The Falling Woman

1 Elizabeth Butler

‘I dig through ancient trash,’ I told the elegantly groomed young woman who had been sent by a popular women’s magazine to write a short article on my work. ‘I grub in the dirt, that’s what I do. I dig up dead Indians. Archaeologists are really no better than scavengers, sifting through the garbage that people left behind when they died, moved on, built a new house, a new town, a new temple. We’re garbage collectors really. Is that clear?’ The sleek young woman’s smile faltered, but she bravely continued the interview.

That was in Berkeley, just after the publication of my last book, but the memory of the interview lingered with me. I pitied the reporter and the photographer who accompanied her. It was so obvious that they did not know what to do with me.

I am an old woman. My hair is gray and brown – the color of the limestone monuments raised by the Maya one thousand years ago. My face has weathered through the years – the sun has etched wrinkles around the eyes, the wind has carved lines. At age fifty-one, I am a troublesome old woman.

My name is Elizabeth Butler; my friends and students call me Liz. The University of California at Berkeley lists me as a lecturer and field archaeologist, but in actuality I am a mole, a scavenger, a garbage collector. I find it somewhat surprising, though gratifying, that I have managed to make my living in such a strange occupation.

Often, I argue with other people who grub in the dirt. I have a reputation for asking too many embarrassing questions at conferences where everyone presents their findings. I have always enjoyed asking embarrassing questions.

Sometimes, much to the dismay of my fellow academics, I write books about my activities and the activities of my colleagues. In general, I believe that my fellow garbage collectors regard my work as suspect because it has become quite popular. Popularity is not the mark of a properly rigorous academic work. I believe that their distrust of my work reflects a distrust of me. My work smacks of speculation; I tell stories about the people who inhabited the ancient ruins – and my colleagues do not care for my tales. In academic circles, I linger on the fringes where the warmth of the fire never reaches, an irreverent outsider, a loner who prefers fieldwork to the university and general readership to academic journals.

But then, the popularizers don’t like me either. I gave that reporter trouble, I know. I talked about dirt and potsherds when she wanted to hear about romance and adventure. And the photographer – a young man who was more accustomed to fashion-plate beauties than to weatherworn archaeologists – did not know how to picture the crags and fissures of my face. He kept positioning me in one place, then in another. In the end, he took photographs of my hands: pointing out the pattern on a potsherd, holding a jade earring, demonstrating how to use a mano and metate, the mortar and pestle with which the Maya grind corn.

My hands tell more of my history than my face. They are tanned and wrinkled and I can trace the paths of veins along their backs. The nails are short and hard, like the claws of some digging animal, and the wrists are marked with vertical white scars, a permanent record of my attempt to escape my former husband and the world in the most drastic way possible. The magazine photographer was careful to position my hands so that the scars did not show.

I believe that the reporter who interviewed me expected tales of tombs, gold, and glory. I told her about heat, disease, and insect bites. I described the time that my jeep broke an axle fifty miles from anywhere, the time that all my graduate students had diarrhea simultaneously, the time that the local municipality stole half my workmen to work on a local road. ‘Picture postcards never show the bugs,’ I told her. ‘Stinging ants, wasps, fleas, roaches the size of your hand. Postcards never show the heat.’

I don’t think that I told her what she wanted to hear, but I enjoyed myself. I don’t think that she believed all my stories. I think she still believes that archaeologists wear white pith helmets and find treasure each day before breakfast. She asked me why, if conditions were as horrible as I described, why I would ever go on another dig. I remember that she smiled when she asked me, expecting me to talk about the excitement of discovery, the thrill of uncovering lost civilizations. Why do I do it?

‘I’m crazy,’ I said. I don’t think she believed me.

It was three weeks into the field season at Dzibilchaltún that Tony, Salvador, and I held a council of war. We sat at a folding table at one edge of the central plaza, an area of hard-packed dirt surrounded by mud-and-wattle huts. The plaza served as dining hall, classroom, meeting place, and, at that moment, conference room. Dinner was over and we lingered over coffee laced with aguardiente, a potent local brandy.

