Chapter Five
In the days following, Zephairi uncovered another stela, which he named stela B and which depicted Tlaloc, the Mayan god of rain. The statue was wearing a miter and was surrounded by two guacamayas. Following counsel from Lanai, Ms. Morales questioned Zephairi. Trying to make sense of the interpretation that the Egyptologist assigned to the finding, and whether according to him, the statue depicted a god or a priest.
"The guacamayas represent chastity," said Lanai.
"How do you know?" asked Ms. Morales.
"There is a Mayan section in a book I'm reading called the ‘Book of the Adept’, which explains the symbols used to represent chastity, and birds are depicted as one of those symbols. The book is also called Decadence, but I don't pay attention much to that part."
Zephairi began giving orders to his crew to take the stela near his tent, but Ms. Morales stopped him.
"I have to invoke the god of rain to stop floods here, it's important to preserve the Mayan tradition."
"Will you leave the village earlier if you do that?"
"I won't leave, but I'll let you take this stela."
Zephairi sighed. "All right, do what you think is traditional."
Ms. Morales reached inside a bag for a headdress she considered sacred, and placed it on her head. She kept all of her devotional items inside her chest along with her toucan, and the headdress was an essential ornament for any ritual. With it firmly placed above her head, she began a long series of bows in front of the statue of Tlaloc.
"May all floods leave Miradorcito and may the misfortune caused by the crater of the dam leave as well." She prayed for more than ten minutes, repeating the sentence in Yucatec Maya language. For some reason, Clarity wasn't connecting with the prayer and instead was rubbing the stone of the statue, caressing the head of the guacamayas. Deep down she thought it was superstitious to pray for something bad to disappear out of one's life. In her experience, it was better to confront a bad situation or person right away, instead of wishing it would go away. To some extent, she thought that Ms. Morales was using the ostrich method of burying her head below the ground to ignore the problems facing her. She shared her thoughts with Lanai, but her friend disagreed.
"No, prayer may work," said Lanai, "it brings your consciousness out of a bad area into proper ways of thinking. Things may actually get better in Miradorcito as a result of this prayer." Ms. Morales approved of what the librarian said, nodding and appreciating the support.
"I guess," said Clarity, unconvinced.
Within a few weeks, all the huts in Miradorcito had been levelled by the excavators used by Zephairi's crew, except the palapa of Ms. Morales, and the fenced home of Kish, which stood in the middle of the village. The inhabitants of Miradorcito were expropriated out of their home and told to settle in the tents prepared by Zephairi's Alabastriah foundation. The living conditions in the tents were more precarious than those of the village itself, and only Clarity's friends found it fun, like a taste of living in the wild for a short period.
Opinions of discontentment began spreading among the villagers, questioning whether Ms. Morales should remain the head of the village. Ms. Morales chose to ignore the rumours, but they were clearly beginning to affect her, although she remained firm in her decision to continue living by herself in her palapa, claiming that she wasn't going to move or let anyone destroy her home until the governor of Campeche himself showed up, asking her to leave. The line of argument of Kish was different. He claimed that his home was a traditional Maya home, and could become a tourist attraction by itself, without changing anything of it.
A cornfield and a stacked-stone fence surrounded the thatched hut belonging to Kish. The indigenous weaver's home had no plumbing and no electricity, and Ms. Morales had argued with him for several weeks, until he finally accepted to adopt a generator that powered a single light bulb, which he rarely used. Kish disliked being eco-friendly because he viewed the notion of a modern ecovillage with all the amenities of the western lifestyle, as an intrusion into his own way of life. He knew that nature could be cruel sometimes, and he accepted it. What he was looking for was to work his loom in peace and sell his crafts at local markets; things like tablecloths, napkins, and rebozos, a long flat garment similar to a shawl, prominently worn by women such as Mexican painter Frida Kahlo. Clarity marvelled at the old loom and how the various parts interacted to create a weaving pattern.
"Don't touch," he said.
"I like the feel of wood," said Clarity.
Kish sometimes worked with a backstrap loom, which included sticks that were placed horizontally as a mat to hold the woven thread, rope, and a strap worn by the weaver around the waist. Using this simple design, a weaver could produce fabric with a plain weave, doing an over-under-over-under pattern. Kish enjoyed making mats and huipiles, a traditional garment worn by indigenous women of Yucatán and Quintana Roo, like a loose-fitting tunic made of two or three rectangular pieces of fabric joined with ribbons or stitching, and which showed colorful embroidery depicting flowers. The back-strap loom allowed the weaver to include elaborate brocade patterns that gave Mayan weaving its distinctive character.
He asked Clarity about the plan Zephairi had in mind.
"I'm not sure, but you should probably be thinking about moving to another home," said Clarity.
"There is no other home built nearby, they want us to move to tents in the camping site they arranged for us. I dislike tents, water from the rain can get inside." Kish offered Clarity a portion of Ti'sik, smoked pork with Maya radish and sour orange.
"Do you plan to stay here? Your home is sort of standing out along with the palapa of Ms. Morales."
"My fence is not moving and my home is not moving either." He brought his chair closer to Clarity.
"Have you seen the papers of the real estate deal that Fahibian has negotiated with the governor of Campeche for Miradorcito?"
"No," said Clarity. Kish knew that the members of the Miradorcito community were not getting their proper share of profits from the planned site and resort envisioned by Fahibian. He mistrusted Zephairi and disliked Egyptian pyramids.
"Egyptian pyramids are less functional than Mayan pyramids," said Kish.
"How so?"
"Egyptian pyramids house dead people, Mayan pyramids were made to perform live rituals, a lot more fun."
