PASSPORT OR FAIL
I guess I had expected that, when it finally happened, it would be magical. I thought that I would arrive and it would feel like I was at last home, that it would be the end of my old life, as a boring, hypersensitive paranoiac, and that my constant emotional crises would be replaced by a general feeling of worth and, perhaps, even happiness as I finally found some place to belong. It would welcome me, and I would welcome Mexico, and together I could say I was complete.
But the problem was that I’ve been feeling tired. Watching TV makes me tired. Drinking water is tiring. I wash the dishes, because even if I don’t I’ll still be tired from not washing the dishes. I used to have fantasies about winning an Academy Award. In them, I wear a silk lavender gown with a braided halter neckline and a slit from neck to navel, my boobs are enormous, a hip-hop mogul (any hip-hop mogul) is my good friend and date, and I somehow manage to thank my ex-boyfriend, who is watching from his mansion, full of regret that he broke my heart. I’m too tired for even this fantasy.
People say “going through the motions”, but the phrase “going through the emotions” went through my mind over and over on the layover flight from Houston to Cancún. I thought about how I’m doing the self-help thing to work on my emotional life, the way one might use library books to fix a car that doesn’t work anymore; I could be getting faster, less-embarrassing results, but anything is better than years-long personal and professional standstills. In my carry-on bag, I had a workbook to help ease what I call a Salinger-esque inability to maneuver and bear the universe appropriately. Another book: an endeavor to allow emotions[i] to manifest and progress completely, instead of the self-sabotage I dabble in. (Self-destructive behavior means I’ll always have less-painful, more-colorful things to ponder over beers the next day.) But I’m having trouble going through the emotions because I’m having trouble having any. I’ve been too tired.
Six days before I left for Cancún, I started eating cherry ice cream and rice krispies treats and chocolate cookies (even though I don’t have a sweet tooth) because there was no guilt to feel, and no desire to show off a beach body. Instead of taking pleasure in the suitcase-packing process, a sport I have perfected, I grabbed the first five dresses hung next to each other in the closet, and dropped them into Michaelito’s suitcase along with six pairs of shoes, four bikinis[ii] and whatever else was already on the floor. “You’re not going to fold any of that?” Michaelito asked.
“Why would I do that?”
“You’re hilarious,” he said, before going back to sleep.
When the plane landed, it hit the ground a little too hard at Aeropuerto Internacional de Cancún. I was not too tired to imagine the plane skidding off the track and crashing into trees, but I was too tired to care. Fucking let it, I sighed. I grabbed my bag, went through Customs, and around 10 pm passed the automatic sliding doors to wait for my dad outside, where it was warm and I could feel the humidity through my jeans. The moon was narrowing its eye at me through the sole cloud in the sky. I looked around at the taxi drivers holding poster boards with last names on them, and frowned at anyone who looked at me.
My dad arrived around 10:30 in a taxi. The entire trip was on his dime, and because of this I hadn’t initially wanted to go. The shame of being a part-time retail employee with a private university degree was almost unbearable[iii]. I don’t know what compelled him to convince me to go—perhaps that we never could afford to vacation in style until a year ago—but he did, and that is the reason I went. When he stepped out of the car, his cute belly protruding under his golf tee and loose khaki shorts, he hugged me and looked really happy to see me, the way dads do when their daughters travel by themselves internationally at their father’s persuasion and are too afraid of international roaming charges to turn their iPhones on. As we waited for the taxi driver to get permission from the airport to drive us to the resort, he put his hands on his waist and talked about the food and the rooms we were staying in, and I didn’t know how to say ‘thank you for everything’, or ‘I’m sorry I’m not a better person’, or ‘I really hope I don’t screw this trip up for us’ so I tried my best to smile and say, “That’s awesome”, and, “That sounds really tasty.”
