The Falling Woman

by Pat Murphy

  John, Tony’s favorite student at the dig, always looked at me with an air of faint doubt that reminded me of the bookstore clerk. I did not trust John and he did not trust me.

  After breakfast, Tony and I lingered over our coffee. Diane had left with the survey crew, wearing her new broad-brimmed hat and a liberal coating of Barbara’s sunscreen. Barbara seemed to be taking care of my daughter, making sure she was properly dressed, instructing her in the use of a compass. Diane was smiling when she left. In the light of day, memories of my personal past were less urgent than they had seemed at night. My daughter seemed happy enough; we would talk to each other and the uneasiness between us would dissolve. My immediate concern was a past of considerably greater antiquity.

  Tony had assigned John to supervise the workmen who were moving the brush heap away from the broken stone that might hide an underground chamber. I had wanted to supervise the work myself, but Tony had insisted that we let a student oversee the operation. ‘You have to let them have some fun,’ he had said.

  John was fired with a fierce dedication that was uncomplicated by imagination or eagerness to speculate. He was meticulous, given to caution and obsessed by details. His field reports were noteworthy for the amount of information he packed into a page of small careful printing.

  Tony poured me a second cup of coffee. He would not let me leave for the site right after breakfast. ‘You’ll just pace around, getting in the way and doing your best to get heatstroke.’

  The morning was really too warm for hot coffee, but I ignored the heat and drank the coffee, sweetening it with unrefined sugar that was the color and consistency of California beach sand. The condensed milk that substituted for cream added a slight tang of metal.

  ‘When have I ever been in the way?’ I asked.

  He grinned and leaned back in his chair. ‘Save your energy,’ he advised. Even as a young man, Tony had been slow-moving. Not lazy – he would work hard if the situation called for that. But he was always careful to ascertain exactly what work was needed and what work could be avoided. He considered each problem carefully before he acted, never wasting a movement. My own inclination was to attack a problem at once, trying various approaches in succession until one seemed most productive. ‘You chase problems like a city dog chases rabbits,’ Tony had observed once. Tony waited until the rabbits came to him.

  We gave John an hour’s head start. Maybe a little more – Tony insisted on strolling to the southeast site at an irritatingly leisurely pace. We arrived just as the workmen were hauling away the last branch. John was directing the work, his baseball cap pushed back on his head and a bandanna tied around his neck. His face was red with exertion and yesterday’s sunburn. Beneath his arms, his T-shirt was already dark with sweat. His arms were laced with red scratches from the thorns.

  I squatted beside the tilted stone. It measured about three feet by three feet; one edge was about three inches out of flush with the plaza, cracking the plaster that covered it. Dirt had filled the depression where the stone tilted down.

  ‘Maybe a chultun,’ Tony said and grinned. The underground storage chambers called chultuns often contain unbroken pots, a rarity at this site.

  ‘Maybe a burial,’ I said. ‘A high-ranking individual, perhaps, buried just outside a major temple.’ The tools and artifacts found in tombs are a rich source of information on the Mayan view of the afterlife.

  John deals in the actuality, not in speculation. ‘I don’t understand how you happened to notice it,’ he said. ‘Can’t say I would have given it a second glance.’

  I shrugged. ‘Go for a walk at dawn sometime,’ I suggested. ‘The shadows are better then.’ But even as I made the suggestion, I doubted that John would profit by it. Even at dawn, his imagination was limited. I doubted that he would notice a Mayan woman who stood in the shadows. I glanced at the spot where Zuhuy-kak had stood, but there was no sign of her. In the jungle, a bird called on a rising note of interrogation, but I had no answers.

  ‘It’s cemented in place pretty well,’ John said. ‘It’ll take all day to work it loose, I’d guess. And I’ll need to take two workers from the crew on the house mounds to do it.’

  Tony frowned. The house mounds were his favorite site; he was hoping to find vast quantities of sherds and he begrudged any attempts on my part to shift workers away from that project. ‘Think it’s worth it?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s only a day, Tony.’

  He shook his head, but did not argue further.

