Dancing Girls and Other Stories

The Resplendent Quetzal

Sarah was sitting near the edge of the sacrificial well. She had imagined something smaller, more like a wishing well, but this was huge, and the water at the bottom wasn’t clear at all. It was mud-brown; a few clumps of reeds were growing over to one side, and the trees at the top dangled their roots, or were they vines, down the limestone walls into the water. Sarah thought there might be some point to being a sacrificial victim if the well were nicer, but you would never get her to jump into a muddy hole like that. They were probably pushed, or knocked on the head and thrown in. According to the guidebook the water was deep but it looked more like a swamp to her.

Beside her a group of tourists was being rounded up by the guide, who obviously wanted to get the whole thing over with so he could cram them back onto their pink and purple striped turismo bus and relax. These were Mexican tourists, and Sarah found it reassuring that other people besides Canadians and Americans wore big hats and sunglasses and took pictures of everything. She wished she and Edward could make these excursions at a less crowded time of year, if they had to make them at all, but because of Edward’s teaching job they were limited to school holidays. Christmas was the worst. It would be the same even if he had a different job and they had children, though; but they didn’t have any.

The guide shooed his charges back along the gravel path as if they were chickens, which was what they sounded like. He himself lingered beside Sarah, finishing his cigarette, one foot on a stone block, like a conquistador. He was a small dark man with several gold teeth, which glinted when he smiled. He was smiling at Sarah now, sideways, and she smiled back serenely. She liked it when these men smiled at her or even when they made those juicy sucking noises with their mouths as they walked behind her on the street; so long as they didn’t touch. Edward pretended not to hear them. Perhaps they did it so much because she was blonde: blondes were rare here. She didn’t think of herself as beautiful, exactly; the word she had chosen for herself some time ago was “comely.” Comely to look upon. You would never use that word for a thin woman.

The guide tossed his cigarette butt into the sacrificial well and turned to follow his flock. Sarah forgot about him immediately. She’d felt something crawling up her leg, but when she looked nothing was there. She tucked the full skirt of her cotton dress in under her thighs and clamped it between her knees. This was the kind of place you could get flea bites, places with dirt on the ground, where people sat. Parks and bus terminals. But she didn’t care, her feet were tired and the sun was hot. She would rather sit in the shade and get bitten than rush around trying to see everything, which was what Edward wanted to do. Luckily the bites didn’t swell up on her the way they did on Edward.

Edward was back along the path, out of sight among the bushes, peering around with his new Leitz binoculars. He didn’t like sitting down, it made him restless. On these trips it was difficult for Sarah to sit by herself and just think. Her own binoculars, which were Edward’s old ones, dangled around her neck; they weighed a ton. She took them off and put them into her purse.

His passion for birds had been one of the first things Edward had confided to her. Shyly, as if it had been some precious gift, he’d shown her the lined notebook he’d started keeping when he was nine, with its awkward, boyish printing—Robin, Bluejay, Kingfisher–and the day and the year recorded beside each name. She’d pretended to be touched and interested, and in fact she had been. She herself didn’t have compulsions of this kind; whereas Edward plunged totally into things, as if they were oceans. For a while it was stamps; then he took up playing the flute and nearly drove her crazy with the practising. Now it was pre-Colombian ruins, and he was determined to climb up every heap of old stones he could get his hands on. A capacity for dedication, she guessed you would call it. At first Edward’s obsessions had fascinated her, since she didn’t understand them, but now they merely made her tired. Sooner or later he’d dropped them all anyway, just as he began to get really good or really knowledgeable; all but the birds. That had remained constant. She herself, she thought, had once been one of his obsessions.

It wouldn’t be so bad if he didn’t insist on dragging her into everything. Or rather, he had once insisted; he no longer did. And she had encouraged him, she’d let him think she shared or at least indulged his interests. She was becoming less indulgent as she grew older. The waste of energy bothered her, because it was a waste, he never stuck with anything, and what use was his encyclopaedic knowledge of birds? It would be different if they had enough money, but they were always running short. If only he would take all that energy and do something productive with it, in his job for instance. He could be a principal if he wanted to, she kept telling him that. But he wasn’t interested, he was content to poke along doing the same thing year after year. His Grade Six children adored him, the boys especially. Perhaps it was because they sensed he was a lot like them.

