The Falling Woman

10 Diane

When I went to my hut, I crawled into my hammock, bone-tired after the long day of hiking. I remember scratching a few mosquito bites, thinking about getting up to get a drink of water, then falling into a darkness as quiet and deep as the bottom of the cenote. I woke to the blare of a horn. In the warm bright dawn, I did not remember my dreams.

The second day on survey was much the same as the first. We searched a new transect on the way out to the site where we found the stela. We were hot and sticky, plagued by flies, set upon by stinging ants. Dutifully, we mapped the site where we had found the stela. Using a rope line and small wire flags for markers, we divided the area into squares and Barbara designated certain squares to be searched for potsherds and worked stone: a random surface sample. I had the bad luck to draw a square that was covered with thornbushes that fought me at every turn. By the time I finished the search, my arms were laced with bright scratches.

We were resting in the shade when my mother arrived at the site, tramping cheerfully through the monte, knocking aside thorny branches with her walking staff, fanning away her escort of flies with the other hand. A workman followed her and they were chatting in Maya about something as they walked. ‘Hello,’ she called out.

Barbara opened one eye and peered out from under her hat. ‘It’s too hot to be so cheerful,’ she said.

‘I came out along the sacbe,’ my mother said. ‘It’s much easier going.’

Barbara grunted. ‘I know. But we have to go back through the monte. So I don’t really care.’

‘I take it you haven’t made any wonderful finds today,’ my mother said.

‘We decided to limit ourselves to one wonderful find every other day,’ Barbara said. ‘We didn’t want to overdo it.’ Barbara opened the other eye and went to show my mother the stela. Through eyes half-closed against the brightness of the day, I watched them. I could not hear the words of their conversation, only the sound of their voices rising and falling in the distance. My mother used her staff to hold back the branches and stooped beside the fallen monument. I wanted to get up and join them, but I felt as if I would be intruding. Barbara and my mother seemed to get along well. They did not need my help.

I heard them laughing about something, high laughter like exotic birds in the trees, and I closed my eyes against the sun, jealous of Barbara’s ease with my mother, jealous of her knowledge of archaeology. She was my mother’s daughter, and I was a city dweller who was misplaced here among the flies and the thorns.

A shadow fell over my face and I opened my eyes. My mother stood beside me. ‘How are you doing?’ she asked hesitantly.

I opened my eyes and propped myself up on one elbow. ‘Fine. Just fine.’

‘You’ll want to put some antiseptic on those scratches when you get back to camp,’ she suggested.

I glanced down at my lacerated arms. ‘It’s not so bad.’

Barbara was still out by the stela, taking several pictures with the camera that my mother had carried with her. Maggie was giving her advice that she did not want. Robin was napping on the other side of the clearing.

‘You’re doing very well for someone who has never been on a dig before,’ my mother said quietly. She was not looking at me. She seemed to be watching something on the far side of the clearing, but when I followed her gaze I saw only sunshine and trees. ‘Don’t compare yourself to Barbara. She’s been doing this for years.’

‘I know.’

‘That’s good,’ she said. ‘Remember that.’ She touched my shoulder lightly. ‘Come to my hut for the first-aid kit when you get back to camp.’

Several hot and dusty hours later, with new bug bites and lacerations, I went to my mother’s hut. She was alone, sitting at the table that served as her desk, examining a few typewritten pages.

‘I came for the first-aid kit,’ I said. ‘Sorry to bother you.’

‘That’s all right,’ she said and pointed to the shelf that held a metal box painted with a bright red cross. ‘Wash those cuts with peroxide. You’ve got to take care of yourself out here.’

Half of the cool interior was crowded with supplies and equipment: a bundle of burlap sacks bound with twine; a stack of folded cardboard boxes; a box filled with folded paper bags; another box filled with a jumble of paper bags that had been marked with numbers and letters.

I was swabbing my cuts when my mother spoke again. ‘I wanted to apologize for taking Carlos off survey.’

‘That’s all right.’

‘I’m not very good at dealing with people.’

I looked up at her. Her face was unnaturally still; her hands held a pencil that she rolled between her fingers, a senseless incessant motion.

‘It really is all right,’ I said, with sincerity this time. ‘It was just a mistake. It’s OK.’

She nodded, set the pencil down on her desk, and smiled tentatively. ‘Have you seen the latest find?’ She gestured toward the stone head that stared from the shadows at the far end of the hut.