The situation was this. We had thirty men to do a job that would be difficult with twice that number. Our budget was tight; our time was limited. We had been at work for three weeks out of our allotted eight. So far our luck had been nonexistent. And the municipality had just commandeered ten of our workmen to patch potholes in the road between Mérida and Progreso. In the Yucatán, the season for road building coincides with the season for excavation, a brief period in the spring before the rains come. In five weeks – sooner if our luck was bad – the rains would come and our work would end.

‘Shall I go talk to the commissioner of highways?’ I said. ‘I’ll tell him that we need those men. I’m sure I could convince him.’

Salvador took a drag on his cigarette, leaned back in his chair, and folded his arms. Salvador had been working on excavations since he was a teenager in Piste helping with the restoration of Chichén Itzá. He was a good foreman, an intelligent man who was respectful of his employers, and he did not like to tell me I was wrong. He stared past me.

I glanced at Tony. ‘I think that means no.’

Tony grinned. Anthony Baker, my co-director on the excavation, was older than I was by just a few years. We had met nearly thirty years before at a Hopi dig in Arizona. He had been an affable, easygoing young man. He was still easygoing. His eyes were a startling shade of blue. His curly hair – once blond, now white – was sparse where it had been lush. His face was thin, grown thinner over the years, and sunburned as always. Each season he burned and peeled and burned again, despite all his efforts to block the sun. His voice was low and gravelly, a soft rough whiskey voice with a deep rumble in the throat, like the voice of a talking bear in a fairy tale.

‘I’d guess you were right,’ he said to me.

‘That’s too bad,’ I said. ‘I was rather looking forward to barging into the commissioner’s office. I can be rude to young men.’ I sipped my coffee. ‘It’s one of the few compensations for growing old.’

Salvador took another long drag on his cigarette. ‘I will talk to my cousin,’ he said at last. ‘My cousin will talk to the commissioner. He will reason with the commissioner.’ He glanced at me but did not unfold his arms. ‘It will cost some money.’

I nodded. ‘We budgeted for that.’

‘Good.’

‘If it doesn’t work, I can always go negotiate with the man,’ I said.

Salvador dropped the stub of his cigarette to the ground and crushed it out with a sandaled foot. No comment. Tony poured another shot of aguardiente into each cup.

The sun was setting. The hollow wailing of conch shell trumpets blown by Mayan priests rose over the trilling of the crickets and echoed across the plaza. I alone listened to the sweet mournful sound – neither Tony nor Salvador could hear the echoes of the past.

At a folding table on the far side of the plaza, three of the five graduate students who were working the dig this summer were playing cards. Occasionally, their laughter drifted across the plaza.

‘The students are a good bunch this year,’ Tony commented.

I shrugged. ‘They’re like every other bunch of students. Every year they seem to get younger. And they want to find a jade mask and a gold bracelet under every rock or else they want to have a mystical experience in the ruins when the full moon rises.’

‘Or both,’ Tony said.

‘Right. Some hide it better than others, but they’re all treasure hunters at heart.’

‘And we hide it better than any of them,’ he said. ‘We’ve been at it longer.’

I glanced at his face, and could not continue pretending to be cynical when he was grinning like that. ‘I suppose you’re right. Do you think this is the year that we’ll find a tomb bigger than King Tut’s and translate the hieroglyphics?’

‘Why not?’ he said. ‘I think it’s a good idea.’

We sat in the growing darkness and talked about the possibilities of the site. Tony, as always, was optimistic despite our limited success to date.

From 1960 to 1966 a research group from Tulane University surveyed just over half of the ceremonial center at Dzibilchaltún, completed extensive excavations in a number of structures, and dug test pits to sample some six hundred other structures. Unlike the Tulane group, we were concentrating on outlying areas rather than on the ceremonial center, expanding the surveyed and sampled area.

By the time the sun was completely down and the moon was rising, Tony and I were well into planning the third year of excavations. Salvador had wandered off, impatient with us for being more interested in next year’s plans than tomorrow’s work. We quit with the third year, and Tony wandered over to join the students for a time.

