Tikal and the Jaguar Inn

1989

The sky was changing quickly now and a red dawn was rising behind the city. Soon it would be time to leave. We were naked, with the smell of sleep and sex still infused on our creamy bodies standing in the frame of the doorway over looking the Hotel Colonial’s ornate courtyard waiting for the new morning to begin. I was silent, preparing my mind for the jolt back to New York. The air felt good, gentle and cool and I reached for Vivianna and held her close for a moment and then turned and went inside to dress.

The flight to New York would leave later that morning. Our bags were packed. Three green canvas sacks filled with Guatemalan weavings and soiled clothes and scraps of papers, receipts hand written on soft, porous paper, the kind one finds in places like Guatemala where they still stamp official papers with an authoritative thud talking care not to smudge the fresh ink where the penmanship reveals a curvaceous, flowing script. Everything was set for our departure.

The night before we’d stood together under the full moon in Tikal.  Bright and cold, I remembered how it shone on the Temple of the Giant Jaguar. And the view from the top. The jungle canopy stretching like an ocean to the horizon.  And how it shone on the massive pyramids and Mayan temples, the shadows and pools of moonlight laying across the stone paths that wound through the jungle past the ancient stone structures.

And I thought about the night I’d stayed in the jungle park until dark collapsed around me. “Crump". It was that quick. Now instead of the sharp edges of tropical leaves waving against the pale sky, suddenly there were grotesque floating shadows. The night sounds growing louder and closer. The jungle rustled and shifted and wings flapped against the leaves and it seemed as if the flapping wings were inside my heart which now beat faster.

The path disappeared and was soaked in darkness. I found a small flashlight in my equipment bag. It cut a narrow arc through the blackness insufficient to find the path I sought through the curtain of plants. In fact the flashlight only made the dark more dense and I turned it off and waited for my pupils to dilate. Gradually the shape of the undergrowth emerged and I detected the jungle path. And then I noticed the cuticle of a new moon through the forest canopy and though it was a mere slit in the black curtain of that night, its icy light shone down through the leaves to the jungle floor illuminating the white limestone. With the flashlight turned off I felt part of the forest and less afraid of it.

Eventually I found my way to the main path that lead back to the Jaguar Inn and I could hear the thump of the generator and see the dim blue lights of the bungalows emerging through the jungle. But for a few moments I’d felt completely alone out there with the mysterious Mayans - images of sacrifice; severed heads, high priests and daggers, strange symbols and rivers of blood running across the stones.

We’d taken a beaten up old bus from Guatemala City. It was packed and we’d been lucky to find a seat for Vivianna. For the first three hours of the journey I stood – well it was not really standing but leaning on my fellow passengers, hanging and swinging in unison. I felt a young woman behind me pushing against me as we swung together and if I had not been about twice her age I would have sworn her motif was lascivious.

It was well into the night when finally we stopped to refuel and find something to eat from the dozens of vendors who squatted cooking food. They ran at the bus as it maneuvered into the rural bus station. Finally I could sit and Vivianna and I shared plantains served on a banana leaf and sipped Pepsi Cola.

As dawn broke, twelve hours after leaving the city, we neared the outskirts of Flores, the tiny island township in Lake Petén Itza and our destination. We passed the gray concrete walls of a military compound and soldiers peered out from the guard boxes mounted on the top of the walls.  The driver explained that behind the wall were the Kaibiles, Special Forces soldiers from the Guatemalan army.

Kaibiles trainees were required to spend a month alone the jungles of the Petén fending for themselves. If they survived they became fully-fledged Kaibiles. To celebrate they’d be welcomed back to the barracks where they’d eat a dog cooked over an open flame. They are infamous for their reputed practice of forcing recruits to bite the heads off live chickens and drink river water from a recently fired artillery shell, with the burnt residue still inside. Kaibiles are known for doing field medical work on themselves. When Kaibiles are injured by a gunshot they pull their knife out, cut an X on the wound, and pull the bullet out.  The name "Kaibiles" is derived from an indigenous leader who evaded capture by the Spanish conquistador Pedro de Alvarado. The concrete wall  went on forever. The driver turned to tell us that the base would soon be expanded.

Oil had been discovered in Petén. It’s a vast sparsely populated jungle that stretches northwards towards Belize and Mexico’s Yucatan. There is little farmland except near the Caribbean coast where banana plantations stretch for miles. Somewhere out there in that sea of green, are guerillas fighting the government in a brutal civil war. The Department of Petén is the largest in Guatemala and it's a carpet of green as far as the horizon and beyond.

Tikal is sometimes called the cradle of the Mayas. It extends for more than two-hundred square miles and it reveals an exceptional civilization highly advanced in architecture, astronomy and sculpture. Nobody knows why it collapsed. It is about 2,500 year old and was constructed over a period of more than a thousand years and the remains are evident everywhere.