Leaving the first-aid kit open on the shelf, I went to examine the head more closely. It lay on a burlap wrapping and stared up at the ceiling. I did not like the look of the face. It sneered at me, the lips drawn back, the eyes wide open and hostile.

I squatted beside the face and laid my hand on the elaborately carved headdress. It was cool to the touch. With one finger, I traced the crack that ran through the face. For no particular reason, I shivered.

‘They brought her down from the site today,’ my mother said from behind me. ‘I’m a little surprised she survived the trip with that crack.’

‘Was it part of a sculpture?’

‘More likely part of a building facade. It’s made of limestone stucco,’ my mother said.

I nodded and sat back on my heels. ‘Who was she?’

My mother shrugged. ‘Hard to say. There has been evidence, here and there, of a few women rulers. But I think more likely she was a priestess. Out on the Caribbean coast – on Cozumel and Isla Mujeres – there were shrines for a goddess named Ix Chebel Yax, goddess of the moon. I would like to think that the structure we’re excavating was a temple for the goddess. If it is, it’s the first evidence of such a cult on this coast.’ She squatted on her heels beside me and ran a finger along the spiral on the cheek. ‘Ritual tattooing,’ she said softly. ‘Very common among priests and nobility.’ She touched a long barbed needle that was woven with the shells into the woman’s hair. ‘Stingray spine,’ she said. ‘Usually used in bloodletting ceremonies. The devout would run spines or needles through their earlobes or tongues and offer the blood to the gods.’

‘Seems like a cruel way to live. Human sacrifice, offering blood to the gods.’

She sat back on her heels. ‘Ah, now you are starting to sound as provincial as Robin. Don’t tell me that you’re afraid of the bones in the cenote too?’

I shrugged. ‘I didn’t say that. It just seems like a cruel way to live.’

‘People always talk about human sacrifice as if it were an unusual and aberrant activity,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘Over the centuries, it’s really been fairly common in a number of societies. Think about it. There’re a number of religions in the United States whose worship centers on a particular human sacrifice.’ She glanced at me.

‘Jesus Christ on the cross,’ I said slowly.

‘Certainly. Thousands of people consume Christ’s body and blood each Sunday.’

‘That’s different.’

She shrugged. ‘Not really. Christ died long ago in a faraway place, and that might make it seem different. His worshipers claimed he was God incarnate, but the Aztecs claimed the same for the god-king they sacrificed. It happened only once, and that speaks for moderation on the part of the Christians, but that’s not a fundamental difference, just one of degree.’ She smiled at me, obviously enjoying herself. ‘Besides, I suspect that people overestimate the number of human sacrifices made by the Maya. One sometimes gets the impression that Mayan priests spent most of their time beating their fellows over the head and tossing them willy-nilly into the nearest well. And that’s not so. It was a rare and important occasion. And you must be careful about applying your standards to another culture. They have rules of their own. This woman may have participated in human sacrifices – but by her standards, that was good. The sacrificial victims went to a sort of paradise, and all was well.’

She stood up and went to her desk for a cigarette. She tapped it out of the pack and held it without lighting it, still looking at me. ‘The fundamental bloodiness of the act is the same – whether it’s the Roman soldiers hammering the nails into Christ’s hands or the h’menob slicing out the heart of a captive soldier. Blood has a power to it, a strength and a magic.’ She had rolled up the long sleeves of her shirt and I could see the scars on the pale skin of her wrists. She lit the cigarette, inhaled deeply, and blew out a cloud of smoke. Then she grinned at me. ‘Sorry. I get carried away sometimes. Occupational hazard of being a professor.’

‘You sound almost like you prefer the Maya to the Christians.’

She laughed. ‘Understand them better, anyway.’ She put her cigarette in a jar top that served as an ashtray and walked over to the first-aid kit. ‘Maybe you should let me bandage those cuts,’ she said, and I heard no more about the ancient Maya that afternoon.

The daily rigors of survey left me tired, but the restlessness that had kept me pacing to and fro in my father’s house had not deserted me. Here, I had more room to pace. When I woke in the morning before the blast of the truck horn or when I was restless after dinner, I went walking – past the kitchen where the air was always touched with woodsmoke, past the cenote and out to the tomb site, past the arch of the Spanish chapel and out to the Temple of the Seven Dolls, where I could look down on the green-brown trees of the monte. Often, I met my mother on these walks. I found her by the Spanish chapel, sitting on a fragment of wall and staring out toward the Temple of the Seven Dolls. I found her alone by the cenote, dangling her legs over the water and watching the birds swoop low over the surface. I met her by the tomb site, muttering to herself as she inspected the excavation. When we met, she seemed genuinely glad to see me.

