Only the Sea Is There Pooled Under All That Sky

Only the sea is there pooled under all that sky. Only calm sea, at rest, and in the sea a boat. Nina Coles is awake at the tiller while Walker Davis rests down below in the cabin berth. They are sailing to the Yucatan. Sailing towards a man who has come down to the sea from the mountains of Guatemala. They will cross the pathway of migrating birds and the clockworks of stars. Sail past the hissing of coral reefs towards whatever might be that waits to become. Whatever might be there now only murmurs across the surface of the sea.

I

East / Lahkin

Sunrise / Red / Birth

1

road block at Modesto Méndez

The bus was an old American school bus with cracked red vinyl seats. Some of the seats had no padding left. But I managed to get one that was relatively clean. Everyone was careful about how they placed their packages. I saw some unfold a handkerchief square and place it on the seat, smoothing it out with the side of their hands, before they sat. I had been scared to step on the bus, but then once there, in the midst of so many people, I felt almost good, almost free from the ache of missing Walker.

I was finally on the bus, heading north. Relieved to be on my way. Everyone sat facing forward, hands on their knees, eyes wide open and tense. There were some children laughing, wiggling, and a few live chickens with their feet bound tightly that kept up a racket, but besides those sounds and the straining of the bus engine, no one spoke. The faces on the bus were grim and tense. I thought it was because it was so early and everyone was not yet really awake.

At first the road was muddy but then as we moved away from the river, the landscape grew dry. The hibiscus hedges along the road were white with a powdering of dust from passing cars, trucks. Clothes were laid out to dry on hedges, and clusters of thatched shacks along the road. I'd catch a glimpses of an empty hammock hanging under the porch awning. The tattered banners of a clump of banana trees. Sometimes a house would have a corrugated tin roof. Everywhere I could see that the forest was being cut down. Huge logging trucks passed us going in the other direction, loaded down with lumber. I could see fields being burned for clearing, the remnants of burned palm trees. Cattle grazing, sometimes a horse.

When we passed a cluster of buildings there might be a store with whatever was for sale inside painted on the walls outside, as if to explain what miracles it contained: a sewing machine, cowboy hats, tin buckets, bread. Everywhere there were evangelical churches newly built out of cement blocks and brightly painted, promising salvation, or just the astonishing huge painting above the entrance of a pair of hands held together in prayer. Women sold watermelons, boiled corn and mangoes by the side of the road. We passed fields of sugar cane, corn, but mostly it was open grazing land and the burned stumps of old forest.

I felt self-conscious. Tried to find a relaxed way to sit, a place to put my hands. I knew that I was being watched. I tried not to look at any of the men, only smiling at women and children. The children smiled shyly back at me and for that I was grateful. Mostly I kept my eyes trained at the things passing outside. A truck passed us very fast with a load of men standing in the open back, all wearing bright white cowboy hats. They all seemed to smile directly at me, and then they disappeared behind a cloud of dust.

The people inside the bus were crammed together. I watched a boy share one small part of a seat with his mother. It made my heart ache, the way he lay his body against hers, cheek pressed against her breast, arm draped over her lap. Someone coughed, but no one said anything. It was hot inside the bus. The smell was the smell of animal skins, chalk, and candle wax.

It happened at the road block near Modesto Méndez, about thirty miles out of town, just after we had passed a few white crosses. We started heading north, the road went from paved to dirt, when we came to a clearing where a log painted yellow and white lay in the road. Off to the side was a small blue and yellow cabin, with "Garita de Control," painted on the wall. We could have driven past it, but the bus driver turned the wheel and pulled us to one side. He stood up, took his hat off and turned to face his passengers. Then he said the name of the place like it was an apology.

A soldier came into the bus, and almost lazily announced that we had to get off, to documentarse, bring all our things. An old woman, walking down the aisle, grabbed my hand. That was Isabelle. She was the one who looked after me. She asked me my name, “Nina Coles,” I whispered.

Very quietly as everyone gathered their bundles, she asked me where I was from, where I was going.

I said, "Los Estados Unidos, Mexico."

She was startled, and then smiled.

"Tourista?"

"Si, si."

I tried to explain something about Walker and our boat, but then she asked, "Dónde esta su marido?"

