by Pat Murphy
After Emilio left, Barbara ordered more coffee. ‘It seems we were right about the game,’ she said. ‘You all right?’
‘I’m fine. If he’s busy, he’s busy.’ I shrugged. ‘I don’t care.’
‘You can stop being polite,’ she said. ‘Emilio’s gone.’
‘I really don’t care. It doesn’t make any difference.’
She looked at my hands. ‘You’re shredding that napkin,’ she said quietly.
I put the pieces of paper napkin down on the checkered tablecloth. ‘It shouldn’t make a difference,’ I said. ‘He doesn’t mean anything to me. It doesn’t matter.’
‘What a stupid asshole,’ she said.
I shrugged again. ‘No big deal.’
‘Look,’ she said, leaning forward and putting her hand on mine. ‘I know it’s not a big deal. I know your heart isn’t broken or anything like that. But it’s still no good. You can get mad about it if you want.’
I sipped my coffee, watching a blind beggar trying to sell a badly carved wooden animal to the couple at the next table.
‘Think I should tell Emilio to buzz off?’
‘Why? It’s not his fault.’
‘Whatever you want.’ She leaned back in her chair and spooned more sugar into her coffee. ‘Maybe we should get out of town today. Go tour the ruins at Uxmal. Something different.’
‘I’m all right,’ I told her. ‘I don’t care.’
She studied my face, then nodded. ‘Have it your way. What do you want to do? Go swimming?’
‘Fine.’
We went swimming in the hotel pool, a tiny patch of water in a turquoise concrete basin. I lay on the cement by the side of the pool and tried to read the paperback romance, a stupid story about beautiful people who always wore the right clothes. The world of the heroine was filled with vague anxieties, overblown fears. I felt right at home.
Barbara swam and periodically tried to get me to talk. After an hour of this, I told Barbara that I wasn’t hungry; she and Emilio should eat without me. ‘I think I’ll wander around in the market. Maybe buy a dress. I’ll meet you back here.’
I walked. I didn’t go to the market; I wasn’t up for the crowds. I wandered around the zocalo, bought a lemon ice from a sidewalk vendor, and sat down on a bench near the cathedral to eat it. The clock on the Municipal Palace said it was one-thirty, but it seemed much later. The air was heavy with the promise of rain.
I didn’t miss Marcos. I had expected little of him. He was a person to cling to when the shadows came, no more. But now, I didn’t even have that.
Two withered women wrapped in dark red shawls sat on the pavement before the cathedral, begging coins from passing strangers. The two middle-aged women who sold gilt-framed pictures of saints at the cathedral door were closing up shop, wrapping the garish frames in newspaper and stacking them in a cardboard box. Above their heads, pigeons trudged up and down on the stone lintel.
On the sidewalk, tourists strolled up and down. A neatly dressed woman with a sunburned nose was exclaiming over postcards. A man in a new panama hat was taking a picture of the Municipal Palace. All strangers. None of them would understand if I told them I was afraid that my mother was crazy, afraid that I might be crazy. They would not understand that I was being haunted by an old woman who looked like the stone head in my mother’s hut.
I thought about calling my former lover, Brian. I hadn’t spoken to him since I quit my job. What could I tell him? I’m seeing ghosts and I think my mother is crazy. No, I could tell him nothing.
I was afraid. A friend of mine had a dog that would chase after the spot of light cast by a flashlight beam, unable to catch it and unable to leave it alone. The dog would run after the spot on the floor and bark when it ran up the walls, until he collapsed with exhaustion. Poor dog could never figure out that he could never catch the spot. I felt like the dog. I did not know the rules and there was no one to tell me. It was like chasing a spot of light. Or like trying to catch soap bubbles as they drifted on the breeze. You end up with handfuls of nothing.
I did not see the curandera approach. She sat beside me on the bench and took my hand, holding it tightly in her warm dry hands. She said something to me in a low urgent voice and I shook my head. I didn’t understand. I tried to free my hand, but she would not let go. She called out to a passing hammock vendor and he came near. Still holding my hand, she spoke quickly to him. He glanced at me curiously, amused by the situation.
