‘Shall I go talk to the commissioner of highways?’ I said. ‘I’ll tell him that we need those men. I’m sure I could convince him.’
Salvador took a drag on his cigarette, leaned back in his chair, and folded his arms. Salvador had been working on excavations since he was a teenager in Piste helping with the restoration of Chichén Itzá. He was a good foreman, an intelligent man who was respectful of his employers, and he did not like to tell me I was wrong. He stared past me.
I glanced at Tony. ‘I think that means no.’
Tony grinned. Anthony Baker, my co-director on the excavation, was older than I was by just a few years. We had met nearly thirty years before at a Hopi dig in Arizona. He had been an affable, easygoing young man. He was still easygoing. His eyes were a startling shade of blue. His curly hair – once blond, now white – was sparse where it had been lush. His face was thin, grown thinner over the years, and sunburned as always. Each season he burned and peeled and burned again, despite all his efforts to block the sun. His voice was low and gravelly, a soft rough whiskey voice with a deep rumble in the throat, like the voice of a talking bear in a fairy tale.
‘I’d guess you were right,’ he said to me.
‘That’s too bad,’ I said. ‘I was rather looking forward to barging into the commissioner’s office. I can be rude to young men.’ I sipped my coffee. ‘It’s one of the few compensations for growing old.’
Salvador took another long drag on his cigarette. ‘I will talk to my cousin,’ he said at last. ‘My cousin will talk to the commissioner. He will reason with the commissioner.’ He glanced at me but did not unfold his arms. ‘It will cost some money.’
I nodded. ‘We budgeted for that.’
‘Good.’
‘If it doesn’t work, I can always go negotiate with the man,’ I said.
Salvador dropped the stub of his cigarette to the ground and crushed it out with a sandaled foot. No comment. Tony poured another shot of aguardiente into each cup.
The sun was setting. The hollow wailing of conch shell trumpets blown by Mayan priests rose over the trilling of the crickets and echoed across the plaza. I alone listened to the sweet mournful sound – neither Tony nor Salvador could hear the echoes of the past.
At a folding table on the far side of the plaza, three of the five graduate students who were working the dig this summer were playing cards. Occasionally, their laughter drifted across the plaza.
‘The students are a good bunch this year,’ Tony commented.
I shrugged. ‘They’re like every other bunch of students. Every year they seem to get younger. And they want to find a jade mask and a gold bracelet under every rock or else they want to have a mystical experience in the ruins when the full moon rises.’
‘Or both,’ Tony said.
‘Right. Some hide it better than others, but they’re all treasure hunters at heart.’
‘And we hide it better than any of them,’ he said. ‘We’ve been at it longer.’
I glanced at his face, and could not continue pretending to be cynical when he was grinning like that. ‘I suppose you’re right. Do you think this is the year that we’ll find a tomb bigger than King Tut’s and translate the hieroglyphics?’
‘Why not?’ he said. ‘I think it’s a good idea.’
We sat in the growing darkness and talked about the possibilities of the site. Tony, as always, was optimistic despite our limited success to date.
From 1960 to 1966 a research group from Tulane University surveyed just over half of the ceremonial center at Dzibilchaltún, completed extensive excavations in a number of structures, and dug test pits to sample some six hundred other structures. Unlike the Tulane group, we were concentrating on outlying areas rather than on the ceremonial center, expanding the surveyed and sampled area.
By the time the sun was completely down and the moon was rising, Tony and I were well into planning the third year of excavations. Salvador had wandered off, impatient with us for being more interested in next year’s plans than tomorrow’s work. We quit with the third year, and Tony wandered over to join the students for a time.
Tony always got along well with the students, drinking with them, sharing their troubles and laughing at their jokes. By the end of the summer, they would call him Tony and treat him with affection. Even at the end of the summer, I would be a stranger to them. I preferred it that way.
In the moonlight, I went for a stroll down to the sacred cenote, the ancient well that had once supplied water to the city. Along the way, I passed a woman returning from the well. She walked gracefully, one hand lifted to steady the water jug on her head. From the black and white pattern that decorated the rim of her jug, I guessed that she had lived during the Classic Period, around about AD 800.
I do not live entirely in the present. Sometimes, I think that the ghosts of the past haunt me. Sometimes, I think that I haunt them. We come together in the uncertain hours of dawn and dusk, when the world is on the edge between day and night.
When I wander through the Berkeley campus at dawn I smell the thin smoke of cooking fires that flared and died a thousand years ago. A shadow flits across the path before me – no, two shadows – little girls playing a game involving a ball, a hoop, a stick, and much laughter. For a moment, I hear them laughing, shrill as birds, and then the laughter fades.
A tall awkward young man in a dark green windbreaker, a student in my graduate seminar, hails me. We stand and talk – something about the coming midterm exam, something about the due date for a paper. I am distracted – an old Indian woman walks past, carrying a basket of herbs. The design of the basket is unfamiliar to me, and I study it as she trudges by.
‘So, you think that would work?’ the earnest young man is saying. He has been talking about the topic he has chosen for his final paper, but I have not been listening.
‘Let’s talk about it during my office hours this afternoon,’ I say. Students sometimes find me brusque, abrupt. I try to show interest in their concerns, but my attention is continually drawn away from them by apparitions of the past.
I have grown used to my ghosts. It’s no worse, I suppose, than other disabilities: some people are nearsighted, some are hard-of-hearing. I see and hear too much and that distracts me from the business at hand.
Generally, the phantoms ignore me, busy with their own affairs. For these shadows, as for my students, the times are separate. The Indian village that I see is gone: past tense. The campus through which I walk is now: present tense. For others, there is no overlap between the two. I live on the border and see both sides.
The water of the cenote was cold and clear. The air beside the pool carried the scent of water lilies and wet mud. I stopped at the edge of the pool, sat down, and leaned back against a squared-off stone that had once been part of a structure.
Here and there, other stone temple blocks showed through the soil. Three thousand years ago, the Maya had built a temple here. One thousand years ago, they had abandoned the temple and retreated into the forest. No archaeologist knew why, and the ancient Maya were not saying. Not yet.
The heavy rains of a thousand springs had eroded the stones; the winds had blown dust over them. Grasses had grown in the dust, covering the rocks and hiding their secrets. Trees had grown on the crest of the mound, and their twisted roots had tumbled and broken the stones. The jungle had reclaimed the land.
I liked this place. By day, I could watch the shadows of women draw water from the pool, slaves and peasants stooping to fill rounded jars with clear water, hoisting the full vessels to their heads, and moving away with the stately grace required to balance the heavy jars. They talked and laughed and joked among themselves and I liked to listen.