They don't eat peanut butter here!
How wild is that? They don't even seem to have an accepted term for it: most people call it 'peanut cream' (which is disgusting admittedly), but I've heard variations. I've tried to visualize myself into the state of finding peanut butter disgusting. I guess it's like taking something you're supposed to eat in a solid form, and making it into a mealy paste.
Tuesday, May 24, 2011
Sunday, May 22, 2011
Rompe-Cabezas
I was talking and looking down and thinking about something and watching the traffic and coming down some tricky concrete steps set in the sidewalk when I came suddenly to a jutting concrete overhang and struck the main part of the roof of my skull, the part right in front of the crown that you’d use to headbutt someone with, and fell down in the dust and dropped my waterbottle in the road. Across the street some little kids laughed. I rubbed it ferociously and tried to walk it off. There was a tiny bit of blood from where the concrete had scraped my scalp but I was ok and I knew, even as I winced my way down the open road eschewing the sidewalk that it would not be the last time I hit my damned head walking and I could only hope it would be as inconsequential next time. You always have to watch your footing on the sidewalks because there’s a lot of undesirable matter underfoot, in this town especially there’s dog shit everywhere, and you also have to watch out for cars coming around corners or coming up near the curb, because the sidewalks are so narrow, and if it’s not a car it might be a motorcycle coming along the gutter or an unwieldly bicycle with a bunch of people and luggage loaded on it. You might be in a Frogger-esque scenario where it’s you, a bicycle, a motorcycle, two-way traffic, and then a group of pedestrians behind you and some more ahead of you coming the other way carrying children on their backs, plus a street dog weaving through, and maybe a vendor squatting or breastfeeding and up ahead there might even be a passed-out drunk, good luck to them. You have to very carefully dance around the people who are eating the corn-on-the-cob with mayonnaise, and you oughtn’t to kick any children or HIT YOUR HEAD. I am pretty tall and so that’s one more risk factor, because in the densest parts of your typical Mexican city you will find all kinds of rusty metal rods and awnings and concrete overhangs and brutal corrugated iron edges jutting through the airspace layer that begins about at five and a half feet off the sidewalk and gets especially deadly up around six feet, just above my eyeballs but well within striking distance of my skull. There’s also the ubiquitous home security system whereby you top off a cement boundary wall with a sparkling assortment of multicolored freshly-shattered glass shards in the wickedest possible formations. I’ve seen this before in the US but only in pretty rugged neighborhoods. Here this design accent seems to top off the outer walls of even the ritziest compounds. If you are tall enough that you might be in a position to peer on tip-toe over a wall, in low light, in a state of distracted anticipation, woe unto you. The cities are full of glass-topped concrete and in the country, it’s all barbed wire, rusty barbed wire everywhere in the most dangerous permutations: low, high, half-sagged, obfuscated, buried in the dirt. There are also the dogs that run around peoples’ properties in the country. These are more savage and more frightening than the street dogs, who hardly ever bark or threaten. There are wonderful things in the woods, though, too: shacks where woodcutters live and drink beer, mountain streams with cute bridges, weird ugly isolated concrete mansions that look like Bel Air by way of Dubai, or, as if somebody had done with AutoCAD what urban party promoters do with InDesign. The hills around San Cristobal are full of new construction. It’s all silent pine forest up there, like 60s Lake Tahoe, and the only roads are the desire paths of pickups and Hummers. You must hear the cap-blasting all day from the gravel quarries. Cap-blasting and birdsong. I am happy where I am with the lizards and butterflies and just today the little victory parade down our street with a bunch of kids wearing blue luchador masks decorated with the gold puma-head logo of a popular university soccer team. Every day I learn something new in Spanish and forget something else, but maybe the trick is to keep piling on new things and see which ones stick. It’s all supposed to be good for your brain, at any rate.
