The Lacuna
Page 106
“That is exactly right. For us to visit when we have a mind, or just not go at all. Let the weeds grow up.”
“Here in Mexico there’s a holiday just for being with your dead. You go where your family is buried and have a great party, right on the grave.”
“You have to? Plumb on top of the graves?” Wide-eyed, she looked like the girl she must have been before she was Mrs. Brown.
“People love it, as much as they love a wedding. Really it is a kind of wedding, to the people in your past. You take a vow they’re all still with you. You cook a feast and bring enough food for the dead people too.”
“Well, sir, that would not happen in Buncombe County. Probably the police would arrest you.”
“You might be right.”
She took her glass of limeade and sipped at the straw while holding eye contact. It was unsettling. The puppeteer had moved into her line of view, and her eyes left me to follow that skeleton. When she had drained her glass, she said, “You understand things like that, a wedding in the graveyard. You are from another country.”
“But I want to be brand-new too. The land of weightless people and fast automobiles suits me fine. I made myself a writer there.”
“You could have stayed here and done the same.”
“I don’t think so. I’ve thought about it. I had ghosts to leave behind. Mexican writers struggle with their ghosts, I think. In general. Maybe it’s easier to say what you want in America, without those ancestral compromises weighing you down like stones.”
“Easier to look down upon others, too.”
“Do you mean to say I do that?”
“Mr. Shepherd, you do not. But some do. They look around and say, ‘This here is good, and that is evil,’ and it’s decided. We are America, so that over there must be something else altogether.”
Mrs. Brown will never cease to amaze. “That’s very insightful. You think that comes of cutting our anchor to the past?”
“I do. Because if you had to go sit on a grave and think hard about it, you couldn’t just say ‘This is America.’ Some Indian would cross your mind, some fellow that shot his arrow on that very spot. Or the man that shot the Indian, or whipped his slaves or hung up some tart woman for a witch. You’d couldn’t just say it’s all fine and dandy.”
“Maybe readers need some of that, then. Connections to the past.”
“Fairly warned is fair afeared,” she said.
“I thought it was ‘forearmed.’ Forewarned is forearmed.”
She glanced at her forearms, and never did reply.
Today was the village of Hoctún, a town the color of wheat, with a pyramid sitting at its center. It brought to mind the village with the giant stone head in the square, and Mother’s shaman. Every turn in the road here runs into memory. Isla Mujeres was almost unbearable, from the ferry on. Mrs. Brown sees all, and it puts her on a fret, as she would say. I imagine her pressed against the fret-board of God’s guitar, held against the slender silver bar until she wails her assigned note. She says she came here to do my worrying for me. She does much more: typing up drafted scenes, only to see me throw them away. Arranging things. She’s befriended someone English-speaking at the tourist bureau, a journalist who helps her negotiate miracles. Mexico’s bureaucracies do not daunt Mrs. Brown. She has worked for the United States Army.
I told her I want to study village life now, up close. We’ve seen enough of pyramids, I need goats and cookfires. To peer inside a hut and examine that V-shaped vault, after seeing the same architecture in stone temples. Her inspired idea: to return to the village of Maria, mother of Jesús.
The eternal cauldron of beans still bubbled. Maria was animated while serving us lunch, telling about the lumbermen who passed through earlier this morning. They are clearing the forests all around, dragging out the felled giants on the same dirt track that brought us in. All she can do is stand in the road and halt each truck, insisting they let her inspect the fallen timber and pluck the living orchids from its top branches. That explains the flowers growing from tins in the yard: her rescued orphans. These orchids lived all their lives high up in the bright air, unseen by human eyes, until the firmament under their roots suddenly tumbled. It’s a precarious place, up there with the howlers. Everyone wants the tallest tree to fall.
But Maria of the Orchids seemed to have no such fears, at home in the forest primeval. “The important thing is beauty,” she said once more, reaching a small brown hand toward the treetops. “Even death grants us beauty.”
Another visit to Chichén Itzá tomorrow, the last trip. Then we pack it all in. We will need to take the train for Mexico City on Thursday or Friday if we’re to be there from Christmas until the new year, as Frida insists. Candelaria is meeting us at the station. Candelaria at the wheel of an automobile seems as probable as Jesus running a guided tour. Or Mrs. Brown in hat and gloves sitting beside the flagrant Frida, drinking tea on a bench painted with lighting bolts. Likely, all these things will come to pass.
Chichén Itzá looked completely different today, probably because of everything else we’ve seen since the first visit. “Elegant and remote,” I jotted in my notes that time, “reluctant to reveal its human history.” But today a story came up in relief from every surface, urgent and visible. Every stone was carved with some image: the snarling jaguar, the feathered serpent, a long frieze of swimming goldfish. Emperors stood life-size on stone steles jutting up from the plaza like giant teeth. The Maya carved human figures only in profile: the almond eye, the flattened forehead sloping toward the exquisite arch of nose. They needn’t have worried about that profile being forgotten, it’s the spitting image of Jesús and ten thousand others, automobile vandals included. Better to carve something else in stone, if you mean to be remembered: “I was cruel to my best friend and got away with it. My favorite meal was squid in ink sauce. My mother never quite liked me as I was.”
Traces of paint clung to the surfaces too: red, green, violet. In their time, all these buildings were brightly painted. What a shock to realize that, and how foolish to have been tricked earlier by the serenity of white limestone. Like looking at a skeleton and saying, “How quiet this man was, and how thin.” Today Chichén Itzá declared the truth of what it was: garish. Loud and bright, full of piss and jasmine, and why not? It was Mexico. Or rather, Mexico is still what this once was.
