by Susan Daitch
“Look,” she opened her hand, and the little figure lay nestled in her palm.
Later Ruth marched ahead of me, map folded into back pocket humming My World Is Empty Without You, Babe combined with the Perry Mason theme song, as performed by the Del Byzanteens, but nodding her head back and forth in a way Phil Kline probably never did. The rhythm of walking while hacking your way through the jungle, heavy deliberate steps, kind of lends itself to the Perry Mason theme song, if you think about it. The advocate of the concrete and knowable kept an amulet, a small silver fish, round her neck. Ruth’s grandmother had given it to her to ward off the evil eye, and she believed in it completely. The two inches of silver scales and blue beady eyes was never removed. (I tried once and was pushed away.) Sometimes I let her get ahead of me and completely out of sight just to get a break from her sureness and confidence. I was somebody’s graduate assistant. What did I know?
One evening when we were still out and darkness was falling fast, not leaving us much time to get back to town, in a effort to talk to her, I tried to make the following point. Even the edifice of provable facts is within lasso reach of any itinerant fantasist. The chacmools she studied, for example, with their languid reclining bodies and sphinx-like faces, bearing stone trays to support human sacrifice, were named by an eccentric nineteenth-century French-man, Augustus Le Plongeon, who christened the things he found according to his own random system as he traveled with an assortment of the concertina-shaped cameras of the era, and a monkey who carried his own private embossed-leather satchel. Ruth shrugged her narrow shoulders, spades and compass jangling from her backpack. How long does a human heart keep beating after it’s pulled out of a chest cavity? How long does the person whose aortas and ventricles dangle above their face remain in sentient terror?
“Plongeon spoke to the monkey as if it were a co-antiquarian, trained in a lycée. The little fellow had its own monogrammed trowel and ate with him in the dining car, ” I said.
Ruth scratched an ankle where she’d been bitten by a mosquito. One of Ruth’s eyes was slightly bigger than the other so that I sometimes wondered if two different personalities lodged behind them: one who had no argument with a monkey in the dining car, and the other who called the conductor to complain and spoke to him in his own southern Mexican Spanish. The it’s really no big deal eye shared the cranium space with this is entirely unacceptable. So, I think part of her would have traveled through swarms of locusts with me while the other half never imagined she inflicted a thousand cuts with one snicker.
“He retired to Brooklyn where he died in 1908 with a view of the East River,” Ruth countered.
It was true. Laughed at, his theories in disgrace, Le Plongeon and his wife retreated to Brooklyn. Even in retirement Le Plongeon still claimed a dethroned Mayan queen fled to Egypt on a winged boat, and that the city of Palenque sent ambassadors to Polynesia.
Like Le Plongeon I found something compelling in the idea of going full steam ahead and building an entire universe out of flotsam and jetsam: grab a barque known to the Nile delta region, a Mayan nose ring, a Berlin U-bahn ticket with faces drawn on one side, a giant sandstone ashtray that could also serve as a vessel for containing a human heart rendered in sacrifice, tie all the pontoons together and walk across the Mississippi. Why not? I asked Ruth, which was mostly like asking the air. We were traveling with a few others, but at this point our team was far ahead and not visible. There’s a feeling you get when walking in remote places that someone is watching you, someone you can’t see who travels on a ridge to your right, over your shoulder, who hides behind thick palms or blends with a screen of vines. We were in the jungle to find what we could, while all the while some person or group of people was watching us, even if it was a tribe without written language, someone was noting how this man and woman talked loudly, gestured, didn’t seem to get along or agree about anything and sprayed the air from time to time with some kind of mist that came out of a metal cylinder. How had the Le Plongeons plunged on, perhaps along this exact route, and remained adoring of one another’s schemes and inventions?
“Alice Le Plongeon, though twenty-three years younger and devoted to Augustus,” Ruth reminded me, “was herself a formidable photographer of the concrete and knowable, risking her life to photograph precipitously placed sculpture located in the territory of hostile tribes and vicious white looters eager to turn chacmools into cash. She left a vast archive, pictorial records of what she called ‘the departed grandeur; silent, deserted, fallen cities.’”
