So many girls, I’d thought. Why am I trying to find just one?
Palacio Maya, another of the faux-Mayan resorts on my hit list, is a few kilometers north of here. We putter up the highway, breathing in the fumes of the passing tour buses and trucks. This time, we stash the moped in some flowering shrubs along the winding manicured road that leads to the front gates. Palacio Maya looks a lot like the Maya del Sol, only instead of a monolithic wall, it is fronted by a giant pyramid, with a guard gate in the middle. This time, I’m ready. In Spanish, I tell the guard I’m trying to find a friend of mine who’s staying here but I want to surprise her. Then I slip him a twenty-dollar bill. He doesn’t say a word—he just opens the gates.
“Twenty dollars,” Broodje says, nodding his head. “Much classier than a couple of beers.”
“It’s probably what a couple of beers go for in a place like this.”
We walk along the paved roadway, expecting to find a hotel, or some evidence of one, but what we find is another guard gate. The guards smile at us and call buenos días, as if they’re expecting us, and by the way they’re appraising us, like they’re cats and we’re mice, I see the other guards have called ahead. Without saying a word, I reach into my wallet and hand over another ten.
“Oh gracias, señor,” the guard says. “Que generoso!” But then he looks around. “Only there are two of us.”
I reach back into my wallet. The well’s dry. I show my empty wallet. The guard shakes his head. I realize I overplayed it back at the first gate. I should’ve offered up the ten first.
“Come on,” I say. “It’s all I have left.”
“Do you know how much rooms here are?” he asks. “Twelve hundred dollars a night. If you want me to let you in, and your friend, to enjoy the pools, the beaches, the tennis, the buffets, you have to pay.”
“Buffets?” Broodje interrupts.
“Shh!” I whisper. To the guard I say, “We don’t care about any of that. We’re just trying to find a guest here.”
The guard raises his eyebrow. “If you know guests, why you sneak in like a thief? You think just because you have white skin, and a ten-dollar bill, we think you are rich?” He laughs. “It’s an old trick, amigo.”
“I’m not trying to sneak anything. I’m trying to find a girl. An American girl. She might be staying here.”
This makes the guard laugh even harder. “An American girl? I’d like one of those, too. They cost more than ten dollars.”
We glare at each other. “Give me my money back,” I say.
“What money?” the guard asks.
I’m furious when we get back to the bike. Broodje, too, is muttering about getting ripped off that thirty dollars. But I don’t care about the money, and it’s not the guards I’m mad at.
I keep replaying a conversation with Lulu in my head. Then one when she’d told me about Mexico. About how frustrating it was to go to the same resort with her family every year. I’d told her maybe she should go off the grid next time she went to Cancún. “Tempt fate,” I’d said. “See what happens.” Then I’d joked that maybe I’d go to Mexico one day, too, bump into her, and we’d escape into the wilds, having no idea at the time that this silly aside would become a mission of sorts. “You think that would happen?” she’d asked. “We’d just randomly bump into each other?” I’d told her it would have to be another big accident and she’d teased back: “So you’re saying I’m an accident?”
After I told her that she was, she’d said something strange. She’d said that me calling her an accident might be the most flattering thing anyone has ever said about her. She wasn’t simply fishing for compliments. She was revealing something with that honesty of hers, so completely disarming it was like she was stripping not just herself bare but me, too. When she said that, it had made me feel as if I’d been entrusted with something very important. And it also made me sad, because I sensed it was true. And if it was, it was wrong.
I’ve flattered lots of girls, many who deserved it, many who didn’t. Lulu deserved it, she deserved so much more flattery than being called an accident. So I opened my mouth to say something nice. What came out, I think, surprised us both. I told her that she was the sort of person who found money and returned it, who cried in movies you weren’t meant to cry in, who did things that scared her. I wasn’t even sure where these things were coming from, only that as I said them, I was certain that they were true. Because improbable as it was, I knew her.
Only now it strikes me how wrong I was. I didn’t know her at all. And I didn’t ask the simplest of questions, like where she stayed in Mexico or when she visited or what her last name was, or what her first name was. And as a result, here I am, at the mercy of security guards.
We ride back to our hostel in the dusty part of Playa del Carmen, full of stray dogs and rundown shops. The cantina next door serves cheap beer and fish tacos. We order several of each. A couple of travelers from our hostel roll in. Broodje waves them over, and he starts telling them about our day, embellishing it so that it almost sounds fun. It’s how all good travel stories are born. Nightmares spun into punch lines. But my frustration is too fresh to make anything seem funny.
Marjorie, a pretty Canadian girl, clucks sympathetically. A British girl named Cassandra, with short spiky brown hair, laments the state of poverty in Mexico and the failures of NAFTA, while T.J., a sunburnt guy from Texas, just laughs. “I seen that place Maya del Sol. It’s like Disneyland on the Riviera.”
At the table behind us, I hear someone snicker. “Más como Disneyland del infierno.”
I turn around. “You know the place?” I ask in Spanish.
“We work there,” the taller one answers in Spanish.
I put out my hand. “Willem,” I say.
“Esteban,” he answers.
“José,” says the shorter. They’re a bit of a spaghetti-and-meatball pair, too.
“Any chance you can sneak me in?”
Esteban shakes his head. “Not without risking my job. But there’s an easy way to get in. They’ll pay you to visit.”
“Really?”
Esteban asks me if I have a credit card.
I pull out my wallet and show him my brand new Visa, a gift from the bank after my large deposit.
“Okay, good,” Esteban says. Then he looks at my outfit, a t-shirt and a beat-up pair of kakis. “You’ll also need better clothes. Not these surfer things.”
“No problem. Then what?”
Esteban explains how Cancún is full of sales reps trying to get people into those resorts to buy a timeshare. They hang out at car-rental places, in the airports, even at some of the ruins. “If they think you have money, they’ll invite you to take a tour. They’ll even pay you for your trouble, money, free tours, massages.”