Margotlog: Tikal Pyramids
Getting there is relatively easy today, so I'm told, but when I visited Tikal in the late 1960s even arriving in Guatemala City was something of an ordeal. Stepping off the plane gave us a shiver of apprehension: armed and suited up military stood with legs apart, and rifles slung across their bodies as we tourists filed off the plane. There was a civil war going on, but we were there anyway. Now I know more about the U.S. supported military government, about the Quiche Mayan people represented by Rigoberta Menchu, who were being tortured, denied basic human rights, and shot for over thirty years. Knowing what I do now, I'm appalled that we took it into our heads to visit Guatemala.
Yet we did, leaving Guatemala City immediately for the more subdued colonial city of Antigua. My memory of the palm-filled open courtyard of the hotel, with its marimba and plashing fountain, includes also my first view of iguanas in the "wild," posing on our balcony with back fins raised. In the morning we left for Tikal.
Why we wanted to visit this jungle city, I can't exactly recall. Something about reading American and English archaeologists' accounts of the ancient city, which they stumbled upon in the midst of the jungle. So subdued were we in middle America, so ignorant were we both that I suspect we also stumbled into the plan. At this point in my life, in my first marriage, my political consciousness was virtually asleep for anything outside the Vietnam war and U.S. civil rights agitation. Now I realize that the U.S. government's clandestine support for the rightest military regimes in Guatemala derived from the same mind-set of fear and ignorance which kept us losing and losing in Vietnam. Is it possible that various U.S. governments and parts of the populace were so unhinged by civil disobedience that they vented their retaliation on indigenous peoples in other parts of the world?
The tiny plane that flew us from Antigua to Tikal contained Mayan women in their embroidered huipuls and long multi-colored skirts. They brought cages of chickens and baskets of vegetables and other foodstuffs onto the plane which had its seats arranged along the two sides with an open space in the middle. The plane had to land at Lake Atitlan, a huge lake shaped by volcanos, and dotted with Mayan villages along its shore. The plane rattled and shook: we were frightened, though the other passengers seemed not bothered at all.
Setting down in Tikal we seemed about to decapitate the tree tops. The air strip suddenly appeared, in the midst of the jungle, nothing more than open grass. Someone was criss-crossing two flags; the pilot nosed down the tiny craft, and we were bumping along uneven ground before the propellers slowed to a stop. By this time we were two of the four passengers; the other two were American archaeologists who'd brought in a movie from Guatemala City.
Yes, the main temples were immense, still encrusted with vines and grasses. We had to pull ourselves up the main staircase to the tall comblike top from which we could gaze across the trees. Our guide, who also served us meals in the thatched dining area, took us deeper in the jungle where mounds with trees growing out of them indicated temples and other buildings of the once imperial city, waiting for excavation. I remember intending never to forget the huge serpents carved in block-like elegance around door posts; the warriors and gods in profile with huge flared nostrils from which hung rings. I intended never to forget the enormous butterflies and bees, some broader than my hand as they swooped down in brilliant blue and black or various oranges and yellows across our jungle paths. Or the howler monkeys so high in the trees that we never saw them, only heard their hootings.
But more than any of this, I remember midnight terror, lying under the thick thatch of our cabana, when I awoke and heard scratchings and scrapings. Sure some bat or lizard was about to plummet down onto me, I tied a scarf around my hair and pulled the sheet just under my nose.
In the morning, talking to our guide whose English was better than my Spanish, but not up to answering my question: how often do you show movies? Because he'd been describing the treat we had in store for us that evening. We could attend their movie, shown outside on a sheet. It was something with Rita Hayworth, I seem to recall, and his dark eyes gleamed, and he licked his lips.
"How often do you show movies?" I asked in English. He understood. He stopped, leaning over to refill the coffee cups. Then he straightened: "Cada quince," he said. Over and over I had to have him repeat this. Until finally it registered: quince was a number, it probably meant 15. The phrase signaled "every two weeks."
We didn't stay nearly that long, taking the tiny plane out a few days later, with a stop at the huge lake again, where Mayan people crammed on board. We were the only gingos.
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
Monday, January 10, 2011
Margotlog: Romance with a Car
Margotlog: Romance with a Car
Think of a family as a pyramid: I'm on the phone with my oldest relative, Eleanora, 93, who lives in Dover, Delaware. She bought her first car in her late 30s, "after the war," as the family saying goes. We both know she means the Big War when her husband Dick was killed in the Pacific. After that Big War, she and her youngest sister Sadie found jobs in Washington, D.C., and their mother, the adorable Josephine, came from Pittsburgh to live with them. Eleanora's car payments cost (am I remembering right?) $100 a month. It was only after prolonged study of their joint budgets and after borrowing on the insurance she'd gotten when Dick was killed that this family of women took the plunge and bought a car. "God will provide," Josephine had assured them. Josephine's God, gentle and loving, held them tenderly for years in cupped hands.
Eleanor's last car, a Toyota Corolla, she sold, reluctantly. Her affection for this machine has always astonished me. Sadie never drove, and certainly not Josephine, so tiny she couldn't have seen over the wheel. But Eleanor loved to drive, and held onto the Corolla well beyond becoming too bent to sit comfortably and maneuver the wheel. Having a car meant freedom, becoming the head of their family and driving to visit friends up and down the East Coast. It meant starting a mid-life romance with motion, authority, and command--virtually a man's romance with a car.
On the phone Eleanor and I are talking about where her mother and sister are buried across the road from Arlington National Cemetery and about my parents' graves in Magnolia Cemetery on the outskirts of Charleston, South Carolina. Suddenly, the pitch of her voice rises and she's launched into the story of "Leonard Driving the Bridge." It's one of our set pieces, rousing the blood, making us laugh and feel joined across half the continent.
My father was a terrible driver--that's the bedrock reality. He and his three brothers grew up a block from Eleanor and her two sisters in Pittsburgh--the families joined by their mothers, Rose and Josephine. Thus Eleanor and my father Leonard knew each other from childhood and, in their jokey, loving way, kept in touch over the years. Eleanor doesn't have to convince me that Leonard was a terrible driver. Year after year when we lived across the "Roller Coaster Bridge" in Charleston, he drove my mother, sister and me across the Cooper River to our bungalow in Mount Pleasant.
Charleston is a magical city laved with tidal waters--two rivers, the Ashley and the Cooper, which, so natives like to joke, meet at the tip of Charleston, to form the Atlantic Ocean. When I was a girl and we still lived in The Old Citadel, smack in the middle of the peninsula, I could hear the big ocean freighters boom. The rats that scurried behind our garbage cans came off those huge ships, said my mother. Then when I was starting 8th grade, we moved across the Cooper River to the small community of Mount Pleasant.
The Roller Coaster Bridge, built in the 1930s, rose in dizzying height to one tall span, dipped fast and curved, then rose again over the river's other arm until with a clunk we reached solid ground again. Even now, as I write this, my insides cramp and my breath comes ragged. "Sadie was sitting in the front seat with your mother and father. Mother and I were in the back," comes Eleanor's excited voice, describing a visit long after I left home. "Your father lifted his hands off the wheel and gestured. He looked back at us with that smirk of his. Mother gripped my hand. We could see the water below!"
I'm a girl in the back again, furious at my father's dangerous behavior, terrified we'd plunge through the flimsy railing into the river. It had happened before: a freighter came loose from its moorings and broke a hole in a span. A family of five in their car fell through and drowned. For years this early terror has sat me rigid in front seats, behind other steering wheels. I'm almost phobic of cars. Intensely resentful of my father's for his antics.
