The Falling Woman

by Pat Murphy

  Mary’s hands were spread in acceptance; her mouth was curved in a half smile. But something about her expression seemed wrong to me. The artist who painted her features had tinted her skin several shades darker than the usual anemic white. Her eyes were dark; they caught the shadows. She lacked the delicacy that I had seen in other depictions of the Madonna; her features seemed more Indian than Spanish. She seemed older than the usual pale maiden Mary. Older and wiser. Her smile was knowing.

  The candlelight on her cheeks cast spiraling shadows and her forehead seemed strangely flattened. I could smell incense more strongly now, a sharp resinous smell, like burning pine. The same smell had filled my mother’s hut. The Madonna was watching me from the shadows. She had gathered the shadows around her, and the burning candles shed just enough light to let me see her clearly. I recognized her then: her face matched that of the stone head in my mother’s hut.

  I felt dizzy and sick to my stomach. I looked away from her face, stepped back and put one hand on the edge of a pew for support. I closed my eyes and waited for the wave of dizziness to pass.

  I opened my eyes when the stone floor felt steady beneath my feet once again. The Madonna was staring over my head, her features set in a benign expression of acceptance. She was not watching me. This corner of the cathedral was as well lit as any other.

  I hurried to join Barbara on the far side of the hall. She was strolling toward the door. When we stepped out into the sunshine, I immediately felt better. I put another coin in the beggar woman’s hand and received her blessing once again.

  ‘You look pale,’ Barbara said. ‘You all right?’

  ‘I felt a little sick in there,’ I said. ‘Just for a minute.’

  ‘Touch of the touristas?’

  ‘Could be. I feel better now.’

  ‘You’ll be better after a siesta.’

  Our hotel room was stuffy, but cooler than the outside. Barbara turned the ceiling fan to a faster speed, stripped to her underwear, and flung herself on one bed. ‘Siesta,’ she said, turned her back on me, and fell asleep immediately. I lay awake for a long time, watching the ceiling fan turn, listening to Barbara’s steady breathing.

  Notes for City of Stones by Elizabeth Butler

  Today is Saturday, March 17, 1984, by our reckoning of time. A simple set of numbers and names, designating the day but granting it no particular power, no special value.

  In the Mayan system of dating, this day would be assigned a number and a day name in the tzolkin, or sacred almanac, a different number and a different day name in the haab, or vague year. In the Long Count, the system of dating used on stelae, this date would be written as 12 baktuns, 18 katuns, 10 tuns, 13 uinals, and 15 kins, designating this day as being 1,861,475 days since the starting point from which the Maya count time. By Mayan reckoning, each of these numbers and names has a meaning and an importance.

  The tzolkin and the haab are part of a system of interlocking cycles, known to modern Mayanists as the Calendar Round. The haab is a cycle of 365 days: eighteen months of twenty days and one month of five evil days at the end of it all. The tzolkin is a cycle of 260 days: thirteen months of twenty days. The two cycles are interlocked: one can think of them as two great cogs – one with 260 teeth and one with 365. As one wheel turns, so turns the other. Every fifty-two vague years, both cycles begin a new year at the same time.

  That’s one system for counting the passage of time. The other is the Long Count, a system for counting from an established date long ago. Our notation of the year 1984 indicates the number of years that have passed since the birth of Christ: one period of one thousand years, nine centuries of one hundred years, eight decades of ten years, and four years of 365 days. A Long Count inscription indicates how many days have passed since the beginning of the Mayan time count by noting the passage of baktuns, or periods of 144,000 days; katuns, or periods of 7,200 days; tuns, or years of 360 days; uinals, or periods of 20 days; and kins, or days.

  All this is important, but the heart of the matter lies in the power of the days, not the methods used to calculate or record them. Many years ago, I learned of the importance of these numbers and names from a shriveled woman with a clubfoot, who, for reasons I never ascertained, had moved from a mountain village to the city of Mérida.

  She was bargaining for herbs in the market when I met her; she glanced at me with bright sharp eyes and commented to the shopkeeper on my poor selection of produce, saying that gringas did not know how to shop. She spoke in Maya and I, hot and tired from a long day of shopping, spoke up in the same tongue, saying that I would gladly take lessons on how to shop if anyone would offer to teach me. She grinned and beckoned to me.

