Luna (30 page)

Dear Selena,

Here in the Yucatan peninsula, I have been travelling through the villages. My Spanish is getting quite good and I can manage pretty well. You wouldn’t believe it if you could hear me dickering for food and a place to sleep. I’m riding around on a motor scooter, staying out of the way of the tourists and the tourist centres.

The Indians have a hard life. They are such a small people, I tower over them. They are very poor, and most of them still live in the old ways, growing a little corn and so on, and living in
palapas,
which are thatch-roofed houses with no doors or windows, only openings and with no furniture inside. At night they just string hammocks and sleep in them. During the day they roll them up. They cut wood for their cooking fires and carry water, which is in short supply here, and grind
their own corn as they need it each day. They work extremely hard for the most minimal existence.

But they too, like us at home, live among their ancestors. New little clusters of huts sometimes grow up around stone ruins that their ancestors built six or eight hundred years ago. I think of our women at home in Mallard and Chinook, cooking meals for their families, washing their clothes, nursing their babies and singing them to sleep. Just like their grandmothers did. So-called civilization is drawing closer though. There will soon be fast food stands outside Chichen Itza. And I shudder to think what will happen to the people then.

The women here are very dark-skinned, with black hair drawn tightly back from their faces. They don’t smile much and they seem to do the hardest work. Their costume is a short, white cotton dress. It has about four inches of embroidery around the hem—always a flower pattern in very bright colours—and there are no proper sleeves in it, just a square yoke which extends over the upper arms. The yoke is also covered in brightly coloured embroidered flowers. And the material the dress is made out of isn’t thick and heavy. It’s light and almost sheer. For all I know it might be a polyester blend. They wear a slip under it, I guess because below the hem for another three or four inches, there is a white eyelet frill with a scalloped edge showing. It is a beautiful costume.

The amazing thing to me is that these women all wear this dress, and they wear it all the time. I have seen a woman less than five feet tall, standing in her white dress while her husband loads onto her back a big bundle of sticks (cut neatly in equal lengths) for firewood, so heavy that she bends over with it. And women carrying buckets of water so heavy they stagger, and big ceramic basins on their heads full of grain or corn
to be ground, all of them wearing that white dress with the flowers embroidered around the hem and across the chest.

The first time I saw it, I couldn’t believe it, couldn’t imagine the spirit that would make them produce some beauty that they could live with every day, even in that hard, unbeautiful killing life that they lead. It told me something about women. In fact, it made me think about that argument we had about the community college—about all those classes in embroidery and sewing and different kinds of crafts, and I was so contemptuous of them and of the other women, too. And none of you knew quite how to defend them, or yourselves. I see now what they were for, what they mean. And my respect for the women I grew up with has grown. I may not have been entirely wrong, but I wasn’t entirely right, either.

I think of the North Amerian native women doing all that beadwork with quills and sinew, and our own grandmothers turning the quilts, which they needed to survive the winter, into works of art. As if they didn’t have enough to do.

Even when you turn women into packhorses and slaves, it seems their craving for beauty, which has given light and strength and meaning to humankind, can’t be extinguished.

I am going further south from here, into the camps for the refugees from Guatemala, and after that I will move on south again. I am going further and further into the jungle.

Diana