The Falling Woman

11 Elizabeth

On Saturday morning, before I woke, Diane and Barbara left for Mérida. Having Diane leave was a relief in a way. In the one week that she had been in camp, she had managed to interrupt my moments of solitude more than I could have imagined possible.

Every morning, at dawn and dusk, I wandered the site. I watched a potter – a young woman with glossy black hair that glistened in the morning sun – molding a vessel in the shape of a pot-bellied dog. I stood in the shade and listened to the scraping of an obsidian chisel on cedarwood: a withered old man was carving the statue of a god. I did not see Zuhuy-kak. At the times that I most expected to see the old woman, my daughter would wander by instead.

At dawn, as I sat on a fragment of wall by the Spanish chapel watching a stonecutter, Diane strolled toward me on the path from the cenote. At dusk, as I lingered by Structure 701, watching the shadows gather, I heard the sound of Diane’s boots on the path from camp and the shadows fled. In the early evening, I stood on the edge of the cenote, watching the bats skim low over the water. Diane waved cheerfully as she walked along the path from the camp.

She was willing and eager to walk with me and listen to me talk about the site. I talked a great deal. Sometimes, in the bright light of day, I thought that I talked too much.

During the week, excavation had continued on the house mounds, the Temple of the Moon, and the tomb site. Work went slowly; the dirt had to be cleared away from each boulder before it could be moved, and each bucket of dirt had to be sifted for potsherds and flakes of worked stone. Hot, tedious, and dusty work.

At the tomb site, the workmen had uncovered eight stone steps leading downward to the beginning of an underground passageway. The rubble they removed from the stairway had yielded little of interest: a few plainware potsherds, a few carved stones with glyphs too badly battered to decipher.

Early Saturday morning, I walked alone to the tomb site. As I crossed the open plaza, I saw a flash of blue by the excavation. Zuhuy-kak was standing beside the tarps that covered the open pit. Her eyes followed me as I walked toward her. She stood in the sunlight and cast a shadow of her own. I greeted her in Maya, sat in the shade by the excavation, and lit a cigarette. Zuhuy-kak remained standing, staring out toward the mound.

‘You see,’ she said, pointing to the mound. ‘You see how the ah-nunob have desecrated the temple. But soon their time will be over. Soon, the cycles will turn.’

I followed her gaze but saw only the rubble-strewn mound, the path worn by workmen snaking around it. An iguana stared back at me from its perch on a weathered temple stone.

‘What day is it, Ix Zacbeliz?’ she asked.

I knew that she wanted to know the day in the Mayan calendar. ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘We use a different calendar now.’

She frowned. ‘You don’t know? Then how do you know what to do each day?’ She seemed more confident than she had when she first appeared. She stood straight, with her hand resting lightly on the conch shell at her belt. ‘Don’t you know the cycles of time, Ix Zacbeliz? You know that what has passed will come again, repeating endlessly. You must learn what day this is, so that I can advise you. The time is near for Ix Chebel Yax to return to power.’

‘I’ll try to figure it out.’

‘You must.’ She was watching me with a disconcertingly direct gaze.

‘Yes, I will,’ I said, a little sharply. ‘But right now I am concerned with this excavation. Can you tell me how much further we will have to dig here? And what will we find in the end?’

But she was not there. The wind hissed like snakes in the dry blades at my feet, rattling the tarps and sending dust devils scurrying about the mound.

At dinner that night, I missed having Diane and Barbara there. Only John and Tony had remained in camp; all the others had run away to Mérida, to sleep in clean beds and take hot showers. The three of us sat together in the plaza, drinking coffee and aguardiente while the sun set. John and Tony talked while I stared out into the dusk beyond the plaza. The moon was just above the trees – a thin crescent with the horns pointing aloft. For once the shadows were quiet: the priest had finished scraping the jaguar skin; no wood-carvers worked by moonlight.

‘What do you think, Liz?’ Tony asked.

‘What? I wasn’t listening.’

‘John was talking about problems at your favorite site.’

I looked at John, suddenly attentive. He hunched his broad shoulders forward slightly, as if to protect himself against me. ‘What sort of problems?’ I asked.

John wrapped both big hands around his coffee cup. ‘Work’s going slowly. I leave to check on Carlos’s crew, and when I come back, the men have always been delayed. The sifter is torn. The head of a pickax has come loose. A man is stung by a scorpion. Someone saw a rattlesnake. Always something.’

