...but the village wants to give me something other than products to buy, something that I can't use. So I just sit there, writing postcards that are not sincere and are not funny, trying to make something happen in the mind, something revealing, shivering at the thought of being back soon to the life I had before (isn't travelling life? yes-- and no), in the house that isn't mine and to a job that isn't going to be mine. What a folly, what a waste, to stretch the rope so, and still being attached to it. I kill a small fly with a quick slap. The insect's body is smeared across the palm of my hands, bits of it are trapped between my fingers. I don't feel nothing, no sense of success or relief. If only they stopped to play the music and we could go down to the lake and look at the stars and talk about life and other stronzate without the need of the booze, the radios, the yelling laughs of the lost moments [probably in San Pedro, Atitlan]

Outside goes on the happy and sad music of the band hired by the local association of vendors. In front of the stage, only the drunks dare to dance, while a large platoon of people by the beautiful, colorful clothes stands in silence, looking and listening. Everyone is shy, and also, the mexican music playing is obviously not their music. The town, voided of tourists (us two are the sole representatives of the category) appears finally as a shred of truth after all the set-up stages for gringos, but the truth is nothing special. Not that special places really exist. They should not be considered as such, probably, and the only decent question is always: what I am doing here? For many the answer seems always to be, I am here to drink cheap, to take pictures, to buy stuff. I don't think I am different from anyone else. I am a stranger, and I don't have a good reason to be here, no special keys in my pockets. Because the force of tourism is such that you cannot pretend not to be one.
The town around the music and the market, dirty and old and vexed by cars, ugly restaurants, ice cream place, hardware store, and two white churches on the opposite sides of the square, around the market stretch on the pavement of the square, around the forever dried fountain. Everything is obvious like in any other country of the world, like in Puglia, or in Somalia, what is that, being people? [in Chichicastenago]

When the night falls the faces become confused, the cars in the streets impel the passersby with imperious honking and the little kids disappear behind the corners of the streets. My wet clothes are wavering up on the roof of the hotel in the cold night wind, and I can see my blue pants slapping in the dark night, glowing orange from every side. What I learned from this trip? What questions! nothing, nothing of course [in Copan]

It's precisely the disappointing stories, which have no proper ending and therefore no proper meaning, that sound true to life.

-- Max Frisch

The Hotel LaCroix in Palenque, Chiapas, is a run-down one storey building whose once beautiful garden is now scattered with trash, and whose once welcoming cozy lobby is now covered by layers of dust, debris fallen from the failing roof. Not that I ever saw it before this day, but just looking through the gates and the garden fence is enough to understand that part of the story. The outside and inside walls of the structure are still marked by martian-red painted-over quotations from books, and in the inside, mysterious colorful paintings of figures from the mayan tradition. The plants in the garden grown wildly, the grass green only in patches. All the rest is lost.

I go around the barrio looking for people who can help me to understand. It is difficult to get enough attention from them today, Sunday, during the futbal match, and many just mumble words keeping their eyes fixed on the TV screens.

As I learn it, the dueño of the hotel LaCroix (el señor LaCroix, possibly) died few years ago (some say four, some say ten) and right after his departure his sons fought over the property, as so often happens. The property is now split between them, and thus unusable, unsellable, abandoned.

The town of Palenque, once a village in the middle of the rain forest, is a horrible place, no doubts about it: grown rapidly in the last forty years out of a handful of cabañas and turned into a collection of modern or semi-modern, cheaply built hotels, restaurants and shops for gringos and for those who live out of tourism, makes the same impression of certain italian cities, especially in the south, whose growth consists of self-built unfinished cement houses that cannot last more than two generations without turning into dust. They have no spirit, no solidity, no character... People inhabit them, occupy them, and crowd them with big cars and loud music and colorful commercial banners without understanding that it is the city itself, its careless presence, the cause of their unhappiness.

