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Dec. 22nd, 2004 03:25 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
smokingbootOK, this does not work for me. It feels right that a story for the longest night of the year has a longer and slower rhythm than usual, but hmm. I may have to face the fact that there are other styles I prefer.
Still, it is hatched now,
It is my offering in honour of Yule and the Longest Night of the Year. Sometimes we just have to accept the shape things take.
Six months in Mexico City had hardened my resolve to get away from it for the Gran Fiesta. My plan was to lie on a beach at Cancun and forget work until January, so I flew to Medina, where the plan changed. Rather than fly over Yucatan I would drive through it. I was tired of cities, of people, of speed I couldn’t feel. The roads to the resorts are good and I wanted to spend the longest night driving under bright stars by myself.
I did all that. Got lost too. This didn't worry me because all roads lead to fuel stations, you just have to keep driving til you meet them. I looked for signs and watched the land grow higher, mountains in the distance, with no hope of Cancun's light and a sense of being way too far south. Then the gas ran out. I got out of the car and started walking until the road became a track, and the track led me into the village of Tchac, where I looked for petrol, knowing there wouldn’t be any.
I knew there wouldn’t be any because Tchac was a pathetically cheerful collection of shacks and huts made habitable by the addition of corrugated iron roofs, chicken wire and ‘borrowed’ doors, some not even hinged on. There was a well here, several chickens and a few burnt out tyres, but the nearest thing to a car was mine, some six kilometers back on the road. I could see a small sign; Café Bar Tchac. I went in and found myself face to face with a man and a fridge.
‘Do you sell beer?’ I asked.
He gave me a wide smile. ‘ Hello, yes, American, no? English, ah, English, welcome to Tchac, have a drink.’ He threw open the fridge door, and I found myself presented with row upon row of coca-cola cans stacked high. These were evidently the Christmas editions, as every can was adorned with a smiling white-bearded man in red fluff. The fridge wasn’t working.
‘Fifty cents a can,’ he said.
‘Do you have any beer?’ I asked again, more slowly this time. My Spanish is all right, but I don’t speak Yucatec with any fluency. He paused.
‘We will have beer,’ he continued smiling,’Very soon.’
I waited. ‘And then we will put it in the fridge for you.’
Sat myself down and relaxed, as I wasn’t going anywhere in a hurry.
‘A coke would be lovely,’ I said, to the delight of his eager teeth. His was the biggest smile I've ever seen; any wider would have sucked his dimples into his ears. He cleaned a glass for me with great deliberation, and poured a can of coke into it. He then added a small striped pink and white plastic straw. I drank the coke. It was warm and flat.
‘Thank you.’ I said. Then paused a moment. ‘My car is empty.’
‘Well yes,’ he said, as though that was obvious.
‘And I need help to get it going again.’
‘Uit Valez can help you with that. He is a mechanic.’
‘Fantastic. Where can I find Uit Valez?’
‘He is in Cancun for the Gran Fiesta.’
‘Oh.’
The barman looked a little glum, as if he wanted to be more useful.
‘He will be back after the Fiesta.’ He smiled apologetically.
All very well, I thought, but the Fiesta ends on the 26th. That leaves me stuck here for six days – for I could tell just by looking that no-one else in Tchac had a car. The barman corrected me when I voiced my doubts. Apparently Rosario Huup had a car, the doctor had a car, the barman himself had a car and the old priest used to have a car, but of these four, three were holidaying with family members at Cancun and one had been returned to the diocese two years ago.
‘I will need a phone,’ I said.
He smiled apologetically again.
I began to panic.
A while later I was walking up the hill towards the church, directed there by the barman, whose preternatural positivity had been sorely taxed by my reaction to the news about the phone. I was going to speak to a man called Alejandro Puuc. Occasionally,in the Amerindian farmlands around Medina, one might hear a Spanish first name coupled with a Mayan surname or vice versa, but it was universal in Tchac – having said that, the very name of the village told its ancestry. A pointless dump, but an ancient pointless dump. Apparently Huup knew a lot of 'useful things'. I was hoping he had a scooter or a map.
I found him waving an egg over a woman in the church.
They were both sat at the foot of a statue of the virgin who stood rolling her eyes in alabaster sympathy for Puuc’s patient. The church was dark and marginally larger than the bar, rank with tobacco, candlewax and alcohol. I waited while he sang incomprehensibly, drew something on the egg, and after a few moments' mutual prayer, sent her away smiling. He was smiling too, until he saw me.
