A Stolen Season

by Rodney Hall

  Aware of four alternative approaches to the top, Marianna decides to sample them all. The massive masonry courses and tuck-fitted corners—treated as sequential syllables—require only that she keep count. Dividing the enterprise into the sections of a spiral, by vertical thirteens and horizontal twenties, she should be able to bear right—stage by stage—following each platform around one corner to the staircase on the next facade and by this means encompass the entire structure. Driven by a sacred intoxication. Perhaps it may even be her lot to unravel the mystical pattern once and for all.

  Now she has just one more specific question to resolve. Nagged by the need to confirm the practicality of the plan, she plonks herself down to consult Joshua Shilling again. To her irritation there is no index. But, with the book open on her lap, the wind finds the page for her. For a baffled moment she stares at it.

  While we, of the advanced nations, despise such arithmetical determinism, we would do well to remember that, many centuries after the Mayans finished erecting the last of their great monuments, our own leading thinkers were still grappling with similarly ambitious calculations. For example, in his Annals of the World Archbishop James Ussher, Church of England Primate of All Ireland from 1625 to 1656, set out to calculate the date when God began His seven days of creation, no less! And, what’s more, the worthy archbishop came up with an answer: Sunday, 23 October 4004 BC.

  Now, at long last, Marianna smiles. 4004 BC! Sunday 23 October! Poor vaunting fragile race! Sunday! She smears a fresh layer of sunscreen on her nose, jams her hat on her head and tucks the book away. She must attend to her project. Procrastination will be her downfall. In the midst of life we are in death.

  Her sentimental father had been bad enough, but Manfred was worse. Manfred, while practising his manoeuvres and avoiding the buckled patches of parquetry, talked amiably the whole while, his voice—now approaching now receding—bridged the emptiness to reach her. Its Germanic lilt became the most familiar thing in her life. Before long Marianna, proud of her courage, took the plunge and had him home. So that was that.

  Ledges mirror the simple sky, transformed to blank slabs of space. Another mood swing kicks in. Cicadas, having taken a break, ratchet up their soundtrack in an assault on eternity. Tomorrow there will be no sign Marianna was ever here, an ocean of indifferent leaves emptily heaving in every direction as far as the horizon.

  Sure-footed she climbs the steep cracked stairs with whatever she gathers for her treasurehouse of memories. Already the entire landscape opens out, mapped with straight lines enmeshing the distant volcanoes of Guatemala. So here it is. Mystical energy and, in some sense, an extension of the soul. At midday her plan will reach its culmination when she stands alone at the top under a vertical sun. This should be amazing. There is nothing to prevent her finding God. After all, at forty-nine, Marianna Gluck has had enough of everything else. Even the air smells of eternity. All her senses alert. She listens . . . intently . . . having begun to detect a hint of something unexpected: whispers . . . perhaps the gods of the ceiba tree have caught up with her . . . most probably a phenomenon caused by angled walls magnifying the murmurously restless foliage below . . . developing as secret growls and insinuations so profoundly deep they drag at the inner ear.

  Segue.

  In the tropics even the most brilliant day retains a dark edge left over from the night. Sunlit sills and cornices underscored with indigo. A dark river roars through the ravine far below. The scream of baffled insects climaxes to a war footing. Something electric is about to happen. Marianna braces. Hairs at the back of her neck stand on end. Sure enough, a clap of thunder detonates like an exploding shell to rumble around the clear sky. Shaken, she turns to scan the horizon for some sign of missed warnings. None. Ahead, her view is blocked by the pyramid itself. She spares a thought for President Molina leading his public circus, top hat and ribbons at risk of a drenching. She imagines him, caught halfway to the top, finding the steepness of the steps taxing, and no escape either up or down. At least he will not be alone in his exposure—as she is—nor faced with primal helplessness.

  She balances high on the shoulder of a precipice.

