‘Why don’t you ask Jim [her older brother who was also reading] to do it?’

  Her mother: ‘Because he’s studying.’

  One morning I put my wooden beach chair facing the sea under the single surviving palm tree near our tent, to read. It is the only possible orientation at Kailuum: One goes into and comes from it, looks at it endlessly, sits beside it, swims and wades in it, walks beside it, and watches the sun rise and, by reflection, go down over it. Half-buried in the sand I found an abandoned, thick paperback book, in a genre I don’t especially enjoy: science fiction. I read a bit in it. It was about a young girl endowed with ESP who disrupts the life of what the author described as a middle-aged man. A few pages on, the man is further described as thirty-four years old. I reburied the book in the sand.

  Another morning, unable to concentrate on the revisions I should have been making on Camp, I left my manuscript under my chair and went to talk to a young, bearded fellow who seemed to be surveying the beach. He told me he had been hired by the Mexican government to see what could be done to restore the hurricane-ravaged reefs and beaches. He said the reef off Kailuum had been badly damaged.

  ‘But I can’t get mad at the sea,’ he said. ‘What makes me furious is that the Mexican government is knowingly allowing developers to threaten the whole shore, from Cancún almost as far down as Tulum.’

  He told me a long, horrifying story of coastal destruction in Yucatán. He had advised the government about proper sewage control provisions for a newly erected, very large resort south of us, called Aventura. It is lavish, expensive, but carelessly planned and built, with only minor inspection by local or provincial officials. His advice went unheeded. So, in a few years, he predicted, the land area and waters around the resort will be polluted. I told him we had been able to smell the pollution in the lagoon in Cancún as we drove along the stretch of more than a hundred new, glossy hotels that clearly must be emptying their sewage into it.

  He said, sadly: “Oh yes, the sewage treatment plants are not sufficient for the building that has taken place. The town of Carmen del Playa is in the same danger. It is overpopulated and straining the water and sewage services.”

  We stood together staring out at Kailuum’s clean water and immaculate beach.

  ‘How long do you think this will stay this way?’ I asked him.

  ‘Not long,’ he said glumly. ‘I’ve been told that the Mexican government has sold a large strip of beachfront and acres of land to the Hilton people, just five miles north of here. They may ask me to do a study of the service needs for a hotel of hundreds of rooms. I will do it, make recommendations, but inevitably money will change hands, American money into official Mexican hands, because Mexico is poor and needs the money. Holes will be dug into rock for the refuse, so it will spread sideways, and inevitably, someday pollute the water.’

  ‘Terrible,’ I said. He started down the beach carrying his equipment, saying nothing more.

  The last morning, dreading the thought of leaving, we were up at five-thirty to watch the sun rise. I thought of Auden, who said once: ‘Those who hate to go to bed fear death, those who hate to get up fear life.’ What of those, like me, who can’t wait to get up? Do we not fear the death that lying in bed represents?

  Walking along the beach to our last breakfast at the camp, Sybil and I talked about our house in Washington, as if to prepare ourselves for being gone from here, and back there at the end of this day. Her eyes filled with tears. She said she clings to the house, reluctant to let it go, hating the prospect of change, wishing we didn’t have to sell it, feeling it is our one place she thought she would always be secure. I wonder why I am not sad about leaving the house, only my studio in the carriage house.

  We ate fruit and sweet buns and drank coffee in silence. I believe I knew what she was thinking (presumptuous, surely), and I regretted my own deep and perpetual selfishness. I mourn the passing of the carriage house because that is where my work is. I contemplate the end of our residence on North Carolina Avenue without regret because I have always felt an irrational need to break ties when they threaten to be permanent. It is not that I am confident of what life in Maine will be like—the prospect of fixing the house there to make it livable for us is frightening—but that, for a brief period, I will be gone from here and hardly settled there; and that seems to me to be a kind of odd freedom. Sybil has agreed that the first room to be redone in the Maine house will be my study. Once I am settled in it, I will be happy and at home, with my work, my books, my manuscripts, my computer, and the chattering, efficient printer.

  Walking back to our tent to pack, I saw, at the edge of the clearing where all the destroyed trees are heaped, the roots of what I thought was a manzanita tree. I remember hearing from a native on St. John in the Virgin Islands that every part of this tree—roots, leaves, flowers, stems—is poisonous. Columbus called its fruit ‘death apple.’ To see it dead instead of flourishing made Kailuum’s devastation by Gilbert a little less satanic.

