Meet Me at Infinity (31 page)

This is going to be a longie, better get out that baggie until you feel like being Ancient Marinered. I’m lonesome for English above the level of Why is there kerosene in the gasoline? Or Who was Andreas Quin-tana Roo? Or How do you say kilowatt in Maya? (“Kilowatt,” stupid.)

Let’s see. I’ll write after I sluice off some sweat. It is
muggy hot
in this coco beach. I’m dripping into the fungus. I’ve handwritten a couple quite different bits, but am bored with them. (Love, death, $.) Feel like talking about what I’m looking at. It may come out too long. Do what you want. I think I have to come back in April, but may not be in communication as what I have to go back for is to have a piece of stomach ulcer cut out, after which I’ll maybe be moving again. Goddamn ulcer isn’t healing; it perforated once and nearly killed me and I’m quite a ways from any emergency medical intervention and likely to remain so. Also I
want
to eat chilis. They have a luscious stuff called salsa verde here you put on cheese or fish or your finger and after the top of your head settles back, this beautiful green shooting star roams around your back palate making life good. If I got rid of this badly vulcanized stomach section once and for all, I could pig it, really pig it on peppered snapper and cactus buds and not be all the time worrying about is there bits of shell in the coconut. So I think I’ll give in to the medicos, who predicted it would be like this. Hate to fulfil other people’s prophecies about my own dammit body.

Hey, a word maybe worth saying. Essentially what I said about Canada, but with fangs:
Don’t come here freaky.
Mexico, I mean. They’re having a drive on U.S. cultural influences, and if there is one word that is known from Cuernavaca estate to Indio hut, it’s “Ippy.” I saw a barefoot Maya toddler say “Ippy!” and spit. Why? Well, first don’t forget Mexico culture is partly (superficially maybe) traditional Spanish, churchy and square. But
more
important—Mexico is a
revolutionary
country and most revolutionary countries are prim. Prudish. They’re fighting for the early stages of what we’re rejecting the ripe-rot stage of—literacy, plumbing, jobs (JOBS!), malaria control (which means guys in uniforms and checkboards, very dedicated and mechanized), clean-living progressive patriotic youth. Man, they’ve
had
lying around in hovels screwing and meditating and puffing grass—they’ve had centuries of that, now they’re after Getting Out the Vote and Rural Electrification.
My eldest boy has won an engineering scholarship:
That’s the stage the dream is at, here. So be warned. And be warned like this: hair.

Mexicans, you see, don’t really dig any of the distinctions between Yank and Yank that you and I would see at once. All they see is
hair.
And that goes for mustaches. Remember, most Indians have little or no facial hair. A mestizo’s idea of a mustache is a Ronald Colman hairline on the upper lip. Their head hair is straight and black and chopped in a curve about earlobe length at most. (That’s progressive.) So when they see a bunch of pink giants with frizzy light-colored stuff cascading all over their heads and faces, we look like Martians. I don’t care if you’re IBM’s squarest computer designer in a three-button suit and polished floaters, you come here with an inch and a half of mustache and—
“Ippyl”
Splat.

And another thing: Aside from the Spanish religious prejudice and the general revolutionary ideals, you have the billion-dollar budgetary weight of the turismo industry, a big big item in a still-poor country. And what are the best paying tourists? See that family over there, rhinestone hornrims on the old lady, forty pounds of lard on everybody, Truman shirts? They’re buying rebozos and baskets and staying at the Acapulco Holiday Inn or the Presidente and hiring cars and guides and eating—Christ, do they eat—and what they are is good fat sheep trotting through the tourist circuit, leaving rich hunks of wool on all the little hooks. And nothing—but nothing—that upsets them or tightens their wool or scares them off is going to be tolerated. And it has been discovered—shades of St. Miguel d’Allende—that some kinds of Yank young people upset them. What kind? The kind with—you guessed it—
hair.

And it has been further discovered that the hairy young family in a VW camper unfortunately does
not
buy serapes and dyed hats or stay at the Presidente or go on the Robinson Crusoe cruise, that they bring their own granola and leave, instead of wool, decorous little plastic bags of Pepsi bottles and soiled disposable diapers. Period. And so, no matter how nice they are, or
simpatico,
and genuinely interested in the Mexican people or art or history, they are a zero sign in the big balance sheet which is counted on to build roads and hospitals as well as enriching politicians. And so… if they step over any line, or get too near the sheep run, regretfully, their car papers get misstamped, their tourist cards expire, their trailer hitch is unsafe, their vaccinations suddenly become necessary—in short,
good-bye to sunny Mexico.