The air was cooler at dawn and dusk, and my mother seemed slower, more contemplative. We walked together when we met. I told her little about myself – life in Los Angeles seemed distant and unimportant, a faded snapshot where the colors were muted and the figures blurred. My mother’s world was painted in vivid colors with crisp lines and edges. As we walked together, she talked slowly and carefully, as if she pieced together the ideas as she spoke them, groping for the next fragment and slipping it in place. Her sentences had the feel of written text – scripted thoughtfully, but as yet unedited.

She told me about the Maya and their gods. ‘For each yield that the Maya took from the monte, a return was due the gods. A turkey, a bowl of balche beer, a jicara of atole, a kind of corn gruel sweetened with wild honey. The offering to the gods was given freely in a spirit of goodwill. Wise men did not haggle with the gods. A mean man who gave grudgingly would suffer bad health, his crops would fail. The Maya recognized that what they made, they made with the permission and protection of the gods. It was only temporarily theirs. In the end, it belonged to the gods. Our society tends to regard the monte, the wilderness, as an enemy. Christians battled and subdued the wilderness. The Maya have a much saner way of looking at the world, I think.’

She was a strange woman, my mother. When I was fifteen and she came to visit my father’s house at Christmastime, I recognized that she did not belong there. But I did not realize then that she did not really belong anywhere. She walked with me, but she did not belong in the world I knew. She did not look at me as we walked together. She was always staring off into the monte, peering into the mounds as if something fascinating were out there.

We sat by ruins of the Spanish chapel and I asked about her books. ‘In the last chapter of your first book, you said, “There’s more to be seen in the world than most will admit.” What did you mean?’ I asked.

She stared into the distance, where the light of the rising sun already shimmered on the sparse grass and barren ground. ‘Over there, on the edge of the plaza, a stoneworker once sat and shaped irregular lumps of obsidian into sharp sacrificial blades for priests, into spearheads for hunters. He squatted on the ground, shaded by an awning of bright blue cloth. His skin glistened with sweat as he bent over his work. He was a well-fed man, fattened by the venison and wild turkey with which the hunters paid him, unusually stout for a Mayan.’ My mother leaned forward, as if to get a better view of the stoneworker. ‘Do you see him there, sitting in the sun and patiently chipping an edge on an obsidian blade? I see him. He’s a very careful workman. You can choose to see him. Or you can choose to see the bare earth.’ She glanced at my face. ‘That’s what I meant. Do you see him?’ Her tone was light and casual.

I felt uncomfortable, staring at the bare place in the earth. I remembered the dream that had led me to discover the stela. But that had been a dream – I was awake now. I shrugged. ‘I see the sunlight on the rocks, that’s all.’

She nodded. ‘Nothing wrong with that. I sometimes think that to see the past clearly you must give up a good deal of the present.’ She shrugged. ‘It’s a choice I made long ago. A sacrifice of sorts.’

‘Do you mean you really see him? In the same way that you see me?’

She was silent for so long that I thought she had decided not to answer. When she spoke, she spoke softly. ‘Sometimes, I think I see the shadows of the past more clearly than I see any living person.’ She shrugged, as if to rid herself of the thought, then quickly stood to return to camp.

I did not follow all that she said to me. I was reluctant to ask questions, because questions seemed to disturb the spell, to break some unspoken rule. If I asked too many questions, my mother would shrug and fall silent, or suggest immediately that we return to camp. Sometimes, it seemed like our morning walks were waking dreams, unsettling, subtly disturbing. Thoughts and feelings that I could not pinpoint were tapping at the back of my skull. I liked my mother, but I did not understand her. I did not understand her at all.

In the heat of the day, my mother was a different person – brisk, fast-moving, impatient that the excavation went so slowly. She argued with Tony about where the crew should be digging, about the significance of the stone head, about the likelihood that the underground chamber would really turn out to be a tomb.

By the fourth day, I felt at home at the dig. It seemed that I had always washed my face in gritty lukewarm water from a black barrel that smelled faintly of plastic, had always blundered to a pungent outhouse in the darkness each night.

Barbara asked me if I wanted to go to Mérida with her that weekend. She knew a cheap hotel with a pool. We could take hot showers, maybe see a movie and eat popcorn in an air-conditioned theater. I asked my mother if she thought that a trip to Mérida would be worthwhile, and she said I should go.

