by Mary Morris
The train pulled in about an hour later and everyone piled on. The first-class compartment was full, except for four seats that two very fat Mexicans were occupying. They were lying down, sprawled out. They were obviously friends of the conductor because he refused to look at their tickets or make them sit up. Catherine found a seat right away, but there was none for me. I felt completely on edge and out of sorts. I asked her what I should do and she said I should wait and eventually there would be one.
I went between cars and began to cry. I probably needed to do so, but I felt foolish and childish. After a while Catherine came to find me. She told me to pull myself together and she managed to talk the conductor—actually I think she may have bribed him—into getting me a seat. At about one in the morning we found two together. Catherine, as usual, fell asleep immediately, and slept the whole night through. I sat upright, staring out the window. I struggled to get comfortable but in the end gave up. I watched the Yucatán go past as the train sped through the dark.
The Yucatán-Petén peninsula is a single great limestone shelf that rises up into the blue waters of the Gulf of Mexico, which borders the peninsula on the west and north; its eastern shores, lined with reefs, face the Caribbean Sea. As we moved north to the Yucatán in daylight, the landscape altered, the world changed. We had left the highlands and the tropical lowlands. The world became flat, the jungle receded. We came out into the light.
The goal of our journey, its true direction, had been to travel from the jungle to the sea, and I wasn't sorry to leave the jungle behind. As we headed toward the coast, the heaviness of the landlocked lifted from me. We entered the coastal region and I seemed to wake from a bad dream. Everything felt more normal, and were it not for the houses and the people, it would have been almost banal. I saw giant thatched huts like beehives, some on stilts. Mayan women in perfectly white, clean, embroidered dresses stood in front of their houses with their children. It was a world of whiteness, of cleanliness, and of exotic beauty. In Campeche, Mayan women boarded the train and sold delicious sweet coffee and sponge cake.
We reached Mérida by midmorning and settled into a small, comfortable guest house. Mérida is an incredibly peaceful city of color, trade, and Mayan influence. The houses are painted in pale pastels. I learned that the average murder rate in this city of almost three hundred thousand is one a year, and somehow I found this comforting.
Catherine said she wanted to be alone and I left her for a while to stroll the markets of Mérida. I admired the colors of spices, curries and cumins, cayenne, green spices, gray and black flour. Everything had a remarkable smell. I could have been in the bazaars of Jerusalem or Marrakesh. City blocks of chickens and ducks and piglets. Throats being cut before my eyes. Mayan women are beautiful with their pale brown skin and high cheekbones, their jet-black hair and their characteristic noses, which hook down. The noses are a distinctive trait and it amazed me to see the same profiles I'd admired on the images carved in stone at the ruins of Palenque.
The women tried to sell me bracelets of silver, earrings of gold. Small idols, supposedly originals from Mayan ruins. These I knew better than to bargain for. What I was tempted to buy were the giant live beetles, bigger than silver dollars, decorated with paint and rhinestones and little leashes around their necks, being sold as pets. They were dressed as cowboys with small hats, boots on their legs, soldiers in camouflage, and women of the night, with long eyelashes and pink satiny skirts. One woman had these beetles covering her arms, crawling all over her. I had no idea what I'd do with a pet beetle in my travels, so I resisted and kept going.
I bought myself a hammock, some deerskin sandals, a guayabera (a man's short-sleeve shirt), and a beautiful Mayan blouse. I visited public buildings famous for their murals depicting the conquest, the period of colonial rule, and then the revolution and the casting off of the conquistadors. The Mayan people are clearly proud of their revolutionary zeal and the fact that, compared to their northern counterparts, who intermarried with the Spanish, their race has remained pure.
When I returned, Catherine was preparing to head for the ruins of Uxmal. The heat of the day was becoming unbearable and I couldn't stand the thought of boarding another bus and riding some sixty miles. But in a way it seemed we just couldn't stop. "Why don't we go tomorrow?" I suggested, but Catherine already had on her small pack. "You can stay here if you like," she said. But I knew I couldn't stay there alone. A momentum had entered our journey. Something had happened to us since Agua Azul and we were like women being chased.
