The Falling Woman

21 Elizabeth

I woke on Saturday, the day Kan, as stiff and sore as if I had been hiking through the monte in my sleep. The sky was overcast and the morning was half over. I stopped by the kitchen and Maria gave me – reluctantly, I thought – a breakfast of atole. Barbara and Diane had left for Mérida; Tony was nowhere to be seen.

This day is governed by the smooth-faced young god who makes the maize grow. It is a good day, by most accounts, favorable for beginning new projects and continuing old ones. I considered this as I sat in the plaza and ate my atole. Then I gathered my equipment and went to the tomb.

I was halfway there when Zuhuy-kak fell into step beside me. She limped slightly and I remembered seeing the knotted thighbone that caused her pain. I looked at her broad face and knew the smooth white surfaces beneath it. I glanced at her, but did not speak.

‘Are you happy with the secrets you have found?’ she asked. When she spoke, I remembered the skull’s gaping mouth.

We had reached the mouth of the tomb. I did not acknowledge Zuhuy-kak’s presence. I pulled aside the tarpaulin that covered the excavation, and descended the steps into the tomb. In the passageway, I lit the Coleman lantern, reached through the opening to set it on the floor of the tomb, and squirmed in after it.

In the tomb, it was still night, governed by the jaguar, the dark aspect of the sun. The lantern cast a circle of light that faded before it reached the ceiling. In the silent darkness, I could hear my heart beating quickly, as if I had run a long distance. I lifted the lantern high and looked toward the back of the tomb. The floor sloped away, ending in darkness. Caves are the entrance to Xibalba, the Mayan underworld inhabited by gods of death and sacrifice. Cold air from the underworld stirred the hairs on my arm and I shivered. On the mottled stone wall of the tomb my shadow shifted and changed, monstrous and strange. I saw Zuhuy-kak standing at the edge of the circle of lantern light, watching me.

On Friday, we had begun clearing the area, brushing away the loose dirt. Our initial work had uncovered a vase that lay on its side on the floor near the skeleton’s head. I set the lantern on the stone dais, so that the vase fell within the pool of light.

I knelt by the vase. On Friday, I had started cleaning it, but the vessel was still half covered with soft dirt and bits of straw brought in by generations of rodents. I used my whisk broom to brush the upper surface clean.

‘I made that vase,’ Zuhuy-kak said. ‘When I emerged from the well, while I lay on the pallet, I painted it.’

I noticed that my hands were shaking and I stopped for a moment, waiting for the trembling to subside before I continued my work. I breathed deeply. I could still feel a trembling deep inside me, but my hands were still. I recognized one glyph – the place glyph for Chichén Itzá. On the side of the pot, just below the band of glyphs, I could make out a thin black outline on the cream-colored pottery. I continued brushing. The dirt brushed away easily now, revealing the elaborate headdress of a priest or nobleman. The black outline was his hand, which was raised above his head. He was looking down, at something beyond and below him.

I continued brushing the dirt from the pot. The half inch of rim that I had exposed was circled with a band of black marks on a red background: glyphs that were scratched and illegible in the dim lantern light. On the vase, a priest stood on a cliff with a group of other priests and nobles. All of them looked down. My whisk broom uncovered feet first, then her blue dress, fluttering around her as she fell. Her hair was streaming behind her. The falling woman. The priest’s hands were raised because he had cast her off the cliff. Her arms were crossed on her breast; her eyes were open and staring. She saw something, but I did not know what it was. She was falling through empty space, just as she had been falling for many years.

The glaze at the base of the vase was scratched, but I could make out curling waves of turbulent water, black swirls on the cream-colored background. In the swirls, between the cracks and gaps in the glaze, I could see an upthrown arm and a weeping face, several small figures struggling against the serpentine coils of the water.

‘I brought that vase with me when I came down here,’ she said. ‘I wanted it with me. I brought my daughter’s bones.’

I heard the rain begin to fall outside the tomb. The tarp flapped in the wind and the water trickled down the steps – I could hear the soft liquid sound, like a cat licking itself.

I used my trowel to remove the soil surrounding the vase, transferring the loosely packed dirt and detritus to a bucket. The vase was almost free of its cradle of soil. When I brushed it, it moved slightly, rocking in place. I stopped for a moment, waiting for the trembling in my hands to stop. Then, with care, I lifted the vase from the soil.

The glaze on the side that had faced the ground was pitted and cracked, but the picture was still intact. The woman in blue – the falling woman – lay on a platform. At her feet lay a conch – a symbol of the water from which she had emerged and of the underworld where the sun dies and is reborn. One hand held a leaf-shaped obsidian blade. Her other arm was extended to display a bloody gash from which blood flowed. She was smiling and her expression was triumphant.

‘You killed yourself here,’ I said.

