The Falling Woman

by Pat Murphy

  ‘Where does she live?’ The question was out before I stopped to think.

  ‘It’s a little apartment in an old building. One-bedroom. Crammed with books and pots and artifacts. Tiny kitchen. I think she eats out mostly.’ Barbara glanced at me, still casual. ‘You know, you still haven’t told me the story here. You’re Liz’s daughter, but you don’t know her and she doesn’t know you. You turn up here unexpectedly and you stay.’ She shrugged without looking at me. ‘Tell me if you want to.’

  ‘She and my father were divorced when I was five. My father raised me,’ I said. ‘I only saw my mother a few times after the divorce. My father didn’t want her to have anything to do with me. So I don’t know her. 1 don’t know her at all.’

  ‘Your father kept her from seeing you? Didn’t Liz have anything to say about that?’

  I shrugged. ‘Apparently not.’

  The courtyard erupted with cheers when Marcos’s team grabbed the ball and made a basket – their first in ten minutes. Barbara waited for the echoes to die, her eyes following the running men. ‘So, do you think you’ll sleep with him?’

  I shrugged, grateful that she had changed the subject and knowing that she had done so for my benefit.

  ‘Don’t expect much if you do,’ she said. ‘Mexican men play by a different set of rules.’

  ‘That sounds like the voice of experience.’

  ‘I’ve heard tales,’ she said.

  I did not get to hear any of the tales. Emilio hailed us from the bottom of the bleachers and made his way up to where we sat. He sat on the level below us, leaned against Barbara’s legs, and grinned up at her, showing his gold-rimmed teeth. ‘I knew Marcos and I would have luck today,’ he said.

  Sunday morning, Barbara and I woke early to the sound of church bells calling the people to Mass. Marcos and Emilio arrived at the café just as we were finishing breakfast.

  Emilio dropped a stack of hammocks beside the table, collapsed into a chair, and waved for the waitress to bring two more coffees. ‘Qué hacemos?’ Marcos asked, sitting beside me. ‘What are we going to do?’

  ‘Want a hammock?’ Emilio said to a passing couple, and what we did for a while was watch the intricate quick-step of careful negotiations. The woman said no and the man said yes, then after a while the man said maybe and the woman said maybe. Then finally, after much bargaining, the woman said yes and the man said yes. Emilio returned to the table smiling.

  ‘So what are we going to do?’ Barbara asked, but Emilio, distracted from romance by the promise of profit, had spotted two French tourists on the other side of the café and was watching another hammock vendor try to convince them to buy a hammock.

  ‘I will sell them a hammock tomorrow,’ he said.

  ‘Let’s leave these guys here and go somewhere cool,’ Barbara suggested to me.

  Marcos leaned forward and said, ‘We could go to the park. You haven’t seen the park, have you?’

  We caught the crosstown bus, a battered vehicle that had come to Mérida to die. Clattering, wheezing, overloaded, and much abused, it had, I would have bet, served many years hard time in the States or in some wealthier province of Mexico before it reached Mérida. The bus took us to the park, which was not cool, but was a little cooler than the café.

  We rode the small train that circled the park, squeezed in one corner of a car packed with fat women in peasant dresses and sticky happy children who smelled of cotton candy and hot sauce. We rented a small boat with clumsy wooden paddles and journeyed slowly across a tiny cement pond filled with pale green water no deeper than waist-high. Barbara and Emilio paddled enthusiastically. Halfway across, we collided with a boat piloted by a solidly built Mexican father; his wife and two children watched us with round eyes as we called out apologies in English and Spanish. On the way back, we rammed a boat piloted by two high school boys, who seemed to regard the collision as a challenge of some sort. The taller boy smacked his paddle against the water to send a cascade of green water in our direction, and we hastily retreated toward shore.

  We rode in red-and-gold skyway cars, passing over the pond and dropping potato chips on the high school boys and, accidentally, on the father, who still paddled valiantly in a vain and foolish effort to reach the far shore.

  We watched high school students on roller skates careen around a small concrete rink. Marcos bought me a balloon from a withered old man. Barbara and Emilio tried to sell a hammock to two young American men.

