Extra Innings (23 page)

I liked to imagine that my computer, and millions of others, had contracted a fatal illness, a deadly virus for which there was no cure. If the virus was catching, it might have infected elaborately programmed toaster ovens, keyboard touch telephones and their answering machines, five-disk CD players, and preset VCRs, all of which I have still to master.

With impunity, should all this happen, I will go back happily to making toast in the oven, getting my party on the telephone by jiggling the handle and summoning up a human voice, playing my old, still serviceable 78-rpm records with a reed needle on a wind-up Victrola, and, with a flourish, writing with a quill pen.

‘Toute heure blesse l'homme, la domain letal.' ‘Every hour wounds a man; the last one kills.' I try to find the source of this aphorism, without success.

Sybil has returned from ‘doing' a New York book fair. She wanted to stay within a short distance of the Greenwich Village school where the fair is held, so she took Helen Yglesias's advice and reserved a room at the Markle Residence on West 13th Street.

It turned out to be a wonderful choice, reminiscent of those old-time residences that used to be common in the city, a place for single young women or older women to reside, protected from the lascivious approaches of urban gentlemen. This one is for senior citizens, young businesswomen, and graduate and undergraduate students. It is possible to live here permanently, with two meals a day, for a very moderate sum, or, on occasion, to have a room with meals as a transient. No drugs or alcohol are permitted, on pain of eviction, and no gentlemen visitors are allowed in the rooms.

Sybil returned from her two-night stay somewhat chastened.

It seems to have happened the first morning when she came down to a sumptuous breakfast feast. ‘Everything you can think of that might be offered at that meal,' she said. She filled her plate, took her tray to a table in the corner of the room, and settled down with the fresh
New York Times
she had gone out of the residence to buy. She said she felt in a fine mood, privileged to be able to read the paper the morning it was published instead of having the usual Sargentville delay.

Still gloating about her triumph over distance and late delivery, she was tapped on the shoulder. A waitress said: ‘I'm sorry, but newspaper reading at breakfast is not permitted.' Without asking the reason, Sybil hastily, guiltily, stowed the offending paper under her chair and continued to eat her enormous, solitary breakfast.

We thought about this stern injunction and decided it must have had to do with the threat of newsprint to the white tablecloth. But this did not seem to console her. She said she felt like a freshman early in her first semester at college.

‘I flunked breakfast,' she said.

Baby Doe Tabor: Sandy Kirschenbaum, my friend who founded and edited
Fine Print
(now, sadly, no longer being published), is in Leadville, Colorado, for a conference. She sends me a postcard about the legendary lady, the same one who is the heroine of the opera
The Legend of Baby Doe
. There is a pouting, golden-curly-haired picture of her, clearly a most beautiful woman, who closely resembles the singer Madonna.

The story on the face of the card is this:

Baby Doe had married and divorced many times by the time she was twenty-five. She met a Colorado silver baron named Horace Tabor, twenty-four years her senior. He divorced his wife and married Baby Doe, who was considered a ‘gold-digger,' creating a great scandal in Leadville and Washington, D.C., where they lived. Scorned by society, they nonetheless lived an extravagant and happy life with each other, until Horace's fortunes were wiped out in the Silver Panic of 1893.

To everyone's amazement, Baby Doe stood by her ruined husband and sold her lavish jewels to pay his debts. They had two daughters. Six years later he died, and it was said that all he had to leave her was the worthless Matchless mine in Leadville. Legend has it that on his deathbed he made her promise to hold on to it at all costs. Fact was,
True Confessions
magazine fabricated that detail.

But fact again: After his death, Baby Doe went to live in the manager's shack at the mine, and stayed there for thirty-five years, living in rags as a recluse. The children grew up and ran away as soon as they could. One of them was scalded to death in the red-light district of Chicago at the age of thirty-five. Baby Doe stayed at the mine until her death in 1935.

She had become a poverty-stricken ‘hag,' the story goes. Hers is a classic tale of rags to riches to rags, from poverty to great heights and then into the lowest depths, a role Lillian Gish (I remember
Greed
in the silent days) might have played. Sandy thinks it would make a wonderful movie. We ought to write the script and persuade Madonna to play Baby Doe.

