Extra Innings (24 page)

Then I realize I have been populating gentle Balankanche with the thugs and street muggers of the city I have left behind.

The ruins: After many visits over a period of fifty-five years these places have become both more familiar and more distant to me. When I am permitted to be alone with a building—a rare opportunity—I feel what Rose Macaulay called the ‘pleasure of ruins.' I sense their mystery, I realize more strongly than I am able to bear my own mortality, surely the emotion to which one's presence at the ruin of a thousand-year-old civilization must most often lead.

Macaulay, in
Pleasure of Ruins
, writes: ‘…ruin is part of general
Weltschmerz, Sehnsucht
, malaise, nostalgia,
Angst
, frustration, sickness, passion of the human soul; it is the eternal symbol.' Ancient Mayan cities, deserted for reasons no one seems to understand, strike terror into me, push me down to the knees of my habitual despair, make me long for death and then for further life, as these places disappeared and then were restored. I worship my God there, and theirs. The magnificence of these places seems greater because it is only partial (‘This broken beauty is all we have of that ancient magnificence'), my despondency greater. Macaulay says we take a morbid pleasure in decay, and surely this is what I do, because it seems to match my innate pessimism.

But there is another thing. The Mexican ruins are now blackened by acid rain and pollution emanating from tourist buses and cars. Sculptures on the columns at the Temple of the Jaguars in Chichén Itzá are so dark that the
tigres
and feathered serpents are almost invisible. What is being rapidly obliterated, on the one hand, is being fraudulently restored on the other. At three smaller sites, Labná, Sayil, and Kabáh, you can watch restoration being accomplished from trucks that bring foreign stones to the sites. They are hoisted up over broad strips of concrete, in such a way that the newly erected places are yellow and machine-cut, and bear little resemblance to the original stone structure.

These places now suffer from inaccuracy and haste, aimed at quickly pleasing the hordes of tourists who arrive late in the morning and stay until the buses honk for them in early afternoon. The ruins seem to be sinking into modernity, to be backdrops for the many shops that have sprung up at their entrance. Years ago I walked in through narrow footpaths; now there are grandiose entrances and boutiques to the major sites.

At the edge of the hacienda where we are staying there is an orange tree. We ask an attendant when the oranges come out.

He replies: ‘Whenever they want to.'

Last year, when we passed a little shop in Playa del Carmen without entering, the shop keeper called out to us: ‘Come on in and let me rip you off.'

After a siesta and a swim in the late afternoon, we go back to the great pyramid at Chichén to find that it has been taken over by climbers. Today, in these places, appreciation of archaeological splendors is shown athletically. Mystery has given way to sport. From afar the temple resembles an ant hill; close up it is a slanted column of human bodies which move up fast and then come down more cautiously, many of them clinging to the iron chain that goes from top to bottom, screaming, calling, laughing as they come. The holy air of the place has been supplanted by the overheated, noisy atmosphere of a gymnasium or a boxing arena.

I retreat from this display of muscular prowess, walk the hot path to where we are staying, and stand in the shade of a banyan tree, whose surface roots are more widespread and convoluted than its branches. It is one of those spectacles of the natural world that reverses the expected. The roots, like the adventitious roots of the mangrove tree, refuse to be buried. They roll about on the ground like ocean waves and display themselves as if in competition with their leafy crowns. The rebellious roots of the banyan tree are refreshing.

One magical evening Ted finds a secret footpath into the site grounds. The moon is covered, the second light show, that terrible evening violation of the grey stones that is put on for the tourists, has not yet begun. We sit on a wall in the shadow of El Caracol (the shell-shaped observatory), sensing the presence of long-dead spirits. We say nothing to each other for almost an hour. Then the moon is suddenly uncovered; we walk in silence and without our flashlights into the empty chambers at the foot of El Caracol and then turn back. My heart beats fast, from the pressure of awe and from the more immediate fear that we will be caught by the Mexican guards and put in prison for illegally invading the site.

