* * *
Δ I was not far behind you when you left your car and began the slow walk up the stone path that leads very steeply from the base of the pyramid to the Spanish chapel on its top. The pyramid does not look like a pyramid; from a distance it is simply a high rounded hill flattened off at the summit. It is covered with earth and shaggy pines grow thick and the terraces under which the stone mass lies have almost vanished. Actually there are seven pyramids, they are nested inside each other, the first is smallest and is covered by the second, which is covered by the third, until the seventh is reached, and it is covered by earth. The Great Pyramid of Cholula. The Great Cue. Every cycle of fifty-two years a new pyramid was raised on the base of the old one, for the end of a cycle required, as homage to the arrival of the new, that the old should disappear.
You walked slowly up the slope and reached the summit. A flat, attractive landscape lay around you. The great circle of the valley locked between the cardinal points of snowy Popocatepetl and Iztaccihuatl in the west, the distant white star of Pico de Orizaba to the north, the enormous foothills of Malinche to the east, the humped shoulders of the Sierra Madre to the south. A level valley dotted with round-crowned trees and green squares and domes of glazed tile, hundreds of churches that glistened in the sun.
You reached the top of the pyramid out of breath. A belvedere, flat, with a balustrade, surrounds the chapel, which is walled with yellow stucco. It was Spain’s final reply to the underground world of stone and sacred monsters that lies far below the little church beneath four centuries’ accretion of earth. You entered the shrine. Four slender cypresses stand in the atrium. At the end of the nave, beneath a glass bell, is the Virgen de los Remedios, a diminutive doll in a bulky skirt, standing on a half-moon that looks like the horns of a bull. The four of you examined the image briefly and then went back outside. Isabel was the first to notice the nineteenth-century red and yellow brick buildings below you, the neoclassic portico, the stone balustrades and high fences behind which were a series of park-like yards with narrow gravel paths and palm trees and benches. Some of the buildings had barred doors and windows. Men were walking across the lawns and along the paths. Men made small by your height above them. Men with shaved heads or cropped heads, wearing gray pants and gray shirts, many of them barefoot. They walked with their heads down, staring at the ground, or looking up at the sky, sometimes accompanied by men in white. They sat in twos and threes on the stone benches, hiding their ears or eyes with their hands, scratching their ribs or their shaved heads, rubbing their chins. Some sat with open mouths and merely stared. Some crouched on the grass with their knees supporting their faces, like squatting monkeys. Others sat with their feet drawn up to their mouths.
“Who are they?” said Isabel. “Who are they?”
“They’re mental patients,” said Javier. “Lunatics. This is the Cholula insane asylum.”
Pigeons flew above the heads of the men below. One patient had a transistor radio turned to the top of its volume. Their voices could not be heard but the sound of the radio floated up clearly as the patient moved the tuning knob and finally found a station he liked. A corrido from the north, its words carried up to you, Valentín como era hombre de nada les dió la razón … A group seemed to form around the radio. But they weren’t really interested; they listened without curiosity for a moment and then drifted away. One of them was dragging the rope belt of a bathrobe along the path. The music rose: Estas son las mañanitas de un hombre valiente que fue Valentín. You, Elizabeth, rested your elbows on the yellow-painted balustrade. Now lunch was being served. A group of suntanned men in gray sat on a bench and one of them had a nested column of kettles which he set down one by one. He separated a stack of bowls and began to pass them to his companions. But it was not really lunch. They knew, and you knew, that the bowls and kettles were empty. The man shook his arms. He must have said something but his voice did not carry to you. He made a gesture with his closed fist, jabbing the thumb down toward the ground like Nero commanding gladiators to die.
“He is asking for salt,” guessed Javier, who as a child had not understood gestures. He looked at Franz. But Franz’s face was empty, or at most merely showed that seriousness some of us adopt when we are witnessing something that is generally supposed to be of interest, even of scientific interest.
Look at them, Dragoness. Observe them from the distance. Don’t identify with them, don’t go near them. And come into my arms, Betele, hold me, don’t let me go out. Turn the lights on. The lights, please. You are scaring me. Don’t be scaring me, turn the lights on and …
One of the patients suddenly dropped his pants. Another knelt behind him and a white-jacketed attendant ran to separate them. A bell was heard. Madre mía de Guadalupe … A doctor moved among them as another attendant read a list aloud. Por tu religión me van a matar … “Because of your religion they are going to kill me…”
Javier looked at Franz and Franz looked back at him.
* * *
Δ The last day he had found himself in an abandoned barn that was empty of everything, where there was nothing except shadows to hide behind. He told himself that shadows alone could conceal him. Seated on the floor of the wooden loft with his legs spread, he told himself that it was precisely the absence of grain, fodder, animals, that assured he would not be found. Not even horseshoes were left. There was only a leather bellows beside a cold forge, a few pieces of the iron that once had been worked here. No hammer, no nails. He leaned forward and began to pick up bits of straw from between the cracks of the boards. Nothing was real to him in that moment except his hunger. Because of his hunger he would have liked to have been outside in the fields: the sun is brother of abundance. And today he would not ask for much. A very modest life, simple, lacking ambition, above all undisturbed. That vision came back to him again and again. A little life of quiet comfort at his childhood home in Prague with his parents, those quiet and comfortable Sudeten Germans who, he realized now, only now, had merely wanted to defend their comfort, to find order and stability, and had believed that that was all they had wanted. He crawled through the darkness of the barn loft picking up whatever he could find and hoarding it in his fist. And on his hands and knees, wearing a stained torn uniform and mud-caked boots, he could laugh and see that what his parents had wanted to preserve had now been destroyed forever with his parents’ aid. His fist was full of bits of straw. He stopped laughing. He thought of his parents and saw them clearly, a quiet couple who had passed from adolescence into old age as if the years between had not existed, unable to understand the time of inflation, unable to comprehend the shifts in national boundaries and fortune, the violence and the killing; who had comforted themselves in the early days of Hitler by saying, “He studied architecture, he is one of our class,” and later, “He has given us the Autobahn and established order,” and finally, “Because of him, Germans can be proud again.” He felt in his tunic pocket for a scrap of wrinkled brown paper. Some sort of document. He emptied the straw into the paper and rolled a makeshift cigarette. He felt in his pants pockets for his matches, matches that had resisted dampness, fire, mud; as always, excellent manufacture, even under these conditions. Efficiency. He smoked slowly, coughing repeatedly. The substitute tobacco eased his hunger pangs a little, let him think of something besides food. He rubbed his face with his free hand and tried to remember himself as he was. His skin lay thin against his bones, tight across his forehead, loose around his nostrils and mouth; he had a seven days’ beard. He would have liked to sleep. He raised his head and leaned forward away from the wall. He put his hand to his empty holster. That morning he had thrown his pistol into a river after firing his last cartridge.