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After three days at Palenque, he has spent another night on a bus. The SPEED ALARM kept going off -- whenever the bus broke over 95, a red light flashed on and loud buzzer sounded in the cabin. Ai ya, what else could you do to further TERRIFY the passengers in Mexico?
Hey, don't laugh, it works. The driver always slows down. Well, below 95, at least. (YES, that's kilometers, NOT MILES!)
*Heh heh heh*
The bus was full of Italians and English and Dutch and Deutsch and French and United Statesians. Probably only five or six real Mexicans. For the first two hours, until sleeeeeep finally came, there was an endless babel of multiple tongues echoing through the bus, underneath the insane soundtrack of another damn movie-video. SAY NO to Video-Piracy! Ha. Piratas. How appropriate, since they were going to pass through Campeche City, many times attacked and burned and looted and raped. An' this weren't no Disney-correct raping, neither. Nope.
Shall he use passe-compose or imparfait? Preterit or imperfect? While they were busy looting the city, the pirate captain stumbled on a strongbox hidden in the mayor's wall.
Long before that, the bus crossed the Usumacinta, his eyes glued to his window, staring out at the water in the night. Ah yes. The river I must explore one day, in boat upstream to fabled Yaxchilan, and onward, into Guatemala jungles....
But that shall be written in future tense, not present.
Another inspection station after the river. They left one state, entered another. He stares out at military guard, civilian inspectors, silent attendants. Cement and plaster buildings.
Then sleep. Campeche es obligatorio. He woke as they came near to that ancient city. Brief hills of stone broke through the flat earth. For a few moments, the Gulf of Mexico floated outside their left-hand windows, a sheet of dark water with a streak of shine from the waxing moon. She will be full in another two or three days, he thinks, wondering if he will sneak into Chichen Itza at midnight.
Then they entered the town. Dark buildings, gleaming street lamps. Ten minutes at the bus station. Danch walked outside, onto the street, looked up, looked down. All was quiet in that darkness before dawn, that melancholy madrugada that only overnight travelers know as home, bitter home, amargo hogar.
They they were on the road again. He slept again. No more movies this late. The road, smooth. Then they were passing through some small villages and he saw them. Maya houses. Na.
Na.
Stick walls, plastered in white, raised in an oval shape. A pointed, thatched roof, or, more recently, with the scarcity of thatch palms, a pressed carboard roof painted black with rubber to seal it against water. Or, at least, that's what he thought they might be....
Sleep again, dry mouthed, waking to grasp a drink of water from his plastic bottle, and nodding again, until....
Concrete buildings. Merida. The outskirts of Merida. A long grinding haul into the center of town, and then....
They are there.
In the last darkness before dawn, Dan'l is faced with a choice, a decision: shall I stay or shall I go? Remain in Merida, or head immediately over to Piste and Chichen Itza? He remembers what Kyle said day before yesterday, smoking, "Yeah, like there I was buying tomatoes and oranges from this little old Maya woman on the sidewalk outside the bus station, and across the street the whoures were walking up and down and calling to me -- You want phouquie phouquie??"
He has to spell it different so the machines won't censor it automatically. So much for freedum and arte, what?
Go figure. It's still too early for any of that, now. Sun ain't even risen yet. Daniel walks out onto the sidewalk, and smells the city. Fooo... gas and dirt. The street busses and trucks are already growling. He decides.
I'm getting out of here. Go to Piste. Get away from this BIG City. NOW. Maybe I'll see Nelson from Chile in Chichen, if I go today.
A second class bus crawls out from Merida at dawn, twisting through narrow streets, stopping here, stopping there, picking up passengers, escaping into the east and Juliet is the sun. A tiny girl with a huge head cold sits on her large mother Maya's lap next to Daniel. He wonders if he smells as weird to them as they do him. Endless villages, endless stops beside the road, endless green scrub in morning yellow sunlight, the little Maya houses covered in thatch and rubbered cardboard, the crumbling old walls of haciendas and tiny shops, restaurants, and the people come running for the bus....
I am here. I am here, surrounded by the Maya. The babel of bilingual tongues around me on this bus, and I don't mean English. No. Spanish and Maya. Mexican and Yucatec.
After a long, slow roll across the Yucatan, he knows they are getting close. The map in his hand tells him. Next town is his. Theirs. Piste.
And then they are there. Again the brush falls back from the highway, and little houses and shops gather beside the road. Dirt streets open to the left and to the right. The town center, they stop... "Momento," he calls, before the bus can drive away again, "quiero bajarme aqui...."
And now he is really here. The bus growls away from him, down the road into the east. Danchar staggers across the highway to the plaza, before the ancient little church, beside the small city hall. Sits under a tree.
Tries to remember the name of that man who wrote the book which brought him here....
