The Secret Letters of the Monk Who Sold His Ferrari (10 page)

As he talked, Chava led me through the forest, over tree roots and crumbling stones. Along the way, I spotted the occasional fieldworker moving along the paths, but the place was hardly quiet or empty. Birds squawked and sang out as they swooped through the trees. I heard branches rustling and scurrying sounds all around us. I tried to concentrate on the birds and not think of spiders, scorpions or pumas. Chava stopped now and then to point out barely revealed formations of stones or freshly excavated sites. He had walked me around a small pyramid. It was stepped, like the pictures I had seen of the famous pyramid at Chichen Itza but was only about thirty-five feet high. And then we arrived in front of what looked to be the remains of buildings laid out around two sides of large raised stone. The bottoms of the walls were composed of stone squares, and the tops were covered with what looked like a stone-column motif. “A half-finished palace here,” said Chava. “Around a plaza, a public space.”

I walked around the base of the ruins and peered at the stone building blocks.

“You said they didn’t have metal tools?”

“That’s right,” said Chava. “Just granite, flint, obsidian. There aren’t materials to make metal in these parts.”

I ran my hand across the foundation. “Incredible.”

“Shall we take a short rest?” Chava asked, moving to the edge of the raised stone plaza and sitting down. He pulled a water bottle from the pack he had been carrying and handed it to me. I walked over and took it from him gratefully. The trees provided shade, but the heat seemed to rise from the forest floor as well as pounding down from above the treetops. My shirt was clinging to my back; my pants were glued to my legs.

“That’s what I like about this work, you know,” Chava said. “The mysteries. We know that some of the abandoned cities we see were simply left by people moving about. But the population didn’t just move—it disappeared. And even the remaining populations did not stay on in the big cities.”

Chava went on to explain that scientists who studied Mayan skeletons had said that the bones, even the bones of the royalty, suggested that in the later years of the civilization, food was scarce. That might have been the result of overhunting. Another possibility was a plague of pests or some sort of agricultural disaster, perhaps caused by deforestation. But the most likely cause of the food shortage was an extended drought. “There isn’t much water in Yucatán at the best of times,” he laughed. And of course, disease, wars or other violence could have decimated the population as well.

Chava stood up and put the water bottle back in his pack.

“But here, at this site,” he said, “we see something we don’t often see at the excavations. Come.” Chava led me to one side
of the ruins. The main exterior featured square archways supported by short, round columns. But Chava was looking at the ground in front of the building.

“Now,” said Chava, pointing at an assembly of stones laid out on the ground. It wasn’t a neat formation, but it didn’t look haphazard either. “What would you guess that was?”

“I don’t know,” I said, moving closer. There were small tufts of grass between the stones. A lizard scurried across one corner and disappeared down the side of the pile. “Is it the beginning of a building? Or something that fell down?”

“That, my friend,” said Chava, “is a wall. Not a wall that has fallen down, but one that was assembled ahead of time and laid here, waiting to be moved up there to make a second story. It was all ready to go, but the work was not finished. This is something you don’t see in a site that was abandoned because of long drought or disease. This work wasn’t stopped—it was
interrupted.
”

When we had started this little tour, it all felt a bit random—taking a crash course in archaeology, becoming immersed in the working world of someone I just met. But I was beginning to see why Chava might want to show all this to everyone he encountered, why he might want to share his work with a stranger, why a job like his might hook a person. There were so many questions to be answered.

“What do you think it was?” I asked. “Were they attacked or something?”

“War or violence seems likely here, doesn’t it?” said Chava. “We have found a quantity of spearheads. But no burned buildings or walls or barricades for defense. And if it was an unexpected attack, well … you need to see another thing.” Chava
gestured for me to come away from the wall. “Can you take just a bit more climbing?”

Chava led the way, up a winding, twisting path. Here and there were the remains of crumbling stairs, which we scrambled over. Chava stopped climbing near the top of the hill and headed over to a flat area of stakes and stones. It was obvious that an excavation was under way. Cleared from the under-growth were the stone bases of walls surrounding dry dirt pits. In one, a young blond woman squatted in a corner, carefully sweeping dirt away from a buried object with a small brush. In another corner of the pit were various bits of rock and broken pottery with numbered flags and labels on them.

