I was unnerved that it could be reclaimed by moss and vines and time so easily. I felt temporary and insubstantial.
“Come with me.” He led me away from the main temple and out of the arena to a small building with a stone courtyard and the empty sockets of windows regularly spaced. There was a place where a door had been and he led me through it. We had to bend ever so slightly under the low roof. “This was a private house,” he said, “Look…” he walked to a corner where several clay pots stood untouched while the world crumbled around them. There was a hole in the wall, shallow and blackened. “This was the kitchen, the hearth. There is a chimney that leads out of the oven… and here where you are standing… that is where they sat and ate, talked and gossiped, minded the children and made their plans… and here…” He led me through another opening, into a small room with a window and gentle curving corners. “This was where they slept, the woman and the man and any of their children, all together on straw mattresses covered with finely spun blankets in brilliant colors. This is where they rested and dreamed.”
His hands were loosely clenched, imagining they held the folds of those blankets, the red and purple threads caught in his fingers. “Can’t you see it Isabei? Can you feel it? The life they left behind here? How real they were?” He stretched out his hands, his fingers spread, giving the impression that he was feeling it in the air, this life force, this tangible memory, and its floating remains.
I closed my eyes and stood still, seeing the man and woman in this room, whispering their secrets, making love, sometimes sleeping back to back with hostility between them. I could hear the gentle snores and whufflings of their sleeping babies; smell the sweet sweat of their infant skin. I opened my eyes. “Do you believe in ghosts?” I asked him.
His eyes were focused above my head out the window. “No,” he said. “Only memories.”
We abandoned this private place haunted by life-crumbs and returned to the remote and removed temple.
I followed Julián into a small fissure in the side of one of the pyramids; it was hidden from view behind a large stone and a twisted mangrove. We pushed through on all fours. Inside the darkness was complete and ebon. I tried to sense the size of the enclosure.. A breeze ruffled my hair from within the darkness, heightening my impression that we stood in the bowls of the earth. “Did you bring a flashlight?”
He chuckled, his breath warm on my shoulder. “I told you I wanted you to see my way today.” He pulled me away from the opening, lifted my hand and placed it flat on the wall. I could feel runnels, and ridges, and curving grooves. His hand over mine, he smoothed my palm over the carvings, pebbly and then smooth, curving and suddenly angular.
As we traveled around the room he explained the meaning of what I felt under my heightened skin; depictions of gods and man, markings representing the heavens and the earth, the whirl and orb of celestial bodies. His voice was as deep and penetrating as the black air we stood in. In front of me I felt the passage of time, the legacy of chisels, and behind me the lines and curves of Julián’s bones and flesh, close in the hush of darkness, spinning stories. He stopped suddenly, his heart against my back, it pumped through me and into me, through my arm and into the wall, as if I were a conduit between that time and this, between his past and his future. “Can you feel it?” he asked me, so softly it seemed to come from the beat of his heart. “Can you feel the blood?”
Outside the sunshine was unwelcome, at first as disorienting as the darkness within had been. I had been thrust out and birthed back into my own time, a place of separateness. I looked back at the inky crack we had emerged from. Above me the steps led toward the clouds. I began to climb up and Julián followed testing his footing as he went.
At the top I stood, breathless, considering the canopy from my king’s eye view, the distant house my father had built. “I hear they were always doing sacrifices at these temples, rolling heads and ripping out still-beating hearts.” I considered how this view might lead a man to believe he was entitled to do such things. “It must have been a terrifying place to live.”
Julián had closed his eyes to the sun and was letting it warm his face. A clement breeze blew his hair and relaxed his expression.
“A society geared toward constant fear and death would never have thrived as this one did. The truth is that they only did human sacrifices in times of great calamity: droughts, or famines, or plague.” He leaned down and ran his fingers across the ground, a delicate brown spider, picking up a sharp stone and running his thumb along its edge. “Normally when the priests and people prayed, the only blood they took was their own. They would make small incisions in their lips or ears and offer the trickle of blood to the gods.” He squeezed the stone in his palm, and I thought perhaps he meant to bleed and pray in the place of his ancestors. He threw the stone into the air where it hung before tumbling, just as I imagined all those heads rolling down the incline of the temple. “Sometimes sacrifice is necessary,” he said.
In the distance ribbons of smoke climbed out of the tree tops, lazy in the humid hair, they hung in place, serpents in the sky.
“I see smoke over there.” I lifted his hand in the direction of the plumes.
“It’s the village of St. Elena, the Mopan village. They often live close to the temples of their ancestors. Even though they can’t remember, they are still drawn to it.” He stretched and lifted his arms toward the sun. “Would you like to go?”
“To the village? Wouldn’t they mind?”
“Most of them are my congregants, I know them well. You’ve seen the past; the day wouldn’t be complete without seeing the present too.”
“Do the villagers come to the ruins?”
“Sometimes. I imagine more than anything it’s the young people looking for privacy.” He grinned at me. “That’s why I wanted to bring you here years ago.”
“Some priest you are.”
