Suddenly it was midday.
We were standing outside on an embankment, where it stank less but was even hotter, because there was no shade, eating our pineapple; we leaned forward because of the dripping juice, then we bent down over the stones and rinsed our sugary fingers; the warm water was also sticky, not sugary but salty, and our fingers smelled of seaweed, of motor oil, of shells, of unidentifiable rotting matter, so that we immediately wiped them on our handkerchiefs. Suddenly there came the roar of engines. I stood paralysed. My DC-4 for Mexico City was flying directly overhead, then it curved round and out to sea, where it seemed to dissolve in the hot sky as though in a blue acid.
I said nothing.
I don’t know how that day passed.
It passed.
Our train (Campeche–Palenque–Coatzocoalcos) was better than expected – a diesel engine with four air-conditioned carriages, so that we forgot the heat and along with the heat the stupidity of this whole journey.
‘I wonder whether Joachim will recognize me?’
Every now and then our train would stop during the night on the open track, no one knew why, there was no light anywhere, from time to time a distant flash of lightning revealed that we were passing through a jungle, or sometimes a swamp, the lightning flashed behind a tangle of black trees, our locomotive hooted and hooted into the night, we couldn’t open the window to see what was going on…. Suddenly it started off again – at twenty m.p.h., although the ground was as flat as a pancake and the line dead straight. Still, we were glad it was moving at all.
At one point I asked: ‘Why did they get divorced?’
‘Don’t know,’ he said. ‘She became a Communist, I think.’
‘Was that the reason?’
He yawned.
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t a success. I never inquired.’
Once, when our train stopped again, I went to the carriage door and looked out. Outside was the heat we had forgotten, humid darkness and silence. I stepped down on to the footboard, the stillness was broken by flashes of lightning, a buffalo stood on the track in front of us, that was all. It stood as though stuffed, because it was dazzled by our headlamps, obstinately immovable. The sweat at once ran over my forehead and down my neck again. The locomotive hooted and hooted. All around us was undergrowth. After a few minutes the buffalo (or whatever it was) moved slowly out of the light of the headlamps, then I heard a rustling in the undergrowth, the snapping of branches, then a plop and it splashed around in the water out of sight.
After this we drove on.
‘Have they any children?’ I asked.
‘One daughter.’
We settled down to sleep, our jackets under our heads, our legs stretched out on the empty seat opposite.
‘Did you know her?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Why?’
Soon afterwards he fell asleep.
When morning broke, we were still in the brushwood; the early-morning sun shone over the low jungle horizon and white flocks of herons rose with a flapping of wings in front of our slow-moving train; there was brushwood without end, as far as the eye could see, with every now and then a group of Indian huts hidden among trees with aerial roots, an occasional isolated palm, but for the most part deciduous trees, acacias and others I didn’t know, above all bushes and antediluvian ferns; the place was teeming with sulphur-yellow birds and the sun shone once more as though behind smoked glass, you could see the heat-haze.
I had been dreaming (not of Hanna!).
The next time we stopped on the open track it was Palenque, a little halt at which no one got out or in except us, a small shed beside the line, a signal, that was all, not even a double track (if I remember rightly); we asked three people where Palenque was.
The sweat immediately began to pour again.
The train drove on, leaving us standing there with our luggage as though at the end of the world, or at least at the end of civilization, and of the jeep that was supposed to take the gentleman from Düsseldorf straight to the plantation there was, of course, not a sign.
‘Here we are.’
I laughed.
All the same, there was a narrow road, and, after a pretty exhausting half hour, children emerged from the bushes and later a donkey-driver, who took our luggage, an Indian of course. All I kept was my yellow briefcase with the zip-fastener.
For five days we were suspended in Palenque.
We were suspended in hammocks, with beer within reach all the time, sweating as though sweating was our purpose in life, incapable of coming to any decision, quite contented actually, because the beer here was excellent, YUCATECA, better than the beer in the uplands. We lay suspended in our hammocks and drank, so that we could sweat better, and I couldn’t think what we really wanted.