Once you’ve grasped a few basic rules, you can reliably produce torturous words like “metonymy” in the target language, but just like long ago when I tried to learn French, I can never remember the word for ‘Thursday’, and so I blunder on, judiciously skirting the vast chasms of my ignorance and occasionally ascending these rare Greco-Roman lookouts, making odd impressions on my conversation partners. ‘Pedagogy,’ I’ll say; ‘Ah, or teaching?’ ‘Yes, teaching, of course.’
What is it about Thursday?
Once you’ve grasped a few basic rules, you can reliably produce torturous words like “metonymy” in the target language, but just like long ago when I tried to learn French, I can never remember the word for ‘Thursday’, and so I blunder on, judiciously skirting the vast chasms of my ignorance and occasionally ascending these rare Greco-Roman lookouts, making odd impressions on my conversation partners. ‘Pedagogy,’ I’ll say; ‘Ah, or teaching?’ ‘Yes, teaching, of course.’
What is it about Thursday?
Thursday, May 19, 2011
Birding
This morning a Tzotzil woman knocked on the door with 15 bags of soil for delivery. She had been supposed to come yesterday while the gardeners were working. I couldn't understand what she wanted at first but she wore a gorgeous electric-turquoise head-wrap and she had her kindergarten-age daughter with her. We got the affair sorted out and she and her daughter proceeded to hump the 15 bags at speed across the courtyard and down to the garden, where the owners of the house are carrying out a long-term open-ended landscaping project.
For now, the courtyard itself suffices. I take my book and I sit on a low chair-like relic made of animal skin stretched in an S-shape. You sit under the eaves of the Spanish tile roof and look between black wood columns to the blooming flowers and skinny drunken-looking cacti in the middle of the open courtyard. The street we live on happens to be one of the last cobblestone pavements in town and cars avoid it, so there's nothing to hear but the occasional wandering dog or drunk or sometimes by night marauding mariachis. Today it rained in the afternoon while the sun shone, so that you could watch shining against the courtyard's cool shadows the sunlit raindrops falling while rufous-necked sparrows needled the grass and the hummingbirds whirred down from wherever to suckle the blossoms.
They're white-eared hummingbirds, very tiny and dear and sophisticated, like expensive avian gadgetry. We've been fortunate to see so many improbable birds in this country but who can resist the garden hummingbird with its urgent metabolic extravagance? As if set in invisible slots, they slide from point to point and halt abruptly. They take one good slurp at a time and slot over like someone's clocking their waypoints with a stopwatch. Some effect a flat tuneless chirp while feeding. For little whiffs of things they're violently territorial and you can see them charge at each other, buzzing in like dive bombers and whacking the vegetation, and these little dogfights and the tuneless calls and the riverine murmur of treetops blowing were the only sounds in the courtyard while I read. One at a time the raindrops would spot the sun-warmed clay tile, where they disappeared instantly and spotted down again elsewhere.
For now, the courtyard itself suffices. I take my book and I sit on a low chair-like relic made of animal skin stretched in an S-shape. You sit under the eaves of the Spanish tile roof and look between black wood columns to the blooming flowers and skinny drunken-looking cacti in the middle of the open courtyard. The street we live on happens to be one of the last cobblestone pavements in town and cars avoid it, so there's nothing to hear but the occasional wandering dog or drunk or sometimes by night marauding mariachis. Today it rained in the afternoon while the sun shone, so that you could watch shining against the courtyard's cool shadows the sunlit raindrops falling while rufous-necked sparrows needled the grass and the hummingbirds whirred down from wherever to suckle the blossoms.
They're white-eared hummingbirds, very tiny and dear and sophisticated, like expensive avian gadgetry. We've been fortunate to see so many improbable birds in this country but who can resist the garden hummingbird with its urgent metabolic extravagance? As if set in invisible slots, they slide from point to point and halt abruptly. They take one good slurp at a time and slot over like someone's clocking their waypoints with a stopwatch. Some effect a flat tuneless chirp while feeding. For little whiffs of things they're violently territorial and you can see them charge at each other, buzzing in like dive bombers and whacking the vegetation, and these little dogfights and the tuneless calls and the riverine murmur of treetops blowing were the only sounds in the courtyard while I read. One at a time the raindrops would spot the sun-warmed clay tile, where they disappeared instantly and spotted down again elsewhere.
