Time Among the Maya by Ronald Wright

Author:Ronald Wright
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780143198192
Publisher: Penguin Canada

“Canadá.”

“Canada.”

“¿Adónde van?”

“Where are you going?”

“A Todos Santos.”

“To Todos Santos.”

“¿Para qué?”

“For what purpose?”

“Para conocei, no mas.

“Just to see it.”

“Pasen, pues. Que les vaya bien.”

“Go ahead. Farewell.”

We fork left through a small village. Another civil patrol; a football field; an evangelical chapel boarded up. The houses are made of pine beams chinked with clay, and roofed with hand-split shingles. They look oddly like Brueghel homesteads: pigs, chickens, turkeys, and scattered garbage. David gets out at an isolated shack beside the road and begins switching lenses, aiming for the best shot. An old man rolls out of the front door, his limited Spanish hampered by swigs of aguardiente from a green plastic canteen. He has a shrewd, dissolute face, covered in a sparse beard like the hair on a coconut. “¡Cada foto, un quetzal!” he shouts. David pays up. His nephew, a shy and sober lad, asks us for a lift to Todos Santos.

2:00 PM If the road gets any worse the Mitsubishi won’t make it. Rocks are scraping underneath. The nephew reckons we have about fifteen kilometers still to go, and that we’re almost at the cumbre, or crest of the pass. I carry on for another mile or two, weaving to avoid the biggest rocks and deepest holes. We decide to content ourselves with the view from the top and turn back if the road doesn’t improve. But when we reach the pass there is nothing to be seen. A solid mass of white cloud, flat and utterly opaque, starts at our feet and stretches away until it mingles with the leaden sky. Down there somewhere is All Saints.

I’ve wanted to come here since reading The Two Crosses of Todos Santos by Maud Oakes, one of the earliest studies to reveal that the ancient Maya calendar had survived into modern times. She also delved into the ethnic conflict between Indians and Ladinos, symbolized by crosses in front of the church. From time immemorial a tall wooden cross had stood there. For the Mam “prayermen,” or daykeepers, it was the cross of Holy Earth, as old as time itself. But a new Ladino intendente (administrator) decided the time had come to modernize Todos Santos; he ordered that the old cross be replaced with a new one made of concrete. The daykeepers begged him to change his mind, but they were brushed aside and the old cross was thrown down in the weeds. “Soon after a wind came up, and this wind never stopped. The weather became cold, very cold, the coldest in many years. The sheep died.… No rain fell and all the corn dried up.”17 The prayermen went to the mountaintops and through divination asked the lord of the hills what had happened, and he told them: “You have cast down the big cross, the cross that was born long ago when Santo Mundo was born, the big cross that came with the creation of the world.… Put the big cross up again in the same place. Otherwise all the people and all the animals will die.

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