Time Among the Maya. - book reviews

In case you thought the Maya all died out with the conquest, or earlier in the mysterious fall of the pyramid-builders, look again. Entire Maya villages, even states, in Mexico and much of Guatemala ore quite intact linguistically and culturally, despite persistent reduction by governments of their numbers and lifestyle.

Another great English travel writer, Wright offers the reader history, nature, contemporary politics, and appropriate reflections on life tucked into the exotic and mundane. He is particularly fascinated with the multilevel Mayan calendor, following it in his doily entries, making both the sacred and mundane aspects clear to the uninitiated. He shows us how the calendar is practiced today, the will to live that the Mayo are still exhibiting in their customs, their lanquages, and their survival under the shadow of Guatemalan militarism.

Time Among the Maya is educational, stimulating, ironic, even optimistic in the overview. These folks ho- survived a long time, through many changes; their calendar has neither o beginning nor an end. "If there is to be a twenty-first century," he writes, "the Mayo will be part of it." Kathleen Harrison McKenna

* His name was Ignacio Ek. He was a Maya, born in 1910, the year the Mexican Revolution broke out, and he remembered that his people and mine had once been enemies. We were standing on the steps of a pyramid he had discovered one day when hunting in the forest. His dogs had chased a tepezcuintle down a burrow in a mound covered with cohune palms; he enlarged the hole with a stick and saw the giant face of an ancient god, hidden by the jungle for more than a thousand years. Archaeologists later found others, modeled in stucco, flanking the staircase on each of the pyramid's tiers. The faces had the haughty brow and handlebar moustache of Kinich Ahau, Sun-Eyed Lord. In the god's huge eyes was written the hieroglyph for kin (sun, day, or time), Logos of the Maya, foundation of their calendar and universe. The archaeologists restored the ruins and left Ignacio Ek to guard them. He picked weeds from the stones and sold tickets to infrequent visitors.

"Icaiche is my hometown," he said when I asked where he was from. "But it's abandoned now. We left when I was a baby, in the time of the Revolution. We scattered in the forest. There was nothing to eat. My mother gave me the sap of trees to drink because she had no milk.

And you? From where are you?"

* If Greek civilization explored the universe with geometry, the Maya did so with arithmetic and time. Their calculations gave them a conception of its temporal scale unmatched by any other premodern people. They didn't contemplate eternity with mere metaphors ("a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday"), they actually ran the calendrical mechanism back and forth over immense spans of the post and future, apparently to stress symmetries between human and godly time. Stela 10 at Tikal records a date more than five million years in the post; two inscriptions at Quirigua refer to precisely pinpointed days - one ninety million, the other four hundred million years ago.

* "Beliz, Beliz!" a tall black man is shouting. He sees me:

"You goin' to Beliz, moan?"

" Are you Venus?"

"No. Batty. Venus don'com heah no more."

A lie, I later discover, but better to take Batty brothers' old school bus now than wait for the quicker but possibly nonexistent Venus.

We head south across the Hondo River, into Belize. Music pours from a large cassette player in the lap of o young Mexican sitting with his girlfriend at the back. Mexicans consider Belizeans to be light-fingered an it seems he has chosen his ranchero songs with mischief in mind:

Algun pinche ratero/Some rotten thief Se Ilevo mi cartera/Made off with my wallet Con todito mi dinero!lAnd every penny I own

The songs vibrate through Corozal Town, where the road meets the sea and a fishy breeze pushes back the viscous air of the sugar lands; they rebound from the clap-board walls of Bumper's Restoran Chino and Johnny's Place. Gradually the small brown Mexicans and local "Spanish" become outnumbered by colossal black matrons in floral bonnets, little girls with frizzy hair teased into ribboned spikes, lithe young men wearing fringed shorts and T-shirts advertising reggae bands. A jam session of Creole gossip fills the bus; I catch intelligible fragments declaimed like verse:

"Dat Cooper boy done mek she fat.

"Tell me ears now!"

At Orange Walk Town the bus stops at a bar with batwing doors.

"Lonch time!" calls the driver, who has driven with such consideration for his vehicle that I think he must be one of the Batty brothers himself.

"Ow long, maan?" a passenger sings. "Ow long you gi' we heah?" Before Mr. Batty can reply, o tall, smartly uniformed policeman gets on behind a small mestizo with a toothbrush moustache.

"Dat one!" the mestizo shouts. The policeman lopes down the aisle and grabs a young Creole by the back of his T-shirt.

"Let's go, maan."

"Wha'fo'? Wha' de hell fo'?"

"Let's go. You got someting fo' say, you say it at de police station. What you got dere in you han'?"

"Jos one bag o' gots, I jos pick up dis one bag o' gots!" The accused holds up a plastic bag containing pig entrails.

Time Among the Maya Ronald Wright, 1991; 451 pp.

$14.95 ($17.95 postpaid) from Henry Holt and Company, R 0. Box 30135, Salt Lake City, UT 84130; 800/488-5233 (or Whole Earth Access)

COPYRIGHT 1991 Point Foundation
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