Wednesday, May 18, 2011
Why is There an EZLN?
Resentful of the pale young Europeans who breeze in for a week of backpacking and seem to drop fluently into whatever is the language of the moment.
“It’s practically the same language,” laughs the cosmopolitan Frenchman, dismissing and simultaneously crowing over his proficiency (It’s not!). Meanwhile his Dutch or German counterpart is carrying on a long conversation in plain perfect English--the instinctive English to which we had supposed our own claim was secure.
The Italian is right at home, able to keep pretty well within the boundaries of his own native idiom and still be passably understood, as though it were only a question of minding your ‘b’s and ‘v’s.
The Spaniards, of course, like the conquerors they still must deeply long to be, seem to fetishize the small differences that set them apart from their country cousins, lisping like teakettles at every opportunity and comporting themselves as blondly and as affluently as possible.
Rich Europeans in general you can hit here with a thrown stone, cavorting in richy-rich restaurants and calling for all the celebrated vintages, while freezing out the many vendors, beggars and street children who prowl up wide-eyed to their tables like so many stray dogs begging for scraps. You could do an ethnography on the restaurant culture here: once it was rugged young Italians who washed up and opened modest pasta places, then French yuppies with their pastry shops and Belgians with their waffles and chocolate, then the flush Argentines came with their upscale churrascarias, and now it's a veritable polyglot paradise of unwashed, dreadlocked fellow-travelers and the rich tourists who pity them.
I've found a place with enough books here to last me.
There are evident categories of interest in the collection:
Psychoanalysis and creativity
Jewish, Lesbian and Jewish-Lesbian heritage
Nature writing
Regional folklore and ethnography, with a heavy dose of serious anthropology from Harvard (the Chiapas Project) as well as some botany and a variety of local history, many of these warmly inscribed
Cooking
General academic stuff that looks unread (seems like gifts left by guests, many are inscribed)
Travel writing, especially by and about famous women adventurers: Jane Bowles, Josephine Herbst, Isabella Bird.
Classical music, including half a shelf on Mozart.
Everybody who comes to live in Mexico is looking for downtime and so you end up accumulating books, or you did until it became so simple to get English-language movies and television, but not everyone seems to accumulate books out of sheer love of reading. If more than half of your books are books about the exotic locale where you’ve chosen to live, you may not actually be a reader. Here, they pass the test. Most of the stuff is sterling literature in weathered editions: Proust, Joyce, Hemingway, a whole bunch of ragged Henry James, a more or less complete collection of Woolf including all four volumes of published letters, well-worn, and a bunch of scholarly works, there’s Colette obviously, some Anais Nin, Katherine Mansfield, Cynthia Ozick, Flannery O’Connor, Isaac Babel, Camus. Things you like to see and rarely do. There are newer books, recent American stuff like Richard Powers, a handful of Jeanette Winterson. There are relatively few books in Spanish, considering, but there’s of course a lot of Rosario Castellanos in the original: trifecta there of female heavyweight, modernist, and local author.
There’s cool stuff.
I found a slightly crumbly saddle-stapled edition of “Pomes Pennyeach” which might be worth some money. For photography, there are heaps of grand tomes, recent and classic, Mexicana and otherwise. Also right here are all the classic Mexico books I hoped to come across somewhere without paying for: the gentleman explorer John L. Stephens’s ‘Incidents of Travel in the Yucatan’ and the Scottish expat noblewoman Frances Calderon de la Barca’s ‘Life in Mexico’ (both 1843), right up to ‘Basta! Land and the Zapatista Rebellion in Chiapas’ by the anthrologist and old Chiapas hand George Collier. Evidently a friend of the house, Collier inscribed this copy on January 1st, 1995, and there’s also a thanks in the book’s acknowledgements. The story around this book, combined with the frisson of having EZLN bases so close by, drew me in and I made a little study of it.
