If you crave one fascinating book to go to bed with the flu with, try
Daily Life of the Aztecs
by Jacques Soustelle, Pelican. He reconstructs the empire’s life just at the eve of the Spanish irruption. Unforgettable. Take this picture, written by Bernal Diaz, of five Aztec officials passing by what was to be their dooms:
Some Indians… came running to tell the chiefs who had been talking with Cortes that five Mexicans (Aztecs) had been seen, the tax gatherers of Motecuhzoma (“Montezuma”). On hearing this they went pale and began to tremble with fear. They left Cortes to himself and went out to welcome them… adorned a room with foliage, prepared some food and made a great deal of cocoa… . When these five Indians came… they passed by the place where we were with so much confidence and pride that they walked straight on, without speaking to Cortes or any of the others of us. They wore rich embroidered cloaks, loincloths of the same nature, and their shining hair was raised in a knot on their heads: each had a bunch of flowers in his hand and he smelt to it; and other Indians, like servants, fanned them with fly whisks.
Shortly afterwards, says Soustelle, these empire men called in the Totonac chiefs who had been talking with Cortes and gave them hell for presuming to negotiate with them.
As you can see, Fve been at the books; one contracts a hunger to read everything on the mysterious world among whose bones one treads here. The French and English seem to have done more than the U.S., judging from what’s here. Trouble is, book distribution in Mexico is if anything zanier than in the States. Part of a series will be in French, part in Swedish or Zulu; all of
Volume One
of something is, say, at Uxmal, while all the
Volume Twos
are in Honduras. And anybody is an instant expert. There’s one nut whose mimeoed booklets are all over who has found secret messages from the Martians in the snake sculpture, and another series of cheap guidebooks that is apparently a translation from the Japanese—that was where I picked up the Huastec-Aztec booble.
(You’d be amazed at the good paperback SF books in little barrio stalls here, especially English. Most in one copy each, often secondhand.)
Final note: A great new ruin probably more magnificent than Chichen Itza has been discovered (from the air) near Tulum on the east coast of Yucatan. It is believed to be unlooted. The government is trying to protect it until proper funding can be arranged for clearing and restoration. Name is Coba
(Ko-bah).
About ten years from now when you get down here the character being hauled up in the main pyramid in a wheelchair will be Uncle Tip.
Back to you, Jeff; by the way, no need to freeze this communication, it’s being writ on a recently government-sprayed cuarto. When these boys spray, they make the U.S. in Vietnam look like amateurs. Even the Tequila tastes of it.
I got back to the rancho and saw L’mus, a year older and definitely sinister now; his head has filled out into a more triangular shape, wide above the temples, and when he looks at a nonfunctioning motor with that primordial menace in his slit eyes you expect the motor to moan. He’s thicker too, his wrists are about six inches across, like locomotive pistons—Did you ever see one?—and his hands should belong to a guy 6′6″ instead of 4′9″. He doesn’t use a vise to drill metal; just grips it in one vast hand and drills a perfectly vertical slot. He’s into gasoline motors this year. Somebody’s station wagon gave out. L’mus yanked up the hood, stuck his screwdriver in his teeth, and dived onto the engine block with it still running, hot as fire. All you could see were his enormous square feet expressively writhing, and suddenly the motor went wild and then settled down sweetly. His grin when he got out was the same old L’mus. A great guy. I gotta bring him a decent watch.
A lot of the Mayas around there are into learning English this year. The Maya-English accent is good, except the consonants sound like rifles. Even an “1.” The extremely powerful lady who does the laundry for the fishing camp caused some excitement by beamingly announcing, “Billow! Shit!” You’d have to get the sound effects to recapture it. Also the air of total mastery. I got the (imported) flu while in her vicinity and she approached me and laid on me hands of such power and warmth that I cowered. I think the flu did too. She announced that she was going to pray for me; I wondered to what god. It worked. Clearly she is one of the ranch healers; her hands were really extraordinary. She took hold of both thighs and—well, maybe this doesn’t describe so well. But it was not pornography. I’m told they cure many things by massage; one of the ranch owners here is wondering if somebody shouldn’t look into it, because some of the pregnant girls his Western medicine couldn’t cure of various symptoms were fixed by the local massage honcho down the coast.
