Beauty in our own image

In Antigua, Guatemala, where stones pave the streets and men in cowboy hats sell ice cream from handcarts, there is a museum of pre-Colombian art set within the rock walls of an abandoned monastery. It's there that I saw my first examples of Mayan art, the clay statuary and shell beadwork that define the aesthetic tastes of the people who once ruled this land. Most impressive were the pieces made from Guatemalan jade, the green stone that rises to the surface as platelets below the earth shift and collide. I gazed at necklaces fashioned from chunks of jade as big as a man's fist and studied a carved alligator glowing pale green and translucent. The statues of people also caught my attention, and it was the sculpted women in particular who drew my eye.

As in so many post-colonial societies, modern-day Guatemalans are a mix of old and new world ancestry, of Spanish forebears and Mayan roots. For all this blended blood, however, many of the physical traits of the Maya can still be seen. There is skin color — dark as tamarind — and the large, hooked noses seen in Mayan paintings and on the faces of boys in the streets of this city. What stands out most is the shape of people, the women built wide through the shoulders and broad through the hips, shorter and stockier than their Spanish counterparts.

I discovered a clay figurine in one of the display cases, voluptuous and nude, a pre-Colombian Venus de Willendorf. I examined the square shoulders, the thick waist and wide hips, and I thought of the teachers in my Spanish school and the indigena women in the marketplace. The figure captured an idea of beauty that is neither American nor European — that is not rooted in height or slenderness — but that is indigenous to this part of the world and the people who embody it.

By way of this experience, I reflected on beauty and the physical qualities that trigger attraction. I have the sense that the people who complete us also reflect us. So often, when I've asked someone to describe their perfect mate, they'll give me a list of characteristics that match their own. Similarly, in a book I once read about soul mates ( i f you're into that sort of thing), the author said that

those joined over several lifetimes often look similar, especially in the eyes. I remember a time shopping in Wal- Mart with a boyfriend, holding hands as we searched for Moon Pies. We passed another shopper twice before she stopped and asked, "Are you two brother and sister?" We laughed and told her no, but later, standing in front of a mirror in the men's department, we admitted we looked a lot alike.

Not to say the exotic isn't appealing. Here in Guatemala, my Scandinavian friends have more suitors than they can handle. But the men who whistle at those blond-haired beauties aren't serious. Not really. Because the couples I see on the streets and in the marketplace, the ones holding hands and carrying small, dark-eyed children, are all perfect reflections of one another, beautiful in their symmetry.

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