"On our way back into town," comes Eleanor's voice, "Mother whispered to Sadie and me, 'We'll all three sit in the back. Then if we go down, we'll go down together.'" She's laughing. I'm laughing. They're doing the only thing possible, offering each other the comfort I never got from my mother who sat stoic and silent in the front, or from my whimpering younger sister beside me in the back. It's their loving kindness in the midst of terror that redeems my resentment and eases my fear of driving. Having a romance with this kind of fear isn't possible, but knowing some in my family could find comfort in its midst lights a tiny candle. It's no wonder Eleanor and I tell each other this story over and over again.
Think of a family as a pyramid: I'm on the phone with my oldest relative, Eleanora, 93, who lives in Dover, Delaware. She bought her first car in her late 30s, "after the war," as the family saying goes. We both know she means the Big War when her husband Dick was killed in the Pacific. After that Big War, she and her youngest sister Sadie found jobs in Washington, D.C., and their mother, the adorable Josephine, came from Pittsburgh to live with them. Eleanora's car payments cost (am I remembering right?) $100 a month. It was only after prolonged study of their joint budgets and after borrowing on the insurance she'd gotten when Dick was killed that this family of women took the plunge and bought a car. "God will provide," Josephine had assured them. Josephine's God, gentle and loving, held them tenderly for years in cupped hands.
Eleanor's last car, a Toyota Corolla, she sold, reluctantly. Her affection for this machine has always astonished me. Sadie never drove, and certainly not Josephine, so tiny she couldn't have seen over the wheel. But Eleanor loved to drive, and held onto the Corolla well beyond becoming too bent to sit comfortably and maneuver the wheel. Having a car meant freedom, becoming the head of their family and driving to visit friends up and down the East Coast. It meant starting a mid-life romance with motion, authority, and command--virtually a man's romance with a car.
On the phone Eleanor and I are talking about where her mother and sister are buried across the road from Arlington National Cemetery and about my parents' graves in Magnolia Cemetery on the outskirts of Charleston, South Carolina. Suddenly, the pitch of her voice rises and she's launched into the story of "Leonard Driving the Bridge." It's one of our set pieces, rousing the blood, making us laugh and feel joined across half the continent.
My father was a terrible driver--that's the bedrock reality. He and his three brothers grew up a block from Eleanor and her two sisters in Pittsburgh--the families joined by their mothers, Rose and Josephine. Thus Eleanor and my father Leonard knew each other from childhood and, in their jokey, loving way, kept in touch over the years. Eleanor doesn't have to convince me that Leonard was a terrible driver. Year after year when we lived across the "Roller Coaster Bridge" in Charleston, he drove my mother, sister and me across the Cooper River to our bungalow in Mount Pleasant.
Charleston is a magical city laved with tidal waters--two rivers, the Ashley and the Cooper, which, so natives like to joke, meet at the tip of Charleston, to form the Atlantic Ocean. When I was a girl and we still lived in The Old Citadel, smack in the middle of the peninsula, I could hear the big ocean freighters boom. The rats that scurried behind our garbage cans came off those huge ships, said my mother. Then when I was starting 8th grade, we moved across the Cooper River to the small community of Mount Pleasant.
The Roller Coaster Bridge, built in the 1930s, rose in dizzying height to one tall span, dipped fast and curved, then rose again over the river's other arm until with a clunk we reached solid ground again. Even now, as I write this, my insides cramp and my breath comes ragged. "Sadie was sitting in the front seat with your mother and father. Mother and I were in the back," comes Eleanor's excited voice, describing a visit long after I left home. "Your father lifted his hands off the wheel and gestured. He looked back at us with that smirk of his. Mother gripped my hand. We could see the water below!"
I'm a girl in the back again, furious at my father's dangerous behavior, terrified we'd plunge through the flimsy railing into the river. It had happened before: a freighter came loose from its moorings and broke a hole in a span. A family of five in their car fell through and drowned. For years this early terror has sat me rigid in front seats, behind other steering wheels. I'm almost phobic of cars. Intensely resentful of my father's for his antics.
"On our way back into town," comes Eleanor's voice, "Mother whispered to Sadie and me, 'We'll all three sit in the back. Then if we go down, we'll go down together.'" She's laughing. I'm laughing. They're doing the only thing possible, offering each other the comfort I never got from my mother who sat stoic and silent in the front, or from my whimpering younger sister beside me in the back. It's their loving kindness in the midst of terror that redeems my resentment and eases my fear of driving. Having a romance with this kind of fear isn't possible, but knowing some in my family could find comfort in its midst lights a tiny candle. It's no wonder Eleanor and I tell each other this story over and over again.
Saturday, January 8, 2011
Margotlog: Up to Code
Margotlog: Up to Code
No one ever inspected the old Isla ferry riding like a double-decker, open-air church across the bay from the Cancun mainland to the heavenly body of Isla. Later, hydrofoils would compete, rising high on their hunk of spray, zipping across so fast they obscured the approach to salvation. Give me the slow, old way.
On the slow boat, a band of tuba, trombone, guitar and rat-a-tat helped get us there. We recognized a large blind man on tuba. With his companion, a tight-knit black fellow, he tap-tapped along Isla streets or sat by the pier, waiting to convey us out, which was the last direction we rode with him because the next year, the old ferry had departed for more celestial realms. Maybe somebody decided it was not up to code. But the first years, we rode with breeze and spray on our cheeks, dolphins cavorting off one flank, and the mystery of faces opposite, looking like ancient Mayan carvings.
This slow boat transported us from fumes and combustion into another medium: half sea, half immense sky with frigate birds so high they looked like tiny scissors cutting across the castle clouds. Our lives, reduced to a slip of wood bouncing along a changing surface.
I want that reminder: that we are mere spindrift, sparkling for an hour, then gone. Because for that brief moment, our connection is made plain. There is so much above and below we can only spy--grey, sleek backs; scissor wings. The humans traveling with us shine forth their mysteries, ones we do not need to solve or command. Only gaze at with quiet astonishment.
Should I relate that, with the old ferries gone, dolphins no longer followed our passage to Isla? It was impossible to catch sight of frigate birds since the hydrofoil windows were smeared with spray. Yes, we occasionally got sick during our visits: we didn't drink water from the tap; we ordered beer or colas or coffee. We lugged up to our room at Maria's a huge bottle of purified water. The sickness didn't happen every year, only a few times--the sudden rush. Reminder that our insides weren't acclimated to the local fauna.
Did we care enough to stride off in a huff? Seek more sanitized American amenities--like the huge pleasure palaces in Cancun? Never. Though one year, I was bitten by a spider. The bite, once we were home, rose into a huge enflamed knot. Soon flat dots of red began to emerge over my trunk, arms, legs. Purpura, which means the blood was seeping out of its veins toward the surface, sign of a serious allergic reaction. Treatment? The local docs were mystified until a visitor from Indian happened into the emergency room: yes, she confirmed: spider bite. Steriods plus waiting. I recovered but for several years remained very reactive to any kind of bite. We didn't visit Isla the next season, went instead to Savannah where in a high canopy bed we watched the Academy Awards on TV.
Sometimes I parse our national fascination with codes and sanitation: we are a very litigious people, we sue at the drop of a hat. Despite the current furor against government regulation, we want our lives purified, regulated and protected. To this end, oh how we encase ourselves.
A friend once related that a charter school, devoted to environmental education, had to move because parents in the wealthy suburb were very nervous about letting their children loose in the local woods. "Is it up to code?" inquired one anxious mother. Hmmm, what is the code for woods? Can one legislate against spiders, hawks, ticks, rabbits? Not exactly, but with a "code" sufficiently stringent, one can systematically remove, replant, reduce, until habitat resembles not its natural, rather wild but balanced, indigenous self, but instead a garden catalog.
