The Falling Woman (24 page)

"The curandera, the old woman you met, thinks that you are a witch," she said. "You're in good company: she thinks that I'm a witch too. She has more reason to suspect me. I mutter to myself and talk to people who aren't there. I wander around at dusk and dawn, when the spirits are out." She was watching me, her face fixed in a strange smile. "Surely you've noticed these things."

I hunched my shoulders forward. "I didn't think anything of it. I just figured you were working on your book."

"In the United States, people interpret these things as eccentricity or—if taken to an extreme—madness,"

my mother said mildly. "Here, they are the mark of a witch. Of the two interpretations, I have to admit I prefer the second. A witch has some power. A madwoman is just a nut." She tilted her head to one side, considering me. "What do you think?" I shrugged, unable to speak.

"Suppose 1 told you that I get up early to chat with the spirits. I see the past—I described it to you, remember? What would you think then? Would you go to the Caribbean coast and meet me there?"

"You think that I should leave because an old woman thinks I'm a witch?"

"I think you should leave because I want you to leave. I want you to go away—to Isla Mujeres, to Los Angeles, anywhere you want."

I found myself standing, my hands in fists. "You can't tell me what to do."

My mother remained as she was, holding the cigarette loosely in one hand, the other hand relaxed in her lap. "That's true. I gave up that right long ago. I am only saying what I want. What you choose to do is your responsibility." She stubbed the cigarette out in the ashtray, glancing at my face as she did so, a sidelong considering look.

"I won't let you run away again," I said, looking down on the strange woman who was my mother.

She wet her lips and shook her head slowly. "I just want you to be careful."

I left, slipping through the door without saying good-bye. I never did tell her about the old woman in the monte.

The lantern burned dimly in front of Tony's hut. Tony sat in a lawn chair, smoking his pipe and sipping a gin and tonic with no ice. He was dressed in a bathrobe and slippers.

"I'd offer you a cold drink," he said when I sat down in the other chair, "but the gin is warm and we packed all the ice around Philippe's foot yesterday, then forgot to buy more. Want a warm one?"

I shook my head. I could feel tears stinging behind my eyes and I did not want to let them go.

"What's wrong?" He put his hand on my arm. "Are you all right?"

"Nothing's wrong." I managed a very weak smile. "Nothing. I just ..." I shrugged. I had no idea what to say.

He kept his hand on my arm and he watched me with concern. I had to say something.

"Have you ever ..." I began shakily, "have you ever had your life fall apart underneath you? Where suddenly everything and everyone that you trusted went away? It's as if the ground moved out from under you, as if the world shifted and you didn't belong anymore." My voice was shaking and I crossed my arms as if to keep warm. My thoughts weren't clear—I grasped at fleeting images: Brian's blue eyes studying my face when he told me our affair was over; my father's coffin being lowered into the ground; the family portrait on the desk of my boss—to avoid meeting his eyes, I kept glancing at that picture when I told him I was quitting. And from some other time, I could hear my father's voice saying that my mother was gone.

She had left us. Bits and pieces, scraps and tatters. A jumble and a mess. I closed my eyes and said,

"You get through it and you think that everything's fine again. But you keep thinking that it will happen again. You watch. You see little signs that suggest that things are going on under the surface of things. And you don't know what they are. Someone is angry, and you know that they will vanish forever. Everything is too close to the surface."

I shook my head. The words had come out suddenly. I had not intended to say all this. "I don't know how to make it all right again," I said. "I don't know how I can stop feeling like this. It's crazy, crazy ..." That was the other part of it. Normal people did not feel like this. I kept a barrier between myself and the darkness; that was what kept me sane. If that barrier were breached, I knew the world would be swept away in a great bloody flood of emotions. I knew it. Normal people are not like that.

My breathing was coming back under my control. I was bottling up the feelings, pushing them back behind the barrier. I made myself unclench my fists, use my open hands to push back my hair. I almost smiled at him. "Sometimes, you get more of an answer than you bargain for.''

"That's all right," he said. "Sounds like you'd better have that drink." He went into his hut and I heard the sound of liquid pouring from a bottle. He gave me a glass of warm gin and flat tonic water, then returned to his seat. "Can you tell me what set this off?"

I took a deep breath. "Liz wants me to leave the dig. She told me to go away." I could feel my face reddening and I stopped for a moment. "I don't want to go."

He frowned. "That's strange. I thought you were getting along."

"I thought so."

"What did she say?"

"She said she thought I shouldn't waste my vacation here."

"I can see her point, I suppose. Many people would agree."

"She said ..." I hesitated. Somehow, I did not want to tell Tony what my mother had said about being a witch. "The curandera, that old woman, told her that I should go,"

Tony leaned back in his chair, shaking his head. "I'll talk to her. Until then, don't push her. It doesn't pay to push Liz. If you try, she shuts up like a clam. I just wait and sometimes she tells me. Sometimes she doesn't." He shrugged. "You and your mother are both very stubborn women."

"Leave me out of this."

"If you aren't stubborn, then why aren't you packing your bags and heading out of this place? If she doesn't want you here, why stay?" He took his pipe from his mouth and inspected the ashes in the bowl. He held a match to them and puffed until they lit. Then he looked at me. "Stubborn."

"I'm worried about Liz," I said then.

"Why's that?"

"She talks to herself."

"She's been doing that for years."

"She's always up at dawn. I don't think she sleeps well."

"She's been doing that for years too. Tell me something new." He waited, puffing on his pipe.

I didn't like the way my voice sounded, kind of thin and stretched out and weak. "I think ... Do you think she's crazy?''

"I think we're all crazy, living out here with the bugs and the dirt, drinking warm gin, and digging up things that most people don't give a damn about. Normal is what most people do. None of us is normal, so we must be crazy."

"I mean really crazy."

He poked at the ashes in the pipe bowl with a small stick. "I would hesitate to call anyone really crazy."

There was a slight edge in his voice now. "I'd say your mother was no crazier than she has been for years."

He studied my face. "What do you want to do about it? Put her under a doctor's care? That's what your father tried."

"Tony, I'm sorry. I'm just ... I'm worried. I don't know what to do."

"I told you what to do last week," he said. "Give her time. Don't go rushing to conclusions. Take it slow.

And I just told you again. Let me talk to her."

"But she wants me to leave."

"And you said you wouldn't. What else did she say?"

"She said to be careful."

"Always good advice. So stay if you want, but be careful. And admit that you're stubborn. It's not such a bad trait to have. I'll talk to her about this business of making you leave. See what she has to say."

I was watching my hands. They were in fists in my lap. I heard Tony move and one of his hands closed over one of mine. "Take it slow," he rumbled. "I'm still your friend."

I never did tell him about the old woman in the monte.

Chapter Seventeen: Elizabeth

A
t 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?"