by Pat Murphy
She was a strange woman, my mother. When I was fifteen and she came to visit my father’s house at Christmastime, I recognized that she did not belong there. But I did not realize then that she did not really belong anywhere. She walked with me, but she did not belong in the world I knew. She did not look at me as we walked together. She was always staring off into the monte, peering into the mounds as if something fascinating were out there.
We sat by ruins of the Spanish chapel and I asked about her books. ‘In the last chapter of your first book, you said, “There’s more to be seen in the world than most will admit.” What did you mean?’ I asked.
She stared into the distance, where the light of the rising sun already shimmered on the sparse grass and barren ground. ‘Over there, on the edge of the plaza, a stoneworker once sat and shaped irregular lumps of obsidian into sharp sacrificial blades for priests, into spearheads for hunters. He squatted on the ground, shaded by an awning of bright blue cloth. His skin glistened with sweat as he bent over his work. He was a well-fed man, fattened by the venison and wild turkey with which the hunters paid him, unusually stout for a Mayan.’ My mother leaned forward, as if to get a better view of the stoneworker. ‘Do you see him there, sitting in the sun and patiently chipping an edge on an obsidian blade? I see him. He’s a very careful workman. You can choose to see him. Or you can choose to see the bare earth.’ She glanced at my face. ‘That’s what I meant. Do you see him?’ Her tone was light and casual.
I felt uncomfortable, staring at the bare place in the earth. I remembered the dream that had led me to discover the stela. But that had been a dream – I was awake now. I shrugged. ‘I see the sunlight on the rocks, that’s all.’
She nodded. ‘Nothing wrong with that. I sometimes think that to see the past clearly you must give up a good deal of the present.’ She shrugged. ‘It’s a choice I made long ago. A sacrifice of sorts.’
‘Do you mean you really see him? In the same way that you see me?’
She was silent for so long that I thought she had decided not to answer. When she spoke, she spoke softly. ‘Sometimes, I think I see the shadows of the past more clearly than I see any living person.’ She shrugged, as if to rid herself of the thought, then quickly stood to return to camp.
I did not follow all that she said to me. I was reluctant to ask questions, because questions seemed to disturb the spell, to break some unspoken rule. If I asked too many questions, my mother would shrug and fall silent, or suggest immediately that we return to camp. Sometimes, it seemed like our morning walks were waking dreams, unsettling, subtly disturbing. Thoughts and feelings that I could not pinpoint were tapping at the back of my skull. I liked my mother, but I did not understand her. I did not understand her at all.
In the heat of the day, my mother was a different person – brisk, fast-moving, impatient that the excavation went so slowly. She argued with Tony about where the crew should be digging, about the significance of the stone head, about the likelihood that the underground chamber would really turn out to be a tomb.
By the fourth day, I felt at home at the dig. It seemed that I had always washed my face in gritty lukewarm water from a black barrel that smelled faintly of plastic, had always blundered to a pungent outhouse in the darkness each night.
Barbara asked me if I wanted to go to Mérida with her that weekend. She knew a cheap hotel with a pool. We could take hot showers, maybe see a movie and eat popcorn in an air-conditioned theater. I asked my mother if she thought that a trip to Mérida would be worthwhile, and she said I should go.
On Saturday morning, I woke early. Barbara had not set her alarm: we had planned to sleep late and leave camp sometime in the middle of the morning. When I woke, I glanced at Barbara, who was just rolling over to look at the clock.
‘What time is it?’ I whispered. Maggie and Robin were still asleep.
‘Seven-thirty,’ she whispered back. She leaned back in the hammock, one hand tucked under her head.
She was frowning. ‘I can’t even sleep late anymore,’ she grumbled. ‘This is ridiculous.’
We dressed quietly, packed clean clothes, and slipped out of the hut. We stopped at the water barrel to wash, and the splash of water into the metal basin was loud in the hot morning air. The camp was still asleep; the only sign of life was the small curl of smoke rising from Maria’s kitchen.
‘Ah,’ Barbara said. ‘Perhaps we can convince Maria to spare us a cup of coffee.’