There is a place for gardens to grow vegetables and fruits, but often they thrive best when a mild accord is allowed between what is naturally present and possible and what the gardener desires. We call that kind of farming "organic." During our first few years on Isla, we were closer to the organic life of the place. The T-shirt hawkers almost apologized for encouraging us to purchase; they hadn't learned about "Blue Light" specials; they didn't stride into the street and yell in our ears. I know: progress comes in many forms. Yet, when I think of the best times in my life, I've slowed down, given over, stopped rushing. It's a different kind of code.
No one ever inspected the old Isla ferry riding like a double-decker, open-air church across the bay from the Cancun mainland to the heavenly body of Isla. Later, hydrofoils would compete, rising high on their hunk of spray, zipping across so fast they obscured the approach to salvation. Give me the slow, old way.
On the slow boat, a band of tuba, trombone, guitar and rat-a-tat helped get us there. We recognized a large blind man on tuba. With his companion, a tight-knit black fellow, he tap-tapped along Isla streets or sat by the pier, waiting to convey us out, which was the last direction we rode with him because the next year, the old ferry had departed for more celestial realms. Maybe somebody decided it was not up to code. But the first years, we rode with breeze and spray on our cheeks, dolphins cavorting off one flank, and the mystery of faces opposite, looking like ancient Mayan carvings.
This slow boat transported us from fumes and combustion into another medium: half sea, half immense sky with frigate birds so high they looked like tiny scissors cutting across the castle clouds. Our lives, reduced to a slip of wood bouncing along a changing surface.
I want that reminder: that we are mere spindrift, sparkling for an hour, then gone. Because for that brief moment, our connection is made plain. There is so much above and below we can only spy--grey, sleek backs; scissor wings. The humans traveling with us shine forth their mysteries, ones we do not need to solve or command. Only gaze at with quiet astonishment.
Should I relate that, with the old ferries gone, dolphins no longer followed our passage to Isla? It was impossible to catch sight of frigate birds since the hydrofoil windows were smeared with spray. Yes, we occasionally got sick during our visits: we didn't drink water from the tap; we ordered beer or colas or coffee. We lugged up to our room at Maria's a huge bottle of purified water. The sickness didn't happen every year, only a few times--the sudden rush. Reminder that our insides weren't acclimated to the local fauna.
Did we care enough to stride off in a huff? Seek more sanitized American amenities--like the huge pleasure palaces in Cancun? Never. Though one year, I was bitten by a spider. The bite, once we were home, rose into a huge enflamed knot. Soon flat dots of red began to emerge over my trunk, arms, legs. Purpura, which means the blood was seeping out of its veins toward the surface, sign of a serious allergic reaction. Treatment? The local docs were mystified until a visitor from Indian happened into the emergency room: yes, she confirmed: spider bite. Steriods plus waiting. I recovered but for several years remained very reactive to any kind of bite. We didn't visit Isla the next season, went instead to Savannah where in a high canopy bed we watched the Academy Awards on TV.
Sometimes I parse our national fascination with codes and sanitation: we are a very litigious people, we sue at the drop of a hat. Despite the current furor against government regulation, we want our lives purified, regulated and protected. To this end, oh how we encase ourselves.
A friend once related that a charter school, devoted to environmental education, had to move because parents in the wealthy suburb were very nervous about letting their children loose in the local woods. "Is it up to code?" inquired one anxious mother. Hmmm, what is the code for woods? Can one legislate against spiders, hawks, ticks, rabbits? Not exactly, but with a "code" sufficiently stringent, one can systematically remove, replant, reduce, until habitat resembles not its natural, rather wild but balanced, indigenous self, but instead a garden catalog.
There is a place for gardens to grow vegetables and fruits, but often they thrive best when a mild accord is allowed between what is naturally present and possible and what the gardener desires. We call that kind of farming "organic." During our first few years on Isla, we were closer to the organic life of the place. The T-shirt hawkers almost apologized for encouraging us to purchase; they hadn't learned about "Blue Light" specials; they didn't stride into the street and yell in our ears. I know: progress comes in many forms. Yet, when I think of the best times in my life, I've slowed down, given over, stopped rushing. It's a different kind of code.
Wednesday, January 5, 2011
Margotlog: Tripod Dog and the Mexican Beach
Margotlog: Tripod Dog and the Mexican Beach
On Isla, coming as we did only once a year, many things transpired whose consequences we recognized but without knowing their origin. So, with Tripod Dog. He resided, as far as we could tell, across the boulevard from the Naval Station, with its array of flags, low-slung barracks, and big guns painted naval gray. Missing one back leg, Tripod Dog could carry his black and white, short-haired body only so fast. Perhaps one of the Isla red taxis had hit him as it gunned around a push-cart of fruits. Perhaps he'd been wounded in Hurricane Gilbert, like the huge hulk of a ferry, grounded and rusting off shore.
It's odd how one reacts to injured people or animals. Perhaps because we felt vulnerable on Isla--knowing only a bit of Spanish, reveling in the island's natural beauty but stymied by tourists' careless trashing of the beach and sea, and bothered by local poverty--we bonded with Tripod Dog, and looked for him as a sign of the island's health. Its mascot or icon. Word eventually reached us that the sailors at the Naval Station had adopted him and fed him. Perhaps they'd also paid to have his shattered leg amputated. Or in the mysterious ways of nature, perhaps the dog had healed himself. He was not fawning or overtly friendly. And we, as we approached, slowed so as not to frighten him. He would cross the boulevard as we advanced, waiting in the median with its flowering hibiscus and nascent palms, then once we had walked beyond, he'd recross to his spot of brush along the beach. He may have been eating washed up fish as part of his diet.
Another denizen of the beach was the Monkey Man. Tall, elegantly bronzed, wearing only a brilliantly white sarong, he flipped back his sun-bleached hair and strode from his cabana to the waves where he launched a wind-surfer (if that's the right term for this peapod of a boat with its sail held erect by the rider). Every year, we would eventually locate him along the turquoise strand at the north end of the island, the beautiful white sandy beach where some tourist women and men took off all their clothes, and lay baking in the sun. Was Monkey Man a native Isleno? Certainly he was taller than most of the Mayan people, and his insouciant swagger suggested not only that he knew how to use his beauty but cared not a whit for the admiration of transient underlings. One year he acquired a tiny monkey on his shoulder--thus the name we gave him. Occasionally we'd pass him walking from the beach into town, still clad in his sarong with the monkey about his neck. Only much later in our last few years on Isla did we encounter him fully dressed, and by then we had acquired shreds of his story.
About halfway through the almost twenty years we visited Isla, we moved from Posada del Mar with its pink and white lighthouse to a beautiful complex on this tourist beach: Maria del Mar. Maria's offered many choices of residence: the tower of three or was it four stories with motel-like rooms and balconies overlooking either the lush garden or on the bay and beach; cabanas for family groups, then across the sandy road, another lower tower above the breakfast place. The gardens were maintained by a wizened man, with the courtesy of a gentle soul. His hibiscus, rubber trees, purple passion vines, banana and orange trees, and many other flowers and bushes I can't remember were carpeted with heavy green grass--maybe the only grass that held its own against the salt and heat and sand of the island.
Who knows why we fell in love with Maria's? Perhaps the painting in each room, rather crudely done, of a damsel in white dress and flowing dark locks walking the beach; or the painting's look alike who greeted us wearing the typical Mayan dress, a white huipul over a white petticoat. Or perhaps we fell in love with the garden where tiny Mayan doves descended in small flocks, where we'd spy orioles and darting wrens and warblers, and pure white pigeons cooed companionably from their dovecote. There wasn't as much noise at Maria's because the main boulevard didn't pass that way, though one season our floor of the tower swarmed with Philadelphians who stayed up to all hours partying. Fran had gotten fatigued of the "Uno, uno, uno" and the cock crowing near Posada: the first from an elementary school; the second from servants' houses behind the hotel.