On Saturday morning, I woke early. Barbara had not set her alarm: we had planned to sleep late and leave camp sometime in the middle of the morning. When I woke, I glanced at Barbara, who was just rolling over to look at the clock.

‘What time is it?’ I whispered. Maggie and Robin were still asleep.

‘Seven-thirty,’ she whispered back. She leaned back in the hammock, one hand tucked under her head.

She was frowning. ‘I can’t even sleep late anymore,’ she grumbled. ‘This is ridiculous.’

We dressed quietly, packed clean clothes, and slipped out of the hut. We stopped at the water barrel to wash, and the splash of water into the metal basin was loud in the hot morning air. The camp was still asleep; the only sign of life was the small curl of smoke rising from Maria’s kitchen.

‘Ah,’ Barbara said. ‘Perhaps we can convince Maria to spare us a cup of coffee.’

I hung back when Barbara went to the door of the kitchen. The look that Maria gave us was far from friendly. Teresa hid behind Maria’s skirts. Barbara stepped away from the kitchen, frowning. ‘I guess we’ll get coffee in Mérida. Maria says she hasn’t made any this morning.’

I followed Barbara to the car. When I glanced back over my shoulder, I caught a glimpse of Teresa, peering out the kitchen door after us. ‘I don’t think Maria likes me much,’ I said to Barbara.

‘Of course not. She doesn’t like me either. You and I are young women, but we dress in pants and spend all our time with men.’ Barbara shook her head. ‘We don’t behave properly. She doesn’t approve.’

‘She talks to Liz.’

‘She doesn’t like Liz either. She doesn’t approve of any of us.’

I nodded, relieved at Barbara’s certainty that I was not alone in Maria’s disapproval.

Barbara’s battered Volkswagen bug jounced over every bump and rut in the road out of camp, finding every pothole, dropping into it, and emerging triumphant on the other side. Barbara drove with gleeful enthusiasm and unnecessary speed, tramping on the gas whenever the road looked clear for a stretch, only touching the brakes for an instant when the car hit a bump. ‘What’s the hurry?’ I shouted over the roar of the engine.

‘I’m tired of moving slow, that’s all,’ she shouted back. She swerved to avoid one pothole, struck another one dead-on, gunned the engine, and kept moving. ‘I’m tired of dirt and flies.’ She hit another pothole. ‘I want a hot shower, coffee, breakfast, bright lights, and men who want to talk about something besides potsherds.’ She looked away from the road to grin at me with bright-eyed malice. ‘I want to look for trouble.’ We hit another pothole.

‘I know one person in Mérida who might know where to find trouble,’ I shouted. ‘Someone I met on the plane.’

‘Man or woman?’

‘Man.’

‘Of course. Fast worker.’ I didn’t know whether she meant that I was a fast worker or the man was a fast worker. It didn’t seem to matter. ‘Cute?’

I thought for a moment. My memory of Marcos was rather vague, but I thought he had been presentable enough. ‘Not bad.’

‘Good. He’ll have a friend. They always do.’

We reached the main highway, the road that had seemed so narrow on my way to camp. It felt like a freeway now. The car picked up speed, and we rolled down the windows to let the wind blow through. We passed a truck filled with workmen on their way to somewhere, and we waved and honked the horn like high school kids who had escaped the campus for a field trip. We roared by a cluster of huts and waved to a woman who was hanging out the clothes and to a troop of children who were playing by the road.

‘We’ll have hot showers first, then breakfast,’ Barbara shouted.

‘Great,’ I said. Everything was great. The wind, the road, the promise of breakfast.

The hotel was an old establishment, a few blocks from Mérida’s main square and right beside Parque Hidalgo, the park that Marcos had mentioned. A little shabby. The desk clerk spoke bad English. A thin black cat seemed to live in the lobby. The banister on the curving stairs leading down to the lobby was ornately carved, but in need of polish. The blue and gold tiles of the lobby floor needed sweeping; dust hid behind the potted palms. But the sun streamed in through the open arch that led to Parque Hidalgo and there were fresh flowers on the check-in counter.

We registered and took hot showers before breakfast. I sat on one of the two twin beds while Barbara showered, rubbing lotion on my legs, working around the mosquito bites and scratches. For the first time in a week, I was wearing a skirt and sandals rather than jeans and sneakers, and my hair felt clean. Overhead, the ceiling fan turned with a steady rattle. Barbara was singing in the shower.

Parque Hidalgo was a small brick-paved plaza. Tall broad-leaved trees shaded the plaza and dropped small yellow blossoms on the men who spent the day idling on the park benches. In the center of the square a tall bronze man stood on a white stone pillar atop a stone platform. I never did learn his name.

