The man in the seat beside me smiled at me and said, ‘Feeling better?’
I nodded, smiled the mechanical smile, and turned to the window to avoid conversation. Through the window, I looked out on a dusty-green carpet pockmarked with cigarette burns, streaks and patches of gray-white. As the plane came in for a landing at Mérida, the carpet became trees and scrubby bushes; the pockmarks, small fields and roads. I could see thin lines of black slicing through the carpet: roads heading for the Gulf of Mexico or the Caribbean coast. Then the plane was down and I could see only the runway and the terminal.
I felt disoriented and peculiar. The world outside the plane window looked flat and unreal, like the image on a TV screen. The sun was too bright; I squinted, but it still hurt my eyes. The plane pulled into the shade of the terminal and the other people on board were stretching and talking and pushing into the aisles, eager to get somewhere. The man who had been sitting beside me was standing already. He glanced at me. ‘Can I help you with anything?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘No, thank you.’ I did not want help. I wanted to be left alone. When he did not move away, I began rummaging beneath the seat for my purse. By the time I found it, he had given up and was heading away down the aisle. While the other passengers filed out, I took a small mirror from my cosmetics case and looked at myself. I was pale. When I lifted my sunglasses, I could see the dark circles below my eyes. I sat for a while, letting the rest of the passengers crowd toward the doors. I followed the last one out.
As I stepped out onto the boarding stairs at Mérida, I realized that no one was going to stop me. I had flown away from home, from my job, from my former lover. No one had stopped me. I hesitated, squinting into the bright sun. The boarding ramp seemed very high; the terminal, far away. Remembering my vision of falling, I clung to the handrail, unable to take the first step down the stairs.
‘Is there a problem, señorita?’ asked the steward standing beside me.
‘No,’ I said quickly. ‘No problem.’ The metal stairs made tinny noises beneath my feet. I could feel the heat rising from the asphalt as I walked to the terminal.
I stepped into the shade of the terminal, my head up, my smile in place. I waited for my suitcase to roll by on the belt, letting the crowd surge around me. I tried to catch familiar words in the babble of Spanish, but had no success. I grabbed my suitcase when it rolled past and stepped outside the terminal.
‘Taxi?’ asked an old man standing beside a dirty dark blue Chevrolet. I nodded and told him in my best high school Spanish that I wanted to go to the ruins, but he refused to understand. ‘Sí,’ he said. ‘To Mérida.’ He wore a straw hat pushed back on his head, and when he smiled he showed broken teeth stained with nicotine. ‘Downtown,’ he said.
‘No,’ I said. ‘To Dzibilchaltún.’ I stumbled over the name and the cabby frowned.
The young man from the plane appeared beside me and put a hand very lightly on my shoulder. ‘You want to go to Dzibilchaltún?’ he asked, then spoke to the cabby in rapid Spanish. The two of them argued for a moment, then the man from the plane said to me, ‘He’ll take you there for seven hundred pesos. OK? And if you are in town, you must promise to look me up. My name is Marcos Ortega. You can usually find me in Parque Hidalgo. Look for a hammock vendor named Emilio. He’s my friend. He’ll know if I’m around.’ His hand was still on my shoulder. ‘Promise?’
I nodded and gave him a smile that was almost real. As I drove off in the cab, I looked back to see him standing at the curb, staring after me with a curious expression.
The streets of the city of Mérida are narrow and winding, little better than alleys. The houses and shops crowd tightly together, forming an unbroken wall of peeling facades painted in colors that might have been brilliant once: turquoise, orange, yellow, red. The sun fades the paints to muted shades, gentle pastels.
I saw the city in glimpses from the backseat of the cab: a row of shopfronts, each painted a different shade of blue, all peeling. A dim interior seen through an open doorway and a hammock swaying within. A group of men lounging on a street corner, smoking. A small park with a statue in the center. A fat woman leading a small boy down the narrow sidewalk. A row of stone buildings with carved stone facades bordering on the edge of a park. Trees crowned with red-orange blossoms. My cab narrowly missed a motorbike carrying a man, a woman, a baby, and a little girl, then swerved around a buggy drawn by a weary-looking horse. Finally, we headed out of town along a wider road.
The highway ran straight through a landscape of yellowing trees and scrub, broken now and then by a cluster of small huts. We passed a crew of men who were repairing the road; the cabby tooted his horn and passed them without slowing.
I thought about telling the driver that I had changed my mind: he should turn around and go back to Mérida. But I could not explain that in Spanish and he was already turning off the highway onto a side road. My hands were in fists and I forced them to relax. I tried to take deep breaths, tried to calm down.
I had screwed up royally this time, and I knew it. I was arriving with no warning in a place where I was not wanted. I had been stupid to think that I could do this. I felt sick.
On one side of the road, spiky plants grew in unbroken rows. On the other side, the trees and scrub towered over the cab. The cabby did not slow for potholes; the cab jolted and bumped over rocks and raised a cloud of dust. We passed a cluster of battered stucco houses. The driver slowed to let chickens scatter before us, then drove through an archway and down a dirt road to a cluster of palm-thatched huts that looked even more dilapidated than the stucco houses.
The dust settled slowly. The place seemed deserted. Washing – three T-shirts and a pair of jeans – hung on a line by one hut. The tarp that shaded a group of folding tables flapped lazily in a light breeze.
The cabdriver opened the door and said something in Spanish. I hesitated, then climbed out to stand beside the cab. ‘Where are the ruins?’ I asked. ‘Las ruinas?’ He frowned and waved a hand at the huts.
I saw a white-haired man duck through the curtained doorway of one of the huts, squint at the cab, and start walking toward us. The sun burned on my face. I tried to smile at the white-haired old man, but I was glad my sunglasses hid my eyes. ‘You may want the cab to wait,’ the man said. He stood, his hands in his pockets, in the scant shade of a tree. ‘Not much to see here and it’s a long walk back to the bus stop on the highway.’
‘Isn’t there an excavation here?’ My voice was just a little unsteady.
The old man did not take his hands from his pockets. ‘That’s true,’ he said. ‘But there’s still not much to see.’
‘I’m looking for Elizabeth Butler,’ I said. ‘I’m her daughter, Diane Butler. Is she here?’
He took one hand from his pocket to push his straw hat farther back on his head. His eyes were blue and curious. ‘I see,’ he said. ‘Well.’ A pause. ‘Then perhaps you’d better let the taxi go.’ Another pause. ‘Liz didn’t tell me that you were coming.’
‘She didn’t know.’
‘Ah.’ He nodded.
‘Is she here?’
‘She’s swimming. I’ll send someone down to get her.’ He turned and looked toward the huts. A man was strolling across the plaza toward us. ‘Hey, John,’ the old man called. ‘Could you go get Liz? She has a visitor.’