The Catholic church bells continued to toll, but in the eyes of the Indians this was merely another external form to be adopted and mysteriously, indefinably mocked. On feast days they mixed totem poles and saint’s statues, Catholic incense and Indian perfumes, the Catholic wafer and Mayan magic foods. They enjoyed the chanting, the organ and candlelight, the lace and brocades; they played with pictures of the saints and at the same time with Indian bone necklaces.
The silence of the ancient city was so noticeable and palpable that it disturbed Lillian. She did not know at first what caused it. It hung over her head like suspense itself, as menacing as the unfamiliar noises in the jungle she had crossed on the way.
She wondered what attracted Michael to living here among ruins. It was a city rendered into poetry by its recession into the past, as cities are rendered into poetry by the painters because of the elements left out, allowing each spectator to fill in the spaces for himself. The missing elements of the half-empty canvas were important because they were the only spaces in which human imagination could draw its own inferences, its own architecture from its private myths, its streets and personages from a private world.
A city in ruins, as this ancient city was, was more powerful and evocative because it had to be constructed anew by each person, therefore enhanced into illimitable beauty, never destroyed or obscured by the realism of the present, never rendered familiar and forced to expose its flaws.
To gain such altitude it was necessary to learn from the artist how to overlook, leave out, the details which weighed down the imagination and caused crash landings.
Even the prisons, where one knew that scenes of horror had taken place, acquired in the sun, under streams of ivy gently bleached by time, a serenity, a passivity, a transmutation into resignation which included forgiveness of man’s crimes against man. In time man will forgive even the utmost cruelty merely because the sacred personal value of each man is lost when the father, the mother, son or daughter, brother or sister, wife of this man have ceased to exist—the ones who gave his life its importance, its irreplaceable quality. Time, powerless to love one man, promptly effaces him. His sorrows, torments, and death recede into impersonal history, or evaporate into these poetic moments which the tourists come to seek, sitting on broken columns, or focusing their cameras on empty ransacked tombs, none of them knowing they are learning among ruins and echoes to devaluate the importance of one man, and to prepare themselves for their own disappearance.
The ancient city gave Lillian a constriction of the heart. She was not given to such journeys into the past. To her it seemed like a city mourning its dead, even though it could not remember those it mourned. She saw it as the ruins of Chirico’s paintings and asked Michaeclass="underline" “But why the heavy silence?”
“There’s no wind here,” said Michael.
It was true. The windlessness gave it the static beauty of a painting.
But there was another reason for the silence, which she discovered only in the afternoon. She was taking a sunbath on the terrace, alone.
The sun was so penetrating that it drugged her. She fell asleep and had a dream. A large vulture was flying above the terrace, circling over her, and then it swooped downward and she felt its beak on her shoulder. She awakened screaming, sat up, and saw that she had not been dreaming, for a vulture had marked her shoulder and was flying away slowly, heavily.
Wherever vultures settled they killed the singing birds. The absence of singing birds, as well as of the wind, was the cause of that petrified silence.
She began to dislike the ancient city. The volcano began its menacing upward sweep as neat as the edge of the city, and rose so steeply and so high that its tip was hidden in the clouds. “I have been up there,” said Michael. “I looked down into its gaping top and saw the earth’s insides moldering.”
Michael said on Sunday: “I wish you would spend all your free days here, every week.”
That evening he and Lillian, and other guests, were sitting in the patio when suddenly there appeared in the sky what seemed at first like a flying comet, which then burst high in the air into a shower of sparks and detonations.
Lillian thought: “It’s the volcano!”
They ran to the outside windows. A crowd of young men, carefully dressed in dark suits and gleaming white shirts, stood talking and laughing. Fireworks illuminated their dark, smooth faces. The marimbas played like a concert of children’s pianos, small light notes so gay that they seemed the laughter of the instrument.
The fireworks were built in the shape of tall trees, and designed to go off in tiers, branch by branch. From the tips of the gold and red branches hung planets, flowers, wheels gyrating and then igniting, all propelled into space bursting, splintering, falling as if the sun and the moon and the stars themselves had been pierced open and had spilled their jewels of lights, particles of delight.
Some of the flowers spilled their pollen of gold, the planets flew into space, discarding ashes, the skeletons of their bodies. But some of the chariot wheels, gyrating wildly, spurred by each explosion of their gold spokes, wheeled themselves into space and never returned in any form, whether gold showers or ashes.
When the sparkles fell like a rain of gold, the children rushed to place themselves under them, as if the bath of gold would transform their ragged clothes and lives into light.
Beside Lillian, Michael took no pleasure in the spectacle. She saw him watching the students with an expression which had the cold glitter of hunger, not emotion. Almost the cold glitter of the hunter taking aim before killing.
“This is a fiesta for men only, Lillian. The men here love each other openly. See, there, they are holding hands.”
Lillian translated this into: He wants it to be thus, this is the way he wants it to be.
“They like to be alone, among men. They enjoy being without women.” He looked at her this time with malice, as if to observe the effect of his words on her.
“I lived in Mexico as a child, Michael. The women are kept away from the street, from cafes, they are kept at home. But it does not mean what you believe…”
They watched the young men so neatly dressed, standing in the street with their faces turned toward the fireworks. Then they noticed that across the street from Michael’s house one of the windows was brightly lit and a very young girl dresed in white stood behind the iron railing. Behind her the room was full of people, and the marimbas were playing.
Then there was a silence. One of the young students moved forward, stood under the young girl’s window with his guitar and sang a ballad praising her eyes, smile, and voice.
She answered him in a clear, light voice, accepting the compliment. The young student praised her again and begged admittance to her home.
She answered him in a clear, light voice, accepting this compliment too, smiled at him, but did not invite him in. This meant that his ballad was not considered artful enough.
This was their yearly poetry tournament, at which only excellence in verse counted. It was the bad poets who were left outside to dance among themselves!