I couldn’t believe it, as he introduced himself. He was the standard shamanic facsimile to be found in every tourist trap across the continent, but he didn’t have to be. Fluent in English, Spanish and Yucatec, perfectly healthy and intelligent, I could see no reason for him to be playing Carlos Castenada in a no brain backwater like Tchac. My conclusion had to be that he was not only fake, but a fake so bad at faking, he couldn’t cut it in some new age refuge on the coast. And I knew that smell too. Mescal. I almost turned round to leave.
‘Wait, wait,’ he gave a little self deprecating chuckle, ‘So you have decided not to like me. But that's all right, it’s all right...because I can help you, if you will help me...’
I reached back to my pocket and pulled out some notes.
‘No, no, put that away, I don’t need it.’
It was the first time anyone had said that to me since possibly ever. So I stopped and listened. He wanted to talk, and as he talked, he pulled out from under the altar a bottle of something like mescal with a big brown root in it. At least, I hoped it was a root. He winked.
‘The secret of Tchac,’ he said, ‘preparing you for the night.’
‘What is happening tonight?’
‘Not tonight, tomorrow night. The longest night.’
Still northern hemisphere, but I had forgotten. 21st December, winter equinox, shortest day and longest night. We wandered over to a little hut next to the church. It had a table, a mattress with a blanket, and junk against every wall. There was a disconnected stove and a bath tub with a bucket next to it. Someone had hung a piñata over the front door in an attempt to be festive. Here, it transpired, was to be my abode for my stay in Tchac.
‘I will give you all the help I can, get gas as soon as I can,' he continued, ‘But I want something in return…’ He looked at me. ‘Let’s relax and get to know each other. Have a drink.’
By now I was pretty sure I knew what his favour was going to be, so I thought I might as well drink his stinking alcohol – it would help me release my inhibitions when the time came to smash the piñata in his face and kick him through the side of the shack. He talked on, while we drank this terrible stuff, and I lost track of the conversation and before I knew where I was, he was half way through discussing the favour, which had nothing to do with sex. There was no more not-quite-mescal; instead he was waving a can of coca-cola in my face, telling me to try it because it was the real thing.
‘Is this hell?’ I asked him, ‘You can tell me. I won’t blame you.’
When he smiled, his face shone with the glow of the radiantly drunk.
‘The longest night is coming. They can’t even enjoy nice cold beer in a lit bar.’
I looked up at those eyes of his, red-rimmed with disastrous enthusiasm, and thought I understood.
‘I can’t fix your fridge, you know.’
‘You don’t have to fix the fridge. The fridge isn’t broken.’ He leaned forward.
‘The fridge needs electricity. I need you to make electricity.’
And he sat there, straight faced, while I laughed enough to shake the walls of his home, staring at the useless lightbulb swinging above us. At some point afterwards, I recovered myself enough to explain to him that I couldn’t mend a fuse in my house in London, never mind power Tchac’s sole functioning fridge.
‘You are the one to do it, I knew when I saw you. You will, you see, it’s all here, I got the pieces…’ He gestured at the swirling room around us, ‘But I don’t know how to begin. Begin it for tomorrow night, the longest night, and everyone can celebrate. I know it. Besides, you will have help.’ I thought he meant himself until he pulled out another bottle from beneath his mattress. ‘Drink this.’
Later, I woke, shivering and sweating on the floor, my stomach contracting fitfully. I went outside and threw up, sometimes burning, sometimes very cold. I went indoors and lit a candle, and looked at the back wall, where sat the last thing I expected to see: A solar panel.
The sun. Of course, it made sense that the sun would hide here on the shortest day, the time of night and shadow. Tchac was a rain god, I recalled. At this time all across the world people lit tiny lamps to coax the sun back. The Mayans called it Kinich Ahau, the firebird who loved poets and singers. And here it was! Behind my mattress!
I fell forwards in an attempt to touch the panel and instead, crashed a few feet short, extinguishing the candle by landing on it. I expected to throw up but found myself in the grip of foul tasting hiccups instead. ’K-K-Kinich Ahau!’ I cried out, and nothing happened. But I could swear the solar panel was listening. It was only when I realized how very ill I must be to think anything so stupid that my body took over and I passed out.
