Palenque

PALENQUE
by Carol Miller
Excerpt from TRAVELS IN THE MAYA WORLD


A 1992 Mexican presidential decree allocated federal funds to spruce up twelve pre-Columbian sites, among them everyone's darling, Palenque. The site had already suffered exhaustive scrutiny, some of it fanciful or frankly erroneous, for close to three hundred years. As my late friend, the seasoned archaeologist Ricardo Bueno, reminded us, "Anything done to a site like Palenque, good, bad or indifferent, will be criticized. It's too much in the public, as well as the political, eye."
The fact we simply have to accept is the imminence of an official reconstruction and total reorientation of this epitome of Classic Maya grace and charm. Instead of gaining access from the old parking lot, which leads to the foot of the Temple of the Inscriptions, the public now leaves vehicles at the new Museum and Service Center (offices, shop, cafe, and auditorium), where the old Hotel de las Ruinas used to stand, then ascends steep stone stairs through the cool forest, following the course of the "Queen's Bath" to the Temple of the Bats, now reclaimed. The same path leads through the newly recovered Group C--a series of residential-palace like structures that climb the ridge in layer after layer of terraces and patios--and then drops to the riverbed, finally crossing into the ceremonial center at the North Group.
Formidable stucco masks staring blankly from the heights, grand staircases, the reconstructed ball court, and the platform of the labyrinthine administrative palace with its unique tower are only preludes to the show stopper at the Cruz de Palenque. This great platform, now referred to affectionately as "The Crosses," supported a succession of structures over the centuries--the Cross of Palenque, the Foliated Cross, the Temple of the Sun, the unimaginatively named Structure XV--all now subject to the architect's slide rule.
The big news is the discovery, during excavation, of several dozen cylindrical incense burners, remarkably intact and now displayed in the new museum along with jade jewelry and turquoise masks, elaborate inscriptions and panels of glyphs, dainty clay figurines and imposing stone sculpture--what the French iconographer Claude Baudez, in his Lost Cities of the Maya, called "the refinement of the centuries of Palenque, the Athens of Mesoamerica."
The still unexplained abandonment of Palenque at the height of her genius, the peculiar delicacy of her inscriptions and reliefs, her roof combs like stone lace in a jungle that seems to breathe with a life of its own--together they have bewitched every visitor since the French painter-explorer Frederick Waldeck in the eighteenth century. Stephens and Catherwood came, Desiré Charnay, Blom and Morley, Alfred Maudslay, Alfonso Caso, the two Edwards--Seler and Thompson--followed by Miguel Angel Fernández and of course Alberto Ruz Lhuillier, so devoted to the labor of a lifetime that his grave still stands by a tree at the foot of the Temple of the Inscriptions. His imprint is so vivid that even what Ricardo Bueno describes as his "mistaken" design of the Palace staircase is a sacred cow: no one dares modify or correct it.
I have been many times to Palenque, so many I long ago lost count. When I arrived in the early fifties, the site proclaimed by UNESCO as "humanity's patrimony" was dark and damp, shielded by dense growth of the type still visible on the ridge where as yet unexcavated ruins lie collapsed or buried. Today tour buses crowd the parking lot. The Germans, who fly into Cancún, arrive in a special vehicle in which they eat and sleep. A few enterprising Lacandón natives sell them bows and arrows that were never meant to be shot but which are decorated with the iridescent green feathers of the rapidly disappearing tropical parrots. The heat is still oppressive, and sweat pours even from a brow encased in hat or headband.
Getting there is easy now, but in 1954 the road was just a track. It was a long time ago. I think I traveled on second-class buses from Veracruz, then crossed the Papaloapan River by raft at Alvarado before boarding the train that chugs straight across the marshes and lagoons of the Tabasco Plain, bound for Campeche. I remember I awoke in Teapa at the foot of the Black Forest with a great hunger. A woman hawked her tacos on the platform.
"What have they inside?" I called to her. "Meat!" she answered impatiently.
"What kind of meat?" I insisted.
"Dog!" she called back. I thought she was being spiteful, especially since her two small children burst out laughing. But it could have been anything: cat, bird, or pejelagarto (an animal between fish and reptile from the marshy lagoons). Most likely it was tepezcuintle --"wild dog" or "country dog"--a shy and stubby rodent that, although not a canine at all, looks like the mottled clay Colima tomb figures of dogs in any pre-Columbian collection.