Mexico, for two weeks: Last year I did not visit the Yucatán ruins and the Kailuum campgrounds because Sybil was unwilling to make the trip, and I was unwilling to make the trip without her. This year, once again, she hesitates to go. Her reasons are various. Primarily, she distrusts the food, having once been ill there, and later having witnessed the long and miserable case of hepatitis that our friend Tori Hill brought back from the campground.

Ted Nowick, Bob Taylor, and I meet in Washington. Sybil drives us to Dulles Airport, says goodbye with no regret, clearly, and heads back to her beloved city. The plane is full of snowbirds, as they are termed with some derision in central Maine, where leaving the state for the South even for a short time in the winter is regarded as an act of moral weakness.

Three hours later we are in the shiny, refurbished, much-expanded Cancún airport. We obtain our rented car and head inland toward Chichén Itzá, determined to avoid at all costs the ugly and crowded Miami-on-the-Caribbean that Cancún has become. It is pleasant to step out of the Hertz office into the warm, dry, summer air of peninsular Mexico, after the raw winter air we have left behind. It is the 19th of March.

We plan to spend the night in the little city of Valladolid, close to Chichen. One of the few hotels in this bustling town has two rooms reserved for us, but when we arrive only one is ‘ready,' so we three camp in it, tired from the long day of flying and driving. I am undone by the usual hassles of travel: early rising, rush for the plane, inedible food, and arrival at a place unprepared to receive us. It is a two-hundred-year-old hotel, or at least it is that old in parts. The newer additions have unartfully been made to resemble the old arches and stones. In Mexico I have learned a lesson that one should not ever look closely at what pretends to be original. (‘Authentic reproduction'?)

In the early evening we walk about the town plaza to find the restaurant recommended to us as the best. Ted spots a dark, dirt-floored shop inhabited by a sandal-maker. His products have an elaborate name—
alpargatas en campañas
—and he says he can have them, made to order for Ted's special needs, by tomorrow. They are interesting sandals: the straps are of very heavy leather and the soles are thick and unbending, made of pieces of rubber car tire. I wonder if they will be comfortable.

We are all very hungry, but it is so early that we are the only customers at the restaurant. It cannot be said that we are dining in solitary splendor, because we elect to sit at the front of the place, which is open to the busiest street in Valladolid. There is no emission control in Mexico, and most of the vehicles on the streets are old. We are at the mercy of the loud noises of very decrepit cars and their exhaust. But the food is good.

It is still early, so we sit in the plaza to watch the evening social life. Near us is a gathering of high school boys in their brown uniforms, their books in bags on their backs, acting foolishly for the high school girls clustered across the path. The boys laugh among themselves, their eyes always on the girls. Old men in spanking-clean, long white shirts—called
guayaberas
—and heavy black serge trousers (despite the heat) form small circles farther down the walk, their dark, expressive faces turned to each other in the privacy of their talk, nodding and smiling to each other. Ladies in their
huipils
, white embroidered dresses with wide bands of petticoat showing beneath, pull along little children in plastic sandals, talking as they walk. The square is a hive of conversation. Groups move about but never seem to intercept each other. Ted, Bob, and I are the only ones sitting still, watching, learning.…

Next morning I wake at six and go out to explore the early-day life of the plaza. I sit in an open-air restaurant, drink
café con leché
, and eat a sweet roll. I watch men at the tables around me eat huge breakfasts and, when pickup trucks stop in front, pile into the open flat beds at the back, ten workers to a truck, more than appears safe to me.

A stream of tricycles with oversized wheels come by, pedaled by young men, their wives riding in little rear cars, their children astride the single front wheel. The fathers' white shirts and the mothers' white dresses gleam in the sunlight. Little kindergarten-aged
niños
walk through the café, now carrying their book bags, their straight black hair cut squarely around their broad little heads. The girls come a little later, holding hands, their long black hair and coal-black eyes shining.

My breakfast over, I go back to the hotel to pack for the short trip to Chichén Itzá.