Funny thing about medicine: Western medicine is cold. Here’s a pill, go ‘way. We all know about U.S. hospitals, about doctors interested in diseases, not people, etc., etc. You see it clearly here. A pill or a shot is great, sometimes there’s no substitute; but
a person interested in you
is something irreplaceable. The ceremonious direction of total attention to the sick person, the importance of the sick person. The laying on of hands, the doctor taking on the disease in a personal way. Man, it’s half the cure. I know. Only thing, as I mentioned, it is faintly scary. You have to be convinced of the importance of yourself and your disease to endure it. (Remember I said I “cowered.”) Of course in a “primitive” world, people are convinced of the importance of their disease because there’s very little fake sickness. It’s too depriving.
As I write these words I realize there’s a whole big unopened thing there. Has anybody looked into the way sickness and health function in a society without real medicine? (Note the chauvinist pride of that “real.” Well, it’s partly true. I’ve been reading Zinsser on typhus—
Rats, Lice and History
—and Rosebury’s
Microbes and Morals
on syphilis. Until recently, mortality was in general least where there were fewer doctors. Bad medicine is worse than no medicine, and we’ve had a lot of it.) But what I was after above, I imagine that the average Maya here feels and behaves quite differently from the average us about health and pangs and symptoms and actual illness. Somebody must have written a comparative study. Must look.
Of course most nontechnological societies are ridden with the witchcraft thing. Soustelle shows it among the Aztecs. Sickness is viewed as caused by Human malevolence; somebody hired a sorcerer to bewitch me. Was true all over Africa, too. Thus actual sickness is complicated by Human relations, guilt, expectations, etc.
Tiptree, you’re out of your depth.
I’ve been trying to hack out an End-of-Everything story for an anthology Barry Malzberg and Ed Ferman are doing. Couldn’t get started until I saw my first newspaper in several weeks, headlined “Fear of New Hostilities in Indochina.” Meaning, if I read my Spanish aright, that
that wretch
in the White House is about to blow his top and punish the rest of the world for not realizing he is king—with bombers with my name on them.
Oddly enough I got a plot that night, but nothing to do with Nixon. If, as Whately Carrington has proposed, one’s most intense feelings might have a certain immortality as energy patterns, might these not be our most
painful
feelings? Trouble is the damn thing is too long, they want a short one.
Well, this is a lot of nothing—except the Huastecs—but lots of good to you.
—March 6, 1973
When Don Keller and I decided to stop publishing
Phantasmicom
(with #11, May 1974), we asked all our contributors to write something special. Everyone came through for us, and we had an issue we were very proud of, but no one came through for us like Tiptree did.
Nobody tells you the truth about old age.
Nobody tells you much of anything useful, in fact, but that isn’t my point now. About
getting old
they not only tell you nothing, they tell you lies. When they talk about it at all, that is. Their eyes veil up, they get behind a cardboard smile mask and shove you a couple hysterical slogans: Think Young. Don’t Worry. Then a whimper comes out of their throats and they take off, fast.
Even if you’re only five, the implication comes through perfectly: Cheer up, kid—you’re doomed.
Remember how you first met it? A huge face comes at you. Pores, pustules, craters. Wattles and ropes hanging down. Brown crusts, yellow cheesy things. A soft, wobbly wart or two, with hair in them. Tufts and snarls of dead hair in the sore-looking nostrils. Eyes like an oyster’s blowhole. And the smell, the stink blasting at you out of the deformed orifices!
“Hiya, boy,” a broken bellows wheezes, rumbles in the garbage. You identify it, tentatively, as a Human being.
“Mother! What’s wrong with him?”
“That’s Uncle William, dear. Isn’t he marvelous?”
“What’s
wrong
with him?”
“Why nothing, dear. He’s just a little older, that’s all.”
“Will I get like that?”
“You and your ideas, heh-heh. You don’t have to think about that for a long, long time, heh-heh.”
“Will I get like that, Mother?”
“Say, you have some homework to do, right now.”
“Mother.
Will I?”
“… Yes.”
No. No!!!
Remember that, the No? They won’t get
me.