We wanted a jeep.
If we didn’t keep telling ourselves this all the time, we forgot about it, and apart from this we said very little all day long, a curious state.
A jeep, yes, but where from?
Talking only made us thirsty.
The landlord of our tiny hotel (the Lacroix) had a Land Rover, obviously the only vehicle in Palenque, but he needed it himself to fetch beer and guests from the railway station, people interested in Indian ruins, pyramid-lovers; at the moment there was only one of them there, a young American who talked too much, but fortunately he was out all day – looking at the ruins, which he thought we ought to look at too.
Not on your life!
Every step set the sweat pouring, which immediately had to be replaced with beer, and the only way to exist was to lie motionless in the hammock with bare feet, smoking; apathy was the only possible state; even a rumour that the plantation across the frontier had been abandoned months ago did not stir us; Herbert and I looked at one another and drank our beer.
Our only chance was the Land Rover.
It stood outside the hotel day after day.
But, as I have said, the hotel-keeper needed it.
Only after sunset (the sun didn’t really set, it simply wilted away in the haze) did it become cooler, so that we could at least joke. About the future of the German cigar. I found the whole thing ludicrous, our trip and everything. Native uprising! I didn’t believe that for a moment; the Indians were far too gentle, too peaceable, positively childlike. They squatted for whole evenings in their white straw hats on the earth, motionless as toadstools, content without light, silent. The sun and moon were enough light for them, an effeminate race, eerie but innocuous.
Herbert asked what I thought had happened.
Nothing.
What should we do? he asked.
Take a shower.
I showered from morning to evening, I hate sweat, because it makes me feel like a sick man. (I’ve never been ill in my life, except for measles.) I think Herbert was rather hurt that I had no suggestions to make, but it was much too hot. He himself made the craziest suggestions.
‘Let’s go to the cinema,’ he said.
As if there was a cinema in this little cluster of Indian huts! He got quite angry when I laughed at him.
There was not a drop of rain.
Lightning flashed every evening, it was our only entertainment in the evenings, Palenque had a diesel motor that generates electricity, but it was turned off at 9 p.m., so there we were in the darkness of the jungle and all we could see was the lightning, bluish like a quartz lamp, and the red glow-worms, and later a slimy-looking moon, there were no stars to be seen, it was too hazy for that…. Joachim simply didn’t write any letters, because it was too hot, I could well understand that; he lay suspended in his hammock like us, yawning, or he was dead…. There was nothing to do, anyhow, but wait till we could get a jeep and cross the frontier and see for ourselves.
Herbert yelled at me:
‘A jeep! Where from?’
A few minutes afterwards he was snoring.
Apart from this, silence reigned most of the time, once the diesel generator had been turned off; a ho
rse grazed in the moonlight and in the same enclosure a deer, but the deer made no sound, there was also a black sow and a turkey that couldn’t bear the lightning and squawked, and also some geese that started cackling when the turkey set them off, there would be a sudden alarm, then silence again with lightning flashing across the flat landscape, only the grazing horse we heard all night long.
I thought about Joachim.
But what was I thinking?
I was simply awake.
Only our ruin-lover chattered a lot; it was quite interesting when you listened to him – about Toltecs, Zapotecs and Aztecs, who built temples yet hadn’t discovered the wheel. He came from Boston and was a musician. At times he got on my nerves, like all artists who think themselves loftier or more profound beings simply because they didn’t know what electricity is.
In the end I, too, fell asleep.
Every morning I was woken by a curious noise, half mechanical, half musical, a sound which I couldn’t explain, not loud, but as frenzied as crickets, metallic, monotonous; it must be mechanical in origin, but I couldn’t guess what it was, and later, when we went to breakfast in the village, it was silent, nothing to be seen. We were the only guests in the only inn, where we always ordered the same thing – huevos a la mexicana, terribly peppery, but presumably wholesome, together with tortilla and beer. The Indian proprietress, a matron with black pigtails, took us for archaeologists. Her hair resembled plumage; it was black with a bluish-green sheen. She had ivory teeth, that showed when she smiled, and soft black eyes.
