In the afternoon when the sun lights the stucco buildings across the street, it's possible to count a dozen different colors of paint, all fading together on the highest parts of the wall: yellow, ochre, brick, blood, cobalt, turquoise. The national color of Mexico. And the scent of Mexico is a similar blend: jasmine, dog piss, cilantro, lime. Mexico admits you through an arched stone orifice into the tree-filled courtyard of its heart, where a dog pisses against a wall and a waiter hustles through a curtain of jasmine to bring a bowl of tortilla soup, steaming with cilantro and lime. Cats stalk lizards among the clay pots around the fountain, doves settle into the flowering vines and coo their prayers, thankful for the existence of lizards. The potted plants silently exhale, outgrowing their clay pots. Like Mexico's children they stand pinched and patient in last year's too-small shoes. The pebble thrown into the canyon bumps and tumbles downhill.
Here life is strong-scented, overpowering. Even the words. Just ordering breakfast requires some word like toronja, triplet of muscular syllables full of lust and tears, a squirt in the eye. Nothing like the effete "grapefruit," which does not even mean what it says.
Our young lord Jesus today found the right track to Chichen Itza. What a marvel. The Temple of Warriors, the Ball Court, the tall pyramid called the Castle. Magnificent limestone buildings glare at one another in silence across the grassy plaza. Everything is dazzling white, a timeless architecture of pale limestone. Elegant and remote. Whatever I came here looking for is hiding, holding its breath. No crime and punishment present themselves in bloodstained hallways. Unlike the grisly Azteca with their gods sticking out their tongues, the Maya seem serenely untouchable. What they've left behind is in every measure as grand and elegant as the white marble temples of the Greeks.
In the fringe of forest surrounding the plaza we found more temples crumbling quietly into themselves, sleeping under green blankets of vine. Like the ruin in the forest on Isla Pixol, beside the hole in the water, at the end of the lacuna. That one had a smiling skeleton carved on a stone. Here, footpaths through the trees led away in all directions, to different parts of a partially excavated city: the marketplace with its carved columns. The steam bath in a shady grove, its dark stone chamber like a womb, entered through a tiny triangular doorway. The vault inside was a high, inverted V shape, punctuated at each end with a round hole for venting steam. Maybe the story begins here, lit by a dim, steamy ray of light streaming through that hole: the setting for a love scene, or a murder, better yet. Political intrigue. But the place feels bloodless.
The enormous central pyramid stands high and heroic, dominating the plaza. It seems taller than the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacan, though memory can play tricks in matters of heroism. We felt compelled to climb its immense stone stairs to the very top, just as it was with Frida all those years ago, dragging her miserable leg all the way. But Mrs. Brown managed the climb without sending a single soul to the devil.
Today we drove south through villages of Mayan farmers, most beginning with X--pronounced "ish." X-puil, X-mal, Jesus revealed the secret of the Mayan tongue: shhh. X does not mark the spot, it marks a hush. The Mayans speak their language everywhere in the countryside, and it sounds like whispered secrets. Women stand together in doorways, muttering: shhh, shhh. Fathers and sons walk along the roadside carrying ancient-looking hoes, quietly making a plan: shhh.
Another day driving, this time to the east. We stopped at a town and walked out an ancient stone roadbed to the mouth of a lacuna. A cenote, it's called here: a deep, round hole with limestone cliffs for its sides and blue water at the bottom. A kingfisher darted through foliage, calling: Kill him! Kill him! The view from above was dizzying, down the sheer rock face of the hole to the water far below. No handrail stood at the cliff's edge to prevent our falling in. Or diving in, swimming down deep to see what is there, the devil or the sea.
It is fresh water here, many kilometers from the ocean. The Mayans built their towns and civilization on these cenotes, because no sacred thing is more holy than a water source. The entire Yucatan Peninsula has not a single river or stream running on its surface, only these water caves running below, with round mouths opening here and there to the light above. Chichen means "mouth of the world," and so it is, these gasping mouths are as old as human dread. The ancients fed them as best they knew how, throwing in jade and onyx, golden goblets, human remains. Without a thought to what they might be doing to their drinking water.