‘You put Pich in charge of that crew, didn’t you? He’s usually very hard-working.’

John shrugged. ‘Not this time.’

‘I’ll ask Salvador what he thinks,’ I said to Tony. ‘Maybe we need to shift the crews around.’

‘Sounds like it,’ he said.

After a time, I excused myself and wandered by Salvador’s hut. I could see the silhouette of a man standing in the yard, having a smoke. I called to Salvador and he came to the albarrada, the wall of limestone fragments that surrounded the solar, the yard around the house. Lighting a cigarette, I leaned against the wall beside him.

Here, the air smelled of greenery. Within the solar, the growth was lush. Maria kept a careful garden: an avocado tree shaded the doorway to the house; chili plants and herbs grew beside the albarrada. I could smell the sweet oranges that hung from the tree on the far side of the yard.

‘How goes it?’ I asked.

‘Well enough.’ I watched the red tip of his cigarette glow brightly for a moment, then fade to dull red. I could not see his face.

‘It’s quiet with the others gone,’ I said.

‘Yes. It is always quiet here.’

‘John tells me that the work goes slowly at his site,’ I said. ‘He says that there always seems to be a problem.’

He ground his cigarette out on the limestone wall, and red sparks scattered on the rough stone. ‘This is not a lucky time of year. And that is not a lucky place,’ he said. ‘The work goes slowly because the luck is bad.’

I offered him another cigarette and lit it for him. By the brief flame of my lighter, I saw his face: calm, considering, steady. When the cigarette was burning, he spoke again. ‘When we had cattle here, the animals would always spook near that place. It is unlucky.’

‘You did not speak of this before.’

The cigarette hesitated halfway to his mouth. ‘You would not have listened before,’ he said. He was invisible in the darkness, and he knew that.

‘We have to dig there,’ I said. ‘It’s the most promising site we’ve found.’ A pause. The tip of his cigarette glowed brightly as he drew in the smoke. ‘Can we use more men there? Would that help?’

‘It is a narrow passage,’ he said. ‘Only three can work there at a time: one to move rocks, one to move dirt, one to sift.’

‘Perhaps a different three workmen,’ I said. ‘Men who do not know or care that it is an unlucky place.’

‘Perhaps.’ His tone was noncommittal. ‘I will assign a different three.’

That evening I sat in my hut, consulted my reference books, and calculated the date according to the Mayan calendar. It wasn’t an easy task. Sylvanus Morley, a noted Mayanist active in the early 1900s, had derived a formula for the conversion of Mayan dates to dates in the modern calendar, but apparently it had not occurred to him that someone might want to convert from the modern calendar to the Mayan.

After much calculation, checking, and rechecking, I decided that today was Oc in the tzolkin or sacred almanac, the fourth day of Cumku, the last month in the haab or vague year. The Mayan year was almost over. The year’s end, a period of five days of bad luck, would be upon us in sixteen days. I wondered if the proximity of the year’s end was the reason for Salvador’s fear of bad luck. We were also, according to the Long Count, about to reach the end of a katun, a time of change.

In any case, the day Oc was not too bad a day. In the glyphs, it is portrayed by the head of the dog that guides the sun in its nighttime journey through the underworld. I suppose, if I were writing a newspaper horoscope based on Mayan days, I could interpret it as something like ‘A day to receive guidance.’

That night I dreamed clearly. I dreamed of Los Angeles, the tacky battered crackerbox of a city that I left so long ago.

The sun was just up and the morning light was pale. The world had no hard edges: a soft blur of gray-green formed the shrubs in a neighbor’s yard; a slash of dark brown was a broken fence that marked the property line between two pale brown lawns, splashed with dark green where crabgrass grew. An old Volkswagen bug – dull blue flecked with rust – rested on its wheel rims in a weed-filled drive. The tires were flat; they had been flat for many years. The city was silent. No dogs barked; no birds sang; no cars drove past. The people were gone.

Diane walked beside me, a round-faced five-year-old with solemn green eyes. Her small soft hand was in mine and she trudged beside me without complaint though we had been walking for a long time.

Under our feet, the sidewalk was cracked and buckled. Diane tripped at a place where one cement square was higher than another and I caught her as she fell. When she looked up at me, her eyes were filled with tears.