IN A FEW DAYS WE WERE READY TO GO TO THE SEA, and we caught an early afternoon bus to Puerto Juárez, which we reached in time to miss the last ferry to Isla Mujeres. We would have to spend the night in Puerto Juárez, something we had no desire to do. Puerto Juárez only exists as a place to get the ferry to Isla Mujeres. For accommodations, we had two choices. We could stay in a fairly expensive hotel (about seven dollars a night, including dinner). Or for about a dollar we could rent a giant tin box with no ventilation, boiling hot inside, like an Indian sweatbox used for ritual cleansing.
Catherine opted for the tin box, as I knew she would, but I refused, reiterating my promise to sleep at the Isla Mujeres hammock place she had her heart set on. We stayed in a hotel across the way on what was becoming our usual sliding scale—I paid about two thirds. Years later when Catherine actually had money and suggested we do away with the sliding scale, I found I could not do it. It made me as uncomfortable as when one of my high school teachers suggested we call him by his first name.
At about eight-thirty in the morning we arrived at the ferry dock to check the schedule. The man who sold tickets sat beneath a sign that listed the departure hours: 9:00, 11:00, 13:00, 16:00. But when we asked him if the boats would be running on schedule, he said we'd just missed the morning ferry—it had sailed at eight—and we would have to wait until noon and, after that, until three o'clock.
Catherine began to lose her temper. "How is it possible that the morning ferry sailed when the sign says nine o'clock?"
"It left at eight." He shrugged.
"So why don't you change your sign to read 'eight'?"
I told her to sit down and have a cup of coffee while I wandered over to the dock, where I saw passengers boarding a ferry. I asked the captain which island he was going to and he said Isla Mujeres, in five minutes. He told me the ferries were shuttles and continuous all day long, which was not what the ticket seller or his sign said. I raced back, got Catherine, and a moment later we were on the ferry as it sailed to Isla Mujeres, dolphins jumping in our wake.
The hammock room at the Poc-Na had twelve hammocks—six slung high and six slung low—with virtually no protection from the outside world. The roof consisted of wooden slats that didn't quite come together, and I prayed it wouldn't rain. The sides of the building were wooden louvers, open to the outside, without screens. I thought it would be breezy at night, but during the heat of the day, as I stuffed my things into my locker, it must have been about 110 degrees. The room smelled as if small creatures had died in the walls.
Catherine wanted to go off on her own to write letters and read. She had been preoccupied and moody for days and I thought it best to let her be alone. I went to the telegraph office and cabled Alejandro to say I'd be back in three or four days. After sending the cable, I rented snorkel gear at the Poc-Na and was told there was good snorkeling up the beach. I walked about a mile until I came to a place where other snorkelers were preparing to dive.
I put on my gear and went in. A school of thousands of fish surrounded the mouth of a turquoise cave and I dove in and out among the fish. The current was not terribly strong and I could swim into the turquoise cave a little ways without fear of being dashed into the rocks. Then I swam back among the school of fish.
I swam across the reef, across oscillating sea grass reaching for me in that warm Caribbean sea. On the reef I swam with the tropical fish. Angelfish and gourami, blue jacks and a fish that looked like a Picasso plate. I swam farther
across the reef and suddenly found myself in shallow water over a bed of sea urchins, their poisonous spines extended. The water distorted the distance and I could not tell if the spines were inches or several feet away. Urchin spines, once they prick you, work their way into your skin. If you get spines in your foot, they can come out of your arm or your face. They can fester and emerge anywhere. I had to get off that reef and away from the urchins.
I turned and swam and found myself at the edge of the reef, overlooking the great expanse of ocean, a basin of darkness, of nothing at all. That dark void before me terrified me as nothing else has. I turned to the reef, to the urchins, to what was known, and floated over them, my eyes closed, back to shore.
