I lay awake for a long time, listening to unfamiliar sounds: footsteps, insects, rustling leaves, the loud ticking of a clock inside the hut. It seemed strange to be able to lie still, not to worry about what would happen when I reached my destination. It seemed that I had spent the last few weeks in constant motion. Pacing up and down the long corridor of the hospital, waiting for the doctor’s verdict. Staring out the window of the limousine as my father’s funeral procession moved slowly to the cemetery. Wandering in my father’s house, confined by four white walls, aimless, unable to settle. Moving slowly, but always moving. Thinking about my mother, remembering my mother. She was shorter than I remembered. Her hair had more gray than I remembered.
The hammock rocked beneath me and I felt like I was still moving, traveling toward an unknown destination. I was just drifting off to sleep when Robin stumbled in and fumbled about in the dark. Finally, she was quiet. I slept.
Notes for City of Stones by Elizabeth Butler
Robin, one of my students, is a reasonably intelligent, well-educated, young woman. Yet she claims that she sees no reason for human sacrifice. Her attitude, when she speaks of the ancient Maya and their sacrifices to the gods, implies that we are civilized now, we have left that nonsense far behind.
Robin forgets, I think, that her own religion involved human sacrifice. She is a practicing Christian. She partakes of Holy Communion, the body and blood of Jesus Christ, the human son of God who died and rose from the dead to bring back the word of his Father. She believes in the Resurrection, but only as something that happened long ago in a distant land, far removed from her day-to-day life. She believes in God, the Father Almighty. On the other hand, if her next-door neighbor were to claim that God had spoken to him in a vision, she would think him eccentric and possibly dangerous. Her God is a distant patriarch who demands that she attend church and follow a set of ten rules, but he does not deign to pass along new rules through common people. She is accustomed to a God who keeps his distance.
The gods of the ancient Maya are closer and more demanding. At the turning of the katun, the time comes for fasting and drinking balche, for cleansing the sacred books, for dancing on stilts and burning incense. At that time, the people gather at the Sacred Well at Chichén Itzá, a city fifty miles from Dzibilchaltún. The well is a place of power, home of many gods. At the turning of the katun, priests fling jade ornaments, gold bells, copper rings, painted bowls, and incense into the Sacred Well.
With these gifts, they send messengers to the gods. If the messengers do not wish to visit the gods, they are sent – hurled over the edge by muscular priests who only wish to do them honor. The messengers fall, bright feathers fluttering in the sunlight, their voices smothered by the shouting of the crowd, the processional music, the chanting of the priests. Far below, they float, specks of silent color on the jade-green water.
At noon, when the disc of the sun fills the well with light, only one messenger floats on the water. The others are gone, taken down by the Chaacob to the submarine rooms beneath the water’s smooth surface. The priests draw out this survivor, who has returned to tell the message of the gods, bringing the prophecy for the coming year.
It is not a simple thing, this human sacrifice, any more than the crucifixion of Jesus Christ was a simple execution. The messengers who do not return are among the gods; the one who does return is the oracle, the interpreter for the gods.
The archaeologist Edward Thompson dredged human bones from the Sacred Well at Chichén Itzá. The bones that Thompson found belonged to messengers who failed in their duty.
5
Elizabeth
I tapped a cigarette out of the pack and watched the bright point of Barbara’s flashlight move across the plaza to the women’s hut. Barbara and Diane were shadows in the distance.
This daughter of mine was as cool as if she were encased in glass, shielded from the world by an invisible protective barrier. She was not unfriendly: during dinner she had smiled and joked with the others. But she seemed cautious, wary, and even when she removed her sunglasses, I could not begin to guess what she was thinking. I lit my cigarette, cupping my hand to protect the flame from the evening breeze, then shook the burning match to blow it out. Tony sat beside me, nursing a drink. I think it was his fourth.
In the corner of the plaza, not far from the table where the students played their interminable game of cards, a loincloth-clad Toltec priest was scraping remnants of flesh from the hide of a newly killed jaguar. A smoking torch cast red light on his bare back and shoulders; at his side, incense burned in a pottery vessel shaped like a jaguar. As he worked, he chanted incessantly, and his voice competed with the rock-and-roll tapes playing on Carlos’s cassette player.
‘Your daughter is a very nice young woman,’ Tony said. ‘I think she’ll fit right in.’
I said nothing. The priest chanted and the rock-and-roll band sang about love.
‘Did you have a nice chat when you took her around the site?’
‘Curious, aren’t you?’
‘Yes.’ He leaned back in his chair. The hand holding his glass of gin was propped up on one knee; the empty hand on the other. He was waiting. A moth was battering its head against the glass chimney of the lantern. I dimmed the light and moved it to the other end of the table, but the insect circled, found the lamp again, and continued its efforts to die.
‘I don’t understand what she wants from me,’ I said finally.
‘Didn’t you ask her that?’ Tony said.
‘I did. She said she wanted to dig up the past and see what was under the rubble.’
He nodded.
For a moment we listened to the slap of the cards, the low murmur of the students’ conversation, and the soft whir of the cassette player rewinding. The priest had stopped his wailing and I could hear the scrape of the obsidian knife against the hide. I realized that I was holding the burning cigarette, but not smoking. I took a long drag and exhaled slowly.
‘I don’t understand what she’s doing here,’ I said abruptly. ‘It’s all past history. I left her. Why should she look to me for comfort now?’
‘Is she looking to you for comfort?’
‘She’s looking for her mother. I’m nobody’s mother.’
‘Then she’ll figure that out,’ he said. ‘And then she’ll go. Is that what you want?’
I shrugged, unable to say what I wanted. ‘That would be fine,’ I said. ‘Just fine.’
‘All right,’ Tony said. ‘Maybe that will happen.’
We sat quietly for a while. The priest resumed his chanting, but the card game seemed to be winding down. Carlos had his arm around Maggie’s shoulders and the two of them were laughing a great deal. ‘She seems to have hit it off with Barbara,’ I said.
‘True. And having another person on survey isn’t a bad idea.’
‘I suppose.’ I frowned out at the darkness. ‘I wonder why she’s so wary. I suppose that’s Robert’s doing.’
‘Give the woman a chance, Liz,’ he said. ‘Just give her a chance.’
‘She seems bright enough,’ I said grudgingly.
‘That’s something.’
‘All right,’ I said. ‘It was brave of her to come down here by herself. Is that what you’re waiting for?’
He shrugged. ‘I’m not waiting for anything. I was just thinking that arriving unannounced seemed like the sort of thing that you would have done in her position.’
‘I suppose you’re right,’ I admitted reluctantly.
‘I think I am.’
Carlos reached over to the tape player and the music clicked off. Carlos and Maggie headed off, arm in arm, on the path to the cenote, talking in loud whispers. John and Robin headed toward their huts. Tony poured himself one more drink. ‘You ever going to sleep?’ he asked.