The Lacuna (43 page)

“No, I understand. You thought, ‘foreigner,’ and not of a particular place.”

“I reckon that is it. All along, you have known about these folk here and I’ve had no inkling. I read the
Geographic
s, but you can’t think of the people in those stories as having life and breath, and knowing things you don’t. But that sounds silly too.”

“No, I think most people are the same. Until they’ve gone somewhere.”

“I thank my lucky stars, Mr. Shepherd, and I thank you. I do. That I’m a person who went somewhere.” She set her hands in her lap and drew herself fully into looking outward, as people do when settling down in a theater. Vendors had begun to work the dining crowd. You could buy anything if your supper went on long enough: roses, bicycle tires, a shellacked armadillo. A mother and daughter in long skirts and shawls moved from table to table showing their
embroidery. I waved them off with a gesture so small Mrs. Brown probably didn’t see. She feels obliged to look at every single thing, lest the artisans be offended.

“I have been wondering what your novel will be about,” she said. “Apart from the setting.”

“I wonder too. I think I want to write about the end of things. How civilizations fall, and what leads up to that. How we’re connected to everything in the past.”

To my shock she said, “Oh, I wouldn’t.”

“Mrs. Brown, I declare. That’s twice you’ve told me how to be a writer. You apologized the first time.”

“Well. I’m sorry again.”

“Why would you say that?”

“I have no business. It just came out. Some of the things that happened back at home have set me to the fret.”

“I do step in the pie sometimes, I know that. Go on.”

“Should I?”

“Please.”

“I think the readers won’t like it. We don’t like to see ourselves joined hard to the past. We’d as soon take the scissors and cut every ribbon of that.”

“Then I am sunk. All I ever write about is history.”

“People in gold arm bracelets, though. Nothing that would happen to our own kind. That’s how I reckon people take to it so well.”

“So I shouldn’t try something new? What happened to the writer standing up for himself? Not leaving my words to be orphaned, my little bairns, as you called them.”

“I still hold by that. But there’s no shame in a clever disguise. To say what you believe and still keep out of trouble. Thus to now, it has done ye well.”

“Oh. Then you think it wouldn’t go so well if I set my stories, let’s say, in a concentration camp in Texas or Georgia. One of those places where we sent our citizen Japs and Germans during the war.”

She looked stricken. “No, sir, we would not like to read that. Not even about the other Japanese sinking ships and bombing our coast. That’s over, and we’d just as soon be shed of it.”

The marimba players struck up “La Llorona,” the most cheerful rendition of a song about death. I spied the man with the shellacked armadillo for sale. It was only a matter of time, he comes every night.

“If that’s so, then why did Americans make off with the historical artifacts of Mexico to put them, where did he say? In the Peabody Museum?”

“It’s the same as your books, Mr. Shepherd. It’s somebody else’s gold pieces and bad luck. If we fill up our museums with that, we won’t have to look at the dead folk lying at the bottom of our own water wells.”

“And who is
we
?”

She pondered this, eyebrows lowered. “Just Americans,” she said at length. “That’s the only kind of person I know how to be. Not like you.”

“You’d do that? Take scissors and cut off your past?”

“I did already. My family would tell you I went to the town and got above my raisings. It’s what Parthenia calls ‘modern.’”

“And what would you call it?”

“American. Like I said. The magazines tell us we’re special, not like the ones that birthed us. Brand-new. They paint a picture of some old-country rube with a shawl on her head, and make you fear you’ll be like that, unless you buy cake mix and a home freezer.”

“But that sounds lonely. Walking around without any ancestors.”

“I don’t say it’s good. It’s just how we be. I hate to say it, but that rube in the shawl is my sister, and I don’t want to be her. I can’t help it.”

A man walked among the tables working a marionette, a smiling skeleton of articulated papier-mâché bones. To the delight of a family dining nearby, he made the skeleton sneak along slowly, lifting
its bony feet high, then suddenly leap on their table. The children squealed as it stamped on their plates, for the father’s coins.

“And history is nothing but a cemetery,” I said to Mrs. Brown. The puppeteer was behind her, she’d missed the show.

“That is exactly right. For us to visit when we have a mind, or just not go at all. Let the weeds grow up.”

