A Carnivore's Inquiry

by Sabina Murray

  “Who do I have to thank for this?” I asked.

  “The captain,” she said.

  We flew for a while through the clear skies and the earth peeled away beneath me in brilliant green and flat blue. I sipped my narcotic drink. The plane fell some distance, then recovered, then dipped to the left, and then recovered. We entered a toxic brown cloud. The speaker hissed to attention and after a few unintelligible nasal eruptions, went dead. My ears felt the slow ache of increased pressure and I yawned to pop them. All this I took to mean that we had begun our descent into Mexico City.

  A bump, a skid, and a bump later, we had escaped the heavens and were once more bound to the soil.

  16

  I found a hotel within walking distance to the Zocalo, or old town square, and the Belles Artes museum. The taxi driver said the hotel was owned by his cousin. With my Italian and a few Spanish words I was able to communicate somewhat, but he’d told me the room was some price that I’d converted to a suspicious ten dollars a night. The room was, in fact, ten dollars a night. It did have its own bathroom and a TV, set on an ancient dresser, that fizzled on in black and white and offered two Mexican soap operas and a Western set in San Antonio, which, from this particular geographic location, was actually a “northeastern.” I felt significantly better than I had in the previous days and was beginning to regret having asked Johnny to take the car back. Given some rest, I probably could have driven myself.

  For dinner that night I bought a half-dozen taco things from a street vendor. There was a Denny’s, of all things, down on the corner that I knew I would succumb to at some point, but not just then. Musicians wandered the streets in studded pants and monstrous sombreros. A few of them sang at me aggressively, then demanded money. I handed them a few bills, which it turned out (I calculated later) amounted to seventeen cents. They yelled at me and I took off running back to the hotel. I had the woman at the front desk go across the street to buy me a bottle of tequila. I was too scared to go into the bar alone, which made me feel pathetic—so pathetic that when the woman finally got back with my bottle, more cigarettes, and change, and offered to get me a glass, I refused, ready for the bottle. I hadn’t had a chance to drink alone in quite a while and it was actually appealing.

  The next morning I awoke feeling more jittery than hung over. My mind was working and all I needed was a little coffee to make me feel good. At a café down the street I had a thick, milky coffee and a bowl of soup with a raw egg floating in it. I thought I’d ordered a pudding, but the soup was good. Taxis were zipping by on the street. I flagged one down and was soon heading for the Anthropological Museum.

  Although I’d called a number of times from the hotel desk, I’d had no luck in finding Barry Buster. The first time, someone had put me on hold for twenty minutes, and I hung up. The second time, I spoke to a person who responded to every query with a loud and then louder “yes.” I said, “Do you know how I can get hold of Professor Barry Buster Parkinson?” and he said “Yes!” and I said “Great. I very much need to speak with him.” And the guy said, “Yes!” “Well can you connect me?” “Yes.” “Now?” “Yes.” “Do you speak English?” “Yes!” “I just flew in last night and, boy, are my wings tired.” “Yes.” And so on. The last person I spoke to was a woman who sounded both German and Mexican. She said that if I needed to speak to him, I better come in. Parkinson was headed for Chiapas that day, she didn’t know when, to track down some textile thing.

  “I am not sure. Ask at the front desk,” and she hung up.

  I got sidetracked outside the museum. There was a crazy exhibition of a sky dance. The dancers had their ankles twisted into ropes and were spinning around on a pole far above the ground. The dance looked dangerous. There was a hamburger stand just to the right of the crowd, which also looked dangerous. I watched the dancers orbiting high above my head, blocking the sun in turn, while eating my burger. When I finally made it into the museum the combination of burger, dance, and heat had washed out my complexion. I felt all right, but looked dangerously nauseated. When I told the young, uniformed woman, “I need to speak to Barry Buster Parkinson now!” she believed me. She scuttled out from behind the desk and gestured for me to follow her, first into an elevator and then through a labyrinthine series of corridors deep below the main rooms of the museum. I chased after her, feeling much like Alice pursuing the white rabbit. The box felt a good deal heavier than it had at the front desk and I entertained the thought that some transformation had taken place, that maybe what I was carrying was no longer a disconnected assortment of bones, but a small, crouching Plains Indian from the fifth century. Finally we reached an unassuming gray door.

