by Pat Murphy
I put the book down and took a long drink. The bottle was cold in my hand and the beer was cold running down my throat. ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘That was a quick trip to town.’
He nodded and grinned. He was tanned and handsome, and he knew it. He wore white shorts and an air of confidence. He pushed his chair back away from the table and propped his feet up on another chair. ‘Just long enough to do laundry and have an argument.’
‘An argument? What about?’
He seemed at ease, sleek and content as a well-fed cat. ‘I got myself in trouble with Maggie by commenting on how pretty you are.’
‘Barbara mentioned that you liked trouble,’ I said.
He glanced at me, then threw back his head and laughed. ‘I suppose I do,’ he said. ‘I seem to find it often enough.’
‘Are you sure you don’t go looking for it?’ I asked.
He shrugged, still grinning. ‘Could be. You are pretty, though. You’re from Los Angeles, aren’t you?’
‘That’s right.’
‘I spent about five years in Los Angeles. I’m from Mexico originally, Mexico City. L.A.’s a nice town. Why the hell did you decide to spend your vacation in this godforsaken spot?’
I did not look at his face; I considered the condensation on the beer bottle. One drop traced a path through the other drops and reached the table. I shrugged. ‘I really just wanted to spend time with my mother.’
‘I see.’ He turned the book, which I had set down on the table, and read the title. ‘I would have thought you knew all this already. Being Liz’s daughter.’
‘I don’t know much at all,’ I said. ‘This is my first dig.’ On the wall by the kitchen, a small blue lizard marked with yellow stripes was sunning itself. The black pig shifted its position, sighed, and continued its nap. I could still hear the little girl singing softly. The chickens were scratching in the dirt. I watched the chickens and regretted having accepted the beer. I did not want to talk about my reasons for coming here.
‘Why don’t you tell me something interesting about the ancient Maya?’ I asked.
I could see him weighing possible comments. ‘Your eyes are the most beautiful shade of green I’ve ever seen,’ he said at last.
I raised my eyebrows. ‘That has nothing to do with the ancient Maya.’
‘That’s true.’ He paused, and when he spoke again, he spoke slowly, as if choosing each word with care. ‘The ancient Maya carved elaborate ornaments of jade using nothing but stone tools. The jade that they carved was just the color of your eyes.’
I couldn’t help smiling a little. ‘A little better. Try one more time, and leave my eyes out of it.’
He tapped a cigarette from his pack and lit it, studying my face as he did so. Then he said, ‘The people who have put their minds to translating the Mayan hieroglyphics have come to the conclusion that many of the symbols are puns and puzzles. “Xoc,” for example, means “to count.” It is also the name of a mythical fish that lives in the heavens. So the Maya used the head of the fish to represent counting. But since the fish was difficult to carve, they substituted the symbol for water, since that’s where fish live. The symbol for water is a jade bead, since both are green and precious. So jade means water means fish means to count.’ Carlos paused, took a drag on his cigarette, and blew out a cloud of smoke. ‘And as confusing as all that sounds, it is simplicity itself compared to the mind of a woman.’ He tapped the ash from his cigarette and looked at my face. ‘Is that better?’
‘I don’t think so,’ I said, but I couldn’t help smiling. He worked so hard at being charming. ‘Somehow, I think that I’ll learn more about the Maya by reading a book.’
‘Could be. But I’m much more amusing than a book. You did smile there for a minute.’
‘You got me there.’ I studied his smiling face. Clever and dishonest and charming. ‘How many times have you used that line before?’
He shrugged. ‘I never use the same line twice.’
‘Was all that about the hieroglyphics true?’
‘It may not be true, but I didn’t make it up. I leave that to the professors. When I get to those exalted ranks, I’ll make up my own outlandish theories.’ He leaned back in his chair, his arms locked behind his head, his legs outstretched.
I believed him when he said he never used the same line twice. He was a fisherman, choosing his bait carefully with a certain fish in mind.
A moment of silence. The lizard suddenly lifted its head and ran away across the wall. The little girl’s singing had stopped. As I watched, she peeked over the wall at us.