I hung back when Barbara went to the door of the kitchen. The look that Maria gave us was far from friendly. Teresa hid behind Maria’s skirts. Barbara stepped away from the kitchen, frowning. ‘I guess we’ll get coffee in Mérida. Maria says she hasn’t made any this morning.’
I followed Barbara to the car. When I glanced back over my shoulder, I caught a glimpse of Teresa, peering out the kitchen door after us. ‘I don’t think Maria likes me much,’ I said to Barbara.
‘Of course not. She doesn’t like me either. You and I are young women, but we dress in pants and spend all our time with men.’ Barbara shook her head. ‘We don’t behave properly. She doesn’t approve.’
‘She talks to Liz.’
‘She doesn’t like Liz either. She doesn’t approve of any of us.’
I nodded, relieved at Barbara’s certainty that I was not alone in Maria’s disapproval.
Barbara’s battered Volkswagen bug jounced over every bump and rut in the road out of camp, finding every pothole, dropping into it, and emerging triumphant on the other side. Barbara drove with gleeful enthusiasm and unnecessary speed, tramping on the gas whenever the road looked clear for a stretch, only touching the brakes for an instant when the car hit a bump. ‘What’s the hurry?’ I shouted over the roar of the engine.
‘I’m tired of moving slow, that’s all,’ she shouted back. She swerved to avoid one pothole, struck another one dead-on, gunned the engine, and kept moving. ‘I’m tired of dirt and flies.’ She hit another pothole. ‘I want a hot shower, coffee, breakfast, bright lights, and men who want to talk about something besides potsherds.’ She looked away from the road to grin at me with bright-eyed malice. ‘I want to look for trouble.’ We hit another pothole.
‘I know one person in Mérida who might know where to find trouble,’ I shouted. ‘Someone I met on the plane.’
‘Man or woman?’
‘Man.’
‘Of course. Fast worker.’ I didn’t know whether she meant that I was a fast worker or the man was a fast worker. It didn’t seem to matter. ‘Cute?’
I thought for a moment. My memory of Marcos was rather vague, but I thought he had been presentable enough. ‘Not bad.’
‘Good. He’ll have a friend. They always do.’
We reached the main highway, the road that had seemed so narrow on my way to camp. It felt like a freeway now. The car picked up speed, and we rolled down the windows to let the wind blow through. We passed a truck filled with workmen on their way to somewhere, and we waved and honked the horn like high school kids who had escaped the campus for a field trip. We roared by a cluster of huts and waved to a woman who was hanging out the clothes and to a troop of children who were playing by the road.
‘We’ll have hot showers first, then breakfast,’ Barbara shouted.
‘Great,’ I said. Everything was great. The wind, the road, the promise of breakfast.
The hotel was an old establishment, a few blocks from Mérida’s main square and right beside Parque Hidalgo, the park that Marcos had mentioned. A little shabby. The desk clerk spoke bad English. A thin black cat seemed to live in the lobby. The banister on the curving stairs leading down to the lobby was ornately carved, but in need of polish. The blue and gold tiles of the lobby floor needed sweeping; dust hid behind the potted palms. But the sun streamed in through the open arch that led to Parque Hidalgo and there were fresh flowers on the check-in counter.
We registered and took hot showers before breakfast. I sat on one of the two twin beds while Barbara showered, rubbin
g lotion on my legs, working around the mosquito bites and scratches. For the first time in a week, I was wearing a skirt and sandals rather than jeans and sneakers, and my hair felt clean. Overhead, the ceiling fan turned with a steady rattle. Barbara was singing in the shower.
Parque Hidalgo was a small brick-paved plaza. Tall broad-leaved trees shaded the plaza and dropped small yellow blossoms on the men who spent the day idling on the park benches. In the center of the square a tall bronze man stood on a white stone pillar atop a stone platform. I never did learn his name.
We ate breakfast at a sidewalk café beside the hotel and on one side of the park. Ornate metal tables, fringed umbrellas, red-and-white tablecloths, and a matronly waitress who seemed harried.
‘Hamacas?’ asked a stout man in a yellow baseball cap. On one shoulder he carried a bundle of plastic-wrapped hammocks. Over the other shoulder, he had slung a loose hammock, which he held out for our inspection.