Together Le Plongeon and his wife created a box made up of compartments that could be reassembled to form a portable darkroom complete with sink and black curtain, impervious to sunlight. Two people could set it up in less than five minutes. Something carried in a bag you could snap open almost with little more than a flick of the wrist, the anonymous black box, was converted into a complicated functional structure. The same imagination that gave life to chacmools and studied monkey chatter invented some very practical things as well. Couldn’t you be a crackpot, your ideas held up to ridicule, and still be happy? I fished in my pocket for a jack-knife and traced the outline of a glyph in stone until Ruth told me to stop, the noise of the blade against rock was irritating.
Ruth shook the bottle of Rambug she’d bought at a camping store and sprayed the chemical infusion not just on herself but into the air. As far as she was concerned the discussion was over. She had the world on a string. Walking far ahead of me she relegated nineteenth-century antiquarians and their cabinets of curiosities to useless storage. An emerald-green snake hung knotted from a branch overhead. Ruth eyed it with a raised eyebrow before walking underneath. I’d seen her lop the head off a rattler that came too close and do so in a blink, then move on as if she’d done nothing more than swat a mosquito. Members of the reptile family didn’t occupy her nightmares. These were inhabited by other phantoms, as I would eventually learn. She was afraid of the interiors of local churches, hollowed out, they contained no pews or benches of any kind. Incense burned and people came and went, lighting candles and chanting before saints, offering Coke or Fanta, eggs, or a dead chicken. The saints were lined up along the walls, and each had a mirror hung around his or her neck to keep evil away, and no, Ruth wasn’t some kind of reincarnated demon. She just felt creeped out by churches.
Imagine being interviewed on a television show and when asked how you met the person you married, you have to say you collided at the top of a Mayan calendar pyramid. The audience is cued for laughter, the interviewer raises his eyebrows. He thinks you’re making this up. We stayed in Mexico for a year, then moved back to New York.
I never spoke of Suolucidir to Ruth until I arrived home after the flight back from Miami. She hadn’t met me at the airport, but stayed at home, working, and barely acknowledged the difficulty of my trip, visiting my stepmother, going through my father’s things. The emotional register was often out of reach for Ruth. Dead was dead. Get over it. I left my bags by the door, sat opposite her, and told her that I was going to find Suolucidir.
Ruth barely looked up. She considered the study of the Maya to be constructed of concrete and knowable building blocks of evidence. This wasn’t strictly true, even she would admit that, but the project I wanted to undertake was, she felt, built on a foundation of complete absurdity, hearsay, and postwar quicksand. Chasing a whisper of a myth, the ghosts of Victorian explorers and shadows of Soviet refugees down a desert rabbit hole made her shudder. Jacob’s Ladder looks real, but you touch it at your peril as it crackles into nothingness.
She wasn’t alone in her derision; my academic advisers also threw cold water on the idea of the lost city. If the subject of Suolucidir was raised, I was reminded about the paucity of evidence and told that the Nieumacher relics were now, after the intervening years of turmoil in the region, unlocatable, and perhaps had been fraudulently manufactured in the first place. I was warned that the artifacts the Victorians, Hilliard and Congraves, had sent back to the British Mus
eum were in all probability just negligible offshoots of the Burnt City civilization, a city-state that had flourished to the north of the reputed site of Suolucidir. Even if I traveled to London to examine them, I would find the bits and pieces were merely evidence of far-flung provincial villages, not worthy of serious study. It was all deeply discouraging.
