The Falling Woman

16 Diane

The door to my mother’s hut was halfway open when we reached the plaza. I hesitated. ‘I think I’ll see how Liz is doing.’

‘Fine,’ Barbara said grumpily. ‘I still have to finish that report.’

‘I thought you were inspired.’

‘My inspiration expired when I got back. So far, I’ve written the date at the top of a page and read half that rotten romance novel you bought in Mérida. I’ll see you later.’ She left me by my mother’s door and I watched her flashlight bob toward our hut.

I knocked on the door, then peered inside. The only light was a candle burning in a small chimney. The card table that served as my mother’s desk was strewn with books and papers.

‘Sorry to interrupt,’ I mumbled. I felt awkward and embarrassed. Already, the thought of talking to her about the old woman I had seen in the monte was fading, like Barbara’s inspiration.

‘No problem,’ she said, closing the book on the table before her. The candlelight etched shadows on her face, making her look old and weary. She looked pale, though that could have been a trick of the light. ‘I’m glad you came. I understand you met the local curandera.’

I shook my head. ‘I don’t think so.’

‘The old woman,’ my mother said patiently.

For a moment, I was confused, then I realized she meant the old woman by Salvador’s hut. ‘Oh, yeah. I guess so.’ I couldn’t read her face in the candlelight. Her right hand was on her desk, fidgeting with a pencil, tapping it on one end so that it lay parallel with the edge of the desk, then tapping it out of line. She was watching the pencil very carefully.

‘The curandera remembered you better than you remembered her,’ she said lightly. She tapped the pencil again, a little too hard, and it rolled off the edge of the table, bounced on her knees, and fell into the shadows. Lost. She looked at my face then. ‘I haven’t asked you – what do you think of the dig so far?’

‘I like going on survey,’ I said cautiously.

‘You like hiking through the jungle and battling the bugs?’

I shrugged. ‘Barbara and I get along. I’m glad to be able to help her.’

‘Perhaps you should leave the dig for a while,’ she said softly, almost as if she were talking to herself. ‘Rent a car and go out to the Caribbean coast – out to Isla Mujeres, Playa del Carmen. Beautiful beaches, wonderful snorkeling. I’ll meet you there when we’re through here.’ She was gazing thoughtfully at the ground, where the pencil had disappeared. Her face was still, mask-like.

‘I like it here,’ I said.

‘You shouldn’t waste your entire vacation out here in the sticks,’ she said. She did not look at me.

‘I don’t understand.’

She took a cigarette from the pack on her desk and lifted the glass chimney to light it from the candle. The hand that held the cigarette was trembling. The light of the candle reflected in her eyes.

‘Have I done something wrong?’ My voice was shaking.

She turned from the desk to face me, leaning forward on the metal folding chair and resting her elbows on her knees. The hut was very quiet. The crying of the crickets was very far away, on the other side of the moon. My mother wanted to leave me again.

‘The curandera, the old woman you met, thinks that you are a witch,’ she said. ‘You’re in good company: she thinks that I’m a witch too. She has more reason to suspect me. I mutter to myself and talk to people who aren’t there. I wander around at dusk and dawn, when the spirits are out.’ She was watching me, her face fixed in a strange smile. ‘Surely you’ve noticed these things.’

I hunched my shoulders forward. ‘I didn’t think anything of it. I just figured you were working on your book.’

‘In the United States, people interpret these things as eccentricity or – if taken to an extreme – madness,’ my mother said mildly. ‘Here, they are the mark of a witch. Of the two interpretations, I have to admit I prefer the second. A witch has some power. A madwoman is just a nut.’ She tilted her head to one side, considering me. ‘What do you think?’

I shrugged, unable to speak.

‘Suppose 1 told you that I get up early to chat with the spirits. I see the past – I described it to you, remember? What would you think then? Would you go to the Caribbean coast and meet me there?’

‘You think that I should leave because an old woman thinks I’m a witch?’

‘I think you should leave because I want you to leave. I want you to go away – to Isla Mujeres, to Los Angeles, anywhere you want.’

I found myself standing, my hands in fists. ‘You can’t tell me what to do.’

My mother remained as she was, holding the cigarette loosely in one hand, the other hand relaxed in her lap. ‘That’s true. I gave up that right long ago. I am only saying what I want. What you choose to do is your responsibility.’ She stubbed the cigarette out in the ashtray, glancing at my face as she did so, a sidelong considering look.

‘I won’t let you run away again,’ I said, looking down on the strange woman who was my mother.

She wet her lips and shook her head slowly. ‘I just want you to be careful.’

I left, slipping through the door without saying good-bye. I never did tell her about the old woman in the monte.

The lantern burned dimly in front of Tony’s hut. Tony sat in a lawn chair, smoking his pipe and sipping a gin and tonic with no ice. He was dressed in a bathrobe and slippers.

‘I’d offer you a cold drink,’ he said when I sat down in the other chair, ‘but the gin is warm and we packed all the ice around Philippe’s foot yesterday, then forgot to buy more. Want a warm one?’