Tony always got along well with the students, drinking with them, sharing their troubles and laughing at their jokes. By the end of the summer, they would call him Tony and treat him with affection. Even at the end of the summer, I would be a stranger to them. I preferred it that way.

In the moonlight, I went for a stroll down to the sacred cenote, the ancient well that had once supplied water to the city. Along the way, I passed a woman returning from the well. She walked gracefully, one hand lifted to steady the water jug on her head. From the black and white pattern that decorated the rim of her jug, I guessed that she had lived during the Classic Period, around about AD 800.

I do not live entirely in the present. Sometimes, I think that the ghosts of the past haunt me. Sometimes, I think that I haunt them. We come together in the uncertain hours of dawn and dusk, when the world is on the edge between day and night.

When I wander through the Berkeley campus at dawn I smell the thin smoke of cooking fires that flared and died a thousand years ago. A shadow flits across the path before me – no, two shadows – little girls playing a game involving a ball, a hoop, a stick, and much laughter. For a moment, I hear them laughing, shrill as birds, and then the laughter fades.

A tall awkward young man in a dark green windbreaker, a student in my graduate seminar, hails me. We stand and talk – something about the coming midterm exam, something about the due date for a paper. I am distracted – an old Indian woman walks past, carrying a basket of herbs. The design of the basket is unfamiliar to me, and I study it as she trudges by.

‘So, you think that would work?’ the earnest young man is saying. He has been talking about the topic he has chosen for his final paper, but I have not been listening.

‘Let’s talk about it during my office hours this afternoon,’ I say. Students sometimes find me brusque, abrupt. I try to show interest in their concerns, but my attention is continually drawn away from them by apparitions of the past.

I have grown used to my ghosts. It’s no worse, I suppose, than other disabilities: some people are nearsighted, some are hard-of-hearing. I see and hear too much and that distracts me from the business at hand.

Generally, the phantoms ignore me, busy with their own affairs. For these shadows, as for my students, the times are separate. The Indian village that I see is gone: past tense. The campus through which I walk is now: present tense. For others, there is no overlap between the two. I live on the border and see both sides.

The water of the cenote was cold and clear. The air beside the pool carried the scent of water lilies and wet mud. I stopped at the edge of the pool, sat down, and leaned back against a squared-off stone that had once been part of a structure.

Here and there, other stone temple blocks showed through the soil. Three thousand years ago, the Maya had built a temple here. One thousand years ago, they had abandoned the temple and retreated into the forest. No archaeologist knew why, and the ancient Maya were not saying. Not yet.

The heavy rains of a thousand springs had eroded the stones; the winds had blown dust over them. Grasses had grown in the dust, covering the rocks and hiding their secrets. Trees had grown on the crest of the mound, and their twisted roots had tumbled and broken the stones. The jungle had reclaimed the land.

I liked this place. By day, I could watch the shadows of women draw water from the pool, slaves and peasants stooping to fill rounded jars with clear water, hoisting the full vessels to their heads, and moving away with the stately grace required to balance the heavy jars. They talked and laughed and joked among themselves and I liked to listen.

The wind rippled the water, and the moonlight laid a pale silver ribbon on the shining surface. Bats swooped low to catch insects that hovered just above the pool. I saw a movement on the path that led to the cenote and waited. Perhaps a slave sent to fetch water. Perhaps a young woman meeting a lover.

I heard the soft slapping of sandals against rock as a shadow crossed between me and the pool. The figure walked with a slight limp. There was a bulkiness about the head that suggested braided hair, a hint of feminine grace when the figure stooped to touch the water. She turned, as if to continue along the path, then stopped, staring in my direction.

I waited. Crickets trilled all around me. A frog croaked, but no frog answered. For a moment, I thought I had mistaken a woman of my own time for a shadow of the past. I greeted her in Maya, a language I speak tolerably well after ten long years of stammering and mispronunciation. My accent is not good – I struggle with subtleties of tone and miss the point of puns and jokes – but I can usually understand and make myself understood.

