(One Hundred Years of Solitude)--Five Hours of Bus Ride
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.
This article was published in the P&S literary magazine Reflexions in 2004.