“It’s practically the same language,” laughs the cosmopolitan Frenchman, dismissing and simultaneously crowing over his proficiency (It’s not!). Meanwhile his Dutch or German counterpart is carrying on a long conversation in plain perfect English--the instinctive English to which we had supposed our own claim was secure.
The Italian is right at home, able to keep pretty well within the boundaries of his own native idiom and still be passably understood, as though it were only a question of minding your ‘b’s and ‘v’s.
The Spaniards, of course, like the conquerors they still must deeply long to be, seem to fetishize the small differences that set them apart from their country cousins, lisping like teakettles at every opportunity and comporting themselves as blondly and as affluently as possible.
Rich Europeans in general you can hit here with a thrown stone, cavorting in richy-rich restaurants and calling for all the celebrated vintages, while freezing out the many vendors, beggars and street children who prowl up wide-eyed to their tables like so many stray dogs begging for scraps. You could do an ethnography on the restaurant culture here: once it was rugged young Italians who washed up and opened modest pasta places, then French yuppies with their pastry shops and Belgians with their waffles and chocolate, then the flush Argentines came with their upscale churrascarias, and now it's a veritable polyglot paradise of unwashed, dreadlocked fellow-travelers and the rich tourists who pity them.
I've found a place with enough books here to last me.
There are evident categories of interest in the collection:
Psychoanalysis and creativity
Jewish, Lesbian and Jewish-Lesbian heritage
Nature writing
Regional folklore and ethnography, with a heavy dose of serious anthropology from Harvard (the Chiapas Project) as well as some botany and a variety of local history, many of these warmly inscribed
Cooking
General academic stuff that looks unread (seems like gifts left by guests, many are inscribed)
Travel writing, especially by and about famous women adventurers: Jane Bowles, Josephine Herbst, Isabella Bird.
Classical music, including half a shelf on Mozart.
Everybody who comes to live in Mexico is looking for downtime and so you end up accumulating books, or you did until it became so simple to get English-language movies and television, but not everyone seems to accumulate books out of sheer love of reading. If more than half of your books are books about the exotic locale where you’ve chosen to live, you may not actually be a reader. Here, they pass the test. Most of the stuff is sterling literature in weathered editions: Proust, Joyce, Hemingway, a whole bunch of ragged Henry James, a more or less complete collection of Woolf including all four volumes of published letters, well-worn, and a bunch of scholarly works, there’s Colette obviously, some Anais Nin, Katherine Mansfield, Cynthia Ozick, Flannery O’Connor, Isaac Babel, Camus. Things you like to see and rarely do. There are newer books, recent American stuff like Richard Powers, a handful of Jeanette Winterson. There are relatively few books in Spanish, considering, but there’s of course a lot of Rosario Castellanos in the original: trifecta there of female heavyweight, modernist, and local author.
There’s cool stuff.
I found a slightly crumbly saddle-stapled edition of “Pomes Pennyeach” which might be worth some money. For photography, there are heaps of grand tomes, recent and classic, Mexicana and otherwise. Also right here are all the classic Mexico books I hoped to come across somewhere without paying for: the gentleman explorer John L. Stephens’s ‘Incidents of Travel in the Yucatan’ and the Scottish expat noblewoman Frances Calderon de la Barca’s ‘Life in Mexico’ (both 1843), right up to ‘Basta! Land and the Zapatista Rebellion in Chiapas’ by the anthrologist and old Chiapas hand George Collier. Evidently a friend of the house, Collier inscribed this copy on January 1st, 1995, and there’s also a thanks in the book’s acknowledgements. The story around this book, combined with the frisson of having EZLN bases so close by, drew me in and I made a little study of it.
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
A Different Prada
The culture here, meaning language, customs, mores, is a little weird and a little foreign and difficult to grasp, but the rest of daily life is just a little more direct and real. When it rains, the streets flood. When something breaks down, you open it up and tinker with it. If a dog is following you, you pretend to throw a rock at it.