We were on the F train, and it had stalled above ground. It was late at night, and the car was empty except for a couple of snoozing subway workers in orange vests, tool boxes at their feet, and a man sitting directly opposite us who was immersed in a Russian newspaper. Light reflected off the oily surface of the Gowanus Canal and the huge Kentile Flooring sign while searchlights scoped the sky signaling the opening of a store somewhere to the west of the tracks. Ruth was staring glassy-eyed at the furry skunkweed that managed to grow between the rails of the train when it was above ground. Maybe it wasn’t the best moment to have a discussion of this kind, but whether the canal inspired me or the searchlights it’s hard to say. I just plunged right in. I tried, one more time, to interest Ruth in Suolucidir.
“Imagine it’s four thousand years from now and you’re wasting your time excavating Yuba City instead of Los Angeles,” she said. “Suolucidir isn’t even a speck on a page. It’s like those display cases of sparrows and field mice in remote corridors of the Museum of Natural History, lines of tiny carcasses you barely notice on your way to the Hall of Bio-Diversity or the planetarium. Why stand in front of the dead fur commas and question marks when you can go a couple of floors down to the Imax, and watch sharks circling a cageless diver or a special effects re-creation of the eruption of Krakatau, fatal vibrations spreading across the Indian Ocean? If you go too far afield, you’ll end up chasing little nothings and their shadows.”
I argued the comparison to a row of Truman-era stuffed stoats was unfair.
She reminded me of the controversy surrounding Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa. Had Mead, and consequently her readers, been snookered for years by prankster Samoans? And then there was the scandal surrounding the Tasaday people of the Philippines. The same swamp of uncertainty surrounded the subject of Suolucidir.
“Were they real? Had they existed in isolation in the jungle for millennia? Were they actors playing Stone Age tribesmen with Bic pens, Swiss Army knives, and transistor radios hidden under a rock in a cave? Even if you’re right,” Ruth insisted, “and they’re not actors, and there are no hidden plastic buckets and metal spoons, the charge hangs in the air. Once the seeds of doubt have been planted, you can never get rid of them.”
I wished she would spare the plant metaphors; they seemed like a set of straw men.
“Most people who seriously tried to find Suolucidir disappeared into the Shah’s prisons. There were no artifacts, and they were never heard from again.” Ruth was right, but this was a risk I was willing to take.
The New World with its lost tribes and waves of immigrants was terra firma for her. She was afraid to fly over large bodies of water, which she hated in their endlessness. The deserts and mountains of Sistan-va-Baluchistan were, for her, a sandstorm you could never claw your way out of, a gale of locusts that blinded you, their dry little corpses filled your shoes, piled outside your tent like hail, crunching under foot. She felt ill at ease in places where she didn’t know the language, as if all noise around her was reduced to a series of sequential sounds, and her perception of meaning was no better than a two-year-old’s.
Ruth despaired of imagining upward from a rubble-strewn landscape, or to be more precise, from certain kinds of incomprehensible rubble-strewn landscapes. If she walked through a bombed city, a city of which no building survived, no brick lay squarely on top of another, and she found a shattered shell of a tin can, could make out only the letters . . .oup on a shred of paper clinging to it, she would know how to re-animate a kitchen or a grocery store. There were readily available mental pictures for cupboard and shelf, walls, windows, doors, a radio playing in the background, a ticking clock reminding one of dinnertime. The street bustle, the arguments, the traffic crossings, these she could project in all their particularity, she could reconstruct scenes from the ground up, but for a city like Suolucidir, this would be impossible, she knew it. It was even more forbidding than a city of chacmools. It was a heap of stones resistant to that kind of personal holography. Aerial photos of ancient rubble looked to her like teeming, interlocking bacteria seen under a microscope. Helter skelter, job lot of primitive life forms, impossible to extract any meaning.