That night I tried to sleep in the rope hammock, but my skin, burned and glistening, rubbed against the bristling ropes. Every inch of me stung as if I'd been whipped. The twelve hammocks swayed as if in the galley of a slave ship. Mosquito coils smoked in these rooms where no breeze blew off the sea, where the stifling heat was well over ninety degrees. I tried to get comfortable, finding a way to pull the sheet around me, the pillow under me, to keep my burning skin from rubbing against the rope.
A Norwegian girl shouted in her sleep in accented English, "Hurry up, come. Help." Someone down the row farted. A man above me dangled over the edge of his hammock, threatening to fall. His mouth opened and closed as he snored. Someone panted as if making love. How could anyone touch in this heat? A whimpering sound came from the direction of Catherine's hammock. I looked over. Tears ran down her cheeks. "Are you all right?" I whispered.
I don't know if she heard me, but she turned her face to the wall. I thought I should do something but also felt it was best to leave her alone. I spent the night watching the almost naked bodies, laminated with rope marks, toss and rise and rock.
In the morning Catherine sipped coffee, her duffel at her side. She looked drained, her eyes swollen as if she hadn't slept all night. "You're up early," I said, as she was normally a late sleeper.
"I'm going."
I took a sip of her coffee. "To the beach?"
"No, to California."
I felt as if we hadn't stopped for a moment, but now she was ready to leave. She said she wanted to get back. Her decision seemed abrupt and startled me, but I can't say I was displeased. I had grown weary of the tension between us and wanted to be on my own. I told her I would stay a few more days.
Before she left, we took a walk and she said, "Look, this isn't a very good time for me and I don't think it's a very good time for you. A lot of bad things are happening with me now. I've got this boyfriend in Seattle who's just moved all our stuff to Eugene and I don't think he's right for me. Roger should be back in San Francisco and he wants me to move down there with him. I don't know what I'm going to do," she went on. "I need some time alone. We're not getting along very well. I think we should just go our separate ways."
I agreed this was the best thing. Then I loaned her the seventy-five dollars she needed to get home and assumed I'd never hear from her again, though a check and a letter would be awaiting me upon my return.
I could no longer stand the heat in the hammock room and so that night I took the hammock I'd purchased in Merida and went to the beach. I had visited several of the beaches and there was one, not far from the Poc-Na, that was desolate and pristine.
It was a beautiful night as I made my way along a dark, sandy inlet. When I reached the shore, I found two palmettos that were just the right distance apart and I tied my hammock to them with a strong double hitch. I stretched out on my back and watched as a full moon came up. There was a slight breeze and the mosquitoes weren't too bad and I lay there listening to the waves of the warm, shallow water lap the shore and watching the bright orange moon come up over the sea.
On an impulse, I took off my clothes and folded them on the hammock. Standing naked, my feet in the cool sand, I walked to the sea. My skin felt cool as I stood alone, watching the shadow of my body flickering in the golden stream of moonlight stretching before me. I felt as if I could enter that stream and swim to America, to Africa, to the end of the world.
I walked into the water. The sand beneath my toes was silken, the water warm. I walked into the water as if into a baptismal. My feet disappeared into the blackness, my toes dug deeper into the sand. My feet were gone, my legs to the knees. At the edge of the Caribbean, on an isolated strip of beach, everything came back to me. Everything that had ever happened to me and to my body. It all came back there. And when I could stand the infusion of memory no longer, I dove in. I swam in the warm salt water, under the light of the moon. Water held me.
Women remember. Our bodies remember. Every part of us remembers everything that has ever happened. Every touch, every feel, everything is there in our skin, ready to be awakened, revived. I swam in the sea. Salt water cradled me, washing over all I had ever felt. I swam without fear in the line of moonlight radiating on the surface of the sea. The water entered me and I could not tell where my body stopped and the sea began. My body was gone, but all the remembering was there.
I stood up in the water and shook as a dog does. Then, heading toward my hammock, I spotted two figures stirring on the dunes. I caught only a glimpse of their movement at first, but then I saw them. With their heads barely tucked beneath the dune, they were watching me. "What are you doing?" I shouted. I wondered how long they had been watching me and suddenly I was afraid. I covered my breasts with my hands. They were moving along the edge of the dune and my clothing was far up the beach. The men began running in my direction and I turned and fled.
