by Steve Hely
In these towns, the people don’t speak Spanish at home. The languages spoken are Tzotzil Mayan, Tzetzal Mayan, and Ch’ol Mayan.
If you think I’m gonna get involved in sorting out the insanely byzantine world of Mayan languages—if you think I’m that fucking crazy, to involve myself in that whole thing—then you are right, I am, but not until the next chapter.
For now the point is that in the villages in the hills outside of San Cristóbal, we are in another country. We are in the expanse of the Maya. All this world was the world of the Maya. Across this area at one time was something like a single language, a shared religion, and a shared culture. There were towns and cities. The different cities and their ruling families were sometimes, like the city-states and ruling families of Italy during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, at war with each other.
Chiapas is hills on hills on hills on mountains, thick forest in some places, down into jungle near the riverbeds. Even a thousand years ago in the middle ages and the renaissance of the Maya, it was remote. Remote places can keep their old character for a long time.
The air was clear, up in the mountains. You could see down across the pines and the places in the valleys. After Zinacantan we followed the winding road, nothing else on it but a farm truck or two, up and up and up to the town of San Juan Chamula.
I was in luck, then, because it was a feast day. When I got back to San Cristóbal that night, I’d call my mother, who knew it was St. Joseph’s Day in the Catholic Church. I’d never heard of anyone making much of a fuss over that one. In Chamula, St. Joseph isn’t even the number one guy. John the Baptist is the number one guy.
Well, man, then I’d like to see what they do in Chamula for John the Baptist, because on this day, which was just a Wednesday, by the way, a regular old day of the week, a lot of folks had turned up at the church. The church was bright white, intense green and turquoise in trim around the edges. It looked like a wild frosted cake, a white cake with thick but precise lines of frosting from some extreme berry. They do not paint churches like this where I’m from.
Around the wide square laid out with gray stone bricks, there were men in white costumes preparing for ceremonies around and inside the church.
In the guides to these towns, you are told to take no pictures of anyone, especially children, unless they’ve given you permission. Inside the church no pictures. That was just as well for me, because if taking pictures was fine, that’s what I would’ve done. All across the floor were spread fresh pine needles. In some patches they were spread thin and you could feel the floor. In other patches it was like walking on a rug. The whole place smelled like pine. The roof of the church was high, it felt open, like a great big meetinghouse. In a way, you could say the meeting was already happening. All around the walls of the church, and across the front, too, were painted statues of saints. Famous saints, and folk saints of Spain and Mexico, I guess, many saints I’d never heard of during many hours of being lectured about saints in my Catholic boyhood. These saints were terrific, obviously. Their eyes and hair and clothes popped with color, and they looked ready for action. They’d spring to life if you asked them.
Many people were asking. Most saints had people there, at that minute, asking for things. Some silently but many in whispers, and some talking and confiding and asking more or less out loud. To see this was incredible to me. In the churches I knew, you talked only a little bit to statues, and you were meant to understand that the statue itself was a nice thing but maybe wasn’t that important. But in the church in San Juan Chamula, another style was practiced, a direct style, as though you should treat the statue like it was the guy himself, right there. Sure enough, didn’t it look like it might come to life? The Spanish monks, the Franciscan missionaries, thought this was idol worship. They complain about it in their letters home, they’re frustrated, nothing they can do will stop it. Finally they just gave up. The smart ones had long ago shrugged their shoulders about it and moved on.
The saint I liked best was a giant bald guy and his little friend. San Cristóbal carrying Boy Jesus? Perhaps. The sketch I have here in my notebook is not detailed enough for me to glean much more, and it is labeled only the bald saint and his friend. But those are my guys now. I invoke their help to make this a good and true book.
That’s what it was like inside the church.
Outside the church, there was the wide plaza again, under the clear sky and the sun, and the gray stone bricks cut narrow and set in the ground. Across the plaza, outside the Tribunal Superior de Justicia del Estado Juzgado de Paz y Conciliación Indígena, a few men and a few women slouched against the wall or sat against it in the streak of shade, waiting for whatever.
Gringolandia
In the grass in the hills by a running stream, almost a river, that ran so fast you could tell there was a waterfall around the bend, we found half lying, half sitting in the grass some shepherds. They were wearing clothes that were colorful and looked homemade. The scene was familiar to me but not from anything I’d ever seen in real life. I knew it from scenes in old pastoral paintings of shepherds and farmers at rest.
They greeted my guide in a friendly way, like maybe they didn’t know him but they knew his deal and what he was up to, that he was a good guy. My impression, too, by the way. They asked him, in Spanish, something like “Where is this guy from?”
“Gringolandia,” he said.
I understood what Marco was saying, but the shepherds didn’t. Somehow they understood this to be “Iceland.” They discussed Iceland briefly and without much curiosity or energy. It did not seem like they’d be interested if I corrected them, so I said nothing, and on we went, up the trail, to a place the guide showed me where the water cut a cavern through deep rock.