There are no park rangers at Tikal National Park. No khaki and green uniforms with boy scout’s hats and state-of-the art hiking boots. There are no rustic railed wooden fenced walking paths and carefully placed directional signs and map boards beside the trashcans. There are no kiosks and souvenir stands and certainly no MacDonalds. And there are no lights and no public announcements. You are alone except for all of nature and the night.  At dusk a man with an old rifle slug over his shoulder, wandered down the path and asked if anybody was still over at temple number four. I shrugged and he disappeared into the jungle leaving me alone.

Sitting high above the jungle on the Temple of the Giant Jaguar more than one hundred feet high, the view reveals the jungle canopy that stretches to the horizon.  I am looking down on green parrots rushing in pairs, across the forest clearing and I watch the sun set. The stone blocks are warm and comfortable to sit on. The scale of the structure, its mass and the time it measures, the carvings chiseled into its surface, force me to retreat to a more realistic appraisal of my mortality. And as I do I wonder if I might ever return to the bungalow hut and hammock that night.

I think about flight - not the flying birds who dip and dart in such startling variety, that shriek and caw as the sky rapidly changes color and the sun’s golden eye grows brighter in a final burst of light before it dives behind the distant horizon, but the flight of my own body and soul.

I saw myself arching over the treetops, my arms spread wide and the warm air rushing past. This was not Orville Wright’s dream of flight in some complicated contraption but pure abandonment – naked flight - like a bird or a dream.  The urge to launch myself off this Mayan tower is almost overwhelming. I saw myself leaping into the sun, arms flailing but rather than plummeting downward and crashing against the stones, my head cracked open and bleeding feeding the sacrificial edicts of Mayan kings and conquistadors – but rising gently like a cloud gliding through the twilight, catching the dying rays of golden sunlight that glinted like a sword’s blade cutting through the air.

The dream was too real to be imagined. It was a dream of murder and death that comes in some altered state. It seemed only possible in this giant stone temple, dark and somber. And then the sun is gone. The Maya have gone. The dream too is dead.

The morning we’d arrived at the Jaguar Inn at Tikal was uneventful. The driver of the Japanese mini-bus drove for an hour on a well-paved road from Flores to Tikal with practiced efficiency and when we arrived it was quiet. Some girls were carrying bundles and earthen bowls on their shining black heads and some boys were playing soccer with some kind of rolled-up vine to make an irregular soccer ball. An older man leading a mule loaded with carefully stacked fire wood saunterd past. It was after six in the morning and the temperature was already warm.

We could stay in the rustic Jaguar Inn or in cheaper, more basic accommodations in tents set aside on the edge of the surrounding jungle. We chose to stay under canvas.

We spent three days exploring the ruins of Tikal. And each we night returned for dinner at the Jaguar Inn. The archeologists and anthropologists from various universities were sitting at the large table in a back corner of the restaurant where they always sat.

As well as choosing the same table, the researchers always sat in the same places. An older man with white hair and a scruffy beard was always absorbed in his book and he bent over it squinting inches from the pages in the dim light. As more of the scientists arrived for dinner, one by one they opened the door of an industrial size refrigerator to take beers and mineral water, popping the tops as they walked back to the table.

It was more a hut than a restaurant for the windows were framed with unfinished timbers and mosquito wire was stretched across them. The floor was concrete, which had been unevenly laid so the tables were never level and wobbled when you sat to eat.

After dinner we walked across the grass airstrip through the soft tropic night the moon throwing deep shadows across our path.  The hotel generator thumped quietly in the distance and a few lights shone dimly through the trees around the bungalows. The sweet sound of marimbas floated nearby and Vivianna pushed her hand inside the back of my pants and underneath my leather belt and I swung my arm across her shoulders and we walked like that toward the sound of the marimba.

We found a café, a simple affair with the shutters thrown open and a kerosene lantern burning on a table where locals sat sipping beers and listening to the music.  We stopped in the shadows before reaching the café and watched.

The musicians were bent over their marimbas engrossed, heads bobbing, arms flashing as they beat out the tune together. A waitress walked onto the set and swept past the musicians and cleaned the dishes off the red and white checked tablecloth, re-laid the table, turned, and headed back to the kitchen.

A little boy in torn baggy trousers and no shirt, no shoes, began dancing. He moved closer to the fire that burned in a cut-off fifty-five gallon drum where the food was being cooked on a grill. He turned and swayed and the red coals bathed his smooth honey-colored bare back with warmth and his skin shone. He danced and swirled and the marimba sounded even more sweet as he turned and swayed and his dance was so pure - like the star filled night or a swallow flashing in the rain. And then he disappeared around a corner into the darkened kitchen. That child would never know what joy he shared that night, the gift he gave in an image like a dream.

The sweet marimba played on late into the night, the players remembering tune after tune and even when the generator died and darkness descended and the night seemed to move  closer and suddenly the air was alive with the cacophony of insects sounds and the occasional screech of a howler monkey, the marimba kept on. And it played into our dreams as we lay in the tent with the smell of the extinguished candle and all those insects and animals singing their symphony into the night.