Jesus claimed that many valuable artifacts had been dredged from this cenote, but all had been carried off to Harvard and the Peabody Museum. He actually named those places, so it likely could be true. Colonial ransacking in the scientific age.
On our walk back through the jungle we looked but could find no trace of the ancient farms and villages that must have been here. Thousands of ordinary people were part of this metropolis, but their homes would have been perishable wattle and thatch, stuccoed with lime and mud. Every trace of their living has returned to the earth now, except for the limestone temples of art and worship. The things made of ambition, which rise higher than daily bread.
Our automobile parked in the village had attracted a crowd. The tallest boy introduced himself (Maximiliano), and demanded pay for having guarded the vehicle during our absence. "From whom?" we asked, and Maximiliano pointed to the gang of small thugs he claimed would have damaged or even dismantled it. "They are very crafty," he said in English. His payment, a handful of coins, he instantly distributed among all the vandals, their alliance thus perfected. Even morality is a business of supply and demand.
Some older boys had lurked back, distancing themselves from piracy, but came forward then with woodcarvings to sell. Mrs. Brown took one in hand, turning it carefully. They were figures of ancient warriors in elaborate headdress, very much like my little obsidian fellow. It was striking how the wide, slant faces of the figures resembled the faces of the boys who made them. Mrs. Brown paid the sculptor his price, only a little more than the extortion had cost us. A good day for young men standing on the stone and bones of their ancestors to make their way.
In the plaza near our apartment, people come every evening to stroll around in a circle. Lovers come drifting, connected by entwined fingers. Married couples come at a clip, the children like rafts towed on ropes behind the ship. No one is alone. Even the vendors sitting on stools around the periphery work steadily at connection, nodding at potential buyers, like a sewing machine prodding its needle into the cloth.
"We used to do this in Isla Pixol," I told Mrs. Brown. "My mother always wanted to go walk the circle. As long as she had a new dress."
Mrs. Brown in the jaunty blue beret dissected her fried fish, a late supper after our day on the road. But life in the plaza was just waking up. Two men wheeled a great wooden marimba to a spot near the dining tables and uncloaked it, preparing to play.
She said, "You're home here. That's good to see. It serves ye well."
"I don't know that I'm home anywhere."
"Well, you are a queasy one, I'll grant it." she said. She used her knife to push the fish's crisp head and tail together at one side of the plate. "I always knew you came from Mexico, at Mrs. Bittle's you told us that. But see, we thought you were just bashful. We never thought of a whole country where you could call down a waiter in his language, or say, 'Look, they're going to do the hat dance,' and they would do the hat dance. Now, that sounds silly."
"No, I understand. You thought, 'foreigner,' and not of a particular place."
"I reckon that is it. All along, you have known about these folk here and I've had no inkling. I read the Geographics, but you can't think of the people in those stories as having life and breath, and knowing things you don't. But that sounds silly too."
"No, I think most people are the same. Until they've gone somewhere."
"I thank my lucky stars, Mr. Shepherd, and I thank you. I do. That I'm a person who went somewhere." She set her hands in her lap and drew herself fully into looking outward, as p
eople do when settling down in a theater. Vendors had begun to work the dining crowd. You could buy anything if your supper went on long enough: roses, bicycle tires, a shellacked armadillo. A mother and daughter in long skirts and shawls moved from table to table showing their embroidery. I waved them off with a gesture so small Mrs. Brown probably didn't see. She feels obliged to look at every single thing, lest the artisans be offended.
"I have been wondering what your novel will be about," she said. "Apart from the setting."
"I wonder too. I think I want to write about the end of things. How civilizations fall, and what leads up to that. How we're connected to everything in the past."
To my shock she said, "Oh, I wouldn't."
"Mrs. Brown, I declare. That's twice you've told me how to be a writer. You apologized the first time."
"Well. I'm sorry again."
"Why would you say that?"
"I have no business. It just came out. Some of the things that happened back at home have set me to the fret."
