The Falling Woman (31 page)

At Hospital Juarez, two young attendants took over, clapping a respirator over Tony's face and carting him away. I felt cold, listening to the soft babble of voices in the hospital waiting room. The walls were painted white and pastel green, marred by scuff marks near the floor. A young woman with classic Mayan features sat on an orange plastic chair. She held a baby that wailed steadily in constant complaint. The woman crooned soft comforting words in Maya; she told the infant the same tired lie over and over: it will be all right; it will be all right. An old woman in a wrinkled huipil spoke softly to an old man who wore a bandage over half his face; they leaned together like the stones of a corbeled arch. The old man watched us with his one good eye. A young man, wearing the straw hat and loose clothing of a worker on a hacienda, clutched a white cloth to his arm; I could see the bright red of blood seeping through the cloth.

When we walked past him, I caught a whiff of aguardiente— late night in the bars. Salvador and I found two plastic chairs, sat, and waited.

The nurse who called my name wore a stiff blue-striped dress with a white apron. Her dark hair was tucked beneath her nurse's cap. I followed her, listening to the stiff rustling of her skirt. She took me to a tiny airless office, where an officious young doctor asked me questions about Tony. The doctor was thin-faced and he wore the scent of disinfectant like an aftershave. I disliked him immediately.

I recited Tony's full name, age, residence, and professional affiliation. Each question seemed to come to me from farther away, as if the doctor were fading in the distance.

"I don't know how long he was there," I said. "I hadn't seen him since the night before. I suppose he must have been out walking very early." My voice was dull. In my imagination, 1 could see the snake, still sluggish from the cool night air, basking in the sun. I imagined Tony, preoccupied with the necessity of locking up his friend and colleague in the nuthouse, stumbling up the trail. I guessed he had not slept after he left me: he sat alone, drinking and considering the shadows.

"Why would he have been walking so early?"

"I don't know."

I knew, but I did not care to say. Why would he stumble through the monte in the pale light of dawn?

Because someone he cared for was crazy; she was talking about secrets in the shadows. He was thinking about me and he did not see the snake.

Tony died in the early afternoon without regaining consciousness. The doctor's English was very good, but I heard a note of disapproval under his professional tone of sympathy. "He had been drinking heavily,"

the young doctor said. "That's probably why he was unable to reach the camp and seek help." He knew so little of the world, this young doctor. He seemed to think that heavy drinking was unusual.

Salvador was there, standing just behind my chair. An orderly had loaned him a shirt that was much too small for him. The shirt was unbuttoned.

"Would you like the body prepared for transport to the States?" the young doctor asked.

He had pens in his pocket and a stethoscope around his neck. He knew nothing of rocks, ruins, herbs, and old bones. Yet his face, as he looked down at the form on his desk, was a match, feature for feature, for the face of the young maize god of the hieroglyphics. He belonged to the rocks and the ruins, this young doctor, but he did not know it.

He looked up from the form and repeated the question. Salvador laid a hand on my shoulder. "Yes," I said then. "Yes. Have the body prepared."

From a pay phone in the hallway, I contacted the university and spoke to the department secretary, a woman my age who knew everything about everyone. She was appropriately shocked, yet still willing to ask—tactfully and carefully— about the circumstances. I did not like this woman and under normal circumstances she did not like me. But now her voice flooded with sympathy and false warmth.

"How terrible," she kept saying. "How terrible."

I could only agree wearily. She was a tinny voice coming to me from far away. She was not real. As I stood in the white hall, listening to her reassurances and sympathy, an orderly walked by. I watched his shadow move on the white wall. Here in the hospital, shadows had edges. They did not blur, one into the other. Here, people were alive or dead, conscious or unconscious. No gray zones of uncertainty. After explaining to the secretary that I would make arrangements to ship the body, after promising that I would call her on the next day, I hung up.

"Perhaps you should stay here in town, sénora," Salvador said. "I will go to camp."

I shook my head. "You know I have to go back."

Salvador shrugged, a tiny movement of his shoulders. He was a practical man. He did not argue. He drove back to camp with the careful dignity of a man in a funeral procession. We said little to each other. I had nothing to say.