  The livid flanges are transformed to petrified cascades, around which stone clouds suddenly swoop. Clouds that bump and crash. Even their shadows are heavy enough to flatten the hills to a faint pencil line. Thunder snarls again and a storm coheres from empty space. The sky switches to black: the temple switches to white. Drops flung like pebbles dance among tiny shivering star flowers. A giant fist of wind strikes. Rain slants like sheet metal to slice through the forested gullies. Lashing gusts sting her sunburn. (Professor Shilling warns his readers that the storm god Huracán tends to throw his weight around when least expected, so he’s right again.) Dark as an eclipse, celestial curtains swirl on a Turner scale above the dwarfed citadel. Cascades bubble and splash, ledge to ledge. High sloping walls drift through space, patched with ghostly fragments of a story. The sky switches yellow: the temple switches purple. Being drawn from within, the heavens are sucked up to form a stupendous dome. Lift off. The cyclone floats like a terrifying jellyfish of continental scale with dangling tentacles that reach right down into the ravines, a buoyant monster torn loose from clutching earth, that sweeps over and away en route for the conquest of Mexico. Pendent rags of vapour brush the abandoned stone relics of a lost civilization, leaving them slicked with bright varnish. Celestial fire consecrates the sacred structure, a belated angle grinder of lightning shearing its cornices with steely brilliance, as one last colossal thunderclap retracts, trundling away, rolling the length of the horizon. Rolling. Rolling.

  The turmoil of darkness wrenches itself loose. Clouds grumble off in the distance, solemn as icebergs. Corrosive lakes of light drift inland from the Sargasso Sea to undulate across chequerboard farmlands. The hole torn in outer space is suddenly wide enough for the sun to drop through, boulder-heavy and unavoidable as a meteorite.

  Sopping wet, Marianna crouches on the stairs. Fear gives way to misery. Her shirt clings and her hat droops. She tugs at squelching shoes to hoist them off and, having tied the laces together, slings them round her neck. The temple fades the innocent grey of neutrality. A spangle of raindrops on stone. Shakily and barefoot she admits defeat. Scattered drizzle from the clearing sky hushes along the scaly flagstones. She turns tail. She begins to feel her way down, mocked by a distant population of cicadas thrilling with indignation.

  What was she thinking!

  Quite likely the international police have already surrounded the hotel in anticipation of her return. She could have used the time more sensibly, seeking a hideout, perhaps, with one of the local drug lords accredited with being a law unto themselves. Wet stairs gleam. Yet her fibre-memory protests. Her muscles, having stored the recurrent numbers, anticipate more. Trapped by indecision, she props again. She turns on the spot. Will she . . . won’t she? Empty shoes bump against her chest. Exposed on the warm wet stone she understands sacred architecture as only a dancer can. Her skeleton recognizes the need to complete the pattern—quarrelsome mind catching up a beat later—to find courage, to begin again, to account for the remaining multiples of thirteen. In some disquieting way it is as if the building thinks through her.

  Too high for safety and with nothing to hold on to, in point of fact it’s easier to keep going. An old keepsake chimes in, contributing the music of ‘Mitten wir im Leben sind’, the text printed in blackletter on the memorial service card at her father’s funeral. Oh, back then her lungs were so numbed by the mineral Lutheran air (‘In the midst of life we are in death’) she had not known how to reply to people who looked down their noses at her while offering condolences. Did they or didn’t they know the truth of his disgrace? There she was, the young Marianna, betrayed by shame, hanging around the graveyard, staring at a mound of raw soil being heaped on his coffin while kookaburras laughed from the treetops. Sadly such bystanding, such indecision and gormlessness, s
eems to be in her DNA. Despite her admittedly beautiful legs.

  Whoops! She stubs her toe. The mind wanders at risk of a fatal fall.

  Safe on the next shelf she pauses to take stock, tying her shoes back on. No hurry. She has made good progress so far. The sky flies past unchecked. Vertigo. She decides to sit for safety. Why not? The shock of the storm has exhausted her. Indeed she lies full length. Just look at that. So Marianna Gluck stretches out on a parapet hollowed long ago by the shuffling of people’s repeated duties. No longer in danger—and with her daypack for a pillow—she can pretend to be comfortable. Here she floats while the inverted jungle far below grows down into a fan of ravines, converging on a void of shadows dotted with the plumed heads of palm trees, all veiled in mist. Humidity an abomination heavier than flesh, heavier even than the last of her trials. Blinded by the re-emergent sun and cradled in this ancient hollow. Her heartbeat slows. The million-mouthed land gapes at her audacity, while the womb-warm slab serves her up for the knife.