If you want to eat an animal, you have to plan ahead several years and graze and water and vaccinate the animal and keep it in a safe place with a rope tied to it. Electricity itself, which you think you’re so used to, seems more primal and potent here, more nature than technology. You can see an eager spark leap any time you plug in an appliance. When the load gets heavy, the grid shudders, and you see the lights dim and glow again like an animal taking a breath. When it’s down, it’s down. There’s always a certain part of town, where the plant is, that’s roped off and managed by a federal authority. Columns of rickety-looking transformers carry the wires up and down the hillside, in and out of valleys, across mountaintops. The lines are always draped vegetally down to individual houses, from whence an unscrupulous neighbor might steal your power like it was your daily newspaper, and inside your house you probably have more lines running around from your main connection, threading out to your light fixtures, your appliances. Where we live, there are several extinct outlets that were installed long ago and then repealed, taped over, possibly burned out or hazardous. There’s one under the couch, for example, cut right into the ancient and gorgeously worn hardwood floorboards. (You need wood on the floor because it gets cold indoors.)
Utility-wise, gas power is the biggest adjustment to have to make. Some homes have wood-burning fireplaces, but in town everyone uses individual tanks of gas to heat water and to cook with. Just as there’s only one company that sells gasoline, there’s one company that sells heating gas and the guy comes to your door to pick up your empty tank and sell you your full one. To harness the combustion power of this big old crusty tank, you have to hook up some different nozzles and adjust some valves and hoses, and you’ve got to light the pilot light in the water boiler. (The cooking range you start up with a match, as needed.) This is the part that scares me. While the blue pilot light’s going, there’s a lever that controls the volume of gas feeding its flame, and you turn it up when you want to heat water for your shower or whatever. It makes a whooshing noise like a blowtorch. Begging your pardon if this is something everyone is familiar with. I remember, growing up, when I discovered that there was such a thing as a pilot light, burning away underneath the water heater in our basement, regulated not by hand but by an ingenious thermostatic system beyond my comprehension, and I thought, My god, there’s an open flame down here, all the time? When you’re done heating water, or when you leave the house, you ideally remember to turn down the flame of the pilot light. When the stove won’t light, it means you’re out of gas. You can go outside and knock on the tank and hear the emptiness ringing. Where they get all this gas from and how it finds its way into these crusty tanks, I don’t know. The guy comes in his truck and he swaps in a fresh one.
There are a number of itinerant vendors who bring all these staples to your door as needed. They all have their theme music. Since a lot of people don’t drink tap water, there’s a guy who drives the water truck, selling garafones, or water-cooler size plastic jugs of filtered and ozone-purified water. His truck plays the “Mission Impossible” theme. The 90s techno theme, from the movie with Tom Cruise. I won’t sit here and lie to your face via blog by telling you that I don’t like that song. There are other companies selling purified water in other parts of the city, announcing themselves with different theme music, but nobody else has anything as catchy as the 90s “Mission Impossible” theme. The country is a rights-management nightmare, by the way. I noticed there are agencies that download movies and tv all day on their high-speed connections and for five pesos each will upload them to your USB drive. Even the brand-new high-end zoo we went to in Merida was bootlegging the theme from ‘The Lion King’ as bed music for a loudspeaker announcement. One case I’d be interested to get to the bottom of is the clothing retailer Prada, who have boutiques in various of the malls we’ve been to. No, not that Prada: this is a different Prada.
If you want to eat an animal, you have to plan ahead several years and graze and water and vaccinate the animal and keep it in a safe place with a rope tied to it. Electricity itself, which you think you’re so used to, seems more primal and potent here, more nature than technology. You can see an eager spark leap any time you plug in an appliance. When the load gets heavy, the grid shudders, and you see the lights dim and glow again like an animal taking a breath. When it’s down, it’s down. There’s always a certain part of town, where the plant is, that’s roped off and managed by a federal authority. Columns of rickety-looking transformers carry the wires up and down the hillside, in and out of valleys, across mountaintops. The lines are always draped vegetally down to individual houses, from whence an unscrupulous neighbor might steal your power like it was your daily newspaper, and inside your house you probably have more lines running around from your main connection, threading out to your light fixtures, your appliances. Where we live, there are several extinct outlets that were installed long ago and then repealed, taped over, possibly burned out or hazardous. There’s one under the couch, for example, cut right into the ancient and gorgeously worn hardwood floorboards. (You need wood on the floor because it gets cold indoors.)