‘Ask her,’ said Herbert, ‘whether she knows my brother and when she last saw him!’
There wasn’t much to be got out of her.
‘She remembers a car,’ I said. ‘That’s all.’
The parrot didn’t know anything either.
GRACIAS, HEE-HEE!
I spoke Spanish to him.
HEE-HEE, GRACIAS, HEE-HEE!
On the third or fourth morning, while we were having breakfast in the usual way, gaped at by a crowd of Maya children who didn’t beg but merely stood by our table and every now and then laughed, Herbert developed the fixed idea that somewhere in this miserable hamlet, if we only looked hard enough, there must be a jeep – behind some hut, somewhere in the thickets of gourds, bananas and maize. I left him to it. It struck me as crazy, like everything else, but I didn’t care, I lay suspended in my hammock and Herbert didn’t show up all day long.
I was even too lazy to take films.
Apart from beer, YUCATECA, which was excellent but flat, there was only rum in Palenque, rotten stuff, and Coca-Cola which I can’t stand.
I drank and slept.
Anyhow, I spent hours thinking of nothing.
Herbert, who didn’t return till dusk, pale with exhaustion, had discovered a brook and bathed; he had also discovered two men with curved sabres (so he asserted) walking through the maize, Indians with white trousers and white straw hats, just like the villagers – but carrying curved sabres.
Not a word about the jeep, of course!
I believe he was scared.
I shaved while there was still electric current, and Herbert told me all about his time in the Caucasus again, his horror stories about Ivan, which I knew already; later, as there was no more beer, we went to the cinema, accompanied by our ruin-lover, who knew his Palenque – there really was a cinema, a shed with a corrugated iron roof. The first film was Harold Lloyd climbing up and down walls in the manner of the twenties, the main film, love and passion among the Mexican smart set, adultery with a Cadillac and a Browning and plenty of evening dresses and marble. We doubled up with laughter, while the four or five Indians squatted motionless in front of the crumpled screen, their great straw hats on their heads, perhaps satisfied, perhaps not, you can never tell, they are so impassive, Mongolian…. Our new friend, a Boston musician, as I mentioned, an American of French origin, was thrilled with Yucatan and couldn’t understand why we were not interested in ruins; he asked what we were doing here.
We just shrugged our shoulders and looked at one another, each one leaving it to the other to say that we were waiting for a jeep.
I don’t know what he must have thought of us.
Rum has the advantage that you don’t break into a sweat as after every glass of beer; on the other hand you wake up with a headache next morning, when the incomprehensible noise starts off again, half piano, half machine-gun, and accompanied by singing – it went on every day between 6 and 7 a.m., and every day I decided to look into it, but I always forgot about it as the day wore on.
You forget everything here.
On one occasion – we wanted to bathe, but Herbert couldn’t find his legendary brook and we suddenly found ourselves among the ruins – we came across our musician at work. Among the stones, which were supposed to represent a temple, the heat was unbearable. The only thing he was worried about was keeping the drops of sweat off his paper! He scarcely greeted us; we were disturbing him. His work consisted in placing tracing paper over the stone reliefs and then rubbing a black crayon this way and that for hours on end, a crazy way of obtaining a copy of anything; but he insisted that you couldn’t photograph these hieroglyphs and grinning deities, they would be dead at once. We left him.
I’m no art historian.
After climbing around the pyramids for a while out of sheer boredom (the steps are far too steep, the relation between height and width is exactly the reverse of what it should be, so that you get out of breath), I lay down, dizzy from the heat, in the shadow of some so-called palace, with my arms and legs stretched out, breathing.