He’d started asking her to go birding, as he called it, shortly after they’d met, and of course she had gone. It would have been an error to refuse. She hadn’t complained, then, about her sore feet or standing in the rain under the dripping bushes trying to keep track of some nondescript sparrow, while Edward thumbed through his Peterson’s Field Guide as if it were the Bible or the bird was the Holy Grail. She’d even become quite good at it. Edward was nearsighted, and she was quicker at spotting movement than he was. With his usual generosity he acknowledged this, and she’d fallen into the habit of using it when she wanted to get rid of him for a while. Just now, for instance.

“There’s something over there.” She’d pointed across the well to the tangle of greenery on the other side.

“Where?” Edward had squinted eagerly and raised his binoculars. He looked a little like a bird himself, she thought, with his long nose and stilt legs.

“That thing there, sitting in that thing, the one with the tufts. The sort of bean tree. It’s got orange on it.”

Edward focused. “An oriole?”

“I can’t tell from here… Oh, it just flew.” She pointed over their heads while Edward swept the sky in vain.

“I think it lit back there, behind us.”

That was enough to send him off. She had to do this with enough real birds to keep him believing, however.

Edward sat down on the root of a tree and lit a cigarette. He had gone down the first side-path he’d come to; it smelled of piss, and he could see by the decomposing Kleenexes further along that this was one of the places people went when they couldn’t make it back to the washroom behind the ticket counter.

He took off his glasses, then his hat, and wiped the sweat off his forehead. His face was red, he could feel it. Blushing, Sarah called it. She persisted in attributing it to shyness and boyish embarrassment; she hadn’t yet deduced that it was simple rage. For someone so devious she was often incredibly stupid.

She didn’t know, for instance, that he’d found out about her little trick with the birds at least three years ago. She’d pointed to a dead tree and said she saw a bird in it, but he himself had inspected that same tree only seconds earlier and there was nothing in it at all. And she was very careless: she described oriole-coloured birds behaving like kingbirds, woodpeckers where there would never be any woodpeckers, mute jays, neckless herons. She must have decided he was a total idiot and any slipshod invention would do.

But why not, since he appeared to fall for it every time. And why did he do it, why did he chase off after her imaginary birds, pretending he believed her? It was partly that although he knew what she was doing to him, he had no idea why. It couldn’t be simple malice, she had enough outlets for that. He didn’t want to know the real reason, which loomed in his mind as something formless, threatening and final. Her lie about the birds was one of the many lies that propped things up. He was afraid to confront her, that would be the end, all the pretences would come crashing down and they would be left standing in the rubble, staring at each other. There would be nothing left to say and Edward wasn’t ready for that.

She would deny everything anyway. “What do you mean? Of course I saw it. It flew right over there. Why would I make up such a thing?” With her level gaze, blonde and stolid and immovable as a rock.

Edward had a sudden image of himself, crashing out of the undergrowth like King Kong, picking Sarah up and hurling her over the edge, down into the sacrificial well. Anything to shatter that imperturbable expression, bland and pale and plump and smug, like a Flemish Madonna’s. Self-righteous, that’s what it was. Nothing was ever her fault. She hadn’t been like that when he’d met her. But it wouldn’t work: as she fell she would glance at him, not with fear but with maternal irritation, as if he’d spilled chocolate milk on a white tablecloth. And she’d pull her skirt down. She was concerned for appearances, always.

Though there would be something inappropriate about throwing Sarah into the sacrificial well, just as she was, with all her clothes on. He remembered snatches from the several books he’d read before they came down. (And that was another thing: Sarah didn’t believe in reading up on places beforehand. “Don’t you want to understand what you’re looking at?” he’d asked her. “I’ll see the same thing in any case, won’t I?” she said. “I mean, knowing all those facts doesn’t change the actual statue or whatever.” Edward found this attitude infuriating; and now that they were here, she resisted his attempts to explain things to her by her usual passive method of pretending not to hear.

“That’s a Chac-Mool, see that? That round thing on the stomach held the bowl where they put the hearts, and the butterfly on the head means the soul flying up to the sun.”

“Could you get out the suntan lotion, Edward. I think it’s in the tote bag, in the left-hand pocket.”

And he would hand her the suntan lotion, defeated once again.)