  For the next hour I followed her as she trudged from stall to stall. She taught me to shake my finger to indicate disinterest, told me when to push for a better price, when to give a little, when to walk away, when to joke. The shopkeepers stared at us – an American and a Mayan crone – but no one commented. I thanked her at the hour’s end and bought her a Coke, which she drank with great enthusiasm.

  A week after my tour of the market, I met her again, this time in the zocalo in the early evening. She sat alone on a green bench at the west corner of the square and she hailed me, beckoning. She had been drinking aguardiente – to stop the pain, she said. I do not know what caused her pain; she would not talk about that. She asked me the hour and the day, and when I told her, she gripped my wrist so tightly that her nails cut into my skin. I asked her what was wrong, but her answers made no sense. She wanted to talk about time. She said that this was the last day of an evil year; she was distraught, but I could not make out the reason for her agitation.

  I bought her another bottle of aguardiente – her pain seemed real and that was the only help she would allow me to offer. Over the bottle, she began rambling, reciting something. ‘Imix, he is the first one: earth monster, dragon head, root of it all. He rules the corn; a very good day for planting. Ik, he is the second, and he brings the wind, a very good day. Akbal is dark, a prowling jaguar who devours the sun. He lives in the west, where he drinks the dark water, and the rain he brings is not good. He kills the corn. Offer him bebida and do not plant this day.’

  I realized, as she continued, that the names she called, praising this one and warning against that, were the names of the days in the tzolkin. ‘Ben is lord of the maize, a good day for planting. Offer him atole, made of the best maize. Oc wears the head of a dog; he brings the sad rain that makes the maize rot in the ground and gives the children sickness. Cauac wears the head of a dragon; he brings thunder and violent rain.’ She shook her head, let her breath out in a great gasp, and gripped my hand more tightly. She was staring at me wildly, but I did not think that she saw me. She recited the almanac of days for an apprentice, a daughter, a son, a person who would learn and benefit from this knowledge. ‘You know them, do you not?’

  ‘Yes, grandmother,’ 1 said to calm her. ‘I know them.’

  ‘There is Lamat, the lord of the great star that rises with the sun. There is Muluc: give him jade and the rain that comes will favor the corn. You must remember these things!’

  She gripped my hand with both of hers and breathed warm brandy-scented breath in my face. Around us, the square was quiet. The lovers and loiterers who strolled here favored the far side, closer to the café that sold sweet fruit ices.

  ‘You must know them all: Etz’nab is the lord of the sacrifice; he carries a blade of sharp obsidian. Behead a turkey in his name; feast for him.’

  The moon had risen. Its pale light filtered through the leaves of the shade trees to dapple the cement paths that crisscrossed the square. Somewhere across the square a guitarist played a ballad, doubtlessly for lovers who would rather have been left in peace. The old woman stared up at the moon as if she had never seen it before.

  ‘And you must know the day named Men, governed by the old woman moon goddess, Ix Chebel Yax. She is a trickster, that one, bringing rainbows and floods, healing and destruct
ion. She gives children stomach pains, helps women in childbirth, teases madmen, brings sleep to the weary, snarls the thread of weaving women. On her day, you can divine the future, but you cannot trust her.’

  ‘Rest, grandmother,’ I said to the woman, laying one hand on hers. ‘I will remember this. But now you must go home. Let me take you there.’

  ‘That does not matter,’ she said. Her voice was softer now. ‘Today is the last day of the five unlucky days. Cimi is dark and deadly; he knows Ah Puch. When he flies to you, you never hear him coming; his feathers make no sound. On this day, you must burn the blood of a turkey with incense.’

  ‘Yes, grandmother. But now I will take you home.’

  ‘I will die this night,’ she said, standing like an obedient child as I tugged on her arm. ‘It is the end of the old year: the cycles have returned to the place that they were when I was born. The year is out and Cimi has come for me.’