Utility-wise, gas power is the biggest adjustment to have to make. Some homes have wood-burning fireplaces, but in town everyone uses individual tanks of gas to heat water and to cook with. Just as there’s only one company that sells gasoline, there’s one company that sells heating gas and the guy comes to your door to pick up your empty tank and sell you your full one. To harness the combustion power of this big old crusty tank, you have to hook up some different nozzles and adjust some valves and hoses, and you’ve got to light the pilot light in the water boiler. (The cooking range you start up with a match, as needed.) This is the part that scares me. While the blue pilot light’s going, there’s a lever that controls the volume of gas feeding its flame, and you turn it up when you want to heat water for your shower or whatever. It makes a whooshing noise like a blowtorch. Begging your pardon if this is something everyone is familiar with. I remember, growing up, when I discovered that there was such a thing as a pilot light, burning away underneath the water heater in our basement, regulated not by hand but by an ingenious thermostatic system beyond my comprehension, and I thought, My god, there’s an open flame down here, all the time? When you’re done heating water, or when you leave the house, you ideally remember to turn down the flame of the pilot light. When the stove won’t light, it means you’re out of gas. You can go outside and knock on the tank and hear the emptiness ringing. Where they get all this gas from and how it finds its way into these crusty tanks, I don’t know. The guy comes in his truck and he swaps in a fresh one.
There are a number of itinerant vendors who bring all these staples to your door as needed. They all have their theme music. Since a lot of people don’t drink tap water, there’s a guy who drives the water truck, selling garafones, or water-cooler size plastic jugs of filtered and ozone-purified water. His truck plays the “Mission Impossible” theme. The 90s techno theme, from the movie with Tom Cruise. I won’t sit here and lie to your face via blog by telling you that I don’t like that song. There are other companies selling purified water in other parts of the city, announcing themselves with different theme music, but nobody else has anything as catchy as the 90s “Mission Impossible” theme. The country is a rights-management nightmare, by the way. I noticed there are agencies that download movies and tv all day on their high-speed connections and for five pesos each will upload them to your USB drive. Even the brand-new high-end zoo we went to in Merida was bootlegging the theme from ‘The Lion King’ as bed music for a loudspeaker announcement. One case I’d be interested to get to the bottom of is the clothing retailer Prada, who have boutiques in various of the malls we’ve been to. No, not that Prada: this is a different Prada.
Aruga
Doing like fifty on the carreterra, we edged past an equally swift vehicle in the shape of a giant road-ready caterpillar (aruga). It sat on six wheels and was clad sumptuously in lacquered green molded plastic, like a carousel horse, with bright orange antennae. Above its headlights it grinned an enormous caterpillar grin. A sign on its flank said “Rent Me For Parties”! It was an open-cab style caterpillar, no doors or roof, and the driver was pretty young and he was leaning back with one hand on the wheel.
We were continuing north to Villahermosa for two reasons. First, we wanted to see those famous Olmec relics that anthropologists call “the colossal heads”. Second and perhaps more pressingly, because we planned to take the long way around and back up to the mountainous heart of Chiapas, using the graded highway of the western approach instead of the abominable one to the north. When you go north out of San Cristobal down to the town of Palenque, you take curve after punishing curve down from its 7,000 feet, you probably spend half the voyage traveling in the opposite direction from your destination, and you thread these curves along inclines so steep and roads so narrow it seems impossible that they’ll accomodate your bus, let alone traffic in the opposite direction, and because this road connects all the many mountain villages and hamlets, there are also men, women, and children leading animals or carrying bundles up and down the side of the road, edging along the cliff or against the steep hillside. It’s classic. For the protection of these villagers and their livestock there are hundreds of speed bumps and ‘vibradores’, and we duly registered each one. Most of the four-hour ride down I was covering my face with my hands, trying to think of the least nauseating things I could. We were ill for the rest of that day. We sat ourselves in a cafe and felt the earth heaving and shifting.
