I’m sitting and sweating and swatting in a broiling, roaring hot south wind the Mayas call
But Kann,
the Stuffer. It blows for days and nights, “stuffing” the north, which then spews it back as a norther. But this time of year the north hasn’t got much blow in it. This is not, by the way, an “idyllic” beach like the Acapulco side, this is a raving brilliant blowing beach, storms of glittering coral dust, torn skies tumbling by, the surf creaming and blowing spume, the bay inside the reef has a million white lemmings running and plunging over it, everything glinting and gleaming and shrieking turquoise and jade shrieks, palms sweeping, grackles going ass over endwise, only the noble frigate birds demonstrating calm. And then every so often the winds die for a day and the Mayas—and touristas—rush into every available bay and lagoon after fish and go about beaming
Que bonital
And next day the whole works blows back from the other way.
Yesterday we had a bit of excitement on the shore. A family of fishing tourists took one of the owners’ skiffs out on the reef in a twenty-to-thirty mile souther, six people including a kid, and broached it. Everybody out! So they all piled into the chop a mile offshore, no flippers or masks or nothing, and L’mus—remember him?—who was running the swamping skiff promptly headed for shore, abandoning the bobbing heads. After he had found some ranch hands to help him turn the skiff over and empty it and replace the motor, he went back and handed them their flippers, but they were by then almost ashore. I mentioned that this seemed a bit cavalier to the rancher, my friend, and he shook his head gravely. “Oh no,” he said, “I would have done just the same. That motor is valuable. You should understand how he takes care of that motor; he chains it up at night. He did just right. After all, they could float.”
So now I know what to expect if I go lobster-diving with L’mus.
I see his point. Motors are the lifeblood here. We figure there are about two hundred on the east coast of Yucatan. About 25 horsepower is what they find best, small enough to skim over the shallow lagoons and sturdy enough for the reef. They’re switching to Yamahas now; chalk one up for Nippon.
Any friends or followers of L’mus, otherwise known as Audomaro Tzul the Maya puro, will be interested to know that he is converting from land-based electrician to marine. He has been taken on as general engineer and mechanic, and the motors are indeed his treasures. The guides here drive them through anything, and L’mus keeps them running with rusty nails and—literally—string. (In the accelerator heads.) The nails go as cotter pins. He is also taking to the water himself since the departure of another brilliant little guy, Esteban Burgos, who was seemingly born under water and provided the ranch with lobsters single-handed. (No boat, nothing but four fantastically strong Maya limbs and the sea.) But the big news about L’mus is romance.
You may recall that when last heard of L’mus was busy courting the beautiful and at least quasi-virginal Rosalie Pech Balan. But when I came by this year, no more Rosa. Instead, we find the glistening slicked-down snake head of Umus where? Gleaming before a filled side table in the camp kitchen, that’s where. And the camp stove is presided over by Gregoria, a small globular, brown, flashing-eyed, and earringed and beruffled matronly widow of at least forty exciting years. It seems that after whatever happened with Rosa, Umus took a good look around and headed straight for the well-filled hammock of Gregoria. So Gregoria’s hammock is even better filled, and so, not coincidentally, is Umus. If he is mourning the charms of Rosa he is doing it in front of an endless supply of damn good cooking. Gregoria hums and flashes and puts new garnishes on the burnt pargo, thoughtfully saving the best for the side table. Last time I was down there Umus clocked in over an hour solid eating time. Presumably he can use the weight, that hammock must be bouncy. But Umus is really in his glory out on the water; he and Esteban were a sight to behold, fiercely upright in their skiffs in the flaming sea, right out of three thousand years ago if you overlook the madras briefs. Mayas have a habit of standing up in boats, practicable due to their low center of gravity. They also don’t give a damn how many are aboard or how much water comes in. When a party of ranch hands passes going up to Tulum you see four or five stocky dark figures apparently proceeding through the waves without visible support, standing in a bunch on nothing. It takes several looks before the horizontal line of the staggering skiff can be made out under them. They go into the surf in whatever they’re wearing, too. One dawn a huge cable drum washed up, and the foreman simply waded out fully dressed to wrestle it in. “The people on the next ranch steal
everything
out of my sea,” he complained to me, lowering his voice to a hiss and squinting his eyes, forgetting he was supposed to be Spanish.
