There was no doubt why Julian had made Ayame the safekeeper of this talisman. Yes, I thought to myself, smiling.
The past twenty-four hours had been a roller coaster for me. The day had started badly in Paris—or at least I had started badly. Whining, sulking, fussing. I had continued on that track right through my arrival in Osaka, my train ride to Kyoto. But all the complaining had not made me feel one bit better. Taking out my frustrations on others hadn’t eased my burden one bit. Instead, it was the kindness of others that had helped me. Their decency and gentleness had softened me. And somehow, that had made me easier on myself as well. Julian had written some wise words. But Ayame—Ayame seemed to be living them.
CHAPTER SIX
THE “ITINERARY” THAT JULIAN had sent me didn’t cover the full trip, and it gave no indication of when my travels would end. Instead, it simply listed the next two destinations. As I looked at the dates, I inhaled sharply. Julian didn’t seem to be moving me from safekeeper to safekeeper with particular speed.
“Don’t worry,” said Ayame gently. “To go too quickly on a journey like this would not be good for your health. You need to be able to get a little sleep, a little exercise at each place you stop. I am sure that Julian has arranged the trip like this thinking of your needs, not his.”
Once again, Ayame was making me look at things differently. She seemed to move through the world with great gentleness. It was how she responded and how she expected other people to respond—to everyone and everything. She was probably right. Julian was thinking of me. But I wasn’t thinking of him. I was impatient to get back because of my own needs. I wasn’t worrying about why, or how urgently, he needed these talismans. If Julian felt he could take the time that this itinerary suggested, then I could, too.
THE NEXT DAY Ayame took me to the Kiyomizu Shrine and the Ryoanji Temple, and in the evening we strolled through the Gion district, where geishas still step through the streets on their way to appointments. By the time I crawled into my futon that night, I was feeling a great deal of gratitude to Julian and his itinerary. Tomorrow I would be heading to Oxkutzcab, Mexico, to meet a fellow named Chava Ucan. I had been to Mexico once before—to Acapulco with Annisha—but never to Mérida, where I would be landing, or anywhere else on the Yucatán Peninsula. It occurred to me that this would be a hot time of year to visit Mexico.
“See?” Ayame said the following morning, as she shook my hand in Osaka’s Itami airport. “No dagger!” Then we bowed to each other. When Ayame straightened up, a look of concern creased her face.
“Jonathan,” she said. “Please try to remember Julian’s note. The way you relate to others reveals the way you relate to yourself. You are a good man, but I think you do not always treat yourself that way.”
CHAVA UCAN’S WIFE, Sikina, had said she would let me sleep for as long as I could. I wasn’t hopeful, but now here I was, opening my eyes to the Mexican sun blaring full force through the bedroom window, the heat sitting on my chest so heavily that I knew morning was long gone.
In our two days together, I hadn’t told Ayame much about my life. But she seemed to intuit many things. Now, lying on my bed in Chava’s house, the heat rising from the terra cotta floor and radiating from the walls, I was thinking about the way I had treated others in my life. I wasn’t proud of my outburst at the Osaka airport. Or about the times I had been short-tempered with a bank teller or a grocery store clerk. And then there were my impatient moments with Adam, and my angry words with Annisha. They were much more frequent than my lack of civility to strangers. Why is it that often we allow ourselves to treat family in ways we wouldn’t treat friends—or even those we don’t know? Probably because we assume they will forgive us. But that’s no excuse. I was making resolutions to change the way I behaved to everyone in my life. But there were some things that I just wouldn’t be able to make up for. Like the way I treated Juan.
THE FIRST SUGGESTION I got that things might not be going well for Juan at work was the lunch meeting I had with David and his boss, Sven, shortly after I had left the lab.
Sven asked me what I thought of my former supervisor. I started to praise his leadership, when Sven held up his hand.
“No, no, not as a boss. I know he’s a nice guy. I mean his vision. His technical knowledge. Is he on his game? Is he cutting edge? Are we being as progressive, as aggressive, in development as we could be?”
It was an awkward conversation. Every time I said something positive about Juan, David and Sven frowned, as if I’d given the wrong answer. Eventually I just stopped speaking.
“Listen,” said David, “I’m not saying Juan isn’t a bright guy. And I’m sure that at one point he was a leader in his field. But I’m just thinking that there are younger minds out there, a whole new generation of engineers and hardware designers who may be thinking outside the box. Who may have a fresh approach.”
Younger, right. I suspected that what David was really saying was “cheaper.” David was always looking for a way to make the bottom line look a little better.
When the waitress came by to clear the table, my plate was still full. And I was feeling queasy. I knew that Juan had the most brilliant, innovative engineering mind I had ever encountered. What’s more, he was a genius at getting his people to look at things in new ways, to be creative both in problem-solving and in technical advances. But Sven and David were having none of that. They seemed to have made up their minds, and everything I said to contradict them was taking me down a notch in their estimation. It was clear that if I wanted to secure my own career, I would have to back off protecting Juan’s. Now, thousands of miles away from my office, I could see that in one moment at lunch, I had made a cowardly decision which ended up costing both of us in the gravest way possible.