“Here in Mexico there’s a holiday just for being with your dead. You go where your family is buried and have a great party, right on the grave.”
“You have to? Plumb on top of the graves?” Wide-eyed, she looked like the girl she must have been before she was Mrs. Brown.
“People love it, as much as they love a wedding. Really it is a kind of wedding, to the people in your past. You take a vow they’re all still with you. You cook a feast and bring enough food for the dead people too.”
“Well, sir, that would not happen in Buncombe County. Probably the police would arrest you.”
“You might be right.”
She took her glass of limeade and sipped at the straw while holding eye contact. It was unsettling. The puppeteer had moved into her line of view, and her eyes left me to follow that skeleton. When she had drained her glass, she said, “You understand things like that, a wedding in the graveyard. You are from another country.”
“But I want to be brand-new too. The land of weightless people and fast automobiles suits me fine. I made myself a writer there.”
“You could have stayed here and done the same.”
“I don’t think so. I’ve thought about it. I had ghosts to leave behind. Mexican writers struggle with their ghosts, I think. In general. Maybe it’s easier to say what you want in America, without those ancestral compromises weighing you down like stones.”
“Easier to look down upon others, too.”
“Do you mean to say I do that?”
“Mr. Shepherd, you do not. But some do. They look around and say, ‘This here is good, and that is evil,’ and it’s decided. We are America, so that over there must be something else altogether.”
Mrs. Brown will never cease to amaze. “That’s very insightful. You think that comes of cutting our anchor to the past?”
“I do. Because if you had to go sit on a grave and think hard about it, you couldn’t just say ‘This is America.’ Some Indian would cross your mind, some fellow that shot his arrow on that very spot. Or the man that shot the Indian, or whipped his slaves or hung up some tart woman for a witch. You’d couldn’t just say it’s all fine and dandy.”
“Maybe readers need some of that, then. Connections to the past.”
“Fairly warned is fair afeared,” she said.
“I thought it was ‘forearmed.’ Forewarned is forearmed.”
She glanced at her forearms, and never did reply.
Today was the village of Hoctún, a town the color of wheat, with a pyramid sitting at its center. It brought to mind the village with the giant stone head in the square, and Mother’s shaman. Every turn in the road here runs into memory. Isla Mujeres was almost unbearable, from the ferry on. Mrs. Brown sees all, and it puts her on a fret, as she would say. I imagine her pressed against the fret-board of God’s guitar, held against the slender silver bar until she wails her assigned note. She says she came here to do my worrying for me. She does much more: typing up drafted scenes, only to see me throw them away. Arranging things. She’s befriended someone English-speaking at the tourist bureau, a journalist who helps her negotiate miracles. Mexico’s bureaucracies do not daunt Mrs. Brown. She has worked for the United States Army.
I told her I want to study village life now, up close. We’ve seen enough of pyramids, I need goats and cookfires. To peer inside a hut and examine that V-shaped vault, after seeing the same architecture in stone temples. Her inspired idea: to return to the village of Maria, mother of Jesús.
The eternal cauldron of beans still bubbled. Maria was animated while serving us lunch, telling about the lumbermen who passed through earlier this morning. They are clearing the forests all around, dragging out the felled giants on the same dirt track that brought us in. All she can do is stand in the road and halt each truck, insisting they let her inspect the fallen timber and pluck the living orchids from its top branches. That explains the flowers growing from tins in the yard: her rescued orphans. These orchids lived all their lives high up in the bright air, unseen by human eyes, until the firmament under their roots suddenly tumbled. It’s a precarious place, up there with the howlers. Everyone wants the tallest tree to fall.
But Maria of the Orchids seemed to have no such fears, at home in the forest primeval. “The important thing is beauty,” she said once more, reaching a small brown hand toward the treetops. “Even death grants us beauty.”
Another visit to Chichén Itzá tomorrow, the last trip. Then we pack it all in. We will need to take the train for Mexico City on Thursday or Friday if we’re to be there from Christmas until the new year, as Frida insists. Candelaria is meeting us at the station. Candelaria at the wheel of an automobile seems as probable as Jesus running a guided tour. Or Mrs. Brown in hat and gloves sitting beside the flagrant Frida, drinking tea on a bench painted with lighting bolts. Likely, all these things will come to pass.
Chichén Itzá looked completely different today, probably because of everything else we’ve seen since the first visit. “Elegant and remote,” I jotted in my notes that time, “reluctant to reveal its human history.” But today a story came up in relief from every surface, urgent and visible. Every stone was carved with some image: the snarling jaguar, the feathered serpent, a long frieze of swimming goldfish. Emperors stood life-size on stone steles jutting up from the plaza like giant teeth. The Maya carved human figures only in profile: the almond eye, the flattened forehead sloping toward the exquisite arch of nose. They needn’t have worried about that profile being forgotten, it’s the spitting image of Jesús and ten thousand others, automobile vandals included. Better to carve something else in stone, if you mean to be remembered: “I was cruel to my best friend and got away with it. My favorite meal was squid in ink sauce. My mother never quite liked me as I was.”
Traces of paint clung to the surfaces too: red, green, violet. In their time, all these buildings were brightly painted. What a shock to realize that, and how foolish to have been tricked earlier by the serenity of white limestone. Like looking at a skeleton and saying, “How quiet this man was, and how thin.” Today Chichén Itzá declared the truth of what it was: garish. Loud and bright, full of piss and jasmine, and why not? It was Mexico. Or rather, Mexico is still what this once was.