10 minutes later, we were out of the airport and driving up the long, slim strip of land known as Zona Hotelera, that encloses the perfectly rectangular Laguna Nichupté, a crocodile-heavy, gorgeous lagoon. Our resort, one of the many[iv] on this narrow piece of Cancún, was somewhere in the middle on the stretch, and as we drove towards it I was grateful that my dad was making small talk with the driver. The well-paved roads, the manicured greenery, the highway street lamps, and well-lit signs all required my full attention. We passed a young blonde in a sequined mini-dress and stilettos with her male companion at a bus stop, both peering down the highway. Shortly after, a shopping center boasting Cartier and Louis Vuitton storefronts with shiny awnings and steel font signs. I looked down at my hands, wondering why my stomach or heart were not telling me whether I was excited, scared, surprised, or even hungry. I’m always hungry. I closed my eyes.
The cab driver pulled up to the resort, an enterprise with a glass-wall façade and multiple buildings. He helped me pull my luggage out from the car, and then my dad guided me through the buildings, happily relaying more detail about his day. He took me to the suite that my parents and brother would be staying at, where I made small talk with my mom. I hoped my face was registering the appropriate amount of awe and excitement. I have no idea where I was resting my hands. My dad gave me 1200 Mexican pesos—about 99 dollars, he said—which I stuffed into my passport case. I didn’t know what to do with myself. Then my dad took me up a floor to the room I would be sharing with my two sisters, a room right next to my aunt and her family, our vacation buddies. I have seen rooms like these before, back in the U.S.—The Four Seasons in Carlsbad, The Four Seasons in Los Angeles, La Costa, The Phoenician, Fairmont Miramar.
My sisters and I giggled over the chocolate I bought at the airport as I unpacked. They were generous enough to give me all of the closet spaces, where I hung my dresses and folded my gym clothes into neat piles inside the drawers. At bedtime, I refused the idea of the foldout bed and curled up on the couch.
“Are you sure?” Norma asked.
“Yeah. Too tired.” Of course.
The next morning, Norma draws the blinds and I scream. Our internal clock disagrees with the local time zone by two hours, and, whereas she is, I’m not used to 5 am. I demand coffee in exchange for any further interaction.
She agrees to work out with me before breakfast at the resort gym. One thing I love about resorts is the workout equipment. They always have TVs and iPod connections on every machine, saunas in the locker rooms, and are generally emptier than gyms I frequent.
The gym overlooks a giant mall called La Isla Shopping Mall, where I imagine buying a shiny sequin dress like the lip-glossed blonde I had seen the night before. As I run 6 miles and do crunches on a mat until my obliques burn, I decide I need to buy a gorgeous outfit with the 1200 pesos my dad has given me.
Later we lunch at this same shopping mall, and it occurs to me that if the South Coast Plaza in Orange County and The Grove in Hollywood came together and made a baby inspired by Venice, Italy, it might look something like La Isla. I feel good, walking on the faux-cobblestone with my heels, dabbing the sweat on my neck with my silk scarf, and I take pictures of the canal that lassos the mall from the lagoon.
We return to the resort, change into bikinis, and head to one of the enormous pools with an infinity edge. (Should one sink her head far enough into the water, the pool and the blue of the Caribbean horizon merge). My brother explains that all of the white sand next to us was brought in after Hurricane Wilma drove the original sand back into the ocean. “So the sand is all fake?” I asked.
“I don’t know about fake. But it’s new.[v]”
The resort hosts an expensive buffet dinner at their semi-formal restaurant, Oceano. Before we head back to our rooms to get dressed, I ask if they’ll have tres leches cake, a rich, sponge cake full of saccharine milks that I hated as a child. I’m now craving it. My dad expects that there won’t be, because it’s not a high-end type of dessert. It’s more of a celebration country food, he posits, originally for people with lower incomes, as evidenced by the required condensed milk in a can. He’s right, I decide, because, come to think of it, I’ve never seen it in any bakeries I frequent.
Around the dinner table among our party of 13, my siblings order sangria, I order a glass of Mexican chardonnay, and the strolling three-piece mariachi band plays our very limited whims. My cousin can only think of Selena Quintana’s music. I can’t think of any. My brother asks to hear a song from a Quentin Tarantino movie, and the vocalist carries the famously long note to several rounds of applause. Norm leans over and comments that we’re the only brown-skinned people at the resort who are not on the payroll. I look around and I notice that she’s right, she’s been right all day. She adds, “And how come every white woman looks really angry all of the time?” I don’t know, I say. Maybe I should tell them I’m not planning on swiping their husbands, like Eva Mendes in Nora Ephron’s The Women.
