Aventurera?

“Have you ever traveled in Mexico alone?” Nacho asks me over breakfast. His mother, despite my protests and best attempts to be helpful, is making eggs, to accompany the fresh papaya and melon, toast, coffee, cheese and tortillas that are already laid out before us. Really, I try to insist, but I am the guest, and I am made to feel welcome, cared for and pampered. I can’t complain.

I see everything, Nacho, comments, as I am ruffled by the abundance of sexist beer adds (she knows how to swim, but she always has “floaties” how ironic – bastards), sexualized earth mothers, and embedded racism (Jennifer Aniston plastered on a wall, advertising a neighborhood hair salon in San Cristobal de las Casas). But we go back to this idea of traveling alone.

I think. I always travel alone. Except I don’t. In fact, I never travel alone. No that can’t possibly be. He says that he loves traveling alone, I muse that I in fact like to travel to people. The hours in busses, planes, automobiles and boats don’t phase me in the least, in fact, I like to lose myself in abstractions, fantastic stories, wonderment. I ask myself how people live, how they love, how they feel. I wonder if a thousand years ago people had the mental energy after all the physical labor that they needed to complete to have such trivial existential crises as those I have on a regular basis. But I always have someone waiting for me at the other end. Always. We discuss this as a metaphor for our differing poetic style. He is visual, adjectival, conceptual. I eschew adjectives. I am direct, verbal, sensory. We are in a combi, 35 pesos, from Tuxtla to San Cristobal, he gives me a present, his most recent book, not the one that is coming out shortly, but the last one published. There are snatches that catch my attention. I like his writing, I like translating it, perhaps precisely because his style is so different from mine. He closes his eyes and I watch the landscape out the window as we climb steadily, or not so steadily, wobbling from side to side, up the mountain. The vegetation shifts from caducifolios (deciduous trees) to evergreens. There are women squatting by the side of the road, with bright rebosos slung around them, carting babies and I squint, but I don’t ask, what they are doing, as the smoke rises, whipping past, I realize that they are collecting firewood, and constructing square stacks about which to cook. And on we climb. A thick layer of clouds cools the atmosphere, cars come towards us with headlights cutting through the white. I look over and Nacho has his eyes closed. Why do I never travel alone, I ask myself again. I have been all over the world, launched myself off into the unknown, but I always end up with someone. There is always something waiting. When will I learn to be alone?

San Cristobal is beautiful, colonial churches sprout out of unsuspecting plazas, there are street merchants lining long strings of makeshift tents, tianguis, but without the bright blue plastic tarps of other cities. These are white cloth, other than that, they are mostly the same. We bargain. I walk away. We bargain some more. I buy colorful cloths and wedding gifts, adornments for hair and shoulders that have yet to be named. I am attracted to the texture of the cloth as much as the color. I breathe in the smell of wood burning. I feel at peace. The air is cool up here, not nearly as beastly hot as yesterday, on the water with the wind whipping my hair around my face, smiling like a pup with his head out the window. I like to feel the pressure of the wind on my skin, like the pressure of the cool glass against my cheeks as I watch silently, miles passing before my wide eyes. El cañón del sumidero, I am told, is a naturally occurring fault. The embarcadero houses competing rackets, marimbas on one side and a cacophonous drum set on the other. The man who had sold us the tickets, acted like a radio show host, making shouts out to the tourists from different places through a crackly microphone. I made some snide remark about noise pollution and job hazards. Really, Ilana, he laughed, you do come up with some funny things. No, seriously, I insisted, imagine what kind of emotional stress it would cause to have to work with this kind of noise all day long, every day. He nodded in agreement, still laughing at me. I feel sorry for the children who come up with their huge hungry eyes, begging us to buy bracelets, or clay figures, or little comandante Marcos dolls. They have the same hungry eyes as the little boys in Janitzio, “regalame un peso, Seño…” You promised you’d buy something on the way back….

It is a bit disquieting to be surrounded by such rampant poverty, to feel the weight of one’s belongings. It is strange to feel so different, so blatantly devoid of color, of essence, of past. Later in the day a little girl tells me I am lying when I tell her I have no change, another woman, in a market stall tells me I am lying when I tell her I have only 500 pesos, and that I like her merchandise but I simply have no more. “Mentira,” she insists, and I hold up my hands in a shrug, “Los dios sí sabe…” God is watching, he knows…I shrug again, “then he knows that I have no more money with me…” and I walk away. I guiltily buy one boy a packet of ritz crackers and give the other 5 pesos to two little girls, willing to sell their chulel (soul), stolen in a photograph while their mothers hide their faces from the invading white woman. I don’t take their picture. The discrepancies are painful, the raging internalized racists discourse, at once meant to please, and to manipulate. Days before, returning to D.F. from Morelia, drunk on little sleep, I stumbled dazed out of the Observatorio bus station towards the Metro. The taxi drivers stare me down in some sort of mix between pity, amusement and dismay. “A dónde vas?” one asks, “Al metro” I reply, trying hard not to stumble and fall, again… “No… he replies… the metro?” incredulous, “but that doesn’t go with your personality!” My personality, huh? My personality? What can he possibly know about my personality… I buy my two peso ticket, feed it into the metal maw of the turnstiles and limp my way down the stairs: dirección Pantitlán. My ipod is plugged snugly into my ears and I listen to, of all unlikely things, Gloria Estefan’s Mi tierra, wobbling with the melodramatic scenery of common places.

