I found it, he had given up and was heading away down the aisle. While the other passengers filed out, I took a small mirror from my cosmetics case and looked at myself. I was pale. When I lifted my sunglasses, I could see the dark circles below my eyes.
I sat for a while, letting the rest of the passengers crowd toward the doors. I followed the last one out.
As I stepped out onto the boarding stairs at M茅rida, I realized that no one was going to stop me. I had flown away from home, from my job, from my former lover. No one had stopped me. I hesitated, squinting into the bright sun. The boarding ramp seemed very high; the terminal, far away. Remembering my vision of falling, I clung to the handrail, unable to take the first step down the stairs.
"Is there a problem, se帽orita?" asked the steward standing beside me.
"No," I said quickly. "No problem." The metal stairs made tinny noises beneath my feet. I could feel the heat rising from the asphalt as I walked to the terminal.
I stepped into the shade of the terminal, my head up, my smile in place. I waited for my suitcase to roll by on the belt, letting the crowd surge around me. I tried to catch familiar words in the babble of Spanish, but had no success. I grabbed my suitcase when it rolled past and stepped outside the terminal.
"Taxi?" asked an old man standing beside a dirty dark blue Chevrolet. I nodded and told him in my best high school Spanish that I wanted to go to the ruins, but he refused to understand. "S铆," he said. "To M茅rida." He wore a straw hat pushed back on his head, and when he smiled he showed broken teeth stained with nicotine. "Downtown," he said.
"No," I said. "To Dzibilchalt煤n." I stumbled over the name and the cabby frowned.
The young man from the plane appeared beside me and put a hand very lightly on my shoulder. "You want to go to Dzibilchalt煤n?" he asked, then spoke to the cabby in rapid Spanish. The two of them argued for a moment, then the man from the plane said to me, "He'll take you there for seven hundred pesos. OK?
And if you are in town, you must promise to look me up. My name is Marcos Ortega. You can usually find me in Parque Hidalgo. Look for a hammock vendor named Emilio. He's my friend. He'll know if I'm around." His hand was still on my shoulder. "Promise?"
I nodded and gave him a smile that was almost real. As I drove off in the cab, I looked back to see him standing at the curb, staring after me with a curious expression.
The streets of the city of M茅rida are narrow and winding, little better than alleys. The houses and shops crowd tightly together, forming an unbroken wall of peeling facades painted in colors that might have been brilliant once: turquoise, orange, yellow, red. The sun fades the paints to muted shades, gentle pastels.
I saw the city in glimpses from the backseat of the cab: a row of shopfronts, each painted a different shade of blue, all peeling. A dim interior seen through an open doorway and a hammock swaying within. A group of men lounging on a street corner, smoking. A small park with a statue in the center. A fat woman leading a small boy down the narrow sidewalk. A row of stone buildings with carved stone facades bordering on the edge of a park. Trees crowned with red-orange blossoms. My cab narrowly missed a motorbike carrying a man, a woman, a baby, and a little girl, then swerved around a buggy drawn by a weary-looking horse. Finally, we headed out of town along a wider road.
The highway ran straight through a landscape of yellowing trees and scrub, broken now and then by a cluster of small huts. We passed a crew of men who were repairing the road; the cabby tooted his horn and passed them without slowing.
I thought about telling the driver that I had changed my mind: he should turn around and go back to M茅rida. But I could not explain that in Spanish and he was already turning off the highway onto a side road.
My hands were in fists and I forced them to relax. I tried to take deep breaths, tried to calm down.
I had screwed up royally this time, and I knew it. I was arriving