I ran back into the water and dove. It was shallow and I swam slowly under the surface. I thought how easy it would be for them to pluck me from the sea. I kept swimming up the shore, away from the place in the moonlight I had found, oblivious of the urchins, the barracuda, the night eaters, the reaching fingers of jellyfish. I swam into the darkest water of all and stayed there, until they were gone.
In the City
LYING MIDWAY BETWEEN THE PACIFIC OCEAN AND the Gulf of Mexico and in the center of an area of great fertility is a valley forty miles wide and sixty miles long. Rising seven thousand feet above sea level, this valley is flanked on the southwest by Mount Ajusco and on the southeast by two other volcanoes—Popocatépetl, named for a warrior, and Ixtaccíhuatl, named for the Aztec princess who loved him and refused to outlive him. With fertile fields, shallow lakes, plentiful water, a temperate climate, and a cornucopia of tropical fruits, this valley—formerly called Anáhuac—is the Valley of Mexico. It is where the great Aztec Empire was based; it is what Cortés sought to conquer.
Mexico City is a city with a secret, and to live here requires both imagination and will. It is like a person who seems incredibly disheveled but whose core, if you dig deep enough, is ordered, sure, and compelled by belief. What you see when you arrive in this smog-ridden, traffic-heavy city of eighteen million people—many of whom are unemployed peasants from the campos who haven't yet made it to the border—will make you crazy. But its secret is this: beneath its poverty, its filth, its damaged people, another reality exists.
Imagine that the avenue you are riding down, the traffic jam you are sitting in, is the site of what was once a remarkable courseway of roads and lakes and bridges and floating gardens and temples in a perfect, dry, blue valley. A city intended to be a valley for the gods, a paradise, a place of purity and holiness and simplicity, like Jerusalem or Delphi, Machu Picchu or Shangri-La.
Before becoming the first conquistador, Hernando Cortés lived in the Spanish colony of Cuba. He was extremely fond of cards, gambling, and women. But then, at the age of thirty-three, this ne'er-do-well Romeo somehow changed into a Christian soldier. In 15 rç, on August 15, which is the feast of the Assumption of the Mother of God, Cortés burned his boats so that there was no turning back and marched from the coast toward the mythical city that had been described to him by the natives. "México, México, " the natives had said, pointing north, and as Bernal D
íaz described it, they marched toward the city, having no idea what "México" was.
Weeks later, when Cortés, a white man in armor on a horse, rode into the city of Moctezuma, he was greeted with open arms, for he had fulfilled one of the prophecies of Aztec legend—a shimmering white creature, half man and half horse, would arrive, and he would be their god. Cortés was treated as deliverer and beloved guest for over a year.
When Cortés left the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán, he placed Pedro de Alvarado in command of the city. Alvarado was a handsome young captain reported to be of extremely erratic behavior. He might be laughing one moment, then throwing a violent fit the next. What happened while Cortés was away will never be known for certain. But according to Aztec account, when Cortés left, Alvarado gave the Aztec priests permission to prepare a traditional feast for their god, Huitzilopochtli, in which human hearts would be sacrificed. While the Aztecs were performing their rituals, Alvarado's men attacked. Spanish soldiers sprang into the plaza in front of the temple pyramids, butchered the unarmed worshipers, looted jewelry from the dead, and mutilated the corpses.
Cortés and his men returned, fighting their way back into the city. Alvarado claimed to have launched a pre-emptive attack, having intercepted a communiqué indicating that the Aztecs planned to attack the Spanish. But apparently Cortés did not believe Alvarado, for he declared his behavior that of a madman.
After the attack the Aztecs were not so docile, and war was inevitable. Eventually the Spaniards conquered. They razed Tenochtitlán and they hung Moctezuma, the great ruler who had greeted them with open arms. On the ruins of the great Aztec capital they constructed a new city; today it is called Mexico City.
