‘No, you didn’t say anything.’ He was starting to stand, to move toward me, but I glared at him and he sat down again. ‘You think I’ve been crazy for years.’
‘You know better than that.’
My hand was in a fist and my fingernails were etching painful crescents in my palm. The tension was all around me. I was afraid. No words came. When I groped for words, I thought of the great silence that surrounded the mounds at dawn, the scrabbling of the lizards on the rocks, the crying of birds in the monte, the hissing of grasses in a light breeze. No words.
‘I’ll stay,’ he said. ‘I’ve been battling shadows of my own for years. Fighting yours might do me good.’
I felt empty. I heard my own words slurred by alcohol, remembered too vividly the stench of the ward. I looked at Tony, leaning back in his chair, and remembered Robert and the way he had comforted me when I was upset. ‘Don’t worry about it,’ I said to Tony then. ‘I won’t send Diane away. Don’t concern yourself.’
‘Now wait,’ he said, holding out a hand. ‘Relax. Don’t—’
‘I said it’s all right. Don’t worry.’ I left him and returned to the safety of my hut.
18
Diane
At Barbara’s suggestion, we left camp before dinner on Friday. We dined at Los Balcónes, a small restaurant on a terrace that overlooked Parque Hidalgo. From this vantage point, Barbara amused herself by watching the men who were watching the women in the square below. The men loitered on the benches and corners, discussing important things, gesturing and laughing. When a woman strolled past – especially a young woman – the discussion was disrupted. One man stared at her. Another man, noticing that his friend had been distracted, turned his head to see the source of the distraction. A third man saw the second man turn to look and followed suit. By that time, the first man had returned to the discussion, but a fourth man was just beginning to look. Whenever a woman, any woman, walked by, a ripple of turning heads followed her.
‘Look,’ Barbara said. ‘Why don’t you go down and walk through the square, and I’ll check out the reaction? Then I’ll go down, and—’
‘I don’t really feel like it.’
‘Yeah?’ She stopped watching the men in the square for a moment. ‘You feeling sick?’
‘No.’
‘Then what’s wrong?’
I shrugged. ‘I’m just pissed at Liz.’
‘Yeah? Why?’
‘She wants me to leave the dig.’
‘Yeah? Where does she want you to go?’
‘The Caribbean coast. Back to Los Angeles. Anywhere, she said.’
‘Why?’
I watched the men in the square. They had returned to an animated discussion. ‘She said… this is weird, but she said that the curandera said that I should leave.’
‘Liz said that?’
‘Yeah.’
Barbara tapped her fingers restlessly on the table.
‘Do you think…’ I hesitated, uncertain.
‘What?’
‘Sometimes she watches things that aren’t there. Her eyes follow them, and when you look there’s nothing there at all.’
‘I’ve noticed that. She has always done that.’
‘Sometimes, she talks to herself. I keep meeting her wandering around early in the morning and half the time she is talking to herself.’
‘That’s so.’
‘Do you think she’s crazy?’
Barbara looked down at the square. The two flower-selling children were pestering a retired American couple in matching leisure suits. ‘She’s not normal, but that doesn’t mean she’s crazy.’ She shrugged. ‘I mean… who is normal? Those people?’ She pointed at the retired couple. ‘I like your mother. She acts a little odd sometimes, but that’s all right with me. I act a little odd sometimes. What did you tell her when she asked you to go?’
‘Told her I wouldn’t.’
‘And what did she say?’
‘She said it was my responsibility.’
‘Sounds fair enough. So you’re not going.’
‘I guess not.’
For a moment we sat in silence. The bronze statue in the square caught the last rays of sunlight. A hammock vendor strolled through the square and hailed the retired couple without success.
‘You know the night that we had a smoke down by the cenote,’ I said suddenly. ‘I met the curandera over by Salvador’s hut. I wish I had understood what she said to me. She was pretty excited about something.’
‘You hang around this place long enough, and eventually you realize that you won’t ever understand half the stuff that goes on around you. Even when you understand the words, you can’t catch all the nuances.’ Barbara shrugged. ‘I wouldn’t worry about it.’ She glanced at my face and reached across the table to pat my hand. ‘Why don’t you just relax and enjoy your vacation. Don’t worry about Liz. Things will sort themselves out.’
We slept that night in real beds. Of course, we had breakfast at Cafetería Mesón, and of course Emilio and Marcos – ‘the boys’ as Barbara had taken to calling them – showed up as we were drinking our coffee. Emilio bought a round of coffee and I tried to forget camp.
‘So what are you going to do today?’ Emilio asked, spooning sugar into his coffee.
‘We were talking about going to Chichén Itzá,’ Barbara said.
Emilio looked up. ‘You want me to come and drive?’
‘Depends,’ said Barbara. ‘Do we get a cut of the profits for providing transportation?’
Emilio’s grin widened. ‘Sure. I’ll pay for gas.’
Barbara glanced at me and laughed. ‘Don’t look so shocked, Diane. This bandit makes a hell of a good profit on his sales. Even on a bad day, he makes more money than a graduate student.’
‘What does that mean – bandit?’ Emilio asked, stirring his coffee.
Barbara grinned and shook her head.
He looked up at her, pouring more sugar into the pale brown coffee. ‘I think you like this bandit,’ he said. He set down the sugar and grinned at Marcos. ‘We will have good luck today.’
In the end, we all went to Chichén Itzá: Barbara, Emilio, Emilio’s hammocks, Marcos and I. Emilio hailed a German couple on the steep stone steps of an ancient pyramid and sold them two hammocks on the spot. He dickered with an elderly couple in the shade of the feathered serpent columns that topped the Temple of the Warriors. He haggled over a hundred pesos on the steps to a platform carved with jaguars clutching human hearts. He offered a man a good price, a very good price, on the steps that led to a crumbling stone dome. Grass grew between the stones of the steps.
Barbara took to hailing the young male tourists herself. ‘Hey,’ she called happily to two blond college students. ‘Want to buy a hammock?’ They stopped to talk in the shade of a massive structure that was little more than a tumble of stones. A dark passage that led to the inner recesses of the structure smelled faintly of rot and urine. The blond man in the University of California T-shirt bought a matrimonial hammock at twice Emilio’s usual rate.
Emilio led us into Old Chichén, the older portion of the site where the monte had been cut back but the buildings were unrestored. In a secluded corner beyond the main ruins, out where the only sounds were the rustling of leaves in the monte, we smoked a joint and listened to the birds call in the trees. Then Barbara insisted that we had to go see the Sacred Well.
Marcos led the way. Emilio had his arm around Barbara and they strolled slowly, stopping to look at carved stones and buildings. We passed a stone wall where each limestone block had a relief carving of a skull. The blocks were carefully stacked so that row upon row of grinning skulls watched us as we bought soft drinks at a refrescos stand and walked to the Sacred Well to drink them.