No, she wouldn’t be a fit sacrifice, with or without lotion. They only threw people in—or perhaps they jumped in, of their own free will—for the water god, to make it rain and ensure fertility. The drowned were messengers, sent to carry requests to the god. Sarah would have to be purified first, in the stone sweat-house beside the well. Then, naked, she would kneel before him, one arm across her breast in the attitude of submission. He added some ornaments: a gold necklace with a jade medallion, a gold circlet adorned with feathers. Her hair, which she usually wore in a braid coiled at the back of her head, would be hanging down. He thought of her body, which he made slimmer and more taut, with an abstract desire which was as unrelated as he could make it to Sarah herself. This was the only kind of desire he could feel for her any more: he had to dress her up before he could make love to her at all. He thought about their earlier days, before they’d married. It was almost as if he’d had an affair with another woman, she had been so different. He’d treated her body then as something holy, a white and gold chalice, to be touched with care and tenderness. And she had liked this; even though she was two years older than he was and much more experienced she hadn’t minded his awkwardness and reverence, she hadn’t laughed at him. Why had she changed?

Sometimes he thought it was the baby, which had died at birth. At the time he’d urged her to have another right away, and she’d said yes, but nothing had happened. It wasn’t something they talked about. “Well, that’s that,” she said in the hospital afterwards. A perfect child, the doctor said; a freak accident, one of those things that happen. She’d never gone back to university either and she wouldn’t get a job. She sat at home, tidying the apartment, looking over his shoulder, towards the door, out the window, as if she was waiting for something.

Sarah bowed her head before him. He, in the feathered costume and long-nosed, toothed mask of the high priest, sprinkled her with blood drawn with thorns from his own tongue and penis. Now he was supposed to give her the message to take to the god. But he couldn’t think of anything he wanted to ask for.

And at the same time he thought: what a terrific idea for a Grade Six special project! He’d have them build scale models of the temples, he’d show the slides he’d taken, he’d bring in canned tortillas and tamales for a Mexican lunch, he’d have them make little Chac-Mools out of papier-mache… and the ball game where the captain of the losing team had his head cut off, that would appeal to them, they were blood-thirsty at that age. He could see himself up there in front of them, pouring out his own enthusiasm, gesturing, posturing, acting it out for them, and their response… Yet afterwards he knew he would be depressed. What were his special projects anyway but a substitute for television, something to keep them entertained? They liked him because he danced for them, a funny puppet, inexhaustible and a little absurd. No wonder Sarah despised him.

Edward stepped on the remains of his cigarette. He put his hat back on, a wide-brimmed white hat Sarah had bought for him at the market. He had wanted one with a narrower brim, so he could look up through his binoculars without the hat getting in his way; but she’d told him he would look like an American golfer. It was always there, that gentle, patronizing mockery.

He would wait long enough to be plausible; then he would go back.

Sarah was speculating about how she would be doing this whole trip if Edward had conveniently died. It wasn’t that she wished him dead, but she couldn’t imagine any other way for him to disappear. He was omnipresent, he pervaded her life like a kind of smell; it was hard for her to think or act except in reference to him. So she found it harmless and pleasant to walk herself through the same itinerary they were following now, but with Edward removed, cut neatly out of the picture. Not that she would be here at all if it wasn’t for him. She would prefer to lie in a deck chair in, say, Acapulco, and drink cooling drinks. She threw in a few dark young men in bathing suits, but took them out: that would be too complicated and not relaxing. She had often thought about cheating on Edward—somehow it would serve him right, though she wasn’t sure what for—but she had never actually done it. She didn’t know anyone suitable, any more.

Suppose she was here, then, with no Edward. She would stay at a better hotel, for one thing. One that had a plug in the sink; they had not yet stayed in a hotel with a plug. Of course that would cost more money, but she thought of herself as having more money if Edward were dead: she Would have all of his salary instead of just part of it. She knew there wouldn’t be any salary if he really were dead, but it spoiled the fantasy to remember this. And she would travel on planes, if possible, or first-class buses, instead of the noisy, crowded second-class ones he insisted on taking. He said you saw more of the local colour that way and there was no point going to another country if you spent all your time with other tourists. In theory she agreed with this, but the buses gave her headaches and she could do without the close-up tour of squalor, the miserable thatched or tin-roofed huts, the turkeys and tethered pigs.