I dreamed or thought I dreamed. The solar panel was there, and in my hands I held a roll of aluminium conducting ribbon. The solar panel had come in a cardboard packet, and I wound some of the tape around the cardboard. I sat back and stared at it. A flat coil.
In my dream I lumbered back down the hill and demanded things from the passing innocents of Tchac. Next morning, I awoke to find various items outside the door. My head hurt.
It was a baffling list, a list of wonders. There was a multimeter, a car battery, some plastic covered wire flex. I dragged out the coil and the panel and just stared, fiddling haplessly while my head split and nothing made sense. The resulting connection went like this: Battery to panel to flat coil to multimeter to battery. And all I could do was stare and wonder where the car battery had come from.
I walked down the hill to see Alejandro approaching with a can of warm coke. He looked at the rig and asked me if this was what I created ‘In the hands of the spirits.’ I wanted to laugh again but I was far too fragile. So I said that yes it was, and I apologized for not being able to help his people more.
‘If this is what you were given, you have nothing to be sorry for,’ He half turned away. I couldn’t get past this feeling of disappointment, but it wasn’t my fault. He had built something up in his head, and my only hope was that the other inhabitants of Tchac hadn’t been expecting miracles. I picked up the flat coil, and the multimeter sprang into a momentary flurry of action. I was astonished enough to jump back, and Alejandro was gazing at the thing as though he wanted to marry it. Voltage. My only conclusion was that the multimeter must be broken.
‘Electricity,’ He said.
‘Probably from my body,’ I told him, ‘Don’t go ordering your icepacks yet.’
‘Did I not tell you if you took the first step, I could do the rest?’
I shrugged, not knowing what to say. He asked me if the rig could be taken up the hill, and I agreed. Several of them moved it up there as though it was a holy relic. I would have been embarrassed, but by now, all I could focus on was sleep without dreams. I almost collapsed onto the mattress, coke can in hand.
I woke to darkness and a sudden peal of thunder directly overhead. I looked out to see; under the night clouds the church was full of lit candles. I could hear singing. They were probably praying for that damn rig to work, I told myself. So stupid. It’s not connected to anything, it’s way too small and anyway, where’s the power going to come from? The lightning flashed in fury above the church, wild white cracks in the sky and a smell in the air like the sea...
I turned my gaze downhill, to the huts and shacks, right down to where Café Bar Tchac met the edge of a dust track. I stared at it for a while, surprised it was so clear. Then I realized that the reason I could make out the details so distinctly was because of the pale light from inside.
I looked to the shacks right and left of the Café-Bar, watching the shadows fade before a soft yet growing illumination. My eyes slowly tracked its advance under the storm and up the hill, and when I felt the final blast of light from my own little shack, every silhouette grew long, defined in the yellow glare, sharp cartoon shapes ready to play. I was afraid to turn around.
There was silence for a moment from the church, and then another sound, gathering strength, rumbling like a wave on the sea. The service or whatever it was had ended abruptly, and people were leaving, going fast down the hill. I was afraid it was some kind of religious fervour and in a way it was.
‘Bar Tchac!’ they cheered‘Beeeeeeer!’
I could hear the barman above them all, exulting, and promising drinks all round. His face was a lantern of happiness. Business would be good tonight.
I walked towards the church, expecting it to be ablaze in electric glory, but it wasn’t. The candles flickered, serene against the riot of earth and sky. I opened my mouth to say something, and he shook his head, took one of the candles down and held it above the floor of the church, against the back wall. I looked down at where he was pointing.
Ancient but clear, small and intricate carvings covered the lower wall. I could see where the stone had been built over, where the stories had been buried. I followed the candle, as he walked the length of the wall and I marveled at the old secret of Tchac under melting light. The new secret of Tchac sat on the altar. After a while, we left the church and walked down to the bar in silence. People had brought their tables and placed them outside. Coca-cola was being served and some couple of hours after the storm ended, chilled beer did indeed arrive. Alejandro and I were given pride of place at the bar. It made talking difficult, but there were things that had to be said.
‘So what was all that about?’ I asked.
‘All what about?’ came his inevitable reply.
‘The miracle of Tchac. That thing couldn’t work, it just couldn’t work and no way could it work like this...did you connect it up?’
‘No. But you won’t believe what I say.’
‘You want these people to believe Tchac or the spirits or Kinich Ahua did this.'
‘I want you to believe you did this.’