Camp was quiet. A thin ribbon of smoke drifted up from the kitchen; Maria was burning dinner. Barbara, John, Robin, and Diane were sitting in the plaza; they came to the truck as we pulled up.

"Tony died at Hospital Juarez this afternoon," I said. "Snakebite." They were all looking at me, their faces blurring in the heat and the tears. I had one hand on the open door of the truck, leaning on it for support.

"Snakebite and bad luck," I said. Barbara started toward me but I waved her back. It was Cimi, the day of death, and touching me was not a safe thing to do.

"Pack your things," I said to them. "Go to Mérida for the night. We will do no work tomorrow or the next day. Tomorrow is a holiday." I did not tell them that tomorrow would be the beginning of the end. The first of the last five days of the Mayan year. Bad-luck days.

They were watching me, uncertain and confused. I summoned the voice of authority from my distant past, from lecture halls where, fearing the hungry young faces that watched me, I made my voice like a whip and told them what to do. I spoke as a teacher, hard-edged and irascible, no lingering trace of softness. I told them to pack their bags. I told them to leave. Carlos and Maggie had come up from the cenote, summoned by the sound of the truck. They stood, still dripping, just behind the others. I looked at Diane and spoke to them all. "Leave this place," I said. "Come back later and pack up the camp, but leave now. Tony would want you to go."

They watched me blankly and I remembered countless dusty lecture halls where I fought to give blank faces pieces of my dreams, to describe for them the worlds of the past that they would never glimpse, carefully cloaking my thoughts in the words of the professor, the scholar, the archaeologist, careful lest someone think I believed too much in my own dreams, that I saw too well, lived in a different world. "Go," I said. "Go now."

I left them there. I went to my own hut, as if to pack, but I took a flashlight and headed along the path to the tomb. It was late afternoon. The air was heavy with moisture and the sky hung low with clouds. I found my hat in the dust where Salvador had left it. I picked it up, beat it against my knee to knock the dust free, straightened the brim, and carried it as I continued down the trail. I was not willing to wear it now.

A few hundred yards farther down the path, I passed the spot where Tony had dropped his gin bottle.

The shards of clear glass glittered in the afternoon sun. He must have dropped the bottle when he fell.

Beside the trail, the grass was crushed and the ground was marked with blood.

I kept walking along the path. I was halfway to the tomb when Zuhuy-kak joined me. She kept pace with me.

Beside the mound, near a stone that would have made a comfortable seat, I saw burnt leavings of tobacco, emptied from a pipe. Tony had rested here, thinking about me, an old friend who was in trouble.

Considering how he could help.

He had rested here until sunrise, struggling with demons less visible than my own, then headed to camp, meeting the snake on his way down.

The old woman was still with me. I could hear her sandals scraping lightly against the sandy ground. I turned on her suddenly. "Why do you follow me?" I asked her.

"The time is coming," she said. Her voice was very soft, like the gentle hissing when the wind blows dust over temple stones. "The year is ending."

"Why did Tony die?" I said suddenly. In the bright sunlight of late afternoon she was as solid as the silent stones around us.

"Your enemies seek to stop you," she said. Her voice was even and devoid of any expression. "I told you that."

"My life is nothing like yours," I said. "I did not sacrifice my daughter, I will not be hurled into the well."

"The year grows old and things happen," she said. "Perhaps not the same things that happened in my time. Nevertheless, things happen."

"Leave me alone," I said to her.

"It will do you no good to ignore me," she said.

"It did me no good to speak to you," I said. I turned away from her. I climbed down into the pit without looking back.

It was cool and quiet in the inner chamber. I flashed the light on the skeleton. That lay quiet at least. Her daughter's skull peered out of the nest of bones.

"I used that, blade," Zuhuy-kak said, jerking her head toward the obsidian knife that lay on the stone platform. "It is very sharp. Her pain will be brief."

I picked up the blade and tested the edge. Still sharp: a bright bead of blood formed on my thumb. I inspected the old scars on my wrists. The skin was thin and vulnerable. But Tony would not approve if I bled on a valuable artifact. I could use my pocketknife instead.

"Not yet," Zuhuy-kak said. "First your daughter, then yourself.''