“Jonathan,” said Chava as the woman stood up. “This is Ellen. Ellen, this is Jonathan.”

Ellen was another field technician, working with a team from an American university.

“I was just explaining to Jonathan about the recent discoveries. Maybe you could tell him about these hilltop homes,” said Chava. Ellen nodded and wiped her brow with a scarf she took from the pocket of her pants. Like Chava, she seemed to need no encouragement to talk about her work.

She explained that what I was looking at were the remains of meal preparation. The grinding stone for the corn had been rested against the doorframe, but not put away. The neatly laid-out pots suggested that work had started but then stopped midway through. Everything had been left the way people would leave things if they thought they would be returning shortly. They left quickly, but they did not appear to have run off in terror. Everything was orderly, and there were no signs of chaos or attack.

“Ah,” sighed Chava. “We have a lot of work to do before we solve these mysteries.”

“Speaking of which,” said Ellen. “I hope you’ll excuse me while I get back to it. I want to get a bit more done before I leave for the day.”

Chava and I stood on the hilltop for a few minutes more, gazing over the canopy of trees. I looked back at Ellen crouched in the dirt. There was less shade up here, and although the sun was not as high in the sky as it had been when I first arrived, it was still hot.

“That’s one thing I don’t get,” I said to Chava.

Chava cocked his head.

“The work,” I said. “The digging. It seems to move so slowly. I thought electrical engineering and technical design were painstaking, but this…” I waved my hand in Ellen’s direction. “This moves by fractions of inches. How do you manage?”

“Ah yes, I know,” said Chava, smiling. “You can work all day, and at the end of it, what have you done? Moved a few pounds of sand, right?”

I shrugged my shoulders.

“It’s easy to make light of the work we do. The American fieldworkers sometimes refer to themselves as ‘shovelbums.’ But we all have to keep reminding ourselves that we can’t rush our work, that we must be patient. And above all, we must work carefully, accurately, with the greatest professionalism, even if we are feeling bored or restless. It’s so easy to destroy important artifacts or miss things altogether.”

Chava began to head back toward the rough stairs. He looked over his shoulder at me.

“Each carefully excavated square may seem small, Jonathan,
but together, all these little plots can add up to an important historical discovery, a real advance in knowledge. I like to think that if we ‘shovelbums’ do our work well, our small contributions can add up to something really important. We can actually solve great mysteries.”

On the way home, Sikina insisted that I sit next to the window in the truck while she squeezed herself between Chava and me. I kept the window rolled all the way down, and occasionally stuck my head out like a goofy golden retriever. The dry rushing air felt wonderful. Once we were winding our way through the house-lined streets of Oxkutzcab, there was another reason to keep my head leaning out the window—the seductive smell of cooking. I realized how ravenous I was, but it also dawned on me that, since we had all been out all day, it was unlikely supper would be waiting on the stove when we got back.

“I’m just thinking,” I said to Chava and Sikina, “why don’t I take you two out for dinner in town? You’ve spent so much of your day entertaining me.”

“Oh no,” said Sikina. “We can’t do that. Zama is waiting for us.”

It turned out that we were heading to the home of Chava and Sikina’s married daughter. She and her husband had prepared a big dinner for us.

It was a crowded, noisy evening. As well as Zama and her husband and their three small children, various neighbors dropped in to say hi. Music played, my glass was filled and refilled, and my plate was piled high. As the children chased one another around the backyard, my eyes followed Zama’s six-year-old son, Eme. He was a bit smaller than Adam, but with his bubbly laugh and the way his body was constantly in motion, even when he sat down, Eme reminded me of my son. After I’d finished
eating, I walked through the house and out onto the dirt street, where it was a little more quiet. I tried to phone home, but my cell reception had been spotty since I landed in Mexico, and I couldn’t get through. I composed a message to Adam.

Hey buddy,
I wrote.
I am seeing the most amazing things here. When I have more time I will tell you all about them. But right now, I just wanted to say that I love you.

The message would get sent out whenever my phone got reception. In the meantime, I would go back to the party, but my heart was no longer in it.