The person standing motionless by the edge of the pool did not speak for a moment. Then she said, ‘I see a living shadow. Why are you here?’ By the sound of her voice, I guessed her to be a woman about my age. She spoke Maya with an ancient accent.

Shadows do not speak to me. For a moment, I sat silent. Shadows come and go and I watch them, but they do not speak, they do not watch me.

‘Speak to me, shadow,’ said the woman. ‘I have been alone so long. Why are you here?’

The crickets filled the silence with shrill cries. I did not know what to say. Shadows do not talk to me.

‘I stopped to rest,’ I said carefully. ‘It’s peaceful here.’

She was a shape in the darkness, no more than that. I could make out no details. She laughed, a soft low sound like water pouring from a jug. ‘Peace is not so easy to find. You do not know this place if you find it peaceful.’

‘I know this place,’ I said sharply, resenting this shadow for claiming I did not know a place that I considered my own. ‘For me, it is peaceful.’

She stood motionless for a moment, her head cocked a little to one side. ‘So you think you belong here, shadow? Who are you?’

‘They call me Ix Zacbeliz.’ When I was overseeing a dig at Ikil, the workmen had called me that; it meant ‘woman who walks the white road.’ The nickname was as close as I came to a Mayan name.

‘You speak Maya,’ the woman said softly, ‘but do you speak the language of the Zuyua?’ Her voice held a challenge.

The language of the Zuyua was an ancient riddling game. I had read the questions and answers in the Books of Chilam Balam, Mayan holy books that had been transcribed into European script and preserved when the original hieroglyphic books were destroyed. The text surrounding the questions suggested that the riddles were used to separate the true Maya from invaders, the nobility from the peasants. If I spoke the language of the Zuyua, I belonged. If not, I was an outsider.

The woman at the well spoke again, not waiting for my answer. ‘What holes does the sugarcane sing through?’

That was easy. ‘The holes in the flute.’

‘Who is the girl with many teeth? Her hair is twisted in a tuft and she smells sweet.’

I leaned back against the temple stone, remembering the text from the ancient book. As I recalled, many of the riddles dealt with food. ‘The girl is an ear of corn, baked in a pit.’

‘If I tell you to bring me the flower of the night, what will you do?’

That one, I did not remember. I stared over her head and saw the first dim stars of evening. ‘There is the flower of the night. A star in the sky.’

‘And what if I ask you for the firefly of the night? Bring it to me with the beckoning tongue of a jaguar.’

That one was not in the book. I considered the question, tapping a cigarette from my pack and lighting it with a match. The woman laughed. ‘Ah, yes – you speak the language of the Zuyua. The firefly is the smoking stick and the tongue of the jaguar is the flame. We shall be friends. I have been lonely too long.’ She cocked her head to one side but I could not see her expression in the darkness. ‘You are looking for secrets and I will help you find them. Yes. The time has come.’

She turned away, stepping toward the path that led to the southeast, away from the cenote.

‘Wait,’ I said. ‘What’s your name? Who are you?’

‘They call me Zuhuy-kak,’ she said.

I had heard the name before, though it took me a moment to place it. Zuhuy-kak meant ‘fire virgin.’ A few books referred to her; she was said to be the deified daughter of a Mayan nobleman. So they said. I have found books to be completely unreliable when it comes to identifying the shadows that I meet in the ruins.

With half-closed eyes, I leaned my head against the stone behind me and watched her go.

A modem psychiatrist – that shaman sans rattle and incense – would say that Zuhuy-kak was wish fulfillment and hallucination, brought on by stress, spicy food, aguardiente. If pressed, he might say, with waving of hands, that Zuhuy-kak – and the less talkative shadows that haunt me – are aspects of myself. My subconscious mind speaks to me through visions of dead Indians.

Or he might just say I’m mad.

In any case, I have never made the test. I have never mentioned my shadows to anyone. I prefer my shamans with all the window dressing. Give them rattles and incense and bones to throw; take away their books. Let the white-coated shamans of the modem world chase shadows in the darkness. I know my phantoms.