I feel tired. And alone. But alone in that way that you know will end, that will have to end. Alone in myself. There is no self-loathing these days, or very little, though my body rejects the blatant heat, rebelling in little patches of itchy skin that refuse to calm themselves. Here in Tuxtla, I have been treated so well it will be hard to leave. I have been sleeping, finally, after so many months, sleeping despite the heat, with the fan blowing calmly over me. I turn it off in the early hours of the morning if I awaken, because in those hours it is cool, before the suns rays raise waves of heat in rhythmic pulses from the ground. From San Cristóbal, we took a small colectivo to a town with no equal. You want syncretism? He asked, wait until you see this. We step out of the taxi, and I look out across the trash strewn central square, in the late afternoon, there are still stands speckling the plaza, still merchants, mostly women, hopeful of selling their perishable wares. We stop at the municipal building and Ignacio pays the 30$ (pesos) for us to gain access to the church. Since when do you have to pay up front to get into the Catholic church? I ask. Aguanta… this town has its own government and it is relatively independent from the federal and state powers. I smile wanly, make some joke about us being in the middle of another Canoa, and he looks at me seriously. It could be a second Canoa, he states, if you take a picture inside the church. I gulp, look up to see it sparkling white with bright toy-like colors decorating the front entrance. I do not expect what I see when I walk through the doors, reminded in over 15 languages not to take pictures. It has to do with their cosmovision, he reminds me, the believe that the photo captures their chulel, it robs them of their soul and their place of worship of its sacredness. I make sure my camera is neatly stowed in my purse. I have no desire to be lynched, nor to rob anyone of their soul. In fact, later in Palenque, alone, or rather at Agua Azul, I sit eating my filete de mojarra al ajo calmly, willing my massive headache to ease itself, sipping from the black waters of imperialism (coca-cola, what can I say, when it comes in the recycled thick bottles it tastes different, and I needed to try something to combat the migraine and nausea) I watched a young blond man, one that I had seen at each of the varying tourist attractions, the archaeological site, the first falls at Misol-Ha, talking to an amiable young Italian couple. He talks about his travels as if they were conquests, he is tackling the world, taking it on, one important city at a time. I shudder inwardly. I don’t want to be like that. I don’t want to barge through doors, and culturally pillage, I prefer to be invited in. I tell this to Nacho today as we are driving up into the ecological reserve to see the Canyon from above. I thank him again for being so obsequious with me, for his family’s hospitality. I think that may be it, after all, sometimes it seems that we couch our hunger to know the world in terms of the imperative sites, the patrimony of humanity… but I think it is in the smaller places, the less grandiose that I prefer to see. When I travel, what I hunger for is a different sort of knowledge. What are the preoccupations, how are people’s houses decorated, what is a typical day. I hurt a little when the Italian woman asks the little girl if she goes to school, she seems not to understand, which may have more to do with the woman’s poor Spanish than the little girl’s lack of schooling, but I think about such an existence, one that requires you to constantly insinuate yourself, to interrupt meals, to insist that your merchandise be purchased, all day long, every day. That, however, wasn’t my thought then. My thought then was, how can I pretend that I am not as vulgarly consuming of other cultures as this poor kid, who doesn’t even see it? And how do I avoid being a part of that. I send back the wonder bread and ask for tortillas, do I really look that American? I cringe and my headache slowly eases, for a while, and later in the cool water of the river, the falls neatly captured for my Japanese camera’s memory, I forgive myself, just a little, and let the cool water rush over my body, blue water, ancient water, non-potable water, to be sure. I can feel the vibrations, the dull hum, I am back in San Juan Chamula.