‘What’s the little girl’s name?’ I asked Carlos. ‘She won’t talk to me.’
‘That’s Teresa. Qué tal, Teresa?’
She smiled at him and muttered something in Spanish. He said something else to her, but the only words I caught were ‘la señorita.’ Teresa shook her head and said something quickly that I could not begin to understand. She turned and ran away to the kitchen hut.
Carlos looked at me. ‘I asked her why she wouldn’t talk to you. She said that her mother told her not to.’
‘I wonder why.’
Carlos shrugged. ‘Maybe she’s worried that getting to know loose American women will corrupt her little girl.’
‘What makes her think we’re loose?’ 1 said.
He raised his eyebrows and grinned. ‘All American women are loose,’ he said. ‘Ask any Mexican man.’
‘Somehow, I wouldn’t trust you as an expert on American women.’ I leaned back in my chair and noticed my mother watching us from the door of her hut. I waved to her and she strolled out into the plaza.
‘I’ll be leaving for town in fifteen minutes or so,’ she said.
I finished my beer and stood up. ‘I’ll be ready.’
She glanced at Carlos, and turned away without saying anything. ‘You know,’ he said when she was out of earshot, ‘I don’t think your mother likes me.’
The ride to town was hot. The truck hit the potholes in the road hard and the seats were poorly padded. The roar of the engine made polite conversation impossible. Now and then, my mother would shout over the engine to point out a landmark – the road to a small village, the henequen-processing plant, a local high school.
The market in Mérida was housed in a corrugated-steel building: a place of noise, low ceilings, strong smells, and confusion. A beggar woman wrapped in a fringed shawl huddled beside the doorway. My mother dropped a coin in her hand and started into the crowd. I followed a few steps behind.
A woman in a white dress, embroidered with flowers at the neck and hem, carried a plastic basin filled with strange yellow fruits. She balanced it on her head, steadying it with one hand and making her way purposefully through the crowd.
A man shouted behind me and I stepped aside. He carried three crates in a stack on his back, secured with a rope wrapped around his forehead. I let him pass, then hurried after my mother.
An old peasant woman held out a plastic bowl filled with peppers, calling out the price. A younger woman, her daughter I think, squatted beside her, carefully arranging glossy peppers in a neat pile on a square of white cloth.
My mother stopped by a stall in which a wizened old man stood, surrounded by burlap sacks filled with beans. Each sack was open to display its contents – red beans, black beans, rice, dried corn. My mother fingered the black beans and exchanged a few words with the man. He shoveled several scoops of black beans into the metal dish of a scale and poured them into a smaller sack.
My mother glanced to make sure I was with her, beckoned me to follow, and continued through the crowd. ‘Maria does most of the shopping,’ she commented. ‘She’s better at bargaining. I’m just picking up a few things.’
Another stop – this one for chickens. My mother bargained and the chickens watched her nervously from between the wooden slats of their crates. Chicks peeped from the back of the stall, and three large turkeys, exhausted in the heat, lay in the dust of the aisle. The three black hen
s that my mother bought pecked at the hands of the boy who carried them, still crated, to the truck.
My mother made her way through the crowd with confidence, not stopping to glance at the butcher’s stall, where vacant eyes stared from the face of a butchered pig. She seemed undisturbed by the warm sweet scent of overripe fruit and the underlying aroma of decay. She stepped around the squatting women who haggled over the price of tomatoes. She sidestepped to avoid the small dog licking at a crushed mango on the pavement. Now and then, she nodded to a shopkeeper, stopped to buy something – a plastic bag packed with ground pepper the color of blood, a bunch of bananas, a bag of small yellow squash.
I followed her, carrying her packages, stopping when she stopped. I was out of place here – I did not understand a word of the rapid transactions that were taking place all around me. But as long as I followed my mother, I felt protected. She obviously belonged here. I stayed close to her.
