Hunger's Brides (211 page)

Evening. Sunset. Sea of painted glass.

Darkness. Crayons streak the fishing harbour—a string of coloured lights along the jetty. Thick smears of broken wax. We can hardly bear to look. At each other. Can barely speak with it. We measure off the distances, with lengths of silence.

The night smells of cinnamon.

Tomorrow, Beulah, what would you like to do. Do we go for the manatees? Or Fort San Felipe built in the 17th-century.
Sweet Jacinto, your turn to make believe
. Here is where the first Spanish ran aground. Two years before Cortés. They have repaired the bronze guns, the balustrade—

Jacinto … tomorrow I'm leaving.
Tomorrow I'm leaving Jacinto
.

But, we …

To Chichén Itzá.

But why?

For the equinox. To see the shadow. Of the serpent, moving down the steps.

Why.

It's what all the tourists—

Why.

Something I planned. For a long time. To see it for myself.

Why.

It's important … to me.

Why
, Beulah?

The end of something. I need to see it end.

I did not ask where. I do not care why you are going
there
. I ask why you are
leaving
. Here.

Three weeks.

It is not three weeks. It is one Maya
month
. You can have no idea. What it can mean—I will go with you.

Don't you have work, important work?—how long were you planning to keep me—

I will go.
Contigo
.

No.

Why.

I need to go alone.

Why.

Because I can.

Why.

Don't. Please.

I know Chichén Itzá.

No more guides, Jacinto.
No more rescues
.

There will be thousands. In some years
a hundred thousand people
. Do you know what such a crowd is?—what kind of thing? It is like a god with no jaw.

He does not sleep in the hammock with me. He sleeps in the bed. He wakes me, stands by the hammock in the darkness.

Are you awake? Are you listening? Beulah we have something, I think. Do not throw it away. On a plan.

Three weeks. Why can't you just accept—

What you are doing is very dangerous. At the fire—with the men. The drugs.

You think I'm going back there. Chichén Itzá is so ridiculous to you?

This knowledge you want—

I didn't invent this, you did.

Who?

America
—don't the anthropologists tell you people anything?

I am speaking seriously.

Synaesthetic sacred rites all across the Americas, the highest transports—you're the guide you tell me.

Ahh, yes, five senses in one—a shopping flyer, a supermarket. Have everything at once, but something else first. This is not you speaking. This is your culture's sickness.

You said that before.

Time is your disease.

Now explain it.

Are you ready to hear?

Let's find out.

Our masterpiece was never drugs. And it is not a recipe. The Maya masterpiece was time.
Eres muy lista …
but you know nothing about us. A little about the Aztecs but only in books. By white experts. You will not know us through books or drugs. They are gone, but the Maya are here. One is standing before you. Here. Now …

Dear sweet Jacinto, pacing back and forth across the balcony. I climb
down from the hammock. Sit in a cane chair.
The secret of the hammock, señorita, is to lie
.

Plans—this sickness of your culture. Going to the end of things. There is no end, Beulah. Or you do not get there, it comes to you. Whether or not you ask. So there is no need, to go alone.

I'll be back—
soon
.

How much has changed already in the one month we know each other? In this last week?
Soon—
you spend your lives in soon—so near so far. Your time is a caged animal. Your soon is the cage I walk in now. Look at me.

Silently, on bare feet, he swings back and forth—pendulum that strokes the nightsea gleam. My small eclipse.

Time is not a line, Beulah, time is not a ladder time is not a mountain side. Time is
Yaxche
.

Yaxche.

If you would put away your books and your experts I could show you, I could try. What is soon to you? Wait wait always first something else. A scientific culture—
how can you be so slovenly about time?
Your toy calendar—still no place notation for time even now. Time is your disease. I have read in five more years your magnificent computers may die of it.
A culture of wealth and property
. How much of what your parents now hold can they pass on to you? Of the items now in their house—that they do not really own yet anyway. How many of these objects will not fall apart, fall out of fashion, be repossessed? A dress, a car, a bowl, a tool?

One piece of advice that holds true for always?

My mother threw everything away, Beulah. Your parents will not have to.

Time is money you say. No, your money is time—how much is it truly worth Beulah Limosneros? I have seen them in New York in California in Tejas. Dishwashers, microwave ovens, running water—so much running and still you have no time. No time to cook. No time for others that you do not secretly begrudge. For family for friends.
A technological culture
. For every painful step your knowledge takes your ignorance runs back ten. Radio—can you explain it? What makes a toaster pop? Can you bake a bread of corn or wheat, light a fire without gasoline? Feed yourself for two days in the forest?—what
forest?
Name the hills the flowers the insects the plants all around you—even in your own country, your mother tongue, your home town? Do you have home towns? Can you tell what month—what day it is by looking at the constellations?—even
see
the sky at night? Draw a picture of what
you see, without shame, or sing a song before others—without shame—play an instrument? How many of you ever wrote a poem? And, for those few, how long has it been?

What can you teach a child that you are sure of? One thing that lasts? Can you keep anything holy?