I read his thesis, and then his book, and.... hell, what was his name? Quetzal? Quetzile? Something....
He wrote that the ruins of Chichen Itza are a machine to create Maya culture inside the heads of the tourists who visit. He wrote about this town, Piste, two kilometers from the ruins, and told of its struggle to benefit from the waves of visitors that wash through on the way to Chichen.
He wrote, and now I am here. I came here, to Piste, only half because of Chichen. The other half because of what's-his-name book. But now I must find a room.
Take out his Lonely Planet. Read the section on places to stay in Piste.
Yes. A couple of them down the highway toward Chichen. I will walk that way. Pick one of the cheap hotels. Not an expensive one.
"Are you looking for a room?" -- the little man asks in Spanish.
Daniel nods. It is nine o'clock, he thinks.
"Do you speak Spanish?"
"Yes, a little."
"Ah, good. My posada is right there, see -- Posada Maya?"
"Yes, it would please me to see a room."
"Of course. I would be happy to show you one, without any obligation on your part...."
Ah, so polite. I love this language.
He will rent the room. One large bed, hooks for a hammock, and a bathroom. One hundred pesos.
"There is hot water all day long...."
Daniel will discover, however, that the hot water is not hot. But hey, who needs hot water in this warm climate?
"What is your name?"
"Daniel."
"Ah, we say don Daniel, as a courtesy. And I am don Esteban."
"Mucho gusto." They shake hands in that delicate Maya handshake, using only the fingers, and gently touching them.
And so, to the ruins. Walk all the way there, down the two-kilometer sidewalk you read about in your books. Past the hulking hotels and restaurants of east Piste, Stardust, Carousel, Pyramide, and into the open countryside. Green and yellow brush reaches toward the highway. Two paths run beside the road: a cement sidewalk, and a rolling asphalt bike path. Walk on under the morning sun. I am going to Chichen Itza. I am going to Chichen Itza....
Past the road junction where the new highway splits left, to circle around the ruins. Down the old road, toward the zone. Across the parking lot, into the big entrance building. There, on the right, the vendors' market you read about in Quetzile's book. Now you are there. Now you are here. In the zone. The zone the figures so silently in so much political struggle between government, townspeople, bus companies, taxi drivers, guides, restaurant owners, artisans and vendors....
Up the steps. To the ticket window. Surprise: it costs more now. Fifty-one pesos. They must sell you two tickets, one old one for twenty, and a new one for thirty-one. Heh heh heh. Go on, past the bookstore, past the place where guides wait, past the auditorium, past the YOUR NAME IN MAYA LETTERS....
Give your ticket -- correction, give your tickets, both -- to the man at the turnstyle. Enter. "Pasale, senor...."
At last. At last you are here. Slowly walk up the wide gravel path. This is not a picture on paper. This is not a map of ruins in a book. No, these are my feet, your feet, walking on limestone gravel. Here, a sign warning us not to climb on blocked-off staircases. There, a large map of the zone -- yes, see, it includes little-known structures in the bush, far south of the main sections -- but this is only another map, another image. For me, at last, we are here....
I will join up with three English speakers. Paul and Wendy from England, and Stephan from Holland. They have four hours. It is a pleasure to talk and walk with them. Ah, my mother tongue. They ask me a thousand questions about what I have read in books all my life long, dreaming of coming here to see....
The ball court. We look at the huge walls. Clap our hands. Listen to the echo. Study the carvings of one player holding a head in his hand, while the other kneels, snakes of blood squirting up from his severed neck....
The sacred well, wide and deep, yawning before us, a vast cenote joining the underworld, below, to our world of life, and gazing up toward the heavens, above. Priests and rulers threw people in here, and if any of them came back, half-drowned, they were honored as prophets.
"A shamanistic thing, eh?" I say, in fake Canadian.
"How did they decide who to throw in?"
"Captives, slave, men, women, children, perhaps even volunteers."
Paul smiles, "When they had their ceremonies, mightn't there have been such a big crowd that people could have been pushed in by accident? Or on purpose? Say I saw some bloke who'd knicked a fiver off me last week, and I got just close enough to give him a shove with me elbow, and whoof -- over he goes! That'll teach you, you bugger!"
"Ha! Yes! Except that it'd be more likely he'd have stolen a feather, not a fiver, from you."
"But with just the same result, right?"
"People are people."
Stephen turns from the deep view, as, in silent agreement, we all begin to walk back up the path toward the pyramid. "What if no one came back from the water to give a prophecy?"
"Then it would be very bad." I smile, we walk. "In fact, there was one fellow, who, towards the end of the great days of Chichen Itza, took advantage of just such a situation."
"Oh?"
