The Falling Woman

25 Elizabeth

‘Does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good; if it doesn’t, it is of no use. Both paths lead nowhere; but one has a heart, the other doesn’t. One makes for a joyful journey; as long as you follow it, you are one with it. The other will make you curse your life. One makes you strong; the other weakens you.’

– Carlos Castaneda,

The Teachings of Don Juan

I woke from dreams of falling. I was alone in a Mexican hospital room, with a cast on my leg, a tube in my arm, and a foolish white hospital gown wrapped around my battered old body. When I called out, the nurse came, and I asked her what day it was. She told me that it was Sunday, and I calculated that it was Ahau, the first day of the new year.

Eventually they let Barbara in to talk to me. It seems that my daughter dragged me out of the cave with a rope she found in a shelter that had been built for the convenience of hacienda workers. The cave opening was not far from the hacienda. The locals knew about it, but, like many caves in the Yucatán, it had never been fully explored.

My daughter had carried me out to the road and flagged down a car driven by a Mexican restaurateur, who took one look at my daughter and another at me and rushed us both to Hospital Juarez. My daughter was treated for multiple cuts and bruises, none of them serious. After she was released, she contacted Barbara, waited long enough to be sure that I was in stable condition, and then left for the States. Barbara gave me a curious sidelong glance when she told me all this. I don’t believe that she was telling me all that my daughter had told her, and I said as much. Barbara just shrugged. I did not have the strength to persist, and I supposed that if my daughter wanted to keep secrets, she had earned the right.

I slept again, and when I woke Zuhuy-kak had taken Barbara’s place. She was insubstantial here, barely the suggestion of a Mayan woman sitting in a padded plastic-covered chair. Through her, I could see the electrical tape that had been used to patch a tear in the plastic upholstery. ‘Is it over?’ I asked her.

She did not move.

‘There are still things I want to know,’ I told her. ‘I still plan to dig up your bones and take another look at that vase.’

She shrugged.

‘I can’t talk to you here,’ I said to her irritably. ‘They won’t let me have cigarettes. I think that goddamn American antismoking propaganda has spread even here.’

She faded when the nurse opened the door and I realized only then that I had been speaking in English the whole time.

I went home a week after Tony. He went home in a box; I went on crutches. 1 was asked to speak at his memorial service, but I begged off, pleading illness. The department head delivered a fine impersonal eulogy that painted Tony with a rosy hue, flawless and unnatural as the cherubs that flanked the altar.

I went back to my apartment in Berkeley, taking my notebooks. I sent Diane a note, telling her to get in touch when she felt like it. I did not know what else to say.

My leg did not heal quite right. I limped, especially in wet weather, and walked with a cane that Barbara had bought for me in the Mérida market. The university welcomed me back for the fall semester. In the wake of the publicity attending the finds at Dzibilchaltún, three publishing houses were vying for the hardcover rights to my still-unfinished book, City of Stones. I had laid plans to return to Dzibilchaltún to complete the excavation of the tomb and the ceremonial area. Barbara would be assisting me on the project. I watched the shadows of the past, but none of them spoke to me.

On an overcast day, I had paused on a wooden bridge that spans Strawberry Creek to watch an Indian woman weave a basket from water-softened reeds. Someone leaned on the rail beside me, and I looked up, expecting to see one of my students.

Diane was looking down at the creek. For a moment, she did not look at me. When she did, something seemed different about her. She held herself with a new confidence, a certainty that she had lacked before. ‘I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m crazy too,’ she said. Her voice was steady; she did not seem particularly upset. ‘It took a while, but I’ve gotten used to it. In fact, I don’t mind it.’

She paused for a moment, and I could hear the song that the Indian woman was singing to herself, a wandering melody based on an unfamiliar scale.

‘Barbara tells me that you’re planning another expedition to Dzibilchaltún,’ she said. ‘I’d like to go.’

I watched the woman weaving her basket, carefully lacing the reeds together to make an intricate pattern of light and dark. ‘I don’t know what we’ll find there,’ I said.

‘You never do know what you’ll find when you dig in the past,’ she said.

‘That’s true,’ I said.

‘Can I come with you?’

‘I think that could be arranged,’ I said. I turned away from the bridge and Diane offered me her arm. I hesitated a moment, then took her arm.

‘Tell me,’ she said, ‘about the shadows of the past.’