The Falling Woman

by Pat Murphy

  The thirsty trees that set down roots in the sparse soil of the Yucatán are lean and wiry, accustomed to hardship and drought. Even after they have been felled and left to die, the trees fight back, reaching out with thorns and broken branches for the soft flesh of anyone who raises a machete against them. When I tried to pull a branch from the tilted stone so that I could take a better look, the tree clung willfully to the rest of the heap; when I yanked harder, it twisted in my hand and gave way so suddenly that I lost my balance. As I fell back, another branch raked the tender skin on my inner wrist with half-inch thorns, leaving bloody claw marks.

  The monte fights back. My efforts had moved the branch slightly and the stone still looked promising. I wrapped my kerchief around my wrist to stanch the blood and decided to wait until the work crew could move the brush. I turned toward camp.

  An old woman who did not belong to my time stood in the shade of the tree. The air around me was hot and still. A bird in the jungle called out on a rising note, as if asking a piercing question.

  The woman’s dark hair was coiled in braids on her head; strips of bright blue cloth decorated with small white sea-shells were woven into the braids. Around her neck was a string of jade beads – each one polished and round, as if worn smooth by the sea. White discs carved of oyster shell dangled from her ears. Her robe, a deeper shade of blue than the cloth in her hair, hung down to the leather sandals on her feet. From her belt of woven leather strips hung a conch shell trumpet and a pouch encrusted with snail shells.

  She was not an attractive woman. Her forehead slanted back at an unnatural angle, pressed flat by a cradle board in her infancy. Dark blue spots tattooed on one cheek formed a spiral pattern, marking her as a Mayan noblewoman. Her teeth were tumbled like the stone blocks in an old wall. The front teeth were inset with jade beads, another mark of nobility.

  She squinted at me as if the sun were too bright. ‘The shadow again,’ she said softly in Maya. She watched me for a moment. ‘Speak to me, Ix Zacbeliz.’

  ‘You see me?’ I asked her in Maya. ‘What do you see?’

  She smiled, showing her inlaid teeth. ‘I see a shadow who talks. It has been long since I have spoken with anyone, even a shadow. I did not know how lonely I would be when I sent the people away.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You will learn. We will be friends and I will teach you secrets.’ Her hands were clasped before her and I noticed that her arms, from the inner elbow to the wrist, were bandaged with strips of white cloth.

  The sun was hot on my shoulders and back. My heart seemed to be beating too quickly.

  ‘You and I have much in common. You are searching for secrets. I looked for secrets once.’ She spoke quietly, as if talking to herself. ‘But in the end, the h’menob of the new religion said I was mad. Wisdom is often mistaken for madness. Is that not true?’

  I did not speak.

  ‘Lift this stone and you will find secrets,’ she said. ‘I hid them there myself, after I sent the people away. You can find them. It is time for them to come to light. The cycle is turning.’

  ‘How did you send the people away?’ I asked.

  The plaza shimmered in the sunlight and I stood alone. Zuhuy-kak had gone. The bird in the monte called again, asking a question that no living person could answer. I headed for camp, glancing over my shoulder only once.

  Notes for City of Stones by Elizabeth Butler

  A thousand years ago, centuries before the Spanish conquistadors came, the Maya abandoned their ceremonial centers. After about AD 900, they built no more temples, carved no more stelae, the stone monuments etched with glyphs commemorating important events. They fled from the ceremonial centers into the jungle.

  Why? No one knows, but everyone is willing to speculate. Every archaeologist has a theory. Some talk of famine caused by overpopulation and years of intensive agriculture. Some claim there was a catastrophe: an earthquake, a drought, or a plague. Some blame the invasion of the Toltecs, a militaristic group from the Valley of Mexico, and still others suggest that the peasant class rebelled, rising up to overthrow the elite class.

  I enjoy pointing out the holes in all the theories. I admit – freely and honestly – that I have no idea why the Maya left their cities and scattered far and wide in the monte. My favorite theory is one that a withered Mayan holy man who lived near Chichén Itzá told me over a bottle of aguardiente. ‘The gods said that the people must leave,’ he told me. ‘And so the people left.’