I feel the urge to write a travel piece full of advice to someone planning to visit Maya. I probably will never do it, but if I did, it would go like this:

1. Leave your camera at home. Use your eyes, and work at committing to memory what you see. The sun is usually in the wrong place for picture-taking, film is exorbitantly expensive here, it is too hot to carry heavy equipment. Most of all, the optic nerve, retina, cornea, and crystalline lens are more reliable that the Kodak and its complex successors.

2. Leave your camcorder at home. Standing still for a long time, in one place, and fixing your attention on one object at a time will serve you better than moving pictures of your fellow travelers and crowds walking in front of the camera.

3. Politely refuse the services of guides. Their knowledge of languages (English, French, German, even Spanish) is often rudimentary, and their acquaintance with history, archaeology, and the Mayan sciences such as astronomy and mathematics is not only slight, but replete with error.

4. Do not purchase guidebooks sold at the sites. Look up a good bibliography before you leave home, and study authoritative books like John Stephens's account (1842) of his travels, the first and still most vivid such work, and writers like Michael Coe and Eric Thompson,

5. Be prepared to spend time examining the carvings on the stelae and the glyphs, by studying first their meanings, in a book like the recent
The Blood of Kings
. It will teach you how to read the codices and what the carvings mean. The book is too heavy to carry. Learn as much as you can from it at home. Take notes.

6. Rent a car if you can. Arrive at the ruins a few minutes before they open and have a few blessedly quiet hours to explore before the buses and cars come. It is the only undisturbed time you will have to try to get a feeling for the past. On the other hand, visiting ruins is, as Henry James has said, ‘a heartless pastime, and the pleasure … shows a note of perversity.' Enjoy your own private perversities.

7. Get there soon, before it all disappears under the weight of pollution, crowds, noise, and guesswork reconstruction, and before the spirits of its Mayan builders and worshipers vanish into the jungle.

I have a feeling this may be my terminal visit. It is very likely I will not go back to Mexico. I cannot see the Museo Arqueológico in Mexico City again because that city is too high and too polluted for me. I regret this. It would be good to have a last look at Palenque, and to go to Copán and Tikal, but perhaps ending it here is as well. Eventually one needs to let go of one's passions and assign them to the realm of memory. I have grown too demanding of these ruins, too impatient with the behavior of everyone but myself and my traveling companions.

I feel very much like the little boy I saw the last afternoon at El Castillo. He stood at the bottom, grabbed the chain, that runs from top to bottom of the pyramid, and began to wave it vigorously. People climbing down who felt their hold threatened screamed. He had to be dragged away by his mother. I want to shake everyone off the buildings, sweep clean the great plains between them of touring groups and guides, and pass a law forbidding conversation within the confines of the ancient cities. Short of all that being made into law, I'll stay at home.

At month's end, in Washington, I browse through my shelves and find Willa Cather's copy of George Santayana's
Obiter Scripta
. Out of it falls a note in her handwriting containing two quotations she took from Santayana's essay ‘Turn of Thought':

‘To turn events into ideas is the function of literature.' And: ‘Literary art demands a subject matter other than the literary impulse.'

On the back of the book jacket is an advertisement for Santayana's
The Last Puritan
, with its subtitle, ‘A memoir in the form of a novel.' I hold to my theory that all memoirs, like this one, are in the form of a novel or fictional in impulse and concept, and surely in execution.

April

Life can only be understood backward
.

—
Kierkegaard

April 1 in Washington is cold, wintry, windy, not so much cruel as it it is disappointing. Mexico accustoms you to warmth, but spring has not come here yet. I require more layers of clothing to stay warm and need to bury my suntan under heavy sweaters. Still, there are virtues to city life. Today I went to the Seventh Street flea market and found a fine carved wooden plover. At the Mission Traders around the corner, a place that carries only imported objects from Central and South America, I bought a cloth macaw, mounted on strings. You pull one end and his great wings flap gently. I am planning to take both birds to Maine, and set them free, figuratively, into the circumambient air.