My pendulum stops. Stands naked in the dark. Between me and the sea. We had nights that smelled of cinnamon…. Long nights of want, nights of once. In a place called Bacalar.

You had to wait for the Mayans from India to give you zero. But still you have no concept of
zero time
. You cannot take time out of time. No true concept of both-and-neither. It is just a game for intellectuals I have read. You have no word for neverness. And it is this time out of time, this fusion of everything that thinks and feels and sees and is
and
time—you can just barely glimpse your ignorance. Except like a shopping trip like a duty free port like Belize. And this ignorance of yours is not bliss, it is your agony. Time you can cut into tiny fractions but time for you has no stop. Your physicists have barely begun to imagine it, how it might run faster or slower, yet you have sped it up without knowing what it was. You make it flat. You make it run on a line. Straight on and up. Like a train, like your progress rocket. But you cannot make it step off the rails. Walk across a field. Pick a mango. Sit. Rest. Look at the stars….

The equinox, Beulah. In Chichén Itzá. Your March 20, 1995. Is this 1995 years after the birth of Christ or after his crucifixion? How many of you can say? And if it is the crucifixion was it done in the year zero or one? Thirty-three years' difference. Plus the uncounted months from Christmas to Easter. And why is your Easter always moving around? And why can't you decide when he died?

It is a kind of smoke in your heads. Time.

Months of 28, 31, 29, 30 days. How many of you even know how old you are?
How long is a month?
Do you count your age from conception or delivery? And what if you are born late or early? And when you turn twenty are you starting your twentieth year or ending it? How many
scientific
Americans still nod on Sunday to hear the world began in 4004? Is that 4004 years before his birth or 4038 years before his death … give or take a few months, and a few more days for Easter, and the count that begins at zero or one….

It is a smudge, a greenwood fire burning in your minds. Time.

A month has 20 days
, Beulah. Punto final. One
tun
. One year. Eighteen months of exactly twenty days. Five dog days each year. Time out of time, Beulah. Five days. Like our time here in Bacalar.
Ka
tun—each a decade of twenty.
Bak
tun—twenty katun. Each cycle increasing by a factor of twenty. A simple system, Beulah. A stone age system. We have used it to make calendrical calculations.
142 nonillion years into the future
. To the day, to the hour. But here the smudge is growing bigger. It is now a forest fire. Your word nonillion, look at your dictionary. Any number followed by 36 zeroes … or else 50.
Or else 50
. Fourteen zeroes difference, your dictionary cannot decide. Yet your Big Bang! happened
only nine zeroes ago
. This is becoming serious. An explosion, a holocaust, a fire that covers the Amazon. In Europe a billion is a million million. In America only a thousand million. Yes even today, in your information age.
A mathematical culture
. The zero, it still does not really count for you. Zero number, zero time. You still do not quite see, do you? Even after fifteen centuries—and fifteen new deserts. Time is like a mistake to you, the smear of an eraser. How can you bear to have this smudge in your heads? Is that why you have set the world on fire? It is your disease, Beulah. Like the first confusion of a fever, the clumsiness of the ill in the way you touch the world. And now your progress rocket burns out, like bad fireworks. Like bad time. Like a sun flaring out. It is why you smash and burn everything that is precious and precise.

Like a tree.

Your ideas of infinite time are even less interesting than of space. Your time is like the first geometry we teach a child. You have confused
time
with space—an infinite line running back and forth like a metronome. Then you confuse infinite time with
eternity
—a symphony so complex, that branches and leaves and dies like a tree, that swells like a seed. But time is not reason Beulah time is not a line, the tracks of a train. Time is mind, it runs how it will and where and why. And there is a mind of time out of time.

We were a people of the forest. Time, like the sky, was always green. Zero time is a living thing. Now it has come out of the forest to kill you. It swallows your dreams. It feeds where you eat. It feeds on what's left of your trees while you sleep. It is an abscess, an ulcer, an absence inside. It is a blur in your minds, a waking dream. It is the food that starves you.

And we were its wizards. Once. Once, there was a zero time.

Quédate
, Beulah. Tomorrow morning I will borrow another car. There is a place I have been waiting to show to you.

I am begging
you
now.

C
ENOTE
A
ZUL
        

[2 Mar. 1995]

C
OME SEE THE MANATEES
. Stay one more day. Hear them sing like mermaids. Each to each.
²³
Stay one more day in once, not soon. This is how they tempt you. The wizards in the road. Will you stay? We will bask in the sea. Singing each to each. Will you stay? We are all welcome here. Stay one more day in once upon a time. In a place called Xcalak. Take a boat from Bacalar. To places spelled with Ks and Xs. Like ecstasy. Like axes.

They tempt you with the world, the tulips are too red. They heal you, build you up. For more, for Never is enough. But the silence has reached here too. And it will spread. It follows you. In a slattern's slouch and sprawl.

Alright Jacinto Ek Cruz. One more day for what you have tried to do for me. Tomorrow, a place upstream. Of Cenote Azul.

Tomorrow is a place for divers, Beulah Limosneros. Like yesterday. I have seen photographs from underwater. Divers in a cave. Water so clear it looks like they are flying, like bats….