“It depicted, he thought, a scene from the Popol Vuh in which a reluctant victim is sacrificed by the Hero Twins, then brought back to life as part of a clever trick on the Lords of Xibalba.
“I knew if I could find it, it would make his task of reconstruction much easier. I often do this kind of research for museum staff. Anyway, I looked for days, every moment I could.
“Finally I found it. The pot he was thinking of is in the collection of a U.S. university, and I found a photograph of it, in color, in an exhibition catalog.
“I didn’t look at the photograph that closely, frankly. I have so much work to do, I just brought it down here right away. But something must have stuck in my memory.
“See, here it is—the catalog.”
The book was propped up against the base of a work lamp on the table so that the conservator could look at it while he worked.
“You can see the two pots are not identical, but similar,” Valesquez continued. “The conservator commented to me how much this has helped him.”
I did see the similarity. The workmanship was different, certainly, and there were differences in detail, but both appeared to depict the same event.
I absentmindedly turned the pages of the catalog. There was an inscription in the front. To our colleague and friend, Dr. Hernan Castillo, on the occasion of his visit to the United States, June 1989. The signature was illegible.
“Don Hernan’s book?” I queried.
“Quite likely,” Valesquez replied. “He often gave items from his personal collection to the library, particularly when they were expensive or out of print.
“My collection budget is so very small,” he said, almost apologetically.
“I think you must be right about this,” I said. “Particularly since this book belonged to Don Hernan. And he must have been familiar with the work being done here. But what does it mean?”
“I have no idea. But you’re right. Don Hernan did spend a good deal of the time he was in the museo, which is not as much time as he did when he was executive director, of course, down here.
“In fact I think the last time I saw him, he was in what we call the fragments room. It’s just across the hall. I remember I startled him. Either that or he was quite excited about something. He barely had time to talk to me that day.”
“I don’t suppose I could see that, too. The fragments room, I mean,” I said.
“Why not?” Valesquez sighed. “You’re not supposed to be here at all. Given that you are, why should we restrict your movements in any way?”
I looked to see if he was actually making a joke. But he appeared, as usual, to be terribly serious. He carefully locked the door to the lab, then opened another across the hall.
Three walls of a very large room were lined with cabinets of what I would call map drawers, long and wide, but shallow filing drawers. Valesquez took a key from the drawer of a desk in the middle of the room and unlocked one of the cabinets.
“Pick a drawer,” he said, gesturing toward a cabinet.
I pulled out one of the drawers. In it were carefully numbered pottery shards that would eventually be pieced together like the one I had just seen in the lab.
I pulled out another. Fragments of tools, I would venture to guess.
At one end of the room were pieces too large to be filed, and I turned my attention to these. Large chunks of stone, fragments of a temple frieze, perhaps, leaned against the walls. There were broken stelae and large broken masks and figures.
I smiled at Valesquez. “Wonderful place. Thank you for showing it to me.”
“It is,” he said, then looked toward the desk with evident distaste.
I followed the direction of his gaze, and my eyes came to rest on the computer on the desk.
I understood. “Building a collection database, are they?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said. “I cannot believe the collection records will be safe in that thing. What if the power goes off? It often does, you know. All the records could be lost. It would be a catastrophe!”
I thought to tell him about backing up files on disk and so on. But there seemed no point. At some time in the future, the computer age would reach as far as his library.
Antonio Valesquez, no doubt, would either retire or, if he stayed on, continue to maintain his own set of records on his beloved little cards.
I thought of my neighbor, Alex, Valesquez’s senior by at least a decade or so, and wondered what it was that allowed some to embrace the future and others to cling helplessly to the past.
Be that as it may, Valesquez had been most helpful. I offered to buy him a coffee, perhaps a spot of lunch. He looked suspiciously at his watch.
“Make that almuerzo,” I said, remembering that the idea of an early meal is anathema to Mexicans. Better to make it a late breakfast than an early lunch.
Protesting that it was not necessary, he nonetheless agreed, and soon we were sitting in a little cafe nearby, enjoying vegetarian quesadillas and beer with lime. Some breakfast!
“You’ve found me a writing rabbit, Senor Valesquez,” I began after the food arrived.
“Antonio, please, senora.”
“Then it’s Lara, Antonio.” I smiled.
“An interesting name, I think. Reminds me of Dr. Zhivago” he said.
“Absolutely correct. I was born during my mother’s Russian-literature phase,” I replied.
“A mother who loves literature. How extraordinary!” he said. Clearly, his mother did not.
I told him a little about my family, then returned to the subject at hand.
“What do you think the writing rabbit means, Antonio?” I asked.
He paused. “Well, I’m a librarian. Naturally I think it’s about a book.”
“Do people kill over books? I’ve heard of academics destroying each other’s reputations over books, maybe, but not literally killing each other over one.”
“Well, I don’t know. I mean what would a Gutenberg Bible be worth, for example?” he mused. “Millions of pesos, surely. Would some people kill to have one of those, I wonder?
“Or one of the Dead Sea Scrolls. An early version of the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Would people think these worth a human life? I would, I think.
“Not to actually kill someone, of course,” he added quickly, “but do you understand what I am saying?”
“I think I do,” I agreed. “Is there a Maya equivalent of the Gutenberg Bible?”
“There might be, I suppose. We never value our own culture, perhaps. But the Books of the Chilam Balam, for example. These are books in the Roman alphabet that are considered to have ritualistic importance for the Maya. One of the them, the Chilam Balam of Tusik—they’re named after the places they are located in—vanished in the 1970s. The owner/guardian is said to have died under circumstances some consider to be suspicious.”
“Interesting idea,” I said. “I’d like to research this with your help.”
He smiled. “You know our hours. I’ll help all I can.”
He suddenly looked at his watch and exclaimed, “My goodness. It’s so late. I have to attend the reading of Don Hernan’s will this afternoon!”
“So do I,” I said. “Shall we go together?”
I paid the bill, and we shared a companionable cab to the solicitor’s office. As we went we were both deep in our own thoughts. I was thinking how comfortable I felt with this nervous little man, how I’d told him things I had told no one else. Not Isa. Not even Jonathan, with whom I was reasonably sure I was heading for bed.
What did this say about my relationships? I wondered. It was a thought I was not prepared to pursue with any diligence at that moment.