“Everything!”’
he repeated. “Poles, planks, lumber, nets.” His voice went into a strange rhythmic singsong, and he twisted his neck with a most evil look, chanting imprecations in a way utterly unlike anything you’ve heard except Maya. He waded out to get it (I had discovered it) and I tried to “help” him horse it in. Christ, it was like trying to help a volcano; I barely got out of the way before he had that three-hundred-pound sodden monster heaved out of the sandbar and rolling in. His little daughter, tagging along, laughed at me. I suggested the drum would make a good table, and he agreed, suddenly becoming again totally different; in an instant this barrel-shaped old man was a beautiful girl strutting in a hat df noe on the “table.”
A satisfying haul. The sea is a great supplier; everything but metal. Complete small boats come in over the reef from nowhere, Cuba, or Jamaica four hundred miles away. One night a shrimp boat broke up on the reef, and my rancher was mad at himself when he saw the lights of a crew from a ranch miles down the line out in the breakers all night stripping her. A forty- or forty-five-foot boat, quite possibly abandoned for the insurance.
Development, unfortunately, is coming here fast; there have been enormous changes in the five years since I first started coming by. The government has pushed the road through (it was a machete-cut trail) and is starting a bridge over the mouth of the lagoon, that used to be bridged only by an oil drum ferry. (It was a day’s work for the ranchers on the next key to get their cocos across. A pleasant day.) And a big tourist center is going up seventy miles north. The newly discovered big ruined city (Coba) has been vandalized—true of everything here and in Guatemala and Honduras. The vandals even use chain saws to slice the great stone steles. And it is now so accessible with the new coast road that it is as deep in Polaroid backing as in jungle. Hoards of campers, cycles, and trailers are on the way; a few filter down here each week or so. People actually camp—even clear roads and dig wells—in somebody’s ranchland. Last year an incredible phenomenon was in Yucatan: a trailer tour, very monied. Cadillac after Caddy, nose-to-exhaust, towing deluxe aluminum wombs, Airstreams or what, hundreds. I was told they only stopped by big city supermarkets, where they loaded up, and never again got out of their air-conditioning. Don’t roll that window down, Marvin! You put it right back up before Mexico gets in! Great. A huge trailer-bearing cruise ship from Miami also docked just north (after running ignominiously aground the first try), discharging what I am told was the entire contents of about five nursing homes. The
Bolero.
A young girl who was on it told me she had never seen people eat so. “They were all—oh, excuse me—so
old.”
I reassured her that I could bear the thought and was surprised to find that she had felt sympathy for these living hulks. “They were having fun.” I fear I struck her as unsympathetic to my own; it rather humbled me hearing this dear little creature be so humane.
Live and learn.
Jeff, since I have not only had no news of you for months but not
even much news of the U.S., I can’t say anything very connected to reality. I wonder what you are doing and how you both are. Of the U.S. I hear only that the Great Polluter is still in the White House, the remaining wilderness is about to be strip-mined, and people are taking off their clothes for reasons which elude the Mexican press services. I trust that this is not an activity obligatory for all right-minded pinko communist radic-libs. But if the sight of Tiptree in the buff puffing down the GW Memorial Parkway is really deemed vital to world peace, so be it. We shall see. In a few weeks now. Meanwhile, Jeff, all good things to you and be sure good vibes are wavering toward you from the mangroves. If I get time and coolth to add a more SF-type note I will, if it isn’t in, here’s good wishes from yrs as ever. Fondly Fahrenheit. Whew!
