I ate in silence and let her cool. Obviously I'd touched a nerve. She had always been so calm and in control. Here was another side, an intensely passionate side. I found this little peek behind her façade oddly exciting.
I ate slowly. I had trouble getting the tortillas down unless they were slathered with chili sauce, so I stuck mostly to the mix.
“Fair enough,” I said finally. “When people ask me where I've been, I'll just say, ‘Maya country,’ and let them figure it out.”
A small smile as she stared out the door and nodded.
I said, “But you don't look like any of the Mayan women here.”
This was obvious—she stood a good six to eight inches above the tallest Mayas—and I knew the reason, but I wanted her to tell me. I was testing her, I guess. She didn't know that I'd done a background check on her. I wanted to see if she'd tell me the truth.
“I am only half Mayan. My father was a French journalist who traveled here on assignment. He met my mother, they fell in love, and he took her back to Europe.”
“You were born in Europe?”
“No. Algiers. Another of my father's assignments. It was his idea to name me Maya. My mother did not like the idea, saying it's the name of a people, not a person. But my father so loved the Mayas and the name that she finally gave in. He led an exciting life, my father. During the war he joined the French resistance. He worked with Albert Camus on the underground paper, Combat.”
I was feeling a bit guilty now for testing her—this jibed with everything I knew. But the matter of the questionable Berkeley degree hung over me like a sword. I tried an oblique approach.
“How did you get into all this New Age stuff? I mean, was it part of your education in Europe?”
She laughed. “Hardly. There is nothing the least bit ‘new’ about what I do. It is ancient. I learned from my mother. We traveled back and forth often to visit her family.”
“Did you ever have formal schooling? You know, college and the like?”
“I was educated all over the world, but it was here in Maya country where I learned the things that matter most.”
Was she avoiding the question, or simply giving what she thought was a relevant response? As I was searching for a way to home in on the subject of higher education in the U.S., she took my empty bowl and moved back toward the hearth.
“More?”
I shook my head. “That was plenty. Thank you.”
As she set the bowls down, I felt a tremor run through the ground, and heard, rather than felt, a low-pitched rumble. I'd never been in an earthquake, but I was sure the earth had just shifted under me. I turned and saw Maya standing in the center of the hut, still as a heron, her head cocked, listening.
“Was that—?” I began, but she cut me off with an abrupt wave of her hand.
I waited. Finally she relaxed and returned to my side. “Yes. That was an earthquake. A tiny one. They are common here. It is gone now.”
“Nothing to worry about then?” I had visions of all these tools and utensils raining down on us from the ceiling.
“No. We are safe.” She frowned. “I just hope . . .”
“Just hope what?”
“It is nothing. Show me your tine.”
“It's in the duffel.”
She looked concerned. “Oh, no. You must always keep it with you. Please bring it here.”
I struggled to my feet and retrieved it from the duffel.
“I washed it,” I said, holding it out to her, watching the firelight dance off the golden-hued surface.
“It is beautiful,” she said. “And it is good that you washed it. That is your earth tine.”
She kept her hands folded in her lap, and then I remembered what she'd said about not letting anybody else touch it. As I sat again, I plucked its pointed tip and listened to its hum, watching the light dance on its shimmering triangular surface. I wondered what it was made of. Too light for gold.
“What kind of metal is this?”
Maya shrugged. “I do not know. Each of the tines you must find is made of a different metal, metals I have seen nowhere else.”
“What am I supposed to do with it?”
“Keep it always on your person, even when you sleep.”
“That could get a little uncomfortable, couldn't it?”
She gave my poor attempt at humor just the amount of attention it deserved: She ignored it.
“Your tine needs to be near you, to imprint the unique wavelength of your personal energy.”
“Energy?” I said. “What kind of energy? I hear people talking about energy all the time, like they're a microwave oven or something, or a battery that's got to be recharged every so often.”
“The energy of your life force,” she said. “It is generated in every cell of your body. Every living thing radiates energy; it creates an aura around them. Each of your tines must become attuned to your energy, so that it can harmonize with it. Your earth tine there will provide your first harmonic.”
“My first harmonic,” I said, turning it over in my hands. “Is it something I'll hear, like the tone when I pluck it?”
“No. It will be something you feel. You will know when it happens . . . it will be very much like the spiritual harmony you experienced atop the pyramid on your first night here, only far more intense.”
More intense than that? I didn't know if I could handle that.
“You mentioned four tines, so can I assume that each of the tines will find their own harmony with me?”
“Yes. There are four tine harmonics, and one other. The most important of all: the Fifth Harmonic.
“Where's that come from?”
“From Gaea, from you, from everything. It is almost impossible to explain to someone whose third eye is blind. Do not concern yourself with the Fifth Harmonic now. Concentrate on the first. Let your earth tine find its harmony with you so that it can release to you what is stored within it.”
I held up the tine and let it reflect the dying light of day.
“And just what exactly is stored within this baby?”
“A tiny droplet of the Mother's power, Cecil.”
“You called me Will earlier.”
“That was because I feared for your life. You are still Cecil. And let us not get off the subject of the power the All-Mother can store in that tine, a power you doubt.”