  Two old women in huipiles sat at a small metal table by the refrescos stand, drinking Coca-Cola and eating potato chips. A troop of noisy children ran along the paths; a middle-aged woman carrying an oversized purse trudged after them. Four high school boys strolled along the path with their hands in their pockets and sunglasses shading their eyes. Emilio bought us all melon-flavored helados, sweet fruit ices that had cantaloupe seeds mashed in with the fruit juice. Marcos held my warm, fruit-juice sticky hand, and we strolled behind the high school boys, taking the day at its own pace.

  The zoo was small and smelled of warm animals, warm hay, warm manure. The owl, a small brown-feathered bird with delicate ear tufts, perched in the far corner of his cage, as far as possible from the path. When Barbara hooted at him softly, mimicking the call we heard in the camp at night, he blinked at us, ruffled his feathers, then closed his eyes again.

  The jaguar was pacing in his cage, one foot crossing over the other as he turned, took three steps to the far end of the cage, turned again and took three steps back, weaving an endless pattern. He returned my gaze. Marcos leaned on the railing beside me.

  ‘Are there still jaguars in the monte?’ I asked him. ‘I’d hate to meet one out by the camp at night.’

  He shook his head. ‘Not here. Not near Mérida. Not anymore.’ He put his arm lightly around my waist. ‘Are you afraid, being alone in the camp at night? 1 will come back with you and keep you safe at night.’

  I laughed. ‘Ah – there may be no jaguar, but there are wolves in Mérida.’

  He frowned. ‘I don’t understand.’

  I laughed again. ‘Nothing. Never mind. It’s not important.’ I spotted Barbara and Emilio over by the camel’s enclosure and started to lead him in that direction. He held my hand and pulled me back to him, put his hand lightly on my shoulder, and kissed my lips quickly.

  ‘You should not laugh at me when I don’t understand,’ he said. ‘I don’t laugh when you don’t understand.’

  I think I blushed. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I didn’t mean . . .’ He kissed me again, then led the way to where Emilio and Barbara were feeding the camel popcorn through the bars.

  By the time we returned to Parque Hidalgo, the day was fading. The line for the movie theater stretched along one side of the square, and vendors sold balloons to the people leaving the church on the corner. Marcos and I shared a concrete love seat on one side of the park; Emilio and Barbara shared another. The love seats in Mérida’s parks are two concrete chairs joined in an S curve – the person in one chair faces the person in the other chair, yet the two are separated by a wide concrete armrest. Intimacy with separation. I still wore my sunglasses and they made the world seem dim and far away.

  Marcos was holding my hand in a companionable way and I was watching Emilio and Barbara. Emilio was trying to persuade Barbara to stay one more night and go to bed with him. Barbara was saying that she would see him next weekend. I knew their conversation because the discussion had started on the bus back from the park. Barbara was laughing and shaking her head.

  The heat of the day weighed upon me. On the brick plaza, two pigeons were courting. The male was circling the female, cooing and puffing out his neck feathers so that they caught the light. The female was searching for bread crumbs, oblivious to his attention.

  Two small children, a boy in a blue shirt and jeans and a little girl in a faded dress, came to us with a bouquet of flowers. Marcos bought me a flower and I tucked it behind my ear. The little girl grinned: her teeth were crooked and he
r hair needed combing. I patted her on the shoulder – the way you pat a kitten or a puppy – and gave her a coin.

  ‘Will you come here next weekend?’ Marcos asked me.

  ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘I think so.’

  He squeezed my hand lightly. ‘Sometimes,’ Marcos said, ‘you look like you are very far away from here. What happens with you then?’

  ‘Just thinking, I guess. I can’t explain it.’

  He studied my face, then shrugged. ‘Whatever it is, it will be OK. You are in Mérida with us.’ He squeezed my hand lightly. ‘It will be good. We will be good friends.’