Karst
There are many caves in Chiapas, because the landscape is what is called karst. Karst landscapes are made of soft rock like limestone and dolomite and gypsum that dissolves fast, for rock. Water mixed with carbon dioxide can become, in geological terms, “aggressive water” that eats cracks into the rock. As the soluble rock washes away, holes are formed. There are sinkholes and caverns, underground rivers. Caves.
Strange and interesting cultures come from places where there’s karst. That’s my idea, anyway. Florida is karst. Appalachia, Kentucky, Tennessee are pockmarked with karst. Vietnam has karst. In Ireland, there’s a famous haunted karstscape, the Burren. The cave paintings of France are in an area of karst. There is karst in Papua New Guinea, and the Heavenly Pit, a stupefying example of karst, in a hidden valley in central China. Spain has much karst.
The Maya were all about karst. Some of their cities are in places that seem to sit like islands in a sea of dissolving karst. Their greatest stories are all about the underworld. Caverns kept them up at night.
Wherever you find karst, you find odd and fascinating people, is my point. Gaping holes in the earth wonk us out.
Idiots and Heroes
If you tell or write the stories of your travels, there’s great danger of two traps, on opposite sides of a narrow road.
You can try to make yourself out to be more of a hero than you were. Few are dopes enough to do this bluntly. But you can do it with backhands, just by suggesting that the places were sketchy, danger lurked, but you kept your cool. That’s an easy trap to fall into, because sometimes danger does lurk, and you will keep your cool. Most people do.
If you fall into this trap, you’re done. People can sense fast when you’re stretching to make yourself seem heroic, and they won’t believe it.
The other trap is making yourself out to be more of an idiot and a fool than you were. To play your dumbness for laughs. That’s an easy trap to fall into, too, because if you venture far from your home, to some other part of the world, you absolutely will be a dummy half the time. You’re in some new place, you have no idea how it works, you’re discombobulated, you’ll make one dumb mistake after another as series of patient strangers
bop you gently forward. That’s just what’ll happen.
If you make yourself more dumb than you were, you’re also being dishonest and that’s bad, but nobody will suspect you. People will believe you’re that dumb.
Anyway, this is a true story about me being dumb: Somehow, I dropped the keys to both our scooters into a creek.
How I did this I don’t know. We were on a bridge. The keys fell into the creek and disappeared.
Marco stared at me. How had I done something so dumb, and what was I going to do about it?
Shamed, I stripped down to my underwear and waded into the creek. But precious minutes were lost because I was reluctant to dunk my head into what I assumed was a river of invisible Mexican diseases. Marco continued staring as I fished around uselessly. Finally, it dawned on me that this looked, at least, like a beautiful and pure mountain stream. It might be freer of toxins than the tap water in Los Angeles. Maybe there was some horrific pesticide, but most likely the worst that was in it was cow and sheep shit and piss. If that’s what I had to dunk my head into to get the keys back, it was my duty, to Marco and to myself. So I dunked my head many times and fumbled underwater with my eyes closed and at last I found them.
Letting the sun cook off the wetness of my victory, we scootered down the road until brrrp, my engine stopped working. This one I don’t think was my fault. When we’d pulled to the side of the road and taken stock of the situation, Marco said it was something to do with the battery. He could fix it, but we were twelve kilometers up the mountain from town.
“Okay,” said Marco. From the hatch of his scooter he took out some rope. He explained to me what we would do. Attach the two scooters and coast one a few feet behind the other. He thought it over and decided he’d better be coaster, presumably because coastee could more easily fuck everything up and he didn’t trust me to do it.
That’s how we coasted, back down the mountain, into the center of town, the narrow streets now blocked up with cars, all the way back to the door of Croozy Scooters. When we were done, we had garlic fish and cold Victoria beers.
Night Ride
My second day in San Cristóbal, Marco invited me to come with his friends who ride bikes around the city every month or so in the dark. At around nine I walked down to his shop, he loaned me a bike, and we met up with maybe thirty people in a little square, young people. When we were drinking beers the day before at lunch, he had told me some of the friendship and sexual dynamics that were most vexing to his life, specifically one woman who was both erotic and fearsome. It was not hard to guess which one she was.
There were many small but intriguing dynamics of women and men and friends and strangers on this ride. We took off and rode like a herd down dark streets, the bravest and best shouting and out front. A few people had a struggle on their hands. They hadn’t realized exactly what speed and intensity and distance would be expected, nor the challenge of the roads. The scouts at front, when they came to a bump or a fall, would shout out “TOOOPES.” The call would be picked up and passed on with enthusiasm as it spread down the herd. It’s the word that I’m most sure of in Spanish. It means “a bumpy thing like a speed bump or any kind of bump you should be careful about on a bike, or debris. Also a ditch sometimes.”
Getting a crowd of energetic people together, even if it’s just to ride bikes around the city, is still getting people together, so I guess it’s a kind of politics. The message is we’re gonna go out here and ride our bikes around and have fun doing it. That is a positive political message, one I was happy to get behind. If that’s a political message young people are strong for in Chiapas right now, it sounds like good news to me. Marco and the ferocious woman were leaders I could get behind.