“That's because I've never had any contact with your All-Mother, your Gaea.”
She shook her head—sadly, I thought. “Yes, you have. Every day of your life. But you are blind to it, unaware behind your walls.” She sighed. “The Mother wants me to heal the wounded healer, and to truly heal you, I must do more than heal your body. I must heal your mind and spirit as well.”
There, I thought, is a tall order.
“And you think these tines will do that?” I said.
“If you let them, if you do not build more walls against them they can open your mind and free your imprisoned spirit, allowing you to rediscover your connection to nature and the divine.”
Ah, if only something could do that . . .
I tightened my grip on the cylindrical handle of the tine and plucked again the wavy triangular head.
Harmonics . . .
I had no hope of a cancer cure, but I was open to finding a new way to look at the world in my final days. I'd give it a shot—that was part of the adventure—but I didn't see much chance of a spiritual awakening in my short future.
At least I'd be spending those days with a fascinating woman in a fascinating land.
I gave her my most innocent smile. “You've got your work cut out for you, don't you.”
“Yes,” she said, but didn't return the smile. Her expression became grimmer. “And I pray I am equal to the task.”
4
I awoke to the sound of an angry voice—a male's, and not Ambrosio's. I looked across at Maya's hammock. In the early dawn light it hung limp and withered like an empty cocoon.
I rolled over in
my own hammock and felt a jab in my flank. The tine. At Maya's insistence I'd stuffed it inside my shirt before sleep. It was warm against my palm as I pulled it out. I squeezed its handle, waiting, wanting to feel something different about it, about myself.
Nothing. Just a piece of metal.
I left the hammock and shoved the tine into a pants pocket as I padded to the doorway.
I couldn't find the sun, but the clear sky was bleaching to the east. A dozen feet away, a little Mayan man in a white shirt and loose pants was gesticulating angrily at Maya. His eyes were level with the base of her neck, so he had to tilt his head back to look at her.
I didn't know what all his glottal stops and shhhes meant, but I had no doubt that he was angry. Maya was nodding, trying to placate him in the same tongue, but he wasn't having any of it. In fact, it only seemed to make him angrier.
Responding to an instinctive protective urge, I took a step forward. Maya spotted me and made a surreptitious it's-okay gesture with her hand.
I looked around and saw the shadowy figures of other villagers standing in their doorways, watching the contretemps. Then I noticed two other men standing off to my right. I looked closer and recognized Ambrosio and Jorge, and behind them, the other Jeep. I sidled over to Ambrosio.
“What's the problem?”
The little man leaned closer. “He is the man of the house you are staying in. He is very angry that you and Maya slept there.”
“What's wrong? Not enough money?”
“No. He is saying that there is not enough money in the world to make Maya welcome in his house. And worse, she brought a Yankee dog with her.” Ambrosio touched my arm apologetically. “Ambrosio does not say these things—only translates.”
“I understand,” I told him. “What else is he saying?”
“He says his home is now permanently tainted and he will have to burn it.”
Tension thickened the air around me.
“Is he nuts?”
“I think he is big talk, putting on a show for his neighbors. He is even blaming Maya because his wife bears no children.”
“Better than blaming himself,” I muttered, then remembered what Ambrosio had said on my first day here: Some of the locals call her “bruja”—witch.
“He is also calling her a ‘half breed,’” Ambrosio said.
And now I felt my anger mixing with the tension. The little jerk had no right to talk to her like that. I wanted to come to her defense but didn't speak the language. I could guess how Maya felt. She'd been so deeply angry last night about the centuries of depredations against her people, and here was this strutting little cock of the walk telling her she didn't belong.
Finally the man made a series of violent pointing gestures toward the end of the village—undoubtedly a demand that she hit the road—then stomped off toward one of the huts.
Maya walked over to us. She was dressed in a rough cotton blouse and cut-off shorts.
“We must leave,” she said in a low, thick voice. She didn't look directly at me, so I couldn't read her expression in the dim light, but she sounded on the verge of tears. “We were only staying here this one night anyway, but we must leave immediately.”
“No problem,” I said, wanting to put her at ease. “I'm wide awake and ready to go. I'll stow my stuff in the Jeep.”
“No,” Ambrosio said. “No Jeep for you. Boat.”
“Boat? Why a boat?”
“We take the river from here,” Maya said. “We cannot reach the next tine by road, and it is too far to walk. Ambrosio will drive west and meet us later near the water tines.”
“The river,” I said. I'd never been much for boats. Lots of the other doctors I knew had cabin cruisers and sailboats and sport fishers, but the charm had always eluded me. “What kind of boat?”
“I bought one of the village dugouts yesterday.”
Swell, I thought. A dugout to me was little more than an overweight canoe, powered by paddles. My back was already stiff and sore.
“Downstream, I hope.”
That managed to elicit a tiny smile from Maya. “Yes. Downstream all the way.”
“Good. Let's get going.”
As I carried my duffel down to the stream, I worried about fitting it into a dugout canoe. But I was determined to find a way to take it along. No way was I going to be separated from my little Kevorkian kit.