They heard the loud noise of an engine outside the hut. Clarity saw Kish peek through the window, and she saw Duldu attempting to break into his garden fence with the goliath of excavators, the giant five hundred feet long, one hundred feet high G-Earth. Originally designed to remove overburden, waste or spoil, or rocks lying above a coal seam, the excavator was being used to lift heavy stones from Kish's fence. Duldu placed the stones inside two of the eighteen buckets of the excavator, which together, could hold close to six cubic yards of overburden. Kish ran outside his home waving his hands, and he began climbing into the pilot's cabin.
"Stop," said Kish.
"Why?" asked Duldu.
"It's time for lunch, we have some pork today, come in, you must be tired from lifting so many stones and removing the earth."
"Well, I don't lift the earth myself, but yeah, it's rough work. All right, but I'll continue my work afterwards."
"That's fine, we all work to make a living," said Kish.
The weaver entered his hut before Duldu, and whispered in Clarity's ear, telling her to get the keys of the excavator while Duldu was having lunch inside his hut. He pointed towards the backdoor of his hut, which he used to step out into his cornfield.
"Get out this backdoor, before he sees you."
"What do I do with the keys?"
"Simply lose them."
Clarity walked into Kish’s cornfield and climbed the fence surrounding the hut. Approaching the G-earth carefully, she climbed twenty feet slowly on a staircase onto the pilot's cabin and took out the key of the giant excavator from the keyhole. Ensuring no one was looking at her, she stepped down i
nto the ground and walked away from the village, finding the river. She threw the keys into the water and walked back to Miradorcito, satisfied. It was important to preserve the hut of Kish from the effects of western civilization. He found Kish in the doorstep of his backdoor.
"Done," she said, "he won't find them, that bulldozer is finished."
"Good, good, something's working in our favor, finally," said Kish. He went back into the living room area followed by Clarity. Duldu was sitting on the table, waiting for lunch to be served.
"Is the excavator parked all right, are you sure it won't move on its own?"
"Yeah, positive," said Duldu, "I'll go check the brake is on though, pretty sure it is." Kish and Clarity laid their heads on a windowsill, looking out at Fahibian's assistant walk out of the craftsman's property and stepping into the excavator's cabin. An expression of surprise became a scream of anger. Duldu was cursing the giant excavator from its pilot cabin because he couldn't find his keys. Kish opened the window of his home, eager to ask about the nature of the problem.
"I'm sure I left the keys of the excavator here, someone took them. Can't stay for lunch, I have to find these keys." Kish walked out towards the fence of his home, barely able to hide a wide grin.
"You're welcome for lunch anytime," said Kish, looking at him twenty feet below. Duldu glared at the craftsman.
"You have something to do with this. I'm going to find a job for you outside this village when all of it is levelled and you'll start at the bottom like me."
"How did you begin at the bottom?"
"I started as bellboy before Mr. Fahibian saw all the potential I hold to be his professional assistant. That's what you'll be soon, a bellboy in Belize, in Mr. Fahibian's resort there."
"No, I work on my own, I have my own business." Clarity noticed that those words Kish had spoken made Duldu extremely angry. There were only a handful of things which made Duldu angrier than hearing someone as poor as him say he or she had their own business, for having a business of his own was outside his reach, he thought. Fahibian's right hand person stepped out of the excavator, and began searching for the lost key.
Clarity saw Lanai walk toward Kish's hut. Her friend wanted to see his loom. Clarity felt sidetracked by her friend, who wasn't sharing with her what she was doing with Ms. Morales in her palapa, talking about Mayan invocations apparently. She couldn't reconcile the fact that Lanai favored the gambling resort, which would create upheaval in Miradorcito, and the preservation of Mayan traditions, but Lanai had a view different from her on how to be practical for a community and at the same time stay in touch with the deeper aspects of her emotional self. Clarity did the dishes to thank Kish for sharing a meal with her, while Kish showed the way his loom worked to her friend the Malibu librarian. Clarity wanted to show her friend that introducing gambling in Miradorcito was not a good idea, because the influence of gambling on someone poor was very negative. Where she lived in Topanga canyon in California, the run-down house next to her own lower middle class home, housed a near homeless man named Joe Falkenrich, who was poor. And he became poor because he went to Vegas too many times to gamble, each time spending the weekly salary of his construction work. Clarity returned to the loom working area, where Lanai was trying to convince Kish that gambling was not risky. Gambling was risky only when you spent a large fraction of your money, thought Clarity, and that tended to happen by thinking you could recover losses with a win. But Lanai had a different view on the argument.
"If you make ten pesos, you can spend one peso gambling, and you can return to your normal life without bearing any financial burden or losing your job."
"Why would you risk your money, which is so difficult to make?" asked Kish.
Lanai pointed to his loom.
"Because you still have the loom to make a living, you're not risking anything,” said the librarian. Kish shook his head.
"No, if you gamble away ten percent of what you make, you're working ten percent of the time for someone else without getting paid. That's not owning your business, that's almost working for someone else who's taking advantage of you."
"You still own your business," said Lanai, "no one is taking advantage of you."
"Owning your business is owning your profits, and you're not getting ten percent of your income because of gambling, that means fewer profits, it also means you worked to get that ten percent, but it's not part of your business anymore. It belongs to the resort, assuming you lose at gambling, which is most of the time. So you're not owning that ten percent of what you made anymore, the gambling resort has got it, it is the new owner of that money, and they did no work for it, made no effort to get that money but knew it was likely that you'd lose while gambling. That's why they're taking advantage of you. Of your work. They're getting the reward from your effort, they're getting your money, ten percent of your income, and hence a small part of your business, without engaging in any effort, without adding any value, all of it knowing you're nearly certain to lose that money during gambling. Gambling is not a legitimate way of making money, in my view. It deludes you into thinking you don't have to work to make money, and that is simply not the case, should not be the case. I don't want that business in Miradorcito, I want only honest work here, even if profit is small."