‘Stop it. You don’t need to do this. You see what you have up there? That’s real, that’s astonishing. You could have people coming to Tchac for years, tourists paying enough money for everyone here to have a real life, not for one night, but every day!’
‘Every day!’ He mimicked me gently, ‘Not for one night, but every day!’ And he laughed and the rest of the bar laughed too, without hearing a word between us. They were too happy in conversations of their own. He leaned forward and I did too, enjoying our secret:
‘Listen. This village you know belonged to Tchac, was Maya when the Azteca came, ready to destroy. Then there was a temple and in that temple, a mask of Tezcatlipoca, their patron, was found; it was a sign, and the people were saved, and they lived as they had always lived. Then, hundreds of years ago Cortez and his conquistadores came, and a vision of the virgin appeared in the temple and the people were saved again, to live as they had always lived.’
‘The people of Tchac are prudent with their gods.’
‘Yes we are. And we are prudent with other people’s gods. We respect them and they do not hurt us. The new gods come, and see, here you are, the new god’s daughter - stop shaking your head at me!’ For I was laughing and he could not help laughing with me.‘ So tonight we fiesta for the new god, and show him how great he is, and then he will leave us alone. You show us how!’
I drained my ice cold beer. ‘You’re insane. All this stuff. You really think this is right? Controlling them, high priest and handyman, keeping these people in the dark...' Alejandro sighed.
‘Perhaps I am a very bad man,’ He said. ‘Or perhaps you just don’t hear me. But look, everyone is so happy, let us be at peace tonight. Let me run you a bath and cook you some good food on the stove, there will be enough for that…’
I accepted. The bath was warm and sweet, dinner was hot, and breakfast, long afterwards, was hot too; sugary churros and chocolate, fried eggs and ham and coffee. I ate it watching for the lights to go out, hours before dawn. The earth was bare beneath the sky, the hills curiously silent. Even where I was, I could hear the hum of the fridge in the bar doing its work. A part of me delighted in that sound and waited with sorrow to hear it stop.
I was still waiting when the sun rose.
NB: The stuff about electricity is lifted almost verbatim from an article on the net called Electricity out of thin air. For some reason I don't get, my lj won't let me add the link.
Still, it is hatched now,
It is my offering in honour of Yule and the Longest Night of the Year. Sometimes we just have to accept the shape things take.
Six months in Mexico City had hardened my resolve to get away from it for the Gran Fiesta. My plan was to lie on a beach at Cancun and forget work until January, so I flew to Medina, where the plan changed. Rather than fly over Yucatan I would drive through it. I was tired of cities, of people, of speed I couldn’t feel. The roads to the resorts are good and I wanted to spend the longest night driving under bright stars by myself.
I did all that. Got lost too. This didn't worry me because all roads lead to fuel stations, you just have to keep driving til you meet them. I looked for signs and watched the land grow higher, mountains in the distance, with no hope of Cancun's light and a sense of being way too far south. Then the gas ran out. I got out of the car and started walking until the road became a track, and the track led me into the village of Tchac, where I looked for petrol, knowing there wouldn’t be any.
I knew there wouldn’t be any because Tchac was a pathetically cheerful collection of shacks and huts made habitable by the addition of corrugated iron roofs, chicken wire and ‘borrowed’ doors, some not even hinged on. There was a well here, several chickens and a few burnt out tyres, but the nearest thing to a car was mine, some six kilometers back on the road. I could see a small sign; Café Bar Tchac. I went in and found myself face to face with a man and a fridge.
‘Do you sell beer?’ I asked.
He gave me a wide smile. ‘ Hello, yes, American, no? English, ah, English, welcome to Tchac, have a drink.’ He threw open the fridge door, and I found myself presented with row upon row of coca-cola cans stacked high. These were evidently the Christmas editions, as every can was adorned with a smiling white-bearded man in red fluff. The fridge wasn’t working.
‘Fifty cents a can,’ he said.
‘Do you have any beer?’ I asked again, more slowly this time. My Spanish is all right, but I don’t speak Yucatec with any fluency. He paused.
‘We will have beer,’ he continued smiling,’Very soon.’
I waited. ‘And then we will put it in the fridge for you.’
Sat myself down and relaxed, as I wasn’t going anywhere in a hurry.