  “Parkinson’s office,” she said. She swung open the door without knocking. “Mr. Parkinson. You have a visitor.”

  Parkinson was standing with his back to me at a tall table covered with books. “I’m sorry,” he said, without turning around. “I have a journey to make before sundown and I really can’t have any visitors.”

  “Barry Buster, I’ll only take a minute of your time.”

  He turned quickly, then took off his glasses and placed them back on. His black hair was longer than it had been and, although I found it hard to believe, he had lost weight. Never tall at five foot six, he looked positively elfin now that he was thinner. His eyes were the same fierce blue and I realized, to my surprise, that I was very happy to see him again. “Katherine,” he said.

  I gave him a big hug. “You look terrible,” I said. “Don’t you eat?”

  “Amoebic dysentery,” he replied. “Hazard of the trade, and, believe it or not, a status symbol.”

  “I don’t believe it,” I said. “I just had a hamberguesa out in front. Do you think I’m doomed?”

  “Yes. Most definitely, but nothing to do with the hamburger. What are you doing here?”

  “I actually came to see you.”

  “And I’m leaving in a few minutes. The roads south are treacherous and best traveled in daylight. And I still haven’t found the reference for an odd zigzagging border on a textile fragment, which is the whole reason for me making the trip. I think it was in a journal, but for some reason I remember the picture being in color, which doesn’t really support that theory...”

  “Barry, I need you to look at something.”

  “How long are you going to be in Mexico?”

  I rattled the box. “It will just take a minute. I promise.”

  “What have you got in there?”

  I pulled out a femur and waved it at him.

  “Bones?” Barry shrugged.

  “A complete set,” I said. I pulled out the skull.

  “Katherine, we are talking skeletal remains, not Limoges. I don’t think ‘set’ is the correct term. Nor do I think that I am the right person to look at them.”

  “They came from New Mexico. You’re not interested at all?”

  “Anasazi?”

  “Ruins nearby are Anasazi.”

  “Katherine, my specialty is pre-Columbian textiles and pottery. You know that.”

  “Take a look,” I waved the femur seductively. “That scratch looks a bit odd to me. What causes a scratch like that?”

  Barry Buster took the bone and weighed in his hands. “That scratch is nothing, but this, see?” He indicated the end of the bone. “The blunting there? That is suspicious.”

  “What causes that?”

  “We don’t know for sure, but similar blunting has been produced by using the bone as a pot stirrer.” Barry Buster stirred an imaginary pot, then handed the bone back to me.

  I held up the skull. “Smashed in the back,” I said.

  “And charred, to the naked eye. Maybe you do have something.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “The charring? You can cook the brains right in the cranium, which makes a handy bowl.” Barry Buster put the femur back in the box. He took the skull from me and looked deep into it’s eye sockets. “Probably got some story to tell us, don’t you,” he s
aid. “Can you leave the bones with me?”

  “I would love to leave the bones with you.”

  “All right. After I come back from Chiapas, I have two weeks here to finalize things for the catalogue, then I’m heading to Arizona, where the exhibit’s kicking off. I’ll be there for a few weeks. One of my colleagues has done a good deal of work on skeletal remains from the prehistoric Southwest. I’ll ask him what he thinks.”

  “Good enough.”

  “We should get together sometime,” he said. “Are you back in school?”

  “No,” I said, apologetically.

  “Will no one take you?”

  “I haven’t really tried.” I pushed the box of bones over to him. “Think of me pursuing a course of study as an independent scholar.”

  Barry Buster nodded a few times. He picked up the box and put it on a shelf. “Katherine, how did you come by these bones?”

  I pondered this for a moment, but the answer was fairly obvious. “Barry,” I said, “I inherited them.”

  Barry had to rush back to his apartment, where Gaia had spent the morning packing the car. He offered to share a cab with me.

  “We live near Frida Kahlo’s house and Trotsky’s house, and there’s a museum, designed by Diego Rivera to look like a temple in the area. Very impressive in a kind of primitive, artsy, kitschy way. You must see it before you leave.”

