Coming into the End Zone (19 page)

During the sun-soaked days the site is filled with noisy visitors. The Nunnery, the Governor's Palace, the cenote, lose their mystery. But we went back in the early evening before anyone else by an entrance customarily unused. The sun was dying and the dreadful light show for tourists had not yet started, We entered the Great Plain on a footpath. There it was, a deserted city, the great grey stones, enigmatic and silent. A holy place even to us irreverent twentieth-century travelers, struck dumb before these ancient, inscrutable architectural secrets.

My sense of mortality wells up in me, closing my throat, my eyes, bowing my head. I am threatened by stone eternities. The Mayans believed that man is already dead, awaiting only his acceptance into the eternal life of the gods. Or else, in this life, that man awaits death by joining his blood to the already stained soil of sacrifice.

My friend, standing beside me, says: ‘It gives one pause.'

I find this a good way to express one's awe. ‘For in that sleep of death/What dreams may come … Must give us pause.'

At the Temple of the Warriors, I saw vestiges of paint on the pillars. They suggest the past glory of color that the now grey stones have lost. So much is lost here beside color. We came upon a tiny sign that read
CHICHÉN VIEJO
, pointing into the jungle. Next morning we followed the path, so narrow that one foot had to be placed directly in front of the other. Two miles of hard walking and we came upon overgrown, small, lovely vestiges of buildings, one with a rude upright fertility sculpture: A plump, uncircumcised phallus protruded from the half-fallen wall. Buried in high brush were two fine stelae carved with warrior heads, a truncated jaguar, other small carved stones. The recent Hurricane Gilbert had wrecked many of the old trees that lined the path. It is a forgotten place, clearly neglected by avid tourists and misinformed guides. We felt as though we had been presented with a small piece of antiquity for our private delectation, refreshing in its unrestored state.

Restoration is now the curse of the Mayan ruins. My daughter Kate and Paul Yarowsky, whom she is to marry this summer, told us to visit three small sites a short distance from Uxmal. We arrived very early at the first, Kabáh. It was entirely ours for almost two hours—a Puuc village, with many beautifully carved Chac masks on a two-story building, a superb corbel archway, standing alone, the sole survivor, I think, of a structure that now lies strewn across a little plain.

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 her 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?