They can’t make me stick around for that. Leave, that’s what I’ll do. Leave first. Crash the car, dive into the sea in a Piper Cub from ten thousand feet. Have a little hunting accident. Give a party on the edge of a volcano and jump in at midnight, smashed out. fust walk away. Remember?
Because by this time you’ve found out some of the other things about Uncle William besides the deterioration in his looks. Uncle William’s useless thing, for instance, dangling dead and pallid like a pickled worm. The way Uncle William keeps making the unfortunate mistakes that mean he has to be hastily reclothed by Auntie. And Uncle William’s conversation.
“You already told me that story, Uncle William.”
“What say, boy?”
“I said, you told me that before.”
“What? What you say, Martha?”
“I’m not Martha, Uncle William.”
“What?”
The amount of “What?” older people say is weird. Uncle and Auntie have whole conversations that are nothing but “What? What?”; their heads are total mush. In fact, Mom and Dad say “What?” quite a bit, too. You begin noticing that all these adults that you’d taken for normal people, I mean, not
people
exactly but at least alive, okay—they have some funny little ways. You notice this more and more. By the time you’re driving a car all by yourself you’ve realized that the general class of older people, say over twenty-five, are pretty nauseating. For example your mother’s repulsive way of referring to her old-hag friends as “girls.” And more: these old men who seem to have the delusion that your mother
is
a girl. Jeeesus! Why don’t they
realize?
Why don’t they shut up and go around unobtrusively, wear veils or yashmaks or something, like nuns?
I think about here comes a split. The kids who stop there and more or less forget it, versus the kids who go on thinking about it. I was one of those who couldn’t forget it, some kind of third eye and ear inside me stayed stuck to it, focusing, like a diver who has glimpsed a dim, cold alien form:
shark.
Maybe most of you reading this are like that too. The people who know there is tomorrow. Time-coming is real, maybe more real than right now. Sometimes it’s great, today is beautiful because of the great thing coming. But underneath it’s
Brrrr.
Now always passing, future always there, coming. Ozymandias. The plain of dust, covering all. Time.
I had terrible trouble with time. Looking at a picture of Uncle William, a blond Mark Spitz grinning on a load of lumber: young! Uncle William as a little
baby
for crissake. I remember looking at the U.S. Senate once and seeing two hundred little babies, mothers saying what sweet little kids. Then I’d look at real kids and see… skeletons. Old old skeletons in baby carriages in the Red Owl store.
I learned, too. I remembered everything I read about it when I got to the book world. Like the faculties you lose, the falling metabolic rates, the falling response-time rates, the falling everything rates. (We didn’t have Kinsey then, but I had the news.) Out shooting ducks—I quit killing things later—I’d hear the high pinging whistle of birds coming over the pass at 100 mph and a voice inside would murmur, Enjoy it, baby, you won’t be hearing 18,000 cps ten years from now. When I did a back flip (my painful achievement) the voice would inform me about declining reflex curves.
And the girls. Oh, the girls. One girl in particular, the first time it hit me that
it was going to happen to everybody.
That corpselike moment: I heard the rasp of her mother’s voice in her laugh, I glimpsed her mother’s jowls waiting beside that perfect jaw.
Thirty, I thought: Say thirty. That’s the end.
Man, the day I turned thirty I really expected to wake up as a pile of dust.
It was kind of a shock, thirty-morning, finding I looked the same. (Well, just about. Recognizable, anyway.) I could even still do a back flip. Of course, there were all these young kids running around thinking they were people. But what the hell, things didn’t seem to have changed too much, and I couldn’t spend much time thinking about it. I had all these things I was
doing.
Busy, busy. I decided I’d made a mistake. Forty. Forty was the time to go.
Well, forty came, but there kept being all these interesting things I was doing, doing, doing. And I still seemed to be functioning okay, if maybe a little tiredly, perfectly understandable when you’re so busy. The girls were still around, sort of. Of course, I didn’t do any more back flips after the time the board caught my chin going down; accidents happen. But I still felt the same underneath, I was still me.
And then one day I heard myself saying “What?” Not for the first time, either. I began to suspect. And pretty soon I knew: a trap.