We rarely swam at the turquoise beach--something about the competitive display of tourism depressed me. I never felt my body in its black swim suit could past muster. Instead once we discovered the Mexican Beach almost midway down the island, that's where we went to swim and to eat the huge grilled fish called, I believe, coronado. It was a family-style beach on the bay side, reached from the road by crossing a lagoon where for a number of years we encountered exotic wading birds like oyster catchers with their red beaks and tuxedo bodies; or ibis rather clumsily maneuvering orange chopsticks, or several times, roseate spoonbills and pelicans. But only once flamingos, lifting their claw-hammer heads out of the water to make us ohhh and ahhh.
The first time we discovered this beach, and sat under the long gallery of a restaurant there, I ordered a club sandwich. Fran chose the fish platter. It was the exquisitely right choice: not for the "sides" of canned peas and dry rice but for the huge, aciote-flavored grilled fish. From the open gallery of the restaurant, we could spy the large grill where men tended the catch, more than a yard long. It was the best fish we had ever eaten on Isla or "nel mondo." And the people saved it for themselves.
We weren't the only gringos who discovered this inexpensive, delicious meal, but we were among the few. Among the local family groups, children raced around the gallery, adults watched with their elbows on the tables, talking and gesturing in Spanish. We tried not to stand out, but of course we did, playing Scrabble after we ate. But eventually, one at a time, we entered the warm, shallow water, floated way out, occasionally testing the bottom, passing a pelican or two also paddling about, while overhead, the sky built up huge castles of white clouds and far up in the blue, a plane flashed its silver bottom. We were very far from home, lulled into believing we belonged here just like the kids splashing and their parents standing up in the water, still talking.
On Isla, coming as we did only once a year, many things transpired whose consequences we recognized but without knowing their origin. So, with Tripod Dog. He resided, as far as we could tell, across the boulevard from the Naval Station, with its array of flags, low-slung barracks, and big guns painted naval gray. Missing one back leg, Tripod Dog could carry his black and white, short-haired body only so fast. Perhaps one of the Isla red taxis had hit him as it gunned around a push-cart of fruits. Perhaps he'd been wounded in Hurricane Gilbert, like the huge hulk of a ferry, grounded and rusting off shore.
It's odd how one reacts to injured people or animals. Perhaps because we felt vulnerable on Isla--knowing only a bit of Spanish, reveling in the island's natural beauty but stymied by tourists' careless trashing of the beach and sea, and bothered by local poverty--we bonded with Tripod Dog, and looked for him as a sign of the island's health. Its mascot or icon. Word eventually reached us that the sailors at the Naval Station had adopted him and fed him. Perhaps they'd also paid to have his shattered leg amputated. Or in the mysterious ways of nature, perhaps the dog had healed himself. He was not fawning or overtly friendly. And we, as we approached, slowed so as not to frighten him. He would cross the boulevard as we advanced, waiting in the median with its flowering hibiscus and nascent palms, then once we had walked beyond, he'd recross to his spot of brush along the beach. He may have been eating washed up fish as part of his diet.
Another denizen of the beach was the Monkey Man. Tall, elegantly bronzed, wearing only a brilliantly white sarong, he flipped back his sun-bleached hair and strode from his cabana to the waves where he launched a wind-surfer (if that's the right term for this peapod of a boat with its sail held erect by the rider). Every year, we would eventually locate him along the turquoise strand at the north end of the island, the beautiful white sandy beach where some tourist women and men took off all their clothes, and lay baking in the sun. Was Monkey Man a native Isleno? Certainly he was taller than most of the Mayan people, and his insouciant swagger suggested not only that he knew how to use his beauty but cared not a whit for the admiration of transient underlings. One year he acquired a tiny monkey on his shoulder--thus the name we gave him. Occasionally we'd pass him walking from the beach into town, still clad in his sarong with the monkey about his neck. Only much later in our last few years on Isla did we encounter him fully dressed, and by then we had acquired shreds of his story.
About halfway through the almost twenty years we visited Isla, we moved from Posada del Mar with its pink and white lighthouse to a beautiful complex on this tourist beach: Maria del Mar. Maria's offered many choices of residence: the tower of three or was it four stories with motel-like rooms and balconies overlooking either the lush garden or on the bay and beach; cabanas for family groups, then across the sandy road, another lower tower above the breakfast place. The gardens were maintained by a wizened man, with the courtesy of a gentle soul. His hibiscus, rubber trees, purple passion vines, banana and orange trees, and many other flowers and bushes I can't remember were carpeted with heavy green grass--maybe the only grass that held its own against the salt and heat and sand of the island.
Who knows why we fell in love with Maria's? Perhaps the painting in each room, rather crudely done, of a damsel in white dress and flowing dark locks walking the beach; or the painting's look alike who greeted us wearing the typical Mayan dress, a white huipul over a white petticoat. Or perhaps we fell in love with the garden where tiny Mayan doves descended in small flocks, where we'd spy orioles and darting wrens and warblers, and pure white pigeons cooed companionably from their dovecote. There wasn't as much noise at Maria's because the main boulevard didn't pass that way, though one season our floor of the tower swarmed with Philadelphians who stayed up to all hours partying. Fran had gotten fatigued of the "Uno, uno, uno" and the cock crowing near Posada: the first from an elementary school; the second from servants' houses behind the hotel.
We rarely swam at the turquoise beach--something about the competitive display of tourism depressed me. I never felt my body in its black swim suit could past muster. Instead once we discovered the Mexican Beach almost midway down the island, that's where we went to swim and to eat the huge grilled fish called, I believe, coronado. It was a family-style beach on the bay side, reached from the road by crossing a lagoon where for a number of years we encountered exotic wading birds like oyster catchers with their red beaks and tuxedo bodies; or ibis rather clumsily maneuvering orange chopsticks, or several times, roseate spoonbills and pelicans. But only once flamingos, lifting their claw-hammer heads out of the water to make us ohhh and ahhh.
The first time we discovered this beach, and sat under the long gallery of a restaurant there, I ordered a club sandwich. Fran chose the fish platter. It was the exquisitely right choice: not for the "sides" of canned peas and dry rice but for the huge, aciote-flavored grilled fish. From the open gallery of the restaurant, we could spy the large grill where men tended the catch, more than a yard long. It was the best fish we had ever eaten on Isla or "nel mondo." And the people saved it for themselves.
We weren't the only gringos who discovered this inexpensive, delicious meal, but we were among the few. Among the local family groups, children raced around the gallery, adults watched with their elbows on the tables, talking and gesturing in Spanish. We tried not to stand out, but of course we did, playing Scrabble after we ate. But eventually, one at a time, we entered the warm, shallow water, floated way out, occasionally testing the bottom, passing a pelican or two also paddling about, while overhead, the sky built up huge castles of white clouds and far up in the blue, a plane flashed its silver bottom. We were very far from home, lulled into believing we belonged here just like the kids splashing and their parents standing up in the water, still talking.
Monday, January 3, 2011
Margotlog: Hurricano Gilberto
Margotlog: Hurricano Gilberto
After returning to Isla several winters, transferring to Posada del Mar with its pink and white lighthouse, we were forced to pause in planning winter break among the Mayan palms and turquoise sea. Hurricane Gilbert struck the Yucatan in September 1988, the second most powerful Atlantic hurricane on record. Messages filtered north about "our" island: feet of water had swamped it. Everyone was evacuated across the bay to Cancun, or am I making that up? I closed my eyes on the sadness: lovely Isla twisted and wrung out. How many were dead? Would anything be left? We waited. Eventually word came north that the cerviche restaurant with its picture window was intact; even showing a video of the destruction. We phoned Posada and booked a room for late February.