“Here in Mexico there’s a holiday just for being with your dead. You go where your family is buried and have a great party, right on the grave.”

“You have to? Plumb on top of the graves?” Wide-eyed, she looked like the girl she must have been before she was Mrs. Brown.

“People love it, as much as they love a wedding. Really it is a kind of wedding, to the people in your past. You take a vow they’re all still with you. You cook a feast and bring enough food for the dead people too.”

“Well, sir, that would not happen in Buncombe County. Probably the police would arrest you.”

“You might be right.”

She took her glass of limeade and sipped at the straw while holding eye contact. It was unsettling. The puppeteer had moved into her line of view, and her eyes left me to follow that skeleton. When she had drained her glass, she said, “You understand things like that, a wedding in the graveyard. You are from another country.”

“But I want to be brand-new too. The land of weightless people and fast automobiles suits me fine. I made myself a writer there.”

“You could have stayed here and done the same.”

“I don’t think so. I’ve thought about it. I had ghosts to leave behind. Mexican writers struggle with their ghosts, I think. In general. Maybe it’s easier to say what you want in America, without those ancestral compromises weighing you down like stones.”

“Easier to look down upon others, too.”

“Do you mean to say I do that?”

“Mr. Shepherd, you do not. But some do. They look around and
say, ‘This here is good, and that is evil,’ and it’s decided. We are America, so that over there must be something else altogether.”

Mrs. Brown will never cease to amaze. “That’s very insightful. You think that comes of cutting our anchor to the past?”

“I do. Because if you had to go sit on a grave and think hard about it, you couldn’t just say ‘This is America.’ Some Indian would cross your mind, some fellow that shot his arrow on that very spot. Or the man that shot the Indian, or whipped his slaves or hung up some tart woman for a witch. You’d couldn’t just say it’s all fine and dandy.”

“Maybe readers need some of that, then. Connections to the past.”

“Fairly warned is fair afeared,” she said.

“I thought it was ‘forearmed.’ Forewarned is forearmed.”

She glanced at her forearms, and never did reply.

Today was the village of Hoctún, a town the color of wheat, with a pyramid sitting at its center. It brought to mind the village with the giant stone head in the square, and Mother’s shaman. Every turn in the road here runs into memory. Isla Mujeres was almost unbearable, from the ferry on. Mrs. Brown sees all, and it puts her on a fret, as she would say. I imagine her pressed against the fret-board of God’s guitar, held against the slender silver bar until she wails her assigned note. She says she came here to do my worrying for me. She does much more: typing up drafted scenes, only to see me throw them away. Arranging things. She’s befriended someone English-speaking at the tourist bureau, a journalist who helps her negotiate miracles. Mexico’s bureaucracies do not daunt Mrs. Brown. She has worked for the United States Army.

I told her I want to study village life now, up close. We’ve seen enough of pyramids, I need goats and cookfires. To peer inside a hut and examine that V-shaped vault, after seeing the same architecture in stone temples. Her inspired idea: to return to the village of Maria, mother of Jesús.

The eternal cauldron of beans still bubbled. Maria was animated while serving us lunch, telling about the lumbermen who passed through earlier this morning. They are clearing the forests all around, dragging out the felled giants on the same dirt track that brought us in. All she can do is stand in the road and halt each truck, insisting they let her inspect the fallen timber and pluck the living orchids from its top branches. That explains the flowers growing from tins in the yard: her rescued orphans. These orchids lived all their lives high up in the bright air, unseen by human eyes, until the firmament under their roots suddenly tumbled. It’s a precarious place, up there with the howlers. Everyone wants the tallest tree to fall.

But Maria of the Orchids seemed to have no such fears, at home in the forest primeval. “The important thing is beauty,” she said once more, reaching a small brown hand toward the treetops. “Even death grants us beauty.”

Another visit to Chichén Itzá tomorrow, the last trip. Then we pack it all in. We will need to take the train for Mexico City on Thursday or Friday if we’re to be there from Christmas until the new year, as Frida insists. Candelaria is meeting us at the station. Candelaria at the wheel of an automobile seems as probable as Jesus running a guided tour. Or Mrs. Brown in hat and gloves sitting beside the flagrant Frida, drinking tea on a bench painted with lighting bolts. Likely, all these things will come to pass.