I HAD WOKEN UP in Mexico thinking of that lunch scene. The truth was, however, that it had first entered my mind when I read the “kindness” note—and I was pushing it out of my thoughts during the whole of my long trip from Osaka to Mérida. The journey had taken more than twenty-four hours, with connections in Tokyo, Los Angeles and Mexico City. During all of that, I had tried to embrace Ayame’s peacefulness and ease. And I’d forced myself to stop worrying about time. I napped here and there, and gave myself over to jet lag and disorientation. I looked at my phone as little as possible. Landing in Mérida at the close of what was, according to the calendar, the same day that I had left Japan, I was overcome with a peculiar sense of nonchalance. So when a middle-aged woman reached for my elbow as I exited the airport doors, I didn’t start.
Sikina Ucan apologized for her husband’s absence.
“He has to wake up very early tomorrow to get to work. I told him I would get you. We both thought that you would need to sleep for a while tomorrow morning, so Chava will get a ride to the site from a friend, and then I will bring you there in the afternoon to say hello.”
On the long, dark ride from Mérida to Oxkutzcab, Sikina told me that Chava was a field technician working with a team that was excavating Mayan ruins outside of Oxkutzcab.
“He is very excited about giving you a tour of the archaeological dig and telling you a bit about his work. Sikina talked a little more about Chava, herself and her children. She told me that she and Chava had met Julian several years ago when he was touring through the Yucatán, visiting various Mayan ruins and studying the culture.
“What a wonderful man,” Sikina said, tucking a piece of her long dark hair behind her ear. “So wise … and so fun.” But she said nothing about the talisman or the reason for my visit.
I was beginning to appreciate that Julian had chosen each safekeeper carefully. Each seemed to have a certain relationship with the talisman and its wisdom. According to Sikina, Chava wanted to share some of his life with me. And while I might have asked for the talisman right away, I decided to see if I could figure out what the note would say, what lesson I might learn from Chava. By the time we got to Oxkutzcab, it was around one in the morning. Sikina pulled the truck up in fron
t of a small pale pink stuccoed house. Inside she pointed to a door to one side of the kitchen-living area.
The bedroom was tiny, but neat. I dropped my luggage onto the floor and collapsed on the bed. I was asleep before I even got my clothes off.
IT WAS PROBABLY THE HEAT that woke me up, but it was the smell of something rich and savory that drew me out of the bedroom and into the kitchen.
“Oh, good,” said Sikina, wiping her hands on her apron. “I was hoping that lunch might get you up. We should head out soon.”
Sikina motioned for me to sit down at the small table tucked into a corner of her cramped kitchen. The table was painted bright yellow, and each of the four chairs was a different color. Annisha would love this, I thought. I pulled the turquoise chair out and sat down, as Sikina placed a steaming plate in front of me.
“Codzitos,” she said. “Little tacos, with meat and tomato sauce. And guava juice,” she added, pointing to a tall blue glass in front of me.
The food was delicious, and I was regretting how much I had put away as I climbed into Sikina’s truck an hour later. I had washed up and changed my clothes, but I was still feeling distressingly full.
The truck lurched forward as Sikina put it into gear. She looked over at my ashen face and smiled.
“Okay,” she said. “I will give you a short tour of our town so your stomach can rest before we get out on the highway.”
Sikina drove slowly through the streets of Oxkutzcab. We moved through neighborhoods of low square houses, some white-washed, others painted in fanciful shades, and still others built of unadorned cement blocks. The flat roofs were of tin or tile, but there were also a number of small brightly painted oval-shaped houses with peaked thatched roofs.
“That is a traditional Mayan hut,” said Sikina, pointing to one.
The residential streets had a wonderfully irregular look to them. Low stone or concrete walls bordered front yards that were sometimes dry, empty-looking spaces—sometimes overgrown riots of palm trees, hibiscus, and all sorts of plants and bushes I didn’t recognize. Fancy cast-iron railings and gates alternated with lines of laundry flapping in the breeze. In the village center were several churches, small restaurants and hotels, and other buildings painted in bright shades of terra cotta or blue or yellow. The streets were dusty and relatively quiet: few cars, but a number of bikes, motorcycles, pedestrians and food carts making their way slowly through the heat.
As we drove along the narrow asphalt road, the houses and buildings gave way to more and more trees and shrubs until the town was behind us and low rolling hills stretched across the horizon. “Puuc Hills,” Sikina told me. “They are full of Mayan ruins, big and small. Tomorrow Chava wants to take you to Uxmal. That was once a city of more than 20,000. But today we go to a smaller, more forgotten place.”
Half an hour after we had set off, we turned down a rough dirt road that seemed to follow a small valley. We bounced down it for some way, the thick forest rising up on either side of us until we passed under a wooden arch with a name carved across it. Eventually we pulled up in an open space. There were many people buzzing about, including what appeared to be a school group heading into a low, modern-looking building. I could see an assortment of thatched Mayan huts, but even they looked relatively new and very much in use. This is not what I had expected from an archaeological site.