‘A coke would be lovely,’ I said, to the delight of his eager teeth. His was the biggest smile I've ever seen; any wider would have sucked his dimples into his ears. He cleaned a glass for me with great deliberation, and poured a can of coke into it. He then added a small striped pink and white plastic straw. I drank the coke. It was warm and flat.
‘Thank you.’ I said. Then paused a moment. ‘My car is empty.’
‘Well yes,’ he said, as though that was obvious.
‘And I need help to get it going again.’
‘Uit Valez can help you with that. He is a mechanic.’
‘Fantastic. Where can I find Uit Valez?’
‘He is in Cancun for the Gran Fiesta.’
‘Oh.’
The barman looked a little glum, as if he wanted to be more useful.
‘He will be back after the Fiesta.’ He smiled apologetically.
All very well, I thought, but the Fiesta ends on the 26th. That leaves me stuck here for six days – for I could tell just by looking that no-one else in Tchac had a car. The barman corrected me when I voiced my doubts. Apparently Rosario Huup had a car, the doctor had a car, the barman himself had a car and the old priest used to have a car, but of these four, three were holidaying with family members at Cancun and one had been returned to the diocese two years ago.
‘I will need a phone,’ I said.
He smiled apologetically again.
I began to panic.
A while later I was walking up the hill towards the church, directed there by the barman, whose preternatural positivity had been sorely taxed by my reaction to the news about the phone. I was going to speak to a man called Alejandro Puuc. Occasionally,in the Amerindian farmlands around Medina, one might hear a Spanish first name coupled with a Mayan surname or vice versa, but it was universal in Tchac – having said that, the very name of the village told its ancestry. A pointless dump, but an ancient pointless dump. Apparently Huup knew a lot of 'useful things'. I was hoping he had a scooter or a map.
I found him waving an egg over a woman in the church.
They were both sat at the foot of a statue of the virgin who stood rolling her eyes in alabaster sympathy for Puuc’s patient. The church was dark and marginally larger than the bar, rank with tobacco, candlewax and alcohol. I waited while he sang incomprehensibly, drew something on the egg, and after a few moments' mutual prayer, sent her away smiling. He was smiling too, until he saw me.
I couldn’t believe it, as he introduced himself. He was the standard shamanic facsimile to be found in every tourist trap across the continent, but he didn’t have to be. Fluent in English, Spanish and Yucatec, perfectly healthy and intelligent, I could see no reason for him to be playing Carlos Castenada in a no brain backwater like Tchac. My conclusion had to be that he was not only fake, but a fake so bad at faking, he couldn’t cut it in some new age refuge on the coast. And I knew that smell too. Mescal. I almost turned round to leave.
‘Wait, wait,’ he gave a little self deprecating chuckle, ‘So you have decided not to like me. But that's all right, it’s all right...because I can help you, if you will help me...’
I reached back to my pocket and pulled out some notes.
‘No, no, put that away, I don’t need it.’
It was the first time anyone had said that to me since possibly ever. So I stopped and listened. He wanted to talk, and as he talked, he pulled out from under the altar a bottle of something like mescal with a big brown root in it. At least, I hoped it was a root. He winked.
‘The secret of Tchac,’ he said, ‘preparing you for the night.’
‘What is happening tonight?’
‘Not tonight, tomorrow night. The longest night.’
Still northern hemisphere, but I had forgotten. 21st December, winter equinox, shortest day and longest night. We wandered over to a little hut next to the church. It had a table, a mattress with a blanket, and junk against every wall. There was a disconnected stove and a bath tub with a bucket next to it. Someone had hung a piñata over the front door in an attempt to be festive. Here, it transpired, was to be my abode for my stay in Tchac.
‘I will give you all the help I can, get gas as soon as I can,' he continued, ‘But I want something in return…’ He looked at me. ‘Let’s relax and get to know each other. Have a drink.’
By now I was pretty sure I knew what his favour was going to be, so I thought I might as well drink his stinking alcohol – it would help me release my inhibitions when the time came to smash the piñata in his face and kick him through the side of the shack. He talked on, while we drank this terrible stuff, and I lost track of the conversation and before I knew where I was, he was half way through discussing the favour, which had nothing to do with sex. There was no more not-quite-mescal; instead he was waving a can of coca-cola in my face, telling me to try it because it was the real thing.
‘Is this hell?’ I asked him, ‘You can tell me. I won’t blame you.’
When he smiled, his face shone with the glow of the radiantly drunk.
