There is a place that tourists walk over every day without knowing it.
It lies beneath the white sand, beneath the highways, beneath the cenotes where people plunge in looking for a cool respite and a good photograph. The ancient Maya called it Xibalba, and the word, in their language, does not mean paradise. It means, roughly, the place of fear.
The place of fear
It was not a hell like the one the Europeans later brought —there was no punishment, no fire, no morality sorting the dead into good and bad. It was something older and harder to name: a world beneath the world, ruled by lords with names that raise the hairs on your arms —Jun Kame' and Wuqub' Kame', One Death and Seven Death— and by diseases that walked around like people. A place you reached not by dying, but by descending.
The doors of water
Here is what few remember while swimming in a cenote: to the Maya, those pools of water were not attractions. They were doors.
The fresh water that runs today beneath the entire peninsula —a system of underground rivers, caverns and cenotes counted among the most extensive on the planet— was, in the Maya cosmovision, the threshold between this world and the other. To go down into the water was to draw near to Xibalba. That is why, at the bottom of many cenotes, archaeologists have found bones, vessels, offerings. And sometimes things we would rather not find.
"You can live for years above Xibalba without ever thinking of it."
The patience of the underworld
What disturbs me most about Xibalba is not its cruelty. It is its patience.
In the Popol Vuh, the sacred book of the K'iche' Maya, the lords of the underworld chase no one. They wait. They set trials. They let their victims stumble on their own, fall by their own pride, their own fear, their own lie. Xibalba does not need to attack. It is enough for it to be there, below, breathing, while up above life goes on as if nothing were wrong.
Water does not judge, but neither does it forget
You can build a house, fall in love, start over, invent yourself another life. The water allows it. The water does not judge.
But the water does not forget, either. And that —for me, ever since I made this land my own— was always the question that would not let me sleep: what happens when the thing we buried at the bottom decides it has rested long enough?
Nothing Stays Drowned is a psychological thriller set in the Riviera Maya.
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