Chapter Four
Flower and Clarity woke up early the following morning. They stood outside of their tent combing their hair as the pleasant warmth of the sun brushed their faces. The girls watched as a group of cows owned by Ms. Morales, was led to a grazing area outside the area of the flood. Lanai had declined to get up with them, saying that she felt tired after all the drainage work the day before.
"I can't believe that Lanai actually thinks gambling can be good for a community," said Flower.
"Many people think like that, anything that brings jobs is thought to be good."
Flower walked away from Clarity to have some breakfast inside her tent. Clarity saw her stumble and fall head first into the mud. Cursing the flood, Flower examined a large stone that had emerged after some mud had been lifted from the area, causing her fall.
"Clarity, come here, I think I found something."
Flower's finger was pointing at an inscription etched on a slab of limestone. Clarity rubbed the mud off the engraving and read the epigraph. It said Xuleiha. The stone was part of a stela, a sculpted shaft that depicted Mayan kings and recorded their deeds. Flower used a brush to lift some mud from the limestone, uncovering a nose and eyes.
"This is an altar, it's usually at the top of a pyramid, the top of a Mayan pyramid. It's the face of Yuknoom Took Kawiil, a Mayan ruler from the year 731."
Flower knew of a similar stela, known as Stela 51, kept in the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico.
"What do we do now?" asked Clarity.
"Tell Ms. Morales, it's her village."
"And Zeph?"
"Zeph will have to wait."
They walked to the palapa of Ms. Morales, excited about the discovery. Ms. Morales was hoping that the two women had found her totem, and she was slightly disappointed at hearing about the archaeological discovery. She walked with them to the area where Flower had discovered the engraving and examined the epigraph carefully. She had mixed feelings about the altar found. If Flower was right, it meant that there was an authentic pyramid, which lay beneath the earth of Miradorcito. On the one hand, a pyramid was part of her tradition, for she was a descendent of the Mayas. But in this case, it also meant that Fahibian would use the finding to build a gambling resort disguised with the reassuring presence of an authentic Mayan archaeological site, and that bothered her, because Fahibian did not believe in preserving Mayan heritage.
They couldn't keep the discovery to themselves for long. Zephairi inquired and found out quickly about the stela find, gathering his crew to survey the area. Kish, Ms. Morales, Flower, and Clarity, and several villagers followed, to observe Zephairi's reaction.
"I knew that there was a pyramid here," said Zephairi, "this place is more or less midway between the sites of the Peten jungle in Guatemala, and those north of here like Chichen Itza." Zephairi rubbed his hands with a look of satisfaction brightening his face.
"What are you going to do?" asked Ms. Morales
"I'm going to call in the excavators and pair Miradorcito with the Egyptian village of Kom Ombo, it is an agricultural town like this village."
"Do they like colorful shawls in Kom Ombo," inquired Kish, always on the lookout for new markets.
"This is not Egypt," said Ms. Morales.
"This is a project involving Egypt that is improving bilateral trade relations with Mexico."
"You cannot start digging, you don't own this place."
"I have an archaeological permit to be here, and Mr. Fahibian has received a license from the governor of Campeche, to build a casino resort here, and that license is funding my work."
For three days, Ms. Morales pleaded for 'no digging' of the site, and for three days Zephairi ignored the appeal. Clarity and Kish carried a banner to Zephairi's tent, which said 'keep Miradorcito genuinely Maya', but Duldu ripped it and used the tissue to clean some of Zephairi's digging tools. Three days after this struggle, a large convoy of trucks drove into Miradorcito, carrying hydraulic excavators built by Caterpillar, the 350 D, by Komatsu and by John Deere. Duldu acted as foreman and ordered the levelling of several huts, to the dismay of the villagers, who began using tents set up by Zephairi. The tent area established by Zephairi grew to accommodate the fifty construction workers hired and paid by Fahibian to excavate the village and dig the foundations of the new casino resort.
"Isn't there someone you can call to let them know about this bullying?" asked Clarity.
"I can try the governor's office, but bureaucracy is slow here in Mexico, nothing gets done very quickly. And technically Zephairi is right, Fahibian has a license to build a resort here, I was just trying to delay construction works by allowing Mr. Zephairi to do some archaeological work."
"Tell them you think someone created the flood."
"I can't think without my toucan."
Ms. Morales called the governor's office, relaying the bullying that was leading to local people leaving their homes, but the clerk answering the phone said that all the papers of Zephairi and Fahibian were correctly filled and had the appropriate signature. The governor gave an order to Fahibian to fix the dam, and twenty men began working up the Rosarito River to fill the dam's crater. Ms. Morales pleaded to the clerk, expressing concern about their precarious living conditions.
