The Falling Woman

17 Elizabeth

At the best of times, I mistrust students. They bring back memories of lecture halls filled with the dusty smell of chalk, rustling notebooks, and arrogant young men and women with the sleek and well-fed look of wolves in autumn after a long summer of abundant hunting.

I remember afternoon class in an overheated hall, and outside the rain is darkening the cement sidewalks, rattling the leaves, making Strawberry Creek, the campus’s captive brook, rush and swirl in panicked eddies. The students drowse in the warmth of the lecture hall.

I know that I cannot let them see my true self – thin and hungry and draggled as an alley cat crouching beneath a parked car for a moment’s shelter from the rain. The university is my temporary shelter; to keep this lecture post I must waken these somnolent beasts and teach them something, make them blink, shake their heavy heads, and grope for answers in their sluggish brains. I must breathe life into the dusty air.

I lecture like a shaman conjuring spirit forces to life. I work at it – throwing questions like rocks, whirling anecdotes over my head like bolos, calling up visions of burial customs, rites of passage, and ancient cities, dodging, pacing, always on the move. I am afraid, but I keep them at bay, alert but wary, a little confused, always on edge. No one sleeps. I keep my shelter.

Friday, the day Cib, is portrayed in the glyphs by a conch shell, a symbol of rebirth, of passage through the underworld and return to the light. I do not know what god governs this day.

On Friday, tension hung in the air, ran with the lizards over the rocks, hissed with the grasses in the wind. My body ached, and the chills and shivering had continued through the night. The mild fever made me irritable and restless. When I smoked, I felt a trembling in my chest, and my heart seemed to beat too fast.

Throughout the day, the wind carried the sound of chanting. Somewhere in the past, men and women raised their voices to the beat of a drum, the murmur of rattles, the wailing of conch shell trumpets and pipes. I could not make out the words. I searched, but I could not find the source of the sound.

I stayed in camp, drinking hot tea laced with aguardiente and trying to rest. I lit cigarettes one after another, drawing the smoke deep into my lungs as if the nicotine would soothe me and make the shivering stop. But the trembling remained. It seemed a part of the place, like the scrub of the monte, the dust on the stones. In the afternoon, I wandered out to the Temple of the Seven Dolls. In the plaza near the temple, a group of young men were decorating their shields with the richly colored feathers of jungle birds. They did not talk, but worked in grim silence, preparing for war.

Late in the afternoon, Carlos, Maggie, Barbara, and Diane left for Mérida to seek the dubious pleasures of the city. Only Tony, John, and Robin remained in camp. We made our own dinner over a camp stove and for the first time in days the food was not burned, not overspiced. I had tea with aguardiente, then aguardiente without the tea. The aguardiente warmed me but did not ease the trembling. Tony and Robin talked about pottery.

For the past week, Robin had been helping Tony with basic pottery analysis. The young woman seemed to share Tony’s interest in the topic: she talked with muted enthusiasm about color on the Munsell chart and hardness on Mohs’ scale, about burnishing and paint composition, about rim stance and spout attachment.

John was listening with an intensity that seemed unwarranted by the subject. At one point, he reached over, brushed a strand of hair out of Robin’s eyes, and gently touched her shoulder. She smiled and took his hand. I realized that they were lovers and wondered how long this romance had been going on.

After dinner, before the fading of the daylight forced us to resort to lanterns, John brought out his spiral-bound notebook to show us his site drawings: partial floor plans and on-site sketches of the structures immediately surrounding the tomb site. Though I had glanced over his shoulder at the site, noting his progress on each sketch, this was the first time I had seen his work gathered together.

John had studied architecture and his sketches reflected that training: meticulously executed in India ink with sharp black lines and careful shading. The lines were, if anything, too precise, too straight, too crisp. His sketch of the mound to the northwest of the tomb site failed to capture the air of abandonment and decay, the softness of the weather-beaten and eroding limestone blocks. Even so, his work was beautiful.

He flipped through the pages slowly, stopping at the site drawings and passing quickly the work that he judged inappropriate for our attention: quick pencil sketches, a detailed drawing showing exactly how the lintel rested on a particular doorway, a portrait of Pich’s sagging features, a profile of Robin examining a potsherd. He stopped at a sketch of the opening to the tomb that showed the placement of each masonry block, then he set the notebook on the wooden crate beside him.

While Tony and Robin praised the work, I took the notebook and flipped back through the pages, stopping at one that had caught my eye earlier: a pencil sketch of the plaza near the tomb. For once, John had relaxed and allowed himself to imagine the structures as they might have looked. The piece combined meticulous detail with softness, in a style reminiscent of the work of Frederick Catherwood, the nineteenth-century artist who had been the first to sketch the ruins.

The facade of the palace on the left was decorated with stucco Chaac masks and serpents; the low steps that fronted on it were carved with indecipherable glyphs. I recognized the place from my dream. The pile of skulls had rested before these steps; I stood on the edge of the plaza and the ravens flew up, shrieking their warnings.

