I woke up to sunlight pushing
in through the slat-board cracks of my hotel room and falling in bars
over my face and the red woven blanket pulled up under my chin. Climbing
from bed, I walked to the door of my hotel room, and looked bleary-eyed
out onto the slow twisting Mopan River: a ribbon of reptilian green
that skirts the line between Guatemala and Belize. It's a river so lazy
you can't tell which way is upstream and which way is down. I looked
at the banks of the river and their solid earthy slopes. Morning vapor
rose up from the ground and then dissipated. Those banks were tangible.
They defined sides, had owners, while the thick, green vein of water
between them seemed ambiguous - a corridor where the definite loosened
into fluid. Situated on the Belize bank, I was just a stone's throw
from the rest of Guatemala where I had spent the previous months. The
water inched by, and I pondered the opposite shore from this new point
of distance.
For the past two months I had
lived in Tikal National Park and worked for a Guatemalan man named Jose,
whose family owned one of the three hotels within the national park.
I first met Jose during a 2-day visit to Tikal with my mother. We pulled
up to the hotel late in the evening; he greeted us at the front desk,
and then helped carry our bags to our bungalow. He ended up joining
us for dinner, and it wasn't until halfway through the meal that Jose
let on that he oversaw the place for his parents. We joked and laughed
about travel, Guatemala, the United States - he had gone to college
there in the '70s. The next morning Jose offered to lead us on a walk
through the Maya ruins. It was somewhere around Temple IV that he turned
and asked if I'd be interested in helping him write a guidebook to the
ruins of Tikal. He'd been thinking about it for years, he said, but
needed someone to get it down on paper for him. From my just-out-of-college
perspective, it was an offer of a lifetime. At home I was pulling espresso
shots for the impatient soon-to-be-dotcomers of Mill Valley, California,
and looking desperately for any sort of writing job. I didn't stop to
think about why Jose would chose to hire me - someone with little publishing
experience that knew nothing about Guatemala. But three months later,
getting on a bus heading toward the Belize boarder, I was thinking about
it a lot and grappling with what had rolled in all directions away from
me.
I didn't know quite where I
was going on that bus, all I knew was that I wanted to be near water.
I wanted to watch it reflect sunlight, peer into its murky depths, see
its currents slide over one another like layers of skin. When the bus
reached the Belize boarder we all got off for Immigration, and there
I noticed the Mopan River wending its way through the little town of
Melchor de Mencos. I grabbed my bags and asked around for the nearest
hotel.
That night, nestled in bed,
frogs from the Mopan chorusing, I opened a book my mother had sent me.
Over my life she's given me hundreds of books and probably thousands
of clippings. Since that trip to the border I read everything she sends
me, but previously, I just as often did not. This particular book, whose
jacket cover I had not even glanced at, somehow made it into my bag.
I began to read Sastun. It was about a woman named Rosita Arvigo, an
Italian-American from Chicago, who had spent the past several years
studying medicinal plants with an old Maya healer in Belize. Looking
at the map in the front of the book I realized that this woman was within
20 miles of my hotel. I fell asleep chanting, "I'm coming tomorrow,
Rosita. I'm coming tomorrow, Rosita. I'm coming tomorrow. . . "
"Are you ready to go?" The
hotel owner, a Swiss guy who towered 6' 7" high, hollered to me from
his small office. "Yes," I called back from the doorway of my hotel
room. I turned from my water musings and gathered my things. The Swiss
hotel owner gave me a lift through town and down the empty, dusty road
to Ix Chel Farms, and then left me waiting for Rosita in the shade of
the visitor's gazebo. Travelers come to Ix Chel to hike the Rainforest
Medicine Trail, learn about the healing properties of tropical plants,
and buy small bottles of tinctures with names like: Immune Boost, Belly
Be Good, and Female Tonic. I wandered around the gazebo reading labels
and the backs of books, unsure of what to do next, or if I was even
in the right place.
