The Falling Woman

Notes for City of Stones by Elizabeth Butler

A thousand years ago, centuries before the Spanish conquistadors came, the Maya abandoned their ceremonial centers. After about AD 900, they built no more temples, carved no more stelae, the stone monuments etched with glyphs commemorating important events. They fled from the ceremonial centers into the jungle.

Why? No one knows, but everyone is willing to speculate. Every archaeologist has a theory. Some talk of famine caused by overpopulation and years of intensive agriculture. Some claim there was a catastrophe: an earthquake, a drought, or a plague. Some blame the invasion of the Toltecs, a militaristic group from the Valley of Mexico, and still others suggest that the peasant class rebelled, rising up to overthrow the elite class.

I enjoy pointing out the holes in all the theories. I admit – freely and honestly – that I have no idea why the Maya left their cities and scattered far and wide in the monte. My favorite theory is one that a withered Mayan holy man who lived near Chichén Itzá told me over a bottle of aguardiente. ‘The gods said that the people must leave,’ he told me. ‘And so the people left.’

Sometimes, I dream of an abandoned city. I dream that each day the sun shines on the walls, fading the bright paints that color the stucco, cracking the plaster that covers the stone. When the evening wind blows, it tatters the cloth that once closed the rooms off from the outside world, carrying leaves and dust in through the open doorways. When the rains come, they flow down the stone steps, knocking loose fragments of stucco, watering the small plants that have taken hold in the cracks. Deer graze on the new grass that sprouts in the courtyard. Mice feast on maize, forgotten in underground chambers, spilled by peasants in the haste of their departure. The mice, rodents of short memories, do not fear the return of the inhabitants. In a temple room, a jaguar makes her home, bearing kittens beneath a statue of the Chaac amid a clutter of windblown leaves.

Sometimes, I dream of quakes – the earth trembling as if it shivered in the cold. The wood beams that support the roofs crack and the thick walls shift so that one stone no longer rests on the other just so. The walls tumble down.

In my dreams, the sun, the face of Ah Kinchil, the supreme god, shines on the temples of the Maya. Small trees reach up to the sun from the cracks between the stones. The rain falls and runs in a helter-skelter course amid blocks that twist this way and that. Birds sing in the trees, and owls hunt here by night, feeding on the arrogant mice that have come to regard this place as home.

Sometimes, very rarely, I dream of a thin man in the white pants of the Yucatecán peasant or a woman in a clean white huipil, the embroidered dress of the peasant woman. The man or woman comes quietly to the ruins, cautious lest the gods of the ancestors fail to approve of the visit. The people who return are more fearful than the mice: the people remember the past and know its power. Candlelight chases back the shadows for a time. The visitor burns incense, mutters propitiations and prayers, sacrifices a turkey and leaves it for the gods, then slips away into the night. The jaguar and her kittens eat the turkey, and the shadows return to the ruins.

The city I dream is not always the same. Sometimes it is Uxmal, and I watch swallows build nests in the elaborately carved facades. Sometimes it is Tulúm, and I listen to waves crash below the House of the Cenote and hear the humming of bees as they build a nest in the guard tower on the northern corner of the city wall. Sometimes it is Cobá, and I watch the trees take root amid the stones of the ball court, shoving carved blocks aside. Spanish moss sways on the branches, and pajaritos, laughing birds, fly in the branches. The city that I dream changes, but the slow decay is always there. The shadows linger.

I do not know why the Maya left. I only know that the shadows stayed behind.