Villahermosa

Once the only thing I knew about the state of Tabasco was that Tabasco sauce was not invented there. Then I read Graham Greene’s “The Power and the Glory,” which was actually called something else in the original UK edition and now I forget what. It may be my favorite Graham Greene, it’s got everything. In his Mexican travelogues you get the impression that Greene did not like the people very much at all, but in “The Power and the Glory,” (or whatever) he uses the wickedness and fallenness of 1930s Tabasco, when a new revolutionary regime dedicated itself to purging the state of all traces of Catholicism, to dramatize the wickedness and fallenness of everybody, and the possibility of grace. Vintage Greene!

The infernally hot and literally God-forsaken landscapes of “The Power and the Glory” stay with you, so I was thinking about that during the ride. It was pleasant, though. It was one of the top bus rides I’ve had so far. After the wildly nauseating cliff circuit coming down from highland Chiapas, and then the travelling saunas that shuttle fourteen sweat-drenched tourists at a time, always at capacity, between the archaeological sites near the Guatemalan border, we were reluctant to get back on a bus, but it was pleasantly cool, everyone was chill, and the driver played lovely subdued traditional music without any cowbell in it.

With my most recent spate of stomach trouble having come and ebbed, my guts were still feeling hollow and fluttery. Also our limbs were covered with insect welts from the jungle, and I’d developed a heat rash on my neck. I’ve never had one of these before! I think it had something to do with the abrupt transition from cool weather to sultry 105-degree weather. The skin was textured and I couldn’t stop touching it.

I got my legs arranged around the seat in front of me and contorted my upper body so as not to press the damp back of my shirt against the seat back, and I gave in to the easeful sweetness of the ride and watched the countryside rolling by evenly in the late morning sun.

By bus it takes two and a half hours to travel from grimy Palenque to Villahermosa, the capital of Tabasco and the commercial headquarters of the 1970s Mexican oil boom. The parts of the state we saw do not look like too much from the road. The landscape kind of reminded us of the endless flatness of the Yucatan, but with a lot more ripeness and greenery and some distant mountains. There is an element of wrack and ruin. Black bald-headed vultures sit in the trees by the road and also circle in flocks over the fields.

There is a lot of green and a lot of white heat, but naturally you have a lot of rot, a little poverty, the simple brutality of cowboys and cattle farming and slaughter, the complex brutality of the cement-block factories: the giant conglomerates that tear apart the mountains to gather the raw materials of the construction industry, and the rough and ready peasant houses all made of cement blocks. Some of the houses are the color of cement, but some are pretty fluourescent shades. Often there are optimistic bundles of rebar sticking out of the roofs, waiting for a second storey that may just arrive some day. In the context of the torrid sun and the fecund woodland, the exposed rebar bundles seem like rooftop plantings: ugly but unkillable vegetation, like the monstrously stricken banana trees along the road, with their wracked, flanged fronds drooping, the bare vines with their withered segments looking just like columns of stripped and sundried vertebrae. Wherever the trees have been removed to make a pasture, the grass grows high, thick, green. Now and again you spot a tire-track trail leading off the highway and out to a house or hamlet or farmstead. There are roadside foodstalls with handpainted signs. There was a barbecue place with a vast grill outside billowing white smoke and a big sign that said "DIOS ES AMOR" in bubble letters with a cartoon pig next to that.