  We checked in on the investigation of house mounds near the plaza, an operation that was also under John’s supervision. Four men were digging a test trench across one mound. The de facto leader of the crew, an older man who went by the nickname of Pich, grinned at me and climbed from the trench when I greeted him in Maya. He pushed his straw hat back on his head, wiped his hands on his white pants, already marked with smears of powdery soil, shook my hand, and bemoaned their lack of luck so far. Removing wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow filled with dirt had revealed only fragments of plainware – potsherds with no markings – and assorted tools for grinding corn. I patted Pich on the shoulder, suggested that the crew take a short break to smoke, handed around cigarettes, and offered a few words of encouragement.

  On the far side of the clearing, the shadow of a woman who had died long ago was grinding maize, rubbing the kernels between two stones and leaning into each stroke. Nearby, a naked little boy played with a small dog. I suspected that no matter how much dirt we moved in this area, we would find only broken plainware and grinding tools. At this spot, I had seen only the shadows of peasants going about their daily chores. But I could not tell that to Tony.

  We left John, Pich, and the crew and followed the winding path around the mound to the far side, where Salvador was supervising a group of men. The sun was high. The shadows were sharp-edged patches on the barren earth. We climbed the mound in the afternoon heat, following the path worn by the workmen. For the past two weeks, the men had been stripping away the dirt that covered the top of the mound. It still didn’t look like much: a heap of rubble with a recently flattened top; a jumble of flat-sided boulders. The work had exposed one wall of the temple on the crest, and we were using that as a guide to establish the orientation of the building.

  Mayan buildings were constructed using tremendous quantities of stone and limestone cement. They used corbeled arches, building up a curved opening by placing each block farther in than the block on which it rested. Sometimes, they used beams of sapodilla, a local hardwood, as supports. When the beams collapsed and the roofs caved in, the rooms filled with stone rubble and the building became a mound.

  ‘Good thing I trust your judgment, Liz,’ Tony said from behind me. He had stopped in the trail, resting in the scant shade of a tree. He had been trailing a few steps behind me as we walked up the mound. ‘If anyone else had insisted on excavating that area at the expense of the house mounds, I might have argued.’

  ‘Good thing,’ I said. I waited for him to move from the shade.

  ‘Come now, Liz,’ he said, pushing back the straw hat he wore to keep the sun out of his eyes. ‘Tell me why you think we should take two men from the house mounds to loosen that block.’

  ‘Looks promising.’

  ‘A better reason.’

  ‘A hunch,’ I said. ‘I just don’t think we’ll find much more than we already have at the house mounds.’

  ‘Son of a bitch,’ he said. ‘I wish your hunches weren’t right so often. All right. I give up.’

  I smelled Salvador’s cigarette before I saw him waiting for us at the top of the path. ‘How goes it?’ I called to him in Spanish.

  He squatted to crush his cigarette against the ground and dropped the stub in the pocket of his loose-fitting white pants. ‘We have found something,’ he said in Spanish and gestured for us to follow him around the crest of the mound.

  The test pit was a two-meter square, sunk in the rubble on the far side of the mound. Since the last time I v
isited this site, the crew had taken the pit down to a depth of more than a meter. Tony crouched on the edge of the pit and began fanning himself with his broad-brimmed hat.

  I stood over him and peered into the pit. The men grinned up at me. The floor of the unit was a jumble of large stones that could well have been part of a roof. On one, I could see the traces of worn decoration. Others had obviously been shaped.

  ‘Over there,’ Salvador said, pointing to the far corner of the pit, which was slightly higher than the others. The workman – I recognized him as Salvador’s nephew – stood aside to give me a clear view. Between two stone slabs, a great stone head lay wedged in the floor of the pit.

  I told the men to take a break and climbed down into the pit carefully. It was pleasantly cool after the sunshine of the mound. I used a stiff brush to clear the loose dirt away from the face. The head was about three times life size. It was not actually stone; it had been sculpted in the durable stucco that the Maya had manufactured using local limestone. I recognized the spiraling tattoos that decorated one cheek. Zuhuy-kak, the ghost who haunted me, had been a woman of power in her time. Carved shells decorated her carved braids. Below the headdress, the forehead was flattened. Long ago, the tip of the nose had been chipped. A crack ran through the forehead, through the left eye and the left cheek.

