The Lacuna (42 page)

“He buys about everything on the Haywood news stand. You could go down there and make a list, if you like.”

“Do you happen to know if he’s ever studied up on Karl Marx?”

“Go and see if they sell Karl Marx on the Haywood newsstand.”

“Do you know where Mr. Shepherd stands on Abstract Art?”

“Well, if he wanted a good look, I expect he’d stand in front of it.”

“Very funny. Can you tell me the name of his cat?”

“Are his cats also under suspicion?”

“The neighbors said they hear him using an obscene word to call the cat.”

“I’ve never heard Mr. Shepherd use obscene language against any person. Certainly not his cats.”

“Well, they say that he does. They say he uses a very vulgar word to call the cat. They’re concerned for the youngsters. They say the boy comes over here.”

“My stars. What do they think he calls his cat?”

“I apologize, ma’am, it’s a very vulgar word. They said
Jism
.”

“The cat’s name is Chisme. It means ‘gossip’.”

November 1947

Notes for a novel about the end of empire.

When Cortés’s men first arrived here, they asked in Spanish, “What is the name of this place?” From the native Mayans they received the same answer every time: “Yucatán!” In their language that word means: “I do not understand you.”

The apartment is decently spacious, the two bedrooms and a good-sized table for working in the main room, with the window overlooking the street. The kitchen and bath are a jumble but there’s no need for cooking. It’s too easy to walk downstairs to the restaurant in the courtyard, morning or night. The previous residents must have shared this languor, because a long, white sprout of a bean was growing from the drain of the sink when we arrived. I offered to put it in a pot for the balcony and call it our garden.

Mrs. Brown did not smile at the joke. She submits to not one iota of domesticity here, except to make the coffee as she did at home. The inside of her room I have not seen; we simply chose doors at the beginning, and her lair remains a mystery. She emerges each morning in her gloves and Lilly Daché hat, as reliably as the little Mayan women in the market will be wearing their white embroidered blouses and lace-bottomed skirts. The gloves and Lilly Daché are Mrs. Brown’s native costume.

A typewriter is installed on the writing table, delivered yesterday, a sure sign of progress. A car and driver for touring the ancient sites may soon surface as well. Mrs. Brown has gamely got her sea legs on, already going to the shops on her own to get small necessities. Each day she manages more of the arrangements, soldiering through the obstacles of a language she cannot speak. My advice (which she did not heed): in answer to any question, say “Yucatán!”
I do not understand
.

A reasonable title for the novel:
The Name of This Place
.

But for now, the name of this place is mud. Or so Mrs. Brown must think, when forced to take her life in her white-gloved hands. She grips the side-arm of the rumble seat with one, the other squashing her hat to her head, as we pummel down the peninsula over shocking roads, navigated by our fearless driver Jesús. After all the time we spent searching for this combination, vehicle and driver both together in one place, I dare not ask whether he is old enough for the job. He is just a boy, despite the authority of his Mayan nose and magnificent profile. It’s a shock to realize that, not his youth really but my age, that he must regard me as a man, perhaps his mother’s age more or less, not worth any real study. A series of directions to follow, and a wage at the end of the journey.

And yet he’s seen something of life already, clearly. His shirt is weathered as thin as a newspaper, and the lower part of one ear is missing. It took a while to notice that. It’s his left, away from the passengers’ side. He calmly asserted, when asked, that it was bitten off by a jaguar. So he has the imagination, if not the experience, for labor in the service of a novelist. He can lecture on any subject without hesitation. Today en route to Chichén Itzá it was the military history of his people, the Maya: “More courageous than ten armies of Federales,” he shouted above the banging axles and backfiring engine of the ramshackle Ford. Or mostly Ford; one door and the front fenders
are of a different parentage. Across the land of the mestizo we ride, in a mixed-caste automobile.

“At this place, Valladolid,” Jesús announced above the racket, “we view the scene of the last Mayan rebellion. One hundred years ago the Yucateca took our whole peninsula back from the ladinos. We declared independence from Mexico like your Tejas of North America, and nearly made it the nation of the Maya again.” Except for Mérida, he confessed, where the Federales lodged throughout the rebellion. But fate was decided at Valladolid. A final victory over the Mexican army was at hand, but just as the Mayan warriors were poised to strike, an old shaman came with urgent news: the ancient calendar said it was time to return to their villages to plant corn. They put down their weapons and went home.

“The Gods speak to my people in their hearts,” says the boy called Jesús, beating his breast with one fist as he drives, head tilted back in sloe-eyed tranquillity even as the tires hit another crater in the road and his whole body levitates. The Mayans obeyed the ancient imperatives of survival. They walked away from power, letting the federal army take back the peninsula and return it to Mexican rule.

Somewhere during the lecture he lost his way on the dirt track through jungle, and we found ourselves also called back to his home village, conveniently at lunchtime, as it happened. We were near enough to Chichén Itzá, the temples of one of its outlying towns towered above the treetops, a monument to ancient prosperity throwing its shadow across thatched roofs and the naked children who gathered to see what might emerge from this calamitous machine. We could as well have arrived by flying saucer.

The mother of Jesús, similarly sloe-eyed, bade us sit on a log while she dipped beans from a cauldron that must bubble eternally on the fire outside her hut. Her name: Maria, naturally. Her lath house, like every one in the village, had a tall, peaked roof of thatch, open at each gable end for ventilation. Inside the open doorway a knot of motionless brown limbs, presumably sleeping children, weighted a
hammock into a deep V shape, the inverse of the roofline. At the side of the house a scrambled garden grew, but the front was bare dirt, furnished only with the logs on which we perched. Mrs. Brown steadied the tin plate on her knee with a gloved hand, tweed skirt pulled around her knees, eyebrows sailing high, calf leather brogues set carefully together in the dust. Flowering riotously around her were a hundred or more orchids, planted in rusted lard tins. White, pink, yellow, the paired petals hung like butterflies above roots and leaves.

My beauties
, Maria called them, leaning forward to brush a speck of ash from her son’s worn shirt, then gently boxing his good ear. “The only importance is beauty.”

The light here at the window is good, and the view is a satisfying distraction. The street stays busy at all hours, this apartment is only a short walk from the central plaza, the markets and old stone cathedral. It must be the oldest part of Mérida, judging by its charm and conspicuous fortifications.

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 or
dering 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 Jesús today found the right track to Chichén Itzá. 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 Teotihuacán, 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, Jesús 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 Yucatán 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.
Chi-chen
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.

Jesús 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.”