‘Are you doing all right?’ she asked just as we were about to plunge down another aisle of stalls, through the dim light and tropical heat. Without waiting for a reply, she said, ‘We’ll stop for a drink soon.’ She bought two pineapples, a bunch of radishes, and two heads of wilted lettuce.
We left the food in the truck with the squawking chickens and she bought me a Coke – too sweet but at least it was wet. We sat at a counter and the crowd surged past us.
‘It’s confusing,’ I said.
She shook her head, smiling. ‘At first, I suppose. You get used to it.’
‘I’d like to.’ And that was good. Maybe I would have the chance to get used to it.
When we finished our drinks, my mother led me to another area of the market: a line of stalls filled with dresses, hammocks, shawls, sandals, blankets, tourist trinkets. She stopped at a hat-seller’s stall and chatted with the man behind the counter. Something in her manner had changed. She had slowed down, relaxed a little. She lit a cigarette and laughed at something the man said. I stood to one side, fingering the brim of a hat, grateful for the breeze that blew in from the street, fanning away the heavy scent of decay.
The man held out a broad-brimmed hat with a high crown. ‘Try it on,’ my mother said. The man nodded and smiled and said something in rapid Spanish that made my mother laugh again. When she replied, he shrugged and spread his hands in a gesture of denial.
‘He says that you look very pretty,’ my mother told me. ‘And he says that you look like me.’ She smiled and leaned against the counter. ‘I told him that he was just trying to make a sale.’ She looked younger when she laughed, her blue eyes caught in a net of wrinkles, her face shaded beneath the broad brim of a straw hat similar to the one I wore. ‘What do you think?’
I glanced in the mirror that the man held out. ‘Great.’
Bargaining for the hat took longer than bargaining for food, proceeding at a more leisurely pace, with more smiles and laughter. Final sale and my mother dropped the stub of her cigarette, ground it into the asphalt at her feet, and used both hands to adjust the hat on my head. She eyed it critically and nodded. ‘Looks good. Wear it on survey.’
That was it. We drove back with our produce, and the chickens squawked each time we hit a bump.
Notes for City of Stones by Elizabeth Butler
Why do we come here to dig in the dirt, living in huts and going without showers, battling insects and trudging through the afternoon heat? Some people think that archaeologists look for treasure – jade masks, delicate shell jewelry, beaten-gold ornaments. In truth, we search the gray stone past for something much more elusive.
We are looking for patterns. We search for pieces of the past and try to reassemble them. Who lived here? How did they live? Who ruled them and how was that determined? Who were their gods and how did they worship them? Did the people of this place trade salt and carved shell from the gulf for pots from Tikal, obsidian tools from Colha, molded figurines from Isla de Jaina? What news traveled with the merchants who journeyed along the sacbeob, the limestone roads that connected the cities? Did merchants talk of the rise of new rulers, the festivals held to honor gods, the failure of the cacao-bean crop, the overabundance of quetzal feathers this year, the new fashions in Uxmal, the rumors of war in the north?
Each of us looks for patterns in his own way. Anthony Baker, my co-director, is a good man with a trowel and a brush, possessed of awesome patience and the dexterous hands of a grease monkey. In his youth, Tony dismantled and reassembled clocks, electric motors, gas-powered engines, mechanical toys, and, on one hot summer day, the fiendishly intricate planetary-gear-shifting mechanism hidden in the hub of a three-speed bicycle, a device constructed of gears within gears and wheels within wheels.
These days, Tony deals with intricate constructions of a different kind. Tony studies pots. Or, to be more accurate, he studies pieces of pots – potsherds, broken fragments of bowls and pitchers and vases and incense burners and little pipes and ceremonial vessels. Long ago, the vessels broke and the shattered pieces were tossed in the trash heap, thrown into the fill for a new building, kicked aside, cast off, ignored. Tony gathers these fragments and considers them with affection.
