Signs of Grace

by Thomas Sandor

Sometimes even in a place where everything is supposed to be equally fresh and new, a single item can jump out, catch your eye and send you captivated down a series of clues, questions and possible answers, like a young naturalist pursuing a butterfly, or in this case,

A PIECE OF CLOTH

The tiny girl child, dwarfed by the citizens and tourists, in the main plaza of Antigua, was intently studying every eye, searching for contact with her next customer. She was one of twenty or more mountain tribes’ women, most with trade goods or infants slung to their backs and chests, in the brilliantly decorated shawls they wore. Like their long wrap-around skirts, these shawls were woven in a riot of colorful, Guatemalan patterns, so brightly chaotic they overwhelmed the background color of the fabric itself. Distinct from the rest of Central America’s largely mestizo population and with their culture still somewhat intact, these remnants of a once great Mayan empire, had somehow survived their collision with European conquest and plagues. Echoing the movement of the tectonic plates in this volcanically active, transcontinental part of the Earth’s crust, the European culture had slammed into the Central American culture, pushing the Mayan from the coastal plains, up into the mountains to the northwest. A grinding process, this resulted in a pyroclastic explosion of color throughout those highlands. Now, in order to restore their nation’s wealth and vitality, these Mayan remnants were flowing back through the mountain valleys, into the tourist-friendly, Spanish built towns, bringing in from the rich volcanic soils, a harvest of produce whose colors of pineapple, papaya, melon, cane and ripe coffee bean, decorated the everyday cloth they wove.

The plaza, about 100 yards square, was bestrewn with scores of flowering plants, a fountain, trees, park benches and surrounded on three sides by large, beautiful colonial buildings and a cathedral. The Mayan women, jaguar-like in their colorful dress, blended into, as naturally as they stood apart from, the plaza’s flora. This was a slightly decaying, photographer’s paradise, which kept my wife busy tracing ever widening circles around my slowly advancing position, snapping pictures as she went, of the architecture: that created by God, as well as man.

The plaza, at one time new and starkly bare, had been used for military drill and formation, directed by the smartly dressed, aristocratic, Spanish officers, who had built it and many others, after destroying the original, indigenous centers of culture – a culture they had dismissed as inferior to their own. Today, however, instead of the sounds of horses’ hooves, stomping boots, and the slap and click of bare hands on muzzle loading rifles, all timed to the beat of drum and bugle, I heard the wafting tones of a marimba from the far edge of this tree lined square. As I approached, the music sounded like thumps on hollow, hardwood logs, ripe melons and gourds. The small cloth-covered hammers held by three musicians, bounced off the hardwood tone plates, atop this ornately carved wooden instrument, echoing sound vibrations through hollow, wooden cylinders hung beneath. Like goats jumping from one rock outcropping to another, the hammer hooves held by six flashing hands, jumped up and down the three levels of the marimba’s hardwood plates, chasing each other across high notes and low notes, creating a simple infectious melody. It was a perfect background rhythm for the lyrical bustle of the plaza’s human commerce.

I stopped an older girl, in the center of the plaza, and asked her about the hand-woven look of her colorful skirt and shawl, and if she had any actual, hand-woven cloth, not the foot loom or machine woven types which made up most of what was seen here. I bought a piece even though I knew it wasn’t what I was looking for. I would have to go outside of the main plaza, away from the tourists, who like myself, were mostly content to buy anything. I was searching for a clue to solve a mystery, which was beginning to consume my imagination. Why did these Mayans remind me so much of the Mountainard tribes I had lived with four decades ago in the central highlands of Vietnam? Was it wishful thinking, some kind of survivor’s guilt, for not being able to stop a possible impending tragedy? Or was there something else going on here, something I couldn’t quite fathom? The pure-blood Mayan, I had seen in a copy of National Geographic earlier that morning, had the epicanthic fold, on the medial corner of his eyes, signaling his Asian ancestry. Could these Mayans be some lost tribe of a once united Southeast Asian people?

The tiny Mayan girl child, looking too small to be out of her mother’s sight, and who had seen me buy from the older girl, followed my wife and I out of the plaza and down the narrow cobblestone streets, hawking persistently as I pushed ahead. She stood barely mid-thigh high to me, and had a mouth like a longshoreman.

“Mister, you buy this from me, you rich, you can buy!”

“I don’t know – that cloth looks machine woven to me, No Gracias.”

“You lie mister – my mother made this with her own hands. See.”

“Oh yea, maybe on a machine,” I accused.

“You lie! You lie! Maybe you buy necklace for your wife, yes?”

“Look! Over there,” I pointed. “Your sister has three customers. Go help her!”

“She not my sister, you lie.”

My first mistake was to make eye contact; my second was conversation. I knew I had to ignore her completely, to be free of this full-court press, which would have embarrassed the Laker’s Derek Fisher, but these Mayan mountain girls made me curious, the way they dressed so similar to the mountain tribeswomen of Vietnam. The way the contentment shown on the faces of the elderly grandmothers seemed somehow eerily familiar. Familiar also was the way a mother’s eyes lit up when I asked to see an infant slung close to a breast, by the bright shawl that she wore. I would be shown an actual hand loom by the older Mayan woman, I was later to meet that day; this hand loom was almost identical to a Southeast Asia counterpart I had seen beside a Mountainard village hootch four decades earlier. Was this all a coincidence, a case of parallel evolution, or something else? Was there some real connection between these two peoples, buried deep within a prehistoric past as old as the rain forests that protected them on opposite sides of the globe?