"I sent my daughter away."

The woman was not listening to me. She lifted her head as if she heard something outside the tomb, and she smiled.

"Liz?" My daughter's voice came from the dark gap that led to the outside world. "Are you there? Are you all right?"

What do you do when you are falling? Do you reach out and try to grab for support? If you aren't careful, you will pull others down with you. Unless you are very careful.

A flashlight beam found the gap in the wall, filling it with yellow light. Diane's head followed the beam.

"You don't belong here," I said. "Go back."

The hand that held the flashlight was trembling. "You can't tell me what to do." She climbed through the opening into the tomb.

"No." I took a step back, away from her. Shadows nestled in her eyes, making them into dark hollows, like the eyes of a skull.

She stepped toward me, holding out a hand in supplication or threat—I could not tell which. I backed away, the blade in my hand, retreating into the cave. I was not afraid of these shadows. I wasn't afraid of death; dying was an easy way out. I could not name the thing I feared, but I saw it in the reaching hand of my daughter.

I broke and ran, scurrying away like a bewildered rat in an unfamiliar warren. Some dark instinct had overtaken me, driving me to escape, to dart down any tunnel that led away from the light, to crawl where I could not run, to squeeze through narrow passages, rushing just ahead of the pursuing flashlight beam, a nocturnal animal seeking the safety of darkness.

She was just behind me, always just behind me. "Liz?" I dropped my light and did not linger to retrieve it.

I could hear her behind me as I blundered forward, hands out like a blind man, touching the cool walls and the rounded stalactites.

"Mother?" she said, and the voice was so near that I leapt forward. I did not land for a long time. I fell in the warm velvet darkness, knowing that this was what had to happen, this was the destiny of the katun that was to come.

I woke with a sharp pain in my leg and the chill of water around me. For a moment, I thought 1 floated in the Sacred Well, but I opened my eyes to darkness. I was resting in a puddle of chill water, cupped in a low basin of limestone. My hips were in the water; my shoulders, on the rock. My leg was twisted beneath me, stabbing with a pain that distracted me from the aching of my head. I drew a deep breath and lifted myself on my arms, trying to straighten the leg, an effort that made me cry out in pain.

In response to the cry, like an answer from the gods, a beam of light flashed down from above, blinding me and making me cry out again. I could not see the source of the light—it was a bright spot high above me—but I recognized my daughter's voice. Her voice was ragged. "Why did you run? You shouldn't have run."

I squinted up into the beam. "That's so." My voice was as rough as the limestone beneath me. I was calmer now. The instinct that had made me run was contained. I looked down at myself, and by the light of Diane's flashlight I could see the twisted leg. Broken, I thought. When I tried to shift my weight and support it on my hands, I felt the bones grind. For a moment the flashlight seemed to fade and my head filled with a dull red thundering darkness.

When I could hear again, my daughter's panicky voice stabbed me from above. "Are you all right? Say something. Are you all right?"

"My leg is broken," I told her, my voice rasping. "You've got to go back and get help."

"I can't." The light did not waver from my face. Her voice was thin and strained, on the edge of tears. "I don't know the way. I lost track. You were going too fast."

There was a moment of quiet in which I could hear water dripping, a sweet, high sound. I looked around me. Beside the pool, a stalagmite rose from the limestone floor to meet a stalactite that reached down from the ceiling. Beside this pillar was a rounded stone, an altar of sorts. Pots and clay figurines clustered around the base of the pillar. On the distant walls, I could see paintings: Ix Chebel Yax watched me from the wall, and the serpent coiled on her headdress grinned. In one hand, she held a thunderbolt; in her other hand, a scrap of the rainbow. Women danced before her, and a child, painted bright blue, lay across the altar, her chest arched back to receive the knife.

"Why did you run?" she asked. "Why did you run from me?"

The water dripped, a steady liquid music. My leg throbbed, but as long as I did not move, I was spared the shooting pains that made me cry out. I did not answer my daughter because I had no answers. What would satisfy her? I had been dreaming of blood. I held an obsidian blade in my hands and I feared that I was capable of much. I knew that soon I would die, and that death would spare me the necessity of providing answers.