  Sometimes, I dream of an abandoned city. I dream that each day the sun shines on the walls, fading the bright paints that color the stucco, cracking the plaster that covers the stone. When the evening wind blows, it tatters the cloth that once closed the rooms off from the outside world, carrying leaves and dust in through the open doorways. When the rains come, they flow down the stone steps, knocking loose fragments of stucco, watering the small plants that have taken hold in the cracks. Deer graze on the new grass that sprouts in the courtyard. Mice feast on maize, forgotten in underground chambers, spilled by peasants in the haste of their departure. The mice, rodents of short memories, do not fear the return of the inhabitants. In a temple room, a jaguar makes her home, bearing kittens beneath a statue of the Chaac amid a clutter of windblown leaves.

  Sometimes, I dream of quakes – the earth trembling as if it shivered in the cold. The wood beams that support the roofs crack and the thick walls shift so that one stone no longer rests on the other just so. The walls tumble down.

  In my dreams, the sun, the face of Ah Kinchil, the supreme god, shines on the temples of the Maya. Small trees reach up to the sun from the cracks between the stones. The rain falls and runs in a helter-skelter course amid blocks that twist this way and that. Birds sing in the trees, and owls hunt here by night, feeding on the arrogant mice that have come to regard this place as home.

  Sometimes, very rarely, I dream of a thin man in the white pants of the Yucatecán peasant or a woman in a clean white huipil, the embroidered dress of the peasant woman. The man or woman comes quietly to the ruins, cautious lest the gods of the ancestors fail to approve of the visit. The people who return are more fearful than the mice: the people remember the past and know its power. Candlelight chases back the shadows for a time. The visitor burns incense, mutters propitiations and prayers, sacrifices a turkey and leaves it for the gods, then slips away into the night. The jaguar and her kittens eat the turkey, and the shadows return to the ruins.

  The city I dream is not always the same. Sometimes it is Uxmal, and I watch swallows build nests in the elaborately carved facades. Sometimes it is Tulúm, and I listen to waves crash below the House of the Cenote and hear the humming of bees as they build a nest in the guard tower on the northern corner of the city wall. Sometimes it is Cobá, and I watch the trees take root amid the stones of the ball court, shoving carved blocks aside. Spanish moss sways on the branches, and pajaritos, laughing birds, fly in the branches. The city that I dream changes, but the slow decay is always there. The shadows linger.

  I do not know why the Maya left. I only know that the shadows stayed behind.

  2

  Diane Butler

  I pressed my forehead to the window of the jetliner and watched the plane’s shadow ripple over the brown land below. The plane jerked a little, bucking like a car on a rough road. We were flying through turbulence, and I felt sick to my stomach. My hands were shaking.

  Still, I felt no worse than I had for the past two weeks. Not much better, but no worse. At least I was moving. I turned away from the window and rubbed my eyes. They felt gritty and sore from crying and lack of sleep. When was the last time I had slept? Three days ago, maybe. Something like that. I had tried to sleep but when I went to bed I lay awake, my eyes open and staring at nothing. I rubbed my eyes again and covered them with my hands for a moment, shutting out the light. Maybe I could get some sleep now. Maybe.

  ‘Excuse me,’ said a man’s voice. ‘Are you all right?’ Someone touched my a
rm and I jumped, moving my arm away.

  I had not really looked at the man when he had taken the seat beside me. He was Mexican, a few years younger than I was – maybe in his mid-twenties. Dark hair, high cheekbones.

  ‘Fine,’ I said. My voice was hoarse and I cleared my throat. ‘Just tired.’ I tried to smile to reassure him, but my face was stiff and uncooperative.

  ‘I thought you were sick.’ He was watching me with concern.

  I knew I looked pale. I felt pale. I felt half dead. ‘Fine,’ I said. I could think of nothing more to say. My father is dead, I could say. I just broke off a bad love affair and quit my job as a graphic artist. I could tell him that. I’m on my way to meet a mother I have not seen in fifteen years. And I think I might be going crazy. Then I would burst out crying and hide my face in the shoulder of his sport coat and leave a big damp spot. He looked very earnest and very sympathetic. ‘I’m fine,’ I said and turned back to the window.