He applied the same logic to restaurants. There was a perfectly nice one in the village where they were staying, she’d seen it from the bus and it didn’t look that expensive; but no, they had to eat in a seedy linoleum-tiled hutch, with plastic-covered tablecloths. They were the only customers in the place. Behind them four adolescent boys were playing dominoes and drinking beer, with a lot of annoying laughter, and some smaller children watched television, a program that Sarah realized was a re-run of The Cisco Kid, with dubbed voices.

On the bar beside the television set there was a creche, with three painted plaster Wise Men, one on an elephant, the others on camels. The first Wise Man was missing his head. Inside the stable a stunted Joseph and Mary adored an enormous Christ Child which was more than half as big as the elephant. Sarah wondered how the Mary could possibly have squeezed out this colossus; it made her uncomfortable to think about it. Beside the creche was a Santa Claus haloed with flashing lights, and beside that a radio in the shape of Fred Flintstone, which was playing American popular songs, all of them ancient.

“Oh someone help me, help me, plee-ee-ee-eeze …”

“Isn’t that Paul Anka?” Sarah asked.

But this wasn’t the sort of thing Edward could be expected to know. He launched into a defence of the food, the best he’d had in Mexico, he said. Sarah refused to give him the consolation of her agreement. She found the restaurant even more depressing than it should have been, especially the creche. It was painful, like a cripple trying to walk, one of the last spastic gestures of a religion no one, surely, could believe in much longer.

Another group of tourists was coming up the path behind her, Americans by the sound of them. The guide was Mexican, though. He scrambled up onto the altar, preparing to give his spiel.

“Don’t go too near the edge, now.”

“Who me, I’m afraid of heights. What d’you see down there?”

“Water, what am I supposed to see?”

The guide clapped his hands for attention. Sarah only half-listened: she didn’t really want to know anything more about it.

“Before, people said they threw nothing but virgins in here,” the guide began. “How they could tell that, I do not know. It is always hard to tell.” He waited for the expected laughter, which came. “But this is not true. Soon, I will tell you how we have found this out. Here we have the altar to the rain god Tlaloc…”

Two women sat down near Sarah. They were both wearing cotton slacks, high-heeled sandals and wide-brimmed straw hats.

“You go up the big one?”

“Not on your life. I made Alf go up, I took a picture of him at the top.”

“What beats me is why they built all those things in the first place.”

“It was their religion, that’s what he said.”

“Well, at least it would keep people busy.”

“Solve the unemployment problem.” They both laughed.

“How many more of these ruins is he gonna make us walk around?”

“Beats me. I’m about ruined out. I’d rather go back and sit on the bus.”

“I’d rather go shopping. Not that there’s much to buy.”

Sarah, listening, suddenly felt indignant. Did they have no respect? The sentiments weren’t that far from her own of a moment ago, but to hear them from these women, one of whom had a handbag decorated with tasteless straw flowers, made her want to defend the well.

“Nature is very definitely calling,” said the woman with the handbag. “I couldn’t get in before, there was such a lineup.”

“Take a Kleenex,” the other woman said. “There’s no paper. Not only that, you just about have to wade in. There’s water all over the floor.”

“Maybe I’ll just duck into the bushes,” the first woman said.

Edward stood up and massaged his left leg, which had gone to sleep. It was time to go back. If he stayed away too long, Sarah would be querulous, despite the fact that it was she herself who had sent him off on this fool’s expedition.

He started to walk back along the path. But then there was a flash of orange, at the corner of his eye. Edward swivelled and raised his binoculars. They were there when you least expected it. It was an oriole, partly hidden behind the leaves; he could see the breast, bright orange, and the dark barred wing. He wanted it to be a Hooded Oriole, he had not yet seen one. He talked to it silently, begging it to come out into the open. It was strange the way birds were completely magic for him the first time only, when he had never seen them before. But there were hundreds of kinds he would never see; no matter how many he saw there would always be one more. Perhaps this was why he kept looking. The bird was hopping further away from him, into the foliage. Come back, he called to it wordlessly, but it was gone.

