When I first came to Central America there were many more ways for an outsider to suddenly find themselves completely out of their depth, particularly outside the major towns. These days the whole environment has become markedly shallower.
If there is an age-old tendency to predate on outsider, it has adjusted to this new environment, yet the works of Paul Bowles are (unjustly one feels) now often disparaged by contemporary American liberals who pride themselves on their seemingly all-encompassing comfort zones and perhaps don't appreciate their good fortune to be gracing this new era.
Bowles was a highly talented writer and composer, a gay man who found an extended temporo-spatial slither of liberation (along with undoubtedly enviable comfort) in the developing world, which confounds many in the mainstream today.
Pastor Dowe at Tacaté, peak Bowles one might say, is set amongst the Lacandon Maya and features some of his very best evocations of potentially mean landscapes. As with Lowry's Under the Volcano, the period is the back end of the Spanish Civil War, though the narrative itself was also written just over a decade later.
Its protagonist is a widowed protestant preacher who has come to this made-up settlement in the backwoods of Chiapas from his base in Ocosingo, having brushed up a bit on the local lingo and cosmology and, as is often the case with Bowles protagonists, his comfort zone soon segues into the tract of smothering discomfit.
This is in part because he has possibly failed to appreciate that his own modernity is compromised by his adherence to ancient credulities and when he tweaks the 'good news' to accommodate Mayan beliefs and divine personages, he permits his flock to turn the tables on him.
Intriguingly, we learn that these Maya possess a duo of creator gods, Hachakyum and Metzabok, venerated here in a pair of adjacent, hidden caves. 'Metzabok makes all the things that do not belong here,' the pastor is informed, and it is to this deity that he soon finds himself praying.
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