‘The longest night is coming. They can’t even enjoy nice cold beer in a lit bar.’
I looked up at those eyes of his, red-rimmed with disastrous enthusiasm, and thought I understood.
‘I can’t fix your fridge, you know.’
‘You don’t have to fix the fridge. The fridge isn’t broken.’ He leaned forward.
‘The fridge needs electricity. I need you to make electricity.’
And he sat there, straight faced, while I laughed enough to shake the walls of his home, staring at the useless lightbulb swinging above us. At some point afterwards, I recovered myself enough to explain to him that I couldn’t mend a fuse in my house in London, never mind power Tchac’s sole functioning fridge.
‘You are the one to do it, I knew when I saw you. You will, you see, it’s all here, I got the pieces…’ He gestured at the swirling room around us, ‘But I don’t know how to begin. Begin it for tomorrow night, the longest night, and everyone can celebrate. I know it. Besides, you will have help.’ I thought he meant himself until he pulled out another bottle from beneath his mattress. ‘Drink this.’
Later, I woke, shivering and sweating on the floor, my stomach contracting fitfully. I went outside and threw up, sometimes burning, sometimes very cold. I went indoors and lit a candle, and looked at the back wall, where sat the last thing I expected to see: A solar panel.
The sun. Of course, it made sense that the sun would hide here on the shortest day, the time of night and shadow. Tchac was a rain god, I recalled. At this time all across the world people lit tiny lamps to coax the sun back. The Mayans called it Kinich Ahau, the firebird who loved poets and singers. And here it was! Behind my mattress!
I fell forwards in an attempt to touch the panel and instead, crashed a few feet short, extinguishing the candle by landing on it. I expected to throw up but found myself in the grip of foul tasting hiccups instead. ’K-K-Kinich Ahau!’ I cried out, and nothing happened. But I could swear the solar panel was listening. It was only when I realized how very ill I must be to think anything so stupid that my body took over and I passed out.
I dreamed or thought I dreamed. The solar panel was there, and in my hands I held a roll of aluminium conducting ribbon. The solar panel had come in a cardboard packet, and I wound some of the tape around the cardboard. I sat back and stared at it. A flat coil.
In my dream I lumbered back down the hill and demanded things from the passing innocents of Tchac. Next morning, I awoke to find various items outside the door. My head hurt.
It was a baffling list, a list of wonders. There was a multimeter, a car battery, some plastic covered wire flex. I dragged out the coil and the panel and just stared, fiddling haplessly while my head split and nothing made sense. The resulting connection went like this: Battery to panel to flat coil to multimeter to battery. And all I could do was stare and wonder where the car battery had come from.
I walked down the hill to see Alejandro approaching with a can of warm coke. He looked at the rig and asked me if this was what I created ‘In the hands of the spirits.’ I wanted to laugh again but I was far too fragile. So I said that yes it was, and I apologized for not being able to help his people more.
‘If this is what you were given, you have nothing to be sorry for,’ He half turned away. I couldn’t get past this feeling of disappointment, but it wasn’t my fault. He had built something up in his head, and my only hope was that the other inhabitants of Tchac hadn’t been expecting miracles. I picked up the flat coil, and the multimeter sprang into a momentary flurry of action. I was astonished enough to jump back, and Alejandro was gazing at the thing as though he wanted to marry it. Voltage. My only conclusion was that the multimeter must be broken.
‘Electricity,’ He said.
‘Probably from my body,’ I told him, ‘Don’t go ordering your icepacks yet.’
‘Did I not tell you if you took the first step, I could do the rest?’
I shrugged, not knowing what to say. He asked me if the rig could be taken up the hill, and I agreed. Several of them moved it up there as though it was a holy relic. I would have been embarrassed, but by now, all I could focus on was sleep without dreams. I almost collapsed onto the mattress, coke can in hand.
I woke to darkness and a sudden peal of thunder directly overhead. I looked out to see; under the night clouds the church was full of lit candles. I could hear singing. They were probably praying for that damn rig to work, I told myself. So stupid. It’s not connected to anything, it’s way too small and anyway, where’s the power going to come from? The lightning flashed in fury above the church, wild white cracks in the sky and a smell in the air like the sea...
I turned my gaze downhill, to the huts and shacks, right down to where Café Bar Tchac met the edge of a dust track. I stared at it for a while, surprised it was so clear. Then I realized that the reason I could make out the details so distinctly was because of the pale light from inside.