The street of palms along the bay side of town sprouted fledgling green: all the big palms were gone. Our first hotel was smashed: one corner caved in, and sliding glass doors on the ocean-side punched through. Yet, Tony still patrolled the streets in his green-roofed golf cart; chickens still pecked in the sandy street by his once functioning hotel. But Rope-dog had vanished.
Even more dramatic, and oddly welcome: the imposing ocean-front hotel, El Presidente, as arrogant and fancy as a Vogue advertisement, no longer sent white-coated Mexican waiters out to palm-topped cabanas with iced drinks. The beautiful marble floor of the disco was scored with rocks and sand. The stepped roof, mimicking an ancient temple, broken off in places. Yet, El Presidente had reopened, hadn't it? And the waiters adopted several pelicans, injured in the storm, who followed them around like puppies--Rope-dog's descendants.
Taxis had somehow emerged from the churning sea and now could take a gringo or local to the other end of the island in under 10 minutes. There over the next decade fancy new hotels in perfect centipede lawns would rise out of the jungle. As we watched the video of Gilbert's howling, thrashing passage (how anyone had captured such footage, only the Weather Channel could explain), we pressed each other's hand in relief. None of the graves had washed away; no human Isleno had been lost. But the place had received a sudden pruning. It would take years for the colonnade of palms greeting tourists off the ferries to grow tall enough to be recognizable. And the tiny temple to the goddess, a fake we had to admit, was swept away.
One afternoon as we strolled along the street of T-shirts, a bearded mariner suddenly bolted from his table and accosted my husband, shaking his hand vigorously and ruffling his beard with pleasure. It was Chester Anderson from the University of Minnesota. When he looked lower and recognized me, he did a double-take: why, he'd taught both of us, years apart: Fran as an undergraduate, and I in my Ph.D. program. By the time I arrived at the huge University, the wave of Vietnam protest had subsided. My daughter wasn't born yet, and Chester was ruffling his beard over Yeats, Frost and Plath (or was the triumvirate different?) Who could have guessed that he would link me with a man I hadn't yet met, wouldn't meet for another fifteen years, a man who'd gone to prison as a draft refuser, not simply a conscientious objector but absolutely refusing to participate with his draft board in any way. Yet, here we stood, in the Isla sunshine, waving into the shade where his wife sat, probably used to her husband's storm of friendship, and later at dinner, perfectly happy to recall my husband's early impact on her: this youngish man released from prison who was writing sketches of other prison inmates.
They introduced us to the best ice cream I had ever tasted--they, who had been on the island only a few days! My favorite flavor was coconut, creamy, absolutely authentic with real coconut woven through the sweetness. A few days later, after the Andersons had left, and we were shopping for a mask to take home, I paused before the floor-to-ceiling array in the "mask lady's" shop, which hadn't been destroyed by Gilbert, even though it hung above the rocks on the ocean's snarling side. There were snake and lizard-men, wooden fangs opening around the human face; there were wooden mermaids, their tails exotically sequined but their faces oddly impassive. And there were bearded mariners with blue glass eyes, staring vacantly across eons of ocean. It was no surprise to me that they looked like Chester Anderson, handsome and rugged, with their European hawk-beak noses, and long curly beards such as no Isleno with smooth Mayan features could even produce. There, too, were the compelling profiles of Mayan warriors and gods such as I'd puzzled over years before in the jungle temples of Tikal. And jaguars, with orange cat faces dotted with black and whiskered with porcupine quills.
We chose a metal sun fiery red, embracing cooler bluish rabbit moon because our waiter at Posada, whose English far outshone our Spanish, had informed us that to them, there was no man in the moon, which had risen warm and soothing above the placid water, but a rabbit. The combination of heavenly bodies seemed perfect to express our relief at rejoining Isla and at reuniting briefly with Chester Anderson and his wife. It was as if a comet with fiery mane had lit up our past which even then had been slowly moving toward an embrace.
After returning to Isla several winters, transferring to Posada del Mar with its pink and white lighthouse, we were forced to pause in planning winter break among the Mayan palms and turquoise sea. Hurricane Gilbert struck the Yucatan in September 1988, the second most powerful Atlantic hurricane on record. Messages filtered north about "our" island: feet of water had swamped it. Everyone was evacuated across the bay to Cancun, or am I making that up? I closed my eyes on the sadness: lovely Isla twisted and wrung out. How many were dead? Would anything be left? We waited. Eventually word came north that the cerviche restaurant with its picture window was intact; even showing a video of the destruction. We phoned Posada and booked a room for late February.
The street of palms along the bay side of town sprouted fledgling green: all the big palms were gone. Our first hotel was smashed: one corner caved in, and sliding glass doors on the ocean-side punched through. Yet, Tony still patrolled the streets in his green-roofed golf cart; chickens still pecked in the sandy street by his once functioning hotel. But Rope-dog had vanished.
Even more dramatic, and oddly welcome: the imposing ocean-front hotel, El Presidente, as arrogant and fancy as a Vogue advertisement, no longer sent white-coated Mexican waiters out to palm-topped cabanas with iced drinks. The beautiful marble floor of the disco was scored with rocks and sand. The stepped roof, mimicking an ancient temple, broken off in places. Yet, El Presidente had reopened, hadn't it? And the waiters adopted several pelicans, injured in the storm, who followed them around like puppies--Rope-dog's descendants.
Taxis had somehow emerged from the churning sea and now could take a gringo or local to the other end of the island in under 10 minutes. There over the next decade fancy new hotels in perfect centipede lawns would rise out of the jungle. As we watched the video of Gilbert's howling, thrashing passage (how anyone had captured such footage, only the Weather Channel could explain), we pressed each other's hand in relief. None of the graves had washed away; no human Isleno had been lost. But the place had received a sudden pruning. It would take years for the colonnade of palms greeting tourists off the ferries to grow tall enough to be recognizable. And the tiny temple to the goddess, a fake we had to admit, was swept away.
One afternoon as we strolled along the street of T-shirts, a bearded mariner suddenly bolted from his table and accosted my husband, shaking his hand vigorously and ruffling his beard with pleasure. It was Chester Anderson from the University of Minnesota. When he looked lower and recognized me, he did a double-take: why, he'd taught both of us, years apart: Fran as an undergraduate, and I in my Ph.D. program. By the time I arrived at the huge University, the wave of Vietnam protest had subsided. My daughter wasn't born yet, and Chester was ruffling his beard over Yeats, Frost and Plath (or was the triumvirate different?) Who could have guessed that he would link me with a man I hadn't yet met, wouldn't meet for another fifteen years, a man who'd gone to prison as a draft refuser, not simply a conscientious objector but absolutely refusing to participate with his draft board in any way. Yet, here we stood, in the Isla sunshine, waving into the shade where his wife sat, probably used to her husband's storm of friendship, and later at dinner, perfectly happy to recall my husband's early impact on her: this youngish man released from prison who was writing sketches of other prison inmates.