The humid air…
The slimy sun…
I had made up my mind to go back on my own if we didn’t get hold of a jeep tomorrow. It was more sultry than ever, damp and musty; birds with long blue tails were flitting in all directions; someone had used the temple as a lavatory, hence the flies. I tried to sleep. The flitting wings and animal cries made the place sound like a zoo; you couldn’t tell what creatures were whistling and screeching and warbling, it was a din like modern music, they might have been monkeys, or birds, or maybe some feline species, it was impossible to tell, they might have been in rut or terrified, you couldn’t tell that either.
I could feel my stomach. (I was smoking too much.)
At one time, in the eleventh or thirteenth century, a whole city is supposed to have stood here, said Herbert, a Maya city.
So what?
To my question whether he still believed in the future of the German cigar, Herbert returned no answer; he was snoring, having finished talking about the religion of the Mayas, art and stuff like that…
I let him snore.
I took my shoes off, snakes or no snakes, I needed air, I had palpitations from the heat, I was astounded by our tracing-paper artist, who could work in the blazing sun and gave up his holidays and his savings to bring home hieroglyphs which no one could decipher.
People are funny.
A race like these Mayas, who hadn’t discovered the wheel and built pyramids and temples in the jungle, where everything becomes smothered in moss and crumbles with damp – what for?
I couldn’t understand myself.
I should have landed in Caracas a week ago and today (at the latest) I ought to have been back in New York. Instead of that I was stuck here – for the sake of saying hello to a friend of my youth, who had married the girl friend of my youth.
What for?
We were waiting for the Land Rover that brought our ruin-artist here every day and took him back again around evening with his rolls of tracing paper. I decided to wake Herbert and tell him I was going off with the next train to leave Palenque.
The flitting birds…
Never an aeroplane!
Every time I turned my head to one side to avoid seeing the smoked-glass sky, it was as if I was in the sea, our pyramid an island or a ship, with the sea on all sides; and yet it was nothing but undergrowth, unending, greenish-grey, flat as an ocean – underg
rowth.
Above it the full moon, lilac in the daylight.
Herbert was still snoring away.
It’s amazing how they got these blocks of stone here, when they weren’t acquainted with the wheel and therefore had no pulleys. They didn’t know the arch either. Apart from the decorations, which didn’t appeal to me anyhow, because I like functionalism, I found these ruins extremely primitive – unlike our ruin-lover, who liked the Mayas precisely because they had no technology, but gods instead. He thought it delightful that they began a new era every two hundred and fifty years, smashed up all their pots and pans, put out all their fires, then relit them all over the country from the fire in the temple and made fresh pots and pans. A people that simply abandoned their cities (intact) and moved on, for religious reasons, and after fifty or a hundred miles built a completely new temple-city somewhere in this unchanging jungle – he thought it pregnant with significance, though uneconomic, a sign of great depth of spirit, that was his serious opinion.
Sometimes it made me think of Hanna.
When I woke Herbert, he sprang to his feet. What was the matter? When he saw that nothing was the matter, he started snoring again – to avoid being bored.
Not a sound of an engine!
I tried to picture what it would be like if there were suddenly no more engines as in the days of the Mayas. One has to think about something. I felt a rather childish amazement at the way in which they had shifted these blocks of stone: they simply built ramps and then dragged the blocks up them with an idiotic expenditure of manpower, that was what made it so primitive. On the other hand their astronomy. According to the ruin-lover, their calendar reckoned the solar year at 365.2420 days, instead of 365.2422 days; nevertheless, for all their mathematical knowledge, they never evolved a technology and were therefore condemned to decline and disappear.
Our Land Rover at last!
The miracle happened when our ruin-lover heard that we had to cross over into Guatemala. He was wildly enthusiastic. He took out his little calendar and counted the remaining days of his vacation. Guatemala, he said, was teeming with Maya settlements, some of them barely excavated, and if we could take him with us he would do everything in his power to get the Land Rover, which we couldn’t get, on the strength of his friendship with the landlord of the Lacroix Hotel – and he did get it.