  “Thanks, Barry,” I said. “I will, but I haven’t had a chance to look around here yet.” I gestured over my shoulder back at the Anthropological Museum.

  Barry gave me a big hug and an inappropriate kiss. He got into a taxi and, waving out the window, called, “Keep in touch. Maybe I’ll come visit.”

  The museum was quiet and airy. I was excited to be there and momentarily forgot why I’d come to Mexico. Pre-Columbian art had been my favorite class, and not just because I was sleeping with Barry Buster. In fact, I think I started sleeping with him because I appreciated the course so much. I stopped in front of an enormous statue of Coatlicue, goddess of life, death, and the earth. The statue must have been fifteen feet tall. I have no idea how much it weighed. Coatlicue’s head was crowned with grinning skulls. Her necklace had a large skull pendant, the chain strung together with dismembered hands and something, which at first looked like grenades—goddess of explosions?—but after closer inspection, turned out to be hearts. To the Aztecs, who saw actual human hearts with fair frequency, this must have been an easily recognized motif. At first, I found this gory, but then I changed my mind. What made the ubiquitous candy-box type heart that I saw everywhere more acceptable, other than the fact that it was anatomically incorrect? How many heart-shaped chocolates had I eaten in my time? Anything heart-shaped should remind us of our bloody muscle, tick-ticking away. I placed my hand over my own heart and felt the comfort of its drumming.

  In the courtyard outside a fountain trickled appealingly. The light was dim and with all the artifacts and murals surrounding me, it was easy to imagine myself not in the museum, but in a temple. I almost felt convinced of the Aztec concept of time. To the Aztecs, time was no more abstract than anything else and was a real commodity owned and operated by the various gods. If one adopted this definition, all the subjects of the art—kings, vassals, artisans, villains, and victims—could have been running through the matter of their lives in the next room.

  I stopped at the great wheel that was the sun stone. This calendar had dominated the lives of the Aztecs. It was their belief that the world ran in fifty-two-year cycles, and at the end of this cycle a great cataclysm would occur. A new phase of history of the One World would begin. I wondered what it was like for Montezuma in those last days before Aztec time—all the billions of days so carefully recorded in katun, baktun, pictun, calabtun, kinchiltun, stringing out from zero and chillingly accurate—suddenly and permanently ceased.

  My errand in Mexico was done but my plane didn’t leave for another two days. I called the real estate agent to see if she had listed the property.

  “I’m listing it at one million,” she said.

  “Do you think it’s worth that much?”

  “It is if someone pays that much. The house is four thousand square feet and the lot is,” I heard her rifling through papers, “over twenty acres. We could ask for more, but I think we’re better off listing it at market rate.”

  “All right,” I said. She checked my address and phone number. She’d forgotten to have me sign the agency agreement, but once that was taken care of, we could move forward. I’d had no idea the house was that valuable. All this good news ought to have made me happy, but the whole thing seemed bizarre, as if I was watching my life unfold on TV, so I found it hard to celebrate. Also, the hotel room was beginning to make me feel uncomfortable.

  I never liked hotel rooms, a leftover from a childhood trauma. When I was five, after some terrible fight between my parents, my mother had run away with me. I’m not sure where we went. I remember us driving for hours. She was screaming and crying on and off. We pulled into a motel parking lot and my mother got us a room. It was late at this point and I was hungry. I think my mother left to get food, but she was gone a long time. I brushed my teeth, put on my pajamas and waited. I fell asleep on the bedcovers. The next morning, she still wasn’t there. I didn’t know what to do. When the cleaning woman came in at eleven, she found me crying. She took me to the office and she and the office manager, an Indian man with children of his own, listened to my story with the appropriate concern. His wife made a big lunch for me—pan-fried Spam and rice—then sat with me on the couch in her odd-smelling living room. We watched a video that was all in Hindi, a romance with men in turbans spying on gorgeous saried women from behind trees. She translated each exchange,

  “He says she is very, very beautiful.”

  “She says he is very, very handsome.”