Two men, local canoe guides,
lolled on a bench under the gazebo waiting to paddle visitors down the
river to San Ignacio. They asked where I was from and what I was doing
in Belize. I said I was taking a break from my writing in Tikal where
I had been working with Jose. One of the guides began to laugh, "Oh
man, those mother fuckers are crazy. Those boys are madmen." He was
genuinely laughing and glancing at me through teary eyes. " They're
my friends. I know them. I know them... and they are mad. Didn't turn
out like their father wanted them to at all," he shook his head until
his laughter settled into the occasional snort and a smile. The other
guide, named Felice, asked if I was waiting for a ride. I said no.
"Are you sick?" he asked.
"No. It's, um, the other kind,"
I replied.
He nodded, then looked at me
for a long while. "Does she know you are here? You're lucky you know,
she's not usually here in the mornings." He stood up and walked out
from under the gazebo and into the wall of jungle.
Rosita and others set up the
Rainforest Medicine Trail and shop to support ethnobotanical research
and the work of traditional healers, but her primary work continued
to be as doctor to many people in the area. I knew my asking to see
her was a bit nervey. After waiting about a half-hour and having read
the ingredients of all the tinctures, Rosita's assistant beckoned me
from the gazebo and led me to a patio shrouded in greenery. I took a
seat; the mounting heat and hum of the midday insects lulled me. My
mind drifted back to one of my first days in Tikal.
I waited, equipped with pens,
paper, and tape recorder, on the porch of my bungalow for Jose. We were
going to begin interviewing, and he was going to tell me about his family,
how his father had been the foreman of the excavations of the world
famous Maya ruins and how they had lived in Tikal before there were
roads. Jose grew-up as mounds of jungle were stripped away, and the
thousand-year-old Maya ruins were exposed. He and his three brothers
helped build bungalows for the archeologists and catch lizards and tarantulas
for the herpetologists and entomologists. Eventually I learned all of
this but not during that first interview. That day I waited 20, 30,
40 minutes for Jose before he finally emerged from his bungalow and
climbed up the steps onto my porch. His hair was wet, shining black.
He gestured slightly toward the empty chair.
"Sit down, please. Please,"
I smiled. He sat slowly and let go a low, wind-like sigh.
"You want to learn about spirits,
Victoria?"
"Sure," I piped up, as if
he'd just asked me if I wanted a piece of gum.
"Hmmm. Are you sure? Because
they will meet you if you want. They are here. You may think you're
just humoring me, but they are here. One just hit me, POW, hit me with
its presence while I was in the shower." They came to him all the time,
he said. Spirits came like a bat swinging and left him shaking for hours.
As he began a story about a spirit that tormented his friend Miguel,
he reached into a paper bag and pulled out two bottles of red wine.
Before I could introduce myself,
or stand up for a handshake, Rosita strode onto the patio and said,
"So, what's going on." Black wiry hair twisted away from her face. She
looked at me with steady, dark eyes. I was so relieved to be talking
to someone, to an American woman, that without plan the words and stories
tumbled out, and I began describing the night in room 16A.
"We were in there waiting
for spirits," I started. Everyone at the hotel in Tikal knew that a
few spirits lived in the fringe bungalow 16A. Everyone knew. Except
for me, of course, who knew nothing at all about spirits other than
that this guy who'd hired me to write a book had been talking about
them since the day I arrived.
That night, just after the
sun went down, we opened the door into room 16A, which had the usual
two beds, a dresser, and a bathroom. Tourists stayed in there all the
time. I wondered if they noticed any spirits. Jose was slowly walking
the length of the room, looking up at the rafters. His eyes were wide
open, and he explained in a low voice that he wanted to ask the spirits
about the ancient Maya, that he was inviting them to come speak with
us. We sat down on the beds to wait. I tried to relax but struggled
between wanting to tell Jose to knock it off 'cause he was being weird
and deep fascination. At some point, I lay down and without realizing
it, I fell asleep. I couldn't help it. My eyes and body felt like they
weighed thousands of pounds. Like I was at the bottom of the sea. I
dreamt about being in that same room, in 16A, about lying on the double
bed with its white, wind-dried sheets, and sleeping. Jose slept next
to me, holding my hand. A spirit came to the foot of the bed and I woke
up. It sort of gooed over me, pressing into every crevice. It was heavy
and thick like congealed water. So heavy that I couldn't move or yell,
although I tried. Jose was right next to me and I yelled for him to
wake up. He started to mumble, saying he understood what was happening.