I looked to the shacks right and left of the Café-Bar, watching the shadows fade before a soft yet growing illumination. My eyes slowly tracked its advance under the storm and up the hill, and when I felt the final blast of light from my own little shack, every silhouette grew long, defined in the yellow glare, sharp cartoon shapes ready to play. I was afraid to turn around.
There was silence for a moment from the church, and then another sound, gathering strength, rumbling like a wave on the sea. The service or whatever it was had ended abruptly, and people were leaving, going fast down the hill. I was afraid it was some kind of religious fervour and in a way it was.
‘Bar Tchac!’ they cheered‘Beeeeeeer!’
I could hear the barman above them all, exulting, and promising drinks all round. His face was a lantern of happiness. Business would be good tonight.
I walked towards the church, expecting it to be ablaze in electric glory, but it wasn’t. The candles flickered, serene against the riot of earth and sky. I opened my mouth to say something, and he shook his head, took one of the candles down and held it above the floor of the church, against the back wall. I looked down at where he was pointing.
Ancient but clear, small and intricate carvings covered the lower wall. I could see where the stone had been built over, where the stories had been buried. I followed the candle, as he walked the length of the wall and I marveled at the old secret of Tchac under melting light. The new secret of Tchac sat on the altar. After a while, we left the church and walked down to the bar in silence. People had brought their tables and placed them outside. Coca-cola was being served and some couple of hours after the storm ended, chilled beer did indeed arrive. Alejandro and I were given pride of place at the bar. It made talking difficult, but there were things that had to be said.
‘So what was all that about?’ I asked.
‘All what about?’ came his inevitable reply.
‘The miracle of Tchac. That thing couldn’t work, it just couldn’t work and no way could it work like this...did you connect it up?’
‘No. But you won’t believe what I say.’
‘You want these people to believe Tchac or the spirits or Kinich Ahua did this.'
‘I want you to believe you did this.’
‘Stop it. You don’t need to do this. You see what you have up there? That’s real, that’s astonishing. You could have people coming to Tchac for years, tourists paying enough money for everyone here to have a real life, not for one night, but every day!’
‘Every day!’ He mimicked me gently, ‘Not for one night, but every day!’ And he laughed and the rest of the bar laughed too, without hearing a word between us. They were too happy in conversations of their own. He leaned forward and I did too, enjoying our secret:
‘Listen. This village you know belonged to Tchac, was Maya when the Azteca came, ready to destroy. Then there was a temple and in that temple, a mask of Tezcatlipoca, their patron, was found; it was a sign, and the people were saved, and they lived as they had always lived. Then, hundreds of years ago Cortez and his conquistadores came, and a vision of the virgin appeared in the temple and the people were saved again, to live as they had always lived.’
‘The people of Tchac are prudent with their gods.’
‘Yes we are. And we are prudent with other people’s gods. We respect them and they do not hurt us. The new gods come, and see, here you are, the new god’s daughter - stop shaking your head at me!’ For I was laughing and he could not help laughing with me.‘ So tonight we fiesta for the new god, and show him how great he is, and then he will leave us alone. You show us how!’
I drained my ice cold beer. ‘You’re insane. All this stuff. You really think this is right? Controlling them, high priest and handyman, keeping these people in the dark...' Alejandro sighed.
‘Perhaps I am a very bad man,’ He said. ‘Or perhaps you just don’t hear me. But look, everyone is so happy, let us be at peace tonight. Let me run you a bath and cook you some good food on the stove, there will be enough for that…’
I accepted. The bath was warm and sweet, dinner was hot, and breakfast, long afterwards, was hot too; sugary churros and chocolate, fried eggs and ham and coffee. I ate it watching for the lights to go out, hours before dawn. The earth was bare beneath the sky, the hills curiously silent. Even where I was, I could hear the hum of the fridge in the bar doing its work. A part of me delighted in that sound and waited with sorrow to hear it stop.
I was still waiting when the sun rose.
NB: The stuff about electricity is lifted almost verbatim from an article on the net called Electricity out of thin air. For some reason I don't get, my lj won't let me add the link.
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Date: 2004-12-22 09:06 am (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2004-12-22 03:16 pm (UTC)*does a little dance of shy joy*
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Date: 2004-12-23 01:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-12-23 10:21 am (UTC)