More on the House

Hanging above the fireplace is a heavy mahogany ox-collar. On the mantelpiece, a small framed photo of the couple that owned the house. After their deaths, their ashes were scattered in the garden. There are two stone memorial tablets at the foot of a big tree at the bottom of the yard near the wall, just visible over a carpet of flowers. I also found a little wooden sign under some bushes that said “In Memory of Our Cats.” And still today there are cats that roam in and out of the property looking for food and sex, and still there are people moving in and out of the house to read the couple’s books and look at the mountains and enjoy the quiet. (I don’t like the noise the cats make.)

I have their ancient comprehensive English-Spanish dictionary laying open on a wooden trunk in the corner of the living room. I went to look up something and lifting the front cover I found a green lizard curled up underneath in the inch of space afforded by the thickness of the book’s spine. The lizard took one look at me and bolted down the side of the trunk and under a bookcase. I first spotted this lizard in the house about a week ago. I don’t know how it got in the house or how to get it to leave, but it seems healthy enough. There are plenty of bugs inside to eat. Older paperbacks all show the dainty lace-patterned boreholes of book-eating pests around their ‘gutters’ and the bottom edges of their pages. Flies are always getting in and banging at the windows. The other day, I found a dead bee on the floorboards that was bigger and also yellower than any I’d ever seen.

This morning I noticed a spider dangling from the ceiling of the cloister, outside the bedroom door. It twirled comically on its thread like a bridge-jumper at the perigee of his plunge. It had iridescent green markings. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a spider that color.

Metric:
At the mall I got on a machine that tells your height and weight. Wearing shoes, I am 1.84 meters tall and 81.6 kilograms. These measurements feel alien and clinical but they pertain to me in my intimate corporeality, my very substance. It turns out that just like a fallen meteorite or some giant species of river fish, I am measurable in metric units.
People are always asking me how many kilometers to this or that. In the Lacandon jungle there was a group of villagers sitting on chairs in the grass near the one store, and as I walked back to the camp an old guy tried to get my attention and was asking me how many meters I was. I said I didn’t know how many meters. Apparently in earnest, he asked me if I was too tall to sleep in hotel beds. “Do you need a special bed wherever you go?” The villagers looked at me appraisingly. “Yes,” I said, “I always need to find a special long bed.” The old guy looked grave and nodded and turned to the others, like, “What did I tell you?” Then I had to laugh and admit that I was just kidding and I slept in regular beds. The villagers all thought that was a riot and they gave the old guy a hard time. People are always asking me how many kilometers from this or that. “Look,” I shrug, “Just be happy I’m learning Spanish. Give me a break with the kilometers.”

These laundromats shrunk the legs on all my pants. My ankles are always exposed. And my favorite t-shirt is falling apart at last: the light green one with the compIetely faded insignia on the breast that I lifted from Eric and always assumed was from his days as a lifeguard on some beach I’d never heard of until he told me it was mock-vintage Abercrombie. When it’s cold, I wear a heavy red and blue heavy flannel with a quilted lining. It looks appropriate in the pine forest. We went hiking with some other foreigners and they said as much. Does that flannel give you special knowledge about the trail? No, not special knowledge--just confidence. With the right outfit you feel more prepared in every respect. I like to wear green t-shirts in the jungle and plaid in the pine forest. White at the beach, and also in Merida, “the white city”. The Zapatistas wear black balaclavas, or “mountain-passers” in Spanish, and the women of the Tzotzil town of Chamula and its environs wear long skirts made of unspun wool, dyed jet-black, so that they look, to me, sort of fake, like part of a gorilla costume. They love these skirts and wear them every day. You can see them in the pastures, sitting on the ground near their sheep and combing out wool for new dresses. There is a hierarchy of quality for the skirt material, but I don’t know it by sight. They tend to wear sporty synthetic-fiber backpacks, too, which make a strange accessory. It’s a look. The sheep are funny to watch because they get pegged into place to graze with a length of neon-yellow nylon rope, and when they literally get to the end of their rope, they  reach way out with their necks and their three untied legs while their left hind ankle is tethered. They look like idiots.

Sheep watch you when you come close, like they’re waiting to see what you’re going to do. Maybe untie them? No, sorry. If I had to sit on a hill watching sheep all day, I think to myself, then...what?

In the foothills and on the edge of the mountain highway there are cattle fields. ‘The cows in the field’: they’re always right there, available for a rhetorical contrast with some higher function of humanity.
"Conspicuous figures of Zinacantec dream life,  cows are always creatures of unrestrained, unpredictable evil power." (Robert M. Laughlin, The People of the Bat: Mayan Tales and Dreams from Zinacantan)