The Falling Woman (33 page)

As I watched, the dancing woman accepted a gourd bowl from a young man and took it to the child. The woman knelt, lifted the child's hands so that she held the bowl, and guided the bowl to her lips. The child drank and the cavern echoed with another howl. The sound startled the child, and though she was finished drinking, she clung to the bowl, staring around her. The woman in blue tickled her hands with one of the feathers, and the little girl let go of the bowl, distracted.

The woman touched the child's head gently, then picked her up and carried her in her arms as she danced.

The beat of the drum was faster now, and the woman whirled with the child. The girl was laughing now and reaching for the bright fluttering feathers in the woman's hair. One small hand clutched a feather triumphantly. The woman danced faster, whirling, her eyes gleaming in the torchlight.

The dancer set the laughing child on the stone altar. She lay on her back, her arms stretched to either side like a child lying in the grass on a summer day. She was smeared with blood from the dancer's wrists and in one hand she clutched a blue feather. The dancer undid the child's belt and tenderly folded back the blue robe. I saw the child laugh when the woman tickled her chin with another feather, but I could not hear the sound over the chanting. The child's eyes were half closed, and she looked as if she were falling asleep.

Four men in white loincloths stepped from the waiting circle and each one took hold of an arm or a leg.

The little girl smiled up at the dancer, waiting for the next game to begin. The dancer lifted the obsidian blade, hesitated for an instant, then plunged the blade into the child's chest. The howl of the crowd drowned out any sound she might have made.

I cried out and closed my eyes and I must have squeezed my mother's hand because she stirred, pulling weakly against my hand. She said something, but I could not hear her over the drums and rattles. I leaned closer and watched her lips. She was struggling for consciousness, but losing the fight. She lay still, her hand once again limp in mine.

The altar was bloody; the four men were spattered with dark spots. The dancer held something dark and small over her head. Though the beat of the drum continued, her dance faltered. There was a new hesitation in her step and the drumbeat slowed, the chanting grew softer.

I saw the runner coming before the crowd surrounding the altar noticed him. A single torch bobbed toward them, growing larger. I saw a shadow taking long strides, then saw the runner in the torchlight: a young boy clad only in a loincloth.

He held the torch in his left hand; his right arm bled from a wound in his shoulder. He stumbled as he came toward the crowd, and he must have cried out, for some of the men turned to look, then ran to help him.

The chant faltered. The drumbeat continued, but people crowded around the boy, pressing close to him.

The drumbeat stopped. I noticed now, seeing the people gather around the boy, that the men in the crowd were gray-haired, limping, toothless.

The chant had given way to the babble of voices. The power was gone. The drum had stopped. The rattles ceased their hissing. The people turned and snatched up torches and surged back the way they had come, away from me, carrying the runner with them.

The woman, the dancer, remained where she was. She had lifted her head to listen to the clamor, but she did not move with the others. A single torch, wedged in a crack in the wall, still burned beside her. The echoing clamor of voices faded in the distance.

The woman crouched beside the altar. Her expression had stiffened. She picked up the blue feather that lay on the cavern floor where the child had dropped it, and smoothed it between her fingers. Then quickly, like someone coming out of a daze, she reached out and caressed the child's cheek. A shadow of doubt crossed her face. Then she hugged the body to her and hid her face in the blue cloth of the robe.

The thunderous power of the chant and the drum remained with me. Watching the woman, I felt that she mourned more than the death of a child. I wondered what news the boy had carried. Somehow, it seemed that his news had changed the value of the child's death. The cavern was dark; the temple had fallen.

She remained like this for a time. I watched her, not knowing whether to fear her or pity her. My head was burning and my heart still beat in the rhythm of the drum. I heard, as if from a great distance, the sound of a woman weeping. I went to her, my head on fire. When she looked up, her eyes vague and unfocused in the torchlight, I think she saw me. I don't know.

When she stood, I returned to my mother's side. While the woman was arranging the blue robe around her daughter's body, I checked my mother's splint. It was inadequate, but I could see no way to improve it.

I used another strip of cloth to knot my mother's hands together. Kneeling, I ducked into the circle of her arms and hoisted her piggyback, leaning forward so that her body fell against mine, stumbling as I clambered to my feet, but catching myself before 1 fell. The woman was lifting her daughter's body, staggering a little under the burden. She slung the awkward bundle partly over one shoulder, so that the child's face, still painted blue and smeared with blood, looked back at me. In her other hand, the woman carried the torch. I followed the light of the bobbing torch as she trudged away from the pool.

She walked slowly, stopping now and then to adjust her burden, to rest, to get a better grip on her torch.

The flickering light of her torch showed me the way. Occasionally, a bat flew over us—a rustle of wings and a burst of high-pitched chittering. I listened to our footsteps, to the faraway musical tinkle of water falling into a pool, to my mother's shallow breathing. My mother grew heavier, but the woman stopped frequently, and whenever she did. I rested by leaning against the cavern wall. The girl's dead eyes watched me over the woman's shoulder.

The smell of incense hung in the air. Sweat trickled down my back and my jeans clung damply to my legs. The stone beneath our feet was glossy, worn smooth by the passage of many feet. Once, I slipped and smashed my knee against the floor, a new throbbing ache to add to the pain in my feet and hands. I tried to ignore the pain and watch where we were going. Was this the second large room filled with stalactites or the third? Had I been trudging through the darkness for hours, days, weeks, or years? It didn't matter. My mother's breath rasped past my ear and I could still walk. That was all that mattered.

My mother was very heavy. I thought about laying her down on the floor and lying beside her to rest for a while, but the torch bobbed on ahead of me and I did not stop. My footsteps had taken up the rhythm of the drum, a steady beat that matched the pounding of my heart and the soft sighs of my mother's breath passing in and out.