In the church, which is much less a church than a wide-open nave with no pews, and evergreen needles spread over the white tile floor. Lining the outer limits of the space of worship are statues in glass cases, saints, like those in any other church, but in an abundance that I have not had the privilege of seeing before. Inside that and all around the perimeter there are candles burning, pulsing, there is a glow that rises, and falls, the mirage of aqueous air that the flames give off. There are small groups of people, clans, huddling in spaces on the floor that have been cleared of pine needles. There are rows of candles lit or being lit, and bottles of aguardiente, coca-cola and other sodas. The coca-cola, I am told, is an integral part of the ritual. Every ofrenda has three small bottles, I see, and there are soda bottles among them, always. Syncretic practices indeed, I smile, or cringe, or feel sad and sorry and at the same time amused, though I know this is a highly inappropriate feeling that I try to squelch. I couldn’t help giggling with Joel either, just a few days before in the tiny, kitschy church on Janitzio with its gold colored aluminum fishes, and tinsel, Christmas lights flashing along the pulpit. There was only one Saint in glass there, and he was covered with American dollars. Migration, we both got serious, of course, the almighty dollar, splitting up families, dragging people off their islands, out of their communities over the border to work for pittances. It can’t be all bad, I think, but I can’t seem to find any good in it, and we are serious for a few minutes, walking up the hill, around the far side of the island, avoiding the loud thumping bass and the imploring calls to buy pseudo-Mexican Taiwanese merchandise, mixed with local goods and color.


But here, there is a low hum that rises, like steam off of water. It is not a chanting in language, though there are prayers being said in a language so unintelligible to me as to be foreign even in its cadence. It is like an ohm, like Buddhist prayer, and I know that it may sound the same but its meaning must be entirely other. Or perhaps not. Is there any basic meaning in prayer that differs fundamentally from one faith to another? I am astounded by such acts of faith in and of themselves, and I am conscious that we are being merely tolerated. There is, at the end of the church the typical retablo, but the strange thing, the astonishing thing is that instead of Christ in the center, he has been shrunken, and pushed to the side, and in his place there is a huge figure of San Juan Baptist, from whom the town derives its name, and, it would seem, its power.

So, I decide to travel alone, if for only a day, to Palenque. It is one of the places that I have long been meaning to visit, to see its friezes, to the jungle. I arrive at 6:24 in the morning, in a stupor of back pain and vague nausea. The bus stopped in San Cristóbal and Ocosingo (which houses the Toniná ruins which I will have to see on another journey), bright lights for 10 minutes at a time, and the highway was nothing more than a long series of sharp curves cutting swaths back and forth through the mountains. I found myself paying for a collective tour because it seemed much more efficient and cost effective than private transport, or combi. I used my national student id card, despite its date of validity having passed, once again for both bus discounts and free entrance into the INAH site. Being the intrepid traveler that I am, I climbed every temple step available, followed trails deeper into the jungle, circled around the ancient edifices. I tried to take pictures that avoided the majority of people, and in spite of the early hour, there were many. Sweat poured off of me, soaking my shirt, behind a massive tree, I stripped my pants from my sticky skin, and put on shorts, later I removed the shirt, only to wear a sports bra, albeit a relatively modest one that covered almost all of my belly as well. Here it was a normal sight. Mostly Italians, French and Germans, with some Americans, there are always Americans, interspersed among the European travelers. I smiled at the children, thought of my own as my muscles wavered with each descending step. If I die, I thought, at least I talked to her this morning. Fleeting thoughts, I have no intention of dying, though one never knows when zipping around slower-moving traffic on mountainous jungle roads. When I had seen all my little head could take, and stretch my body in yogic precision, I started my march down to the museo de sitio, the rendezvous point. “Pero güerita, es un kilómetro y medio,” says the man who I ask, very earnestly. “You need a taxi, or a bus…” “It’s just a kilometer, 10 minutes, tops,” I smile, and it is downhill, I think to myself, which is only mostly true, I later find out. “Te acompaño güerita?” his buddy asks hopefully, and I wave my hand in a gesture of gratitude and rejection, the same gesture used to say no more food, or no I don’t want to buy a comandante Marcos model clay pen. I march happily in my difference, under the sun, through the jungle. I hear the screams of monkeys that I do not see. I am alive.
At the first waterfall, I scramble up over rocks, hopping up hundreds of feet above the lagoon, I turn down the offer of a guide into the gruta, and feel my way through the darkness to the interior. The guide shows everyone, including me, the bats, and the interior waterfall, coursing in the darkness. I am transported momentarily to the caves outside of San Miguel de Allende, filled with steaming thermal waters that jump from cracks in the earth’s crust. This water is cold though, and once I scramble back down, I quickly peel the colored pareo from my waist, the shoes from my feet, and I submerge myself, desperate to relinquish the heat that seems to emanate from within my body.