And the first dividing line is
hair.

Beyond that line, way beyond it, is any chemical from grass up. (I carry
every
prescription taped to
every
pill bottle in my first aid kit, even vitamins.) It’s as simple as this: Tequila or any sort of juice, yes.
Anything else, no.
And the “No” takes the form of a Mexican slam, which is very very very unpleasant in many indescribable ways, and your friendly U.S. consul not only can’t get you out but may never find out you’re there. You are, friend, in jail on an alien planet. And you
stay.
And stay. Mom and Pop can come down and feed you through the bars—maybe. (Prisoners have to
buy
several essential, too.) The only good thing that can be said about it is that you probably won’t die and it’s a comparatively fast method of growing ‘way ‘way up, if you’re capable of reflection. But I’m sure
PhCom’s
readership can figure other methods, and certainly they won’t make the error of thinking that just because the fuzz is three feet high and a strange color that they aren’t efficient as hell with a commo system that makes the country a small town. And one in which we’re just as inconspicuous as a radioactive self-luminous moog-amped giraffe on the main street.

So if it occurs to you that the Martians next door are worth seeing—and O god they are—grit your teeth, take out the clippers, stash your stash, and set forth as humble skinheads, even as your pal Tip.

I don’t want to give the impression that I think you can only come here shaved bald. Of course you can come in hairy; there are mustachioed Yanks motorscootling around in a lot of towns, unmolested. (It does help to come in a tour group of thirty with Express Checks plastered on your nose. Or an armful of scuba gear—but you’d better be able to fit those curls into your mask.) What I mean is that hair nigger-izes you. If you hit somebody’s fender or chicken, the hair throws the presumption against you. If you get sunstroke, you’re presumed stoned. If you smile, the whores and shopkeepers will be mostly smiling back, not the people you’d maybe rather meet. And as for the countryside… Here: I was here when three young men visited the next plantation and made a deal to rent a hut. They looked to me like ex-Eagle scouts, seriously interested in swimming and savoring this incredible spot. (Tiptree owns binoculars, not being a Maya.) Clean solid new camping gear, expensive equipment, tailored shorts, sedate swimsuits. No sounds of music of revelry. Only thing they seemed to be lighting was a Coleman lantern. But… one had shoulder-length hair, two had modest guardsman lip bangs. Now they probably thought they were on a deserted world, but the fact is the place is and has been for three thousand years full of sharp-eyed Mayas. Their every move was observed by an eleven-year-old, who reported to his mother, who told her aunt, who told the foreman. (I was present, that’s when the baby went “Ippy—splat.”) (Another term is
Malo typo.)
Anyway, the foreman murmured to his boss, whose orbit crossed that of the next plantation owner, who sent word to his caretaker… and in five days the hut became no longer available. One loused-up vacation in paradise. See what I mean?

And there’s a great deal to freak out on here, and there are, as everywhere, ways to freak out in your own very pleasingly after you learn the lines—would I be here?—so it’s worth thumbing through your stereotypes and selecting the right head to wear. Says Tip, anyway.

As of spring 1972. Things may change.

—March 31, 1972

Listen, I have to talk to you about Maya Indians. I ache to talk about Maya Indians like Lawrence ached to talk about Ay-rabs. My motives are a little different, for example I’m not so far as I know suffering from obscure yearnings for alien buggery. (If I were I’d probably talk your ear off about it.) More important, Mayas are about as different from Arabs as Frisbees are from cyanide capsules. The only thing they have in common is that people come down with the same intensity of Mayaphilia that you see in Victorian Arabophiles, or U.S. Pakophiles. But Mayas hook a different kind of people.

All right, Tiptree. Start.

I’m looking at a Maya Indian, Maya puro. His name is Audomaro Tzul which means Honcho or Knight in Maya. His nickname is L’mus, meaning L’mus. L’mus is an adult, nineteen; his body is a braid of muscle the color and shine of a black bay horse. He is wearing khaki shorts and a red bandanna, a blue-black earlength bob and magnificent Maya teeth.