Edward was suddenly happy. Maybe Sarah hadn’t been lying to him after all, maybe she had really seen this bird. Even if she hadn’t, it had come anyway, in answer to his need for it. Edward felt he was allowed to see birds only when they wanted him to, as if they had something to tell him, a secret, a message. The Aztecs thought hummingbirds were the souls of dead warriors, but why not all birds, why just warriors? Or perhaps they were the souls of the unborn, as some believed. “A jewel, a precious feather,” they called an unborn baby, according to The Daily Life of the Aztecs. Quetzal, that was feather.

“This is the bird I want to see,” Sarah said when they were looking through The Birds of Mexico before coming down.

“The Resplendent Quetzal,” Edward said. It was a green and red bird with spectacular iridescent blue tail plumes. He explained to her that Quetzal Bird meant Feather Bird. “I don’t think we’re likely to see it,” he said. He looked up the habitat. “ ‘Cloud forests.’ I don’t think we’ll be in any cloud forests.”

“Well, that’s the one I want,” Sarah said. “That’s the only one I want.”

Sarah was always very determined about what she wanted and what she didn’t want. If there wasn’t anything on a restaurant menu that appealed to her, she would refuse to order anything; or she would permit him to order for her and then pick around the edges, as she had last night. It was no use telling her that this was the best meal they’d had since coming. She never lost her temper or her self-possession, but she was stubborn. Who but Sarah for instance would have insisted on bringing a collapsible umbrella to Mexico in the dry season? He’d argued and argued, pointing out its uselessness and the extra weight, but she’d brought it anyway. And then yesterday afternoon it had rained, a real cloudburst. Everyone else had run for shelter, huddling against walls and inside the temple doorways, but Sarah had put up her umbrella and stood under it, smugly. This had infuriated him. Even when she was wrong, she always managed, somehow, to be right. If only just once she would admit… what? That she could make mistakes. This was what really disturbed him: her assumption of infallibility.

And he knew that when the baby had died she had blamed it on him. He still didn’t know why. Perhaps it was because he’d gone out for cigarettes, not expecting it to be born so soon. He wasn’t there when she was told; she’d had to take the news alone.

“It was nobody’s fault,” he told her repeatedly. “Not the doctor’s, not yours. The cord was twisted.”

“I know,” she said, and she had never accused him; nevertheless he could feel the reproach, hanging around her like a fog. As if there was anything he could have done.

“I wanted it as much as you did,” he told her. And this was true. He hadn’t thought of marrying Sarah at all, he’d never mentioned it because it had never occurred to him she would agree, until she told him she was pregnant. Up until that time, she had been the one in control; he was sure he was just an amusement for her. But the marriage hadn’t been her suggestion, it had been his. He’d dropped out of Theology, he’d taken his public-school teaching certificate that summer in order to support them. Every evening he had massaged her belly, feeling the child move, touching it through her skin. To him it was a sacred thing, and he included her in his worship. In the sixth month, when she had taken to lying on her back, she had begun to snore, and he would lie awake at night listening to these gentle snores, white and silver they seemed to him, almost songs, mysterious talismans… Unfortunately Sarah had retained this habit, but he no longer felt the same way about it.

When the child had died, he was the one who had cried, not Sarah. She had never cried. She got up and walked around almost immediately, she wanted to get out of the hospital as quickly as possible. The baby clothes she’d been buying disappeared from the apartment; he never found out what she’d done with them, he’d been afraid to ask.

Since that time he’d come to wonder why they were still married. It was illogical. If they’d married because of the child and there was no child, and there continued to be no child, why didn’t they separate? But he wasn’t sure he wanted this. Maybe he was still hoping something would happen, there would be another child. But there was no use demanding it. They came when they wanted to, not when you wanted them to. They came when you least expected it. A jewel, a precious feather.

“Now I will tell you,” said the guide. “The archaeologists have dived down into the well. They have dredged up more than fifty skeletons, and they have found that some of them were not virgins at all but men. Also, most of them were children. So as you can see, that is the end of the popular legend.” He made an odd little movement from the top of the altar, almost like a bow, but there was no applause. “They do not do these things to be cruel,” he continued. “They believe these people will take a message to the rain god, and live forever in his paradise at the bottom of the well.”

The woman with the handbag got up. “Some paradise,” she said to her friend. “I’m starting back. You coming?”

