Joy

Here's a thank-you story for an early reader of Eight Hurricane Maria Stories from Puerto Rico. This one is for Alma. Her topic, and I suspect her way of life, is

JOY

In the town of Valladolid, it's not unusual to see people wearing traditional clothes. White suits, white hats, red kerchiefs for the men. White dresses with floral embroidery for the women. Not a fashion statement designed to shove centuries of time-honored traditions down your throat. No hiding behind long-gone ancestors here. The clothes are just plain nice.

In the town of Valladolid, time is under no obligation. You can stare up at the double towers of the stone church and let history hang over you, or you can hop on the double-decker party bus that blasts electronica. When you return to the town square, the world may be younger, older, wiser, weirder. Depends on which way you look.

In the town of Valladolid, every meal is unreasonably good. Local, Mayan, Italian, hole in the wall, upscale establishment. Doesn't matter what you eat or where you eat it. “We put it in the water,” jokes the gentleman who claims to make Valladolid's best lime soup. If you ask, he'll explain in exquisite detail what goes into the soup. If you return to his corner of the town square tomorrow, you know he'll be happy to again guide you through the wonder that is his soup, to make the same joke,

We put it in the water. We left it all there...

No, too much repetition. What am I trying to say about traditions, and what's with the lime soup? Alma wiggles her toes in the water and watches the words ripple outwards, dissipate into stillness. The tiny black fish hovering around her feet do the same.

Alma may be passing through Valladolid, but for now she's floating within one of the town's cenotes, a deep freshwater pool that will be here long after she's gone. The Yucatan Peninsula is covered in cenotes, as if some goddess dug her fingers into the earth but forgot to sow the seeds. Or maybe the seeds are waiting there beneath the waters and only need another million or so years to germinate. Whatever the story, each cenote is a little different, ranging from sacred spring to swimming spot.

This cenote, right in the heart of Vallaolid, is called Zaci. To get here, Alma didn't have to do much more than step off the sidewalk. Zaci resides under a sunken half-dome. The open-air half looks up into the cloudless sky, no hint of civilization except for the faint call of car horns occasionally drifting down from the unseen avenue. The shaded half is home to hanging plants and nesting sparrows above and modest carp below. Alma has discovered that if you hold your legs perfectly still in the water, then these little fish will clean your feet with kisses. Scratchy smooches that remove dead skin and detritus without leaving so much as a mark. Better than any spa.

Of course there are other talking tool-making animals at Zaci too. Locals and tourists wade in the shallow end under the clear sky, while swimmers explore the cenote's blue-grey center. Young men and women climb the curving path that spirals up towards the surface. They climb closer and closer to the half-dome's rock ceiling then dare each other to jump. As for Alma, she's found a stone shelf in the deep end, a submerged bench where she can take in the sights and sounds, a spot where she can connect with the spirit of this place.

So far, the pool's sleek fish have been Alma's only visitors, the cenote's sole emissaries. They nibble her toes whenever she settles into the stillness of a story taking shape, so she tells the story of how the carp came to be in this cenote:

Long ago, when the half-dome above Zaci was still whole, there was an emperor who bled his people dry. He told them that the gods demanded a backbreaking tribute year after year in order for their crops to have a healthy harvest. The emperor collected their jasper and jade and amber agate, but he especially loved their gold. The people believed in him... until there was a drought and all the crops died. They rose up against their ruler in the night, but they could not find him because he had covered his body in onyx and obsidian. The blackest of these stones covered the glint of his gold as he moved it piece by piece to the underground cenote.

With plenty of water and wealth surrounding him, the emperor knew he could outlast the drought and his people. Still, he ran into problems during the wait.

He'd been able to move the gold down there a little at a time, but he couldn't bring it up all it once. What if someone stumbled upon his hiding spot and stole some of his gold while he was above ground? So, he stayed under ground, near the water's edge with his ill-gotten tribute close at hand. But what if someone slipped through the shadows and stole his riches while he slept? The emperor dropped the gold to the bottom of the cenote, so the splashing of thieves would wake him. Still, a very good thief might be able to swim without making a sound. The emperor dove into the dark waters to be with his treasure.

As the ages flowed by, his body grew smooth, long, and slippery. Although he did keep his long black whiskers, the emperor would've been unrecognizable to his past people. He didn't remain alone forever.

Conquistadors, courtiers, chieftains, and countesses all sought this place. Those who found it ran into the same problems that the emperor had: there was no way to move all that gold at once without losing some of it to potential thieves. Whoever joined the emperor in his cenote never left the water.

Time eventually exposed their hideaway; it wore away the cenote's protective dome and opened it to the wider world. The carp, for that is what they had become, looked up to see that the world had gone on without them. They were not even big fish in a small pond.

Alma wiggles her toes again to signal the story's end, but the carp don't retreat this time. They bump against her heels, dart away, then return as if they're trying to get her to follow. She laughs when one of the fish, the one with the longest whiskers of all, coughs up a gold coin onto her big toe.

“No, we put it in the water.” She heads back to the town square to enjoy some of the best lime soup Valladolid has to offer.