The dinner conversation turns to what the concierge had recommended we do for the duration of our stay. Everyone wants to see a Mayan tournament show; my dad mentions getting a discount later on in the week. At dessert time, I head to the dessert line, and I stand there for a minute with my plate in hand when I see tres leches cake on a platter. It doesn’t look like any tres leches cakes I’ve ever seen at family birthdays and weddings. Iced with a soft fondant frosting, there are no food-colored rosettes or fluffed star-armed lines around the edges of the cake. Pieces of kiwi and strawberries aloft the frosting are also scattered on a caramel sauce drizzled on the edges of the platter for presentation. For presentation. I scoop two pieces onto my plate with the delicate triangular server.
Next morning, I awake at 5 am, work out for two hours[vi], and am in a button-up shirt dress, silk scarf, and gold Ralph Lauren sandals, ready for our trek to Chichen Itza by 8:15. I’m starving, but I don’t eat meat. I would eat meat right this second if it were in front of me, but I have another cup of coffee instead. When I fetch my mom from her room, I find her cooking carne asada and frijoles. We won’t eat lunch for a while, she says. I really shouldn’t. I do it.
From the backseat of one of our rented cars, I see Zona Hotelera in the daytime. The palm trees, storefronts, and elegant people walking around have me thinking about The Real Mexico, the one I imagined throughout my childhood, the one that would pull me in and lull me to a better, saner place. But I have seen greenery like this before, maybe, even bluer skies, somewhere.
After a brief stop for gas, my aunt’s husband finally leads our two-car caravan inland out of Cancún and onto a two-lane highway. I see foliage growing on the power lines. The following things look much more startling in the verdant jungle: a small garbage dump on the side of the road; later, a car graveyard. There is very little else for 45 minutes besides the jacarandas, palm trees, zapote trees, and dense thornbush. In the sky, clouds begin to look like shoes and pencils.
We decide to stop for lunch in Valladolid, at a place the concierge had recommended. When we exit the highway, my aunt’s husband takes a wrong turn down a one-way street and my dad refuses to follow. Our phones don’t work in Valladolid, so we park the car near a market place and stand around, waiting for a remedy. My dad suggests we eat first, find later. We cross the street to the market place, a red one-floor building with huge archways, no doors, and dozens of vendors, some inside, some on the sidewalk, and some under the many umbrellas that line the curb. Flies hop from vegetable to vegetable on the little makeshift carts. Little beads of water rest on the plastic bags full of various fruits that I’ve never before known existed. My sisters and I linger under the doorway leading into the market, our eyes not meeting. Finally when we realize we are blocking the flow of pedestrian traffic, we step inside, where all of the stalls and counters are tiled white. In front of us, an entirely empty row of stalls. On one counter lies a heap of animal innards. I refuse to acknowledge the number of flies feasting and visiting other items, so I head to the nearest exit. I pass shoes and lamps with plastic gold trim and fruits and meats hanging in front of butchers engaged with their customers. My dad, the only one talking, points out that there are several kitchens across the streets surrounding the market, and that, perhaps, we could eat there. None of us respond. Eventually, he trails off, too.
I would like to tell him that I would love to, but something is buried tight in my throat. I’m wearing the wrong thing, I realize. I have always been wearing the wrong thing. My parents were not born and raised in this small town, but they could have been. How far is Cuernavaca from here? They were raised in a pueblo thirty minutes away from the heart of that city. I know vaguely our stories. My dad lived in a one-room house with dirt floors. As a little girl, my mom had a donkey named Tijeras[vii]. Long ago, an ancestor moved away from the hills and settled into urbanity with a new surname (Anica, I imagine, must have sounded like his original name in Nahuatl). I think about how a college professor once told me that poetry might be where the self and infinity meet, and that place has no room for identity politics. I did not like hearing this then, and right now, I don’t like thinking about how I’m alive and I came into being with brown skin, and does this mean something, or doesn’t it?
This is not the time. I walk to the corner, lean against an archway column, and wish that I had dressed more like my sisters, in tourist comfort clothes. To feel at ease would be fantastic right now. I look around at the pink plastic wallets, hair clips, and synthetic clothes for sale hanging on the walls behind me and realize that nothing is going to make me feel less guilty about having been the first of my family born in the States.