I tried to tell her that Walker was sailing another boat, but then, I started to cry, just a few tears. She squeezed my hand, and hushed me. Si, si, she said, she had seen it in my eyes the moment I stepped onto the bus, she knew I was heartbroken. She thought we had broken up, that my husband had abandoned me. My Spanish, even after half a year in Mexico, was still so rough. I clung onto her, I let her believe that I was a woman abandoned. She couldn't speak English, but she was good with signs and facial expressions. She seemed to understand me. And she warned me with her looks to be very careful with the soldiers.

They lined everyone up next to the bus, men on the right, women on the left, and had us dump our bags in front of us. Onto the dusty earth in little piles. Most of the piles were made up of food bought at the market, a few plastic trinkets, blankets, sometimes a photograph, or ten yellow church candles wrapped in wax paper, a mirror, a child's stuffed animal. I had only my purse, my money, a key, passport, credit card, and the little picnic of bananas and tortillas that the woman at the inn had given me that morning. Mine was the smallest pile.

There were three soldiers, one older man in charge, who had no gun, no uniform, and spoke very softly to the other soldiers. And the two younger soldiers with big guns who did all the talking to us. They worked their way down the line, while the older man stood back. Everyone stood with papers in their hands, ID papers, or a letter. Some of these had been carefully wrapped in blue clear plastic.

They walked past an old man. Asked a few questions, he took off his hat to answer them, but they did not do the same for him. He showed them his thin worn scrap of paper. I could see his thick peasant fingers trembling with such a fragile and important document. It had been handled so many times that it had the look of thin leather. The soldiers waved it away and moved on. Another old man, a farmer, with his son, a young boy. The soldier said something that was supposed to be funny and the boy laughed, nervous, then wiped his runny nose on his sleeve. I saw his father put his hand on the boy's shoulder, quietly trying to comfort.

They got to a young man and something happened, they kicked his things, scattered them across the ground. No one was really watching. All

eyes turned down, and yet every fiber was concentrated. I felt my skin crawl with goose bumps, and realized, then, that this was serious.

The soldiers accused the man of not doing his military service, of working for the guerrillas instead. He was pleading with them, he kept saying that he had done his military service. They asked for the paper to prove it. We all knew that at any moment they would hit the man, or even shoot him. Then the older soldier who had been standing back, watching, made a sign with his head and they suddenly stopped yelling at the man, told him to pick up his things. Like they were just playing, like cats will with half-dead mice.

One by one they made the men turn and face the bus, spread their legs and place their hands high on the bus's dusty windows. As each man was searched in turn, one soldier placed his foot between the man's legs as if to trip him should he try to run, while the other trained a rifle on his back. They searched them with their hands, under the arms, between the legs, down the back, around the ankles. When the men turned back around I saw their handprints spread on all those windows.

When they got to the women, they were less aggressive. One woman with three kids stared them down, and it seemed that she embarrassed them. It was clear that the soldiers were intimidated by the older women who could be their mothers. The soldiers just nodded their heads and walked past them, down the line.

Then they looked past Isabelle and saw me.

Isabelle quickly moved closer to me and told them that I was an American. The older soldier came forward. He had been leaning casually in the door of a little one-room cabin of the Garita de Control. He came forward and picked up my passport, wiped it off with the back of his hand. He had lots of questions, some I understood, whether I was a Protestant missionary or a Catholic. Isabelle insisted I wasn't with the Church, I was simply interested in the ruins at Tikal. They wanted to know if I was an archeologist, if I had been to any of the other ruins. And why Tikal, when it was so hard to get to? The soldiers wanted to know then if I was working for the government, if I had a letter of introduction, a special pass, an address of a hotel in Guatemala City, an airplane ticket home, where was my luggage? Isabelle spoke for me; often I didn't even understand his questions. Isabelle answered them all, as if she had known me all my life. She kept pointing her finger at the passport over and over again, not wanting them to forget for one instant that I was an American.

The older man nodded with his head that I was to follow him, towards the little cabin.

"Your passport is not in order. You need special permission to travel into this area," he said. "Why didn't you get the proper papers in Guatemala City?"

He tried to make Isabelle stay behind but she clung on to me as if we were together. She became even more insistent that I was an American. She warned him that he better call his superiors before he made problems for an American tourist. He stopped walking towards the cabin and turned back. He looked angry. She said something about how I had just spent several weeks in Guatemala City, staying with some important people who lived in Zona 10. That's where I had left most of my belongings, and airplane ticket. They were very high up, so maybe that's why they did not know about this special permission which must certainly be only for common citizens.