By night I am exhausted and my head hurts again, but I have taken several pills and drunk various liters of water to no avail, the nausea-provoking ride out of the jungle was more than my over-taxed body could take. I sit quietly in the central plaza. It is different than others, there is only one side of Portales, and on the other side there is another plaza, filled with artisan stands and fried-food (ok, that part is typical). I suddenly feel like I am the only gringa ever to dare sit there alone, with no protection. There are eyes on me, and I feel self-conscious, but I am still too hot to put pants back on. Walking I see the looks, the whistles, the sucking in of breath that sounds like sizzling meat. The only ones who really dare say anything seem to be the younger boys, “Hello Baybeee… don’t go, baybeee…” I want to burst out laughing because the boy sounds like the big bopper but is young enough to be my charge, if not my child. I take refuge, yes, of course, in an air-condition internet café, and only there, talking to people halfway across the world, do I finally find myself at home. Plugged in, cooled-off. Quite depressing really, but safely familiar nonetheless. For 8 pesos an hour, I kill some time, in the quiet cool. A little boy comes in, asks for money, tells me I am “mala” when I refuse. “Sí,” I tell him, a little boy of 7, maybe, “soy lo peor” and for him, at that moment, this white woman who can afford to sit in front of a glowing screen for 8 pesos an hour can certainly afford to give him 5, and isn’t there some moral imperative? This chantaje moral, I think, as he grumbles out the door, is it a learned characteristic? Globalization in its finest glory.

But I am too tired to get my head around it, and I am not as bad as all that either, I think back to the movie we saw at the Muestra Internacional de Cine (there are benefits to being a big fish in a small town, Nacho has free passes to all the films in the muestra that started at the Cineteca but rolls around the country, spreading film culture – hallelujah) the other night. Vers le sud. (Bienvendios al paraíso, France-Canada, Dir. Laurent Cantet) It had its problems, mostly regarding incoherencies in costume and social spaces, and an annoying interlocution with the camera that had no raison-d’être, but we will not enumerate them here as this is not my film diary, but a travelogue (though incidentally another really good film that I saw a few weeks back in DF Play (Chile-Argentina, Dir. Alicia Scherson was also in the muestra and i, in my opinion, an excellent, coherent film, well worth the 25 pesos to get into the Cineteca, to say the least, and really much more)- it was about reverse sex tourism in Haiti in the late 70’s, unquestioned racism that is wrapped up in the veneration of the exotic, and in our analysis, it touched on some of the threads that Ignacio and I had been unraveling as we walked through Tuxtla’s botanical garden earlier that day, after we had visited the paleontology museum, and the pre-Colombian collection in the central museum where the “cuidador” dumped the contents of my bag, including Lucy, my lovely little computer, onto the floor. She has a few more dents and curves than before, but otherwise doesn’t seem much the worse for wear. As we walk out, grumbling about idiots and misshapen metal, I point out that the “cultural corridor” is peopled only by busts of illustrious men, not a single woman (although, come to think of it, with women like the national teacher’s union’s avaricious head, Esther Gordillo, biological sex has very little to do with one’s commitment to social justice and equality)

Under the thick foliage we ask ourselves: Is there such a thing as female writing? Film-making? I still can’t decide, but there is certainly, if not an aesthetic, an ethical commitment I find myself upholding. He has had this argument with his fiancée, Alicia, also a dear friend of mine, many a time. We come to no conclusion, but I insist on pointing out instances of soft sexism, naming cultural institutions after men and women, but principally the primary schools are women and the universities and higher prestige institutions are men. It is a never-ending battle, so we end this tale with micro-tourism, walking along the forest trail to look out over the water of the Río Grijalva that courses through the canyon, we find a proliferation of insects which I choose to examine and capture on film. I lose my sunglasses, but insist on being the one to climb down over the wall to retrieve them, and climb back up. I apologize for teasing him about being macho for wanting to do me the favor, he helps me back up over the ledge because I can’t find a finger hold in the rock face. We reconcile. After all, he did come pick me up at the bus station at 5 in the morning, after another night of interrupted sleep.

Now it is off to the movies again, to see Nuovomondo (Italy-France, Dir. Emanuele Crialese) after an afternoon of Japanese food (not bad at all) and a late nap. Globalization indeed. Tomorrow morning, back to San Cristóbal, of I can drag myself out of bed, to see about indulging myself in a present of amber jewelry (I mention to Nacho that what I need, really, regarding relationship material, is someone who knows how to buy me presents. I say this only half joking because I think that if there were someone that could a) discern my highly contradictory and stringent tastes, and b) thought of me fondly and often enough to spontaneously buy them, and c) was self-sufficient enough to do so, then they would meet my basic criteria anyway). Then, at night, another 12 hour bus ride back to reality, in order to do not one, but two interviews. I don’t relish the thought.