They introduced us to the best ice cream I had ever tasted--they, who had been on the island only a few days! My favorite flavor was coconut, creamy, absolutely authentic with real coconut woven through the sweetness. A few days later, after the Andersons had left, and we were shopping for a mask to take home, I paused before the floor-to-ceiling array in the "mask lady's" shop, which hadn't been destroyed by Gilbert, even though it hung above the rocks on the ocean's snarling side. There were snake and lizard-men, wooden fangs opening around the human face; there were wooden mermaids, their tails exotically sequined but their faces oddly impassive. And there were bearded mariners with blue glass eyes, staring vacantly across eons of ocean. It was no surprise to me that they looked like Chester Anderson, handsome and rugged, with their European hawk-beak noses, and long curly beards such as no Isleno with smooth Mayan features could even produce. There, too, were the compelling profiles of Mayan warriors and gods such as I'd puzzled over years before in the jungle temples of Tikal. And jaguars, with orange cat faces dotted with black and whiskered with porcupine quills.
We chose a metal sun fiery red, embracing cooler bluish rabbit moon because our waiter at Posada, whose English far outshone our Spanish, had informed us that to them, there was no man in the moon, which had risen warm and soothing above the placid water, but a rabbit. The combination of heavenly bodies seemed perfect to express our relief at rejoining Isla and at reuniting briefly with Chester Anderson and his wife. It was as if a comet with fiery mane had lit up our past which even then had been slowly moving toward an embrace.
Saturday, January 1, 2011
Margotlog: Isla Circus
Margotlog: Isla Circus
Horoscope, December 31, 2010: "Part of the reason you love to travel is that the unfamiliar environment makes you feel brand-new. Getting lost and finding your way out is exhilarating."
What is this precision?! Does the StarTribume's "Holiday Mathis" have an inside track to the stars? I take this both as a prediction for the day, the year, my life, and a summary of all past travel pleasures. And suddenly I'm remembering Isla. Fran, my husband, went there with me even before he was my husband, there being Isla Mujeres, off the coast of Cancun. Isla hadn't been discovered yet, not really, though acquaintances recommended a cerviche or cold seafood cocktail at a certain corner with a picture window. How we chose the hotel, I can't recall, but it was ocean-front, three stories of salt-clogged sliding glass doors onto rusty balconies, and rooms with queen-size beds made with rumpled green sheets. Every day the owner Tony's wife removed our towels, washed them, and hung them in the courtyard to dry. Showers had to occur before 10 or after 4; otherwise we'd have to air dry. Did we care? Not much. We were youngish, giddy, in love and startled into enchantment by Isla's lazy, sand-clogged way of life.
Along with chickens and a few constantly crowing roosters, "Rope dog" wandered the sandy street into town: low to the ground, with plume of tail and floppy ears, an animated pot-bellied dog statue like the one I'd bought a decade before in Merida, in my first marriage. Mayan dog, who'd broken free from constraining rope, Rope Dog bayed at us as we slogged toward the street of T-shirts and breakfast. The restaurants were still serving conch and turtle, that first year we escaped Saint Paul snow and ice. Before ocean advocates helped put a stop to conch and turtle--tortuga--I tried conch. Nothing could persuade me to eat endangered sea turtle. As sat upstairs in another corner restaurant, amid breeze and palm-frond clatter, I put conch in my mouth: tough, almost unchewable, with no taste: the first and only time I attempted the innards of those beautiful spiky shells which as a girl I'd collected on South Carolina beaches.
We did feel brand-new on Isla, new in the skin of togetherness, new in the easy-going local manner of Isla, squinting through dazzling light toward brilliant turquoise sea. Isla held no geographic challenges: with perhaps only a mile width at the town-end, two at its widest midsection, and five miles long, Isla was easy to circumnavigate on bicycles. In the bramble-and-mosquito-infested interior, we followed a hand-lettered sign to "Mundaca's." According to legend, a pirate named Mundaca had "discovered" Isla Mujeres, Island of Women, in the early 19th century, but of course, even as we recognized the fallibility of "discovery," another legend insisted that Isla was named for Women because a shrine to a Mayan goddess stood at its slender southern tip.
Overgrown, with small trees poking their heads above the roofless hacienda, Mundaca's slumbered in its enchantment. Below the oyster-shell house, low wide steps led to an overgrown garden with weedy rosebushes still pushing out a few dispirited red blooms. The benches with oyster-shell backs were shaped like tall biscuits, rounded into two breasts at the top, with low arms and oyster-shell skirts. It was as if a fabricator of fantasy had defeated boredom in the daily construction of these dream benches where no one would ever sit. Legend had it that Mundaca settled Isla, in love with an Island woman, where he died and, yes we would soon attest, was buried in the town cemetery under a skull and crossbones. His overgrown plantation was the only vestige of Spanish conquest we found on Isla. And it was giving way to brambles: a real ruin, those first years we visited Isla, until a surge of money after a major hurricane in the early 90s, punched the place into shape, gave the hacienda a new roof, cleaned out the brambles, founded a little zoo nearby, and charged admission. We visited once in its newness, not nearly so fresh as the original ruin.
That first year, we also met a butter-eating parrot at a breakfast place on the square. Isla breakfasts delighted the glutton: pancakes Americano, with maple syrup poured from a Log Cabin bottle, but also huevos rancheros, local eggs cooked with peppers, onions, and tomatoes; toast soaked with butter, more than you could ever eat, and delicious fruit: pineapples, mangos, papayas, bananas. The parrot lived in a wicker cage with a bell and mirror and "breakfast" strewn on its floor: cut-up apple, nuts, seeds. We'd seen the huge car-ferry dock daily, with local boys unloading crates of foodstuffs, so we knew where breakfast Americano came from. The mangos, bananas, and papayas hung from local trees. The eggs walked around on two stiff legs, waiting to be laid.
A tourist stood at the parrot's cage, feeding the huge beak from a paper of butter. The parrot squawked and jingled its bell. Amid the mild uproar I was startled to identify Minnesota voices, with their slightly lilting speech which, now, after years of living in the Twin Cities, brings me home. But I wasn't home. What were these OTHER tourists doing on our island? Much the same as we, it turned out as we swallowed our pride of first discovery and agreed to join them for dinner, same place eight hours later. They were from "out-state"--Bemidji, Brainerd, Little Falls--flown into Cancun just as we had, but staying on the bay side of town at a place called Posada del Mar. Who could resent anyone who'd located such a beautiful place to stay? "It's got a lighthouse," one woman told us. Thus began their rendition of discovery--sheets, towels, spiders as big as quarters, dogs, pelicans, fishermen who pulled in their catch on that calmer beach, plus tidbits about the ferries and local musicians. Soon they were talking snow stories, ice-fishing, local sheriff-and-cafe scandals. We had little to contribute, aware that living in the midst of the state's biggest city, had fed us few tales to contribute to this round of exaggeration and deligh. Amused, shivering a bit at hearing what snow horrors we were missing, we decided that for our next few days until we had to return, we would avoid these reminders of what we had hoped to escape.
Horoscope, December 31, 2010: "Part of the reason you love to travel is that the unfamiliar environment makes you feel brand-new. Getting lost and finding your way out is exhilarating."
What is this precision?! Does the StarTribume's "Holiday Mathis" have an inside track to the stars? I take this both as a prediction for the day, the year, my life, and a summary of all past travel pleasures. And suddenly I'm remembering Isla. Fran, my husband, went there with me even before he was my husband, there being Isla Mujeres, off the coast of Cancun. Isla hadn't been discovered yet, not really, though acquaintances recommended a cerviche or cold seafood cocktail at a certain corner with a picture window. How we chose the hotel, I can't recall, but it was ocean-front, three stories of salt-clogged sliding glass doors onto rusty balconies, and rooms with queen-size beds made with rumpled green sheets. Every day the owner Tony's wife removed our towels, washed them, and hung them in the courtyard to dry. Showers had to occur before 10 or after 4; otherwise we'd have to air dry. Did we care? Not much. We were youngish, giddy, in love and startled into enchantment by Isla's lazy, sand-clogged way of life.
