‘That’s all right,’ she said and pointed to the shelf that held a metal box painted with a bright red cross. ‘Wash those cuts with peroxide. You’ve got to take care of yourself out here.’
Half of the cool interior was crowded with supplies and equipment: a bundle of burlap sacks bound with twine; a stack of folded cardboard boxes; a box filled with folded paper bags; another box filled with a jumble of paper bags that had been marked with numbers and letters.
I was swabbing my cuts when my mother spoke again. ‘I wanted to apologize for taking Carlos off survey.’
‘That’s all right.’
‘I’m not very good at dealing with people.’
I looked up at her. Her face was unnaturally still; her hands held a pencil that she rolled between her fingers, a senseless incessant motion.
‘It really is all right,’ I said, with sincerity this time. ‘It was just a mistake. It’s OK.’
She nodded, set the pencil down on her desk, and smiled tentatively. ‘Have you seen the latest find?’ She gestured toward the stone head that stared from the shadows at the far end of the hut.
Leaving the first-aid kit open on the shelf, I went to examine the head more closely. It lay on a burlap wrapping and stared up at the ceiling. I did not like the look of the face. It sneered at me, the lips drawn back, the eyes wide open and hostile.
I squatted beside the face and laid my hand on the elaborately carved headdress. It was cool to the touch. With one finger, I traced the crack that ran through the face. For no particular reason, I shivered.
‘They brought her down from the site today,’ my mother said from behind me. ‘I’m a little surprised she survived the trip with that crack.’
‘Was it part of a sculpture?’
‘More likely part of a building facade. It’s made of limestone stucco,’ my mother said.
I nodded and sat back on my heels. ‘Who was she?’
My mother shrugged. ‘Hard to say. There has been evidence, here and there, of a few women rulers. But I think more likely she was a priestess. Out on the Caribbean coast – on Cozumel and Isla Mujeres – there were shrines for a goddess named Ix Chebel Yax, goddess of the moon. I would like to think that the structure we’re excavating was a temple for the goddess. If it is, it’s the first evidence of such a cult on this coast.’ She squatted on her heels beside me and ran a finger along the spiral on the cheek. ‘Ritual tattooing,’ she said softly. ‘Very common among priests and nobility.’ She touched a long barbed needle that was woven with the shells into the woman’s hair. ‘Stingray spine,’ she said. ‘Usually used in bloodletting ceremonies. The devout would run spines or needles through their earlobes or tongues and offer the blood to the gods.’
‘Seems like a cruel way to live. Human sacrifice, offering blood to the gods.’
She sat back on her heels. ‘Ah, now you are starting to sound as provincial as Robin. Don’t tell me that you’re afraid of the bones in the cenote too?’
I shrugged. ‘I didn’t say that. It just seems like a cruel way to live.’
‘People always talk about human sacrifice as if it were an unusual and aberrant activity,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘Over the centuries, it’s really been fairly common in a number of societies. Think about it. There’re a number of religions in the United States whose worship centers on a particular human sacrifice.’ She glanced at me.
‘Jesus Christ on the cross,’ I said slowly.
‘Certainly. Thousands of people consume Christ’s body and blood each Sunday.’
‘That’s different.’
She shrugged. ‘Not really. Christ died long ago in a faraway place, and that might make it seem different. His worshipers claimed he was God incarnate, but the Aztecs claimed the same for the god-king they sacrificed. It happened only once, and that speaks for moderation on the part of the Christians, but that’s not a fundamental difference, just one of degree.’ She smiled at me, obviously enjoying herself. ‘Besides, I suspect that people overestimate the number of human sacrifices made by the Maya. One sometimes gets the impression that Mayan priests spent most of their time beating their fellows over the head and tossing them willy-nilly into the nearest well. And that’s not so. It was a rare and important occasion. And you must be careful about applying your standards to another culture. They have rules of their own. This woman may have participated in human sacrifices – but by her standards, that was good. The sacrificial victims went to a sort of paradise, and all was well.’
She stood up and went to her desk for a cigarette. She tapped it out of the pack and held it without lighting it, still looking at me. ‘The fundamental bloodiness of the act is the same – whether it’s the Roman soldiers hammering the nails into Christ’s hands or the h’menob slicing out the heart of a captive soldier. Blood has a power to it, a strength and a magic.’ She had rolled up the long sleeves of her shirt and I could see the scars on the pale skin of her wrists. She lit the cigarette, inhaled deeply, and blew out a cloud of smoke. Then she grinned at me. ‘Sorry. I get carried away sometimes. Occupational hazard of being a professor.’
‘You sound almost like you prefer the Maya to the Christians.’
She laughed. ‘Understand them better, anyway.’ She put her cigarette in a jar top that served as an ashtray and walked over to the first-aid kit. ‘Maybe you should let me bandage those cuts,’ she said, and I heard no more about the ancient Maya that afternoon.
The daily rigors of survey left me tired, but the restlessness that had kept me pacing to and fro in my father’s house had not deserted me. Here, I had more room to pace. When I woke in the morning before the blast of the truck horn or when I was restless after dinner, I went walking – past the kitchen where the air was always touched with woodsmoke, past the cenote and out to the tomb site, past the arch of the Spanish chapel and out to the Temple of the Seven Dolls, where I could look down on the green-brown trees of the monte. Often, I met my mother on these walks. I found her by the Spanish chapel, sitting on a fragment of wall and staring out toward the Temple of the Seven Dolls. I found her alone by the cenote, dangling her legs over the water and watching the birds swoop low over the surface. I met her by the tomb site, muttering to herself as she inspected the excavation. When we met, she seemed genuinely glad to see me.
The air was cooler at dawn and dusk, and my mother seemed slower, more contemplative. We walked together when we met. I told her little about myself – life in Los Angeles seemed distant and unimportant, a faded snapshot where the colors were muted and the figures blurred. My mother’s world was painted in vivid colors with crisp lines and edges. As we walked together, she talked slowly and carefully, as if she pieced together the ideas as she spoke them, groping for the next fragment and slipping it in place. Her sentences had the feel of written text – scripted thoughtfully, but as yet unedited.
She told me about the Maya and their gods. ‘For each yield that the Maya took from the monte, a return was due the gods. A turkey, a bowl of balche beer, a jicara of atole, a kind of corn gruel sweetened with wild honey. The offering to the gods was given freely in a spirit of goodwill. Wise men did not haggle with the gods. A mean man who gave grudgingly would suffer bad health, his crops would fail. The Maya recognized that what they made, they made with the permission and protection of the gods. It was only temporarily theirs. In the end, it belonged to the gods. Our society tends to regard the monte, the wilderness, as an enemy. Christians battled and subdued the wilderness. The Maya have a much saner way of looking at the world, I think.’
She was a strange woman, my mother. When I was fifteen and she came to visit my father’s house at Christmastime, I recognized that she did not belong there. But I did not realize then that she did not really belong anywhere. She walked with me, but she did not belong in the world I knew. She did not look at me as we walked together. She was always staring off into the monte, peering into the mounds as if something fascinating were out there.