But this wasn’t the sort of thing Edward could be expected to know. He launched into a defence of the food, the best he’d had in Mexico, he said. Sarah refused to give him the consolation of her agreement. She found the restaurant even more depressing than it should have been, especially the creche. It was painful, like a cripple trying to walk, one of the last spastic gestures of a religion no one, surely, could believe in much longer.
Another group of tourists was coming up the path behind her, Americans by the sound of them. The guide was Mexican, though. He scrambled up onto the altar, preparing to give his spiel.
“Don’t go too near the edge, now.”
“Who me, I’m afraid of heights. What d’you see down there?”
“Water, what am I supposed to see?”
The guide clapped his hands for attention. Sarah only half-listened: she didn’t really want to know anything more about it.
“Before, people said they threw nothing but virgins in here,” the guide began. “How they could tell that, I do not know. It is always hard to tell.” He waited for the expected laughter, which came. “But this is not true. Soon, I will tell you how we have found this out. Here we have the altar to the rain god Tlaloc…”
Two women sat down near Sarah. They were both wearing cotton slacks, high-heeled sandals and wide-brimmed straw hats.
“You go up the big one?”
“Not on your life. I made Alf go up, I took a picture of him at the top.”
“What beats me is why they built all those things in the first place.”
“It was their religion, that’s what he said.”
“Well, at least it would keep people busy.”
“Solve the unemployment problem.” They both laughed.
“How many more of these ruins is he gonna make us walk around?”
“Beats me. I’m about ruined out. I’d rather go back and sit on the bus.”
“I’d rather go shopping. Not that there’s much to buy.”
Sarah, listening, suddenly felt indignant. Did they have no respect? The sentiments weren’t that far from her own of a moment ago, but to hear them from these women, one of whom had a handbag decorated with tasteless straw flowers, made her want to defend the well.
“Nature is very definitely calling,” said the woman with the handbag. “I couldn’t get in before, there was such a lineup.”
“Take a Kleenex,” the other woman said. “There’s no paper. Not only that, you just about have to wade in. There’s water all over the floor.”
“Maybe I’ll just duck into the bushes,” the first woman said.
Edward stood up and massaged his left leg, which had gone to sleep. It was time to go back. If he stayed away too long, Sarah would be querulous, despite the fact that it was she herself who had sent him off on this fool’s expedition.
He started to walk back along the path. But then there was a flash of orange, at the corner of his eye. Edward swivelled and raised his binoculars. They were there when you least expected it. It was an oriole, partly hidden behind the leaves; he could see the breast, bright orange, and the dark barred wing. He wanted it to be a Hooded Oriole, he had not yet seen one. He talked to it silently, begging it to come out into the open. It was strange the way birds were completely magic for him the first time only, when he had never seen them before. But there were hundreds of kinds he would never see; no matter how many he saw there would always be one more. Perhaps this was why he kept looking. The bird was hopping further away from him, into the foliage. Come back, he called to it wordlessly, but it was gone.
Edward was suddenly happy. Maybe Sarah hadn’t been lying to him after all, maybe she had really seen this bird. Even if she hadn’t, it had come anyway, in answer to his need for it. Edward felt he was allowed to see birds only when they wanted him to, as if they had something to tell him, a secret, a message. The Aztecs thought hummingbirds were the souls of dead warriors, but why not all birds, why just warriors? Or perhaps they were the souls of the unborn, as some believed. “A jewel, a precious feather,” they called an unborn baby, according to The Daily Life of the Aztecs. Quetzal, that was feather.
“This is the bird I want to see,” Sarah said when they were looking through The Birds of Mexico before coming down.
“The Resplendent Quetzal,” Edward said. It was a green and red bird with spectacular iridescent blue tail plumes. He explained to her that Quetzal Bird meant Feather Bird. “I don’t think we’re likely to see it,” he said. He looked up the habitat. “ ‘Cloud forests.’ I don’t think we’ll be in any cloud forests.”
“Well, that’s the one I want,” Sarah said. “That’s the only one I want.”
Sarah was always very determined about what she wanted and what she didn’t want. If there wasn’t anything on a restaurant menu that appealed to her, she would refuse to order anything; or she would permit him to order for her and then pick around the edges, as she had last night. It was no use telling her that this was the best meal they’d had since coming. She never lost her temper or her self-possession, but she was stubborn. Who but Sarah for instance would have insisted on bringing a collapsible umbrella to Mexico in the dry season? He’d argued and argued, pointing out its uselessness and the extra weight, but she’d brought it anyway. And then yesterday afternoon it had rained, a real cloudburst. Everyone else had run for shelter, huddling against walls and inside the temple doorways, but Sarah had put up her umbrella and stood under it, smugly. This had infuriated him. Even when she was wrong, she always managed, somehow, to be right. If only just once she would admit… what? That she could make mistakes. This was what really disturbed him: her assumption of infallibility.
And he knew that when the baby had died she had blamed it on him. He still didn’t know why. Perhaps it was because he’d gone out for cigarettes, not expecting it to be born so soon. He wasn’t there when she was told; she’d had to take the news alone.
“It was nobody’s fault,” he told her repeatedly. “Not the doctor’s, not yours. The cord was twisted.”
“I know,” she said, and she had never accused him; nevertheless he could feel the reproach, hanging around her like a fog. As if there was anything he could have done.
“I wanted it as much as you did,” he told her. And this was true. He hadn’t thought of marrying Sarah at all, he’d never mentioned it because it had never occurred to him she would agree, until she told him she was pregnant. Up until that time, she had been the one in control; he was sure he was just an amusement for her. But the marriage hadn’t been her suggestion, it had been his. He’d dropped out of Theology, he’d taken his public-school teaching certificate that summer in order to support them. Every evening he had massaged her belly, feeling the child move, touching it through her skin. To him it was a sacred thing, and he included her in his worship. In the sixth month, when she had taken to lying on her back, she had begun to snore, and he would lie awake at night listening to these gentle snores, white and silver they seemed to him, almost songs, mysterious talismans… Unfortunately Sarah had retained this habit, but he no longer felt the same way about it.
When the child had died, he was the one who had cried, not Sarah. She had never cried. She got up and walked around almost immediately, she wanted to get out of the hospital as quickly as possible. The baby clothes she’d been buying disappeared from the apartment; he never found out what she’d done with them, he’d been afraid to ask.
Since that time he’d come to wonder why they were still married. It was illogical. If they’d married because of the child and there was no child, and there continued to be no child, why didn’t they separate? But he wasn’t sure he wanted this. Maybe he was still hoping something would happen, there would be another child. But there was no use demanding it. They came when they wanted to, not when you wanted them to. They came when you least expected it. A jewel, a precious feather.