THE INSURGENCE of CHAN SANTA CRUZ

CHAPTER SEVEN

Two large carreteras rumbled down the road towards Merida on the following morning, raising a dusty cloud that clung to both carreteras and their passengers and cargo. One was loaded with provisions from the hacienda for the New Year's feast... boxes packed with screeching fowl tipping this way and that at the whim of ruts in the road and a young steer, already slaughtered and gutted, which drew an audience of admiring flies. A dozen piglets, bound together by the leg, dangled upside down over the side of the vehicle like a sheaf of bananas. The commotion was constant and, at the rough spots, dreadful.

In the other carretera a dozen of the people squatted and, among these, were Silvestro and Esteban. Talking little, responding to the frequent bumps with only grunts, they rolled cigarettes instead and gazed out at the countryside, dotted with windmills enough to have engaged a battalion of Quijotes. In this arid north, thousands of windmills were employed in pumping water from beneath the limestone.

The journey had been long, beginning before sunrise, but Esteban welcomed the monotony after the adventures of the previous night. He dozed or, alternately, gazed up at the clouds that rolled across the clear blue sky, finding and naming animals until the road grew better and sun grew high and warm, bringing sleep.

He was awakened by the noise with which their entrance into Merida proclaimed itself. Although the city proper was the reserve of the dzulob, a ring of small suburbs contained some free mazehualob... here the cargadores, laborers and roving salesmen of the white city made their homes. Animals and shrieking children dodged the wheels of the old carretera, one of whose occupants purchased two cents' worth of oranges from a boy. Keeping three for himself, he distributed the rest to his companions.

It was a happy band of travelers in the carretera. They were going to earn more money in a day than in a week at Idznacab, even counting the mayordomo's extortions. Esteban sucked at half an orange, took a deep breath of tobacco. Surely this benefit had been awarded by the gods, even by Juan de la Cruz himself, as a foretaste of the paradise awaiting those who served, with faith, the Lord God and his saints. Eternal Heaven... could it be any finer than sweet oranges, tobacco and the smiles of the pretty house-girls who were increasingly evident on the boulevard.

"Look there," cried one, the bitter Diego who never tired of recounting his bad fortune. "That's it... the San Benito Penitentiary! I spent nine months there for drinking on the feast day of the Holy Mother until don Armando paid my fine. That was before the chinos came, and the estates still purchased prisoners. Before I was taken, I was assistant to a printer here who promised to teach me to read and write. Perhaps we'll pass the shop... I'll show you where I worked. That was a fine job, better than clearing brush at Idznacab, although ink spilled on my clothes, and it would not come off, no matter how many times I washed."

Diego sank back in the carretera, the occasion ruined by the painful memory. "I wonder who has my beautiful job now?" he asked.

But except for the unhappy corner of the unhappy man, the sadness drifted past as soon as the carretera turned a corner and the baleful prison... more than three centuries old... disappeared from view. Who could be melancholy among all the noise and wonder of the capital, which Esteban had not seen in three years! A vendor trotted beside the carretera with a turkey in either hand, plucked to the skin alive and screeching blasphemies at the pavement. "Función de gallos hoy!" shouted a proprietor, holding up a cockfight poster at the corner. And amid the hue and cry of Merida's polyglot masses... negroes from Belize and Honduras, chinos, Arab peddlers from Lebanon, their hawklike eyes roving the street for prospective customers, Spanish devils and Englanders in their khaki and moustaches and throngs of the people, pretty women, armless beggars, legless beggars, urchins, travelers from all points of the compass... walked a Roman Catholic padre eating watermelon, spitting seeds sideways into the noise, smells and the surprise.

"Listen muchachos," called out the mayordomo from the seat he shared with the driver at the front of the carretera. By don Armando's boot was a bottle of aguardiente, nearly empty, and the mayordomo was in an expansive mood. "We're early. So, we'll make a little detour, no, to the plaza and the cathedral. There you can make your prayers, you miserable bastards and confess, in advance, whatever sins you may be planning here. For, as you see, this is the Devil's own city and every variety of temptation may be had. For a price..." he added with a tipsy giggle. "Guard yourselves muchachos, be wary of the devil and his wiles." And roaring with laughter, Armando emptied the remainder of the bottle to his lips and let it fall into the street.

"They have changed the streets again," said sad Diego from the penitentiary. "When I was here we called them by wonderful names, Street of the Elephant, Flamingo see..." he declared, pointing to an engraving of a crone with goggles on her hooked nose carved into a corner building, "that was the street of the Old Woman. Since the Mexicans came, everything has been given numbers."

"Look, there's the plaza!" cried another, interrupting.

Indeed the carretera, with its motley cargo of the people, and its brother, packed with shrieking birds and howling pigs and flies, turned onto the southern boulevard in sight of the plaza, the cathedral and the President's palace and venerable Montejo home. This latter, built in 1541 for don Francisco Montejo, conqueror of all Yucatan had come into the possession of the Peon family, the wealthiest of all Merida. Above the door a statue of the conqueror was mounted with a sword in his right hand and three severed heads of the people, held by their topknots in his left.

Perpendicular to this, to the east, was the cathedral.

Out of the carretera stumbled the people, and immediately they tumbled to the pavement, legs slow to stand after so many hours' journey. With don Armando's laughter urging them forward, they half stumbled, half crawled through the horde of vendors and worshippers who crowded the entrance to the house of God, offering candles, pungent copal incense, images of saints.

Esteban paused before an old woman with candles. He untied his shirt, into which he had placed a few coins in anticipation of the opportunity to make some purchases, an enterprise which, if detected by the mayordomo, would reap him a bountiful harvest of arrobas. With some embarrassment, he asked for a candle ambient to the saint of the day of January fifteenth, the patron of his marriage.

The shrunken brown face of the vendor softened into a smile. "Ah," she said, "you mean San Pablo de Palmas."

"Thank you," said Esteban.

When he returned from his offering, the mayordomo was jousting with a woman selling plaster images of the Virgin. Esteban climbed into the carretera unseen. "Did you find your saint?" Silvestro asked. "Good." He bent sideways, out of the mayordomo's view and lifted his shirt over the top of his trousers to reveal a pouch of British candy.

"Don Armando will be furious," Esteban nagged.

Silvestro waived the prospect off. "He'll never know, so how can be furious? By the time that he sobers up it will be gone. The secrets of the soul and stomach," he declared, "are equally beyond the comprehension of Armando. You just wait!"

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