Since arriving at San Christobal I´ve had the feeling of returning to my home in a dream.
I was in Chiapas from January 1997 to May 1997 (see ´Jah DEP: True Possession of Place in the Time of the Connecticut Indian Casinos´ at www.libbyhome.blogspot.com ) I spent a good deal of time here. But spent most of that time in the lowlands near Palenque where the newspaper news was then happening.
Since I never got paid by The New York Times while I was working for them in Chiapas I survived by taking backpackers to Mayan Ruins and back and forth from Palenque to San Cristobal. When I took backpackers to San Cristobal, I took them to the rooftop of Duena Maria´s. The rooms there were basic, cheap and they all had million dollar views of the city and the mountains.
When I arrived this time I immediately went to Duena Maria´s.
But it wasn´t there.
I asked the neighbors, was directed to the Posada del Centro, found a new and improved Duena Maria´s, immediately realized I had seen the place in my dreams.
I´ve become re-acquainted with past acquaintances.
I´ve mentioned before that while San Cristobal is exotic, beautiful, cosmopolitan - there is an other side that is dark, medieval. There´s the feeling of the lurking possibility that you could turn a corner and come face-to-face with Senor Diablo.
This happened to me in 1997.
At that time the chief of the city´s underworld was a tall Yacqui Indian who was a formidable, fierce satanic presence - made even more formidable by his periodic cocaine dementias. One night an Argentine friend - a still physically beautiful woman in spite of a strange, disfiguring, almost leprosy-like skin disease - and myself became entangled in his cocaine dementia.
In his dementia he felt we were hexing him, somehow cursing him, going in the face of his power, somehow trying to take him down.
He couldn´t have this.
As I was leaving the night club that was the place at that time, I was forced into a cab by the jefe and one of his muchachos. We went to the abandoned plaza of Santo Domingo.
I had no illusions about what was going to happen. If I was lucky I would be beaten to within an inch of my life.
When we got out of the cab the jefe began explaining why I was judged and condemned. With the power of one who has nothing to lose I reached up and grabbed his head, pulled it down and locked eyes with him.
I plunged into depths of madness. But I held with it - didn´t look away. And when I came to the bottom of IT - I explained without words that I meant no harm, no disrespect. That I was a stranger in a strange land who had been misunderstood.
The muchacho was startled by my move, confused that the jefe had not resisted. But then he pulled me away and started to go at me.
The jefe stopped him. They both walked away.
I saw him again. He is much diminished in weight, mass, presence, life-force. He asked me for a peso to use the public toilets.
When all gathered on Sunday, January 1 for the coming of Marcos, everyone I had become re-acquainted with or newly acquainted with - was there. When I saw him again I still gave him the respect of a former jefe. As I was wishing him a felice nuevo ano - the new jefe - a big, very European-looking Mexicano - gave him a swift, hard, humiliating kick in the ass.
He skulked away.
I rediscovered a nearby fruit market. There is a new store on the street selling cheese and other milk products produced by Mayan Campasinos. There are these bollas - ice cream like things encased in plastic, whose corners you have to bite off to get to them. They cost one one-and-a-half pesos.
I ate a chocolate one. It was delicious.
I ate a strawberry one. It was delicious.
I ate a yoghurt one. It was way too much. It was very rich in lactose. For 24-hours it was like having cholera.
Afterwards, I have this shivery feeling of lightness of being - a whole new magnitude of IT. It persists, slightly, as I write this on the rooftop looking north to the pine-covered mountains.