Along with chickens and a few constantly crowing roosters, "Rope dog" wandered the sandy street into town: low to the ground, with plume of tail and floppy ears, an animated pot-bellied dog statue like the one I'd bought a decade before in Merida, in my first marriage. Mayan dog, who'd broken free from constraining rope, Rope Dog bayed at us as we slogged toward the street of T-shirts and breakfast. The restaurants were still serving conch and turtle, that first year we escaped Saint Paul snow and ice. Before ocean advocates helped put a stop to conch and turtle--tortuga--I tried conch. Nothing could persuade me to eat endangered sea turtle. As sat upstairs in another corner restaurant, amid breeze and palm-frond clatter, I put conch in my mouth: tough, almost unchewable, with no taste: the first and only time I attempted the innards of those beautiful spiky shells which as a girl I'd collected on South Carolina beaches.
We did feel brand-new on Isla, new in the skin of togetherness, new in the easy-going local manner of Isla, squinting through dazzling light toward brilliant turquoise sea. Isla held no geographic challenges: with perhaps only a mile width at the town-end, two at its widest midsection, and five miles long, Isla was easy to circumnavigate on bicycles. In the bramble-and-mosquito-infested interior, we followed a hand-lettered sign to "Mundaca's." According to legend, a pirate named Mundaca had "discovered" Isla Mujeres, Island of Women, in the early 19th century, but of course, even as we recognized the fallibility of "discovery," another legend insisted that Isla was named for Women because a shrine to a Mayan goddess stood at its slender southern tip.
Overgrown, with small trees poking their heads above the roofless hacienda, Mundaca's slumbered in its enchantment. Below the oyster-shell house, low wide steps led to an overgrown garden with weedy rosebushes still pushing out a few dispirited red blooms. The benches with oyster-shell backs were shaped like tall biscuits, rounded into two breasts at the top, with low arms and oyster-shell skirts. It was as if a fabricator of fantasy had defeated boredom in the daily construction of these dream benches where no one would ever sit. Legend had it that Mundaca settled Isla, in love with an Island woman, where he died and, yes we would soon attest, was buried in the town cemetery under a skull and crossbones. His overgrown plantation was the only vestige of Spanish conquest we found on Isla. And it was giving way to brambles: a real ruin, those first years we visited Isla, until a surge of money after a major hurricane in the early 90s, punched the place into shape, gave the hacienda a new roof, cleaned out the brambles, founded a little zoo nearby, and charged admission. We visited once in its newness, not nearly so fresh as the original ruin.
That first year, we also met a butter-eating parrot at a breakfast place on the square. Isla breakfasts delighted the glutton: pancakes Americano, with maple syrup poured from a Log Cabin bottle, but also huevos rancheros, local eggs cooked with peppers, onions, and tomatoes; toast soaked with butter, more than you could ever eat, and delicious fruit: pineapples, mangos, papayas, bananas. The parrot lived in a wicker cage with a bell and mirror and "breakfast" strewn on its floor: cut-up apple, nuts, seeds. We'd seen the huge car-ferry dock daily, with local boys unloading crates of foodstuffs, so we knew where breakfast Americano came from. The mangos, bananas, and papayas hung from local trees. The eggs walked around on two stiff legs, waiting to be laid.
A tourist stood at the parrot's cage, feeding the huge beak from a paper of butter. The parrot squawked and jingled its bell. Amid the mild uproar I was startled to identify Minnesota voices, with their slightly lilting speech which, now, after years of living in the Twin Cities, brings me home. But I wasn't home. What were these OTHER tourists doing on our island? Much the same as we, it turned out as we swallowed our pride of first discovery and agreed to join them for dinner, same place eight hours later. They were from "out-state"--Bemidji, Brainerd, Little Falls--flown into Cancun just as we had, but staying on the bay side of town at a place called Posada del Mar. Who could resent anyone who'd located such a beautiful place to stay? "It's got a lighthouse," one woman told us. Thus began their rendition of discovery--sheets, towels, spiders as big as quarters, dogs, pelicans, fishermen who pulled in their catch on that calmer beach, plus tidbits about the ferries and local musicians. Soon they were talking snow stories, ice-fishing, local sheriff-and-cafe scandals. We had little to contribute, aware that living in the midst of the state's biggest city, had fed us few tales to contribute to this round of exaggeration and deligh. Amused, shivering a bit at hearing what snow horrors we were missing, we decided that for our next few days until we had to return, we would avoid these reminders of what we had hoped to escape.
Thursday, December 30, 2010
Margotlog: Neapolitan Cousin
Margotlog: Neapolitan Cousin
The taxi from the airport was surrounded by boys with rags. Leaning out, the driver shouted imprecations as they swiped the windshield. "Cholera," warned one friend; "pickpockets" warned another: "sling your purse across your body and clutch it like a life preserver." Finally safe, high above the streets, in Naples' only sky-scraper--"grattacielo"--I stared down at the old castle, squatting like an enormous egg on the harbor. What had I done, coming solo to Naples, with only a few years of Italian on my tongue?
Several years before, my soon-to-be-ex and I had met my father at this very hotel, then driven into the mountains. In Pescopagano, where mountains crouched close on their haunches we found an ancient cemetery, but no family graves, only bins of femurs, digits, skulls in the Ossarium, Who could tell which belonged to the great-grandfather Michael, reputed to be a horse thief, who'd died when my grandfather was seventeen? There was no hope of identifying dates and names, but, miracolo, real-life relatives put us up, the portion of the family who'd stayed in this mountain town while others crossed the ocean for the grey-green mountains of Pittsburgh--Gonellas, in particular, one of whom, Maria, married to a well-to-do lawyer, had reclaimed an old tower for modernity.
I had to have more; I had to prove that my life wasn't fractured irrevocably by divorce. Writing to Maria, I learned that her sister Giovanna lived with their mother outside Naples. Giovanna taught middle-school. Would she come into the city to meet me? In Naples everybody lived life in the open. Glancing into a butcher's shop, I saw a lovely woman in deep conversation across the cold case with the butcher. He reached across and gave her cheek a pizzichille, just as my father used to do with me--little pinch kiss. Women walked arm and arm, men hugged and kissed each other on both cheeks. Motorscooters sped by as I hugged the walls.
Giovanna was adorable: small and light, with golden curls above her school-teacher rimless glasses. Where did I want to go, as a tourist? she asked in clearly enunciated, standard Italian. I pointed up up to the rim of the city where the palace/museum of Capodimonte stood. Trip-trip-trip went her little heels as she inquired of bus after bus if they stopped at the museum. Eventually, as the motor strained up the steep hills, the panorama of turquoise bay, and distant islands spread before us. We looked down into apartments where households were making beds, preparing pasta--our vision almost as close as a window-washer's.
The huge red-facade of the Museo di Capodimonte (head of the mountain) fronted a lovely park where we sat to catch our breath. Built by the Spanish-Bourbon king of the Two Sicilies, Charles VII as a dwelling for his Farnese mother and her huge art collection, the museum did indeed rival the Vatican's collection with room after room of Titians, Caravaggios, Raphaels and many minor followers. But it was the porcelain collection which sent Giovanna clicking around the gallery, repeating "Beh, Beh, I did not know such excellence existed." I too was intrigued by story-telling scenes of monkey tormenting parrot, or lifelike birds swaying on branches as they pecked at fruit.