  Across the way, Emilio’s attempts to persuade Barbara had been interrupted by the flower-bearing children. As I watched, Emilio tried to shoo them away and continue his conversation with Barbara, but the boy just grinned and thrust the flowers out again. Clever urchins, they kept grinning and holding out the flowers and watching Barbara laugh. Finally, Emilio threw up his hands with impatience, bought a flower from the boy and bribed the little girl with a coin.

  ‘Don’t look sad,’ said Marcos. ‘You will come back in a week. One week will pass just like that.’ He waved a hand in the air.

  Barbara was walking toward me, twirling a white flower between her finger and thumb. Emilio, defeated but still hopeful, walked at her side. Barbara and I drove away in a car filled with the scent of dying flowers.

  13

  Elizabeth

  Diane and Barbara returned to camp late on Sunday, roaring in about an hour after sunset. Tony, John, and I were sitting beside Tony’s hut when they drove up. Barbara waved to us from the car, immediately brought over a bottle of red wine that she had purchased in Mérida, and insisted that we all share it. She seemed exuberant, happy to have gone to Mérida, happy to be back. Diane was more subdued.

  Barbara dragged over a few folding chairs, and we drank wine and listened to Barbara’s tales of selling hammocks to tourists. The wine was too sweet. Diane said very little, and I found myself watching the shadows shift and move. The dancing woman did not return. I felt restless and out of place and I excused myself after finishing a single glass of wine. Alone, I walked to the cenote.

  I fingered the lucky piece that I carried in my pocket. Tony had given me the coin on the same day he told me that he loved me. I don’t remember what I said to him. I have a better memory for what others say than for what I say myself. We were walking home from the movies. Tony had insisted on taking me; he told me I was working too hard, that I needed some time off. When we reached my apartment door, he pulled a dark blue box from his pocket and handed it to me. ‘I made you a present,’ he said.

  ‘You realize,’ he said as I was opening it, ‘that I care a lot about you.’ He was shy, a little awkward. I remember hoping, as I opened the box, that a collapsible rubber snake would jump out, or that a joy buzzer would sound, or somehow the whole thing would be a joke. The coin glistened in the light. ‘I love you, Liz. You know that?’ Tony said quietly.

  I did know – though I had not admitted it to myself before. I said, I think I said, ‘I don’t want this. I’m sorry.’ I think I held the coin out to him, hoping that he would take it back and hide it away again.

  He took my hand and gently closed it around the coin. He kept his hands on mine for a moment. ‘Think about it,’ he said. He turned and walked away, leaving the coin in my hand.

  I remember sitting in my apartment. I didn’t turn on the lamp; I could see the dim outlines of the furniture by the light of the streetlamp, filtered through the window shade, and I wanted no more light than that. What I had told Tony was true – I could not love him. Somewhere at my center, with the madness I had locked away, I had sealed off the part of me that knew how to love. It was too close to the part of me that knew how to hate, and that was at the center of the madness. I had sealed them all away, leaving a dead place, a place where nothing hurt because there were no nerve endings there. I had severed connections, cauterized the wound. I sat in the dim light in an ugly apartment that needed painting and I probed the dead spot, thinking about Robert, thinking about the pain of madness. Nothing.

  I don’t think I cried. I don’t remember crying. I remember taking a shower and letting the warm water run over my body. I remember thinking, I feel the water, so I must be alive. But the warm water did not reach the part of me that I had sealed away.

  Tony and I remained friends – very good friends. I tried to give him the coin back, but he insisted I keep it. We went to lunch together, to dinner now and then. Eventually, he mentioned to me that he was dating Hilde, one of the secretaries who worked in the department.

  The cenote was dark and still. I stood on the edge of the pool and held the coin lightly in my hand. Something was stirring in the back of my mind; something that I did not want to examine too closely. Feelings that I had buried long ago were surfacing in me. I turned the coin over and over in my hand.

  I heard the rustle of fabric behind me. Zuhuy-kak stepped to my side, smiling in the moonlight. ‘Ah, you are here,’ she said. ‘That is well: you belong here.’

  I smiled back. Seeing her helped ease the restlessness. I did belong here; I had always felt that.

