Mateo

Mateo is the gardener. He could be sixty, seventy, eighty years old, I couldn’t say. He’s small, with short arms and legs and heavily creased brown skin. He makes very little noise and you can run into him in the garden sometimes when you hadn’t known he was there. He most courteously declines to shake my hand because his palms are covered with garden dirt. He wears a cowboy hat and seems as light as a feather. He sounds perpetually on the verge of laughter, with his broad grin and his high, thin voice, and I have to lean down close to him to hear him while he looks up into my face from under his handsome white hat. His teeth are big and white and full of tartar.
“Oh yes,” he says, “It will rain today.”

The weather has become difficult to predict, month to month, in these last years, as worldwide weather patterns of long custom crumble and dissolve in the general flux, and there hasn’t been much rain in the city this rainy season. Everyone says, Today it will rain, but then you find it doesn’t. Clouds mass up and thin out again and blow on. It gets hot in the afternoons. Mateo likes to eat avocados: a tree in the garden bears what must be ‘natural’ avocados, the pre-Columbian variety that people cultivated into the big pear-shaped ones. These avocados are shiny and round and look like black billiard balls dangling from the branches. They don’t taste that great. There’s also a grapefruit tree, but Mateo doesn’t like these on account of their bitter taste. He doesn’t remember the Spanish word for the fruit until I remind him, he calls them something in Tzotzil. His Spanish is as tricky for me to make out as mine must be for him. He can’t make the “fr” in ‘fruit’ or ‘frio’--he says ‘ruita and ‘rio--or the hard ‘g’ in ‘gusta’, or a bunch of terminal vowels, the endings of his words are more like consonants. There is also a birdlike warble or whistle just beneath everything.

Mateo wanted to know about what kinds of fruits and vegetables grew in New York. He was curious about just how far away the United States were. He was totally taken with the idea that I’d flown to Mexico on an airplane. “With the airplane, you don’t have to go all around, back and forth. With the airplane, you come straight there!” There are plenty of people in this town for whom the state capital of Tuxtla Guiterrez represents the effective edge of the world. Anyway, Mateo was right. Around six o’ clock it started pouring in thick, distinct drops from low and heavy clouds, mountain rain. The umbrella vendors prowl up and down the tourist area with their brightly-colored umbrellas and everyone tries to get a taxi. The rain lasts an hour or two, then passes on for the lowlands. The streets flood, the steeper ones becoming like salmon rills, the houses in the bottom-most parts of town having to be bailed out. The hills outside the city are safe as long as all the pine trees grow, but every year they clear-cut and develop more and more of the hillside. You can see these vast rectilinear swaths where the timberland looks like it’s been peeled away, and sown with colorful concrete cubes. The city-sized valley where we live was named by the Spaniards after a type of indigenous architecture where you use mud to plaster over a framework of thin sticks and then thatch the roof and paint a waterproof limestone paste over the mud walls. There were once so many examples of this type of Mayan house that you would naturally call the valley after them, but now all the houses are concrete and no one really remembers the fine art of the mud-and-thatch house. It’s still possible to find disintegrating mud edifices in the center of town, pocked with age and grafitti and with all the crumbled parts reenforced first with brick and pinewood and finally with industrial concrete.