Someone finally gets cell phone reception, and we head over to the restaurant, a landmark establishment with a thatched roof, no walls, baby opossums for sale, and a balcony overlooking its main attraction, the two hundred foot deep well, Cenote Zaci. In the bathroom, the toilets are toilet seat-less. Our party orders two meat platters, big enough to barely leave room for our cups on the tables. The platters are full of meats cooked in every possible way. I order a plate of rice, and worry that I’m offending my parents, the waiters, the cow I ate earlier, the universe, by sitting here and not having, ever before, been more humble and honest. I look at the food in front of me, and decide that if I could, I would stay and learn how to eat vegan here, where the buildings are square, of concrete and adobe, and the business signs are hand-painted on the walls. There are things I’m missing that I could find here, I convince myself, things that my heart and taste buds have yet to discover.
I think about my favorite book, and how, at cocktail parties, I enjoy talking about how the Holly Golightly of literary form is better than her cinematic counterpart because, in the former, she leaves for Africa, sleeps on mats in huts with whomever, and dashes off into the jungle on her horse by herself at will. Being here, like this, these thoughts, the vocabulary that my emotions conjure, means Holly and I are actually nothing alike.
I had thought Holly and I were exactly alike. I decide the best way to remedy this is to start tasting the sauces on the table in my vicinity. One has pumpkin seeds. Another is the spiciest thing I’ve ever had. The headwaiter ends our visit with a nance liqueur-tasting, and a detailed description of how to make the seed sauce. We leave for Chichen Itza with a plastic bag of ground pumpkin seed under my arm, and a bottle of anise liqueur in hand.
Chichen Itza is beautiful, humid, full of souvenir vendors. I buy a hat for 70 pesos. A spider lands on this hat. I usually cry when these things happen, but my body has no extra bodily liquids to produce in this jungle weather, where it’s so humid that my gum has melted, so I hold out my hat and calmly wait for someone to flick it off for me. Holly Golightly would have done the same.
When it’s time to go home, the Mexican Federal army stops us, at random, to inspect our car. We pull over to the side of the road, where they ask us all to get out. I avoid eye contact with all of them, about 15 or 17, each with rifles strapped over their shoulders and poised ready. They go through some of our bags. I cross my arms, and clench my jaw until I feel a click. My dad makes friendly small talk with the rifled man nearest him. When we get back into the car, I think about my political science professor, and how she said the best way to describe the Rule of Law is when it’s not there. Only later does it occur to me the irony of this association lies not in that that I’m an entitled American, but that I’m an American who did not think about the Rule of Law when I was at the airports in the States.
For the next several days, there is nothing to say. I laze around the pool, I laze on the bed. For the remainder of the trip, I have a total of 4 piña coladas, a vodka martini, a Cosmo, lots of wine, and free beer. I write letters that I don’t send because I am too tired to send them. I stop blow-drying my hair in this humidity. I am around the loves of my life, but I’m not used to constant companionship anymore, and I’m not used to the subtle pull of stress that family vacations ask one to tolerate, so I sit around, watching MTV in the hotel room, offering only uncertain silence. Silence, some more. When my dad relays a story where I’m supposed to offer support and empathize, I’m so uncertain about what has happened in the last 25 years of my life, that I fail. I am failing, again.
Finally, on Friday, we manage to get those heavily-discounted, all-inclusive tickets to a place called Xcaret, where we will swim, sunbathe, and see a big show. The concierge pronounces it like “itch-car-rhett”. Since I landed, I have seen advertisements[viii] and brochures for Xcaret on buses, sides of buildings, billboards, and magazines, but I’m still unsure if it’s a ruin, an island, or the name of a river. I put on a white bathing suit, toss a gold print dress over it, and hope that my shawl will suffice if it gets cold.
