I never did tell him about the old woman in the monte.
17
Elizabeth
At the best of times, I mistrust students. They bring back memories of lecture halls filled with the dusty smell of chalk, rustling notebooks, and arrogant young men and women with the sleek and well-fed look of wolves in autumn after a long summer of abundant hunting.
I remember afternoon class in an overheated hall, and outside the rain is darkening the cement sidewalks, rattling the leaves, making Strawberry Creek, the campus’s captive brook, rush and swirl in panicked eddies. The students drowse in the warmth of the lecture hall.
I know that I cannot let them see my true self – thin and hungry and draggled as an alley cat crouching beneath a parked car for a moment’s shelter from the rain. The university is my temporary shelter; to keep this lecture post I must waken these somnolent beasts and teach them something, make them blink, shake their heavy heads, and grope for answers in their sluggish brains. I must breathe life into the dusty air.
I lecture like a shaman conjuring spirit forces to life. I work at it – throwing questions like rocks, whirling anecdotes over my head like bolos, calling up visions of burial customs, rites of passage, and ancient cities, dodging, pacing, always on the move. I am afraid, but I keep them at bay, alert but wary, a little confused, always on edge. No one sleeps. I keep my shelter.
Friday, the day Cib, is portrayed in the glyphs by a conch shell, a symbol of rebirth, of passage through the underworld and return to the light. I do not know what god governs this day.
On Friday, tension hung in the air, ran with the lizards over the rocks, hissed with the grasses in the wind. My body ached, and the chills and shivering had continued through the night. The mild fever made me irritable and restless. When I smoked, I felt a trembling in my chest, and my heart seemed to beat too fast.
Throughout the day, the wind carried the sound of chanting. Somewhere in the past, men and women raised their voices to the beat of a drum, the murmur of rattles, the wailing of conch shell trumpets and pipes. I could not make out the words. I searched, but I could not find the source of the sound.
I stayed in camp, drinking hot tea laced with aguardiente and trying to rest. I lit cigarettes one after another, drawing the smoke deep into my lungs as if the nicotine would soothe me and make the shivering stop. But the trembling remained. It seemed a part of the place, like the scrub of the monte, the dust on the stones. In the afternoon, I wandered out to the Temple of the Seven Dolls. In the plaza near the temple, a group of young men were decorating their shields with the richly colored feathers of jungle birds. They did not talk, but worked in grim silence, preparing for war.
Late in the afternoon, Carlos, Maggie, Barbara, and Diane left for Mérida to seek the dubious pleasures of the city. Only Tony, John, and Robin remained in camp. We made our own dinner over a camp stove and for the first time in days the food was not burned, not overspiced. I had tea with aguardiente, then aguardiente without the tea. The aguardiente warmed me but did not ease the trembling. Tony and Robin talked about pottery.
For the past week, Robin had been helping Tony with basic pottery analysis. The young woman seemed to share Tony’s interest in the topic: she talked with muted enthusiasm about color on the Munsell chart and hardness on Mohs’ scale, about burnishing and paint composition, about rim stance and spout attachment.
John was listening with an intensity that seemed unwarranted by the subject. At one point, he reached over, brushed a strand of hair out of Robin’s eyes, and gently touched her shoulder. She smiled and took his hand. I realized that they were lovers and wondered how long this romance had been going on.
After dinner, before the fading of the daylight forced us to resort to lanterns, John brought out his spiral-bound notebook to show us his site drawings: partial floor plans and on-site sketches of the structures immediately surrounding the tomb site. Though I had glanced over his shoulder at the site, noting his progress on each sketch, this was the first time I had seen his work gathered together.
John had studied architecture and his sketches reflected that training: meticulously executed in India ink with sharp black lines and careful shading. The lines were, if anything, too precise, too straight, too crisp. His sketch of the mound to the northwest of the tomb site failed to capture the air of abandonment and decay, the softness of the weather-beaten and eroding limestone blocks. Even so, his work was beautiful.
He flipped through the pages slowly, stopping at the site drawings and passing quickly the work that he judged inappropriate for our attention: quick pencil sketches, a detailed drawing showing exactly how the lintel rested on a particular doorway, a portrait of Pich’s sagging features, a profile of Robin examining a potsherd. He stopped at a sketch of the opening to the tomb that showed the placement of each masonry block, then he set the notebook on the wooden crate beside him.
While Tony and Robin praised the work, I took the notebook and flipped back through the pages, stopping at one that had caught my eye earlier: a pencil sketch of the plaza near the tomb. For once, John had relaxed and allowed himself to imagine the structures as they might have looked. The piece combined meticulous detail with softness, in a style reminiscent of the work of Frederick Catherwood, the nineteenth-century artist who had been the first to sketch the ruins.
The facade of the palace on the left was decorated with stucco Chaac masks and serpents; the low steps that fronted on it were carved with indecipherable glyphs. I recognized the place from my dream. The pile of skulls had rested before these steps; I stood on the edge of the plaza and the ravens flew up, shrieking their warnings.
That’s not right, I thought, looking at the temple facade, and remembering how Zuhuy-kak had described it to me and how I had dreamed it. This was the temple of the moon goddess, and the Chaac masks and serpents had no business there. No business at all.
‘What’s wrong?’ John asked, and for a moment I thought I had spoken aloud. He leaned close to me, looking over my shoulder at the sketch. ‘You were frowning. Is something wrong?’
I shook my head to clear it. ‘The facade’s wrong. It should be more like the facade over the temple at Tulúm. Seashells and fishes.’
He took the sketchbook from my hands. ‘Why do you say that?’
Why did I say that? Because I had been drinking and remembering a dream. Because the aguardiente hummed in my head. The past and present had momentarily crossed. I tried to smile, but my face was frozen. ‘Just a feeling.’
He gave me a strange look. John did not like statements based on vague feelings. ‘I don’t really have enough information to do a reconstruction drawing. I was just fooling around a bit.’
‘Nothing wrong with that,’ I said. ‘Nothing wrong with using your imagination.’
An awkward pause. John held the sketchbook as if he did not know what to do with it and frowned at me. Finally Robin leaned over to him and gently took it, asking if she could look. Tony got up to light the lantern and pour me another cup of tea. And the conversation went on.
I sat at the edge of the circle of light, listening and watching the three of them. John relaxed again, after a moment. They were comfortable together: Tony and Robin joked about studying pots; John’s arm rested lightly on the back of Robin’s chair; now and then, she smiled at him or touched his hand lightly. I watched them, much as I watched shades of the past, an observer but not a participant. But somehow, I could not leave.
Much later, Robin and John left the circle of light, walking hand in hand toward the cenote. Tony poured me another glass of aguardiente. Sitting together in the circle of lantern light, watching the moths circle and tasting the bite of the aguardiente at the back of my throat, it seemed that there was something new between Tony and me, or else something very old that was stirring once again. Something was shifting uneasily beneath the surface.