‘What’s wrong?’ I asked her. ‘Did you hurt yourself?’

She shook her head, but the tears started to spill over. I was caught by the strange restlessness that forced me to keep walking despite the blisters on my feet. ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘We have to keep going.’ She did not move, even when I took her hand and tugged on it. ‘If you won’t come,’ I said, ‘I’ll have to leave you here.’

The tears were rolling down her round cheeks and falling to make dark spots on the cement. I swung her into my arms, arching my back to lift her. ‘Don’t cry,’ I said. In that moment, I heard the coughing roar behind us. I glanced back to see a jaguar slip from behind the Volkswagen and begin to pace us, following without haste, as if confident of his prey.

I started to run, but I ran at dream speed: my feet moved slowly; my steps took me nowhere. Diane had locked her arms around my neck; she was a burden that I could not drop. My foot caught on the edge of a sidewalk stone, and I fell heavily to one knee. Diane lost her grip around my neck and fell away from me.

I heard the coughing roar of the jaguar behind me and knew that I did not have the time or the strength to save the child.

I woke in my hammock. The thunder sounded again, a rumble like a jaguar’s roar, like the hoofbeats of the horses that the Chaacob were reputed to ride. No rain yet, just thunder. Thunder from a rabbit sky, the Maya called it. A bad sign. The Chaacob rode, but they brought no rain. A particularly unlucky sign for us if it presaged the end of the dry season. When the rains began, excavation would have to end.

I stood in the doorway of my hut, looking out across the plaza. Though my watch said quarter past one, a burning lantern still hung from the corrugated tin roof that sheltered a small area just in front of Tony’s hut. I pulled on my clothes, knowing it would be hours before I could sleep again, and crossed the plaza.

Tony sat in one of his two lawn chairs. His old plaid robe – the same robe he brought to camp each year – was belted tightly around him. He wore scuffed leather slippers. Above them his legs were painfully thin and marked with the red swellings of mosquito bites. A wooden crate served as a side table, holding Tony’s pipe, a box of wooden matches, a glass, a bottle of gin, and a bottle of tonic water. Tony was reading a thick blue book that I recognized as a reference on Mayan pottery types.

He looked up when he heard my footsteps, smiled, and set the book aside. ‘You’re still up,’ I said. ‘The thunder woke me. Do you think the rains are starting early?’

‘Not a chance,’ he said. ‘It’s just a summer shower. Come have a drink with me. It’ll help you sleep.’

When he ducked into his hut to get me a glass, he seemed a little uncertain of his footing, a trifle unsteady. I had never worried about Tony’s drinking until his wife, Hilde, died two years ago. Before that, I knew he drank in the field, but assumed that Hilde kept him from drunken excesses at home. Now he lived alone in Las Cruces, and I suspected he drank heavily throughout the year. I had noticed that the circles under his eyes were darker this year than last. He seemed thinner, paler, a bit more battered and scuffed.

The drink that he poured for me was warm and the tonic was flat, but I did not mind. The lawn chair creaked beneath me when I sat down and stretched my legs out in front of me. The air was muggy and still. The thunder rolled across the sky like the stones of falling empires.

My first dig was a Hopi site located in Arizona’s Mogollan Mountains. For two months, I lived in the motley village of leaky tents that New Mexico State University called a field camp. On my first night, I woke to the sound of thunder, to the trickling of running water, and to a feeling of dampness. I snapped on my flashlight and the beam glinted on the shifting surface of a minor waterfall that cascaded down the side of the tent – a foul-smelling army surplus model supplied by the university. A puddle had soaked my shoes and was creeping toward the tent flap. Outside, the rain whipped against the side of the tent, shaking the poles. The wet khaki-colored canvas shifted uneasily around me.

I had crawled out of my wet sleeping bag and was pulling on my clothes when I heard the creaking of poles shifting position, the sharp crack of a rope giving way, and the soft sigh of wet canvas released from tension. One side of the tent gave way and the rest followed, soddenly collapsing into itself, relaxing into its natural folded state.

I abandoned my possessions and groped my way to the door, cursing with a passion, swearing exotic oaths I had learned from the madwomen in the nuthouse, kicking at the dripping canvas and beating at it with my fists and flashlight, flinging the tent flap aside and escaping into the downpour. The tent lay like a dying animal, twitching sporadically in the wind.