I dug my nails into his palm. He told me to stop. And then the spirit
stopped its squeezing and pressing. It peeled back and was gone. We
got up and left the room. I was annoyed at the spirit for thinking it
could trap me. It seemed mean (dare I say spirited) to prevent Jose
and me from speaking. I did not feel threatened but confused, taken
by surprise even. Sitting in the hotel's dining hall, I saw a friend
from college. It made no sense at allÉ.I woke up. I did not know what
room I was in or what bed. Jose was not next to me. I felt like clear
sky.
"Jose?"
"I'm right here." He answered
from the next bed. Leaning forward with his forearms on his knees, he
stared at me."You haven't moved in a half hour. They were here."
I glanced up at Rosita. I
was playing with a bead on my bracelet, trying to center it perfectly
between two other beads, as I told my story. Rosita simply nodded and
listened. She didn't appear to think I was crazy, even if I thought
I might be crazy. That was reassuring. It wasn't that I was closed to
the idea of spirits and other worlds. It was that I was open. I was
ready to embrace whatever the world threw at me. But these spirits,
Jose's spirits, turned the back of my neck cold, made the thousands
of hairs on my body prick to attention. I wanted nothing to do with
them. I told Rosita about the guidebook, but that I didn't know if I
could go back to Tikal. I was out of my league.
She shook her head and said
that what people say about spirits being in Tikal, about the ruins being
some sort of Mecca, is crap. The Benevolent Spirits left when the archeologists
came. I had to agree.
Telling me to wait there, Rosita
stood up and in two quick steps was off and absorbed by the green swirl
of jungle. I looked at the palm fronds crowding to fill in the clearing
around the patio and thought about the many hundreds of thousands of
people who walked through Tikal in a year. During my time there, I had
found only one quiet spot. It was the northern most building in the
park and part of Group H; getting there entailed a long walk through
jungle. The first time I explored the temple I climbed up its steep
stone steps and wandered into the three inner chambers. Some anthropologists
say the rooms in the tops of temples were meant to replicate caves in
the side of a mountain. Maya priests sat in these sacred rooms and let
blood from their bodies, allowing it to collect in small fig tree paper
bowls. Mixed with leaves and copal resin, they burned the blood and
as the smoke twisted and rose, a giant serpent emerged in front of the
priests. The serpent's jaws split open and out leaned an ancestor, there
to guide and counsel.
Inside the first chamber I
found a handmade ladder propped against the wall, leading up to the
roof. Rungs, fitted into crude notches on the frame, were bound with
botan vine and wire. I placed hand above head, and climbed up the gray,
dry wood on to the roof of the temple, which lay flush with the jungle
canopy. I visited there most days during my stay in Tikal. On four occasions
I watched a mother spider monkey, a baby clinging to her belly, feed
on figs in a nearby tree. A mealy-headed parrot often roosted in some
of the branches that leaned in toward my limestone perch. From up there
I could look south and see the six temples of Tikal poking up through
the green canopy. I could see the sun and moon for the split second
of the day when they faced each other.
Rosita reappeared almost suddenly,
as if the jungle had coughed her back up, and landed her on the patio.
She was laden with bundles of green plants and small packets. Into one
of my hands she pressed a bundle of rue, the smell, bitter and sharp.
In the other hand she placed a bag of copal. Rue is an herb with small,
round, blue-green leaves that I had heard of time and again in Guatemala
being used for calming the nerves.