  ‘I came to tell you that a day of bad luck is coming,’ she said. ‘The day Ix, three days from now, will be unfavorable. It is ruled by the jaguar god, who does not wish the goddess to return to power. You must give to the goddess to make her stronger so that she can help you against her enemies.’

  ‘What can I give?’

  ‘Something you value.’ Zuhuy-kak was looking at the coin and I closed my hand around it. My mind suddenly held a picture of the coin arcing high in the air, catching the moonlight as it tumbled toward the black waters.

  ‘You hesitate,’ she said.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I was thinking that you have never told me what we will find when we finish digging.’

  She frowned at me. ‘You were wondering whether the result would be worth the sacrifice. You cannot bargain with the gods.’

  I shrugged. ‘I think about these things differently than you.’

  ‘What do you want to find, Ix Zacbeliz?’

  I thought for a moment. Tony and I joked about jade masks and gold, but that was just joking. What did I want? A tomb that added to our knowledge of religious ritual? Murals like the ones in the caves at Bonampak?

  ‘I know what you want,’ Zuhuy-kak said softly. ‘I can tell you. You want power. That is what you will find when you reach the end. You will find the power of the goddess.’

  I was turning the coin over and over in my hand.

  ‘You must sacrifice to the goddess to gain her favor. You must give to her willingly.’

  I held the coin, unwilling to let it go. It caught the moonlight and gleamed in my hand. A sound on the path distracted me. My daughter’s voice calling, ‘Hello?’ I turned toward her, slipped on the rock, started to fall and flailed my arms to regain my balance. My hand opened and the coin slipped away from me, through my fingers. I heard it hit the rock, slide. I heard a splash in the water below. Gone.

  ‘Hello? Who’s that?’ Diane called. My daughter had stopped in the shadows where the trail reached the pool’s edge. She was alone. ‘Who’s there?’

  1 walked around the pool to stand beside her. ‘What are you doing here?’ My voice sounded strained and I fought to control it. ‘It’s late to be wandering around.’

  She shrugged. ‘I thought I might go for a swim,’ she said. ‘I thought it might help me sleep.’

  ‘The water should be cool.’ I stood with my hands in my empty pockets, looking at the cenote.

  ‘What are you doing out here?’ Diane asked hesitantly.

  ‘Thinking,’ I said. ‘It’s cooler here. And quieter.’

  ‘Sorry to interrupt,’ she said quickly. ‘I didn’t know—’

  ‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘It’s fine.’ Her eyes were large in the moonlight, like the eyes of a little girl. ‘I was just heading back to camp.’

 
; ‘All right,’ she said with a trace of relief. She turned away, kneeling by the pool to test the water with her hand.

  And suddenly, I don’t know why, I was afraid to leave her there by herself. ‘I’ll wait for you,’ I said. ‘I’ll walk you back to camp.’

  She frowned at me, puzzled. ‘That’s all right. I’m fine by myself.”

  ‘No, I’ll stay. I’d like to just sit here for a while anyway,’ I said.

  She shrugged. ‘If you want.’

  When she dove in, she shattered the silver moon that floated on the surface of the pool. The moonlight rippled around her. I think she shortened her swim because I was there. She ducked beneath the dark surface once or twice, did a slow breaststroke to the far end of the pool and back.

  Walking along the dark path to camp with my daughter at my side, I realized that she frightened me. I am not used to caring. The breeze blew and I thought I heard laughter in the branches overhead.

  That night, I dreamed of the city of Dzibilchaltún before the coming of the ah-nunob.

  In the dream, I walked north along the sacbe that led from the outskirts to the city center. The city was quiet and still. Most houses were empty, but the desertion seemed temporary. I could see through the open doorways into the huts. In one, an old woman tended a fire and stirred a pot of atole. In another, a child cried, a sound as thin and lonely as a fingernail scraping on a classroom chalkboard an hour after school was out. In one solar, I saw tall water jars, elegantly painted with black on red. A woman hurried along the sacbe, glancing warily over her shoulder. I saw a man lying in a hammock, while a woman sat beside him, her head bowed, rocking his hammock as if he were a child. I guessed the date of the dream to be sometime near AD 900, sometime before the Toltec invasion.