The train finally stopped in a corner of the jungle where the roadbed widened. There I got off. I asked someone by the track--there was no station, not even a platform--if this was really Palenque, because I saw no ruins. A kind man answered me with a gracious bow and a soft, indefinable accent: "My name is Domingo LaCroix. I have a Jeep and the only hotel in town. I am at your service." I jumped into the front seat.
The original village, a few wooden houses, had stood by the side of the tracks, but not long before my arrival it had been moved four kilometers into the jungle. From there it was five or six more kilometers to the ruins, an easy walk. I went often during the next few weeks, especially early in the morning, before the heat was up, with the mist of dawn like a shroud on the hills.
The singularly unappealing town of today, called Santo Domingo Palenque, in those days sported a single dirt lane lined with six or eight ramshackle wooden houses with peeling paint, wooden shutters, and none of the geraniums in motor oil cans so notable in other, more temperate climates. The largest house was the hotel, called, appropriately in view of its owner's name, "The Cross of Palenque." The shower was out back, just a pipe with a head, on a grassy knoll. The way was lit by fireflies.
Another house was the pool hall, a sometime saloon, where on Friday nights chairs were brought in and set in rows. All the electricity in town was turned off in order to generate enough to run a temperamental projector for the weekly film. It was the golden age of Mexican cinema; the pictures were often wonderful. If the movie was foreign, it came with Spanish subtitles. These days education is compulsory and it is hard to find anyone unable to read and write Spanish, independently of local dialects or regional languages, but back then the privileged literate read to the others, generally the very old or the very young.
It was November, and I was about to celebrate my twenty-first birthday with the village's butcher and his wife and with their tenant, the village doctor, whose name I remember was José. A young graduate from the dry farm town of Acámbaro in the state of Guanajuato, he was doing the six months of social service required by law in order to receive his degree. But first I yearned for communion with nature and went to sleep in the ruins, as Waldeck and all the others had done.
The sounds of the jungle range from startling lucidity to rampant dementia. Humming, gurgling, growling, purring, panting; a falling leaf sounds like thunder and the thunder on the horizon fades to a sigh in the heavy darkness. Bats and ghosts lurk in the high vaults of the temples: Lord Pacal and Zak-Kuk, the White Bird, his mother. Great Snake Jaguar, Jackal the Third, Lord Storm. Shield Jaguar, his face pale, his breath fetid, rages from the deepest passageways and underground hallways of the Palace maze. The night is long.
Dawn comes suddenly. The air is soft and pale with damp haze. I step aside to give way to an anteater as I make my way to the river. I stretch out, fully clothed but soaking wet, and match my breathing to the panting of the jungle. Then I stop and hold my breath. A pair of tapirs, round and fit, have come to drink from the right bank. I watch them, transfixed, losing all track of time, until out of the corner of my eye I notice the jaguars--their feline stench--on the opposite bank. Their yellow eyes glow with morning, the cold dappled light on their glossy rosettes. Neither couple perceives the other, and neither notices me. I am frozen in paradise, at the beginning of time.
The insects have begun their chorus, through the forest of zapote cedar, and guarumbo, and I return to town, joyous and humble, moved by God's gift on the day of my birth. The butcher's wife has already prepared breakfast. The butcher is angry because the baby is crying and refuses to eat.
The sharp sounds penetrate my idyll. And then I feel the itching. "What's happening to me?" I yell at José, as if it were his fault. He stares at me in horror. My face and arms have begun to swell. "Maybe gnats, mosquitoes, who knows? I come from Acámbaro, remember? We have to do something."
My feet are swelling, my eyes are closed. The itching is unbearable. I start tearing at the reddened skin. My entire body, despite my heavy denim clothing, is covered with rashes and bites of varying sizes and colors, some as big as plum-colored plates, already running blood.
The butcher and his wife bring strong cord and tie me down to prevent my scratching. José is attempting any remedy that occurs to him. "We must try vinegar," he says. "No, wait. Maybe a puree of tomato. Let me go for tobacco. They say it helps--rubbing an unsmoked cigarette on the bites. And then again, there's calamine lotion."
Everyone in town comes to look at me, and even the baby, at first alarmed and then bemused by the flurry, stops whimpering and starts to eat. I eat nothing, of course, and spend the night of my birthday tied to a chair.

oOo