On Ribbons

In the mountains of Honduras, it is said that the women grow old by the time they are twenty. In 1990, atop one of the highest mountains, a family of impoverished farmers was rumored to subsist on the only apron of land that had not been overfarmed, the last of the Maya descendants. I was the token female in a 12-person archaeology film crew, with whom I’d spent weeks climbing through the rain forests of the western part of the Yucatan peninsula, working among the Mayan ruins, wading through rivers, scrambling up cliffs, groping for vines and grasping hands across muddy slopes, proving my mettle, heavy packs strapped to my back in search of answers to age-old questions about the demise of the Maya civilization. Inside a mud-house, a family was waiting. An old woman greeted me without lifting her eyes. Her arms reminded me of those of my grandmother, so thin one might mistake her as brittle, as incapable of withstanding the many seasons of disease and hunger that had passed. My guide said she was 28, five years older than I. Four daughters and her young son stood beside her.

The women began their day bent over hot stones, shoulder to muscled shoulder in the sweltering heat of the oven, their backs twitching under identical veils of red threadbare dresses as they ground corn and pounded tortillas into the once thin mountain air, now made soup-thick with soot. I remember counting my heartbeats, dreaming of how I would help them as I scratched words in my notepad. Writing was a part of my job. The other parts included finder of facts. Compassionate witness. Interpreter. But words had no place here. I watched the mother’s jaw clench as she fed the fire, reaching her arms all the way into the oven as though fire had no influence here, as though this was a holy space, her arms and every part of her body too holy even for fire. She never looked up. Neither did her daughters, their faces slick, soiled dresses dampening as the hours passed. As the camera focused on the corn and soot and the sweat, I noticed how neatly their black hair was brushed and tied in ribbons made of the same red material as their dresses, the same strips of cloth wrapped around the left ankle of the small boy whose stomach was so swollen with the ravenous snakes of hunger that it made my hands ache to hold my pen. The red ribbon was to keep him close by, to prevent him from running away, as if away was a better place, as if there were anywhere to go but to fall off a mountain, to fall through the front door that was tied to the entrance of the hut by another piece of red cloth, by ribbons a mother shredded perhaps alone, or with her daughters, to tear grief apart into loveliness, to drape it across every corner and door, to wrap it around every wrist and ankle, as if red ribbons could save a life.

In a fraction of a glance the woman’s wet black eyes spoke of survival. She smiled, her mouth empty of teeth, beautiful in the way a night sky unadorned with stars is beautiful, a woman insisting on this life and not another, whose spirit floated effortlessly above the fires like smoke, filling every part of the hut, finding its way into every corner. She embodied this space in a way I had seldom seen with others.

How do we come back from those places where words have no place? Some of us write our way back, knowing our words are not magic. Still, we write on, marveling at the enormous strength that arises when a woman insists on her own life, and the way this transforms red ribbons on a mountain into beacons of survival.

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