“Oh, there is a lot more going on here,” said Sikina when I commented. “This is also a nature preserve and a research facility. It is over four thousand acres.”
We had not been out of the truck for more than a few minutes when a short, squarish man in a ball cap, shorts and heavy boots came loping toward us.
“Hola, Jonathan!” he said.
I smiled and extended my hand. Chava pumped it vigorously.
“Bix a beel? How are you?”
You only had to talk with Chava for a minute to realize that his passion was history. He did ask about my trip, about Julian, about whether Sikina had fed me sufficiently. But his voice did not become fully alive until he started to talk about the place where he was working. Sikina stayed back at one of the offices, visiting friends who worked at the nature preserve. As Chava led me past the open area and through the forested hillside, he explained the current focus of the excavations at this location. I wondered what, if anything, this had to do with the talisman, and whether I really needed a tour, but I was beginning to see that this trip was going to have a rhythm of its own that I could do very little to change.
“Archaeologists have worked here off and on for decades,” Chava told me as we pushed our way through the foliage, “but it’s only in past few years or so that we’ve begun to realize that this site may offer us some new clues about the collapse of the Mayan Empire.”
It was as if my father had been reborn in this middle-aged Mayan archaeologist. I found myself smiling as Chava continued his running commentary.
The people speaking the Mayan language had, he said, appeared in the Yucatán well over four thousand years ago. For the next three thousand years, sophisticated, very densely populated cities sprang up throughout the Mayan world. At the height of the Mayan period, most of the land between these city-states was covered with farms and villages. And all the major centers were connected with white limestone roads.
The city-states not only operated under elaborate political systems but were marvels of architecture as well: stepped pyramids and temples, multiple-story dwellings, ornate courtyards and public squares. The Maya, Chava said, also created breathtaking art works and developed one of the world’s earliest writing systems. And their sophisticated math skills allowed them to make great advances in astronomy, which led to perhaps their most famous achievement: the Mayan calendar. Chava’s thoughts were spilling out like a finely crafted lecture, but they also seemed threaded with personal pride, as if he were talking about people he knew and loved.
But then somewhere between 900 and 1000 AD, Chava explained, six hundred years before the arrival of the Spanish, the civilization began to crumble. Over the next two hundred years or so, he told me, a sadness edging his words, 90 percent of the population disappeared, the cities were abandoned, and the greatness of the Mayan world became a memory. It took only a century or two for the forests to take over the cities, for green growth to mask the monuments and roadways, for the remaining population to scatter across the countryside, clinging to tiny villages and subsistence agriculture. These survivors, Chava noted, were his ancestors.
As he talked, Chava led me through the forest, over tree roots and crumbling stones. Along the way, I spotted the occasional fieldworker moving along the paths, but the place was hardly quiet or empty. Birds squawked and sang out as they swooped through the trees. I heard branches rustling and scurrying sounds all around us. I tried to concentrate on the birds and not think of spiders, scorpions or pumas. Chava stopped now and then to point out barely revealed formations of stones or freshly excavated sites. He had walked me around a small pyramid. It was stepped, like the pictures I had seen of the famous pyramid at Chichen Itza but was only about thirty-five feet high. And then we arrived in front of what looked to be the remains of buildings laid out around two sides of large raised stone. The bottoms of the walls were composed of stone squares, and the tops were covered with what looked like a stone-column motif. “A half-finished palace here,” said Chava. “Around a plaza, a public space.”
I walked around the base of the ruins and peered at the stone building blocks.
“You said they didn’t have metal tools?”
“That’s right,” said Chava. “Just granite, flint, obsidian. There aren’t materials to make metal in these parts.”
I ran my hand across the foundation. “Incredible.”
“Shall we take a short rest?” Chava asked, moving to the edge of the raised stone plaza and sitting down. He pulled a water bottle from the pack he had been carrying and handed it to me. I walked over and took it from him gratefully. The trees provided shade, but the heat
seemed to rise from the forest floor as well as pounding down from above the treetops. My shirt was clinging to my back; my pants were glued to my legs.
“That’s what I like about this work, you know,” Chava said. “The mysteries. We know that some of the abandoned cities we see were simply left by people moving about. But the population didn’t just move—it disappeared. And even the remaining populations did not stay on in the big cities.”
Chava went on to explain that scientists who studied Mayan skeletons had said that the bones, even the bones of the royalty, suggested that in the later years of the civilization, food was scarce. That might have been the result of overhunting. Another possibility was a plague of pests or some sort of agricultural disaster, perhaps caused by deforestation. But the most likely cause of the food shortage was an extended drought. “There isn’t much water in Yucatán at the best of times,” he laughed. And of course, disease, wars or other violence could have decimated the population as well.
Chava stood up and put the water bottle back in his pack.
“But here, at this site,” he said, “we see something we don’t often see at the excavations. Come.” Chava led me to one side of the ruins. The main exterior featured square archways supported by short, round columns. But Chava was looking at the ground in front of the building.
“Now,” said Chava, pointing at an assembly of stones laid out on the ground. It wasn’t a neat formation, but it didn’t look haphazard either. “What would you guess that was?”
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