Much later; it’s past midnight and a few refreshing beverages. Still blowing like a furnace, sea raving and crashing in the stage moonlight, so bright you can see the indigo waters and cobalt sky, palm fronds thrashing with a perpetual sizzling strum like static from space, the lavender shadows chasing themselves around over the shining sand like flat animals pouring by. The sea has taken most of the beach up to Puerto Morales, leaving an enormous opalescent shingle on which lone coconuts incoming from, maybe, Africa, play ghostly billiards. The strange parcel ser
vice of ocean. Dead men occasionally, plastic unending. A fluorescent tube came in waving like a submerged conductor’s baton. The plague of dolls I mentioned a couple years ago seems to have ceased; whatever rites caused them must have stopped. They were replaced by a sending of glass hypodermic vials—empty. Quick shoot-ups by the rail. Every year there is a harvest of the wooden planking used to stack freight, gratefully received by the Mayas. Lots of very big bamboo, occasional immense mahogany logs from a Honduran barge. I mean immense; four-foot diameters. Several such trees are buried in the beach, which uncovers them to gloat over and then covers them again. There is also a very old sailing vessel deep down, just the ribs showing. The bolts for the shrouds are visible at times; a sailor told me they were hand poured in place, you can see where the hot metal ran. About two hundred years ago… Crash, crash; the sea is busy bringing a new beach up from Belize.
Guilty recall that this was supposed to be about SF. Well, I did read some; newest was a collection of Aldiss’s he sent me,
Moment of Eclipse.
Take a look at one killer in there, “Heresies of the Huge God.” It tells nearly everything you need to know about religion—and should be afraid to ask. I like Aldiss; when he gets into high gear he’s hot. He seems to have seen some of the places I met early, his piece on the living and the dying is the blow that makes you reel in India. And he’s the only writer I know who has done something with a loa worm infestation; my uncle got one. What happens is that a fly lays an egg which hatches into a solitary hairlike worm, which for the next seven or so years roams your body under the skin, looking, as I was told it, for its mate. If you have gone back to Illinois of course the mate is missing, so the loa roams on, causing no pain but incredible swellings. One day you can’t buckle your watch strap, a week later you have a melon on your elbow. The idea is to wait until it crosses your eyeball and hook it out. The waiting is made interesting by the knowledge that if it wanders into your brain you die.
Listen, Tiptree: SF. Okay. Oh hell—the main thing I’ve been into is a serious study of Tolkien’s
Ring
and reading H. G. Wells for the first time. I will spare you my conclusions beyond saying I take both very seriously indeed. One of the aspects which they share is that they are both strategies for handling almost unbearable grief. In Wells’s
Days of the Comet,
the fantastic, gut-tearing paean of hope reveals the wound beneath; it is the blinded crying for light. In Tolkien the held-back cry of bitter loss becomes lacerating; it is interesting to read that his first memories were of the ravaging of his childhood lands by the devastations of the railroad, and that in his youth, by 1918, all but one of his close friends had been killed in the war. His prescription is go on, go on; it stinks, it hurts, but go on. Somehow go on. Wells goes on, too; both men are, well, sturdy. Brave, one might have said in a simpler age. Both tremble toward sentimentality, are saved at each last moment by their brilliantly observing eyes, their regard for what is, no matter how dismaying. And of course with Tolkien, the rich airy landscape of words, his almost magical grasp.
In contrast I was reading another favorite, Malzberg; didn’t too much like his
In the Enclosure
—not so much new in it for me—but was delighted by one of his that seems to have slipped out unnoticed a couple of years back:
Revelations.
Dear God what mythic ideas. M. is another of those in overt pain—
Stop it,
this has to stop, I can’t bear any more. And his pain rises above exasperation and frenzy, it has metaphysical dimensions. But it is a somewhat different pain, less focused. Everybody and everything
hurts,
for no known reason.
I often feel that way.
Take a look at
Revelations.
He has used his stock figure of the disenchanted astronaut in a new wild way. And the concept of the incredible TV talk show host savagely driving to find, well, God, or something—to me unforgettable. And the way the thing comes out, the way you fall through dissolving realities. Some rough edges, some writing that bears signs of too long hours pounding out a story a day or whatever he does, but I’m not about to quibble with the oyster.
The main other item I went through was some Ballard, principally the Chronopolis group. I’ve decided not to shoot myself because of Ballard; he’s great but he is for me on some kind of parallel track, his stories send me up but never have that ultimate personal reference.
Finally got around also to Aldiss’s
Report on Probability A
—probably the world’s hardest story to end, after that maniacal obsessive crescendo flight through the microscope; a genuinely strange story. And—at last—Silverberg’s antho
New Dimensions One.
Now I see why everybody was raving about Harlan’s “Mouse Circus” and Le Guin’s “Vaster than Empires and More Slow.” That Harlan.