(One
Hundred Years of Solitude)--Five Hours of Bus Ride
By SEAN LUO
September 18, 2004
By the time the second gush of passengers poured in,
I was already fast asleep.
I opened my eyes and took a peek of the dude sitting
next to me. Sported a worn, earthy wife beater, arms and legs all
stretched out with red and yellow tattoos, he was lying motionlessly on the recliner,
recuperating from a hard day’s work. The bus was almost completely full,
and AC was blasting full throttle, blocking out the
dripping, verdant heat of Yucatan peninsula.
Mexico has its most prominent stereotypes: the
sombrero wearing men sitting against a wall half asleep; cacti sprawling in
a surreal, stagnant landscape. Yet southern Mexico is
different. There is no desert. There are no sombreros (except to humor
the tourists). Instead, it is a confusing, dynamic smorgasbord of paragons of
capitalistic (mis)adventures tinctured by some of the most remote,
impoverished diaspora and their Leninist revolutionary offshoots. It
was surely one of those big blank unsightly holes of the nightly news broadcasts.
Away from el centero, Cancun seemed to be part
of a Yankee pipedream that was staunch but fading in my head: its airport
was decadently pampered, more brilliant than the two old and decrepit New
York airports combined. The streetscape was subtitled in English, and
gasoline stations were as numerous as palm trees. Flashy teenager
couples in designer labels were absorbed in a frenzy of public display of
affection.
Just minutes later, it was all gone.
I sidestepped into The National Geographic. Out of
the window, I saw a flat, shrubby jungle covered with trees that extended
over to the horizon. Great tailed grackle, a black, fluttering dot within
the green ocean, whistled in the unnerving zanate and hopped from
one tree to the next. The road was straight and narrow, intrusive,
mysterious, and convergent.
The big dude sitting next to me woke up unexpectedly,
and signaled to the driver to stop the bus. Mexico’s bus system was a wonder,
and a second class bus that you could flag down and get out of anywhere on
its path was like a long, repetitive song circle. Women wearing colorful
embroidery burst on, in the middle of nowhere, like chromatic interludes
cutting through the diatonic tempo. I rubbed my eyes, and tried to figure
out where my seat mate was going to go.
It was impossible. There was no way to go. He
stepped out of the bus and literally stepped into the jungle that
surrounded us and then he was gone. I was amazed and astounded. Hovering
over, far away, there might be some trickles of posadas, but
vanishing like this, right here, was magical. Throughout this disturbingly
long ride, people of various sizes and shapes constantly emerged from the
roadside, half a meter away from the seemingly unending flora--only to be
submerged by the lushness again minutes later. Where to? They came from the plains, like the
birds, and the ocelot, disappearing without a trace.
The guy who sat a row behind me noticed me from the
get go. At the bus station he mentioned something about senuo, and
with my pathetic Spanish there was no way I could comprehend anything—that
is, until he made the gesture of resting his head on his wrist. I
realized he was referring to me yarning uncontrollably. He had a doughy
face and wore a blue t-shirt. The wide, grinning mouth reminded me of
Robin Williams. I was cautious though, these days you never knew what
people wanted from you, especially when you looked like an easy target of
a gringo tourist.
So I didn’t pick up on his end of the conversation,
and dozed off instead. The bus traversed through a little village briefly
after the baffling roadside stops. It was not a village as much as a few
red and white mud-piled huts sprawling across an arcade of dirt roads.
Strayed dogs ran amok, looking fruitlessly for food. (A recurring
phenomenon—dogs were not leashed here, and often they had no owners,
though they were mostly tame and pleasant, looking for sustenance from the
unsuspecting bystander. I even witnessed a dog eating corn once, out of
my great consternation.) Chickens and turkeys flocked across the dirt
roads. Children sat by the roadside shirtless, counting cars running by.
Men sitting in the back of a pick-up truck stared at nothing and
everything at the same time.
The bus halted in the middle of the road. A little
boy popped in carrying a giant bag hanging off of his neck. His whole
body was tanned like a little ball of coal. He smiled and talked to the
driver, clearly already well acquainted with each other. In a minute he
would walk down the isle, trying to sell sliced fruit in his bag. He
couldn’t be more than ten years old, with soft, smooth features, bright
dark eyes that tickled my fancies of London’s underage chimney cleaners a
couple centuries back. It was three o’clock in the afternoon. Shouldn’t
he be going to school now? The little boy didn’t make much progress with
the passengers, but still merrily gave the driver a bag of mangoes: he
poured some cinnamon powder into a plastic bag with his dirty little
hands, squeezed in some lime juice, and twirled it up. He got off the bus
at the border of the next village, as cheerily and unfazed as he was when
he got on.