It was while taking the long way back that I was moved to give thanks for just how far the theory and practice of road-building have come.
Just as the jungled-under ruins of ancient Palenque make such a dreamy contrast to the greasy modernity of contemporary Palenque-town, the screwy road from highland Chiapas down to Palenque is so wonderfully juxtaposed with the dead-shot, black-top four-lane highway west to Tuxtla Guiterrez, the capital of Chiapas. Instead of winding up, down and around every peak and gulch, it bores right through them like justice itself. We crested a hill and I saw the road for miles ahead framed at the base of a deep and perfectly symmetrical ‘V’ of dynamited rock, more beautiful to me than any of the corbeled arches of Palenque itself. The road cut like a canyon. It flowed like a river. This is how you build a road, I thought, straight and flat and still affording big blockbuster views, a swooning red hazed-out sunset on our right as we crossed the neck of an immense mountain lake. Colossal tractor-trailers barreled by on either side. Some were carrying new cars. What a luxury, I thought, a road big enough for a truck big enough to carry a bunch of cars! Bring it on, I smiled, there’s room for all! Fiat, a strong hand, eminent domain: the land calls out for an iron will to bind it! At Tuxtla, the bus station is actually incorporated right into the mall, so you can hop off and grab a Cinnabon or watch ‘Thor’ or get your name engraved on rice in the name of progress.
We were continuing north to Villahermosa for two reasons. First, we wanted to see those famous Olmec relics that anthropologists call “the colossal heads”. Second and perhaps more pressingly, because we planned to take the long way around and back up to the mountainous heart of Chiapas, using the graded highway of the western approach instead of the abominable one to the north. When you go north out of San Cristobal down to the town of Palenque, you take curve after punishing curve down from its 7,000 feet, you probably spend half the voyage traveling in the opposite direction from your destination, and you thread these curves along inclines so steep and roads so narrow it seems impossible that they’ll accomodate your bus, let alone traffic in the opposite direction, and because this road connects all the many mountain villages and hamlets, there are also men, women, and children leading animals or carrying bundles up and down the side of the road, edging along the cliff or against the steep hillside. It’s classic. For the protection of these villagers and their livestock there are hundreds of speed bumps and ‘vibradores’, and we duly registered each one. Most of the four-hour ride down I was covering my face with my hands, trying to think of the least nauseating things I could. We were ill for the rest of that day. We sat ourselves in a cafe and felt the earth heaving and shifting.
It was while taking the long way back that I was moved to give thanks for just how far the theory and practice of road-building have come.
Just as the jungled-under ruins of ancient Palenque make such a dreamy contrast to the greasy modernity of contemporary Palenque-town, the screwy road from highland Chiapas down to Palenque is so wonderfully juxtaposed with the dead-shot, black-top four-lane highway west to Tuxtla Guiterrez, the capital of Chiapas. Instead of winding up, down and around every peak and gulch, it bores right through them like justice itself. We crested a hill and I saw the road for miles ahead framed at the base of a deep and perfectly symmetrical ‘V’ of dynamited rock, more beautiful to me than any of the corbeled arches of Palenque itself. The road cut like a canyon. It flowed like a river. This is how you build a road, I thought, straight and flat and still affording big blockbuster views, a swooning red hazed-out sunset on our right as we crossed the neck of an immense mountain lake. Colossal tractor-trailers barreled by on either side. Some were carrying new cars. What a luxury, I thought, a road big enough for a truck big enough to carry a bunch of cars! Bring it on, I smiled, there’s room for all! Fiat, a strong hand, eminent domain: the land calls out for an iron will to bind it! At Tuxtla, the bus station is actually incorporated right into the mall, so you can hop off and grab a Cinnabon or watch ‘Thor’ or get your name engraved on rice in the name of progress.
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.
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)