Chichén Itzá looked completely different today, probably because of everything else we’ve seen since the first visit. “Elegant and remote,” I jotted in my notes that time, “reluctant to reveal its human history.” But today a story came up in relief from every surface, urgent and visible. Every stone was carved with some image: the snarling jaguar, the feathered serpent, a long frieze of swimming goldfish. Emperors stood life-size on stone steles jutting up from the plaza like giant
teeth. The Maya carved human figures only in profile: the almond eye, the flattened forehead sloping toward the exquisite arch of nose. They needn’t have worried about that profile being forgotten, it’s the spitting image of Jesús and ten thousand others, automobile vandals included. Better to carve something else in stone, if you mean to be remembered: “I was cruel to my best friend and got away with it. My favorite meal was squid in ink sauce. My mother never quite liked me as I was.”

Traces of paint clung to the surfaces too: red, green, violet. In their time, all these buildings were brightly painted. What a shock to realize that, and how foolish to have been tricked earlier by the serenity of white limestone. Like looking at a skeleton and saying, “How quiet this man was, and how thin.” Today Chichén Itzá declared the truth of what it was: garish. Loud and bright, full of piss and jasmine, and why not? It was Mexico. Or rather, Mexico is still what this once was.

For the last time we climbed the tall pyramid, El Castillo. “We don’t have to go on, you know,” I told Mrs. Brown, halfway up. The day was so bright and hot it almost tasted of gunpowder, and she had left her hat in the car, where Jesús was now napping. She paused on the stone step, shading her eyes with one flat hand, her hair blowing back like the mermaid on the prow of a ship. She had removed her gloves to use both hands for the climb, the steps were that monstrous. “Of course we do,” she said, sighing deeply as if to say, “Men do this.” And that is a fact, men do, unable to resist the same impulse that built the thing in the first place: senseless ambition.

But the view from the top, we convinced ourselves, was worth the pain. We sat on a ledge looking down on the tourists in the plaza, pitying those little ants because they were not up here, and if they ever meant to be, they would have to pay the price. And there is the full sum of it, senseless ambition reduced to its rudiments. Civilizations are built on that, and a water hole.

“Imagine the place crawling with slaves and kings,” I said.

“Ten thousand slaves to every one king, I’d imagine.”

And barking dogs. And mothers, wondering if their children have fallen down the well. We stayed a good while, reconstructing the scene. She was curious about how a writer decides where to begin the story. You start with “In the beginning,” I told her, but it should be as close to the end as possible. There’s the trick.

“How can you know?”

“You just decide. It could be right here. In the first light of dawn, the king in maroon robes and a golden breastplate stood atop his temple, glowering down at the chaos. He understood with dismay that his empire was collapsing. You have to get right into the action, readers are impatient. If you dilly-dally, they’ll go turn on the radio and listen to
Duffy’s Tavern
instead, because it’s all wrapped up in an hour.”

“How could the king know his empire is about to collapse?”

“Because everything’s in a mess.”

“Fiddlesticks,” she said. “Everything’s always a mess, but people say ‘Buck up, we just have to get through this one bad patch.’”

“True enough. But you and I know it was, because we’ve read about it. Chichén Itzá was the center of a vast and powerful empire, art and architecture that flourished for centuries. And then around 900 after Christ, it mysteriously vanished.”

“People don’t vanish,” she said. “Hitler took his life, but Germany is still there. Just for example. People going to work and having their birthdays and what all.”

True enough, and the Mayans who now people this forest surely do not think of themselves as a failed culture. They build their huts of ancient design, make gardens, and sing children to sleep. Rulers and generals change without their notice. In the time since Cortés, the great Spanish empire has collapsed into one small landmass of rock and vineyards, the little right paw of Europe. Its far-flung provinces have been lost, the million shackled subjugates set free. Spain
outlawed slavery, built schools and hospitals, and its poets, come to think of it, are practically in a contest now to condemn the Spanish history of conquest. Did Cortés see all that roaring toward him like a steam locomotive? Did England or France? All this earnest forward motion, the marches to the mountain, the murals and outstretched hands: which part of it do we ever call failure?