  ‘Are you going to be spending much time in Mérida?’ he asked. ‘If you are, I can suggest some good restaurants.’

  I smiled politely, a plastic smile, a Barbie doll smile, a curve of the lips with no intent behind it. ‘Thanks, but I’ll be on an archaeological dig outside Mérida. I don’t plan to spend much time in the city.’

  ‘You must be going to Dzibilchaltún,’ he said and smiled when I nodded.

  ‘How did you know?’

  He shrugged. ‘Mérida is not so big. That’s the only archaeological dig nearby. I have heard about Dr Elizabeth Butler, the woman leading the excavation.’

  ‘What have you heard?’

  ‘She writes books.’

  I smiled despite myself. ‘That, I know.’ I had read all my mother’s books, buying the hardcover editions as soon as they came out.

  ‘How long will you be there?’

  ‘Hard to say.’

  I leaned back and closed my eyes against further questions. For once, the world inside my head was dark and quiet. The plane was taking me south and there was nothing I could do to speed it up or slow it down. No action was required of me now. I could not stop even if I had wanted to.

  My memories of the past two weeks were hazy, but some moments stood out clearly. I remember the night before my father’s funeral. I could not sleep, and at some point, around about midnight I think, I got the bottle of Scotch from my father’s liquor cabinet, and I started drinking. The liquor did not stop the noise in my head, but the buzz of the alcohol helped drown out the nagging voices that told me about how badly I was behaving, about how ashamed my father would be to see me. I turned on the television and idly flipped from station to station, never lingering beyond the first commercial, until only one station remained on the air, playing old movies until dawn.

  I sat in my father’s easy chair and watched a pretty blond actress argue with a craggy-faced man. I knew, without seeing the rest of the movie, that the argument would come to nothing. Sooner or later, the craggy-faced man would sweep the blonde into his arms and she would allow herself to be swept, forgetting all past disagreements. I knew that by the end of the movie they would kiss and make up. They always kissed and made up in old movies.

  My mother and father had fought, but somehow they never got around to kissing and making up. When they fought, they never shouted – but even when my mother kept her voice down, her words had a bright sharp intensity, like the touch of alcohol on an open cut. And my father was stubborn too – he would not give an inch. I remember the time that he told me that my mother was crazy. There was a hard edge of reproach in his tone, as if somehow her insanity had been her own fault.

  A commercial came on, and I downed the rest of my Scotch. I left the television talking to itself and wandered out onto the balcony. My father’s house was perched on the edge of a hill, and the balcony offered a panoramic view of Los Angeles, a carpet of twinkling lights, freeway interchanges glittering like distant mandalas, neons flashing, streetlights, houselights, headlights. I stood at the railing, looking down at the city and thinking about my mother. In a moment of sudden dizziness, I closed my eyes.

  I opened them to darkness and silence. No lights, except for the pale crescent moon that hung low over the dark valley. No freeways, no houses, no neon. The cool breeze that fanned my face carried the scent of distant campfire smoke. I could hear an owl hooting in the distance and the rapid beating of my own heart.

  I clutched the railing with both hands, fighting a wave of vertigo. Panic came over me: I feared I would tumble over the railing and fall into the black void beyond the balcony, plummeting forever in endless darkness. I closed my eyes against the vision and when I opened them I saw the lights of Los Angeles, distant and cold, but infinitely reassuring.

  I quit drinking. I did not sleep, but I quit drinking. And in the small hours before dawn, I decided to find my mother. The need to find her seemed linked to my drunken vision of falling and to the restlessness that had plagued me even before my father’s death.

  I shifted uneasily in my seat, listening to the reassuring hum of the jet’s engines. I tried to imagine my mother’s face, building it out of the darkness. A thin face, dominated by restless blue eyes. Short and unruly hair, brown with streaks of gray, the color of an English sheepdog. A slight woman whose clothes were too large for her, whose hands were always moving, whose eyes were bright and curious. The picture of my mother that formed in my mind was static, frozen, but I remembered my mother as being constantly in motion: walking, cleaning, cooking.