‘Is your name Emilio?’ I asked. ‘I’m looking for a hammock vendor named Emilio.’ He shook his head heavily and went to the next table, where there were tourists with simpler needs.
Barbara flipped through the pages of a tourist guide to Mérida, which she had picked up from the hotel lobby. It told the way to the zoo, to the market, to the ruins at Chichén Itzá, to the best places for lunch and for dancing. She read aloud bits of information that she found interesting.
‘The main square is called the zocalo,’ she told me.
I nodded, watching the people strolling by on the street. The coffee was good and I was content. I had not realized that I was nervous about being at the dig until now, when I had relaxed.
‘You interested in a tour of Chichén Itzá?’ she asked me. ‘It’s only about an hour’s drive from here.’
‘Maybe tomorrow,’ I said.
‘We could tour Casa Montejo, the mansion built by the Spanish back in 1549,’ she said. ‘Or we could visit the cathedral. Or we could go to the market.’
‘Whatever you like.’
We decided to go to the market, figuring that we would have time to stop in the cathedral on our way back and still have time for a siesta before dinner.
We were finishing breakfast and drinking coffee when I spotted Marcos at the far end of the cafe. I nudged Barbara. ‘He’s better-looking than I remembered,’ I said. He was a thin, small-boned young man with dark brown eyes, white teeth, high dark cheekbones. He was grinning as he watched a hammock salesman – I assumed it was Emilio – display a hammock to an American couple: a woman in a sundress and a man in a Hawaiian shirt. Emilio had looped one end of a hammock around the arm of one of the wrought-iron chairs. He hesitated for a moment, holding the hammock in a bundle, then he flipped it open with an elegant flourish – the way a waiter uncorks a bottle of wine. The gesture conveyed the importance of the act and the value of the product. The hammock was a rich shade of purple that caught the sunlight and held it.
Marcos saw us then and joined us at the table. ‘Hello,’ he said to me. ‘How are you?’ He pulled out a chair. We watched Emilio close his sale; the American couple walked away with two hammocks, and Emilio stuffed a handful of paper money into his pocket.
He came to the table and dropped his bundle of hammocks by a chair. ‘It’s going to be a good day,’ he said. ‘I have luck today.’ He was a head shorter than I, compact and broad-shouldered. Dark eyes, dark skin, and a smile like an all-American boy except for the gold filling that showed around the edges of one front tooth. ‘You are Marcos’s friends.’ The easy charm of a born salesman. ‘You want to buy a hammock? I’ll give you a good price.’
‘We’ve got hammocks,’ Barbara said. ‘In fact, we’re sick to death of hammocks.’
‘How could you be sick of hammocks?’ Emilio asked, and Barbara went on at length on how she could be sick of hammocks, so very sick of hammocks.
‘Buy one for a present,’ Emilio suggested and then bought a round of coffee with the same sort of flourish with which he displayed a hammock. We talked about tourists and the weather while the morning wore on. Emilio and Marcos seemed quite at home in the café, familiar with the waitress. A line was forming outside the nearby movie theater. The smell of popcorn hung in the warm air.
After a time, Emilio was trying to talk Barbara into visiting an isolated cave at a place called Homún. An underground river in a limestone cave with stalactites. ‘Beautiful,’ he said. ‘Really beautiful.’
Marcos was watching me. ‘Qué piensas?’ he asked. ‘What are you thinking?’
I shrugged. ‘Not much.’
‘You looked like you were thinking about something.’
I shrugged again. Emilio was using both hands to describe the stalactites in the cave. Barbara looked unconvinced.
‘On the plane, you looked sad. What was wrong?’ Marcos asked.
I said nothing. Shrugged.
He glanced at Emilio, who was growing more eloquent in his attempts to persuade Barbara that a visit to the lonely cavern at Homún was the perfect thing for any young American’s summer vacation. ‘I am tired of sitting here,’ Marcos said. ‘Come on. We’ll walk and come back here.’ We left Barbara and Emilio talking about underground rivers.
They walk, in Mérida. Out in the small parks, where the breezes are a little cooler than the air pushed about by the ubiquitous ceiling fans. We wandered through the main square. ‘What were you doing in Los Angeles?’ I asked Marcos.
‘I went to visit my uncle.’ He shrugged. ‘But there was no work, so I came home. There is no work here, but I have friends.’
