“Sometimes there is an easy balance between the two, sometimes not.
“Sort of like my family.” She smiled.
I told her of my sense the day before that all was not entirely well with the Ortiz family, and about the argument I thought I might have heard below my window.
“I am reasonably sure it was a Mayan language I heard, probably Yucatecan. But perhaps I just dreamed it.”
She looked troubled for a moment. “I can’t tell you about the argument—I didn’t hear anything, and perhaps as you say, it really was a dream.
“As far as my family is concerned—perhaps my comparison between Merida and us is very apt. Alejandro has discovered, or perhaps rediscovered, his Maya heritage.
“It is a cause for some friction in the family. He accuses Mother of selling out to the Spanish. Presumably that means by marrying my father.” Again she smiled.
“Oh, I know we all go through stages as we are growing up when we are not exactly enamored of our parents, of course, but Alejandro seems to have gotten involved with a group of young people at the university we’re not crazy about. He makes a lot of speeches, when he deigns to speak to us at all, that is, about fighting injustice, and there is a tone to it that worries parents a great deal.
“I’m sure his talk of rebellion is just youthful posturing, a phase all university students go through. But there is no question the Indigenas suffered greatly because of the conquest, and that disaffection is often very close to the surface. You may recall the riots in Chiapas not that long ago.”
Indeed I did. I had been there, in fact, on a buying trip. The riots had occurred over the New Year, and had lasted several days.
“If I remember correctly,” I said. “The riots were the work of a group called the Zapatista National Liberation Army, planned to coincide with the day the North American Free Trade Agreement, NAFTA, came into effect.”
“That’s right. It is said that the Zapatistas trained for ten years in the jungle before coming out that New Year’s,” Isa said. “There were rumors, of course. We all heard them. You couldn’t plan something like this for ten years in complete secrecy. But when it happened, it seemed to take the government completely by surprise. There had been nothing seen like this in Mexico since the Revolution.
“It was all over pretty quickly, but since then there have been flare-ups. Sometimes the Zapatistas and the government are talking, sometimes they aren’t. But the possibility of violence always seems to be there.
“Anyway, I guess what I am saying is that our family problems mirror in some way the tensions that exist in our society. Alejandro talks a lot about injustice and hints at revolution.
“Mother is distraught of course,” she continued. “Alejandro is her baby, the son born late in life. I was well into my teens when he was born, and I confess that while I thought he was an adorable baby, there was too much of a gap in our ages for me to find him very interesting. I guess I just find him irritating now, despite the fact I agree with him about many things.
“For example, Alejandro despises me because, like many of the children of the well-to-do in Merida, I went to university in the United States. He has chosen to go to university here in Merida, and I admire him for it, actually, although he is so tiresome on the subject that I have never told him.”
“I’m sure he’ll grow out of it,” I said. “After all, when I was at university, I was the most conservative person on the campus, and that was only because my mother seemed embarrassingly flaky to me at the time. Now I realize she was just ahead of her time—she never let any of the rules about what women could, and could not, do influence her in any way.”
“I’m sure you’re right,” Isa replied, and with that we parted company, she to visit her small factory where her designs were manufactured, I to prowl the museum—the Museo Emilio Garcia, named for its founder, a wealthy Merida philanthropist. The museo was housed in a former monastery a few short blocks from the Plaza Grande.
I had hoped, I think, to run into Dr. Castillo Rivas, who had an office there. Santiago Ortiz had told me that Don Hernan had not returned to his room the previous night, but as that was not an unusual occurrence, no one gave it much thought. Don Hernan was often hot on the trail of some treasure or other, and when he was, he tended to get a little distracted, more so as the years went by. I had always regarded this as a sign of his genius, the absentminded-professor type. His wife, if I remember correctly, had found it less endearing.
I sneaked past the “Prohibido Entrar” sign on the staff door on the top floor of the museo and checked at his little office. It was dark and locked up tight.
I decided to try to solve the puzzle he had given me—the one about writing rabbits. I thought it a little coy of him, but Don Hernan and I had spent many a wonderful day together searching for goods for my shop, and I was determined to get into the spirit of the thing.
Because it had been Dr. Castillo who had first introduced me to the Tzolkin, the Maya count of days, I thought of that first. It was he who had explained to me that there are twenty name days, and thirteen numbers associated with them. Each day is linked to a number, 1 Imix, 2 Ik, 3 Akbal, and so on. Because there are more names than numbers, the fourteenth name is given the number one again. With thirteen numbers and twenty names, it is 260 days before the original day and number, 1 Imix in my example, comes round again.
Several visits earlier, sitting over a cup of very strong Mexican coffee in the darkened dining room at the Casa de las Buganvillas late one evening, Don Hernan had begun to explain all of this to me.
“To understand the Maya, you must understand their concept of time,” he had told me.
“Like us, the Maya devised ways of recording the passage of time. Like us they gave names to days, but unlike us they attributed characteristics to those days.
“While most of us have forgotten these vestigial origins of our days—your Thursday was the Norse Thor’s Day, Wednesday, Woden’s Day, for example— many of the Maya have not.
“For the Maya, everything is influenced by the characteristics of the day, the number of the day, the character of the Haab or what we would call the month sign, and the character of the quadrant sign, four gods each characterized by a color, red for the east, black for the west, white for the north, and yellow for the south. Each of these gods, called Kawils, rules a quadrant of eight hundred and nineteen days.”
“I suppose this is not dissimilar to our applying human characteristics to astrological signs and judging events by the cycles of the planets. Even American presidents have been known to do this,” I said. “And the number-day-name correlation is not unlike our Friday the thirteenth.”
“Yes, but as you will learn, theirs is a much more complex system, moving back and forward over enormous periods of time. While we measure time in years, decades, centuries, and so on, the Maya measure time in katuns, or twenty-year cycles, and baktuns, twenty times twenty, or four-hundred-year cycles.
“And while our largest unit of time is a millennium really, the Maya have much longer ones. They have, for example, a calabtun, a one-hundred-and-sixty-thousand-year unit. And they measure time from the beginning of what they consider to be the current cosmos, the fourth one to exist.
“There are dates and numbers carved on Maya temples that would predate the big bang many times over, and they predict dates millennia into the future. I think what I am trying to say is that for the Maya, the past is still with us, still alive.”