María - Chance or destiny?
Tony said that "there are a lot of natural beauties that you should talk about in your column". Tony said. And nevertheless Maria keeps appearing in my mind this afternoon.The 24th of December, on entering the town of San Juan Chamula in Chiapas, the spirit moved me. I saw a sidewalk full of seated men wrapped in rough jackets made of black lambs wool and I was afraid. They followed the car with their eyes. In the whole street the crowds of people covered huge green crosses with branches. The car was moving slowly with the windows open, surrounded by 15 or 20 indigenous women, when I felt something fall in my lap. I instantly thought it was an attack. I saw that it was a woven bracelet. I got out of the car and asked the women: "Who threw this, and why?" One of them stepped in front of the others:"I threw it, and it´s a gift." I insisted in paying for it and she refused. She asked my name and said she was Maria. I looked closely at her: she was a very sweet girl. With a smile like a river and long braids. I was moved by the view. The mysterious temple of Chamula behind, with all the darkness it emanated, and in front of me her, Maria: the light. With all of Mexico in her skin, and in her melancholia. All of the time in Chamula, she was before my eyes.
Some time after returning to Cancun I remembered that I hadn´t taken my photos of Chiapas to be developed. I decided to do it. I hesitated about which place to take them. I hesitated about whether I would go in myself or send an emissary who was in the car. I hesitated about everything, but the wind took the things so that I parked in front of a photo developing store on Tulum Avenue. And that it was me who went in. Right before I went in I saw two indigenous women from Chiapas seated in the doorway, selling woven items. My eyes suddenly fell on a face I had seen before and never forgotten. My heart jumped. I bent down so we were face to face: "What is your name and where are you from?"
"Maria, and I am from Chamula."
I couldn´t believe it. I reminded her that we had met at Christmas and I told her my name, French and little known in Chamula, and she instantly remembered. "Oh yes, Michele." From then on my life in the following days was tormented and neurotic: Why, of all the indigenous women from Chiapas, is it her that I saw in Cancun? Why is she the only one whose face and name I remembered? Why did she, only she, throw me a bracelet on Christmas day?
"It´s a sign, surely, something I have to learn from her or something I have to do. This goes farther than logic," insisted the crazy woman who lives inside of me. I invited her to lunch (the indigenous woman; the crazy woman eats every day at my table), her and her friend. That´s how I learned that they wer exploited by a woman who gave them woven articles to sell in exchange for a place to sleep and a few pesos a month which they had yet to see.
- And why don´t you weave your own things?
- Because we don´t have yarn.
- And why don´t you have yarn?
- Because we don´t have money, and they don´t even sell it in Cancun.We went immediately to Market 28 and we bought 50 rolls of colored yarn. I explained how to get to my office if they had any problem. I didn´t hesitate when two days later Maria appeared in front of me, a sea of tears, saying that they had evicted her from where she lived and worked, that she was in the street. I offered to pay in that instant for her ticket to Chamula. She refused. "Don´t worry," then said Wonder Woman, "we´ll take care of it right now." And yes, in less than two hours Maria from Chamula had work in the cafeteria of the Casa de la Cultura in Cancun, and also a place to live. Maria had found her fairy godmother. And she was on the opposite side from those who continue waiting for Marcos, as they wait for Kukulcan. But it wasn´t so simple. A few hours after she was hired I went to see how she was doing. And when she saw me look in she started to cry again. So I embraced her and heard her say: "I don´t want to work here; I want to go sell things in the street, my things, with my friends." And so I realized how stupid I am sometimes. I tried to cage a quetzal. I remembered a day when I saw a raccoon in a park a few meters wide, surrounded by streets. I felt like an imbecile. I took her to eat in my house, with my family. I offered her a bed to sleep in. Maria spent all that day sitting in my office, next to me. Ten hours. "Don´t look at me any more," I told her, "Tell me the gossip of Chamula, go on, tell me who goes with who and those things." (we had already talked a lot about the religious conflict and more). It wasn´t until 10 at night that we were able to contact a friend of her brother, at the Crossroads. I left her there. I gave her 100 pesos more and asked her to visit me, to count on me, to let me know what she was doing, to not abandon me, to not break my heart with her silence. I didn´t hear anything more from her.
Sometimes in afternoons like this one, I walk in Palapas Park. I sit on a bench and watch the indigenous women from Chiapas. I see how they smile when they´re together, and how their tone of their voices and their lives raise when they speak in Tzotzil. I see Maria in them, and I discover the natural beauties that Tony talked about. Because it´s like a green river that passes, that flows, without staying, like the hope of the indigenous women of Latin America. I wonder why Maria didn´t come back to look for me and I see an impotent ruin, with the bewitchment of Yaxchilan and the humidity of Bonampak, that tells the truth: why five centuries of distrust separate her from me. From now on, I´ll have to live without trying to know if things happen by chance or by destiny. They happen, and the magic is in the fact of that. Fleeting encounters that show that parallel and distant realities (like the rivers) can meet for an instant in a solitary waterfall, to dissolve a moment later in the afternoon light…
The light, that is what stays.
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