"Yes. Hunac Ceel was his name, or at least, so the old Maya writings say. He was here for a sacrifice, and when nobody came back, he threw himself into the water, and then came back. He was accepted as a prophet, and then he became a priest, and then he became a ruler."
"Clever fellow."
"Yes. But he evidently betrayed the people of Chichen. In the story, he gets the blame for the end of the city."
On the steps of the observatory, I hear a voice calling my name.
Nelson.
So then we are five. We go study las Monjas. And the Iglesia. And then Akab Dzib.
And when Paul, Mary, and Stephan must leave, Nelson and I walk around for a while. He climbs up the big pyramid. I take his picture from the bottom, with his camera. We wander over to the ball court. "So this is the famous Chichen," he says over and over again in Spanish.
I know exactly how he feels.
We are captives of the mind, travelers in time, imagineers running wild amidst the severed heads, drowned prophets, towering stone walls....
I am sorry when he, too, must leave. I walk him to the gates. He offers me his hand. I take it, then hug him, and briefly kiss his cheek. He returns the compliment. And then he is gone. I turn to go back up the path into the zone, but keep looking back over my shoulder, watching him disappear further and further into the entrance crowd, until he is gone....
Now, for the first time, I am alone in the ruins, surrounded by Saturday tourists. I wander in the shade of trees, along the south side of the pyramid, into the court of a thousand columns, under more trees toward the mercado, where I find a stone in the shade, and sit. A young woman comes into the place, admiring the patio of pillars. Smiles at me writing here.
"Hello...."
We begin to talk. Jennifer. She is with the green tortoise.
"Ah, then you know Adam?"
We talk for a while. I try to convince her to stay overnight, "It's free tomorrow, you know?"
"Oh? Well..." she looks around, "I would like to spend more time. Don't like feeling rushed, you know?"
I know very well. She goes on, leaving me wondering if I will see her tomorrow.
I sit, silent. Eat a piece of fruit. Drink some water. Smoke a Marlboro. Put the dead butt into my back pants pocket. I refuse to leave the ugly filters on the ground. Tobacco may be sacred, but not dead filters.
Eventually rise, the sun hanging lower. Explore the sweat bath, and beyond, into a set of buildings that looks very much like some ancient banquetting halls, wrapped around a courtyard where jugglers and acrobats might have performed while the great lords dined and drank....
Imagination....
There would be music of flute and wooden drum, and the smells of venison, turkey, tomato and chili, and the dark, heavy froth of cup after cup of chocolate brought to them, until, perhaps, at last, tobacco....
I smoke another cigarette. Save another butt.
"Todavia esta abierto?" I ask at the tiny door, at the foot of the great pyramid of Kukulkan.
"Si... until five... another fifteen minutes."
So I go into the hidden stairway, and drag myself up, up, up the narrow, cramped steps, crouching under the outer staircase, ducking my head all the way up, climbing the inner pyramid, the first pyramid that was buried under the outer Castillo.
At the top -- puff, puff, puff -- hurl myself down onto the stone portal and sit, waiting, praying, dying to catch my breath....
Puff... puff... puff... slower, now. Whew. An electric fan purrs, blowing a false breeze within this stifling chamber. Behind the locked metal grill, a chac-mool sits bent-kneed on its back, holding an offering plate on its belly, twisting its head outwards toward the world. Beyond, in the inner sanctum, the red jaguar throne stands empty.
Other tourists struggle up the steps. I move aside. They take the prize position directly in front of the metal grille, staring in briefly at the two figures of stone who could tell them so much....
"That's it?"
"Yep."
"We climbed up here for that?"
"You didn't have to come."
"But you did-- for this?! I hope you're happy!"
"I am."
"Shit, what a waste of energy."
"For you, maybe. Not me."
"Oh stuff it, I'm going."
One sees. The other does not. I listen.
"Come on, dude!" -- the blind voice calls from the steps.
The sighted one looks at me. We smile. He looks again at the chacmool and jaguar, then sighs, and turns, following his friend down....
Long minutes pass. I stand staring into the chamber. Dead stone sculptures sit in silence. The fan roars louder and louder. Two more voices and footstep pairs climb up behind me. I step aside. They whisper in English. A man and woman in their thirties. We begin to talk. The lights go off.
"Oh-oh... time to go."
We climb down together and walk to the ball court. Stand here, stand there. Clapping at the echo. Studying the chopped-off heads. Talking.
Barry and Linda. Eventually we will eat dinner together, at a little place by the road junction, just outside the zone. They insist on paying for my meal. And giving me a ride back into Piste.
Jesus. Some people can be so nice, sometimes....
As we get into their car, I stop... "Listen...."
Across the trees, in the darkness of night, you can hear an echoing voice. The noise of the sound and light show, muttering under the stars.
"Mmmm. You coming back tomorrow?"
"Of course. It's free."