THE POSSIBILITY OF EVERYTHING

Introduction

Cayo District, Belize
December 24, 2000

A ragged, mostly dirt road twists through six miles of rainforest in western Belize, linking the villages of Cristo Rey and San Antonio. If you make this drive a day after a heavy December rain, as my husband, Uzi, and I do, the road will still be gluey and ripe. Its surface will be the color and consistency of mango pudding. You might focus intensely on these two elements, mango and pudding, to divert your attention from how the white van you're riding in keeps sashaying across the slippery road. And you might look down at the three-year-old lying across your lap and think about how she is a child who loves mangoes and loves pudding but that you have never thought to put the two together for her before. You might look at her and think, Mango pudding! Great idea! Let's find a way to make some tonight! Or you might think, If you'll be okay, I'll make you mango pudding every night for the rest of your life. Or you might look down at her and just think, Please, and leave it at that.

Victor, our driver for this ride, maneuvers the eleven-seat passenger van with more skill and less caution that I could safely manage. "Hee-yah!" he calls out as he deftly steers us out of a skid. Every time the van's back end fishtails, I spring for the door handle. I don't know what I'm thinking: grabbing the door handle in an unlocked car is only going to result in an open door on a muddy road, but when you're ricocheting around in the back of a van without seatbelts, with a sick child lying across your thighs, the impulse is to lunge for something solid.

I tighten my right arm around my daughter Maya's waist. Everything's fine, I tell myself. She's going to be fine. I press my left hand against the window and watch the landscape stream by between my fingertips. The jungle grows flush against both sides of the road, tangled and pristine. The bulldozers of American expatriates chewing up the Caribbean Coast haven't found their way back here yet. Fat, squat cohune palms burst up from ground level like Las Vegas fountains, spraying out of the forest floor. Thick, serpentine vines encircle tree trunks like lush maypole ribbons. The biodiversity here is astounding. I never imagined there could be so many different kinds of leaves in one place, or so many shades of green.

The air outside is like nothing I've encountered before: energetic and molecular and intense. A few hours ago, when we were sitting on the front steps of our cabana at Victor's resort, I took in deep gulps of the jungle's bright, wet promise, the loamy, rich animation of the dirt marrying with chlorophyll to form air so dense it tempts you to take a bite.

At lunch, we ate family style in an open-air dining hall lined with rectangular wooden tables, under the thatched roof Victor and his sons had woven from local palm fronds. While his wife and daughters served heaping plates of rice and beans and bowls of fried plantains, Victor meandered between the tables with a small pad of paper in one hand and a bottle of orange Fanta dangling between the thumb and forefinger of the other. As he approached each table he flipped the chair around and sat on it backward, pulled a pen from behind his ear, and scribbled down each families travel request for the day. A foursome of fresh-scrubbed Brits—mother, father, daughter, son—wanted to go canoeing on the Macal river. Two bearded men who look too old to still be backpackers wanted to see the nearby Maya ruins at Xunantunich. A family from Montreal with two college-age daughters opted for a few hours in the neighboring town of San Ignacio, a few miles down river.

"Sure, sure," Victor said to everyone, tossing back swigs from his bottle. "We take you. No problem." Victor quickly established himself as part hotelier, part chauffeur, and part general contractor, a rainforest Renaissance man in an olive green baseball cap. At our table he rested a hand on Uzi's shoulder. We'd already put in our afternoon request.

"Two o'clock," Victor told us. "I'll take you, or my son will."

This drive to San Antonio rolls on. Our tires make loud sucking noises as they peel away from the gummy earth. Off to our right, an animal lets loose with what sounds like a familiar, plaintive howl. Maya raises her head in recognition, pivots around like a slow periscope, then lets it drop back down against my thigh.

"You have coyotes here?" Uzi asks. He's riding up front with Victor, one hand braced against the glove compartment for support.

"What?" Victor maneuvers the van around a wide puddle.

"Coyotes," Uzi says. "You know, like little wolves. We have them at home."

"Oh, yeah," Victor says, swatting the air with his hands. "We got anything you want here."

Anything? Maya coughs her raspy cough against my leg, the sound of gravel rattling between her ribs. I press my palm against her forehand. I'm guessing 101, maybe one a 101.5, better than yesterday but not by much. I tuck a sprig of dark curls behind her ear.

Mi vida, I think. My life.

These words that come to me are not the words of my own country, but those of a language I struggled to learn for years, a language that both exhilarates me and breaks my heart. Mi vida. At home in Los Angeles, it is the language of the hard working and oppressed, of the woman who cleans my house with care once a week, of the man with the white pickup truck who trims the palm trees that line our driveway, of the childless nanny who loves my daughter with a selfless passion while I spend hours in front of a computer screen rearranging words. But here in Belize it is the language of conquerors, the language that overtook the indigenous Maya and then, centuries later, turned around and pushed out the Imperial British masters. A language that says, "Here. This. Mine."

Victor sits calmly behind the van's steering wheel. Perhaps he's made this drive for dozens of guests before. I imagine a steady parade of Americans traipsing into the jungle in their Lakers caps and Teva sandals, acting entitled to their cures. Yet surely, we must stand out from the pack. There's Uzi, who's forty, though so boyish no one can believe his age, with an Israeli accent so slight it barely dusts the surface of his speech. He's a quintessentially low-impact kind of guy, soft-spoken, careful to tread lightly on the earth. Not like me, who can't help leaving footprints and food wrappers in my wake everywhere I go. And there's Maya, three feet tall with a mop of dark curls, carrying two rubber baby dolls tucked under her right arm, refusing to eat anything but cucumbers and water for the past three days because everything else hurts going down.

And me? How might I look to someone I've just met? Probably like a medium aged American woman in striped cotton pants who's equal parts grateful and unsure about being here and you can't stop hovering over her three-year-old—checking, fixing, trying to coax forkfuls of food past the child's tightly shut lips. Or maybe I'm wrong maybe I don't make an impression at all. Maybe I'm just another tourist messing up the bed sheets, acting as if I have a right to benefit from knowledge that took Victor's countrymen millennia to learn.

The low, brightly painted buildings of San Antonio Village appear in the distance. Like a handful of colorful marbles scattered across the valley's gentle bowl. The Maya Mountains rise blue-grey in the distance. Maya coughs again.

"Ay, raina," Victor sighs. He calls her "queen."

Here in the land of the Maya, where body, mind and spirit are tightly intertwined, physical and spiritual illnesses are considered one and the same. Physical symptoms, the Maya believe, erupt when the life force that surrounds a person's body, the ch'ulel, is damaged by trauma or stress. Those who are sick in body are believed to be first sick spirit, and so Maya healers always treat both.

Uzi glances at me over his left shoulder, searching my face for a sign. My gentle husband, always gauging my moods, always trying to position himself on the safe side of conflict. Are you still okay with this? his expression asks. I crimp the left side of my mouth and shrug my shoulders slightly. I'm deliberately impossible to read.

Even now, eight years later, I cannot tell you if I traveled down that road as a whole person, held intact by my own convictions, or if I went there as a broken woman, mechanically following my husband's lead. I can tell you only what it is like to be riding in that van, on that mango road, rolling past dense fields of brown and green. It is to be a thirty-six-year-old woman, a mother and a wife, who is willing to do anything—anything—to help her child.

Mi vida. I will tell you. This is how it feels. As if my life is lying across my lap and I am bringing it into the jungle, to the man who speaks with spirits, so it can be healed.

© Hope Edelman 2009