"What are we going to do? Where are the people here going to live?"
"You should negotiate all of that with your local contact, Mr. Fahibian, this project has been negotiated with him directly, the government of Mexico has given Mr. Fahibian a concession to exploit the land in Miradorcito."
"What is Mr. Zephairi doing here? He's not from Mexico."
"Mr. Zephairi represents the interests of Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History, they don't want the land of Miradorcito in private hands. The 1931 charter says private interests should be subordinate to the community."
Ms. Morales blew a sigh. Her fourth generation ancestor, Fernando Morales, had bought the land of Miradorcito to create a small plantation. Since then, the Morales family had been considered the 'shepherds of the land' in Miradorcito. Ms. Morales was fourth generation keeper of the area, and was considered a 'clan mother' who helped many in the local population. Ms. Morales ended the phone conversation with the governor's clerk and summoned an urgent meeting in her palapa, which had not been levelled yet Fahibian's crew. Kish, Clarity, Lanai and Flower gathered around her table.
"I think you should accept the idea of creating an ecovillage," said Clarity.
Flower had shared the idea of the ecovillage with Clarity, running across it during her ethnography studies and reading an article on it from a local Mexican newspaper printed in Mérida. It basically meant the creation of a community whose members sought to live according to ecological principles, with as little impact on the environment as possible. Ecovillages were known as planned, intentional communities with the goal of becoming socially, economically and ecologically sustainable. The governance of the ecovillage was democratic, embodied by consensus decision-making. Ms. Morales shook her head.
"No, I think the village can do fine as it is, with its cattle, its crops, and its crafts, there is no need for any reform. It's not a good idea."
"You don't have much leverage here, no one seems to care about this place or what happens to it," said Clarity.
"I care about this place."
Lanai stepped forward to give her opinion.
"In fact, what's important is that the dam has been fixed, so that there are no more floods."
"The dam has been fixed? No one has told me that, yes that's important," said Ms. Morales.
Lanai kept asking questions to Ms. Morales about the way she raised cattle and cultivated crops, and how the loom of Kish was used to create shawls. Within a few days, Ms. Morales, with no friendly allies to counsel her, had forgotten that Lanai favored the gaming resort. Clarity's friend had filled a space as the head of the village's confidant, and the Malibu librarian began to assist Ms. Morales with daily chores, helping
her clean the house, sell her cattle to a meat distributor in Chetumal, and mourn the loss of her toucan. All of this alleviated the physical work of draining the water from the flood and excavating the site, which Lanai found annoying and boring. Although Lanai kept saying that the divergence in opinion with Clarity about what the village should become did not change their friendship, the fact of the matter was that she wasn't sharing much with Clarity about what she was doing during the day, talking instead for hours with Zephairi's crew about the various artifacts coveted by the Egyptologist. Clarity began confiding her observation to Flower.
"I think she's up to something," said Clarity.
"No, she's just curious about what we ethnographers do, and she may just have her own views on the way the village should be led."
Flower looked at her watch. "I have to get back to work, Zeph expects me to be with him, we're working on the stela to see whether we can find a codex underneath or inside."
Lanai convinced Ms. Morales that what the head of the village needed to restore her confidence, was to own the Mayan artifacts that Zephairi was trying to find, among them a codex, similar to the Dresden codex, kept at the Royal Library of Dresden, which read like a boustrophedon, depicting the region and several aspects of the Mayan culture related to the Mysteries. Like Clarity, Lanai was fascinated by the Esoteric Mysteries that had surfaced in different cultures, and she was keen on knowing more about them. She had a hunch that Ms. Morales knew more than what she said on the Mayan Mysteries, and that was one of the reasons for becoming closer to the head of the village.
The librarian pulled Ms. Morales aside on the terrace of her palapa, while Clarity examined Ms. Morales’ title of property of the land of Miradorcito, to see whether any argument could be found to change the decision of the governor to give the land to Fahibian.
"What you want to show is that you know more than Zephairi about the Mayan tradition," said Lanai, "then you can become the conservationist of this site, even if it becomes a tourist or a gambling resort. You'll be able to defend the Mayan tradition and heritage from that position." Ms. Morales tapped her finger slightly against her nose, a sign that she was listening closely to Lanai.
"How are we going to do that, I'm not an archaeologist?"
"By working with Zephairi, and letting me work with his assistant, Flower. I want to know more about the boustrophedon of Xuleiha and where it may be."