Though Bruno and Sidonie Nieumacher disappeared sometime in 1939, fragments of Suolucidiri writing from pieces of the scrolls and parchments they discovered found their way to Tehran. While bombs began to fall on London, experts in Old Persian, Farsi, and Baluchi at Tehran University began the work of translating the fragments. It was a daunting task, and at first the lines of symbols appeared to the untrained eye to have no or little relationship to any known linguistic system. Two linguists, Farouk Rashidian and Ali bin Dost, spent years studying the shreds of parchment, and determined the writer or writers were not Suolucidiri, but citizens of a city established by a group related to the Seleucids whose Persian king was Seleucus, satrap of Babylonia. Though his reign was brief, he was one of the most powerful satraps to succeed Alexander the Great. However, there were differences between the writing in the Nieumacher scroll and the alphabet used by the Seleucids. One theory connected their language to Aramaic and ancient Farsi with some Urdu inflection, but so few written fragments of it have survived that its linguistic relatives in the region can only be the subject of conjecture. Rashidian and bin Dost declared the Zahedan Parchments were written in a combination of Elamite and Akkadian cuneiform.
There was a partial copy of the Rashidian bin Dost grammar and lexicon in Columbia’s Butler Library, which I was able to access. Though it wasn’t supposed to leave the rare book room, and couldn’t be photocopied, the grammar had already been vandalized. Despite missing bits and pieces, I needed it. Lessons in deviousness acquired years ago from a college roommate expert in shoplifting (among other things), those remembered conversations came in handy. Over a period of several days when alone in the library examining room I cut the pages of the book with the blade of an X-acto knife and replaced them with pieces of ordinary paper; in this way the theft might not be detected for years, perhaps never. No one was interested in the analysis of this long dead language by two linguists tortured by Reza Shah. Presto: the only section of the Rashidian bin Dost grammar and lexicon known in the United States found its way to Brooklyn. What I studied on my kitchen table wasn’t even the entire work. Others with an unknown agenda had desecrated the book, though why they would bother with something so arcane and, for most people so inconsequential, is unknown. Perhaps it was a lark while high, perhaps they were agents of Savak masquerading as Columbia students. I can only hope somewhere in the world the book remains intact. If Ruth didn’t want to go with me, I’d travel on my own.
Two days after the letter arrived announcing my small research grant from the Zafar Institute, Ruth was on her way to the airport back to the land of Quetzalcoatl, and I now think she had her ticket from the moment our conversation turned to shrews that had visited the taxidermist. In four thousand years the sun explodes, and we’re not here anymore anyway. There’s no human life remaining to dig up the intersection of Sunset Boulevard and Camden or the Yuba City 7-11. Ruth left with Larry Saltzman, an anthropologist who called at all hours and whose speech was sprinkled with what he claimed were Mayan truisms like your festivals fill me with terror. Ruth thought he was hilarious. When she took his calls behind closed doors I could hear her laughing. Ruth, wedging the phone between her ear and her shoulder as she doodled chacmools dancing the fandango, playing drums, fucking their stone brains out, was the kind of person who never needed to say I’ll get back to you on that, she always had the answers at hand. You would be glad she was on your side of a debate until one day it turned out she wasn’t anymore.
S
ometimes I did have the sense that every square meter of the earth and sea had been excavated, and there were no unknown clusters of people who’d built cities, created systems of government, mythologies, established rituals of birth, marriage, death, harvesting and eating, still to be found. All past human habitations have been mapped and inventoried. To go any deeper was to hit magma or deep ocean volcanoes inhabited by translucent shrimp and hairy white crabs. What remained? Had I hit a brick wall? I would find out.
I packed my topographical maps, compass, measuring tape, bundle of flag pins, trowels, short hoes, and camera and flew out to Tehran, stopping only to change planes in Istanbul. Ruth would be sorry. She might be lounging poolside in Cuernavaca with the king of Aztec one-liners, but I was confident that treasure lay under my feet if only I could find the right map. Once it was located and verified, she’d read, entirely by accident, about my triumph and would leap up, kicking sand in the king’s face. Why are you wasting time on that beach? I said to the chair next to me. She’d dash off a letter from the nearest hotel desk, begging to help me catalogue relics and translate the surviving scrolls and tablets of Suolucidir. It will take years, but I’ll agree, yes, she can return and act as my assistant, my Alice Le Plongeon, camera in hand, ready to chase Mayan queens to Cairo and beyond.