We ate breakfast at a sidewalk café beside the hotel and on one side of the park. Ornate metal tables, fringed umbrellas, red-and-white tablecloths, and a matronly waitress who seemed harried.

‘Hamacas?’ asked a stout man in a yellow baseball cap. On one shoulder he carried a bundle of plastic-wrapped hammocks. Over the other shoulder, he had slung a loose hammock, which he held out for our inspection.

‘Is your name Emilio?’ I asked. ‘I’m looking for a hammock vendor named Emilio.’ He shook his head heavily and went to the next table, where there were tourists with simpler needs.

Barbara flipped through the pages of a tourist guide to Mérida, which she had picked up from the hotel lobby. It told the way to the zoo, to the market, to the ruins at Chichén Itzá, to the best places for lunch and for dancing. She read aloud bits of information that she found interesting.

‘The main square is called the zocalo,’ she told me.

I nodded, watching the people strolling by on the street. The coffee was good and I was content. I had not realized that I was nervous about being at the dig until now, when I had relaxed.

‘You interested in a tour of Chichén Itzá?’ she asked me. ‘It’s only about an hour’s drive from here.’

‘Maybe tomorrow,’ I said.

‘We could tour Casa Montejo, the mansion built by the Spanish back in 1549,’ she said. ‘Or we could visit the cathedral. Or we could go to the market.’

‘Whatever you like.’

We decided to go to the market, figuring that we would have time to stop in the cathedral on our way back and still have time for a siesta before dinner.

We were finishing breakfast and drinking coffee when I spotted Marcos at the far end of the cafe. I nudged Barbara. ‘He’s better-looking than I remembered,’ I said. He was a thin, small-boned young man with dark brown eyes, white teeth, high dark cheekbones. He was grinning as he watched a hammock salesman – I assumed it was Emilio – display a hammock to an American couple: a woman in a sundress and a man in a Hawaiian shirt. Emilio had looped one end of a hammock around the arm of one of the wrought-iron chairs. He hesitated for a moment, holding the hammock in a bundle, then he flipped it open with an elegant flourish – the way a waiter uncorks a bottle of wine. The gesture conveyed the importance of the act and the value of the product. The hammock was a rich shade of purple that caught the sunlight and held it.

Marcos saw us then and joined us at the table. ‘Hello,’ he said to me. ‘How are you?’ He pulled out a chair. We watched Emilio close his sale; the American couple walked away with two hammocks, and Emilio stuffed a handful of paper money into his pocket.

He came to the table and dropped his bundle of hammocks by a chair. ‘It’s going to be a good day,’ he said. ‘I have luck today.’ He was a head shorter than I, compact and broad-shouldered. Dark eyes, dark skin, and a smile like an all-American boy except for the gold filling that showed around the edges of one front tooth. ‘You are Marcos’s friends.’ The easy charm of a born salesman. ‘You want to buy a hammock? I’ll give you a good price.’

‘We’ve got hammocks,’ Barbara said. ‘In fact, we’re sick to death of hammocks.’

‘How could you be sick of hammocks?’ Emilio asked, and Barbara went on at length on how she could be sick of hammocks, so very sick of hammocks.

‘Buy one for a present,’ Emilio suggested and then bought a round of coffee with the same sort of flourish with which he displayed a hammock. We talked about tourists and the weather while the morning wore on. Emilio and Marcos seemed quite at home in the café, familiar with the waitress. A line was forming outside the nearby movie theater. The smell of popcorn hung in the warm air.

After a time, Emilio was trying to talk Barbara into visiting an isolated cave at a place called Homún. An underground river in a limestone cave with stalactites. ‘Beautiful,’ he said. ‘Really beautiful.’

Marcos was watching me. ‘Qué piensas?’ he asked. ‘What are you thinking?’

I shrugged. ‘Not much.’

‘You looked like you were thinking about something.’

I shrugged again. Emilio was using both hands to describe the stalactites in the cave. Barbara looked unconvinced.

‘On the plane, you looked sad. What was wrong?’ Marcos asked.

I said nothing. Shrugged.

He glanced at Emilio, who was growing more eloquent in his attempts to persuade Barbara that a visit to the lonely cavern at Homún was the perfect thing for any young American’s summer vacation. ‘I am tired of sitting here,’ Marcos said. ‘Come on. We’ll walk and come back here.’ We left Barbara and Emilio talking about underground rivers.