In fact the whole group was moving off now, in the scattered way they had. Sarah waited until they had gone. Then she opened her purse and took out the plaster Christ Child she had stolen from the creche the night before. It was inconceivable to her that she had done such a thing, but there it was, she really had.

She hadn’t planned it beforehand. She’d been standing beside the creche while Edward was paying the bill, he’d had to go into the kitchen to do it as they were very slow about bringing it to the table. No one was watching her: the domino-playing boys were absorbed in their game and the children were riveted to the television. She’d just suddenly reached out her hand, past the Wise Men and through the door of the stable, picked the child up and put it into her purse.

She turned it over in her hands. Separated from the dwarfish Virgin and Joseph, it didn’t look quite so absurd. Its diaper was cast as part of it, more like a tunic, it had glass eyes and a sort of page-boy haircut, quite long for a newborn. A perfect child, except for the chip out of the back, luckily where it would not be noticed. Someone must have dropped it on the floor.

You could never be too careful. All the time she was pregnant, she’d taken meticulous care of herself, counting out the vitamin pills prescribed by the doctor and eating only what the books recommended. She had drunk four glasses of milk a day, even though she hated milk. She had done the exercises and gone to the classes. No one would be able to say she had not done the right things. Yet she had been disturbed by the thought that the child would be born with something wrong, it would be a mongoloid or a cripple, or a hydrocephalic with a huge liquid head like the ones she’d seen taking the sun in their wheelchairs on the lawn of the hospital one day. But the child had been perfect.

She would never take that risk, go through all that work again. Let Edward strain his pelvis till he was blue in the face; “trying again,” he called it. She took the pill every day, without telling him. She wasn’t going to try again. It was too much for anyone to expect of her.

What had she done wrong? She hadn’t done anything wrong, that was the trouble. There was nothing and no one to blame, except, obscurely, Edward; and he couldn’t be blamed for the child’s death, just for not being there. Increasingly since that time he had simply absented himself. When she no longer had the child inside her he had lost interest, he had deserted her. This, she realized, was what she resented most about him. He had left her alone with the corpse, a corpse for which there was no explanation.

“Lost,” people called it. They spoke of her as having lost the child, as though it was wandering around looking for her, crying plaintively, as though she had neglected it or misplaced it somewhere. But where? What limbo had it gone to, what watery paradise? Sometimes she felt as if there had been some mistake, the child had not been born yet. She could still feel it moving, ever so slightly, holding on to her from the inside.

Sarah placed the baby on the rock beside her. She stood up, smoothing out the wrinkles in her skirt. She was sure there would be more flea bites when she got back to the hotel. She picked up the child and walked slowly towards the well, until she was standing at the very brink.

Edward, coming back up the path, saw Sarah at the well’s edge, her arms raised above her head. My God, he thought, she’s going to jump. He wanted to shout to her, tell her to stop, but he was afraid to startle her. He could run up behind her, grab her… but she would hear him. So he waited, paralyzed, while Sarah stood immobile. He expected her to hurtle downwards, and then what would he do? But she merely drew back her right arm and threw something into the well. Then she turned, half stumbling, towards the rock where he had left her and crouched down. “Sarah,” he said. She had her hands over her face; she didn’t lift them. He kneeled so he was level with her. “What is it? Are you sick?”

She shook her head. She seemed to be crying, behind her hands, soundlessly and without moving. Edward was dismayed. The ordinary Sarah, with all her perversity, was something he could cope with, he’d invented ways of coping. But he was unprepared for this. She had always been the one in control.

“Come on,” he said, trying to disguise his desperation, “you need some lunch, you’ll feel better.” He realized as he said this how fatuous it must sound, but for once there was no patronizing smile, no indulgent answer.

“This isn’t like you,” Edward said, pleading, as if that was a final argument which would snap her out of it, bring back the old calm Sarah.

Sarah took her hands away from her face, and as she did so Edward felt cold fear. Surely what he would see would be the face of someone else, someone entirely different, a woman he had never seen before in his life. Or there would be no face at all. But (and this was almost worse) it was only Sarah, looking much as she always did.

She took a Kleenex out of her purse and wiped her nose. It is like me, she thought. She stood up and smoothed her skirt once more, then collected her purse and her collapsible umbrella.

“I’d like an orange,” she said. “They have them, across from the ticket office. I saw them when we came in. Did you find your bird?”