Falling for the Sun.
 The
pipes of Tulum sang, high and eerie, from the top of the pole.
A celebration to the Mexican sun. One man played the song;
four men sat facing inwards on slats around the top. Ribbons
fluttered from the small stage, dizzy and far away. The stage
turned. The men fell back and soared outwards. Ropes attached
to their feet kept the bright birds from flying away. Round
and round and down and down until, having dared death, they
reached the ground and jumped to a stand. The pipes stopped.
I shivered at the thought of climbing so high and falling
so far.
The crowd clapped; grateful their donations had started the
show. A little train took us along a dusty track to the ruins.
Inside the walls of Tulum, I listened to our guide who denied
that the Spanish had destroyed the carvings. Perhaps, since
Christianity had emptied this holy Mayan city of its priests
and rulers. The Spanish who brought murder also brought life.
Their mixed descendants resisted the diseases that wiped out
more natives than the invaders’ guns. Our guide thanked
the new tourist invaders who created the need for pure water
in a dry land where disease stalked the small stores of the
cenotes.
I wandered after another guide who showed his group photographs
of the Millennium moon beaming through a high hole in the
wall before us. A coincidence of a Mayan system set up to
work each leap year. Twice a year, during the spring and fall
equinox, the rising sun sat behind the hole, a tribute to
the gods of the Maya. We walked on, past the roped off stairs
to the ruined altars.
“The authorities at Chichen Itza may decide to rope
off El Castillo, due to the pressure of the tourists,”
the guide said. “If you visit, you may be among the
last people to climb it.”
I wandered off to the open area leading down to the beach.
Dry dust facing the azure sea that once held Mayan pilgrims
and merchants arriving in dugout canoes. A young woman wearing
only a thong sat browning herself by a bent and gnarled tree.
I looked at her and mourned my belly button. I made this
trip to Mexico as a convalescent. Six weeks before, my hernia
repair had burst and my bowel twisted. The doctors could not
believe that throwing up in February meant more than the flu.
I spent a week with no food or drink; attached to a machine
that sucked out the fluid an intravenous put in me. A week
of floating blue cold, without hunger or thirst.
Surgery untwisted my bowel. A new scar proclaimed my brush
with death while it took away the evidence of my birth. Never
mind, I’m too old and lumpy to lie naked in the sun.
The good heat baked through my Tilley hat and warmed the bones
that had not shed the cold. My husband, John, called me away,
up a hill to overlook the city, then through the broken walls
and onto the tour bus.
* * *
I soared without flying over cliffs and valleys, sand and
rock. My lungs sucked in the alien air and I heard my breath
through the snorkel like the gasps of anaesthetic from the
clear mask in the hospital. My flippers flapped away bright
fish. I drifted over brain coral, bright fans, lace and a
forest of twisted seaweed. Beyond them, the sun shafted down
on a watery desert of sand and stone. A hand touched my shoulder
and pointed. A large barracuda floated in front of a dead,
white coral.
John snapped pictures. I backed away, suddenly afraid of
the barracuda and sharks. I had courted death by entering
the water with the beginning of the blood that signals life.
A remnant in a body too mended and aged to support it. I flew
away, back to the beach.
* * *
At Chichen Itza, the guide clapped his hands and the invisible
eagle at the top of El Castillo cried. We all clapped our
hands and the eagle shrieked.
“The people at the top of the citadel can’t hear
the eagle only we can” the guide said.
We had just missed the spring equinox, when the setting sun
helped the snake, Kukulcan, descend from the top of the pyramid.
Our group moved onto the ball court where before the Spanish
came, the head priest once stood on an open high ledge and
watched an endless game with a flying ball. The leader of
the winners lost his head in a shower of blood but gained
eternal honour and life in a mound of skulls.
John and I walked to the sacrificial cenote. Just before
arriving at Chichen Itza, I had floated in pure drinking water,
over crowds of tiny silver and black fish in another sinkhole.
Sound echoed around the high grey walls and green vines fell
from the hole in the roof. Swallows dipped and soared in the
cool air. Scum covered this cenote and a coke can bobbed on
the far side. Here victims had fallen like broken birds, into
the deep.
On the way back to the centre of Chichen Itza, we came across
a small Chac Mool, the god of rain, who rested alone in the
jungle and waited for blood and death to be placed on his
stomach. He carried the sacrifices to the sun. No one had
mentioned that the Mayans sacrificed children. The size made
the use obvious. We hurried on.
John and I stared at the steep climb to see heaven at the
top of El Castillo. A sign at the bottom of the monument told
us that people afraid of heights shouldn’t climb the
stairs. Instead of the safety barriers that Canadians would
have put around the top of El Castillo, ruining it forever,
the Mexicans warned us and took no responsibility for our
actions.
Both of us were afraid of heights, but the guide had said
that this could be the last time anyone was allowed to climb
to the top. With all the places to go in the world, we would
never return and the opportunity would vanish forever.