‘Do you speak English?’ I asked him. ‘Can you tell her to let me go?’
‘A little,’ he said. He spoke to the woman and she shook her head and said something else.
‘She wants me to tell you . . .’ He hesitated, as if searching for the right words. ‘You got to go away,’ he said at last. ‘Don’t go back to your mother.’
‘What are you talking about? Why shouldn’t I go back?’
He shrugged. ‘She says that your luck is bad.’ He shrugged again. ‘That is what she says.’
‘Tell her that I understand,’ I said. I looked at the old woman and she stared back. ‘Yo comprendo.’ Her grip on my hand loosened and I freed myself. I stood then, backing away from her.
‘Hey,’ the hammock vendor called after me. ‘You want to buy a hammock?’
I was stumbling away, almost running across the zocalo. Thunder rolled across the sky, bumping from cloud to cloud. I went back to the hotel to get my bag and found Barbara and Emilio at the usual table. I told Barbara that I was going to catch a cab back to camp. When she protested, I just shrugged. I knew that I had to go back. I did not know why the old woman wanted to chase me away from my mother, but I knew I had to go back.
The first fat drops of rain began falling as I ran from the hotel across the square to the taxi stand. The bronze man on the pillar glistened in a flash of lightning. He stared out over my head, ignoring my hurried negotiations with the cabby.
The road to the ruins seemed longer in the rain. The taxi driver tried to talk to me. I think he was complaining about driving in the storm, but I just shrugged, understanding only a few of the words. I watched the shapes in the moving rain, never clear but always present. Once, I almost called to the driver to tell him to stop – I saw an old woman crossing the road. But she vanished into the rain, a shadow, nothing more. Thunder rolled overhead like the crash of falling monuments.
21
Elizabeth
I woke on Saturday, the day Kan, as stiff and sore as if I had been hiking through the monte in my sleep. The sky was overcast and the morning was half over. I stopped by the kitchen and Maria gave me – reluctantly, I thought – a breakfast of atole. Barbara and Diane had left for Mérida; Tony was nowhere to be seen.
This day is governed by the smooth-faced young god who makes the maize grow. It is a good day, by most accounts, favorable for beginning new projects and continuing old ones. I considered this as I sat in the plaza and ate my atole. Then I gathered my equipment and went to the tomb.
I was halfway there when Zuhuy-kak fell into step beside me. She limped slightly and I remembered seeing the knotted thighbone that caused her pain. I looked at her broad face and knew the smooth white surfaces beneath it. I glanced at her, but did not speak.
‘Are you happy with the secrets you have found?’ she asked. When she spoke, I remembered the skull’s gaping mouth.
We had reached the mouth of the tomb. I did not acknowledge Zuhuy-kak’s presence. I pulled aside the tarpaulin that covered the excavation, and descended the steps into the tomb. In the passageway, I lit the Coleman lantern, reached through the opening to set it on the floor of the tomb, and squirmed in after it.
In the tomb, it was still night, governed by the jaguar, the dark aspect of the sun. The lantern cast a circle of light that faded before it reached the ceiling. In the silent darkness, I could hear my heart beating quickly, as if I had run a long distance. I lifted the lantern high and looked toward the back of the tomb. The floor sloped away, ending in darkness. Caves are the entr
ance to Xibalba, the Mayan underworld inhabited by gods of death and sacrifice. Cold air from the underworld stirred the hairs on my arm and I shivered. On the mottled stone wall of the tomb my shadow shifted and changed, monstrous and strange. I saw Zuhuy-kak standing at the edge of the circle of lantern light, watching me.
On Friday, we had begun clearing the area, brushing away the loose dirt. Our initial work had uncovered a vase that lay on its side on the floor near the skeleton’s head. I set the lantern on the stone dais, so that the vase fell within the pool of light.
I knelt by the vase. On Friday, I had started cleaning it, but the vessel was still half covered with soft dirt and bits of straw brought in by generations of rodents. I used my whisk broom to brush the upper surface clean.
‘I made that vase,’ Zuhuy-kak said. ‘When I emerged from the well, while I lay on the pallet, I painted it.’