The so called colonial cities of Chiapas I visited after Guatemala, before arriving here, in this ugly hot, damp, dusty place, were of rare beauty: San Cristobal de Las Casas, of course, despite all the silly t-shirts and puppets of the subcomandante, where the "alternatives" go to the pub "revolucion" apparently convinced that being in Chiapas itself is some dangerous revolutionary act; even more beautiful, Comitan (where, all right, they stole my cell phone on the road to the Lagos of Montebello): an almost gringos-free town of rich and poor, of sexy women and steep narrow roads going up and downhill, ran by the inevitable wolksvagen beetles.
These cities, rich islands in the middle of the poverty and inequality of the rich state of Chiapas, are proof that if anything, the spanish colonialists, incapable of recognizing the beauty of the pre-hispanic architectures and culture they only wanted to destroy, obviously had an idea of beauty themselves: an idea which was powerful and which was meant to resist across the centuries and resist almost forever-- although nothing does, just like it didn't the idea of beauty and religion they were seeking to destroy.

In Palenque there is nothing of the beauty and character and promise left over by the loathed colonial times: it is instead a perfect example of the confusion and wasteland of modern times, times were humans are no more capable of designing, inventing, or imitating a beautiful town: they cannot vindicate their past in any way, but still they call themselves in way of development, mainly because they can impose their loud cheap pop music to anyone's ears, thanks to their new stereos (and mind you, half of it is cheap pop italian music sung in spanish by hypocrite italian pop stars).

At the core of the town of Palenque, the only decent thing would have been the Hotel La Croix, and probably only for me, here, today: only because I am the only one to know that the Hotel La Croix was so beautifully described by Max Frisch in his masterpiece Homo Faber, and because it was a unpredictable, unique place.

But the hotel is closed. For one night I sleep into another one, a horrible box of cement down the road. In the following morning I go to the ruins, sit on the top of one of the overwhelming temple-pyramids and sleep surrounded by the monkey-bird-chicharras sounds of the awaken forest all around, and later, by the voices of the vendors and the tourists and the guides explaining it all. I long to be back to San Cristobal in the evening, the small old colorful houses and the relative calm of its zocalo. And from there, possibly to get to the beaches somewhere on the pacific coast, for a couple of my last weeks here on this so big continent called America.

A different version of this quite short story has been published on the amazing anthology Userlands edited by Dennis Cooper for Akaschic books, NYC.
Honestly I always hated that version of my story, it came out all wrong because of a series of stupid personal reasons that got in the way, and I always regretted it especially because of all the other amazing Userlands authors that surround it with great pages.
Anyway. What follows here is a version of it I might consider now decent and final, and that I read with defective pronunciation at Bluestockings, NYC on March 22nd 2007.
Some of you reading this might be reminded of an old post on this blog which in fact was the original inspiration both for the first and second version of this very piece.

*

you weird people by corpodibacco

I know that the smile of the grocery girl is because of my mother, her crazy looks, untidy hair, her odd clothes, the strange hat, the jabbering. You all must be weird people, says her smile, putting those useless animals before yourself.
I cave in with my own phony smile. Like I'm not like my mother. Not to be confused with her. Not of the weird people.

Outside the grocery store dogs and people move about in the brown shadows of the trees, and the metal bodies of the parked cars shine dryly, the edges white-hot under the sun.
We move out into the light and I reach for the trunk, squinting, crate of carrots in my hands, warning the old man that the car is a mess, 'cause that's the way my mother keeps it. He says okay and starts to fight his way into it, moving empty bottles around, dried sheets of old newspapers torn to pieces, the snow chain case that will tumble against his feet every time we accelerate, various slabs of dried mud spatter all around the inside, including the seats. As we slam the doors the overloaded ashtray exhales out gray and white particles that flit between our legs.
Dogs share the car, I apologize to him. Would he appreciate it if I started blaming my mother for everything? I wonder. I am willing to. He repeats three times, No problem.