  I ran one finger along the crack, but could not tell if it was only on the surface or if it went all the way through. Offhand, I would have guessed that it had been at least a thousand years since those staring eyes had last seen the sky.

  ‘Looks like it could have been part of the roof comb or a decorative facade,’ I said to Tony, trying to suppress my excitement. ‘If that’s so, there should be others. Would you say ninth century or eighth?’

  He shrugged and grinned at me and I found myself grinning back. ‘Doesn’t much matter, does it?’ he said.

  ‘It’s too late to do much now. Looks like it will take a few days to get it free. Tomorrow, let’s start by getting this out of the way,’ I said, tapping on the smaller of the two slabs beside the head. ‘And maybe we can get her out intact.’

  I reached up for Tony’s hand, and he helped me climb back into the sun. Salvador was standing by. ‘Good find,’ I said. Salvador shrugged and smiled. ‘We’ll work on it tomorrow.’ We left the head where it lay, staring up at the sky from the rubble of an ancient roof.

  8

  Diane

  ‘A ruin is never going to speak, except if one’s mind gives it magnetic power, gives it force. For this reason, we should not confuse ourselves that the spirit, that the evil shadows, frighten us, kill us. One frightens oneself; it is not the shadow that frightens us.’

  – Eduardo el Curandero, the Words of a Peruvian Healer

  Even at six in the morning the air was warm. Lizards basked on the rocks, running a few feet as we approached, then stopping to watch us.

  Barbara led the way and I walked beside her, wearing the hat my mother had given me. Carlos, Maggie, and Robin trailed behind.

  ‘We’re walking on history,’ Barbara told me, stamping one boot on the ground beneath our feet. ‘This is a limestone causeway, built by the Maya. They built miles of them all over the place. God knows why. Trade, religious ceremonies . . .’ She shrugged. Her mannerisms and speech reminded me of someone, but for a moment I could not place them. Then I remembered walking with my mother to the Temple of the Seven Dolls. Barbara had adopted the same staccato style: abbreviated and to the point. ‘They called the roads sacbeob. The singular form of the word is sacbe. Plural is sacbeob. We’re using this one as a reference line for the survey.’

  Trees crowded close on either side. Grasses and scrub had grown underfoot, but the way was clear compared to the monte around us.

  Like my mother, Barbara did not wait for questions. She assumed that I was interested. ‘Aerial surveys are just about useless here,’ she said. ‘They give you a great view of trees, but that’s it. The only way to map a site is to walk it and get personally acquainted with every tree, rock, stinging bug, and thorn. This causeway runs east. We’ll be mapping the quadrant between here and a line due south. That means we’ve got to walk over every square foot and note every ruin, mound, and monument. Maybe we sample some of the ones that look promising.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘Then I figure out a theory based on what we find, get my Ph.D., and you call me Dr Barbara.’ She stopped beside a tree marked with a blaze and waited for the others to catch up. When they did, she turned into the monte, following what looked like a deer trail to another blazed tree.

  The concept of the survey, as Barbara described it, was simple enough. The survey team spread out, leaving about twenty paces between people. Carlos was on one end of the line and Barbara was on the other. Carlos made a blaze on trees as he passed them; Barbara followed the line of blazes from the previous day. We were to follow a compass course due east. Barbara instructed me on the use of the compass and put me in the middle of the line.

  It was hot work, sticky work, boring work – trudging through the monte, ducking branches, climbing over rocks, shouting out when I stumbled over something of interest, and then waiting while Barbara carefully noted its location on her map. The first three mounds we found had already been noted by the Tulane University crew several years before, but Barbara methodically checked location and noted minor corrections.