Waterfalls to Palenque
Where I wanted to go was the ruins of the city of Palenque, some 130 miles from San Cristóbal.
The way I got there was in a twelve-passenger van. I’m not sure it was really an official twelve-passenger van, but there were twelve passengers in it, twelve Spanish and Mexican tourists and a driver and a teenage boy who if he had a job didn’t do it. The van was not air-conditioned, that became very clear, and vocally lamented histrionically by the woman sitting next to me, who made it known to me in Spanish that she and those with her were from Spain, not Mexico, and this was outrageous to them. Several of the other people in the van, being Mexican, took offense at this. Her friends did not spring to her defense. She took vigorous charge of her case herself, however, and said many things quickly that I did not understand. By the end of them, it seemed to me, she had made herself much less popular but believed herself to have been pretty much elected president of the van, permitted to speak dramatically and imperiously to the driver on behalf of all of us. Including me. She several times referred to me as though I was one of the most wronged victims here, fortunate only in that I had her as an advocate. Her goal, it seemed, was getting the air conditioner turned on. The driver’s counterpoint was that this was impossible as the air conditioner was broken, broken far beyond his and, he seemed to suspect, anyone’s power to repair.
This answer was not accepted. She insisted her case until it became clear her arguments were not making it easier for the bus driver to navigate the absurd curves of the road we were taking, down from the mountain country into deep jungle-bedded river bends, often then back up a mountainside before coming down twice as far again. She was making it more likely we would topple off the side and die was the point. I do not think she ever agreed to this point, but she did stop her case, for a while, before we came to the waterfall Agua Azul, a local attraction included on our van tour.
Agua Azul. Blue water, and that’s what it is, a stretch of cascades and rapids over and around and through rounded rocks. In both the cartoonish color and the worn, soft shape of the rocks, it looks less “real” than like something from an amusement park, something Disney.
There’s not much to do with it, though, other than stare at it. You could swim in a certain roped-off pool, but the two old women who were trying it didn’t appear to be having a blast.
Two Australian guys, eighteen maybe, walked up to an outdoor taco stand where I sat drinking a beer and considering the waterfall. They identified the movie playing on the TV as Dragon Ball Z, and stared at that for a while as the water ran behind them.
Rounded back onto the bus, we had two more stops, both karst-related natural water wonders of southern Mexico, neither disappointing, both worth a stop but both just little pauses between what was becoming a camaraderie of the insane aboard our sweatbox van. Many of the passengers had half fainted into zonked-out sleep, and my shirt was soaked by around four thirty p.m., when we finally came to Palenque.
Ancient Writing of Central America
From their earliest days in the Yucatán, the Spanish knew there were written books around. Some were very old and were hidden away like treasures among people who could no longer read them.
These books were made on bark paper, stitched together. Just by looking at them, you could tell the thinking recorded was complex. They were dense with mysterious writing, full of charts and vivid illustrations.
How many of these books were there? Thousands?
By the time the Spanish showed up, the golden age of Mayan writers and bookmakers had been over for two or three hundred years. Very possibly the age ended violently, in something like a revolution.
Maybe hundreds or thousands of books (and bookmakers) were destroyed.
Centuries later, in the 1500s, when the Spanish set up shop, there were still lots of books to be found. At least fifty, maybe a hundred. At Tenochtitlán, before it was destroyed, there must’ve been a library of them.
Diego de Landa arrived in Mérida in the year 1541. Of the Maya he encountered he said:
These people also used certain characters or letters, with which they wrote in their books about the antiquities and their sciences; with these, and with figures, and c
ertain signs in the figures, they understood their matter, made them known, and taught them. We found a great number of books in these letters.
So: What did he do next?
Did you guess: He put together a fantastic collection of these amazing books for posterity?
Nope! The answer is:
Since they contained nothing but superstitions and falsehoods of the devil we burned them all, which they took most grievously, and which gave them great pain.
What kind of jackass shows up in a place and the first thing he does is burn all the books? Even fellow missionaries thought de Landa was too much of a hard-ass.
To look at it from his perspective, though? Just for one second? In his mind, he was in a jungle where every single person was an idol and demon worshipper, maybe even full-on Devil worshipper, and they were all bound shortly for a fiery Hell unless he could by a miracle save them.
Supposedly—who knows if this is true, but this is a story—on, like, his first day in the Yucatán, de Landa was walking out in the sticks when he interrupted a human sacrifice, and the whole thing freaked him out.
Anyway: The total number of Mayan books that survived—codices is the more accurate word, I’m told, because they’re not bound like books exactly—the total number of Mayan codices that we have today is three.
Maybe four.
Dresden, Madrid, Paris, named for the city that had the dusty library where each was found, or “found” most recently by the people who comb dusty libraries. Maybe Grolier is authentic, too, I refuse to weigh in. Grolier is named for a private club of book collectors in Manhattan, where it was exhibited after it was, allegedly, found in a cave in the 1970s.
So, three books, full of dense writing.