I shook my head. I could feel tears stinging behind my eyes and I did not want to let them go.

‘What’s wrong?’ He put his hand on my arm. ‘Are you all right?’

‘Nothing’s wrong.’ I managed a very weak smile. ‘Nothing. I just…’ I shrugged. I had no idea what to say.

He kept his hand on my arm and he watched me with concern. I had to say something.

‘Have you ever…’ I began shakily, ‘have you ever had your life fall apart underneath you? Where suddenly everything and everyone that you trusted went away? It’s as if the ground moved out from under you, as if the world shifted and you didn’t belong anymore.’ My voice was shaking and I crossed my arms as if to keep warm. My thoughts weren’t clear – I grasped at fleeting images: Brian’s blue eyes studying my face when he told me our affair was over; my father’s coffin being lowered into the ground; the family portrait on the desk of my boss – to avoid meeting his eyes, I kept glancing at that picture when I told him I was quitting. And from some other time, I could hear my father’s voice saying that my mother was gone. She had left us. Bits and pieces, scraps and tatters. A jumble and a mess. I closed my eyes and said, ‘You get through it and you think that everything’s fine again. But you keep thinking that it will happen again. You watch. You see little signs that suggest that things are going on under the surface of things. And you don’t know what they are. Someone is angry, and you know that they will vanish forever. Everything is too close to the surface.’

I shook my head. The words had come out suddenly. I had not intended to say all this. ‘I don’t know how to make it all right again,’ I said. ‘I don’t know how I can stop feeling like this. It’s crazy, crazy…’ That was the other part of it. Normal people did not feel like this. I kept a barrier between myself and the darkness; that was what kept me sane. If that barrier were breached, I knew the world would be swept away in a great bloody flood of emotions. I knew it. Normal people are not like that.

My breathing was coming back under my control. I was bottling up the feelings, pushing them back behind the barrier. I made myself unclench my fists, use my open hands to push back my hair. I almost smiled at him. ‘Sometimes, you get more of an answer than you bargain for.’

‘That’s all right,’ he said. ‘Sounds like you’d better have that drink.’ He went into his hut and I heard the sound of liquid pouring from a bottle. He gave me a glass of warm gin and flat tonic water, then returned to his seat. ‘Can you tell me what set this off?’

I took a deep breath. ‘Liz wants me to leave the dig. She told me to go away.’ I could feel my face reddening and I stopped for a moment. ‘I don’t want to go.’

He frowned. ‘That’s strange. I thought you were getting along.’

‘I thought so.’

‘What did she say?’

‘She said she thought I shouldn’t waste my vacation here.’

‘I can see her point, I suppose. Many people would agree.’

‘She said…’ I hesitated. Somehow, I did not want to tell Tony what my mother had said about being a witch. ‘The curandera, that old woman, told her that I should go,’

Tony leaned back in his chair, shaking his head. ‘I’ll talk to her. Until then, don’t push her. It doesn’t pay to push Liz. If you try, she shuts up like a clam. I just wait and sometimes she tells me. Sometimes she doesn’t.’ He shrugged. ‘You and your mother are both very stubborn women.’

‘Leave me out of this.’

‘If you aren’t stubborn, then why aren’t you packing your bags and heading out of this place? If she doesn’t want you here, why stay?’ He took his pipe from his mouth and inspected the ashes in the bowl. He held a match to them and puffed until they lit. Then he looked at me. ‘Stubborn.’

‘I’m worried about Liz,’ I said then.

‘Why’s that?’

‘She talks to herself.’

‘She’s been doing that for years.’

‘She’s always up at dawn. I don’t think she sleeps well.’

‘She’s been doing that for years too. Tell me something new.’ He waited, puffing on his pipe.

I didn’t like the way my voice sounded, kind of thin and stretched out and weak. ‘I think… Do you think she’s crazy?’

‘I think we’re all crazy, living out here with the bugs and the dirt, drinking warm gin, and digging up things that most people don’t give a damn about. Normal is what most people do. None of us is normal, so we must be crazy.’

‘I mean really crazy.’

He poked at the ashes in the pipe bowl with a small stick. ‘I would hesitate to call anyone really crazy.’ There was a slight edge in his voice now. ‘I’d say your mother was no crazier than she has been for years.’ He studied my face. ‘What do you want to do about it? Put her under a doctor’s care? That’s what your father tried.’

‘Tony, I’m sorry. I’m just… I’m worried. I don’t know what to do.’

‘I told you what to do last week,’ he said. ‘Give her time. Don’t go rushing to conclusions. Take it slow. And I just told you again. Let me talk to her.’

‘But she wants me to leave.’

‘And you said you wouldn’t. What else did she say?’

‘She said to be careful.’

‘Always good advice. So stay if you want, but be careful. And admit that you’re stubborn. It’s not such a bad trait to have. I’ll talk to her about this business of making you leave. See what she has to say.’

I was watching my hands. They were in fists in my lap. I heard Tony move and one of his hands closed over one of mine. ‘Take it slow,’ he rumbled. ‘I’m still your friend.’

I never did tell him about the old woman in the monte.