Ronald Wright - Time Among the Maya: Travels in Belize, Guatemala, and Mexico

PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS

RONALD WRIGHT is the author of ten books of history, fiction, and essays published in sixteen languages and in more than forty countries.

A Short History of Progress, from his 2004 CBC Massey Lectures, won the Libris Award for Non-Fiction Book of the Year and inspired Martin Scorseses 2011 documentary film Surviving Progress.

Wrights first novel, the dystopia A Scientific Romance, won Britains David Higham Prize for Fiction and was chosen as a book of the year by The New York Times, The Globe and Mail, and The Sunday Times. His other bestsellers include Time Among the Maya, What Is America?, and Stolen Continents, a history of the Americas since Columbus, which won the Gordon Montador Award and was chosen book of the year by The Independent and The Sunday Times. His latest work is the novel The Gold Eaters.

Wright contributes criticism to The Times Literary Supplement and other publications. He has also written and presented documentaries for radio and television on both sides of the Atlantic.

Born in England to Canadian and British parents, Wright read archaeology and anthropology at Cambridge University and has been awarded two honorary doctorates. He lives on Canadas West Coast. Visit his website at ronaldwright.com.

PICO IYER is the author of many books of travel, including Video Night in Kathmandu, The Lady and the Monk, The Global Soul, and The Man Within My Head, as well as novels about Cuba and mystical Islam. Born and educated in England, he has long been based in California and Japan.

Books by Ronald Wright

FICTION

The Gold Eaters

A Scientific Romance

Hendersons Spear

NON-FICTION

A Short History of Progress

On Fiji Islands

Time Among the Maya

Home and Away

Cut Stones and Crossroads

Stolen Continents

What Is America?

RONALD WRIGHT

TRAVELS IN BELIZE, GUATEMALA, AND MEXICO

With an Introduction by Pico Iyer

by Pico Iyer

Candles glow like fireflies through the smoke, Ronald Wright observes as he climbs up to Mass in a Catholic church that doubles as a Mayan site in Chichicastenango, Guatemala. Women on the lower steps are selling arum lilies and other flowers, as bright as their striped huipiles; silent babies stare wide-eyed from brilliant carrying cloths on their mothers backs. Most of the Quich men wear straw Stetsons and cheap manufactured clothes, but at the top of the platform, there are half a dozen chuchkahau dressed in the outfit weve seen on the hotel staff. Here the strange blend of Mesoamerica and Europe seems appropriate, adding dignity to the lined, fervent faces swinging censers, calling on ancestors, kneeling in quiet supplication, oblivious of the orderly turmoil all around them.

Its only one paragraph among a thousand such, at once vivid and suggestive, drawing expected exoticism together with unexpected details into a fine, complex mesh. I can see the candles like fireflies, the wide-eyed gaze of the babies amid the dazzling colours. Yet I can also see how the local indigenous population has a genius for surviving by taking in the ways of the conqueror and making them its ownthe central theme of Wrights account of travelling through Guatemala, Mexico, and Belize in 1985. I see how Stetsons and somewhat inauthentic local costumes merge, and how shades of Europe (those swinging censers) flit through the New World setting. Everything is orderly turmoil.

In the same breath, I notice how my guide to the site can recognize lilies as well as esoteric customs, can register how the scene before him is and is not something authentic and traditional. Our author is a passionate empiricist, we realize, less interested in passing judgment than in collecting observations, sensory and human and historical, so that we find ourselves constantly encircled by the world he is describing, and subliminally aware of how Mayan culture can sustain its cyclical calendar in the midst of a younger world committed to linear progress.

By the time, in the next paragraph, we encounter hymns in Quich and a mix of candlewax and pom incense, were ready to be taken even deeper into a subtle, constantly shifting and conscience-driven examination of what happens when opposing cultures, as described by someone whos a master of them both, converge. Were also being imperceptibly prepared for perhaps the climactic scene of the entire book, barely twenty pages later and right at the centre of the long narrative, in which our watchful, scholarly, apparently non-believing author enters a tunnel during a private ceremony and finds himself transformed amid all the candles and incense, carried into a double night. The candles on the ornate alterpiece at Chichicastenango, one cant help recalling now, looked like a distant town on fire.

In the year Time Among the Maya came out, 1989, the literary charting of the world was enjoying a glorious Indian summer. At almost exactly the moment when Ronald Wright published his work of rich cultural and geographic exploration, Bruce Chatwin was celebrating Australias indigenous wisdom in The Songlines; Colin Thubron was beginning to compile his patient, masterful portraits of modern China and Central Asia; Charles Nicholl was bringing a gift for raffish Elizabethan scholarship to the seaside bars of Colombia; and a college-age William Dalrymple was journeying all the way to Xanadu.

Groups of Englishmen were fanning across the globeincreasingly joined by women and un-English types, too. As in the Golden Age of Greene and Waugh and Huxley between the wars, the subjects of Pax Americana were scrutinized as rigorously as once those of the British Empire had been. Its a striking feature of this work written by an English-born Canadian, long committed to Latin America, that one of its secret subjects is the devastation wrought on ancient, complex cultures by young America, whether through its spies or its business interests, its evangelicals or their fugitive opponents, the hippies.

You realize from the opening sentences that Wright is a traveller at once contemporary and classical; he can catch the reggae dishevelment and ganja rhythms of Belize as immediately as if he were shooting a video, and yet he is also bringing with him a deep stash of knowledge, so he is not surprised, in the opening pages, that England is a longtime enemy of the people he finds himself among. Hes travelling in the classic English stylestaying in fleapits that charge fifty cents a night for mattresses (and sheets) made of stuffed flour sacksyet he can call upon an elegant frame of reference that includes the European culture he absorbed growing up, along with the Peru and Egypt hes visited already. Were in the hands of a future novelist able to catch every cadence of Irish priest and Californian biker and Frenchman chuckling like a concrete mixer, but also of a historian so steeped in archaeology and Mayan belief that he can offer a brilliantly lucid and sustained explanation of the Mayan calendar.

Even before the first sentence, in fact, you may have noted that Wrights very title points in two directions at once, suggesting both a travellers casual sojourn and a researchers driving theme; Time Among the Maya tells you that youre going to spend some months in an ancient, long imperiled world, but also that in fact the books concern, deep down, is with the central organizing principle of that world, more important than (and sometimes indistinguishable from) its God: Time. Its a flash of wit appropriate to a people who, as Wright will tell us, exemplify and love wordplay. Its not every travel diary, after all, that comes with a thirteen-page Bibliography and a Glossary explaining terms in three languages.