“That is history,” he said shortly, reprimanding himself. “I have other desires and obligations now.”
Embedded in his words were small promises remembered. “I always wondered what your parents must have thought about you running around the jungle with me. I thought maybe in your culture it was normal, that all boys seduced maidens in the forest with talk of mangoes.”
He said, “My parents were dead by then.”
“Oh Julián, no one ever told me. I just assumed…how?
“I don’t remember…I’ve been told, but I don’t remember any of it. Men we didn’t even know came and killed my father and dragged me and my baby sister and my mother into the forest. God knows what they did to my mother and the baby, whatever it was, it left them dead when it was over. Apparently they beat me badly. I woke up in a hospital and I couldn’t remember any of it at all.
All I do remember is my mother cooking dinner that night, a soup with onions and gibrut. My sister Theresa was on her hip, in a striped sling. She used to wind her chubby little fingers in my mother’s hair while she cooked. It irritated my mother usually, but that night when she finished stirring the soup she untangled Theresa’s little hands and kissed each of them right in the center of her palms, like a benediction.”
I stood in the path trying to swallow the sounds that wanted to escape. What a small, small person I was from a small, small world. I had never suffered.
Julián wiped the tears from my face with his fingertips. He placed them on his lips and licked them off. “Tears are a great gift Isabei. Thank you for them, but keep them for another time. I do not remember it, I did not see it. That was the day I lost my sight. The last thing I saw was my mother kissing my sister’s hands. It is a beautiful image to remember.” He tucked my hair behind my ears and smiled. “And it was the day I knew that there was a God. I was only ten and I knew with absolute certainty.”
“But…” The last of my tears notched a bitter trail in my throat. “After all that, how could you possibly have any faith at all?”
“There has to be a power in the universe that knows and
allows such things to happen. There has to be a reason for this plan, a place for atrocities, a promise of life beyond that moment for victims. Otherwise there would be no reason to exist. We could not endure.”
We walked the rest of the way to the village in silence. I imagined the world he had belonged to; the colors, the smells, the tenderness, and then the sudden darkness and isolation that claimed him. He floated on a black sea held aloft only by faith in a God that had initially robbed him of all those things. When I met him he was a child of those senses he had left, seeking connection and life through his fingerpads, and lips, and nose, and ears.
Sometimes, I watched him make his way around a room and I knew that even his breath helped him navigate, that he was a finely tuned instrument always seeking the right note. Did he find himself or lose himself in all those sensations? Perhaps it was easier to see God in the dark.
“There is no room for sadness Isabei. I am filled. Everyone eventually has something they have to leave behind to make room for joy.”
I wondered what I would someday have to abandon, in order to survive.
The village consisted of about twenty little huts with wood plank walls and thatched roofs. They sat in a communal milpas, fields where they farmed together and lived as a community. Wild orchids twined up the sides and nested in the thatch. The Maya were small, and delicate, and brown, with wide gentle faces and deep eyes. The men had learned to wear western clothes and shoes from working in towns and cities away from home, but the women still went barefoot in embroidered nuipils and colorful skirts or cortes, with gold hoops swinging from their ears. Some of them sat on their front stoops nursing babies and giggling with one another, some were just coming back from the river with baskets of wet clothes on their heads and naked dripping children that had had their bath in the fresh water. They all greeted Julián in that guttural tongue and said hello very politely and shyly to me in English. The women spread their clothes out to dry. The children ran in circles leaving wet silty foot prints in the loose dirt.
Many of the men I recognized from work on the plantation. I was ashamed that I did not know their names. I thought of how I had run my hands over their ancestor’s sacred temple wall today, and how I had placed their money into Julián’s palms to give to them, how I sent Matilde down with lime drink or water in clay jugs. I had never passed anything into their hands myself. I lowered my head as they spoke to Julián knowing that I had treated them as less than myself, and being at least equal, they had known it.
“Tell them I’m sorry,” I whispered beside him, knowing that he would hear me under their voices. “Tell them they can have their temple back, and I’m sorry, I didn’t understand.”
“Are you certain? Someday soon those temples could become very valuable to you. Someone will want that history and they will be willing to pay for it.”
“It‘s already stolen. I don’t want to profit from their loss, so that it can be crated up and stored away for someone else. I am giving it back, and some of the land in between. Tell them.”
Julián turned to me. A look of worry crossed his features. His thoughts had always been easy to read. He placed his hands on my shoulders, closed his eyes and bent his head. I did not understand his prayer, but I felt it. I was rooted and stunned, galvanized and connected to his hands. They held me captive to a force I did not want to know. When he opened his eyes again, they were filled with radiance, a golden light shone through their ruined black depths the way sunshine filters into the deep black sea.
“You are blessed,” he said to me, and then he turned and gave them my message.
They responded with a complete stillness and silence. The women gathered up the children and disappeared into the houses, although I had not seen the men signal for them to do such a thing.
“What’s wrong?”
Julián approached the men and they huddled together, their backs to me.
