Yaxchilan south acropoles
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Español
December 22, 2024
by Donald Patterson
"Shake the cobwebs outta your head, boy." I was expecting Lady Xoc of Yaxchilan, but instead it was the voice of my father.
Funny isn't it? But almost every bit of advice and instruction that I recall from my father either started or ended with the word "boy." He never called me son. He never called me Don, even though we shared the same name. He always referred to me as "boy." As a teenager I hated it.
We were never close. We never had any of those father-to-son talks. Instead he enjoyed a singular vocabulary that consisted of the word "chores."All of our communication focused on these activities, which, as I grew older, he added to and accented their definition by his direct manner, stern expressions and the pronoun "boy". "Shake the cobwebs outta your head, boy," he would say each time he caught me day-dreaming. He must have done some dreaming of his own because he left my mother when I was fifteen. A few months later, so did I.
My great life adventure began in the train station in Pueblo, Colorado. I can't say there were any "great expectations"when I found myself on my own. I can still picture the Redstone railroad station where I awaited the Colorado Eagle coming down the track from Denver (Although I know it was impossible in 1957, the music of Simon and Garfunkel's "The Boxer" wafts softly in the background.) I can still see, in the sweaty and trembling palm of my hand, the eight dollars and change that remained after I purchased a ticket to Lindsborg, Kansas.
I had no idea where Lindsborg was but then it didn't matter. I did not have enough money for recognizable places like Wichita or Kansas City.
I didn't see my dad again until I was twenty seven. I did not know what to expect after twelve years without communicating, but I soon found out nothing had changed. My father's first words to me were, "I might 'a known you'da had a mustache, boy." Then he shook my extended hand and, grabbing me around the shoulder (he never hugged), ushered me into his house and presented me to my stepmother.
Ten months later I left Colorado again, this time on my way to Mesoamerica. Of course I didn't know it was Mesoamerica. I thought I was just going to Mexico. Nevertheless, here I was on the banks of the Usumacinta River kneeling in the eerie, bat filled darkness below a candle lit lintel in the ancient Maya city, Yaxchilan.
"Shake the cobwebs outta your head, boy."
Damn it, Dad!
I must have answered the voice in my head because Thorrun, the Icelander, motioned me to be quiet. I tried once again to focus on the burning candles and to meditate. It wasn't going to be easy to bring Lady Xoc back. I was skeptical. I suspected that I would just keep bringing back my own ancestors.
Reflecting over the last 36 years living in Mexico, I have come to the conclusion that my journey to Xibalba began much earlier, in some childhood portal of my mind. There, in the dim recesses of my past, I picture the five-year-old boy sitting on the floor in front of the Zenith Radio, frustrated as he tries to adjust the dial to make sure that he didn't miss a single word of another adventure of Jack, Doc and Reggie in "I Love a Mystery." The episode that spurred his youthful imagination took place in some vampire-invested temple in the jungles of Central America.
I will probably never know if that was the moment that I was sucked into a portal and down the road to Xibalba. But the journey has certainly been more fantastic than I could have imagined, even in my wildest childhood dreams.
Farmer San Miguel Viejo
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I hadn't been in Mexico more than a few weeks when the Lords of the Xibalba sent me a messenger with an invitation.
It was 1970. I was standing near the edge of the lake just west of San Miguel de Allende when the messenger suddenly appeared. He seemed to materialize out of the thorny huizaches, mesquites and cactus.
His complexion matched the color of the dirt where he stood. He spoke a few words in a language that I did not understand and extended his closed fist. The gesture was not aggressive. It suggested the game of "guess which hand contains…", but I wasn't sure, and, seeing my hesitation, he took hold of my hand and motioned me to receive what was in his.
He placed a string of beads and a pendant-sized ceramic snakehead in my hand. As I examined the string of beads, I saw they were hand-drilled pieces of shells, bones and small stones. The string was new but the beads were old. The ceramic head of the reptile bore long, narrow scales that retreated from the eyes toward the neck and fanned out above it like feathers. It also had two drilled holes and I wondered why it was not strung along with the beads. I lifted my eyes, smiled and focused my attention on the man.
My impression was that he was poor and his clothing indicated he was a farmer. He returned my smile and his yellow teeth showed years of neglect. Because of the bright sunlight, his wide brim hat cast a dark shadow across his forehead, cutting a contrasting horizontal line at the level of his bushy eyebrows. The many lines on his face were like arroyos created by millennia of erosion. The rest of his features - eyes, mouth and nose - were comically pinched together in the lower portion of his face like a baby. He must have had some kind of nervous twitch because he frequently squinted his eyes closed. It wasn't a blink, because they closed completely and very slowly. But it was his tiny nose, curved and pointed like that of a barn owl, which tempted me to laugh. A strange odor emanated from him that reminded me of the smell of clothes after spending the night around a campfire. I was surprised that his feet, shod in the typical leather huaraches of the region, were without scars or calluses. "How does he avoid cutting his feet in all those thorns?" I remember wondering to myself. He was the earth itself. His dark eyes penetrated through my own shallow urban facade, making me feel uneasy.
Without speaking, he slowly turned his head, looking over his shoulders to the right and then to the left. As I followed his gaze I saw mounds of dirt and rocks behind him. Somehow, without any past experience, I knew that they were not part of the natural topography, but rather some ancient, man-made structures that were buried beneath the dirt and vegetation. When he caught my eyes anew he seemed satisfied with my puzzled expression and extended his hand outward once again, this time with his palm up. Without a word I returned the items to him. He smiled and turned to walk away into the matorrales (bushes) in the direction of the mounds.
I supposed that he wanted me to follow him in order to show me the mounds, so I started after him. But as I picked my way carefully through the thorny bushes my eye fastened on something black and shining on the ground near my right foot. l stooped to pick it up, and when I lifted my head again the man had disappeared. I took a closer look at the black shiny object in my hand. I held it up to the sky and decided that I had picked up a small flake of obsidian. But when my focus returned to earth below my feet, the magic occurred. It was as if a veil had been lifted from my eyes. Everything on the ground had taken on the characteristics of humanity. There were more obsidian flakes, pottery shards and other broken fragments of the past lying at my feet. Ten minutes earlier I had walked over this past with no awareness of it. Something told me that I would never let that happen again.
Quetzalcoatl
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In hindsight, this amazing moment brought together all of the elements for an equally amazing myth. Was it just one of those outrageously improbable coincidences that I had held in my hand the face of Quetzalcoatl (feathered serpent) and the power of Tezcatlipoca (smoking mirror) that day?
After describing the incident to my gringo friends in San Miguel, they always suggested that the man was trying to sell me the artifacts. My Mestizo friends suggested that he was an Indian and had spoken to me in his native language. There were still Otomí speaking people living in the valley, they told me. They thought the old man's motivation was probably nothing more than his pride of the past, and that he had shared these elements with me as a courteous gesture. Nobody ever attached anything metaphysical to the moment but me.
That was the beginning. I have spent the past 36 years looking at the ground, looking up only to encounter the Mesoamerican earth-colored people with strange histories, stories and myths that even now continue to stir my emotions. Let the journey begin.
Tezcatlipoca
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