When I wrote the previous story, “Chocolate and Donuts,” that memory jogged another memory—a moment I told few people about. It was a visit to a place in the Yucatán Peninsula I’d been to for only a few minutes, but what happened there stayed with me a lifetime. I realized after writing the other selection, it was time to visit Akumal again, if only in print.
I have yet to return to Akumal in the forty years since that first visit, though I borrowed from the experience for a chapter in Caramelo (but nobody would know that but me). My friend the designer Verónica Prida passed through Akumal and was surprised to see my photo in a Texas newspaper clipping taped under the gift shop counter. “But why is this news story here?” she asked. “Well, I don’t know,” the cashier said. “Someone put it there.” What is the connection between Akumal and me? Sólo Dios, as the Mexicans like to say, only God knows.
It was the last time I’d travel with them, or so I thought. I was twenty-one, the end of my childhood. Too old to be traveling with my mother and father, I told myself. Yet, out of love for Mexico and my father who’d invited me, I said yes.
It was the summer between undergraduate and graduate school. Am I remembering or inventing here? In my memory it’s just before I go to study at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. In my mind I’ve settled this summer like a jade bead before the dull two years to come working in that foreign place Iowa City.
The trip is Father’s idea; so is the idea that I’d be coming along with them. Most probably he didn’t ask Mother before he invited me; he doesn’t think about that. Or she doesn’t care yet, but will later when she has one of her famous tantrums. Then it’s him and me against her, always against her.
Every trip has low points, just as it has its highs. I want to talk about the highs, a few only, the ones I remember now, today, thirty-seven summers later, as brightly as the day they waltzed away with me.
The trip was to take us to the Yucatán, Quintana Roo, and finally Oaxaca. Father’s choices. We were traveling to states where his father, a military man, had been posted. Because of his father’s meandering career, Father was born in Oaxaca instead of at home in Mexico City. Maybe the ancestors were calling Father back, but if so, he wasn’t listening. He talked about new beaches and good food, and that was enough to convince us.
We flew from Chicago to Mexico City, then Mérida. After the lulling drone of the plane, I glanced out the window and was amazed to see, standing alongside us, an enormous mountain with snow on top and a little cloud snagged on its peak like a beret. It took my breath away. I could only nudge and point.
“Popo,” Father said. Popocatépetl, that was it. Our Mexican Mount Fuji. One of the twin volcanoes seen from the rooftops of Mexico City when I was a child. I’d never seen it from this altitude. Our plane’s shadow swept across like a mosquito, the great mountain as solid and still as a Buddha.
In Mérida we rented a sky-blue VW Bug, Father at the wheel as always, and drove into the jungle headed for Chichén Itzá, a Mayan pyramid we’d only seen on television. The blue Bug was zipping along the two-lane highway, all of us jabbering like macaws when we came around a curve and there it was. We were left with words dangling from our mouths. Chichén Itzá rising from the jungle. Brilliant, white, enormous, as impressive as Popo.
How had we not known Chichén Itzá would be…stupendous? Chichén Itzá was as magnificent as the Parthenon, or the Egyptian pyramids, or the Eiffel Tower, or any other world wonder. Here again was a “How come nobody told me?” moment.
Chichén Itzá might have been enough for the whole trip, but we had to drive on before nightfall to a new resort called Cancún, the place where Mayan kings had supposedly wintered, or so the ads wanted us to believe. It was just a few hotels then, with sacks of cement and piles of sand and loose boards lying about, a town so new it had no charm. But the waters, ah! They were the most beautiful beaches I’d ever seen: fine white sand like talc and water more shades of turquoise than I’d ever dreamt.
We stayed only a night and then aimed the Bug toward the Mayan ruins of Tulum, down the coast of Quintana Roo, syllables so lovely to the mouth and ear Joan Didion stole them for her daughter’s name.
Tarantulas skittered across the highway, making their trembly way from one part of the jungle to the other. Father stopped at a place called Akumal so we could rest. It was nothing more than a few thatch-roofed palapas with hammocks strung up and a quiet lagoon rimmed by palm trees.
I was lucky enough to be wearing my swimsuit, or I might not have ventured in. The water was calm and still. I lay down at the shallow lip of water and land where the sand, ridged and soft and firm at the same time, settled into the contours of my back and neck. The water, warm as a body, lapped at my earlobes, and the trees set a dappled light waving the sunlight gently over me as if giving me a cleansing. The waves, slow and calming, murmured things I didn’t need to understand for now. I shut my eyes.
And I felt something that has come and gone in my life at odd times without my asking. A sense of detaching from myself, of sliding out of myself and connecting with everything in the universe. Of being empty so I could fill up with everything.
And I wondered if dying was like this, and if so, why was everyone so afraid of it? All the while the water lap-lapped at my earlobes, saying and saying things softly.
This was only for a moment, maybe a few seconds, a few minutes at most. I was living in dreamtime, like when you’re in love. There’s no such thing as time, just being, unhitched from a body, that tractor trailer. I was fearless finally. Infinite happiness.
“¡SANDRA, YA VÁMONOS!” my father shouted, reeling me back to the world of the living with its minutiae of petty obligations.
“Let’s go,” Father shouted, impatient to get us to the next destination on his list, not knowing how far away I’d just traveled. How could I explain?
It was gone as suddenly as it had come. But it belonged to me, it had been given to me.
I kept it a secret inside the car and inside my heart, as if I’d unearthed an exquisite artifact that might be confiscated at the border. Something ancient yet new, something of great value, like a coin I would have to hide under my tongue.