When Mexico wasn’t called with this name and the new world was living of its culture ignoring ours and, for its fortune, it hadn’t been discovered yet by navigators in search of spoils…in that golden period maybe it could still hope to avoid all the barbarism thanks to fact of being separated by an ocean of water from our world!
In that happy age the different ethnic groups that populated that world, still unknown for us, had gathered to make a common calendar.
A Maya temple in Hocicalco
At Hocicalco the Mayas, Aztecs, Tolmecs and Olmecs people in 200 AD had built together a place of worship, an observatory. Here they met to form a new common calendar and they built four temples with a square base, one for every people, where on every side they marked on stone their notions about time. That place, junction of their ideas, symbol of extreme civilization, represented the pacific point of exchange of knowledge and ideologies in the preservation of their own traditions.
They were considered bloody people, worshipper of the sun, who loved offering human blood-sacrifices…I don’t know how much truth is there in it…what is sure is that they ended with a bloodshed …defenceless victims of the european dominant race whom they offered their lifes together with their goods too without opposing any resistance as if they themselves were sacrificial victims…the few people who saved themselves from the slaughter sought safety in flight without opposing the advancing of our culture thirsty of bloodstained treasures.
a pelota player
Why?
Maybe the deep reason has to be searched in their profound beliefs and unfortunately not many traces of that have survived our colonization except in the tale of some episode of real life…orally transmitted from generation to generation… they are said to have been keen of pelota play, two teams competed for a sphere that had to be passed through a stone ring leaning out on the wall in the central side of a big rectangular square built in grey stone.
To the winner player was given as prize…. the Death!
here i am!
A point of view totally opposite to ours saw as a premium by own merits the end of a passage through anxieties, dangers and sorrows. Nothing to be astonished if they couldn’t resist to the invasion, fight and kill “impious” men as the conquistadores not considering them worthy to pass to the hereafter and they let themselves been slaughtered without rising up in arms against the assaulter.
It was usual among those ancient people offering to the vestals, called virgins since unaware of alchemies and not since such physically, a sacrificial flight in the sacred well of Uxmal to reward them immediately with a new life, preserving them from the decay of soul and body, setting them free with only one act from the martyrdom of a life outside of knowledge.
the sacred well in Chichinitza
It doesn’t make a big difference if we are living persons who must die or dead men who are living….since we are!
This is the main thing for me and for that ground I wouldn’t have shortened my experience of life on behalf of a… liberation…now that I am here I want to live this life up to the end…understand it, search it, master it to try again and again the sensation of childish astonishment the deeply moves me any time that a arcanum is disclosed to me, that sensation to indissoluble belong to the chance and receive by it enlightening messages!
So I wouldn’t have agreed at all to jump in the void of a well, even if sacred, in search of a utopia, an impossible happiness…my sound dizziness remember it to me on the edge of every precipice…even if only three meters high!
But the journey in “Mexico” during the Christmas holydays in 1971… was lying in wait for me…just to reward me setting me free from this “useless” life…to which I would have clinged with all my strenghts!
wearing a “panama”
Ruy had offered me that journey, to do together with his younger brother Leonello and we three had set off for the capital city and from here, with a jolting and very unsafe twin-engined aircraft, for the conquest of the peninsula of Yucatan with Parco de la Venta and its big rocks forged as Olmecs heads of the year 1000 B.C. and Merida where there was a percentage of humidity of hundred per cent.
The Olmeches ‘heads” in Parco de la Venta
I’ve always enjoyed the dry climates, for me synonym of phisical and mental healthiness, while in the dampness I see the proliferating of pathologies, of rottenness, filth and poverty…It was raining every half an hour and dampness was stagnant everywhere, on the skin, on the clothes…a layer of sticky humus impossible to take away…it was possible to breathe only inside the hotel with doors always hermetically close to oxygen and air conditioning at full speed that generated bacteria over bacteria spreading them in the air! In that place vegetation grew everywhere compelling local people to going out with a machete instead of a walking stick to extricate themselves from the creepers, opening passages, beheading atlantic coral-snakes that, unfortunately met in the bush, would have granted only further thirty minutes of life from their lethal bite unless the wounded limb were immediately amputate….In those conditions was not to be astonished by the small value given to life!
the bush
We visit Palenque, discovered in a moonlight night thanks to the white glare come into sight under the ray of our satellite that showed to the archaeologists, revealing it, the pinnacle of a pyramid missing for centuries. Once climbed on those steep stairways it was impossible to get down if one suffered from dizzy spells like me, they were so steep to compell me to get down the steps one by one sitting on my back. At the basement of the pyramid an indian girl with her baby in her arms was waiting for me: she told the guide that she wanted me to pass her baby my spirit… that I christened her he corrected himself translating with a term more in accordance with our culture…”seguro” presentiment of something uncertain and unsafe…I’d have better postpone the ritual …instead of becoming the protagonist of the life of that little innocent!
some indios
In the afternoon we stopped in a small hut in the middle of the jungle completely surronded by trees crowded with blonde, hateful monkeys who jumped everywhere at the speed of light clinging to tourists long hairs like at creepers…they were really too many…I took shelter in the wooden small hut and passing in front of a sort of kitchen I noticed an enormous ice block laying down on some jute on the planks wood with a big rusted pliers near it and a chisel that should certainly help to fragment it. Mindful of what I had seen while Ruy and Leonello was having a warm tea I ordered a coke …with ice.