“Julián-” I interrupted, unnerved. He held up a hand for patience. They spoke for perhaps five minutes before they all turned to face me, their eyes closed to interpretation.
Julián stood at an equal distance between them and me. “They say a foreigner’s promise is not to be trusted. They will believe such a thing when it is done.”
They would not meet my eyes. This is how it felt to stand on top of that pyramid in control of everything below. This is how easy it was to give life or take it, from a position of power.
Chapter Four
THE CROSS WE BEAR
Christmas was hot and muggy; an oppressive day laden with heavy unforgiving air. The Maya believed that the air was populated with the souls of the dead. I could feel their brush and tickle in the swollen sky as I moved through the silent sultry house.
In the living room we had hung red and silver balls on a potted palm. The plant was tired and thirsty, it’s back bent from the decorations, curving over the presents I had wrapped in homemade paper and stacked around the base.
Matilde had the holiday off, and so I drank a coke and ate leftover roast gone luke-warm with the stopping of the forgotten generator. I would have to get myself moving or I would never have hot water for a bath and the food in the ice box would spoil completely. Matilde would be disappointed in my irresponsibility.
While I wiped the table with the trickle of water left in the tap without the well pumping, I tried to whistle Jingle Bells. It was ludicrous and creepy in my jungle solitude. I wished for the hundredth time that I had a telephone so that I could call my mother.
I had sent her a card in Spanish, the only one I could find, with a black baby Jesus in a crèche surrounded by angels wearing red. Lord knows what she thought about that. I was certain she didn’t display it.
“I am eating well,” I wrote her, these things still mattered because she was my mother. “I have made a lot of friends. The banana plants are growing. I have a very happy little kingdom. I wish you could see it.”
She had sent me a cheerful glitter-flocked card that had admonished me sternly for not writing or calling more often.
It was just like my mother, sparkle on the outside and reprimand on the inside.
I invited Pierre to join me for dinner but he had declined, his eyes rolling around in his head looking for a flat place to settle. “Mi gat obligatuns,” he said evasively.
“Oh yeah…like what?” Usually he was very forthcoming, more than one wished.
His eyes rolled to a stop over my left shoulder. “Mi gat to spend holiday taim wit mi childrens and…” He swallowed and gave his cap a thorough round the world twist. “And mi wife.”
This was news to me. “You have a family? What about Matilde? I thought…you know… that there was something?”
“Oh well, dat,” he said meeting my eyes. “Some tings ju jus cawn’t du any ting bout, ju know?”
After this he tried to restore my good opinion of him with extra magazines and chocolate bought at his own expense. I enjoyed the bribes but I really should have just told him that I understood the things you cannot change.
I was going to Christmas Mass at Julián’s church in Monkey River. Ever since the day of the ruins I had been ashamed of my attraction to him, succumbing as my mother had, to humid air and brown skin.
I had felt in his hands when he prayed the power I was up against.
The first time I had gone to morning mass the villagers and Monkey River inhabitants had smiled toothily at me and made room for me up front. Julián, no doubt hearing my rain drop walk or smelling me in the open air of the windowless wooden building, smiled right down at me. “Welcome Isabei,” he said, and I thought he sounded relieved.
When he spoke from the pulpit, everyone in that room was certain he was speaking just to them, his voice an intimate whisper in the temple darkness. He had the power of the shaman, the medium, the great politician.
I reserved my awe for Julián however, not God.
Sometimes he gave the message in Spanish or Mayan and I drifted away from the words into the feeling, the
evocation of faith and history as a single unit. We were all easily swayed or convinced. He was listening and so were we. We believed because he believed.
Christmas, even here at the ends of the earth was overdone and gilded with magic, a day completely about belief in the things we never saw. Julián had told me only the other day that we must see God as a child saw Father Christmas, as a beneficent adult bringing presents if only we were good and trusted in his existence.
Inside the church, red and green bulbs were strung along the ceiling bathing everyone in a bar- room glow. The room was packed, all the holiday Catholics of the jungle had come. In the closeness and press of bodies the room smelled of the village; of fish, and sweat, and onions, and cooking fires. When the wind blew just right, it carried in the stink of brackish river mud and the distant latrines. I breathed through my mouth.
Julián stepped up on the dais at the front; his altar wreathed in orchids that looked black in the Christmas lights. He wore a pure white shirt and pants, his collar a black ribbon looping the muscles of his throat.
He read from the Gospel of John, and then described the manger, not as some clean byre redolent with straw and the sweet breath of animals, but as it must really have been, as he would have us see it to appreciate the gravity of the situation.
“It was a stable,” he said emphatically, his hands waving in the air conjuring the image. The lurid light cast deep long shadows, made every one’s eyes all pupil. “A place that animals lived. A cold cave full of dung and dirt.” He hung his head, shook it, a slight tremor passed through his shoulders. “Our Lord was born in the only place they could find for his parents, in squalor and filth. He was already suffering for your sins with his first breath.”
He stared out among us, his sightless eyes skimming over the women, their breasts bared to their babes as they listened rapt.
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