He led the way through the square, past small horse-drawn carriages in which tourists rode.
‘What made you sad?’ Marcos asked. ‘You can tell me.’
I shrugged and told him about coming to the dig to find my mother, about how I had not seen my mother in many years.
He listened and nodded. ‘So, what do you want from your mother?’ he asked.
I shrugged.
‘You don’t know what you want.’
‘I guess not.’
‘Tonight,’ he said, ‘I play basketball for the university. You want to come?’
‘Basketball? Let me see what Barbara thinks.’
He took my hand. ‘Even if Barbara does not want to come, you come and watch me play, OK?’
‘All right.’
Back at the café, Emilio was asking Barbara what we were planning to do that day.
‘Go to the market,’ she said. ‘Wander around Mérida.’
‘And tomorrow?’ he said. ‘What are you going to do tomorrow?’
‘We talked about going to Chichén Itzá,’ she said. ‘But it’s a long drive.’
‘I’ll help drive,’ Emilio said. ‘No problem. I’ll bring hammocks to sell. All right?’ Barbara was laughing, but Emilio did not let up. ‘I’ll tell you what. If you want to go to Chichén Itzá, you meet me here tomorrow in the morning. I’ll help drive. It’ll be good.’ He grinned, showing his gold-rimmed tooth.
We finished our coffee, and Emilio and Marcos went to the zocalo to sell hammocks. Barbara and I went to the market, heading away from the zocalo on Calle 60, a narrow street with narrow sidewalks. All the streets were narrow. The houses and shops pressed close to the street and stood shoulder to shoulder, presenting a solid front to the world.
We passed the open door of a room filled with the smell of beer and the sound of men talking. A young man standing in the doorway smiled at us, but we did not smile back. We smiled at children, dogs, and women. The children smiled back; the dogs and women did not.
A middle-aged man was selling coconuts from a pushcart. We watched him skillfully chop the husk from a nut, break the shell away, pierce the round white fruit, and insert a straw. We each bought a coconut and sipped the sweet milk as we walked.
I recognized the market but could not begin to remember the way through the maze of tiny stalls. We peered down long corridors that led into darkness. In the dimness beyond where the sunlight reached
, I could see boxes of fruit and vegetables, crates of chickens, hanging meat. Barbara consulted her guidebook and dragged me to the corridor where clothing was sold. It was on the edge of the market and the sun shone in. Every stall was bright with hanging shawls, dresses, shirts, skirts.
‘I like that one,’ I said to Barbara, pointing out a very pretty burgundy-colored shawl with a painted floral border. The woman who sat in the stall called to us, smiling and beckoning. She had gold earrings that matched her gold tooth and she seemed fascinated by my hair and determined to sell me the shawl. I bargained in bad Spanish and, I think, ended up paying too much for the shawl. Barbara bought a white dress that was embroidered with a pattern of dark blue squares. It was just past three when we headed back to the hotel.
‘Time for a nap,’ I said.
‘Let’s stop at the cathedral,’ Barbara said. ‘It’s on the way and it’ll be cool inside.’
I put a coin in the hand of the beggar woman who sat just outside the arched door. She blessed me with the sign of the cross.
The interior was cool and dark. Light filtered down from high octagonal windows. White columns rose to a high vaulted ceiling, crisscrossed with stonework that was lost in the shadows. An emaciated Christ hung wearily on his cross at the far end of the hall. Old women knelt in the front pew. A young boy sat in the back, doing sums in a school notebook.
A few other tourists were wandering around the hall. I hesitated just inside the door. I felt uncomfortable – more than just awkward about entering an unfamiliar church, but somehow reluctant to move closer to the figure of Christ. But Barbara had already started up one of the side aisles, and so I followed her.
Plaques on the white stone walls depicted Christ’s suffering and death. I did not linger to look at them. I remembered my mother’s contention that Christianity was a religion of human sacrifice and I was inclined to agree. Halfway up the aisle, I paused to look at an elaborately carved statue of the Virgin Mary. Candles burned on a small table before the statue, and the warm air was thick with the scent of incense and burning wax. The candlelight flickered on the Virgin Mary’s carved wooden robes.