When Tony finds a potsherd, chances are he’ll pop it in his mouth to clean it with spit. Archaeologists get used to the taste of dirt and Tony claims he learns about a sherd by its taste and its texture. Each sherd carries its history with it. What kind of clay did the potter use? What was added to the clay to temper it? How was the pot shaped, decorated, burnished, fired? Tony concerns himself with these things, and sometimes I think that he would be quite at home chatting with the artisans of AD 800 about the merits of organic paint over mineral paints, sand-tempered clay over untempered clay. Behind his home in Albuquerque he has a studio where he turns and fires pots.
Fashions in pottery changed steadily over the years, and potsherds are durable records of changing times. The presence of certain types marks the passage of certain eras. Finding a broken bowl in the fill of a palace lets us date the structure.
John, one of Tony’s most trusted graduate students, has a different preoccupation. Though I have never asked, I believe that his father was a bricklayer or a carpenter, a builder of some sort. John admires a well-built wall. He will talk for hours about arches – noting the difference in construction methods used in AD 400 and 800. I think he would be happiest if he were funded to rebuild a temple or two, mortaring temple stones in their rightful places. He draws elegant reconstruction sketches, extrapolating from the tumbled stones of the structure back to the plans from which it could have been built. In his sketches, he realigns the walls, returns the roof combs to their lofty position, carefully sets each stone of the arches back in its place, canting them inward to make a smooth line. His drawings are black and white – fine ink lines on smooth white paper. John knows that the Maya painted their stucco and stone – traces of red and black paint still cling to sheltered stones. But his imagination stops short of color. He likes the stones – solid, massive, and gray – and does not embellish upon them.
And what do I like? I like asking impossible questions about remnants less tangible, but no less durable, than pots and walls. Ancient gods, myths, legends, modes of worship, belief systems – these are my concern. What motivated the potter to shape an incense burner, a mason to build a wall? When a small child woke crying in the dead of the night, what frightened him and to whom did he pray for comfort? When a woman was dying in childbirth, what god did the h’men call on for power?
The questions are impossible; the answers, elusive. I have fewer clues than Tony or John: ancient texts in unreadable glyphs, unreliable records kept by Franciscan friars on the pagan religion they sought to destroy, ceremonial objects cast in cenotes and sealed in tombs, fragments of knowledge retained by the current h’menob. And the embellishments of my own imagination. In my dreams of the ancient past, the buildings are always painted in vivid colors. I people them with ghosts.
Tony makes pots; John builds walls; and I construct castles in
the air.
7
Elizabeth
‘Who are your gods?’ The old woman smelled sour. Her costume was constructed like a Mayan temple: layers rested on layers upon layers. An orange turtleneck showed through the ragged holes in a thick brown fisherman-knit cardigan. The hem of a wine-colored skirt dangled beneath her green dress. She was dressed for a colder climate than Berkeley in the spring, bundled to withstand arctic winds. She had singled me out of the crowd of browsers in the used bookstore, recognizing me as a fellow outcast.
‘Who are your gods?’ Her voice was cracked, a parody of a confidential whisper. She stepped closer and the smell of unwashed clothes enveloped me.
I had been a lecturer on the Berkeley campus for one year and I had gained a reputation for being hard-nosed, unyielding, uncompromising. But when I looked into the bag lady’s eyes – innocent blue eyes with the color and luminance of cracked antique glass – I backed away. ‘I don’t know,’ I muttered before fleeing down another aisle of books.
She pursued me, waving her finger with greater energy. They know me, these strange ones with crystalline eyes that see what others do not.
‘Sorry,’ mumbled the clerk who had followed us both. He was talking to us and to himself. He was sorry that he was the one who had to throw the woman out. ‘Sorry, but you are disturbing the other customers.’ He was looking at the bag lady, but somehow I felt that he included me as a troublemaker. ‘I’ll have to ask you to leave.’
‘She’s not hurting anyone,’ I said in a feeble voice that no student of mine would have recognized.
Too late. The old woman was shuffling toward the street, mumbling and clutching her sweaters about her. The clerk cast me a doubtful look, and I knew that I was tagged as a strange one, a woman who talked to the human flotsam that drifted down Telegraph Avenue. I left the store soon after.