vertigo…stairs
A violent general rush stroke us immediately…that evening nobody was spared ..we were weak as amoebas, incapable of a reaction. At dawn of the next day it was in programm the departure from the peninsula of Yucatan to the beach of Acapulco where we’d have spent our last two days of the year in the comfort, the first evening guests at Las Brisas at Dino Fabbri’s, the publisher father of our friend Ottavio. Just arrived at Acapulco although I was unsteady on my legs for all the nightly runs I don’t skimp on an evolution in parasailing together with Leonello to twirl as Icaro on that golden bay…we should run on the beach fastened to a rope dragged along by a motorboat and then we flight away, we soared…the problem was descending in the middle of all those bathers laying sunbathing! Once landed I felt extremely weak, totally wanting in energy, with difficulty I prepared myself for dinner and, while the others were laughing at the landlord’s jokes, I felt myself estranged, I felt a strong sensation of fear for the cold that I was unnaturally beginning to feel: the room temperature was 35 degrees centigrades! I began to shiver with cold and to sweat profusely…then I don’t remember anymore …safe the fact to have lost consciousness, how and with which words I don’t have any memory…neither I ever felt the desire to hear the story.
…the life is a mystery….
I woke up in my room at dead of night, at my side a man in a white linen double-breasted, dark complexion and a panama hat on his head …he was speaking at the phone…so he was my Doctor… but what was waiting to heal me? Finally he made me a injection and I felt asleeped again…the next day I asked to see him…see who?…nobody knew anything…I should have dreamt! Yes, maybe I had dreamt but everything was so real ..it couldn’t be a result of my imagination…I felt asleeped again and this time I dreamt, I dreamt to have glimpsed an angel unfavourable to my departure from this world that had discussed for a long time at telephone before saving my life from that form of fulminating paratyphoid fever…
The day just begun was the last of the year, at midnight we should have celebrate the New Year’s Eve, I had take with me for the occasion a very romantic dress made in smoking by Valentino yellow and blue, with two underskirts in voile and a neck opening in “Gone with the wind” style…ethereal, restored to life…I should seem really of an other world that evening when Ruy took me to see the divers who were performing their exploits risking their lifes in a jump with lighted torches from that high cliff… They waited for the wave arriving, informed by the whistle of the mate, to throw themselves in that abyss and come out alive.
Acapulco’s divers
What a lot of likenesses… I kept myself with all my strength to the balustrade thinking to my night flight and to my vast luck to be still here alive, so weak as not being able to stand up alone… I looked down along that precipice… I felt my legs jammed by the dizziness, immobilizing all my movements. No, I wasn’t qualified for the jumps in the void… I preferred remaining steadily fasten to the earth and to the pleasures that I could find in it.
Once in Rome I had made love in such an involving way that remained indelible in my memory as one of the major pleasure proved during my life…come back from an evenig with friends I had let me be undressed lazily and I had kept only my black tights…lenghtened on the sofa..I offered me to his gaze and with words I instigated him to catch me, to have it off with me ripping up any obstacle he should find between his and my body. That transgression had hit the nail on the head, full of pleasure and excitement he tore up the nylon of my tights to penetrate me …to open a way to our pleasure…to love me! I remember the deep pleasure proved seeing some flesh emerging in the middle of the black ripped veil, the desire clouding the sight and the gestures become excited in the rush to be performed…involved in that complicity, joints in our desire…everything made that night unforgettable.
It’s not necessary giving a name at things or people to recognize them, sometimes you feel on your skin the alchemy, you know from the beginning with whom you have to do and you respect each other for that. With Ruy I had a calm relation, an amitiè amoureuse, I don’t know if he expected too much of me but he knew he could trust on my disinterested love…. I think we really loved each other, everyone respectful of the other’s desires. But I wouldn’t have had a future in his life … I knew this in advance, I was part of his dream, of his tale and I was unfortunately real, extemporary… not at all observant and respectful of roles…nearly dangerous for the naivety with which intentionally I advanced in my age.
I was not right to lead him in that official world to which he was addressed as firstborn which he was and I kew intimately that I wouldn’t have been a part of that reality.
Now he has a wonderful daugther whom he is much devoted to and maybe it will be permitted to her to live with the naïvety which the father had to give up to…. many years ago!
Ice skating in Cortina
I think his family has drawn a sign of relief when in Cortina, the first months of 1972, I decided to put an end to our story, even if reluctantly because I loved and I love him deeply. I succeeded in making a clean break to our love affair that was slowly dying; it was too late for those afternoon têtè a têtè that saw us privy when we liked melting us in pleasure embraces… to which we cared so much…in the hours of the afternoon when the fantasies and the habits tempt more!
I moved my glance somewhere else, on other loves “socially” less complicated, trying by force to build a new story, a new family from nothing, beliving in the possibility of reinvent me in a wedding, following that absurd law of “one pain drives out another”… maybe for reaction, maybe to forget.
But it’s not in this way that life must be faced….