I needn't have worried. The dugout was a big one, hand hewn from a twenty-foot cedar log, and back-breakingly heavy. It took the four of us to slide it from the bank into the water. The dugout easily accommodated my duffel and Maya's, plus a pair of sleeping bags and a cooler Ambrosio produced from the rear of the Jeep.
Maya took the rear position, I climbed in near the bow; our gear lay piled between us. A push from Jorge and Ambrosio, plus a few swift strokes from our paddles, and we were off.
We didn't have to work hard to keep moving. Maya used her paddle as a rudder to steer us to the center of the flow where the current did the rest. I dipped my paddle regularly, but it was more for show than anything else; the stream carried us along at an easy pace.
Behind us the sky glowed rose and gold as the sun clawed its way toward the tops of the dense tree walls lining the banks. Monkeys chittered in high-pitched voices as they scampered from limb to limb, bright green and red birds glided overhead, herons stood statue-still in the shallows, while kingfishers poised on the low branches, studying the flow, ready to lunge at anything that moved below the surface. Around us the water lay smooth and glistening, with only the faintest hint of a ripple—a mirror made by a glazier who hadn't quite got it right yet—to betray the presence of the current.
I glanced back at Maya. She was staring over her shoulder at the village as it disappeared around a bend in the stream. I admired the long slopes of her quadriceps running the length of her lean muscular thighs, saw them tighten and roll under the smooth brown skin as she knelt in the stern.
When she turned toward the front again, I saw the hurt in her eyes.
“Why was that man so angry?” I said.
“Because I am half dzul. The people in that little village are pure Mayan. They are very proud that they have not allowed their line to be tainted with dzul blood.”
“Back where I come from we call that racism.”
She sighed. “In a textbook sense, I suppose it is. But here in Maya country, it is different. Here they do not let bygones be bygones. They do not forgive, and they never forget.”
“The injustices you were talking about last night?”
“Yes. But the centuries of slaughter are nothing compared to the devastation wrought by the diseases the dzul brought with them from Europe. Ninety percent—this is not an exaggeration, Cecil—nine out of every ten Mayas died in the plagues that stalked Mesoamerica during the sixteenth century. We lost our priest classes, our royal families, our daykeepers, our finest minds. Our towns became mortuaries. The raw number of dead among the Aztec, Incas, and Mayas is estimated at somewhere between forty and fifty million souls.”
She paused, perhaps to let that sink in, perhaps to hear how I'd react. I was speechless.
She went on: “The Aztecs and the Incas had already been defeated militarily by then. The conquistadors had conquered them with their guns and swords, but the Mayas remained unbowed. The invaders needed the microbe as an ally against the Mayas.”
Now that I thought about it, I remembered reading about the fall of Mexico City, and how, further south in Peru, Cortés or one of his fellow armor-plated barbarians had held the Inca king for ransom. But I knew nothing about the fall of the Mayas.
“We did not have a single king or a central royal city,” she said. “We were scattered throughout Mesoamerica in dozens of selfcontained pockets, much like ancient Greek city-states. There are still twenty different Maya languages. We were a hydra of a nation—chop off one head and the rest remained alive and well. That was our strength, and our great weakness. Our many city-states could not find a common leader to
unite them and drive off the invaders. Or if such a man existed, he was taken by the plague before he could rise to power. By 1620, when your Pilgrims were landing on Plymouth rock, my people and their civilization had been reduced to an empty shell.”
“‘My people,’” I said. “It didn't look to me like that bantamweight bully back there includes you in his version of ‘my people.’”
“No. The women accept me but the men do not. The memories of the invasions, the old slaughters, the new slaughters, the Caste War have been passed on from father to son. The blood debt remains fresh. And the fact that I do not stay here in Maya country, that I shuttle back and forth between the land of the dzul, especially the U.S.—”
“The U.S.? We never invaded Maya country.”
“Of course you did. With Frutera.”
“With Who-whata? What are you talking about?”
“Frutera—that was what we called your invading army. Or sometimes ‘the Green Octopus.’ You probably knew it as the United Fruit Company. It tried to buy up most of Mesoamerica, or at least all those areas that could grow bananas. It controlled the railways, it rigged elections and maneuvered puppets into the presidential palaces. Where do you think the term ‘banana republic’ comes from? But when Jacobo Árbenez decided he wanted to give some of the uncultivated land back to the natives, Frutera called on its allies in the U.S. government. The CIA was sent in to arrange his overthrow.”
“Oh, come on. Everything that goes wrong in the world gets blamed on either fluorocarbons, El Niño, or the CIA.”
“This time it is true. John Foster Dulles was Secretary of State then. He was also a major shareholder in United Fruit. The head of the CIA was his brother Allen. Árbenez was labeled a communist, CIA-trained rebels overthrew him, and the disputed land went back to Frutera.”
I didn't know enough of the political history of the region to argue with her. And I wasn't sure I wanted to. The story had an ugly and familiar ring to it.
“Mesoamerica has been in political turmoil ever since,” she said. “Contras or Sandinistas, left wing or right wing, my people wind up either at the wrong end of the gun or in displacement camps. Somehow we always lose.”