They walk, in Mérida. Out in the small parks, where the breezes are a little cooler than the air pushed about by the ubiquitous ceiling fans. We wandered through the main square. ‘What were you doing in Los Angeles?’ I asked Marcos.

‘I went to visit my uncle.’ He shrugged. ‘But there was no work, so I came home. There is no work here, but I have friends.’

He led the way through the square, past small horse-drawn carriages in which tourists rode.

‘What made you sad?’ Marcos asked. ‘You can tell me.’

I shrugged and told him about coming to the dig to find my mother, about how I had not seen my mother in many years.

He listened and nodded. ‘So, what do you want from your mother?’ he asked.

I shrugged.

‘You don’t know what you want.’

‘I guess not.’

‘Tonight,’ he said, ‘I play basketball for the university. You want to come?’

‘Basketball? Let me see what Barbara thinks.’

He took my hand. ‘Even if Barbara does not want to come, you come and watch me play, OK?’

‘All right.’

Back at the café, Emilio was asking Barbara what we were planning to do that day.

‘Go to the market,’ she said. ‘Wander around Mérida.’

‘And tomorrow?’ he said. ‘What are you going to do tomorrow?’

‘We talked about going to Chichén Itzá,’ she said. ‘But it’s a long drive.’

‘I’ll help drive,’ Emilio said. ‘No problem. I’ll bring hammocks to sell. All right?’ Barbara was laughing, but Emilio did not let up. ‘I’ll tell you what. If you want to go to Chichén Itzá, you meet me here tomorrow in the morning. I’ll help drive. It’ll be good.’ He grinned, showing his gold-rimmed tooth.

We finished our coffee, and Emilio and Marcos went to the zocalo to sell hammocks. Barbara and I went to the market, heading away from the zocalo on Calle 60, a narrow street with narrow sidewalks. All the streets were narrow. The houses and shops pressed close to the street and stood shoulder to shoulder, presenting a solid front to the world.

We passed the open door of a room filled with the smell of beer and the sound of men talking. A young man standing in the doorway smiled at us, but we did not smile back. We smiled at children, dogs, and women. The children smiled back; the dogs and women did not.

A middle-aged man was selling coconuts from a pushcart. We watched him skillfully chop the husk from a nut, break the shell away, pierce the round white fruit, and insert a straw. We each bought a coconut and sipped the sweet milk as we walked.

I recognized the market but could not begin to remember the way through the maze of tiny stalls. We peered down long corridors that led into darkness. In the dimness beyond where the sunlight reached, I could see boxes of fruit and vegetables, crates of chickens, hanging meat. Barbara consulted her guidebook and dragged me to the corridor where clothing was sold. It was on the edge of the market and the sun shone in. Every stall was bright with hanging shawls, dresses, shirts, skirts.

‘I like that one,’ I said to Barbara, pointing out a very pretty burgundy-colored shawl with a painted floral border. The woman who sat in the stall called to us, smiling and beckoning. She had gold earrings that matched her gold tooth and she seemed fascinated by my hair and determined to sell me the shawl. I bargained in bad Spanish and, I think, ended up paying too much for the shawl. Barbara bought a white dress that was embroidered with a pattern of dark blue squares. It was just past three when we headed back to the hotel.

‘Time for a nap,’ I said.

‘Let’s stop at the cathedral,’ Barbara said. ‘It’s on the way and it’ll be cool inside.’

I put a coin in the hand of the beggar woman who sat just outside the arched door. She blessed me with the sign of the cross.

The interior was cool and dark. Light filtered down from high octagonal windows. White columns rose to a high vaulted ceiling, crisscrossed with stonework that was lost in the shadows. An emaciated Christ hung wearily on his cross at the far end of the hall. Old women knelt in the front pew. A young boy sat in the back, doing sums in a school notebook.

A few other tourists were wandering around the hall. I hesitated just inside the door. I felt uncomfortable – more than just awkward about entering an unfamiliar church, but somehow reluctant to move closer to the figure of Christ. But Barbara had already started up one of the side aisles, and so I followed her.

Plaques on the white stone walls depicted Christ’s suffering and death. I did not linger to look at them. I remembered my mother’s contention that Christianity was a religion of human sacrifice and I was inclined to agree. Halfway up the aisle, I paused to look at an elaborately carved statue of the Virgin Mary. Candles burned on a small table before the statue, and the warm air was thick with the scent of incense and burning wax. The candlelight flickered on the Virgin Mary’s carved wooden robes.

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.