The wind rippled the water, and the moonlight laid a pale silver ribbon on the shining surface. Bats swooped low to catch insects that hovered just above the pool. I saw a movement on the path that led to the cenote and waited. Perhaps a slave sent to fetch water. Perhaps a young woman meeting a lover.
I heard the soft slapping of sandals against rock as a shadow crossed between me and the pool. The figure walked with a slight limp. There was a bulkiness about the head that suggested braided hair, a hint of feminine grace when the figure stooped to touch the water. She turned, as if to continue along the path, then stopped, staring in my direction.
I waited. Crickets trilled all around me. A frog croaked, but no frog answered. For a moment, I thought I had mistaken a woman of my own time for a shadow of the past. I greeted her in Maya, a language I speak tolerably well after ten long years of stammering and mispronunciation. My accent is not good – I struggle with subtleties of tone and miss the point of puns and jokes – but I can usually understand and make myself understood.
The person standing motionless by the edge of the pool did not speak for a moment. Then she said, ‘I see a living shadow. Why are you here?’ By the sound of her voice, I guessed her to be a woman about my age. She spoke Maya with an ancient accent.
Shadows do not speak to me. For a moment, I sat silent. Shadows come and go and I watch them, but they do not speak, they do not watch me.
‘Speak to me, shadow,’ said the woman. ‘I have been alone so long. Why are you here?’
The crickets filled the silence with shrill cries. I did not know what to say. Shadows do not talk to me.
‘I stopped to rest,’ I said carefully. ‘It’s peaceful here.’
She was a shape in the darkness, no more than that. I could make out no details. She laughed, a soft low sound like water pouring from a jug. ‘Peace is not so easy to find. You do not know this place if you find it peaceful.’
‘I know this place,’ I said sharply, resenting this shadow for claiming I did not know a place that I considered my own. ‘For me, it is peaceful.’
She stood motionless for a moment, her head cocked a little to one side. ‘So you think you belong here, shadow? Who are you?’
‘They call me Ix Zacbeliz.’ When I was overseeing a dig at Ikil, the workmen had called me that; it meant ‘woman who walks the white road.’ The nickname was as close as I came to a Mayan name.
‘You speak Maya,’ the woman said softly, ‘but do you speak the language of the Zuyua?’ Her voice held a challenge.
The language of the Zuyua was an ancient riddling game. I had read the questions and answers in the Books of Chilam Balam, Mayan holy books that had been transcribed into European script and preserved when the original hieroglyphic books were destroyed. The text surrounding the questions suggested that the riddles were used to separate the true Maya from invaders, the nobility from the peasants. If I spoke the language of the Zuyua, I belonged. If not, I was an outsider.
The woman at the well spoke again, not waiting for my answer. ‘What holes does the sugarcane sing through?’
That was easy. ‘The holes in the flute.’
‘Who is the girl with many teeth? Her hair is twisted in a tuft and she smells sweet.’
I leaned back against the temple stone, remembering the text from the ancient book. As I recalled, many of the riddles dealt with food. ‘The girl is an ear of corn, baked in a pit.’
‘If I tell you to bring me the flower of the night, what will you do?’
That one, I did not remember. I stared over her head and saw the first dim stars of evening. ‘There is the flower of the night. A star in the sky.’
‘And what if I ask you for the firefly of the night? Bring it to me with the beckoning tongue of a jaguar.’
That one was not in the book. I considered the question, tapping a cigarette from my pack and lighting it with a match. The woman laughed. ‘Ah, yes – you speak the language of the Zuyua. The firefly is the smoking stick and the tongue of the jaguar is the flame. We shall be friends. I have been lonely too long.’ She cocked her head to one side but I could not see her expression in the darkness. ‘You are looking for secrets and I will help you find them. Yes. The time has come.’
She turned away, stepping toward the path that led to the southeast, away from the cenote.
‘Wait,’ I said. ‘What’s your name? Who are you?’
‘They call me Zuhuy-kak,’ she said.
I had heard the name before, though it took me a moment to place it. Zuhuy-kak meant ‘fire virgin.’ A few books referred to her; she was said to be the deified daughter of a Mayan nobleman. So they said. I have found books to be completely unreliable when it comes to identifying the shadows that I meet in the ruins.
With half-closed eyes, I leaned my head against the stone behind me and watched her go.
A modem psychiatrist – that shaman sans rattle and incense – would say that Zuhuy-kak was wish fulfillment and hallucination, brought on by stress, spicy food, aguardiente. If pressed, he might say, with waving of hands, that Zuhuy-kak – and the less talkative shadows that haunt me – are aspects of myself. My subconscious mind speaks to me through visions of dead Indians.
Or he might just say I’m mad.
In any case, I have never made the test. I have never mentioned my shadows to anyone. I prefer my shamans with all the window dressing. Give them rattles and incense and bones to throw; take away their books. Let the white-coated shamans of the modem world chase shadows in the darkness. I know my phantoms.
Generally. But my phantoms do not speak to me and call me friend. My phantoms keep their distance, going about their lives while I observe. This ancient Mayan woman named Zuhuy-kak did not follow the rules that I knew. I wondered, in the lily-scented night, if the rules were changing.
Back in the hut that served as my home for the field season, I lay in my hammock and listened to the steady beat of my own heart. The palm thatch rustled in the evening breeze.
The hammock rocked me to sleep and the sounds changed. The steady beat was a tunkul, a hollow wooden gong that was beaten with a stick. The cricket’s song grew harsh and loud, like the buzzing of stones shaken in a gourd rattle. The whisper of the palm thatch became the murmuring of voices: a crowd surrounded me and pressed close on all sides. I felt the weight of braids on my head, a cumbersome robe around me. When a hand on my arm tugged me forward, I opened my eyes.
A precipice before me, jade-green water far below, a drumbeat that quickened with my heart, and suddenly I was falling.
I woke with a start, my hands clutching the cotton threads of the hammock. The rising wind stirred the palm thatch and sent a few thin leaves scurrying across the hard-packed dirt floor of my hut.
In my brief glance over the edge, I had recognized the steep limestone walls and green waters of the sacred cenote at Chichén Itzá. The scent, I thought, had been copal incense. The music – rattle and drum – was processional music.
I closed my eyes and slept again, but my dreams were of more modern pasts: I dreamed of the long ago time when I had been a wife and mother. I did not like such dreams and I woke at dawn.
Dawn and dusk are the best times for exploring ruins. When the sun is low, the shadows reveal the faint images of ancient carvings on temple stones; they betray irregularities that may hide the remains of stairways, plazas, walls, and roads. Shadows lend an air of mystery to the tumble of rocks that was once a city, and they reveal as many secrets as they hide.
I left my hut to go walking through the ruins. It was Saturday and breakfast would be late. Alone, I strolled through the sleeping camp. Chickens searched for insects among the weeds. A lizard, catching early-morning sunlight on a rock, glanced at me and ran for cover in the crack of a wall. In the monte, a bird called on two notes – one high, one low, one high, one low – as repetitive as a small boy who had only recently learned to whistle. The sun was just up and the air was still relatively cool.