The next village was a bit larger. Middle aged Maya
women wearing huipils, and their teenage daughters wearing t-shirts
with English captions, blue jeans and silver earrings crammed in. They
carried giant pots of tortilla shells and potpourri of meats. It
smelt so good! I had to swallow my salivation hard and fast before it
broke my defenses. I knew I ought to do my best to avoid a traveler’s
diarrhea. The good looking girls stood next to the driver in the front,
laughing, talking like good friends. It was a community of regulars.
Another big dude wearing a white baseball cap
squeezed into my seat when the bus came to a hasty stop. He swiftly
took another seat when the bus recovered and glared towards my direction.
“Hola!” he said with good cheer.
“Hola!” I replied, not knowing what else to say.
He pointed himself and uttered, “Yo!” and he pointed
me and said, “Tu” clearly trying to teach me some first lessons in
Spanish, discerning my dazed confused deer look.
A bit more pointing and my acknowledgement of
comprehension. He hollered with excitement, “Amigos!
Brothers!”
He shook my hand pretty hard, touched my thumb with
his thumb, trying vainly to get rid of my unease.
After a couple more exchanges of How are yous and
Where are you goings, he thought I was ready for a long spill of
incomprehensible Spanish. He was probably trying to tell me what he was
doing, as I could vaguely catch the first person pronouns sprinkling
sporadically in his fluttered monologue.
Of course, to me, all this is No Comprendes.
The girls were giggling hysterically. My face turned
red and I was grinning nervously as if I were asking someone out on a
first date. The big dude looked around for help. I suppose he gave up
quickly, realizing that it was a hopeless cause. But really there wasn’t much
of importance that needed to be explained in the first place. I was just
given another Bienvenido from another one of the so many folks in a
world that I knew so little of.
By then the sun was about to set. The bus ride was
supposedly four hours, but it looked like it’s going to whimper pretty
late into the evening. It was a flood of warm red glow everywhere, an
effluvium of little bright sparkles gradually draping over a lime, velvety
floor. The graying clouds floated idly, basking, like the white haired
old lady sitting in front of my apartment building every morning. The
driver popped in a cassette of nameless folkloric Mexican tunes, with a
quiet banjo playing in the background. Cars whooshed by, and their lights
boogied with the up and down bus swinging. Sometimes an old Spanish
colonial cathedral slipped through quickly, white, yellow, pondering, gawking, ageless,
tireless—the spectator of gloaming, the reveler of the night.
Robin Williams gestured to me when we got to
Valladolid. He reminded me that there was a five minute break for
bathrooms. I expressed my appreciation. He muttered nadas and
limped away to the toilet. I never noticed how small he was until we both
stood firmly on the ground.
He asked me where I was from.
“Japones? Coreano?”
I finally understood his question. “Chino!” I
emphatically completed his sentence.
“Ah! Chino…Buenos…” his eyes brightened a bit. The
Middle Empire to him was probably as much of a lore—a tall tale of a
place, like Mayan Mexico to me, only seen through the prism of modern
technologies, but never so sure whether it really existed in actuality.
It got dark pretty fast. There were no lights except
the headlights of the bus, and I grew increasingly nervous. I asked the
driver where Piste, my destination, was, and he said something
unintelligible and pointed
forward. I asked Robin Williams how long we’ve been on the bus. He counted on his fingers to make sure I understood
the Spanish numbering system. “uno, dos, tres, cuatro, cinco…cinco horas.”
He pulled my ticket from my hand. “Ah! Piste!” He asked me if I were to
go visit the ruins.
“Si!” I answered gleefully in completely
understanding. Some sentences were so lucid, it’s like I suddenly
emerged out of a dense fog and dipped my head in a cool pool of water.
A couple seconds later, the fog overwhelmed me again when the continuous,
fast, non capping Spanish spilled out like bullets from machine guns of
the Western Front.
I waved goodbye to him when the little village of
Piste finally emerged. And it was already pretty late. I was hungry and
sleepy, and the midtown Manhattan traffic was still vociferous in my short
term memory. The only thing I could hear now was the bugs buzzing and the
occasional thundering of a pick-up truck. I thought about the polyglot
Maya warlords, the catholic bishops, the PRI, the Spanish conquisidor,
Porfirio’s favorite aphorism “tan lejos de dios, y tan cerca de Estados
Unidos”—so far from God, and so close to the United States, the
Zapatistas, John Lloyd Stephens—the charismatic Columbia Law school
graduate turned Mayanist scholar, the preppie backpackers from Holland and
all the huddled masses trekking through and encapsulated within the plains
of Yucatan.
But wait, before I get too emotional, there it was: a
perky little hotel waiting right there, as if it had anticipated my
arrival for years.
