Dancharthos : Yucatan

Another Yankui in Yucatan

4 February/Febrero 1999
Truckload of Chickens and Plaza thoughts.
Evening FIESTA!

There's a truck full of young chickens parked on the street in front of the Municipal Palace. David has driven them from the border to give to country people around here. He drives all over Mexico as his work. The birds are a present from farmers of the United States. I sit on a bench and talk to him for almost two hours. He's waiting for his contact to show up before he can leave. People walk by and peer into the back of the truck full of peep peep cluck cluck juvenile birds babel babel babel hundreds of them babel peep cluck future egglayers and roast chicken dinners.

He tells me where there're some really good whorehouses in Merida but I'm too chicken myself to ever spend my money there God only knows what I'd catch and hope he hasn't for his sake. For his wife's sake.

Feeling a little better. Glad I stayed in town to rest a few days. Tomorrow I am dragging myself back to Chichen Itza not Chicken Eatsa for the day. Free day. I keep hearing that there's another place nearby here, called Ek Balam, which is very good, little known and only recently excavated and rebuilt by the government. Supposedly well worth visiting by a ruins nut like me. But no busses run there. Oh Daniel where's your sense of adventure? Answer: gone with this damn cold.

Ran into Jacqueline again, she's tried to get out there, but only got as close as the taxis running north toward Tizimin and then came back after seeing that town. Somewhere along the highway there you have to leave the main road and then go some twenty miles along dirt road to get to Ek Balam.... She almost started walking it but then said to the driver no, she'll just go on and miss it.

*Sigh* next trip I guess, we both say, sitting in the curved seats of the plaza garden. (NO! GO NOW!!!!)

Damn this cold. But at least I'm resting it. Hope I get over the worst congestion before I must go back over the mountains to Mexico city, thousands of feet up, next week....

Two middle class rich ladies come walking their doggies through the plaza jardin of Valladolid. Start to talk with us once they understand we speak Spanish. Oh yes, they just love Valladolid. They live in Cancun, husbands work managing hotels or something, and these two ladies like to come to this charming old city just to walk their dogs. Ah, I sigh, some people have the good life, eh? Jacqueline nods. Oh, by the way, says one of the ladies, you should visit the cenote of...(name)... it is such a spiritual, psychic place, a place where you can cleanse and heal your soul....

Ah, Mexico. I do love you.

Ah, Yucatan. I do love you.

This evening Jacqueline and I will walk up to the church in the north part of town -- this is fiction I went by myself -- what a delightful small city this is, you can walk anywhere -- to visit the shrine of the goddess -- I mean the Virgin of Candelaria. Tonight she is celebrating her final evening of the fiesta. Tonight she goes back to heaven. This is not fiction but I wonder how they're going to pull that off. Jacqueline laughs, "We'll just have to wait and see, won't we my yank friend?"

We buy a couple candles. "Que es la costumbre? -- what is the custom?" we ask. "You take you candle in, present it to the virgin, then go out in the church courtyard and light it, leaving it at one of the altars out there."

We do that. Visit the image. Mothers are in there, carressing the virgin statue and rubbing their children under the watchfull eye of a guardian nun.

Afterwards there's a big mass, amplified over loudspeakers to the outdoor plaza full of people. Thousands. We all wave white balloons as the virgin makes her ascent to heaven -- six men carry her up a big outdoor staircase to the church attic. Ah ha, that's what it means to go up. La subida de la virgen. Wow. Everyone is very happy and excited. Fireworks rocket up into the sky.

This is how Spain conquered the new world, I whisper to Jacqueline. Conquered in the heart, in the spirit, in the religion of these people. Not to mention the language. Except that here in Yucatan the Maya tongue is still perfectly strong. And the stone colonial buildings at the center of town are surrounded by blocks and blocks of traditional Maya houses with their thatched pointed roofs -- although a few now sport corrugated metal rooves instead of thatch.