‘There was no one else left to kill me,’ she said softly. ‘The goddess had no power and I had sent the people away.’

Zuhuy-kak was sitting on the edge of the stone dais, and she seemed as solid as the bones that lay beside her. She sat with her shoulders hunched forward, staring at her folded hands. For a moment, I felt sympathy for this poor mad ghost, exiled by her own doing, lost and alone. Without thinking, I reached out toward her. She looked up and I stopped.

‘How did your daughter die?’ I asked.

Zuhuy-kak met my gaze. Her hands were folded in her lap. For a moment, she said nothing. ‘I gave her to the goddess,’ she said at last.

‘You sacrificed your daughter,’ I said, staring at the woman’s face.

Zuhuy-kak did not speak for a moment. ‘The ah-nunob were coming and the battle was not going well,’ she said. ‘We had captured their warriors. I killed them at the altar and we heaped their skulls in the courtyards, but that was not enough.’

Her hands were grasping each other tightly. She turned her gaze toward the darkness at the back of the cave and swayed forward and back almost as if she rocked a child in her arms. She spoke in a singsong tone. ‘There had been much killing, so much killing on the battlefield and in the temple. My husband, a man of power and nobility, a good man, had died that week on the field. The scent of blood hung thick and heavy in the air, overflowing the temple, filling the courtyard, spilling out of the sacred places and flowing down the sacbe, a river of rich red scent laced with the smoke of burning incense. The sound of the drum and the rattle followed me everywhere, beating like my own heart, steady and strong. Like my own heart.’

She had drawn her folded hands up to her breast, and she was rocking back and forth, back and forth to a drumbeat that I could not hear. Her words came quickly now. ‘The smoke, the smell of blood, the cries of the wounded tended by the healers – these seemed natural things.’ She had closed her eyes. ‘I gave my child to the gods to stop the coming of the ah-nunob. I meant it to be a willing sacrifice, a gift. I prepared her, dressed her, and perfumed her, gave her balche mixed with herbs to drink. I took her to the place of sacrifice, filled with the power of the goddess. She did not struggle. She smiled at me, because I had told her that Ixtab would come and take her to paradise. She was afraid, but she smiled up at me. And at the moment that I was bringing the blade down, when the power of the goddess should have been greatest, I doubted. My daughter looked up at me, and I doubted the power of the goddess.’ She opened her eyes and the strange light that filled them reminded me of the madwoman who claimed to be Jesus Christ. ‘I doubted and the ah-nunob took the city. The cycle turned and the goddess lost her power.’

My stomach ached, a solid steady pain that reminded me of the aching in my gut that plagued me throughout my pregnancy. A sad and heavy feeling, as if I carried a burden that was too great. The doctor who attended me during pregnancy said it was nothing, it was psychosomatic. Many pregnant women felt unhappy, he said; it wasn’t abnormal. He said that they felt unhappy – I remember that. It did not seem to cross his mind that maybe they had good reason to feel unhappy, maybe they were in pain, maybe they carried a weight that was too great to bear. I wondered what the doctor would say now.

‘Now it is time for the cycle to turn again. You can bring the goddess back to power. Your daughter—’

‘No,’ I said.

‘You can,’ she said. I noticed then that she was holding the obsidian blade. ‘It will be easy. And then, once it is done, you can rest.’

‘No.’

‘You are like me,’ she said. ‘I know you. I knew you when I saw you by the well. You too made a sacrifice that was not good. You began falling just as I began falling when my daughter died and the power of the goddess died with her. I began falling long before the priests threw me in the well,’ she said.

‘You can rest now,’ I said. ‘You can stop.’

‘I tried to stop. When the people were leaving and the city was in confusion. I asked two masons to wall me in, and they did it for me. They walled me in and I stopped here. I wanted to rest. But there is no rest. The cycle is turning again. The time is near for sacrifices to be made. Once they are made, we can rest, you and I.’

‘You can rest,’ I said. ‘There is no need for you to be here. There will be no sacrifices, no blood spilled.’

She looked at me with eyes as dark as the darkness beyond the tomb. ‘Why are you here?’ She did not wait for my answer. ‘You are here because you want to learn secrets. You want them, and at the same time, you are afraid to learn them. You want power, but you fear it. You fear that you will learn what you are capable of doing.’ She ran her finger along the obsidian blade. ‘There will be blood.’

She held it out, and I took it. Held it in my hand and drew it gently along the skin of my wrist, testing the blade, just testing it. Blood beaded in its wake and I felt a new warmth and strength travel up my arm and into my heart. The touch of the cold obsidian recalled my suicide attempt. I remembered the feeling of heated anticipation, the sense that the pain I felt was insignificant beside the power I would gain. I watched the blood trickle from the wound in my arm and I felt warm and strong.