  She followed me to the curb and I hailed a taxi. Apparently she had finished the recitation of the days; she was quiet, acquiescent. She told me her address and I told the cabby to take her there, paid him in advance, paid him extra to help her inside. I stood under the full moon, listening to the distant guitar serenade. The hag’s fingernails had left marks beside the old scars on my right wrist. I rubbed them idly and watched the taxi drive away.

  On the next day, which I called Sunday for lack of a better name, I took a taxi to the address that the old woman had given the cabby, a shabby house in a row of shabby houses. The woman who answered the door frowned when I asked after the old woman and said in Spanish, ‘She is dead now. What do you want here?’

  I backed away, unable to tell her of the strange evening under the moon, unwilling to describe the feelings that had pulled me here. I needed to ask the old woman what day this was and what that day meant, but I said nothing. I caught the same taxi – he had waited for me at the corner – and went home to my hotel.

  Today – the day I write this – is Saturday. I do not know its Mayan name and number. I do not know the gods that influence this day. I know very little.

  11

  Elizabeth

  Gods that are dead are simply those that no longer speak to the science or the moral order of the day . . . every god that is dead can be conjured again to life.

  – Joseph Campbell,

  The Way of the Animal Powers

  On Saturday morning, before I woke, Diane and Barbara left for Mérida. Having Diane leave was a relief in a way. In the one week that she had been in camp, she had managed to interrupt my moments of solitude more than I could have imagined possible.

  Every morning, at dawn and dusk, I wandered the site. I watched a potter – a young woman with glossy black hair that glistened in the morning sun – molding a vessel in the shape of a pot-bellied dog. I stood in the shade and listened to the scraping of an obsidian chisel on cedarwood: a withered old man was carving the statue of a god. I did not see Zuhuy-kak. At the times that I most expected to see the old woman, my daughter would wander by instead.

  At dawn, as I sat on a fragment of wall by the Spanish chapel watching a stonecutter, Diane strolled toward me on the path from the cenote. At dusk, as I lingered by Structure 701, watching the shadows gather, I heard the sound of Diane’s boots on the path from camp and the shadows fled. In the early evening, I stood on the edge of the cenote, watching the bats skim low over the water. Diane waved cheerfully as she walked along the path from the camp.

  She was willing and eager to walk with me and listen to me talk about the site. I talked a great deal. Sometimes, in the bright light of day, I thought that I talked too much.

  During the week, excavation had continued on the house mounds, the Temple of the Moon, and the tomb site. Work went slowly; the dirt had to be cleared away from each boulder before it could be moved, and each bucket of dirt had to be sifted for potsherds and flakes of worked stone. Hot, tedious, and dusty work.

  At the tomb site, the workmen had uncovered eight stone steps leading downward to the beginning of an underground passageway. The rubble they removed from the stairway had yielded little of interest: a few plainware potsherds, a few carved stones with glyphs too badly battered to decipher.

  Early Saturday morning, I walked alone to the tomb site. As I crossed the open plaza, I saw a flash of blue by the excavation. Zuhuy-kak was standing beside the tarps that covered the open pit. Her eyes followed me as I walked toward her. She stood in the sunlight and cast a shadow of her own. I greeted her in Maya, sat in the shade by the excavation, and lit a cigarette. Zuhuy-kak remained standing, staring out toward the mound.

  ‘You see,’ she said, pointing to the mound. ‘You see how the ah-nunob have desecrated the temple. But soon their time will be over. Soon, the cycles will turn.’

  I followed her gaze but saw only the rubble-strewn mound, the path worn by workmen snaking around it. An iguana stared back at me from its perch on a weathered temple stone.

  ‘What day is it, Ix Zacbeliz?’ she asked.

  I knew that she wanted to know the day in the Mayan calendar. ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘We use a different calendar now.’

  She frowned. ‘You don’t know? Then how do you know what to do each day?’ She seemed more confident than she had when she first appeared. She stood straight, with her hand resting lightly on the conch shell at her belt. ‘Don’t you know the cycles of time, Ix Zacbeliz? You know that what has passed will come again, repeating endlessly. You must learn what day this is, so that I can advise you. The time is near for Ix Chebel Yax to return to power.’

  ‘I’ll try to figure it out.’