  Flies hovered just in front of my eyes, dancing and buzzing, a constant irritation. I trudged through the heat, listening to the shrill cries of insects, the rustling of small animals and birds, the sound of footsteps, the occasional crash when someone blundered into a low-slung branch and the curses that followed. At regular intervals, the sounds of the monte were punctuated by the solid impact of Carlos’s machete against the innocent trees. I stabbed myself several times before I learned to watch for thorns. It took a great deal of effort to keep looking for the lines of rocks that Barbara said marked where walls had once been, the overgrown low mounds that had once been huts or temples.

  Conversations grew shorter as the day grew hotter. Even when we were waiting for Barbara to complete corrections on her map, we maintained our positions in line, unwilling to move together just to move apart again. Early morning was hot; midmorning was hotter. At about eleven, beside the largest mound we had yet encountered, Barbara called a lunch break.

  We sat in the thin shade of a ceiba tree, saying little, drinking water, and eating the tortillas and cheese that Maria had packed. Maggie was still pissed off at Carlos, I think. She and Robin sat a little way apart from us, sharing food and laughing at private jokes. Carlos tried to start up a conversation with me and Barbara, but Barbara ignored him and I was too tired to be drawn into talk.

  I leaned back against the solid trunk of a tree and, drowsy from the heat, let my eyes droop closed. Such a peaceful place, I thought. I was still tired from my sleepless nights in Los Angeles, and I was at peace for the first time in weeks. I relaxed.

  The bark of the tree at my back had a strong sweet aroma, like the smoke of incense carried on the breeze. In the distance, a bird called with a long low breathy note, like the sound of a child blowing across the top of a bottle. The call ended, then came again, a hollow tone that rose in pitch. The buzz of the insects seemed to grow louder and harsher, as if in response to the bird’s call. A warm breeze fanned my face, and the sweet smell was stronger.

  I dreamed that I heard voices, unfamiliar voices. In the private darkness behind my closed eyes, I listened, but I could not understand the language that the voices spoke.

  I opened my eyes, but I was still dreaming. Across from me, a temple built of carved limestone blocks glistened in the afternoon sun. I squinted against the reflected light.

  The voices continued, muttering softly in a foreign tongue. I could see two men, standing in the bright sunlight and looking down at a carved slab of stone. They were dressed in white loincloths and their bare chests were decorated with intricate tattoos in great swirling patte
rns, like the waves of a turbulent sea. At their feet was an incense burner in the shape of a crouching cat. Smoke escaped from the cat’s mouth, white tendrils curling past sharp teeth and dissipating in the breeze.

  I knew somehow, with the certainty of a dreamer, that the men were a threat to me. I did not like them. There was something cruel about their faces. They did not smile and their voices were harsh, hard-edged.

  I sat very still, not even moving to wipe away the sweat from my forehead. If I did not move, perhaps they would not notice me, perhaps I could get away. I felt the same panic that had touched me on my father’s balcony.

  A drop of sweat trickled down my forehead and dripped into my eyes. I blinked and the men were gone. The voices were gone. The temple was gone. I sat alone beneath a tree, staring out at the sunlight that filtered through the thin leaves. A twisted tree grew where the men had been standing. At its base was a fallen log, overgrown by creeping vines and thornbushes.

  Disoriented, I stood and went to where the men had been standing. The air was as warm and stuffy as the air in an attic. The flies droned, flickering like spots before my eyes. Sweat trickled down my back, making my shirt cling to my skin. A vagrant branch, lined with thorns and eager to make mischief, grabbed at my shirt as I squatted beside the fallen shape beneath the tree.

  It was not a fallen log. Thorny creepers had overrun a large block of limestone, covering the surface completely. I gingerly pulled one aside and caught a glimpse of the carved surface underneath. I looked around and saw Barbara, poking in the bushes on one side of the mound. ‘I’ve found something here,’ I called to her.

  She picked her way slowly through the brush to reach my side. She knelt beside the limestone block and used the trowel that she carried at her belt to scrape away more vines. She cut away the branch of one bush with the edge of her trowel and held back another, careless of the thorns and of the black bugs that ran away from the sudden light. I could see the weathered surface of a carved slab of stone, half buried in dirt and debris.