In the pile of mail that came while I was away is a volume from Villard Books called
Sweet Revenge
. It is written by ‘the celebrated socialite' Sugar Raubord and accompanied by elaborately printed publicity. The book is described as being about ‘High Fashion. High Finance. Hot Sex.' It is, the publicist assures me, the ‘year's most tantalizing novel.' What
is
tantalizing is that I cannot even guess what that implies. Raubord, a ‘real-life member of the upper-class elite,' ‘takes us into her world—a high society whirl of glamorous parties, steaming affairs, high-stakes business deals, and secret intrigues!' (The exclamation mark is the publicist's.)

The
heat
of those words! Whirl, glamorous, intrigue, steaming! And written by a society lady whose first name is Sugar! I find myself overusing the exclamation point as I write this—punctuation I rarely resort to—in order to add fuel to the warmth of the description. This is the secret of all romantic writing: to use words that burn on the page, setting fire to the susceptible reader's imagination.

Mistaken definitions: I have always believed that ‘pericope' was a variation of the word for a sea instrument of some sort. I learn today from a crossword definition, and then considerable path-finding through the dictionary and at last into the
OED
, that it is a section or extract from a book. The root is
ope
, the Greek for a cutting.

Alewife: a North American fish. I knew that, in Chaucer, I think, it designated a woman who ran a pub, but a fish? No one is quite sure how the fish came to be so named, unless it originated in this country with the French
allowes
, for shad. Fish names tend to be descriptive: flounder, pike (for its pointed head), swordfish (for its elongated upper jaw). But alewife: that is a curious cognomen.

Another mistaken belief of mine. Consider the well-known apology ‘Forgive this too long letter. I had not time to write a short one.' When I have quoted it I always wrongly ascribed it to Mark Twain.
Sounds
like Twain. Then someone told me it was written by Voltaire, someone else, Pascal. Turns out, I learn today, to be by Madame de Staël, famous for her letters.… I find those sentences useful whenever I indulge my prejudice of preferring short works of fiction to tomes.

Looking up the origin and precise meaning of new words is hazardous. When Alan Bisbort inherited my decrepit copies of the eleventh edition of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
he wrote to me: ‘The
EB
is a blessing—and a torment. Every time I pick out a volume to look something up, I get sidetracked, endlessly, along the way. Today, for example, I wanted to look up George Gissing, but I ended by making unscheduled stops at Gipsy and then Girdle before I remembered why I'd picked up the volume in the first place.'

The city is now in the grip of a beautiful spring. The dogwood outside our apartment building is budding, all the fruit trees show signs of flowers, and the cherry blossoms, we are told, should be ‘ready,' as they say, in a few days. In other years we went to the Jefferson Memorial and breakfasted under the low, fresh, dark-pink flowers, but this year, because we are so busy preparing to sublet the apartment, we drive through the tree-lined ways, thinking that all this unlimited beauty disguises—for the moment—the social and economic injustices of the capital.

Sybil is delighted to have found a well-known writer who will take our apartment for the eight months we plan to stay in Maine. She is not ready to break her ties here, to become a country person ‘for good.' So she happily buys a secondhand rug to replace our prized oriental one, three lamps to be left in place of my grandmother's lamp-vases, a serviceable set of stainlesssteel cutlery, and some white porcelain plates to eke out our very scanty supply. We retire the worn toaster-oven and replace it with a new toaster, stow away Sybil's good pewter, and inform our friendly mover, John Kidner, that we will be ready for his services in mid-May, to bring to Maine books, clothing, lamps, the good rug, and other things that will make more room for our tenant. Everything of mine, including my ailing, elderly PC, and all my books, pictures, and papers will go, a sign that I am indeed moving to Maine. Sybil will leave some of her clothes and various memorabilia, a sign that she is not.

Yesterday we drove to Columbia to see my daughter Kate and her children. Hannah, the new baby born while I was in Mexico, is doing well and, like all infants, making the usual unreasonable demands upon her mother for comfort and nourishment at all hours of the night. During the day she sleeps contentedly. It appears she will be dark, unlike the blond and blue-eyed Maya, who is now a little over two. This is good. Hannah will be her own person rather than a clone of her sometimes too-much-admired, beautiful sibling.