Dancharthos : Yucatan |
Another Yankui in Yucatan
Free Day at Chichen, Evening Church in Piste.
Awake early. Today is Sunday & the zone is free. La zona arqueologa. I am already waiting at the turnstyle at eight with the few other early birds -- less than a dozen. We eagerly pass through without paying when the smiling man gestures us okay, it's eight, let 'em in. I wonder what language he thinks in. Yucatec Maya or Mexican Spanish. His smile is universally biological. We are only one species here. I rush down the little cutoff trail to old Chichen, past THE OBSERVATORY and all those wonders I pondered yesterday, yes, yes, and down to the road behind the right hand corner of the Monjas. I know this rough dirt road leads to old old Chichen, that part that only real ruinatics know about. Not old Chichen, but old old old Chichen. The mask behind the splendor. |
Half an hour more of walking in this warm morning, past places where bulldozers have been digging for new construction and reconstruction -- INAH is preparing this zone for future visitors. I come to the Atlantids mound. It is being reconstructed. I go on further, arrive at the area of the complex of the whatever it's called. Sit in a new palapa no doubt built for visitors to rest. Explore the thorn jungle full of mounds. Then go beyond, seeking the ultimate, the little temple of the doors, or lintels. Meet a returning train of horseback riders who assure me, yes, just a little further on, you can't miss it, this is the way. My God but this city was huge. I walk through empty lands covered with scrubby trees but all of this was once contained within the sprawl of Chichen -- the metropolis of power a thousand years ago. The well-known zone a mile or two behind me, where most tourists walk in reconstructed wonder, that was only the center of it all. These bumps and nudges of the earth around me were all temples and plazas and apartment complexes. Wow. All the people who lived here are gone. All the buildings abandoned centuries ago, crumbled back into the sleeping ground. At last I find the reconstructed gem I have been looking for. The Temple of Lintels. Flies are buzzing in its silent doorways. A centipede bites my leg when I sit for a few moments. But it's worth it -- the little building is a jewel both in itself and as a work of reconstruction. Leaves me once again wondering what is real and what is memorex. Eventually I walk back to the regular zones which by now are sporting many more people. I haunt the outer, less crowded rim of the nucleus, around the edges of the Thousand Columns, the Mercado, etc. Sit down on an ancient bench where grandees once sat. Eat my bread and fruit. Water. Wander around some more, as much watching the tourists now as the buildings. People are so very funny. In the evening, back in the town of Piste, I go for a walk. Visit a beer cantina out to the west of town, a huge Maya house with one-eyed cantina waiter man. End up on the back porch talking with a son of the family owners who tells me he knows Quetzil, oh yes. Is pleased someone has read his book. "He read some of it to us, you know?" Yes, I know. Then I visit some yanks parked in an empty lot with their RVs in a circle. Finally to the Presbyterian church seven pm service. That feels good, singing and praying. I am so obviously a foreigner, tall and not brown, that the minister asks me to stand up and introduce myself. Ah, he says, all the way from the far frontier of California? I reflect how every protestant church always has its let's-meet-our-visitors moment. I've never seen that in Roman churches. Afterwards, standing outside chatting with these beautiful Maya, I mention that I'm moving on to Valladolid tomorrow. Ah, one says, you'll see their goddess there. Goddess? - I ask. They laugh, yes, you know, the virgin of Candelaria. |