That’s not right, I thought, looking at the temple facade, and remembering how Zuhuy-kak had described it to me and how I had dreamed it. This was the temple of the moon goddess, and the Chaac masks and serpents had no business there. No business at all.

‘What’s wrong?’ John asked, and for a moment I thought I had spoken aloud. He leaned close to me, looking over my shoulder at the sketch. ‘You were frowning. Is something wrong?’

I shook my head to clear it. ‘The facade’s wrong. It should be more like the facade over the temple at Tulúm. Seashells and fishes.’

He took the sketchbook from my hands. ‘Why do you say that?’

Why did I say that? Because I had been drinking and remembering a dream. Because the aguardiente hummed in my head. The past and present had momentarily crossed. I tried to smile, but my face was frozen. ‘Just a feeling.’

He gave me a strange look. John did not like statements based on vague feelings. ‘I don’t really have enough information to do a reconstruction drawing. I was just fooling around a bit.’

‘Nothing wrong with that,’ I said. ‘Nothing wrong with using your imagination.’

An awkward pause. John held the sketchbook as if he did not know what to do with it and frowned at me. Finally Robin leaned over to him and gently took it, asking if she could look. Tony got up to light the lantern and pour me another cup of tea. And the conversation went on.

I sat at the edge of the circle of light, listening and watching the three of them. John relaxed again, after a moment. They were comfortable together: Tony and Robin joked about studying pots; John’s arm rested lightly on the back of Robin’s chair; now and then, she smiled at him or touched his hand lightly. I watched them, much as I watched shades of the past, an observer but not a participant. But somehow, I could not leave.

Much later, Robin and John left the circle of light, walking hand in hand toward the cenote. Tony poured me another glass of aguardiente. Sitting together in the circle of lantern light, watching the moths circle and tasting the bite of the aguardiente at the back of my throat, it seemed that there was something new between Tony and me, or else something very old that was stirring once again. Something was shifting uneasily beneath the surface.

I had another glass of aguardiente, leaned back, and closed my eyes against the lantern light. The brown liquor comforted me, slowing the beating of my heart, blurring the cries of insects and birds in the monte.

Tony’s lawn chair creaked as he leaned forward to take his pipe from the crate. I heard the rustle of his tobacco pouch as he began the endless process of packing the pipe with tobacco and lighting it. The sweet scent of unburned tobacco hung in the warm air. I heard the scratch of a wooden match and smelled the sulfur when it caught, then the first smoke of the tobacco. Tony’s voice was as rough and warm as a block of granite in the sun. ‘I’ve been drinking too much lately,’ he said softly. ‘I wanted to let you know that I’m cutting back.’

I opened my eyes. The glass at his elbow was empty and his hands were busy with his pipe. I had noticed that he had not been sharing the aguardiente, but had thought little of it.

He glanced at me. ‘I know that you’ve been worried about it, about my drinking. It just got to be a habit after Hilde died.’

I nodded, not knowing what to say. ‘I guessed that.’

‘It’s a habit I’m breaking. I wanted to let you know that.’

‘Good.’

His pipe had gone out and he began poking in the bowl with a burned-out wooden match. He was avoiding my eyes and I knew that he was edging around a difficult topic.

I waited for a moment, then asked, ‘What is it, Tony?’

‘Diane told me that you asked her to leave,’ he said abruptly.

‘That’s so.’ I leaned back in my chair, feigning a relaxation I did not feel.

‘Why?’

‘It doesn’t much matter, does it? She refuses to go.’

He sat on the edge of the chair, his hands clasped before him, drooping between his knees. Behind him, the open doorway was a blaze of light. He stared down at his hands. ‘Diane said that the curandera told you to send her away.’

‘Does that sound like something I would do? Listen to the advice of a Mayan shaman?’ I shook my head.

‘Then why do you want her to go?’

‘I thought she might want to see something of the Yucatán besides one little dig. Just a suggestion.’

‘She was pretty upset. She seemed to think that you really wanted her to go.’

I shrugged angrily. ‘Yes, there are times that I would like her to go. She seems to expect something from me that I can’t give her.’ I rubbed my hand across my forehead, wishing I could clear away the liquor and the fever and think straight. ‘She’s trying to learn who she is and she seems to think I can tell her. I can’t tell her anything.’

‘I think that sending Diane away would be a mistake,’ Tony said quietly. ‘I think that you want to run from a situation that you’re afraid you can’t handle. You’re afraid of getting to know your daughter, afraid you will be hurt. But you can’t go on being afraid forever.’

‘Tony,’ I said, leaning forward. ‘Tony, listen to me.’ I stopped. What could I tell him? Nothing. An ancient priestess of a long-dead moon cult is showing an unhealthy interest in my daughter. ‘I just have a bad feeling about this place. I think somehow it’s dangerous for Diane, maybe dangerous for all of us. I can’t control what’s happening here.’