  When I was a child, I had daydreamed about my mother constantly. I dreamed that she would come home. How and why she came changed with each dream. She drove up in a jeep to take me away to an archaeological dig. She roared up on a motorcycle and took me to live with her in Berkeley. She rode into town on a black horse and we galloped away into the sunset. Details changed: she wore khaki, jeans, Mexican costume, ordinary dress. But always the dreams were bright and clear, and always the ending was happy. Fifteen years ago I stopped dreaming.

  It was Christmastime. The air had been scented with burning pine; the wine had sparkled in my mother’s glass. I was fifteen years old, and 1 sat on the carpet by the fireplace. Robert, my father, sat in an easy chair beside me.

  My mother sat alone on the love seat, an ugly antique with carved wooden arms and upholstery of heavy tapestry cloth. She had flung her left arm carelessly across the back of the love seat and the sleeve of her shirt, a baggy shirt that was a little too large for her, had fallen back to show the white scars that marked her wrist. Her skin was tanned around the scars.

  Robert and my mother were talking politely. ‘Are you staying in town?’ Robert asked.

  ‘At the Biltmore,’ she said. ‘I’ll be heading back to Berkeley tomorrow. I’ve been in Guatemala for two months now, and I have much too much to do.’

  At the time, I wondered what my mother could possibly have to do. She seemed out of place in my father’s house, but I could not imagine where she would be in place. She seemed a little nervous, glanced at the clock on the mantel often.

  ‘Where were you in Guatemala?’ I asked.

  ‘Near Lake Izabal,’ my mother said. ‘Excavating a small site. A trading center. We found some pottery from Teotihuacán, up by Mexico City, some from farther north.’ She shrugged. ‘We’ll be arguing for months about how to interpret our findings.’ She grinned at me – a brilliant, open smile very unlike the polite smile with which she had greeted Robert. ‘After all, archaeologists need to do something in the winter.’

  ‘Would you like some more wine?’ Robert asked, cutting off my next question. He moved quickly to refill her glass.

  He changed the subject then, talking about the house, his business, my schoolwork. When my mother finished the glass of wine, we exchanged presents. Her package for me was wrapped in brown paper, and she apologized for the wrappings. ‘The Guatemalan market offers a limited choice in wrapping paper,’ she said in a dry tone that seemed to imply that I had been to Guatemala and knew the
market quite well.

  I unwrapped a shirt made of a heavy cloth woven of burgundy and black thread. On the pockets and back, a stylized bird surrounded by an intricate border was woven into the cloth. ‘You can watch the women weaving these shirts in the market,’ my mother said. ‘That’s a quetzal bird, the symbol of Guatemala. It’s called a quetzal shirt.’

  I pulled the shirt on over my T-shirt. It was loose on my shoulders, but I pulled it tight around me. ‘It’s great,’ I said. ‘Just great.’

  ‘It’s a little large,’ Robert said from his seat by the fire.

  ‘I’ll grow into it,’ I said, without looking at him. ‘I’m sure I will.’

  There was more polite conversation – I couldn’t remember it all. I remember Robert congratulating her for her second book – just out and getting good reviews. My father said good-bye at the door. I walked my mother to the car. It had rained that day and the streets were still wet. A car passed, its tires hissing on the pavement. The Christmas lights that my father had strung along the front porch blinked on and off: red and blue and green and gold.

  I stood beside my mother’s car. When she opened the front door, the interior light came on and I caught a glimpse of the clutter on the backseat: two more packages wrapped in brown paper and tied with ribbon, a dirty canvas duffel bag adorned with baggage tags, a straw hat with a snakeskin band that held three brilliant blue feathers. My mother sat in the front seat and closed the door.

  ‘Where are you going to spend Christmas?’ I asked her.

  ‘I’ll spend Christmas day with friends,’ she said. ‘I’ll be driving back to Berkeley the day after.’ I heard the click of metal on metal as she slipped the key into the ignition.

  ‘Can I come?’ I asked quickly. ‘I won’t be any trouble. I thought maybe . . .’ I stopped, caught in a tangle of words.

  The colored lights flashed on her face: red, blue, green, gold, red, blue. I have a clear memory of her face, frozen like a snapshot. The air around us seemed cold.