  She closes her eyes.

  As ever, her thoughts revert to the subject of Manfred. It all ended when she returned home by taxi (the traffic ahead dragging red tail-light bloodsmears on the wet road) and caught him out. Evidently he had not expected her back so soon. She saw proof in his evasiveness, his already-combed hair and choice of cufflinks. She gathered her resolve.

  It amounted to this: once he had had his say, she had hers.

  What keeps casually popping into mind—quite as if it matters no more than any other memory—is the revolver that lay on top of Manfred’s folded clothes in his open suitcase. Black metal gleaming silkily, it fascinated her with its strangeness. Till then she had never seen an actual gun. The weight of it depressed the pile of shirts to form a revolver-shaped nest. A further surprise was the top drawer of the cupboard, wrenched askew and empty, sagging in a rhomboid of light cast by the mirror fixed to the inner side of the open wardrobe door. The wreckage of order. Already exhausted she said, ‘I didn’t know you were planning a trip.’ He replied, ‘There’s been no plan.’ What could she say to that?

  She reached out and took the revolver in her hand. An object made to be held, it felt amazingly solid and ominous. Instinctively she adjusted her grip to explore the comfort of it. He warned, ‘Be careful, that’s loaded.’ She held it at arm’s length. ‘Why loaded?’ she asked with every reasonable expectation—now—of an answer. He shrugged and explained, ‘It’s an old habit of mine somehow.’ But already she guessed: he intended his departure to be permanent. No, he hadn’t planned a trip, he planned to leave for good. ‘Is this the safety catch?’ she asked. ‘Don’t worry,’ he assured her softly, ‘I deposited your share in our old joint bank account.’ Why old? Was there a new account?

  The better to reveal the nakedness of her need for answers she faced him fully at this point, while replacing the revolver on its cushion of shirts. He boasted, ‘You will find a nice amount for you to live a comfortable life.’ A nice amount being what? ‘But, Manfred!’ She could not believe . . . she simply could not, even when he dropped his Konstantin von Clausewitz bombshell.

  Oh, it is too painful to recall.

  Marianna, opening her eyes, finds herself confronted by a hornet, hovering for all the world as if it expects her to recognize it. To put some distance between the threat of being stung and her unprotected sidewise nose, she tries twisting where she lies. But the persistent insect anticipates the withdrawal, realigned already, holding her eye to eye and maintaining its distance with a blur of wings. There’s no point batting it away. Batting’s how people get stung. Finally the truth dawns: here at last is a creature interested in her.

  She seizes the opportunity—because she still has one unspoken secret to tell—and confesses to the hornet, ‘I betrayed my baby.’ Now she finds the words she has kept buried all this time. ‘The baby I was pregnant with,’ she begins again. But her throat closes against saying more.

  Forget it. Yes. Forget about Manfred-doppelganger-swineface. Just get going.

  Marianna scrambles to her feet. She balances, teetering on the parapet, and slaps the damp seat of her pants. Kaleidoscoping perspectives tug at her nerves to drag her towards the vertiginous fall and the gulf of air behind her. Canted facades defy perspective by appearing to topple over—and she herself slips. She slips . . . slipping . . . help! . . . even while the vast still-somnolent forest waits far below, digesting its illimitable and ferocious past. But no. She has regained her balance. The turmoil roaring in her head locks her rigidly still, at the edge of the precipice, and the Belizean hornet steadies too, adjusting to new circumstances.

  ‘Sting me, then,’ she says.

  She turns her back. Defying gravity she thrusts herself up into the hollow sky, pressing her body against the sheer weight of light. She will climb Manfred out of her system. His sentimental Germanisms have no place here. The pyramid demonstrates its own climax in diminishing ratios of lichened stone. And symmetry satisfies her need for stability. Miraculous. She places her feet to do the least damage to tiny flowers tremulous in the cracks. Her muddy runners rise to their calling, bright and alien, untouchable as the winged boots of Mercury. She has never thought much about stairs needing to be of regulation size. Now, to her discomfort, these prove too narrow and a great deal too steep.

  Some secret still remains a secret.

