The Falling Woman

7 Elizabeth

‘Who are your gods?’ The old woman smelled sour. Her costume was constructed like a Mayan temple: layers rested on layers upon layers. An orange turtleneck showed through the ragged holes in a thick brown fisherman-knit cardigan. The hem of a wine-colored skirt dangled beneath her green dress. She was dressed for a colder climate than Berkeley in the spring, bundled to withstand arctic winds. She had singled me out of the crowd of browsers in the used bookstore, recognizing me as a fellow outcast.

‘Who are your gods?’ Her voice was cracked, a parody of a confidential whisper. She stepped closer and the smell of unwashed clothes enveloped me.

I had been a lecturer on the Berkeley campus for one year and I had gained a reputation for being hard-nosed, unyielding, uncompromising. But when I looked into the bag lady’s eyes – innocent blue eyes with the color and luminance of cracked antique glass – I backed away. ‘I don’t know,’ I muttered before fleeing down another aisle of books.

She pursued me, waving her finger with greater energy. They know me, these strange ones with crystalline eyes that see what others do not.

‘Sorry,’ mumbled the clerk who had followed us both. He was talking to us and to himself. He was sorry that he was the one who had to throw the woman out. ‘Sorry, but you are disturbing the other customers.’ He was looking at the bag lady, but somehow I felt that he included me as a troublemaker. ‘I’ll have to ask you to leave.’

‘She’s not hurting anyone,’ I said in a feeble voice that no student of mine would have recognized.

Too late. The old woman was shuffling toward the street, mumbling and clutching her sweaters about her. The clerk cast me a doubtful look, and I knew that I was tagged as a strange one, a woman who talked to the human flotsam that drifted down Telegraph Avenue. I left the store soon after.

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 visited 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.