By now, Giovanna and I had eased into tentative friendship. I could speak well enough to answer her questions about gli Stati Uniti, and to understand her family stories of Italy. Her father had immigrated to Pittsburgh where he'd been forced to stay by the war, leaving Giovanna, her older sister Maria and their mother Elisa in starving Pescopagano. Eventually they packed the little they had in a neighbor's cart as he traveled down the mountains into Naples to sell the town's two cheeses: Burro, a soft mozzarella with a buttery center, and Cacciacavallo or was it Caciocavallo? This cheese, like two little provolones connected by a cord was thrown over the horse's neck to go out and "bing, bing" shoot, Maria had emphasized. The cavallo clearly meant horse, but was the first part of the word cacio for cheese or caccia for shoot? Maria said shoot.
Naples at the end of the war was swarming with British and American soldiers. For a while Elisa worked in a military hospital, cleaning and making beds, but leaving the two girls locked in a room all day long. This dangerous city was no place for two bambine to wander alone. Soon, she acquired a commission from the hospital to stitch sheets. Her prized possession, a sewing machine, thus allowed the three to take lodging with two other families in a large room; each family group separated by sheets hung on wires.
"Even wars end," said Giovanna. By now we had left the museum, and were walking the Old Quarter of Naples where she showed me the Policlinica where my great-uncle had studied. Its facade lined with beautifully blue accacia trees. "Finally my papa reunites with us," Giovanna said, as we walked a narrow, cobble-stoned street in the old quarter, so narrow it wasn't designated Vico for street, but Vicolo, diminuitive street. Suddenly a roar. A motorscooter shot by. Giovanna let out a cry and clutched her throat. The scooter passenger had torn a gold cross from her neck.
Weeping as we sat for relief in the ancient church of Santa Chiara, Giovanna said over and over, "It was from my father. It was all that remained from him." When her father returned after the war, he could not find work, though he'd been trained as an engineer. Within a few years, he immigrated again, this time to Ethiopia, which had been an Italian colony for a short time. He send money back to Naples, but later died in Ethiopia, never having returned.
As I held her hand and murmured my few words of condolence, "peccato, peccato," too bad, too bad, I felt keenly the irony of this loss, falling on the daughter of Italy rather than on the distant American cousin. With my tourist caution, I'd worn no jewelry; Giovanna, no doubt wanting to dress up for her visitor, had put on a cross which she perhaps always wore. I felt deeply the sadness of separation and war, which had barely touched my immediate family--my father being too near-sighted and flat-footed to be drafted for World War II. And wished intensely I could comfort her for all she and her family had lost.
The taxi from the airport was surrounded by boys with rags. Leaning out, the driver shouted imprecations as they swiped the windshield. "Cholera," warned one friend; "pickpockets" warned another: "sling your purse across your body and clutch it like a life preserver." Finally safe, high above the streets, in Naples' only sky-scraper--"grattacielo"--I stared down at the old castle, squatting like an enormous egg on the harbor. What had I done, coming solo to Naples, with only a few years of Italian on my tongue?
Several years before, my soon-to-be-ex and I had met my father at this very hotel, then driven into the mountains. In Pescopagano, where mountains crouched close on their haunches we found an ancient cemetery, but no family graves, only bins of femurs, digits, skulls in the Ossarium, Who could tell which belonged to the great-grandfather Michael, reputed to be a horse thief, who'd died when my grandfather was seventeen? There was no hope of identifying dates and names, but, miracolo, real-life relatives put us up, the portion of the family who'd stayed in this mountain town while others crossed the ocean for the grey-green mountains of Pittsburgh--Gonellas, in particular, one of whom, Maria, married to a well-to-do lawyer, had reclaimed an old tower for modernity.
I had to have more; I had to prove that my life wasn't fractured irrevocably by divorce. Writing to Maria, I learned that her sister Giovanna lived with their mother outside Naples. Giovanna taught middle-school. Would she come into the city to meet me? In Naples everybody lived life in the open. Glancing into a butcher's shop, I saw a lovely woman in deep conversation across the cold case with the butcher. He reached across and gave her cheek a pizzichille, just as my father used to do with me--little pinch kiss. Women walked arm and arm, men hugged and kissed each other on both cheeks. Motorscooters sped by as I hugged the walls.
Giovanna was adorable: small and light, with golden curls above her school-teacher rimless glasses. Where did I want to go, as a tourist? she asked in clearly enunciated, standard Italian. I pointed up up to the rim of the city where the palace/museum of Capodimonte stood. Trip-trip-trip went her little heels as she inquired of bus after bus if they stopped at the museum. Eventually, as the motor strained up the steep hills, the panorama of turquoise bay, and distant islands spread before us. We looked down into apartments where households were making beds, preparing pasta--our vision almost as close as a window-washer's.
The huge red-facade of the Museo di Capodimonte (head of the mountain) fronted a lovely park where we sat to catch our breath. Built by the Spanish-Bourbon king of the Two Sicilies, Charles VII as a dwelling for his Farnese mother and her huge art collection, the museum did indeed rival the Vatican's collection with room after room of Titians, Caravaggios, Raphaels and many minor followers. But it was the porcelain collection which sent Giovanna clicking around the gallery, repeating "Beh, Beh, I did not know such excellence existed." I too was intrigued by story-telling scenes of monkey tormenting parrot, or lifelike birds swaying on branches as they pecked at fruit.
By now, Giovanna and I had eased into tentative friendship. I could speak well enough to answer her questions about gli Stati Uniti, and to understand her family stories of Italy. Her father had immigrated to Pittsburgh where he'd been forced to stay by the war, leaving Giovanna, her older sister Maria and their mother Elisa in starving Pescopagano. Eventually they packed the little they had in a neighbor's cart as he traveled down the mountains into Naples to sell the town's two cheeses: Burro, a soft mozzarella with a buttery center, and Cacciacavallo or was it Caciocavallo? This cheese, like two little provolones connected by a cord was thrown over the horse's neck to go out and "bing, bing" shoot, Maria had emphasized. The cavallo clearly meant horse, but was the first part of the word cacio for cheese or caccia for shoot? Maria said shoot.
Naples at the end of the war was swarming with British and American soldiers. For a while Elisa worked in a military hospital, cleaning and making beds, but leaving the two girls locked in a room all day long. This dangerous city was no place for two bambine to wander alone. Soon, she acquired a commission from the hospital to stitch sheets. Her prized possession, a sewing machine, thus allowed the three to take lodging with two other families in a large room; each family group separated by sheets hung on wires.
"Even wars end," said Giovanna. By now we had left the museum, and were walking the Old Quarter of Naples where she showed me the Policlinica where my great-uncle had studied. Its facade lined with beautifully blue accacia trees. "Finally my papa reunites with us," Giovanna said, as we walked a narrow, cobble-stoned street in the old quarter, so narrow it wasn't designated Vico for street, but Vicolo, diminuitive street. Suddenly a roar. A motorscooter shot by. Giovanna let out a cry and clutched her throat. The scooter passenger had torn a gold cross from her neck.
Weeping as we sat for relief in the ancient church of Santa Chiara, Giovanna said over and over, "It was from my father. It was all that remained from him." When her father returned after the war, he could not find work, though he'd been trained as an engineer. Within a few years, he immigrated again, this time to Ethiopia, which had been an Italian colony for a short time. He send money back to Naples, but later died in Ethiopia, never having returned.
As I held her hand and murmured my few words of condolence, "peccato, peccato," too bad, too bad, I felt keenly the irony of this loss, falling on the daughter of Italy rather than on the distant American cousin. With my tourist caution, I'd worn no jewelry; Giovanna, no doubt wanting to dress up for her visitor, had put on a cross which she perhaps always wore. I felt deeply the sadness of separation and war, which had barely touched my immediate family--my father being too near-sighted and flat-footed to be drafted for World War II. And wished intensely I could comfort her for all she and her family had lost.
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