  She is glad she has so far said nothing she cannot take back. She wonders if Manfred ever wrote a will. Or whether she’d only been his wife in name. What might she be worth when it comes to the worthless matter of money? Just for a moment the temptation to establish her rights and pursue her claims as Marianna von Clausewitz floats like a lethal bubble in her bloodstream. The sky—re-crafted as an inversion of the temple—fits itself around every detail. And the hornet has taken the hint and gone: one hazard less.

  Belated diamond drops drift through space, straying northwards in silence. But, hang on, wait a minute . . . she imagines . . . what’s this? She could swear she hears someone . . . a stalker being what she most dreads . . . and now, surely, some man is breathing behind her! . . . hard, effortful breaths . . . betrayed by a whiff of cologne . . . Manfred! . . . fully expecting to catch him out, she swings round, but too impulsively . . . losing her balance. Steady. It’s nothing. Nobody. Not a soul in sight. Of course not. Just unsupported space tumbling down an eternal precipice of stairs left treacherously slippery by the storm. And herself altogether too high up. Now it’s the gods she plainly hears whispering: Arrest her . . . arrest her . . . arrest her. Though what do they know?

  ‘Besides, whoever heard of Konstantin von Clausewitz?’ she remembers shrieking at him. ‘So why tell me this?’ He’d smirked as he said, ‘Tomorrow morning it will be in all the papers.’ Well, tough luck. Tomorrow never came.

  She squints up at the slanting wall, regretting the loss of her dark glasses (they were Guccis, too), able to make out life-size carved figures locked into a vast shadow puzzle. Scrambling for a closer look she can see they are all men, lined up, with arms bound behind their backs. Naked, stooped and humble-headed, there can be no mistaking their submission. Slaves! Individual portraits, perhaps, of the actual labourers who built the temple, their misery recorded on the walls of their own creation. The very idea of a man-made mountain comes to seem monstrous and an abuse of power.

  So, what of the sculptors who shaped the stone—did they enjoy any status at all in those opaque times? Or were they, also, non-persons? Did they carve these slaves with sympathy? Or immortalize them in anger? The misery of captivity speaks across the centuries. And, yes, she understands, with the hindsight of history, that the powerless sometimes outlive the tyrants who persecuted them. Here it is. The sacrificing priests are dead—the gods themselves may be dead!—meanwhile the gallery of human suffering lives on. Reaching up, her fingertips can read the Braille of a manacled ankle.

  ‘Nothing much changes,’ she says aloud. As if the ensl
aved can be reassured. And several voices answer murmurously. Yes, actual voices—faint voices—speaking with the remote flat factuality of the everyday, an illusion so credible that, though unable to pick individual words, she hears the phrases of living speech.

  I am Marianna Gluck. And this trick of the ear frightens me.

  She must escape. She must finish what she has begun. Up and up. Clothes cling to shoulders and breasts. But, oh, how she objects to the sheer clumsiness of counting by thirteens and twenties. That ridiculous combination. Wildly improbable! At long last—out of pure annoyance—she puts the question as she gets moving again: do such numbers occur in nature? And there it is. Quite suddenly she solves it . . . there are thirteen full moons in every year (this is an immutable fact, a symbol of the divine order) and twenty is the sum total of our fingers and toes (symbol of the human).

  So simple, so profound.

  Radiant in the moment, Marianna is convinced she has chanced on the latitude and longitude of this abstract culture. She sees, with awe, how gigantic a leap in the dark it must have been: to build such a theory in stone, entailing the sheer burden of emptying a quarry, block by block! The madness of giving away all power and freedom for the sake of demonstrating an idea! Thirteen steps higher she asks herself if this isn’t what every civilization does in its own way?

  Segue.

  The towering ruin mounts into a sun-conquered sky—grotesque, brooding and phallic—inscrutable as the state itself. Marianna has reached the fourth of five terraces. A diminutive forked figure, she turns the corner to confront another fleet of descending stair-treads, picked out in silver. Rain-washed reflections highlight the conical perspective with uncanny emphasis. The citadel down below unfolds the last page of its map: courtyards of scrubby grass closed off at either end by a ramp. Most striking in its completeness—midway between the temple and the outer causeway—stands a squat tower on a circular ground plan. Openings let into the upper storey suggest an observatory.