"I do step in the pie sometimes, I know that. Go on."
"Should I?"
"Please."
"I think the readers won't like it. We don't like to see ourselves joined hard to the past. We'd as soon take the scissors and cut every ribbon of that."
"Then I am sunk. All I ever write about is history."
"People in gold arm bracelets, though. Nothing that would happen to our own kind. That's how I reckon people take to it so well."
"So I shouldn't try something new? What happened to the writer standing up for himself? Not leaving my words to be orphaned, my little bairns, as you called them."
"I still hold by that. But there's no shame in a clever disguise. To say what you believe and still keep out of trouble. Thus to now, it has done ye well."
"Oh. Then you think it wouldn't go so well if I set my stories, let's say, in a concentration camp in Texas or Georgia. One of those places where we sent our citizen Japs and Germans during the war."
She looked stricken. "No, sir, we would not like to read that. Not even about the other Japanese sinking ships and bombing our coast. That's over, and we'd just as soon be shed of it."
The marimba players struck up "La Llorona," the most cheerful rendition of a song about death. I spied the man with the shellacked armadillo for sale. It was only a matter of time, he comes every night.
"If that's so, then why did Americans make off with the historical artifacts of Mexico to put them, where did he say? In the Peabody Museum?"
"It's the same as your books, Mr. Shepherd. It's somebody else's gold pieces and bad luck. If we fill up our museums with that, we won't have to look at the dead folk lying at the bottom of our own water wells."
"And who is we?"
She pondered this, eyebrows lowered. "Just Americans," she said at length. "That's the only kind of person I know how to be. Not like you."
"You'd do that? Take scissors and cut off your past?"
"I did already. My family would tell you I went to the town and got above my raisings. It's what Parthenia calls 'modern.'"
"And what would you call it?"
"American. Like I said. The magazines tell us we're special, not like the ones that birthed us. Brand-new. They paint a picture of some old-country rube with a shawl on her head, and make you fear you'll be like that, unless you buy cake mix and a home freezer."
"But that sounds lonely. Walking around without any ancestors."
"I don't say it's good. It's just how we be. I hate to say it, but that rube in the shawl is my sister, and I don't want to be her. I can't help it."
A man walked among the tables working a marionette, a smiling skeleton of articulated papier-mache bones. To the delight of a family dining nearby, he made the skeleton sneak along slowly, lifting its bony feet high, then suddenly leap on their table. The children squealed as it stamped on their plates, for the father's coins.
"And history is nothing but a cemetery," I said to Mrs. Brown. The puppeteer was behind her, she'd missed the show.
"That is exactly right. For us to visit when we have a mind, or just not go at all. Let the weeds grow up."
"Here in Mexico there's a holiday just for being with your dead. You go where your family is buried and have a great party, right on the grave."
"You have to? Plumb on top of the graves?" Wide-eyed, she looked like the girl she must have been before she was Mrs. Brown.
"People love it, as much as they love a wedding. Really it is a kind of wedding, to the people in your past. You take a vow they're all still with you. You cook a feast and bring enough food for the dead people too."
"Well, sir, that would not happen in Buncombe County. Probably the police would arrest you."
"You might be right."
She took her glass of limeade and sipped at the straw while holding eye contact. It was unsettling. The puppeteer had moved into her line of view, and her eyes left me to follow that skeleton. When she had drained her glass, she said, "You understand things like that, a wedding in the graveyard. You are from another country."
"But I want to be brand-new too. The land of weightless people and fast automobiles suits me fine. I made myself a writer there."
"You could have stayed here and done the same."
"I don't think so. I've thought about it. I had ghosts to leave behind. Mexican writers struggle with their ghosts, I think. In general. Maybe it's easier to say what you want in America, without those ancestral compromises weighing you down like stones."
"Easier to look down upon others, too."
"Do you mean to say I do that?"
"Mr. Shepherd, you do not. But some do. They look around and say, 'This here is good, and that is evil,' and it's decided. We are America, so that over there must be something else altogether."
