Tours of the Black Clock

146

THE GUERRILLAS LIVE IN an old Indian ruin that lies hidden in a mahogany forest at the tip of the peninsula. The old man and I stay through the early weeks of summer, which is when it rains in the Yucatan. The ruins are carved out of gray limestone and not much is left except the walls. The guerrillas sleep in hammocks strung high above the ground, under the hot rain of the skies above them; parapets have been constructed nearby. The woman in command, around twenty-eight years old, was born in the city of Merida and trained in America; she’s hard and determined, and her name is Lucia. The guerrillas from the first regard me with extreme suspicion. They don’t understand what two old men were doing in the company of a driver who was known to work for the Germans, in a car that was heading up the coast. There’s continual discussion, even a month after we’ve been here, of whether I’m a German spy using a senile old man as a cover, and what should be done with me. I have no explanation other than that we’re Austrian refugees who escaped through Italy and France; it only sounds more preposterous to them. My American English is all the more unsettling. When I tell them I want to get to America they only shrug, But you’re already in America.

The guerrillas are traveling to Progreso too, where they’ll blow up the railroad that links the seaport to German Merida. We travel at night, negotiating the underground pools and long mean swatches of jagged coral on my crippled feet, crossing the dark smoking henequen fields that have been strafed by German Stukas overhead. The ruins and abandoned Spanish plantations of the countryside are the bastions of the Mayan Resistance. Lucia says, The Americans bring in their own troops sometimes but the truth is they don’t understand the territory much better than the Germans. Better, she says, that they airdrop the supplies and guns, or ship them across the gulf, and let us do the fighting. Let the Yanquis worry about defending Des Moines. I think she’s trying to make an impression on me, so that if I am a German spy I’ll understand that no matter how many Germans there are, or how big the guns and planes, or how many miles of the peninsula the Germans believe they control, there will always be the Mayans who know the Yucatan better and will engage the Germans until the last one’s sealed up in a Viennese wall or has returned to Berlin to get drunk in his favorite beer garden. Sometimes I want to tell Lucia that my mother was an Indian; but there aren’t many Austrian refugees with American Indian mothers, and I don’t want to get caught in even the most harmless lie. During our time with the guerrillas, the old man and I live through two battles and several skirmishes. Z sits in a gully watching me load weapons for the purpose of shooting his army. Often I’m shaken awake in the night and must arouse the old man so we can pull out because a German patrol is close by. It’s the guerrilla strategy to retreat whenever possible, never to be drawn into a battle for which the guerrillas themselves didn’t plan and prepare. We wind our way though the forests across the limestone flats, always to another crumbling palace where we meet up with other rebels. Few of them ever speak to me, though they’re always kind to the old man, feeding him soup and finding him the softest and most secure hammock. They blame me for having brought him into the situation, and of course they don’t understand when I almost beat him to death one night in a small devastated village half a day south of the railway that runs to the sea.