Generally. But my phantoms do not speak to me and call me friend. My phantoms keep their distance, going about their lives while I observe. This ancient Mayan woman named Zuhuy-kak did not follow the rules that I knew. I wondered, in the lily-scented night, if the rules were changing.

Back in the hut that served as my home for the field season, I lay in my hammock and listened to the steady beat of my own heart. The palm thatch rustled in the evening breeze.

The hammock rocked me to sleep and the sounds changed. The steady beat was a tunkul, a hollow wooden gong that was beaten with a stick. The cricket’s song grew harsh and loud, like the buzzing of stones shaken in a gourd rattle. The whisper of the palm thatch became the murmuring of voices: a crowd surrounded me and pressed close on all sides. I felt the weight of braids on my head, a cumbersome robe around me. When a hand on my arm tugged me forward, I opened my eyes.

A precipice before me, jade-green water far below, a drumbeat that quickened with my heart, and suddenly I was falling.

I woke with a start, my hands clutching the cotton threads of the hammock. The rising wind stirred the palm thatch and sent a few thin leaves scurrying across the hard-packed dirt floor of my hut.

In my brief glance over the edge, I had recognized the steep limestone walls and green waters of the sacred cenote at Chichén Itzá. The scent, I thought, had been copal incense. The music – rattle and drum – was processional music.

I closed my eyes and slept again, but my dreams were of more modern pasts: I dreamed of the long ago time when I had been a wife and mother. I did not like such dreams and I woke at dawn.

Dawn and dusk are the best times for exploring ruins. When the sun is low, the shadows reveal the faint images of ancient carvings on temple stones; they betray irregularities that may hide the remains of stairways, plazas, walls, and roads. Shadows lend an air of mystery to the tumble of rocks that was once a city, and they reveal as many secrets as they hide.

I left my hut to go walking through the ruins. It was Saturday and breakfast would be late. Alone, I strolled through the sleeping camp. Chickens searched for insects among the weeds. A lizard, catching early-morning sunlight on a rock, glanced at me and ran for cover in the crack of a wall. In the monte, a bird called on two notes – one high, one low, one high, one low – as repetitive as a small boy who had only recently learned to whistle. The sun was just up and the air was still relatively cool.

As I walked, 1 fingered the lucky piece that I carried in my pocket, a silver coin that Tony had given me when we were both graduate students. The design was that of an ancient Roman coin. Tony cast the silver himself in a jewelry-making workshop, and gave the coin to me on the anniversary of the day my divorce was final. I always carried it with me, and I knew I was nervous when I caught myself running my finger along the milled edge.

I was nervous now, restless, bothered by my dreams and my memory of the old woman named Zuhuy-kak. I started when four small birds took flight from a nearby bush, jumped when a lizard ran across my path. My encounter with Zuhuy-kak had left me feeling more unsettled than I liked to admit, even to myself.

I followed the dirt track to the cenote. On the horizon, I could see the remains of the old Spanish church. In 1568, the Spanish had quarried stones from the old Mayan temples and used them in a new church, building for the new gods on the bones of the old. Their church had fared no better than the Mayan temples. All that remained of it now was a broad archway and the crumbling fragment of a wall.

Each time I left California and returned to the ruins, I found them more disconcerting. In Berkeley, buildings were set lightly on the land, a temporary addition – nothing more. Here, history built upon history.

Conquering Spaniards had taken the land from the Toltec invaders who had taken the land from the Maya. With each conquest, the faces of old gods were transformed to become the faces of gods more acceptable to the new regime. Words of the Spanish Mass blended with the words of ancient ritual: in one and the same prayer, the peasants called upon the Virgin Mary and the Chaacob. Here, it was common to build structures upon structures, pyramids over pyramids. Layers upon layers, secrets hiding secrets.

I lingered for a time on the edge of camp. A stonecutter, working alone in the early hours, was tapping a series of glyphs into a limestone slab. The clacking of stone chisel on limestone beat a counterpoint to the monotonous call of the distant bird. 1 leaned close to see if I could identify the glyphs he carved, but a chicken chose that moment to wander through the space occupied by the limestone slab. The stoneworker and his tools faded into dust and sunlight, and I continued on my way.