I had faced a slow death from disbelief and dehydration.
The bowel cancer that killed my father and grandmother had
missed me. This time. I would climb those stairs.
I fell down on my hands and knees, looking straight at the
stairs, not left or right. We climbed straight up. Up stairs
that were built for a smaller people living one step beyond
the use of ladders.
We reached the top, a small crumbling ledge. John stood up
and inched away. I rose and made the mistake of looking around.
The stairs had disappeared. I stood on the edge. Only the
air separated me from the ground far away below.
Dozens of people squeezed over the ledge. They pushed by
me and I felt like falling. I reached out, stumbled to the
doorway of the copula and froze. I could not move. I would
never get down.
A helicopter could lift me off, but I would dangle on a rope,
a statue in the air, unable to climb into the machine. Would
our tour guide lift me down or encourage me? Or would I be
left here to wait for Kukulcan, dehydrated and disbelieving,
a sacrifice to the sun. People would point to me as the answer
to the warning not to climb if afraid of heights.
I stepped backwards into the dark and walked inside the copula.
A better way down must exist. I turned a corner and the faint
light from the next doorway showed a gaping, broken grate.
Was it better to fall in darkness or in light?
I inched around the hole and followed the light. I peeked
out the next opening. Rocks rubbled down to packed earth and
a few dry scraggly trees. A mountain climber could descend
on this side but not me. I eased my way back to the first
doorway.
Outside, a laughing boy sat on a corner of the ledge and
dangled his legs into space. Behind him, John stood plastered
to the wall and viewed the distant souvenir market through
his camera lens. His phobia of a bad picture overcame his
shaking fear.
A young woman squeezed in front of him. “Is my hair
a mess?” she asked.
“No.” He stared at her, appearance the last thing
on his mind.
John snapped a few pictures of the distance, not the dizzying
dust below. He edged his way to the rope that a person could
cling onto on the way down. He clutched onto the rope, lowered
himself onto his bottom and looked out at the world. He bumped
down, stair by stair, as recommended by the tour guide. Two
women bumped down beside him.
I clung to the doorway and watched him fly down, away from
me. I couldn’t put my bottom on that edge and look at
the high world. I would faint and tumble.
I thought of the panorama in the museum. A whole Mexican
village going about their daily business: The barber, the
grocer, a woman with her basket, the children, the priest,
the mayor. Every one of them a skeleton representing the life
of the dead and created for the Day of the Dead. A new display
would show El Castillo with crawling skeletons, bones-dangling
skeletons, hair-tossed skeletons and falling, tumbling skeletons.
At the top, a big-boned skeleton would cling to the stone
doorway.
I remembered the flying men of Tulum. They faced inwards
and looked away from the high world. I decided to return the
way I came up, never mind that the tour guide said our thighs
could hurt from the exertion.
 I
lowered onto my hands and knees and crawled across the ledge
to the stairs. One foot leaned away from the ledge, out into
the air. I sucked in my breath. My foot struck a stair. My
leg eased against the stone to make sure it was the first
stair down. I crawled backwards over the ledge, each limb
heavy as rock, and began to creep down. I stared straight
at the steps, ignoring my peripheral vision.
“That woman’s so in the way,” a tourist
said.
I ignored her and lumbered down. They moved out of my way.
I caught a glance out the corner of my eye of dry earth and
hot sky and tiny trees. I scrunched myself still. I was a
cat at the top of a tree that waited for the fire department.
I licked my cracked lips. A cat who knew all the time how
to get down.
Arm, leg, arm, leg. I crawled down; a fledgling tumble-flying
from the nest. I passed my husband who, fear gone, threw out
his arms and waved.
“Am I low enough to turn around?” I asked.
“Yes,” the women with him cried.
I half-turned. I wasn’t low enough or brave enough.
At five steps from the bottom, I turned again. The world sat
in its proper place. I bumped down the rest of the way.
One of the women and I slapped our hands in a high five.
The eagle called from the cupola, but only we heard it. The
women took pictures of John and I and we took pictures of
them. The brave souls who sailed down the stairs in the hot
sun.
The next day, John and I piled on our sun block and rode
a catamaran to a reef. The boat rode the sea like a dining
table. John avoided the sea sickness of a small boat. I nursed
sore legs. We stopped a few hundred metres from the shore.
The seamen opened up a bright, giant parasail. A sailor sat
on the small cloth swing below the billowing kite. The parasail
carried him up and up, high in the hot sun sky. He jumped
and fell into the sea.
“Who would like to parasail?” the sailor asked.
I was not afraid, but my scar was too new to risk a belly
flop. John smiled. He placed himself on the small cloth swing
and the wind lifted the colourful sail. He flew up, back and
forth, side to side, around the back of the boat. High up,
flying away, climbing high. Falling down, splashing into the
sunshine sea.
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