  “Now they are singing about love.”

  And then my father showed up with a wad of bills (I remember them refusing the money, citing my good behavior) and drove me home.

  My mother went into the hospital after that and was gone a long time.

  Years later, I asked my mother about it. She was surprised that I remembered the motel incident, because no one ever mentioned it at home. “I should have left him then,” she said. “I wanted to.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  My mother looked at me, surprised that I didn’t already know. “Because of you,” she said. “And he puts up with me because he thinks that a child should have her mother. Children always love their mothers. Even Romulus and Remus loved their mother, and she was a wolf.”

  This was an odd moment of tenderness for us so I didn’t point out—even though I thought it at the time—that Romulus and Remus were adopted.

  I thought I should get out of town. I wanted to go to Teotihuacan to see the Toltec pyramids, so armed with a map, I took the subway to the bus station. Once there, I discovered that I was at the wrong bus station, that the one I needed was the northern station—a good two hours from where I was.

  “Well, what’s south?” I asked.

  The ticket vendor looked at a bus schedule. His eyebrows came together in the same way as I imagined a doctor’s would had he discovered a grapefruit-size tumor in my cranium. “There is one bus for Tepochtlan in fifteen minutes.”

  “What’s in Tepochtlan?”

  “They make the wooden spoon.”

  “For what?”

  “For the chocolate.”

  “Can I look at that?” I asked, gesturing at the schedule.

  “Yes,” he said, pushing the schedule across with the same solemnity, “but it is incorrect.”

  I nodded to myself. I looked around the train station. A group of religious kids—or so I assumed from their matching “Jesus Lives” T-shirts—were massing around their suitcases. “Where are they going?” I asked, pointing.

  “They are going to Cuernavaca.”

  “Why are they going to Cuernavaca?”

  “Because i
t is a very nice place with nice restaurants and beautiful food. There is a palace also of Cortes.”

  Cuernavaca. I remembered Malcolm Lowry’s doomed British consul. “And when does the bus to Cuernavaca leave?”

  “It leaves forty-five minutes ago.”

  I considered this. “Can I have a ticket to Cuernavaca?”

  Cuernavaca seemed to be the least sinister place on earth, no death stalking the streets. Vendors strolled by with straining bunches of balloons. The sky was a brilliant blue, as if the beige tarp of the city had been rolled back. The volcanoes, Popocatepetl and Ixtaccihuatl, loomed up in monumental profile. Beyond their peaks the brilliant sky was full of promise and mystery. The plaza was clean and well laid out. I was aware of the heat, but a clean breeze was blowing, resulting in an unidentified tinkling of glass, making everything seem enchanted. I bought a pack of Chiclets from a small, barefoot boy in exchange for directions to Cortes’s palace. He volunteered to walk me over for ten pesos, which seemed like a good deal to me and exorbitant to him, so we were both happy. He even gave me some extra gum to cement the goodwill between us.

  Cortes’s palace was made of stones, a maze of rooms that led into one another in a seemingly accidental way, as if each room were giving birth to the next as I passed through it. The light was filtered and alien, shining here and there, but every room had a pocket of darkness, a cold spot of gloom. I thought of the palaces I’d seen in Europe: the Pitti Palace in Florence, the Residenz in Munich, the Schoenbrun in Vienna. There was none of that lightness, frivolity, excess here, rather the feeling that adobe walls—the very ceiling—had calcified out of crushed bone, been cemented with thickened blood. Glass cases were arranged on the walls displaying pens and inkwells, woven goods from the Philippines, leather-covered bibles from Spain, the junk of colonization. Small clusters of people moved from case to case reverentially, arranging the occasional strand of hair or probing a rogue zit, when they thought no one would notice. I was studying my own reflection—wondering if the odd light and the angle of the glass had made me look so deathly pale—when the businessman entered the room. He was wearing a suit, which I guessed was made of tropical wool. He wore yards of the stuff because of his size. The businessman was sweating profusely, mopping away the rivulets of sweat with an inadequate handkerchief. He had a tour guide who, for the sum of fifty pesos, was impersonating an English speaker with some knowledge of Cuernavacan history.