In two minutes we are at the pharmacy, a quiet door gaping out on a narrow lane abandoned in the shade. At the opposite end of the alley the village suddenly disappears, and the curvy hills shine in the distant land before the Italian sea.
The old man and I part ways with a wave and a grumble, but then he calls me from the other side of the road, and he says, the grocery girl, she's my daughter. She's a good girl.
In my paranoia I figure he has a scheme that I should marry her.
The round face of the pharmacist takes its time to scan mine. There's a priest-like morbid aura about it, eyes of repressed sexual desire in the gloomy colors of the store as he hands me back the prescription.

Later I stop by an abandoned lot along the road across the olive groves in the countryside. The landscape is marked by scattered trulli and modern cement angular houses half hidden by the green.
The cats flock over meowing and rubbing themselves against the edges of the low stone walls as I get out of the car. I have detailed instructions about where the cat food has to be dropped. The small bowls and the old aluminum pans, one for each cat, are important. The pecking order is important. My mother is crazy.

Back on the shattered road I think of her, and how it would be if she died. Because she's at the hospital I am entitled to this thought. As the road winds down the hill bordered by more stone walls, further into the land I am not familiar with, I imagine a funeral, words of condolence and affection exchanged, how I wouldn't cry, unable to, maybe later on, and how unsatisfactory the long awaited sense of liberation would be, secret joy for a new life that in the end doesn't come about.
I wonder if the disappointment produced by my imagination makes me a better person or is it that I am just unprepared, that there is no way to be prepared but to imagine, and be disappointed.

As the car jolts against the roots cracking the driveway, the eight dogs rush out of the house barking and howling against the fence to cheer for my approaching smell and figure. The wind is ruffling their fur, scraps of toys and rags are scattered in the yard, their animation is irrational and sweet. All my perceptions are now flattened out to a uniform complacent, absurd lack of criticism, as I mentally go through the returning-home procedures. One bone-shaped biscuit for each of the dogs, in a rigorous hierarchical order. Two biscuits for the biggest one. The oldest barks fiercely and runs across my legs. He knows he comes first.

Hours have gone by when I'm finally done feeding the dogs and the horse and cleaning the stable.
At this point outside it is quiet as inside, only residual puffs of wind are stirring the foliage and shaking the hanging clothes. At moments, there's the crunching noise of the horse chewing on the last bits of carrot scattered in the hay. That's when I feel how after all my mother was right, to come to live this far from everything, here where communities are remote lights out in the dark and being this far and invisible is the safest thing you're left with at the end of the day.

But then some of the dogs are barking from very far out in the field, possibly at a fox. They're too far to be called back. I mentally pray not to find the fox slaughtered in the field the next day, not to have to get the shovel and the black bag and be seen from across the field again, gleaning the fox remains strewn about the meadow, carrying the rolled up formless bag to the dumpster down the hill, carelessly tossing it as if it were no corpse. But the dogs continue to bark, excitedly.

Take the case of Viganella. With the prospect of another winter in the dark -- until the 2 of February -- they found the material and the money and placed a giant mirror to reflect the sun down in the village. Light comes from the wrong direction, but who cares as long as it dries things up a little. The only problem is that the reflected sun light is very limited, and at its peak covers at most the central square of the village, in front of the monument. The houses surrounding the square are lucky, but certainly other villagers must have grumbled. At most they can take a walk to the square to catch some of the light... which is undoubtedly better than having to wait until february anyway. And think how much chit chat this thing can produce down in the village. For generations. That's money well spent.

So what this teaches us? That no matter how dark the winter to come is, with little ingenuity there's always a way to warm up a little? That science and tradition can coexist? It teaches us that Archimedes had a melodramatic way to conceive technology?
To me, it just make me think that I wish I had a giant mirror placed in the right position, so that I could send my limited love to those whom I have turned my back to, or who turned their backs to me.