I walked past the cenote, following the trail that the shadow called Zuhuy-kak had taken, winding through the brush to the southeast plaza, where we had begun excavating a mound designated as Structure 701, renamed Temple of the Moon by Tony. I strolled slowly along the side of the mound, studying the slope for any regularities that might betray what lay beneath the rubble.

About a thousand years ago – give or take a hundred years – the open area beside the mound had been a smooth plaza, coated with a layer of limestone plaster. Here and there, traces of the original plaster remained, but most had been washed away by the rains of the passing centuries.

Workmen had cleared the brush and trees from the open area, exposing the flat limestone slabs that had supported the plaster. Uprooted brush was heaped at the far end of the mound in the shade of a large tree. I reached the brush heap, began to turn away, then looked again.

A stone half covered by the piled brush seemed to be at an angle, a little different from the rest, as if it were collapsing into a hollow space beneath the plaza. I stepped closer. It looked very much like the other stones: a square of uncarved limestone unusual only for its reluctance to lie flat. But I have learned to follow my instincts in these matters.

The thirsty trees that set down roots in the sparse soil of the Yucatán are lean and wiry, accustomed to hardship and drought. Even after they have been felled and left to die, the trees fight back, reaching out with thorns and broken branches for the soft flesh of anyone who raises a machete against them. When I tried to pull a branch from the tilted stone so that I could take a better look, the tree clung willfully to the rest of the heap; when I yanked harder, it twisted in my hand and gave way so suddenly that I lost my balance. As I fell back, another branch raked the tender skin on my inner wrist with half-inch thorns, leaving bloody claw marks.

The monte fights back. My efforts had moved the branch slightly and the stone still looked promising. I wrapped my kerchief around my wrist to stanch the blood and decided to wait until the work crew could move the brush. I turned toward camp.

An old woman who did not belong to my time stood in the shade of the tree. The air around me was hot and still. A bird in the jungle called out on a rising note, as if asking a piercing question.

The woman’s dark hair was coiled in braids on her head; strips of bright blue cloth decorated with small white sea-shells were woven into the braids. Around her neck was a string of jade beads – each one polished and round, as if worn smooth by the sea. White discs carved of oyster shell dangled from her ears. Her robe, a deeper shade of blue than the cloth in her hair, hung down to the leather sandals on her feet. From her belt of woven leather strips hung a conch shell trumpet and a pouch encrusted with snail shells.

She was not an attractive woman. Her forehead slanted back at an unnatural angle, pressed flat by a cradle board in her infancy. Dark blue spots tattooed on one cheek formed a spiral pattern, marking her as a Mayan noblewoman. Her teeth were tumbled like the stone blocks in an old wall. The front teeth were inset with jade beads, another mark of nobility.

She squinted at me as if the sun were too bright. ‘The shadow again,’ she said softly in Maya. She watched me for a moment. ‘Speak to me, Ix Zacbeliz.’

‘You see me?’ I asked her in Maya. ‘What do you see?’

She smiled, showing her inlaid teeth. ‘I see a shadow who talks. It has been long since I have spoken with anyone, even a shadow. I did not know how lonely I would be when I sent the people away.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You will learn. We will be friends and I will teach you secrets.’ Her hands were clasped before her and I noticed that her arms, from the inner elbow to the wrist, were bandaged with strips of white cloth.

The sun was hot on my shoulders and back. My heart seemed to be beating too quickly.

‘You and I have much in common. You are searching for secrets. I looked for secrets once.’ She spoke quietly, as if talking to herself. ‘But in the end, the h’menob of the new religion said I was mad. Wisdom is often mistaken for madness. Is that not true?’

I did not speak.

‘Lift this stone and you will find secrets,’ she said. ‘I hid them there myself, after I sent the people away. You can find them. It is time for them to come to light. The cycle is turning.’

‘How did you send the people away?’ I asked.

The plaza shimmered in the sunlight and I stood alone. Zuhuy-kak had gone. The bird in the monte called again, asking a question that no living person could answer. I headed for camp, glancing over my shoulder only once.