A giant charter bus, paid for by the all-inclusive tickets, hops from resort to resort, scooping tourists to take all the way, two hours south, to Playa Del Carmen. Our resort is the charter bus’ first stop, and as the only party from our resort to board, we sit in random spots and watch the seats gradually fill around us until there are no seats left. A little girl sits next to me, occasionally staring up at my face until each time I have to turn to smile at her. Outside my window, we pass heaps of concrete where buildings once stood years ago. Not knowing what else to expect, I put my headphones on and close my eyes. An hour into the ride, a young man in a Hawaiian print shirt and nametag speaks into a microphone, translating his monologue from Spanish to English. If I hadn’t turned my headphones up and gone back to sleep, I would have heard him explain that Xcaret is a recreational eco park[ix] (and, though not his words, it makes Knott’s Berry Farm, the San Diego Zoo, and Medieval Times look like greedy flea circuses.)
When we arrive, I still have no idea what is going on; we are waiting in a small parking lot full of equally enormous charter buses, and it has started to rain. Everyone else is holding what looks like maps and sheets of coupons, and I’m about to risk asking the little girl what happens next, when Hawaiian Shirt Hombre tells us to wait patiently for the driver to attach each one of our bracelets. I get up to sit next to Dave, a few rows behind me in the very back, who vaguely fills me in and lets me take a look at his map, before I ask about the rain. It’s pouring now.
It’s still raining when we exit the bus. (Am I supposed to leave my bag in here?) My littlest sister, Jazz, mentions that we’ll have to buy more sun block inside the park because our own sun block is not allowed (something about environmentally dangerous toxins in most commercial grade sunscreens), and I wonder why she’s not more concerned about the sun not coming out at all. (“It’s not cold?” she offers.) Gradually, though, the rain clouds pull back, and by the time we’ve entered the park, and our bags are checked into lockers, and we’ve all managed into our snorkeling gear, the sun comes back like it missed us.
I’m still unsure about everything as we make our way to the underground river. I tell Jazz that there is something weird, that I’ve been feeling weird for the last several days. I don’t want to go into the river. What if I don’t go into the river. She tells me to hang in there.
I dip my body into the water. Underground, the water is greener, from the light hitting the stone around us, and deeper than I expected. Schools of fish jerk around way below our feet. Through holes in the ground above us, we see water dripping from the earlier rain. Afterwards I bask in the sun, see the baby turtles, and everything becomes a little more manageable. When the rain returns, while we’re having a grandiose buffet lunch in a giant wall-less hut-like building, I pull a towel around my shoulders, and remain in my seat. I eat so much food that I find it necessary to nap in this same seat. Later, I find a hammock on a shore that faces Caribbean waters, and I marvel at how few people there are around me. I notice that all of the buildings in this place are built with natural stone and adobe packed tight and shaped by hands. Some faucets are actually just enormous conch shells spilling water from the curled lip. Suddenly, I can’t believe I was ever entertained by the amusement parks, or anything else, back home.
Finally it is time for the Mayan tournament show[x]. We head to the theatre, which is actually a stadium; the architecture is stone, enormous. On the way, past the 19th-century village with burros, a chapel, and water well, there are dozens of people in ancient Mayan costume—sapphire, ruby, and black feathers, painted faces, stained breechcloth, bird-beak and gemstone headdresses, shell necklaces—standing around, posing. I can’t get over how even the cobblestone beneath my shoes looks authentic and un-manufactured. We pass tourists taking pictures of them, in front of them.
The audience is instructed to light the candles distributed by the ushers, and the show starts with a 14-member orchestra introducing the pre-Hispanic ballgame players (and the priests, emperor, and entourage of women, parrots, and dogs who purify them). The game resembles basketball, in that the ball must be aimed at a small hole off to the side, and soccer, in that the ball must be maneuvered by hitting it with the hip. We cheer. Another orchestra comes in and accompanies a woman singing in Mayan, and then they play a game in which the ball is lit on fire and volleyed from one side of the stage to the other, like hockey without the skates and ice. More musicians step in, with flutes and drums, to accompany the cheers for every point scored.
And then the stage is set up with fake temple columns on one end of the floor, and all of a sudden, the other end has performers dressed in conquistador outfits, holding spears and posts with sails, like the boats that hit the Yucatan Peninsula coast some four hundred years back; they greet the natives with stiff arms and tight smiles. And before we realize what’s happening, there are actual horses on the stage, and the Spaniards are charging forward with crosses around their necks, and I know about this stuff from the books I’ve read. They introduced horses and coffee and Christianity, and here, on this stage they are white men dashing forward. And when the natives respond, with their wooden mechanisms, I start to cry.
