at our first meal together, don mario to my left at the head of the table, doña leonor and lucy across from me, i remember how badly i wanted to tell them just how good it tasted, the fresh pressed yellow corn tortillas and the avocadoes and the orange juice. behind me on the turqoise-painted, dangerously cracked open concrete floor little marito scurried backwards in his walker-dinghy thing, hit the wall, dropped his little mangled stalk of sugar cane and laughed hysterically with dimples galore. oh, the dimples.
before bed, lucy slides her worn flip flops off and washes her legs and feet under single-bulb light beside the cooking fire. her ankles are strong like a mare's and long, lovely feet, brown and clean as the beach. she's three years younger than me and is the perfect mother: beautiful, stern, playful. her eyes are a rare moss green, sea-like, salty, moist and directed, and her calm reminds me of my own, only more consistent, less forced.
i am three hours by pickup truck southeast of san cristobal de las casas, chiapas, mexico in an area called nuevo leon, and more specifically in coral de las piedras, where the huts spill down the road from the jungle like the mother's blood line - with ninety-six year old abuelita at the end of the road, most of her twelve daughters and sons (leonor one of eight girls), nieces and nephews who are grandparents themselves now, her grandchildren and their families' homes closest to town. still far enough into the jungle to call themselves campesinos, to eat cheese only when the cheese vendor drives down the road on his motorcycle-with-cooler once a week. queso fresco! he shouts.
don mario tells rambling stories about his childhood, when he and his father lived at the presidential palace in mexico city, his father working for the president himself. while he speaks he tosses his chicken bones to the dogs with a look in his eye that means he hopes this will be the one to choke and kill, oh those useless, mangy dogs. doña leonor guides me through her garden and describes twenty-eight flowers, dozens of trees and vines, countless herbs, and the medicinal uses for all of them. she is a curandera. her silver-capped front teeth catch rays of sun when she smiles up at me, "the stomach," she says with wide eyes, "this one is for pain in the stomach". leonor teaches me how to press a ball of masa in my fist, roll it around gently, and smash it fuerte! in the wooden tortilla press. she plays with my hair. she speaks so fast and with such a strong accent that she is impossible to understand, though i never let on.
and their daughter, lucy, and i, we are quick friends. with as little spanish as i have we manage joke after joke, about the baby, about boobs and men and menstrual cramps and we giggle for hours and hours. we're unbeatable when we pick coffee together, smiling, filling plastic beach-buckets, finding out how similar we are - lucy has a year of school under her belt and plans to go back and become a lawyer once marito is two. she's political, wise and articulate. she is curious, like me, about her history, about people. she's nurturing and crass; graceful and tomboyish. we plant cilantro and tomatoes, and she laughs at the way i chop an onion.
within two or three days personal vanity is rendered completely useless. the beauty of this place is not in you or on you but around you...it's more than you are, would eat you up in one giant gulp if it weren't for its totally encompassing generosity, the utter humanity of the landscape. i wake to seven o`clock sunlight and lay in bed for another hour just listening to the murmur of tuba tunes from a distant radio, the ongoing symphony of guttural rooster crows, the buzz of flies, the whoop whoop of some magnificent tropical bird, the gallop of horses and the slip of donkey's hooves on the dirt lane. little boy's voices as they march past, two by two, with sticks like bayonets. outside, chiapas breathes green and golden. piedras is a clump of houses arranged on a hillside plastered with banana groves and maiz fields. the corn is ready this time of year, and the stalks, now dry and withering, are intentionally bent bent over by the farmers, who know that in this way the corn will stay fresh in its husks until needed. then, in a race to achieve the perfect symbiotic relationship, the beans curl up the dried stalks, where they will be protected, fed and shaded just the right amount. thus, corn and beans, the perfect food source, occupy the same space, grow together, are alternately harvested, and give their life without complaint. the hillside is composed of domineering black rock formations covered in a startlingly green moss, and they roll downward into puffy, tallgrass meadows where donkeys chew and shreik throughout the day; below the road and the houses it's red coffee plants and green coffee plants and then the valley, like a pile of velvet, miles and miles and miles of it. at the center of the valley is a jutting black rock that resembles the tip of a thumb.
in this place i am not myself, it's impossible. whether it's our position overlooking the valley below or something else, i am in a perpetual state of vertigo, a dreamlike coma in which i can't really detect my own body, but know that i'm waking up and moving and eating and talking every day. only, it's like a story being told to me.
it doesn't help that all this time i'm reading carlos castaneda, spending hours every day asessing the events of my dreams, and sometimes in the mornings opening my eyes before my awareness has settled back into my body, and so i jump a little in bed, startle myself, and think, more profoundly than ever before, "where am i?". i dream that i am standing inside an ice cave. there is a small opening out of which i can see an endless cold ocean saturated in moonlight, and inside the cave the formations are perfect curls of glistening white ice like waves. in the dream i lift my hands to my face, but my hands are only the shadows of my hands, and they change shape just a little bit with the undulating light.
at night don mario lays upstairs in his hammock and sings across the darkness to marito. under the lightbulb i stay up with lucy and leonor drinking coffee, which is not really coffee but coffee pie, as we toss a handful of animal cookies into our mugs and let them absorb the liquid until it's a sort of soggy caserole to be eaten with a spoon. my spanish is getting better and better but i find that it's somehow easier to speak in metaphor rather than try and describe the word i'm looking for. life is like an underground metro...like a sheep...it's like an onion...no! it's like a taco, like a parade!
every day we eat beans and rice and tortillas and chiles. i am taught how to cut down banana leaves, how to soften them on the flame, how to mix chipilin with masa and then fold tamales. there is something so outrageously satisfying about making a tamale. the act requires a flood of motherly tenderness, rolling, no not rolling, swathing, bundling, packaging, gifting, patting, dressing. they're perfect. we make empanadas filled with potatoes, and we dip bananas in warm chocolate for chocobanana, and we grind rice and cinnamon for the boiled sugary delight that is atole.
on my twelfth day in nuevo leon i quote octavio paz in my journal, "yo soy mis pasos", i am my footprints, and a few hours later i slip and fall on the back step, twisting my right ankle so hard that it swells up and bruises, brown like a discarded fruit. but i feel strangely resillient, rub the bruise with oregano-rosemary oil (thank you, marleen), and hold in the tears while doña leonor forcefully grinds my bones into place. it feels better. later i write in my journal, "i am folded and unfolded, lit and snuffed, buried and dug up, eaten and regurgitated, rolled over again and again by a strong tongue, like a piece of gum in a child's mouth, a drip of sugary syrup on a smiling chin...". and in bed that night while my ankle pulses with dull pain, i realize that after less than two weeks i am aching more with nostalgia for this place, for the sadness of having to leave, than i ache for my crooked, bulging limb.
my fears about leaving, maybe never to return, are confirmed on my fourteenth and final day, when lucy writes me the most beautiful letter, in which she says that i am worth all of my ideas, dreams, and good humor combined - which is exactly, exactly, exactly the way i feel about her.
there is so. much. more.
but i have to stop somewhere. this morning i took a pickup truck at six a.m. from nuevo leon back to san cristobal de las casas. emerging from the tropical valley and into the pine forest felt great, and in the next few days i hope to be able to tear myself away from sc de lc and get my ass to the beach.
will certainly keep you updated on that one.