  ‘You must.’ She was watching me with a disconcertingly direct gaze.

  ‘Yes, I will,’ I said, a little sharply. ‘But right now I am concerned with this excavation. Can you tell me how much further we will have to dig here? And what will we find in the end?’

  But she was not there. The wind hissed like snakes in the dry blades at my feet, rattling the tarps and sending dust devils scurrying about the mound.

  At dinner that night, I missed having Diane and Barbara there. Only John and Tony had remained in camp; all the others had run away to Mérida, to sleep in clean beds and take hot showers. The three of us sat together in the plaza, drinking coffee and aguardiente while the sun set. John and Tony talked while I stared out into the dusk beyond the plaza. The moon was just above the trees – a thin crescent with the horns pointing aloft. For once the shadows were quiet: the priest had finished scraping the jaguar skin; no wood-carvers worked by moonlight.

  ‘What do you think, Liz?’ Tony asked.

  ‘What? I wasn’t listening.’

  ‘John was talking about problems at your favorite site.’

  I looked at John, suddenly attentive. He hunched his broad shoulders forward slightly, as if to protect himself against me. ‘What sort of problems?’ I asked.

  John wrapped both big hands around his coffee cup. ‘Work’s going slowly. I leave to check on Carlos’s crew, and when I come back, the men have always been delayed. The sifter is torn. The head of a pickax has come loose. A man is stung by a scorpion. Someone saw a rattlesnake. Always something.’

  ‘You put Pich in charge of that crew, didn’t you? He’s usually very hard-working.’

  John shrugged. ‘Not this time.’

  ‘I’ll ask Salvador what he thinks,’ I said to Tony. ‘Maybe we need to shift the crews around.’

  ‘Sounds like it,’ he said.

  After a time, I excused myself and wandered by Salvador’s hut. I could see the silhouette of a man standing in the yard, having a smoke. I called to Salvador and he came to the albarrada, the wall of limestone fragments that surrounded the solar, the yard around the house. Lighting a cigarette, I leaned against the wall beside him.

  Here, the air smelled of greenery. Within the solar, the growth was lush. Maria kept a careful garden: an avocado tree shaded the doorway to the house; chili plants and herbs grew beside the albarrada. I cou
ld smell the sweet oranges that hung from the tree on the far side of the yard.

  ‘How goes it?’ I asked.

  ‘Well enough.’ I watched the red tip of his cigarette glow brightly for a moment, then fade to dull red. I could not see his face.

  ‘It’s quiet with the others gone,’ I said.

  ‘Yes. It is always quiet here.’

  ‘John tells me that the work goes slowly at his site,’ I said. ‘He says that there always seems to be a problem.’

  He ground his cigarette out on the limestone wall, and red sparks scattered on the rough stone. ‘This is not a lucky time of year. And that is not a lucky place,’ he said. ‘The work goes slowly because the luck is bad.’

  I offered him another cigarette and lit it for him. By the brief flame of my lighter, I saw his face: calm, considering, steady. When the cigarette was burning, he spoke again. ‘When we had cattle here, the animals would always spook near that place. It is unlucky.’

  ‘You did not speak of this before.’

  The cigarette hesitated halfway to his mouth. ‘You would not have listened before,’ he said. He was invisible in the darkness, and he knew that.

  ‘We have to dig there,’ I said. ‘It’s the most promising site we’ve found.’ A pause. The tip of his cigarette glowed brightly as he drew in the smoke. ‘Can we use more men there? Would that help?’

  ‘It is a narrow passage,’ he said. ‘Only three can work there at a time: one to move rocks, one to move dirt, one to sift.’

  ‘Perhaps a different three workmen,’ I said. ‘Men who do not know or care that it is an unlucky place.’

  ‘Perhaps.’ His tone was noncommittal. ‘I will assign a different three.’

  That evening I sat in my hut, consulted my reference books, and calculated the date according to the Mayan calendar. It wasn’t an easy task. Sylvanus Morley, a noted Mayanist active in the early 1900s, had derived a formula for the conversion of Mayan dates to dates in the modern calendar, but apparently it had not occurred to him that someone might want to convert from the modern calendar to the Mayan.