  On the plane, I talked to a businessman coming home from a conference in Cancún. Twice he rounded off anecdotes about his stay with the same favorite (these days) phrase: ‘The bottom line is …’ And once he answered a question with another popular formulation that I have grown tired of: ‘There is good news and bad news. The good news is …’ People seize upon these clichés as though they had just thought them up. They use them in place of simple or original rhetoric. I can only hope to live long enough to see such language swell up in volume, explode, die, and disappear.

  The flight attendants on the plane had movable wagons that completely filled the aisle. Once they began to serve from them, drinks, and then food, and then drinks again, it was impossible to pass them, to go to the bathroom or, if one was foresighted and made it to the bathroom, to get back to one’s seat. An unaccustomed claustrophobic panic welled up in me, caused, perhaps, by two weeks of wandering about in the expanses of ancient cities and living beside the endless sea. Now I was confined to a seat, strapped into it, with two people on one side and the barely mobile wagon on the other. I should have been gracious, I suppose, and accepted this state of affairs as instructive preparation for my return to the city and our narrow Victorian house, walled in by a hundred cartons of books and possessions.

  February 22: This morning I learn, through a Washington Post obituary, that Rudy von Abele has died. He was a colleague of mine at American University who retired a year or so before I did. He had taught for many years and was an enigmatic figure to me, brilliant, talented, almost a dwarf of a man, with very bad eyes and a great love for the work of Joyce, Yeats, and Beckett, German classical music, mystery stories, and young women. He had written one novel I admired, The Party, an equally good book of poems published by a university press, and a perceptive study of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Good students trusted and admired him, poor ones feared and misunderstood him.

  I never knew him well. Indeed, I thought he rather disliked me. The last time I saw him was at the door to his apartment. I called to tell him I had received an extra copy of the new three-volume critical and synoptic edition of Joyce’s Ulysses, and would be glad to give it to him. He said, yes, he would like to have it, and told me where he lived. Sybil and I drove to the apartment house on Massachusetts Avenue and rang his bell. He opened the door a crack.

  ‘I’ve brought the Ulysses,’ I said.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said, reached out, took the books, and closed the door. I never saw him again.

  Strangely enough, after this curious dismissal, he told his executor to offer his books for sale to Wayward Books after his death. Sybil spoke to his executor today and arranged to pick up the key to the apartment next week and look at the books.

  Back in my study. It now begins to resemble a warehouse. The bookcases are bare, the once ample walking space is fille
d with cartons, pictures and memorabilia are gone from the walls. But packing up in the study is very slow because I keep finding books I have forgotten I had. Today I sat on a pile of cartons to read from a collection of essays by George Bernard Shaw and came upon a typically Shavian view of women. (He is thought by many eager enlisters in the cause to have been an early feminist.)

  No fascinating woman ever wants to emancipate her sex. Her object is to gather power into the hands of Man, because she knows she can govern him. She is no more jealous of his nominal supremacy than he himself is jealous of the strength and speed of his horse. Women disguise their strength as womanly weakness, their audacity as womanly timidity, their unscrupulousness as womanly innocence, their impunities as womanly defenselessness; simple men are duped by them, and subtle ones disarmed and intimidated. It is only the proud, straightforward women who wish, not to govern, but to be free.…

  A finely shaped piece of rhetoric, saved from patriarchal condescension only by the last sentence.

  A letter today from Kay Boyle, who has moved back to the Bay Area, Oakland, to be near her son. She is a miraculous woman, a phoenix, rising up and surviving one almost mortal illness after another. I think of her often, remembering at odd moments in the day the wise things she has said or written to me over the twenty years I have known her. Whenever I start to write in this memoir about my troubles writing Camp, the painful rejection of The Habit, the strain of trying to remember accurately what I did, I recall her warning that ‘the less writers write about their own work, the better.’

  Her unselfish devotion to the well-being of others, to the commonweal, is her most notable characteristic. In her eighties she is still active in Amnesty International, and still is writing. She differs from a writer like Tillie Olsen, who wrote what she had to say in the thirties and has spent the next fifty years nursing her writer’s block, caressing her early reputation, and rationalizing her sterility by blaming it on her hard life as a working woman. I remember Kay telling me she once had to write her novels at night in the bathroom perched on the toilet seat, after her six children were cared for and put to bed.