I noticed that my hands were shaking and I stopped for a moment, waiting for the trembling to subside before I continued my work. I breathed deeply. I could still feel a trembling deep inside me, but my hands were still. I recognized one glyph – the place glyph for Chichén Itzá. On the side of the pot, just below the band of glyphs, I could make out a thin black outline on the cream-colored pottery. I continued brushing. The dirt brushed away easily now, revealing the elaborate headdress of a priest or nobleman. The black outline was his hand, which was raised above his head. He was looking down, at something beyond and below him.
I continued brushing the dirt from the pot. The half inch of rim that I had exposed was circled with a band of black marks on a red background: glyphs that were scratched and illegible in the dim lantern light. On the vase, a priest stood on a cliff with a group of other priests and nobles. All of them looked down. My whisk broom uncovered feet first, then her blue dress, fluttering around her as she fell. Her hair was streaming behind her. The falling woman. The priest’s hands were raised because he had cast her off the cliff. Her arms were crossed on her breast; her eyes were open and staring. She saw something, but I did not know what it was. She was falling through empty space, just as she had been falling for many years.
The glaze at the base of the vase was scratched, but I could make out curling waves of turbulent water, black swirls on the cream-colored background. In the swirls, between the cracks and gaps in the glaze, I could see an upthrown arm and a weeping face, several small figures struggling against the serpentine coils of the water.
‘I brought that vase with me when I came down here,’ she said. ‘I wanted it with me. I brought my daughter’s bones.’
I heard the rain begin to fall outside the tomb. The tarp flapped in the wind and the water trickled down the steps – I could hear the soft liquid sound, like a cat licking itself.
I used my trowel to remove the soil surrounding the vase, transferring the loosely packed dirt and detritus to a bucket. The vase was almost free of its cradle of soil. When I brushed it, it moved slightly, rocking in place. I stopped for a moment, waiting for the trembling in my hands to stop. Then, with care, I lifted the vase from the soil.
The glaze on the side that had faced the ground was pitted and cracked, but the picture was still intact. The woman in blue – the falling woman – lay on a platform. At her feet lay a conch – a symbol of the water from which she had emerged and of the underworld where the sun dies and is reborn. One hand held a leaf-shaped obsidian blade. Her other arm was extended to display a bloody gash from which blood flowed. She was smiling and her expression was triumphant.
‘You killed yourself here,’ I said.
‘There was no one else left to kill me,’ she said softly. ‘The goddess had no power and I had sent the people away.’
Zuhuy-kak was sitting on the edge of the stone dais, and she seemed as solid as the bones that lay beside her. She sat with her shoulders hunched forward, staring at her folded hands. For a moment, I felt sympathy for this poor mad ghost, exiled by her own doing, lost and alone. Without thinking, I reached out toward her. She looked up and I stopped.
‘How did your daughter die?’ I asked.
Zuhuy-kak met my gaze. Her hands were folded in her lap. For a moment, she said nothing. ‘I gave her to the goddess,’ she said at last.
‘You sacrificed your daughter,’ I said, staring at the woman’s face.
Zuhuy-kak did not speak for a moment. ‘The ah-nunob were coming and the battle was not going well,’ she said. ‘We had captured their warriors. I killed them at the altar and we heaped their skulls in the courtyards, but that was not enough.’
Her hands were grasping each other tightly. She turned her gaze toward the darkness at the back of the cave and swayed forward and back almost as if she rocked a child in her arms. She spoke in a singsong tone. ‘There had been much killing, so much killing on the battlefield and in the temple. My husband, a man of power and nobility, a good man, had died that week on the field. The scent of blood hung thick and heavy in the air, overflowing the temple, filling the courtyard, spilling out of the sacred places and flowing down the sacbe, a river of rich red scent laced with the smoke of burning incense. The sound of the drum and the rattle followed me everywhere, beating like my own heart, steady and strong. Like my own heart.’