There were just too many coincidences here: the way the women folded the large continuous circle of cloth back onto itself cinching it with a cloth belt about the waist, the way the males had largely abandoned the cloth with its clan-distinct woven colors for North American pants and t-shirts, even the way the women would hold open the arm’s width diameter of cloth around one who needed privacy while she relieved herself out in the fields or in the hills. The most glaring difference with these Mayans, of course was in the eruption of colors typical of the Mayan cloth, jarring yet somehow harmonious, as compared to the conservative black field with modest stripes of color used in the cloth woven by indigenous Southeast Asian tribes. But wasn’t this overflow of chaotic color appropriate to a part of the world where the Pacific and Cocos Plates were crushing tectonically into the Caribbean Plate, pushing up mountain ranges pregnant with red hot magma flowing from perfectly conical volcanoes, which burst from verdant, yellow sun washed, green rainforests. The volcanoes of Southeast Asia, like Dragon Mountain, were scores of millions of years past their prime and had long since ceased sending their spirit into the atmosphere and across the plateaus. Their strong but muted presence replicated itself in the quiet integrity of Mountainard weavings.

Had the first ancestors of these Mayans come across the Pacific on some huge floating snag? Had they somehow dispatched their captors, after being enslaved by some Neolithic seamen, and then drifted in their newly commandeered boat, across the huge Pacific Ocean on the warm equatorial counter current that leads directly from the Philippines to the Central American Isthmus? Were they hastened by a strong north wind, which this one time only, had overcome the Mid Pacific Doldrums, to deliver them, to new coastal plains, enriched by river flushed, volcanic highlands?

The second glaring difference was what came out of the mouths of some of these Mayan girls. It was a complete contrast to the modest and demure speech of their Asian cousins, rivaling the contrast in colors, of their cloth weavings. After two blocks of persistent hawking and “No gracias,” my wife and I turned to face our tiny nemesis, but my wife’s thirty-four years of dealing with Los Angeles high school juvenile delinquents, which she had condensed into one laser-like stare of disapproval and rebuke, could not even make a dent in this one who had made herself at home on these streets.

“Excuse me, I’m talking to your husband,” the tiny girl tossed matter-of-factly.

So, with my hands on my hips, I stared down at her sternly and scolded, “Donde esta su madre?”

“I don’t have any mother!” she shot back defiantly into my eyes, forgetting the one who had woven cloth with her own bare hands. So I ignored her completely, no eye contact, no response, nothing.

As she reached up with tiny asking fingers, stroking the ample hair on my forearm, I thought of the old man of the forest we had been riveted by two days earlier. He was stationed alongside the Mangrove River, amidst the egrets, the caymans, and the black hawk, bragging overhead, with a fresh caught fish in his talons. The hair on the old man’s forearms was thicker than mine, and repeated across his legs, back, chest and stomach. His huge black eyes were shining amidst his leathery black face and his chin was dripping of fruit pulp and juice, as he sat upright in a mango tree. Belayed by a prehensile tail, wrapped around a branch, he had reached out to the very ends of slender twigs, for orb after orb of red and green fruits, which he stuffed into his mouth one after another. How many people had he seen coming and going, through his forest, these past twenty thousand years? How many human cultures had risen and fallen, how much human potential had been lost or realized?

I thought of the Slum Dog Millionaire, whose movie we had seen aboard ship the previous night. Would these Mayan girls, with their back-sass and street smarts, be like the beggars, thieves, and con artists of Mumbai, made motherless by war, orphaned, organized and sent out into the towns and cities, by crime syndicates? Would they live off the charity, gullibility or moral depravity of whoever they could find? Was this mid-thigh high girl, with her over the top persistence, destined to become some pimp’s property? Or would she somehow, through family support, be able to hang onto the best of her traditional culture, while merging with the demands of a modern world? Surely she didn’t talk this way at home, to her family, if she indeed had a family.

After having ignored away our tiny stalker, and after having discovered the old Mayan weaver, in the back of an off-plaza Mercadito, who had shown me how to tell the difference between hand, foot loom, and machine woven cloth, who had sold me a sample, and asked me questions about those other mountain tribes people, seven thousand miles away; we retraced our way back. As we reentered the main plaza, there she was again, the tiny Mayan tourist hawk, or was it her twin sister or another holding up a brilliantly decorated tote bag, exploding with embroidered Mayan motifs?

“Mister, you buy this. Yes?”

“No gracias, it’s probably made in China anyway.”

“No! You made in China! This made Guatemala!” she blasted back at me.

If only we could harness this pride and defiance for the betterment of humanity. And, perhaps we somehow are. The Mountainard have survived continuous wars and advancing immigrations and invaders. These Mayans are surviving as well. Both are becoming a twenty-first century tourist phenomenon. Is this just another cosmic coincidence, or is the convergence of almost extinct indigenous peoples, from the far corners of two or three continents, at this one point in history, a sign to be taken note of?

I remembered another scene from my time in Vietnam, a velvety hanging on the wall of an African American soldier’s billet. It depicted a late-teen Mountainard girl, sitting on a rug, in a much too short, tribal dress, looking straight at the viewer, through the upper halves of her deep slightly downcast eyes – a modern day Pocahontas, but with her indigenous features and hair mixed with the blood traits of Africa.

Was this merely some soldier’s personalized pin-up fantasy, or was it a much deeper yearning for some semblance of the unity and peace, within our human biosphere, which had been promised to us, by God and Gene Rodenberry?

Uhuru, where have you gone?

Copyright 2009, Thomas Sandor.