The barriers were down. The anger that had surged forth to make me scream at my mother and pound my hands bloody against the rocks was still with me, but it had changed. The first wild surge had made me scream; now I felt a strong steady current, more like the movement of the tide than like a crashing wave, or maybe like a big slow river, strong and smooth and winding as a serpent. It carried me along like a boat on the tide. The water was dark and murky, and I could not see beneath the surface. But I had to flow with the river; I could not resist it.

The great river washed me along, washed me clean of sin, washed me in the blood of my own hands, washed me through dark tunnels and caverns into a dead end. Then the torch winked out; the woman was gone. A dead end.

I lowered my mother to the floor and sat beside her. Her hands were dark and swollen where the cloth strip had cut off circulation. I loosened the strips and rubbed her hands to warm them and make the blood flow. I closed my eyes, grateful for the rest.

I heard a bat fly overhead, but I was not listening to that. I was listening to the soft hooting of an owl somewhere in the darkness outside the cave. I was smelling the cool dry scent of the monte at night.

My flashlight beam found the opening, a narrow slit high above me in the wall of the cave. I left my mother on the cavern floor and started climbing. The wall was sheer and the handholds were covered with the droppings of generations of bats. I climbed about five feet, then threw my arm over a ledge and pushed myself through the narrow opening.

The monte was dark, but not as dark as the cave. I lay on my back and listened to the sounds—strange bird-calls and animal rustlings. It was all right now. I would get my mother out of the cave somehow.

Everything would be all right. The owl hooted in the distance and I laughed out loud.

Chapter Twenty-five: Elizabeth

"Does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good; if it doesn't, it is of no use. Both paths lead nowhere; but one has a heart, the other doesn't. One makes for a joyful journey; as long as you follow it, you are one with it. The other will make you curse your life. One makes you strong; the other weakens you."

—Carlos Castaneda,

The Teachings of Don Juan

I
woke from dreams of falling. I was alone in a Mexican hospital room, with a cast on my leg, a tube in my arm, and a foolish white hospital gown wrapped around my battered old body. When I called out, the nurse came, and I asked her what day it was. She told me that it was Sunday, and I calculated that it was Ahau, the first day of the new year.

Eventually they let Barbara in to talk to me. It seems that my daughter dragged me out of the cave with a rope she found in a shelter that had been built for the convenience of hacienda workers. The cave opening was not far from the hacienda. The locals knew about it, but, like many caves in the Yucatan, it had never been fully explored.

My daughter had carried me out to the road and flagged down a car driven by a Mexican restaurateur, who took one look at my daughter and another at me and rushed us both to Hospital Juarez. My daughter was treated for multiple cuts and bruises, none of them serious. After she was released, she contacted Barbara, waited long enough to be sure that I was in stable condition, and then left for the States. Barbara gave me a curious sidelong glance when she told me all this. I don't believe that she was telling me all that my daughter had told her, and I said as much. Barbara just shrugged. I did not have the strength to persist, and I supposed that if my daughter wanted to keep secrets, she had earned the right.

I slept again, and when I woke Zuhuy-kak had taken Barbara's place. She was insubstantial here, barely the suggestion of a Mayan woman sitting in a padded plastic-covered chair. Through her, I could see the electrical tape that had been used to patch a tear in the plastic upholstery. "Is it over?" I asked her.

She did not move.

"There are still things I want to know," I, told her. "I still plan to dig up your bones and take another look at that vase."

She shrugged.

"I can't talk to you here," I said to her irritably. "They won't let me have cigarettes. I think that goddamn American antismoking propaganda has spread even here."

She faded when the nurse opened the door and I realized only then that I had been speaking in English the whole time.

I went home a week after Tony. He went home in a box; I went on crutches. 1 was asked to speak at his memorial service, but I begged off, pleading illness. The department head delivered a fine impersonal eulogy that painted Tony with a rosy hue, flawless and unnatural as the cherubs that flanked the altar.

I went back to my apartment in Berkeley, taking my notebooks. I sent Diane a note, telling her to get in touch when she felt like it. I did not know what else to say.

My leg did not heal quite right. I limped, especially in wet weather, and walked with a cane that Barbara had bought for me in the Mérida market. The university welcomed me back for the fall semester. In the wake of the publicity attending the finds at Dzibilchaltún, three publishing houses were vying for the hardcover rights to my still-unfinished book,
City of Stones.
I had laid plans to return to Dzibilchaltún to complete the excavation of the tomb and the ceremonial area. Barbara would be assisting me on the project. I watched the shadows of the past, but none of them spoke to me.

On an overcast day, I had paused on a wooden bridge that spans Strawberry Creek to watch an Indian woman weave a basket from water-softened reeds. Someone leaned on the rail beside me, and I looked up, expecting to see one of my students.

Diane was looking down at the creek. For a moment, she did not look at me. When she did, something seemed different about her. She held herself with a new confidence, a certainty that she had lacked before.

"I've come to the conclusion that I'm crazy too," she said. Her voice was steady; she did not seem particularly upset. "It took a while, but I've gotten used to it. In fact, I don't mind it."

She paused for a moment, and I could hear the song that the Indian woman was singing to herself, a wandering melody based on an unfamiliar scale.

"Barbara tells me that you're planning another expedition to Dzibilchaltún," she said. "I'd like to go."

I watched the woman weaving her basket, carefully lacing the reeds together to make an intricate pattern of light and dark. "I don't know what we'll find there," I said.

"You never do know what you'll find when you dig in the past," she said.

"That's true," I said.

"Can I come with you?"

"I think that could be arranged," I said. I turned away from the bridge and Diane offered me her arm. I hesitated a moment, then took her arm.

"Tell me," she said, "about the shadows of the past."