She had drawn her folded hands up to her breast, and she was rocking back and forth, back and forth to a drumbeat that I could not hear. Her words came quickly now. ‘The smoke, the smell of blood, the cries of the wounded tended by the healers – these seemed natural things.’ She had closed her eyes. ‘I gave my child to the gods to stop the coming of the ah-nunob. I meant it to be a willing sacrifice, a gift. I prepared her, dressed her, and perfumed her, gave her balche mixed with herbs to drink. I took her to the place of sacrifice, filled with the power of the goddess. She did not struggle. She smiled at me, because I had told her that Ixtab would come and take her to paradise. She was afraid, but she smiled up at me. And at the moment that I was bringing the blade down, when the power of the goddess should have been greatest, I doubted. My daughter looked up at me, and I doubted the power of the goddess.’ She opened her eyes and the strange light that filled them reminded me of the madwoman who claimed to be Jesus Christ. ‘I doubted and the ah-nunob took the city. The cycle turned and the goddess lost her power.’
My stomach ached, a solid steady pain that reminded me of the aching in my gut that plagued me throughout my pregnancy. A sad and heavy feeling, as if I carried a burden that was too great. The doctor who attended me during pregnancy said it was nothing, it was psychosomatic. Many pregnant women felt unhappy, he said; it wasn’t abnormal. He said that they felt unhappy – I remember that. It did not seem to cross his mind that maybe they had good reason to feel unhappy, maybe they were in pain, maybe they carried a weight that was too great to bear. I wondered what the doctor would say now.
‘Now it is time for the cycle to turn again. You can bring the goddess back to power. Your daughter—’
‘No,’ I said.
‘You can,’ she said. I noticed then that she was holding the obsidian blade. ‘It will be easy. And then, once it is done, you can rest.’
‘No.’
‘You are like me,’ she said. ‘I know you. I knew you when I saw you by the well. You too made a sacrifice that was not good. You began falling just as I began falling when my daughter died and the power of the goddess died with her. I began falling long before the priests threw me in the well,’ she said.
‘You can rest now,’ I said. ‘You can stop.’
‘I tried to stop. When the people were leaving and the city was in confusion. I asked two masons to wall me in, and they did it for me. They walled me in and I stopped here. I wanted to rest. But there is no rest. The cycle is turning again. The time is near for sacrifices to be made. Once they are made, we can rest, you and I.’
‘You can rest,’ I said. ‘There is no need for you to be here. There will be no sacrifices, no blood spilled.’
She looked at me with eyes as dark as the darkness beyond the tomb.
‘Why are you here?’ She did not wait for my answer. ‘You are here because you want to learn secrets. You want them, and at the same time, you are afraid to learn them. You want power, but you fear it. You fear that you will learn what you are capable of doing.’ She ran her finger along the obsidian blade. ‘There will be blood.’
She held it out, and I took it. Held it in my hand and drew it gently along the skin of my wrist, testing the blade, just testing it. Blood beaded in its wake and I felt a new warmth and strength travel up my arm and into my heart. The touch of the cold obsidian recalled my suicide attempt. I remembered the feeling of heated anticipation, the sense that the pain I felt was insignificant beside the power I would gain. I watched the blood trickle from the wound in my arm and I felt warm and strong.
22
Diane
I paid the cabby and ran out into the rain. Behind me, I heard him gun his engine and roar away.
My mother’s hut was deserted. Both doors were open and the rain had swept in, dampening the dirt floor. A plastic poncho hung on a nail, and after a moment’s hesitation I pulled it on over my dress and headed back into the rain. I didn’t know exactly why 1 wanted to see my mother right away. I think I had some idea that I would tell her about the old woman that I had seen, and then we would discuss the whole thing like adults, separating phantasms from reality carefully, bit by bit.
I followed the path to the tomb, splashing recklessly through the puddles in my sandals. I was already soaked; a little more water made no difference. Once, I slipped and banged my knee on the ground, and after that I limped.
The mouth of the tomb was a dark spot on the plaza floor. As I stepped down into the passageway, I felt a faint breeze that carried the scent of newly turned earth. The rain was splashing down the stairs into the tomb. Over the sound of the rain I could hear my mother’s voice. I could not make out the words.
