The Falling Woman Read Free Page B

rustled in the evening breeze.
    The hammock rocked me to sleep and the sounds changed. The steady beat was a tunkul, a hollow wooden gong that was beaten with a stick. The cricket's song grew harsh and loud, like the buzzing of stones shaken in a gourd rattle. The whisper of the palm thatch became the murmuring of voices: a crowd surrounded me and pressed close on all sides. I felt the weight of braids on my head, a cumbersome robe around me. When a hand on my arm tugged me forward, I opened my eyes.
    A precipice before me, jade-green water far below, a drumbeat that quickened with my heart, and suddenly I was falling.
    I woke with a start, my hands clutching the cotton threads of the hammock. The rising wind stirred the palm thatch and sent a few thin leaves scurrying across the hard-packed dirt floor of my hut.
    In my brief glance over the edge, I had recognized the steep limestone walls and green waters of the sacred cenote at Chichén Itzá. The scent, I thought, had been copal incense. The music—rattle and drum—was processional music.
    I closed my eyes and slept again, but my dreams were of more modern pasts: I dreamed of the long ago time when I had been a wife and mother. I did not like such dreams and I woke at dawn.
    Dawn and dusk are the best times for exploring ruins. When the sun is low, the shadows reveal the faint images of ancient carvings on temple stones; they betray irregularities that may hide the remains of stairways, plazas, walls, and roads. Shadows lend an air of mystery to the tumble of rocks that was once a city, and they reveal as many secrets as they hide.
    I left my hut to go walking through the ruins. It was Saturday and breakfast would be late. Alone, I strolled through the sleeping camp. Chickens searched for insects among the weeds. A lizard, catching early-morning sunlight on a rock, glanced at me and ran for cover in the crack of a wall. In the monte, a bird called on two notes—one high, one low, one high, one low—as repetitive as a small boy who had only recently learned to whistle. The sun was just up and the air was still relatively cool.
    As I walked, 1 fingered the lucky piece that I carried in my pocket, a silver coin that Tony had given me when we were both graduate students. The design was that of an ancient Roman coin. Tony cast the silver himself in a jewelry-making workshop, and gave the coin to me on the anniversary of the day my divorce was final. I always carried it with me, and I knew I was nervous when I caught myself running my finger along the milled edge.
    I was nervous now, restless, bothered by my dreams and my memory of the old woman named Zuhuy-kak. I started when four small birds took flight from a nearby bush, jumped when a lizard ran across my path. My encounter with Zuhuy-kak had left me feeling more unsettled than I liked to admit, even to myself.
    I followed the dirt track to the cenote. On the horizon, I could see the remains of the old Spanish church.
    In 1568, the Spanish had quarried stones from the old Mayan temples and used them in a new church, building for the new gods on the bones of the old. Their church had fared no better than the Mayan temples. All that remained of it now was a broad archway and the crumbling fragment of a wall.
    Each time I left California arid returned to the ruins, I found them more disconcerting. In Berkeley, buildings were set lightly on the land, a temporary addition—nothing more. Here, history built upon history.
    Conquering Spaniards had taken the land from the Toltec invaders who had taken the land from the Maya.
    With each conquest, the faces of old gods were transformed to become the faces of gods more acceptable to the new regime. Words of the Spanish Mass blended with the words of ancient ritual: in one and the same prayer, the peasants called upon the Virgin Mary and the Chaacob. Here, it was common to build structures upon structures, pyramids over pyramids. Layers upon layers, secrets hiding secrets.
    I