‘What is happening here?’ he asked. ‘What do you see that I don’t?’

I leaned back in my chair and looked down at my hands with their broken nails and old scars. ‘Can’t you feel the danger?’ I asked him. ‘I know you don’t see things as I do, but you must realize that what you see is not all that there is to the world. There are always things just beyond your gaze when you walk alone in the darkness, or in the dim light just after sunset or just before dawn.’ I studied his face. ‘I guess you don’t walk alone, not often. You keep people around you. Even when you are by yourself, you think about your friends, worry about them, keep them wrapped around you like a blanket that keeps you warm.’ I shook my head. ‘I live in a more solitary place.’

‘You don’t have to,’ he said. He looked up at me and held out his open hands. ‘You don’t have to be alone.’

I shook my head.

‘I think it was hard enough for Diane to find you once. If you send her away, you shouldn’t expect her to try again.’

‘I don’t expect anything from her.’

‘And from me?’

‘Nothing, Tony. There’s nothing you can do.’ His open hands were in his lap and I wanted to reach out to him, put my hands in his. But I was a danger to him. I would hurt him by being near. I clasped my hands in my lap and shook my head.

He looked up and hesitated. ‘Liz, we’ve known each other a long time. I’ve known…’ He stopped and started again. ‘Ever since I have known you, you’ve been watching things that aren’t there. I accept that. It doesn’t bother me. I have never mentioned this to you because I thought that if I did you would back away from me. I’ve always been afraid to talk about this.’ He was watching me steadily; he held his pipe, but his hands were still. ‘Do you believe that?’

I nodded, not trusting my voice. In the monte, the crickets shrilled. Above us, the palm thatch hissed like a roof full of snakes. I could feel the touch of a breeze stirring the hairs on my arms, tickling my neck with loose strands of hair. The camp was very quiet.

‘But lately I have heard you talking in Maya when you are alone – in your hut, out at the site. I wondered who you were talking to.’ His voice was very gentle.

The aguardiente had slowed my mind and body. I leaned toward him, cradling my cup in both hands. ‘You don’t have to worry about this, Tony. Like you said, I’ve been seeing people who aren’t there for years. Why start worrying now?’

‘Diane is worried about you,’ he said.

The sudden rush of anger was a product of the aguardiente; I knew that. ‘She told you that she was worried about my sanity, right?’

‘She did mention that.’

I leaned back in my chair, realized that one of my hands was gripping the other tightly, forced them to relax. ‘And what did you say?’

‘I told her that you were no crazier than you had always been.’ He shrugged. ‘I think that’s true.’

‘And how crazy is that?’

He looked at me steadily. ‘Depends on one’s definition,’ he said. ‘I don’t worry when you see people who aren’t here. I only start to worry when you ignore people who are. I don’t think that you should send Diane away.’

I sat silent. The moon was up. I remembered my view of the moon from the ward. I could see it only if I stood on the back of one of the toilets and peered through a tiny grill-covered window. Clinging to the dusty ledge, I could watch the moon reluctantly lift her battered face over the horizon and gaze down on the earth. With the flowers that Robert brought me, I bribed another woman to keep watch at the door while I watched the moon rise. I could watch until I tired of the scent of urine and disinfectant, or until an orderly caught me and escorted me roughly to bed. I remembered.

Tony reached across the space between us to touch my hand, but I stood up and moved to the edge of the circle of light. I stumbled a little and put one hand on the chair back for support. The aguardiente had left my body heavy and my head light. When I turned my head, the world moved too quickly around me. ‘I don’t mind being told I’m crazy,’ I said, looking out into the plaza. ‘I don’t care what you think about that. But I won’t be locked up.’

‘What are you talking about, Liz? I didn’t say anything about—’

‘No, you didn’t say anything.’ He was starting to stand, to move toward me, but I glared at him and he sat down again. ‘You think I’ve been crazy for years.’

‘You know better than that.’

My hand was in a fist and my fingernails were etching painful crescents in my palm. The tension was all around me. I was afraid. No words came. When I groped for words, I thought of the great silence that surrounded the mounds at dawn, the scrabbling of the lizards on the rocks, the crying of birds in the monte, the hissing of grasses in a light breeze. No words.

‘I’ll stay,’ he said. ‘I’ve been battling shadows of my own for years. Fighting yours might do me good.’

I felt empty. I heard my own words slurred by alcohol, remembered too vividly the stench of the ward. I looked at Tony, leaning back in his chair, and remembered Robert and the way he had comforted me when I was upset. ‘Don’t worry about it,’ I said to Tony then. ‘I won’t send Diane away. Don’t concern yourself.’

‘Now wait,’ he said, holding out a hand. ‘Relax. Don’t—’

‘I said it’s all right. Don’t worry.’ I left him and returned to the safety of my hut.