"Give me your necklace," Rosita
said. It was an uncut piece of jade about the size of a human eye. It
was bound in thin silver wire and I wore it on a black cord around my
neck. Jose had given me the stone. He kept a burlap sack, which probably
weighed 20 pounds, full of jade stones of various sizes. Every night
as he moved to a new bungalow, he brought the sack with him. Jose lived
at the hotel, but had no room; he simply stayed in whichever one was
unoccupied that night. Besides the jade, I think he kept a few boxes
of clothes and a camera, all of which maids ferried daily from room
to unoccupied room.
One evening we sat on the
porch of his bungalow, talking, gazing at the black shapes of jungle.
Lianas draped like rope between the tree crowns. Overhead cracks in
the canopy opened onto leagues of night sky; more stars, it seemed,
than space. Jose held the bag of jade on his lap and rummaged through
it, sometimes picking out a piece and holding it up to the porch light.
"I am looking for your piece
of jade, Victoria; the perfect piece. I'll know it when I see it, when
it has the right light."
I began to examine the pieces
he had set out, laying them in my palm, feeling the texture, thinking
how different this jade was from anything I had ever seen. "I like this
one," I smiled, holding the jade out.
He swiped the stone from my
hand. "You cannot choose! This one is not right at all!" he barked.
Adrenaline ignited fires through
my arms, stomach, the back of my skull. Icy silence. He flung the sack
into the corner of the porch and slumped in his chair. My eyes focused
on a hairline crack in the concrete floor.
Suddenly, he blurted, "Can
I borrow some film for my camera?"
I said of course and pulled
several rolls out of my backpack for him to choose from. He leaned over
and scooped all three out of my palm.
"I can feel them. They are
here," he said and disappeared into his room. I sat on the porch and
listened as he shot and shot and shot.
I handed Rosita the jade pendant.
She took the stone and began murmuring payers in Spanish, speaking to
the four directions. Nine times she repeated each prayer over the necklace.
As she murmured I looked at the plastic bag full of copal in my hand.
In Tikal I had seen copal trees oozing sap like thick tears. It was
the same resine Maya had gathered to burn in their ceremonies since
B.C. In the past they called it itz: an excretion of life, a medium
through which the gods spoke.
Rosita finished saying the
prayers and sat back. Her look into my eyes was unwavering as she gave
me her instructions. She explained that copal smoke cleanses a person
and can help protect them from a Malevolent Spirit. She said not to
feel fear because it's what the Malevolent Spirits feed on, it's their
door in. Sleeping with a fresh sprig of rue under my pillow and chewing
on bits of it throughout the day would help keep me calm. The Benevolent
Spirits never try and scare people. They only communicate in ways that
won't frighten a person. I asked how exactly. She replied that they
come in lots of ways, but dreams are common. "Don't try to save Jose,
as women have a tendency to do, Victoria. Of the nine Benevolent Spirits,
five are female." She also warned not to try and learn about the spirits
with Jose, because he didnŐt know what he was doing. She said to go
write the guidebook, that it was a good opportunity. Handing back my
jade pendant, she gave a smile and wished me well.
That night, back at my borderside
hotel room, I went for a walk along the river. I searched for a place
to build a fire, but every piece of wood I found was wet and I couldn't
get them to catch. I wanted to burn the copal. As I began the walk back
to my room, thinking that maybe I could just burn the resin in a dish
and forget the rest, a slight spiral of smoke caught my eye. Near the
edge of the river was a rock fire ring, with embers smoldering amid
bits of trashŃeggshells, cornhusk, pineapple cuttings.
Scraping a few of the orange
coals together, I poured a palm full of copal granules onto the mound.
I crouched over my tiny offering and blew. Sweet smoke billowed and
rose above me, clouds like round faces, swelling and falling. The bunch
of rue was in my pocket. I took it out and placed a sprig of its lobed
leaves under my tongue. My eyes watered at the earthy almost bitter
taste. I began to call silently into the smoke, letting it wash over
me, asking for some sort of sign, some sort of map for crossing rivers.
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