Mrs. Brown will never cease to amaze. "That's very insightful. You think that comes of cutting our anchor to the past?"
"I do. Because if you had to go sit on a grave and think hard about it, you couldn't just say 'This is America.' Some Indian would cross your mind, some fellow that shot his arrow on that very spot. Or the man that shot the Indian, or whipped his slaves or hung up some tart woman for a witch. You'd couldn't just say it's all fine and dandy."
"Maybe readers need some of that, then. Connections to the past."
"Fairly warned is fair afeared," she said.
"I thought it was 'forearmed.' Forewarned is forearmed."
She glanced at her forearms, and never did reply.
Today was the village of Hoctun, a town the color of wheat, with a pyramid sitting at its center. It brought to mind the village with the giant stone head in the square, and Mother's shaman. Every turn in the road here runs into memory. Isla Mujeres was almost unbearable, from the ferry on. Mrs. Brown sees all, and it puts her on a fret, as she would say. I imagine her pressed against the fret-board of God's guitar, held against the slender silver bar until she wails her assigned note. She says she came here to do my worrying for me. She does much more: typing up drafted scenes, only to see me throw them away. Arranging things. She's befriended someone English-speaking at the tourist bureau, a journalist who helps her negotiate miracles. Mexico's bureaucracies do not daunt Mrs. Brown. She has worked for the United States Army.
I told her I want to study village life now, up close. We've seen enough of pyramids, I need goats and cookfires. To peer inside a hut and examine that V-shaped vault, after seeing the same architecture in stone temples. Her inspired idea: to return to the village of Maria, mother of Jesus.
The eternal cauldron of beans still bubbled. Maria was animated while serving us lunch, telling about the lumbermen who passed through earlier this morning. They are clearing the forests all around, dragging out the felled giants on the same dirt track that brought us in. All she can do is stand in the road and halt each truck, insisting they let her inspect the fallen timber and pluck the living orchids from its top branches. That explains the flowers growing from tins in the yard: her rescu
ed orphans. These orchids lived all their lives high up in the bright air, unseen by human eyes, until the firmament under their roots suddenly tumbled. It's a precarious place, up there with the howlers. Everyone wants the tallest tree to fall.
But Maria of the Orchids seemed to have no such fears, at home in the forest primeval. "The important thing is beauty," she said once more, reaching a small brown hand toward the treetops. "Even death grants us beauty."
Another visit to Chichen Itza tomorrow, the last trip. Then we pack it all in. We will need to take the train for Mexico City on Thursday or Friday if we're to be there from Christmas until the new year, as Frida insists. Candelaria is meeting us at the station. Candelaria at the wheel of an automobile seems as probable as Jesus running a guided tour. Or Mrs. Brown in hat and gloves sitting beside the flagrant Frida, drinking tea on a bench painted with lighting bolts. Likely, all these things will come to pass.
Chichen Itza looked completely different today, probably because of everything else we've seen since the first visit. "Elegant and remote," I jotted in my notes that time, "reluctant to reveal its human history." But today a story came up in relief from every surface, urgent and visible. Every stone was carved with some image: the snarling jaguar, the feathered serpent, a long frieze of swimming goldfish. Emperors stood life-size on stone steles jutting up from the plaza like giant teeth. The Maya carved human figures only in profile: the almond eye, the flattened forehead sloping toward the exquisite arch of nose. They needn't have worried about that profile being forgotten, it's the spitting image of Jesus and ten thousand others, automobile vandals included. Better to carve something else in stone, if you mean to be remembered: "I was cruel to my best friend and got away with it. My favorite meal was squid in ink sauce. My mother never quite liked me as I was."
Traces of paint clung to the surfaces too: red, green, violet. In their time, all these buildings were brightly painted. What a shock to realize that, and how foolish to have been tricked earlier by the serenity of white limestone. Like looking at a skeleton and saying, "How quiet this man was, and how thin." Today Chichen Itza declared the truth of what it was: garish. Loud and bright, full of piss and jasmine, and why not? It was Mexico. Or rather, Mexico is still what this once was.
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