But it turns out to take most of the day, because we elect to make two good detours. Bob sees a photograph in a
National Geographic
of the beautiful, vast Dzitnup cenote (well). Cenotes and underground springs that feed wells have for centuries been essential to Mayan life, since there are no surface waters. We pay our pesos and make the long climb down the winding, steep, damp stone steps, I clinging both to the rope provided and Ted's arm. We are in the Mayan version of a Gothic cathedral, at the bottom of which are the pure blue-green waters of the well. Stalactites of tree roots hang from the ceiling, almost reaching the water, and slim black fish swim near the edge of the water. The silence is absolute, broken only by the tiny flicker of their tails. We are alone, fortunately, for half an hour. The old mysteries, the worshipful spirit of long-gone Mayans who threw jade objects (and, it is claimed, human sacrifices) into these waters to propitiate the rain god Chac-mool, seem to be with us.

We climb back up the hazardous way. In the parking lot there is another car, full of Americans carrying bathing suits. They have come to swim in the holy waters. I feel resentful at their lack of reverence and, at the same time, regretful that I did not know this was permitted.

Then, on the map, we see a black triangle signifying a ruin on the way to Chichén. We cannot find the road to it, so we stop in a small village to ask a workman if he knows where Balankanche is. He grins, the wide, gracious Mayan smile, and says yes, he will lead us there. How far? Oh, not far, about half a kilometer. Okay, we'll go. He is joined by a friend who has been working on a building with him.

We start out on a broad plain made of red dirt with outcroppings of limestone. It narrows to a footpath and then disappears into a tangle of unmarked underbrush and thorned brambles. We climb steadily. I hold Ted's arm, stopping often to catch my breath. After more than an hour of hard climbing, we arrive at what appears to be the top of the hill, although it is so overgrown that I cannot be sure. Here and there in the brush we see small grey stones; nowhere is there evidence of a structure.

Sí
, Pedro says, there was more here before, but gringos came in a big car and took away some carved stones to give to the
museo
. They said they would return to start uncovering the mound, but never did. I wonder: Did the historic stones, loaded into the trunk of the gringo's Lincoln Continental, end up in an antique shop in Manhattan? Who knows?

We climb back down, rather more easily. Bob claims he was able to sense a structure up there, but I am less sure. Pedro tells us the story of a man who built a cabin at the top and then was driven off the mountain by the sound of a woman crying every night. I am driven off by bad scratches from the rough foliage, a myriad of mosquitoes, and thirst. We pass Pedro's house, a Mayan
choza
, the one-room structure made of slender wooden poles holding aloft a thatched roof. Inside we can see hammocks, some stools, a table. His wife is at the doorless entry, and two stalwart boys. They wave to us. We go on to Pedro's store, which he opens for us, and where, from his freezer, we buy Coca-Colas. I am so parched I hardly stop to breathe as I drink.

On the drive to Chichén, Ted devises a scenario: The two gentle Mayans observe our eagerness to find ruins and note our generosity at the end of the trek. Their wives are equally observant. They say to their husbands: See how these strange gringos come here, and pay, to see these, ah, holy places, these stones and jungle. We should build a road, clear the hill, put up some stones, one upon another, charge three thousand pesos for entrance, sell food and drink at the exit, straw hats and replicas of the Chac at the entrance.… We return a few years from now, and are struck with terrible guilt for having ruined yet another ‘undeveloped' site.

On the other hand, I confess to having written a different scenario as we climbed the hill: The Mayans are weary of Americans interrupting the serenity of Balankanche. They will lead us farther and farther into the deep brush, separate us, and then strike us down. In this way, they will gain far more cash than the pittance we have agreed to pay them for conducting us to the ruin, in addition to suitcases crammed with useful objects and clothes, watches, rings, jewelry, and all the parts and tires of our rented car. They will drag our carcasses and the stripped-down body of the car into the far reaches of the dense scrub and thicket where no one has been for centuries, and no one will ever go again.

No one knows we have made this detour, far from the direct road between Valladolid and Chichén Itzá. So this foolish, romantic jaunt into the wilds of Yucatán will end in the unsolved mystery of our disappearance.