Chava seemed to notice how quiet I had become after my return, and about thirty minutes later he suggested we depart. By the time I was lying in my bed later that night, having written in my journal about watching Chava’s happy family, my chest was tight from longing. I wanted nothing more than to have my son sprawled next to me. How had I not treasured those moments when they were so easily in reach?

T
HE NEXT MORNING
, Chava and I picked our way through the car park in the predawn darkness. I had toyed with the thought of asking Sikina to take me back to the airport in Mérida instead, to see if I could get an earlier flight out of Mexico, but Ayame’s words returned to me. Julian seemed to be pacing this trip with a reason. What’s more, Chava seemed intent on continuing my Mayan education, and I would have felt bad suggesting that we cut it short. He had insisted that we come out here, to Uxmal, before daybreak.

“When the sun comes up,” he had said, “the people appear. You want to see this alone, or almost alone.”

Chava had many connections with the people who ran the site, so a security guard had been instructed to meet us at the entrance to the building that acted as the gateway to the temples and the ruins. We could see his uniformed figure silhouetted against the museum’s front door.

When we approached, he and Chava exchanged a few words in Maya, and the guard opened the door for us. Then he pointed across the lobby and said something else.

“I know the way,” said Chava. “Just follow me.”

Ten minutes later we were standing outside. In the dim light, a magnificent pyramid rose before us over a hundred feet high and at least two hundred feet wide. Unlike the small pyramid I had seen yesterday, or the pictures I had seen of other Mayan pyramids, this one seemed to have an oval base. “Temple of the Magician,” said Chava.

While we stood, the sun climbed behind us. As it did, its light hit the stones of the temple, making them glow golden, as if an enormous fire had been lit inside the pyramid.

Chava leaned sideways toward me and said in a low voice, “Amazing, no? To think that men built this. Ordinary men like you and me, capable of such accomplishments, such excellence.” I nodded, dumbstruck by what was before me.

We watched the pyramid as the sky lightened around it. Then Chava started walking. He was heading toward the structure.

“Tourists are no longer allowed to walk up the steps, but we have special permission.” Instead of starting up the steps directly in front of us, Chava walked around the base. The thought of scaling the pyramid excited me. I was suddenly glad that Chava was taking my education so seriously.

“The other side is better for climbing,” he explained as he
led me around to the opposite face of the pyramid.

As I stood at the bottom of the pyramid, the stone rising high above me, the staggering height became clear. It would be a tough climb. Chava started up, and I followed. We made our way slowly up the smooth, hard steps. They were steep and narrow, and the sensation of moving up an enormous open staircase was disorienting. Chava told me that many of the pyramids have metal chains to hang on to as you climb. I could see why. By the time we reached the very top, I was sweating like I’d just finished a marathon.

“This is the best view of Uxmal,” said Chava. “Sit, rest, look.”

Chava dropped his small canvas backpack to the ground and squatted down onto his heels. I did the same.

The Uxmal site stretched around us for hundreds of acres. Much of the remains of the ancient city were still covered in vegetation. The only suggestion of many of the streets and buildings were flat stretches broken by squarish mounds. Directly below us, however, was a series of vast stone ruins.

Chava told me that when Uxmal was inhabited, the houses would have stretched out for many more acres than what I now saw before me. He pointed out another pyramid, half-covered with vegetation, that was called the Great Pyramid, and he told me about the other ruined buildings that we could see all around us.

“Have you ever heard the legend of this pyramid?” Chava asked me after describing the city at our feet. I shook my head.

“There are many different versions of the tale,” said Chava.

The legend that Chava recounted described how, long ago, the king of Uxmal was warned that when a certain gong in the city was struck, his empire would fall to a man not born of
woman. One day, indeed, the gong sounded, and the king was dismayed to discover that the person who had struck it was a dwarf boy hatched from an egg by an old, childless woman. The king summoned the dwarf to his palace and was going to execute him, when he had a change of heart. Instead of killing the boy on the spot, he decided to set the dwarf an impossible task. If the dwarf could build the king a magnificent temple, taller than any other building in the city and could do this in one single night, his life would be saved.