If I knew such people, why then was I riding on a common bus, he wanted to know? Isabelle shrugged her shoulders and laughed.

"Who can understand Americans?" she asked him.

He smiled and paused. He found two fifty-dollar bills that Walker had carefully folded into the inside cover of my passport.

"Why doesn't she have more money?"

"What's there to buy in the jungle?" Isabelle replied. "Even tourists don't pay for mosquitoes," she added.

The two other soldiers smiled at her joke.

The older man looked again at my passport, flipping quickly through the pages.

"Livingston?" he said. "There's an entry stamp for Livingston."

He was pointing to a blurred red stamp imprint on one page of my passport and held it up for me to look at. Isabelle had been saying that I had come from Guatemala City, so why was there this stamp. I felt a trickle of sweat run down my back, knew my face was flushed and red. Isabelle looked at me with a questioning grimace.

I spoke to her in English.

"My boat," I said. "I have a boat there."

He understood what I had said and seemed to think I was talking about a yacht. It seemed to lend credence to the story about having wealthy friends in Zona 10. He turned to face Isabelle for the first time, instead of looking at me. He wanted to know who she was, and why she was involved in this, why did she care so much about this crazy gringa traveling alone into the jungle when she at least should know better?

Isabelle did not blink. She said that she was my guide and translator, so I wasn't traveling alone. She had been hired by important people to get me to the ruins at Tikal safely. She felt sure that he would not want to upset anyone important over this silly gringa who just wanted to see Tikal before going back to America.

They looked at each other silently for a long moment and then he handed me back my passport, keeping the money.

"This will pay for your special permission papers."

He nodded for me to get back in line, for the soldiers to move on to the next passenger.

Isabelle squeezed my hand very briefly. I think she even winked at me. I felt relieved, I think, though it is hard to remember now. I do remember that I could feel my whole body trembling as I stood there.

I don't remember relief because only a few short moments later they got to the girl. And it was as if everyone knew this would happen. As if they had all been trying to hide her, making her blend into the line-up, but it had not worked. They could not hide her beauty; the mud, the piles of modest belongings, the blank empty faces, even an American on the bus hadn't been enough to hide it. No one moved, no one said anything.

The soldiers were smiling now, saying she had to come inside the office for questioning. They were tugging at her arms, almost playfully, as if they were bashful boys. I felt my throat tighten. She didn't say anything, but did not move either. She had a baby, a young baby in her arms. An older woman said, "Dé sala! The baby is hungry."

One of the young soldiers took the baby from the young woman and handed it to the old woman, saying. "You feed the baby then, old mother."

Then they led her inside. One soldier stayed outside by the door, but the older man and the other one, the one who had given her baby to the old woman, they both went inside with her.

We stood in line, silent. The only sound now was the baby crying for its mother, and the old woman singing to quiet the baby. Even the other children were silent.

I don't know how long we stood there. One soldier came out, and he was grinning. He told the other one to go inside, into the office. But the other soldier did not want to go, and there was a moment, almost a moment of hope.

But then the grinning soldier saw us watching him, hating him, and he shouted at us all to get back on the bus, to wait on the bus. He waved his gun and told us to move fast. We stumbled back into our seats. The baby who had cried itself to sleep, woke up again and began crying. I don't know how long we waited in our seats.

When she came back on the bus, the soldiers were not with her. They had stayed in their cabin. She came up the steps alone and sat in her seat, turned her head to the window, to the trees beyond the window. Her hair, that had been tied up in a tight bun, was now falling down, but she made no move to straighten it. The sight of her messed up hair made me feel sick. Why had I just sat there? I wasn't sure what I could have done, but I should have done something earlier, and now it was too late. A young man at the front of the bus stood up then, he had tears on his cheeks. He was going to get off the bus. He said something angry, almost yelling, but two older men and the bus driver grabbed him and forced him back to his seat. They talked to him urgently in very quiet voices.

The old woman tried to hand over to the young woman her crying baby. But she shrugged the baby away, pulled her arms tighter around herself. The baby was taken away, the old woman admonished, another woman moved into the seat next to the beautiful woman and put her arms around her. And I could hear, just barely, that she was singing to her.