In this stadium, seating thousands, I pinch my arm to try to stop what has been happening since I was born. The conquistadores on horses knock over the fake temple columns, and the natives feign terror and bend and sway and pretend to almost be crushed by the conquistadores’ heels, but everything is starting to dissolve in front of me: the tres leches cake, the powdery white sand, the seat-less toilets, the plastic hair clips, the Mexican army, and the books in my carry-on bag, and now there is a furious, red-hot feeling in my stomach that is the burning realization that I don’t know enough about to world to have been this unhappy. The monks are onstage now, to help massacre a history and, as they vocalize their way across the stage, I am taking deep breaths, burying my fingernails into my knuckles to stop the tears, but the depth of what has happened before this moment is all there is now. I am someone, of a people. I am. And I have been speaking a vocabulary that does not translate outside myself, for anyone, a useless language, vulgar and incomplete. I’m actually a little girl, and I’ve been standing before the world with my eyes closed. I have not bowed my head in humility. I have not yet kneeled.
2010
[i] Grief, self-loathing, insecurity, low self-esteem, loneliness, meaninglessness, and, my personal favorite, constant anxiety.
[ii] I was under the impression that there would be heavy rain and thunderstorms for most of my trip, because I’m an idiot who doesn’t know how to read weather reports. When I realized my trip was not going to be spent entirely indoors, my sole thought was that four bikinis might not now be enough. Let it be noted that I had the presence of mind to pack a board game into my suitcase, in case of a hurricane.
[iii] It’s been hard to look at anyone who knows me in the eye.
[iv] Over 55 resorts, all lined up next to each other, all of them with beachfront access, facing the Caribbean sea. This strip of land was technically an island, before the first resorts were erected, and the gaps filled with paved roads and sand.
[v] Over $19 million dollars was spent in 2005 on bringing sand back onto the shores. I heard from someone somewhere shortly after my trip that the sand was brought in from Africa. Another story I heard was that it was pumped in from the ocean floor. Wherever it came from, it looks like sugar powder, and it allegedly doesn’t get hot with the sun. It’s also highly dense; in the event another hurricane occurs, it won’t readily be swept back into the water. It remains mind-boggling to me that this territory now has sand that no ancient Mayan ever walked on.
[vi] Around the time my exhaustion started, it occurred to me that perhaps it was a function of getting old. I had heard from my older friends and even older lovers that one eventually becomes more complacent and disinterested and tired. My energy and enthusiasm, I was told (which came in handy whenever I was in search of serious misadventure and debauchery in lieu of the aforementioned avoidance of emotional processes), would go away indefinitely. Knowing that long-distance running is a great way to look and feel young, sometime during Michaelito’s trip back east, I started running. It wasn’t hard to run 5 then 6 then 9 miles, because I was running away from the 24 and 11/12th years behind me. Running also meant that I could concentrate on breathing, rather than feeling or analyzing.
[vii] Because my mom’s grandmother wouldn’t let my mom touch a pair of scissors once.
[viii] In all of its manifestations, it was actually printed as Xcaret! Mexico, with the dot of the exclamation point serving as the ‘O’, which served to confuse me further.
[ix] A host to a number of leisure and educational activities, including underground rivers, a natural pool and inlet, a coral reef aquarium, flora and fauna (including a bee farm, a bat cave, a butterfly pavilion, deer shelter, jaguars, spider monkeys, mushroom farm, orchid greenhouse, sea turtle area, etc), a revolving scenic tower, a lagoon where one can swim with dolphins, another where one can swim with nurse sharks, another yet where one can swim with stingrays, masseuses, a stadium theater, a sweat lodge, a Mayan village with a cemetery and a chapel (where they have Mass every Sunday overlooking the sea), 4 archeological sites, a bustling 19th-century-style village with an art museum, shops, and another chapel, and, my personal favorite, a beach full of hammocks and shaded lounge chairs where waiters bring the piña coladas to YOU.
[x] According to the brochure, 200-300 performers take the stage nightly.
