“Why so regular?”

“He finds it comforting to keep regular habits.”

“Ma’am, do you know what magazines he reads?”

“He buys about everything on the Haywood news stand. You could go down there and make a list, if you like.”

“Do you happen to know if he’s ever studied up on Karl Marx?”

“Go and see if they sell Karl Marx on the Haywood newsstand.”

“Do you know where Mr. Shepherd stands on Abstract Art?”

“Well, if he wanted a good look, I expect he’d stand in front of it.”

“Very funny. Can you tell me the name of his cat?”

“Are his cats also under suspicion?”

“The neighbors said they hear him using an obscene word to call the cat.”

“I’ve never heard Mr. Shepherd use obscene language against any person. Certainly not his cats.”

“Well, they say that he does. They say he uses a very vulgar word to call the cat. They’re concerned for the youngsters. They say the boy comes over here.”

“My stars. What do they think he calls his cat?”

“I apologize, ma’am, it’s a very vulgar word. They said Jism.”

“The cat’s name is Chisme. It means ‘gossip’.”

Mérida, Yucatán Peninsula

November 1947

Notes for a novel about the end of empire.

When Cortés’s men first arrived here, they asked in Spanish, “What is the name of this place?” From the native Mayans they received the same answer every time: “Yucatán!” In their language that word means: “I do not understand you.”

The apartment is decently spacious, the two bedrooms and a good-sized table for working in the main room, with the window overlooking the street. The kitchen and bath are a jumble but there’s no need for cooking. It’s too easy to walk downstairs to the restaurant in the courtyard, morning or night. The previous residents must have shared this languor, because a long, white sprout of a bean was growing from the drain of the sink when we arrived. I offered to put it in a pot for the balcony and call it our garden.

Mrs. Brown did not smile at the joke. She submits to not one iota of domesticity here, except to make the coffee as she did at home. The inside of her room I have not seen; we simply chose doors at the beginning, and her lair remains a mystery. She emerges each morning in her gloves and Lilly Daché hat, as reliably as the little Mayan women in the market will be wearing their white embroidered blouses and lace-bottomed skirts. The gloves and Lilly Daché are Mrs. Brown’s native costume.

A typewriter is installed on the writing table, delivered yesterday, a sure sign of progress. A car and driver for touring the ancient sites may soon surface as well. Mrs. Brown has gamely got her sea legs on, already going to the shops on her own to get small necessities. Each day she manages more of the arrangements, soldiering through the obstacles of a language she cannot speak. My advice (which she did not heed): in answer to any question, say “Yucatán!” I do not understand.

A reasonable title for the novel: The Name of This Place.

But for now, the name of this place is mud. Or so Mrs. Brown must think, when forced to take her life in her white-gloved hands. She grips the side-arm of the rumble seat with one, the other squashing her hat to her head, as we pummel down the peninsula over shocking roads, navigated by our fearless driver Jesús. After all the time we spent searching for this combination, vehicle and driver both together in one place, I dare not ask whether he is old enough for the job. He is just a boy, despite the authority of his Mayan nose and magnificent profile. It’s a shock to realize that, not his youth really but my age, that he must regard me as a man, perhaps his mother’s age more or less, not worth any real study. A series of directions to follow, and a wage at the end of the journey.

And yet he’s seen something of life already, clearly. His shirt is weathered as thin as a newspaper, and the lower part of one ear is missing. It took a while to notice that. It’s his left, away from the passengers’ side. He calmly asserted, when asked, that it was bitten off by a jaguar. So he has the imagination, if not the experience, for labor in the service of a novelist. He can lecture on any subject without hesitation. Today en route to Chichén Itzá it was the military history of his people, the Maya: “More courageous than ten armies of Federales,” he shouted above the banging axles and backfiring engine of the ramshackle Ford. Or mostly Ford; one door and the front fenders are of a different parentage. Across the land of the mestizo we ride, in a mixed-caste automobile.

“At this place, Valladolid,” Jesús announced above the racket, “we view the scene of the last Mayan rebellion. One hundred years ago the Yucateca took our whole peninsula back from the ladinos. We declared independence from Mexico like your Tejas of North America, and nearly made it the nation of the Maya again.” Except for Mérida, he confessed, where the Federales lodged throughout the rebellion. But fate was decided at Valladolid. A final victory over the Mexican army was at hand, but just as the Mayan warriors were poised to strike, an old shaman came with urgent news: the ancient calendar said it was time to return to their villages to plant corn. They put down their weapons and went home.

“The Gods speak to my people in their hearts,” says the boy called Jesús, beating his breast with one fist as he drives, head tilted back in sloe-eyed tranquillity even as the tires hit another crater in the road and his whole body levitates. The Mayans obeyed the ancient imperatives of survival. They walked away from power, letting the federal army take back the peninsula and return it to Mexican rule.

Somewhere during the lecture he lost his way on the dirt track through jungle, and we found ourselves also called back to his home village, conveniently at lunchtime, as it happened. We were near enough to Chichén Itzá, the temples of one of its outlying towns towered above the treetops, a monument to ancient prosperity throwing its shadow across thatched roofs and the naked children who gathered to see what might emerge from this calamitous machine. We could as well have arrived by flying saucer.

The mother of Jesús, similarly sloe-eyed, bade us sit on a log while she dipped beans from a cauldron that must bubble eternally on the fire outside her hut. Her name: Maria, naturally. Her lath house, like every one in the village, had a tall, peaked roof of thatch, open at each gable end for ventilation. Inside the open doorway a knot of motionless brown limbs, presumably sleeping children, weighted a hammock into a deep V shape, the inverse of the roofline. At the side of the house a scrambled garden grew, but the front was bare dirt, furnished only with the logs on which we perched. Mrs. Brown steadied the tin plate on her knee with a gloved hand, tweed skirt pulled around her knees, eyebrows sailing high, calf leather brogues set carefully together in the dust. Flowering riotously around her were a hundred or more orchids, planted in rusted lard tins. White, pink, yellow, the paired petals hung like butterflies above roots and leaves.