Walking around Mexico City's archeological museum, a reasonable man has to come to the conclusion that the Aztecs and the Spanish thoroughly deserved each other. They were the two most vicious sets of 16th-century xenophobes, a righteous blind date.
I suspect from looking at Aztec culture that their lives were a cross between a Nuremberg rally and the Folies Bergères, but then you walk into another room and here are the Maya. For most of us, American artefacts are a cultural margarine test — can you tell Aztec from Maya? Nine out of 10 can't, until you see them side by side and then instantly you know the Maya were the good guys, altogether more ethereal, amused and inquiring. Where the Aztecs are all threats and instructions, the Maya are all observations and questions. They were a collection of agrarian city states, connected by a common language, a culture, some religion and a hierarchy that flowered in what is now the Yucatan peninsula, Belize, Honduras and Guatemala. They flourished for 700 years each side of the birth of Christ. At the very apex of that remarkable civilisation, the Maya suffered a catastrophic, vertiginous decline and vanished.
"Whatever happened to the Maya?" may not be a question that furrows your brow, but for beardy, Birkenstocked chaps with trowels and Indiana Jones complexes it's one of the great mysteries of humanity, and to find an answer you have to go to Guatemala, heartland of the Maya.
"Guatemala," I was told by an enthusiast, "is like Mexico was 50 years ago." And that's a good thing, is it? To start with, you bypass Guatemala City, the capital. It's a sprawling, snarling, bad-tempered mess of a place, and potentially dangerous. These things are all relative, of course: it's an adventure playground compared with 10 years ago. Guatemala suffered an intractable civil war that started in 1960, instigated by the CIA on behalf of American fruit companies. Thirty years later, nobody could remember what it was they were fighting about, so they decided to give elections a go, and we're in the middle of one right now. The country is papered in posters sporting smiley, "Trust me," open-necked candidates. Every tree, rock, wall and telegraph pole is daubed in slogans, and you realise at least in the electronic West, television is somewhere to put political graffiti.
Forty minutes down the road from Guatemala City is Antigua, which used to be the capital. Guatemala's had bad luck with capitals. The first colonial one was overrun by Indians, the second was buried under a mud slide, and the third, Antigua, was wrecked by an 18th-century earthquake so severe, the shaken population upped sticks en masse, leaving the dead to rot in the streets. Today it's a miraculously beautiful, crumbly Spanish colonial town. Sometimes neglect is the best thing that can happen to a place. It's set in the lee of three towering volcanoes, one of which smokes and dribbles malevolently. It's a low grid of pastel- and earth-coloured shop fronts, courtyard houses, picturesquely ruined churches and runaway tropical gardens. It has an outré expat population who all seem to be escaping from something. Antigua is a Butch and Sundance hide-out for the comfortably off and the harmlessly dotty.
The weather, they boast, is permanent springtime. On the streets, riotously embroidered Indians carry bundles of blankets on their heads.
I took Matthew, my photographer, to the local market, which was so bright and exuberant it made your eyes strobe and teeth ache. We ate corn porridge with black beans and chilli. "Bloody hell," he said, "we've landed in a Tintin book." It does have a simple, primary, timeless feel to it. Guatemala is innocent of what the holiday trade call a top end: there are virtually no luxury hotels, or at least none that fit their billing, and the tourist infrastructure is pretty much everyone else's infrastructure — that is, like Mexico 50 years ago. What there is instead are lots of bed-and-breakfasts set in wonderfully evocative period houses.
We stayed in Quinta Maconda in the middle of Antigua. It's owned by John Heaton, a stalled adventurer and escapee from the First World who managed to be a beguiling cross between Keith Richards and Cecil Beaton. He has been collecting curios and votive objects from Central America to make a house and garden of eccentric beauty and tasteful comfort. He appointed himself our guide and travelling companion, which turned out to be something of a godsend, though whose god I'm not entirely sure. Most tourists in Guatemala carry their beds on their backs and are walking through Central America as an act of stamina before doing something grown-up or media studies. Very few locals speak any English, there are no road signs in any language, and indeed often not much road either.
Guatemala has proportionally the largest population of indigenous Indians in Central America. These are the descendants of the Maya. You see faces that could have come off limestone reliefs a thousand years old. Nobody could pretend that history since the conquistadors has been kind to them. This is still a tonally racist, exploitative and hierarchical society. Unemployment stands at around 40%, wages are tiny, corruption a matter of fact, but everyone we met was quietly polite and as helpful as mutual incomprehension allows. But there is overall a miasma, a maudlin sense of loss and of resignation. There is little exuberance about the Maya: their body language is folded and hunched. Mourning becomes the Maya.
I was having breakfast in a village, and I noticed something odd about a washing line. It was made from barbed wire. It seemed very Guatemalan, that — emblematic, appropriately awkward.
We travel out of Antigua and visit great crimson football fields of poinsettias, named for the poor Mexican girl who could only offer weeds to the baby Jesus at Christmas, but whose piety so touched the Almighty he turned them red at the altar. And then a coffee finca, where the parcel-farmers and day workers wait in line with bags of beans to be weighed and paid for. The global price of coffee has fallen to the basement, and it shows on the resigned acceptance of their faces. Coffee is Guatemala's principal export, so of course it's impossible to find a decent cup. Occasionally it manages to be too repellent to swallow at all. Their other thing is cocoa, but there's no chocolate either, just weird little packets of 1950s biscuits that taste of dust and rationing. We go on, up to San Andreas Iztapa and a shrine to Maximon.
Guatemala is a Catholic country converted with torture and blackmail. But the Indians developed another underground religion that is half hidden behind the plaster saintly images of the church. Maximon is an idol originally invoked to protect women from being raped by the Spanish while their men worked in the field. Bizarrely, he is part Pedro de Alvarado, the conquistador who conquered Guatemala, and part Judas Iscariot. The manifestation in this chapel is called San Simon: he's another, rather absurd mannequin dressed as a classic early-20th-century landowner or lawyer. He sits awkwardly on a podium in a black suit and hat, with a stick-on moustache. His shrine is covered in votive plaques thanking him for miracles. A few squat peasants queue to ask him favours. They offer booze and fags as gifts; a man kisses the corner of his scarf with a barely restrained fervour and hoarsely implores some desperate desire. It's almost funny, like watching someone talk to a ventriloquist's dummy — but then it isn't, because the belief and the need are so nakedly intense.
Outside in the courtyard, a drunk with rheumy eyes and an idiot's grin tries to sell us good luck: he doesn't look as if he has much stock. Invoking the spirit of people who have massacred and subjugated you looks like spiritual masochism, but it's explained that the idols represent unimpeachable power. That's what the impotent peasant needs. Power, like electricity, is in itself neither good nor bad — you just have to plug into it — and who could be more powerful than Judas, the man who killed the conquistadors' God?