Seen sideways, L’mus is a normal well-formed male about 4′ 9″ tall. When he turns, which he does with the snap and power of a tuna’s tail, you see that he is also about 4′ 9″ broad. He can pick up an eighty-pound gas tank one-handed, hoist it in the air, and run. (Mayas run a lot. The sand is full of gouges where their broad, prehensile toes have dug in for take-off.) Moreover, L’mus’s old grandmother could hoist you on her head and toddle off with you, without sweating her embroidered petticoat.

L’mus is an electrician. An electric line came through here last month from a generator L’mus helped install, through two transformers he also helped line in. When the juice was turned on L’mus stood at severe attention to the god of Faraday, six hundred volts in each eye.

When the voltmeter socked the mark, L’mus split a grin of such beauty that the moon landings paled.

He has, however, one professional difficulty: his good brain struggles with his Maya macho. This makes it difficult to persuade him to break a 115-volt current before handling the wires. And when the line was run to my tent and L’mus ran up the palm trees to twist it around nails, I saw how he cuts and strips wire: He bites it. Up to No. 14. Teeth!

All right, so far nothing much, and maybe you’ve seen lots of Indians. So have I, especially the Huastec-language people in the main part of Mexico. Aztecs, to you.
¹
Now Aztecs are great. Aztecs specialize in a wild, adenoidal, faintly horrified profile that’s satisfyingly archaic. But Aztecs, and most other tribes, are… well… class-structured. With them you meet this dominance-submission thing, a certain amount of Yassuh-Boss. Aztec thinking has ladders in it; you get the bottom-rung resentment shit, the middle-rung climbing piss, the deviousness, the opacity—the residue of millennia of conquering-and-being-conquered; slaves, masters, gore, and tribute.

Not Maya.

Mayas—like the Scots—have
never
been officially conquered in war. They’ve been massacred and chased, most lately by the Mexicans under Porfirio Diaz, when Yucatan wanted to secede. But Mexico didn’t flatten them; it ended with a
negotiated
truce in—gasp—1935. (The last Secretary of the Maya Armies died recently, and when this coco ranch was started in 1936 the mestizo homesteader had to pay regular tribute to the nearest Maya chief in addition to his Mexico taxes.)

Mayas have also warred plentifully among themselves—they probably ruined their ancient cities that way before the Spaniards came. But the Maya people en masse have never lived under anybody’s heel. They simply took off into the jungle and some of them haven’t been found to this day.

What this means is that a Maya looks at you in a way you’re not used to unless you’re lucky. Like the Scotsman; straight, easy, humorous. Who you? And they laugh in a way you don’t hear much. Right out, delighted. They laugh a lot, they value a joker. (Broke your leg? Ha-ha-ha! But gentle and tender to real infirmity and to babies.) When you meet Mayas, don’t expect the How do you do, senor, si senor snake oil. What you get, from men, women, infants, is questions. Sharp minds have been watching you and everything else in the environment. (Why aren’t you fishing today? How much money do you make? What kind of social security program they got in the States? What’s that thing for?)

Be ready to account for yourself.

Mayas have their social trauma, sure. The juggernaut of cauc culture is punishing them, too. Some Mayas lost their language before the present realization that it’s valuable. They suffer the fierce glooms that lurk inside the guy on the bottom of the intercultural cement grinder. (And which can make intercultural drinking parties end bloody.) L’mus stares slit-eyed at his transformers, knowing in his heart they’re child’s play; he senses computers he’ll never have the chance to master, how-to mathematics he can’t read. But it isn’t in him to whine; he throws his black wings back and sends Rosa Pech Balan a killing grin. Thinking, maybe, of his new Uruguay tapes or the fact that his sons will get free education.

Rosa? Wait a minute. I didn’t finish telling you how Mayas look.

Technically, Mayas are the most Oriental-appearing of all American Indians. They have the strongest—is it epicanthial?—eyefold; their eyes are so slanted their own artists draw them as 90-degree angled almonds. And Mayas are short. But although some of the Maya tribes over by Merida are yellow rather than mahogany and look superficially Chinese, the second look shows you the tremendous solid bones. Stone bones, fantastic strongly built. These are, remember, the people who have owned and survived in this land for at least three thousand years. They have walked right out of the old, old murals of Bonampak. L’mus was here when Pilate had his administrative problem.