The rain beat on my head, hammering my hair to my skull, soaking my clothes. I was barefoot in the mud. I heard someone chuckling. He stood in the open doorway of another tent, his hands in the pockets of his flannel robe. He was dry, clean, and amused, and I started over to kill him.

He stopped laughing when he saw me coming. ‘Stop grinning or I’ll kill you,’ I said. I had not been out of the nuthouse long, and I managed to remain socially acceptable only through a conscious effort. Without that effort, I slid easily back into a more primitive state.

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Want to come in and dry off?’

I think it was his voice that won me. Even at thirty, Tony had a husky comforting voice with a soft rasping quality, like a fine wool blanket against bare skin or the warm coat of a friendly dog. He offered me a towel, loaned me dry clothes that did not fit, made hot chocolate over a camp stove, and, in the morning, helped me resurrect my fallen tent.

We were never lovers, Tony and I. We were good friends, best friends for a while, but we never slept together. I thought it better that way.

I can remember Tony’s wedding more clearly than I can my own. Thinking about my wedding to Robert is like seeing stones at the bottom of a clear running stream. I can see them, but I know that their shapes are distorted by the water’s movement, that the colors I see are not their true colors. I know that the stones are not as smooth as they look, but I can’t touch them to be sure. The water is too cold and too treacherous; I cannot venture closer to investigate. I must keep my distance. I think, as I recall that time, that I married Robert in an effort to become a person I wasn’t. An ordinary normal person.

Thinking of my wedding, I imagine Robert and me, dressed neatly and uncomfortably in our best clothes, standing before a justice of the peace in an office that smelled of dying flowers. I feel cold, thinking of it now. I cannot remember if I felt cold then.

Tony’s wedding was in a church filled with flowers and well-wishers. I stood in the back, having declined a place in the bridesmaid lineup. Hilde had asked me, but I would have felt strange and awkward in a lacy gown. I remember watching Tony stride toward the altar, fumble for the ring, lift the white lace veil and kiss the tow-headed bride. I can even remember what I was thinking. I was wondering why I did not hurt. I was considering how curiously empty I felt. I felt like the shell of a half-constructed house or like a broken pot. The hollowness was centered in the pit of my stomach and I wondered if I might be catching the flu.

After the wedding I wished them well and drank champagne. The bubbles rose and burst in the great void inside me, but failed to fill it. I danced badly with men I did not like.

A little after midnight, I returned to my home. Sitting at my desk in the cramped ill-furnished one-bedroom apartment, looking at the flowered wallpaper and the ugly green rug, I worked on my thesis project, reading and taking meticulous notes. At dawn I went to the campus library so that I would be there when it opened, and I passed an Indian hunting party on my way. When Tony returned from his honeymoon, I welcomed him back and we picked up our friendship without a hitch.

Now we had come to this: old friends drinking warm gin and tonic and listening to thunder.

‘I like your daughter,’ Tony said easily. ‘She’s a lot like you were on that first dig.’

‘Yes? And how was I?’

‘Careful,’ he said. ‘Very cautious. She’s friendly, but she never lets her guard down completely. Something’s going on under all that calm, but I don’t know what it is.’

‘Neither do I.’

The thunder rumbled and Tony waited for it to pass. The wind was blowing harder and our shadows rocked as the lantern was buffeted by wayward gusts. ‘I don’t think you need to worry about Carlos. Diane’s too smart for him.’

‘You’ re probably right.”

The rain began with large drops. Each one made a wet spot the size of a dime on the hard-packed dirt of the plaza. The wind blew behind us, sweeping the rain over the tin roof and away from us.

‘What about you?’ he asked. ‘How are you getting along with your daughter?’

I shrugged, staring out at the rain. The memory of the dream was still with me. My world was filled with uncertainties that I could not explain. ‘All right, I suppose.’

‘I’ve been wondering – it seems like you’ve been worried about something. Anything you want to talk about?’ He was leaning forward, holding his glass in both hands.

I do not like it when friends lean forward and ask me what is wrong, particularly when they are asking about worries that I have not yet admitted to myself. I had a vague feeling, still less than a hunch, that a balance somewhere was shifting and I was losing control.

‘That first summer in Arizona you held everything tight, sealed up, smooth like glass,’ Tony said. ‘But I knew there was something explosive inside. If anything nicked the surface, you would blow up. You’re like that again.’

My arms were folded across my chest. I shook my head. Somewhere in the darkness beyond the swaying circle of lantern light, the shadows were gathering. The world was out of balance.

‘What’s wrong?’

‘I just feel like…’ I made a quick helpless gesture with my hands. Empty. Open. Vulnerable. ‘I don’t know.’

He leaned back in his chair. ‘I’ve always wondered which of us has it worse. You keep everyone at a distance, shut them out so they can’t hurt you. I drag people in so close that they can’t help but hurt me.’ His voice was slow and steady, only slightly blurred by gin. ‘Neither of us can find the middle ground.’ He reached out and took one of my hands in both of his, holding it carefully and gently. I liked the feel of his hands on mine. His voice was warm and comforting. His hands were rough from the acid bath he used to clean lime deposits from potsherds.

I find it difficult to let people help. I always have. Tony knew that. He would not push me. ‘I’m afraid,’ I said.

The thunder roared and rain clattered on the tin roof above us. In the flash of lightning that illuminated the plaza I saw a shadow step into the open space, moving with the rain that swept across the hard-packed dirt, yet oblivious to it. In her world, it was not raining.

‘Don’t be afraid,’ Tony said.

Another flash and I saw the shadow more clearly: a young woman dressed in blue, her face illuminated by a moon that I could not see. I recognized her by the tattoos on her face: Zuhuy-kak, when she was much younger. I heard the steady beat of a drum, a hollow wooden sound. The woman was dancing, lifting her arms over her head and leaping toward the sky. Another lightning flash: she was whirling and the light glinted on the obsidian blade in her hand. The drumbeats blended with the thunder. Her expression was joyful; her eyes were enormous and filled with power. I felt the moonlight running in my veins, and for an instant, I wanted to join her, to dance with her under the moon.

‘Liz?’ Tony squeezed my hand to get my attention. ‘Just remember that you can talk to me.’

‘I’ll remember,’ I said.

The lightning flashed and the plaza was empty except for the rain. I held Tony’s warm calloused hand and tried not to be afraid.

I was tired. The rain let up soon after I left Tony, but I slept sporadically, awakened again and again by ordinary sounds: the rattling of the door in the wind, the croaking of a frog, the thunder. At dawn, I was glad to leave my hammock and walk out to check on the southeast site.

The ground steamed in the early-morning sun. Most of the water had already seeped away into the soil. Birds bathed in the few remaining puddles. One of Maria’s pigs was napping in a wet spot beside the albarrada.

At the excavation, all was well. Some water had leaked past the tarp that covered the opening, but only a little. The stones were damp.

I went down the steps. A centipede rippled across the floor to hide in the rubble. When I stood erect in the passageway, my hat just brushed the stone slabs. The passageway was about five and a half feet high, three feet wide. Its construction was nothing remarkable: the walls of the stairway were smooth masonry, square blocks stacked neatly. At the top, protruding stones formed a lip on which the flat slabs that made the roof of the passageway rested. The plaster of the plaza had been laid on top of these slabs. The passageway was interesting only because I expected it to go somewhere interesting. I climbed the stairs and stepped out into the sunshine.

Zuhuy-kak squatted in the shade, as if she were waiting for me. I greeted her and she nodded to me, accepting my presence. I sat on a nearby rock and lit a cigarette. ‘Yesterday was the day Oc,’ I told her. ‘The fourth day of Cumku.’

She smiled. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘The year ends soon. The time is near. Have you seen my enemies, Ix Zacbeliz?’

‘Last night, I dreamed of a jaguar who stalked me and my daughter,’ I said slowly.

‘He knows that the time is coming for change,’ she said. ‘Cycles are turning.’ She fingered the conch shell on her belt thoughtfully. ‘My enemies will try to stop the goddess from returning to power. You must be careful.’ She turned away from me, her eyes tracing the line of a building that had long since fallen. ‘It is so quiet here since the people have gone,’ she muttered. A lizard the length of my forearm watched us from a sunny rock on the mound. The grasses whispered softly. ‘I did not know it would be so quiet.’

She looked sad and weary. I started to reach out to her, wanting to give her comfort. My hand passed through her as if she were smoke and I sat alone beside the tomb, talking to myself in the growing heat of the morning.